DREAM AND REALITY IN THE POETRY OF DAVID GASCOIGNE (LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE POEM AND THE SEVENTH DREAM IS THE DREAM OF ISIS)

Abstract

Surrealism, the XX century literature and art movement, inspired an impressive number of scientific research regarding different aspects of the phenomenon. This paper studies surrealism as a type of artistic thinking which raised the role of the unconscious in poetry. It focuses on the core of surrealist aesthetics – an automatic image, which allowed the poets to study human irrational states, such as dreams. Focusing on the themes of dreams and dream-like narrations, surrealists created poetry which was formed by specific images. An automatic image coming directly from one’s unconscious mind was expected to reveal new knowledge about the world and people. But as the poet ’functions’ only as a conductor of the unconscious images, it is the reader who has to create meanings in this kind of poetry.The paper regards surrealism in terms of a lingvo-poetic experiment and analyzes the linguistic characteristics of the automatic texts in the early poetic collection of David Gascoyne (1916–2001). It outlines the peculiarities of the British poet’s techniques which are built upon French surrealist concepts and theories and examines phonetic, semantic and syntactic aspects of his poetry. David Gascoyne’s lyrics demonstrates the poet’s commitment to the French version of surrealism, his interest in the unconscious and dream-like narration. The streams of arbitrary visual images, deep emotionality, the artistic use of the word, semantic increments of meaning make Gascoigne’s texts open to interpretation. And though the poet actually refers visual effects (we rather see dreams), specific dream-like patterns are created not only by lexical, but also by phonetic repetitions, via intonation in which lexemes acquire a new semantic load.