რომანი რომანში: (ზაირა არსენიშვილის რომანის „კოლაჟი მთვარის შუქზე“ მაგალითზე)

ანოტაცია

“Text within the text” is a specific rhetorical and narrative construc­tion in which the differentiation in the coding of various textual layers be­comes a consciously revealed factor – shaping both the author’s compositi­onal strategy and the reader’s interpretive experience. In their article On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture, Lotman and Uspensky (1971) observed: “The 20th century has produced not only metalanguages of science, but also a metaliterature and meta-metapainting and apparently is creating a meta­cul­ture – an all-encompassing metalingual system of a secondary order.” In literary theory, Lotman's model has developed along two main directions: 1. Texts that openly display traces of their own creative process – what can be called, conditionally, a “novel about a novel”; and 2. The so-called “novel within a novel,” in which real and fictional narrative planes are juxtaposed within a single textual framework.

Narrative theorist Ryan (2005) notes that “tellability is at least partly a matter of conceptual and logical complexity of a situation, or of a sequence of events,” and that this depends on “an underlying system of what we can call ‘embedded narratives’ – story-like representations produced in the mind of a character and reproduced in the mind of a reader”. Accordingly, a strong structural and conceptual connection exists between the “main text” and the “embedded narratives,” including their characters, events, and chronotope.

Zaira Arsenishvili’s novel “Images under the Moonlight” exemplifies the “novel within a novel” structure. The frame narrative centers on Tiko, a junior research fellow at the Telavi Regional Museum of History and Ethno­graphy. The inner narrative – Tiko’s fictional work – recounts the final days of King Erekle II. This second narrative also follows the tradition of the ποιούμενον novel: it is written by Tiko, who simultaneously appears as various characters within it.

Fowler (1982) notes that “the imaginary work being composed within the story continually gives opportunities for self-reference”, a dynamic that causes the inner and outer narratives to merge and intertwine. Moreover, the embedded narrative remains deliberately fragmentary: regardless of the narrator’s eloquence, the text repeatedly returns to the frame story. Tiko’s “Chronicles” consist of several essay-like fragments embedded in correspon­ding sections of the main text. These fragments are closely tied to the city of Telavi and affect the fate of the frame narrative’s characters – not only in the 1960s, but also in the 1990s – underscoring the recursive, layered structure of the novel.