სინესთეზია და მისი ენობრივი არეკვლა ლიტერატურულ ნიმუშებზე დაყრდნობით

Abstract

Colours form part of the objective world; therefore, it is natural that they are reflected by an individual more or less subjectively. Colours are categorized and verbalized in a peculiar way. In some cases, the result is adequate to reality, while in other cases, there are deviations from the norm. It is a widespread device in fiction literature (for example, with Symbolists) to deliberately re-evaluate colours i.e. to use them figuratively, as stylistic devices in order to aggravate or embellish reality. An ordinary user of language may also apply this device. An essentially different phenomenon, described in psychology as synesthesia, is of a completely different origin. It is distinguished by a multitude of combinations, for instance: synthesis of smell and colour, tactile sensation and smell, colour and sound and so on. Based on the genesis, psychologists describe a) genetic/hereditary synesthesia, which is revealed at an early age, alongside the child’s mental development; b) secondary/ acquired, i.e. caused by the emotional state, physical or psychic trauma; c) suggestive, aroused on the mental level, as a result of reading psychological literature on the topic of synesthesia. The paper focuses on the synthesis of colour and the phenomena of the material world, analysing it on the language plane, based on the illustrative material from German and Russian fi ction literature (Trakl, Tsvetaeva). The research aims to outline differences between the mere metaphoric use of colours and the process of their transformation in the prism of the “ego” of a synesthetic writer. We aim to distinguish a “genuinely” synesthetic writer from the one marked as such by a literary critic. Based on the constellation Trakl ||Tsvetaeva, we have outlined the common features of synesthetic writers, without regard to the aetiology of the phenomenon itself: a) on the personal plane – psychic disorders, depression, drug addiction, incestuous inclinations, suicide attempts; b) on the language plane – association of numbers, characters of the alphabet, geometric figures, substances, situations and people with colour; verbalization of these associations by means of occasional forms (in the verb, noun and adjective); composition of semantically inappropriate attributive nominal phrases and non-existent collocations with functional verbs; the use of non-adverbial forms in the adverbial function and so on.