Temporal and spatial dimensions of the discourse of loneliness in Christopher Isherwood’s “A Single Man”

Abstract

The article analyses the peculiarities of the discourse of loneliness in its connection with the categories of time and space in Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (1964). The relevance of the research is conditioned by the general tendency to revise the canon of modernist literature with a special focus on its ‘minor’ voices. Neither the novel chosen as the object of research nor Isherwood’s literary heritage in general is sufficiently represented in Ukrainian studies of Anglo-American literature. The purpose of the study is to identify and characterize the main forms through which the discourse of loneliness is actualized in the dimensions of time and space. The complex methodological approach applied in order to reach the objective involves hermeneutic analysis, close reading, aspects of genre studies (D. Higdon’s concept of the circadian novel) and narratology (G. Genette’s paratext theory).

As a result of the study, it is discovered that loneliness in the novel is represented as a complex multidimensional phenomenon motivated by multiple factors of various origins. The analysis of paratextual elements allows for interpretation of loneliness as a key category of the text. The existential plane functions as the conceptual dominant, around which the entire discourse of loneliness is organized.

The forms of realization of loneliness in the categories of time and space are reviewed and a distinction is made between their external and internal variations. External time is characterized as the novel’s historical and sociocultural background, connected with the consumerization and simulacrization of American society. At the internal level, the features of the circadian novel construction are defined: the chronological frame, limited not only by the physical boundaries of day but also the conceptual separation of the past and the future; the narrative focus on the present; the sensation of the moment; the effect of recursive repetition. External space is divided into local, represented by a multitude of small loci (the house, the hospital, the gym, etc.), and global, incarnated in the opposition of natural and urban. The internal spatial dimension has areas of memory, trauma, liberation, eschatology, which in various combinations actualize loneliness in the external spaces.