Problems in current research of foreign literature (linguo-stylistic analysis of the specificity of the use of parody, pastiche and stylization in the David Lodge’s novel "The British Museum is falling down")

Parody and pastiche are a simulation of a special or unique style, dressing up a stylistic mask. However, the practice of such imitation is neutral. It has neither hidden motive, which is typical for parody nor a satirical impulse and laughter. It excludes the feeling of certainty that there is something normal, which makes imitation looking quite comical. Pastiche is a pure parody, a parody, which has lost its sense of humour.

Stylization is distinguished from the direct style by the presence of the linguistic consciousness (modern stylist and its audience), which reproduces a stylized style. It highlights some moments, leaves others in the shadow and creates a special emphasis on its moments.

The theoretical basis of the research is the works of N. Arutyunova, M. Blek, R. Gior, S. Glyuksberg, S. Gusev, M. Kozhina, V. Karaban, T. Kazakova, S. Terminasova, H. Miram, N. Razinkina, T. Starodubtseva, O. Alexandrova, M. Rogava, S. Prus and others.

There is a real need to study the specifics of using parody, pastiche and stylization as important language phenomena. Therefore, it is relevant to study the ways of reproducing various forms of them.

The aim of the scientific research is a linguo- stylistic analysis of the specificity of the use of parody, pastiche and stylization in the David Lodge's novel “The British Museum Is Falling Down”.

The main material of the research. David Lodge is Britain's largest literary critic, writer, playwriter and screenwriter, the author of more than ten novels, as well as numerous theoretical and literary critic works that put him along with such meters of post-structuralism, deconstructionism, and postmodernism as J. F.

Lyotard, I. Hassan, D. Fokkema, J. Butler, U. Eco, L. Haym, and others who found and systematized “narrative strategies” and “narrative tactics” of “postmodern writing” [11].

“The British Museum Is Falling Down”, which is maybe the most famous Lodge's work, is a parody, pastiche about the day in the extremely literary and very Catholic life of Adam Appleby, the protagonist of the novel. Desperate, but not hopeless, Adam begins to mislead the literature and life, because every event in a wildly incredible series that consists of one day, unfolds in its unique parody style. Parodies are fun, but they also have a semi-ambitious goal. It is the undermining of all forms of power, both religious and literary. Being the parody in its form, “The British Museum Is Falling Down” reflects the comic intention that the work was written in the period of waiting for changes in the church [2].

The novel “The British Museum Is Falling Down”, first published in 1965, is the third novel of the writer. The researchers of creativity note that in previous novels the author partly refers to the themes of Catholicism. “The British Museum Is Falling Down” is the first novel of the writer, in which this issue occupies the central place. In the epilogue to the novel, Lodge provides a general overview of the features of the structure, the problems and the history of its writing. He also turns to the issue of literary influences, using the terms “alternating styles” and “parody”, referring the reader to the model of the novel “Ulysses” by J. Joyce.

Like in Joyce's “Ulysses”, the action of the Lodge's novel is placed in one day, where parodies play an important role (in this case, the style of the great writers of the 20th century is parodied), and the epilogue includes an internal monologue-reflection on the marriage and family life of Barbara, the wife of the main character. This monologue is stylized for the technique of “flow of consciousness”, with the help of which there was an internal monologue of Molly Bloom in the final part of “Ulysses”.

However, this novel is the first work, where Lodge purposely and structurally uses the experimental strategies peculiar to postmodernism. Stylization serves as the main metaprosaic (and compositional) method in the work, whereas the inclusion of the elements of literary theory and criticism (with the help of thematic dominant of science, namely, the theory of literature, with which the hero's profession is concerned) to the novel and the creation of a biography of a fictional writer, as well as the presentation of his artistic creativity, are the two other most important elements of the metaprosaic element in the novel.

As a way of organizing artistic material, the parody is also an expression of the writer's outlook, irony as a living and literary doctrine. The decisive feature of this thinking is the combination of rational and irrational principles. The rational component can be considered as the natural ability of the author to adequately perceive the destructive mood in the world like Lodge ironically does in his novel through the outlook of his protagonist. In the field of the writer's vision, first of all, there are those phenomena of language, like literature and the surrounding reality, which are internally contradictory. The irrational component of thinking is the conscious desire to reproduce an open, undeveloped meaning as intentionally false. That is why parodies deliberately choose indirect, often ambiguous, illogical forms of expression, create “embedded dolls”. The author of the novel provoked the very possibility of ambiguous reading and many interpretations through parodying different styles and numerous writers, who definitely have already put some meaning between the lines of their works.

The protagonist of the novel and the main personification of the parody in the novel, twenty-five- year graduate student Adam Appleby, gets into a creative and vital trap. Being not able to retain his beloved wife and three young children, he faces a dilemma: if he should abandon a future academic career (its prospects are extremely shaky), a dissertation research in the field of modern English literature (its contours are very foggy), and after that find a job and thereby get rid of the burdensome lack of money and permanent fears about the probable next replenishment of the family [7].

At the same time, the hero thinks that his life has already been “written” by someone, and one scumbager, eternal student, Kemal, puts an ironic diagnosis of his phobia: “It's a special form of scholarly neurosis.” Thinking on the properties of the parody as a form of overcoming the intertextual dictation of the cultural tradition, Lodge starts the story with an epigraph by O. Wilde: “Life imposes the Art,” and in “The Afterword”, he "poses a diagnosis" to the author of the postmodern text, referring to the American critic X. Bloom's definition of “anxiety of influence”[6].

Lodge, in the past, the university teacher himself, is personally familiar with the “field of work” of the academic campus, and he submits the story of his hero to the unlucky author of the dissertation. The author puts him at the centre of the pseudoscientific panoptic, with a sparkly irony and a significant proportion of selfirony. He grotesquely breaks from the inside the airtight small world of the “temple of science”, but warns against seeing the writer's double in the character.

The museum absorbs him, and repels every day from the outside world, deprives the normal life joy as a slave, pulls it to the working place and does not reveal its secrets. The dream of going through all its galleries in order to replenish general education is forgotten. Adam stopped in time, walked only through the halls of Japanese weapons and Egyptian vases.

The museum is a place with the sad reputation (notoriously a place), where you will inevitably meet everyone, except loved ones and dear ones (the irony of fate), ruthlessly left in small flats in the name of the unknown highest destination. On this peak of pseudo- pathetic, the author gives an ironic comment: the abandoned wife does not completely share the sacrificial election of their scholarly husbands and spells the sky to deprive at least their children of the hard heritage of knights of science.

The choice of names is revealed; the author tells how the “canon” is perceived by the artists themselves. The reuse of some texts from the British Catholic literary tradition also engages the Lodge's novel in dialogue with these texts. These well-known segments are the building blocks on which Lodge builds his alternative creative “building.” The metaphor for “buildings” is particularly relevant: the British Museum, the repository of English culture, falls. It is in this sense that Lodge “reconstructs” (or “does not build” if the first term can cause unsuccessful expectations) the English tradition.

Museum phantasmagoria is the central link of the parody mode of the story in the Lodge's novel. Creepy ghosts chase the hero, but the terrible turns into the parodically funny. Thus, in the third section, Adam has the visions of the Chinese, who leaned in prayer pose over his workplace. It is the first sign of madness. But in reality the delegation from China inspects a memorial table, on which Marx wrote his “Capital,” and Adam unknowingly occupied it, and thus enlisted himself to the assembly of great people. The museum's hypertext is covered with a net of additional subtexts made of epigraphs borrowed from the works of historians involved in the work in the museum [5].

Considering the functioning of metaprosaic elements in the analyzed novel, it is worth turning to the phenomena of parody and stylization. As is known, the parody is considered one of the main tools of postmodern reflection of reality and it is used in the literature of postmodernism everywhere.

It is worth considering the parody as a metaprosaic phenomenon. Determining the parody as “comic motivated and stressed stylization” is the phenomenon that “introduces the semantic orientation, which is directly opposite to another's direction, into this concept.”

The researchers distinguish stylization and parody, defining, however, one through another and thus exposing their similarity. Although Lodge himself and the foreign researchers talk about the parody when referring to the particular sections of the novel, and they use the term “the parody of style”.

Examining poetics, the researchers tend to use the term “stylization” to determine the narrative dominant in each section of the work, the use of this technique is associated with the Lodge's literary experiment when he experiments with the form and types of narration. Stylization is not always comically motivated.

Thus, stylization can be considered as one of the main goals of the prose techniques in the novel. Turning to the phenomenon of stylization and trying to understand the narrative strategy of the writer as a whole, let us dwell on the second, fourth and seventh chapters and the epilogue of the Lodge's work, where the imitation of the style of V. Woolf. Ch. Snow, H. James and J. Joyce is obvious.

In chapter 3, the character Adam Appleby, the hero of the novel, rides on his scooter and is stuck on his way to the British Library of Museums. He tells us about “Mrs. Dalloway, who spent an hour and a half” (referring to Virginia Woolf's novel “Mrs. Dalloway”). Then we read an excerpt that comically simulates the Woolf's style. The image of “Mrs. Dalloway of the present”, caricaturally depicted in the original, perceived by the hero with reference to the novel of Woolf (he calls a woman Clarissa) according to his own picture of the world, in which the unreal world of literary works and the real world are interchangeable.

The chapter ends with the words “Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury Bloomsbury!”, which can be interpreted in two ways: on the one hand, it is the area of London where the British Museum is located, where the main character seeks to be; on the other, it is an allusion to creative activity [7].

The chapter is styled under the novels of Ch. Snow, which were very popular at that time and were written from the first person. The story in it is characterized by laconicism, epithets and artistic means, which are scientifically consistent.

The seventh chapter of the novel is considered as the best one. In one of the episodes of it, Adam takes part in the tea ceremony with the Merrymarsh's niece, who is also the owner of the scandal letters. The scene is shown in the best traditions of Henry James' novels.

The tone and imagery in the passage (family relics, vintage items, and the atmosphere of mystery) are associated with James's novel “The Aspern Papers", published in 1888, where the protagonist, as well as Adam Appleby, seeks to get the trust of the owner of the previously published manuscript of the famous poet.

The epilogue of the novel, as it was said, is stylized under the “stream of consciousness" of Molly Bloom, the hero of the novel of J. Joyce “Ulysses". The technique of change “in the level of reality" is realized also in the Lodge's novel.

Changing the level of reality, the use of collage and parody points to the possible “redefinition" of the novel as a genre. The use of stylization as a method that arose in connection with the narrative domination of the world perception of the hero in the novel. Sometimes he does not distinguish between real life and fictitious, verbal-figuratively reproduced world. Literally filling up with literary associations and allusions allowed the writer to create a compositional structure based on a variety of elements, “points of view" and ways of presenting situations, most often associated with ironic comparison, preceded by the existing literary tradition and modern hero of reality.