“Being as a book”: Topos — formula — cliché (to the topoi of modernity)

Abstract

In the recent decades, the idea of a literary topic as a phenomenon that belongs mainly to the culture of the rhetorical era is increasingly being revised: it is evidenced by a number of works on the ‘finished forms’ beyond the borders of the era of ‘reflexive traditionalism’. These studies are united by a common approach: as a rule, they describe specific cases of the complex functioning of the traditional loci communes in the authors’ works of the 19th–21st centuries, that is, they move in their consideration from an individual artistic image to a metaphorical archetype. This article is an attempt to describe the functioning of the traditional topos in the literary system of the non-canonical era from the point of view of an opposite approach. ‘Being as a book,’ one of the most common topoi of the rhetorical era, is described in the classical works of E. R. Curtius, D. Čiževskij, and A. M. Panchenko. In modern culture, the metaphor of ‘world readability’ (H. Blumenberg) remains relevant and acquires new original manifestations. However, there is another form of functioning of the traditional topos beyond the framework of the culture of the finished word. In literature of the 19th century, its main variants (‘The Book of Nature’ and ‘The Book of Fate’) continue to exist in the form of the stable formulas that preserve the values that arose at different stages of a metaphor’s life. Such a topos-formula has the possibility to develop and acquire new meanings connected with definitive contexts (‘The Book of Life’ of writers-democrats and ‘The Book of Memory’ in the elegiacal tradition). When stable semantics disappear, the formula transforms into a stylistically neutral cliché. Topos in particular forms maintain their presence in Russian literary discourse of the 19th century.