The body of war in Vladimir Makanin’s novel Asan

Abstract

It is very conspicuous how in Vladimir Makanin’s novel Asan war is depicted first of all from its corporal point of view. Soldiers are presented as living, wounded, or dead bodies. Communication in war is performed by means of corporal signs; when characters speak, it seems that the bodily quality of their voices is more important than the words they speak and the voices are often compared with voices of various animals. There are many corporal metaphors related to military institutions and weapons, so war turns out to be a tremendous military body. This paper interprets these bodily metaphors by means of Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory, thus describing a complex metaphor, underlying the novel’s plot. Refs 25.