“School For Fools” as a metafiction. The problem of subjective neosyncretism

Abstract

The article deals with the study of the subjective structure of Sasha Sokolov’s novel “School for Fools”. Using the methodological apparatus of narratology and receptive aesthetics. An attempt is made to analyze the compositional structure of the text in order to describe the so called “subjective neosyncretism” – an aesthetic trend in the literature of the second half of the twentieth century, exacerbating the relationship between the value and narrative instances of the work. The need for such a study is motivated by the complexity of the description of the metafictional structure of the work, undertaken by us for the first time on the basis of the concept of V.B. Zuseva-Ozkan. The main hypothesis of our research is confirmed by a practical analysis in the subject structure of the novel: the fusion of the position of the hero and the author, or, more precisely, their conflict-free identical coexistence as different functions of the work, does not allow us to unambiguously attribute the “School for Fools” to any of the four invariants of the metafiction proposed by Zuseva-Ozkan. It does not create an internal conflict in the mentioned concept, derived from other metafictional material, but allows us, following M. Foucault, to propose a clarifying parameter – the authorship function.