THE PLAY WITH NATIONAL SPACE IN POSTMODERN PROSE: “ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE” BY GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ AND “THE SWAN FLOCK” BY V. ZEMLIAK

Abstract

The article examines genre-stylistic and aesthetic parallels between the two novels with the aim of explaining their similarities through typology, namely, through the unfolding of a shared European Baroque discourse common to both Márquez and Zemliak, which in different countries acquired distinct genre and stylistic forms due to national specificity. It is argued that the phenomenon of Latin American prose of the 1950s–1980s is explained by its rootedness in Spanish-French Baroque, which in the twentieth century assumed the form of Neo-Baroque and influenced various stylistic trends of modernism, most notably Surrealism.
Latin American prose incorporated the Baroque discourse within the context of postmodernism, which actualized the ludic dimension of art as a play with national tradition. The continuity of this discourse and the gradual evolution of Baroque into twentieth-century Neo-Baroque are also characteristic of the Ukrainian artistic tradition (Hryhorii Skovoroda, Ivan Kotliarevskyi, Taras Shevchenko, Maik Yohansen, Todos Osmachka, O. Ilchenko). In the novels, a play with tradition is traced in the way both authors model their mythopoetic worlds: this is a play with the hyper-narratives of utopia and dystopia. Based on two texts that vividly embody the characteristic features of national literary phenomena (“magical realism”, “chimerical prose”), convergences within the postmodern context are identified. The research methodology is based on comparative-typological analysis combined with genre-stylistic analysis and grounded in the philosophy and aesthetics of postmodernism.