Perceptual Narrative Layer in Muriel Spark’s Story “The Dark Glasses”

Abstract

The article deals with the visual perception layer in Muriel Spark’s short story “The Dark Glasses” with the aim of carrying out a conceptual analysis of this text. Meaning generation models have already been demonstrated as multilayer non-homogeneous structures describing different points of view and different narrative layers in B. Uspensky’s, G. Genette’s and W. Schmid’s theories. The text as a complex structural language unit can, like the word, vary in different semantic fields. This article presents the spatial, temporal, ideological, and linguistic narrative layers according to the dominant visual perception layer in the protagonist-narrator’s internal point of view expressed in the story. The perceptual layer is demonstrated on the basis of the cognitive process in visual perception, namely, the optic array and human perceptual system. The optic array is implied in the story’s composition as a framed closed structure comprising two texts: the frame and the embedded text. Both of them follow the subject-object model of perception and are organized according to the principles of reflectivity, doubling, and copying. The perceptual system is expressed through various language units: simple verbal predicates see, look and a set of verbs of perception, substantives eyes, glasses and their direct (initial) and figurative meanings, colour terms based on adjectives in descriptions of the characters, as well as conceptual archetypal visual metaphors from the light–dark family, and metonymies based on causal and partitive semantic relations.
For citation: Zhanturina B.N. Perceptual Narrative Layer in Muriel Spark’s Story “The Dark Glasses”. Vestnik Severnogo (Arkticheskogo) federal’nogo universiteta. Ser.: Gumanitarnye i sotsial’nye nauki, 2021, no. 1, pp. 41–49. DOI: 10.37482/2687-1505-V073