Psychological parallelism in literature: examples

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

In this article we will consider such a literary concept as psychological parallelism. Often this term causes some problems with the interpretation of its meaning and functions. In this article, we will try to explain as clearly as possible what this concept is, how to apply it in the artistic analysis of the text, and what you should pay special attention to.

Definition

Psychological parallelism in literature is one of the stylistic devices. Its essence lies in the fact that the plot of the work is based on a consistent comparison of motives, pictures of nature, relationships, situations, actions. Usually used in poetic vernacular texts.

Usually consists of 2 parts. The first depicts a picture of nature, conditional and metaphorical, creating an emotional and psychological background. And in the second, the image of the hero already appears, whose state is compared with the natural. For example: falcon - well done, swan - bride,a cuckoo is a yearning woman or a widow.

History

However, it is necessary to delve a little into the past in order to fully understand what psychological parallelism is. The definition in the literature, by the way, usually begins with a little historical background.

So, if this technique came to literature from folklore, then it has rather deep roots. Why did it occur to people to compare themselves with animals, plants or natural phenomena? This phenomenon is based on naive syncretic ideas that the surrounding world has its own will. This is confirmed by pagan beliefs, which endowed all life phenomena with consciousness. For example, the sun is an eye, that is, the sun appears as an active living being.

Such parallels were formed from:

• The complex similarity of characteristic features with life or action.
• The ratio of these signs with our understanding of reality, the laws of the world.
• Adjacency of various objects that could be similar in terms of identified features.
• The vital value and completeness of the described object or phenomenon in relation to humanity.

That is, initially, psychological parallelism was based on a person's subjective idea of the world.

Views

We continue to study psychological parallelism. We have already given the definition, now let's talk about its types. There are several different approaches to the study of this stylistic phenomenon and, accordingly, severalclassifications. We present here the most popular of them - the authorship of A. N. Veselovsky. According to her, psychological parallelism happens:

• two-term;
• formal;
• polynomial;
• single-term;
• negative.

Binary parallelism

It is characterized by the following construction method. First, there is an image of a picture of nature, then a description of a similar episode from a person's life. These two episodes seem to echo each other, although they differ in their objective content. It is possible to understand that they have something in common, according to certain consonances, motives. This trait distinguishes psychological parallels from simple repetitions.

For example: “When they want to pick roses, they have to wait until spring, when they want to love girls, they have to be sixteen years old” (Spanish folk song).

It should be noted, however, that folklore parallelism, which most often happens to be binomial, is built mainly on the category of action. If it is removed, then all other elements of the stylistic figure will lose their significance. The stability of this design is ensured by 2 factors:

• Bright similarities of the category of action are added to the main similarity, which are not transcribed to him.
• Native speakers liked the comparison, became part of the cult and remained in it for a long time.

If both of these points are observed, then the parallelism will turn into a symbol and become a household name. However, far from all two-term parallelisms await such a fate, even those built according to allrules.

Formal parallelism

There are times when the psychological parallelism is not immediately clear, and to comprehend it, you need to hear the entire text. For example: one of the folk songs begins with the line “The river is flowing, it will not stir”, then there is a description of the bride, to whom many guests came to the wedding, but no one can bless her, since she is an orphan; thus, there is a similarity - the river does not stir, and the bride sits sad, silent.

Here we can talk about the default, not the lack of similarity. The stylistic device becomes more complicated, the understanding of the work itself becomes more difficult, but the structure becomes more beautiful and poetic.

Polynomial parallelism

The concept of "psychological parallelism", despite the apparent complexity, is quite simple. Another thing is when we talk about varieties of this stylistic device. Although, as far as polynomial parallelism is concerned, there are usually no problems with its detection.

This subspecies is characterized by one-sided accumulation of several parallels that come from several objects simultaneously. That is, one character is taken and compared immediately with a number of images. For example: “Do not caress, dove, with a dove, do not twist, grass, with a blade of grass, do not get used to, well done, with a girl.” That is, there are already three objects in front of the reader for comparison.

Such a one-sided increase in images suggests thatparallelism gradually evolved, which gave the poet greater freedom of writing and the opportunity to show his analytical skills.

That is why polynomial parallelism is called a relatively late phenomenon of folk poetic style.

Single-term parallelism

One-term psychological parallelism is aimed at the development of figurativeness and strengthening its role in the work. This approach looks like this: Imagine the usual two-term construction, where the first part speaks of the stars and the moon, and in the second they are compared with the bride and groom. Now let's remove the second part, leaving only the images of the stars and the month. According to the content of the work, the reader will guess that we are talking about a girl and a young man, but there will be no mention of them in the text itself.

This reticence is similar to formal parallelism, but unlike it, there will be no mention of the human characters that are meant here. Therefore, here we can talk about the appearance of a symbol. Over the centuries, well-established allegorical images have appeared in folklore, which are identified with only one meaning. Such and such images are used in single-term parallelism.

For example, a falcon is identified with a young man, a groom. And often the works describe how a falcon fights with another bird, how he is kidnapped, how he leads a falcon down the aisle. There is no mention of people here, but we understand that we are talking about human relations between a boy and a girl.

Parallelismnegative

Let's proceed to the description of the last type, which can be psychological parallelism (examples are given in the article). The negative constructions of our stylistic device are usually used to create riddles. For example: “Roars, not a bull, strong, not a rock.”

This construction is built as follows. First, an ordinary two-term or polynomial parallelism is created, and then the characterized image is removed from it and negation is added. For example, instead of "roars like a bull" - "roars, not a bull."

In Slavic folklore, this technique was especially popular and loved. Therefore, it can be found not only in riddles, but also in songs, fairy tales, etc. Later, it migrated to author's literature, being used mainly in fairy tales and stylistic attempts to recreate folk poetry.

From a conceptual point of view, negative parallelism, as it were, distorts the very formula of parallelism, which was created to bring images closer together, and not to separate them.

From folklore to author's literature

When did psychological parallelism migrate from folk poetry to classical literature?

It happened at the time of the vagants, itinerant musicians. Unlike their predecessors, they graduated from classical music and poetry schools, so they mastered the basic literary techniques of depicting a person, which were characterized by great abstractness. They had little specificity and connection with reality. At the same time as all the vagrantsmusicians, they were quite familiar with folklore. Therefore, they began to introduce its elements into their poetry. Comparisons with natural phenomena of the character's character appeared, for example, winter and autumn - with sadness, and summer and spring - with fun. Of course, their experiments were quite primitive and far from perfect, but they laid the foundation for a new style, which later migrated to medieval literature.

Thus, in the 12th century, folk song techniques gradually began to intertwine with the classical tradition.

What is the function of similes, epithets and metaphors of psychological parallelism?

For starters, it's worth saying that without metaphors and epithets, there would be no parallelism itself, since this technique relies entirely on them.

Both of these paths serve to transfer the sign of one object to another. Actually, already in this function it is clear that without them it is impossible to compare nature with man. Metaphorical language is the main tool of the writer in creating parallelisms. And if we are talking about the function of these tropes, then it just consists in the transfer of signs.

Basic concepts (psychological parallelism) are associated with descriptions, so it is not surprising that metaphors and epithets occupy the main place among them. For example, let's take the epithet "the sun has set" and make a parallelism out of it. We will succeed: as the sun went down, so did the life of the clear falcon. That is, the fading of the sun is compared with the fading of the life of a young man.

Psychological parallelism in The Tale of Igor's Campaign

The “Word” can serve as an excellent example of folk stylistic devices, since it is itself part of folklore. For example, let's take the main character Yaroslavna, since her image is associated with nature and is often compared with her. Take the episode of the heroine's crying. One day, she “calls with a lonely tap dance at dawn” - a parallelism between Yaroslavna and a bird.

Then you can remember the image of the narrator himself. His fingers on the strings are compared to ten falcons on doves.

And one more example: the retreat of the Galichs to the Don is described as "not a storm the falcons will bring across the wide fields." Here we see a pattern of negative parallelism.