ИСТИНА

In his ‘Dialogic Imagination’ Bakhtin writes that ‘[i]n the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.’ As it is the case with many other tools employed in literary analysis, Bakhtin’s chronope functions as a primarily visual metaphor enabling the scholar to ‘map’ spacial and temporal features found in the text. In my paper, I try to argue that the ‘thickening’ of time and space mentioned in the quote above may be better conceptualized and subjected to analysis in sonic / auditory terms. The literary time-space may be imagined as a space in which the voices of the author / the characters undergo transformations similar to those affecting sound propagating in a reverberating environment. As an example, I demonstrate that many characteristic features of Kafka’s (in relation to both style and narrative content) may be accounted for by considering the qualities of the sonic structures described / inscribed in his writing. In particular, the all pervasive and yet elusive presence of power in some of his works (such as Der Prozess, In der Strafkolonie, and Das Schloss) may be explained as a product of verbal reverberations within a specific ‘sonic chronotope.’