A Work of Art = A New World: Chronotope

An excerpt from Culture vs. Copyright: “[E]very artwork creates a new layer of humanity consisting of a new world (less and more real than the physical one), a new author (capable of creating that world), and a new audience (capable of understanding, believing in, accepting, and enjoying all of the novelty) with all their new forms of behavior, thinking, and speaking.”

There were some theoretical advances happened in my old mind since that was written.

One concerns with the chronotope. I learned (and am coming to understand that in full) from my teacher, Vladimir Bibler that poetry and philosophy, each in her own way, deal with the moment and the eternity. But I never understood where the time comes from. That was taught by Michail Bachtin in respect to novels. Nowadays, I realize that time is presented in any work of art, including poetry, as much as it delivers a “story.” Well, the moment that was said it became obvious, and I want to explore a bit that evident phenomenon. What is so obvious here? It is the story, evidently, to be going in time, event by event, little or big happenings following one another. It is time! So what?

Two things. The First: How we get that time? The Second: What happens as a result?

The First. A work of art involves us in its world but not entirely. We can get out. Actually, spacewise we are out anyway. That is, being actually distanced from the story we witness, we perceive it from outside from one “end to another” in time. That is, the story time is viewed in its entirety even though that time can amount to ages. We observe those ages in a very short period of our “own” physical time. But there is an issue with the latter there: we cannot observe it for we are “inside!” From this follows:

The Second. The only physical time that can be real for human consciousness is that one a human being is exposed to in a work of art. The most expressive in this respect must be a narrative of literature, either fiction or . . . fiction. Real reality behind a story has nothing to do with that and plays no role in that.

In short: Arts (fiction in the first place) and only arts teach us the sense of time.

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