TEXT MARKERS OF THE NATIONAL SELF-IDENTITY IN HUGO HAMILTON’S NOVEL “THE SPECKLED PEOPLE”

Abstract

The purpose of the article – to analyze textual idiosyncratic markers of national self-identity based on the material of Irish writer Hugo Hamilton’s autobiographical novel “The speckled people”. Research methods. The novel is studied in the mirror of postcolonial criticism using the methodology of memory theory and narratological analysis. Research results. Key vectors of national oneness are highlighted in the text of the novel: linguistic, toponymic, onomastic, cultural, gastronomic, attributive, post-imperial. The linguistic code of national selfidentity deciphers the triple splitting of the narrator’s national self-identification, reveals the textual mechanisms of such splitting through the motifs of play, fear, the symbolism of reflection and home. The textual identity of the concepts of memory and word is proved. The toponymic-onomastic code reveals the national self-identity of the narrator through the motives of homelessness, loss of landmarks, the search for a home, and the concept of collective trauma. The narrator finds his own identity at the point of de-anglicization of Ireland, and loses it at the point of violent anglicization. Images of the material world project attributive and cultural vectors of the national self-identity (religious markers of home, literary signifiers of false oneness). The post-imperial variety of national self-identity explicates the textual neo-concept “brack people”, as well as the mythologemes of home-country and country-home, implied by the motifs of gathering, collecting, reconciliation-acceptance. The textual manifestations of pseudo- and simulative identification and anti-national identity in the context of stereotypes, distortion, profanation and harmful identification and equalization are studied. Conclusions. The explanation of the binary and ternary oppositions of own / foreign / other, superior and inferior through the ethnodominants “Irish”, “German”, “English” is described. The homodiegetic narrator of the novel acts in an extradiegetic situation as a direct participant in the events. The I-narrator extrapolates the routes of returning to oneself, to one’s own home, through national self-awareness.