NARRATIVE MODELLING OF HISTORICAL TIME AND THE ARTISTIC CHRONOTOPE IN NOAH GORDON'S «THE PHYSICIAN»

Abstract

The article examines, from a narratological perspective, how the American writer Noah Gordon's novel «The Physician» (1986) models eleventh-century historical time and fuses it with fictional space into a chronotope. Drawing on M.M.Bakhtin's theory of the chronotope, G.Genette's categories of narrative time and Yu.M.Lotman's concept of artistic space, the study distinguishes historical, biographical and cyclical layers of time in the novel. The chronotopes of London, the English roads, the caravan route, the Isfahan maristan and the Scottish hills are modelled as a chain of loss, road, threshold, initiation and return. Through the figure of Ibn Sina, the article reveals how Eastern and Western scholarly traditions meet in narrative time and how historical fact is subordinated to the fictional design.