“That, really, is altogether sort of…”: On the Meaning of Particles That Have Decidedly no Meaning

Abstract

The article offers an analysis of the speech manner of the protagonist of Nikolay Gogol’s story The Overcoat described by Gogol through the tendency of Akaky Akakievich to express himself “mostly with prepositions, adverbs, and finally such particles as have decidedly no meaning.” The hypothesis of the article is that there is a certain concept behind the manner of speech of this character, which is not only linguistic but also political in nature. The latter becomes obvious if we trace the evolution of the hero’s speech from the words “That, really, is altogether sort of…” to “Secretaries are altogether sort of… the untrustworthy race…” Grounding of the hypothesis is based on two theoretical sources. The first of them is the study of the specifics of Martin Heidegger’s language, presented by Andrey Paribok in his article On the Philosophical Legitimateness of Heidegger’s Language Licences (Voprosy filosofii. 2018. Vol. 11). The emphasis in this article is on the role played by non-root words (for example, Inheit) in Being and Time. The second concept that we use is the linguistic model proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their A Thousand Plateaus. In this concept, it is proposed to understand speech not on the basis of shifters that bind it to the subjectivity, but on the basis of tensors, which serve to express impersonal affects that are not reducible to the speaker’s ego. Thus the relaxed and free speech manner of Gogol himself can be viewed as a utopian ideal in relation to the inability of the hero of The Overcoat to verbal articulation of his thoughts. However, the strong side of Akaky Akakievich’s speech is its power to express the affect that testifies to the hero’s belonging to the multitude of those who have a “strong enemy” represented by “our northern frost.” The climate here is an obvious metaphor for social order. So, “particles devoid of meaning” reveal their potential, and Akaky Akakievich’s speech turns from plaintive babble into a formidable demand to articulate his desire in a generally valid form.