GENRE STRUCTURE TRANSFORMATION OF H. DE BALZAC’S NOVEL “FATHER GORIOT” IN GRAPHIC ADAPTATION

The article analyzes genre transformations of the classic narrative structure of the 19-century novel in the modern graphic adaptation. The comparative analysis of H. de Balzac’s novel “Father Goriot” and its graphic implementation reveals the peculiarities of plot deconstruction, narrative organization, characterology, and principles of reality mapping within the verbal-visual paradigm. The article also studies the ways the traditional features of the realistic prose are graphically recoded – social and psychological determinism, analytism, objectivism, objectivism, typification, universalism, and author’s demiurgism.The key characteristics of Balzac’s literary method, such excessive detailing of the subject world, absolutization of everyday life, social analyticalism, polyphony, aphorism, and polemical pathos, undergo transformations caused by the weakening of the main socio-cultural function of realistic writing, which is to ensure the truth of life. The experience of creating the graphic version of Balzac’s novel is viewed in terms of the modern culture’s aspiration to rediscover the ways of reconsidering the classics, similar to postmodernism game principles (nonlinearity, inversion, shifting the center of meaning, segmentation). The verbal-visual paradigm of the graphic novel is regarded as a sign of epistemological uncertainty, denial of logocentrism, distrust of classical narrative models, and destruction of boundaries between elite and popular cultures. The internal reality of the graphic novel is based on denying the aesthetics of life-likeness. The fragmentation, mosaic structure, and the characters representation as pictured, conventional, and grotesquely exaggerated are evidence of the deconstruction technique, plausibility rejection, and sticking to the writer’s ideological intentions. The epistemological realism discourse relies on the dominating cognitive function of art, emphasis on the true-to-life reflection of the reality, the essence of which is to preserve the scale and proportions of life situations and circumstances, whereas the graphic novel loses its cognitive orientation since it focuses on criticizing the aesthetics of life-likeness, non-canonicity, and denying the author’s demiurgism and omnipotence. The genre deconstruction of the classics as a cultural field is evaluated as a complex and multilevel process, which not only destroys the boundaries between high and mass culture, but also, due to the selection method, ruins the logic of hierarchy – the renewal and reactualization of the classics in accordance with the contemporary context.