The article deals with the problem of the Greek consciousness' limited ability to image certain abstract notions: abysm/chasm, death and the Underworld in the Classical period. The first part of the analysis, based on Greek classical literature sources, concerns the general problem of categorization and conceptualization of the idea of the Underworld which human consciousness was trying to seize by means of a metaphor 'to die is to pass'. The author argues that the ability of the human mind (gnome) to understand abstract notions metaphorically limits the idea of the Underworld simultaneously; it is a reversed reflection of the senses experienced during reality, which creates the anti-world of human visions of passage into a different space. Only the notion of chasm does not have its mirror image; however, it is still perceived as a part of the Greek kosmos (order). Being conceived as a physically existing space, it is frequently figured as a whale's barrel. The second part contains a detailed structural analysis of an old, drunken woman's figure being devoured by a whale which was introduced in Phrynichos' lost comedy. The example is to illustrate the mechanism in displaying abstract notions connected with the sphere of death which the Greek mind could only properly understand as the act of mimesis. Such a construction of the Underworld and chasm which was just an extension of the existing reality denoted the human desire to get rid of fear of emptiness. The image of the 'inexpressible' was, as a result, a mode of self-consolation.
The opposition between the motoric and visual method of reading a text releases a tension between the visible and the invisible, which is active in both original projects of literary structures and individual courses of reading. Visualisation, that is, transformation of the invisible into the visible, is opposed by de-visualisation (transformation of the visible into the invisible) and re-visualisation which consists in regaining an image that has been lost beforehand. These processes are graduable, non-obligatory, imprecise, important for the work's aesthetic facet, neutral in interpretation, the latter being oriented, as a rule, toward combinations of meanings. In lexical resources of language, the visualisation experience becomes the source for distinction of a group of 'visualisms' - units being independent of the norms of grammar. This alters the classical Jakobsonian model of act of communication, since a text imbued with 'visualisms' refers the reader simultaneously to the code and the context, rendering it unfeasible to separate the metalinguistic and the cognitive function.
'Visualisation' is nowadays one of the most expansive notions in cultural (semiotic) studies, including literary research. By means of introductory remarks to the periodical's present issue, the author discusses the notion's various meanings and applications - from' practical/service-oriented' in the domain of computer graphics, through to psychotherapeutic ones, various varieties of visual arts, anthropology of sensuality and its cultural forms, visual-arts concepts and visual arts' associations with literature, up to theoretical afterthought on the status of literary text.
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