Structuralism
Structuralism
challenged many of the most cherished beliefs of both critics and readers: the
assumption that a literary work expresses an author’s mind and personality and
that it also tells some essential truth about human life. Structuralists state
bluntly that the author is dead and that literary discourse has no truth
function. In an essay of 1968, the French theorist Roland Barthes put the
structuralist view in perhaps its most forceful form. He claimed that writers
only have the power to mix already existing writings, to reassemble them. They
cannot use writing to express themselves but can only draw on language, which is
already formulated, and culture, which is essentially already expressed in
language (in Barthes’ words it is ‘always already written’). Structuralists
also describe themselves as anti-humanist because they oppose all forms of literary
criticism in which the meaning is related to a human subject. Of course, if all
these tenets were demonstrably true, then writers might as well cast aside
their pensand reach for their knitting needles.
Ferdinand de
Saussure (1857–1913)
Concepts
formulated by one man have greatly influenced the whole of modern literary
theory. He is included here among the structuralists because that is where his
influence is particularly strong but the whole of cultural theory is permeated
by distinctions first drawn up by him. If there is some truth in the claim that
the whole of western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato, then the
same could be said of the relationship between cultural (hence also literary)
theory and Ferdinand de Saussure.
Important for
structuralist theory is his distinction between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’. ‘Langue’
is the language system which we all share and which we unconsciously draw on
when we speak; ‘parole’ is language as we actually realize it in individual
utterances. For Saussure, the proper study for linguistics is the underlying
system and not the individual utterances. Structuralist literary criticsalso
endeavoured to study the underlying rules, or grammar, of a work and not its
idiosyncrasies.
Another famous
distinction made by Saussure is that between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’. For
him, words do not refer directly to things. There is, in other words, no discernible
connection between a word and the thing to which it refers. Words are signs
with two aspects: the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’. What is written or
spoken is the ‘signifier’ and what is thought when the word is written or
uttered is the ‘signified’. Meaning is perceived not through the word’s
relation to something but in understanding it as part of a system of
relationships, as part of a sign-system. This mode of analysis can be applied
not only to language but to a whole range of phenomena. The most common and
easily comprehensible illustration of the principle is in the system of traffic
lights. Red, amber and green have no intrinsic meanings but mean ‘stop’, ‘get ready’
and ‘go’ only in relation to each other in the context of a set of traffic
lights. The science of such sign systems is called semiotics or semiology,
which are related to structuralism, but structuralism also concerns itself with
systems, such as kinship relations, which do not utilize signs. In this
respect, structuralism reveals that it has important roots in the anthropology
of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The basic importance of structuralism for a study of
literature derives from its interest in underlying structures of sign systems.
The assumption is that such structures are even more basic than form, more
basic therefore than conventional notions of literary form. Structures are considered
as somehow enabling meaning to emerge.
Semiotics
The term
‘semiotics’ (or the alternative term ‘semiology’) is frequently used in close
association with the theory of structuralism. In the previous section, it was
referred to as a science of signs. It has been argued that literary
structuralists are really engaging in semiotics, so some distinctions should be
made clear. Structuralism is, strictly speaking, a method of investigation,
whereas semiotics can be described as a field of study. Its field is that of
sign systems.
I. C S Peirce
(1839–1914)
The American
philosopher C S Peirce drew up three useful distinctions between different
types of sign (in Saussure’s sense of the word).
1. The ‘Iconic’
is a sign which resembles its referent (e.g., on road signs a picture of a ship
near a port, or a car falling off a quayside).The word ‘icon’ is of course
still used for images representing the Virgin Mary in the Russian Orthodox
Church. Nowadays the word is most commonly used to refer to those little images
identifying various functions on a computer.
2. The
‘Indexical’ is a sign associated, sometimes causally, with a referent (e.g.,
smoke as a sign indicating fire, or a flash as a warning about electricity).
3. The
‘Symbolic’ is a sign which has only an arbitrary relation to its referent, as
is the case with words in a language.
These terms were
generally adopted by semioticians and further classifications were developed.
What a sign stands for is called ‘denotation’ and what other signs are
associated with it is ‘connotation’. There are also ‘paradigmatic’ signs, which
may replace each other in the system, and ‘syntagmatic’ signs, which are linked
together in a chain. A sign system which refers to another sign system is
called a ‘metalanguage’ (literary theory itself is a good example of this).And
signs which have more than one meaning are called ‘polysemic’.With this short
list the range of terminology is not exhausted.
II. Yury Lotman
The Russian
semiotician Yury Lotman did much to develop the application of the theory of
semiotics to literature, most famously in The Analysis of the Poetic Text (1976).
He was very much concerned not to restrict himself to pure structural analysis
but also to introduce a degree of evaluation of the text. He combined strict
structural analysis with close reading of the text in the mode of New Criticism
and argued that literary texts were more worthy of our attention than
non-literary ones because they carried a ‘higher information load’. He
describes a poem, for example, as being ‘semantically saturated’. A poor poem
for him carries insufficient information. A poem consists of a complex
arrangement of interrelated systems (phonological, metrical, lexical etc) and
poetic effects are created through tensions between these systems. There is a
norm, or standard, for each system, from which the poet can deviate, or which
can clash with the norms of another system. Sentence structure, for example,
may not correspond with the standard metric pattern. The reader becomes more
aware of relations of meaning between words when they are placed in some unusual
metric or other structural relationships to each other. In this way, the reader
can perceive new significances beyond dictionary definitions. Lotman argues
that a poem can in effect only be re-read. To read it once is not to read it at
all because some of its effects can only be perceived with a knowledge of the
structural complexity. What we perceive in a poetic text is only the result of awareness
of contrasts and differences. Even the absence of an expected effect can
produce meaning, such as when the reader is led to expect a rhyme which does
not appear. Lotman did not believe however that poetry and literature could be
adequately defined by linguistic analysis alone. The text had to be seen in
wider relation to other systems of meaning, not only within the literary
tradition but in society generally.
Phoneme Theory
It may not be
immediately obvious how phoneme theory could be of relevance to literary theory
but the French critic Roland Barthes made it central to his analysis of the short
story Sarrasine by the author Balzac. A phoneme is a distinct unit of
sound in a language which distinguishes one word from another, for example the p,
b, d and t in the English words pad, pat, bad
and bat. A word can be pronounced in a variety of ways, with
different stresses and accents etc, and the whole word will remain
distinguishable and therefore recognizable as long as the individual phonemes
remain recognizable. There is of course no ideal phoneme but only a mental
abstraction of it. All actually occurring sounds are variations of phonemes. The
logical consequence of this is that we do not recognize sounds in their own
right but only by distinguishing them from others.
The relevance of
this theory for cultural and literary analysis is that it presupposes an
underlying system, or structure, of paired opposites at the very basic level of
language. In phoneme theory, it manifests itself in pairs which are, for
example, nasalised/non-nasalised, voiced/ unvoiced etc. Such ‘binary
oppositions’ occur in many cultural phenomena and have been especially fruitful
in anthropological analyses by, for example, Mary Douglas and Claude
Lévi-Strauss who analysed rites and kinship structures by adapting phoneme
theory to examine the underlying system of differences between practices. Roland
Barthes adapted the procedure to analyse all kinds of human activities, from
clothes to cuisine. His early essays, collected in Mythologies (1957)
and Système de la mode (1967), are accessible and enjoyable books. His
ideas will be considered again later in the context of Poststructuralism.
Structuralist
Narratology
Structuralist
narrative theory uses the model of linguistic analysis to reveal the structure
of narrative. The basis model for that of a storyline is that of grammatical
syntax. Narrative is compared to the structure of a sentence. Especially
influential on the development of structuralist narratology was Vladimir Propp.
I. Vladimir
Propp (1895–1970)
Tomashevski’s
distinctions between fabula and suzhet were taken up by Vladimir
Propp and applied to the analysis of fairy tales. Propp was not a formalist and
used the terms for purely structural analysis. He realised that if you look closely
at traditional Russian fairy tales and folk tales, you find one basic story
structure underlying them all: many suzhets derived from one basic fabula.
There might be superficial differences between the stories, in terms of the individual
details of events and characters, but all can be reduced to the same basic
structure. To demonstrate this Propp devised the categories of ‘actors’ and
‘functions’. ‘Actors’ are the types of central characters who appear and ‘functions’
are the acts or events which carry the narrative forward. There is a limited
number of ‘actors’, the main ones being the following: the hero, the villain,
the seeker (often identical with the hero), the helper, the false helper and
the princess. And there are thirty-one functions which always appear in the
same sequence, although not all of them appear in every story. Some common ones
are: the setting of a task or challenge, successful completion ofthe task or
overcoming the challenge, recognition of the hero, exposure of the villain,
marriage of the hero etc. It is therefore possible to fit virtually all popular
fairy tales into this basic pattern. The comparison with sentence structure is,
in the first instance, a very simple one. The ‘actors’ are the subject of the
sentences and the ‘functions’ are the predicates. It is clear also that many of
Propp’s ‘actors’ and ‘functions’ are to be found in all kinds of literary
narratives and are most clearly defined in myths, epics and romances. Needless
to say the reader is not usually aware of this underlying structure, nor is it
necessary to be. The recognition that this kind of structural analysis was possible
for all fairy tales inspired the hope of pursuing such analysis of literature
in general.
II. A J Greimas
(1917–1992)
A J Greimas (Sémantique
Structurale, 1966) developed and expanded Propp’s theory to make it
applicable to various genres. His approach was based on a semantic analysis of sentence
structure. He proposed three pairs of binary oppositions which include all six
main ‘actors’ (actants) necessary: Subject/Object, Sender/Receiver,
Helper/Opponent. He thereby made Propp’s scheme more abstract, stressing neither
a narrative form nor a specific type of character but a structural unit. These
six actants can be combined into three structural units which he
believed recur in all kinds of narrative:
1.
Subject/Object: desire, search or aim.
2.
Sender/Receiver: communication.
3.
Helper/Opponent: auxiliary support or hindrance.
The most basic
structure is the first. The subject is the main element, though not necessarily
a person, in a story. This subject desires to achieve a certain object through
its (his, her) action. It is this desire which moves the narrative along. The
pattern as applied to actual texts becomes more complex than this, with various
permutations.
Greimas also
reduced Propp’s thirty-one functions to twenty and grouped them into three
‘syntagms’ (structures): ‘contractual’, ‘performative’, and ‘disjunctive’. The first
of these is perhaps the most common. As its name suggests the ‘contractual
syntagm’ involves the setting up or breaking of contracts, rules or systems of
order. Thus, a narrative may adopt either of two structures: there is a contract
or other principle of order, which is violated and subsequently punished, or
there is the absence of such a contract (disorder) with a subsequent
establishment of order. Greek tragedies and some of Shakespeare’s plays conform
to the first structure and American novels of the Wild West conform to the
second. It must be stressed that Greimas’ approach enables the reader to
identify how meaning is created in the text but does not imply any specific
interpretation. This the reader must supply for him- or herself.
III. Tzvetan
Todorov (1939–)
Tzvetan Todorov
took the ideas of both Propp and Greimas to what one might term their logical
conclusion. He describes narrative structure using common syntactic concepts:
agency, predication, adjectival and verbal functions, mood, aspect, etc. The
basic unit of narrative is the proposition, which can either be an agent (such
as a person) or a predicate (such as action).A predicate can also function like
an adjective, describing the state of something, or it can function like a
verb, indicating some kind of action. There are two higher levels of organization
above that of proposition: the sequence and the text. The basic sequence is
made up of five propositions describing a state, which is subsequently
disturbed and then re-established, though usually in a different form. The five
propositions in sequence are: equilibrium (1), force (1), disequilibrium, force
(2) and equilibrium (2).A succession of such sequences forms a text. Various
complexities and permutations of the sequences can, of course, be introduced, connecting
them in different ways, embedding one within another, digressing and returning
etc. A work of literature is thus read as though it were one extended and complex
sentence. Such a theory provides an apparently scientific procedure but it
contributes little, if anything, to an actual understanding of meaning.
One of Todorov’s
most well-known studies is The Typology of Detective Fiction (1966), in
which he distinguishes three basic types of detective fiction, which have evolved
over time: the ‘whodunit’, the ‘thriller’ and the ‘suspense novel’. This study
also confirms the view that it is much easier to apply structuralist techniques
of analysis to popular fiction than to more ‘literary’ works.
IV. Gérard
Genette (1930–)
Gérard Genette’s
Narrative Discourse (1972) is regarded by many as one of the most
important contributions to narratology. He redefined existing categories and
introduced a number of completely new ones. For example he redefined the
Russian Formalist distinctions between fabula and suzhet by dividing
narrative into three levels: ‘story’ (histoire), ‘discourse’ (récit)
and narration. This is most clearly perceived in texts in which there is a
distinct narrator or storyteller addressing the reader directly (‘narration’).
He or she presents a verbal ‘discourse’, in which he or she also appears as a
character in the events related (‘story’). These three levels are related to
each other by three aspects, which Genette derived from the three common
aspects of verbs: ‘tense’, ‘mood’ and ‘voice’. While the aspect of ‘tense’ may
be readily understood by its reference to situating the story and/or the
‘narration’ in present or past time, those of ‘mood’ and ‘voice’ need further
clarification. Both are important in analysing the point of view in a
text.‘Mood’ here refers to the perspective from which events are viewed (eg
from that of a particular character) which may actually be described by a
different narrative ‘voice’ (it might for example be an old man telling of the
events of his own youth). Genette formulated a distinction between two
different kinds of relation between narrator and character in terms of a binary
opposition: there is ‘homodiegetic’ narrative, in which the narrator tells us
about him/herself, and there is ‘heterodiegetic’ narrative, in which the
narrator tells us about third persons. A ‘homodiegetic’ narrator is always in some
way involved in the world narrated. A ‘heterodiegetic’ narrator is never
involved in that world. Genette also used the term ‘focalisation’, which has proved
to be of lasting usefulness in literary theory for describing some of the more
complex relations between narrator and the world narrated. This term is
especially useful when dealing with uncertain or shifting perspectives. In the
case, for example, of what is known as free indirect discourse (revealing the
thoughts of characters in their own idiom, but in the third person and tense of
the narration). Sometimes it becomes difficult to distinguish between the
‘voice’ of the narrator and that of the character. If the narration has yielded
in this way to the perspective of the character but still maintains the third person
form (e.g., ‘He knew he would always love her’), then this narrative can be
described as being related through a ‘focaliser’.
Genette’s theory
is more complex than I have been able to outline here and he employed a wider
range of technical vocabulary than can be defined in the present context but
one more of its achievements needs to be highlighted. In the essay Frontiers
of Narrative (1966), he explored and criticised three pairs of commonly
maintained binary oppositions in a way which prefigures, to some extent, the
approach of deconstructive theory. The first opposition is that which Aristotle
formulated in his Poetics of ‘diegesis’ (the author speaking in his own
voice) and ‘mimesis’ (representation of what someone else actually said).
Genette argued that ‘mimesis’ in this sense is simply not possible, as part of
a text can never be what someone actually said. It is also narrative. The
second opposition is that between narration and description. Narration, telling
about the actions and events in a story, would appear to be different in kind
to describing things, people and circumstances. However, Genette demonstrated that
the very choice of nouns and verbs in a sentence telling of an action is part
of the description. He dissolved the distinction. ‘The man closed his hand into
a ball’ can become descriptive of quite a different situation if one changes
the verb and a few of the nouns: ‘The stranger clenched his hand into a fist.’
The third opposition is that between narrative (a pure telling of a story uninfluenced
by the subjectivity of the author) and discourse (in which the reader is aware
of the nature of the teller). Genette demonstrated that pure narrative with no
trace of authorial perspective is very rare indeed and difficult to maintain.
Structuralist
Poetics
Jonathan Culler
took as his premise in Structuralist Poetics (1975) that linguistics
provided the best model for the analysis of literature. He wanted to explore
‘the conventions that enable readers to make sense of ’ works of literature, believing
that it was impossible to establish rules that govern the actual writing of
texts. Structure could be found underlying the reader’s interpretation of a
text. In a later work, The Pursuit of Signs (1981), he attempted to explain
the fact that readers, while following the same interpretative conventions,
often produce different interpretations of, for example, a poem. One reason for
this is that readers expect to find unity in a work but they employ different
models of unity and apply such models to the actual work in different ways. In
this book, however, Culler did not consider the effects of the reader’s own
ideology on perceptions of meaning. Using Chomsky’s notion of underlying
‘competence’, Culler argued that a poet or novelist writes on the assumption of
such a ‘competence’ in the reader. Just as we need linguistic ‘competence’ to
make sense of what we hear or read, so we make use of ‘literary competence’,
acquired through experience and institutional education, to make sense of
literature. In more recent works, especially in Framing the Sign (1988),
Culler has questioned more the institutional and ideological basis of the
concept of ‘literary competence’ and, in his popular introduction, Literary
Theory (1997), he summed up structuralism as attempting to ‘analyse
structures that operate unconsciously (structures of language, of the psyche,
of society)’. But he still emphasised that structuralist poetics is not essentially
concerned with establishing meaning: ‘it seeks not to produce new
interpretations of works but to understand how they can have the meanings and
effects that they do.’
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