Literary Theory and Criticism, Part-III

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.’

Literary Theory and Criticism, Part-II

Russian Formalism

Both American and Russian Formalists were concerned to examine what was specifically literary about a text. As has been noted in the Introduction to the present volume, defining ‘literariness’ has proved to be virtually impossible, both because its attributes are not unique and because statements which are true about all literary works are not, on the whole, very useful. Early Formalism developed quite independently in America and Russia but it was Russian Formalism, which flourished during the pre- and post-revolutionary period in Russia, that had the more far-reaching effects.

As the name suggests, formalism, and especially Russian Formalism, was more interested in analysis of form, the structure of a text and its use of language, than in the content. Formalists wanted to establish a scientific basis for the study of literature. The credo of the early Russian Formalists was an extreme one: they believed that the human emotions and ideas expressed in a work of literature were of secondary concern and provided the context only for the implementation of literary devices. Unlike the New Criticism in America, they were not interested in the cultural and moral significance of literature, but wished to explore how various literary devices produced certain aesthetic effects.

The Three Phases

It has been argued that there are three distinct phases in the development of Russian Formalism which can be characterised by three metaphors. The first phase regarded literature as a kind of machine with various devices and functioning parts; the second phase considered it to be more like an ‘organism’; and the third phase saw literary texts as ‘systems.’ Particularly influential in the early phase of Russian Formalism was Viktor Shklovsky.

Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984)

Shklovsky was the leading light in a group of literary critics based in St Petersburg and known as ‘Opayaz’. They encouraged experimental literature and art. Shklovsky’s essay Art as Technique, published in 1917, served as a manifesto for the group. In this essay several concepts were formulated which are crucial to understanding the philosophical premises of Russian Formalism. The first of these is ‘habitualisation.’This refers to the fact that, as we become familiar with things, we no longer really perceive them: ‘…as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic.’ Related to this idea is what Shklovsky called the ‘algebraic’ method of thought. Through ‘habitualisation’we come to think of things in only the most general way and conceive of them only in ways akin to algebraic symbols. Thus a chair loses its individuality and becomes just the thing we sit on. We no longer perceive its texture, its sheen, its precise design etc. This leads to Shklovsky’s third and probably most famous concept, that of ‘defamiliarisation’ (ostranenie which means literally ‘making strange’).This he considers the main function of art: ‘And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.’ He then proceeds to demonstrate how some great writers (Tolstoy and Pushkin) have consciously used the technique of ‘defamiliarisation.’ It is also in this essay that we find the famous formulation which makes clear the priorities of Russian Formalist aesthetics: ‘the object is not important.’

  

Theories of Narrative

Theories of narrative featured prominently in Russian Formalist thought, especially distinctions between ‘story’ and ‘plot.’ This was not, of course, new in the theory of literature. The distinction goes back at least to Aristotle, for whom plot (mythos) or ‘the arrangement of the incidents’ was clearly different to the story on which it was based. The time sequence of events in a Greek tragedy, for example, is clearly different to that of the events it relates. Usually the tragedy starts with a report of what happened before and then the audience is plunged into the middle of events (in medias res), with occasional references back to earlier stages in the story.

Boris Tomashevski developed further a concept that Shklovsy had first formulated in his essay on the English author Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. The basic material of the story was termed fabula. Tomashevski contrasted this with suzhet, the story as it is actually told. One fabula can provide material for many suzhet, a notion which was taken up by later formalists and was also to provide a link with structuralism. These formalist distinctions are not essentially a reformulation of Aristotelian concepts because the Russian Formalists conceived the effects and purposes of suzhet differently to those of Aristotle’s mythos. For Aristotle, plot had to be plausible, have a degree of inevitability and provide insight into the human condition. For the Russian Formalists, on the other hand, the function of plot was to defamiliarise what we are observing, to make us aware of the artificiality of the process of literary creation.

The Russian Formalists also had an idiosyncratic notion of ‘motivation’, using the concept not with the meaning of ‘intention, or purpose’, but in relation to the structural concept of a ‘motif ’. Tomashevski was the one to elucidate the distinction. It is a unit of construction: the smallest unit of a plot, a single statement, or action, for example. Tomashevski distinguished between ‘bound’ and ‘free’ motifs. A ‘bound’ motif is necessitated by the original story (for example, the pact with Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust) but a ‘free’ motif is not necessary in the same way. It is part of the artifice of the work (for example, Goethe’s decision to set the scene with a ‘Prologue in Heaven’ at the beginning of his play). The term ‘motif ’ came about because the Russian Formalists perceived the ideas and themes of a work as secondary, as motivations (in the more usual sense) for the literary devices. They argued that a constant awareness of the distinction between ‘bound’ and ‘free’ motifs is necessary because, when an unfamiliar device or ‘free’ motif is included, it serves for a while to make us aware of the artificiality of the text but eventually it too becomes familiar or conventional. For example, when playing with the time sequence became the norm, both in literature and in the cinema, then that device could no longer have a defamiliarising effect.

Jan Mukařovský

Jan Mukařovský is usually categorised among the structuralists but his roots are in Russian Formalist thought and he is certainly a significant transitional figure. He was a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, founded in 1926. He developed Shklovsky’s concept of ‘defamiliarisation’ more systematically, using the term ‘foregrounding’ instead. He defines this as ‘the aesthetically intentional distortion of the literary components’. For Mukařovský, ‘foregrounding’ has the effect of ‘automatizing’ other aspects of the text in close proximity to it. That is to say, it makes us no longer sensitive to them. The other objects have become, to use Shklovsky’s terminology again, overfamiliar to us. The term ‘foregrounding’ clearly comes from the visual arts (painting and photography providing the clearest examples). Through focusing (by means of perspective or adjustment of lens) upon figures or events in the front (‘foreground’) of a picture, the ‘background’ is not subjected to our conscious attention. ‘Defamiliarisation’ makes what is familiar appear strange only but ‘foregrounding’ reveals the whole work to be a complicated and interrelated structure. It is not surprising, therefore, that the concept was taken up by more explicitly structuralist theorists. It can be compared to the notion of the ‘dominant’ developed by Roman Jakobson.

Mukařovský, unlike earlier Russian Formalists, did not consider the object, of which a literary work was a treatment, to be of secondary interest. Indeed, he emphasized the dynamic tension between literature and society in the creation of literature. He argued also that an object can have several functions. Often the aesthetic function is just one of many. A simple and obvious example is that a church can be both a place of worship and a work of art. A speech can be political or legal rhetoric and also a work of art. (Arguably, this is the case with many of Winston Churchill’s and certainly it is so with several in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.) What is considered to be art changes in close relation to the tastes and preferences of a given society. In Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts (1936), Mukařovský argued that aesthetic function cannot exist in isolation from its place and time, nor without considering the person evaluating it. He distinguished between the ‘material object’, the actual book or other physical object, and the ‘aesthetic object’, which can exist only in the mind of the person who interprets the ‘material object’.

The Bakhtin School

The attribution of several important works to Mikhail Bakhtin is disputed. Three theorists worked closely together and precise attribution may never be obtained. The three associates were Mikhail Bakhtin, Pavel Medvedev and Valentin Volosinov. As a student and teacher in the 1920s, Bakhtin began to take a critical stance against Russian Formalism but the ideas of the three may be considered formalist in their interest in the linguistic structure of literary works. Also, the three men believed in the social nature of language and reveal clear influence of Marxist thought. But they differed from orthodox Marxists in their assumptions about the relationship between language and ideology. For them, ideology is not a reflex of socio-economic conditions but is conditioned by the medium through which it manifests itself: language. And language is a material reality. The meanings of words change according to the different social and historical situations in which they are used. Multiple meanings are in fact the normal condition of language (‘heteroglossia’).The reflection of social interaction (in the novel, for instance) reveals this ‘heteroglossia’. The novel which embodies a single authorial voice is, in fact, a distortion of natural language, imposing unity of vision where naturally there is none. The monologue has always been an unnatural genre.

Bakhtin, in particular, developed these ideas in relation to literary texts, principally in three works: Problems of Dostoievsky’s Art, the revised version Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1963) and Rabelais and his World (1966). He argued that all language  artakes of the nature of dialogue. Every speech is inspired by a previous utterance and expects a future response. And the language always seems to encourage reflection on its own nature. In this respect, Bakhtin is still essentially a formalist. In From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse (probably written in 1940 but first published in Russia in 1967) he wrote: ‘To a greater or lesser extent, every novel is a dialogized system made up of the images of “languages”, styles and consciousnesses that are concrete but inseparable from language. Language in the novel not only represents, but itself serves as the object of representation. Novelistic discourse is always criticizing itself.’

Roman Jakobson (1896–1982)

Roman Jakobson was a bridge between Russian Formalism and Structuralism. He was a founder member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and all his writings reveal the centrality of linguistic theory in his thought and especially the influence of Saussure (see chapter 3). He was also an enthusiastic supporter of experimental poets. In 1920, he moved to Czechoslovakia and helped to found the influential Prague Linguistic Circle. With the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, he left the country and finally settled in the USA in 1941.

Apart from his linguistic research Jakobson gained respect for his very precise linguistic analyses of classic works of literature. He and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, were also colleagues at the New School of Social Research in New York from 1941.They collaborated on an analysis of Baudelaire’s poem Les Chats, which not only became famous as a typical structuralist analysis but also drew much negative criticism. Jakobson attempted the daunting task of trying to define ‘literariness’ in linguistic terms. His paper Linguistics and Poetics, delivered at a conference in 1958 and published as Style in Language in 1960, provides the clearest expression of his ideas on the topic. Even when we transpose a work of literature, he argues, from one medium to another (eg a novel into a film, an epic into a comic book) certain structural features are preserved, ‘despite the disappearance of their verbal shape’. Many features of a work are not limited to the language in which it is expressed. The ‘truth value’ of a work, for example, or its significance as a myth are obviously ‘extralinguistic entities’. Such aspects ‘exceed the bounds of poetics and of linguistics in general’.

It would seem that Jakobson is here going beyond a purely formalist approach but, while revealing his awareness of such dimensions, he is firm in restricting himself to the purely linguistic: ‘…no manifesto, foisting a critic’s own tastes and opinions on creative literature, may act as substitute for an objective scholarly analysis of verbal art.’ Another idea of his which proved to be especially relevant to modern literary theory was the postulation of two fundamental poles of organising discourse that can be traced in every kind of cultural product: metaphor and metonymy. This idea was developed as a result of investigating the mental disorder of aphasia (expounded at length in Fundamentals of Language, 1956, which he published together with Morris Halle). In the sentence ‘The ship crossed the sea’, the sentence can be made metaphorical by selecting a different verb, for example by comparing the motion of the ship to that of a plough (‘The ship ploughed the sea’). Metonymy is the use of an attribute of something to suggest the whole thing. For example, deepness can suggest the sea (‘The ship crossed the deep’). Metaphor depends on the combination of things not necessarily associated or contiguous, whereas metonymy utilises closely associated attributes.

This led Jakobson to make some interesting characterizations of different literary schools according to their positions on the metaphor-metonymy axis: ‘The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of romanticism and symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insufficiently realized that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predetermines the so-called “realistic” trend, which belongs to an intermediary stage between the decline of romanticism and the rise of symbolism and is opposed to both.’

Jakobson developed the concepts of ‘defamiliarisation’ and ‘foregrounding’ further to characterise whole schools of critical and literary thought. In the dynamic system of a work of literature elements are structured in relation to each other as foreground and background. A foregrounded element was referred to by the later Russian Formalists as ‘the dominant.’ Jakobson regarded ‘the dominant’ as one of the most important late formalist concepts. He defined it as ‘the focusing component of a work of art; it rules, determines and transforms the remaining components’. Literary forms change and develop as a result of a ‘shifting dominant’. He believed that the literary theory (or poetics) of a particular period might be governed by a ‘dominant’ which derives from a non-literary system. For example, the theory of Renaissance poetry was derived from the visual arts and that of Realism from verbal art. The basic elements of the system do not change (plot, diction, syntax etc) but the functions of the elements do.

Literary Theory and Criticism, Part-I

The Literary Canon and New Criticism

Most books on the development of literary theory in England start with Matthew Arnold, because he ushered in an era in which literature was to be considered by influential critics as the central repository of English culture and values. These critics were to have lasting effects on the ways in which many generations of students perceived the significance of literature. F R Leavis and the poet T S Eliot, above all, established the notion of the existence of a literary canon of undeniably great works of literature. I A Richards, with his focus on close textual analysis, inspired the development of the so-called New Criticism in America.

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)

Arnold, an educator, poet and professor of poetry at Oxford University, was of the opinion that literature, apart from its pleasing aesthetic qualities, had an educational role in people’s lives. He believed that the persistence of English culture was threatened by the growth of Philistine values, which were being encouraged by the rise of a middle class obsessed with material wealth. As he believed that religion had been undermined by Darwin’s theory of evolution, he expressed the wish that poetry would take its place in men’s hearts. Poetry would interpret life for us all and console us, as indeed it had always done, dating back to antiquity. Arnold famously defined culture as ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’ (Culture and Anarchy, 1869).This culture was to be a bulwark against the chaotic life of the working class and the illusions by which middle-class Protestants lived. Through culture it was possible to be free from fanaticism and move towards an existence of sweetness and light. Culture encouraged ‘the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality’.

The problem with Arnold’s ideas for more recent theorists has been that he thought the values of the culture, which he espoused, were eternally true for every age and all conditions of human beings. All people, at all times, were capable of aspiring to the same ideals. The essence of true culture transcended history. Recent critics have found it difficult to go along with his notion of poets as somehow having access to eternally valid wisdom which they impart to others. Basically, Arnold saw literature as the domain of high-minded intellectuals and his definition excluded the writing of a large part of the populace.

T S Eliot (1888–1965)

After the First World War, the American-born poet, T S Eliot, took up Arnold’s challenge and began to reassess the literary culture of England. In the words of the British theorist Terry Eagleton, he set about conducting ‘a wholesale salvage and demolition job on its literary traditions’ (Eagleton, 1983). Eliot was very largely responsible for formulating what already existed as a loosely drawn up list: the canon of English literature (the indisputably good and great works). He made poetry central to his theory and focused specifically on the poem as a text. For him poetry should be impersonal. In Traditional and the Individual Talent (1919), he asserted that a poet did not have ‘a personality’ to express but a particular medium. Poetry was to serve as an escape from the self: ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality’ (ibid). The poet’s personal and social circumstances were secondary to the poetry itself, and he/she should not indulge in expressions of profound emotion, but seek what he called, in the essay Hamlet (1919), an ‘objective correlative’: ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.’ Emotion should be conveyed indirectly. Through the awareness of an ironic perception of the world and of paradoxes, the reader should be challenged and made to think. This meant of course that Eliot’s canon of good poetry was severely limited in scope: he found little use for most of the poets in the previous two centuries!

Eliot considered literature (and especially poetry) to be in direct opposition to the modern world. Poetry could provide the profound experience that the modern world, with its utilitarian materialism, could not offer. Poetry especially could recapture a lost ideal of wholeness and convey complex meanings which we would otherwise simply not perceive. Eliot’s ideas greatly influenced a group of academics at Cambridge University, including IA Richards and F R Leavis, who, in turn, were to exert longlasting influence on critical thinking about literature.

The Newbolt Report

The importance of government education policy on the study of literature in schools should not be ignored. A government report entitled The Teaching of English in England (1921), the author of which was Sir Henry Newbolt, strongly encouraged the study of English literature in educational institutions. It is full of sentiment which owes much to Arnold and Eliot: ‘Literature is not just a subject for academic study, but one of the chief temples of the Human Spirit, in which all should worship’ and it is ‘an embodiment of the best thoughts of the best minds, the most direct and lasting communication of experience by man to man.’ For Newbolt, literature also had the function of creating a sense of national identity, serving to ‘form a new element of national unity, linking together the mental life of all classes’. All these ideas, of course, were articulated in the aftermath of the First World War and have to be viewed in that context.

I A Richards (1893–1979)

Following Eliot’s emphasis on the poem as text, Richards, an academic at Cambridge, with a background in aesthetics, psychology and semantics, published a widely influential book in 1924, Principles of Literary Criticism. He argued that criticism should emulate the precision of science and differentiate the ‘emotive’ language of poetry from the ‘referential’ language of non-literary works. For Richards, poets are able to articulate the chaos of the world around them and gain control of it. They can reconcile contradictions and transcend self-centredness. Literature helps us to evaluate our personal experiences. It conveys a certain type of knowledge which is not factual or scientific but concerned with values.

In his book Practical Criticism (1929), Richards included examples of work by his students, in which they attempted to analyse short unidentified poems. This exercise rapidly became the standard method of training students in critical analysis, both in Great Britain and America. As it involved the ruthless exclusion of any consideration of context, historical or social, and of the biography of the author, its scope was limited but it did have one positive effect. It nurtured the close reading of literary texts. Many subsequent theorists have lamented the passing of this skill. Richards left Cambridge in 1929 and settled at Harvard University. His subsequent work greatly influenced the development of what became known as American New Criticism.

William Empson (1906–1984)

William Empson was a student of Richards and he produced his first and most famous work, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), when he was still a student. For Empson, ambiguity was the defining characteristic of poetic language. He shared Richards’ passion for close reading of texts, which has led many to ally him with the American New Critics, but, in many ways, he was opposed to their major doctrines. He preferred to treat poetry as a type of utterance which has much continuity with ordinary ways of speech. He also took seriously into account what he conceived the author’s intentions to be. He did not examine works in isolation but was concerned to consider how the words were used in social contexts. For him, a final coherent interpretation of a poem was impossible. The ambiguities he discovered in poetry could never be given a specific final interpretation. Poetic language was suggestive of inexhaustible meaning. For these reasons, his ideas have often found more sympathy with the common reader than with academic critics, concerned as they are, for the most part, with precise definition. Empson was a highly idiosyncratic thinker, not really belonging to any school, and is doubtless long overdue for reassessment.

New Criticism

American New Criticism, which was active from the late 1930s to the late 1950s, also took on most of the ideas of Eliot and Richards, as well as those of Empson. The movement had its roots in the American South, which had long been backward economically, but was then undergoing rapid modernisation. The leading critics had much sympathy with similar reactions against rapid modernisation among British critics. Prominent among the group were John Crowe Ransom, W K Wimsatt, Monroe C Beardsley, Cleanth Brooks and Mark Schorer.

For the New Critics, poetry was also central to their concerns and seen as a quasi-religious defence against sterile scientific modes of thought. An alienated world could be reanimated. Poetry could remain untouched by the prevalent materialism all around. A poem existed as a self-evident, unique entity. It could not be paraphrased, nor could it be expressed other than as it was. Every element in a poem was in balanced integration with every other element, leading to a coherence of the whole. A poem was considered as an object in itself, cut off from both author and the world around it. This view was, of course, completely compatible with Richards’ procedure of ‘practical criticism’.

Yet New Criticism did not consider the poem to be cut off completely from reality. It was not, in other words, an entirely formalist approach, which would involve examining only the form of an isolated entity. The poem was seen somehow to incorporate the outside world within itself. In practice, New Criticism concentrated on paradoxes and ambivalence which could be established in the text.

For John Crowe Ransom, in an essay called Criticism. Inc (1937), a poem creates harmony and coherence from the chaos of experience: ‘The poet perpetuates in his poem an order of existence which in actual life is constantly crumbling beneath his touch.’ In The Language of Paradox (1942), Cleanth Brooks wrote that ‘it wields together the discordant and the contradictory’.

W K Wimsatt and Monroe C Beardsley wrote two highly influential essays which advocated the importance of giving prime attention to the text. They isolated two common fallacies in literary interpretation. In The Intentional Fallacy (1946) they criticised the tendency to confuse what the author intended in the writing of a work of literature with what is actually there on the page. One should not speculate on what the writer may have wanted to say. In The Affective Fallacy (1949), they criticized readers who confuse their own emotional response to a work with what the poem itself really tells them. The way a work affects readers can too easily blur their vision. These views found echoes later in poststructuralist theory, though the latter has a different concept of the nature of a text.

New Criticism clearly focused predominantly on poetry but one writer, Mark Schorer, extended its main precepts to include analysis of prose fiction. In an essay entitled Fiction and the Analogical Matrix (1949), he concerns himself with the revelation of unconscious patterns of images and symbols which are present in all forms of fiction and which clearly go beyond authorial intentions. Meaning often contradicts surface sense but, while this theory may seem to prefigure deconstructive approaches, in reality Schorer emphasises the fact that prose fiction always ultimately manages to integrate all apparent contradictions into a coherent whole.

The Chicago School

New Criticism also spawned a group of critics with similar but fundamentally heretical views. They were known as ‘The Chicago School’ or the ‘New Aristotelians’, and were active from the late 1930s through the 1940s and 1950s.The central figure was R S Crane at the University of Chicago. They derived their ideas basically from Aristotle and reacted against the principles of New Criticism, with its prime concern for poetry and its rejection of historical analysis. They believed in applying whatever method of analysis seemed appropriate to a particular case and were most influential in the study of narrative structure in the novel. Wayne C Booth, a later critic, in his book The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), acknowledged his debt to the ‘New Aristotelians.’ He examined the methods, or rhetorical devices, employed by the author to communicate with readers, making an important distinction between the actual author and the ‘authorial voice’ in the work. He distinguished between ‘reliable’ and ‘unreliable’ narrators and promoted the view that authors do, indeed, intend to impose their values on the reader through the presence of a ‘reliable’ narrator.

F R Leavis (1895–1978) and D H Lawrence (1885–1930)

Leavis was instrumental in putting English and the study of English Literature at the heart of school and university curricula in England. However one may view his critical legacy, the study of the humanities in England owes much to his efforts. Especially important were his essays published as Education and the University (1943). He was very much concerned with the practical business of criticism and not with theorising about it, and regarded criticism and philosophy as completely separate activities. He adopted Richards’ methods of practical criticism as well as the emphasis on the text stipulated by the New Critics. For Leavis, a text should contain within it the full justification of why it is as it is and not otherwise. The first stage in the process of analysis was close scrutiny of the text (he gave the name Scrutiny to the journal he founded and edited from 1932 to 1953). Such close scrutiny led ultimately to establishing the ‘Life’ (a term never defined) of the text, its closeness to experience and its moral force.

In Revaluation (1936), Leavis delineated the ‘true’ English poetic tradition along the lines prescribed by Eliot, and in The Great Tradition (1948) he established the Leavisite (the word has entered common critical parlance) canon of great English novels. His great novelists (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Leavis’ near contemporary D H Lawrence) promote, according to Leavis, full human awareness in the face of materialism and technology. Unlike Richards and the New Critics, Leavis brought a social and political awareness to bear in his analyses.

D H Lawrence, whom Leavis greatly admired, echoed Leavis’ sentiments. In his essay Morality and the Novel (1925) he wrote: ‘If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships may consist in.’ And in Why the Novel Matters (1936) his concept of ‘Life’ is as mystically and vaguely defined as that of Leavis: ‘To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you.’  Many have regarded Leavis and the ideology of Scrutiny as essentially elitist: your soul is only really safe if you studied literature under Leavis, or at least under a Leavisite!

'Can the Subaltern Speak?' (Essay) by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

SOME of the most radical criticism coming out of the West today is the result of an interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject. The theory of pluralized ‘subject-effects’ gives an illusion of undermining subjective sovereignty while often providing a cover for this subject of knowledge. Although the history of Europe as Subject is narrativized by the law, political economy, and ideology of the West, this concealed Subject pretends it has ‘no geo-political determinations.’ The much publicized critique of the sovereign subject thus actually inaugurates a Subject….

   This S/subject, curiously sewn together into a transparency by denegations, belongs to the exploiters’ side of the international division of labor. It is impossible for contemporary French intellectuals to imagine the kind of Power and Desire that would inhabit the unnamed subject of the Other of Europe. It is not only that everything they read, critical or uncritical, is caught within the debate of the production of that Other, supporting or critiquing the constitution of the Subject as Europe. It is also that, in the constitution of that Other of Europe, great care was taken to obliterate the textual ingredients with which such a subject could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary—not only by ideological and scientific production, but also by the institution of the law…. In the face of the possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self’s shadow, a possibility of political practice for the intellectual would be to put the economic ‘under erasure,’ to see the economic factor as irreducible as it reinscribes the social text, even as it is erased, however imperfectly, when it claims to be the final determinant or the transcendental signified.

   The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other. This project is also the asymetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subjectivity. It is well known that Foucault locates epistemic violence, a complete overhaul of the episteme, in the redefinition of sanity at the end of the European eighteenth century. But what if that particular redefinition was only a part of the narrative of history in Europe as well as in the colonies? What if the two projects of epistemic overhaul worked as dislocated and unacknowledged parts of a vast two-handed engine? Perhaps it is no more than to ask that the subtext of the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism be recognized as ‘subjugated knowledge,’ ‘a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity’ (Foucault 1980).

   This is not to describe ‘the way things really were’ or to privilege the narrative of history as imperialism as the best version of history. It is, rather, to offer an account of how an explanation and narrative of reality was established as the normative one….

   Let us now move to consider the margins (one can just as well say the silent, silenced center) of the circuit marked out by this epistemic violence, men and women among the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat. According to Foucault and Deleuze (in the First World, under the standardization and regimentation of socialized capital, though they do not seem to recognize this) the oppressed, if given the chance (the problem of representation cannot be bypassed here), and on the way to solidarity through alliance politics (a Marxist thematic is at work here) can speak and know their conditions. We must now confront the following question: On the other side of the international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic text, can the subaltern speak?…

   The first part of my proposition—that the phased development of the subaltern is complicated by the imperialist project—is confronted by a collective of intellectuals who may be called the ‘Subaltern Studies’ group. They must ask, Can the subaltern speak? Here we are within Foucault’s own discipline of history and with people who acknowledge his influence. Their project is to rethink Indian colonial historiography from the perspective of the discontinuous chain of peasant insurgencies during the colonial occupation. This is indeed the problem of ‘the permission to narrate’ discussed by Said (1984). As Ranajit Guha (1982) argues,

The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism—colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism…shar[ing] the prejudice that the making of the Indian nation and the development of the consciousness-nationalism which confirmed this process were exclusively or predominantly elite achievements. In the colonialist and neo-colonialist historiographies these achievements are credited to British colonial rulers, administrators, policies, institutions, and culture; in the nationalist and neo-nationalist writings—to Indian elite personalities, institutions, activities and ideas.

Certain varieties of the Indian elite are at best native informants for firstworld intellectuals interested in the voice of the Other. But one must nevertheless insist that the colonized subaltern subject is irretrievably heterogeneous.

   Against the indigenous elite we may set what Guha calls ‘the politics of the people,’ both outside (‘this was an autonomous domain, for it neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter’) and inside (‘it continued to operate vigorously in spite of [colonialism], adjusting itself to the conditions prevailing under the Raj and in many respects developing entirely new strains in both form and content’) the circuit of colonial production (Guha 1982). I cannot entirely endorse this insistence on determinate vigor and full autonomy, for practical historiographic exigencies will not allow such endorsements to privilege subaltern consciousness. Against the possible charge that his approach is essentialist, Guha constructs a definition of the people (the place of that essence) that can be only an identity-in-differential. He proposes a dynamic stratification grid describing colonial social production at large. Even the third group on the list, the buffer group, as it were, between the people and the great macrostructural dominant groups, is itself defined as a place of in-betweenness, what Derrida has described as an ‘antre’ (1981):

1. Dominant foreign groups.

elite   2. Dominant indigenous groups on the all-India level.

3. Dominant indigenous groups at the regional and local levels.

4. The terms ‘people’ and ‘subaltern classes’ [are] used as synonymous throughout [Guha’s definition]. The social groups and elements included in this category represent the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the ‘elite’

Consider the third item on this list—the antre of situational indeterminacy these careful historians presuppose as they grapple with the question, Can the subaltern speak?

Taken as a whole and in the abstract this…category…was heterogeneous in its composition and thanks to the uneven character of regional economic and social developments, different from area to area. The same class or element which was dominant in one area…could be among the dominated in another. This could and did create many ambiguities and contradictions in attitudes and alliances, especially among the lowest strata of the rural gentry, impoverished landlords, rich peasants and upper middle class peasants all of whom belonged, ideally speaking, to the category of people or subaltern classes. (Guha 1982)

The task of research’ projected here is ‘to investigate, identify and measure the specific nature and degree of the deviation of [the] elements [constituting item 3] from the ideal and situate it historically.’ ‘Investigate, identify, and measure the specific’: a program could hardly be more essentialist and taxonomic. Yet a curious methodological imperative is at work. I have argued that, in the Foucault-Deleuze conversation, a postrepresentationalist vocabulary hides an essentialist agenda. In subaltern studies, because of the violence of imperialist epistemic, social, and disciplinary inscription, a project understood in essentialist terms must traffic in a radical textual practice of differences. The object of the group’s investigation, in the case not even of the people as such but of the floating buffer zone of the regional elite-subaltern, is a deviation from an ideal—the people or subaltern—which is itself defined as a difference from the elite. It is toward this structure that the research is oriented, a predicament rather different from the selfdiagnosed transparency of the first-world radical intellectual. What taxonomy can fix such a space? Whether or not they themselves perceive it—in fact Guha sees his definition of ‘the people’ within the master-slave dialectic—their text articulates the difficult task of rewriting its own conditions of impossibility as the conditions of its possibility.

   ‘At the regional and local levels [the dominant indigenous groups]… if belonging to social strata hierarchically inferior to those of the dominant all-Indian groups acted in the interests of the latter and not in conformity to interests corresponding truly to their own social being’ When these writers speak, in their essentializing language, of a gap between interest and action in the intermediate group, their conclusions are closer to Marx than to the self-conscious naiveté of Deleuze’s pronouncement on the issue. Guha, like Marx, speaks of interest in terms of the social rather than the libidinal being. The Name-of-the-Father imagery in The Eighteenth Brumaire can help to emphasize that, on the level of class or group action, ‘true correspondence to own being’ is as artificial or social as the patronymic.

   So much for the intermediate group marked in item 3. For the ‘true’ subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself; the intellectual’s solution is not to abstain from representation. The problem is that the subject’s itinerary has not been traced so as to offer an object of seduction to the representing intellectual. In the slightly dated language of the Indian group, the question becomes, How can we touch the consciousness of the people, even as we investigate their politics? With what voice-consciousness can the subaltern speak? Their project, after all, is to rewrite the development of the consciousness of the Indian nation. The planned discontinuity of imperialism rigorously distinguishes this project, however old-fashioned its articulation, from ‘rendering visible the medical and juridical mechanisms that surrounded the story [of Pierre Riviere].’ Foucault is correct in suggesting that ‘to make visible the unseen can also mean a change of level, addressing oneself to a layer of material which had hitherto had no perti-nence for history and which had not been recognized as having any moral, aesthetic or historical value.’ It is the slippage from rendering visible the mechanism to rendering the individual, both avoiding ‘any kind of analysis of [the subject] whether psychological, psychoanalytical or linguistic,’ that is consistently troublesome (Foucault 1980)….

   When we come to the concomitant question of the consciousness of the subaltern, the notion of what the work cannot say becomes important. In the semioses of the social text, elaborations of insurgency stand in the place of ‘the utterance.’ The sender—‘the peasant’—is marked only as a pointer to an irretrievable consciousness. As for the receiver, we must ask who is ‘the real receiver’ of an ‘insurgency?’ The historian, transforming ‘insurgency’ into ‘text for knowledge,’ is only one ‘receiver’ of any collectively intended social act. With no possibility of nostalgia for that lost origin, the historian must suspend (as far as possible) the clamor of his or her own consciousness (or consciousness-effect, as operated by disciplinary training), so that the elaboration of the insurgency, packaged with an insurgent-consciousness, does not freeze into an ‘object of investigation,’ or, worse yet, a model for imitation. ‘The subject’ implied by the texts of insurgency can only serve as a counterpossibility for the narrative sanctions granted to the colonial subject in the dominant groups. The postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss. In this they are a paradigm of the intellectuals.

   It is well known that the notion of the feminine (rather than the subaltern of imperialism) has been used in a similar way within deconstructive criticism and within certain varieties of feminist criticism. In the former case, a figure of ‘woman’ is at issue, one whose minimal predication as indeterminate is already available to the phallocentric tradition. Subaltern historiography raises questions of method that would prevent it from using such a ruse. For the ‘figure’ of woman, the relationship between woman and silence can be plotted by women themselves; race and class differences are subsumed under that charge. Subaltern historiography must confront the impossibility of such gestures. The narrow epistemic violence of imperialism gives us an imperfect allegory of the general violence that is the possibility of an episteme.

   Within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject, the track of sexual difference is doubly effected. The question is not of female participation in insurgency, or the ground rules of the sexual division of labor, for both of which there is ‘evidence.’ It is, rather, that, both as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow….

(Abridged)

'Night of the Scorpion' by Nissim Ezakiel

Night of the Scorpion

I remember the night my mother
Was stung by a scorpion. Ten hours
Of steady rain had driven him
To drawl beneath a sack of rice.
Parting with a poison flash
Of diabolic tail in the dark room--
He risked the rain again.
The peasants came like swarms of flies
And buzzed the name of God a hundred times
To paralise the Evil One.
With candles and with lanterns
Throwing giant scorpion shadows
On the sun-baked walls
They searched for him: he was not found.
They clicked their tongues.
With every movement that the scorpion made
His poison moved in Mother’s blood, they said.
May he sit still, they said.
May the sins of your previous birth
Be burned away tonight, they said.
May your suffering decrease
The misfortunes of your next birth, they said.
May the sum of evil
Balanced in this unreal world
Against the sum of good
Become diminished by your pain.
May the poison purify your flesh
Of desire, and your spirit of ambition,
They said, and they sat around
On the floor with my mother in the centre,
The peace of understanding on each face.
More candels and more lanterns, more neighbours,
More insects, and the endless rain.
My mother twisted through and through
Groaning on a mat.
My father, sceptic, rationalist,
Trying every curse and blessings,
Powder, mixture, herb and hybrid.
He even poured a little paraffin
Upon the bitten toe and put a match to it.
I watched the flame feeding on my mother.
I watched the holy man perform his rites
To tame the poison with an incantation.
After twenty hours
It lost its sting.
My mother only said
Thank God the scorpion picked on me
And spared my children.

What I Feel

   Nissim Ezakiel is one of the most prominent poets of post-independent India. He wrote about Indian lives and experiences. In this poem Ezakiel depicts how a village mother was stung by a scorpion and superstitious country-people gathered around her and performed religious rites to get her rid of the Evil One's venomous curse. But the husband of the lady was quite rational and tried to save her through rational ways. The poem ends in a universal note--the mother's desire to save her children even at the cost of her own life. The poem is written in a lucid language and without any rhyme. It intends to give a blow to the  superstitious beliefs residing at the core of Indian country-life. 

'Malatibala Balika Vidyalaya' (Malatibala Girls' School) by Joy Goswami

Translated from original Bengali by Saikat Guha


Benimadhav, Benimadhav, I’ll go to your abode 
Benimadhav, do you still remember me?
Benimadhav, the maddening flute under gulmohur tree
You played, I was then in Malati School
Solving math, the classroom was a little one, 
Outside the husband of our ma’am beside her,
I was then in class IX, I was then in saree
We got acquainted at the home of Sulekha.


Benimadhav, Benimadhav, I was good at study
You came from city for a casual visit, I was dark
I rushed from the place into my room:
Benimadhav, my father worked in a small shop,
Bees hum and buds still bloom in garden
I used to mistake known sums during evening study,
I was then in class IX, I was then sixteen
We met, Benimadhav, aside the bridge secretly.


Benimadhav, Benimadhav, after so many days,
Tell me, do you still recall those days?
Have you told your beloved about it?
Just one day I saw her beside you
Under light, the light was so enchanting!
I admit, your match seemed to me perfect
It eased my eyes, it burned my eyes
I said on way home, ‘Be they happy!’


In these days I go to sleep in the ground-floor room 
The bed is on the floor on which fall moonbeams,
My sister just next to me is lost in the maze of life
I don’t know with whom she lives now-a-days,
I’ve got food today, but tomorrow?—Devil’s sitting there!
I’m the embroidery teacher in this locality now;
Still fire, Benimadhav, fire is burning within me,
What happens if I also become a bad girl?

What I Feel:

   Joy Goswami is a prominent contemporary Bengali poet. This much-loved and much-recited poem says about a girl's frustrated experience of first love in teenage. She was shy and also suffered from lack of confidence because she was 'dark' in complexion and she belonged to lower middle-class family. As a result, she could not express her love for Benimadhav who was engaged to another lady. Now, the maiden lives a lonely life in hardship and manages to earn her bread by teaching the work of embroidery. But the fire of passion within her can hardly be extinguished. The poem is remarkable for its earnestness of tone and underlying pathos. The original Bengali poem has a lovely musical structure which is not possible to create in translation. However, the fine confessional tone of the poem marked by serenity may be appreciated even in translation.