Structuralist Theories
Structuralist Theories
New ideas often provoke baffled and anti-intellectual reactions, and this was
especially true of the reception accorded the theories which go under the name of
‘structuralism’. Structuralist approaches to literature challenged some of the most
cherished beliefs of the ordinary reader. The literary work, we had long felt, is the
child of an author’s creative life, and expresses the author’s essential self. The text is
the place where we enter into a spiritual of humanistic communion with an author’s
thoughts and feelings. Another fundamental assumption which readers often make is
that a good book tells the truth about human life – that novels and plays try to ‘tell
things as they really are’. However, structuralists have tried to persuade us that the
author is ‘dead’ and that literary discourse has no truth function. In a review of a book
by Jonathan Culler, John Bayley spoke for the anti-structuralists when he declared,
‘but the sin of semiotics is to attempt to destroy our sense of truth in fiction… In a
good story, truth precedes fiction and remains separable from it.’ In a 1968 essay,
Roland Barthes put the structuralist view very powerfully, and argued that writers
only have the power to mix already existing writings, to reassemble or redeploy them;
writers cannot use writing to ‘express’ themselves, but only to draw upon that
immense dictionary of language and culture which is ‘always already written’ (to use
a favorite Barthesian phrase). It would not be misleading to use the term ‘antihumanism’
to describe the spirit of structuralism. Indeed the word has been used by
structuralists themselves to emphasize their opposition to all forms of literary
criticism in which the human subject is the source and origin of literary meaning.
The linguistic background:
The work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, complied and published
after his death in a single book, Course in General Linguistics (1915), has been
profoundly influential in shaping contemporary literary theory. Saussure’s two key
ideas provide new answers to the questions ‘What is the object of linguistic
investigation?’ and ‘What is the relationship between words and things?’ He makes a
fundamental distinction between langue and parole – between the language system,
which pre-exists actual examples of language, and the individual utterance. Langue is
2
Structuralist Theories
the social aspect of language: it is the shared system which we (unconsciously) draw
upon as speakers. Parole is the individual realization of the system in actual instances
of language. This distinction is essential to all later structuralist theories. The proper
object of linguistic study is the system which underlies any particular human
signifying practice, not the individual utterance. This means that, if we examine
specific poems or myths or economic practices, we do so in order to discover what
system of rules – what grammar – is being used. After all, human beings use speech
quite differently from parrots: the former evidently have a grasp of a system of rules
which enables them to produce an infinite number of well-formed sentences; parrots
do not.
Saussure rejected the idea that language is a word-heap gradually accumulated
over time and that its primary function is to refer to things in the world. In his view,
words are not symbols which correspond to referents, but rather are ‘signs’ which are
made up of two parts (like two sides of a sheet of paper): a mark, either written or
spoken, called a ‘signifier’, and a concept (what is ‘thought’ when the mark is made),
called a ‘signified’. The view he is rejecting may be represented thus:
SYMBOL = THING
Saussure’s model is as follows:
signified
SIGN
‘Things’ have no place in the model. The elements of language acquire meaning not
as the result of some connection between words and things, but only as parts of a
system of relations. Consider the sign-system of traffic lights:
red – amber – green
signified (stop)
signifier ('red')
The sign signifies only within the system ‘red = stop / green = go / amber =
prepare for red or green’. The relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary:
there is no natural bond between red and stop, no matter how natural it may feel.
When the British joined the EEC they had to accept new electrical colour codings
which seemed unnatural (brown not red = live; blue not black = neutral). Each colour
in the traffic system signifies not by asserting a positive univocal meaning but by
3
signifierStructuralist Theories
marking a difference, a distinction within a system of opposites and contrasts: trafficlight
‘red’ is precisely ‘not-green’; ‘green’ is ‘not-red’.
Language is one among many sign-systems (some believer it is the
fundamental system). The science of such systems is called ‘semiotics’ or
‘semiology’. It is usual to regard structuralism and semiotics as belonging to the same
theoretical universe. Structuralism, it must be added, is often concerned with systems
which do not involve ‘signs’ as such (kinship relations, for example, thus indicating
its equally important origins in anthropology – see the references to Lévi-Strauss
below, pp. 65, 68) but which can be treated in the same way as sign-systems. The
American philosopher C.S. Peirce made a useful distinction between three types of
sign: the ‘iconic’ (where the sign resembles its referent, e.g. a picture of a ship or a
road-sign for falling rocks); the ‘indexical’ (where the sign is associated, possibly
causally, with its referent, e.g. smoke as a sign of fire, or clouds as a sign of rain); and
the ‘symbolic’ (where the sign has an arbitrary relation to its referent, e.g. language).
The most celebrated modern semiotician was Yury Lotman of the then USSR.
He developed the Saussurean and Czech types of structuralism in works such as The
Analysis of the Poetic Text (1976). One of the major differences between Lotman and
the French structuralists is his retention of evaluation in his analyses. Literary works,
he believes, have more value because they have a ‘higher information load’ than nonliterary
texts. His approach brings together the rigour of structuralist linguistics and
the close reading techniques of New Criticism. Maria Corti, Caesare Segre, Umberto
Eco (for a brief discussion of him as postmodern novelist, see Chapter 8, p. 199) in
Italy and Michael Riffaterre (see Chapter 3) from France are the leading European
exponents of literary semiotics.
The first major developments in structuralist studies were based upon
advances in the study of phonemes, the lowest-level elements in the language system.
A phoneme is a meaningful sound, one that is recognized or perceived by a language
user. Hundreds of different ‘sounds’ may be made by the speakers of particular
languages, but the number of phonemes will be limited. The word ‘spin’ may be
pronounced within a wide range of phonetic difference, so long as the essential
phoneme remains recognizable as itself. One must add that the ‘essential phoneme’ is
only a mental abstraction: all actually occurring sounds are variants of phonemes. We
do not recognize sounds as meaningful bits of noise in their own right, but register
them as different in some respects from other sounds. Roland Barthes draws attention
4
Structuralist Theories
to this principle in the title of his most celebrated book, S/Z (see Chapter 7, pp. 151-
3), which picks out the two sibilants in Balzac’s Sarrasine (Sä-rä-z
differentiated phonemically as voiced (z) and unvoiced (s). On the other hand there
are differences of raw sound at the phonetic (not phonemic) level which are not
‘recognized’ in English: the /p/ sound in ‘pin’ is evidently different from the /p/ sound
in ‘spin’, but English speakers do not recognize a difference: the difference is not
recognized in the sense that it does not ‘distribute’ meaning between words in the
language. Even if we said ‘sbin’, we would probably hear it as ‘spin’. The essential
point about this view of language is that underlying our use of language is a system, a
pattern of paired opposites, binary oppositions. At the level of the phoneme, these
include nasalized/non-nasalized, vocalic/non-vocalic, voiced/unvoiced, tense/lax. In a
sense, speakers appear to have internalized a set of rules which manifests itself in their
evident competence in operating language.
We can observe ‘structuralism’ of this type at work in the anthropology of
Mary Douglas. She examines the abominations of Leviticus, according to which some
creatures are clean and some unclean on an apparently random principle. She solves
the problem by constructing the equivalent of a phonemic analysis, according to
which two rules appear to be in force:
ēn), which are1
food for a pastoralist’; animals which only half conform (pig, hare, rock
badger) are unclean.
‘Cloven-hoofed, cud-chewing ungulates are the model of the proper kind of2
element to which it is biologically adapted. So fish without fins are unclean,
and so on.
At a more complex level, the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss develops a
‘phonemic’ analysis of myths, rites, kinship structures. Instead of asking questions
about the origins or causes of the prohibitions, myths or rites, the structuralist looks
for the system of differences which underlies a particular human practice.
As these examples from anthropology show, structuralists try to uncover the
‘grammar’, ‘syntax’, or ‘phonemic’ pattern of particular human systems of meaning,
whether they be those of kinship, garments, haute cuisine, narrative discourse, myths
or totems. The liveliest examples of such analyses can be found in the earlier writings
of Roland Barthes, especially in the wide-ranging Mythologies (1957) and Système de
5
Another rule applies if the first is not relevant: each creature should be in theStructuralist Theories
la mode (1967). The theory of these studies is given in Elements of Semiology (1967;
see Chapter 7, p. 149).
The principle – that human performances presuppose a received system of
differential relations – is applied by Barthes to virtually all social practices; he
interprets them as sign-systems which operate on the model of language. Any actual
‘speech’ (parole) presupposes a system (langue) which is being used. Barthes
recognizes that the language system may change, and that changes must be initiated in
‘speech’; nevertheless, at any given moment there exists a working system, a set of
rules from which all ‘speeches’ may be derived. To take an example, when Barthes
examines the wearing of garments, he sees it not as a matter of personal expression or
individual style, but as a ‘garment system’ which works like a language. He divides
the ‘language’ of garments between ‘system’ and ‘speech’ (‘syntagm’).
System Syntagm
‘Set of pieces, parts or details which
cannot be worn at the same time on
the same part of the body, and whose
variation corresponds to a change in
the meaning of the clothing: toquebonnet-
hood, etc.’
‘Juxtaposition in the same type of
dress of different elements: skirtblouse-
jacket.’
To make a garment ‘speech’, we choose a particular ensemble (syntagm) of
pieces each of which could be replaced by other pieces. An ensemble (sports
jacket/grey-flannelled trousers/white open-necked shirt) is equivalent to a specific
sentence uttered by an individual for a particular purpose; the elements fit together to
make a particular kind of utterance and to evoke a meaning or style. No one can
actually perform the system itself, but their selection of elements from the sets of
garments which make up the system expresses their competence in handling the
system. Here is a representation of a culinary example Barthes provides:
System Syntagm
‘Set of foodstuffs which have
affinities or differences, within which
one chooses a dish in view of a certain
meaning: the types of entrée, roast or
sweet.’
‘Real sequence of dishes chosen
during meal; menu.’
(A restaurant á la carte menu has both levels: entrée and examples.)
6
Structuralist Theories
Structuralist narratology
When we apply the linguistic model to literature, we appear to be in a
methodological loop. After all, if literature is already linguistic model? Well, for one
thing, it would be a mistake to identify ‘literature’ and ‘language’. It is true that
literature uses language as its medium, but this does not mean that the structure of
literature is identical with the structure of language. The units of literary structure do
not coincide with those of language. This means that when the Bulgarian narratologist
Tzvetan Todorov (see below, p. 70) advocates a new poetics which will establish a
general ‘grammar’ of literature, he is talking about the underlying rules governing
literary practice. On the other hand, structuralists agree that literature has a special
relationship with language: it draws attention to the very nature and specific
properties of language. In this respect structuralist poetics are closely related to
Formalism.
Structuralist narrative theory develops from certain elementary linguistic
analogies. Syntax (the rules of sentence construction) is the basic model of narrative
rules. Todorov and others talk of ‘narrative syntax’. The most elementary syntactic
division of the sentence unit is between subject and predicate: ‘The knight (subject)
slew the dragon with his sword (predicate).’ Evidently this sentence could be the core
of an episode or even an entire tale. If we substitute a name (Launcelot or Gawain) for
‘the knight’, or ‘axe’ for ‘sword’, we retain the same essential structure. By pursuing
this analogy between sentence structure and narrative, Vladimir Propp developed his
theory of Russian fairy stories.
Propp’s approach can be understood if we compare the ‘subject’ of a sentence
with the typical characters (hero, villain, etc.) and the ‘predicate’ with the typical
actions in such stories. While there is can enormous profusion of details, the whole
corpus of tales is constructed upon the same basic set of thirty-one ‘functions’. A
function is the basic unit of the narrative ‘language’ and refers to the significant
actions which form the narrative. These follow a logical sequence, and although no
tale includes them all, in every tale the functions always remain in sequence. The last
group of functions is as follows:
25
A difficult task is proposed to the hero.26
The task is resolved.27
7
The hero is recognized.Structuralist Theories
28
The false hero or villain is exposed.29
The false hero is given a new appearance.30
The villain is punished.31
It is not difficult to see that these functions are present not just in Russian fairy
tales or even non-Russian tales, but also in comedies, myths, epics, romances and
indeed stories in general. However, Propp’s functions have a certain archetypal
simplicity which requires elaboration when applied to more complex texts. For
example, in the Oedipus myth, Oedipus is set the task of solving the riddle of the
sphinx; the task is resolved; the hero is recognized; he is married and ascends the
throne. However, Oedipus is also the false hero and the villain; he is exposed (he
murdered his father on the way to Thebes and married his mother, the queen), and
punishes himself. Propp had added seven ‘spheres of action’ or roles to the thirty-one
function: villain, donor (provider), helper, princes (sought-after person) and her
father, dispatcher, hero (seeker or victim), false hero. The tragic myth of Oedipus
requires the substitution of ‘mother/queen and husband’ for ‘princess and her father’.
One character can play several roles, or several characters can play the same role.
Oedipus is both hero, provider (he averts Thebes’ plague by solving the riddle), false
hero, and even villain.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the structuralist anthropologist, analyses the Oedipus
myth in a manner which is truly structuralist in its use of the linguistic model. He calls
the units of myth ‘mythemes’ (compare phonemes and morphemes in linguistics).
They are organized in binary oppositions (see above, p. 65) like the basic linguistic
units. The general opposition underlying the Oedipus myth is between two views of
the origin of human beings: (1) that they are born from the earth; (2) that they are born
from coition. Several mythemes are grouped on one side or the other of the anti-thesis
between (1) the overvaluation of kinship ties (Oedipus marries his mother; Antigone
buries her brother unlawfully); and (2) the undervaluation of kinship (Oedipus kills
his father; Eteocles kills his brother). Lévi-Strauss is not interested in the narrative
sequence, but in the structural pattern which gives the myth its meaning. He looks for
the ‘phonemic’ structure of myth. He believes that this linguistic model will uncover
the basic structure of the human mind – the structure which governs the way human
beings shape all their institutions, artifacts and forms of knowledge.
8
The hero is married and ascends the throne.Structuralist Theories
A.J. Greimas, in his Sémantique Structurale (1966), offers an elegant
streamlining of Propp’s theory. While Propp focused on a single genre, Greimas aims
to arrive at the universal ‘grammar’ of narrative by applying to it a semantic analysis
of sentence structure. In place of Propp’s seven ‘spheres of action’ he proposes three
pairs of binary oppositions which include all six roles (actants) he requires:
Subject / Object
Sender / Receiver
Helper / Opponent
The pairs describe three basic patterns which perhaps recur in all narrative:
1
Desire, search, or aim (subject/object).2
Communication (sender/receiver).3
If we apply these to Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, we arrive at a more penetrating
analysis than when using Propp’s categories:
Auxiliary support or hindrance (helper/opponent).1
both subject and object).
O searches for the murderer of Laius. Ironically he searches for himself (he is2
herdsman all, knowingly or not, confirm its truth. The play is about O’s
misunderstanding of the message.
Apollo’s oracle predicts O’s sins. Teiresias, Jocasta, the messenger and the3
messenger and the herdsman unwittingly assist him in the search. O himself
obstructs the correct interpretation of the message.
It can be seen at a glance that Greimas’ reworking of Propp is in the direction
of the ‘phonemic’ patterning we saw in Lévi-Strauss. In this respect Greimas is more
truly ‘structuralist’ than the Russian Formalist Propp, in that the former thinks in
terms of relations between entities rather than of the character of entities in
themselves. In order to account for the various narrative sequences which are possible
he reduces Propp’s thirty-one functions to twenty, and groups them into three
structures (syntagms): ‘contractual’, ‘performative’ and ‘disjunctive’. The first, the
most interesting, is concerned with the establishing or breaking of contracts or rules.
Narratives may employ either of the following structures:
9
Teiresias and Jocasta try to prevent O from discovering the murderer. TheStructuralist Theories
contract (or prohibition) > violation > punishement
lack of contract (disorder) > establishment of contract (order)
The Oedipus narrative has the first structure: he violates the prohibition against
patricide and incest, and punishes himself.
The work of Tzvetan Todorov is a summation of Propp, Greimas and others.
All the syntactic rules of language are restated in their narrative guise – rules of
agency, predication, adjectival and verbal functions, mood and aspect, and so on. The
minimal unit of narrative is the ‘proposition’, which can be either an ‘agent’ (e.g. a
person). The propositional structure of a narrative can be described in the most
abstract and universal fashion. Using Todorov’s method, we might have the following
propositions:
X is king X marries Y
Y is X’s mother X kills Z
Z is X’s father
These are some of the propositions which make up the narrative of the
Oedipus myth. For X read Oedipus; for Y, Jocasta; for Z, Laius. The first three
propositions denominate agents, the first and the last two contain predicates (to be a
king, to marry, to kill). Predicates may work like adjectives and refer to static states of
affairs (to be king), or they may operate dynamically like verbs to indicate
transgressions of law, and are therefore the most dynamic types of proposition.
Having established the smallest unit (proposition), Todorov describes two higher
levels of organization: the sequence and the text. A group of propositions forms a
sequence. The basic sequence is made up of five propositions which describe a certain
state which is disturbed and then re-established albeit in altered form. The five
propositions may be designated thus:
Equilibrium
Force
Disequilibrium (War)
Force
Equilibrium
10
1 (e.g. Peace)1 (Enemy invades)2 (Enemy is defeated)2 (Peace on new terms)Structuralist Theories
Finally a succession of sequences forms a text. The sequences may be
organized in a variety of ways, by embedding (story within a story, digression, etc.),
by linking (a string of sequences), or by alternation (interlacing of sequences), or by a
mixture of these. Todorov provides his most vivid examples in a study of Boccaccio’s
Decameron (Grammaire du Décaméron, 1969). His attempt to establish the universal
syntax of narrative has all the air of a scientific theory. As we shall see, it is precisely
against this confidently objective stance that the poststructuralists react.
Gérard Genette developed his complex and powerful theory of discourse in the
context of a study of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. He refines the Russian
Formalist distinction between ‘story’ and ‘plot’ (see Chapter 2, p. 34) by dividing
narrative into three levels: story (histoire), discourse (récit), and narration. For
example, in Aeneid II Aeneas is the story-teller addressing his audience (narration);
he presents a verbal discourse; and his discourse represents events in which he
appears as a character (story). These dimensions of narrative are related by three
aspects, which Genette derives from the three qualities of the verb: tense, mood and
voice. To take just on example, his distinction between ‘mood’ and ‘voice’ neatly
clarifies problems which can arise from the familiar notion of ‘point-of-view’. We
often fail to distinguish between the voice of the narrator and the perspective (mood)
of a character. In Dickens’s novel Great Expectations, Pip presents the perspective of
his younger self through the narrative voice of his older self.
Genette’s essay on ‘Frontiers of Narrative’ (1966) provided an overview of the
problems of narration which has not been bettered. He considers the problem of
narrative theory by exploring three binary oppositions. The first, ‘diegesis and
mimesis’ (narrative and representation), occurs in Aristotle’s Poetics and presupposes
a distinction between simple narrative (what the author says in his or her own voice as
author) and direct imitation (when the author speaks in the person of a character).
Genette shows that the distinction cannot be sustained, since if one could have direct
imitation involving a pure representation of what someone actually said, it would be
like a Dutch painting in which actual objects were included on the canvas. He
concludes: ‘Literary representation, the mimesis of the ancients, it not, therefore,
narrative plus “speeches”: it is narrative and only narrative.’ The second opposition,
‘narration and description’, presupposes a distinction between an active and a
contemplative aspect of narration. The first is to do with actions and events, the
second with objects or characters. ‘Narration’ appears, at first, to be essential, since
11
Structuralist Theories
events and actions are the essence of a story’s temporal and dramatic content, while
‘description’ appears to be ancillary and ornamental. ‘The man went over to the table
and picked up a knife’ is dynamic and profoundly narrativistic. However, having
established the distinction, Genette immediately dissolves it by pointing out that the
nouns and verbs in the sentence are also descriptive. If we change ‘man’ to ‘boy’, or
‘table’ to ‘desk’, or ‘picked up’ to ‘grabbed’, we have altered the description. Finally,
the opposition ‘narrative and discourse’ distinguishes between a pure telling in which
‘no one speaks’ and a telling in which we are aware of the person who is speaking.
Once again, Genette cancels the opposition by showing that there can never be a pure
narrative devoid of ‘subjective’ coloration. However transparent and unmediated a
narrative may appear to be, the signs of a judging mind are rarely absent. Narratives
are nearly always impure in this sense, whether the element of ‘discourse’ enters via
the voice of the narrator (Fielding, Cervantes) or a character-narrator (Sterne), or
through epistolary discourse (Richardson). Genette believes that narrative reached its
highest degree of purity in Hemingway and Hammett, but that with the nouveau
roman narrative began to be totally swallowed up in the writer’s own discourse. In our
later chapter on poststructuralism, we shall see that Genette’s theoretical approach,
with its positing and cancellation of oppositions, opens the door to the
‘deconstructive’ philosophy of Jacques Derrida.
At this point, the reader may well object that structuralist poetics seems to
have little to offer the practicing critic, and it is perhaps significant that fairy stories,
myths and detective stories often feature as examples in structuralist writings. Such
studies aim to define the general principles of literary structure and not to provide
interpretations of individual texts. A fairy story will provide clearer examples of the
essential narrative grammar of all stories than will King Lear or Ulysses. Tzvetan
Todorov’s lucid ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’ (1966) distinguishes the
narrative structures of detective fiction into three chronologically evolving types: the
‘whodunit’, the ‘thriller’ and the ‘suspense novel’. He makes a virtue of the fact that
the narrative structures of popular literature can be studied much more systematically
than those of ‘great’ literature, because they readily conform to the rules of popular
genres.
12
Structuralist Theories
Metaphor and metonymy
There are some instances when a structuralist theory provides the practical
critic with a fertile ground for interpretative applications. This is true of Roman
Jakobson’s study of ‘aphasia’ (speech defect) and its implications for poetics. He
starts by stating the fundamental distinction between horizontal and vertical
dimensions of language, a distinction related to that between langue and parole.
Taking Barthes’ garments system as an example, we note that in the vertical
dimension we have an inventory of elements that may be substituted for one another:
toque-bonnet-hood; in the horizontal dimension, we have elements chosen from the
inventory to form an actual sequence (skirt-blouse-jacket). Thus a given sentence may
be viewed either vertically or horizontally.
1
substituted for another in the set.
Each element is selected from a set of possible elements and could be2
This distinction applies at all levels – phoneme, morpheme, word, sentence.
Jakobson noticed that aphasic children appeared to lose the ability to operate one or
other of these dimensions. One type of aphasia exhibited ‘contiguity disorder’, the
inability to combine elements in a sequence; the other suffered ‘similarity disorder’,
the inability to substitute one element for another. In a word-association test, if you
said ‘hut’, the first type would produce a string of synonyms, antonyms, and other
substitutions: ‘cabin’, ‘hovel’, ‘palace’, ‘den’, ‘burrow’. The other type would offer
elements which combine with ‘hut’, forming potential sequences: ‘burnt out’, ‘is a
poor little house’. Jakobson goes on to point out that the two disorders correspond to
two figures of speech – metaphor and metonymy. As the foregoing example shows,
‘contiguity disorder’ results in substitution in the vertical dimension as in metaphor
(‘den’ for ‘hut’), while ‘similarity disorder’ results in the production of parts of
sequences for the wholes as in metonymy (‘burnt out’ for ‘hut’). Jakobson suggested
that normal speech behavior also tends towards one or other extreme, and that literary
style expresses itself as a leaning towards either the metaphoric or the metonymic.
The historical development from romanticism through realism to symbolism can be
understood as an alternation of style from the metaphoric to the metonymic back to
13
The elements are combined in a sequence, which constitutes a parole.Structuralist Theories
the metaphoric. David Lodge, in The Modes of Modern Writing (1977), applied the
theory to modern literature, adding further stages to a cyclical process: modernism
and symbolism are essentially metaphoric, while anti-modernism is realistic and
metonymic.
An example: in its broad sense, metonymy involves the shift from one element
in a sequence to another, or one element in a context to another: we refer to a cup of
something (meaning its contents); the turf (for racing), a fleet of a hundred sails (for
ships). Essentially metonymy requires a context for its operation; hence Jakobson’s
linking of realism with metonymy. Realism speaks of its object by offering the reader
aspects, parts, and contextual details, in order to evoke a whole. Consider the passage
near the opening of Dickens’s Great Expectations. Pip begins by establishing himself
as an identity in a landscape. Reflecting on his orphaned condition, he tells us that he
can describe his parents through the only visual remains – their graves: ‘As I never
saw my father or my mother… my first fancies regarding what they were like were
unreasonably [our italics] derived from their tombstones. The shapes of the letters on
my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square stout man…’ This initial act of
identification is metonymic in that Pip links two parts of a context: his father and his
father’s tombstone. However, this is not a ‘realistic’ metonymy but an ‘unrealistic’
derivation, ‘an odd idea’, although suitably childlike (and in that sense
psychologically realistic). Proceeding to the immediate setting on the evening of the
convict’s appearance, the moment of truth in Pip’s life, he gives the following
description:
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound,
twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the
identity of things [our italics], seems to me to have been gained on a
memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for
certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and
that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above,
were dead and buried; and that… the dark flat wilderness beyond the
churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle
feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the
river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the
sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning
to cry, was Pip.
Pip’s mode of perceiving the ‘identity of things’ remains metonymic and not
metaphoric: churchyard, graves, marshes, river, sea and Pip are conjured up, so to
14
Structuralist Theories
speak, from contextual features. The whole (person, setting) is presented through
selected aspects. Pip is evidently more than a ‘small bundle of shivers’ (he is also a
bundle of flesh and bones, thoughts and feelings, social and historical forces), but here
his identity is asserted through metonymy, a significant detail offered as his total self
at this moment.
In a useful elaboration of Jakobson’s theory David Lodge rightly points out
that ‘context is all-important’. He shows that changing context can change the figures.
Here is Lodge’s amusing example:
Those favourite filmic metaphors for sexual intercourse in the prepermissive
cinema, skyrockets and waves pounding on the shore, could be disguised as
metonymic background if the consummation were taking place on a beach on
Independence Day, but would be perceived as overtly metaphorical if it were
taking place on Christmas Eve in a city penthouse.
The example warns us against using Jakobson’s theory too inflexibly.
Structuralist poetics
Jonathan Culler made the first attempt to assimilate French structuralism to an
Anglo-American critical perspective in Struturalist Poetics (1975). He accepts the
premise that linguistics affords the best model of knowledge for the humanities and
social sciences. However, he prefers Noam Chomsky’s distinction between
‘competence’ and ‘performance’ to Saussure’s between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’. The
notion of ‘competence’ has the advantage of being closely associated with the speaker
of a language; Chomsky showed that the starting-point for an understanding of
language was the native speaker’s ability to produce and comprehend well-formed
sentences on the basic of an unconsciously assimilated knowledge of the language
system. Culler brings out the significance of this perspective for literary theory: ‘the
real object of poetics is not the work itself but its intelligibility. One must attempt to
explain how it is that works can be understood; the implicit knowledge, the
conventions that enable readers to make sense of them, must be formulated…’ His
main endeavour is to shift the focus from the text to the reader. He believes that we
can determine the rules that govern the interpretation of texts, but not those rules that
govern the writing of texts. If we begin by establishing a range of interpretations
which seem acceptable to skilled readers, we can then establish what norms and
15
Structuralist Theories
procedures led to the interpretations. To put it simply, skilled readers, when faced
with a text, seem to know how to make sense of it – to decide what is a possible
interpretation and what is not. There seem to be rules governing the sort of sense one
might make of the most apparently bizarre literary text. Culler sees the structure not in
the system underlying the text but in the system underlying the reader’s act of
interpretation. To take a bizarre example, here is a three-line poem:
Night is generally my time for walking;
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times;
Concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise.
When we asked a number of colleagues to read it, a variety of interpretative
moves were brought into play. One saw a thematic link between the lines (‘Night’,
‘time’, ‘times’, ‘year’); another tried to envisage a situation (psychological or
external); another tried to see the poem in term of formal patternings (a past tense –
‘was’ – framed by present tenses – ‘is’); another saw the lines as adopting three
different attitudes to time: specific, contradictory, and non-specific. One colleague
recognized that line two comes from the opening of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities,
but still accepted it as a ‘quotation’ which served a function within the poem. We
finally had to reveal that the other lines were also from the openings of Dickens’s
novels (the Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend). What is significant from a
Cullerian point of view is not that the readers were caught out but that they followed
recognizable procedures for making sense of the lines.
We all know that different readers produce different interpretations, but while
this has led some theorists to despair of developing a theory of reading at all, Culler
later argues, in The Pursuit of Signs (1981), that it is this variety of interpretation
which theory has to explain. While readers may differ about meaning, they may well
follow the same set of interpretative conventions, as we have seen. One of his
examples is New Criticism’s basic assumption – that of unity; different readers may
discover unity in different ways in a particular poem, but the basic forms of meaning
they look for (forms of unity) may be the same. While we may feel no compulsion to
perceive the unity of our experiences in the real world, in the case of poems we often
expect to find it. However, a variety of interpretations can arise because there are
several models of unity which one may bring to bear, and within a particular model
there are several ways of applying it to a poem. It can certainly be claimed for
16
Structuralist Theories
Culler’s approach that it allows a genuine prospect of a theoretical advance; on the
other hand, one can object to his refusal to examine the content of particular
interpretative moves. For example, he examines two political readings of Blake’s
‘London’ and concludes: ‘The accounts different readers offer of what is wrong with
the social system will, of course, differ, but the formal interpretative operations that
give them a structure to fill in seem very similar.’ There is something limiting about a
theory which treats interpretative moves as substantial and the content of the moves as
immaterial. After all, there may be historical grounds for regarding one way of
applying an interpretative model as more valid or plausible than another, while
readings of different degrees of plausibility may well share the same interpretative
conventions.
As we have noted, Culler holds that a theory of the structure of texts or genres
is not possible because there is not underlying form of ‘competence’ which produces
them: all we can talk about is the competence of readers to make sense of what they
read. Poets and novelists write on the basis of this competence: they write what can be
read. In order to read texts as literature we must possess a ‘literary competence’, just
as we need a more general ‘linguistic competence’ to make sense of the ordinary
linguistic utterances we encounter. We acquire this ‘grammar’ of literature in
educational institutions. Culler recognized that the conventions which apply to one
genre will not apply to another, and that the conventions of interpretation will differ
from one period to another, but as a structuralist he believed that theory is concerned
with static, synchronic systems of meaning and not diachronic historical ones.
The main difficulty about Culler’s approach surrounds the question of how
systematic one can be about the interpretative rules used by readers. He does not
allow for the profound ideological differences between readers which may undermine
the institutional pressures for conformity in reading practices. It is hard to conceive of
a single matrix of rules and conventions which would account for the diversity of
interpretations which might be produced in a single period about individual texts. At
any rate, we cannot simply take for granted the existence of any entity called a
‘skilled reader’, defined as the product of the institutions we term ‘literary criticism’.
However, in his later work – On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after
Structuralism (1983), and more particularly Framing the Sign (1988) – Culler moved
away from such purist structuralism and towards a more radical questioning of the
institutional and ideological foundations of literary competence. In the latter book, for
17
Structuralist Theories
instance, he explores and challenges the powerful tendency in post-war Anglo-
American criticism, sustained by its institutionalization in the academy, to promote
crypto-religious doctrines and values by way of the authority of ‘special texts’ in the
literary tradition.
Structuralism attracted some literary critics because it promised to introduce a
certain rigour and objectivity into the impressionistic realm of literature. This rigour is
achieved at a cost. By subordinating parole to langue the structuralist neglects the
specificity of actual texts, and treats them as if they were like the patterns of iron
filings produced by an invisible force. The most fruitful applications of the
Saussurean model have been those which treat structuralist concepts as metaphors –
as heuristic devices for analyzing texts. Attempts to found a ‘scientific’ literary
structuralism have not produced impressive results. Not only the text but also the
author is canceled as the structuralist places in brackets the actual work and the person
who wrote it, in order to isolate the true object of enquiry – the system. In Romantic
thought on literature, the author is the sentient being who precedes the work and
whose experience nourishes it; the author is the origin of the text, its creator and
progenitor. According to structuralists, writing has no origin. Every individual
utterance is preceded by language: in this sense, every text is made up of the ‘already
written’.
By isolating the system, structuralists also cancel history, since the structures
discovered are either universal (the universal structures of the human mind) and
therefore timeless, or arbitrary segments of a changing and evolving process.
Historical questions characteristically are about change and innovation, whereas
structuralism has to exclude them from consideration in order to isolate a system.
Therefore structuralists are interested not in the development of the novel or the
transition from feudal to Renaissance literary forms, but in the structure of narrative
as such and in the system of aesthetics governing a period. Their approach is
necessarily static and ahistorical: they are interested in neither the moment of the
text’s production (its historical context, its formal links with past writing, etc.) nor the
moment of its reception or ‘reproduction’ (the interpretations imposed on it
subsequent to its production – see Chapter 3, for theories to do with this).
There is no doubt that structuralism represented a major challenge to the
dominant New Critical, Leavisite, and generally humanist types of critical practice.
They all presupposed a view of language as something capable of grasping reality.
18
Structuralist Theories
Language had been thought of as a reflection of either the writer’s mind or the world
as seen by the writer. In a sense the writer’s language was hardly separable from his
or her personality; it expressed the author’s very being. However, as we have seen, the
Saussurean perspective draws attention to the pre-existence of language. In the
beginning was the word, and the word created the text. Instead of saying that an
author’s language reflects reality, the structuralists argue that the structure of language
produces ‘reality’. This represents a massive ‘demystification’ of literature. The
source of meaning is no longer the writer’s or the reader’s experience but the
operations and oppositions which govern language. Meaning is determined no longer
by the individual but by the system which governs the individual.
At the heart of structuralism is a scientific ambition to discover the codes, the
rules, the systems, which underlie all human social and cultural practices. The
disciplines of archaeology and geology are frequently invoked as the models of
structuralist enterprise. What we see on the surface are the traces of a deeper history;
only by excavating beneath the surface will we discover the geological strata or the
ground plans which provide the true explanations for what we see above. One can
argue that all science is structuralist in this respect: we see the sun move across the
sky, but science discovers the true structure of the heavenly bodies’ motion.
Readers who already have some knowledge of the subject will recognize that
we have presented only a certain classical type of structuralism in this chapter – one
whose proponents suggest that definite sets of relations (oppositions, sequences of
functions or propositions, syntactical rules) underlie particular practices, and that
individual performances derive from structures in the same way as the shape of
landscape derives from the geological strata beneath. A structure is like a centre or
point of origin, and replaces other such centres of origins (the individual or history).
However, our discussion of Genette showed that the very definition of an opposition
within narrative discourse sets up a play of meaning which resists a settled or fixed
structuration. For example, the opposition between ‘description’ and ‘narration’ tends
to encourage a ‘privileging’ of the second term (‘description’ is ancillary to
‘narration’; narrators describe incidentally, as they narrate). But if we interrogate this
now hierarchized pair of terms, we can easily begin to reverse it by showing that
‘description’ is after all dominant because all narration implies description. In this
way we begin to undo the structure which had been centred upon ‘narration’. This
process of ‘deconstruction’ which can be set in motion at the very heart of
19
Structuralist Theories
structuralism is one of the major elements in what we call poststructuralism (see
Chapter 7).
Selected reading
Key texts
[For later works by and about Roland Barthes, see Chapter 7, ‘Selected Reading’.]
Barthes, Roland,
Smith (Jonathan Cape, London, 1967).
Barthes, Roland,
Smith (Jonathan Cape, London, 1967).
Barthes, Roland,
University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1972).
Barthes, Roland,
trans. ed. and intro. by Susan Sontag (Fontana, London, 1983).
Blonsky, Marshall (ed.),
1985).
Culler, Jonathan,
Literature [1975] (Routledge, London, 2002).
Culler, Jonathan,
(Routledge, London, 2001).Writing Degree Zero [1953], trans. by Annette Lavers and ColinElements of Semiology [1964], trans. by Annette Lavers and ColinCritical Essays [1964], trans. by Richard Howard (NorthwesternSelected Writings [1982, as A Barthes Reader (Jonathan Cape)],On Signs: A Semiotic Reader (Basil Blackwell, Oxford,Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study ofThe Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction [1981]
22 December 2020 at 22:52
Awesome article. One of the hardest things to explain to potential customers is why a paid professional website is so important. book back cover samples
Post a Comment