Critical Theory Today: Structuralist Criticism PDF

critical theory today  7 Structuralist criticism The first thing you have to get used to when you begin to study structuralism is that common uses of the word structure do not necessarily imply structuralist activity. For example, you are not engaged in structuralist acti...

critical theory today  7 Structuralist criticism The first thing you have to get used to when you begin to study structuralism is that common uses of the word structure do not necessarily imply structuralist activity. For example, you are not engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the physical structure of a building to discover if it is physically stable or aesthetically pleasing. However, you are engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the physical structures of all the buildings built in urban America in 1850 to discover the underlying principles that govern their composition, for example, principles of mechanical construction or of artistic form. You are also engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the structure of a single building to discover how its composition demonstrates the underlying principles of a given structural system. In the first example of structuralist activity, you’re generating a structural system of classification; in the second, you’re demonstrating that an individual item belongs to a particular structural class. In terms of literary study, the same model of structuralist activity holds true. You are not engaged in structuralist activity if you describe the structure of a short story to interpret what the work means or evaluate whether or not it’s good literature. However, you are engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the structure of a large number of short stories to discover the underlying principles that govern their composition, for example, principles of narrative progression (the order in which plot events occur) or of characterization (the functions each character performs in relation to the narrative as a whole). You are also engaged in structuralist activity if you describe the structure of a single literary work to discover how its composition demonstrates the underlying principles of a given structural system. In other words, structuralists are not interested in individual buildings or individual literary works (or individual phenomena of any kind) except in terms of what those individual items can tell us about the structures that underlie and organize all items of that kind. For structuralism sees itself as a human science whose effort is to understand, in a systematic way, the fundamental structures 210 Structuralist criticism that underlie all human experience and, therefore, all human behavior and production. For this reason, structuralism shouldn’t be thought of as a field of study. Rather, it’s a method of systematizing human experience that is used in many different fields of study: for example, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and literary studies. For structuralism, the world as we know it consists of two fundamental levels— one visible, the other invisible. The visible world consists of what might be called surface phenomena: all the countless objects, activities, and behaviors we observe, participate in, and interact with every day. The invisible world consists of the structures that underlie and organize all of these phenomena so that we can make sense of them. For example, the English language consists of over a million words, each of which can be pronounced in any number of different ways by different speakers, resulting in millions of different utterances of individual words. How is it possible that native speakers of English master enough of this overwhelming collection of linguistic items to communicate effectively with one another at a rather advanced level of sophistication and at a rather early age? The answer is fairly simple: while there are millions of individual linguistic surface phenomena (individual words and all the different ways people pronounce them), there is a relatively simple structure underlying all these words, and it is that structure we master. The structure of English vocabulary consists of approximately thirty‑one phonemes (fundamental units of sound recognized as meaningful by native speakers of a language) and the rules of their combination. Most of us are not aware of these phonemes and could not describe the rules of their combination, but our ability to use English vocabulary demonstrates that we have unconsciously internalized these structures. Similarly, our ability to construct simple sentences depends on our internalization, whether or not we are aware of it, of the grammatical structure subject‑verb‑object. Without a structural system to govern communication, we would have no language at all. Analogously, without the structuring principles that allow us to organize and understand the natural world, the data provided by our five senses would be overwhelming and meaningless. Structuring principles, whether or not we are aware of them, allow us, for example, to differentiate vegetables (they grow in soil; they reproduce; they’re edible) from stones (they don’t grow; they don’t reproduce; they’re not edible) and from all other kinds of physical matter. Structuring principles also allow us to differentiate among groups within a given domain, for example, we might differentiate plant life with medicinal properties from plant life with harmful properties from plant life with neutral properties. As these examples illustrate, the world we live in consists of innumerable events and objects, that is, innumerable surface phenomena. However, the structures  Structuralist criticism 211 that underlie and organize these phenomena are relatively few. Without these structures our world would be chaos. Where do these structures come from? Structuralists believe they are generated by the human mind, which is thought of as a structuring mechanism. This is an important and radical idea because it means that the order we see in the world is the order we impose on it. Our understanding of the world does not result from our perception of structures that exist in the world. The structures we think we perceive in the world are actually innate (inborn) structures of human consciousness, which we project onto the world in order to be able to deal with the world. It’s not that there is no factual reality; it’s that there are too many facts to be perceived without conceptual systems to limit and organize them. And those conceptual systems originate within human consciousness. Thus, structuralism sees itself as a science of humankind, for its efforts to discover the structures that underlie the world’s surface phenomena—whether we place those phenomena, for example, in the domain of mathematics, biology, linguistics, religion, psychology, or literature—imply an effort to discover something about the innate structures of human consciousness. Before we go any further, we should take a moment to consider how structural‑ ism defines the word structure. First of all, as we noted earlier, structures aren’t physical entities; they’re conceptual frameworks that we use to organize and understand physical entities. A structure is any conceptual system that has the following three properties: (1) wholeness, (2) transformation, and (3) self‑regulation. Wholeness simply means that the system functions as a unit; it’s not merely a collection of independent items. The whole is different from the sum of its parts because the parts working together create something new. To use a physical example, water is a whole that is different from its component parts (hydrogen and oxygen). Transformation means that the system is not static; it’s dynamic, capable of change. The system is not merely a structure (a noun); it also structures (a verb). In other words, new material is always being structured by the system. For example, language, a structural system, is capable of transforming its basic components (phonemes) into new utterances (words and sentences). Self-regulation means that the transformations of which a structure is capable never lead beyond its own structural system. The elements engendered by transformations (for example, new linguistic utterances) always belong to the system and obey its laws. Structuralism assumes that all surface phenomena belong to some structural system, whether or not we are consciously aware of what that system is. The relationship of surface phenomena to structure might be illustrated by the following simplified diagram.  212 Structuralist criticism Surface phenomena:  dog runs happily  tree appears green  (words)  Susan is tall   clouds roll ominously     wisdom comes slowly  Structure:   (parts of speech) Noun Verb Descriptor     (rules of combination)  Subject + Predicate     If you read the rows of surface phenomena from left to right, you have a list of individual utterances, such as “dog runs happily” and “tree appears green.” However, if you read the columns of the whole diagram from top to bottom, you can see that the surface phenomena, which consist of fifteen different items but could consist of many more, are governed by a structure that consists, in this case, of only three parts of speech and two rules of combination. Thus, the utterance “dog runs happily” (or any utterance that follows the same grammatical pattern) is a surface phenomenon governed by the following structure. Subject (Noun) + Predicate (Verb + Descriptor) The components of a structure (in this example, parts of speech and rules of combination) are always fewer in number than the surface phenomena they underlie because their purpose is to organize, classify, and simplify. So far, most of my examples have come from language. This is not surprising because language is considered the most fundamental structure of humankind and the one on which most other structures depend. In fact, the field of structural linguistics is the source of most of structuralism’s terminology. So let’s take a brief look at that field now. Structural linguistics Structural linguistics was developed by Ferdinand de Saussure between 1913 and 1915, although his work wasn’t translated into English and popularized until the late 1950s. Before Saussure, language was studied in terms of the history of  Structuralist criticism 213 changes in individual words over time, or diachronically, and it was assumed that words somehow imitated the objects for which they stood. Saussure realized that we need to understand language, not as a collection of individual words with individual histories but as a structural system of relationships among words as they are used at a given point in time, or synchronically. This is the structuralist focus. Structuralism doesn’t look for the causes or origins of language (or of any other phenomenon). It looks for the rules that underlie language and govern how it functions: it looks for the structure. In order to differentiate between the structure that governs language and the millions of individual utterances that are its surface phenomena, Saussure called the structure of language langue (the French word for language), and he called the individual utterances that occur when we speak parole (the French word for speech). For the structuralist, of course, langue is the proper object of study; parole is of interest only in that it reveals langue. And these terms are used, as well, by structuralists who study literature: as we’ll see later, structuralist critics look for the langue that structures individual literary works and that structures the system of literature as a whole. As we saw above, the components of a structure are not merely a collection of independent items: they form a working unit because they exist in relation to one another. They interact. And we are able to perceive those components, as Saussure noted in terms of the structure of language, only because we perceive their difference from one another. Difference simply means that our ability to identify an entity (such as an object, a concept, or a sound) is based on the difference we perceive between it and all other entities. For example, if we believed that all objects were the same color, we wouldn’t need the word red (or blue or green) at all. Red is red only because we perceive it to be different from blue and green. According to structuralism, the human mind perceives difference most readily in terms of opposites, which structuralists call binary oppositions: two ideas, directly opposed, each of which we understand by means of its opposition to the other. For example, we understand up as the opposite of down, female as the opposite of male, good as the opposite of evil, black as the opposite of white, and so on. Furthermore, unlike his predecessors, Saussure argued that words do not simply refer to objects in the world for which they stand. Instead, a word is a linguistic sign consisting, like the two sides of a coin, of two inseparable parts: signifier + signified. A signifier is a “sound‑image” (a mental imprint of a linguistic sound); the signified is the concept to which the signifier refers. Thus, a word is not merely a sound‑image (signifier), nor is it merely a concept (signified). A sound‑ image becomes a word only when it is linked with a concept. Furthermore, the relationship between signifier and signified, Saussure observed, is arbitrary: 214 Structuralist criticism there is no necessary connection between a given sound‑image and the concept to which it refers. There is no reason why the concept of a tree should be rep‑ resented by the sound‑image “tree” instead of by the sound‑image “arbre”; the concept of a book is just as well represented by the sound‑image “livre” as the sound‑image “book.” The relationship between signifier and signified is merely a matter of social convention: it’s whatever the community using it says it is. The idea that signifiers, or linguistic sound‑images, do not refer to things in the world but to concepts in our mind is crucial for structuralism. As we noted earlier, structuralists believe that our perceptions of the world result from the conceptual framework that is an innate feature of human consciousness. We don’t discover the world; we “create” it according to innate structures within the human mind. Given that language is the most fundamental of these structures, and the one through which our beliefs are passed on from one generation to the next, it makes sense that it is through language that we learn to conceive and perceive the world the way we do. This is why learning a new language carries with it the potential to learn to see the world in new ways. If native speakers of English learn to speak an Eskimo language, for example, they may learn to see snow quite differently, for they will learn that there are many different words for what English calls snow, depending on the size and texture of the flake, the density of the snowfall, the angle at which it falls, the direction from which the storm originates, and so on. Similarly, if native speakers of English learn to speak Spanish, they may learn a new way to view the idea of human existence, for they will learn that Spanish has two different verbs for the English verb to be: ser and estar. Ser means “to be” in the sense of what one permanently considers oneself. One uses ser to say “I am a human being,” “I am a woman,” “I am Mexican,” and the like. One uses estar to make statements about one’s changeable state of being, such as “I am at the supermarket” or “I am a cab driver.” And one uses neither ser nor estar to say “I am hungry” or “I am sleepy,” for in Spanish these are not considered states of being. In Spanish one has hunger or sleepiness—tengo hambre or tengo sueño— but these are not states of being. Thus, when speaking a particular language, our attention is drawn to particular aspects of our experience, or more precisely, particular experiences are generated by that language. In other words, our language mediates our experience of our world and ourselves: it determines what we see when we look around us and when we look at ourselves. The belief in the primacy of language in structuring human experience is of great interest to many students of human culture. Before we examine structuralist approaches to literature, let’s take a brief look at two related areas of cultural study in which structuralist thought plays an important role: structural anthropology, which is the comparative study of human cultures, and semiotics, which  Structuralist criticism 215 is the study of sign systems, especially as they apply to the analysis of popular culture. Examples of structuralist activity in both these areas can help us grasp the structuralist enterprise as a whole and prepare us to better understand its applications to literature. Structural anthropology Structural anthropology, created by Claude Lévi‑Strauss in the late 1950s, seeks the underlying common denominators, the structures, that link all human beings regardless of the differences among the surface phenomena of the cultures to which they belong. Despite the very different ritual forms in which different cultures express important aspects of community life, it seems that all human cultures have some codified process of, for example, mate selection, kinship ties, and initiation into adulthood. While trial by ordeal (for example, being expected to survive on one’s own in the wilderness for a specified period of time without the provision of food, clothing, or weapons) certainly appears different from, say, a twenty‑first birthday party at a college dormitory, structural anthropologists would argue that the differences are only at the level of surface phenomena or, as structural linguists would put it, at the level of parole. For as rites of initiation, both cultural practices have the same underlying structures, the same langue. Both involve some sort of ritual ceremony: being bathed by members of the community upon one’s return from the wilderness or blowing out candles and being toasted by assembled friends. Both involve some special form of personal decoration: special markings painted on the body or party hats. And both involve eating some sort of special food at the end of the ritual: perhaps the heart of a powerful animal or birthday cake and beer. The existence of structural similarities among seemingly different myths of different cultures was one of Lévi‑Strauss’s particular areas of interest. His goal was to discover when “different” myths are actually different versions of the same myth in order to show that human beings from very different cultures share structures of consciousness that project themselves in the formation of structurally similar myths. These structural similarities, he claimed, reveal that certain human concerns cross cultural boundaries, and they include such practical questions as how to define kinship ties (in order to determine rights of inheritance and incest taboos) and such philosophical questions as how to account for the origin of the human race. An illustration of the latter question occurs in Lévi‑Strauss’s analysis of the Oedipus myth, which he believed embodies the conflict between our knowledge that we are born of sexual union and the persistent belief among many cultures that we are born of the earth, as the Spartoi spring from the soil in the Oedipus myth (or, we might add, as Adam is fashioned from clay in the 216 Structuralist criticism Bible). Lévi‑Strauss argued that there is no “true” or “original” version of any myth. Each version of a given myth is equally valid because each embodies the attempt of all structures to make sense out of an otherwise chaotic world. When examined from a structuralist perspective, he found that the enormous number of myths from various cultures reduces itself to a rather limited number of what he called mythemes, the fundamental units of myths. A mytheme is analogous to a sentence in that it represents a relationship between two or more concepts, often in the form of a subject‑verb relationship. A hero killing a monster is an example of a mytheme, as is a hero violating a moral law. Lévi‑ Strauss defines mythemes as “bundles” of relations because a mytheme consists of all its variants. For example, the mytheme “the hero kills a monster” includes a variety of different kinds of heroes (rich, poor, orphaned, of good family) killing different kinds of monsters (male, female, half‑human, sedentary, mobile, land‑bound, seafaring, articulate, mute) for different reasons (to win a wife, to save a community, to prove himself). The point is that a structural approach to myth shows us that there is a relatively limited, knowable langue (underlying structure) by means of which we can order and understand the otherwise overwhelming number of different myths produced all over the world. Of course, myths are forms of narrative, and mythemes are therefore narrative structures. So the structural analysis of myths has obvious implications for the structural study of literature. Indeed, as we’ll see later in this chapter, in the section entitled “The Structure of Literary Genres,” some literary critics believe that all literature consists of the retelling, in various guises, of the same myths. Semiotics Just as structural anthropology applies structuralist insights to the comparative study of human cultures, semiotics applies structuralist insights to the study of what it calls sign systems. A sign system is a linguistic or nonlinguistic object or behavior (or collection of objects or behaviors) that can be analyzed as if it were a specialized language. In other words, semiotics examines the ways linguistic and nonlinguistic objects and behaviors operate symbolically to “tell” us something. In terms of literary analysis, semiotics is interested in literary conventions: the rules, literary devices, and formal elements that constitute literary structures. We’ll examine this topic at some length in the following section, “Structuralism and Literature.” So let’s concentrate here on the nonlinguistic uses of semiotics, which I think you’ll find rather interesting. For example, the picture of the reclining blond beauty in the skin‑tight, black velvet dress on the billboard advertising a particular brand of whiskey, when examined semiotically, “tells” us that those who drink this whiskey (presumably  Structuralist criticism 217 men) will be attractive to seductive, beautiful women like the one on display. As this example illustrates, semiotics is especially useful in analyzing popular culture. Other examples of the kinds of pop‑culture sign systems semioticians often examine might include pictorial ads in magazines, popular dances, Disneyland, roller derby, Barbie dolls, automobiles, and, to use two examples analyzed by the famous semiotician Roland Barthes, professional wrestling and the striptease. Here’s a simplified summary of Barthes’ semiotic analysis of professional wrestling. He argues that professional wrestling (the brand of wrestling in which the contestants use pseudonyms like Gorgeous George or Haystacks Calhoun, dress in costume, and orchestrate the match in advance) can be viewed as a sign system. It can be interpreted as a language with a very specific purpose: to provide the audience with the cathartic satisfaction of watching justice triumph in a situation that (unlike life) makes it very clear who is good and who is evil. This purpose is revealed in the structural similarities of the matches, regardless of who the contestants are: for example, (1) each wrestler is a clear type (clean‑ cut All‑American, mean‑tempered slob, barbarous evildoer, and so on); (2) each match contains contestants who—by their type, their behavior during a par‑ ticular match, or both—can be clearly identified as the “good guy” and the “bad guy”; and (3) each match ends with the triumph of goodness over evil. The match, Barthes further observes, greatly resembles the spectacle of ancient Greek theatre, as the wrestlers act out their pain, despair, or triumph with exaggerated gestures and grimaces. The exhibition of suffering, defeat, and justice is thus the purpose of the spectacle. The signs we read in order to come to this conclusion include the names, physiques, and costumes of the contestants; their body language in the ring (strutting, cowering, swaggering, menacing, placating, and the like); and their facial expressions (smug, outraged, proud, horrified, triumphant, defeated, and so on). It doesn’t matter that the contest is rigged because its purpose is not to determine who is the better wrestler but to enact the kind of spectacle different versions of which have for centuries provided the public with the vicarious release of anger, fear, and frustration. Now let’s take a look at some of the theoretical concepts underlying semiotic analyses like the one just summarized. Semiotics recognizes language as the most fundamental and important sign system. As we saw in our discussion of structural linguistics, a linguistic sign is defined as a union of signifier (sound‑ image) and signified (concept to which the signifier refers). For semiotics, too, sign = signifier + signified. However, as we just saw, semiotics expands the signi‑ fier to include objects, gestures, activities, sounds, images—in short, anything that can be perceived by the senses. Clearly, semiotics gives the signifier a wide range of possibilities. However, of the three recognized classes of signs—index, 218 Structuralist criticism icon, and symbol—semiotics limits its study to signs that function as symbols. Let’s pause briefly to examine why this is the case. An index is a sign in which the signifier has a concrete, causal relationship to the signified. For example, smoke signifies fire; a knock on the door signifies that someone is there. An icon is a sign in which the signifier physically resembles the signified. For example, a painting is an icon to the extent that the picture resembles the subject it represents. A realistic painting of President Kennedy is an icon. A symbol is a sign in which the relationship between signifier and signified is neither natural nor necessary but arbitrary, that is, decided on by the conventions of a community or by the agreement of some group. As we saw earlier, language is an example of a symbolic sign system. The sound‑ image “tree” refers to the idea of a tree only because speakers of English have agreed to use it that way. While smoke is an index of fire, and a realistic painting of fire is an icon of fire, the word fire is a symbol of fire. There is no quality of fire inherent in the word fire. Any other sound‑image agreed upon by a group could be used to represent fire. Let’s consider a different example. Ice crystals on your living room window are an index of winter. A photograph of a frozen landscape is an icon of winter. However, that same photograph of a frozen landscape or a written description of it in a story (such as Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”) would function for most English majors as a symbol of death. Thus, of the three kinds of signs, only the symbol is a matter of interpretation. A group of people doesn’t decide that fire produces smoke (an index). It is sim‑ ply the case that fire produces smoke. A group of people doesn’t decide that a realistic portrait of President Kennedy (an icon) will have the same color hair, eyes, skin, and other physical features that the late president had. If the portrait didn’t have these physical features, it wouldn’t be an icon. But a group of people does have to decide that the color white symbolizes virginity, that the color red symbolizes sexuality, that horns and a pitchfork symbolize Satan, and that the cross symbolizes Christianity. It is the business of semiotics, then, to isolate and analyze the symbolic func‑ tion of sign systems, although the objects or behaviors under investigation will often have other functions as well. For example, food and clothing have obvious biological functions (they keep us nourished and protected from the elements) and economic functions (fluctuations in the price of food and clothing influ‑ ence a society’s standard of living). But a semiotician will be interested in food and clothing only to the extent to which they function as sign systems, only to the extent to which they have symbolic content. Furthermore, as a structural‑ ist enterprise, semiotics will analyze a sign system by focusing on a group of similar objects (for example, billboards or pictorial magazine ads or restaurant menus) synchronically (at a given moment in time). To analyze the semiotics of  Structuralist criticism 219 food as it is expressed in restaurant menus, for example, one would not examine menus from a single restaurant as they have changed over time (diachronically). Instead, one would examine a large number of menus produced by different restaurants at the same point in time (synchronically) in order to discover their semiotic codes, the underlying structural components that carry a nonverbal cultural message of some sort. What might a semiotic analysis of restaurant menus reveal? In other words, besides the concrete data about the five food groups communicated by the words on the menu, what nonlinguistic messages are these menus sending? By examin‑ ing such signs as the menus’ color, size, decoration, type of print, size of margins, amount and distribution of blank space, prices, names of dishes (not words like steak or baked potato, but “tags” like à la Parisienne or Pioneer’s), and the pre‑ dominance or absence of foods that carry symbolic value (such as hamburgers or caviar), we would probably be able to discover a “fashion industry” of food in which, for example, messages about patrons’ self‑images are communicated. The semiotics of some menus will send the message, “If you’re a well‑bred, well‑ educated person of distinction with an extremely discriminating palate and the wallet to back it up, you will slip into your Guccis, slide into your BMW, and dine with us.” Other menus will send the message, “If you’re a down‑to‑earth nonphony who doesn’t want to waste time or hard‑earned dough on sissified showing off, come on in.” Still other menus will send the message, “If you’re a patriotic American who still believes in God and Grandma’s apple pie, you’ll celebrate your family values by eating here.” If you’re a movie fan, you might be interested in trying to map out a semiotics of the musical comedy, the murder mystery, or the love story. Similarly, you might want to see if you can discover a semiotics of daytime drama, or “soap operas.” For semioticians, anything can be a sign. The whole world of human culture is a “text” waiting to be “read,” and structuralism provides the theoretical framework to do it. Structuralism and literature For students of literature, structuralism has very important implications. After all, literature is a verbal art: it is composed of language. So its relation to the “master” structure, language, is very direct. In addition, structuralists believe that the structuring mechanisms of the human mind are the means by which we make sense out of chaos, and literature is a fundamental means by which human beings explain the world to themselves, that is, make sense out of chaos. So there seems to be a rather powerful parallel between literature as a field of study and structuralism as a method of analysis. 220 Structuralist criticism Our discussion of structuralist approaches to literature will focus on the narrative dimension of literary texts because structuralist criticism deals mainly with narrative. This focus is not as narrow as it may seem at first glance, however, if we remember that narrative includes a long history and broad range of texts, from the simple myths and folk tales of the ancient oral tradition to the complex mélange of written forms found in the postmodern novel. In addition, most drama and a good deal of poetry, though not classified as narrative, nevertheless have a narrative dimension in that they tell a story of some sort. In any event, as we’ll see, narratives provide fertile ground for structuralist criticism because, despite their range of forms, narratives share certain structural features, such as plot, setting, and character. We must keep in mind, however, that structuralism does not attempt to interpret what individual texts mean or even whether or not a given text is good literature. Issues of interpretation and literary quality are in the domain of surface phenomena, the domain of parole. Structuralism seeks instead the langue of literary texts, the structure that allows texts to make meaning, often referred to as a grammar because it governs the rules by which fundamental literary ele‑ ments are identified (for example, the hero, the damsel in distress, and the vil‑ lain) and combined (for example, the hero tries to save the damsel in distress from the villain). In short, structuralism isn’t interested in what a text means, but in how a text means what it means. Thus, The Great Gatsby’s Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, and Tom Buchanan are surface phenomena that draw their meaning from the ways in which they relate to the structures underlying them: respectively, hero, damsel in distress, and villain. As you may remember from chapter 6, reader‑response critics also focus on how a text means rather than what it means. Indeed, there is some overlap between the two disciplines, for structuralists and reader‑response critics would agree that there is a relationship between the underlying structure of the text and the reader’s response to it. After all, structuralism believes that the structures we perceive in literature, as in everything else, are projections of the structures of human consciousness. However, you’ll recall that the final goal of reader‑response criticism is to understand the reader’s experience, which structuralists would call a surface phenomenon. In contrast, the final goal of structuralism is to understand the underlying structure of human experience, which exists at the level of langue, whether we are examining the structures of literature or speculating on the relationship between the structures of literature and the structures of human consciousness. In other words, reader‑response criticism does not seek a universal science that would link innate structures of human consciousness to all human experience, behavior, and production. Structuralism seeks precisely that.  Structuralist criticism 221 Structuralist approaches to literature have tended to focus on three specific areas of literary studies: the classification of literary genres, the description of narrative operations, and the analysis of literary interpretation. For the sake of clarity, we’ll discuss these three areas separately. The structure of literary genres Let’s begin our discussion of structuralist approaches to genre with a simplified summary of one of its most complex and sweeping examples: what Northrop Frye calls his theory of myths, which is a theory of genres that seeks the structural principles underlying the Western literary tradition.1 Mythoi (plural of mythos) is a term Frye uses to refer to the four narrative patterns that, he argues, structure myth. These mythoi, he claims, reveal the structural principles underlying liter‑ ary genres: specifically, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony/satire. According to Frye, human beings project their narrative imaginations in two fundamental ways: in representations of an ideal world and in representations of the real world. The ideal world, which is better than the real world, is the world of innocence, plenitude, and fulfillment. Frye calls it the mythos of summer, and he associates it with the genre of romance. This is the world of adventure, of successful quests in which brave, virtuous heroes and beautiful maidens over‑ come villainous threats to the achievement of their goals. Examples of romance you may be familiar with include the chivalrous adventures in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1470), Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596), John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), and “Sleeping Beauty.” In contrast, the real world is the world of experience, uncertainty, and failure. Frye calls it the mythos of winter, and he associates it with the double genre of irony/satire. Irony is the real world seen through a tragic lens, a world in which protagonists are defeated by the puzzling complexities of life. They may try to be heroic, but they never achieve heroic stature. They may dream of happiness, but they never attain it. They’re human, like us, and so they suffer. Examples of ironic texts you may have read include Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937). Analogously, satire is the real world seen through a comic lens, a world of human folly, excess, and incongruity. In the world of satire, human frailty is mocked, sometimes with biting, merciless humor. Examples of satire you may be acquainted with include Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1946), the episodes satirizing the abuses of the antebellum American South in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), 222 Structuralist criticism and the passages satirizing conservative complacency and leftist self‑delusion in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). While romance occurs within an ideal world and irony/satire occurs within the real world, the remaining two mythoi involve a movement from one of these worlds to the other. Tragedy involves a movement from the ideal world to the real world, from innocence to experience, from the mythos of summer to the mythos of winter, and therefore Frye calls tragedy the mythos of autumn. In tragedy, a hero with the potential to be superior, like a romantic hero, falls from his romantic height into the real world, the world of loss and defeat, from which he can never rise. Well‑known examples of tragedy include Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (5th century b.c.), Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601) and Othello (1604), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). In contrast, comedy involves a movement from the real world to the ideal, from experience to innocence, from the mythos of winter to the mythos of summer, and therefore Frye calls comedy the mythos of spring. In comedy, a protagonist caught in a web of threatening, real‑world difficulties manages, through various twists in the plot, to overcome the circumstances that have thwarted him and attain happiness. Unlike the villains who obstruct romantic heroes, those who obstruct the protagonists of comedy are absurd and humorous. And in the end, the protagonist moves, usually with his or her beloved, from the cold, trouble‑ some real world to a happier, kinder, gentler fictional space. Examples of comedy you may be familiar with include Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (1590) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). This description of Frye’s framework is merely a skeletal map of his detailed analysis of each mythos and the genre to which it is related. He argues that each genre identifies itself with a particular repertoire of themes, character types, moods, kinds of action, and versions of the plot formulas summarized above. Taken together, the four genres form a kind of master plot, or key to understand‑ ing narrative as a whole. And for Frye, that master plot is the structure of the quest, of which each mythos represents one leg. Frye notes that the traditional quest has four structural components: conflict, catastrophe, disorder and confusion, and triumph. Conflict, he observes, is the basis of romance, which consists of a series of fantastic adventures in which superheroes encounter obstacles. Catastrophe is the basis of tragedy, which consists of the hero’s downfall. Disorder and confusion are the basis of irony and satire, which require that confusion and anarchy reign supreme and that effective action be impossible. And triumph is the basis of comedy, in which the protagonist and his or her beloved become the centerpiece of some sort of improved social order. Taken together, then, the genres of romance, tragedy, irony/satire,  Structuralist criticism 223 and comedy—in that order—spell out the structure of what Frye calls a “total quest‑myth.” Thus, for Frye, all narrative is structurally related because it’s all some version of some part of the quest formula. Frye calls this method of classification archetypal criticism because it deals with the recurrence of certain narrative patterns throughout the history of Western literature. The word archetype refers to any recurring image, character type, plot formula, or pattern of action. An archetype, then, is a kind of supertype, or model, different versions of which recur throughout the history of human production: in our myths, literature, dreams, religions, and rituals of social behavior. Frye’s method thus seeks the structural principles that underlie the Western literary tradition. Indeed, archetypes are themselves structural in nature: in order to be an archetype, an image, character type, or other narrative element must serve as a structural model that generates numerous different versions of itself, that is, numerous different surface phenomena with the same underlying structure. So while the specific content of particular romances, tragedies, ironic/ satiric narratives, and comedies is different—that is, their surface phenomena are different—the structure of each genre remains the same.2 Another method with which Frye seeks the structural principles that govern genres in the Western literary tradition he calls his theory of modes. His classification of fiction into modes is based on the protagonist’s power to take action as it compares to the power of other men and to the power of their environment (nature and/or society). Frye’s modes are also determined according to whether the protagonist is superior in kind to others (of a type beyond the reach of ordinary people, like gods or demigods) or merely superior in degree (having the same positive attributes that all humans are capable of but having them to a greater degree). Perhaps a chart will help clarify Frye’s system. Protagonist’s power Fictional mode Character type 1. Superior in kind to both Myth Divine beings men and their environment 2. Superior in degree to both Romance Heroes 3. Superior in degree to men High mimesis (imitation of life, like Leaders but not to their environment that found in epic and tragedy) 4. Superior in no way Low mimesis (imitation of life, like Common people that found in comedy and realism) 5. Inferior Irony Antiheroes Frye notes that, for the most part, myths, though early forms of narrative, fall outside the usual literary categories. For this reason, and because it seems somewhat odd to include comedy and realism under the same heading, Robert  224 Structuralist criticism Scholes offers a different version of Frye’s modes, one he believes will provide a more clear and useful basis of differentiation among genres by eliminating the nonliterary mode of myth and inserting a new category in order to account for the difference between comedy and realism. Here’s a chart outlining Scholes’ system of classification. Protagonist’s power Fictional mode Character type 1. Superior in kind to both Romance Heroes men and their environment 2. Superior in degree to men High mimesis (imitation of life, like Leaders but not to their environment that found in epic and tragedy) 3. Equal in degree to men Middle mimesis (imitation of life, Ordinary people and their environment like that found in realism) like ourselves 4. Inferior in degree to men Low mimesis (imitation of life, like Comic and and their environment that found in comedy) pathetic figures 5. Inferior in kind Irony Antiheroes As these two charts indicate, different structuralists can have different ways of categorizing the same material. And there are many more structuralist theories of genre than those outlined here. This kind of structural analysis is an ongoing attempt to classify and thereby understand the relationships among literary texts by finding the most useful way to represent the structural system governing literature as a whole. The structure of narrative (narratology) Structuralist analyses of narrative examine in minute detail the inner “workings” of literary texts in order to discover the fundamental structural units (such as units of narrative progression) or functions (such as character functions) that govern texts’ narrative operations. A good deal of literary criticism that today goes under the name narratology belongs to this kind of structuralist approach. We’ll limit ourselves to three examples that are representative of the field in general and that I think you’ll find most useful at this stage in your understanding of structuralism: the work of A. J. Greimas, Tzvetan Todorov, and Gérard Genette. Greimas observes that human beings make meaning by structuring the world in terms of two kinds of opposed pairs: “A is the opposite of B” and “–A (the negation of A) is the opposite of –B (the negation of B).” In other words, we perceive every entity as having two aspects: its opposite (the opposite of love is hate) and its negation (the negation of love is the absence of love). He believes that this fundamental structure of binary oppositions, consisting of four components  Structuralist criticism 225 arranged in two pairs, shapes our language, our experience, and the narratives through which we articulate our experience. In our narratives, this structure is embodied in the form of plot formulas, such as conflict and resolution, struggle and reconciliation, and separation and union. These plot formulas are carried out by means of actants, or character functions, which are slots filled by the actual characters (surface phenomena) in a given story. A single character may perform the work of two or more separate actants. For example, in The Great Gatsby, Nick supplies the role of at least two actants: the hero’s helper (he sympathizes with Gatsby and helps reunite him with Daisy) and a quester in his own right (Nick has come to Long Island seeking himself, seeking a purpose for his life). Analogously, two or more characters may perform the function of a single actant. For example, Tom, Wolfsheim, and Gatsby’s parasitical party guests all function as a single actant: the embodiment of a corrupt world that finally destroys Gatsby. For Greimas, the forwarding of the plot—the movement from conflict to resolution, struggle to reconciliation, separation to union, and so forth— involves the transfer of some entity (a quality or an object) from one actant to another. For example, Daisy is transferred from Tom to Gatsby (or, more precisely, from Gatsby to Tom to Gatsby then back to Tom), and Gatsby’s disillusionment at the end of the story is transferred to Nick. Thus, the fundamental structure of narrative is the same as the fundamental structure of language: subject‑verb‑object. This basic narrative grammar generates the following three patterns of plots by aligning what Greimas sees as the six fundamental actants into three pairs of oppositions: Actants Plot types Subject—Object Stories of Quest/Desire (a subject, or hero, searches for an object: a person, thing, or state of being) Sender—Receiver Stories of Communication (a sender—a person, god, or institution—sends the subject in search of the object, which the receiver ultimately receives) Helper—Opponent Subplots of Stories of Quest/Desire or Communication (a helper aids the subject in the quest; an opponent tries to hinder the subject) Of course, a given narrative can combine a story of quest/desire with a story of communication. For example, in a simple love story, the hero can be both the subject and the receiver, and his beloved can be both the object and sender. Or in stories like those about the quest for the Holy Grail, each actant can be performed by a separate character: God is the sender, the hero is the subject, the Holy Grail is the object, and humanity is the receiver. 226 Structuralist criticism Finally, in order to account for various possible narrative sequences, Greimas suggests the following structures, which he derived from his study of folk tales. 1. Contractual structures involve the making/breaking of agreements or the establishment/violation of prohibitions and the alienation or reconciliation that follows. 2. Performative structures involve the performance of tasks, trials, struggles, and the like. 3. Disjunctive structures involve travel, movement, arrivals, and departures. Greimas uses his system to analyze the works of twentieth‑century French author Georges Bernanos, concluding that the novelist creates a world in which all conflicts reduce to the fundamental symbolic conflict between life and death. Furthermore, this key conflict expresses itself, Greimas suggests, in the following structure (which I have simplified) that governs the author’s fictional universe. Available experiences Possible transformations Ideological choices 1. joy/pain Truth: revolt + acceptance Life: joy + pain 2. boredom/disgust Lie: refusal + resignation Death: boredom + disgust The grammar of Bernanos’ novels thus structures a world in which we can avoid feeling pain only if we are willing to give up joy as well, for the two are linked: our capacity to feel joy makes us vulnerable to pain. Thus, we must either accept the truth that life is a double‑edged sword of joy and pain (though we tend, initially, to revolt against that truth), or we must refuse the truth and resign ourselves to the only alternative: boredom and disgust, which are a kind of emotional death we choose in order to protect ourselves from the emotional risks of life. In a manner similar to that of Greimas, Todorov draws an analogy between the structural units of narrative—such as elements of characterization and plot— and the structural units of language: parts of speech and their arrangement in sentences and paragraphs. Units of narrative Units of language Characters Proper nouns Characters’ actions Verbs Characters’ attributes Adjectives Propositions Sentences Sequences Paragraphs  Structuralist criticism 227 A proposition is formed by combining a character with an irreducible action (for example, “X kills Y” or “X arrives in town”) or irreducible attribute (for example, “X is evil” or “X is queen”), that is, an action or attribute in its most basic form. A sequence is a string of propositions that can stand on its own as a story. The structure of the most basic sequence is (1) attribution, (2) action, (3) attribution: the protagonist starts out with an attribute (for example, he is unloved), and by means of an action (he seeks love) that attribute is transformed (he is loved or, at least, has learned something important as a result of his quest). A story must contain at least one sequence, though it may contain many sequences. Todorov further subdivides his structural system into such categories as negation (the absence of an action or attribute), comparison (the presence of an action or attribute to different degrees), and modes (the qualification of an action or attribute, such as occurs when an action or attribute is desired, feared, expected, done unwillingly, and the like). This “grammar” of narrative allows Todorov to analyze texts in terms of what he sees as their fundamental narrative properties. Once a text’s propositions are discovered—by combining each character (noun) with an action (verb) or attribute (adjective)—the kinds of actions and attributes that recur in a text can be categorized as can the kinds of propositions and the relations between propositions. For example, in his analysis of the stories in Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1350), Todorov finds, among other things, that all attributes can be reduced to three categories of adjectives: states (unstable attributes, such as happiness and unhappiness), qualities (more stable attributes, such as good and evil), and conditions (the most stable attributes, such as one’s sex, religion, or social position). Especially significant, I think, is his claim that all actions in The Decameron can be reduced to three verbs: to modify, to transgress, and to punish. For this discovery led to his observation of a significant pattern of recurrence in the tales: changes are continually made, and sins continually go unpunished. This pattern, and his knowledge of history, led Todorov to speculate that there is a connection between the values operating in Boccaccio’s stories and those of the culture in which he lived. Todorov suggests that, in both The Decameron and Boccaccio’s world, a new system of values was emerging, one that appreciated the personal daring and initiative associated with the free‑enterprise system of capitalism, which was beginning to replace the older, more restrictive system of commerce. It is important to note that both Greimas and Todorov derive their frameworks from and apply them to a large body of materials—Greimas uses all the works of a single author, and Todorov uses a long work that consists of a collection of tales—because they want to produce a structural system useful for understanding narrative in general. Similarly, Genette develops his narrative theory by 228 Structuralist criticism means of a detailed study of Marcel Proust’s seven‑volume work, Remembrance of Things Past (1927). Genette begins by differentiating among three levels of narrative that generally have been included under the umbrella of the term narrative: story, narrative, and narration. Story consists of the succession of events being narrated. The story thus provides the content of the tale in the order in which events “actually happened” to the characters, an order that does not always coincide with the order in which they are presented in the narrative. Narrative refers to the actual words on the page, the discourse, the text itself, from which the reader constructs both story and narration. The narrative is produced by the narrator in the act of narration. Narration refers to the act of telling the story to some audience and thereby producing the narrative. However, just as the narrator almost never corresponds exactly to the author, the audience (narratee) almost never corresponds exactly to the reader. For example, in The Great Gatsby, Nick describes his summer in New York to some audience (narration). In doing so, he presents a verbal discourse, which we see as the words on the page (narrative). And that discourse represents the events in which Nick appears as a character (story). Genette’s work focuses on narrative, the words on the page, but he notes that all three levels work together. That is, for the purposes of analysis, he separates aspects of a text that don’t operate separately, but he does so in order to see how they interact. And he observes that story, narrative, and narration interact by means of three qualities, which he calls tense, mood, and voice. 1. Tense is the arrangement of events in the narrative with respect to time. That arrangement involves the notions of order, duration, and frequency. a. Order refers to the relationship between the chronology of the story (the order in which the events of the story occur in the fictional world) and the chronology of the narrative (the order in which the narrative presents those events). For example, Jay Gatsby’s story consists, in part, of the following facts in the following order: he was born to poor farmers, ran away from home, worked for Dan Cody, courted Daisy, went to war, returned, and set about acquiring a fortune and reclaiming Daisy. However, the narrative presents these events in a different order. For example, we don’t learn about his boyhood until chapter 6. b. Duration refers to the relationship between the length of time over which a given event occurs in the story and the number of pages of narrative devoted to describing it. A character’s trip to Europe may last five years in the story, but the narrative may describe it in five lines.  Structuralist criticism 229 Conversely, a conversation between lovers may take five minutes in the story, but the narrative may describe it in five pages. Thus, duration is what produces the sense of narrative speed. c. Frequency involves the relationship between the ways in which events may be repeated in the story (the same event may occur more than once) and in the narrative (a single event may be described more than once). 2. Mood is the atmosphere of the narrative created by distance and perspective. a. Distance is created when the narrator is one of the characters in the narrative, a “go‑between” through whose consciousness the story is filtered. The more intrusive the narrator, the greater the distance between narration and story. Conversely, the least distance is created when we are unaware of the narrator’s presence, when a tale seems to “tell itself.” Distance is also created by the absence of descriptive detail. The less detail given, the less the effect of reality is created, and the greater the sense of distance between narration and story. The more detail given, the less distance exists. Thus, the least distance, or the greatest imitation of life, is produced by maximum information and minimum presence of the narrator. b. Perspective refers to point of view, or the eyes through which we see any given part of the narrative. Although the narrator may be speaking, the point of view may be that of one of the other characters, and the feelings of a point‑of‑view character may be different from those of the narrator telling that character’s story. 3. Voice refers to the voice of the narrator. The voice we hear (the narrator’s) may not be the same as the eyes we see through (the perspective). When we analyze voice, we analyze the relationship of the narrator (the act of narration) to the story being told and to the narrative (the way the story is being told). Voice helps us determine the narrator’s attitude toward the story and reliability. It is interesting to note that tense, mood, and voice are all aspects of verbs. For in Genette’s opinion, all fiction functions like an expanded verb: all narrative reduces to action. Although his definitions may seem “cut and dried,” he generates his categories, in large part, to be able to show when a literary text creates its effects by “violating” those categories. In his study of Remembrance of Things Past, for example, Genette shows how Proust creates an effect of intense immediacy, of great intimacy between narration and story, by combining maximum information with maximum presence of narrator, an effect that is traditionally produced by combining maximum information with minimum presence of narrator. Thus, Genette underscores the notion that systems of classification should 230 Structuralist criticism be used to help us illuminate the complexity of literary works, not obscure that complexity through oversimplification. Of course, the work of Greimas, Todorov, and Genette is far more complex than this summary implies. Our purpose here is simply to understand the kinds of analyses made possible by structural narratology. It might be helpful to think of this approach as looking at narrative through a microscope in order to identify its smallest units and see how they work. Structural narratologists thus offer us a way of seeing the details of narrative operations and a vocabulary with which to describe them. It is important to note, however, that Greimas, Todorov, and Genette, once they identify the formula that structures a narrative or group of narratives, use that formula to address larger questions about literary meaning and its relationship to human life. That is, once we identify the formula of a given narrative or group of narratives, we must then ask ourselves, “How does this formula reveal a pattern in narrative in general, and what does this pattern imply about human expe‑ rience or the structures of human consciousness?” In other words, what does a given narrative pattern contribute to our knowledge of the relatively small number of stories human beings have been telling themselves for thousands of years (though the stories may take hundreds of different forms, they are still, structurally, the same stories) in order to help themselves cope with life? For at the heart of structuralist analysis of any kind is the desire to understand what it means to be human. The structure of literary interpretation According to Jonathan Culler, the structural system that governs both the writ‑ ing and interpretation of literary texts is the system of rules and codes, which we have consciously or unconsciously internalized, that tell us how to make mean‑ ing when we read literature. Some of these rules and codes are taken for granted by the public at large (for example, that a fairy tale is a fictional story not to be taken literally), but many of them are learned in the classroom (for example, that the use of nature imagery reveals a good deal about a work’s theme). In America, this system of rules and codes is part of the Western literary tradition as it has been passed on by our universities, and our individual literary competence is determined by how much of the system we have internalized. The point is not that any two competent readers would necessarily agree in their interpretations of a particular work but that both interpretations would be guided by the same structural system of interpretive rules and codes. Culler thus believes that what we refer to as the structure of literature is really the structure of the system of interpretation we bring to it. His effort is to unearth this structural  Structuralist criticism 231 system and show us how it operates. Perhaps the best way to acquaint you with the structural system Culler has identified is simply to describe some of its major components, which he has named as follows: the convention of distance and impersonality, naturalization, the rule of significance, the rule of metaphorical coherence, and the rule of thematic unity. The convention of distance and impersonality is an assumption we make as soon as we see that we are reading a literary work, even if that work is in the form of nonliterary writing, such as a letter (like Barthelme’s story “The Sandman,” 1972) or a journal (like Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974). As soon as we know we’re reading a piece of fiction or poetry rather than a letter or journal, we read it differently than we would read a real letter or journal: we know we’re entering a fictional world, and this creates a fictional distance, so to speak, that carries with it a kind of impersonality that would not be present if we knew we were reading a factual account of a human being’s personal experience. The convention of distance and impersonality is the code that enables all the following codes to come into play. Naturalization is the process by which we transform the text so that the strangeness of its literary form, which we don’t see in everyday writing—for example, rhyme; meter; divisions into stanzas, acts, or chapters; and interior monologues— makes sense in terms of the world we live in. When we read, for example, “My darling is a ripening pear,” we don’t think the narrator is in love with a piece of fruit; we assume he is speaking metaphorically. And we appreciate the beauty and strangeness of the literary language even as we translate it into an idea we understand. Furthermore, we generally assume we are hearing the voice of a narrator, rather than that of the author, and it is to the narrator’s point of view that we ascribe any inconsistencies or biases in the narration. Other ways in which we naturalize the text include recognizing the codes that tell us how to interpret such literary elements as characters and symbols. For example, in real life we don’t believe that a person with fine, clear skin necessarily has a fine, clear soul, but we would accept this correlation in certain kinds of fiction. The rule of significance is the assumption that the literary work expresses a significant attitude about some important problem, and so we pay attention to what it says in ways that we wouldn’t do with other kinds of writing. If our spouse left us a note saying “I’ve gone to the antique store in search of a lamp,” we’d probably take the message at face value: our spouse wants to buy an antique lamp. If this same sentence were broken into a four‑line poem, however, the words “I’ve gone,” “in search,” “antique,” and “lamp” would suddenly take on greater resonance. We might conclude, for example, that the poem represents the desire to escape some unsatisfactory situation in the present in order to return to the past and find some kind of enlightenment that can’t be found in the here and now. 232 Structuralist criticism The rule of metaphorical coherence is the requirement that the two components of a metaphor (the vehicle, or metaphorical term, and the tenor, or subject to which the metaphor is applied) have a consistent relationship within the context of the work. Imagine, for example, a story about the plight of a penniless, aging, Native American drifter who, at the close of the tale, falls asleep forever under a freezing sky. In this context, the description of a pale, winter sunset could be a metaphor for the death of the character and perhaps for the end of an era, but it couldn’t very well be a metaphor for the restful sleep that precedes the hopeful beginning of a bright new life. The rule of thematic unity is the chief reason why there is a rule of metaphorical coherence, for the rule of thematic unity is our expectation that the literary work has a unified, coherent theme, or main point. In fact, it is because we expect a literary work to have thematic unity that we almost always manage to find it or, more precisely, construct it when we interpret the text. We tend to create thematic unity, Culler observes, by means of certain procedures, which include, among others, (1) theme as a binary opposition (good versus evil), (2) theme as the resolution of a binary opposition (good conquers evil), and (3) theme as the displacement of a binary opposition by a third term (good‑versus‑evil is absorbed by an all‑encompassing Nature, as we see in Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” 1855). It’s not difficult to see why Culler’s structuralist approach is of interest to reader‑ response theorists. Like the social reader‑response theory of Stanley Fish dis‑ cussed in chapter 6, Culler’s approach asserts that our understanding of literature is based on the interpretive strategies we bring to the text. As we noted earlier, structuralists believe that we “create” the world we see by projecting onto it our structures of consciousness. Apply this belief to literature, and the result is the same as the reader‑response notion that we “create” the literary text as we read it. But the structuralist move Culler makes is his question, “What is the struc‑ ture that underlies the surface phenomena of our interpretations?” And to find the answer, he examines interpretation as a structural system. Unlike reader‑ response theorists, Culler examines the langue, the structural system of rules and codes, that operate (consciously or unconsciously) when authors write and readers interpret within the Western literary tradition. Even the small sampling of approaches offered here illustrates the wide range of structuralist methodologies, both in terms of the kinds of theoretical frameworks structuralists use and the kinds of texts, literary and otherwise, they analyze.  Structuralist criticism 233 Some questions structuralist critics ask about literary texts The following questions are offered to summarize structuralist approaches to literature. Keep in mind that structuralists don’t try to determine whether or not a literary text constitutes great literature. Their focus is on the structural systems that underlie and generate literary meaning. 1. Using a specific structuralist framework (such as the ones we examined by Frye and Scholes), how should the text be classified in terms of its genre? 2. Using a specific structuralist framework (such as that of Greimas, Todo‑ rov, or Genette), analyze the text’s narrative operations. Can you speculate about the relationship between the text’s “grammar” and that of similar texts? Can you speculate about the relationship between the text’s gram‑ mar and the culture from which the text emerged? 3. Using Culler’s theory of literary competence, what rules or codes of interpretation must be internalized in order to “make sense” of the text? Depending on the text in question, it might be necessary to identify codes in addition to those specified by Culler. (In other words, what does a given text contribute to our knowledge of literary competence?) 4. What are the semiotics of a given category of cultural phenomena, or “texts,” such as high school football games, television and/or magazine ads for a particular brand of perfume (or any other consumer product), or even media coverage of a historical event, such as Operation Desert Storm, an important legal case, or a presidential election campaign? In other words, analyze the nonverbal messages sent by the “texts” in question, as well as the semiotic implications of such verbal “tags” as “Desert Storm” or “White Diamonds” (a brand of perfume). What is being communicated, and how exactly is it being communicated? Depending on the literary text or texts in question, we might ask one or any combination of these questions. Or we might come up with a useful question not listed here. These are just starting points to get us thinking about produc‑ tive ways to approach literature from a structuralist perspective. Remember that not all structuralists will interpret the same texts in the same way, even if they use the same approach. As in every field, even expert practitioners disagree. Our goal is to use structuralism to help us see some fundamental connections among the structures of literary texts, between the structure of literature and that of language, and among the structures of cultural phenomena of every sort, including, for example, literature, mythology, art, social rituals, sports, forms of entertainment, and advertising. The construction of a systematic, univer‑ sal terminology to describe the fundamental structures of literature offers us the opportunity to make clearer and more rigorous comparisons as we try to increase our understanding of the processes at work in literary production and literary history. 234 Structuralist criticism The following structuralist reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is offered as an example of what a structuralist analysis of that novel might yield. Drawing on Todorov’s notion of narrative “grammar,” I will argue that all of the action in the novel can be reduced to three verbs: to seek, to find, and to lose, which grammar can be interpreted, I think, as the modern novel’s rejection of the traditional seek‑and‑find quest formula. In addition, I will suggest that The Great Gatsby’s seek‑find‑lose grammar offers us an interesting way to use Frye’s theory of mythoi to analyze the relationship between the novel’s two principal plot‑lines, those concerning Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway. “Seek and ye shall find”... and then lose: a structuralist reading of The Great Gatsby In many ways, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) is so carefully organized that the novel’s structure seems to draw attention to itself. A brief description of the text’s structural symmetry should illustrate this point. The narrative revolves around Jay Gatsby’s pursuit, attainment, and loss of Daisy Fay Buchanan. As we learn in flashback, this failed quest is a replay of the same pur‑ suit, attainment, and loss of the same beloved that occurred in Gatsby’s youth, before the novel opens. Each failed quest occurs during the compressed period of a few months, and in both instances Gatsby disguises his true origins, so there is a kind of narrative symmetry between the structure of fictional past and fictional present. Another kind of structural symmetry is produced when Gatsby is reunited with Daisy in chapter 5, which is at the physical center of the novel’s nine chapters and at the temporal center of the narrative action: it is late July, the midpoint between Nick’s first visit to the Buchanans’ new home in early June, when “the history of the summer really begins” (10; ch. l), and Gatsby’s death in early September. In addition, the narrative unfolds in a pattern of similarly structured triads, bounded at the beginning and end of the novel by narrator Nick Carraway’s meditative reflections on the events he recounts: Opening: Narrator’s opening meditation (ch. 1) I: The world of wealth described (ch. 1) II: The world of poverty described (ch. 2) III: Intersection of I and II—rich and poor mingle at Gatsby’s party (ch. 3) I: Nick hears story of Gatsby’s past (ch. 4) II: Nick hears story of Daisy’s past (ch. 4) III: Intersection of I and II—Gatsby and Daisy reunite at Nick’s house (ch. 5)  Structuralist criticism 235 I: The eternal triangle appears—Tom, Daisy, and Gatsby at Gatsby’s party (ch. 6) II: The eternal triangle explodes—the confrontation scene in the New York hotel room (ch. 7) III: Intersection of I and II—three disasters result A. Myrtle Wilson’s death (ch. 7) B. Gatsby’s death (ch. 8) C. George Wilson’s death (ch. 8) Closing: Narrator’s closing meditation (ch. 9) Of course, any of these narrative patterns could serve as a starting point for a structural analysis of The Great Gatsby. The particular structure I want to focus on, however, is the one I believe is at the foundation of all the others: the novel’s narrative “grammar,” which is illuminated, I think, by the use of Tzvetan Todo‑ rov’s schema of propositions. As you’ll recall, according to this framework we try to discover how the text is structured by the pattern of relations among recurring actions (which are analogous to verbs) and attributes (which are analogous to adjectives) associated with particular characters (which are analogous to nouns). In other words, we try to discover how the text is structured by the repetition of the same grammar, the same formula, the same “sentence,” so to speak. In the case of The Great Gatsby, I think all the action can be reduced to three verbs: “to seek,” “to find,” and “to lose.” These three verbs produce, in turn, the repetition of two related “sentences,” or narrative patterns: (1) “X seeks, finds, and then loses Y,” or simply (2) “X seeks but doesn’t find Y.” (X = the character in question; Y = a desired person, object, state, or condition.) In both cases, of course, the overall narrative formula is the same: 1. Attribute: X lacks Y 2. Action: X seeks Y 3. Attribute: X lacks Y (either because X doesn’t find Y or because X finds but then loses Y) I’d like to begin my analysis of the novel by revealing how this formula structures the text as a whole by structuring the narratives of the main characters. Then I will suggest that the seek‑find‑lose grammar can be seen as the modern novel’s rejection of the traditional seek‑and‑find quest formula. Finally, I will argue that this narrative grammar offers us an interesting application of Northrop Frye’s theory of mythoi. For in The Great Gatsby, this grammar produces a narrative that embeds the mythos of summer (Gatsby’s story, the genre of romance) within the mythos of winter (Nick’s story, the genre of irony). And although the mythos of summer is eventually overridden by the mythos of winter, the latter structure remains “haunted” by the former. 236 Structuralist criticism Of course, the “master plot” of the novel’s seek‑find‑lose formula is the story of its title character, Jay Gatsby. As we noted above, he seeks, finds, and loses Daisy twice: once in his youth, before the novel begins, and again during the sum‑ mer that Nick lives next door to him on West Egg. In addition, the narrative of Gatsby’s pursuit, attainment, and loss of Daisy is accompanied by the narrative of his pursuit, attainment, and loss of the new life he sought when he changed his name from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby. His seek‑find‑lose story is thus repeated not merely in two different time periods but in terms of two different goals: love and social status. Both are lost to him, of course, when he dies. Furthermore, Gatsby’s narrative provides the framework on which the narratives of the other characters are “strung,” so to speak: it is in the unfolding of Gatsby’s story by Nick that the other stories are told. Daisy’s story mirrors not only the seek‑find‑lose pattern of Gatsby’s narrative but its repetitive quality as well. As we learn in flashback, the young Daisy Fay sought excitement, found it in the form of her love for Lieutenant Jay Gatsby, then lost him to the war. Next she sought emotional security, found it in the form of marriage to Tom Buchanan, then lost it when she soon discovered that he was chronically unfaithful to her. Finally, she craves the attention that she isn’t get‑ ting from Tom, finds it in Gatsby, and loses it when he dies (or, perhaps more precisely, when Tom reveals that Gatsby isn’t the man Daisy thought he was). Similar seek‑find‑lose grammars structure the narratives of Tom Buchanan, Myrtle Wilson, and her husband George. As a young man, Tom sought ego gratification, found it in his career as a college football hero, then lost it when he graduated from college. As a married man, Tom seeks a similar kind of ego gratification—the adoration of “inferiors”—by seducing a series of working‑class women, the latest incarnation of which is Myrtle Wilson. In each case, however, the ego gratification lasts only as long as the affair, so Tom continually returns to the position of the unfulfilled seeker. Analogously, Myrtle Wilson seeks escape from the boredom and economic pov‑ erty of her marriage, finds it in Tom Buchanan, then loses it when she is killed in the hit‑and‑run accident. Of course, even if she had lived she would not have succeeded in marrying Tom. His intention to avoid a permanent commitment to Myrtle is evident in his lie to her that Daisy’s Catholicism would never per‑ mit her to divorce him. Operating as a shadow behind Myrtle’s seek‑find‑lose narrative is that of George Wilson, who sought love, found it in his marriage to Myrtle, and lost it when she became unfaithful to him with Tom (or, perhaps more precisely, when she learned that George didn’t own the suit in which he was married). As a backdrop to these seek‑find‑lose grammars is a subset of seek‑find‑lose: seek‑but‑don’t‑find. We see this pattern operating in George’s pursuit of financial  Structuralist criticism 237 security, which is an impossible dream, and in Jordan’s pursuit of social and financial security, which seem ever to elude her grasp just as the winning putt remains, of late, just beyond her reach. The grammar of seek‑but‑don’t‑find also structures the setting in the form of the numerous minor characters who popu‑ late it. Mr. McKee seeks but doesn’t find success as a photographer. Myrtle’s sister Catherine seems a permanently dissatisfied seeker: her trip to Monte Carlo was a financial disaster; her “solid sticky bob of red hair,” “complexion powdered milky white,” and “rakish” painted eyebrows “blurred” by the plucked hairs growing back (34; ch. 2) are a fashion disaster; and her search for a good time seems merely to take her from one scene of drunken chaos to another. Even Gatsby’s innumerable party guests have the air of dissatisfied wanderers, coming to his mansion from parts unknown, seeking something new in the latest dances, and seeking excitement, or perhaps just escape from their dissatisfaction, at the bot‑ tom of a bottle. Certainly the most well‑developed seek‑but‑don’t‑find narrative in the novel is that of Nick Carraway. Nick’s summer in New York is just the latest in a series of unsuccessful pursuits. His experience in World War I apparently involved the pursuit of excitement from which he returned more empty‑handed than when he left: “I enjoyed [World War I] so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle‑west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business” (7; ch. 1). As his narrative reveals, of course, his venture in the bond business, and in the East in general, also follows the seek‑but‑don’t‑find pattern: he abandons both within a few months of his arrival in New York. Neither is his search for the right woman successful. He leaves his hometown, in part, to escape a woman he was feeling pressured to marry. He apparently cares so little about the woman at work with whom he has an affair that he allows her brother’s “mean looks in [his] direction” (61; ch. 3) to drive him off. And his relationship with Jordan Baker is rather clearly an infatuation with no staying power: he tires of her as soon as he tires of the Buchanans. Nick’s most important seek‑but‑don’t‑find pattern, however, seems to be his unfulfilled search for a purpose in life. Throughout his narrative, Nick seems “at loose ends.” At the age of thirty he is still without a stable career, without a seri‑ ous love interest, and without a home of his own. And he feels their lack acutely: “Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair” (143; ch. 7). In fact, he’s still being supported by his wealthy father, who “agreed to finance [him] for a year” (7; ch. 1) while he learned the bond business. It’s no wonder he seems so fascinated by Gatsby, for Gatsby has, to an extreme degree, the quality Nick lacks most, the quality he is unable to acquire despite his best efforts: purpose. 238 Structuralist criticism It might be interesting to think of the seek‑find‑lose grammar of The Great Gatsby as the modern novel’s rejection of the traditional quest formula. The traditional quest is structured by a seek‑and‑find grammar. Even if the hero dies achiev‑ ing the goal of his quest, or attempting to achieve it, the world is transformed in some way by his effort: something important is found. Thus, the basic plot formula Todorov isolated consists of an attribute transformed by an action: (1) attribute (for example, the protagonist is unsuccessful), (2) action (he seeks suc‑ cess), (3) attribute (he is successful or, at least, has learned something important as a result of his quest). The traditional quest is thus redemptive in some way. As we have seen, in Fitzgerald’s novel, the characters’ attributes are not trans‑ formed by the hero’s action nor by their own actions. At the novel’s end the characters have the same attribute—the same lack—with which they began, and apparently nothing is learned in the process. Gatsby is dead, presumably without having admitted to himself that Daisy has abandoned him and with‑ out living long enough to benefit from that insight had it occurred. Myrtle and George are dead, without having learned anything from their experience. The last time we see Jordan, she’s putting up her usual false front, lying to Nick that she is unmoved by his withdrawal from their relationship and is engaged to someone else. Finally, Tom and Daisy, true to form, flee the chaos they helped create, “retreat[ing] back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together” (188; ch. 9). The only exception to this rule is Nick, who is transformed by his experience in New York. As the narrative opens, he is very optimistic, feeling that “life was beginning over again with the summer” (8; ch. 1). He’s excited by his new job and his new life in New York. By the end of the summer he is utterly disil‑ lusioned, abandoning his plans for a new career and a new life in the East: “When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart” (6; ch. 1). However, Nick’s transformation is not redemptive. Although he certainly learns some‑ thing important about human nature over the course of that summer, the lesson produces in him a dark vision of human life. His attitude, as the novel closes, is hopeless and despairing: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (189; ch. 9). If the traditional quest formula—seek‑and‑find (or seek‑and‑be‑transformed)— can be associated with a worldview that includes the possibility of redemption, then perhaps the seek‑find‑lose (or seek‑but‑don’t‑find) grammar can be associ‑ ated with a worldview in which redemption is impossible or highly unlikely. This more pessimistic, or some would say realistic, vision of human experience is the vision associated with the modernist worldview, which dominated Anglo‑  Structuralist criticism 239 European literature from the beginning of World War I (1914) to the end of World War II (1945) and which The Great Gatsby epitomizes. We can certainly find numerous examples of this grammar in modern novels, for example, D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913) and Women in Love (1920), Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). Presumably, the readers of these works, rather than the characters that populate them, are supposed to undergo whatever transformation is possible, but the texts do not offer a worldview that could be called redemptive. (Analogously, we might char‑ acterize the grammar of the postmodern novel as don’t‑bother‑to‑seek. Certainly, it might be argued that novels such as Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 , Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays , Joseph Heller’s Something Happened , and Don DeLillo’s White Noise are structured by such a grammar.) My speculation that The Great Gatsby’s seek‑find‑lose grammar reflects the mod‑ ern novel’s rejection of the traditional quest formula is compatible with the way in which I think Fitzgerald’s novel requires us to apply Northrop Frye’s theory of mythoi. For according to Frye’s framework, The Great Gatsby embeds the struc‑ ture of romance (Gatsby’s narrative, the mythos of summer, the quest) within the structure of irony (Nick’s narrative, the mythos of winter, realism), and the second structure offers a kind of running commentary on the first, which, by the novel’s close, forces Nick to realize that the structure of romance (Gatsby’s narra‑ tive) is no longer possible in the modern world. That is, in Fitzgerald’s novel, the structure of irony contains and eventually overrides the structure of romance. Gatsby is, of course, the hero of the romantic quest. Although all the other characters have “quests” of their own, only Gatsby’s occurs within the mode of romance. In Anatomy of Criticism Frye notes, “[t]he romance is nearest of all literary forms to the wish‑fulfillment dream, and for that reason [i]n every age the ruling social or intellectual class tends to project its ideals in some form of romance” (186). For the get‑rich‑quick Jazz Age of the American 1920s, the kind of meteoric financial rise Jay Gatsby achieved was emblematic of the American dream, which clearly was and still is a romantic dream of wish fulfill‑ ment. Typical of romance, too, is Gatsby’s persistent search for a past Golden Age, which, for him, was his courtship of Daisy Fay in Louisville before he was sent to war. Upon his return to America after the war, he devoted himself to amassing a fortune and following her social activities in the newspapers. When he was able, finally, to buy a mansion across the bay from hers, he arranged to meet her again so that he could “fix everything just the way it was before” (17; ch. l), so that he could return to the Golden Age. In fact, all of Gatsby’s activities between the time he met Dan Cody to the moment at which he is reunited with Daisy at Nick’s cottage constitute the series of minor adventures the romantic hero must undertake before the major adventure— 240 Structuralist criticism reclaiming Daisy for his own—occurs. His adventures with Cody taught him the skills he needed to succeed in life, including the perseverance and tem‑ perance that mark the romantic hero. His military achievements resulted in his rapid ascendancy through the ranks from lieutenant to major and covered him with medals for his valor on the battlefield. Then with similar rapidity, he ascended the ranks of Wolfsheim’s organization, gaining a fortune to rival that of Tom Buchanan. Gatsby’s major adventure (his quest to regain Daisy) is also typical of the roman‑ tic quest to obtain a bride. Like the hero of the traditional quest, who is often separated from his love by a barrier of water, Gatsby is separated from Daisy by the bay between his mansion on West Egg and her home on East Egg. And, again typically, he can see the “promised land”—the green light at the end of the Buchanans’ dock—from his side of the gulf that separates them. Fur‑ thermore, his quest for Daisy pits Gatsby against an antagonist with whom the reader can have little sympathy. Indeed, Tom fills the role of the usurper, from whose selfish machinations Daisy must be rescued. The climactic struggle of the romantic conflict between hero and antagonist occurs, for Gatsby, during the confrontation scene with Tom in the New York hotel room. Although the hero sometimes dies as a result of this battle, his willingness to sacrifice himself for his quest proves him a hero. And, indeed, Gatsby does die, both symbolically—“ ‘Jay Gatsby’ had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice” (155; ch. 8)—and literally, when Tom sends George Wilson, armed and crazed, to Gatsby’s house. In fact, Gatsby’s willingness to sacrifice himself for Daisy becomes the dominant motif as the narrative moves toward his death. In a subtler fashion, Gatsby’s quest also resembles that of another incarnation of the romantic hero: the quester‑hero who saves the kingdom from the ravages of a monster. As Frye puts it, “the quest‑romance is the victory of fertility over the waste land” (193): the monster to be defeated is the sterile, fallen world that waits to be redeemed by some sort of messiah. For the modern wasteland embod‑ ied in the novel’s setting—including both the “valley of ashes” (27; ch.2) and the empty pleasures of the idle rich—Gatsby represents the renewal of life and vitality. In Nick’s words, Gatsby has a “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” an “extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again” (6; ch. 1). Gatsby has, in short, what the modern world desperately needs to save it from the hopelessness of its own sterility. Like a messiah‑figure, he represents renewed hope. Although Gatsby may seem, on one level, part of the sterile modern world— he engages in criminal activities and throws parties that inevitably turn into  Structuralist criticism 241 drunken revels—he is symbolically separate from it. Like the quester‑hero who saves the imperiled kingdom, he is isolated from the world he inhabits. He lives alone and is close to no one but Daisy. He knows none of the people at his par‑ ties, which he throws only in the hope that Daisy will “wander i[n] some night” (84; ch. 4). And he is pictured, most frequently, alone in a tableau that bespeaks his romantic isolation. For example, one evening Nick observes that Gatsby “emerged from the shadow of [his] mansion” and “stretched out his arms toward the dark water” (25; ch. l), “trembling” toward the “single green light, minute and far away” (26; ch. 1) at the end of Daisy’s dock. The night Myrtle Wilson is killed, he stands guard alone, in a “sacre[d]... vigil” (153; ch. 7) outside Daisy’s house, in case Tom “tries to bother her” (151; ch. 7) about their affair. Even at his riotous parties, Gatsby is pictured in romantic isolation: “A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell” (60; ch. 3). In a world of corruption, Gatsby is incorruptible because he has an “incorruptible dream” (162; ch. 8). Gatsby’s early life, too, fits that of the quester‑hero who saves the fallen world. His origins are mysterious, and even when he reveals who his parents are we learn that “his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God [A]nd to this conception he was faithful to the end” (104; ch. 6). Gatsby even goes through a kind of baptism by water, typical of the messiah figure. “It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon” (104; ch. 6), but by the time he rowed out to Cody’s yacht anchored off the shore of Lake Superior, “it was Jay Gatsby” (104; ch. 6) who emerged from the water to accept a job as Cody’s steward. And like the sun god who, Frye tells us, “is represented as sailing in a boat on the surface of our world” (192), Gatsby sailed with Cody for five years. Indeed, just as the quester‑hero is often “a third son, or the third to undertake the quest, or successful on his third attempt” (Frye 187), Gatsby’s travels by boat took him “three times around the continent” (106; ch. 6) before he “landed” in the modern world. The narrative of Gatsby’s romantic quest is embedded within a very different kind of narrative: that of Nick’s summer in New York. We learn about Gatsby because Nick’s relationship with him forms a large part of the narrator’s own experience. However, Nick’s narrative is structured by a genre that is the polar opposite of romance: the genre of irony, which, Frye says, “is consistent... with complete realism of content” (224). Irony, Frye argues, derives from the mythos of winter. In contrast to the idealized world of romance, Frye observes, the mythos of winter “attempts to give form to the shifting ambiguities and complexities of unidealized existence” (223). This “unidealized existence” is not a world of heroes but of everyday, flawed human beings. It’s a world in which 242 Structuralist criticism human misery is the result not of fate or of some kind of cosmic intervention but of sociological and psychological causes. In other words, this is the real world, warts and all. In the real world, in which Nick and all the other n