Summary Series: Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory- Structuralism (chapter 2) pages: 38 - 58

 Structuralism 

The French intellectual movement of the 1950s known as structuralism is thought to have started with the writings of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and literary critic Roland Barthes. It arrived in Britain in the 1970s and rose to prominence in the 1980s. The theory is difficult to understand in isolation because it is linked to the study of broader structures in various situations.

Structuralist Chickens and Liberal Humanist Eggs

This theory suggests that "structure" is imposed by one's experiences and perceptions of the world rather than being innate to its objects. So, meaning is always outside (rather than inside) of things and is attributed to them by the viewer.

In the context of literature, "structure" refers to the way that a text represents a particular genre. They are related to one another, just as a phrase is to the language. The text (phrase) is subject to the genre's (language) norms and conventions.

Understanding Donne's "Good Morrow", for instance, necessitates familiarity with the "alba/dawn song" genre, which it parodies and subverts. However, "alba" cannot be understood without first understanding the concept of courtly love and its conventions. The structuralist method thus draws the reader into the larger, more abstract fields of genre, history, and philosophy, drawing them away from the text.
 

To put it simply, the genre (alba, which includes the history of courtly love and poetic conventions) is like chicken, and the text (Donne's poem) is like an egg. While liberal humanists are interested in analysing the egg, structuralists are interested in figuring out the exact nature of the chicken.

Structuralism in the UK and the USA

• When the theory first emerged in the 1970s, it caused a lot of controversy in the American and British literary scenes because the large, abstract issues raised by structuralism were not taken seriously by critics in these countries.
• Since the 1920s, the Cambridge scholars have advocated the opposite approach, which involves closely reading the text. [Refer to Practical Criticism.]
• Structuralism raised questions about what is "literary", how narratives function, and what makes a poetic structure.
• Traditional critics were not ready to switch their attention from eggs to chicken.

Signs of the Fathers – Saussure

• The sign theory of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.
• "General Principles", the first part of Course in General Linguistics [compiled by his students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaya and published posthumously in 1916], delves into the concept of the linguistic sign, outlining its structure and function.
• Meaning is arbitrary Ex. Hut can refer to a basic shelter (dwelling), a temporary housing during wartime (military hut or mountain hut), a fast-food chain (Pizza hut), a place (Hut bay, in the Andaman islands), specific structures (huts of Gustav Mahler)
• Meaning is relational Ex. A hut is a dwelling place only when it is in the paradigmatic chain: hovel, shed, hut, house, mansion, palace.
• Meaning exists in binary opposition or in the 'differencing networks'. Ex. Hut is not a house, a male is not a female, etc.
• Meaning is attributed. Ex. India's freedom fighters are Terrorists for England (during the war of independence) No neutral or objective alternative is available in the language.
• Saussure used the 8.25 Geneva to Paris Express Train as an example, which is distinguished by its arrival time (7.25 to 9.25) and destination (Geneva-Paris). Even if it is not the same train, is not driven by the same driver, is not occupied by the same passengers, does not travel on the same track, or is not a train (due to maintenance). [Identity is arbitrary, attributable, relational, and differential].
• Saussure also used the words langue and parole. Langue refers to language as a structure or system, and parole is any specific utterance in the language.
• Saussure's model—language as an independent system in which things relate to one another to form larger structures—was adopted by structuralists.
• In literary analysis, the structuralists used Saussure's terminology. Langue refers to the genre of novels as well as a body of literary practices, while parole refers to any literary work, such as Middlemarch.

Scope of Structuralism

• Structuralism is not only about language and literature
• Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used the structuralist method to investigate myth.
• He understood the mythological cycle as "langue" and the individual myth as "parole".
• Ex. The Oedipus myth is parole, and the whole cycle of tales connected with the city of Thebes is langue. He moves from the particular to the general in studying the meaning of myths.
• Repeated motifs and contrasts provide the dyadic pairs with symbolic thematic and archetypal resonance: husband/son, sighted/blind, relation/stranger, etc.
• The langue may not be limited to a specific genre.
• The langue can also refer to a broader system of structured and organised signification with cultural connotations that is closely related to the parole. Consider Dickens' departure from novelistic conventions and into other popular genres such as melodrama and ballad.
• Reading "culture" as a language is encouraged by structuralists.
• Culture is made up of numerous structural networks (codes) that have meaning and can be shown to work methodically.
• Fashion can also be understood as a language. Separate items or features (parole) are combined into a complete outfit (langue) governed by rules. For example, no one wears an evening gown with carpet slippers or goes to school in a military uniform.
• Those rule-breaking fashions of the 1940s (like making outer garments that look like undergarments or wearing too small or too big garments) can be read as signs of deconstruction.
• Roland Barthes, a cultural anthropologist, applied structuralist methods in the study of modern culture.
• In Mythologies (1957), Barthes studies unconventional subjects like boxing, wrestling, magazine pictures, etc.
• The author employs a structuralist approach, contextualising individual items (such as boxing, which is about endurance and repression) and revealing layers of significance (as distinguished from wrestling, which exaggerates pain).
• Jonathan Culler (Structuralist Poetics, 1975), Terence Hawkes (Structuralism and Semioitics, 1977), and David Lodge (Working with Structuralism, 1980) are notable among the mediators who translated French materials into English.

What Structuralist Critics Do

• Analyse prose narratives (to reveal the literary conventions, intertextual connections,  and recurrent patterns)
• Examine aspects of narrative structure to reveal the minimal unit of narrative 'sense' and identify the underlying universal narrative structures, similar to how linguistic analysis reveals the morpheme, the smallest grammatical unit. Levi-Strauss, for example, delves into the concept of mytheme.
• Attempt to systematically pattern and structure Western culture (like a mytheme) across cultures (in mythologies), seeing cultures as sign systems.

Structuralist Criticism: Examples

• Barthes's S/Z (1970) - is a structuralist reading of Balzac's 30 page story 'Sarrasine'. The story is broken into 561 units (lexias) and analyses each using his five narrative codes (proairetic, hermeneutic, cultural, semic, symbolic) 
• Barry illustrates how these codes function by studying Poe's 'The Oval Portrait' and using a cloze test to read a passage from Mervyn Jones' Mr Armitage Isn't Back Yet.
• Symbolic: parallels and Contrast (binary structure – frame narrative and main narrative in Poe's story)
• Semic: the construction of character Mr Armitage (wearing Swiss watch, implies he lives an well-ordered and well-to-do life)
• Cultural: "Armitage ... among those ... whose car is never more than a year old." This line implies his high culture and rich habits.
• Barry explores proairetic (action) and hermeneutic (suspense) codes using a cloze test on the same passage.
• Barthes's "Analysing Narrative Structures" (1968) has 93 interspersed digressions.
• And, The Pleasure of the Text (1973), the full post-structuralist critical work.
• These books project Barthes' shift from structuralist to poststructuralist.

Take Away:

• Every system has a structure – be it language, literature, culture, mythology, fashion or any such
• The whole structure determines the position of each element
• The entire structure is subject to systematic laws of coexistence.
• Structure is the reality that lies beneath the surface of meaning.
• Every structure is a system of signs (signifier, signified)
• the signs are relational – the relationship can be arbitrary or conventional, sequential or analogues etc. 
• For example, a red rose (signifier) represents passion (signified) – they are in an arbitrary relationship; smoke (signifier) represents fire (signified) – they are in a sequential relationship; and the word dog (signifier) represents a picture of a dog (signified) – they are in an analogous relationship.