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Monstrous
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This is a collection of ideas from various authors gathered
together by Professor John Lye for the
use of his students. This document is copyright John Lye 1996, but may be
freely used for non-proft purposes. If you have any suggestions for
improvement, please mail me.
I. General Principles
1. Meaning occurs through difference. Meaning
is not identification of the sign with object in the real world or with some
pre-existent concept or essential reality; rather it is generated by
difference among signs in a signifying system. For instance, the meaning of
the words "woman" and "lady" are established by their
relations to one another in a meaning-field. They both refer to a human
female, but what constitutes "human" and what constitutes
"female" are themselves established through difference, not identity
with any essence, or ideal truth, or the like.
2. Relations among signs are of two sorts, contiguity and substitutability,
the axes of combination and selection: hence the existence of all 'grammars',
hence all substitutions, hence the ability to know something by something
else, or by a part of it in some way -- hence metonymy and metaphor. The
conception of combination and selection
provides the basis for an analysis of 'literariness' or 'poeticality' in the
use, repetition and variation of sound patterns and combinations. It also
provides keys to the most fundamental elements of culture.
3. Structuralism notes that much of our imaginative world is structured of,
and structured by, binary oppositions
(being/nothingness, hot/cold, culture/nature); these oppositions structure
meaning, and one can describe fields of cultural thought, or topoi, by
describing the binary sets which compose them. As an illustration, here is a binary
set for the monstrous.
4. Structuralism forms the basis for semiotics, the study of signs: a
sign is a union of signifier and signified, and is anything that
stands for anything else (or, as Umberto Eco put it, a sign is anything that
can be used to lie).
5. Central too to semiotics is the idea of codes,
which give signs context -- cultural codes, literary codes, etc.
The study of semiotics and of codes opens up literary study to cultural study,
and expands the resources of the critic in discussing the meaning of texts.
Structuralism, says Genette, "is a study of the cultural construction or
identification of meaning according to the relations of signs that constitute
the meaning-spectrum of the culture."
6. Some signs carry with them larger cultural
meanings, usually very general; these are called, by Roland Barthes,
"myths", or second-order signifiers. Anything can be a myth. For
example, two-story pillars supporting the portico of a house are a mythic
signifier of wealth and elegance.
7. Structuralism introduces the idea of the
'subject', as opposed to the idea of the individual as a stable
indivisible ego. Toquote from Kaja Silverman in The Subject of Semiotics,
The term 'subject' foregrounds the relationship between ethnology,
psychoanalysis, and semiotics. It helps us to conceive of human reality as a
construction, as the product of signifying activities which are both
culturally specific and generally unconscious. The category of the subject
thus calls into question the notions both of the private, and of a self
synonymous with consciousness. It suggests that even desire is culturally
instigated, and hence collective; and it de-centers consciousness,
relegating it....to a purely receptive capacity. Finally, by drawing
attention to the divisions which separate one area of psychic activity from
another, the term 'subject' challenges the value of stability attributed to
the individual.
The value of the conception is that it allows us to 'open up', conceptually,
the inner world of humans, to see the relation of human experience to cultural
experience, to talk cogently of meaning as something that is structured into
our 'selves'.
There is no attempt here to challenge the meaningfulness of persons; there
is an attempt to dethrone the ideology of the ego, the idea that the self is
an eternal, indivisible essence, and an attempt to redefine what it is to be a
person. The self is, like other things, signified and culturally constructed.
Post-structuralism, in particular, will insist that the subject is
de-centered.
8. The conception of the constructed subject opens up the borders between the
conscious and the unconscious. The unconscious itself is not some
strange, impenetrable realm of private meaning but is constructed through the
sign-systems and through the repressions of the culture. Both the self and the
unconscious are cultural constructs.
9. In the view of structuralism our knowledge of 'reality' is not only
coded but also conventional, that is, structured by and through conventions,
made up of signs and signifying practices. This is known as "the
social construction of reality."
10. There is, then, in structuralism, a coherent
connection among the conceptions of reality, the social, the individual, the
unconscious: they are all composed of the same signs, codes and
conventions, all working according to similar laws.
II. Structuralism, culture and texts
1. Structuralism enables both the reading of texts
and the reading of cultures: through semiotics, structuralism leads
us to see everything as 'textual', that
is, composed of signs, governed by conventions of meaning, ordered according
to a pattern of relationships.
2. Structuralism enables us to approach texts
historically or trans-culturally in a disciplined way. Whenever we
have to look more objectively, when we are transversing barriers of time, say,
or of culture or interest, then the structural method, the search for
principles of order, coherence and meaning, become dominant.
3. This sort of study opens up for serious cultural analysis texts which
had hitherto been closed to such study because they did not conform to the
rules of literature, hence were not literature but 'popular writing' or
'private writing' or 'history' and so forth. When the rules of literary
meaning are seen as just another set of rules for a signifying arena of a
culture, then literature loses some aspects of its privileged status, but
gains in the strength and cogency of its relationship to other areas of
signification. Hence literary study has expanded to the
study of textuality, popular writing has been opened up to serious
study, and the grounds for the relationship between the meaning-conventions of
literature and the way in which a culture imagines reality have been set, and
we can speak more clearly of the relation of literary to cultural (or,
'human', or 'every-day') meanings.
4. As everything that can be known, can be known by virtue of its belonging
to a signifying system, then everything can be spoken of as being textual.
- All documents can be studied as texts -- for instance, history or
sociology can be analyzed the way literature can be.
- All of culture can be studied as text. Anthropology, among other fields,
is revolutionized through ethnography; qualitative rather than
quantitative study becomes more and more the norm in many areas of social
science.
- Belief-systems can be studied textually and their role in constructing
the nature of the self understood.
5. Consequently much greater attention is paid to the nature of
language-use in culture. Language-use relating to various social topics or
areas of engagement has become known as "discourse."
Although "discourse" is a term more prevalent in post-structuralist
thinking, it is of its nature a structuralist development.
III. Structuralism and literature
See my summary of Gerard Genette's
"Structuralism and Literary Criticism" for more ideas.
1. In extending the range of the textual we have not decreased the
complexity or meaning-power of literature but have in fact increased it, both
in its textual and in its cultural meaningfulness. If the reader and the text
are both cultural constructions, then the meaningfulness of texts becomes more
apparent, as they share meaning-constructs; if the cultural is textual, then
the culture's relation to the textuality of literature becomes more immediate,
more pertinent, more compelling. Literature is a
discourse in a world of discourses, each discourse having its
protocols for meaning and typical uses of language, rhetoric, subject area and
so forth.
2. The thesis that what seems real to us is coded and conventional leads to
a consideration of how 'reality' is represented in art -- what we get is a
'reality effect'; the signs which represent reality are 'naturalized', that
is, made to seem as if we could see reality through them -- or in another way
of saying, made to seem to be conforming to the laws of reality. This is
achieved through 'vraisemblance', truth-seeming, or
'naturalization'. Some elements of vraisemblance (from Culler, Structuralist
Poetics) are as follows.
- There is the socially given text,
that which is taken as the 'real' world -- what is taken for granted. That
we have minds and bodies, for instance. This is a textual phenomenon.
(Every term of "we have minds and bodies", the relations between
most of these terms, and what we mean by them, in fact codify culturally
specific assumptions.)
- There is the general cultural text:
shared knowledge which would be recognized by participants as part of
culture and hence subject to correction or modification but which none the
less serves as a kind of 'nature'. This is the level at which we interpret
motive, character and significance from descriptions of action, dress,
attitude and so forth. "Jake put on his tuxedo and tennis shoes"
will provide an interpretation of Jake or will look forward to an
explanation of why he broke the cultural code, in this case a dress code.
"Harry gazed for hours on the picture of Esmeralda" is a
culturally coded statement: we read Harry's attitude, and so forth. We
'imitate' 'reality' by recording cultural codes.
- There are the conventions of genre,
a specifically literary and artificial vraisemblance -- "the series
of constituent conventions which enable various sorts of works to be
written." The lines
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; The center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
require certain conventions of reading. If we were to read it as part of a
paragraph in Dickens they would make less sense. One convention of
literature is that there is a persona who is articulating the text -- that
it comes from some organizing consciousness which can be commented on and
described. Genre is another convention: each genre designates certain
kinds of action as acceptable and excludes others.
- There is what might be called the natural
attitude to the artificial, where the text explicitly cites and
exposes vraisemblance of the kind directly above, so as to reinforce its
own authority. The narrator may claim that he is intentionally violating
the conventions of a story, for instance, that he knows that this is not
the way it should be done according to the conventions, but that the way
he is doing it serves some higher or more substantial purpose -- the
appeal is to a greater naturalness or a higher intelligibility.
- There is the complex vraisemblance of specific
intertextualities. "When a text cites or parodies the
conventions of a genre one interprets it by moving to another level of
interpretation where both terms of the opposition can be held together by
the theme of literature itself." -- e.g. parody, when one exploits
the particular conventions of a work or style or genre, etc. Irony forces
us to posit an alternate possibility or reality in the face of the
reality-construction of the text. All surface incongruities register
meaning at a level of the project of interpretation itself, and so comment
as it were on the relation between 'textual' and 'interpretive' reality.
In short, to imitate reality is to represent codes which 'describe' (or,
construct) reality according to the conventions of representation of the time.
3. The conventions of reading. We read
according to certain conventions; consequently our reading creates the meaning
of that which we read. These conventions come in two 'layers':
- how we (culturally) think that reality is or should be represented in
texts, which will include the general mimetic conventions of the art of
the period, which will describe the way in which
reality is apprehended or imagined, and
- the conventions of 'literature' (and
of 'art' generally), for instance,
- the rule of significance whereby we raise the meaning of
the text to its highest level of generalizability (a tree blasted by
lightning might become a figure of the power of nature, or of God);
- the convention of figural coherence, through which we
assume that figures (metonyms, metaphors, 'symbols') will have a
signifying relationship to one another on a level of meaning more
complex than or 'higher' than the physical;
- the convention of thematic unity, whereby we assume that
all of the elements of the text contribute to the meaning of the text.
These are all conventions of reading.
4. The facts that some works are difficult to interpret, some are difficult to
interpret for its contemporaries but not for later readers, some require that
we learn how its contemporaries would have read them in order fully to
understand them, these facts point to the existence of literary competence,
the possession by the reader of protocols for reading. When one reads
modernist texts, such as The Waste Land, one has to learn how to read
them. One has in fact to learn how to read Blake's Songs of Innocence and
Experience, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and so forth. Culler
remarks that
reading
poetry is a rule-governed process of producing meanings; the poem
offers a structure which must be filled up and one therefore attempts to
invent something, guided by a series of formal rules derived from one's
experience of reading poetry, which both make possible invention and impose
limits on it.
5. Structuralism is oriented toward the reader
insofar as it says that the reader constructs literature, that is, reads the
text with certain conventions and expectations in mind. Some post-structural
theorists, Fish for instance, hold that the reader constructs the text
entirely, through the conventions of reading of her interpretive community.
6. In joining with formalism in the identification of literariness as the
focus on the message itself as opposed to a focus on the addressee, the
addresser, or the referential function of the message, structuralism places ambiguity,
as Genette points out, at the heart of the poetic
function, as its self-referential nature puts the message, the
addresser and the addressee all in doubt. Hence literary textuality is
complexly meaningful.
7. Structuralism underlines the importance of
genre, i.e., basic rules as to how subjects are approached, about
conventions of reading for theme, level of seriousness, significance of
language use, and so forth. "Different genres lead to different
expectations of types of situations and actions, and of psychological, moral,
and esthetic values." (Genette)
8. The idea that literature is an institution
is another structuralist contribution; that a number of its protocols for
creation and for reading are in fact controlled by that institutional nature.
9. Through structuralism, literature is seen as a
whole: it functions as a system of meaning and reference no matter
how many works there are, two or two thousand. Thus any work becomes the
parole, the individual articulation, of a cultural langue, or system of
signification. As literature is a system, no work of literature is an
autonomous whole; similarly, literature itself is not autonomous but is part
of the larger structures of signification of the culture.
10. The following are some points based on Culler's ideas about the
advantages of structuralism, having to do with the idea that
literature is a protocol of reading:
- Structuralism is a firmer starting-point for reading literature as
literature than are other approaches, because literariness and/or
fictionality does not have to be shown to be inherent in the text, but in
the way it is read. It explains, for instance, why the same sentence can
have a different meaning depending on the genre in which it appears, it
explains how the boundaries of the literary can change from age to age, it
accommodates and explains differing readings of a text given differing
reading protocols -- one can read a text for its 'literary' qualities or
for its sociological or ideological qualities, for instance, and read as
complex a text in doing so.
- One gains an appreciation of literature as an institution, as a coherent
and related set of codes and practices, and so one sees also that reading
is situated reading, that is, it is in a certain meaning-domain or set of
codes. It follows that when literature is written, it will be written
under these codes (it can break or alter the codes to create effects, but
this is still a function of the codes).
- Consequently one can be more open to challenges to and alterations of
literary conventions.
- Once one sees that reading and writing are both coded and based on
conventions one can read 'against the grain' in a disciplined way, and one
can read readings of literature -- reading can become a more
self-reflexive process.
IV. Structural Analysis
As structuralism is so broad a theory with such extensive ramifications, there
will be different ways of doing structural analysis. Here are some possible
approaches.
1. The study of the basic codes which
make narrative possible, and which make it work. This is known generally as narratology,
and often produces what might be called a grammar of narrative. Greimas,
Barthes, Todorov and others investigated what the components and relations of
narrative are. This gives rise to such things as Barthes division of incidents
into nuclei and catalyzers, and his promulgation of five codes of narrative,
given briefly here, as adapted from Cohen and Shires:
- proairetic -- things (events) in
their sequence; recognizable actions and their effects.
- semic -- the field where signifiers
point to other signifiers to produce a chain of recognizable connotations.
In a general sense, that which enables meaning to happen.
- hermeneutic -- the code of narrative
suspense, including the ways in which the story suspends closure,
structures parallels, repetitions and so forth toward closure.
- symbolic -- marks out meaning as
difference; the binaries which the culture uses/enacts to create its
meanings; binaries which, of course,but disunite and join.
- reference -- refers to various
bodies of knowledge which constitute the society; creates the familiarity
of reality by quoting from a large assortment of social texts which
mediate and organize cultural knowledge of reality -- medicine, law,
morality, psychology, philosophy, religion, plus all the clichs and
proverbs of popular culture.
- diegetic (C&S's addition) -- the
narration, the text's encoding of narrative conventions that signify how
it means as a telling.
2. The study of the construction of meaning in
texts, as for instance through tropes, through repetitions with
difference. Hayden White analyzes the structure of Western historical
narrative through a theory of tropes; Lodge shows how metaphor and metonymy
can be seen to form the bases respectively of symbolic and realist texts.
3. The study of mimesis, that is, of
the representation of reality, becomes
- the study of naturalization, of
the way in which reality effects are created and the way in which we
create a sense of reality and meaning from texts;
- the study of conventions of
meaning in texts.
4. Texts are also analyzed for their structures of
opposition, particularly binary oppositions, as informing
structures and as representing the central concerns and imaginative structures
of the society.
5. Texts can be analyzed as they represent the
codes and conventions of the culture -- we can read the texts as
ways of understanding the meaning-structures of the cultures and sub-cultures
out of which they are written and which they represent.
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