Structuralism and Semiotics

Frye is not a developmental link between New Criticism and structuralism but he is roughly half way in terms of approaches. He harshly criticised the New Criticism school for its subjective value judgments and lack of a system. In Catherine Belsey's words he saw it as 'without system, atomistic, intuitive and so finally elitist, a ritual of sensibility which mystifies the possession of an illusory good taste'. (21) In other words it was a hopelessly subjective way of justifying judgments of taste.

So Frye saw New Criticism as subjective and able to explain only individual works (and even then not very well) while not being able to explain literature as a whole.

Frye wrote Anatomy of Criticism to form some sort of system or theory for the reading of literature. The theory he came up with was this -- that literature itself was a system. It was not just a random set of texts but was part of a recurring system. Criticism's job was to find the system that encouraged or generated the actual works. Anatomy of Criticism then outlines different modes, genres, archetypes and myths which structure lit works. These work in a complex way and I'll give you only one example of his argument. Frye wrote that at the base of literature there are four narrative categories --

COMIC	ROMANTIC	TRAGIC	IRONIC
SPRING	SUMMER	AUTUMN	WINTER

which correspond to the myths of the four seasons. His system is a lot more complicated than this of course -- but this gives you a taste of the fact that he, unlike the New Criticisms, at least theorised a system. He wanted to find what deep structure generates literature. You might speculate as to why each genre is attached to each season. Spring, summer and autumn are fairly self-explanatory -- but why is winter ironic? You may wish also to think of various stories and see whether they fit into one or several of these categories. This system seemed to make sense to a Canadian like Frye -- there are distinct seasons in Toronto. But would people from other climates have a quite different sense of the natural world and the passage of time, and thus a different sense of literature.

You will remember that the New Critics in a very vague fuzzy way insisted that literature had something to do with reality. In other words literature has some referential power -- it points to things in the world. Frye's theory works against this -- literature is self- referential. It is not a way of knowing what reality is, but is an expression of deep human desires. It is in Eagletons summary of Frye a kind of utopian dreaming going on through history; not expressions of individual authors. In one sense it is an anti-humanist and highly scientific theory, but it is also embodies paradoxically a Christian/humanist agenda. It is Christian in some ways because of the idea of winter as ironic -- imbedded in this is the idea of death and rebirth, a cycle true not only of nature but in the story of Christ.

Frye was Canadian and his achievement stands somewhat alone -- not part of a school. But the idea of a structure or system which underwrites literature was being worked on elsewhere. To see how it came about it is necessary to look at two disciplines which at first might seem to be unrelated to literature -- anthropology and linguistics.

Saussurean linguistics points to an analogous state of affairs within the world of language. He argued that words only work because they are within a system of differences, not because they are somehow tied into the real world. Indeed they operate in a separate sphere. Words do not depend on reality for their meaning -- nor do they depend on intention of author or speaker. They are a self-sufficient system and once uttered they have meaning because of their place in the system and not because of what the speaker meant. The author and reality then are not taken into account in structuralist interpretations.

Indeed structuralists are not much concerned with meaning either -- they are more concerned with the signifier than the signified. And so they don't care much about the content -- they are interested in the formal features that allow meaning to come about -- not in the meaning/content itself.

1. There is no necessary connection between words and the thing. For example, the word 'dog' is an arbitrary label -- this can be proved by simply looking at other languages where other words like 'chien' are used. We might as well use 'woofer' or 'furry' for 'dog' -- it doesn't really matter.

2. To reflect this Saussure came up with this system to explain meaning. The sign is divided into two elements: the signifier and signified.

The signifier is the material aspect of the sign -- the word on paper, the spoken word, or a traffic sign or a supermarket (signs are not only linguisitic).

The signified is the concept that results in your mind -- the idea of a dog, or a chair, or liberty or whatever.

SIGN =	SIGNIFIER
	SIGNIFIED

A sign is composed of two elements: a red light and the idea STOP!, for example. But there is no necessary connection between the two -- it is purely conventional. You can imagine a society where the red light means GO AS FAST AS YOU CAN! Even in one society or sign system one signifier may mean many things; a red light may mean 'brothels are near'. This last example is important, for it illustrates well one of the points of structuralism; that meaning is never 'inside' the signifier -- whether it is a light, or a poem, or a word. The meaning is dependent on context -- a red light hanging over a road is likely to be a stop sign; outside a house in a well-known area, it will probably signal that this is a house of prostitution.

Saussure argued this out in a way that sounds odd, initially at least. He argued that things have meaning because of what they are not. The letter 'c' works because it is not any of the other letters in the alphabet. The word 'dog' works as a signifier because it is not the word 'bog', 'hog', 'fog' or 'academic'. This sounds a little funny -- that the word 'dog' works because because it is not the word 'toaster' -- but you may see his point -- that meaning is defined by what the sign is not.

The two most important implications of this theory are that meaning is not inside something, but is the product of a set of relationships, often negatively defined. And that we do not have direct access through language to reality itself. However we try to access reality, it is always through language or other sign systems. You think through language -- even attempting to appreciate a garden, for example, you will be thinking through words such as 'beautiful' or 'picturesque' -- connection without the mediation of language is not possible. Reality, the 'referent' in this system is there, but culture can only access it through our sign systems.

For a complete summary of de Saussure see these sites or the many others available:

His most important work is after WW2 --Tristes Tropiques . He connected anthropology and language but the most important feature for our purposes is his notion that meaning is product of structural relation. An example would be someone in a Chinese court bowing to the emperor nine times. A European viewer would not know the meaning of this action -- is it a sign of obedience, or equality, or deference or fear or greeting? The meaning is a result of its place within a network of relations (between the emperor and his subjects) and within a network of rituals. The meaning is not within the action itself -- as the same action in an English court would have a completely different meaning. This is more than just taking context into account -- this is the realisation that meaning is always generated by relationships within a system.

This began an important shift within our ideas about meaning. Whereas meaning had previously been thought of as within something (such as a poem), it was now always somewhere else. Meaning never corresponds with the sign it is never hiding within it, but is generated by the relationship of signs with other signs.

What came out of all this was the idea that language is a system based on difference. Culture was seen by Levi-Strauss as similar to a language in this respect, and structuralist critics carried this one step further. They argued that stories have deep structures like a language. Just as a sentence is underwritten by the structures of grammar (as well as others) so to is literature underwritten by structures. I am going to concentrate on one kind of structural analysis -- narratology. Some of the technical elements as we will find are very abstract -- the important thing is that we are trying to find the structures that generate a narrative.

You will also note that I'm now talking about narrative rather than literature. Structuralism does not make a difference between literature and other forms of writing or value judgements between good and bad literature.

So what's a narrative? Tzvetan Todorov argues that the simplest possible narrative consists of an equilibrium followed by a change which results in a new equilibrium. eg The king rules the land. Macbeth murders the king and then is killed in turn. The new king rules the land. Gotham city is threatened by the Penguin. Batman defeats the Penguin. Gotham city returns to peace. A peaceful group of Englishmen are disturbed by a vampire. He is killed. They return to their lives.

The suggestion is that this is one of the structural rules that all stories must obey. Try to think of a story where this does not occur for example, The shop is empty. A man walks into the shop. Not much of a story is it? But if we add He steals a fur coat and runs we have a story of a shoplifter.

Trying to find the basic structures that generate narrative was the structuralists game. Todorovs structure is very simple. But narratives have other structures that are less simple. Here is a famous example of one structure which reminds us what we often forget how constructed stories are. Structuralists point to the diifference between:

Discourse: this is the narrative as it unfolds as we read the book or see the movie.

Story: this is the order in which the events would have taken place if they had been real.

The times that these most obviously differ is when you have a flashback technique. The discourse might be this:

Discourse : Wo man murders husband. Long flashback sequence showing how he mistreated her. Police come and arrest woman.

See how in the discourse, which is what you read or see on screen the order of imaginary events has been reworked to create interest. But all works of art do this to some extent -- they compress time, or show separately two events which are simultaneous. There are no real events of course but imagining them allows us to see how highly conventional is the structure of discourse. The flashback is not natural but a conventional element of discourse. Examine Pulp Fiction in the light of this structural observation.

Structuralism is good at highlighting those strategies or structures of story which we take for granted. Even simple stories can have extremely complex structures. This is particularly true of narration.

You are probably aware that when you read a story its not really the author that telling it but some sort of narrative level. Structuralism comes up with some terms which are more specific than the usual terminology of 'first person etc narration'.

If a story begins once upon a time the old lady etc what do you think the narrator is? (heterodiegetic)

If a story begins "I woke up feeling like a truck had run me down and then backed over me for good measure" ? (homodiegetic)

Levels of narration

Intradiegetic narrator tells a story from within the one being told by an extradiegetic narrator.

Hypodiegetic narrator tells a story from within the one being told by an intradiegetic narrator.

In Heart of Darkness the narrator is an unnamed character on board ship. He presents the character Marlow, a grizzled sailor. Marlow then tells his story which is the rest of the novel. The unnamed narrator is extradiegetic, Marlow is intradiegetic. If there was a character in Marlow's narrative who himself told a story he would be hypodiegetic. This kind of structure is more common than you would think it is used in Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, for example.

And, no, you won't have to remember these terms -- but they do give a sense of the various ways in which people have highlighted the structure of stories, and the fact that even the simplest of stories have highly complex structures.