STRUCTURALISM AND LITERATURE JONATHAN CULLER

STRUCTURALISM AND LITERATURE

JONATHAN CULLER

This is a summary of the essay purely meant for scholarly purpose

S. Sreekumar

Professor of English at Cornell University. He is a leading exponent of Structuralism, literary theory and criticism. His major works are Literary Theory: A Short Introduction, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and Study of Literature, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature,  On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism,

Structuralism is not a recondite (obscure) theory. It is directly applicable to the practical study and teaching of Literature. In Structuralism the objects of study are literary works and the students are supposed to learn about literature and how to read it. In the present essay Jonathan Culler tries to do/explain two things:--

1.     What is structuralism and how is it relevant to the study of literature?

2.     Outline a structuralist approach to literature with examples.

 Structuralism is not a new way of interpreting literary works, but an attempt to understand how it is that literary works do have a meaning for us.

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What is structuralism?

Barthes once defined it as a method for the study of cultural artefacts derived from the methods of contemporary linguistics.

There are two possible ways of using linguistic methods in the study of literature.

1. To describe in linguistic terms the language of literary works [this is not what Barthes meant in his definition. This is not the method Culler is going to follow]

2. To take linguistics as a model which indicates how one might construct a poetics [the study of linguistic techniques in poetry and literature] which stands to literature as linguistics stands to language. Only a few fundamental principles of linguistics are directly relevant here. Of these the most important is Saussure’s distinction between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’.

La langue: what one knows when one knows ‘English’.

La parole: utterances or speech acts—instances of language.

Saussure said that la langue was the proper object of linguistics and he went on to state that in the linguistic system there are only differences, with no positive terms. Study of la langue is an attempt to determine the nature of a system of relations, oppositions, and differences  which makes possible la parole.   In learning a language we master a linguistic system which makes actual communication possible.

Structuralism and semiology are based on two fundamental things – 1. Social and cultural phenomena do not have essences but are defined by a network of relations, both internal and external, 2.  In so far as social and cultural phenomena, including literature, have meaning they are signs.

Ø The task of structural analysis is to formulate the underlying systems of convention which enable cultural objects to have meaning for us.

Ø Structuralism is not a method for producing new and startling interpretations of literary works.

Ø Structuralism asks how the meanings of literary works are possible.

Structuralist perspective

The best way to reach this perspective is to take linguistics as a model and to think of the relationship between an utterance and the speaker/hearer.

·        A sentence comes to the hearer as a series of physical events, a sequence of sounds which we may represent by a phonetic transcription. We hear this sequence of sounds and give it a meaning. How is this possible?

·        The hearer brings to the act of communication an immense amount of implicit, subconscious knowledge. He/she has assimilated the phonological, grammatical, semantic and syntactic structure of the language.

Moving from language to literature, we find an analogous (comparable) situation. A person who knows ‘English’ but who has no knowledge of the literary conventions of English will be totally confused if a poem is given to him for interpretation. He/she may understand the words and sentences but may not know how to make sense out of it. What he/she lacks is a complex system of knowledge which we might call ‘literary competence’.

The task of linguistics is to make explicit the system of a language which makes linguistic communication possible. In the case of literature a structuralist poetics must enquire what knowledge must be postulated (assumed) to account for our ability to read and understand literary works.

Now Culler gives a simple example for ‘literary competence’. He takes an ordinary sentence, ‘Yesterday I went to town and bought a lamp’, and set it down as a poem:-

Yesterday I

Went into town and bought

A lamp.

The words remain the same. But when we look at the ordinary sentence as a poem the meanings change.

‘Yesterday’ no longer refers to a particular day. It refers to all possible yesterdays and sets up a temporal opposition in the poem between the past and the present. This is because of our concept about the relationship of poems to the moment of utterance. Similarly, we expect the lyric to capture a moment of some significance, to be thematically viable. We thus apply to ‘lamp’ and ‘bought’ other symbolic meanings. The symbolic meanings of ‘lamp’ are very clear; ‘buying’ can be called a particular mode of acquisition. Thus we get potential thematic material. Thirdly we expect a poem to be a unified whole. We have to attempt to explain the fact that this poem ends so swiftly and inconclusively. The silence at the end can be read as a kind of ironic comment, a blank, and we can set up an opposition between the action of buying a lamp, the attempt to acquire light, and the failure to tell of any positive benefits which result from the action. The conventions of the lyric create possibilities of new and supplementary meanings. The meanings generated in the poem depend on the operations performed by the readers of the poem.

New Criticism argued that the meanings are there within the text. The poem is a harmonious totality, something like a natural self-sufficient organism. This attitude will lead to the notion that the critic or reader approaches the poem without any preconceptions and attempts to appreciate fully what is there. Such an attempt will lead to a theoretical impasse (stalemate), to a hopeless attempt to show how the language of poetry itself differs from the language of prose or everyday speech.

Structuralism leads us to think of the poem not as a self-contained entity but as a sequence which has meaning only in relation to a literary system or rather to the ‘institution’ of literature which guides the reader. The sense of a poem’s completeness is a function of the totality of the interpretive process, the result of the way we have been taught to read poems. This is the way conventions are assumed by the writer. The poet is not setting words down on paper but writing a poem. Even when he is in revolt against the tradition, he still knows what is involved in reading and writing poems.

It is very clear that knowledge of English and a certain experience of the world do not suffice to make someone a perceptive reader of literature. Something else is required, something which literary training is designed to provide. And a poetics ought to go some way towards specifying what is supposed to be learned.

Again it is obvious that the study of one work facilitates the study of the next. We gain not only points of comparison but a sense of how to read a work—general formal principles and distinctions that have proved useful, a sense of what one is looking for. If we are to make sense of the process of literary education we must assume the possibility of a coherent and comprehensive theory of literature, some of which the student unconsciously learns as he goes along, but the main principles of which are as yet unknown to us.

There are some obstacles to this kind of enterprise. First critics think of their task as producing new and subtler interpretations of literary works. To ask them to attend to what is taken for granted by experienced readers cannot but seem proper for critical enterprise. Most people are interested in exercising their understanding of literature than in investigating what it involves.

The second obstacle is the difficulty of determining what will count as literary competence. This is an obstacle which will resolve itself in practice. Critics differ widely in their assessment of literary competence. And it is clear that there are a number of acceptable readings for any poem. What one tries is to discover the operations which account for the range of readings. Literary competence is the result of an interpersonal experience of reading and discussion, any account of it will doubtless cover much common ground.

Some kind of literary competence is expected from everyone who discusses or writes about literature. There are shared notions of how to read and both critic and audience know what counts for reading. Culler argues that the common basis for reading must be understood clearly and the conventions which make literature must be made more explicit.

Artificiality of Literature

Though literature is written in the language of information, it is not used in the language game of giving information. The poet does not stand in the same relation to a lyric as to a letter he has written. The strangeness of language is the primary fact we have to deal with. To overcome the strangeness, we have to naturalize the text and making it something of a communication. The French theorists call the process of naturalization—‘vraisemblablisation’. In this we transform the text to an order of ‘vraisemblance’ (verisimilitude=probability). This is absolutely necessary for the reading of literature. A simple example would be the interpretation of a metaphor. When Shelly calls his soul ‘an enchanted boat’, we must in order to ‘understand’ naturalize the figure. We must perform a semantic transformation on ‘enchanted boat’ so as to bring it under a particular order of ‘vraisemblance’. Here we have a particular lyric posture, of the poetical character, of the inadequacy of ordinary discourse and so on.

Premature naturalization

The conventions of literature guide the process of naturalization and provide alternative to ‘premature naturalization’. If we naturalize Donne’s ‘The Good Morrow’ thus: ‘the poet was in bed with his mistress one morning when the sun rose and, being still befuddled with drink, he uttered this statement in the hope that the sun would go away and shine elsewhere’—it is an example for premature naturalization. Even the least advanced student knows that this is an inappropriate explanation. The protest to the sun itself is a figure; the situation of utterance of a poem is a fiction. We are likely to naturalize the poem as a love poem which uses this situation as an image of energy and annoyance, and hence as a figure for a strong, self-sufficient passion.

Naturalization

Naturalization is the process of making something intelligible by relating it to what is already known and accepted as ‘vraisemblable’ [vaisambla] [plausible, likely] We are guided in the process by various codes of expectations which we ought to try to make explicit. In discussing prose fiction, Roland Barthes identifies five different codes (see notes).Culler takes just two by way of example.

Semic code

This is a good case of literary conventions which produce intelligibility. As we go through a novel we pick out items which refer to the behavior of characters and use them to create a character. This involves considerable semantic transformation. Cultural stereotypes also help us in building character, for example, the correlation between perfect/ blemished complexions and perfect/ blemished character.

Symbolic code

This is the oddest and most difficult to discuss. There are a few symbols consecrated by tradition. But most potential symbols are defined by complex relations with a context. The rose, for example, can lead in a variety of directions, and within each of these semantic fields (religion, love, nature) its significance will depend on its place in an oppositional structure. Sun and Moon can signify almost anything, provided the opposition between them is preserved.

The symbolic code is poorly understood. This code teleologically (teleology= the study of the purpose/design of natural occurrences) limits the range of plausible interpretations. To be told that in a phrase like ‘shine on my bowed head, O moon’, the moon represents ‘the quarterly production quota set by the district manager’ is ridiculous. We quickly learn that there are sets of semantic oppositions—life and death, simplicity and complexity, harmony and strife, body and soul, certainty and doubt, imagination and intellect which are culturally marked as in some way ‘ultimate’

Culler quotes a short poem by William Carlos Williams:

This is Just to Say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

so cold.

At one level the sentences are presented as a note asking forgiveness for eating plums, since poetry is by convention detached from immediate circumstances of utterance we deprive it of this pragmatic function. By doing this we avoid the premature naturalization which says, ‘the poet ate the plums and left this note on the table for his wife, writing it as verse because he was a poet’.

Starting from the assumption that this is not a pragmatic utterance but a lyric in which the fictional “I’ speaks of eating plums; we are faced with the question of structuring the poem. We take up the binary oppositions in the poem. The elementary model of oppositions can take the thematic form of rule and transgression: the plums were to be saved for breakfast but they were eaten. We can then group various features on one side or the other. On the side of ‘eating’ we have ‘delicious’, ‘sweet’ and ‘cold’. On the other side we have the assumed priority of domestic rules about eating (one recognizes them and asks for forgiveness).

Thus a thematic structure could be stated in various ways. The claim is that in interpreting the poem we are implicitly relying on assumptions about poetry and structural models without which we could not proceed: that our readings of the poem depend upon some common interpretive operations.

Interpretation might generally stop here. But if we think about the fact that these sentences are presented as a poem we can go a step further and ask ‘Why’? Why should such a banal statement be a poem? Here by an elementary reversal which is crucial to the reading of modern poetry, we can take banality of statement as a statement on banality. This is why the poem is so sparse and apparently incomplete. It must produce a sense of missing intensity and profundity, so that in our desire to read the poem and to make it complete we will supply what the poem itself dare not claim: the sense of significance.

Finally, the meaning of the poem will lie in the kind of operations which it forces us to perform in the extent to which it resists or complies with our expectations about literary signs. It is in this sense that structuralist poetics can be hermeneutic. If we become accustomed to think of literature as a set of interpretative norms and operations, we will be better equipped to see how and where the work resists us, and how it leads to that questioning of the self and of received modes of ordering the world which has always been the result of the greatest literature.

Notes

The Hermeneutic Code (HER)--The Hermeneutic Code refers to any element of the story that is not fully explained and hence becomes a mystery to the reader. The purpose of the author in this is typically to keep the audience guessing, arresting the enigma, until the final scenes when all is revealed and all loose ends are tied off and closure is achieved.

The Proairetic Code (ACT)--The Proairetic Code also builds tension, referring to any other action or event that indicates something else is going to happen, and which hence gets the reader guessing as to what will happen next.

The Semantic Code (SEM)--This code refers to connotation within the story that gives additional meaning over the basic denotative meaning of the word.

The Symbolic Code (SYM)--This is very similar to the Semantic Code, but acts at a wider level, organizing semantic meanings into broader and deeper sets of meaning. This is typically done in the use of antithesis, where new meaning arises out of opposing and conflict ideas.

The Cultural Code (REF): This code refers to anything that is founded on some kind of canonical works that cannot be challenged and is assumed to be a foundation for truth. Typically this involves either science or religion, although other canons such as magical truths may be used in fantasy stories. The Gnomic Code is a cultural code that particularly refers to sayings, proverbs, clichés and other common meaning-giving word sets.

S. SREEKUMAR