Structuralism
The fundamental insights on which structuralism is based, are those provided by Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss. Saussure used the following three terms language, language and parole in his lectures to indicate
(a) the entire human potential for speech,
(b) the system that each of us uses to generate discourse that is intelligible to others and finally
(c) individual utterances.
His objective was to study the language system and he showed by observing and studying individual utterances that there is a system governing them and that system may be called language. Since the study was to be scientific and objective he started with the units of utterances and called the basic element of an utterance is a sign, which is a complex consisting of a sound image and a concept.
The sound image (or the word in a sentence) may be called a sígnifier and the concept it signified was called signifie. Yet another thing he noted was that the relationship between the signifier and the signified was arbitrary, arbitrary with respect to nature but not with respect to culture. The system of signs (in language) was very much like a system of rites, political formulas of a composite cultural group.
Claude Levi-Strauss, the French cultural anthropologist, found the linguistic model very useful in examining the different systems of habits, customs and rituals underlying different cultures. He came to the conclusion that cultural systems worked like language systems and the task of the anthropologist was to discover the grammar of each system. Levi-Strauss felt that an anthropologist using a method analogous in form to the method used in structural linguistics achieves the same kind of progress in his own science.'
Saussure also defined the limits of his study by proposing a distinction between the synchronic and the analyses and said, his interest was in the synchronic study of language. This emphasis on the synchronic aspect was also perhaps influential in turning the structuralist critics' attention to the given work with regard to its internal relationship and its relation to the system of literature rather than to its genesis or the subjective intentions of its author."
The Saussurean theories concerning concepts of sign and system and the distinction between language and parole were systematised into what we now call structuralism by Niolai Trubet Skoy and Emile Benveniste. Trubet Skoy understood how scientific discipline meant replacing anatomism by structuralism, and individualism by universalism.
Benveniste demonstrated the personal aspects of language and testified to a certain self consciousness or reflexibility within language. Noam Chomsky's concept of universal grammar and his distinction between competence and performance may be said to bring him close to the structuralists in one sense."
Although structuralism may be defined as a certain mode of analysis of cultural art facts based on the methods on contemporary linguistics, it has been followed by scholars interested in other disciplines of knowledge such as anthropology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, history, semiontics etc.
For readers and historians of literature and literary criticism, however, structuralism is of special significance because it marks a revolt against particular types of scholarship which dominated the French universities and secondly it believed in a return to the text though the mode of analysis was on semiological terms and it attempted to discover what the nature of its component signs is and how the system governing their use and combinations operates. Its aim was not interpretation.
It was rather to arrive at a poetics which studies the conditions of meaning, the formal structures which organise a text and make possible a range of meanings, poetics for the structuralists is 'concerned with a general grammar of literature which will be only partially visible in any individual work."
While constructing poetics as a general science of literature by the application of the Saussurean linguistic model was the concern of the early structuralists, the later ones proceeded on the belief that while literature uses language it is also itself like language in that its meanings are made possible by systems of convention.
Anne Jefferson observes, "At one level literature is always about language, it is 'regarded as distinct from all other use of language, since only literature (by being non-referential) makes one aware of the true (Saussurean) nature of language. Thus the linguistic model is triply pertinent to literature, to its material (verbal) to its formal organization (semiological) and to its themes (linguistic)."
Structualists thus constructed an elaborate metalanguage on the basis that literature is itself like language. Hence for Roland Barthes language becomes literature's Being Todorov's introduction to Poetics (1981) speaks of the grammar of literature. Any individual work like parole can only reveal part of a system and we must arrive at a poetics that would account for the rules governing as yet unwritten works of literature.
The systematization of literary discourse in turn resulted in the systematization of critical discourse too. Barthes brings out the difference between reading and criticism, both of which are inturn different from poetics. While reading is largely passive activity. criticism constructs a meaning for the text. It does not decipher the meaning. for in the structuralist view there is no single meaning inhering in a literary work.
We may recall how the New Critic put all his faith in plurisignation and canonized 'ambiguity in critical discourse. The structuralist rejection of authorial intention and advocacy of polysemy is an extension, a more radial love, of course of the New critical position. The structuralist view is much more iconoclastic because it frankly abandons the criterion of coherence and organic unity which was at the heart of the New critical poetics.
It throws literary works open. Meaning there may be, but only as the product of the rules and conventions of different signifying systems. It is these systems which shape, human consciousness or unconscious by creating 'thoughts, fancies laws, customs and other forms of cultural representation. 'Human consciousness is the result rather than the origin of meaning-creating signifying systems so that very notion of a human centre is questioned."
Poetics, the science of literature, 'which is the third Lategony of critical discourse, is the forte of structuralism. It expounds the different systems which can generate meaning. But paradoxically the interest in the system rather than the meaning or the content, or to use Saussure's terms, in the signifier rather than the signified.
In fact structuralist poetics breaks open the Saussurean complex of sign which we saw is a combination of signifier and signified and releases the signifier from the tyranny of signifying. It is in this context that we must place the applied criticism written by structuralist critics. Some of their best contribution has been in the are a of narrative theory or narratology, 'the science of narrative', to use Toxtonov's words.
The consuming interest in poetics has altered the very nature of critical discourse as employed by structuralist critics. Criticism itself is an exercise in constructing the supremacy of poetics over reading or criticism. It is here we can locate the transition from structuralism to post-structuralist tendencies. In structuralist criticism primacy is given to the principle of self-reflexivity."
Barthes challenges the presuppositions of structuralism itself. He objects to the structural spatialisation of a text. He insists that we read a text from left to right implying that the process of reading is 'linear' and that we must move from the text to various 'codifications' of the world evoked by it. Barthes wants structuralism to be flexible.
Bathes refers to five codes -
(i) The probiotic code or code of actions (Actions are systematic)
(ii) The hermeneutic code or code or puzzles - an aspect of narrative syntax,
(iii) The cultural codes, i.e. the social-cultural codes,
(iv) The connotative codes i. e. constituting character,
(v) The symbolic fields, i. e. constituting theme.
Barthes method is an extension of the structuralist approach in as much as he started as a structuralist and developed into a semiologist when he invoked the cultural and sociological dimension. Another point of interest in Barthe's criticism is the emphasis on the role of the reader in reading texts.
The 'death of the author in the heyday of structuralism paved the way for Barthes to look upon the writing of a text as a practice. Now he would go a step further and declare breaking the scientific nature of the systems themselves that the readers 'are to open and close the text's signifying process without respect of the signified. They are free to take the pleasures of the text.
Barthes distinguishes between what we call Vilisible (readerly) and scriptible, (writerly) texts. The categories of 'readerly' and 'writerly' texts are helpful in distinguishing between novels which belong to the old school of realism and novels which -(V. S. Seturaman) may be called 'metafiction."
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