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UNIT 1 ROOTS : NEW CRITICISM AND
STRUCTURALISM
Structure
Objectives Introduction New Criticism: A Brief Survey From New Criticism to Structuralism Structuralism: An Introduction 1.4.1 Saussurean Linguistic: 1.4.2 Saussure to Structuralism 1.4.3 Binary Oppositions Literary Structuralism 1.5.1 Linguistics and Literary Structuralism 1.5.1.1 Jakobson's Poetic Analyses 1.5.1.2 Griemas' Semantic Analyses 1.5.1.3 Todorov's Grammar of Decameron 1.5.1.4 Culler's Structuralist Poetics Let Us Sum Up Questions Glossary Suggested Readings
1.0 OBJECTNES
We begin this unit with a recapitulation of the basic tenets of N e Criticism, which~ you read in detail in Block 4. We then move on to familiarize you with the evolution of critical thought between New Criticism and the rise of Postsructuralism. Put together, the two discussions should provide you with the roots of Deconstruction.
1.1 INTRODUCTION
The two important critical / theoretical movements, which precede Deconstruction and in a sense provide the soil from which it grows are New Criticism and Structuralism. New Criticism broke off from the conventional historical/biographical approach to reading literature and focused exclusively on the text-+ tendency similar to the close focus on language in Structuralism. New Criticism tried to explain the effect of a poem in terms of images locked in paradox and irony. This, in a sense, fostered the structuralist tendency to break-up the literary text into its supposedly constituent units and analyze its functioning. Thus the basic parameters of the deconstructionist method-close focusing on a text and trying to analyze its structure seem to be prepared for in New Criticism and Structuralism.
1. 2 NEW CRITICISM A BRIEF SURVEY
In Block 4, you studied New Criticism as practised between 1920 and 1950 in England and America. Let us recapitulate some of the important tenets of this school:
- New Critics believed literature to be a self-sustaining artifact and hence discussed it only through a "close reading" of texts. They worked without any
Deconstruction assumptions about the author's intention, the work's relation to history, society, or the sciences; and did not value any subjective response. A text's meaning
was to be found through careful attention to the complex verbal texture
present on the page.
- Within literature, poetry was seen as a special kind of language saying things that could not be paraphrased-therefore a poem was said to possess an organic unity with form and content being inseparable. Further, New Criticism tried to displace content in literary analysis and treat the work's form as its content. Form was treated as a self-contained and autonomous entity deserving all critical attention. This is what is referred to & the formalism of New Criticism.
- The form of a poem was defined by the New Critics primarily in terms of its images. A clo e reading involved a reader's preliminary identification of key images in a re urring pattern of opposition or tension. Paradox and Irony were posited as the ontrolling figures of tension. A poem operating through this
tension also r solved it. Discovering images locked in tension through paradox or i
irony and their resolution, thus became a substitute in New Criticism for the conventional project of determining the content of a poem.
- Paradox and irony were considered important because they were thought to reflect the structures of the human imagination itself.
1.3 FROM NEW CRITICISM TO STRUCTURALISM
New Criticism declined in the 1950s. One of the chief causes for its decline was that it concentrated on the isolated literary text and left the broader, structural aspects of literature untouched. This conflicted with the spirit of the then current North American society, which was steadily growing more scientific and managerial in its mode of thought. What was needed was a mix of the formalist bent of New Criticism together with something much more broad-based, to make criticism a good deal more systematic and scientific. The answer arrived in 1957 in the form of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism.
Reacting mainly to the limited, 'single-text' perspective of New Criticism, Frye felt that contemporary criticism had become a matter of subjective value judgments and needed the discipline of an objective system. He believed that literature itself was an objective system and worked through certain objective laws.
Frye's theory viewed literature as a recurrence of mythic archetypes and unlike New Criticism found in it an alternative history---the history of literature itself. Frye viewed each literary text,as a structure composed of variants of certain fixed mythic archetypes. Literature for Frye, to put it rather simply, became a system of such individual literary structures, Criticism was set the task of identifying and classifying the objective laws of this literary system.
I L This view of literature, as you can see, appears more scientific and systematic. But, it was equally subjective and did not have the general validity and consensus which a
systematic and scientific discipline merited. Frye .after all, was talking only about
mythic archetypes.
Meanwhile criticism in this century continued to grow more scientific, objective and self-reflective and in the process, shifted its emphasis from author to text and reader. In the early years of the century, biographical 1 historical criticism focused on the author and hisher age; later, New Criticism focused exclusively on the text. Frye's
Anatomy also concentrated on the text but was concerned only with its subjective-
mythical structure. The call of the hour was to go beyond it. And it seemed to be
Deconstruction marks and the concept. The relation between the whole sign^ (signifier+signified)^ and what it refers to, which Saussure called the referent, ( the real funy four-legged creature) is therefore also arbitrary. That is, Saussure argued about two arbitrary links: between a signifier and the signified, and the sign and the referent.
There is also a third level of arbitrariness according to Saussure, which is slightly more difficult to understand. This is the arbitrary nature of the sign at the level of the signified / concept. He argued that not only do different languages use different signifiers, they also cut ud the phenomenal world differently-+hat is, they use different signifieds/concepts. Cutting up the phenomenal world means dividing the sensual phenomena we perceive into discrete and useful categories. The need to do this arises because the world is not available to us as an array of independently existing concepts which language goes on to name. Rather, it is in the process of cutting up and representing, that language gives these phenomenal categories their discrete and independent status. As Saussure points out "if words stood for pre- existing entities [i.e. signified~]they would all have exact equivalents in meaning from one language to another, but that is not true"
One of the most commonly referred to illustrations of this fact is the colour spectrum. The colours of the spectrum actually form a continuum so that blue, grey, etc. are not independently existing entities. They are rather the products of cutting up of the colour continuum by the English language in a particular way. Other languages cut it up differently as Hjelmslev shows this in the comparative study of the English and Welsh languages. In Welsh the color glas includes elqents which English would as green or grey. The boundaries are placed dikerently in the two languages the Welsh equivalent of the English 'grey' may be llwyd or glas.
Siqilarly, there is nothing natural or inevitable about the way we cut up and articulate the rest of our world in a particular language. Each language cuts up the world differently, constructing different meaningful categories and c o n c e p t ~ r e a t i n gdifferent signifieds.
That was how Saussure conceived the nature and structure of the basic unit of language - the sign. He further went on to explore how signs had meaning and posited the principle that each sign has meaning only by virtue of its difference from others in the system. CAT has meaning not by itself but because it is not CAP or CAD or BAT. For the production of meaning it does not matter how a signified is altered, as long as its difference is preserved from all the signifiers. So, Saussure says, "in language there are only differences, without any positive terms". By positive terms he means fixed immutable entities.
\
This is what in criticism is referred ;o as the differential / relational nature of meaning and let's open it up a little further. To do this, let us return to Hjelmslev's color spectrum, and pick up anyone color in it--say green. We have seen that green. is not an independently existing color but a range in the continuum cut up into a category and represented by the word 'green' in the English language. Green, in other words, is not a fact but a value particular to the English language in that it is created within that linguistic system. In Welsh there is nothing called green but two
values: gwyrrd & glas which combine the English green with blue and an undesignated color above green in Hjelmslev's figure. So, when we speak of green or glas as concepts we should be aware that these are actually values constructed within the English and Welsh linguistic systems --constructed by their difference from other elements in the system, not, by any positive content which they independently possess. Their identity lies in their difference from others. We can verify the absence of their positive content deductively. If they had any, it would have asserted its influence in the operation of other linguistic systems. Green or glas, on the contrary simply disappear in some linguistic systems.
Let us discuss an example Saussure himself cites. Division of time into the present, past and the future, so familiar to us in English, are unknown in certain languages. Hebrew does not recognize even the fundamental distinction between the past, present and the future. Proto-Germanic has no special form for the 'future'. This implies that the flux of time is cut up differently into one, two or three sets in Hebrew, Proto-Germanic and English. So, instead of pre-existing ideas about the division of time, we find in all the foregoing examples different modes of cutting up the flux of time. That is to say, the parts into which time is divided are values particular to a system. The future is a value particular to the English lpguage in that is created within that linguistic system .As we have seen, Proto-Germanic has nothing called the future. It is these values which are referred to as concepts or signifieds and are constructed within the system - constructed by the difference from other elements in the system and not by any positive content whiCh they possess. Like in the early example, we can only deduce the absence of its positive content. If the concept 'future' had any positive content, it would have asserted itself in other linguistic systems too.
Language was thus understood as a system of signs in which the meaning of each sign was determined by its difference from others. This view of language had certain revolutionary implications. It challenged the commonsensical belief that language words had any direct link with the worldlobject they named .The essential status of. the colour green is thus brought under question. What we can be sure about is the system under which we produce an identity for a range-nothing beyond that. This de-linking of the word from the world has, as we shall see, important consequences for the interpretation of literary texts.
1.4.2 Saussure to Structuralism
We have seen that Saussure's structural analysis of language attempts to examine the conditions that allow language and meaning to function, seeking to know how meaning is made possible. Saussure hoped that his linguistic theory would be applied to other social and cultural phenomena as well. Through his linguistic theory, Saussure claimed to have inaugurated "Serniology:": a science that studies the life of signs [linguistic or otherwise] within society".
Saussure's linguistic theory was reconstructed by his friends and colleagues on the basis of his notes and lectures delivered between 1907-1911 at the University of Geneva. However, it was only in the 1950s that some thinkers started applying his linguistic theory to other disciplines. Chief among them were Claude Levis Strauss and Roland Barthes working in the fields of anthropology and culture respectively. After a gap of about four decades, semiology, as Saussure had envisaged, had finally taken off. And Structuralism was another term used to designate the basic premises of its operations.
Roots : New Criticism And Structuralism
Thus, Barthes defined Structuralism as a mode of analysis of cultural artifacts, which originates in the method of contemporary linguistics. "I have been engaged in a series of structural analyses which all aim at defining a number of non-linguistic languages"
1.5.1 Linguistics and Literary Structuralism
Interpreting literature as language is in practice a complex process. Literary Structuralism does borrow its approach from linguistics but these approaches are varied. Jonathan Culler outlines three distinct ways in which linguistics has I influenced literary structuralism: (^1) A. As a scientific discipline, linguistics suggested to critics that a rigorous and I systematic study did not necessarily mean looking for causal i (^) explanations-that is, linking elements in the text to objective cultural/ personal facts through cause and effect. An element in a literary text, like an
element in a linguistic system, could be explained by its place in a network
of relations rather than in a chain of cause and effect. It therefore justified the desire to abandon historical and biographical criticism. B. Linguistics provided a number of concepts, which could be applied arbitrarily in discussing literary works. Some common examples already encountered, are signifier, signified; langue, parole; diachronic, synchronic
1 etc. These concepts can be employed skilfully or ineptly on the literary text
but they do not by virtue of their linguistic origin produce valid insights. However, the use of such terms may help one identify relations of various kinds in a text, which are responsible for the production of meaning. C. Linguistics provides structuralists with a model of how one should go about studying systems of signs. In this case, linguistic concepts are not used arbitrarily but as constituents of a model. This is a stronger claim about the relevance of linguistics and in Cu11Q's opinion characterizes Structuralism proper. A But within the third perspe'ctive, there are different ways of interpreting and applying the linguistic model. To borrow from Culler again, four distinct ways of interpreting can be outlined :
1.5.1.1 Jakobson's Poetic Analyses
In the first category are linguists like Jakobson who claim that linguistics provides a discovery procedure which can be applied directly to the language of literature to reveal poetic structures. That is, linguistics can define the structures in a given piece of language that make it poetic. Let us spend some time understanding this claim. Jakobson, the linguist believed that a linguistic utterance fulfilled any one of the six functions - one of which was the. poetic. He also believed that the fundamental aim of linguistics was to study verbal forms in relation to any one of the six functions. That is ,which characteristics of a verbal form are performing what function in a text. In the context of poetry, it means -identifyingwhich features make the language poetic. Further, the poetic function is defined as the maximum foregrounding of the text itself, and, not its content. For Jakobson, the principal technique used for foregrounding is the use of highly patterned language - i.e making conspicuous use of words and phrases, using them as much more than message carriers. Roots :New Criticism And Structuralism Put simply, the poetic use of language involves selecting and placing in a sequence items that arephonologically and grammatically related. A linguistic analysis would aim at revealing these patterns formed by the repetition of these related items.
Deconstruction "Any unbiased, attentive, exhaustive, total description of the selection, distribution and interrelation of diverse morphological classes and Syntactic constructions in a given poem surprises the examiner himself by unexpected, striking symmetries and anti - symmetries, balanced structures, efficient accumulation of equivalent forms
and salient contrasts... " writes Jakobson.
We are now in position to understand the claim with which we began. This passage suggests that if we follow patiently and correctly the procedures of linguistic analysis we can produce a complete inventory of patterns in a text. That is, linguistics provides a discovery procedure for poetic patterns in that, if followed correctly it will yield an account of the patterns present in the text responsible for the poetic effect. Jakobson's problem is that he thinks these structures are static and objectively present in a text. As we will see later, they may be fairly dynamic and relative.
1.5.1.2 Greimas' Semantic Analysis
In the second category we can consider the semantic analyses by linguists like Griemas which illustrate that although linguistics does not provide a procedure for the discovery of literary structures, some of the complex operations of reading may at least be partially identified by applying linguistic techniques directly to the language of literature.
Griemas starts on the assumption that linguistics and particularly its subset 'semantics' ought to be able to account for meaning of all kinds, including, literary meaning. But as he works out his theory, it emerges that literary meaning cannot be explained by a method which works up from smaller units to larger ones. That is , literary meaning is not as simple an affair as general meaning would be. We may be able to specify a broad framework of meaning for a text. But the process by which individual units contribute to the filling up of a reader's framework of meaning of a literary text, involves some complex expectations and semantic operations. His theory, thus, only partially explains the complex operations involved in making sense of a literary text
1.5.1.3 Todorov's Grammar of Decameron
Todorov's analysis of Boccaccio's Decameron represents the third category which works on the assumption that if we apply linguistic categories metaphorically to a body of texts we can produce results which are as valid as an account of a linguistic system. Todorov segments and classifies the Decameron in the hope of producing a grammar or general set of rules, of the way the narratives or plots are structured out of their basic units. The strategy works on the dubious assumption that the Decameron is structured like language, which can be revealed through a systematic dismantling of its constituent units. This, to say the least, may not be true. A large variety of structures can be found within the Decameron depending on the linguistic category one starts the investigation with. For example, reading each story as a sentence and defining its units as noun, adjective and verb is one way of discovering its structurejust as reading each story as an argument may lead to identifying it as structured out of a subject, predicate, etc. None of these two views and others like them can be seen as privileged-as revealing the real structure of the Decameron.
1.5.1.4 Culler's Structuralist Poetics
In the fourth category fall theorists like Jonathan Culler who believe that the linguistic method cannot serve as a discovery procedure. We cannot transport concepts or theories from linguistics and apply it to literature in the hope of discovering its meaning. Instead, linguistics should be used as a general model for serniological investigation. That is, we should try to construct a poetics, which will
Deconstruction
Langue and Parole
Phonology
Semantics
Signs
refers to all the other social, cultural and political activities undertaken by the society.
Langue refers to the complete grammatical system used by a particular linguistic community. Parole on the other hand refers to an individual's particular use of language, the actual speech act.
Science of vocal sounds or the system of sounds in a language. So, a phonological analysis would try to study the way sounds are arranged in a sentence and the effect they achieve.
A branch of Linguistics dealing with the production of meaning.
In Saussure's theory of language, a sign refers to a combination of the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the graphic or the verbal element of a word-that is, the mark that we make while writing it or the sound which we make while uttering it. The signified refers to the concept that we evoke in the mind of the reader or the listener.
Synchronic and Diachronic : Two approaches to the study of a subject. Synchronic relates to the study at a particular period, without considering its past or present. Diachronic refers to its study through its historical development.
Syntax Refers to the grammatical arrangement of words in speech or writing.
1.9 SUGGESTED READINGS
Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought U m. New York : Harcourt & Brace,
Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. New York : Atheneum, 1967. Genette, Gerard. "Structuralism and Literary Criticism". In David Lodge ed. Modern Criticism and Theory .London :Longman, 1988. Saussure, FerdinandD., Course in General Linguistics. London: P. Jones,
Sturrock, John. Structuralism, London: Grafton Books, 1986. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
Finke,Laurie and Robert Con Davis ed. Literary Criticism and Theory. London: Longman, 1989. Metheun., 1989. Lodge, David ,ed. Modern Criticism and Theory .London : Metheun., 1989. Rice, Philip and Patricia Waugh ed. Modem Literary Theory. A Reader. London: Bedford Arnold, 1992. Selden,Raman. Practising Theory and Reading Literature An Introduction. New York, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989.
