Literary Theories

A Case Study in Critical Performance

William Baker, Julian Wolfreys

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 1996
• Print ISBN:
  9780333663011
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350317789
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Every student of literature needs to understand how to use literary theory to analyse and interpret the text. Literary Theories challenges the out-dated notion that theory is something separable from the act of reading and interpretation and, believing that the best way to learn is through practical application, plunges the student into the midst of a range of critical readings. Clearly argued and lucidly written, these essays offer the student reader an interactive introduction to the ways in which contemporary literary theories challenge us to rethink interpretation, literary writing and critical reading.

PART 1 FORMALIST CONCERNS

1

‘Snowed Up’: A Structuralist Reading

JULIAN COWLEY

‘I’ve got a fire in my bedroom tonight, and am writing cosily before I retire as the books say’ (21). Edie’s diary entry for ‘Jan. 4th’ alludes to conventions of literary expression, to phrases that characterize the writing of fiction. The reference to what ‘the books say’ affirms the diary’s factuality; it too is written, yet it is distinct from those completed works of imagination. Here we may see the writer writing, in a particular place, at a specific time. What could be more real?

It is the end of the day, when diaries are usually composed; it is ‘Jan.’, not ‘Dec.’ or ‘Feb.’; and it is the 4th, rather than the 3rd, or the 5th. But no year is given, to ground our reading in history, and it is prudent to ask what historical authenticity, what reality is actually conveyed by the specified date. Experience may tell us that in January, in England, snow may well fall, so there is a credible relationship between the action of this story, centred on heavy precipitation, and the time of its setting. Yet it is surely essentially the case that ‘Jan. 4th’ acquires meaning only in relation to other dates, from which it is distinct, within our calendar system for indicating the passage of time.

Let us turn to that fire, keeping Edie warm as she writes. We are tacitly invited to envisage it, to imagine its comforting glow. The invitation is issued not only by Edie, but by Richard Jefferies, the author of her writing. The fire is an example of those descriptive details which add flesh to the bare bones of storytelling, and convince us that here is a substantial world. Often such details have less apparent significance than this source of heat in a story of isolating snowdrifts. The fire, then, fulfils a double function: it contributes to a set of thematic oppositions of warmth and coldness; and it adds to the solidity of the world we project as we read ‘Snowed Up’. The French critic, Roland Barthes, noted how such descriptive details (to his end the more superfluous the better) deliver ‘the reality effect’ (Barthes 1982, 11–18). As readers, our sense of ‘concrete reality’ resides largely in such particulars of concocted, fictional worlds.

Our perception of concrete detail relies, Barthes suggests, upon ‘the direct collusion of a referent and a signifier’ (1982, 16). In other words, the verbal registration, whether written or spoken, of ‘a fire’ (signifier) leads us directly to an actual, physical fire (referent). For Barthes, a structuralist reader, immersed in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, ‘this is what might be called the referential illusion’ (1982, 16).

Saussure, whose theory of language provides the basis for the wide range of practices known as structuralism, denied words this seemingly natural referential status. In his Course in General Linguistics (1916), he proposed a model in which the verbal or graphic sign (for example, a word written or printed on paper), unites a phonic signifier (for example, the sound of a word when uttered), and a signified (a concept). In our case, the printed word ‘fire’ fuses the sound made when it is read aloud, or mentally pronounced during silent reading, and a generalized, conceptual understanding of ‘fire’. The referent is excluded from this model; we have lost direct access to that actual mound of burning coals, throwing out its palpable heat. Structuralism surrenders ‘the referential illusion’.

Saussure, in effect, rejected the common-sense notion that the structure of language imitates the structure of things in the world. Instead, he conceived it as a self-contained system, generating meaning according to internal relationships of difference. In the Course, he explains this conception by analogy to the game of chess, where ‘the respective value of the pieces depends on their position on the chessboard just as each linguistic term derives its value from its opposition to all other terms’. Chess is possible because of ‘the set of rules that exists before a game begins and persists after each move’ (Saussure 1981, 88). Language similarly has its constant principles that underlie all meaningful instances of language use. At the same time, however, the values of meanings of the words also depend on, and emerge out of, their relationships with other words, other phrases, and so on. In Saussure’s view, then, while invariant rules are the basis for variant utterances, the act of signification is essentially arbitrary.

In Barthes’s analysis, descriptive details in a text do not form a bridge to the world of things, rather they signify the ‘category of the real’. Structuralist approaches regard the text as a literary system, and aim to clarify how that system produces meaning. The structuralist reader attends to sets of differences within a work, or works, and identifies a structure for consideration – this might be, for instance, genre, narrative, or character. Attending to descriptive detail, Barthes sought to show how the ostensibly incidental belongs integrally to the literary system, and may be encompassed within structuralist analysis more familiarly handling, ‘separating out and systematizing the main articulations of narrative’ (1982, 11).

In his influential essay, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’, Barthes leaves no doubt as to where the emphasis falls in his study of tales and telling:

Narrative does not show, does not imitate; the passion which may excite us in reading a novel is not that of a ‘vision’ (in actual fact, we do not ‘see’ anything). Rather it is that of meaning, that of a higher order of relation which also has its emotions, its hopes, its dangers, its triumphs. ‘What takes place’ in a narrative is from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing; ‘what happens’ is language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming. (1977, 124)

It is stating the obvious, perhaps, but it goes against deeply engrained habits of reading to point out that the fire in Edie’s bedroom is a linguistic phenomenon. So, indeed, is the bedroom. And so too, alas, is Edie. Even the diary, emerging before our eyes, is just an illusory entity, a linguistic knot in the web of Jefferies’ storytelling. Why stop there? Richard Jefferies … what do those words signify … ?

We have jettisoned the projected world with which we began. Now let us turn to the structuralist adventure of how ‘Snowed Up’ comes to have meaning. Given that the tale is written in diary form, the organization of time, the nature of temporal relationships within it, suggests itself as a good point of departure. The Russian Formalists stressed an important distinction between fabula and sjuzet (these terms broadly corresponding to ‘story’ and ‘plot’), and investigated ways in which a chronological sequence of events might be modified or distorted in an act of plotting. Viktor Shklovsky’s study of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is a classic of such analysis. Formalist work stimulated a considerable amount of subsequent structuralist investigation.

Gérard Genette made a notable contribution with Narrative Discourse (1980). Genette is particularly concerned here with the time of narration, and distinguishes three broad areas of classification: order, duration, and frequency. An analysis attending to ‘order’ would remark how the sequence in which events occurred stands in relation to the sequence of their narration. So, we might note how the gift of furs made by Edie’s Papa is temporally subsequent to the act of persuasion which prompted Edie to keep a diary, yet those elements appear in inverse order in the telling. From this inversion, aspects of what we may read as Edie’s temperament emerge. The role of recipient suits her well; it is her excitement at the gift that is registered in the opening lines. But the diary is a chore; she finds it laborious, and so, uncongenial. Reference to the reason for its composition effects a cooling of the warmth of her initial excitement. We might say that in a textual system based on the opposition of production and consumption, Edie is located toward the latter pole. That location is established in this initial instance of narrative order, and is corroborated by later instances within the tale.

Duration relates to the pace of narration. In a written account, a decade or a century might be dealt with in a few lines, while pages might be dedicated to a momentary occurrence, or to the experience of a few minutes. Such distortion is particularly characteristic of Modernist narratives, such as Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). In Jefferies’ tale, it is evident that the diary entries are not of uniform length: ‘Jan. 15th’ is considerably shorter than ‘Jan. 14th’. In this case the relative brevity of the later entry is rationalised internally: ‘My fingers are so numbed I can hardly write …’ (26). Here duration may be read as a measure of coldness, within the meaning system that proceeds from the opposition of coldness and warmth.

The length of the entry for ‘Jan. 14th’ also reflects the fact that the preceding entry is dated ‘Jan. 10th’. A period longer than a day has elapsed; there is catching-up to do. But the missing days produce meaning of another kind. They testify to Edie’s unreliability, to her lack of dedication to the task of writing. This characterological evidence supports the overt testimony of the confession: ‘… I shall never be a good diarist, my last entry I see was a month ago. Oh dear whenever shall I reduce this giddy head of mine to something like order’ (19–20). In a textual system differentiating order and disorder, Edie veers toward the pole of disorder. The practice of writing is presented, on the other hand, as an agency for order. She remarks how the clergyman who advised her to keep a diary ‘said it would help me to classify my ideas, and bring my mind into shape’ (20). Those missing dates, then, register lapses into disorder.

In the light of this structure of meaning, our reading of the ‘Jan. 14th’ entry may be suggestively developed. It begins: ‘Snowing still – nothing but snow. Troubles are coming faster and faster’ (23). The accumulation of snow signals greater disorder, and as a corollary the pace of troubles arriving is increased. This substantial entry may be regarded as an assertion of order against the advent of chaos, an attempt to establish shape amid formlessness. To identify another system of opposition, the diary is an accretion of the blackness of print, against the white nothingness of snow, beyond the walls of the house. The terms of this opposition are developed further within the house, in the servants’ declaration that they could not live on (white) flour and water, and Alderman Thrigg’s descent to the cellar in search of (black) coals, with their promise of life-sustaining warmth.

Genette’s third term is ‘frequency’, where a single event may repeatedly be recounted in a narrative, or, alternatively, a repeated action may receive a single mention. A variant of this notion of frequency, featuring prominently in ‘Snowed Up’, is the regularity of Edie’s reference to her suitors. This repeated reference establishes a set of relationships between her character, the nature of the suitors (according to her perception), and the situation in which she is a prize to be won, a commodity to be purchased, or a gift to be bestowed by her father. I do not seek to emulate here the complexity and sophistication with which Genette reads texts. Rather, I have drawn on his terms to illustrate the kinds of structural category that can be utilised in a structuralist reading. The way I have used them demonstrates that numerous systems to generate meaning are present simultaneously within any text. So, a verbal matrix may further the story and develop character, at the same time. This is scarcely a revelation, but structuralists such as Genette, Barthes, and the Bulgarian theorist, Tzvetan Todorov, have produced subtle, rigorous and stimulating models for analysing the internal operations of that matrix.

In explaining how linguistics may provide the foundational paradigm for a structural analysis of narrative, Barthes points out that ‘linguistics stops at the sentence, the last unit which it considers to fall within its scope’ (1977, 82). Structuralism posits a homology, a corresponding formal organization between the sentence and the structure of more extended signifying systems, such as the textual narrative. In short, Barthes declares that ‘a narrative is a long sentence’, although it cannot be reduced to ‘the simple sum of its sentences’ (1977, 84). Just as a linguist can identify the particular order that constitutes a sentence, and can analyse how that order produces meaning, so a structuralist reader can attend to the arrangement of narrative elements, and to the generation of meaning through that ordering. It is evident that structural analysis can elucidate the combination of elements involved in a narrative’s unfolding along its horizontal axis (in structuralist terminology, derived from Saussure, the syntagmatic axis).

Barthes takes pains to point out that ‘to understand a narrative is not merely to follow the unfolding of the story, it is also to recognize its construction in “storeys”, to project the horizontal concatenations of the narrative “thread” on to an implicitly vertical axis’ (1977, 87). Reading is not just a matter of moving from one word to the next, but crucially involves movement across levels of meaning. The vertical (paradigmatic) axis is vital to the generation of meaning, which is never simply the culmination of a simple, horizontal thrust.

I have suggested that a number of binary oppositions are set up on the vertical axis of ‘Snowed Up’: warmth/coldness, order/disorder, blackness/whiteness. Others may readily be added: wealth/poverty, fatness/thinness, age/youth, mobility/immobility, and so on. The meaning of Edie, of her diary, and of the events it records may be seen to arise from these minor meaning systems; in keeping with Saussure’s teachings, it proceeds from internal differentiation, rather than through reference to external events or circumstances.

We need, then to recognize ‘storeys’ within our story, but it is important not to confuse these with depth, of the kind familiarly associated with character defined as a discrete entity, with a psychological dimension. Structuralism approaches characters not as distinct individuals, but as components of a system, or in terms of relationships. In analysing narratives we are not confronted with flesh-and-blood beings; rather, as Barthes points out, we are faced with ‘paper beings’ (1977, 111). Indeed, it is appropriate to structuralist reading to drop the notion of ‘beings’, and to examine characters as participants. They participate in what Barthes calls ‘a sphere of actions’. This is to be understood not in terms of ‘trifling acts’, but of major narrative articulations such as desire, communication, or struggle (1977, 107).

This notion of spheres of actions is indebted to work performed, during the 1920s, by the formalist Vladimir Propp. He took a sizeable sample of Russian folk-tales, and set out to isolate their common features, to discover the invariant model underlying the variations constituting a diverse, yet identifiably related, range of stories. Propp identified thirty-one ‘functions’ within the invariant model, with ‘function’ conceived as ‘an act of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action’ (Scholes 1974, 62). These functions are not tied to particular characters, yet they form the fundamental components of the tales; they are limited in number, and while not all occur in every tale, the sequence of their appearance is unchanging. This disclosure provided a vital, pioneering example for later structuralist study of narrative.

In addition to functions, Propp identified seven ‘spheres of action’ within the folk-tales. These are basically roles performed in the realisation of each and every narrative. In Propp’s case they are: villain; donor; helper; princess and father; dispatcher; hero; and false hero (Scholes 1974, 65). Importantly, role was not of necessity identical with one specific character; a character might take more than one role; one role might be performed by more than one character. As with the structuralists, a certain level of abstraction is crucial to identification of the basic terms of analysis.

It would be possible to apply Propp’s spheres of action to ‘Snowed Up’, but he appears here as a precursor to Barthes, and what follows will look more broadly at how Jefferies’ characters participate in communication, as one of the major spheres of action (in Barthes’s sense) of the story. It will soon become apparent that a number of the minor meaning systems referred to already can be subsumed within this sphere.

Communication assumes a message, a sender and a receiver. It also requires a medium to bridge the gap and convey the message, and a capacity, shared by both the interested parties, to understand what the message says. At the end of ‘Snowed Up’, an editorial voice enters, having tacitly framed Edie’s narrative from the start, to draw a lesson from it. This act of overt communication provides a new focus for local instances of meaning generated throughout the tale. The conclusion highlights how snow, rendering the railway immobile, constituting a major breakdown between sender and receiver (in this case of goods), foregrounds a recurrent structural configuration of the story. It is notable that the editor takes for granted a shared interpretative competence with his reader, a kind of understanding that is distinctly male-gendered; Edie may have exaggerated things, but the editor and reader, more detachedly the donor and receiver of ‘Snowed Up’, may communicate none the less as reasonable beings. Structuralism alerts us to the fact that the editor and his projected reader are in fact produced by the text, rather than producers of it; the addresser and his assumed addressee are poles of a relationship established within, not beyond the literary system. As Barthes puts it, ‘the signs of the narrator are immanent to the narrative’ (1977, 111).

Edie, as diarist, is, in a sense, both sender and receiver, although an implied reader can be detected in the text, who is other than its ‘author’. The message may be read as the need for order as opposed to her habitual disorder, with the black print, as mentioned before, accumulating sense against the blanket of snow that conceals information under uniform whiteness. More pressingly, perhaps, the message is affirmation of a subject position for Edie, engaged as an ‘I’ in the act of writing, in opposition to the object role in which she is cast throughout the story – notably, as a prize to be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Overture
• Part 1 Formalist Concerns
• Entr’acte
• Part 2 Political and Ideological Accounts
• Encore
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index