The structure of narrative (narratology

Nash, Charles C. “From West Egg to Short Hills: The Decline of the Pastoral Ideal from The Great Gatsby to Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus.” Philological Association 13 (1988): 22–27. Phelan, James. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus:

Ohio State University Press, 1996. Pichert, J. A., and R. C. Anderson. “Taking Different Perspectives on a Story.” Journal of Educational Psychology 69.4 (1977): 309–15. Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987. Rosenblatt, Louise. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. Scrimgeour, Gary J. “Against The Great Gatsby.” Criticism 8 (1966): 75–86. Rpt. in Twentieth- Century Interpretations of The Great Gatsby. Ed. Ernest Lockridge.

Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1968. 70–81. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, 1818. Stern, Milton R. The Golden Moment: The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Urbana: Univer‑ sity of Illinois Press, 1970. Trilling, Lionel. “F. Scott Fitzgerald.” The Liberal Imagination. New York: Viking, 1950. 243–54. Rpt. in The Great Gatsby: A Study. Ed. Frederick J. Hoffman. New York:

Scribner’s, 1962. 232–43.

7 Structuralist criticism

The first thing you have to get used to when you begin to study structuralism is that common uses of the word structure do not necessarily imply structuralist activity. For example, you are not engaged in structuralist activity if you exam‑ ine the physical structure of a building to discover if it is physically stable or aesthetically pleasing. However, you are engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the physical structures of all the buildings built in urban America in 1850 to discover the underlying principles that govern their composition, for example, principles of mechanical construction or of artistic form. You are also engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the structure of a single build‑ ing to discover how its composition demonstrates the underlying principles of a given structural system. In the first example of structuralist activity, you’re gen‑ erating a structural system of classification; in the second, you’re demonstrating that an individual item belongs to a particular structural class. In terms of literary study, the same model of structuralist activity holds true. You are not engaged in structuralist activity if you describe the structure of a short story to interpret what the work means or evaluate whether or not it’s good literature. However, you are engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the structure of a large number of short stories to discover the underlying principles that govern their composition, for example, principles of narrative progression (the order in which plot events occur) or of characterization (the functions each character performs in relation to the narrative as a whole). You are also engaged in structuralist activity if you describe the structure of a single literary work to discover how its composition demonstrates the underlying principles of a given structural system. In other words, structuralists are not interested in individual buildings or indi‑ vidual literary works (or individual phenomena of any kind) except in terms of what those individual items can tell us about the structures that underlie and organize all items of that kind. For structuralism sees itself as a human science whose effort is to understand, in a systematic way, the fundamental structures

that underlie all human experience and, therefore, all human behavior and pro‑ duction. For this reason, structuralism shouldn’t be thought of as a field of study. Rather, it’s a method of systematizing human experience that is used in many different fields of study: for example, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psy‑ chology, and literary studies. For structuralism, the world as we know it consists of two fundamental levels— one visible, the other invisible. The visible world consists of what might be called surface phenomena: all the countless objects, activities, and behaviors we observe, participate in, and interact with every day. The invisible world consists of the structures that underlie and organize all of these phenomena so that we can make sense of them. For example, the English language consists of over a million words, each of which can be pronounced in any number of different ways by different speakers, resulting in millions of different utterances of indi‑ vidual words. How is it possible that native speakers of English master enough of this overwhelming collection of linguistic items to communicate effectively with one another at a rather advanced level of sophistication and at a rather early age? The answer is fairly simple: while there are millions of individual linguistic sur‑ face phenomena (individual words and all the different ways people pronounce them), there is a relatively simple structure underlying all these words, and it is that structure we master. The structure of English vocabulary consists of approximately thirty‑one phonemes (fundamental units of sound recognized as meaningful by native speakers of a language) and the rules of their combination. Most of us are not aware of these phonemes and could not describe the rules of their combination, but our ability to use English vocabulary demonstrates that we have unconsciously internalized these structures. Similarly, our ability to construct simple sentences depends on our internalization, whether or not we are aware of it, of the grammatical structure subject‑verb‑object. Without a structural system to govern communication, we would have no language at all. Analogously, without the structuring principles that allow us to organize and understand the natural world, the data provided by our five senses would be overwhelming and meaningless. Structuring principles, whether or not we are aware of them, allow us, for example, to differentiate vegetables (they grow in soil; they reproduce; they’re edible) from stones (they don’t grow; they don’t reproduce; they’re not edible) and from all other kinds of physical matter. Struc‑ turing principles also allow us to differentiate among groups within a given domain, for example, we might differentiate plant life with medicinal properties from plant life with harmful properties from plant life with neutral properties. As these examples illustrate, the world we live in consists of innumerable events and objects, that is, innumerable surface phenomena. However, the structures

that underlie and organize these phenomena are relatively few. Without these structures our world would be chaos. Where do these structures come from? Structuralists believe they are generated by the human mind, which is thought of as a structuring mechanism. This is an important and radical idea because it means that the order we see in the world is the order we impose on it. Our understanding of the world does not result from our perception of structures that exist in the world. The structures we think we perceive in the world are actually innate (inborn) structures of human con‑ sciousness, which we project onto the world in order to be able to deal with the world. It’s not that there is no factual reality; it’s that there are too many facts to be perceived without conceptual systems to limit and organize them. And those conceptual systems originate within human consciousness. Thus, structuralism sees itself as a science of humankind, for its efforts to discover the structures that underlie the world’s surface phenomena—whether we place those phenomena, for example, in the domain of mathematics, biology, linguistics, religion, psy‑ chology, or literature—imply an effort to discover something about the innate structures of human consciousness. Before we go any further, we should take a moment to consider how structural‑ ism defines the word structure. First of all, as we noted earlier, structures aren’t physical entities; they’re conceptual frameworks that we use to organize and understand physical entities. A structure is any conceptual system that has the following three properties: (1) wholeness, (2) transformation, and (3) self‑reg‑ ulation. Wholeness simply means that the system functions as a unit; it’s not merely a collection of independent items. The whole is different from the sum of its parts because the parts working together create something new. To use a physical example, water is a whole that is different from its component parts (hydrogen and oxygen). Transformation means that the system is not static; it’s dynamic, capable of change. The system is not merely a structure (a noun); it also structures (a verb). In other words, new material is always being struc‑ tured by the system. For example, language, a structural system, is capable of transforming its basic components (phonemes) into new utterances (words and sentences). Self-regulation means that the transformations of which a structure is capable never lead beyond its own structural system. The elements engendered by transformations (for example, new linguistic utterances) always belong to the system and obey its laws. Structuralism assumes that all surface phenomena belong to some structural system, whether or not we are consciously aware of what that system is. The relationship of surface phenomena to structure might be illustrated by the fol‑ lowing simplified diagram.

S Suurrffaacceepphheennoommeennaa::

(words) dog tree Susan clouds wwisdom runs appears is roll comes happi

         lly

green tall ominously slowly

S Sttrruuccttuurree::

(parts  of speech)   Noun Verb Descriptor  

 (rules o ffcombination) Subject   + Predicate   

If you read the rows of surface phenomena from left to right, you have a list of individual utterances, such as “dog runs happily” and “tree appears green.” However, if you read the columns of the whole diagram from top to bottom, you can see that the surface phenomena, which consist of fifteen different items but could consist of many more, are governed by a structure that consists, in this case, of only three parts of speech and two rules of combination. Thus, the utterance “dog runs happily” (or any utterance that follows the same grammati‑ cal pattern) is a surface phenomenon governed by the following structure.

Subject (Noun) + Predicate (Verb + Descriptor)

The components of a structure (in this example, parts of speech and rules of combination) are always fewer in number than the surface phenomena they underlie because their purpose is to organize, classify, and simplify. So far, most of my examples have come from language. This is not surprising because language is considered the most fundamental structure of humankind and the one on which most other structures depend. In fact, the field of struc‑ tural linguistics is the source of most of structuralism’s terminology. So let’s take a brief look at that field now.

Structural linguistics

Structural linguistics was developed by Ferdinand de Saussure between 1913 and 1915, although his work wasn’t translated into English and popularized until the late 1950s. Before Saussure, language was studied in terms of the history of