of The Great Gatsby

men) will be attractive to seductive, beautiful women like the one on display. As this example illustrates, semiotics is especially useful in analyzing popular cul‑ ture. Other examples of the kinds of pop‑culture sign systems semioticians often examine might include pictorial ads in magazines, popular dances, Disneyland, roller derby, Barbie dolls, automobiles, and, to use two examples analyzed by the famous semiotician Roland Barthes, professional wrestling and the striptease. Here’s a simplified summary of Barthes’ semiotic analysis of professional wres‑ tling. He argues that professional wrestling (the brand of wrestling in which the contestants use pseudonyms like Gorgeous George or Haystacks Calhoun, dress in costume, and orchestrate the match in advance) can be viewed as a sign system. It can be interpreted as a language with a very specific purpose: to provide the audience with the cathartic satisfaction of watching justice triumph in a situation that (unlike life) makes it very clear who is good and who is evil. This purpose is revealed in the structural similarities of the matches, regardless of who the contestants are: for example, (1) each wrestler is a clear type (clean‑ cut All‑American, mean‑tempered slob, barbarous evildoer, and so on); (2) each match contains contestants who—by their type, their behavior during a par‑ ticular match, or both—can be clearly identified as the “good guy” and the “bad guy”; and (3) each match ends with the triumph of goodness over evil. The match, Barthes further observes, greatly resembles the spectacle of ancient Greek theatre, as the wrestlers act out their pain, despair, or triumph with exag‑ gerated gestures and grimaces. The exhibition of suffering, defeat, and justice is thus the purpose of the spectacle. The signs we read in order to come to this conclusion include the names, physiques, and costumes of the contestants; their body language in the ring (strutting, cowering, swaggering, menacing, placat‑ ing, and the like); and their facial expressions (smug, outraged, proud, horrified, triumphant, defeated, and so on). It doesn’t matter that the contest is rigged because its purpose is not to determine who is the better wrestler but to enact the kind of spectacle different versions of which have for centuries provided the public with the vicarious release of anger, fear, and frustration. Now let’s take a look at some of the theoretical concepts underlying semiotic analyses like the one just summarized. Semiotics recognizes language as the most fundamental and important sign system. As we saw in our discussion of structural linguistics, a linguistic sign is defined as a union of signifier (sound‑ image) and signified (concept to which the signifier refers). For semiotics, too, sign = signifier + signified. However, as we just saw, semiotics expands the signi‑ fier to include objects, gestures, activities, sounds, images—in short, anything that can be perceived by the senses. Clearly, semiotics gives the signifier a wide range of possibilities. However, of the three recognized classes of signs—index,

icon, and symbol—semiotics limits its study to signs that function as symbols. Let’s pause briefly to examine why this is the case. An index is a sign in which the signifier has a concrete, causal relationship to the signified. For example, smoke signifies fire; a knock on the door signifies that someone is there. An icon is a sign in which the signifier physically resembles the signified. For example, a painting is an icon to the extent that the picture resembles the subject it represents. A realistic painting of President Kennedy is an icon. A symbol is a sign in which the relationship between signifier and signified is neither natural nor necessary but arbitrary, that is, decided on by the conventions of a community or by the agreement of some group. As we saw earlier, language is an example of a symbolic sign system. The sound‑ image “tree” refers to the idea of a tree only because speakers of English have agreed to use it that way. While smoke is an index of fire, and a realistic painting of fire is an icon of fire, the word fire is a symbol of fire. There is no quality of fire inherent in the word fire. Any other sound‑image agreed upon by a group could be used to represent fire. Let’s consider a different example. Ice crystals on your living room window are an index of winter. A photograph of a frozen landscape is an icon of winter. However, that same photograph of a frozen landscape or a written description of it in a story (such as Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”) would function for most English majors as a symbol of death. Thus, of the three kinds of signs, only the symbol is a matter of interpretation. A group of people doesn’t decide that fire produces smoke (an index). It is sim‑ ply the case that fire produces smoke. A group of people doesn’t decide that a realistic portrait of President Kennedy (an icon) will have the same color hair, eyes, skin, and other physical features that the late president had. If the portrait didn’t have these physical features, it wouldn’t be an icon. But a group of people does have to decide that the color white symbolizes virginity, that the color red symbolizes sexuality, that horns and a pitchfork symbolize Satan, and that the cross symbolizes Christianity. It is the business of semiotics, then, to isolate and analyze the symbolic func‑ tion of sign systems, although the objects or behaviors under investigation will often have other functions as well. For example, food and clothing have obvious biological functions (they keep us nourished and protected from the elements) and economic functions (fluctuations in the price of food and clothing influ‑ ence a society’s standard of living). But a semiotician will be interested in food and clothing only to the extent to which they function as sign systems, only to the extent to which they have symbolic content. Furthermore, as a structural‑ ist enterprise, semiotics will analyze a sign system by focusing on a group of similar objects (for example, billboards or pictorial magazine ads or restaurant menus) synchronically (at a given moment in time). To analyze the semiotics of

food as it is expressed in restaurant menus, for example, one would not examine menus from a single restaurant as they have changed over time (diachronically). Instead, one would examine a large number of menus produced by different restaurants at the same point in time (synchronically) in order to discover their semiotic codes, the underlying structural components that carry a nonverbal cul‑ tural message of some sort. What might a semiotic analysis of restaurant menus reveal? In other words, besides the concrete data about the five food groups communicated by the words on the menu, what nonlinguistic messages are these menus sending? By examin‑ ing such signs as the menus’ color, size, decoration, type of print, size of margins, amount and distribution of blank space, prices, names of dishes (not words like steak or baked potato, but “tags” like à la Parisienne or Pioneer’s), and the pre‑ dominance or absence of foods that carry symbolic value (such as hamburgers or caviar), we would probably be able to discover a “fashion industry” of food in which, for example, messages about patrons’ self‑images are communicated. The semiotics of some menus will send the message, “If you’re a well‑bred, well‑ educated person of distinction with an extremely discriminating palate and the wallet to back it up, you will slip into your Guccis, slide into your BMW, and dine with us.” Other menus will send the message, “If you’re a down‑to‑earth nonphony who doesn’t want to waste time or hard‑earned dough on sissified showing off, come on in.” Still other menus will send the message, “If you’re a patriotic American who still believes in God and Grandma’s apple pie, you’ll celebrate your family values by eating here.” If you’re a movie fan, you might be interested in trying to map out a semiotics of the musical comedy, the murder mystery, or the love story. Similarly, you might want to see if you can discover a semiotics of daytime drama, or “soap operas.” For semioticians, anything can be a sign. The whole world of human culture is a “text” waiting to be “read,” and structuralism provides the theoretical framework to do it.

Structuralism and literature

For students of literature, structuralism has very important implications. After all, literature is a verbal art: it is composed of language. So its relation to the “master” structure, language, is very direct. In addition, structuralists believe that the structuring mechanisms of the human mind are the means by which we make sense out of chaos, and literature is a fundamental means by which human beings explain the world to themselves, that is, make sense out of chaos. So there seems to be a rather powerful parallel between literature as a field of study and structuralism as a method of analysis.

Our discussion of structuralist approaches to literature will focus on the narra‑ tive dimension of literary texts because structuralist criticism deals mainly with narrative. This focus is not as narrow as it may seem at first glance, however, if we remember that narrative includes a long history and broad range of texts, from the simple myths and folk tales of the ancient oral tradition to the com‑ plex mélange of written forms found in the postmodern novel. In addition, most drama and a good deal of poetry, though not classified as narrative, nevertheless have a narrative dimension in that they tell a story of some sort. In any event, as we’ll see, narratives provide fertile ground for structuralist criticism because, despite their range of forms, narratives share certain structural features, such as plot, setting, and character. We must keep in mind, however, that structuralism does not attempt to inter‑ pret what individual texts mean or even whether or not a given text is good literature. Issues of interpretation and literary quality are in the domain of sur‑ face phenomena, the domain of parole. Structuralism seeks instead the langue of literary texts, the structure that allows texts to make meaning, often referred to as a grammar because it governs the rules by which fundamental literary ele‑ ments are identified (for example, the hero, the damsel in distress, and the vil‑ lain) and combined (for example, the hero tries to save the damsel in distress from the villain). In short, structuralism isn’t interested in what a text means, but in how a text means what it means. Thus, The Great Gatsby’s Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, and Tom Buchanan are surface phenomena that draw their meaning from the ways in which they relate to the structures underlying them: respectively, hero, damsel in distress, and villain. As you may remember from chapter 6, reader‑response critics also focus on how a text means rather than what it means. Indeed, there is some overlap between the two disciplines, for structuralists and reader‑response critics would agree that there is a relationship between the underlying structure of the text and the read‑ er’s response to it. After all, structuralism believes that the structures we perceive in literature, as in everything else, are projections of the structures of human consciousness. However, you’ll recall that the final goal of reader‑response criti‑ cism is to understand the reader’s experience, which structuralists would call a surface phenomenon. In contrast, the final goal of structuralism is to under‑ stand the underlying structure of human experience, which exists at the level of langue, whether we are examining the structures of literature or speculating on the relationship between the structures of literature and the structures of human consciousness. In other words, reader‑response criticism does not seek a universal science that would link innate structures of human consciousness to all human experience, behavior, and production. Structuralism seeks precisely that.

Structuralist approaches to literature have tended to focus on three specific areas of literary studies: the classification of literary genres, the description of narrative operations, and the analysis of literary interpretation. For the sake of clarity, we’ll discuss these three areas separately.

The structure of literary genres

Let’s begin our discussion of structuralist approaches to genre with a simplified summary of one of its most complex and sweeping examples: what Northrop Frye calls his theory of myths, which is a theory of genres that seeks the structural principles underlying the Western literary tradition.1 Mythoi (plural of mythos) is a term Frye uses to refer to the four narrative patterns that, he argues, structure myth. These mythoi, he claims, reveal the structural principles underlying liter‑ ary genres: specifically, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony/satire. According to Frye, human beings project their narrative imaginations in two fundamental ways: in representations of an ideal world and in representations of the real world. The ideal world, which is better than the real world, is the world of innocence, plenitude, and fulfillment. Frye calls it the mythos of summer, and he associates it with the genre of romance. This is the world of adventure, of successful quests in which brave, virtuous heroes and beautiful maidens over‑ come villainous threats to the achievement of their goals. Examples of romance you may be familiar with include the chivalrous adventures in Sir Thomas Mal‑ ory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1470), Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596), John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), and “Sleeping Beauty.” In contrast, the real world is the world of experience, uncertainty, and failure. Frye calls it the mythos of winter, and he associates it with the double genre of irony/satire. Irony is the real world seen through a tragic lens, a world in which protagonists are defeated by the puzzling complexities of life. They may try to be heroic, but they never achieve heroic stature. They may dream of happiness, but they never attain it. They’re human, like us, and so they suffer. Examples of ironic texts you may have read include Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937). Analogously, satire is the real world seen through a comic lens, a world of human folly, excess, and incongruity. In the world of satire, human frailty is mocked, sometimes with biting, merciless humor. Examples of satire you may be acquainted with include Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1946), the episodes satirizing the abuses of the antebel‑ lum American South in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885),

and the passages satirizing conservative complacency and leftist self‑delusion in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). While romance occurs within an ideal world and irony/satire occurs within the real world, the remaining two mythoi involve a movement from one of these worlds to the other. Tragedy involves a movement from the ideal world to the real world, from innocence to experience, from the mythos of summer to the mythos of winter, and therefore Frye calls tragedy the mythos of autumn. In trag‑ edy, a hero with the potential to be superior, like a romantic hero, falls from his romantic height into the real world, the world of loss and defeat, from which he can never rise. Well‑known examples of tragedy include Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (5th century b.c.), Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601) and Othello (1604), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). In contrast, comedy involves a movement from the real world to the ideal, from experience to innocence, from the mythos of winter to the mythos of summer, and therefore Frye calls comedy the mythos of spring. In comedy, a protagonist caught in a web of threatening, real‑world difficulties manages, through various twists in the plot, to overcome the circumstances that have thwarted him and attain happiness. Unlike the villains who obstruct romantic heroes, those who obstruct the protagonists of comedy are absurd and humorous. And in the end, the protagonist moves, usually with his or her beloved, from the cold, trouble‑ some real world to a happier, kinder, gentler fictional space. Examples of comedy you may be familiar with include Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (1590) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). This description of Frye’s framework is merely a skeletal map of his detailed analysis of each mythos and the genre to which it is related. He argues that each genre identifies itself with a particular repertoire of themes, character types, moods, kinds of action, and versions of the plot formulas summarized above. Taken together, the four genres form a kind of master plot, or key to understand‑ ing narrative as a whole. And for Frye, that master plot is the structure of the quest, of which each mythos represents one leg. Frye notes that the traditional quest has four structural components: conflict, catastrophe, disorder and confusion, and triumph. Conflict, he observes, is the basis of romance, which consists of a series of fantastic adventures in which superheroes encounter obstacles. Catastrophe is the basis of tragedy, which con‑ sists of the hero’s downfall. Disorder and confusion are the basis of irony and satire, which require that confusion and anarchy reign supreme and that effec‑ tive action be impossible. And triumph is the basis of comedy, in which the pro‑ tagonist and his or her beloved become the centerpiece of some sort of improved social order. Taken together, then, the genres of romance, tragedy, irony/satire,

and comedy—in that order—spell out the structure of what Frye calls a “total quest‑myth.” Thus, for Frye, all narrative is structurally related because it’s all some version of some part of the quest formula. Frye calls this method of classification archetypal criticism because it deals with the recurrence of certain narrative patterns throughout the history of Western literature. The word archetype refers to any recurring image, character type, plot formula, or pattern of action. An archetype, then, is a kind of supertype, or model, different versions of which recur throughout the history of human pro‑ duction: in our myths, literature, dreams, religions, and rituals of social behav‑ ior. Frye’s method thus seeks the structural principles that underlie the Western literary tradition. Indeed, archetypes are themselves structural in nature: in order to be an archetype, an image, character type, or other narrative element must serve as a structural model that generates numerous different versions of itself, that is, numerous different surface phenomena with the same underlying structure. So while the specific content of particular romances, tragedies, ironic/ satiric narratives, and comedies is different—that is, their surface phenomena are different—the structure of each genre remains the same.2 Another method with which Frye seeks the structural principles that govern genres in the Western literary tradition he calls his theory of modes. His clas‑ sification of fiction into modes is based on the protagonist’s power to take action as it compares to the power of other men and to the power of their environment (nature and/or society). Frye’s modes are also determined according to whether the protagonist is superior in kind to others (of a type beyond the reach of ordi‑ nary people, like gods or demigods) or merely superior in degree (having the same positive attributes that all humans are capable of but having them to a greater degree). Perhaps a chart will help clarify Frye’s system.

Protagonist’s power Fictional mode 1. Superior in kind to both men and their environment Myth

. Superior in degree to both Romance . Superior in degree to men but not to their environment High mimesis (imitation of life, like that found in epic and tragedy) . Superior in no way Low mimesis (imitation of life, like that found in comedy and realism)

. Inferior Irony Character type Divine beings

Heroes Leaders

Common people

Antiheroes

Frye notes that, for the most part, myths, though early forms of narrative, fall outside the usual literary categories. For this reason, and because it seems somewhat odd to include comedy and realism under the same heading, Robert

Scholes offers a different version of Frye’s modes, one he believes will provide a more clear and useful basis of differentiation among genres by eliminating the nonliterary mode of myth and inserting a new category in order to account for the difference between comedy and realism. Here’s a chart outlining Scholes’ system of classification.

Protagonist’s power Fictional mode 1. Superior in kind to both men and their environment Romance

. Superior in degree to men but not to their environment . Equal in degree to men and their environment . Inferior in degree to men and their environment . Inferior in kind High mimesis (imitation of life, like that found in epic and tragedy) Middle mimesis (imitation of life, like that found in realism) Low mimesis (imitation of life, like that found in comedy) Irony Character type Heroes

Leaders

Ordinary people like ourselves Comic and pathetic figures Antiheroes

As these two charts indicate, different structuralists can have different ways of categorizing the same material. And there are many more structuralist theories of genre than those outlined here. This kind of structural analysis is an ongo‑ ing attempt to classify and thereby understand the relationships among literary texts by finding the most useful way to represent the structural system governing literature as a whole.

The structure of narrative (narratology)

Structuralist analyses of narrative examine in minute detail the inner “work‑ ings” of literary texts in order to discover the fundamental structural units (such as units of narrative progression) or functions (such as character functions) that govern texts’ narrative operations. A good deal of literary criticism that today goes under the name narratology belongs to this kind of structuralist approach. We’ll limit ourselves to three examples that are representative of the field in gen‑ eral and that I think you’ll find most useful at this stage in your understanding of structuralism: the work of A. J. Greimas, Tzvetan Todorov, and Gérard Genette. Greimas observes that human beings make meaning by structuring the world in terms of two kinds of opposed pairs: “A is the opposite of B” and “–A (the nega‑ tion of A) is the opposite of –B (the negation of B).” In other words, we perceive every entity as having two aspects: its opposite (the opposite of love is hate) and its negation (the negation of love is the absence of love). He believes that this fundamental structure of binary oppositions, consisting of four components

arranged in two pairs, shapes our language, our experience, and the narratives through which we articulate our experience. In our narratives, this structure is embodied in the form of plot formulas, such as conflict and resolution, struggle and reconciliation, and separation and union. These plot formulas are carried out by means of actants, or character functions, which are slots filled by the actual characters (surface phenomena) in a given story. A single character may perform the work of two or more separate actants. For example, in The Great Gatsby, Nick supplies the role of at least two actants: the hero’s helper (he sympathizes with Gatsby and helps reunite him with Daisy) and a quester in his own right (Nick has come to Long Island seeking himself, seeking a purpose for his life). Analogously, two or more characters may perform the function of a single actant. For example, Tom, Wolfsheim, and Gatsby’s parasitical party guests all function as a single actant: the embodiment of a cor‑ rupt world that finally destroys Gatsby. For Greimas, the forwarding of the plot—the movement from conflict to resolu‑ tion, struggle to reconciliation, separation to union, and so forth—involves the transfer of some entity (a quality or an object) from one actant to another. For example, Daisy is transferred from Tom to Gatsby (or, more precisely, from Gatsby to Tom to Gatsby then back to Tom), and Gatsby’s disillusionment at the end of the story is transferred to Nick. Thus, the fundamental structure of narrative is the same as the fundamental structure of language: subject‑verb‑object. This basic narrative grammar generates the following three patterns of plots by aligning what Greimas sees as the six fundamental actants into three pairs of oppositions:

Actants Plot types Subject—Object Stories of Quest/Desire (a subject, or hero, searches for an object: a person, thing, or state of being) Sender—Receiver Stories of Communication (a sender—a person, god, or institution—sends the subject in search of the object, which the receiver ultimately receives) Helper—Opponent Subplots of Stories of Quest/Desire or Communication (a helper aids the subject in the quest; an opponent tries to hinder the subject)

Of course, a given narrative can combine a story of quest/desire with a story of communication. For example, in a simple love story, the hero can be both the subject and the receiver, and his beloved can be both the object and sender. Or in stories like those about the quest for the Holy Grail, each actant can be performed by a separate character: God is the sender, the hero is the subject, the Holy Grail is the object, and humanity is the receiver.

Finally, in order to account for various possible narrative sequences, Greimas suggests the following structures, which he derived from his study of folk tales. 1. Contractual structures involve the making/breaking of agreements or the establishment/violation of prohibitions and the alienation or reconcilia‑ tion that follows. 2. Performative structures involve the performance of tasks, trials, struggles, and the like. 3. Disjunctive structures involve travel, movement, arrivals, and departures. Greimas uses his system to analyze the works of twentieth‑century French author Georges Bernanos, concluding that the novelist creates a world in which all conflicts reduce to the fundamental symbolic conflict between life and death. Furthermore, this key conflict expresses itself, Greimas suggests, in the following structure (which I have simplified) that governs the author’s fictional universe.

Available experiences Possible transformations Ideological choices 1. joy/pain Truth: revolt + acceptance Life: joy + pain . boredom/disgust Lie: refusal + resignation Death: boredom + disgust

The grammar of Bernanos’ novels thus structures a world in which we can avoid feeling pain only if we are willing to give up joy as well, for the two are linked: our capacity to feel joy makes us vulnerable to pain. Thus, we must either accept the truth that life is a double‑edged sword of joy and pain (though we tend, initially, to revolt against that truth), or we must refuse the truth and resign ourselves to the only alternative: boredom and disgust, which are a kind of emotional death we choose in order to protect ourselves from the emotional risks of life.

In a manner similar to that of Greimas, Todorov draws an analogy between the structural units of narrative—such as elements of characterization and plot— and the structural units of language: parts of speech and their arrangement in sentences and paragraphs.

Units of narrative

Units of language Characters <–––––––––––––––––––––––––> Proper nouns Characters’ actions <–––––––––––––––––––––––––> Verbs Characters’ attributes <–––––––––––––––––––––––––> Adjectives Propositions <–––––––––––––––––––––––––> Sentences Sequences <–––––––––––––––––––––––––> Paragraphs