Questions for further practice: structuralist approaches to other literary works

A proposition is formed by combining a character with an irreducible action (for example, “X kills Y” or “X arrives in town”) or irreducible attribute (for example, “X is evil” or “X is queen”), that is, an action or attribute in its most basic form. A sequence is a string of propositions that can stand on its own as a story. The structure of the most basic sequence is (1) attribution, (2) action, (3) attribution: the protagonist starts out with an attribute (for example, he is unloved), and by means of an action (he seeks love) that attribute is transformed (he is loved or, at least, has learned something important as a result of his quest). A story must contain at least one sequence, though it may contain many sequences. Todorov further subdivides his structural system into such categories as negation (the absence of an action or attribute), comparison (the presence of an action or attribute to different degrees), and modes (the qualification of an action or attribute, such as occurs when an action or attribute is desired, feared, expected, done unwillingly, and the like). This “grammar” of narrative allows Todorov to analyze texts in terms of what he sees as their fundamental narrative properties. Once a text’s propositions are discovered—by combining each character (noun) with an action (verb) or attribute (adjective)—the kinds of actions and attributes that recur in a text can be categorized as can the kinds of propositions and the relations between propo‑ sitions. For example, in his analysis of the stories in Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1350), Todorov finds, among other things, that all attributes can be reduced to three categories of adjectives: states (unstable attributes, such as happiness and unhappiness), qualities (more stable attributes, such as good and evil), and conditions (the most stable attributes, such as one’s sex, religion, or social position). Especially significant, I think, is his claim that all actions in The Decameron can be reduced to three verbs: to modify, to transgress, and to punish. For this discovery led to his observation of a significant pattern of recurrence in the tales: changes are continually made, and sins continually go unpunished. This pattern, and his knowledge of history, led Todorov to speculate that there is a connection between the values operating in Boccaccio’s stories and those of the culture in which he lived. Todorov suggests that, in both The Decameron and Boccaccio’s world, a new system of values was emerging, one that appreciated the personal daring and initiative associated with the free‑enterprise system of capitalism, which was beginning to replace the older, more restrictive system of commerce. It is important to note that both Greimas and Todorov derive their frameworks from and apply them to a large body of materials—Greimas uses all the works of a single author, and Todorov uses a long work that consists of a collection of tales—because they want to produce a structural system useful for understand‑ ing narrative in general. Similarly, Genette develops his narrative theory by