For advanced readers

Conversely, a conversation between lovers may take five minutes in the story, but the narrative may describe it in five pages. Thus, duration is what produces the sense of narrative speed. c. Frequency involves the relationship between the ways in which events may be repeated in the story (the same event may occur more than once) and in the narrative (a single event may be described more than once). 2. Mood is the atmosphere of the narrative created by distance and perspective. a. Distance is created when the narrator is one of the characters in the narrative, a “go‑between” through whose consciousness the story is filtered. The more intrusive the narrator, the greater the distance between narration and story. Conversely, the least distance is created when we are unaware of the narrator’s presence, when a tale seems to “tell itself.” Distance is also created by the absence of descriptive detail. The less detail given, the less the effect of reality is created, and the greater the sense of distance between narration and story. The more detail given, the less distance exists. Thus, the least distance, or the greatest imitation of life, is produced by maximum information and minimum presence of the narrator. b. Perspective refers to point of view, or the eyes through which we see any given part of the narrative. Although the narrator may be speaking, the point of view may be that of one of the other characters, and the feelings of a point‑of‑view character may be different from those of the narrator telling that character’s story. 3. Voice refers to the voice of the narrator. The voice we hear (the narrator’s) may not be the same as the eyes we see through (the perspective). When we analyze voice, we analyze the relationship of the narrator (the act of narration) to the story being told and to the narrative (the way the story is being told). Voice helps us determine the narrator’s attitude toward the story and reliability. It is interesting to note that tense, mood, and voice are all aspects of verbs. For in Genette’s opinion, all fiction functions like an expanded verb: all narrative reduces to action. Although his definitions may seem “cut and dried,” he gener‑ ates his categories, in large part, to be able to show when a literary text creates its effects by “violating” those categories. In his study of Remembrance of Things Past, for example, Genette shows how Proust creates an effect of intense imme‑ diacy, of great intimacy between narration and story, by combining maximum information with maximum presence of narrator, an effect that is traditionally produced by combining maximum information with minimum presence of nar‑ rator. Thus, Genette underscores the notion that systems of classification should

be used to help us illuminate the complexity of literary works, not obscure that complexity through oversimplification. Of course, the work of Greimas, Todorov, and Genette is far more complex than this summary implies. Our purpose here is simply to understand the kinds of analyses made possible by structural narratology. It might be helpful to think of this approach as looking at narrative through a microscope in order to identify its smallest units and see how they work. Structural narratologists thus offer us a way of seeing the details of narrative operations and a vocabulary with which to describe them. It is important to note, however, that Greimas, Todorov, and Genette, once they identify the formula that structures a narrative or group of narratives, use that formula to address larger questions about literary meaning and its relationship to human life. That is, once we identify the formula of a given narrative or group of narratives, we must then ask ourselves, “How does this formula reveal a pattern in narrative in general, and what does this pattern imply about human expe‑ rience or the structures of human consciousness?” In other words, what does a given narrative pattern contribute to our knowledge of the relatively small number of stories human beings have been telling themselves for thousands of years (though the stories may take hundreds of different forms, they are still, structurally, the same stories) in order to help themselves cope with life? For at the heart of structuralist analysis of any kind is the desire to understand what it means to be human.

The structure of literary interpretation

According to Jonathan Culler, the structural system that governs both the writ‑ ing and interpretation of literary texts is the system of rules and codes, which we have consciously or unconsciously internalized, that tell us how to make mean‑ ing when we read literature. Some of these rules and codes are taken for granted by the public at large (for example, that a fairy tale is a fictional story not to be taken literally), but many of them are learned in the classroom (for example, that the use of nature imagery reveals a good deal about a work’s theme). In America, this system of rules and codes is part of the Western literary tra‑ dition as it has been passed on by our universities, and our individual literary competence is determined by how much of the system we have internalized. The point is not that any two competent readers would necessarily agree in their interpretations of a particular work but that both interpretations would be guided by the same structural system of interpretive rules and codes. Culler thus believes that what we refer to as the structure of literature is really the structure of the system of interpretation we bring to it. His effort is to unearth this structural

system and show us how it operates. Perhaps the best way to acquaint you with the structural system Culler has identified is simply to describe some of its major components, which he has named as follows: the convention of distance and impersonality, naturalization, the rule of significance, the rule of metaphorical coherence, and the rule of thematic unity. The convention of distance and impersonality is an assumption we make as soon as we see that we are reading a literary work, even if that work is in the form of nonliterary writing, such as a letter (like Barthelme’s story “The Sandman,” 1972) or a journal (like Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974). As soon as we know we’re reading a piece of fiction or poetry rather than a letter or journal, we read it differently than we would read a real letter or journal: we know we’re entering a fictional world, and this creates a fictional distance, so to speak, that carries with it a kind of impersonality that would not be present if we knew we were reading a factual account of a human being’s personal experience. The convention of distance and impersonality is the code that enables all the follow‑ ing codes to come into play. Naturalization is the process by which we transform the text so that the strange‑ ness of its literary form, which we don’t see in everyday writing—for example, rhyme; meter; divisions into stanzas, acts, or chapters; and interior monologues— makes sense in terms of the world we live in. When we read, for example, “My darling is a ripening pear,” we don’t think the narrator is in love with a piece of fruit; we assume he is speaking metaphorically. And we appreciate the beauty and strangeness of the literary language even as we translate it into an idea we understand. Furthermore, we generally assume we are hearing the voice of a narrator, rather than that of the author, and it is to the narrator’s point of view that we ascribe any inconsistencies or biases in the narration. Other ways in which we naturalize the text include recognizing the codes that tell us how to interpret such literary elements as characters and symbols. For example, in real life we don’t believe that a person with fine, clear skin necessarily has a fine, clear soul, but we would accept this correlation in certain kinds of fiction. The rule of significance is the assumption that the literary work expresses a signif‑ icant attitude about some important problem, and so we pay attention to what it says in ways that we wouldn’t do with other kinds of writing. If our spouse left us a note saying “I’ve gone to the antique store in search of a lamp,” we’d prob‑ ably take the message at face value: our spouse wants to buy an antique lamp. If this same sentence were broken into a four‑line poem, however, the words “I’ve gone,” “in search,” “antique,” and “lamp” would suddenly take on greater reso‑ nance. We might conclude, for example, that the poem represents the desire to escape some unsatisfactory situation in the present in order to return to the past and find some kind of enlightenment that can’t be found in the here and now.