Structuralist Narratology

 

There is a deep connection between structuralism and what is called narratology. While structuralists are concerned with how language constructs meaning, narratologists are concerned with how language constructs meaning within stories. In particular, they are concerned with the patterns that exist across different stories.

The ideas developed here are similar to those developed by new critics for example, Jonathan Culler is a well-known narratologist, whose Structuralist Poetics (1975) and The Pursuit of Signs (1981) examine how communities of readers construct and follow particular ‘competences’ – understandings of sets of rules for reading, that limit and define the meaning of a text.

The notion that there is a distinction between the idea of a story and how events are ordered in its telling (plot) is shared by formalist and narratological thinking. Consider, for example, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847), which begins not at the beginning of the events it recounts but midway through, or Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), all of which begin at the middle (in medias res). Narratologists ask, how do these orderings shape meaning?

Structuralists want to know not so much what kind of literariness is at work but what the root meaning of that literariness is. This concern developed into a preoccupation with myth, as the origin of the founding structures of language. Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) argues that myth is a specific type of language with its own rules. While myth functions according to Saussure’s theory of the sign, Barthes suggests that it functions with an additional layer of meaning, which draws the audience away from the literal image and towards a greater, symbolic function. This study of myth is also the central focus of the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss. In his study of myth, Lévi-Strauss returns to formalist ideas about story (fabula) and plot (sjuzet). The story is the actual sequence of events as they have occurred, and is merely raw material for artistic work. Plot is the artistic representation of these events, it may employ repetition, reordering and juxtapositions to heighten literary effect. In particular, he draws on the work of Vladimir Propp (1895–1970), whose The Morphology of the Folktale was first published in Russian in 1928 but not translated into English until 1958 in the wake of structuralist activity.

 

Vladimir Propp analyses the folk tale to formulate the principles of narrative theory. Propp argued that every character in a folk tale’s plot had a specific function. Further all fairy tales can be reduced to a set of seven characters who generate the entire plot through their various relationships and actions. These characters are: hero, false hero, villain, helper, princess, her father and dispatcher. These characters are involved in 31 basic functions including struggle, victory, return, rescue, violations, trickery, departure of the hero, recognition, punishment and wedding. All plots are made up of these characters and actions, in varying combinations and proportions.

 

Influenced by Propp’s work as well as the work of Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss in his 1958 work Structural Anthropology develops the idea of mythemes: the central elements shared between myths and passed down through cultures.He argues that myths have meaning only in relation to other myths in the same myth sequence.

 

This kind of theory has been particularly influential in the study of popular literatures, which often have more generalizable features. Later structuralist narratologists, such as Tzvetan Todorov and Gérard Genette, refine and complicate Propp’s somewhat simplistic structure. Todorov, for example, provides a more complex set of functions than Propp in his attempts to find a formula, not just for folktale but for narrative in general. Unlike Propp, he allows for the reordering of elements and for more complex embedding of plot elements, such as through the use of stories within stories. Genette, meanwhile, moves beyond the concern for function to consider how the tale is told, distinguishing between mimesis (the presentation of events as if they are happening, with action and direct speech) and diegesis (the narrator telling the story). In our own literary analysis, we can consider how a text moves between these two modes and for what purpose, giving emphasis to particular events through the slow unfolding of mimesis or reducing the impact of particular aspects of the story through diegesis.