Barthes: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Culler

Author:Jonathan Culler
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2010-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

to take as a moral goal not the decipherment of a work’s meaning but the reconstruction of the rules and constraints of that meaning’s elaboration. . . . The critic is not responsible for reconstructing the work’s message but only its system, just as the linguist is not responsible for deciphering the sentence’s meaning but for establishing the formal structure that permits this meaning to be transmitted.

pp. 259–60/256–7

In order to understand the functioning of the most interesting and innovatory literary works, one must reconstruct the systems of norms they parody, resist, or disrupt.

One can distinguish four aspects of the structuralist study of literature. First, there is the attempt to describe the language of literature in linguistic terms so as to capture the distinctiveness of literary structures. Barthes frequently employs linguistic categories in discussing literary discourse; he is particularly interested in Émile Benveniste’s distinction between linguistic forms that contain some reference to the situation of enunciation (first and second person pronouns, expressions such as here, there, yesterday, and certain verb tenses) and forms that do not. This distinction helps Barthes to analyse some aspects of narrative technique, but he has a piratical approach to linguistics and does not attempt systematic linguistic descriptions as some structuralists do.13

The second major project is the development of a ‘narratology’ that identifies the constituents of narrative and their possible combinations in different narrative techniques. Building on the work of the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp, whose ‘grammar’ of folktales describes basic motifs and their possibilities of combination, French structuralists concentrated particularly on plot, asking what its basic elements are, how they combine, what the elementary plot structures are, and how effects of completeness and incompleteness are produced. Barthes wrote a long introduction to a special issue of Communications on this subject (‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’ in Image, Music, Text), and his later works emphasize both the role of plot structures in assuring the intelligibility of writing and the effects that can be produced by disrupting narrative expectations. It is impossible to produce a narrative ‘without reference to an implicit system of units and rules’, he writes (Image, Music, Text, p. 81); it is only in relation to conventional narrative expectations that constructions can be excessive or deceptive.

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