STRUCTURALISM

            Structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France in the 1950s.  It is first seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi Straus and the literary critic Roland Barthes.  It is difficult to define structuralism in a single line.  However, it can be defined that a work of art cannot be understood in isolation.  They have to be seen in the context of the larger structures they are part of.

            Peter Barry explains structuralism by taking Good Morrow, a poem by John Donne as an example.  According to him, a structuralist believes that a poem can be understood only if one has a clear notion of the genre which that poem belongs to.  Any single poem is an example of a particular genre and the genre and the example relate to each other.  In the case of Donne’s poem Good Morrow, the relevant genre is the ‘alba’ or ‘dawn song’. A dawn song is a poetic form in which lovers lament the approach of daybreak because it means that they must part.  But the ‘dawn song’ can be understood only by the concept of courtly love.  Further, the ‘dawn song’ being a poem presupposes a knowledge of poetry. Thus, the sturcuralist approach takes the reader further and further away from the text.  It takes him into larger and comparatively abstract questions of genre, history and philosophy rather than closer and closer to it. Peter Barry uses the analogy of chicken and eggs.  He considers the dawn song, courtly love, poetry as the chicken and Donne’s poem as the egg. For structuralists determining the nature of the chicken is the most important activity, whereas for the liberal humanists the close analysis of the egg is important.

            Thus in the structuralist approach to literature there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the individual work and there is a drive towards understanding the larger abstract structures which contain them.  These structures are usually abstract such as the notion of the literary or the poetic or the nature of narrative.

            The arrival of structuralism in Britain and the USA in the 1970s caused a great deal of controversy because literary studies in these countries had very little interest in large abstract issues which the structuralists wanted to raise.  The Cambridge Revolution in English Studies in 1920s encouraged  close study of the text in isolation from all wider structures and contexts.  It was purely ‘text based’.  But structuralism brought a topsy turvy change in the principles of literary criticism by switching its attention from eggs to chicken.

            Though structuralism began in the 1950s and 1960s, its roots can be traced in the thinking of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand Saussure.  Saussure concentrated on the functions of language.  He emphasised on how meanings are maintained and established in a language.  He said that the meanings we give to words are purely arbitrary and that these meanings are maintained by conventions only.  For instance, the word ‘book’ does not contain the meaning in itself but it is only we who have given the meaning to it. Secondly, he said that the meanings of words are relational and no word can be defined in isolation. For example the word ‘good’ will have the meaning only when the word ‘bad’ exists. Thirdly Saussure emphasised that language constitutes our world.  Meaning is always attributed to the object by the human mind and expressed through language.

            Then Peter Barry enumerates the functions of the structuralist critics. According to him, the structuralist critics relate the text to some larger structures such as literary genre, a network of intertextual connections or recurrent patterns or motifs. They interpret literature in terms of a range of underlying parallels with the structures of language. 

            Peter Barry cites Roland Barthes’ book S/Z as an example for structuralistic criticism. In S/Z,  Roland Barthes comments exhaustively on Balzac’s famous story Sarrasine. The five codes identified by Barthes in S/Z are:

a)      The proairetic code - This code provides indications of actions (eg. They began again)

b)      The hermeneutic code – This code poses puzzles which creates narrative suspense (eg. He moved stealthily and opened the door)

c)      The cultural code – This code contains references beyond the text ( eg. Baptism, a ceremony to cleanse a person of his sin)

d)      The semic code or connotative code – This code when organised around a particular proper name constitutes a ‘character’ ( eg. He is a good Samaritan)

e)      The symbolic code – This code consists of contrasts and pairings ( eg. Male and female)

After 1966, two new theories in context with structuralism emerged. They are Deconstruction and Post-structuralism.