Structuralism (Literary Theory)

Theory: The How's and Why's of Literature

Structuralism - Part I

Although other literary theories we will be examining (like Marxism and Feminism) predate Structuralism, there are such close connections between it and Formalism that it makes sense to follow the one with the other. It is also the case that, while many schools of literary thought were founded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some of them (again, like Feminism and Marxism) continued to grow and develop influence through to the present day, making them their own largely independent tracks of influence, rather than pieces of a larger line of continuity (though influence obviously extends between these approaches and others in a less direct way). New Criticism and Formalism both ceased to be after some time, and both of these approaches gave way to Structuralism, first in the east after the demise of Formalism, then in the west with the introduction of French theory (which spelled the end of New Criticism). Structuralism was an emerging theory of literature and communication that sought to integrate literary studies into a broader social and cultural context without sacrificing the specificity and uniqueness of the literary. It is no coincidence that this is the direction that Russian Formalists were headed in before their dissolution, because key Formalist thinkers, most notably Roman Jakobson, relocated both geographically and theoretically, bringing their earlier work to exciting new places, founding the first Structuralist school of literary theory, and even coining the term Structuralism.

Although Structuralism truly came into being in the late 1920s and early 1930s, one must rewind to an earlier time to discover the scholar and his work that made Structuralism possible, and which served as its foundation. Ferdinand de Saussure was a linguist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who found himself in a very interesting cultural moment. Linguistics (known then primarily as philology) had made great strides in the 19th century, but the findings made by various scholars were highly specific and their methodology was so diverse as to be almost idiosyncratic, making it difficult for various scholars in the field to benefit from one another's work. Also, when a consistent method is used based on solid theory, it is possible to make useful characterizations and generalizations that simply are not possible if the field in question is a free-for-all. Saussure's ambition, which puts us in mind of the goals of the Formalist project discussed previously, was to create a way of looking at the disparate findings of philology and to work them into a scientific, systematic, coherent discipline.

Of course, such an undertaking was not an easy one, as Saussure's project was actually to give a theoretical foundation to an entire discipline, thereby making it a coherent, intelligible science. So, rather than presenting new findings in the study of a specific language or discussing specific problems of translation across various languages, Saussure worked on finding out all he could about language itself. The approach of his contemporaries was historical, in that it focused on what could be called narratives detailing the birth, life, and development of given languages, as well as their influences on each other, and the effects of migration, invasion, and other cultural flows. Saussure, on the other hand, wanted to look at language as it stood in a given time, and what made it work. He wanted to understand the structures that govern a linguistic system, the structures that make meaning and communication possible.

No one would argue that knowing the history of a word or a language is unimportant, but what fascinated Saussure is how words mean through their interactions with each other now. To take a simple example, the words house and home signify the same basic concept, and can be taken as synonyms in most cases. However, when we put them side-by-side, their subtle contrast stands out. It is this idea of relational meaning that Saussure wanted to apply to language in a broader, more general way: every word in a language only has meaning because of its relation to other words in the language. This conception of meaning generation in language might seem somewhat abstract, but when you consider it more carefully, it makes sense. There is a certain, almost innate and certainly intuitive idea many people have about how language works, and this is based in correspondence to reality. So, I look out the window at a tree, point to it, and say "tree." I repeat this process for everything that exists, and I have my language. Simple.

Of course, the actual process of meaning generation is far more complex, and it relies on the existence of many other systems in order to do anything, to mean anything. After all, what has pointing at the tree accomplished? Certainly I have named it, but then what? I have not described it, defined it, or said anything about the tree. In order to do this, I need to bring in an entire system of far less concrete operators. If I want to say the tree is large, I need a word that tells me I am talking about the being of the tree (is) and another that tells me something about the magnitude of the tree (large). Now, try pointing out your window at an is or a large, and see what you can come up with. Large exists only as a relational concept, which makes no sense unless words like small and medium exist, and is cannot do anything outside of a system of signification which designates it as a being verb in a given tense. Refining this further, we can see that the word large takes on a different meaning when placed beside the very similar word larger, which is an even more specific relational term (and one which renders large smaller!). It is obvious from these basic examples that it is the system or structure of language that makes it work, not any inherent connection between reality and specific words or utterances.

Two vital terms introduced by Saussure regarding the distinction between specific speech acts and the system of language in general are parole and langue. Parole is the term Saussure used to identify specific utterances, which are examples of the language in which they are spoken or written. The wood was too hard to cut is an example of parole, as is hungry hippos. Langue, on the other hand, is the general system of language that makes and given speech act (or parole) make sense and do something we can identify as communicative. All native speakers of a language have a firm foundation in both of these aspects of linguistic meaning, though they have often completely internalized langue to such an extent that, although they unconsciously follow its rules, they could not explain them to you or tell you why they exist. Parole depends on langue for its meaning, and this is no more evident than in the case of people who learn a phrase in a foreign language without knowing what it means. It is possible for anyone who can speak to utter a phrase in a given language, and although the accent and intonation might not be perfect, the phrase will be comprehensible to anyone who knows the language. A favorite trick of cruel people is to give someone who does not speak the language a phrase with an embarrassing meaning, and then ask them to repeat it. The person is perfectly capable of uttering the parole, but since he or she is ignorant as to the langue, comedy is created; the person says far more than he or she knows.

The difference between langue and parole is one of the key sets of terms that powers Structuralist theory, and indeed which is later subsumed by Poststructural and Deconstructive theorists much later in the 20th century. Another key set of terms for Saussure which became a lynchpin of Structuralist theory is the difference between diachronic ways of conceptualizing language, and synchronic ways. Both of these terms sound highly academic and intimidating, but by breaking them down into their constituent parts, we can see that their meanings are clearer than they first appear, and far easier to remember than we might have originally imagined.

The first of these terms, diachronic, can be broken down into two separate Greek roots, the first being dia, which means throughout, or during, and the second is chronic, coming from the Greek word for time, and appearing in contemporary English with the meaning of continual and repeated. Putting these two Greek halves together, we can see that throughout time, is the transliteration, and this is quite close to the meaning of the term. Saussure uses diachronic to refer to the way linguists of his generation and those previous to it looked at language. As we discussed in an earlier article in this series, the way linguists and philologists approached the study of language was to look at its historical development and its transformation over time. Since Saussure coined this term, originally in his native French as diachronique, it has been used to describe not just a way of looking at language and linguistics, but a way of looking at any discipline, especially when contrasted with its sister term, synchronic.

As I mentioned previously, Saussure was interested in coming up with a new way of considering language, and practicing linguistics, and the term he used to describe this was synchronic. Again, the Greek roots of the word tell us a lot about it. The first piece, syn, comes from a Latin version of a Greek word meaning together, and can be found in many English words like synchronize or lip-sync. Combining this with the chronic, which we have just discussed, we are left with a word that means something like at the same time. Taken alone, this doesn't mean much, but taken in conjunction with its opposing term, it creates an excellent conceptual apparatus. Rather than looking at language in terms of its historical development, diachronically, Saussure wanted to look at it as it occurred in the present, or at any given state in time, without reference to what came before and after it. So, instead of looking at how a word developed as it did through the years based on various influences, synchronic analysis indicates an investigation that focuses on the relation of the elements of a given language which exist at the same time, and which allow words to take on the specific meanings they do.

Aside from becoming indispensable in the field of linguistics, these terms have broadened into regular academic use, and are applicable to a whole host of situations. For example, it is possible for me to study the literature of a nation or a language group either diachronically or synchronically. The former way would require me to look historically at the development of a given nation's literature, and to trace its progress across time. Looking at it synchronically, I would take the present state of the nation's literature, or some past state discreetly conceived, and look at its internal relations. It should be noted that it is also possible to combine both approaches to varying degrees, which will give a more complete picture of the phenomenon in question in many cases.

As is already plainly visible, the goals of Saussure overlapped significantly with those of the Russian Formalists, and, to a lesser extent, the New Critics, in that he was striving to make the study of language a science, and that he was attempting to create an autonomous new discipline that did not rely on any other fields of inquiry (like, in the case of linguistics, history) for its value and foundational premises. In order to achieve his goal, Saussure laid out four vital premises that became the foundation of the modern study of linguistics, and which turned into the basis for a large number of important literary theories, Structuralism foremost among them.

The first of these assumptions is that language, by its nature, is systematic. This is in contrast to the approach forwarded by the Formalists in their early stage, when they suggested that the examination of specific devices in isolation was the best way to ensure an accurate, scientific analysis. However, in the second period of Formalism, we can see a turn to the investigation of interacting systems. Essentially, the difference is illustrated in the opposition between the mathematical concepts of the simple operator and the function. With a simple operator, like the addition sign, for instance, the terms being related by it can be compared very directly, and a predictable outcome will be achieved based on the individual magnitudes and properties of the numbers involved. In the case of a function, however, the relation of the terms in question is determined by all of the others with which it is being considered. The outcome is far more complex and is never a simple matter of addition or subtraction. Based on its context and proximity to the other terms, each term's nature is affected.

This is an accurate, if basic, way of conceiving of any system. Once you assume that you are dealing with a system, the way you approach it is far different than if you assume you are dealing with a number of discrete entities. Part of the scientific investigation of any phenomenon is to make sure to disentangle it from other complicating factors so that the results obtained will be as accurate as possible. For example, if I am studying the properties of a compound, I have to make sure that I am dealing with that compound in its purest form, or else my results will be tainted. Looking at it another way, I have to make sure that the number of independent variables in an experiment is limited as much as possible. If I have too many, I can not decide which one(s) had the desired effect on the dependent variable, and my experiment will prove far less accurate.

If my object of study is a system, however, I must conduct my studies differently. Since I know that any given relation will be influenced by other relations, I must be careful to get a feel for all of the variables that are at work in anything I decide to investigate. Then, if I remove one, or change another, I can begin to get a feel for how the system as a whole is affected. Once I have determined some general rules of the system, I can begin to make more refined experiments which tell me something about the more specific relationships between some of the variables under consideration. This will always been done with an awareness of context, and without recourse to absolute claims (since I am never able to observe one variable out of the presence of at least most of the others without causing the system to fail, and therefore ceasing to be the thing I have set out to examine in the first place). However, work on understanding a system can build as one discovery aids in the next, and this was the principle under which Structuralism operated throughout its prime, and even into the present day.

A popular way of conceiving of a system versus an accumulation is by recourse to an old but effective expression: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Any aspect of a system, taken on its own, will have a certain power, a certain value, but this value will be far less than the value it possesses within the context of its system. Within a given system, the parts which make it up have synergies which affect their values, increasing them and changing their characteristics. In fact, because of this, the parts in a given system are often difficult or impossible to consider on their own, because they are so closely integrated with the others that it is impossible to usefully look at them when the others are absent. Sometimes, a part is so seamlessly connected to another that even placing a dividing line between them is a difficult undertaking, and the parts therefore receive their names as a matter of academic convenience, rather than because they are obviously two discreet entities. Because the individual characteristics of a part of a given system are not the primary concern, parts of systems are most often described not on the basis of their inherent natures, but rather on their functions within a system.

For an excellent example of this principle of relational identity of parts within a system, consider for a moment the old television show MacGyver. The title character was known for his ingenuity, and his trademark talent was the ability to create relatively complex machines out of normal household objects and substances. With no more than a piece of bubblegum, a paper clip, a bottle of bleach, and a drop of his own blood, MacGyver was able to build a bomb that could destroy the enemy base without harming himself or the person he was supposed to rescue. This might seem like a tangent, but Richard Dean Anderson's character illustrated perfectly how the parts of a system gain their value for being a part of the system, and how the value of something changes not only quantitatively (with regard to its magnitude) but also qualitatively (with regard to its character and function) when it is included in a system.

Looking at the piece of bubble gum on its own, I would describe its value as relatively low, since it is incapable of doing very much on its own. Its purpose is to taste good and to provide a substrate for making bubbles, which it does well, for a short time at least. However, when incorporated into MacGyver's system, the gum gains in value immeasurably. No matter what its function there is, it is participating in something far more powerful than tasting good and making bubbles, which means it has gained value quantitatively. Also, since its function is no longer to merely be chewy goodness, but rather to blow something to bits (by holding a key piece of the bomb in place, for instance, or combining with the bleach to create a flammable material), it has changed value qualitatively as well. This is precisely why systems must be studied and considered differently than discreet entities. If I decide that I want to know more about the system, studying bubble gum on its own will do me no good at all. I have to study it according to the role it plays in the grander scheme, and if I do remove it in order to look at it, I have to remember that what is valuable about it is determined by characteristics that are usually unimportant to the evaluation of gum (like its flammability).

The second premise that Saussure saw as essential to his study of language was the relational nature of language. This has been well covered in previous essays in this series, so a brief recap will serve here. To use an illustrative example, I will compare the value of the number 1 with the value of the word small. When I see the number 1, it always means the same thing, and stands for the same quantity. I can put it beside something, stand it near large numbers, place words or phrases around it, but it will always still have the same meaning and value. The word small, on the other hand, will mean different things in different contexts. We certainly have an idea of it, and we generally consider things like mice and lice to be small things. However, small simply cannot mean anything outside of the system of language, and is an inherently relational term. A small dog and a small house are certainly not the same size. A small person is obviously small, but when placed beside a smaller person, that person might seem large. As we can see, the relational nature of language renders is parts very fluid, far more so than entities that are non-relational. Keep in mind that numbers can also be considered relational (the digit one in the number 100 means something different, after all) since they are part of a system. However, relatively speaking (and I use the word intentionally), the 1 is less relationally determined than small, or any word for that matter.

Saussure's third foundational assumption is that the parts of language, its words and the elements which are chosen to matter within it, are arbitrary. Yes, you have heard me right, and you have correctly defined the word arbitrary as being based on something that is chosen at will, according to whim, or at random. Most people have at least a small part of themselves that balks at the idea that the constituents of language are arbitrary, and it is very natural for us to consider a given word somehow inherently connected to the thing it describes, especially in the case of concrete nouns. This is likely a result of the way we learn language, especially the language that we learn first and speak the best. People do not learn to speak from being trained in the art - far from it. Think about how difficult it would be to sit down with a 2 year old and begin teaching them the grammar of any given language! As most of us have seen, children learn a given language by hearing it from others, not through any kind of instruction. We can speak from an early age, and there is a great debate about what effect language acquisition has on self-consciousness (or vice versa, depending on the order in which they arise), as well as on memory. Can you remember what it was like to be alive without knowing how to speak? The answer is likely no, and so almost all of us grow up speaking and just knowing that a word means what it means and is connected to that thing as a matter of course.

However, when a person decides to learn another language somewhat later in life, the arbitrariness of linguistic constituents becomes far more clear. I remember taking French when I was about 8 years old, and thinking how very odd it was that they had all of the same things and ideas we did but chose (stubbornly, I thought) to use different words for them. And in some cases, the words weren't even all that different (like bleu for blue), which increased my suspicion that the French were merely being stubborn in refusing the usual words.

Even earlier, a Vietnamese family which had recently come to the country had come over to our house to visit. The young child, about my age, whom I was entertaining, did not speak a lot of English (though he learned very quickly, as young children do when it comes to language), so I thought I would be a gracious host and turn to the French channel to give him something he would be able to understand. I still remember The Smurfs was playing, and he was absolutely delighted, laughing and clapping. I left it on that channel, assuming he understood what was being said (unlike me). I was under the impression, at the ripe age of 4 or 5, that there were a couple of languages, and that if you didn't know one, you knew the other. After all, it just didn't make sense that people would have invented, and been able to invent, hundreds or thousands of languages, all mutually incomprehensible and unique. I mean, what would the purpose have been?

Of course, I have since learned that languages weren't all invented at the dawn of humanity through either divine inspiration or the combined minds of all the people living at that time, and that as a result there are thousands of them. I also realize that the boy I was playing with was likely just delighted by the images he saw (he and his family did not have a TV), and had even less idea than I did about what was being said. However, I do feel somewhat vindicated based on something I learned much later on. You see, the Vietnamese have a history of being colonized by several groups, including the French. So, although I didn't know it at the time, offering my guest the French channel, considering the options available, was an astute move.

Returning to the point at hand, we have established that we feel like certain words are inherently connected to the concepts and things they describe because we cannot remember a time when the concept and word were not connected. We have all grown up knowing that some word, depending on your language, stands for a given entity. The word tree, as a result, seems to contain an inherent tree-ness for me, and I cannot see the object without thinking of this word. Even the word arbre (which means tree in French) has a certain tree-ness about it for me, and both words seem linked to the things they describe intimately and completely.

However, this is simply not the case, and this could not be more obvious when other languages come into consideration. After all, the Chinese word for tree is a character containing 16 strokes and sounding nothing like either the English or the French words. Obviously, then, there is no central authority which caused words to be connected inherently with what they represent, nor is there something in the thing itself that makes one combination of letters or strokes more representative of it than any other. The only real limitations on what words can exist is the range of human sound and motion. For example, a word that required me to sound like a dental drill cutting through hard pudding would be impossible, since human beings cannot make those sounds (although we could communicate through dental drills if we wanted...). Several languages have been invented where combinations of sounds and letters have been arbitrarily chosen based on the whim of the inventor(s), and even children sometimes create secret languages which reveal the principle of arbitrariness at the core of all language.

According to Saussure, and the school of Structuralism which later followed his ideas, the arbitrariness of the words and sounds of language, as well as their lack of relation to the entities and concepts that they represent, meant that language could be infinitely flexible, and new words and ideas could arise into the future ad infinitum with no fear of somehow running out. Language is infinite and inexhaustible, and even when it it is bound by the rules of a specific language group, there is still an infinite amount of possibility available to it.

Attached to his idea of the arbitrariness of language is Saussure's claim that linguistic components can only be usefully defined and examined in terms of their ends (what they are designed to achieve) and their functions. As we discussed in the MacGyver example previously, parts of a system have more and different value when they are embedded in their system, as opposed to when they are considered in isolation from it. However, unlike the parts of the machine MacGyver created, Saussure argued that the constituents of language have no purpose or meaning outside the system in which they exist. The bubble gum we spoke about, when considered outside the mechanism of the bomb which MacGyver used it to create, at least had a purpose and function of its own. Words and sounds, on the other hand, are without any redeeming value outside the system of language. After all, what purpose or function am I fulfilling when I utter the syllable p? I have not achieved anything, have not made meaning, and unless I have some kind of idiosyncratic propensity for that sound, I have not even given myself or others pleasure. So, the constituents of language are completely dependent on it for meaning and purpose, which makes the study of language the study of systems in coordination, and never the study of its individual constituents.

All of the talk of arbitrariness, as true as it is, can also serve to be somewhat misleading if a key distinction is not kept firmly in mind. Note that I have been saying, to keep true to Saussure's meaning, that the constituents of language are arbitrary. I have made sure never to say that language itself is arbitrary. It might sound like I am being picky about semantics here, but there have been many who did not notice that Saussure was making this distinction, and criticized him unfairly and inaccurately as a result. Any given element of a language is not rooted in any kind of essential or natural way to the thing or idea it represents. However, this is not to say that the system of language itself, or any given language, is arbitrary. The word tree, as we have discussed, has no relation to the actual living thing with leaves that we can point to. However, in English, that is the right word to use, and it can be used correctly or incorrectly in different contexts, depending on the rules of the language. For example, in the sentence The trees are swaying madly the word tree would simply not be correct because the verb are indicates that there is more than a single tree. It should also be noted that, considered diachronically, the words we have today are not accidental. At one point, in an ancient language no longer spoken (known as Indo-European), all of the current Romantic and Germanic languages (among others) got their beginning. Related concepts were described in related terms, and the language I speak today owes a good deal to how things were in the ancient cultures in which Indo-European arose. However, while this does give a historical motivation to the words I use, it does not take away from the fact that even those ancient words were arbitrarily associated to the things and ideas they represented.

Theory: The How's and Why's of Literature

Structuralism - Part II

These first three principles of Saussure form the basis for early Structuralism, as well as linguistics as a whole, but they are not complete without his fourth premise, the insistence that language is social in nature, and that without looking at the social contexts in which language arises, language itself can have no meaning. This sounds like a very bold claim, and it is, but it is no less true for being so boldly stated. You see, at its base, language is a system of communication, and communication is always a transaction between two individuals, either present and live (as in a phone conversation or face-to-face exchange), or mediate and distant (as in a letter or even an email). Its purpose is to facilitate communication, while at the same time being the communication itself. This sounds confusing, but that is only because language is such a pervasive and overarching system. Any system which cannot exist outside a social system, and which can not come into being, change, or develop without a society to surround it, is inherently social. Language is such a system, and it would fail to be if there were no one left to take part in it in order to keep it going.

Although, as we have been discussing, language is a system, it is not a self-sufficient one, at least in part because it relies on extra-linguistic factors in order to achieve meaning, especially some subtle shades of meaning that are conveyed through means that are not solely linguistic. When someone speaks to me in a very animated tone, using their hands and speaking quickly, they convey their excitement not through the words they use, but through the way they use those words. Certainly the speed of utterance and the use of one's hands has no bearing on English grammar, but both certainly do have an effect on the meaning of the language. If I utter the sentence Yeah, I loved going to see the dentist, what would this mean? If I look at it purely grammatically, it states unambiguously that I enjoyed going to see the dentist. However, when we read a statement like this, we often fill in the intonation that is missing, which in this case would be a strong stress on the word loved, which would also be drawn out. This would indicate that I was being sarcastic, and that I really didn't like going to see the dentist at all.

We take phrases like this for granted because we use them all the time, but think about how much difference intonation makes; you can change the meaning of a straightforward utterance into its complete opposite without changing a single word! This is obviously a space where the human, interactive, social elements of language can come to the fore, and show the insufficiency of language as a system of words and sounds only. Another important social aspect of language is apparent when we examine the same dentist sentence without recourse to imagining the intonation on the appropriate word. Even if someone delivered the sentence in a complete monotone, or in the most natural way possible, we would still think it likely that the person was actually being sarcastic. This is where language's dependence on its social context becomes most evident, because, in this case, the meaning of the sentence can be changed to its opposite without recourse to any alteration whatsoever! It is obvious that something beyond language, even if language is as broadly conceived as to include intonation and gestures, is the cause of the difference, and this cause is social context.

It is evident to most of us that our previous example sentence Yeah, I loved going to see the dentist is likely sarcastic, but are there any linguistic clues evident here that make it obviously sarcastic? Perhaps one could argue that the lead word yeah is an indicator of sarcasm; it is a perfectly appropriate, although informal, affirmative response to a question, but it does often appear in front of sarcastic responses. So, what if we dropped the yeah from the sentence? Would we still have a sarcastic sentence? It might be harder to tell, but it would still usually be interpreted as meaning the opposite of what it is saying! Again, in the absence of any linguistic indicators, we have to turn to social factors to make sense of this.

There is no linguistic rule about dentist visits, and nothing in the rules of grammar to say that a dentist visit can't be enjoyable. However, almost anyone reading this sentence has been to see the dentist, and knows that it is not an enjoyable experience. Even more significantly, in contemporary society, dentist visits have gained a certain reputation that is pervasive in our culture. If you watch television, you have heard more than one character compare an experience they did not enjoy to a having a root canal, or to going to see the dentist in general. Since all of the activities associated with a dental visit are, at the very least, not enjoyable, and since so many of us experience such visits at least once or twice in our lives, it has become a standard way within our society to describe experiences we would have preferred not to have experienced at all. So, turning back to our example sentence, it is no part of the sentence itself that turns it to its opposite meaning, but rather a pervasive social idea embedded in the minds of readers and speakers that makes it so. No one enjoys the trip to the dentist, and so because of this social fact, the sentence automatically seems ironic.

A fantastic and telling example of the power of social convention in the formation of the meaning of a sentence can be found in Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," which I highly recommend you read before you go any further if you have not done so already. Set in a time when the Irish were particularly badly off, "A Modest Proposal" is Swift's suggestion of a solution to the problem of Irish poverty. Presented as an essay, but also as a kind of open letter to English lawmakers (who controlled policy and government in Ireland at this time), Swift suggests that the best way to solve the problem of poverty and starvation rests in using part of the problem as its own solution. You see, there were simply too many mouths to feed with the available resources, and too many children were being born to support. So, a very practical solution would be to continue having the children, but then to eat them, and to set up a kind of child-meat delicacy market. In this way, the Irish would have fewer mouths to feed, more food, and a thriving export industry, all of which could significantly increase their outlook, financially and otherwise. I have had students read this essay and react with outrage because they believed Swift was being sincere and serious, and this can be attributed to Swift's refusal to give himself away by using any linguistic means of showing that his proposal is intended to be ironic and satirical. The only way we can know his proposal is not sincere is that no one would think it ok to eat babies, no matter how well the plan works to achieve other ends.

Swift's A Modest Proposal is a lengthy and extended example of the power social systems have on language, but it causes one to wonder why one might decide to make their words say the opposite of what they mean. Wouldn't it be far more effective and efficient to actually state what you want to say in the plainest terms so that your message is clearly conveyed, and so no one mistakes your meaning for its opposite? In terms of what we usually think of as the purpose of language, this kind of thinking makes sense. After all, the purpose of language is to effectively convey meaning to others through the rules of its system, isn't it? As it turns out, this is merely the way language achieves the goals it does, and not the purpose toward which it is directed.

Not only is linguistic meaning determined largely by social convention, but the very purpose of language is inherently social. In the most obvious way of looking at it, whenever we want to convey information, there must be a receiver and a sender, and so a social interaction is presupposed by every utterance. However, language's purpose is social in an even more profound way. Whenever we speak to someone, we are not interested in sending them a properly phrased packet of information for its own sake. Instead, we want to have some effect on the person to whom we are sending the information. We don't place our interest on the message itself, but rather on what it is intended to do to its intended recipient. All language, therefore, is a means to the end of social influence, making language social to its very core.

One might argue that this is not the case in all utterance, but this is a difficult argument to uphold. In the most obvious example of a command, I expect my utterance to have an effect on the speaker which will cause them to do what I want. If I tell you Stop there and don't move, I obviously want you to stop, and I am attempting to use my words to achieve this end. I don't care at all for the utterance I made, but I do care deeply about its effects in the actual, social world in which it exists. A request is designed in the same way, but phrased in a way that is designed to get me what I want in a more polite way. A question is evidently concerned with eliciting a response, and there are a host of other utterances that are equally obviously geared toward having effects in the social world.

This leaves us with the simple declarative sentence, which is perhaps the least obviously social of the sentence types. It rained yesterday is such a sentence, and it seems to be aimed at nothing but conveying itself as clearly as possible to someone else. However, once we ask why someone would say this, we can quickly see that it is striving at the social in the same way all of the other types do. If this statement occurs is a phone conversation with someone distant, I am likely trying to make them feel closer to me by giving them some idea of what conditions are like where I am. If I say this to a stranger at the bus stop, it is likely an attempt to make polite conversation and start a simple conversation about a topic that is not likely to be too involving or controversial. If I tell this to the weatherman at my local television station, it could be a reproach for not having correctly forecasted the weather on that day. In every case, my utterance has a purpose that uses, but far surpasses, the linguistic.

With Saussure's four assumptions firmly in mind, Structuralism developed as a way of studying literature that took its cues from linguistics, and rooted itself in these linguistic assumptions. Literary texts could therefore be studied on a series of synchronic levels, moving from the sound, to the word, to the phrase, to the sentence, to the paragraph, to the entire literary work in question. Contrasts could exist at each of these levels to create meaning in the literary work, and the contrasts and comparisons at each level could act to reflect those at other levels, resulting in the production of a highly ordered meaning which was an important property of literary texts. For poetic texts especially, ordered oppositions and similarities exist on many levels, and all work in concert to make the most tightly arranged and compact way to convey powerful meaning the poem. Not all poems are created equal, but order on multiple levels is what, for the Structuralists, made a poem what it was.

The idea of ordered oppositions was a powerful force throughout the span of Structuralism, and this resulted in a strong concern for binary opposition, a term Claude Levi-Strauss coined to describe the kinds of oppositions he found at the core of a broad range of myths from various cultures. After analyzing the work of other anthropologists working on myth, and doing his own work, he came to the conclusion that beneath the level of the specific events in a mythic story, there rested a mythic structure that remained consistent through a large number of myths. His analysis focused on the presence of oppositions he consistently found in story after story, oppositions which include the raw versus the cooked, the beautiful versus the ugly, the human versus the divine, the dead versus the living, and many, many more. Being a thoroughgoing Structuralist, his goal was not to provide a convincing reading of a single text, or to point out individual features he found in a given myth. He was trying to find the structural rules which governed the composition of myths as a whole, the system of oppositions and symbols that underlay the production of myth in a universal way. When he looked at individual myths, it was through the lens of these broader structural concerns, and what he found and focused on with in them was not their individual differences, but how their unique surface features were actually concealing a hidden unity, based on rules which all myth followed.

The leap from the analysis of myth in the realm of anthropology to the analysis of poetry and prose in literary studies was not long in coming, and the analogues were so apparent that binary opposition was seen as an excellent way of analyzing literary works. After all, myth is a kind of fictional literature, and so it is clear that something that works for it is likely to work well for other kinds of literary production. Indeed, some of the same categories of opposition apply to both, and so the application of Levi-Strauss's ideas to literary studies was quick and pervasive. Other schools around at the same time as Levi-Strauss's work, including New Criticism, were predisposed to this kind of method, as it involved the close reading of a text to reveal hidden unities which might be overlooked. Its systematic approach was also appealing to the Formalists, and the early Structuralists, who both wanted to see the study of literature adopt a scientific mode of investigation.

The term binary opposition seems quite difficult and intimidating when one is first presented with it, and this is not surprising; the term almost seems to contradict itself. The first word, binary, has to do with a pair of objects in close relation to one another, while the second term places these linked terms against one another in what looks like a complete reversal. However, this tension is what makes the term, and the binaries it opposes, so interesting, and so useful for literary analysis. A primary component of literature, as most of us learn in high school or even before, is conflict. When this conflict occurs at the level of ideas, around terms that are closely related, this is particularly interesting, and sets up a dialogue that reaches beyond the surface of the text, and reaches the level of theme. Again, as we learn in high school or before, the thematic aspects of a literary work are what is most important, and when we look at more minute details, our task is to fit them into a thematic reading that relates the disparate elements of the text as convincingly as possible. You may disagree with this privileging of the thematic, but for the Structuralists, this kind of higher order consideration was at the top of their analytical totem pole.

Performing a structural analysis of a story using binary opposition is an interesting exercise that reveals a lot about this method. For our example, let's take Joseph Conrad's short novel (or novella) Heart of Darkness, which is rife with interesting oppositions begging to be brought out. This story (chosen in pat because so many people read it in high school and university) takes place primarily in the Congo, in the jungle and on the river itself. The land is inhabited by natives, and the Europeans are making inroads in order to plunder the land of its resources and to establish colonial control of the territory. The first opposition we see is between the tame and the wild; the land the Europeans come from is not inhabited by wild beasts, but only domesticated animals, unless you happen to be in a zoo. Africa, on the other hand, is a land that had not been tamed, and wild plants and animals are the norm. Africa is presented as a force of nature, a wild entity that the Europeans are striving to tame with little success.

This brings us to a closely related binary, the opposition between the civilized and the uncivilized. The word civilization has at its root the idea of the city, and brings with it all of the connotations of urbanity and sophistication that word carries. The Europeans, city dwellers for the most part, are civilized, mannered, and highly self-aware. They are attempting to civilize the natives, by setting up cities, and their own form of government, which they hope will eventually allow them to set up the social control needed to civilize the people as well, teaching them European manners and culture. One European, Marlow, manages to become the leader of a tribe of natives, and the tension between the civilized and the uncivilized is foregrounded vividly. He has used his civilized skills in manipulation to become their leader, and to make them into something of a city over which he is the ruler. However, he becomes uncivilized as a result, and it looks as thought this tension has finally driven him completely mad by the end of the tale.

As we have seen from the analysis of the wild versus the tame and the civilized versus the uncivilized, one set of binaries tends to reveal another, and all of the binaries in a given work are related to the others in a complex system. Looking at the attributes of each binary, we can see lists of oppositions developing, and these lists map on to the lists of oppositions that can be generated by looking more closely at each set of binary terms. The word wild, for instance, has a host of associations, including dangerous, natural, animal, and free. The word uncivilized from the other binary pair is analogous to it, and could include all of the terms just listed, including the lead term wild. On the other side of the binary match, we have civilized and tame, which could also be terms on each other's lists of analogous terms, and which would contain a significant overlap of these lists. A favorite Structuralist method is to take as many sets of binaries as they can find and to set them into a relation like I did above, only in a far more complete way. This allows the Structuralist to go from the relatively specific to a conceptualization of the work that is far more strongly unified and general.

One we have taken all of the binaries we have found in a given work and placed them on the appropriate side of the divide, we can often see that there is a larger binary which subsumes the others we have been discussing. In the limited example that we have been exploring so far, a category of binaries that goes above the two we have listed is subject versus object. On the side of the subject, we would place the tame and the civilized, while on the side of the object we would place the wild and the uncivilized. The tame and civilized are associated with the agents of the novel, the people who have power and authority and who control what happens. Also, the narrative perspective adds to this conception of the work, because it is presented from a European point of view. The Europeans are the ones with voices, the only ones who really speak, and they dominate the foreground of the work. The natives and their land, on the other hand, are relegated to the role of wild, uncivilized objects. The Africans are as often as not seen as part of the land or the landscape, constantly in the background of the action and having no effect or influence on it. The Congo and its people are constantly receiving the action of the European subjects; the Europeans have invaded the land, set up trade, and used the natives as slaves to do their bidding in some cases. Even Marlow has set himself up in the role of decision maker over the tribe he rules, and they become objects which he can manipulate in order to carry out his will.

This motion from one set of relatively specific binaries to another, and then the combination of these under an overarching set of binaries is at the heart of this kind of Structuralism. No aspect of the text is considered important for its individual difference from everything else, but rather for its structured unity and opposition which ties it into the larger framework of the work as a whole. Of course, the analysis I have done and the overarching binary I have chosen is not the only possible way to perform this kind of analysis on the text, but any good Structuralist analysis will have to take the binaries I discussed into account, because they are evident and essential to the text.

While the importance of binary opposition can not be overstated in Structuralism, it was not the only method of textual structuration the Structuralists had available to them, though many of their other methods involved it to one degree or another. Another of the dominant methods of literary analysis involved the comparison of two or more texts (though usually far more than two), and while it could also include an element of binary exploration, it relied more on features of the story and a general plot trajectory to achieve its ends. If this definition seems somewhat vague, that is because its lead terms are interpretable in a number of ways, and Structuralists took advantage of all the variety possible herein in order to do their analyses as thoroughly and completely as possible, as well as to add some element of novelty to investigations that likely would have turned monotonous relatively quickly.

One way to structure a story is to look at the key events that take place in it, and then to abstract them to a level that will allow for comparison to other texts. Taking the Odyssey as an example, one not versed in the method of appropriate abstraction might get completely lost, as Odysseus goes on such a great number of smaller adventures during his journey home that it is difficult to know which are most important and which are not. However, if we look at the story very broadly, we can see that a hero, having set out from his home, encounters many monsters and gets in many adventures, visits the underworld, and returns home successfully with newfound wisdom and knowledge. This is the typical trajectory of the hero's journey, and we can see it played out in many other literary works, especially those which have the designation of epic.

For the purposes of comparison, we can compare the primary story of Beowulf, in which a mighty warrior leaves home, encounters strange monsters and gets in many adventures, visits the deep underwater cavern of a monster (a kind of underworld), and returns home successfully with newfound wisdom and knowledge. I can hear some of you complaining now that this kind of analysis and comparison does not do justice to the rich textures of either work, and that by abstracting them to their barest constituents, you are no longer dealing with literary works, but a selective list of information, chosen to line up with a predetermined set of criteria. In truth, I agree completely with this criticism when it is leveled at a comparison of a small number of texts. However, when this method of structuration through abstraction is applied to many, many works, and they are all found to have even this much in common, I think this method can tell us something important about literature in general. To be certain, you are sacrificing the literary essence of the texts you analyze in this way, but you are mapping out an interesting continuity which shows a general trend in one kind of literary composition. Since the Structuralists are most concerned with this kind of general finding, this kind of analysis fits their scientific objectives quite well. By looking at the works in this way, the Structuralists were able to create general criteria which can help in the definition of an entire genre, and while not all works labeled as such will follow this structure perfectly (we even had to fudge Beowulf's trip to the underworld), we can read the variations as logical, metaphorical transformations.

Whereas the analysis of individual texts in Structuralist terms usually involved binary opposition, and the analysis of many texts involved a high level of abstraction, the analysis of small numbers of texts, especially pairs of texts, was done in a way that preserved the literary specificity of each text while still making interesting structural opposition apparent between the texts. The way this was achieved was through the abstraction of story events and plot trajectories, but to a far more limited degree than in the analysis of many texts together.

Let us suppose, for example, that we want to carry out a structural analysis of two texts, which we will label A and X (and such functional designations were highly favored by the Structuralists, who wanted to make their analyses as mathematical and scientific and possible in most cases). In text A, we see a man and a boy (labeled M and B), who escape from the law and run into the wilderness. The boy ends up murdering the man, and the man's ghost haunts the boy until he is driven mad and kills himself. In story B, on the other hand, we see an elderly woman and a young woman (labeled E and Y) who are shipwrecked on a deserted island. The young woman dies by accident, and her ghost helps the elderly woman to survive till she dies of natural causes.

Now, while one can again make the argument that this kind of analysis strips the texts of their literary value, keep in mind that my example must be truncated in the interests of space and time, and that Structuralist analyses of texts can be less abstract than both my previous example and this one. Here, we have two stories that are quite different, but which possess structures that are highly comparable, and overlapping. In both, we have the opposing binary of young versus old. In both texts, the duo leaves everyday society, and find themselves having to take care of themselves in hostile situations. Next, we are presented with an inversion, which is another kind of structural relation which can take place within a context of parallels. In one story, the old person dies and returns to haunt the younger. In the other, the younger dies, and returns to haunt the older. From here, the ghosts have a great influence on their living counterparts, and maintain this influence until the living join the dead. The outcomes and motivations are very different, as are the surface details, but the general trajectory of each story is very structurally similar.

Although some of the examples I have given have been not much more than caricatures of actual Structuralist analyses, they capture the general outlines of the principles the Structuralists used to study literary (and many other kinds of cultural) works. As time progressed, Structuralist analysis became increasingly refined, and even up to the present day, there are those who consider themselves Structuralists, although they would be quick to mention that Structuralism now and Structuralism 40 years ago are not the same thing. Several other schools of literary theory have arisen in that time, and provided a critique of Structuralism that has proven highly informative to contemporary Structuralists, but which has also made Structuralism appear to be a largely outdated and limited approach. However, I believe that we can learn a lot from the approaches and overall philosophy the Structuralists, and that it is a strong enough approach that it should not be quickly and easily forgotten.