Structuralist and Poststructuralist Criticism

Space and spatial form traditionally bear directly upon the visual arts, and only metaphorically, by virtue of the tradition of the sister arts (Ut pictura poesis), upon literature. The language of literary criticism is rich in spatially metaphorical terms such as “background,” “foreground,” “local color,” “form,” “structure,” “imagery,” and “representation.” The opposition of literal and metaphorical spatiality in literature could be accounted for as a residual effect of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing ’s classic and influential attack in the eighteenth century on the Ut pictura poesis tradition.

Lessing maintained an absolute distinction between the verbal and visual arts based on a belief that an essential difference between poetry and painting is the divergent perceptions of their signs: The proper domain of language is temporal, since its signs are sequential, unfolding one by one in linear fashion along a time line, whereas the proper domain of painting, whose signs are simultaneous images juxtaposed in space, is spatial.

The modern mind, nurtured in Einsteinian physics, would have no trouble collapsing the mutual exclusivity of Lessing’s categorization by way of the notion of space-time, in which the description of an object consists not merely of length, width, and height but also of duration. The fourth dimension is the inclusion of change and motion; space is defined in relation to a moving point of reference.

If time and space are not viewed as mutually exclusive, then Lessing’s categories cannot maintain the absolute distinction he desired to establish between the verbal/temporal and the visual/spatial arts. A painting, in fact, is not perceived as a whole instantaneously; rather the eye moves across the picture plane, assimilating and decoding in a process not unlike that of reading, which likewise entails movement over spatial form: the words written on the page. Given this interpretation of space and time, literary criticism of the second half of the twentieth century radically redefined the nature of the relationship between the sister arts.

The seminal theoretical work in Anglo-American studies on literature as a spatial art is Joseph Frank’s essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945). Frank asserts that in the literature of modernism (Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound), spatial juxtaposition is favored over normal linear chronology, marking the evolution toward a radical dislocation of the theory that language is intrinsically sequential. The formal method of modern literature is architectonic-spatial rather than linear-temporal, in that meaning is seen to arise ex post facto from the contiguous relation among portions of a work, rather than simply being represented in a temporal and progressive unfolding. The theory that the modern text has its own space by virtue of the simultaneous configuration of its elements—words, signs, sentences—in temporal disposition, is then extended to language in general in the model of meaning predominant in the critical movement known as structuralism.

Structural linguistics: Saussure

Structuralism is a method of investigation that gained popularity in the 1960’s in Paris and in the 1970’s in the United States through the writings of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, social historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, critic Roland Barthes, and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, among others. The diversity of the list is accounted for by the fact that structuralism grew out of structural linguistics, whose methods were considered applicable to several disciplines. Analysis is structuralist when the meaning of the object under consideration is seen to be based on the configuration of its parts, that is, on the way the elements are structured, contextually linked.

The linguistic theory grounding structuralism, and, by extension, literary criticism in the structuralist vein, is that of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Saussurian linguistics considers the basic unit in the production of meaning to be the sign, an entity conceived of as a relationship between two parts; the signified or mental, conceptual component, lies behind the signifier, or phonetic, acoustical component. The signifier is a material manifestation of what is signified, of a meaning. Any given sign will be conceived of spatially, inasmuch as it always occupies a particular semantic and phonetic territory whose boundaries mark the limits of that space, thus allowing meaning to “take place”; that is, allowing the sign to function. For example, the phonetic space within which “tap” remains operable is always relative to a limit beyond which it would no longer differ from “top” or “tape.” Likewise, its semantic space would be defined in terms of differentiation from other signs verging on “tap” semantically, such as “strike,” “knock,” “hit,” and “collide.” Thus, the value of the sign is neither essential nor self-contained but rather is contingent upon its situation in a field of differential relations, in the absence of which meaning would not arise.

Comparable to Frank’s attribution of spatial form to modern literature by virtue of its atemporality, Saussurian linguistics renders language spatial in promoting synchrony over diachrony as its procedural method. The synchronic study of language, whose basic working hypothesis is that there exists an underlying system structuring every linguistic event, would reconstruct language as a functional, systematic whole at a particular moment in time, in contrast to the diachronic method of nineteenth century linguists interested in etymologies, the evolution of language over the course of time. Space becomes a linguistic activity in structural linguistics through investigation under ahistorical conditions of the synchronic structures governing the language system and through the notion of the sign as constitutive of a space of differential relations. Applied to the analysis of poetic texts, this theoretical groundwork accords the written work a space of its own in which meaning is produced. The pervasive influence of structural linguistics, specifically in the analysis of poetic texts, might be traced to the investigation in the early 1960’s by Roman Jakobson of what he termed the “poetic function” of language.

Roman Jakobson

Roman Jakobson designates the poetic function (one of six possible functions fulfilled by any utterance) as “the focus on the message for its own sake”; it is distinct from the referential or mimetic function dominating in normal linguistic usage, where the meaning to which signs refer is directly conveyed (represented) by virtue of a univocal rapport between signifier (sound) and signified (meaning). The exchange of signs (communication) is not problematic. Whereas referential or mimetic language would focus on an exterior referent, the nature of the poetic function is introversion. The poetic function reaches its apex in poetry, according to Jakobson: “a complex and indivisible totality where everything becomes significant, reciprocal, converse, correspondent…in a perpetual interplay of sound and meaning.”

The poetic text is characterized by a high degree of patterning; its principal technique of organization is parallel structure: Patterns of similarity are repeated at each level of the text (phonetic, phonological, syntactic, semantic, and so on), such that the grammatical structure is seen as coextensive with the level of meaning or signification. In his analysis of William Blake’s “Infant Sorrow” (1794), for example, Jakobson uncovers a network of ten nouns contained in the poem—evenly divided into five animates and five inanimates, and distributed among the couplets of the poem’s two quatrains according to a principle of asymmetry:

Anterior couplets: 3 animates, 2 inanimatesOuter couplets: 3 animates, 2 inanimatesPosterior couplets: 2 animates, 3 inanimatesInner couplets: 2 animates, 3 inanimates

Recalling “a remarkable analogy between the role of grammar in poetry and the painter’s composition,” Jakobson compares what he terms the manifestly spatial treatment opposing animates and inanimates in the poem to the converging lines of a background in pictorial perspective. The tension in the grammatical structure between animate and inanimate nouns underscores the tension between birth and the subsequent experience of the world on the poem’s semantic level.

This type of structural analysis is characterized by the codification and systematization of the structural patterns grounding textual space, resulting in an immanent rather than transcendent reading of that space, one that reconstructs the rules governing the production of meaning rather than uncovering an essential meaning of that text. The tendency is toward all-encompassing systematic accountability in which every detail supplies information. The poem is interpreted as a highly structured network of interacting parts; it is a space closed off from “normal” language, a polysemic discourse whose semiotic play eventuates meaning within its borders, and not by virtue of an exterior referent or a priori idea that the poem is to convey. Structuralism thus implies the rejection of a purely phenomenological approach to language as expression, as denotation. As Vincent Descombes remarks in Modern French Philosophy (1980),

if a poetic utterance presents the construction that it does, this is not at all that some lived state (regret, desire) has elicited this particular form of expression in which to speak its meaning.…The poet listens not so much to the stirrings of his heart as to the prescriptions of the French language, whose resources and limitations engender a poetics which governs the poem.

The poem as productive textual space signals the dissolution of the notion of the author as a univocal source of meaning and intentionality situated outside the text and, thus, marks a radical shift away from critical analysis that would determine meaning as controlled by authorial intent or ultimately by the sociological, historical, or psychological influences structuring that intent.

Deconstruction and poststructuralism

The tendency in literary criticism of the 1970’s to examine the unquestioned assumptions of structuralism came to be called deconstruction, or poststructuralism. It is largely influenced by the writings of Jacques Derrida, whose examination of the Western concept of representation (of language as referential, mimetic) is responsible in large part for the highly philosophical bent of poststructuralist criticism.

Poststructuralism does not offer an alternate comprehensive system of textual analysis as a replacement for structuralist methodology; rather, it supplements tenets of structuralism. It is not a system, but rather a particular use of language that recognizes the involvement of any discourse, itself included, in paradoxes that might be repressed but cannot be resolved. Whereas structuralism tends to view textual space in the final analysis as the configuration of a unified and stable semantic space—a system actualized by its structure in which every detail is functional—for the poststructuralist a fully coherent and adequate system is impossible. The system in which all coheres depends on exclusion: the repression of elements that will not fit. For example, in the analysis of “Infant Sorrow” on the basis of grammatical categories, Jakobson is able to ignore the pronoun “I” in his discussion of animate and inanimate nouns. Taken into account, “I” alters Jakobson’s numeric scheme, undermining the specific nature of the parallel structures claimed to function in the poem.

When textual space is made to function systematically, it is only by the synthesis or exclusion of elements otherwise disruptive of the system. Such unified totality and closure are illusory from a poststructuralist point of view, which sees textual space effecting a meaning that is always at least double, marked by unresolvable tension between what a discourse would appear to assert and the implications of the terms in which the assertions are couched. Inscription, the writing per se, is thereby not seen as a neutral form at the service of meaning, but a signifying force threatening the determination of signification. In its attention to the graphic force of a word, its “letteral” meaning, poststructuralism would not pass off writing as mere transcription of the spoken word. In some sense dealing with any discourse as if it were concrete poetry, it recognizes the participation of the medium—the letter, the word as plastic form—in its own definition. Signification would be seen to be constantly displaced along a multiplicity of signifying trajectories whose transformations “anagrammatically” engender new possibilities: A signifier might verge on another, perhaps contradictory, signifier that it resembles phonetically or graphically; it may disengage other signifiers by way of semantic similarity; the visual impact of the word or letter on the page might cut a significant figure; signifying combinations might arise from mere juxtaposition of elements without any other apparent connection.

No longer conceived as the transparent carrier of a message, the signifier/word/inscription menaces the establishment of ultimate signification. Poststructuralism thus supplements the structuralist attack on the authority of the writing subject to include the dissolution of the illusion of mastery on the part of the critic. To the poststructuralist, the text is a space of semantic dispersal, a space of dissemination forever in flux, never to be completely controlled and mastered. From this standpoint, structuralist methodology is thought to be overly reductionist in its resolution of the text into a set of structuring components, too akin to the effort of archetypal criticism, or to Romantic notions of the work as an organic whole, albeit in structuralism an architectural one. Although it might be said in defense of structuralism that the analysis of structure is purely formal, that an essence (nature of being) is not ascribed to particular structures, structuralist readings imply essentiality by the air of puzzle-solving involved in their uncovering of the semiotic unity of a work, its essential governing principles. Structures are implicitly privileged with the status of eschatological presence; language’s suggestive power, the disruptive force of its inscription, is attenuated for the sake of form: that is, of defining the system.

Poststructuralism would regard, for example, the emphasis in structuralist linguistics on synchrony as an attempt to exclude linguistic force and change that might undermine the fixity of systematic analysis. Following the implications of structuralism’s principle of difference, of meaning produced by virtue of relational differences, one cannot escape the conclusion that the practice of language is implicitly diachronic, temporal, and historical because the principle is undeniably one of combination, selection, and exclusion. If meaning for the structuralist is the product of relational differences rather than derivative of an intrinsic permanent value attached to a word in itself, then it can never be fully present all at once at a given moment; no single word/gesture/expression/signifier is in and of itself capable of initiating the difference necessary for significance to operate. Like motion, meaning cannot be completely grasped in a present moment that would exclude a past and a future moment, and thus the structuralist principle of difference implies a paradoxically double movement at the “origin” of meaning that is repressed in favor of the oneness and synchrony establishing textual space as an unproblematic domain of simultaneous, systematic relationships.

The structuralist concept of textual space does attribute spatiality to language and not merely to a particular use of it (“modern literature”). It establishes a synchronic stable space containing the movement of signification guaranteeing that the text will be something other than nonsense. Language is dealt with as a spatial phenomenon, but to the exclusion of temporal movement and flux, which might trigger disorder or nonsense. In other words, a protest against Lessing’s separation of the verbal and visual arts by way of structuralism seems only to reverse the categories of space and time and thus remain within the mode of oppositional thinking: Language is synchronic when diachronicity is ignored, spatial when temporal movement is repressed. In an effort to exceed the limitations of oppositional thinking, poststructuralism supplements the principle of difference with what Derrida terms the différance operative in the textual dissemination of signification.

Difference = Différance

Différance is a neologism whose graphic play (in French) combines the meaning of “différance” (difference), with which it is exactly equivalent phonetically, and “deferring.” It articulates meaning as a complex configuration incorporating both a passive state of differences and the activity of differing and deferring that produces those differences. Différance is consequently inconceivable in terms of binary opposition: Like motion, it is neither simply absent nor present, neither spatial (differing in space) nor temporal (deferring in time). “Espacement” (spacing), a comparable Derridean term, indicates both the passive condition of a particular configuration or disposition of elements, and the gesture effecting the configuration, of distributing the elements in a pattern.

Like the Einsteinian concept of space-time, différance and spacing (articulated along the bar of binary opposition that would separate space and time, active and passive) disrupt the comfort of thinking within a purely oppositional mode. Derrida demonstrates such lack of guarantees in his reading of “hymen” in the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. An undecidable signifier whose meaning cannot be mastered, “hymen” is both marriage as well as the vaginal membrane. Whereas hymen as virginity is hymen without hymen/marriage, hymen as marriage is hymen without hymen/virginity. Hymen, then, articulates both difference (between the interior and exterior of a virgin, between desire and its consummation), and, at the same time, the abolition of difference in the consummation of marriage; it is the trace of a paradoxical abolition of difference between difference and nondifference.

Within a structuralist framework, meaning produced by textual space, albeit ambiguous or polysemic, is in the final analysis recuperable. Ambiguity is controlled as the various strands of meaning are enumerated and accounted for. Poststructuralism views the implications of such practice as problematic. On the one hand, meaning is claimed to be the product of semiotic play governed by a principle of difference (signaling the dissolution of the control of the writing subject) that implicates a definition of the sign in which meaning floats among signifiers rather than existing a priori as an essence—the signified. On the other hand, by enclosing this textual play within the boundaries of the “poetic” and seeking out and privileging structures informing that play, a very classical definition of the sign is implied in which the signifier serves ultimately as a vehicle representing an eschatological presence: an ultimate signified that arrests play and closes off the movement of signification. Dissemination, différance, and spacing would splay the fixed borders that characterize criticism’s structuring of the movement of signifiers within poetic space so as to explicate texts.

Sign, like symbol, ultimately refers back to a single source, a signified assuring of the determination of meaning; with the poststructuralist gloss on signifier as signifying trace, there can be no return to a simple origin. Signifying trace would articulate an effect of meaning without the illusion of understanding provided by binary opposition. Trace (again, like motion), cannot be determined as simply either present or absent. Giving evidence of an absent thing that passed by, trace “in itself” contains its other which it is not (the absent thing). It paradoxically “is” what it is not, inasmuch as its presence (its identity) depends on alluding to an absence (its nonidentity to the absent thing leaving the trace) from which it distinguishes itself. Its meaning or identity is thus split from the beginning, already always involved in a paradoxical movement of différance. The origin of meaning or identity is then not single; the first trace of anything is first only in deferring to a second in relation to which it becomes first—and in that sense it is more of a third. The poststructuralist endeavor is a recognition of the intractable paradox of the nonsingle point of origin of the difference that inaugurates any signifying system. Différance is, then, not so much a concept as an opening onto the possibility of conceptualization.

Image and Différance

A recapitualization of Pound’s theory of the image as a generative and dislocating force in Joseph Riddel’s “Decentering the Image” is a useful gloss on différance. Like spacing, which is both configuration and the gesture effecting that configuration, Pound’s image is both a visual representation (form) and a displacement or trope (force); it is a cluster of figures in a space of relational differences and a transformative machine articulating movement across the differential field. The image is not an idea, not the mere signifier of a signified, but rather a constellation of radical differences, a vortex whose form as radiating force resists the synthesis and collapse of differences into oneness and unity. Whereas formalist, archetypal, and structuralist criticism tends to privilege implicitly master structures, assuring a totalization of the poem’s fragments, Pound’s vortex would disrupt the assurance of an originating signified in its refusal to be resolved into the unity of presence, to be fully present at a given moment. As the signifying trace is always already split at its origin, constituted in a present moment/space by absence, so too is Pound’s vortex always already an image; that is, a field of relations, originally a text, the reinscription of a past into a present text, a vector, a force always already multiple and temporalizing.

There is, then, no continuity between origin and image as there is with symbol and the conventional sign. A poem is not recuperable in synthesizing totality and must be read somewhat in the manner of a rebus, whose play of signifiers annuls/refuses a simple reading, provoking, instead, reinterpretations and reopenings.

Poststructuralism vs. structuralism

The poststructuralist critique of the frame that structuralism would draw around poetic discourse provokes reinterpretation of structuralist discourse. Because the principle of difference provides for theoretically unlimited play of the sign within the textual space, what prevents that movement from exceeding its borders, that force from spilling out of its form? How can one unproblematically draw borders around different language functions, keeping the play of the poetic—that introverted self-referential “focus on the message for its own sake”—framed off from the mimetic referential space of common linguistic usage?

The controversy between structuralism and poststructuralism indicated by such questioning is not a simple dispute over methodological technique in the analysis of poetry. Deconstruction of structuralist discourse betrays the ideological move involved in fixed framing: the strategy of setting up distinctions to shelter “rational” discourse from the vagaries of the poetic.

Relegation of textual play to the poetic seemingly protects the language of critical discourse from irrational forces, guarantees it the possibility of lucidity, of the impression that language is under control—mastered by the critic. Meaning as différance/spacing dissolves the illusion of the possibility of purely logical discourse unfettered by the anomalies of the poetic, of a purely literal language unhampered by figural machinations. Furthermore, différance annuls the very distinction classically affirmed between literal and figurative. Signification would be neither purely literal nor metaphoric; there would be no literal truth represented by a sign because the very possibility of representation depends on metaphor: In representing an absent in a present, in transferring the literal reference signified, the sign “tropes” and metaphorizes (metapherein—to carry over, transfer). Likewise, if purely metaphoric meaning were possible, then there would be a literal meaning of metaphor to which metaphor would refer metaphorically.

Whereas for structuralism, space structures meaning, delineating its borders and giving it form, poststructuralism demonstrates that closure of meaning is illusory. Meaning as spacing/différance is neither fixed nor absolute but kept in motion by the figural, the figural both as metaphor usurping the position of the sign’s would-be literal referent, and as inscription, whose graphic impact on the page engenders disruptive anagrammatic combinations. Poststructuralism traces the catachresis at play in the space of discourse, be it poetic, philosophic, or critical. The signifying traces at play in the text are catachrestic in their deconstruction of the illusion of literal terms whose eschatological presence would stop the movement of signification. Catachresis—the metaphor created when there is no literal term available (such as the foot of the table)—is traditionally considered a form of abuse and misapplication. Poststructuralism demonstrates such misapplication as the condition of language: The sign necessarily fails to hit the mark; the signifier is always something other than its signified in order that language might operate.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, et al. Deconstruction and Criticism. 1979. Reprint. New York: Continuum, 2005. Five essays by leading postmodern theorists, including Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller.

Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. 2d ed. New York: Routledge, 2002. When it first appeared in 1975, this book introduced the concept of approaching a literary work by analyzing its structure. In a preface written for this edition, Culler defends his ideas against subsequent criticism.

Habib, M. A. R. A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. An award-winning book, praised for its comprehensiveness, lucidity, and accessibility. Explains literary theories, discusses writers and their works, and offers close readings of major texts. Almost forty pages are devoted to structuralism and deconstruction. Bibliography and index.

Harland, Richard. Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. New York: Routledge, 2003. Discusses all the major superstructuralists, including Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Notes, bibliography, and index.

Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2d ed. New York: Norton, 2010. An extensive collection of critical works, including several by leading structuralists and poststructuralists. Includes general introduction, head notes, and annotations, as well as a bibliography of modern and contemporary critical movements.

McQuillan, Martin, ed. Deconstruction: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2001. Sixty essential texts by writers from Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger to Jacques Derrida. Introduction by the editor. Extensive bibliographical references and index.

Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2d ed. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. One entire section of this massive volume is devoted to essays about structuralism, linguistics, and narratology by such eminent scholars as Jonathan Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, and Michel Foucault. Bibliography and index.

Selden, Raman, Peter Widdowson, and Peter Brooker. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. 5th ed. Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2005. A clear and balanced guide to a complex subject. Bibliography and index.

Sturrock, John. Structuralism. 2d ed. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. Sturrock’s work has long been admired for its lucidity and its impartiality. In his introduction to this new edition, the French theorist Jean-Michel Rabaté points out recent developments in the critical reception of structuralism.

Williams, James. Understanding Poststructuralism. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. Each chapter of this work concentrates on a key text, summarizing the main points and providing an analysis of the arguments advanced. The major criticisms of the movement are also noted and evaluated. Serves as an ideal introduction to the theory and the methodology of poststructuralism. Includes discussion questions, bibliography, and index.