Genette

Centre for Post-Graduate Studies Prof.S.Jayaraman.
& Research in English, Email:[e-mail]
Muslim Arts College,
Thiruvithancode-629174.
Gerard Genette. Structuralism and Literary criticism.
“Gerard Genette’s structuralism is, to some extent, like the ‘close reading’ of the Americans or the ‘verbal analysis’ of F. R. Leavis”—Justify.
How does Genette elucidate the meaning and scope of structuralism?
Gerard Genette’s theory of structuralism is dealt with in an exhaustive, elaborate manner in his brilliant essay ‘Structuralism and Literary Criticism.’ As a classicist, he wants to revive the classical tradition by means of structuralism.
Genette says that language is the common binding factor of structuralism and literature. Literature is primarily a work of language whereas structuralism is pre-eminently a linguistic method. Thus, their encounter with each other takes place on the terrain of linguistic material, namely sounds, forms, words and sentences. The Russian formalism was only a meeting of critics and linguists on the terrain of poetic language. The Russian formalism, the mould of structural linguistics, temporarily ignored content to study more closely the system of the convention of literary discourse.
Genette regards content as an essential part of structuralism. But he argues that it should not be imposed. In fact, structuralist-mode is constituted at the moment when message in the code is rediscovered by analysis of the inherent structures and not imposed by ideological prejudices. Structural analysis must make it possible to uncover the connection between pure formalism and traditional realism. Pure formalism reduces literary forms to a sound material. Since it is nonsignifying, it is ultimately formless. But, traditional realism accords to each form, an autonomous, substantial, expressive value. Here, it is structuralism that replaces term by term analogies with one for homologies.
In his study ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, Roman Jakobson argues that the structural study of poetic language cannot reject the analysis of the relation between code and message. Jakobson places the categories of meaning at the heart of the structural method. His concepts of metaphor and metonymy play a significant role in understanding structuralism in a better way. Metaphor, closely linked to romanticism, is based on imagining similarity between things otherwise dissimilar. On the other hand, metonymy, related to realism, signifies an effort or cause or attribute of a thing. Taking the exposition of Jakobson further, Genette argues that structuralism is under no obligation to confine itself to ‘surface’ analysis, quite the reverse. Since structuralism is a method based on the study of structures, it aims at the analysis of the significations. In fact, structures are not encounted objects, but are systems of latent relations. They are conceived rather than perceived, which analysis constructs as it uncovers them.
Genette stresses that structuralism must concentrate on the work itself. The work is not an effect but an absolute being. The idea behind structural analysis is what F.R.Leavis calls verbal analysis. Here, Genette emphasises that any analysis that confines itself to a work, without considering its sources or motives, is structural. He says that structuralism is pure analysis and it is thematic. In a brilliant exposition, Genette argues that a thematic analysis of a work of art culminates spontaneously. When tested in a structural synthesis in which the different themes are grouped in a network, their meaning is extracted. In fact, structures are those links which each artist reinvents according to his own needs. Thus, structuralism is the principle of coherence, as the German comparatist Spitzer rightly calls, its spiritual origin.
Thematic analysis is threatened by the danger of fragmentation. It is a danger against all immanent criticism. But structuralism serves as a refuge for all immanent criticism. Immanent criticism can look at a work of art either as subject or object. But Georges Poulet said that the end of criticism is to arrive at an intimate knowledge of the reality criticized. Criticism must succeed in re-feeling, re-thinking and re-imagining the thought from inside. Criticism also must avoid attending to any object. Instead, it must obtain a subject. Thus, it becomes a spiritual activity.
What Poulet, Paul Ricoeur and Wilhelm Dilthey called hermeneutics, Genette calls intersubjective criticism. He says that structures are experienced neither by the creative consciousness nor by the critical consciousness. Structures are at the heart of the work of art. They are accessible only through analysis and substitutions to a sort of geometrical mind that is not consciousness. Structural criticism is not tainted by either psychoanalysis or Marxist explanation. It is not a superficial examination, but a sort of radioscopic penetration, all the more external. That is why, the immanence of structuralism, which is not transcendent, is not the sort of immanent criticism which hermeneutics is.
Genette asks the reader to imagine a sort of division in the literary field. The one is that of living literature that is capable of being experienced by the critical consciousness. He reserves this for hermeneutic criticism. The other one is that literature which is not exactly ‘dead’ but in some sense distant and difficult to decipher. He says that its lost meaning is visible only in the operation of the structural intelligence. Genette believes that structuralism could treat this whole ethnographic domain of literature like anthropological material. By this, he believes, that structuralism would regain the terrain it had lost to hermeneutics. The distinction between structuralism and hermeneutics lies not in the object but in the position they take. To French philosopher Merlean Ponty, ethnology is a discipline. The same can be applied to structuralism as a method. It is a way of thinking that requires us to transform ourselves. Hence, Genette says that on the subject of the same work, the relation between structuralism and hermeneutic criticism is complementary. Structuralism speaks the language of distant speech and intelligible reconstruction. Hermeneutic criticism speaks the language of the resumption of meaning and internal recreation. Thus both bring out complementary signification. But, one could never speak these two languages at once.
Genette says that classical criticism from Aristotle to La Harpe was attentive to the anthropological aspects of literature. It knew how to measure the requirements of verisimilitude, that is, the idea that the public has of the true or the possible. The distinction between the genres, the notions of epic, tragic, heroic, comic and fictional corresponded to the mental attitude of the reader’s imagination. The reader, due to his predisposition of mind, immediately understood what to expect from each of them. Thus, the highest efficacy of literature rests on a subtle play between expectation and surprise, that is, between the verisimilitude expected and desired by the public and the unpredictability of creation. That is why the French critic Borges says that the great poet is not so much an inventor as a discoverer.
Genette talks of Valery’s utopian dream of a history of literature as a history of mind. He argues that literature is a coherent whole. It is a homogeneous space within which works touch and penetrate one another. He says that literature of mankind as a whole can be regarded as constituted in mind. Hence, he argues that a library, whether it contains one book, two books or several thousand, is a civilization that is complete, because in men’s minds it always forms a whole, a system.
Genette says that classical literature found its verisimilitude in genres. But, it did not know that they could, as a system, evolve. Here, Genette brilliantly describes their evolution. He says that a particular element that has a particular value in a given period will completely change its function and consequently its value in another period. He points out that the French critic and poet Boileau himself had witnessed the death of the epic and the birth of the novel, but he was not able to integrate those modifications into his Ars Poetica. Genette says that the 19th century discovered history but it forgot the whole. Thus, the individual history of works and of authors wiped out the table of genres. The structuralist idea, in this matter, is to follow literature in its overall evolution, at the same time, making synchronic cuts at various stages and comparing the tables with one another. Thus, the system survives while constantly altering. That is why and how the literary evolution appears in all its richness. It is in a continual change of function, as grotesque evolved, that the true lives of the elements of the literary work are to be found. Jakobson has remarked that the literary table of a period describes not only a present of creation but also a present of culture, and thus a certain image of the past. Likewise, Saussure also contends, as one of his two complementary facets, that a language at a given moment represents both what it is at present and what it was. Thus, a literary production of any given period becomes that part of the literary tradition which has remained vital or has been revived. Hence, the selection of a new tendency from among the classics and their reinterpretation by a novel trend is a substantial problem for literary studies and consequently for the structural history of literature. Genette’s brilliant elucidation of the meaning and scope of structuralism concludes with his prophetic words that the value of the method – any method for that matter- “may lie in its ability to find, beneath each silence, a question.”