Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics
03.05.06Filed Under: Theoryand tagged Naturalization, Poetics, Sign, Structuralism
An indispensible book on the poetics of fiction and lyrics, as well as a good overview of structuralism which points to its history and further development.
Here, I am particularly interested in his work on convention and naturalization. Culler’s basic argument is how the use of conventions is necessary in order to naturalize writing. Naturalization, for Culler, is not a negative thing, but the very way we read:
“To study writing, and especially literary modes of writing, one must concentrate on the conventions which guide the play of differences and the process of constructing meanings. Barthes emphasizes that all modes of writing have a monumentality which is foreign to spoken language [...] Writing has something of the character of an inscription, a mark offered to the world and promising, by its solidity and apparent autonomy, meaning which is momentarily deferred. Precisely for that reason it calls for interpretation, and our modes of interpretation are essentially ways of constructing communicative circuits into which we can fit.” (156)
Literature, for Culler as for Barthes, is a form of communication, even if it is a distinctly different form of communication than spoken language:
Yet the urge to assimilate that power and permanence or to let that formal organization work upon us requires us to make literature into a communication, to reduce its strangeness, and to draw upon supplementary conventions which enable it, as we say, to speak to us. The differnce which seemed the source of value becomes a distance to be bridged by the activity of reading and interpretation. (157)
There are different ways of bridging this difference, and Culler goes into some of them:
“A genre, one might say, is a conventional function of language, a particular relation to the world which serves as norm or expectation to guide the reader in his encounter with the text. [...] To read a text as a tragedy is to give it a framework which allows order and complexity to appear. Indeed, an account of genres should be an attempt to define the classes which have been functional in the process of reading and writing, the sets of expectations which have enabled readers to naturalize texts and give them a relation to the world or, if one prefers to look at it in another way, the possible functions of language which were available to writers at any given period.” (159)
Culler thus argues that reading is a process of assimilation, of bringing us into contact with the text :
“To assimilate or interpret something is to bring it within the modes of order which culture makes available, and this is usually done by talking about it in a mode of discourse which a culture takes as natural. This process goes by various names in structuralist writing: recuperation, naturalization, motivation, vraisemblablisation.” (161)
He then provides a definition of five levels of vraisemblance:
“One might distinguish five levels of vraisemblance, five ways in which a text may be brought into contact with and defined in relation to another text which helps to make it intelligible. First there is the socially given text, what is taken as the ‘real world’. Second, but in some cases difficult to distinguish from the first, is a general cultural text: shared knowledge which would be recognized by participants as part of culture and hence subject to correction or modification but which none the less serves as a kind of ‘nature’. Third, there are the texts or conventions of a genre, a specifically literary and artificial vraisemblance. Fourth, comes what might be called the natural attitude to the artificial, where the text explicitly cites and exposes vraisemblance of the third kind so as to reinforce its own authority. And finally, there is the complex vraisemblance of specific intertextualities, where one work takes another basis or point of departure and must be assimilated in relation to it. At each level there are ways in which the artifice of forms is motivated or justified by being given a meaning.” (164)
Although he develops these levels further, the major thing I am interested in here is the way that Culler argues for reading as an assimilating activity. He comes naturally from a structuralist perspective, and it is this which makes him focus on the text as being assimilated by being read. It is made ‘ours’, as it were, and this happens in relation to the various networks of culture. Culler thus aptly demonstrates the structuralist side of textual existence: meaning exists and does so because of our situatedness, be it culture, genre, the real or whatever.
The flip-side of this is the poststructuralist approach, where the text overflows, meaning is uncertain and lacking and there is no fixed point from which to ‘view’ or assimilate a text. We should here keep in mind that this ‘choice’ in approach is not a matter of either-or, but is much more usefully viewed as a both-and, depending on the situation. We need to understand textual meaning as constructed by this oscillation between one state and the other. Certainly we understand most texts rather easily and straightforwardly. Yet upon closer examination, we often find things we had missed, overlooked, misunderstood and what not. Nor is our understanding of a text static: we constantly change and modify our understanding and perception of a text. While textual assimilation is thus a definite part of reading, we should not make it the only part of reading, nor believe that it can explain everything; it is not a master discourse.
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April 1st, 2009 at 2:00 pm