Chapter 7: Structuralist Criticism

According to Tyson, (1999) structuralism is an interdisciplinary movement of thought which became fashionable though the 1960s and early 1970s – when it acquired a certain radical cachet – but which has left its most durable mark in the fields of linguistics, anthropology and literary theory. What unites structuralist in these different fields is the principle, derived from Ferdinand de Saussure, that cultural forms, belief systems, and ‘discourses’ of every kind can best be understood by analogy with language, or with the properties manifested in language when treated form a strictly synchronic standpoint what sees to analyze its immanent structures of sound and sense. Structure then, is any conceptual system that has the following three properties: (1) the system functions as a unit, its not merely a collection of independent items, (2) the system is dynamic, capable of change, and (3) it is self-regulating, meaning it never moves beyond its own structural system. In other words, “structuralism sees itself as a human science whose effort is to understand , in a systematic way, the fundamental structures that underlie all human experience and, therefore, all human behavior and production” (p. 198). There are two fundamental levels of structuralism – one visible and the other is invisible. The visible world consists of all the countless objects, activities, and behaviors we observe, participate in, and interact with in everyday life, where the invisible worlds consists of structures that underlie and organize all of these phenomena so that we can make sense of them.

Basic to this approach is the idea that we can discern underlying structures behind the often fluctuating and changing appearances of social reality. While the appearance we observe appears to change, the configuration underneath is a frame that holds up the different expression of literature. Structural linguistics is a model built on the notion that a language can be described in terms of a basic set of rules that govern the combination of sounds to produce meanings. For Levi-Strauss and semiotics generally, these underlying structures are categories of mind, in terms of which we organize the world around us. Within the structure of literary genres, we have four structural principals that continue to be erected, but with a different form, these include comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony/satire. As we examine stories written over time, we see that the basic structure of romance is a world of adventure, of successful quests in which brave virtuous heroes and beautiful maidens overcome villainous threats to the achievement of their goals, for example Sleeping Beauty. Irony, is the real world seen through tragic lens, a world in which the protagonists is defecated by the puzzling complexities of life and satire, is the real world seen through a comic lens, a world of human folly, excess, and incongruity where human fragility is mocked, sometimes with biting, merciless humor. Tragedy involves movement form the ideal world to the real world, from innocence to experience, where the hero with the potential to be superior, like a romantic hero, falls from his romantic height into a world of loss and defeat, which he can never rise such, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601). In contract, comedy involves a movement from the real world to the ideal, form experience to innocence, where the protagonist is caught in a web of threatening, difficulties but manages, through various twists in the plot, to overcome the circumstances that have thwarted him and attain happiness.

As we see from the myth of Tristan and Iseult, one of the earliest romance tales second only to Lancelot and Guinevere as a great loves of the Arthurian Legends. The story of their tragic love has been the subject o numerous medieval and modern retellings. A common version of their story is that Tristan brought the maiden Iseult from Ireland to Britain to be the bride of his uncle, King Mark. On their voyage, they drink a potion that made them fall eternal in love with each other. When King Mark learns of their love, he banished Tristan. Tristan sent for Iseult as he was dying, but she arrives after his death and died herself beside his corpse. This is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s tale of Romeo and Juliet who were kept apart by feuding families, the Montague and Capulet. The tension escalates until Romeo reluctantly fights his relative, Mercuto after secretly marring Juliet and kills him in a duel. Friar Lawrence prepares a potion that allows Juliet to fall in deathlike coma as part of an effort to bring realization of the destruction of their family feud, with hope of resolving the conflict. Romeo is unaware of the plot and learns that his love has died, in anguish he too drinks poison and dies. When Juliet wakes, she is overcome with grief and plunges a dagger into herself. In 1961, Arthur Lauet writes a play loosely adapted from Romeo and Juliet, this time set in modern New York City. Instead of warring family, Tony and Maria are the lovers kept apart by the quarrel of two street gangs, the Sharks and the Jets. Eventually a rival gang member murders Tony in the street. While some may consider it a stretch, the recent story by Anne Proulex, which barrowed themes from the previous stories to create a poignant story of forbidden and secretive relationship between two cowboys in Brokeback Mountain. In this raw, powerful story of two young men, a Wyoming ranch herder and a rodeo cowboy, who meet in the summer of 1963 while sheep herding in the high grasslands of the Rocky Mountains. This time, society’s mores around acceptable sexuality is what keeps these two men apart and eventually results in the death of Jack at the hands of homophobic men of the time. Each of these stories has an underlying structure where two lovers are kept apart by circumstances beyond their control, and prevent them from loving one another. Each story ends in a tragic death, reminding us of the loss of potential. Although the characters change, the locations and time of the stories is different, the similarity is undeniable.