Month: September 2012

F. Rastier’s “Daddy Hen” is a very detailed analysis of “Toine” and a very good example of a modern structuralist reading (see bibliography here). I read the story without thinking too much about his article. I then went back to the article and compared my “naive” reading to his. (I will make the article available to you, should you wish to compare your own reading to his.) Some remarks he made, and neglected to make, attracted my attention. This post is a mix of a summary of “Toine”, of Rastier’s remarks about “Toine” and of my own thoughts about both (turtles all the way down).

Oppositions

Maupassant stories are generally seen as “fractured fairy tales”. They progress from an initial problem, usually something related to paternity (the counterpart to fairy tales which always end in marriage), then some magical object is found that leads inexorably to a miraculous solution; here it is the miraculous birth of chicks. Heroes in a Maupassant fairy tale are however never heroic; they are anti-heroes, ironic victims their own actions. Or more often, it is the villain who in the end is the hero. At the center of his stories is a practical joke, which is usually underlined in a parting shot by the unenviable hero or the triumphant villain.

The other dimension to his stories, that Rastier amply analyzes, is the use of an array of stark contrasts. Toine is fat and red like the apples (the setting is Normandy) used to make his “brûlot” (flambée brandy with sugar); his wife, gaunt like the legs of her chickens. Toine’s livelihood is about the pleasure of laughter and alcohol, the “rire chaleureux” that Rastier mentions. His wife’s livelihood is the production of food — turning grain into meat to be slaughtered. She is furious, he laughs.

The husband and wife don’t get along, any more than the ocean and the land that fight over the hamlet itself.

At the end of his analysis, Rastier subsumes these oppositions under a more general over-arching opposition, the yin and yang of the male and female genders. Taoist oppose hot/cold, masculine/feminine, upright/prone, before/behind, joy/sadness, life/death, visible/hidden, expansion/contraction, yes/no. To the female passive, sunken, wet, soft corresponds the male active, protrusive, dry, hard. However in “Toine” these features are mixed in the same actor and at times systematically reversed:

The “grotesque” nature of the text – emphasized by all its commentators – is in part due to this juxtaposition of features that are usually contradictory. (167)

The wife is more male than Toine, Toine more female than the wife.

The “dramatic” or “jarring” nature of the text can also be explained by that juxtaposition: heterogeneous classes cannot be reconciled. Hence the failure or implausibility of all the variations and internal versions of the story. (167)

He notes that:

The interpretative path described does not make it possible for us to choose an isotopy or variation or one where we might find the “deep meaning”. … The interpretative path of certain mythic texts show the form of a labyrinth, and that is why they indefinitely can attract and mislead readers. (162)

The fascination exerted by certain literary or religious texts, and the determined yet seemingly unsatisfactory readings they entail, are undoubtedly in large measure due to the fact that the reader goes round and round in circles as a result of the conflictual interaction between their hypotexts [different readings of the same text]. (150)

Is it this shimmering of meaning that makes a text mythic and therefore artistic? Or is there necessarily something more?

Mythology

Rastier is hesitant to engage in what he calls a “productive reading”. In a footnote, he reluctantly draws a parallel between dimensions of the Christ story and “Toine”: Toine as the Virgin Mary, the miraculous birth, the gathering of the peasants / shepherds as witnesses, and the sacrifice of the chicks. (Not to mention the pagan and Christian significance of eggs.)

Yet it seems likely that the effect of this text lies in part in the fact that it resonates with other texts. Jung would point to atavistic archetypes. In any case literature offers us figures – ready-made characters and situations – that are activated by the writer.

There is a rich history of women described as birds, from chicks and birds to hawks, harpies and owls. One biblical reference is to the ultimate castrating female, Lilith:

Lilith (Hebrew לילית) is a mythological female Mesopotamian storm demon associated with wind and was thought to be a bearer of disease, illness, and death. The figure of Lilith first appeared in a class of wind and storm demons or spirits as Lilitu, in Sumer, circa 4000 BC. Many scholars place the origin of the phonetic name “Lilith” at somewhere around 700 BC despite post-dating even the time of Moses.[1] Lilith appears as a night demon in Jewish lore and as a screech owl in the King James version of the Bible. [Wikipedia]

And men are certainly pigs:

“You’d be better in the stye along with the pigs! You’re so fat it makes me sick to look at you!”

And she would shout in his face:

“Wait! Wait a bit! We’ll see! You’ll burst one of these fine days like a sack of corn-you old bloat, you!”

Toine would laugh heartily, patting his corpulent person, and replying:

“Well, well, old hen, why don’t you fatten up your chickens like that? just try!”

And, rolling his sleeves back from his enormous arm, he said:

“That would make a fine wing now, wouldn’t it?”

And the customers, doubled up with laughter, would thump the table with their fists and stamp their feet on the floor.

The old woman, mad with rage, would repeat:

“Wait a bit! Wait a bit! You’ll see what’ll happen. He’ll burst like a sack of grain!”

And off she would go, amid the jeers and laughter of the drinkers. [Toine]

Since Homer, women have turned men into animals, and specifically pigs:

In Homer‘s Odyssey, her home Aeaea is described as a water mansion standing in the middle of a clearing in a dense wood. Around the house prowled lions and wolves, the drugged victims of her magic; they were not dangerous, and fawned on all newcomers. Circe worked at a huge loom.[1] She invited Odysseus‘ crew to a feast, the food laced with one of her magical potions, and she turned them all into pigs with a wand after they gorged themselves on it. Only Eurylochus, suspecting treachery from the outset, escaped to warn Odysseus and the others who had stayed behind at the ships. Odysseus set out to rescue his men, but was intercepted by Hermes, who told him to use the holy herb moly to protect himself from Circe’s potion and, having resisted it, to draw his sword and act as if he were to attack Circe. From there, Circe would ask him to bed, but Hermes advised caution, for even there the goddess would be treacherous. She would take his manhood unless he had her swear by the names of the gods that she would not.

Odysseus heeded Hermes’s advice, thus securing the transfigured freedom of his fellows. For one year, he and Circe were lovers. She later assisted him in his quest to reach his home. [Wikipedia]

In spite of all the structuralist analyses of mythology, there seems to be no consensus on the status and treatment of intertextual mythology.

Scientific structuralism

Near the end of the article Rastier says “In order that this exposé not be too long, I leave the rest of these observations to the reader” (165).

[to be continued]

¡Bienvenidos! Welcome!

FHIS 501 blog.

I want to learn Literary Theory!!

By Josimar Yácuta Verduzco

Welcome to UBC Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

The header image of this blog (an ocean coastline) seems appropriate for our course. It serves as a reminder of how meaning and form have cast their shadow on Western thought since the earliest times, beginning notably with the Bible: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”.

Earth, water, air, fire

In the classical Greek period, the atomist theories taught by Democritus (460 BC) set the stage for the four fundamental elements of Empedocles – earth, water, air, and fire. Not surprisingly, the same four building blocks were recognized very early in other cultures.

The atomists described things of the world as coming from combinations of elements – the form of the elements. Modern chemists would agree. But are these elements part of the world or part of our way of thinking about the world? If other cultures used the same divisions, is it because the world is the way it is or because the mind and human culture are the way they are? Do we have an atomist rationality?

Fire means something important for cultures, therefore it naturally becomes that through which we most easily understand other things in the world. More than a physical thing, it becomes a unit of reasoning, something that we can use metaphorically to describe and reason about other things, such as emotion. The fundamental element fire, like water, air and earth, is that part of language that spreads out through the mind and creates more language. (See Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things – not in our corpus of texts.)

The trough and crest of signs

Saussure used the trough and crest of a wave to describe the relation between the signified and the signifier. Where the signified is not, there is the signifier, and vice-versa. A trough is created by crests; crests, by troughs.

The linguistic fact can therefore be pictured in its totality—i.e. language—as a series of contiguous subdivisions marked off on both the indefinite plane of jumbled ideas (A) and the equally vague plane of sounds (B). The following diagram gives a idea of it:

The characteristic role of language with respect to thought is not to create a material phonic means for expressing ideas but to serve as a link between thought and sound, under conditions that of necessity bring about the reciprocal delimitations of units [my emphasis]. Thought, chaotic by nature, has to become ordered in the process of its decomposition. Neither are thoughts given material form nor are sounds transformed into mental entities; the somewhat mysterious fact is rather that “thought-sound” implies division, and that language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses. Visualize the air in contact with a sheet of water; if the atmospheric pressure changes, the surface of the water will be broken up into a series of divisions, waves; the waves resemble the union or coupling of thought with phonic substance. [my emphasis]

Language might be called the domain of articulations, using the word as it was defined earlier (see p. 10). Each linguistic term is a member, an articulus in which an idea is fixed in a sound and a sound becomes the sign of an idea.

Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound; the division could be accomplished only abstractedly, and the result would be either pure psychology or pure phonology.

Linguistics then works in the borderland where the elements of sound and thought combine; their combination produces a form, not a substance [emphasis in the original].

http://faculty.smu.edu/dfoster/cf3324/Saussure.htm

We think the ocean is where there is water. Saussure politely points out that in fact there is ocean where there is not land (or air or fire?), and vice-versa. Each is defined as the expression of the other. From that dual delimitation comes the coastline: “Linguistics then works in the borderland…” [my emphasis] (Saussure).

Isn’t form always a combination? Saussure’s goal is to make sure we understand that when we talk about language, we have left that other realm, the realm of substance. Chaos theory tells us how that happens.

That coastline? It is form, not substance. (More discussion here.)

Chaos theory

Chaos theory and the whole dynamic, non-linear family (fractal theory, catastrophe theory, cellular automaton theory, neural network theory, genetic algorithms, etc.) confirm much of what Saussure describes, but in the most precise and mathematical fashion possible. This non-linear approach has become perhaps the most ubiquitous and paradigm-changing approach since Saussure and structuralism. (There are new competitors, such as string theory.)

The coastline is an illustration of a fractal – a line that is mathematically of a dimension greater than 1 but less than 2. The theoretical length of the coast is infinite because of the infinite number of twists and turns we can recognize as we zoom in from outer space to the atomic level. The line lengthens from the undulating edges of continents as seen from space to the wriggling line of a series of pebbles, all the way down to molecular shape. The same form of twist exists at whatever level of detail we may chose, so the coastline is said to be self-similar in its structure.

What these non-linear theories tell us in particular is how form develops and becomes stable even though the substance that takes on form is chaotic: “Thought, chaotic by nature, has to become ordered in the process of its decomposition” (Saussure). Form gives rise to form, but perhaps more importantly, the chaos of substance, its lack of form, gives rise to form.

Waves, then, are regular and of a particular structure because there are “waves all the way down” (see Turtles). Interpretatively as well, there are stories all the way down.

Theory of theories

This theory course is about considering where theories go.
[to be continued]