Maitrise des outils methodologiques Flashcards
passage tire de “The Sound and the Fury
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A) Repérages d’ordre narratologique/ progression
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dramatique :
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La scène centrale : la géométrie des relations
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interpersonnelles s’installe
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Notion d’interdit que l’on transgresse
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it’s not wet … “ you know she will whip you when you get your dress wet [structuration] ?
la scène est donnée à voir à travers une perception
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immédiate , non médiatisée, dévoilement progressif ————————————— ———————————
quelle dimension du texte ?
personnages périphériques ; Versh et Benjy
L’enfermement solipsiste participe de la négation de l’autre.
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Quel aspect du texte est-il en jeu?
Codes et systèmes de valeur soumis à un travail de sape
quel aspect de l’ecriture de l’auteur ?
logique enfantine manichéenne
quel aspect du texte?
Le code victorien est mis en question
Dichotomie être / parâitre
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quel aspect de l’ecriture de l’auteur?
Alice et le lecteur s’égarent vite dans les sables du langage
quel aspect textuel?
La réintégration du groupe se fait à l’aide d’un rituel
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initiatique
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quelle dimension du texte?
télescopages de diverses formes du discours
quelle dimension du texte?
. La reconstruction
Elle s’opère grâce à deux èlèments constitutifs : le regard
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et la parole
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quel est le repere textuel utilise?
Regard médiatisé par celui des autres
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C'est la parole qui le consacre comme sujet
but de l'isotopie?
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Ce n’est pas tant la guerre que le discours sur la guerre qui compte
A quoi sert ce reperage stylistique?
Ces deux éléments sont hiérarchisés : il y a d’abord la parole puis le regard
A quoi sert cette structuration?
La confusion des valeurs
Fragilité de la vision ; fragilité du discours : parole incohérente
quelle est la problematique du texte?
Le discours constitutif du héros est également miné de l’intérieur
quel aspect de l’ecriture de l’auteur ?
Cl : plusieurs sortes de discours qui se télescopent : quels sont ces discours?
quels sont les elements de sens du texte?
féminine , bienfaitrice : sens?
d’Henry James
quel aspect de l’ecriture de l’auteur?
Jeu sur le principe du plaisir et le principe de realite [concept]
strategie narrative
[structuration]
[dynamique de l’écriture]
[structuration]
[dynamique de l’écriture]
representation en vue du lecteur
Déficit interprétatif [sens]
[stratégie narrative]
[stratégie narrative]
[stratégie narrative]
isotopie
[stratégie narrative]
stratégie narrrative
dynamique de l’ecriture
[progression dramatique ]
[sens]
[dynamique de l’écriture]
un discours réaliste
Un discours romantique
[dynamique de l’écriture]
[dynamique de l’écriture] , effets de représentation en direction d’un lecteur.
(repérage narratologique)
dechiffrage du texte :
- strategie narrative
- dynamique de l’ecriture
- progression dramatique
- structuration
- dimension epistemologique
“Poor, “meagre” , “mean” , sont les indices*:
La narration est prise en charge par un passage descriptif puis par un dialogue
la description a pour charge d’enraciner le récit dans un lieu référentiel
La scène est écrite sous le signe de la répétition, de l’enfermement , de la circularité.
Recentrage du débat
Ce passage est organisé autour d’une dynamique de
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contraste : l’ancien et le moderne
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Une mise en scène de la lutte entre chaos dionysiaque et
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ordre apollinien
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Scène inscrite dans la série des scènes provinciales, endroit de perversion
La première partie du texte est le lieu d’un affrontement
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par la parole et la gestuelle , évaluer le poids du non-dit *
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L’axe de la communication s’inverse
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Le jeu est la métaphore privilégiée du roman
le poétique
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Cette technique permet au héros de retrouver un état
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mythique originel
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*d’une construction littéraire , subjective et de la présence d’une instance littéraire subjective qui ne cesse d’évaluer
déplacements de Birkin, d’Uursula .
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La pensée manipule le langage et le langage devient action
Aspect cinématographique.
Caractère statique et elliptique de cette scène où le langage prend le relais de l’action
: les sourires de Ned Beaumont
Parcours qui va de l’abstraction à la perception sensuelle
décalages et ses ruptures , dans ses questions sans
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réponses
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truquage du sens
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Moll flanders
Rite of passage
Dorothée acts the part of the initiator
Newgate is a symbolic rather than a referential place
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with its realistic topography
A character whose emotional involvement limits his
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intellectual abilities
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the description becomes fantasmatic
hyperbolic vocabulary
She can overcome that anxiety by the distanciation of art
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Notion of elusive reality
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The changing of his name can be seen as part of the process of losing his inner self
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Raging storms -or the elements -water , fire ,air , , earth _ as Durand and Bachelard have shown , frequently have a symbolical and archetypal value.
the dialogue is punctuated by narratorial interventions
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Narrative rhythm is slowed down
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Immobility in space analogically suggests the immobility
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of time
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This sequence is characterized by a sudden acceleration of tempo
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The rhythm begins to gather speed
Dramatic swiftness of the action
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She soon drifts into the past
To further the characterization
The unspoken tension between the two sisters* :
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The character becomes a type embodying a moral
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standpoint
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this unscientific discourse is at odds with historical discourse which aims at complete closure so as to become historical truth
Focalisation in this text is mainly used for purposes* of
internal focalisation contributes to* :
Process of objectivization *
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on the discursive level
The elements in the text channel the reader into a symbolic mode of interpretation
Pantheistic vision of peace and harmony
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relationship.
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In the overall construction of characters , the reader is bought face to face with these
A microcosm in which aesthetic perfection seems to be
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the governing principle
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Monolithic descriptions vs disconnected remarks
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The setting , far from being static and closed is one that is dynamic and open , including both indoor and
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outdoor places
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The word “tension “, on the surface level designates a part of the machine
Pivotal character
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Transitional objects
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She tries to negotiate between her consciousness of death and her desire for continuity
Memories of the past become perceptions : “she saw”
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Veronica’s construction of the past is double-edged : a
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kind of virtual past and real events
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metafictional process
The farce serves to create
He plays the conventional part of the culprit and uses
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the conventional code of adults according to which
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children are thoughtless
throughout the novel the dichotomy between outward
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passivity and inward intensity of feeling and mental
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activity is used to characterize her.
Setting contributes to the creation of atmosphere
Actual pauses alongside with the withholding of
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suspense
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Actual pauses alongside with the withholding of information operate in such a way as to underline suspense
as to indicate clearly the author’s ideological position
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Tension betwen fragmentation and totality
The death symbolism is associated with the desire to create , the boy is liberated from the fetters of rationality.
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The visionary is also an outsider , one who is distanced from the world by his vision
elements of discontinuity
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the listeners ridiculing credulity and superstition
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her sense of space is entirely subjective
the paradigm of space is used to characterize*
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James’ use of characters as reflectors
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A panoramic view of hills and armies
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The change in the scale of space is accompanied with a change in the scale of sounds
passage from immobility to movement
the limited number of objects serve to highlight the colorful world of his imagination
we attend the transformation of a doctor into a young lover * strategie narrative ?
Gothic fiction with its paraphernalia of haunted ruins
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shrouded in mystery
Man is dwarfed by nature
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Ambiguity and uncertainty about the monster * are the
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main sources of our disturbance
and religious connotations which set up*
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Time is linked with*
The anticlimax of the hunting scene lies in the boys’ games and celebrations of their victory
A slice of felt life or experience
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The maieutic function of conversation
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elements pertaining to the level of history are intricately interwoven with movements belonging to the level of diegesis*
The future couple formed by Maria and Zerkov is filtered for us through the voices of the two women who are having a conversation
The manner in which they discuss the ill-matched couple
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is highly conventional
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The two women’s way of talking are given a realistic
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stamp by the use of idiolectal forms which serve to
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characterize their speech mannerisms
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But this illusion of reality must not be taken at face value :
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reflection on other slices of life
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The description of his dangerous position serves to clinch
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our sense of the present by something like a snapshot
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What brought them together precludes any initiation to real understanding
A typical noncommittal relationship which he extends to his
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relationship with his wife
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It seems the attempted murder on top of the cliff is an
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inversion of sexual intercourse
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. she does the “push” which is sexually speaking a male
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privilege
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thus he seems to exploit the possibilities of focalization and enunciation to create*
The inner focalization is used to represent*
While Helen ought to be paying lip service to social
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conformism she sticks to her personal views as the outsider
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she is
Her view is characterized by some quaint anthropological
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bias which is also Archer’s when he sees New-York as
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powerful engine which nearly”crushed her”
The view of society as a foreign tribe smacks of*
- the irritation of Kate’s mind
*The text follows a dramatic progression
- awareness rather than dramatic progression
the problem of evil
the catastrophic turn of events that follow in its wake
The dramatic progression of the text shows
*our total identification with Molly
Archer’s change of mind
symbolic reading of the passage
*the then-emerging analysis of man as social animal whose collective urges totally ignore and trample to death individual destinies
Narrative theory :
Focalisation
perspective on events* :
free indirect speech
rhetoric
internal focalizer* :
external focalization* :
when any fictional character within the diegetic frame tells a story , we move onto another level which Genette calls the metadiegetic level
narrators can be either heterodiegetic or homodiegetic ; extradiegetic or intradiegetic
Nick Carraway is an extradiegetic homodiegetic* narrator .
Historical contextualisation
modal distance in the area of speech representation
the way the words of others are filtered through one’s own direct discourse
vision restricted to what he sees and knows at the time the events occur
he knows in advance all the events which are to occur in the text
( position of retrospective knowledge ) standing outside the diegesis ; but he is also present as participant in the story he tells ( thus homodiegetic)
Time and narrative
Time according to Ricoeur is paradoxically repetition within irreversible change ( day repeats day )
Clock and calendar time may be juxtaposed with internal time . Ricoeur *
In “narrative Discourse” , Genette distinguishes between text time (a page) and narrative time ( 5 years)
Order : anachronies* : The tempo of the narrative * : Ellipsis occurs when the linear temporality of the narrative is broken
: or descriptive pause
interior monologue*
dramatic , as opposed to “summary” linked to the non-
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dramatic
The number of episodes devoted to any scene points to its centrality ( ex the centrality of death )
Textual time devoted to an incident marks*
Repetition : the retelling of an event or incident gets its meaning from the variations it introduces on the original
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telling :
Ex : the repetition of the name Caddy becomes the point of departure for revealing the differences in the attitude of the first three narrators toward her
c The fictive experience* _ voir article encyclopedia
the vital thing about metaphor is that*
Cadre prosaïque : refus du romanesque
Déroulement chronologique
Perspective suggestive , préférant la suggestion plutôt que la description
Prédominance de la vision
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Lyrisme stendhalien
Monologue intérieur
Symbolique de la fascination de l’amour dans ce va-et
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vient du regard du paysage au cage.
the temporal distortions attributable to a narrator or a focalizing center can only be explained by setting it into the context of what Ricoeur calls “the time of life”
Internal time” is the time of consciousness : it is the way we capture time’s flow in our mind
analepsis and prolepsis
its speed , acceleration : Rimmon-Kenan
scene is associated with the use of dialogue with a minimum of framing
commentary where”story duration and text duration” are conventionally considered identical
its centrality in the narrator’s mind
activity and perceptual activity . it is Benjy’s inability to
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function in the initial area which gives his section its relative speed
it hinges between an awareness of both similarity and difference
Repérages stylistiques & rhétoriques:
Les enclencheurs graphiques :
c’est le changement de typographie qui signale le surgissement de l’image
“Cow” et “barn” font jaillir d’abord une image (italiques) , une scéne
Parataxe
Tout s’inscrit dans un schéma répétitif porteur
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d’ambiguité [sens]
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L’idée de l’absence s’inscrit dans la relation Benjy /
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Caddy
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L’effet de réel est totalement miné : “caddy smelled like
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trees” [sens]
Sensation , perception brute jusque dans la métaphore
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du déchirement et de l’absence
Métaphore centrale du texte : Caddy smelled like trees “ [repérages stylistique] ,
un des paradigmes de l’itération de l’absence et de la douleur qu’engendre le texte [sens
Le passage est placé sous le signe de la subversion
L’expression : “you dear old thing”* :
La violence est mise en évidence par la conjonction
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d’une gestuelle et d’un dire
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La douceur prêtée à l’enfance n’est pas constitutive
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Pas de mythe de l’adolescence enfantine
Ni tentation de l’angélisme
Recours aux anaphores [repérages stylistique]
Une volonté taxinomique : besoin d’inventorier [repérages stylistique]
Formes langagières figées _ phraséologie consacrée , expressions proverbiales [repérages stylistique]
figure d’exception : “a war devil “
L’image de la fumée qui se dissipe et monte vers le soleil devient le corrélat objectif de cette nouvelle position de
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Flemming (repérage stylistique)
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Ironie dramatique*
Au centre du monologue où il se définit , Fleming institue déjà le doute ( “ he has been a tremendous hero , no doubt “ )
Oxymore : “ green rejoicing “ (repérage stylistique)
procédés métonymiques au centre du pasage
L’objet est soumis à une surdétermination
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isotopie du fragmentaire : “heaps of rubbish”
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Isotopie du labyrinthe et du chaos , d’où l’effet d’une
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descente aux enfers , la représentation d’un monde en
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décomposition , minée de l’intérieur
Le jeu de pronoms : présence d’un trio
Glissements métonymiques : effet de contamination : le fauteil est dépouillé de ses valeurs esthétiques pour devenir un objet métonymique
Les modalisations , les silences
Tourbillons de bouts de papier : images de la futilité *
Distanciation et modulation ( “it was as though “ )
Discours réflexif mais les instruments d’exploration sont ceux d’une rhétorique mécanique
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Questions affaiblies par leur nature répétitive
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Question naive : rhéthorique creuse
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Les épaules sont “too broad” ; l’intrusion par quantification majorante ou disqualifiante est ici abstraction comme l’est la généralisation “ our gait”
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Rhéthorique qui s’auto-produit ou dérive à partir de jeux de mots
Clichés oratoires , paroles d’émigrant , mort fantasmée
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La seule voix qui apparaît est celle de l’oralité
Vocabulaire de destitution , de la dépossession
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Reality effect
The precisions have a didactic aspect
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Archétype romantique
A very visual scene
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Theatrical trappings
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The room is a duplication of other bedrooms
Réification
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L’accumulation des tournures elliptiques insiste sur la
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vacuité de l’être
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Usage de la prétérition
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Certain names seem to possess precise social resonances
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Concern with specific details of clothing reveal also*
As long as Ellie can use language she has the upper hand
synechdoches
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This inversion of semantic norms ( the marble scrolls
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possessed a measured voice” ) is a means of conveying*
The selection and the foregrounding of certain details “wooden-handled mirror “creates*
: “ the past flowed “*
Metonymic displacement : David’s gradual identification with
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Jhonny
A network of subtle echoes
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“The scraping feet” , blotting out all the other parts of the body
Chtonian images
Tension betwen fragmentation and totality
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The various symbolic elements are in in dynamic
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relationship .
the boy is liberated from the fetters of rationality.
The visionary is also an outsider , one who is distanced from
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the world by his vision
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Constant shift from the referential to the figurative
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“Rapiers” are metonomycal attributes of the cavalier’s
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sexual inuendo
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Broadside on certain foibles of victorian society
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Phonic repetition : an “acrid, acid”
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The overall impression is that of psychic statism and
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stagnation;
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modalized utterances; what is absent from the
mother’s portrayal is the absence of any corporeality
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differences
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The rose symbolism is linked to immutability
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The reader is enabled to seize upon the final word “safe place”
Which highlight her blindness since she cannot see the difference between facts and fiction
Derogatory comparison with a walrus
The stereotype of the machine getting an upper hand over its creator is easily recognizable
Comparisons are rife throughout the text
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widespread exploitation of the field of tactile and visual impressions
Colours are used to connote visibility
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_ blue-clothed men
his eyes are panning around the room
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Tears are the antithesis of the cold and muddy water of the
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pond
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The storm as such casts upon the landscape a lurid hue
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Blood is associated with liquidity _ dripping sow’s head-
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dribbling down the stick _details creating visual effect _ prodding whenever pigflesh appeared _ the killing is the
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ritual murdering of a mother
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By killing the sow they satisfy a sexual urge for rape as well as their hunger for meat
The head attracts flies , the latter connoting of course *
The flies represent*
Todd is very knowledgeable in the field of historical costumes
Pathos
The very name Grotensteintein suggests an effect of
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onomastics as we decode it into grotesque+ Einstein
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Recalls novels in the realistic vein
_ cut him in two _*
The gratuity of their hatred is thus comic
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Humans beings are reified
The irony of the text makes the whole passage something as*
Lexical field of pulsion _ grope –urged by _
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life and dynamism are endowed to the plant
The reification of their character makes Molly’s nausea clear
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to us by*
vision of domestic comfort , the second alludes to feminity as well as to comfort
Caractère dépouillé du style
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La répétition des imparfaits soutenue par une espèce de modulation de la même sonorité confère*
La vision d’un personnage assis près d’une fenêtre suggère la paix qui émane de certains tableaux flamands
Série d’instantanés sur Emma
Effets d’échos dans les sonorités
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Harmonie fluide de la phrase par le jeu des allitérations
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Retombée de la phrase avec*
Etirement du temps: rythme étiré
- harmonie imitative
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création d’une atmosphère par le souci du détail extérieur
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restriction de champ
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rupture de ton
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La sécheresse du commentaire ne nuit pas à la suggestion
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poétique
Intrigue amoureuse dont Fabrice se hâte de tirer les fils
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Balzac: le père Goriot:
Portrait non pas réaliste mais expressif: l’art de balzac
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consiste à styliser et à accentuer des traits dégagés
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d’avance
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Art expressioniste
A completer
(repérage narratologique) .
désir persistant de mettre à mal/ à mort l’autre en le réifiant [repérages stylistique]
( repérage rhétorique)
Jeu du littéral avec le figuré : L’allégorique ou le symbolique
something of the character’s psychological make-up
man’s attempt of overcoming death and mastering time
a striking”effet de réel”
Hackneyed metaphor
the metaphor excludes all that might have stood for physical proximity or tenderness
The death symbolism is associated with the desire to create
the erynnies in greek tragedies
our inner desires
As well as our awareness of evil as a specifically human feature of our mind
Rhetorical threats
a caricature
depriving us of any internal approach on what he thinks or feels
une unité harmonique au passage
le rythme qui va s’amenuisant
restriction de champ
rupture de ton
Repérages linguistiques:
Absence de marqueurs chronologiques
c’est à partir d’une modalisation ‘” I bet you won’t ) / I bet you will “ ) que se dessine l’affrontement entre Caddy et Quentin
Repères sensoriels “he groped blindly “ repères spatio-temporels
La prolifération de comparaisons avec “like” ou avec “as” montre que*
Incohérences syntaxiques
Jeu sur les pronoms : va-et-vient perpétuel qui permet au narrateur de retrouver son identité
They are not framed in the “here” and “now”
linguistic markers
Henry james : The Wings of the Dove
The text is characterised by a complex network of tenses
In the opening passage Kate is waiting for her father’s decision * ;
,she waited Kate Croy self-awareness *
and there were moments at which she showed herself , in the glass over the mantel , a face positively pale .
the reflexive pronoun is unnecessary to the significance of the phrase . thus the outwards projection of her visions turned back upon herself
While space is used to delineate clearly the stages of the action no specific indication of time is given
the boys are out of the usual time/ space continuum*
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we never hear her voice , the level of enunciation being restricted to her husband’s voice*
Their gradual intimacy appears on the level of deictics “he” and “she” in the first paragraph are replaced by “I” and “you”
Focalisation / Enonciation
The parents’ threats are expressed only in direct speech, with no participation of the narrator in the utterance
: “for now that. …” “now the dead town. ..,” “so*
la vérité ne peut se dire que par approximations [ sens] (repérage linguistique)
Valeur illocutoire du langage
Groupes nominaux sur-déterminés
she is defined by her function , a passive one , as the fact her name is in apposition to the verb shows
No progression in chronological time is given
- The enunciative process :
- progression in time
- space
“proximate” deictics (features of free indirect speech) indicate that the narrator situates his enunciation, temporally and spatially, near that of the boys
A ) A theoretical framework for studying narrative fiction.
pride and prejudice
1 Elizabeth and Darcy meet.
2 He unknowingly insults her at a dance.
3 She dislikes him as a consequence.
4 He starts to find her attractive, but she finds him more disagreeable.
5 They meet again at his aunt’s.
6 He proposes.
7 She refuses and tells him why.
8 He writes a letter defending himself.
9 Swayed by the letter, she begins to revise her impressions of him.
10 They meet yet again at his estate.
11 She realizes she loves him.
12 He proves himself by helping the Bennet family in a time of trouble.
13 He proposes again.
14 She accepts.
15 They marry.
Set in relation to these kernels are numerous satellite events, the dance at Netherfield among them, which amplify different stages of interest and disinterest on the part of each character.
As far as the various story-lines are concerned, the macrostructure primarily enchains events and even whole sequences. Mr Collins proposes first to Elizabeth, she refuses, and then he proposes to her friend Charlotte.
The story achieves its structural economy by arranging the unfolding of events to coincide with the unfolding of an enigma:
Structurally, Pride and Prejudice joins its various story-lines through the mystery concerning Darcy and his past events in relation to each other go unanswered or are answered only partially or wrongly. relations with Wickham.
The enigma thus guarantees the story’s movement, while also directing it towards a privileged final signified.
The paradigmatic structure of events
Bingley’s departure and Elizabeth’s refusal of Darcy’s proposal bear a relation of paradigmatic substitution, since each marks a deterioration which threatens the anticipated closure (marriage).
Events that move the story closer towards the anticipated closure, such as Jane’s stay at Netherfield and Elizabeth’s visit to Pemberley, also bear a paradigmatic relation of substitution. The comparisons organized by such selections and substitutions make marriage the paradigmatic motivation of the story’s closure, which is to say that marriage is always “present, ” placed in a vertical relation to the horizontal axis of the syntagm, where marriage is always being displaced.
Character is, according to Chatman, “a paradigm of traits, ”
So too does the attention to individuality over type in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel, as opposed to those narratives from other historical cultures - such as medieval allegory and oral folk tales - which represent characters only in terms of pre-defined categories such as social types or moral abstractions. I
the traiting of character draws upon historically different frames of reference which a culture uses to construct notions of identity
If it seems natural today to read and write about character as individual essence, that is because such an assumption about identity is historically bound to our particular culture and its values. In fact, it is more precise to say that traits are not psychological features but semantic features (or semes), which refer, not to an essentialized and universal human nature, but “to a stock of physical, behavioural, psychological and verbal attributes out of which fictional characters may be put together
How do we recognize a trait? Rimmon-Kenan explains that various “textual indicators of character” define traits directly or present them indirectly (Rimmon-Kenan 1983:59). Traits stated directly may appear briefly in the form of epithets linked to the character’s name (adjectives or adverbs) or more fully in descriptions. Sometimes a name itself directly signifies the trait either through a paradigmatic metonymy (Beauty, Allworthy, Green Knight, etc.) or through a paradigmatic metaphor (Angel Clare, Stephen Dedalus, Michael Knight, etc.).
Traits stated indirectly are implied by actions and dialogue, or by analogy to traits attributed to other characters. Lydia Bennet, for example, is “stout, ” “well-grown, ” “fifteen, ” has “a fine complexion and good-humoured countenance, ” “high animal spirits, ” “a sort of natural self-consequence, ” and “easy manners” (Austen 1966:31).
Here the relation between the name and the trait is established on the basis of explicit contiguity. By contrast, Lydia’s elopement with Wickham is an indirect statement of recklessness:
Here the relation between name and trait is established on the basis of an implicit comparison between one type of signifier (an action) and another (the characteristic trait).
The repetition of traits confirms the consistency of a character, just as an alteration announces a change or development in the character, and the number and variety indicate simplicity (“flatness”) or complexity (“roundness”). Elizabeth Bennet achieves “depth” and “individuality” as a character because, in contrast to other characters, she displays a more extensive and changing array of traits. Her traits range from her “lovely, playful disposition, which delighted in anything ridiculous” (Austen 1966:7) and her “quickness of observation” (9); to her being “blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd” after reading Darcy’s letter (143); to her feeling “humbled” and “grieved” at the thought of losing Darcy’s good opinion because of Lydia’s actions (213). The traiting of Lydia, on the other hand, remains consistent. Even after her marriage, “Lydia was Lydia still; untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless” (216). In contrast to Elizabeth, Lydia appears as less of an “individual” and much more of a “type.”
Characterization assembles traits at a proper name so that the name can serve as a substitution for those traits (this is the reasoning behind Chatman’s claim that a character is a paradigm of traits).
In the case of masculine narrative, the story structure promotes the values of competition, physical power, and authority as irrefutable signs of “masculinity.” Moments of exclusion, like the ones we pointed to earlier in this chapter, put in jeopardy the class-bound representations of masculinity and femininity apparently stabilized in the story's closure, where gender difference works to reconcile class difference but in fact conceals class power.
In contrast to Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, published in 1847, closes with a marriage that excludes much more than it synthesizes. When Jane finally marries Edward Rochester, their union significantly differs from Elizabeth and Darcy’s. Rochester has been blinded and maimed, made physically dependent upon Jane, while she has been made financially independent. Even more to our point here, marriage removes them from the traditional ancestral country house, and their new home is depicted as a domestic retreat from society rather than as a center of social activity and power. Armstrong accounts for this difference by citing the social unrest occurring in industrial centres in the 1840s, arguing that it made the crossing of social boundaries more politically dangerous to imagine. In these later narratives, she observes, male and female no longer appear as “complementary halves of the same political structure” but instead “represent competing [social as well as sexual] forces” (Armstrong 1987:54-5).
It no longer resolves the problem of social heterogeneity, nor can it so successfully contain female desire in the name of gender equality.
First we shall discuss temporality, the narration’s arrangement and display of events in time, which most clearly illustrates the relation between a story and its telling. Then we shall go on to discuss: agency, the medium by which events are narrated; focalization, the perspective from which they are narrated; and discourse, the site in which they are narrated
The anachronic placement of an event differentiates it from all the other events that are chronologically ordered.
There are two basic types of anachrony. An analepsis, or textual point of retrospection, reaches back to a time anterior to that being narrated, often for purposes of exposition.
A prolepsis does just the reverse: it flashes ahead to events yet to occur in the story sequence, often for purposes of foreshadowing.
, narration mediates story time because of the textual length or brevity with which it recounts events. Duration measures the length of narrational time against the temporal span of the story. The duration awarded to events will not necessarily be the same for each of them, and the syntagmatic organization of similar or variable durations produces a narration’s temporal pacing
The two most common methods of narrating duration are summary and scene. A summary, as in passages 1 and 2, condenses time in the narration so that it is less than story time.
In giving an account of duration, summary acknowledges the mediation of events by diegesis - the telling of events as narrative - whereas scene reaches for mimesis - the imitation of events as they occur in story time and as if they did not need to be told at all. This comparison draws upon a longstanding tradition of opposing the showing of events to the telling of them, but it should be taken only relatively, not absolutely. For, as far as narration is concerned, there can be no showing (mimesis) without telling (diegesis); scene and summary merely identify two different types of duration
In conjunction with scene and summary, other means of narrating duration are the slow-down, the pause, and the ellipsis. The first two extend narrational duration, while the last one eliminates it altogether.
A pause goes even further to stress narrational time over story time
An ellipsis, finally, occurs when the narration omits a point in story time
When a narrator is also a character in the story, however peripheral, the narration is character-bound, told in the first person (so named because a first-person pronoun - I - is used to refer to the character who also narrates), as in these examples:
A well-known example of a slow-down is the murder of Mr Verloc in The Secret Agent, which lasts about twenty seconds in story time and yet takes two pages to recount.
What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon! How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought! I could not answer the ceaseless inward question - why I thus suffered; now, at the distance of - I will not say how many years, I see it clearly. (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1971:12)
Jane Eyre is the primary narrator of her story, but other characters serve as secondary narrators whenever they relate information about events to her which she quotes in full.
The classification of first- and third-person narrations usefully designates the internal or external relation of narrating agent to the story
Emile Benveniste instead classifies narration according to its mediation of story. Narration, he explains, falls along “two different planes of utterance” (Benveniste 1971:206). When a narration calls linguistic attention to its recounting of events as an “utterance assuming a speaker and a hearer, and in the speaker, the intentions of influencing the other in some way” (209), it functions as discourse
When, on the other hand, “events that took place at a certain moment of time are presented without any intervention of the speaker, ” the narration functions as history. “There is then no longer even a narrator. The events are set forth chronologically, as they occurred. No one speaks here; the events seem to narrate themselves” (Benveniste 1971:206-8). Passage 6 from Heartbreak Tango narrates events as history by effacing all linguistic signs of a narrating agency. 1
At first glance the terms “discourse” and “history” may appear simply to rename distinctions between first- and third-person narrators. First-person narration approximates discourse by positing a narrating agency responsible for the narration, whereas third-person narration approximates history by positing a narrating agency which is linguistically absent from the text. History and discourse, however, do not distinguish between agencies but between those narrations which display objectivity, impersonality, and non-mediation (events thus narrate themselves regardless of who tells them) and those which display subjectivity, personality, and mediation (some agency is narrating those events).
Since narration mediates story in the very act of representing events in language, signs of discourse make themselves visible even in passages of history
Outside on the quay the sun beat fiercely. A stream of motors, lorries and buses, private cars and hirelings, sped up and down the crowded thoroughfare, and every chauffeur blew his horn; rickshaws threaded their nimble path amid the throng, and the panting coolies found breath to yell at one another; coolies, carrying heavy bales, sidled along with their quick jog-trot and shouted to the passer-by to make way; itinerant vendors proclaimed their wares. (Maugham, “The Letter, ” 1951:184)
Passage 9 is an example of external focalization because the anonymous narrator also functions as the focalizer of Singapore, the setting being described.
Passage 10, on the other hand, uses figural focalization. Joyce, not the narrator, is the focalizer of Robert (the focalized).
Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow, ” said Mrs Ramsay.
“But you’ll have to be up with the lark, ” she added. (Woolf 1927:9)
In this case there is no doubt that the character is the origin of the utterance, and the focalization is figural Since narrated dialogue has the potential to conflate the character’s language with that of the narrator’s
- When, on the other hand, the source of the language cannot be determined, the focalization is external, as in the following instance.
- When the narration directly quotes the character’s own thoughts or his/her own verbalization of feeling, it is quoted monologue. For example:
When a lengthy quoted monologue appears without a narrative tag setting it apart as a quotation, it is called interior monologue. A special instance of interior monologue in first-person narration is stream of consciousness, a style of broken syntax and temporal anachrony which simulates the seemingly “unedited” and “unnarrated” random flux of free associations and subliminal thought content.
* If the narration includes an indirect quotation of the character’s own thoughts or verbalization of feeling, then it is narrated monologue.
- If the narration goes beyond the character’s actual thoughts or verbalization of mental life, then it is called psycho-narration. Whereas narrated monologue can be translated back into direct quotation
In the passage of dissonant psycho-narration from Pride and Prejudice, phrasing like “it may well be supposed” and “what a contrariety of emotion” indicates the narrator’s detachment from Elizabeth’s perspective, whereas in the passage of consonant psycho-narration the more excited, exclamatory phrasing indicates the dominance of her perspective over the narrator’s.
And Andrew shouted that the sea was coming in. (Woolf 1927:115)
That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart. My heart is quite calm. I will go back. (James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1976:86).
It was unfair and cruel because the doctor had told him not to read without glasses and he had written home to his mother that morning to send him a new pair. And Father Arnall had said that he need not study til the new glasses came. Then to be called a schemer before the class and to be pandied when he always got the card for the first or second and was the leader of the Yorkists! How could the prefect of studies know that it was a trick? (Joyce, Portrait, 1976:51-2)
herself, and from actual weakness sat down and cried for half an hour. Her astonishment, as she reflected on what had passed, was increased by every review of it. That she should receive an offer of marriage from Mr Darcy! that he should have been in love with her for so many months! so much in love as to wish to marry her in spite of all the objections which had made him prevent his friend’s marrying her sister, and which must appear at least with equal force in his own case, was almost incredible! (Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1966:134)
15 If Elizabeth, when Mr Darcy gave her the letter, did not expect it to contain a renewal of his offers, she had formed no expectation at all of its contents. But such as they were, it may well be supposed how eagerly she went through them, and what a contrariety of emotion they excited. (Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1966:140)
In passage 4 from Jane Eyre, for example, Jane is the narrator of her own story, while her own insights, feelings, etc., focalize what she narrates in what appears to be an act of continuous self-expression. Telling her story ten years after she has married Edward Rochester, the narrating Jane is obviously not the same as the younger Jane, the subject of that older Jane’s narration and the actor in the story. Yet it is the younger Jane who focalizes what is being recounted: “What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon!”
We can examine this division more closely by analyzing one section of the novel: Brocklehurst’s interview with Jane in chapter 4.
Outside the room where Brocklehurst and Mrs Reed await her, the child Jane stands “intimidated and trembling, ” while the adult Jane mediates, remembering “what a miserable little poltroon had fear, engendered of unjust punishment, made of me in those days!” A change in tense, from “I feared to return to the nursery” to “I must enter, ” signals a quoted monologue in the next paragraph: “’Who could want me?’ I asked inwardly.” That Jane’s monologue is quoted rather than narrated establishes a momentary conjunction of the narrating subject and subject of narration through figural focalization: “The handle turned, the door unclosed, and passing through and curtseying low I looked up at - a black pillar! such, at least, appeared to me, at first sight, the straight, narrow, sable-clad shape standing erect on the rug: the grim face at the top was like a carved mask, placed above the shaft by way of capital” (Brontë 1971:26). The participles in this sentence - “passing, ” “curtseying” - especially reinforce the impression that Jane’s consciousness as a child is seemingly immediate and unmediated by the adult Jane. Jane’s narration, however, alters this impression in the next paragraph with a return to the simple past tense of historical narration: “Mrs Reed occupied her usual seat by the fireside” (26).
The opening of the second chapter after Jane’s fight with John Reed exemplifies the text’s discursive plurality to the point of excess and incoherence:
A second description of Brocklehurst proposes a striking contrast to the initial one of his “grim face” appearing like a “carved mask.” Jane is examined by “two inquisitive-looking grey eyes which twinkled under a pair of bushy brows.” This kind face, in turn, changes again just a few lines later. As Brocklehurst addresses her, “he seemed to me a tall gentleman; but then I was very little: his features were large, and they and all the lines of his frame were equally harsh and prim.” As Jane quite literally changes her position - “I stepped across the rug; he placed me square and straight before him” - she becomes subject to his “scrutiny” and interrogation. “What a face he had, now that it was almost on a level with mine! what a great nose! and what a mouth! and what large prominent teeth!” (26-7)
Throughout this encounter with Brocklehurst, the child Jane focalizes the narration but is a conspicuously silent subject of narration. The narrating adult articulates her subjectivity for her through the pronoun I, but so do the adults when they address her as you. “Well, Jane, and are you a good child?”
When Mrs Reed warns Brocklehurst “above all, to guard against her worst fault, a tendency to deceit, ” Jane does identify with that “contrary opinion”: “Now, uttered before a stranger, the accusation cut me to the heart . . . I saw myself transformed under Mr Brocklehurst’s eye into an artful noxious child, and what could I do to remedy the injury?” (28).
After Brocklehurst leaves, Jane finally speaks out to her aunt. Speech gives the child “the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, ” of “unhoped-for liberty, ” because it articulates her “passion of resentment, ” making her feel “thrilled with ungovernable excitement” (30-1).
). With Mrs Reed’s departure from the room, the adult Jane reinserts herself to narrate and focalize the child Jane from a point of view not too unlike her aunt’s: “A child cannot quarrel with its elders, as I had done; cannot give its furious feelings uncontrolled play, as I had given mine, without experiencing afterwards the pang of remorse and the chill of reaction” (32).
subject of narration (the child Jane), and the subject narrated by the adult Jane and by the other characters as well when they address her directly.
he thus tells her who she is by subject-ing her to his discourse.
* These secondary narrating subjects include not only her enemies Brocklehurst and Mrs Reed, but also her suitors Rochester and St John Rivers, and her friends Helen Burns and Bessie the nurse
“Hold her arms, Miss Abbot: she’s like a mad cat.”
“For shame! for shame!” cried the lady’s-maid. “What shocking conduct, Miss Eyre, to strike a young gentleman, your benefactress’s son! Your young master.”
“Master! How is he my master? Am I a servant?”
“No; you are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep. There, sit down, and think over your wickedness.” (Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1971:9)
Semically, this passage encodes Jane’s character as wild, shocking, violent, ungrateful, wicked. Proairetically, it encodes a sequence of resistance and constraint: the child Jane is being held down and carried away by the two servants. Symbolically, it encodes various antitheses: conscious/unconscious, powerful/ powerless, consistency/inconsistency, nature/society, freedom/ servitude. Hermeneutically, it encodes two enigmas: the indeterminacy of Jane’s social and natal status in the Reed household, and the uncertainty raised by her having acted in a “new” and unpredictable way to disturb the order of the household
Referentially, the passage locates this subject in a variety of discourses. First, the discourse of revolution represents Jane as a mutinous “rebel slave” who has been subjected to cruel tyranny. But a discourse we would now call psychological also represents Jane’s subjectivity as a momentary madness: “I was a trifle beside myself, ” she says, or, put even more strongly, “out of myself.” Furthermore, Miss Abbot and Bessie the nurse subject Jane to the discourse of nature in calling her a “cat”; and, when they modify “cat” with “mad, ” they imply that she is not domesticated but a predator. Finally, Jane is also subjected to discourses of class, patriarchy, and morality: John Reed is her master, the women tell her, and she is wicked to strike the young gentleman, who is socially superior.
While these multiple discourses all contribute to the representation of Jane Eyre as a subject of narration, they do not cohere into a unified subjectivity. Cast as an animal, she exhibits a natural instinct to claw back; cast as John Reed’s social inferior, she has stepped outside her station. As a girl, she appears to be a natural inferior - physically weak - yet she must be held down by two adults.
- As such different discourses emerge and retreat in the text, often intersecting each other, they implicate the representation of Jane’s subjectivity in multiple and incompatible ideologies. When Jane goes to work for Rochester as the governess of Thornfield, for instance, patriarchal discourses of class and gender define her sense of being an impoverished, plain, and powerless woman.
I rose; I dressed myself with care: obliged to be plain - for I had no article of attire that was not made with extreme simplicity - I was still by nature solicitous to be neat. It was not my habit to be disregardful of appearance, or careless of the impression I made: on the contrary, I ever wished to look as well as I could, and to please as much as my want of beauty would permit. I sometimes
regretted that I was not handsomer: I sometimes wished to have rosy cheeks, a straight nose, and small cherry mouth; I desired to be tall, stately, and finely developed in figure; I felt it a misfortune that I was so little, so pale, and had features so irregular and so marked. And why had I these aspirations and these regrets? It would be difficult to say to myself; yet I had a reason, and a logical, natural reason too. (Brontë 1971:86)
In order to articulate her complaints to herself, Jane must turn to an alternative discourse, one which can provide “a logical, natural reason” for what she feels.
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with
tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to feel very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrowed in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. (Brontë 1971:96)
In this passage the discourse of revolution links Jane’s subjectivity to an ideological representation of revolt which is historically specific to the time of the novel’s production. This is a discourse of subversion, of “political rebellion.” Its terms of signification referentially encode the French Revolution and its aftermath (approximately the time of Jane’s story), as well as the social unrest in England occurring in the early decades of the nineteenth century - events such as the Luddite attacks on factories and the Peterloo march that resulted in a riot and bloodshed (the time of Jane’s telling).
As it appears in Jane Eyre, this discourse of revolution takes as its object, not the Bastille or the factory, but the home, where women suffer “in silent revolt.” In this replacement of an open and public site of revolt by a contained and private one, Jane Eyre typifies the coding of revolutionary discourse in mid-century representations of revolt. There, according to Nancy Armstrong, family scandal or sexual misconduct stands in for (encodes) social rioting or rebellion as a means of defusing social unrest by combining it with the discourse of domesticity. representing the rebel as a young naïve who is misled (like the young Rochester), or as an impassioned female who is “beside herself” with emotion (like the young Jane), or sometimes even as a monster (like Bertha Mason, Rochester’s first wife, imprisoned in his attic).
Such discursive heterogeneity can, therefore, only result in contradiction. In the passage we just quoted, Jane declares that “Women are supposed to feel very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel.” She apprehends herself as a subject of a discourse transcending social divisions based on gender and class, invoking what Cora Kaplan calls a Romantic ideology of unified identity.
The adult Jane cannot identify with that younger rebel, that “discord in Gateshead Hall” (Brontë 1971:12), but instead misrecognizes herself as “a heterogeneous thing . . . a useless thing . . . a noxious thing” (12). Only as the narrator can she personify “Jane Eyre” to account for “why I thus suffered; now, at a distance of - I will not say how many years, I see it clearly” (12). When “Jane Rochester” replaces “Jane Eyre” in the ending to signify “perfect concord” (397), she does so as the subject of marriage. As Jane confides* :
We do not disagree, though we want to emphasize that Jane un-engenders this discourse only to re-engender it, and that as soon as Rochester arrives at Thornfield she reiterates her subjection to the patriarchal discourses of class and gender: “it had a master, ” she says of the house; “for my part I liked it better” (Brontë 1971:103). It is simply not possible for Jane to transcend gender and class while speaking in the discourse of hierarchical, patriarchal norms, any more than it is possible for her to rebel while serving, without becoming the subject of clashing ideological interests.
“I have now been married ten years. . . . I hold myself supremely blest - blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am; ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh” (396-7). By citing Genesis 2:23, Jane proves that she is hardly as beyond language (not to say ideology) as she proposes. In reviewing her suffering from that distance, Jane Rochester is replacing the child’s subversive discourse of revolution with the more conservative and socialized discourse of domesticity.
We are isolating these discourses of revolution and domesticity in order to show what is ideologically at stake, not only in the text’s conflicting representations of Jane’s subjectivity, but also in its recuperation of a coherent and unified subject in Jane Rochester. Because of its heterogeneous encoding of cultural discourses, this text produces an excess of ideological effects, while its narrative structure attempts to manage this excess, primarily through the hermeneutic and symbolic codes.
the narrative’s closure tames this discourse, first by combining it with the discourse of domesticity, then by replacing it with that discourse so as to position Jane as the subject of “concord.” Once this happens, rebellion is drained of its political meaning and domesticity is likewise protected from any real politics by its simple equation with concord.
In Jane Eyre important issues of class and gender differences, and of national and religious ideologies, are merely regulated, not subsumed by, hermeneutic questions of domestic passion, moral rewards and punishments, and personal freedom. Most obviously, the discourse of puritanical religion (and not the discourse of domesticity) gets the last word with Jane’s reading of a letter
from St John Rivers, who is still searching for his heavenly reward. Quoting Revelation 22:20, he confides in Jane: “My Master . . . has forewarned me. Daily He announces more distinctly, ‘Surely I come quickly!’ and hourly I more eagerly respond, ‘Amen; even so, come Lord Jesus!’” (398). The positioning of this discourse as the last paragraph of the text can be read doubly. On the one hand, it confirms closure by pointing up all the more the stability of the subject Jane Rochester in comparison to the inner torment of St John Rivers. On the other hand, it radically questions, if it does not entirely undermine, the “concord” of equality in Jane’s marriage to Rochester by stressing service to yet another and higher Master. It thus threatens the discourse of domesticity which Jane cites to close her story. Further, if we were to retrace this discourse in the text, we would discover that it remains competitive with the discourses of revolution and domesticity, repeatedly inscribing additional sites of ideological contest
The textual heterogeneity of Jane Eyre exceeds the ideological coherence of any single discourse
The narrative’s closure, on the other hand, fixes the subject to a position of intelligibility or self-apprehension in a single discourse (in this case, that of domesticity) which appears to dominate, subsume, even transform others.
we isolated binaries such as life/death, soft/hard, black/white.
Codes of nostalgia and physical beauty, for example, determine what the past and the body, respectively, signify to our culture.
). Each lexia displays certain codes passing through the text, so that at any and every given point one can see the codes in their
various intersections
The proairetic code gives a narrative its potential to organize a story as a linear sequencing of events occurring in time.
The proairetic code “principally determines the readability of the text” (262) and is the basis of structural analysis.
it does not distinguish between the kernel or satellite status of events, nor does it combine microsequences together in macro-sequences to form a macrostructure
The semic code
While all codes arise from and govern connotations, the semic code inscribes the field where signifiers point to other signifiers to produce the chain of recognizable connotations, as in the word “mourning” from the Bleak House passage.
For example, in one of the stories from James Joyce’s Dubliners, when Eveline sees her boyfriend Frank for the first time, “he was standing at the gate, his peaked cap pushed back on his head and his hair tumbled forward over a face of bronze” (Joyce 1962:38-9).
Bronze” signifies not only a brownish-gold color but also a metal, so, even as the word semically encodes tanned, healthy, sexy, it also encodes medallion or statue or idol, something valued, even worshipped.
The hermeneutic code
Put most simply, the hermeneutic is the code of narrative suspense. It determines a particular expectation of narrative on the part of the reader,
the hermeneutic code linearly and irreversibly organizes the proairetic encoding of events into a macrostructured story
Similarly, the hermeneutic code can locate the semic encoding of traits in a stable characterization by linking the promise of solution with the revelation of motives.
This code, in other words, raises an enigma only to keep increasing its narratological value by delaying or obscuring revelations. Such postponement, in turn, structures the desire to read for the end, for the disclosure that will occur in the story’s closure as the ultimate signified of both story and characterThe symbolic code is the most complex and abstrusely defined of the codes in S/Z, and yet, along with the reference code, it is the most central to the intepretation of texts.
This code marks out “the province of the antithesis” (Barthes 1974:17) - a “given opposition” (27) such as male/female, good/evil - as the field in which culture articulates meaning by representing it differentially through symbolic identities so that the opposition appears inevitable and non-linguistic.
The symbolic code inscribes the text as a site in which the privileging of one binary term over another is both staged and exposed, legitimized and placed in jeopardy. Barthes himself defines this symbolic site in what he calls “phallic terms” (Barthes 1974:35), his point being that sexual opposition is the primary way in which our culture represents identity.
The “phallus, ” as Barthes uses the term, following the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, is not literally the penis but, rather, the patriarchical signifier of power, fullness, the law. The symbolic field distributes identities along an axis of gender based on the presence or absence of the phallus. “Male” symbolizes having the phallus - or being plenitude - the
meaningful sign of gendered identity, while “female” symbolizes not having the phallus or being lack. 1 Against these “two opposing terms” are set “a mixed, and a neuter” (Barthes 1974:35). “Androgyny” symbolizes the simultaneous presence of having and lacking (i.e. the androgyne has both the male’s plenitude and the female’s lack), while “castration” symbolizes the simultaneous negation of having and lacking (i.e. the eunuch has a penis but lacks the phallus).
One of the primary symbolic codes of Dracula, for example, is male/female, which the text represents in the phallic terms described above by differentiating gender, as in the figures of Lucy Westenra and her three suitors, on the basis of having/ lacking. All the same, the text can assert the importance of that
symbolic opposition only by representing its perversion in the androgynous figure of Dracula. He has blood-red lips and long fingernails; and while he is the one who usually sucks blood from the neck of his victims for nourishment, and is said to have a child’s brain, at one point he nurses Mina Harker on blood from a vein opened at his “bare breast, ” “forcing her face down on his bosom” (Stoker 1965:288). Likewise, his victim Mina can be read as a castrated figure when she is described as if she were a man lacking. She is said to have “man’s brain - a brain that a man should have were he much gifted - and a woman’s heart” (Stoker 1965:241), that is, she has the brain with the power of a man but in a female body.
First, it shows that the symbolic field exceeds biological difference. Female characters can be encoded as masculine, and masculine characters can be encoded as feminine.
Dracula, in fact, is symbolically encoded to represent the articulation of a number of differences: just as he is male and female, he is dead and alive, old and young, mother and child. Dracula, then, symbolizes pure difference: he is the demonic Other to every cultural meaning which the text cites.
The reference code As its name implies, its function is to provide a text with cultural frames of reference Many contemporary “postmodern” narratives make such mediation of the text very explicit by over-encoding cultural references. Heartbreak Tango, for example, includes frequent references to North and South American popular culture (films, soap opera, romances, magazines, beauty, clothing, songs, dances, superstitions), as well as to religion, class, ethnicity, gender, family, love, and so on Viewed in this light, ideology is not a system of true or false beliefs and values, a doctrine, so much as it is the means by which culture represents beliefs and values. And, just as culture is not monolithic or homogeneous, neither is ideology. As Louis Althusser explains, “an ideology is a system (with its own logic and rigour) of representations (images, myths, ideas or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a historical existence and role within a given society” (Althusser 1977:231) A system of representation, ideology is real and material. However, what an ideology represents is “not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live” (Althusser 1971:165). Providing the “real” enabling conditions of knowledge and action, ideologies are, at the same time, “imaginary” - in the double sense of fabricating and imaging - because they are the representations of meaning Silencing contradiction and evading alternative representations of the real, an ideology represents society's network of power relations as inevitable and natural, beyond question or change. Bourgeois ideology, for instance, glosses over or fully evades the divisions of race, gender, and class that empower the cultural values and beliefs motivating people's lives. Instead it depicts these relations in terms of comforting verities - Happiness, Fairness, Motherhood, Noble Suffering, etc. way to get a purchase on Happiness is through class standing. The ad therefore equates Happiness, which it depicts as a natural drive, with Status, a socially constructed category.
In the previous chapter we explained how that novel’s narration divides subjectivity so that, textually, the subject of narration, Jane Eyre, is not a whole and a continuous identity but a series of fragmented subjectivities inscribed in discourse.
To explain this sliding, we need to consider how and why the subject’s relation to a signifier is, in the Lacanian scheme, both imaginary and symbolic. The imaginary is that register of subjectivity achieved through identification with a phantom or an image, as in a mirror.
B ) Literary poetics
Ferdinand de Saussure ( 1857 -1913) :
The language itself is not a function of the speaker ; it is a product passively registered by the speaker . it never requires premeditation and reflexion enters into it only for the sake of classification . on the contrary , speech is an individual act of the will and intelligence : the combinations by which the speaker uses the code provided by the language in order to express his own thoughts
Language and its place in human affairs . semiology
From a semiological ( from the greek “semeion”, sign )standpoint , a language is a system of signs expressing ideas , and hence comparable to writing , symbolic rites , forms of politeness
Linguistic is only one branch of the general science of semiology
The linguist’s task is to define what makes languages a special type of system within the totality of semiological facts
Even when due recognition must be given to the fact that the sign must be studied as a special phenomenom , the sign always to some extent eludes control by the will of the individual or of society : that is its essential nature , even it may be by no means obvious at first sight
swiss linguist who studied in France and Germany before taking up a chair in his native city in Geneva
