The Formalist-Structuralist Study of Space in Narrative: A Historical Appraisal and Its Applications to Four Modernist Novels

• Main Authors: Chen, Rong-bin, 陳榮彬
• Other Authors: Professor Chang Han-liang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/86771671055488735508

博士 === 輔仁大學 === 跨文化研究所比較文學博士班 === 99 === Abstract In this Formalist-Structuralist integrative study of “tales of two cities,” a two-fold task has been completed. First, through the “functional analysis” of Propp and Greimas, Shklovsky’s “literary devices,” and Tomashevsky’s typology of “motifs,” I’ve tried to explore and clarify both the constant and variable elements of narrative. Secondly, following the Formalist-Structuralist tradition formed by Propp, Lotman, and Greimas, I’ve also shown how the element of “space” works in narrative. The so-called “tales of two cities” in this dissertation are four novels of early Modernism from France, Britain, and Taiwan. The Taipei in Crystal Boys and the London in Confessions of a Young Man and The Picture of Dorian Gray have been put into a comparative perspective in the framework of Greimas’s topological semiotics. Huysmans’s A rebours is also treated accordingly, because it can be seen as a tale of London and Paris. It has to be stressed that each of the four novels has a narrative structure which is constructed on the basis of the protagonists’ travels inside a city, between a city and its suburbs, or between cities. According to the Proppian-Greimasian tradition, the urban/suburban and metropolitan/cosmopolitan worlds in the four works can be seen as consisting of heterotopic, paratopic, and utopic spaces, where the glorifying, qualifying, and decisive (main) tests are to be taken by the protagonists (subject-actants). Furthermore, according to the topological-axiological dichotomy of “euphoria/dysphoria,” first explored in Greimas’s “Toward a Topological Semiotics” and later applied to literary analysis in his Maupassant, if space in narrative is engaged by certain subjective perspectives, cities or suburbs can be either euphoric or dysphoric. For example, Paris is thus dysphoric for Huysmans’s Duc des Esseintes, and its suburban Fontenay is euphoric; on the contrary, for Moore’s Edward Dayne, Paris becomes euphoric rather than dysphoric, and its dysphoric counterpart is London. If the afore-mentioned three spaces and three tests can be seen as “the constants” in narrative, the literary devices explored by Shklovsky are “the variables.” Through a detailed textual analysis, this dissertation has shown the devices used in the four novels, such as the devices of “threading” and “retardation” in A rebours, that of “parallelism” in Confessions of a Young Man and The Picture of Dorian Gray, and those of “gathering place” and “digression” (unrolling) in Crystal Boys. After the extensive discussions of Formalist-Structuralist theories and analytical approaches in Chapter One, Maupassant’s “The Piece of String” and “Two Friends” are dealt with in Chapter Two. The reason for choosing them is two-fold: on one hand, to show how they are analyzed by Greimas in his own theoretical framework; on the other, to complement the analysis by using Shklovsky and Tomashevsky’s approach to “the variables.” As to how a textual analysis can proceed properly, this chapter indeed has set an example for the following ones. As it has been shown in Chapter Three, the major parts of A rebours consist of the protagonist’s aesthetic experiments conducted in his suburban house, so it is quite clear that the only utopic space in the novel is interior rather than exterior. Also, the novel’s episodic structure is formed by the inner segmentation of the house; therefore, an individual room (bedroom, dining room, etc.) is used by the author in each chapter. Furthermore, in this novel, we can also see that the causal relations among the chapters are rather weak and the order of the chapters can be rearranged at will without altering the novel’s basic structure of fabula, which consists of only a few dynamic motifs. In Chapter Four, I tried to explore a common feature shared by the two novels by Moore and Wilde and how this feature is closely related to the urban spaces of Paris and London. The protagonists of Confessions of a Young Man and The Picture of Dorian Gray are both young men in their late teens or early twenties. Due to this static motif (or, for Barthes, an “informant”), the paratopic spaces of the two novels are very important. Before the protagonists can enter into the realm of utopic space and take the main test, their competencies are yet to be acquired. Furthermore, since the two novels are more plot-driven that A rebours, the protagonists’ journeys in and out of London and Paris are very important and each of their spatial translocations is followed by a function (or dynamic motif). Therefore, Edward Dayne’s travels between London and Paris and Dorian Gray’s moving from the West End to the East End are important disjunctional syntagms in both novels, each of which is followed by a performative syntagm. In Chapter Five, we have seen that Crystal Boys is “a tale of three cities” in which Taipei, New York, and Tokyo are in many ways related. The novel uses Shklovsky’s so-called “parallelism” device, so it can be simultaneously seen as a story of exile of a gay community in Taipei and as many parallel episodes of the members in that community. The other main device of plot-construction in the novel is “the myth of Dragon and Phoenix,” which is essentially a kind of “digression,” a “spreading out” of the novel’s subject matter. In one central aspect Crystal Boys is the same as The Picture of Dorian Gray: for both of them, the translocation from one place to another inside the city is more important than that between cities or between the city and its suburbs. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the “East/West” urban structure in Taipei from the perspective of topological semiotics. In the final chapter of this dissertation, some concluding remarks will be brought forth in order to review the outcome of my textual analysis and to appraise the validity of the Formalist-Structuralist approaches deployed in the preceding five chapters. First of all, I will show that Greimas’s topological-axiological analysis of urban space can be interpreted as being related to the “inward turn” of the early Modernists and to their urban visions. Secondly, besides showing my observations on the qualifying and glorifying tests, the complementarity of “the constants” and “the variables” in narrative is again stressed. Finally, reflections on how characters are treated in Formalism and Structuralism are also made, and I’ve argued that the treatments are on the whole oversimplified.