A Good Dose of Formalism? Reading The Hungry Tide

Abstract

In the following chapters, I want to discuss the heuristic value of a focus on narrative strategies and the concept of a ?deep structure' of texts in the context of hermeneutic interpretation and (postcolonial) ecocriticism. The event of EnvironMentality, comparable to Attridge's notion of the effectiveness of a literary text, will be described as a result of the interplay of formal aspects and the text as a whole. But what is a text ?as a whole'? One of the tasks of this chapter is to spell out what this notion comprises. Ultimately, the chapter will locate the event of fiction in the interplay of textual structures, the various readerly responses these structures evoke, their general embeddedness in a specific interpretive community, and the conflicts arising from this interplay, which from a hermeneutical angle engender meaning. By narratively harmonising the various conflicts they deal with, or by staging the tensions they are concerned with, literary texts permit experiences and perspectives. Thus, the effectiveness of literature and the hermeneutics of EnvironMentality rely on processes of making sense of textual form in the context of one's natural and cultural environment. These processes concern the always dialogic discourse of literature, the emplotment of dichotomies into a coherent narrative whole, and, thus, the means by which the deep and the surface structure of the text create meaning.The notion of a text's deep structure is grounded on structuralist concepts as proposed by Algirdas Greimas, Jurij Lotman and Tzvetan Todorov. They have argued that narrative texts contain sets of binary oppositions that are, in the course of narrative discourse, translated into the textual surface structure. According to structuralist notions, human thinking is structured around such binary oppositions, and structuralism maintains that translating these binaries into narratives constitutes an ?acting out' of antagonistic positions and thus harmonises these positions.1 Is there a way, then, to connect this narrative harmonisation described by the structuralists with the harmonisation I am looking for with regard to EnvironMentality? Would this be an ecocritical specification of what Attridge calls ?effectiveness', that is, the coming into being of the wholly new (2004b: 24) that opens up ways of thinking and feeling? Clearly, the experience of nature, or of one's environment, is fundamental to our making sense of the world, particularly in the context of the imaginative crisis I described above. A formalist-structuralist focus on narrative discourse and narrative grammar therefore seems well capable of explaining how the representation of nature is connected to human systems of meaning, and how, sensu Zapf, the harmonising function of literature relates to the harmonising aspects of narrativisation.Given that the cultural-ecological idea of harmonisation can be discussed in terms of formalist-structuralist stances of narrative harmonisation, it is the literary discourse - the ?how' of narrative mediation - that needs to be understood as a crucial element of EnvironMentality. Attridge claims that the effectiveness of narrative form is closely connected to the phenomenon of literary ?singularity', and, as stated above, he maintains that it is this singularity that distinguishes literary texts from other forms of writing. At the same time, however, he points to the problematic status of the notion of ?form' and asserts that[u]nless we can rescue literary discourse from [the opposition of form and content], form will continue to be treated as something of an embarrassment to be encountered, and if possible evaded, on the way to a consideration of semantic, and thus historical, political and ideological, concerns. (Attridge 2004b: 108)However, if the effectiveness of literature in the postcolonialecocritical context is related to its harmonising function, its singularity would rely on the formal means of narrativisation and negotiation of the ecocritical aporias of anthropocentric versus ecocentric thinking, the problematic role of science, and the questions of ethics arising from these issues. …