A Theory of Literary Structuralism (in Henry James)

Abstract

Structuralism provides innovative grounds for the analysis of prose literature. The role of the fiction reader, story in the service of language, and story no longer for representing the concrete reality but for manufacturing new, relational, and pluralistic realities in language spaces are some of the outcomes of literary structuralism. The present article intends to discuss the application of Henry James's theories of the novel for providing a grammar of narrative. For doing this, it also attempts to show that James's theories of novel testify to the literary structuralisms of Claude Levi_Struass, Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, and Jonathan Culler. The role of language in James, his innovative narrative modes like the use of scenic method and unreliable narrator, and the highlighted role of the reader in his last style which renders it a space of critical interpretation by the professional elite make his fiction structurally analyzable. In addition, these structure-making features bear witness to what Barthes suggests structural activity of fiction should be based on. Some of these Barthesian formulas are: regarding the text as an open-ended site of signification which should consequently be handled differently from the work, transferring the task of producing meaning from the author to the reader, and considering characters not as psychological entities but as participants in the formation of textual discourse. James's theories also testify to Todorov's theory of absolute and absent cause which he finds in the fiction of James and the outcome of which is the production of new frames of intelligibility. In addition, they give evidence to Culler's formula as to the production of meaning in novels, because reading James structurally is strategic for creating new realities in the space of language.