Makers of Meaning: A Structuralist Study of Twain's Tom Sawyer and Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle

Abstract

Makers of Meaning:A Structuralist Study of Twain's Tom Sawyer and Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle Anita Moss The central questions which structuralists, post-structuralists, and deconstructionists have asked have to do with the ways an active mind makes meaning. How do readers make sense of texts? How do human beings read and decipher the bewildering universe of signs in which they are immersed? How do conventions shape fictions; how do fictions shape our perceptions of reality? To make meaning from literary texts, structuralists argue, a reader must bring them within the modes of discourse which one's culture makes possible. Cultural conventions become after a time so thoroughly internalized that they appear to be natural. A central structuralist notion (deriving from the Russian formalist critics) concerns the force of genre conventions in establishing a reader's expectations, which may or may not be fulfilled by a given text. Central also to structuralist thought is the notion that making meaning results from the interplay of the signifier and the signified, the two components of what Saussure called the "sign." Though they had not heard of structuralism or semiotics, Mark Twain and E. Nesbit were intensely aware of the conventions of literature and of the power those conventions exercised on the minds of children. Both Twain and Nesbit reveal the child readers' attempts to use the conventions of literature in making sense of the world. Tom Sawyer's culture has taught him to live by the letter, not the spirit, of books. When Tom observes Aunt Polly at family worship, her "prayer built from the ground up of solid courses of scriptural quotations, welded together with a thin mortar of originality; and from the summit of this she delivered a grim chapter of the Mosaic Law, as from Sinai."1 Tom's culture encourages him to accept the world of adult authority and rules without question: to obey, to use, to own, but not to think or to create. His culture encourages him to reduce all signs to simplistic, rather than full and rich, ways of making meaning. In Sunday School, he is asked to memorize and to recite endless passages from the Bible, to appropriate lifeless and rigid rules in which there is no room for meaningful "play" between signifier and signified, the field whereby human beings invent new meanings for themselves. To his credit and to the reader's delight, Tom signally fails to comply with these demands for rote learning. He fails to memorize Bible verses at church and he pretends at least to fail to memorize his lessons at school. If he has failed to master the surface substance of these lessons, however, Tom has internalized the method, the system by which his culture reads and makes use of texts. As a reader, Tom is disconcertingly literal-minded. In reading adventure stories and in employing their rules and "conventions" in his play, Tom reveals himself as an expert at the misuse of literature. We often use literary texts to establish our own power and authority over others; to manipulate them, and to make them like us. In his use of superstitious folk rituals, Tom is a stickler, indeed a pedant. He insists upon strict adherence to the rules and does not hesitate to use fallacious arguments to counter Huck's notions on the subject. Living in a community of readers who read and write strictly according to convention, Tom adopts their methods for his own purposes. Apparently Tom has not internalized structures which allow him to recombine experience and conventions in creative and liberating ways. Roland Barthes deplored contemporary French toys because they do not invite the child to "invent" his world.2 So it is with Tom. He is capable only of mechanical manipulation of convention. A voracious reader of adventure and romance, Tom uses the conventions of such literature as rituals for play. In these episodes he reveals that, despite his apparently subversive attitudes towards the major institutions of his society, he has nevertheless appropriated the "deep structures" (if not the surface ones) of his culture. He is authoritarian, arbitrary, and literal-minded in the conduct of this play. When his friends try to...