The Semiotics of Plot: Toward a Typology of Fictions

Abstract

Though there have been many attempts to draw a conclusive distinction between high and popular art, for instance on the basis of their different degrees of literariness, these attempts have failed to give us a conclusive principle for making such discrimination. Even if it seems unnecessary to agree with the German critic Karlheinz Stierle (1975) who bluntly calls this critical discussion hitherto beside the point, there is reason enough to try and approach the problem from a radically different point of view. Most traditional attempts have been based on one central presupposition about the ontology of literature that literature should be seen in its relation to real life, as mimesis. It is this conception of the real nature of fiction which constitutes the principle on which attempts to make such mimetic concerns as the adaptation to laws of probability and requirements of verisimilitude into a differential criterion are grounded. Even the suggestion made by Kermode in The Sense of an Ending (1973), a theoretical exposition of the nature of fictions which appears to contest their direct tie to a concrete referential world, that in contrast to popular fiction the plot of high art frustrates our easy expectations about the end, would seem to betray an ultimate bias for mimesis or imitatio (1973:17). Though this mimetic assumption based on our intuitive understanding of fiction is not untrue, neither has it proven entirely satisfactory on moral and intellectual grounds. The critical controversy about the status of popular fictions testifies to this effect, but also the apparent exhaustion affecting traditional interpretation of literature. There is, moreover, Derrida's criticism of the Saussurian concept of the sign, consisting of a discrete signifier and signified, and thus, according to Derrida, rooted in, as well as facilitating, the dualism of Western metaphysics in the otherness of signans and signatum, the preceptible and the intelligible, the ideal and the real (Derrida, 1971:11-27). Thus there would seem to be complex and compelling reasons warrant-