Gimlé

This is supposed to be a short critical evaluation on the theories and theoreticians behind my Phd research, the primary focus being the very ideas behind the theories.

Jacques Derrida.

Derrida is the first and probably the most important of academics who form the theoretical basis for this research.

Although he is undoubtedly a solid part of the poststructuralist movement his critiques point out the major weakness, caveats and flaws in structuralist and formalist theory and as such forms an essential part of any theoretical enterprise that intends to use structuralist and formalist ideas.

The thrust of his theories is that meaning is not constructed out of some essential truth or fact found in reality but that meaning itself and our perceptions of meaning are linguistic and philosophical constructs, an idea that was probably originated by Nietzche who referred to truth as a fossilized or hardened linguistic metaphor. A referential construct that is necessary to comprehend reality and make it accessible to the human intellect.

Derrida’s work consists of systematically looking for and analysing these linguistic constructs, he breaks them apart with the idea that once you figure out which bit, once removed, breaks the machine, that gives you a handle on what makes it work.

Do this often enough and you should have an understanding of how the construct works.

One construct that he analyses are structures which only gain meaning as contextual constraints to other linguistic structures (remember, in Derrida’s world-view, everything is a linguistic structure so he finds these ideas to be very applicable to art and painting as well as writing).

These contextual constraints are any sort of structure that exist on the boundary of a work, thereby adding their meaning to the work as well as marking the boundary by their very existance. A good example of this sort of structure is a painting’s frame which gives us an initial indication of how we are supposed to understand the painting (the classic example being the difference between a plain black frame, a gilded frame, and an unvarnished, rough wooded frame).

Derrida calls this structure a parergon or comment.

The idea here is that the computer interface provides us with several structures which are of a similar nature to Derrida’s parergon, examples being comments, tooltips, popup-windows, the browser-window’s decorations and user interface. Each of these change the way you approach and understand a text on the net without actually touching the structure or content of the text itself.

M.M. Bakhtin.

Bakhtin sees the novel as an interplay of languages. If you have a novel with a working-class lead character, what seems to be an upper-class narrator, a literate middle-class supporting character, then you have a structure composed of three identifiable and interdependant languages. The meaning of the novel is derived from their interplay, how their styles work with each other and comment upon each other (Bakhtin calls it dialogic contact tying neatly in with Derrida’s ideas above).

A novel is any narrative structure where the primary origin of meaning is derived from this interplay.

Each language serves the role of being a thread in the tapestry of the novel’s structure. Each thread is a linguistic image of a language or style used in society.

A linguistic image can be the unique style of speaking belonging to certain classes, social groups or areas. It can be a narrative style existing usually in it’s own form (a frequent reference here is how other poetic styles appear within the context of Evgenij Onegin as the language of specific characters. The interplay between the poetic styles of those characters with the poetic style of the narrator gives the whole structure an added meaning that is impossible to derive from those poetic styles as independent and separate wholes.

The ideas behind this theory of multi-voice narrative structures (or Derrida’s parergon) does not preclude nonlinear structures. It seems very likely that one of the primary narrative methods of some hypertexts is to create interplay between stylistically different threads using hyperlinks and other digital media structures.

Claude Lévi-Strauss.

The concept of binary opposition is central to structuralism (q.v.) and structuralist practice. As a structuralist concept it derives especially from Lévi-Strauss’s studies of mythology.
Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory: Fourth Ed.(p.82)—J.A. Cuddon

Binary opposites represent one of the central ideas of structuralism and is as well one of the things poststructuralism gains meaning from criticising.

You cannot really discuss Derrida’s ideas without referring to binary oppositions and Claude Lévi-Strauss (as well as Saussure’s theories on the sign and signifier), and vice-versa. You cannot really discuss Derrida without talking about Saussure and Lévi-Strauss.

Binary oppositions, while frequently artificial and invalid constructs existing only in the academic’s mind (or as a cultural tradition) as deconstructionists like to point out, remain a good method to tease out the motive engine behind the narrative structure&mash;it’s a way to figure out where the tension, excitement, and power of a story comes from.

By finding two extreme opposites that interplay and bounce of each other within the text you find two narrative threads whose dialogic contact (to use Bakhtin’s term) is that of a more obvious and extreme opposition. Subsequently deconstructing that opposition using Derrida’s analytical methods opens up the nature of the relationships between the independent objects within the narrative structure.

It is equivalent to picking two parts of an engine which have a relatively obvious relationship, taking that relationship apart, finding its flaws, and then using that knowledge to try and understand the relationship of those two parts with their surrounding parts.

Do this often enough and you can gain a comprehensive understanding of the narrative’s structure.

References should follow later.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.