ABSTRACT
New ideas often provoke baffled and anti-intellectual reactions, and this was especially true of the reception accorded the theories which go under the name of ‘structuralism’. Structuralist approaches to literature challenged some of the most cherished beliefs of the ordinary reader. The literary work, it was long felt, is the child of an author’s creative life, and expresses the author’s essential self. The text is the place where we enter into a spiritual or humanistic communion with an author’s thoughts and feelings. Another fundamental assumption which readers often make is that a good book tells the truth about human life – that novels and plays try to ‘tell things as they really are’. However, structuralists have tried to persuade us that the author is ‘dead’ and that literary discourse has no truth function. In a review of a book by Jonathan Culler, John Bayley spoke for the anti-structuralists when he declared, ‘but the sin of semiotics is to attempt to destroy our sense of truth in fiction . . . In a good story, truth precedes fiction and remains separable from it.’ In a 1968 essay, Roland Barthes put the structuralist view very powerfully, and argued that writers only have the power to mix already existing writings, to reassemble or redeploy them; writers cannot use writing to ‘express’ themselves, but only to draw upon that immense dictionary of language and culture which is ‘always already written’ (to use a favourite Barthesian phrase). It would not be misleading to use the term ‘anti-humanism’ to describe the spirit of structuralism. Indeed the word has been used by structuralists themselves to emphasize their opposition to all forms of literary criticism in which the human subject is the source and origin of literary meaning.
