PARTISAN REVIEW
5<45
chambers of literary scholarship. Barthes has been a stimulating indi–
cator of new lines of study; in the second pa rt of
Critique et
verite
and in the essay "Histoire ou littcrature," he makes useful distinct–
tions among various kinds of studies around or about literature, and
outlines some potentially rich topics for "a history not of literature,
but of the literary function." We will perhaps presently see some
important work on the "literary fun ction" not only in the sociological
sense Barthes has in mind, but also, as the Russian Formalists en–
visaged, in the sense of the evolution of various devices
in
literature.
However, enthusiasm wanes when we look at what we have been
given so far. Occasionally, the results are comically simple-minded.
Claude Bremond, for example, in an essay pretentiously entitled " La
Logique des possibles narratifs," sets out to describe the "sequences–
types" fundamental to all "recits." The generality and the vagueness
of the categories are so great _ . " processus d'amelioration" versus
"processus de degradation" - that it would be impossible to argue
for or against them, and Bremond uses them mainly to make elaborate
and wholly uniformative charts.
More serious things are of course at stake in the group's enter–
prise. As Genette suggests in his piece on structu ralism and literary
criticism, systematic structural analysis seems to work best with myths
and stories alien to our own sensibilities. Vladimir Propp argued in
Morphology of the Folk Tale
( 1928 ) that a study of folk tales en–
tirely in terms of characters' functions (that is, in terms of
what
they
do instead of
who
is acting, and how ) is facilitated by the relative
insignificance of characters' identities. Feelings and intentions don 't
seem to affect the course of the action in the folk tale, and Propp
speculated that motivations are probably recent additions to the
genre. With literature closer to us, an interpretive criticism (I' ll be
coming back to what I mean by this ) still yields the best results. But
systematic analysis has been the fashion with all sorts of texts, and
while this makes for a fascinating structural dismembering of primi–
tive myths in Levi-Strauss, it has produced only embarrassing sim–
plifications when it has been applied to the major texts of Western
literature. Why?
Barthes has said that a science of literature depends on treating
the literary work as myth , that is, - - and the definition is from Levi–
Strauss - as a type of discourse from whi ch the subject of the enul1-
