Formalism

Formalism (pronounced fawr-muh-liz-uhm)

(1) Strict adherence to, or observance of, prescribed or traditional forms, as in music, poetry and art.

(2) In religion, a strong attachment to external forms and observances.

(3) In philosophy (ethics), a doctrine that acts are in themselves right or wrong regardless of consequences.

(4) In literary theory, an approach to the interpretation of texts focused on the structure rather than the content, context of its origin or reception.

(5) In mathematics (formal logic), a doctrine that mathematics, including the logic used in proofs, can be based on the formal manipulation of symbols without regard to their meaning (the mathematical or logical structure of a scientific argument as distinguished from its subject matter; the theory a statement has no meaning but that its symbols, regarded as physical objects, exhibit a structure that has useful applications).

(6) A scrupulous or excessive adherence to outward form at the expense of inner reality or content.

(7) In Marxist criticism, scrupulous or excessive adherence to artistic technique at the expense of social values etc; also a view adopted by some non-Marxist critical theorists).

(8) In performance art, theatre a deliberately stylized mode of production.

(9) In both structural engineering and computer science, the notation, and its structure, in (or by) which information is expressed.

1830–1840: The construct was formal + -ism.  Formal was from the Middle English formel, from the Old French formel, from the Latin formalis, from forma (form) of unknown origin but possibly from the Etruscan morma, from the Ancient Greek μορφή (morphḗ) (shape, fashion, appearance, outward form, contour, figure), dissimilated as formīca and possibly formīdō.  The –ism suffix was from the Ancient Greek –ismos & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, often through the Latin –ismus & -isma, though sometimes through the French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Greek.  It appeared in loanwords from Greek, where it was used to form action nouns from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc).  Although actual use of the word formalism dates only from its adoption (1830s) in critical discourse, disputes related to the matter can be found in texts since antiquity in fields as diverse as agriculture, literature and theology.  Formalism is a noun, formalist is a noun & adjective, formalistic is an adjective and formalistically is an adverb; the noun plural is formalists.

The Russian Formalists

In literary theory, the term “form” is used of the “structure & shape” and the manner in which it is constructed, as opposed to the substance (theme, topic and such).  Form and substance are so intertwined as to be inseparable (although that hasn’t stopped some authors of “experimental” works trying to prove otherwise) but long before the post-modernists made deconstruction a thing, the two strands separately had been assessed and analysed.  The other way the word is used is as a synonym of genre (novella, essay, play etc).  Formalism was different; it was a literary theory with origins in the early Soviet Union of the 1920s, the practitioners and followers labelled “formalists”, a pejorative term which implied limitations.  In the way things then were done by the Bolshevists, Formalism as an identifiable entity faded quickly and fell into desuetude by late in the decade; movements which of which comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) didn’t approve had bleak prospects.

Influenced by the Moscow Linguistic Circle (1915) and The Society for the Study of Poetic Language (1916), Formalism was in 1917 founded by literary theorist, & writer Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) and author & political satirist Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937) with the then novel assertion art primarily was a matter of technique, the style not merely a method of execution but also the object of the art.  In an example of the way political forces in the post-tsarist state evolved, although Formalism began in the year of revolutions as something with the obvious socialist theme of the artist as a “worker” or “artisan”, its credos came under suspicion in the Kremlin because it was thought to have been captured by authors, artists & composers who found intoxicating the idea their work could be an exercise in pure technique, sometimes of such intricacy that it was only their colleagues who could understand, the public left unmoved or baffled.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December, 2011.

Reflecting what was going on in intellectual circles in Moscow, the Formalists were interested in applying to literary criticism what had come to be understood as the “scientific method” and were dismissive of the role of ideas, emotions, & actions (and “reality” in general) in defining what was specifically “literary” about a text.  What this meant was any distinction between form and content ceased to be relevant and the writer became a kind of cipher, re-working available literary devices and conventions, some practitioners even holding there were no poets or other literary figures, just the output, encapsulated in Shklovsky’s pithy definition of literature as “the sum total of all the stylistic devices employed in it”.  Shklovsky was the most influential figure in the early days of the movement and he was influenced by the Futurists who had been drawn to the speed and mechanical creations of modernity, something manifested in his concept of ostranenie (making strange, later to be called defamiliarization) which was an attempt to divorce art from conceptions such as beauty, elegance or other conventional benchmarks.

Despite the implications of that, Formalism was dynamic (and in the way movements tend to be) schismatic, a theory of narrative also developed which made a distinction between plot and story, the technique adopted reflecting the approach of the Futurists’ understanding of machinery.  Syuzbet (the plot) referred to the order & manner in which events were presented in the narrative while fabuh (the story) tracked the chronological sequence of events.  Another of the Formalists infused with the tenets of Futurism was the literary critic & theorist Boris Tomashevsky (1890–1957) who used the term modf to denote the smallest unit of plot and distinguished between “bound” & “free” motifs, the former one which the story absolutely requires while the latter was inessential; it was a model as familiar to engineers then as it would be to software developers now.  Formalists of course regarded content as subordinate to the formal devices used in its construction and this dependence on external “non-literary assumptions” was called “motivation”, and a text’s motivation was defined by Shklovsky as the extent to which it was dependent on non-literary assumptions, an example of a work totally without motivation cited as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (in nine volumes, 1759–1767) by the Anglo-Irish novelist & Anglican cleric Laurence Sterne (1713–1768).  Whether or not one concurs with Shklovsky’s absolutism, in writing Tristram Shandy, Sterne used so many devices and techniques that had the term “mash-up” then existed, it would have been applied and it can be argued it was with that work the distinction between the techniques of plagiarism and sampling can best be identified.  Formalism’s life was brief but the churning of theory was constant and later the concept of “device” gave way to the notion of “function”, depending on the purpose or mode or genre; it was no longer the device per se which was defamiliarizing but its function in the work.  While comrade Stalin was content he’d killed off Formalism, its elements and deconstructive tools took root in the academic reaches of Western literary criticism and if not a fork, post-modernism is at least a cul-de-sac.

Comrade Stalin, comrade Shostakovich and Formalism

Comrade Shostakovich at his dacha.

Comrade Stalin (1878–1953; leader of the USSR, 1924-1953) didn’t invent the regime’s criticism of formalism but certainly made it famous after comrade Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was denounced in the Soviet newspaper Pravda (Truth) in January 1936, after the Moscow performance of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.  Stalin didn’t like music he couldn’t whistle and the complex strains of Shostakovich’s opera, sometimes meandering, sometimes strident, certainly didn’t permit that; he labeled the composition формализм (formalism), "chaos instead of music", a self-indulgence of technique by a composer interested only in the admiration of other composers, an audience of no value in the school of Soviet realism.  It’s believed the Pravda article may have been written by Stalin himself and he used the word "formalism" in the sense it was understood English; formality being the observance of forms, formalism the disposition to make adherence to them an obsession.  To Stalin, the formal rules of composition were but a means to an end and the only legitimate end was socialist realism; anything other than that "an attack on the people".  Lest it be thought the defeat of fascism in the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) might have mellowed his views in such matters, Stalin at the 1948 party congress made sure the point was hammered home in the Communist Party's brutish way:  

"Comrades, while realistic music is written by the People's composers, formalistic music is written by composers who are against the People.  Comrades, one must ask why it is that realistic music is always written by composers of the People? The People's composers write realistic music simply due to the fact that being by nature realists right to their very core, they simply cannot help writing music that is realistic, while those anti-People composers, being by nature unrepentant formalists, cannot help... cannot help... cannot help writing music that is formalistic."

Comrade Stalin signing death warrants.

In the Soviet Union, producing or performing stuff hated by Stalin was not good career move.  Shostakovich completed his Fourth Symphony in C minor, Opus 43, in May 1936 and, even after the attack in Pravda, planned to stage its premiere in Leningrad December but found the orchestra unwilling to risk incurring the Kremlin’s wrath and almost as soon as rehearsals began, the orchestra's management cancelled the performance, issuing a statement saying comrade Shostakovich had withdrawn the work.  Actual responsibility for the decision remains unclear but it was certainly in accord with the views of the Kremlin and not until 1961, almost a decade on from Stalin’s death, was it performed.

All is forgiven: Soviet postage stamp issued in 1981 to honor 75^th anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich’s birth.

Shostakovich became a realist, his response to denunciation the melodic Fifth Symphony in D minor, Opus 47.  Premiered in November 1937 in Leningrad, it was a resounding triumph, attracting a standing ovation that lasted more than thirty minutes.  The following January, just before its first performance in Moscow, an article, under the composer’s name, appeared in the local newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva in which he described the Fifth Symphony as "…a Soviet artist's creative response to justified criticism."  Whether Shostakovich actually wrote the piece isn’t known but there’s never been any doubt it’d never have been published without Stalin’s approval and the success of the Fifth Symphony re-personed Shostakovich.  Whatever it lacked in glasnost (openness), it made up for in perestroika (restructuring) and the party engineered his rehabilitation as carefully as it had his fall a couple of years earlier, anxious to show how those bowing its demands could be rewarded as easily and fully as dissidents could be punished.

Purple

Purple (pronounced pur-puhl)

(1) Any color having components of both red and blue (often highly saturated), the darker the hue, the more likely to be described thus.

(2) In color theory, any non-spectral color on the line of purples on a color chromaticity diagram or a color wheel between violet and red.

(3) A dye or pigment producing such a colour

(4) Cloth or clothing of this hue, especially as formerly worn distinctively by persons of imperial, royal, or other high rank.

(5) In the Roman Catholic Church, a term at various times used to describe a monsignor, bishop or cardinal (or their office), now most associated with the rank, office or authority of a cardinal.

(6) Imperial, regal, or princely in rank or position.

(7) Any of several nymphalid butterflies including the red-spotted purple and the banded purple)

(8) Of or pertaining to the color purple (or certain things regarded as purple).

(9) In writing, showy or overwrought; exaggerated use of literary devices and effects; marked by excessively ornate rhetoric (purpureal).

(10) In language, profane or shocking; swearing.

(11) In modern politics, relating to or noting political or ideological diversity (in the US based on the blending of Democrat (blue) and Republican (red); in other places red & blue indicate different places on the political spectrum).

(12) In drug slang; the purple haze cultivar of cannabis in the kush family, either pure or mixed with others, or by extension any variety of smoked marijuana (“purple haze” a popular name for commercially available weed in those places where such thing are lawful.  Purple haze was originally slang for LSD.

(13) In agriculture, earcockle, a disease of wheat.

(14) To make or become purple (or, in ecclesiastical use, to put on one’s purple vestments) .

Pre 1000: From the Middle English noun and adjective purple, purpel & purpur, from Old English purpuren & purpul, a dissimilation (first recorded in Northumbrian, in the Lindisfarne gospel) of purpure (purple dye, a purple garment), from the adjective purpuren (purple; dyed or colored purple), from purpura (a kind of shellfish, Any of various species of molluscs from which Tyrian purple dye was obtained, especially the common dog whelk; the dye; cloth so dyed; splendid attire generally), from the Ancient Greek πορφύρα (porphýra or porphura) (the purple fish (Murex)), perhaps of Semitic origin.  Purpur continued as a parallel form until the fifteenth century and was maintained in the rules of heraldry until well into the nineteenth.  The verb purple (to tinge or stain with purple) was from the noun and emerged circa 1400.  The earlier form was purpured, a past-participle adjective.  The adjective purplish (somewhat purple, tending to purple) was from the noun and dates from the 1560s.  Purple is a noun, verb & adjective, purpled & purpling are verbs, purplish, purpler, purply & purplest are adjectives and purpleness is a noun; the noun plural is purples.

1974 Triumph Stag in magenta.  Some of the shades of brown, beige, orange and such used in the 1970s by British Leyland are not highly regarded but some were quite striking.

The rhetorical use in reference to “the splendid; the gaudy” began as a description of garments (classically imperial regalia) and since the mid-eighteenth century, as “purple prose” of writing.  In US political discourse and commentary, purple has since been used (often in graphical or cartographic form) to indicating the sectional or geographical spaces in which the increasing division of the country into red (Republican) and blue (Democratic) was less apparent.  That this came into widespread use only by around 2004 is because the use of red & blue by the US news media became (more or less) standardized only by the 1990s, use have begun circa 1980, something without any relationship to the linking of the colors (red=left; blue=right) traditional in other parts of the English-speaking world.  Other words used to describe purplish shades include lavender, mauve, amethyst, violet (with many sub-types) lilac, orchid, indigo, mulberry, plum, eggplant (aubergine seems rare but is used in commerce), fuchsia, heliotrope, periwinkle, purpureus & thistle and while many directly reference the flowers of plants, one curiosity is magenta: It was so called because the dye of that shade was created at the time of the Battle of Magenta (1559) in which French and Sardinian forces defeated those of the Austrians.  Purple is widely used in zoology and botany to create common names of species to some extent colored purple.

Purple patch: 1970 Dodge Challenger (440 Six-Pack) in Plum Crazy (left) and 1971 Plymouth Hemi ‘Cuda in In Violet) (clone; right).

Chrysler had some history in the coining of fanciful names for colors dating from the psychedelic era of the late 1960s when the choices included Plum Crazy, In-Violet, Tor Red, Sub Lime, Sassy Grass, Panther Pink, Moulin Rouge, Top Banana, Lemon Twist & Citron Yella.  Although it may be an industry myth, the story told was that Plum Crazy & In-Violet (lurid shades of purple) were late additions because the killjoy board refused to sign-off on Statutory Grape.  The lurid colors soon disappeared, not only because fashions change but because at the time they depended on the use of lead which was banned from paint in the early 1970s.  Not until the early twenty-first century did manufacturers perfect ways economically to replicate the earlier colors without using lead.

2025 Chevrolet Corvette 2025 Stingray 1LT in Hysteria Purple with Carbon Flash Painted Aluminum Wheels with Machined Edge (US$995) and standard lug nuts: photographed in natural light.

Although the US manufacturers in the twenty-first century revived a number of the more famous hues available during the first muscle car era (1964-1974), the “Hysteria Purple” (Code GXL; touch-up paint part-number WA-134H) Chevrolet in 2025 added to the Corvette’s exterior color chart genuinely was new.  Unlike four of the metallic choices which for 2026 attracted an additional charge (between US$500-995), Hysteria Purple was a NAC (no additional cost) option and could be ordered in conjunction with several of the available interior colors.  The “recommended” color combinations reflect what the designers think is good taste but, the customer always being right”, the factory allows buyers to tick the CCO (Color Combination Override (Code D30)) option box to mix ‘n’ match as they wish; the CCO lists at US$695.

2026 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1X in Hysteria Purple with standard wheels & lug nuts: studio photograph from Chevrolet’s website.

Response to Hysteria Purple was favorable but there’s been extensive coverage of the intriguing phenomenon of the color appearing to be “purple” when seen indoors, in the shade or at night yet when in natural light seeming more of a “blueberry blue”.  Chemically, the mix is said to be of blue and purple and Chevrolet would have been aware of the color-shift as ambient light changes so clearly it was deliberate rather than something like the “unintended consequences” suffered in 1970 by Imperials when, after exposure to direct sunlight, their hastily dyed vinyl roofs deteriorated rapidly from a fetching mix of blue & purple swirls to a less pleasing beige & brown combo.  On social media platforms and the well-populated Corvette forums, the consensus seemed to be the “bluish-purple” deserved to be dubbed with the portmanteau word “blurple”.

Lug nut porn.

The first run of 300 C1 (1953-1962) Corvettes were all were finished in “Polo White” (part of a patriotic “red, white & blue” theme which included “Sportsman Red” interiors and engines painted “Blue Flame” Blue) but since then the color palettes have been many and varied.  Now, the factory even accommodates those for whom the color of their wheel lugs is an important aesthetic.  The standard wheel on 2026 Corvettes is a forged aluminum piece finished in “Stirling Silver” (a reference to the paint’s color rather than metal) but blue, black and silver forged aluminum units are available for as much as an additional US$1,995 and for a Ferrariesque US$13,995 a buyer can specify “Visible carbon fiber” ones.  So, different color wheels meant a gap in the market for the lug nuts and for those not content with the standard metal fittings, Chevrolet offers them (as a dealer-fitted option) in chrome (US$275) or black (US$295), thus a unit-cost respectively of US$14 & US$15.  That doesn’t seem unreasonable for a high-quality piece of machining but, being dealer-fitted, it’s not clear if the buyer gets to keep the standard lugs fitted at the factory or they’re retained by the dealer.

Salma Hayek in eye-catching purple,  Cannes Film Festival May 2015.

In idiomatic use, purple is popular.  One “born into the purple” was literally one of royal or exalted birth although it’s now often used even of those from families somewhere in the upper middle class.  The “purple death” was hospital slang for Spanish influenza and it was an allusion to the cyanosis which, because of the difficulty breathing, which would turn the skin purple.  In the early post-war years “purple death” was also used to describe a cheap Italian wine.   The phrase “once in a purple moon” was a variation of “once in a blue moon” and some dictionaries include an entry, apparently only for the purpose of assuring us that not only is it extinct but it may never have been in common use.  “Purple bacteria” (the form only ever used in the plural) are a proteobacteria which produce their own food using photosynthesis; they are all classed as purple, even though some are orange, red or brown.  In the analogue-era world of the phone phreaks (hackers who used the telephone networks for other than the intended purpose), a “purple box” was a device which added a hold facility to a telephone line.  It was an allusion to the general term “black box” used in engineering and electronics to describe small devices with specific purposes; not all “purple boxes” were actually purple.  “Purple gas” was a Canadian term which described the gas (motor spirit; petrol) colored with a purple dye to indicate it was sold subject to a lower rate of taxation and for use only in agriculture and not on public roads.  Anyone found using “purple gas” beyond a farm could be charged and many countries use similar methods though the dye was not always purple.  “Purple gold” was a synonym of amethyst gold (a brittle alloy of gold and aluminium, purple in colour).

1994 Porsche 911 Turbo 3.6  (964) in Amethyst Metallic over Classic Gray.

A “purple passage” (also as “purple prose”) was any form of writing thought showy or overwrought, using an exaggerated array of literary devices and effects or marked by excessively ornate rhetoric.  It was a criticism but the later “purple patch” which describes any particular good period or performance (in any context) was wholly positive.  The “purple pill” was an advertising slogan used by a pharmaceutical company but unlike “little blue pill” (Viagra), it never entered the vernacular.  “Purple plague” has specific meanings in chemistry and electronics (relating to a chemical reaction which produces an undesirable purple compound) but a more amusing use is by Roman Catholic bishops noting a unwanted number of monsignors (who wear a purple sash) in their dioceses, sent there by the Vatican.  In US politics a “purple state” is a “swing state”, one which, depending on this and that, may vote either Republican (red) or Democrat (blue).  The “purple star” was the symbol worn by Jehovah's Witnesses in concentration camps in Nazi Germany (1933-1945), one of a number of color-coded patches, the best-known of which was the yellow Jewish star.  The Jehovah's Witnesses were an interesting case in that uniquely among the camp inmates, they could at any time leave if they were prepared to sign a declaration denying their religious beliefs.  In international air-traffic management, a “purple zone” (also “purple airway”) describes a route reserved for an aircraft on which a member of a royal family is flying.  In US military use, the “Purple Heart” dating from 1932, is still awarded to service personnel wounded in combat.  It’s origin was a decoration in purple cloth first awarded in 1782 which came to be known as the “wound stripe”.  In the mid 1960s, “purple haze” was slang for LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide, a psychedelic drug with a long history verging on academic respectability before becoming a popular hallucinogenic, users clipping the term to "acid"); it was later repurposed for various strains of weed.

Lindsay Lohan, admirer of all things purple.

The dye tyrian purple (all the evidence suggests it would now be thought a crimson), was produced around Tyre and was prized as dye for royal garments, hence the figurative use in the sixteenth century of purple for “imperial or regal power” (it was also the color of mourning or penitence among royalty or the upper reaches of the clergy).  Tyrian purple (also known as shellfish purple) was for long periods the most expensive substance in Antiquity (often (by weight) three times the value of gold, the exchange rate set by a Roman edict issued in 301 AD.  By the fifteenth century when the intricate process to extract and process the dye was lost, Tyrian purple had for millennia been variously a symbol of strength, sovereignty and money and its use had spread from the Classical world to Southern Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia and was so associated with the civilization of the Phoenicians (the color named after their city-state Tyre) that they were known as the “purple people”.  What many didn’t know was that the dye associated with the illustrious came not from a gemstone or some vivid coral but from the slimy mucous of sea snails in the Murex family.  Debate continues about what must have been the process used in extraction and production although, given many factories and artisans were involved over the years, there may have been many variations of the method.

2001 Lotus Esprit V8 (twin-turbo) in Deep Purple Metallic over Magnolia leather.

It was in 1453 when the Byzantine capital Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) fell to the Ottomans that the knowledge of Tyrian purple was lost, something of a footnote to the end of the Eastern Roman Empire but still a loss.  Then, the infamously smelly dyeworks of the old city were the hub of purple production although, after a series of punitive taxes, the Catholic Church had lost control of the pigment which is the origin of the pope’s decision that red would become the new symbol of Christian power and this was adopted for the garb of cardinals; the story that the vivid red symbolized the blood cardinals must be prepared to spill in the defense of their pope was just a cover story although one obviously approved of by the pontiff.

For their debut album Shades of Deep Purple (1968, left), the rock band Deep Purple used purple-themed cover art and may have wished they'd stuck with that for their eponymous third album (1969).  The original cover (centre), featuring a fragment of one panel of the triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510) by Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450-1516), was declared "demonic" by the US distributors so an alternative needed hastily be arranged and whether because of the tight schedule or just wanting to play it safe, they reverted to purple (right).  They'd earlier had a similar difficulty with their US label when releasing their second album (The Book of Taliesyn (1968)), the objection that time that one song title (Wring That Neck) was "too violent" (it was an instrumental piece and the reference was to a technique used with the neck of a guitar but it was anyway changed to Hard Road).  Times have changed.

1979 Fiat 124 Sport Spider.

The purple 124 is a US model (identified by the "battering-ram" bumpers and fitted here with aftermarket Panasport wheels, roll bar and exhaust system) and the paint is a Ford part number called Ford Royal Plum; while not a factory shade, it really suits the car.  Resident in California's Napa Valley, rarely can there have been a better color & licence plate combo.

In literary theory, “to etiolate” a text is to remove or revise the “purple passages”.  In literature, purple passages are those sections of a text which are overly elaborate, flowery, or extravagant in style, often prioritizing ornate or decorative language and the use of needlessly long words, the meaning of which is often obscure.  Such writing is thought a literary self-indulgence or a mere pretentious display of knowledge; grandiose execution at the expense of clarity, the usual critique being “style over substance”.  The phrase is almost certainly derived from the historic use of the once rare and expensive purple dye being restricted (actually by statute or edict in some places) to royalty and even when availability became wider, the association with luxury & wealth continued.  The idea has long been a tool of critics, Roman lyric poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 BC) in his Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry, 19 BC) referring disapprovingly to the purpureus… pannus (a purple piece of cloth), the irrelevant insertion of a grandiloquent or melodramatic passage into a work.  Horace thought this disruptive at best and absurd at worst and “purple passages” continues to be used to describe writing which is needlessly ornate, florid and usually discordantly incongruous.  Used almost always pejoratively (although there do seem to be some admirers), comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) might have called such flourishes “formalism”.

Baroque

Baroque (pronounced buh-rohk or ba-rawk (French)).

(1) Of or relating to a style of architecture and art originating in Italy in the early seventeenth century and variously prevalent in Europe and the New World for a century and a half, characterized by free and sculptural use of the classical orders and ornament, by forms in elevation and plan suggesting movement, and by dramatic effect in which architecture, painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts often worked to combined effect (often used with an initial capital letter).

(2) In music, of or relating to the period following the Renaissance, extending (circa 1600-1750) which tended to be characterized by extensive use of the thorough bass and of ornamentation to create dramatic effects. Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederick Handel, and Antonio Vivaldi were great composers of the baroque era.

(3) In literature, a style of prose thought extravagantly ornate, florid, and convoluted in character or style.

(4) An irregularly shaped pearl (rare except in technical use).

(5) In pre-modern twentieth century design or engineering, objects intricately or ornately detailed in a way no longer financially viable.

(6) Descriptively (of any object where the technical definitions don’t apply), variously (1) ornate, intricate, decorated, laden with detail & (2) complex and beautiful, despite an outward irregularity.

(7) In stonemasonry & woodworking, chiselled from stone, or shaped from wood, in a garish, crooked, twisted, or slanted sort of way, grotesque or embellished with figures and forms such that every level of relief gives way to more details and contrasts.

(8) Figuratively, something overly or needlessly complicated, applied especially to bureaucracy or instances like accounting systems which either are or appear to be designed to conceal or confuse.

1765: From the French baroque (originally “pearl of irregular shape”), from the Portuguese barroco or barroca (irregularly shaped pearl) which was in some way influenced by either or both the Spanish berrueco or barrueco (granitic crag, irregular pearl, spherical nodule) and the Italian barocco, of uncertain ultimate origin but which may be from the Latin verrūca (wart).  The etymology is however murky and some suggest the Portuguese words may directly have come from the Spanish berruca (a wart) also from the Latin verrūca (a steep place, a height (and thus “a wart” or “an excrescence on a precious stone”).  Most scholars think at some point it probably conflated with Medieval Latin baroco, an invented word for a kind of obfuscating syllogism although one speculative alternative is the word was derived from the work of the Italian painter Federigo Barocci (1528-1612), a founder of the style, but most think this mere coincidence.  The comparative is baroque and the superlative baroquest, both thankfully rare.  Baroque is a noun & adjective, baroqueness is a noun and baroquely is an adverb, the noun plural is baroques.

Marble Court, Palace of Versailles.  Commissioned in the 1660s by Louis XIV (1638–1715; le Roi Soleil (the Sun King), King of France 1643-1715), the Palace of Versailles is thought one of the the finest example of secular Baroque architecture.

Baroque is one of those strange words in English which has evolved to have several layers of meaning including (1) a term which defines epochs in music & architecture, (2) a term referencing the characteristics in the music & architecture most associated with those periods, (3) a term which is a negative criticism of those characteristics, (4) a term which is (by extension) a negative criticism of the excessively ornate in any field (especially in literature) and (5) a term applied admiringly to things intricately or elaborately detailed.  In English, baroque began as an expression of contempt for the style of architecture which most historians believe began in early seventeenth century Rome and which shocked many with its audacious departure from the traditions of the Renaissance which paid such homage to (what was at least imagined to be) the Classical lines from Antiquity.  In architecture, baroque has never been exactly defined, something some explain by analogy with Clement Attlee’s (1883–1967; UK prime-minister 1945-1951) observation that it was as pointless to define socialism as it was an elephant for “...if an elephant ever walked into the room, all would know what it was”.

Karlskirche, Vienna.The Vatican's Saint Peter’s Square is often used to illustrate Baroque architecture and all those colonnades do make quite a statement but Vienna's Karlskirche better represents the way church architects took to the form.  It was commissioned in 1713 by Charles VI (1685–1740; Holy Roman Emperor 1711-1740) after the end of the last great epidemic of Plague as an act of memorial to Cardinal Carlo Borromeo (1538-1584; Archbishop of Milan 1564-1584), revered as a healer of those suffering from Plague.

Actually, although etymologists would say that's true, that’s not how the word is actually often applied because the terms baroque and rococo are often used interchangeably by non-specialists when speaking of just about any building adorned with the elaborate details not seen since modernism, functionalism & brutalism prevailed.  What distinguishes things is less the actual shapes than the feeling imparted, baroque and rococo both noted for asymmetry, luxuriant detailing, extravagant, unexpected curves & lines and a polychromatic richness but where baroque’s language is of grandeur, weight & monumentalism, rococo’s implementations summon thoughts of lightness, playfulness and frivolity.  Tellingly, rococo, when used as a critique is applied almost always in the negative, suggesting something fussy, pointlessly elaborate and overstated whereas baroque is often used admiringly, literature about the only field in which use is universally negative.  The other common use of baroque in the negative applies to bureaucracy or tangled administrative systems when it’s used as a synonym of byzantine.  For those seeking a rule of thumb, except in literature, baroque tends not to be used negatively and when describing objects which contain ornate or intricate detailing, it’s adopted usually to suggest something complex and beautiful, despite an outward irregularity.  Baroque suggests restraint and good taste (there are many other words with which to describe the garish, crooked, twisted or grotesque) and to damn something as silly, over detailed and laden with decorations with no functional or aesthetic purpose, there’s rococo.

Winter Palace, Saint Petersberg.  Some do find the Winter Palace a bit rococo and there are elements of that in the interior but architecturally, it's an example of early baroque, albeit much modified by later renovations.  It was built as a residence of Peter the Great (Peter I, 1672-1725; Tsar of Russia 1682-1725) and remain an official palace of the Romanov Tsars between 1732 and the 1917 revolutions.  The present appearance reflects both the restorative work of the late 1830s when it was rebuilt after a severe fire and the restoration after the damage suffered during the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944).

The use in the language of literary criticism is, like any application of “baroque” in the non-visual arts, inherently imprecise.  Even in music, it’s understood as a period and many of the compositions which emerged from the era do have a style which is recognisably “baroque” but there was also much which was anything but.  The same can of course be said of the European buildings of the same period, the overwhelming majority of which were neither “baroque”, nor memorable, the adjective in what is now called the “built environment” making sense only when used of representational architecture.  That’s a well-understood distinction in architecture and even painting but more contentious in music, something made murkier still by musicologists having divided the baroque into the “early”, “middle” and late”, mapped onto a range of styles which were sometimes particular to one country and sometimes popular in many.  Interestingly, although as a generalized descriptor it needs still to be thought of as something which began as a term of derision in architecture (and it is from there it gained its parameters), there is an earlier, anonymous piece of (not especially serious) opera criticism which labelled a work as du barocque (in the sense of the original meaning “pearl or irregular shape”), damning the music as un-melodic, discordant and a roll-call of just about every known compositional device; something more like a student’s assignment than a opera.  It’s a critique not greatly different from that made some three centuries later by comrade Stalin (1878–1953; leader of the USSR, 1924-1953) who’d been displeased by one of comrade Dmitri Shostakovich’s (1906-1975) operas, calling it формализм (formalism), "chaos instead of music", a self-indulgence of technique by a composer interested only in the admiration of other composers.

L'Estasi di Santa Teresa (The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa) by Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) is a sculptural group rendered in white marble, set in an elevated aedicule in the Cornaro Chapel of the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome.  It’s thought one of the sculptural masterpieces of the High Roman Baroque and depicts Teresa of Ávila, a Spanish Carmelite nun and saint, in a state of religious ecstasy, a spear-holding angel watching over her.  The installation in 2007 (briefly one supposes) gained baroque sculpture a new audience when it was used in a popular meme which noted some similarity with an early morning photograph of Lindsay Lohan resting in a Cadillac.

The last days of baroque: 1967 Mercedes–Benz 600 Pullman Laudaulet (left & rght) and 1971 Mercedes-Benz 280 SE 3.5 Cabriolet (centre).  There was intricate detailing on the W111 and W100s, the last truly coach-built Mercedes-Benz.  Most were produced between 1963-1971 although the W100s continued in a trickle, substantially hand-built, until 1981.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), remembered as the philosopher who loomed over the French revolution, was also a composer and in his Dictionnaire de la musique (Dictionary of Music, 1767) declared baroque music to be that “...in which the harmony is confused, and loaded with modulations and dissonances. The singing is harsh and unnatural, the intonation difficult, and the movement limited...”, noting the term was a re-purposing of baroco (an alternative spelling of baroko (from a mediaeval mnemonic chant and a mode of syllogism used whenever some point seemed to be exist only pointlessly to obfuscate), used since the thirteenth century by philosophers discussing the tendency by some of their peers (usually those in the Church or university) needlessly to complicate simple concepts and arguments, just for the sake of grandiose academic gloss; formalism as it were.  Etymologists however remain unconvinced by Rousseau’s speculation and cite earlier evidence which suggests it was from architecture that the use in painting and music was derived, pondering that had Rousseau’s musicology been influenced by him being an architect rather than a philosopher, he too may have identified the source in brick and stone.  Anyway, baroque music as it’s now understood is a surprisingly recent construct, discussed as a thing only in the twentieth century, the term widely used only after the 1950s when the advent of long-playing (LP) records made the packaging and distribution of long-form composition practical and the industry became interested in categorizations, the Baroque something different from the Renaissance and the Classical despite the popular association of them all as one.

Narratology

Narratology (pronounced nar-uh-tol-uh-jee)

The study of narrative & narrative structure and the ways these affect human perception (with some mission creep over the years).

1967: The construct was narrate +‎ -ology, an Anglicization of the French narratologie, coined by Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher & structuralist literary critic Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017), it first appeared in his book Grammaire du Décaméron (1967), a structural analysis of Decameron (The Decameron (1348-1353)) by the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375).  Although once thought an arcane appendage to literature and a mere academic abstraction, structuralism and narratology in the 1970s and 1980s became a very popular (and controversial) field and while postmodernism’s historic movement may have passed, the tools are an important part of the “learning” process used by generative AI (artificial intelligence) to produce meaning from the LLM (large language models.)

Title page from a 1620 printing of Decameron.

Boccaccio’s Decameron (literally “ten days”) was a collection of short stories, structured into a hundred tales of seven young women and three young men who had secluded themselves in a villa outside Florence, seeking to avoid the Black Death pandemic (1346-1353) then sweeping Europe.  Although not too much should be made of this comparison, the work in some aspects is not dissimilar to reality television, being a mash-up of erotic scenes, set-piece jokes, suspense and unrequited love.  Todorov’s Grammaire du Décaméron was a literary analysis of the work but “grammaire” must be understood as meaning “grammar” in the sense of the structural or narratological principles rather than as its used in its “everyday” sense.  Historians and literary scholars have for centuries regarded Decameron as a valuable document because, written in the Florentine vernacular of the era, although fictional, it’s a kind of “snapshot” of life in what was one of Europe’s many troubled times.  It was Boccaccio who dubbed Dante’s (Dante Alighieri (circa 1265–1321)) Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy (circa 1310-1321)) “divine” (in the sense of “very good” rather than “holy”).

Narrate (to relate a story or series of events (historically in speech or writing)) may for years (or even decades) have been in oral use in English before the first known use in print in 1656, etymologists noting that until the nineteenth century it was stigmatized as “Scottish” (long a slur among the more fastidious) although it’s thought it was derived from the “respectable” narration.  Narrative ((1) a story or account of events or (2) the art, process or technique or telling the story) was in use by the 1440s and was from the Middle French noun & adjective narrative, from the Late Latin narrātīvus (narration (noun) & suitable for narration (adjective)), the construct being narrāt(us) (related, told), past participle of narrāre (to relate, tell, say) + -īvus (the adjectival suffix).  Again, like “narrate”, narrative was once used exclusively of speech or writing but in recent decades the terms have been more widely applied and not restricted to describing the efforts of humans.

Since the nineteenth century, “-ologies” have proliferated.

The suffix -ology was formed from -o- (as an interconsonantal vowel) +‎ -logy.  The origin in English of the -logy suffix lies with loanwords from the Ancient Greek, usually via Latin and French, where the suffix (-λογία) is an integral part of the word loaned (eg astrology from astrologia) since the sixteenth century.  French picked up -logie from the Latin -logia, from the Ancient Greek -λογία (-logía).  Within Greek, the suffix is an -ία (-ía) abstract from λόγος (lógos) (account, explanation, narrative), and that a verbal noun from λέγω (légō) (I say, speak, converse, tell a story).  In English the suffix became extraordinarily productive, used notably to form names of sciences or disciplines of study, analogous to the names traditionally borrowed from the Latin (eg astrology from astrologia; geology from geologia) and by the late eighteenth century, the practice (despite the disapproval of the pedants) extended to terms with no connection to Greek or Latin such as those building on French or German bases (eg insectology (1766) after the French insectologie; terminology (1801) after the German Terminologie).  Within a few decades of the intrusion of modern languages, combinations emerged using English terms (eg undergroundology (1820); hatology (1837)).  In this evolution, the development may be though similar to the latter-day proliferation of “-isms” (fascism; feminism et al).

A narrative is a story and it can run to thousands of pages or appear in a few words on a restaurant menu describing their fish & chips: “Ethically sourced, line-caught Atlantic cod, liberated from the frigid depths, encased in a whisper-light, effervescent golden shroud of our signature micro-foamed artisanal lager batter and served with hand-sliced, elongated potato batons fried to a crisp perfection in sustainably produced vegetable oil.”  In the age of every customer being able to post from their phone a rating and review of a restaurant, wisely, some institutions include a footnote along the lines: “These narratives are a guide and because natural products vary greatly, there will be variation.”  That’s an aspect of narratology, a process which is not the reading and interpretation of individual texts but an attempt to study the nature of “story” itself, as a concept and as a cultural practice or construct.

Crooked Hillary Clinton's book tour (2017).

Narratologists know that what to a narrator can be a narrative, a naratee will receive as spin.  In What Happened (2017), a work of a few dozen pages somehow padded out to a two-inch thick wad of over 500 using the “how to write an Amazon best-seller” template, crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013) explained who was to blame for her loss in the 2016 US presidential election (spoiler alert: it was everybody except her).

Presumably not comparing what they’re doing with making “fish & chips” sound like something expensive, politicians and their operatives will often describe something they offer as a “narrative” although were mush the same stuff to come from their opponents it might be dismissed as “spin”.  A political narrative functions as a cognitive schema intended to simplify complexity, motivate support and legitimizes particular courses of action.  The concept has a long history but in recent decades the emphasis has been on “simplicity”, something illustrated by comparing a narrative like The Federalist Papers (1878-1788; a collection of several dozen essays advocating the ratification of the Constitution of the United States) with how things are now done (mostly fleshed-out, three-word slogans endlessly repeated).  That descent doesn’t mean both are not narratives in that both are crafted interpretive frame rather than objective descriptions although the extent of the deception obviously had tended to change.  Political spin can also be a narrative and should be thought a parallel stream rather than a tributary; variations on a theme as it were.  Although the purpose may differ (a narrative a storyline intended to set and define and agenda whereas spin is a “damage control” story designed to re-shape perceptions.  Given that, a narrative can be thought of a “macro-management” and spin “micro-management”, both providing fine case-studies for narratologists.

Narratology is a noun; the noun plural is narratologies.  The derived forms are the noun antenarratology (the study of antenarratives and their interplay with narratives and stories), the noun antenarrative (the process by which a retrospective narrative is linked to a living story (the word unrelated to the noun antinarrative (a narrative, as of a play or novel, that deliberately avoids the typical conventions of the narrative, such as a coherent plot and resolution)), the noun  econarratology (an approach to literary criticism combining aspects of ecocriticism (the interdisciplinary study of literature and ecology) and narratology), the noun narratologist (one who (1) studies or (2) practices narratology), the adjective narratological (of or pertaining to narratology) and the adverb narratologically (in terms of narratology).  Remarkably (given the literary theory industry), the adjective narratologistic seems never to have appeared; it can be only a matter of time.

Tzvetan Todorov on the rooftop of Casa Milà (La Pedrera), Barcelona, Spain, November 2014.

Although not a lineal descendent, what Todorov did in Grammaire du Décaméron was in the tradition of Aristotle’s (384-322 BC) work, especially ποιητικῆς (Peri poietikês (De Poetica De Poe in the Latin and traditionally rendered in English as Poetics).  Poetics is notable as the earliest known study of the structure of Greek drama and remains the oldest known text written exclusively in the form of what now would be called literary theory.  To a modern audience the word “poetics” can mislead because the author’s focus was ποιητική (literally “the poetic art”, from ποιητής (poet, author, writer) and his scope encompassed verse drama (comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play), lyric poetry, and the epic.  For centuries, Poetics loomed over the Western understanding of Greek theatre; it was revered by scholars of the late Medieval period and especially the Renaissance and their influence endured.  As far as in known, the Greeks were the first of the tragedians and it’s through the surviving texts of Aristotle that later understandings were filtered but all of his conclusions were based only on the tragedies and such was his historic and intellectual authority that for centuries his theories came to be misapplied and misused, either by mapping them on to all forms of tragedy or using them as exclusionary, dismissing from the canon those works which couldn’t be made to fit his descriptions.  However, as well as being an invaluable historic text explain how Greek theatre handled mimesis (imitation of life, fiction, allegory etc) Poetics genuinely was proto-critical theory and in it lies a framework for structuralism.

Paintings of Claude Lévi-Strauss: Portrait de Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1991 (1991), oil on panel by Bengt Lindström (1925-2008) (left) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (undated), oil on other by Cal Lekie (b 1999).

Narratology as a distinct fork of structuralism does pre-date Todorov’s use of the word in 1967, the seminal work in the parameters of the discipline by Russian folklorist & literary historian of the formalist school Vladimir Propp (1895-1970) who doubtlessly never anticipated “formalism” would come to be weaponized by comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953).  Indeed, by the late 1920s the school of formalism had become unfashionable (something which in the Soviet Union could be dangerous for authors) and their works essentially “disappeared” until being re-discovered by structuralists in the 1950s.  In the West, the idea of narratology as the “theory, discourse or critique of narrative or narration” owes a debt to Belgian-born French anthropologist & ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) who defined the structural analysis by narrative as its now understood.  His landmark text Anthropologie structurale (Structural Anthropology (1958)) suggested myths are variations on basic themes and that in their totality (which runs to thousands) their narratives contain certain constant, basic and universal structures by which any one myth can be explained.  In that way, myths (collectively) exist as a kind “language” which can be deconstructed into units or “mythemes” (by analogy with phonemes (an indivisible unit of sound in a given language)).  Although he didn’t pursue the notion of the comparison with mathematics, others did and that (inherently more segmented) field perhaps better illustrates “structural roles” within language in elements which, although individually standing as minimal contrastive units, can be combined or manipulated according to rules to produce meaningful expressions.  As in formal language theory, in mathematical logic, the smallest units are the primitive symbols of a language which can be quantifiers, variables, logical connectives, relation symbols, function symbols or punctuation.  Broken into the individual parts, these need have no (or only minimal) semantic meaning but gain much meaning when assembled or otherwise handled through syntactic combination governed by a recognized grammar (ie although conceptual primitives rather than “building blocks”, complex meaning can be attained by applying axioms and rules).

Azerbaijani folk art, following Layla and Majnun (1188), a narrative poem by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi (circa 1141–1209), printed in Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928) by Vladimir Propp.  In something of a Russian tradition, there are no known photographs of Propp smiling.

Levi-Strauss’s contribution was that myths can be read in relation to each other rather than as reflecting a particular version, thus the his concept of a kind of “grammar” (the set of relations lying beneath the narrative’s surface), thus the general principle of the “collective existence of myths”, independent of individual thought.  That was of course interesting but the startling aspect was the implication myths as related to other myths rather than truth and reality; they are, in a sense, “outside” decentred, and possess their own truth and logic which, when contemplated in a “traditional” way, may be judged neither truthful nor logical.  In that, Levi-Strauss applied something of the method of Propp who, in Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928), “reduced” all folk tales to seven “spheres of action” and 31 fixed elements or “functions” of narrative.  In Propp’s scheme, the function was the basic unit of the narrative “language’ and denoted or referred to the actions which constitute the narrative while the functions tend to follow a logical sequence.  The concept would have been familiar to engineers and shipbuilders but genuinely there was some novelty when applied to literature

Lithuanian semiotician A. J “Julien” Greimas (1917–1992) was among the many academics working in France who found Propp’s reductionism compelling and in Sémantique Structurale Recherche de méthode (Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method (1966)) he further atomized things, apparently seeking something like a “universal macro language”, a grammar of narrative which could be derived from a semantic analysis of sentence structure.  That was as ambitious as it sounds and to replace Propp’s “spheres of action” he suggested the “actant” (or role): a structural unit which is neither character or narrative.  To handle the mechanics of this approach he posited three pairs of binary oppositions which included six actants: subject/object; sender/receiver; helper/opponent.  The interactions of these binary oppositions served to account for or describe the three basic patterns which are to be found in narrative: (1) desire, search or aim (subject/object), (2) communication (sender/receiver) and (3) auxiliary support or hindrance (helper/opponent).

An eleven-volume first edition of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (published originally in seven (1913-1927); in the the original French it contained some 1.267 million words.  By comparison, Leo Tolstoy's (1828-1910) War and Peace (1898) ran ran (depending on the edition) to 560-590 thousand.

While Greimas didn’t explicitly claim his model successfully could be mapped on to “any and every” narrative, he does appear to have built his model as a general theory and while not all critics were convinced, it seems generally to have been acknowledged his toolbox would work on a much wider range than that of Propp which did break down as narrative complexity increased.  Another French literary theorist associated with the structural movement was Gérard Genette (1930–2018) and in choosing a case study for his model he described in Discours du récit est un essai de méthode (Narrative Discourse: An essay in method (1972)) he selected Marcel Proust’s (1871-1922) À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) (originally translated in English as “Remembrance of Things Past” and of late as “In Search of Lost Time”) which spans many volumes and narrative streams.  This time the critics seemed more convinced and seem to have concluded Genette’s approach was “more accessible” (these things are relative).  Noting the distinctions made in Russian Formalism between fabula (story) & syuzhet (plot), Genette distinguished between récit (the chronological sequence of a narrative’s events), historie (the sequence in which the event actually occurred and narration (the act of narrating itself); atop that framework, he built a complex discussion.  Being a French structuralist, he of course added to the field some new jargon to delight the academy, concluding there were three basic kinds of narrator: (1) the heterodiegetic' (where the narrator is absent from his own narrative), (2) the homodiegetic (the narrator is inside his narrative, as in a story told in the first person) and the autodiegetic (the narrator is inside the narrative and also the main character).  Genene’s approach was thus relational, envisaging narrative as a product or consequence of the interplay of its different components, meaning all and all aspects of narrative can be seen as dependent units (or, debatably, layers).

Narrator & protagonist: Lindsay Lohan as Cady Heron in Mean Girls (2004).  What in literary theory is known as homodiegetic narration is in film production usually called “subjective narration” or “first-person narration”, realized usually in a “voice-over narration by the protagonist”.

In formulating his three categories Genene nodded to Aristotle and Plato (circa 427-348 BC), the ancient worthies distinguishing three basic kinds of narrator: (1) the speaker or writer using their own voice, (2) (b) one who assumes the voice of another or others and (3) one who uses both their own voice and that of others.  These categories need not be exclusive for a story may begin in the voice of a narrator who may then introduce another narrator who proceeds to tell the story of characters who usually have their own voices and one or more of them may turn to narration.  Structurally (and even logically), there’s no reason why such a progression (or regression) cannot be infinite.  Although it’s obvious the term “narrate” denotes the person to whom a narrative is addressed, just because there is a narrative, it need not be axiomatic a narratee is present or ever existed, T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) in The Three Voices of Poetry (1953-1954) discerning three modes (voices) of poetic expression: (1) the poet speaking to himself, a personal, often obscure meditation, (2) the poet addressing an audience, aiming to teach, persuade, or amuse and (3) the poet creating a dramatic character, as in verse drama, something demanding complex communication between imagined characters.  Eliot argued that “good” poetry often was a blend of these voices and distinguishing them helps in understanding a poem's social and artistic purpose, beyond its mere self-expression.  However, Eliot did note that in “talking to himself”, the writer could also be “talking to nobody”.  He was at pains also to point out that when speaking in the third voice, the poet is saying not what he would say in his own person, but only what he can say within the limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character.  More than many, Eliot knew narrative was not always reliable but the techniques of narratology (and structuralism generally) exist for purposes other than determining truth.

Roland Barthes (2015), oil and acrylic on canvas by Benoit Erwann Boucherot (b 1983).

Layers in narrative structure were identified by the French philosopher & literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and his work had great appeal, something of an academic cult once surrounded him and, almost half a century after his death, he retains a following.  In Introduction à l'analyse structurale des récits (Introduction to Structural Analysis of Narrative (1966)), Barthes presumed a hierarchy of levels existed within narrative, suggesting that, up to a point, they can be discussed separately.  Narrative (at least for this purpose), he conceived as a “long sentence”, just as every constative (in linguistics, pertaining to an utterance relaying information and likely to be regarded as true or false) sentence can be the “rough outline” of a short narrative.  Barthes’ model was more building block-like in that he selects basic units of narrative (such as “function” & “index”, functions constituting a chain of acts while indices are a kind of metadata containing information about characters.

François Mitterrand (1984), acrylic on canvas by Bryan Organ (b 1935).

On X (formerly known as Twitter), one tweeter analysed the images on Barthes which exists and the indexed web, finding in 72% he was smoking a cigarette or cigar.  The statistical risks associated with routinely inhaling a known carcinogen have for decades been well-known but Barthes didn’t live long enter the age of “peak statistical risk”.  In February, 1980, having just taken lunch with François Mitterrand (1916–1996; President of France 1981-1995) in a restaurant on Paris’s Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, Barthes was using a zebra crossing on the Rue des Ecoles when knocked down by a laundry van; never recovering from his injuries, he died a month later.  The van’s driver was one Yvan Delahov, of Bulgarian nationality who tested positive for alcohol, but his reading of 0.6 fell below the legal maximum of 0.8; admitting he was late delivering his shirts, he claimed he’d not exceeded 60 km/h (37.3) mph.  At the time, Barthes was carrying no identity documents but was identified his colleague, the philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984).

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (first edition, 1957).

Finally must be acknowledged the contribution of Canadian literary critic & literary theorist Northrop Frye (1912–1991) whose Anatomy of Criticism (1957) is regarded still as one of the more “remarkable and original” (in the words of the English historian and critic J.A. Cuddon (1928-1966)) works of literary theory in the English-speaking world.  In the narrow technical sense, Frye's theory is not structuralist (something which doubtless burnished its reputation among many) but it certainly contains strands which can be seen as structuralist.  Frye positioned literature as an “autonomous verbal structure”' unrelated to anything beyond itself, a world which contains “life and reality in a system of verbal relationships”.  In this “self-contained literary universe”, there were four radical “mythoi” (plot forms and basic organizing structural principles) which corresponded to the four seasons of the natural order and constitute the four main genres of comedy romance, tragedy and satire.  For those non-postmodernists who still long for l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake), Frye’s mythois are there to be used and he proved their utility in a wide range of texts, including the Bible.