Narrative and the Imaginary: A Review of Gilbert Durand's "The Anthropological Structures of the...

Narrative and the Imaginary: A Review of Gilbert Durand's "The Anthropological Structuresof the Imaginary"Author(s): Ross ChambersSource: Narrative, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Jan., 2001), pp. 100-109Published by: Ohio State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20107231 .

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Ross Chambers

Narrative and the Imaginary: A

Review of Gilbert Durand's The

Anthropological Structures of the

Imaginary Durand, Gilbert. The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary. Translated by

Margaret Sankey and Judith Hatten. Mount Nebo (QLD, Australia): Boombana Pub

lications, 1999. pp. 413. ISBN: 1876542 03 9

Physicians sometimes speak of the armamentarium to allude to the battery (or, to keep the military metaphor, the arsenal) of treatment options (drugs, procedures, and the like) that are available in the case of a given medical condition. On that anal

ogy, and although the word is not beautiful, I propose the term imaginarium to cap ture the idea for which French has used the term l'imaginaire in recent generations.

L'imaginaire does not mean only the imaginary, in the sense ofthat which pertains to

the faculty of the imagination, but refers also to the repertory of items (or images) that define what, for a give individual or collective subjectivity, it is possible to imag ine. The advantage of this term is that one can coin a parallel term, argumentarium (French l'argumentaire) for that which it is possible to argue. Taken together, these

two terms describe the idea that there are limits, cultural or psychological or both, on

what it is possible to think. From the point of view of narrative, they permit me to de

scribe narrative statements as the product of an imaginarium, on which they draw, and of an argumentarium that determines the disposition of imaginary elements ac

cording to a set of grammatical rules or regularities. The two terms thus define a

topology of narrative, which would need to be completed by a pragmatics, corre

sponding to the question: what does narrative do and how does it do it?

The etymology of Indo-European words relating to narrative suggests that very ancient understandings refer narrative to knowledge and experience on the one hand

(Walter Benjamin's word was Erfahrung), and to counting on the other. "Narrative"

Ross Chambers is Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Gilbert Durand examined his doctoral dissertation at

the University of Grenoble in 1967. He is currently working on the rhetoric of testimony, with special ref

erence to AIDS writing in Australia, North America, and France.

NARRATIVE, Vol. 9, No. 1 (January 2001)

Copyright 2001 by The Ohio State University



Review of 'The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary 101

is supposedly from a Latin word, gnarus, meaning knowledgeable, while Greek

(h)istoria, an investigation or inquiry, gives both "history" and "story." Telling (cf. German erz?hlen, to relate, and Zahl, a number) is a matter of counting out or retail

ing, as in telling one's beads, while descendants of Latin computare (e.g., French

compter, conter, conte, or English account, recount, count) show considerable se

mantic overlap between narrating and counting. Presumably the fingers were hu

mans' first guide to both. An elementary theory of narrative might thus imagine narrative as the counting out, item by item, of the contents of accumulated wisdom, a thesaurus of resources on which the narrator draws for the edification or entertain

ment of an audience with whom, as a consequence, the treasure is shared.

Between the idea of experience or Erfahrung and that of a store of imaginary resources there is no real incompatibility if one takes into account the fact that the

audience of a narrative event is invited by the narrator to imagine what they may not

themselves have actually experienced (say, the collective knowledge of a group, or

the product of an individual's enterprise). Images, in this understanding, are the means available for making the narrator's experience imaginable by the audience the

narrative addresses. Such images function as symbols, signs that make it possible for

an audience to imagine what beggars description, that is, the powers of linguistic ref erence. The symbolic signifier is understood as not arbitrary; it participates in its sig nified and the signified participates in it; from the narrator's point of view it fuses

experience and image; from the audience's, it makes available experience that could

not otherwise be grasped. The imaginarium, then, is a treasury of symbolic images whose limits are those of what a given audience is capable of imagining.

Gilbert Durand's extraordinary volume, The Anthropological Structures of the

Imaginary, was published in France in 1960. It has gone through a number of edi

tions and been translated into many languages, and now, thanks to the stylish and ac

curate work of two indefatigable Australian translators, it is at last available in

English. It is an impressive work of scholarship, both a catalogue and a glossary of

the imaginarium, a repertoire or thesaurus of symbols in the sense I've just men

tioned, that is, of images charged with the historical, experience-derived wisdom of

humanity, which the author for that reason identifies ambitiously as archetypes and treats as uni versais. (More cautiously than he, and forty years on, I would suggest that it is wise to bracket out the question of universality in work of this kind. Al

though Durand's ambition is immense and ranges widely over the anthropological information available to him in 1960, his materials are mainly Indo-European and

his focus, especially in literature and folklore, largely classical?Latin and Greek?

and French. The word "universal" suggests an exclusionary relation with the partic ular: what is particular cannot be universal and vice versa. But the terms "local" and

"global" have come to be used recently in the context of an understanding that they are in a relation of continuity, such that the global is always manifested in local form

but the local is always paradigmatic of the globality in which it participates. So let's

say that The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary is a local imaginarium rep

resenting one possible manifestation of the global imaginary, which is liable to have

any number of other local inflections.) Three characteristics of this volume strike me as remarkable. The first is simply



102 Ross Chambers

its copiousness, as an effort to provide a comprehensive inventory, a detailed cata

logue of symbols. There is a pleasure in reading it, a stimulus to the individual

reader's imagination, that I would compare with the fascination that was exerted a

few generations ago by Frazer's The Golden Bough. The pleasure is that provided by lists, a discursive form of plethora. In Durand's own terms, one could classify it as

appealing to the digestive or absorptive reflex that governs the imaginary, he argues, in its cyclical mode. For example:

In Germanic and Indo-European tradition, heroes combating monsters are too

numerous to mention. Their prototype appears to be the Vedic Indra, who con

quers Vibrahan. A close relative is Thor; he kills the "terrestrial giant" Hrung n?r.... The triple nature of Hrungnir and Tricipah, emphasized by Dum?zil and

also found in the Iranian Ahzi Dahaka, the Greek Geryon, or the Irish Mech

whose heart is formed from three serpents, is an important symbol of lunar

time.... Such fighting gods, who can be compared with the Latin Mars and his

lances ... are gods of lightning. . . . German folklore is filled with numerous

doublets of Thor; killers of monsters, bears and dragons, such as Barco or

Bjarki, and his prot?g? H?ttr, who are reminiscent of Maritah and the bellicose

companions of Indra. (156-57)

There are pages and pages of writing like this in the book; all one can do is give one

self up to it (while resisting the almost irresistible temptation it offers to parody). There is no other way in the argumentarium of scholarship of indicating the wealth

of the imaginarium. The other two features of the book, on which I'll concentrate in what follows,

are that it proposes that the imaginarium is in fact not a formless heap or a pile, but a

structured set, governed, that is, by a dynamics of relationality and a logic of differ

ence; and that, secondly and as a consequence, it offers the lineaments of a possible

argumentarium of narrative. The book thus suggests that at some level imaginarium and argumentarium are not simply complementary but indissociable: the imaginar ium gives rise to narrative and narrative develops the implications of the imaginar ium because each is formed in response to a single phenomenon, which can be

named as that of time. As ways (a way) of treating time?I revert momentarily to the

lexicon of therapy?they make it "tractable" to human motivations; or as Durand

puts it, referring to the imaginary, their function is to "euphemize" the danger and

pain of temporal existence.

But if heaping appeals to the imagination, and shows the sense in which schol

arly work is itself governed by imaginary imperatives, so too does the structuring

gesture. It fulfills a complementary need to the need for fullness, denying chaos by

extracting order from it. Where digestive satisfactions associated with copiousness are of the Nocturnal Order, Durand might argue, it is the Diurnal order, which gov erns a more combative stance toward manifestations of time, entropy and death, that

controls the intellectual act of ordering that is structural analysis. Since 1960, it is

true, our understanding of what is at stake in the concept of structure has been pro

foundly modified by Jacques Derrida's work, whereas Durand's 1960 title echoes,



Review of The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary 103

perhaps unintentionally, that of L?vi-Strauss's also massive and magisterial tome, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, published in French in 1949. Difference and

differance are not explicitly at issue in Durand; structures do not shift and give, are

not subject to play. Rather he describes structure as a relational model, a paradigm; and characterizes the structures of the imaginary (note the plural) as, on the one

hand, dynamic (they give rise to transformations) and, on the other, as symptomatic

(they "make possible diagnosis as well as therapy," [63]). Perhaps his book can be

seen, therefore, as the work of a grammarian: it declines the paradigms of the imag

inary somewhat as in the noun and verb paradigms we rehearse in learning a new

language. Yet his work is structural too in a way that echoes L?vi-Strauss more

closely than he acknowledges. In New York, during the second world war, L?vi-Strauss had learned, via

Roman Jakobson, the etic-emic distinction still current in the social sciences, a dis

tinction derived from the site of structuralism's early triumphs, linguistics, and more

particularly from the field of structural phonology, which depended on a distinction

between phonetics (a descriptive practice) and phonemics. By contrast with phonet ics, phonemics concerns itself only with those differential relations between speech sounds that are productive of signification (or as Gregory Bateson memorably puts it, those differences that make a difference). This type of emic contrastive analysis is

imitated by L?vi-Strauss when, for example, in a highly influential chapter of Struc

tural Anthropology, he analyzes the Oedipus myth as distributing, along a narrative

time line, like a chord progression in a musical score, events and circumstances that

express contrasting understandings of procreation, the idea that humans are born of

the earth, and the idea that they are born from other humans. All details in the myth that are nonstructural (neither affirming nor denying the terms of this opposition)

simply fall out of the analysis as nonpertinent; they are etic but not emic. The myth

rings the changes on a limited number of relational models; or if you will, it "tells"

the structures of its imaginarium like beads on a string. In a not dissimilar way, Durand's imaginarium is structured by relational mod

els that act as paradigms, governing clusters of "isomorphic" images; it orders the

imaginative plethora emically. There is first a Diurnal Order that has to do with rela

tions, symbolized by light and darkness, that are polemical and entail binary distinc

tions ("diaeresis"); in terms of rhetoric its mode is that of antithesis. The subject separates itself from the monster of darkness, symbolic of time, either by ascending

(climbing, flying) or by making separating or "schizo-morphic" gestures, according to an ethos of heroism. In Durand's conjecture these gestures are themselves deriva

tions of fundamental biological reflexes: the movements a child makes (seeking ver

ticality, resisting gravity) in learning to walk. By contrast, the Nocturnal Order has to

do with relations of intimacy and involvement, that is, with the other possible re

sponse to the phenomenon of time: one can embrace it, whether by nestling or snug

gling in the protective intimacy of earth, the Great Mother, or alternatively by

identifying with time itself in the form of the cyclical rhythms (digestion, the sea

sons, sexuality) that define existence. Where the key images of the diurnal, corre

sponding to two of the four suits of the tarot pack, are the sceptre and the sword, those of the nocturnal are, therefore the remaining two emblems: the containing cup



104 Ross Chambers

and the turning wheel. Its images are not antithetical but antiphrastic, that is, they contain their own opposites (death and life, in a sense, become equivalent). Its re

flexive models are, on the one hand, those of absorption and digestion and, on the

other, the rhythmic pulses of copulation, embrace and related vital cycles. To summarize, we can say then that, according to Durand, there is a grammar of

the imaginarium. It is a case grammar (there is a subject and an object of the imagi nation) and the relationality it describes is verbal in nature: it involves climbing, fly

ing, fighting, falling; or nestling, snuggling, digesting, and being digested; or it

follows the rhythms of embrace and process. Furthermore, it should now be added, the subject-object relation is gendered, and?here I am extrapolating from Durand?

the gendering is masculinist. Whereas the subject is always, by implication, mascu

line (and often explicitly so), the object of the imagination is strongly feminized, with the difference that the feminization occurs in a misogynistic perspective in the

Diurnal Order, and gynophilically in the Nocturnal Order, described as the site of "a

rehabilitation of femininity" (226). (In fact, the "same" images can and do recur,

charged with a different valency, in each of the two Orders, which are thus in a rela

tion of redundancy each with the other, as the terminology of antithesis/antiphrasis

suggests?here Durand's structuralism anticipates Derrida's). It is 1960: Durand

does not question the masculinism but treats it as a given, implying that it is natural

and universal. He does not wonder whether it might not be rather a historical and

local feature of the culture of the analyst. I do not raise the gender issue, though, to win easy points by accusing Durand

of not having had a feminist consciousness in 1960. The gendering of the imaginar ium, however we understand it, is of interest in the context of narrative because it

hints at how the grammar of the imaginarium might give rise to a narrative grammar, that is an argumentarium. The gendered subject-object relationality of the imaginar ium produces personifications that transform the grammatical slots that structure the

imaginarium into animate (anthropomorphic and theriomorphic) figures: gods and

goddesses, heroes and the occasional heroine, monsters, angels, saints, mothers and

sisters a plenty (kinship relations in general being frequently significant). In these we

begin to recognize the actantial roles, and the actors, without which it is hard to con

ceive of there being a narrative in the sense of a story that develops a plot, entailing a succession of situations, actions, and transformations, over time.

One might argue, then, that the imaginarium engenders narrative, in part be

cause the logic of its relationality is verbal and in part because the gendering of its

subject-object grammar foreshadows the development of actantial positions, in

Greimas's sense of the term, into fully fledged characters, entailing both characteri

zation (i.e., motivation) and interaction in time, with its potential for change. On the

one hand, the imaginarium proposes a set of elementary plots and trajectories that

constitute something like the manner in which narrative functions in its own way as

a symbolic "treatment" of time. The plots of the diurnal entail combat and separa

tion, the dynamics of polemic; its trajectories would include ascensional movement

and falling, but also dividing, departing, separating, leavetaking, making new begin

nings, etc. Conversely, the nocturnal proposes plots of descending, exploring, wan




dering, engagement, and involvement; its trajectories are labyrinthine and its

rhythms those of repetition and return. But on the other hand, I would propose, the

subject-object actantial roles already implied by these plots and trajectories move

into the area of narrative interest?the figures begin to become characters?when the

question of individual agency becomes an issue, so that the figures cease to be ex

clusively symbolic in their function. In the case of the subject, the power to choose

(that is, to opt for different plots and trajectories and to succeed or fail in bringing them about) seems crucial, while in the case of the object, the inability to choose it

self becomes significant. The object comes to be perceived as a passive enactment of

that which it symbolically embodies (i.e., if Durand is right, time, entropy, death); or

alternatively, it is defined by its being acted upon by the subject. Masculinity comes

to be identified in this way with agency, as the ability to make choices, and feminin

ity with passivity, either in relation to masculine subjects or in relation to cosmic or

existential forces. And the negotiation of these positions through a range of plots and

trajectories enacted by characters becomes the concern, and the point, of narrative.

Talking at one point about the symbolism of hair, Durand mentions in passing a

fable by La Fontaine, "L'homme entre deux ?ges et ses deux ma?tresses" (Book I, fable xvii), which I translate as follows:

The Middle-Aged Man and his Two Mistresses

A middle-aged man, beginning to grey, decided ("jugea") it was time to think

about marriage. He had cash, and consequently the wherewithal to make a

choice ("de quoi choisir"). All the women sought to please him; so our lover

took his time: making a good choice ("bien adresser") is no small matter. Two

widows had the greatest part in his affections; one still green the other slightly

overripe, but good at artfully repairing what nature had destroyed. With pleas antries and laughter, making much of him, both widows were given sometimes

to dressing his hair, I mean they gave him a hair-do ("L'allaient quelquefois testonnant, / C'est-?-dire ajustant sa t?te"). The elder kept removing bits of the

black hair he still had left, to make her lover more the way she wanted him. The

younger for her part got rid of his white hairs. Between them, our greyhead ended up with no hair at all, and figured they had played a trick. "I give you a

thousand thanks, my beauties, for having shorn me so successfully; I've gained from it more than I've lost: for as far as marriage goes it's out of the question. The one I chose would want me to live her way, not mine. A bald pate is of no

consequence, I am obliged to you, beauties, for the lesson."

La Fontaine's risqu? pun, a double entendre which he underlines by pretending to

correct himself ("testonner" is given in old dictionaries as meaning to dress hair, but

it is perilously close to suggesting the widows give the man their breast to suck), tells us we are in the universe of gauloiserie, a viciously misogynistic folk tradition on

which the poet draws here, as always, a bit archly but apparently without qualms. The figures in the narrative are close, therefore, to their gendered actantial positions



106 Ross Chambers

in the imaginarium. In this respect, what is most striking, of course, is that the two

widows, who are distinguished from each other only by virtue of their slight age dif

ference, together represent time, the grammatical object, and represent it as superfi

cially attractive (the man is inclined to marry) although ultimately dangerous and

destructive. By the same token, the degree of their personal agency as the power of

choice approaches zero: they can't help themselves, like every other woman they are

attracted by the man's wealth, they simper playfully as they go about their symbolic business of laying waste ("saccager") to his head of hair. The only form of psycho

logical motivation they are permitted is simultaneously their most dangerous sym bolic trait: their desire to make the man more like themselves, i.e. to feminize him, coincides with their enacting the work of time. Time's dangerous and deceptive at

tractiveness, its seductive danger, is here represented, then, as the apparent possibil

ity held out to the man, and represented by marriage, of making a choice?a choice

that proves meaningless. For the two women are interchangeable (the one still youth ful but aging, the other already aged but putting on a good show of youth); to choose

either is ultimately to choose time and ultimately death. This is a Diurnal view of the

Nocturnal Order, represented by marriage, as a trap that must be resisted.

The man, unlike the women, is clearly represented as an individual, and as an

active agent in his own right, able to decide (line 3), having the wherewithal that per mits him to choose a nice wife (lines 5-7), and finally, of course, exercizing dis

crimination by finally choosing not to choose at all. Performing a "diaeretic" gesture characteristic of the Diurnal Order and severing himself from the manifestation of

danger represented by the two widows, he rejects involvement with time and hence

the scenarios of the Nocturnal Order, enacting instead an alternative scenario, that of

choosing not to choose. In so doing, he begins to be something other than a merely

symbolic Hero: he affirms his own singularity over the women's duality (as well as

his integrity over their duplicity); and he walks away from his close call enriched and

edified by "experience": at the price of his only slightly premature baldness he has

learned a highly valuable lesson (line 31). His narrative agency, which distinguishes him from the women, resides, not of course in the ability to escape time in the end, but in his ability to identify the scenario of involvement representing the Nocturnal

Order as a form of entrapment, and to choose instead the heroic gesture, in the face

of time, that the Diurnal structure of the imaginary recommends. The narrative thus

functions, in part, as an affirmation and definition of heroic virtue and male dig

nity?the diaeretic attitude toward women/time?but in part also as an exploration of what is entailed in the temporal acquisition of experience (narrative's stock-in

trade) and the concomitant exercise of discrimination, as the marker of human char

acter (in contradistinction to symbolic function). The man has lost his hair, but kept his head; and that is the secret both of his heroic stature (the head is crucial to the Di

urnal Order, with its orientation towards verticality) and of his construction as a

character worthy of narrative interest (the head is the treasure-chest of experience and wisdom, the site of thought, on which narrative draws).

So the pun that opposes breasts to head ("t?ton" and "t?te") is more significant than was at first apparent. But so too is the fable's other pun, which identifies (lines

5-7) the ability to choose with the possession of wealth, financial or narrative:




Il avait du comptant, Et partant

De quoi choisir.

Ready cash ("du comptant") is homophonic with the wherewithal to narrate ("du

contant") and both?as the parody of logic suggests ("Et partant," ergo)?entail the

power to discriminate, to make a choice. The difference is that, where wealth imparts the dubious privilege of being able to choose a relatively presentable widow to wed, the truly judicious choice the man makes is the one in which he opts not to choose ei

ther of the widows and rejects marriage, that is, the seductions of the Nocturnal

Order, in favor of the heroic dignity procured by his conforming to the dictates of the

Diurnal. Not coincidentally, this second form of choice is also what qualifies him as

a narrative hero or character (not a symbol), whose arm against time is the getting of

experience that only time permits. The man's evolution takes him from the first form

of competency (the ability to choose a wife grounded in his financial fortune) to the

second (the ability to make an appropriate choice between the Orders, grounded in

his experience), in such a way that the story of his acquisition of experience becomes

the narrative's detailing or counting out of the wisdom that it has to impart, the im

plicit "moral" or point of the fable. This point boils down to the preference it demon

strates, throughout the story of the man's changing his mind about marriage, for the

Diurnal Order of its imaginarium over the Nocturnal.

Of course, it is obvious that La Fontaine could as readily have made a fable out

of the story of the man's marriage as from his rejection of marriage. Narrative, as

such, is not a manifestation of one Order or the other, but of the imaginarium as a

whole. Consequently it treats each of the Orders as generic options (the Iliad draw

ing on the Diurnal, the Odyssey on the Nocturnal). Moreover, it tends to stage this

genre choice, in its subject-matter, as epitomizing human agency?its powers, its re

sources, and its limits?in relation to the great forces of life and death and the pow ers of time. Where the fable of the middle-aged man moves in this way from the

seductions of the Nocturnal to the exhilarations of Diurnal heroism, another narra

tive might well move, therefore, in the opposite direction. And in fact, in a so far un

translated companion volume to the volume under review, Le D?cor mythique de

"La Chartreuse de Parme", Durand argued, precisely, that it is characteristic of the

"romanesque" (or novelistic) genre to move from the heroic mode (which proves its

deficiency in Fabrice's experience of Waterloo) to the order of intimacy and "bon

heur" (the idyll of Fabrice's imprisonment). The hypothesis to explore, then, would

be this. Narratives are not only the product of a generic choice between orders of the

imaginary, but they tend to draw their narrative subject-matter?what defines them as narrative in relation to the imaginarium?from an exploration of the implications and entailments of such a choice. In so doing, they simultaneously situate them

selves generically, and present generic choice as the exemplary case of human

agency, with its powers and its limits.

Before concluding, though, I would like to return to the question of gender, in

order to suggest further that, if the heroic genre tends to reinforce the masculinist

character of the cultural imaginary by aligning the actantial position of the imagina



108 Ross Chambers

tive subject with the agential narrative role of male character or protagonist, as in La

Fontaine's fable, the novelistic genre tends to challenge and to blur this kind of

alignment, both by feminizing the agential role of masculine narrative actors (Fab rice is an excellent example of this), and by masculinizing the role of feminine char

acters, who achieve the status of agential subjects, as opposed to actantial and

agential objects, through acquiring and/or exercizing the power of judicious choice

(like Gina in La Chartreuse). I take as my example the English novel of courtship, of

which Austen's Emma is paradigmatic. Emma Woodhouse is a somewhat paradoxical figure. At an early age a combi

nation of circumstances (her tidy fortune, her social prestige, the mainly weak and

feminized men who form her entourage) bestows on her a degree of independence and a power of decision-making that, in the terms I have been considering, can be

said to masculinize her. In particular, she contemplates with equanimity exercizing the male privilege of choosing not to choose marriage, of becoming, that is, an old

maid. It is from such an inappropriate self-understanding that she must be rescued.

And the novel retails the trials and errors (mainly the errors) through which she

comes to acquire the experience she needs in order to make a judicious decision, which for her means opting both to marry and to marry the upright Mr. Knightley (who, as his name indicates, is a figure of the Diurnal). She does so only after an in

judicious but brief flirtation with Frank Churchill, a feminized young man whose du

plicity is such that he courts Emma only in order to cover his actual engagement with

Jane Fairfax (and who, in a moment of despair at Box Hill, goes so far as to renounce

the masculine privilege of making a choice, asking only to be married off like a girl). Emma's decision shows, then, that she has overcome the girlish immaturity that

falsely masculinized her, and confers on her the equivalent of real masculine power in that she makes up her own mind and does so wisely?but with the twist that, for

her, this power consists of acknowledging that, as a woman, she requires the support and guidance of a Mr. Knightley so as not to fall into error.

So it is actually the couple formed by Emma and Mr. Knightley, in the end, that

stands in the novel for both masculinity and the diurnal values of uprightness in the

otherwise feminized world of men and women?the whole gallery of Highbury characters?that surrounds them, folk who are variously querulous and hypochon driac, talkative and vain, silly and superficial, deceptive and manipulative, and are

acted upon by the forces of the world rather than acting against them (the sweet but

infinitely malleable Harriet Smith is their epitome). But as a result we cannot say that the novel itself moves from one Order of the imagination (say, the Nocturnal) to

the other (say, the Diurnal); or from Emma as subject to Emma as object, or from a

feminized heroine to a masculinized one, but only that it moves in such a way as to

blur and complicate these categories, while affirming the supreme narrative value

that experience is gainful and exercizing the narrative privilege of counting out the

wealth that is gained by experience. If Emma and Mr. Knightley, as a couple, repre sent the achievement and maintenance of diurnal values in a feminized world, their

marriage, then?by contrast with the diurnal rejection of marriage in the La Fontaine

fable?symbolizes both the blurring of categories and the form of wisdom this blur

ring constitutes, wisdom that the novel embraces and on which it draws. It symbol



Review of 'The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary 109

izes, that is, the dynamics of the Nocturnal Order?the dynamics of involvement and

embrace?to which, in this case, the novel subscribes in its very celebration of up

right knightliness.

The study of narrative?one can say, by way of brief conclusion?owes a con

siderable debt to French structuralism, in the form of the "narratology" (mainly a se

ries of narrative grammars) that was developed in the 1960s and 1970s. Meanwhile, most English-language critical theory has derived sustenance from the complemen

tary moment (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida) known as poststructuralism?it might be

described as the structuralism of grammatology as opposed to the structuralism of

grammar. It has done so to the point of neglecting (with the exception of Lacan) the

slightly earlier work, the fact that Durand has had to wait so long for translation

being startling evidence of that in many ways unfortunate neglect. My purpose here

has been only to suggest to scholars interested in narrative that they, at least, will find

in Durand's massive contribution much food for thought. But I hope that the publi cation that has furnished my pretext will also do something to rehabilitate modes of

structural analysis that have been perhaps too hastily dismissed as obsolete.

WORKS CITED

Austen, Jane. Emma. 1816. Edited by Stephen Parrish. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1972.

Durand, Gilbert. Le D?cor mythique de "La Chartreuse de Parme." Paris: Corti, 1961.

Frazier, J. G. The Golden Bough. 1922. Abridged ed., 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1960.

Greimas, A. G. S?miotique structurale. Paris: Larousse, 1966.

L?vi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. 1949. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960.

-. Structural Anthropology. 1958. New York: Basic Books, 1963.



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