The Importance of Monologues - Essay Example

Intrinsic Value: The Importance of Monologues To be or not to be, to know or not to know, to see and not to see, to write or not to write That is the question. We ask these questions to ourselves when we read a work of literature, all thanks to an essential aspect that have been injected into shaping our textual identities. Monologues have been an essential part of literature in order to convey the internal struggles of a specific character, more so, the reader with himself and with the text. A monologue is the inner voice inside our character's head that helps us reach, as readers, into our internal psyche, our intrapersonal relationship. Monologues have been part of plays, film scripts, and has been interjected into the twenty- first century with the emergence of blockbusters. It allows us to value the importance of a character's own existence without the supplementary help of the surrounding characters, just a certain strength with processing streams of emotions and lines of thoughts into words carefully chosen and rearranged. The term "monologue" was used to describe a form of popular narrativeverse, sometimes comic, often dramatic or sentimental,which was performed inmusic hallsor in domestic entertainments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Monologues are a celebration of a character's humanity. In Shakespeare's playwrights, monologues are often called soliloquies. Asoliloquyis a type of monologue in which a character directly addresses an audience or speaks his thoughts aloud while alone or while the other actors keep silent. In fictional literature, aninterior monologueis a type of monologue that exhibits the thoughts, feelings, and associations passing through a character's mind. These monologues, since time immemorial, have established the character's individuality in a pedestal. It allows the character to see process his feelings, thoughts and perceptions freely. According to ()The "interior monologue" is a technical device in narrative. It renders a character's thoughts in the present tense, omitting speech markers such as "he thought" and quotation marks. Although the terms are often confused, it can be distinguished from thestream of consciousnessdevice by its relatively structured syntax and possibility of the monologist's addressing himself. The device allows a rendition of a character's thoughts and emotions more intimately than traditional forms of narration, since all readers learn what the character says only to himself. These poems aredramaticin the sense that they have a theatrical quality; that is, the poem is meant to be read to an audience. To say that the poem is amonologuemeans that these are the words of one solitary speaker with no dialogue coming from any other characters. Think of one person standing alone on a stage speaking to an audience. Certainly, you are part of that audience, but the poem usually implies that the speaker is mainly talking to a specific person(s). Internal struggles are very humanistic traits and this bridges the gap of reader and literature. Such struggles are very much conveyed by a monologue, especially if well written and a good reflection of a universal human experience. Monologues are crucial to characterization. Often, what readers remember well about a certain piece of literature is the certain character whom they feel deeply with. The novelist's has to render the character strong and human, possesses and air of fascination and must be believable, above all. Monologues are meant to reach out to the reader and supplement the textual identity of the literary work it is encompassed upon. It produces the cadence of and spirit and contributes to the whole lore of a work of literature. Barthes and Textual Identity There is a concept inlinguisticsandliterary theorythat refers to the attributes that distinguish the text (a technical term indicating any communicative content under analysis) as an object of study in those fields. This is called Textuality. To consider the text and its identity is to analyze its textuality for it is the factor or spectrum in literary theory that analyzes the soul of the texts, its meanings and what they are trying to convey and also criticize the text to some point. Textual identity, and the study of such can also be attributed to the theories of structuralism, which will be later on, discussed in the paper as well. The word "text" arose within structuralism as a replacement for the older idea inliterary criticismof the "work," which is always complete and deliberately authored. A text must necessarily be thought of as incomplete, indeed as missing something crucial that provides the mechanics of understanding. The text is always partially hidden; one word for the hidden part in literary theory is the "subtext." (cite) Ronald Barthe is one of the proponents of structuralism in text. Barthes's earliest work was very much a reaction to the trend ofexistentialistphilosophy that was prominent during the 1940s, specifically towards the figurehead of existentialismJean-Paul Sartre. In his workWhat Is Literature(1947)Sartrefinds himself to be disenchanted with both established forms of writing, and more experimentalavant-gardeforms, which he feels alienate readers. Barthes' response is to try to find what can be considered unique and original in writing. He determines inWriting Degree Zero(1953) that language and style are both matters that appeal to conventions, and are thus not purely creative. Rather, form, or what Barthes calls 'writing', the specific way an individual chooses to manipulate conventions of style for a desired effect, is the unique and creative act. One's form is vulnerable to becoming a convention once it has been made available to the public. This means that being creative is an ongoing process of continual change and reaction. He sawAlbert Camus'sThe Strangeras an ideal example of this notion for its sincere lack of any embellishment or flair. InMichelet, a critical look at the work of French historianJules Michelet, Barthes continues to develop these notions and apply them to broader fields. He explains that Michelet's views of history and society are obviously flawed, but that in studying his works one should not seek to learn from Michelet's claims. Rather, one should maintain a critical distance and learn from his errors. Understanding how and why his thinking is flawed will show more about his period of history than his own observations. Similarly, Barthes feltavant-gardewriting should be praised for maintaining just such a distance between its audience and its work. By maintaining an obvious artificiality rather than making claims to great subjective truths, avant-garde writers assure their audiences maintain an objective perspective in reading their work. In this sense, Barthes believed that art should be critical and interrogate the world rather than seek to explain it like Michelet would. In the end Barthes'Mythologiesbecame absorbed into bourgeois culture, as he found many third parties asking him to comment on a certain cultural phenomenon, being interested in his control over his readership. This turn of events caused him to question the overall utility of demystifying culture for the masses, thinking it might be a fruitless attempt, and drove him deeper in his search for individualistic meaning in art. As Barthes' work withstructuralismbegan to flourish around the time of his debates with Picard, his investigation of structure focused on revealing the importance of language in writing, which he felt was overlooked by old criticism. Barthes' "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives" is concerned with examining the correspondence between the structure of a sentence and that of a larger narrative, thus allowing narrative to be viewed alonglinguisticlines. Barthes split this work into three hierarchical levels: 'functions', 'actions' and 'narrative'. 'Functions' are the elementary pieces of a work, such as a single descriptive word that can be used to identify a character. That character would be an 'action', and consequently one of the elements that make up the narrative. Barthes was able to use these distinctions to evaluate how certain key 'functions' work in forming characters. For example key words like 'dark', 'mysterious' and 'odd', when integrated together, formulate a specific kind of character or 'action'. By breaking down the work into such fundamental distinctions Barthes was able to judge the degree of realism given functions have in forming their actions and consequently with what authenticity a narrative can be said to reflect on reality. Thus, his structuralist theorizing became another exercise in his ongoing attempts to dissect and expose the misleading mechanisms ofbourgeoisculture. While Barthes foundstructuralismto be a useful tool and believed that discourse of literature could be formalized, he did not believe it could become a strict scientific endeavour. In the late 1960s, radical movements were taking place in literary criticism. Thepost-structuralistmovement and thedeconstructionismofJacques Derridawere testing the bounds of the structuralist theory that Barthes' work exemplified.Derridaidentified the flaw of structuralism as its reliance on a transcendental signified; a symbol of constant, universal meaning would be essential as an orienting point in such a closed off system. This is to say that without some regular standard of measurement, a system of criticism that references nothing outside of the actual work itself could never prove useful. But since there are no symbols of constant and universal significance, the entire premise of structuralism as a means of evaluating writing (or anything) is hollow. Structuralism and Other Theorists on Textual Identity In extending the range of the textual we have not decreased the complexity or meaning-power of literature but have in fact increased it, both in its textual and in its cultural meaningfulness. If the reader and the text are both cultural constructions, then the meaningfulness of texts becomes more apparent, as they share meaning-constructs; if the cultural is textual, then the culture's relation to the textuality of literature becomes more immediate, more pertinent, more compelling. Literature is a discourse in a world of discourses, each discourse having its protocols for meaning and typical uses of language, rhetoric, subject area and so forth. The thesis that what seems real to us is coded and conventional leads to a consideration of how 'reality' is represented in art -- what we get is a 'reality effect'; the signs which represent reality are 'naturalized', that is, made to seem as if we could see reality through them -- or in another way of saying, made to seem to be conforming to the laws of reality. This is achieved through raisemblance', truth-seeming, or 'naturalization'. Some elements of raisemblance (from Culler,Structuralist Poetics) are as follows. There is the socially given text, that which is taken as the 'real' world -- what is taken for granted. That we have minds and bodies, for instance. This is a textual phenomenon. (Every term of "we have minds and bodies", the relations between most of these terms, and what we mean by them, in fact codify culturally specific assumptions.) There is the general cultural text: shared knowledge which would be recognized by participants as part of culture and hence subject to correction or modification but which none the less serves as a kind of 'nature'. This is the level at which we interpret motive, character and significance from descriptions of action, dress, attitude and so forth. "Jake put on his tuxedo and tennis shoes" will provide an interpretation of Jake or will look forward to an explanation of why he broke the cultural code, in this case a dress code. "Harry gazed for hours on the picture of Esmeralda" is a culturally coded statement: we read Harry's attitude, and so forth. We 'imitate' 'reality' by recording cultural codes. There is what might be called the natural attitude to the artificial, where the text explicitly cites and exposes vraisemblance of the kind directly above, so as to reinforce its own authority. The narrator may claim that he is intentionally violating the conventions of a story, for instance, that he knows that this is not the way it should be done according to the conventions, but that the way he is doing it serves some higher or more substantial purpose -- the appeal is to a greater naturalness or a higher intelligibility. There is the complex raisemblance of specific intertextualities. "When a text cites or parodies the conventions of a genre one interprets it by moving to another level of interpretation where both terms of the opposition can be held together by the theme of literature itself." -- e.g. parody, when one exploits the particular conventions of a work or style or genre, etc. Irony forces us to posit an alternate possibility or reality in the face of the reality-construction of the text. All surface incongruities register meaning at a level of the project of interpretation itself, and so comment as it were on the relation between 'textual' and 'interpretive' reality. In short, to imitate reality is to represent codes which 'describe' (or, construct) reality according to the conventions of representation of the time. The conventions of reading. We read according to certain conventions; consequently our reading creates the meaning of that which we read. These conventions come in two 'layers':how we (culturally) think that reality is or should be represented in texts, which will include the general mimetic conventions of the art of the period, which will describe the way in which reality is apprehended or imagined, andthe conventions of 'literature' (and of 'art' generally), for instance,the rule of significance whereby we raise the meaning of the text to its highest level of generalizability (a tree blasted by lightning might become a figure of the power of nature, or of God);the convention of figural coherence, through which we assume that figures (metonyms, metaphors, 'symbols') will have a signifying relationship to one another on a level of meaning more complex than or 'higher' than the physical;the convention of thematic unity, whereby we assume that all of the elements of the text contribute to the meaning of the text. These are all conventions of reading. The facts that some works are difficult to interpret, some are difficult to interpret for its contemporaries but not for later readers, some require that we learn how its contemporaries would have read them in order fully to understand them, these facts point to the existence of literary competence, the possession by the reader of protocols for reading. When one reads modernist texts, such asThe Waste Land, one has to learn how to read them. One has in fact to learn how to read Blake'sSongs of Innocence and Experience, Spenser'sThe Faerie Queene, and so forth. Culler remarks that reading poetry is a rule-governed process of producing meanings; the poem offers a structure which must be filled up and one therefore attempts to invent something, guided by a series of formal rules derived from one's experience of reading poetry, which both make possible invention and impose limits on it. Structuralism is oriented toward the reader insofar as it says that the reader constructs literature, that is, reads the text with certain conventions and expectations in mind. Some post-structural theorists, Fish for instance, hold that the reader constructs the text entirely, through the conventions of reading of her interpretive community. In joining with formalism in the identification of literariness as the focus on the message itself as opposed to a focus on the addressee, the addresser, or the referential function of the message, structuralism places ambiguity, as Genette points out, at the heart of the poetic function, as its self-referential nature puts the message, the addresser and the addressee all in doubt. Hence literary textuality is complexly meaningful. Structuralism underlines the importance of genre, i.e., basic rules as to how subjects are approached, about conventions of reading for theme, level of seriousness, significance of language use, and so forth. "Different genres lead to different expectations of types of situations and actions, and of psychological, moral, and esthetic values." (Genette) The idea that literature is an institution is another structuralist contribution; that a number of its protocols for creation and for reading are in fact controlled by that institutional nature. Through structuralism, literature is seen as a whole: it functions as a system of meaning and reference no matter how many works there are, two or two thousand. Thus any work becomes the parole, the individual articulation, of a cultural langue, or system of signification. As literature is a system, no work of literature is an autonomous whole; similarly, literature itself is not autonomous but is part of the larger structures of signification of the culture. The following are some points based on Culler's ideas about the advantages of structuralism, having to do with the idea that literature is a protocol of reading: Structuralism is a firmer starting-point for reading literature as literature than are other approaches, because literariness and/or fictionality does not have to be shown to be inherent in the text, but in the way it is read. It explains, for instance, why the same sentence can have a different meaning depending on the genre in which it appears, it explains how the boundaries of the literary can change from age to age, it accommodates and explains differing readings of a text given differing reading protocols -- one can read a text for its 'literary' qualities or for its sociological or ideological qualities, for instance, and read as complex a text in doing so.One gains an appreciation of literature as an institution, as a coherent and related set of codes and practices, and so one sees also that reading is situated reading, that is, it is in a certain meaning-domain or set of codes. It follows that when literature is written, it will be written under these codes (it can break or alter the codes to create effects, but this is still a function of the codes).Consequently one can be more open to challenges to and alterations of literary conventions.Once one sees that reading and writing are both coded and based on conventions one can read 'against the grain' in a disciplined way, and one can read readings of literature -- reading can become a more self-reflexive process. Bibliography Books Roland, B. (1874). S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. Roland, B. (1977). Image/Music/Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday. Belsey, C. (1983). Literature, History, Politics. Literature and History 9.New York: Routledge Publishing ,pp.17-27. Brooker, P., Selden, R. and Widdowson, P. (2005).A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary TheoryFifth Edition. Harlow: p. 76 Bourgois, C. (2009). Carnets du voyage en Chine by Roland Barthes. 252 pp. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n22/michael-wood/presence-of-mind Imec, S. (2009). Journal de deuil by Roland Barthes.271 pp. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n22/michael-wood/presence-of-mind Culler, J.(1983).,Barthes: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford and New York:Oxford University Press, p. 110 Internet Sources Department of English and Literature Brock Universtiy. Department of English and Literature 20008, August/ 2009, November. Elements of Structuralism. http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/struct.php: California. Read More