An Introduction to the (Methodology of) Structural Analysis of Fiction

In the 2nd half of the 20th century, story as a structure in language excited the attention of many literary scholars. Analyzing the structure of the myth, Claude Levi-Strauss proved that it is similar in this with language. And after discovering a set of similar correspondences in sentence and narrative, Roland Barthes claimed that discourse, too, can be analyzed structurally. He argued that a narrative is the outcome of the relations among its "actants" who are no longer considered as independent psychological entities but whose existence is the result of their relations with the other actants. In this stage, the correspondence of Sussurian linguistics with mythological ideas of Levi-Strauss on the one hand, and their agreement with narratological theories of Barthes on the other, that is, with the applicability of these principles in the analysis of literature, grounded the cancellation of traditional "frames of intelligibility" and the establishment of new frames of thought. And Tzvetan Todorov described an "absolute cause" in the typical modern narrative which is always absent from it, but which changes it to a space for a perpetual search of meaning. Yet, along with these improvements in structural narratologies, Jonathan Culler focused his attention on the production of meaning in novels. From the eye of Culler, it is via reading as an interpretive analysis that a novel produces meaning. With a view of encouraging the literary scholars to structurally analyze the Persian narrative, the present paper will attempt to provide an analysis of these methodologies. Also, for a sample work in structural analysis of fiction, Houshang Golshiri's "Naghagh-e Baghani" will be analyzed on the basis of Culler's structuralism.