Greimas, Bremond, and the 'Miller's Tale.' - A.J. Greimas; Claude Bremond

Style, Fall, 1997 by Harold F. Mosher, Jr.

When such binary oppositions are connected with their governing isotopies and with the outcome of the tale's action, it becomes evident that certain values prevail in this fictional world over their contraries: certain types of pleasure over work and certain forms of knowledge over ignorance. Such values and other related ones will figure in our assigning characters to roles and positions in three of Greimas's models.

Despite the frequent structuralist claims for taxonomies developed deductively, the inductive method associated with Levi-Strauss's anthropological field work and Greimas's studies in semantics would also seem to be a possible process in the application of Greimas's theory. According to Courtes, one can begin more or less deductively with the abstract isotopies that govern the semiotic square and then fill in the names of characters; or, more inductively, starting with the surface level, assign the names of characters to the positions on the square according to their oppositions and then derive the abstract isotopies from this (Courtes 197, citing Greimas, Du sens 187 and "les actants" 162). Obviously Greimas's practical criticism, if it can be called that, in such as his study of Maupassant's "Deux amis" (Maupassant), begins with a reading of the text to be analyzed, but the following analysis is far from innocent because it is already shaped by one or more of the models. After this first step of identifying oppositions and isotopics, a second step might be to classify the type of plot: whether, for instance, it is a contractual one or a performative (conjunctive or disjunctive) one or both. Obviously both types shape the Miller's Tale, with the contracts between Nicholas and Alison for their night of love-making, between Nicholas and John for salvation from the flood, and the attempted one between Absolon and Alison for a kiss. These contribute to the performative plots of disjunction between John and Alison and conjunction between Nicholas and Alison. In Greimas's scheme such a plot of struggle and exchange of an object could be diagramed as in Figure 1, where we see that in the first state John possesses Alison, and Nicholas does not; that as a result of Nicholas's persuading Alison not to remain exclusively with John, Nicholas possesses Alison, who in all cases is the so-called object of value (Greimas, "Acquis" 11-15), A similar diagram of Absolon's attempt to seduce Alison shows his failure to transform the situation: the object is not exchanged. (However, as we shall see, with Alison's disappearance at a crucial moment, it would appear that at least temporarily none of the three men possesses her any more.)