Both [Sherlock] Holmes and [Solar] Pons stories share functions that their respective authors did not "invent." The Holmes stories, because of their added associational qualities, may be said to be "super-functional" in that author [Conan] Doyle forges more felicitous associational connections within the literary elements of his tales than [August] Derleth does. But Doyle doesn't escape the need for narrative functionality.
The many abuses of deconstructionism have shown that a good critic requires at least some awareness of the above need, for even if the critic agrees with Derrida that certain authors automatically 'deconstruct' their own intended themes, it's a staggering bit of hubris to suggest that *all* authors do so. Many stories, including those purporting to be rich in experimentation and avant-garde literary devices, are simply no better than they have to be. These stories I deem as being as close to bare functions as it is possible for a story to get, along the line of the functions described by the early folk-tale analyst Vladimir Propp in his MORPHOLOGY OF THE FOLKTALE.
When Propp wrote MORPHOLOGY, he was trying to impose some sort of order on the chaos of folktale studies, which had no agreed-upon morphology. For instance, one folklorist cited in the MORPHOLOGY proposed that each tale should be broken down into "motifs," which he considered to be indivisible units. To this schema Propp suggested the example of a motif that might begin a story thusly: "A dragon kidnaps the tsar's daughter." Then Propp showed that the motif as stated was not indivisible, since other elements could replace those used in the construction: "The dragon may be replaced by Koshchei, a whirlwind, a devil, a falcon or a sorcerer." It is with this awareness that Propp moved toward a larger schema of folktales that emphasized "the functions of [the tale's] *dramatis personae,*" which is meant to allow the analyst to monitor how different elements are mixed and matched within the corpus of folktales and yet remain true to their narrative functions.
At the end of GESTURE AND GESTALT PART 1 I noted that some good comparisons could be made between Propp's concept of functions rooted in *dramatis personae* and Susanne Langer's concept of the "gesture," a symbol which is not "self-expressive" of an emotion occuring in real time but is rather an attempt to "recall" said emotion in a ritualized or formalized context. Not surprisingly given Langer's indebtedness to perceptors like Whitehead and Cassirer, Langer shows more interest than Propp does in the concept of "expressivity," of the tale-teller's intention to tell a certain kind of tale to obtain a expressive effect in an audience.
Proppian analysis was never applied to literature to any great extent, but I imagine that such an application would look a lot like the development of literary structuralism in academia, which followed similar schematic guidelines from Saussure and Levi-Strauss. In contrast to a notorious deconstructive analysis like Barthes' S/Z, literary studies in the structuralist vein have the virtue of granting a close reading of the original material, but these studies can be on occcasion too rigidly formalistic, even as Propp's analyses of folktales may have been. Still, Propp's rationale for his emphasis on function seems to me more "grounded" than the rationales for structuralist readings of both ancient and contemporary literary works. Because Propp's schema is simpler and less tortuous than Levi-Strauss', I can better imagine supplementing the former with an "overlay" of Langerian (and Cassirean) concern for expressivity.
Further, once one is able to use Langer's insight about differing forms of symbolic activity, one should no longer led into the facile fallacy into condemning this or that work for being "unrealistic." In this vein Theodor Adorno once criticized a television drama which attempted to resolve a political situation with an appeal to romance. Adorno did this not because he was incapable of understanding that the drama in question was primarily meant to evoke romantic feelings but because he, having interest only in discursive symbolic concepts, rejected that literary function as being invalid; just more bread and circuses to take the wage-slaves' attention off their continued exploitation.
An increased attention to how literature functions in discursive and presentational modes does not, of course, mean that one cannot critique something simply because it purports to be "non-discursive." This is why I gave examples of how both modes could generate distinct versions of coherence and incoherence. The literature of thematic escapism has its own aeshetically-derived logic which can be every bit as rigorous as that of the literatue of thematic realism.
In effect, what I said in my quote above regarding the distinction between lower and higher levels of functionality could also be subsumed under my dichotomy of gesture and gestalt. Any given story-function in isolation has the value of a ritualized gesture, and a story that simply follows all the prescribed rituals, as if by themselves they conveyed expressive richess, is merely a functional story.
However, true expressive richness stems from a *gestalt* that evolves from an author's use of the expected gestures in such a way that none of them seem *merely* functional. Instead, the gestures become parts that are greater than their whole. Thus it becomes possible for one to read "super-functional" characters in a variety of ways without betraying their functionality, as deconstructive readings tend to do. Conan Doyle's stories not only satisfy the audience's desire to see certain ritual gestures performed; they exceed that desire in such a way that later critics continue to study the stories from a variety of cognitive viewpoints-- psychological, sociological, mythopoeic and all the rest.
Ironically, while Langer explains humanity's evolution of symbolic concepts as a strategy for sorting out the "blooming, buzzing confusion" of uncognized experience, literature in a sense returns its audience to a lesser version of that confusion. In myth, one of the early manifestations of the literary impulse, gods exist to render more comprehensible all the significant phenomena which humans may encounter, and yet the will of these gods remains both inscrutable and imponderable. One might make the interpretation that while human beings are incapable of knowing the *real* gestalt behind the totality of objects and experiences, myth and literature function to give them a more manageable "gesture" that suggests such wholeness, in the form of a world where, as Mark Twain averred, "Fiction has to make sense."
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