Reflections on Actantial Models

Reflections on Actantial Models

The text reprinted here belongs to Chapter 10 of Greimas' Structural Semantics, a comprehensive attempt to adapt linguistic categories to the structural analysis of literature. Drawing on the example of generative grammar, Greimas builds an analogy between the deep structure of language and myth, on the one hand, and surface linguistic manifestations and narrative, on the other. He aims to construct a functional model capable of reproducing the overall deep structure of literature and of accounting for each and every existing or conceivable surface manifestation.

Greimas also offers his own typology of actantial categories for the analysis of narrative, developing Vladimir Propp's pioneer work in Morphology of the Folktale and Etienne Souriau's analysis of actantial models in drama. As Greimas explains, these earlier typologies of actantial models are insufficient in that they are limited to the analysis of one particular genre and are too formal and descriptive, failing to take into account the thematic element. His own model is built out of Propp's distinction between 'characters' and 'dramatis personae', which Greimas calls 'actors' -- the characters who undertake the action in a particular tale -- and 'actants' -- the types of 'actor' established from the generic corpus as a whole. Drawing strict syntactical analogies, Greimas further reduces Propp's and Souriau's actantial categories to three basic actantial pairs. The first is 'Subject vs. Object', which provides the indispensable syntactical functions. The second is 'Sender vs. Receiver', a pair that is often hard to fit into the analysis of literary narrative, though it should be kept in mind that Greimas' model refers to mythical narrative or folktales. The third pair is 'Helper vs. Opponent', whose function Greimas equates to the circumstantial function of adverbs in the sentence. The relationships governing

this basic actantial model are centred on the notion of desire, which provides the motivation for action at surface level and the mythical impulse in the deep structure.

Greimas' acceptance of this element as an intrinsic part of his actantial model helps him negotiate a leap from the merely descriptive and formal analysis of narrative to the thematic and ideological, a direction which is pursued in, for example, his work on the semiotics of passion ( Smiotique des passions, written in collaboration with Jacques Fontanille, 1991). His proposals for evaluating the models elaborated by psychoanalysis for the analysis of myth -- such as Freud's analysis of the Oedipus myth -- and for designing psychoanalytical actantial models based on Charles Mauron's psychocritical analysis of the obsessive metaphors underlying the creation of personal myths, remain general and inconclusive and show Greimas trying to reduce the often tentative notions and heterogeneous terminologies of psychoanalysis to an overall and permanent 'scientific' system of functional formulas. The most influential aspect of Greimas' semantic model is the componential analysis of meaning which tries to connect the macrostructural and microstructural levels of text and word. He is the coiner of terms such as 'seme', 'sememe' and 'isotopy', which have been adopted and further refined by other structuralist critics.

2. The actants in linguistics

We were struck with Tesnire's observation ¹ -- which he probably only intended to be didactic -- comparing the elementary utterance to drama [spectacle]. If it is remembered that functions, according to traditional syntax, are only roles played by words -- the subject is 'somebody who does the action,' the object 'somebody who undergoes the action,' and so forth -- a proposition, in such a conception, is indeed only a drama which homo loquens produces for himself. The drama has, however, this peculiarity, that it is permanent: the content of the actions is forever changing, the actors vary, but the dramatic utterance [l'nonc-spectacle] stays always the same, for its permanence is guaranteed by the unique distribution of its roles.

The permanence of the distribution of a small number of roles, as we were saying, is not simply fortuitous: we have seen that the number of actants was determined by the a priori conditions of the perception of signification. The nature of the distributed roles seemed more difficult for us to articulate: it seemed at least necessary to correct the lame ternary formulation by substituting two actantial categories in the form of oppositions:

Beginning here, we have been able to attempt the following extrapolation: since 'natural' speech can neither augment the number of actants nor widen the syntactic comprehension of signification beyond the sentence, it must be the same inside every microuniverse. Or rather the opposite: the semantic microuniverse can be defined as a universe, that is to say, as a signifying whole [tout de signification], only to the extent that it can surge up at any moment before us as a simple drama, as an actantial structure.

Two arrangements of a practical order, then, have been necessary to adjust this actantial model borrowed from syntax to its new semantic status and to the new dimensions of a microuniverse. On one hand it was necessary to propose the reduction of syntactic actants to their semantic status (whether she receives the letter or whether the letter is sent to her, Mary is always the 'receiver'); on the other hand, it was necessary to gather all the functions manifested in a corpus and attributed to a single semantic actant whatever their dispersion may be, so that each manifested actant would possess, behind it, its own semantic investment and so that we could say that the ensemble of the recognized actants, whatever the relationship may be between them, are representative of the whole manifestation in its entirety.

Here, then, the hypothesis of an actantial model is proposed as one of the possible principles of organization of the semantic universe, too vast to be grasped in its totality, in a microuniverse accessible to man. However, it is necessary that concrete descriptions of delimited areas -- or at least of observations of a general character which, without depending upon precise analysis, would have a bearing upon vast and diversified signifying ensembles -- come to confirm these linguistic extrapolations by simultaneously producing information about the signification and the possible articulations of actantial categories.

3. The actants of the Russian folktale

The first confirmation of this hypothesis was advanced by Vladimir Propp , in his Morphology of the Folktale, the American translation of which, relatively recent, has been known in France only for a short time. ² After defining the folktale as a display on a temporal line of its thirty-one functions, Propp raises the question about the actants, or the dramatis personae, as he calls them. His conception of the actants is functional: the characters are defined, according to him, by the 'spheres of action' in which they participate, these spheres being constituted by the bundles of functions which are attributed to them. The invariance that we can observe by comparing all the taleoccurrences of the corpus is that of the spheres of action that are attributed to the characters (whom we prefer to call actors), which vary from one tale to another. By illustrating this point with the help of a simple schema (see below), we see that, if we define the functions, F ₁, F ₂, and F ₃, as constituting the sphere of activity of a particular actant, A1, the invariance of the sphere of activity from one tale to another allows us to consider the actors, a ₁, a ₂, and a ₃, as occurrential expressions of one and the same actant A ₁ defined by the same sphere of activity.

The result is that if the actors can be established within a taleoccurrence, the actants, which are classifications of actors, can be established only from the corpus of all the tales: an articulation of actors constitutes a particular tale; a structure of actants constitutes a genre. The actants therefore possess a metalinguistic status in relation to the actors. They presuppose, by the way, a functional analysis -that is to say, the achieved constitution of the spheres of action.This double procedure -- the establishment of the actors by the description of the functions and the reduction of the classifications of actors to actants of the genre -- allows Propp to establish a definitive inventory of the actants, which are:

This inventory authorizes Propp to give an actantial definition of the Russian folktale as a story with seven characters.

4. The actants in the theater

At the very point where Propp stops his analysis, we find another inventory which is rather similar, the catalog of the dramatic 'functions' presented by tienne Souriau in his work Les Deux cent mille situations dramatiques. ³ Souriau's thought, however subjective and relying on no concrete analysis, is not very far from Propp's description; it even extends it in a certain way. It is unlikely that Souriau knew Propp's work. But this question is not even pertinent. The interest in Souriau's thought lies in the fact that he has shown that the actantial interpretation can be applied to a kind of narrative -theatrical works -- quite different from the folktale and that his results are comparable to Propp's. We find here, although expressed differently, the same distinction between the events of the story [l'histoire vnementielle] (which is for him only a collection of 'dramatic subjects') and the level of the semantic description (which is made from the 'situations,' which can be decomposed into the action of actants). Finally, we find here a limited inventory of actants (which he calls, according to traditional syntactic terminology, functions). Unfortunately, after hesitating for some time between six and seven dramatic functions, Souriau finally decided to limit their number to six (a number challenged, by the way, by Guy Michaud, in his Techniques de l'oeuvre, who would like to re-establish the seventh function, that of the traitor): we would thus obtain parallel definitions of the two different 'genres' -- folktale and drama -- which separately would have claimed to be narratives with seven characters.

Souriau's inventory is presented in the following manner:

We must not be discouraged by the energetic and astrological character of Souriau's terminology: it does not succeed in concealing reflections that are not without coherence.

5. The actantial category 'subject' vs. 'object'

The definitions of Propp and Souriau confirm our interpretation on an important point: a restricted number of actantial terms is sufficient to account for the organization of a microuniverse. Their insufficiency lies in the character, at the same time excessively and insufficiently formal, that was given to these definitions: to define a genre only by the number of actants, while setting aside all the contents, is to place the definition at too high a formal level; to present the actants under the form of a simple inventory, without questioning the possible relationships between them, it is to renounce analysis too early, by leaving the second part of the definition, its specific features, at an insufficient level of formalization. A categorization of the inventory of the actants therefore appears necessary: we will try to attempt it by comparing, in a first approximation, the three inventories at our disposal, those of Propp and Souriau and one more restricted, since it only has two actantial categories, which we have been able to draw from the considerations of the syntactic functioning of discourse.

A first glance allows us to find and identify in the two inventories of Propp and Souriau the two syntactic actants which constitute the category 'Subject' vs. 'Object.' It is striking, we must note at this time, that the relationship between the subject and object which we had so much trouble defining precisely, and never succeeded in defining completely, appears here with a semantic investment identical in both inventories, that of 'desire.' It seems possible to conceive that the transitivity or the teleological relationship, as we suggested calling it, situated in the mythical dimension of the manifestation, appears following the semic combination as a sememe realizing the effect of meaning of 'desire.' If this is so, the two microuniverses, the genre 'folktale' and the genre 'drama,' defined by a first actantial category articulated in relation to desire, are capable of producing narrativeoccurrences where desire will be manifested under the simultaneously practical and mythical form of 'the quest.' The chart of equivalences of that first category will be as shown.

6. Actantial category 'sender' vs. 'receiver'

The search for what could correspond, in Propp and Souriau's intentions, to that second actantial category cannot fail to raise some difficulties because of the frequent syncretic manifestations of actants (already encountered at the level of syntax), the often noticed plurality of two actants present under the form of a single actor. For instance, in a narrative that is only a common love story ending in marriage without the parents' intervention, the subject is also the receiver, while the object is at the same time the sender of love:

Four actants are there, symmetrical and inverted, but syncretized under the form of two actors. But we see also -- Michel Legrand's couplet sung in the 'Umbrellas of Cherbourg' makes the point in an impressive synopsis:

a man, a woman, an apple, a drama

-- with what ease the disjunction of the object and the sender can produce a model with three actants.

In a narrative of the type of The Quest for the Holy Grail, on the contrary, four actants, quite distinct, are articulated in two categories:

Souriau's description does not pose any difficulties. The category

Sender vs. Receiver

is clearly marked there, as the opposition between

Arbiter, attributer of the Good vs. virtual Recipient of the Good

In Propp's analysis, in its turn, the sender seems to be articulated into two actors, the first of which is rather navely combined with the object of desire:

(the sought-for person and) her father

while the second one appears, as could be expected, under the name of dispatcher. In the occurrences, indeed, it is at times the king, at times the father -- combined or not into a single actor -- who charges the hero with a mission. Thus, without great turmoil and without the help of psychoanalysis, we can reunite the father of the desired person with the dispatcher, and consider them when they are presented separately as two 'actors' of a single actant.As for the receiver, it seems that, in the Russian folktale, his field of activity is completely fused with that of the subject-hero. A theoretical question that can be raised about this point, one that we will return to later, is whether fusions can be considered as pertinent criteria for the divisions of a genre into subgenres.It seems that the two actantial categories appear, so far, to constitute a simple model revolving entirely around the object, which is both the object of desire and the object of communication.

7. The actantial category 'helper' vs. 'opponent'

It is much more difficult to be sure of the categorical articulation of the other actants if only because we lack a syntactic model. Two spheres of activity, however, and, inside those, two distinct kinds of functions are recognized without difficulty.

These two bundles of functions can be attributed to two distinct actants that we will designate under the name of

Helper vs. Opponent

This distinction corresponds rather well to the distinction made by Souriau, from whom we borrow the term opponent: we prefer the term of helper introduced by Guy Michaud, to Souriau's 'rescue.' In Propp's formulation we find that opponent is pejoratively called villain (traitor), while helper takes in two characters, the helper and the donor (provider). At first sight, this elasticity of analysis may be surprising.

We must not forget, however, that the actants are established by Propp, not to mention Souriau, from their spheres of action, that is to say, with the help of the reduction of the single functions, and without taking into account an indispensable homologation. We do not intend to criticize Propp here, whose role as a precursor is considerable, but simply to register the progress made during the last thirty years by virtue of the general development of structuralist procedures. We should also consider that it is easier to operate when two comparable inventories are at our disposal, instead of simply one.

We can wonder what corresponds, in the mythical universe whose actantial structure we want to make explicit, to this opposition between the helper and the opponent. At first glance, everything takes place as if, besides the principal parties in question, there would appear now in the drama projected on an axiological screen actants representing in a schematic fashion the benevolent and malevolent forces in the world, incarnations of the guardian angel and the devil of medieval Christian drama. What is also striking is the secondary character of these two actants. In a little play on words, we could say, thinking of the participial form by which we designated them (for example, 'the opposing' [opposant: i.e. the 'opponent']), that they are the circumstantial 'participants,' and not the true actants of the drama [spectacle]. Participles are in fact only adjectives which modify substantives in the same way that adverbs modify verbs.

When in the course of the procedure of normalization we wanted to grant a formal status to the adverbs, we designated them as aspects constituting a hypotactic subclass of functions. There is in French, inside the rather poorly defined class of adverbs, a very restricted inventory of adverbs of quality, which are presented under the form of two oppositional pairs:

These could be justly considered as aspectual categories, the semantic interpretation of which seems difficult: the first category would indicate, in the process in which we find the function invested, the participation of the will, with or without anticipation of resistance; the second category would constitute the projection, upon the function, of appreciation that the subject conveys of its own process (when the subject is identified with the speaker).

It is already obvious where we wanted to come: to the extent that functions are considered as constitutive of actants, there seems to be no reason why one could not admit that the aspectual categories could be considered as circumstants, which would be the hypotactic formulations of the actant-subject. In the mythical manifestation which concerns us, it is well understood that helper and opponent are only projections of the will to act and the imaginary resistance of the subject itself, judged beneficial or harmful in relationship to its desire.

This interpretation has a relative value. It attempts to explain the appearance of circumstants as well as true actants in both inventories and to account for both their syntactic and semantic status.

8. The actantial mythical model

Inferred from inventories which remain, in spite of everything, provisional, constructed by considering the syntactic structure of natural languages, this model seems to possess, because of its simplicity and for the analysis of mythical manifestations only, a certain operational value. Its simplicity lies in the fact that it is entirely centred on the object of desire aimed at by the subject and situated, as object of communication, between the sender and the receiver -the desire of the subject being, in its part, modulated in projections from the helper and opponent:

9. The 'thematic' investment

If we wanted to question the possibilities of the use, as a structuring hypothesis, of this model which we consider operational, we should begin with an observation: the desire to compare syntactic categories to Propp's and Souriau's inventories made us consider the relationship between the subject and the object -- which first seems to be, in its greater generality, a relationship of teleological character, that is to say, a modality of 'to be able to do,' but which, at the level of the manifestation of functions, would have regained a practical or mythical 'to do' -- as a more specialized relationship of 'desire' (having a heavier semic investment) which transforms itself at the level of the manifested functions into 'quest.' Therefore, we would say that the possible particularizations of the model should convey first the relationship between the actants 'subject' vs. 'object' and then be manifested as a class of variables constituted by supplementary investments.

Thus, with great simplification, it could be said that for a learned philosopher of the classical age the relationship of desire would be specified, by a semic investment, as the desire of knowing, and the actants of his drama of knowledge would be distributed more or less in the following manner:

In the same way, Marxist ideology as expressed by a militant could be distributed, thanks to its desire to help man, in a parallel fashion:

We see that the proposed actantial model, centered on the relationship of 'desire,' is susceptible to a negative transformation, that the substitutions of the terms inside the category

obsession vs. phobia

should in principle have deep repercussions on the articulation of the ensemble of the terms of the model.

11. Actants and actors

Even granted, the simple fact that the procedure of thematic investment in the account of the object at each moment risks confusing the description of the actantial model with the qualificative analysis is not sufficient to account for the variation of actantial models and to establish their typology. Nothing is left but to return to the actants themselves, to see in what measure the distributional schemas of the actants, on the one hand, and types of stylistic relationships between the actants and actors, on the other, can serve as criteria for a 'typologizing' particularization of actantial models.

The first typological criterion of this kind can well be the syncretism, often recorded, of the actants. We can thus subdivide the models into genres, according to the nature of the actants which let themselves be syncretized: in the folktale, we have seen, the subject and the receiver constitute an arche-actant. [ . . . ] Taken in the nonaxiological domain, the example can be made clearer: thus the queen, in the game of chess, is the syncretic arche-actant of the bishop and the rook.

For the second criterion, the syncretism is distinguished by the analytic division of the actants into hyponymic and hypotactic actors, which corresponds to the complementary distribution of their functions. It is thus that Propp has tried -- in an unhappy enough way, it seems to us -- to define the receiver as the sought-for person and her father (he probably was seeking to preserve the human dignity of the woman-object). The analyses of Lvi-Strauss have shown that mythology, in order to account for complementary distributions of functions, often manifests at the level of the actors a preference for the actantial denominations proper to the structures of kinship. The actants often are grouped in pairs of actors such as husband and wife, father and son, grandmother and grandchild, twins, and so forth. [ . . . ] It is here that we can question what exactly corresponds to the models of kinship used by psychoanalysis in the description of individual actantial structures: are they situated at the level of the distribution of the actants into actors, or do they represent, at the end of a generalization which at first sight appears excessive, metaphoric formulations of the actantial categories?

A third typological criterion can possibly be that of the absence of one or more of the actants. Theoretical considerations permit proposing such a possibility only with much skepticism. The examples of absence of actants cited by Souriau are all interpreted as the dramatic effects produced by waiting for the manifestation of an actant, which is not the same thing as absence, but rather its contrary: the absence of Tartuffe during the two first acts of the comedy or the delay of the rescues in the history of Blue Beard only render more acute the presence of the actant not yet manifested in the economy of the actantial structure.

From the operational point of view, and without addressing the problem of the reality of any particular distribution of actants, we can consider the proposed actantial model as a descriptive optimum, reducible to a simpler arche-actantial structure, but also extendible (the limits of which it is difficult, at first sight, to be precise about, but which are certainly not considerable), because of the possible articulation of the actants in simple hypotactic structures.

A whole other question is that of the denomination of actants, which only depends in small part upon the functional analysis from which, in following Propp, we are trying to construct the actantial model. [ . . . ] While agreeing, in principle with Lvi-Strauss when he says, propos of Propp's analysis, that the description of the universe of the folktale cannot be complete because of our ignorance of the axiological cultural network which sustains it, we do not think that this constitutes a major obstacle for description, which, while remaining incomplete, can still be pertinent. ⁴ Thus, to proceed from comparable sequences borrowed from different taleoccurrences, such as:

a tree shows the way . . .
a crane makes a gift of a horse . . .
a bird spies . . .

we can well reduce the predicates to one common function of 'aide' and propose for the three actors a helper-actant which subsumes I them: we are incapable of recovering, without the aid of an axiological description, impossible in this case, the explanation of the particularizing denominations of actors. Nevertheless, the first elements of an actantial stylistic may not be impossible to formulate from only a single functional analysis.

Notes