Studies in the Contemporary Spanish-American Short Story

or deep level that transformational-generative linguistics identifies for languages. By this I mean that, like deep linguistic structures, ecriture-the deep structure of a literary text-is wholly abstract and only accessible by a theoretical model of reading. Thisand only accessible by a theoretical model of reading. This theoretical model, like linguistic analysis, is capable of organizing surface phenomena in terms of an underlying system that provides them with an interdependent order and that explains their structural function. If the surface phenomena of linguistic utterances possess a semiological importance only in terms of an abstract system that specifies hierarchical and interdependent function, the same may be said about the higher-order discourse structures we call literary texts. Literary structuralism has discovered, along with generative linguistics, that structural units virtually cannot be said to possess independent functional meanings. Rather, this meaning is a correlative of the structural context in which they are ordered. This context can only be detailed fully in abstract terms because of the way in which surface order and relationships fail to be adequately explicit, for cognitive reasons that are not yet comprehensible to us. Thus, when we speak of the need for literary analysis to posit the existence of abstract structures, we are, like the linguist, acknowledging the need to postulate functional relationships between structural components that are not directly apparent superficially. Nevertheless, and in contrast to colloquial communication, where we assume that the meaning-message and its transmission are primary, literary theory recognizes the premise that meaning, or meanings, is less basic and perhaps even less interesting than the way in which it is realized, structured, and inscribed in the texture of a literary work. What this means as a consequence is thatin a literary work, although meaning is not trivial, the form in which it is con-