CHAPTER 2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK The second chapter of this chapter consists of the theories explanations that are used to analyze the problem formulation. The theories that are used in this thesis are The Elements of Fiction and Marxism Theory. 2.1. Elements of Fiction Fiction has many elements. Plot, Character, Theme, Point of View, Setting, Symbol, Emotion, Fantasy are some of it. In this research, I will only focuses on the plot, character, setting and the symbol to analyze the elements of fiction in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie. 2.1.1. Plot Robert DiYanni in his book Literature Reading, Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (2001) put forward an opinion that plot is the arrangement of events that make up a story. DiYanni (2001) stated that plot is something that makes the readers curious to read the next page of a book or the next scene in a movie but to do that a plot must have a sequence of incidents that bear a significant causal relationship to each other which means that one thing happens because of-as a result of-something else. DiYanni believed that many fictional plots turn on a conflict which is a struggle between opposing forces that is usually resolved in the end of the story. A fiction usually starts with an exposition that provides background information of a problems, it also describes the setting, and introduces the major characters. Then it 10
11 develop into a series of complications or intensifications of the conflict which lead to a crisis or moment of a great tension, then it reach the climax or a moment of greatest tension, then the action falls off as the problems are sorted out and resolved which is called the resolution. According to Arp in Perrine s Literature Structure, Sound, and Sense (1998, p. 43), Plot is the sequence of incidents or events of which a story is composed, presented in a significant order. Plot include what the characters on the fiction say or think, also what they do, but it mainly focusing on the major events in the story. Plot conform a sequence of a related actions. Plot arises out some sort of conflict. Arp argued that conflict is a clash of actions, ideas, desires, or wills. There are three kinds of conflicts in a story. First one is the conflict between one character with another character or a group of character which is called a conflict of person against person. The second one is the conflict between a character with some external forces such as nature or society, it s called the conflict of person against environment. The last one is the conflict between a character with himself or herself. In plot there is also an element called Suspense. Suspense is the quality in a story that makes readers ask What s going to happen next? or How will this turn out? and impels them to read on to find the answers to these questions. To achieve suspense, there are two elements that need to introduce, first one is the element of mystery, a situation where the readers crave for an explanation. Then a dilemma, a situation where a character must choose between two courses of action which all undesirable. (Arp, 1998, p.41)
12 2.1.2. Character DiYanni (2001) explained that Character is the imaginary people that writers create, sometimes identifying with them, sometimes judging them. Plot and character are inseparable; we are often less concerned with what happened than with what happened to him or her. We want to know not just how did it work out, but how did it work out for them? That explanation is supported by Thomas Arp in his book Perrine s Literature Structure, Sound, and Sense (1998, p.76) He argued that reading for character is more difficult than reading for plot, for character is much more complex, variable, and ambiguous. Anyone can repeat what a person has done in a story, but it will be harder to describe what a person is. What Arp tried to say is that it is easier for us as a human to understand what is going on in a fiction s character mind and feels while in real life, we can only guess at these inner thoughts and feelings from a person s behavior. Arp (1998) also reported: we can know people in fiction more thoroughly than we can know them in real life. And by knowing fictional characters we can also understand people in real life better than we otherwise could (p.77). Characters in fiction can be divided into two categories, major and minor character, and static and dynamic character. DiYanni (2001) believed that a major character is an important figure at the centre of the story s action or theme. The major character is sometimes called a protagonist whose conflict with an antagonist may spark the story s conflict. Minor character is a character that support the major character, the function of minor character is to illuminate the major character. Static character is a character who remain the same from the beginning of a work to the end while dynamic
13 character exhibit some kind of change-of attitude, of purpose, of behavior-as the story progresses (p.55). Arp (1998, p.78) divided character into another two categories: flat and round character. Flat characters are characterized by one or two traits; they can be summed up in a sentence. Round characters are complex and many sided; they might require an essay for full analysis. Round character live by their very roundness, by the many points at which they touch life. Flat characters, though they touch life at only one or two points, may be made memorable in the hands of an expert author through some individualizing detail of appearance, gesture, or speech. Joseph M. Boggs in The Art of Watching Films (third edition) (1991, p.61) also divided character into two categories, Stock and Stereotypes character. Stock characters are minor characters whose actions are completely predictable or typical of their job or profession. Stereotype characters are characters of somewhat greater importance to the film. Examples of stereotypes are the rich playboy, the western hero s sidekick, the pompous banker, and the old maid aunt. 2.1.3. Setting According to Boggs in The Art of Watching Films (third edition) (1991, p.67) the setting is the time and place in which the film s story takes place. Although the setting may often seem unobtrusive or be taken for granted, it is an essential ingredient in any story and makes an important contribution to the theme or total effect of the story. The explanation is supported by DiYanni (2001), he argued that setting is a place or location of a story s action along with the time in which it occurs. Setting functioned
14 as more than a simple backdrop for action, it provides a historical and cultural context that enhances our understanding of the character (p.61). The primary functions of setting as it explained by Pramaggiore and Wallis in their book Film: A Critical Theory second edition (2008, p.92) are to establish time and place, to introduce ideas and themes, and to create mood. In a period film, the setting recreates a place and time; visual details are especially important when the time period is essential to the film s story and themes. Joseph M. Boggs also explained (1991) that in examining the setting as it relates to the story, it is necessary to consider the effect of four factors on the story as a whole: 1. Temporal factors: The time period in which the story takes place 2. Geographical factors: The physical location and its characteristics, including the type of terrain, climate, population density and any other physical factors of the locale that may have an effect on the story s character and their actions 3. Social structures and economic factors 4. Customs, moral attitudes, and codes of behavior 2.1.4. Symbol In Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama and Writing, Kennedy and Gioia (2010) clarified that symbol is a person, place, or thing that suggests more than its literal meaning. Symbols generally do not stand for any one meaning, nor for anything absolutely definite; they point, they hint, or, as Henry James put it, they cast long shadows. Symbols in fiction are not generally abstract terms such as love or truth, but are likely to be perceptible objects (or worded descriptions that cause us to imagine them) (p.223-224).
15 While Arp (1997) defines symbol as something that means more than what it is. It is an object, a person, a situation, an action, or some other item that has a literal meaning in the story but suggests or represents other meanings as well. For example in a story, however, authors may choose names for their characters that serve not only to label them but also to suggest something about them (p.182). Meanwhile, Boggs (1991) categorized symbolism into two categories, Universal and Natural symbols. Universal symbols are infused with values and associations that are understood by most of the people in a given culture. By using objects, images, or persons that automatically evoke complex associations. For example the American flag will trigger set of feelings and values that we associate with America, reactions from the audience will be varied, but all people from the same culture will understand the general symbolic message. Some objects have natural or inherent qualities that make them particularly well suited to be symbols. For example a Buzzard is easily recognized as a symbol of death. 2.2 Marxism Theory German Philosopher, Karl Marx (1818-1883) and a German Sociolinguist Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was the main founder of this particular theory. Marx was born in Trier, Rhineland, Germany, but Marx and his family moved to Britain as a political exile in 1843. While Friedrich Engels moved to Britain in 1842 to worked in his father s textile firm. In Capitalism and it s Economics: A Critical History (2000) Dowd reported: In the 1840s he (Marx) was very much a beginning student of capitalism prompted to be so by Engels, who became his lifelong friend, confidant, and coworker. But, as sometimes happens, the student overtook his teacher. From the start Marx ascertained the key relationships of economic processes, those that center on the control of the means of life. Under capitalism that control depends on private
16 ownership of the means of production, made to function with profit as its end. (p. 42) According to Seldon, Widdowson and Brooker in A Reader s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (1997, p. 88), the basic tenets of Marxism are no easier to summarize than the essential doctrines of Christianity, but two well-known statements by Marx provide a sufficient point of departure: It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point to change it. By stating these statements, Marx was trying to put people s thought into reverse gear. First, Marx thought that philosophy has been only empty contemplation and he thought that it is the time to connect it with the reality. Secondly, He also persuaded us that the world is governed by thought and that material existence is the expression of an immaterial spiritual essence. Marx reverses this formulation and argues that all mental (ideological) systems are the products of real social and economic existence (Seldon, Widdowson and Brooker, 1997, p. 88-89). In Beginning Theory, Barry (2009) clarified that Marxism according to Karl Marx looks for concrete, scientific, logical explanations of the world of observable fact. (Its opposite is idealist philosophy, which does believe in the existence of spiritual world elsewhere ). Marxism sees progress as coming about through the struggle for power between different social classes. Barry (2009) also stated that the simplest Marxist model of society sees it as constituted by a base (the material means of production, distribution, and exchange) and a superstructure, which is the cultural world of ideas, art, religion, law, and so on.
17 Dominic Strinati in his book An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (1995) believed that the base of a society is its mode of material production, the economic system by which it reproduces itself, and the source of exploitative class relations while superstructure of a society is its political and ideological institutions, the social relations and sets of ideas that lie outside the base such as the family, the state, religion, education and culture (p.121). Marx was arguing that what we call culture is not an independent reality but is inseparable from the historical conditions in which human beings create their material lives; the relations of exploitation and domination which govern the social and economic order of a particular phase of human history will in some sense determine the whole cultural life of the society (Seldon, Widdowson and Brooker, 1997, p. 89) In other word, all events, situation, and production that happen to all human had specific historical caused behind them. Marx put forward an opinion that the analysis of events and production of human focused on the relationship between socioeconomic classes. Marx s philosophy had been developed from human behavior into economic thoughts, that s probably caused by the psychology classes that he took before he shifted his focus into materialism. That reason can explained that although he pointed out about economy or materialism, he still see the situation in the reality and how it affected human s psychological side. According to Louis Althusser in For Marx (1965) Marx before 1846 was humanist, Marx after 1845 was anti-humanist or scientific. This opinion was influenced by Althusser structuralism and also by his suspension to young Marx communism philosophy.
18 2.2.1. Capitalism In one of Karl Marx earliest discussions, The German Ideology (1845-46), Marx believed that the ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas: the class, which is the dominant material force in society, is at the same time its dominant intellectual force. Strinati in his book An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (1995, p.120-121) argued that this clearly suggests that the predominant ideas common to a capitalist society, including its popular culture, are those of the ruling class. The ruling class (capitalist) constructs and circulates ideas which secure its power because they dominate the minds of the working class (proletariat). In Cultural Theory: the Key Concepts, Edgar and Sedgwick (2006, p. 52-54) stated that Capitalism is economic and social organization term that symbolized the main role of capital that one has. Capitalism is organized with the process of production, distribution and consumption of goods and service. The capitalism in society includes not only this process of production, but also the whole cycle of production-distributionconsumption. Beside those three cycle process, capitalism also driven by efforts seeking to satisfy its three systemic imperatives: expansion, exploitation, and oligarchic rule as supported by Douglas Dowd in his book Capitalism and it s Economics: A Critical History (2000, p.4): The momentum of the capitalist process was driven by efforts seeking to satisfy its three systemic imperatives: expansion, exploitation, and oligarchic rule. Capitalism could only meet those imperatives within a larger context of three overlapping developments that is strengthened by: colonialism (which became imperialism, and has now become globalization) industrialization, and nationalism.
19 According to Douglas Dowd in Capitalism and it s Economics: A Critical History (2000, p.5) throughout it s history, capitalist profitability has required, and capitalist rule has provided, ever-changing means and areas of exploitation. The central relationship making this possible is the ownership and control of productive property: a small group that owns and controls, and a great majority that does not, and whose resulting powerlessness requires them to work for wages simply to survive. Those social relations between these two classes are the basis vital for capitalist development. In The history of all existing mankind and society is the history of class struggles, Karl Marx stated that at first exploitation began when society was based on slavery, slaves were the real wealth for the high classes, and at the end this system fell off due to the contradiction of it s own, but then this system was replaced by feudalism. Feudalism is an era where slaves were owned by their owner to serve them in war, but also this system was collapsed and replaced by a more modern system called capitalism. Capitalism is a system where skill and hard work will be rewarded, and laziness will be punished. However, the era of capitalism is not only happen in the era of slavery, in 1990 s, capitalism is still happening around the world. Douglas Dowd in Capitalism and it s Economics: A Critical History (2000, p.188) believed that the new economy in 1990 s may also be called as the new exploitation. Wages were falling or stagnant from 1973 until about 1998, since when (in the United States) they have edged up slowly. The latter helps to explain the otherwise startling fact that the average U.S. worker works 260 hours more per year than in 1989, an additional six weeks of work without anything like a proportionate wage increase. The eight-hour day, 40-hour week is becoming a
20 memory. The explanation from Dowd could mean that that the capitalism in 1990 s era is transform into inequality in terms of working hours and wage that do not appropriate. 2.2.2. Alienation Karl Marx stated in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844) that alienation arises from private labor, from commodity production and show that the specific form of labor characteristic of bourgeois society, wage labor, corresponds to the most profound form of Alienation. In other words, Alienation is the estrangement of people from their humanity, which is a systematic result of Capitalism. Under Capitalism, the products belong to the employers, who expropriate the surplus created by others, and so generate alienated laborers. Since wage workers sell their labor power to earn a living, and the capitalist owns the labor process, the product of the workers labor is in a very real sense alien to the worker. It is not her product but the product of the capitalist. In Marx s view, alienation is an objective characterization of the workers situation in capitalism his or her self-awareness of this condition is not prerequisite. Dowd in Capitalism and it s Economics: A Critical History (2000, p.55) as he quote on Marx, the words work and labor had quite different vitally different meanings as he used the terms (in a tradition with its beginnings in the ancient world).50 Work is life-maintaining be it farming, building, fabricating done under the worker s control; labor is done under the control of another (an employer, slave-owner), the class of those who decide what is done, when, how, where, and why and decides as well the division of the resulting income and wealth. Labor characterizes the condition of the working class in capitalist society.
21 According to Ollman in Alienation: Marx s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (1991, p.131), The theory of alienation is the intellectual construct in which Marx displays the devastating effect of capitalist production on human beings, on their physical and mental states and on the social processes of which they are a part. Ollman also stated that alienation is a state of human which is away from or less than unalienation. For Marx, unalienation is the life man leads in communism. It also can be explained in the form of the difference between health and disease, we only know what it is to have a particular disease because we know what it is not to. When we think that someone is ill, we consider that is a statement of fact and not an evaluation based on an outside standard. Barry (2009) argued that the exploitation of one social class by another is resulted as alienation, which is the state which comes about when the worker is deskilled and made to perform fragmented, repetitive tasks in a sequence of whose nature and purpose he or she has no overall grasp. David Hawkes in his book Ideology: The New Critical Idiom (1996, p.97) believes that under a capitalist economy, this objectified essence of our selves does not belong to us. The product made by the worker belongs to the capitalist, who consider it as a commodity to be sold. In Capitalism and it s Economics: A Critical History, Dowd (2000) stated that Marx s first examination of this matter pierced through to its inescapable meaning for those without control over the means of production those powerless to maintain their lives except as alienated persons. Dowd believed that there are two things that construct alienation on labor, first is that the work is external to the worker, that it is not part of his nature. The worker feels himself at home only during his leisure time,
22 whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. Second one is that the worker feels himself to be freely active only in his animal functions: eating, drinking and procreating, or at most also in his dwelling and personal adornment while in his human functions he is reduced to an animal.