Back To Basics: Folk Tales and Fairy Tales
Back To Basics: Folk Tales and Fairy Tales
Back To Basics: Folk Tales and Fairy Tales
BACK TO BASICS
FOLK TALES AND FAIRY TALES
‘Myths, folktales, fairy tales – these are the prototypes of all narrative.’
(Scholes 1974: 60)
the functions will be found in every tale, but Propp was insistent that
when they do occur they always appear in the same sequence. The
functions help us to identify recurring types of events in a narrative
and how they contribute to driving the narrative along and to build-
ing up momentum and suspense.The focus is not on isolated actions
or events, but on the consequences actions have as part of a sequence.
The following is John Fiske’s (1987: 136–7) summary of Propp’s
31 functions, divided into six sequences or stages.
PREPARATION
1. A member of the family leaves home.
2. A prohibition or rule is imposed on the hero.
3. This prohibition/rule is broken.
4. The villain makes an attempt at reconnaissance.
5. The villain learns something about his victim.
6. The villain tries to deceive the victim to get possession
of him or his belongings.
7. The victim unknowingly helps the villain by being
deceived or influenced by the villain.
COMPLICATION
8. The villain harms a member of the family.
8a. A member of the family lacks or desires something.
9. This lack or misfortune is made known; the hero is
given a request or command, and he goes or is sent on
a mission/quest.
10. The seeker (often the hero) plans action against the
villain.
TRANSFERENCE
11. The hero leaves home.
12. The hero is tested, attacked, interrogated, and, as a
result, receives either a magical agent or a helper.
13. The hero reacts to the actions of the future donor.
BACK TO BASICS 17
STRUGGLE
16. The hero and villain join in direct combat.
17. The hero is branded.
18. The villain is defeated.
19. The initial misfortune or lack is set right.
RETURN
20. The hero returns.
21. The hero is pursued.
22. The hero is rescued from pursuit.
23. The hero arrives home or elsewhere and is not
recognized.
24. A false hero makes false claims.
25. A difficult task is set for the hero.
26. The task is accomplished.
RECOGNITION
27. The hero is recognized.
28. The false hero/villain is exposed.
29. The false hero is transformed.
30. The villain is punished.
31. The hero is married and crowned.
example, Propp has been applied to the Bond movies, with their very
recognisable villains (Goldfinger, Scaramanga) and magical agents
(the various gadgets given to Bond by the donor figure, Q). The
Bond movies also have an established formula whereby Bond is sent
on his mission by the dispatcher M, is pursued by various villains
and enters into combat with them, before triumphing and usually
ending up in bed with the ‘princess’ on a luxury yacht or other such
symbol of wealth and achievement. Television and movie franchises
such as Doctor Who, Star Wars and Star Trek have all been analysed
using Propp’s morphology, demonstrating how popular this type of
narrative structure remains with contemporary audiences and how
contemporary media and the folk tale ‘serve similar functions for
their respective audiences’ (Turner 2006: 102).
used to generate new tales, not just to analyse existing ones. While
this was by no means his main intention, it does perhaps explain why
Propp’s morphology is so often quoted by writers and screenwriters
in particular, and has led to the emergence of other models and tools
for writers based on mythic structures (notably Joseph Campbell’s
The Hero with a Thousand Faces [1973] and Christopher Vogler’s The
Writer’s Journey [1998]).
As we shall see in the next chapter, Propp’s work directly influ-
enced many of the classic structuralists. For example, A. J. Greimas
(1983[1966]) attempted to produce his own narrative grammar, pre-
ferring the term ‘actants’ to Propp’s dramatis personae, reducing them
to six (Subject, Object, Sender, Receiver, Helper and Opponent) and
distinguishing them from the more particularlised ‘actors’ (i.e. the
actual character who appears in the narrative). Structuralists such as
Greimas (1983[1966]) and Claude Bremond (1980), followed Propp
in searching for a universal grammar, or the deep structure of narra-
tive (its ‘langue’, see Chapter 2), producing models and diagrammatic
representations that nudged closer and closer to something like a
scientific formula.
Lately, there has been a resurgence of interest in Propp’s work,
thanks to the increasing prominence and influence of the emerging
field of the digital humanities. Propp’s interest and success in quantify-
ing his corpus of folk tales and abstracting from them a morphological
structure that can be applied to a wide range of narrative data provides
an important model for approaches that attempt to use computers to
analyse and explore huge datasets. Today, rather than morphology, we
might talk of Propp’s theory as providing us with a kind of DNA for
narrative (Lendvai et al. 2010), and he has been the inspiration for
the evolution of specific digital tools, including Malec’s (online, n.d)
development of a Proppian Fairy Tale Markup Language, which is
used to explore data structures latent in natural language narratives.
ANALYSIS
Many applications of Propp’s theory unfortunately stop short at the
level of assigning the spheres of action to specific characters. This
does have the benefit of avoiding complexity and what can end up
being a retelling of the story or a rather unimaginative mapping of
the morphology onto the story events. But it is important always to
24 BACK TO BASICS
CONCLUSION
As we have seen in this chapter, even the most seemingly complex
of contemporary narratives often share a basic narrative structure
with folk tales, myths and fairy tales. Similarly, postclassical nar-
ratology’s engagement with cognitive science or computational
approaches seems to share a great deal with the attempts of early
theorists such as Propp to unearth recurring, familiar patterns
across narratives and to understand what kinds of basic human
impulses the need to tell stories addresses. In many ways, Propp’s
morphology has stood the test of time far better than those who
came after him and who tried to improve on his model. Testa-
ment to this is the fact that Propp’s name will in all likelihood be
amongst the first you will encounter whether you are studying
narrative in the media, literature, history or philosophy, while the
attempt to bring a scientific approach to the study of storytelling
continues to drive even the most cutting-edge and technologically
advanced of research.
26 BACK TO BASICS
REFERENCES
Barthes, R. (1993[1957]) Mythologies. Transl. A. Lavers. London:Vintage.
Bettelheim, B. (1991) The Uses of Enchantment. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bordwell, D. (1988) ApProppriations and ImPropprieties: Problems in the Mor-
phology of Film Narrative. Cinema Journal, 27(3), 5–20.
Bordwell, D. and Thompson, K. (2008) (8th ed.) Film Art. New York: McGraw-
Hill.
Bremond, C. (1980) The Logic of Narrative Possibilities. New Literary History,
11, 387–411.
Campbell, J. (1973) (2nd ed.) The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press.
Eco, U. (1985) Strategies of Lying. In On Signs, ed. M. Blonsky. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 3–11.
Fiske, J. (1987) Television Culture. London: Routledge.
Greimas, A. J. (1983[1966]) Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method. Transl. D.
McDowell, R. Schleifer and A.Velie. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Henley, J. (2013) Philip Pullman: ‘Loosening the chains of the imagination’. The
Guardian. Accessed 24/3/15 at http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/
2013/aug/23/philip-pullman-dark-materials-children
Lacey, N. (2000) Narrative and Genre. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Lendvai, P., Declerck, T., Darányi, S. and Malec, S. (2010) Propp Revisited:
Integration of Linguistic Markup into Structured Content Descriptors of
Tales. Paper presented at the Digital Humanities Conference, King’s College
BACK TO BASICS 27
London. Accessed 9/8/2013 at http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/academic-pro
gramme/abstracts/papers/html/ab-753.html
Malec, S. A. Proppian Structural Analysis and XML Modeling. Accessed 9/8/2013
at http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/sam/propp/theory/propp.html
Newman, J. (2004) Videogames. New York: Routledge.
Propp, V. (2003[1968]) Morphology of the Folk Tale. Transl. L. Scott. Austin: Uni-
versity of Texas Press.
Scholes, R. (1974) Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Turner, G. (2006) (4th ed.) Film as Social Practice. London: Routledge.
Vogler, C. (1998) The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structures for Writers. Studio City,
CA: Michael Wiese Productions.
Warner, M. (1995) From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers.
London:Vintage.
Zipes, J. (1993) The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the
Tale in Sociocultural Context. London: Routledge.