We discussed several aspects of structuralism in the previous lectures. Especially its thesis that a thing's identity is defined by its place in a structure. In this lecture we will look at the work of Vladimir Propp, a literary scholar who is often seen as an example of a structuralist, even though he came up with these ideas independently of the Saussure. His analysis of the Russian fairy tale is a beautiful example, first, of what structuralist research in the humanities looks like, and second, of the thesis that a thing's identity is defined by its place in a structure.
So without further ado, Vladimir Prob. Vladimir Prob took a big corpus of Russian fairy tales and started to analyze them. Now obviously, one way to do that would be to think about the meaning or message of each of these stories individually.
That might be the approach taken by a hermeneuticist. But Prob has a very different aim in mind. He isn't so much interested in the particular details of the stories.
He wants to know about the structure that you can find in every story. Just like the grammarian doesn't want to interpret the meaning of a sentence, but wants to dissect it into a subject, an object, a verb and other parts. And then wants to tell us the rules of how such parts can be combined into sentences. In the same way, Krupp wants to dissect fairy tales into their components, and wants to tell us how they can be combined. He wants to understand The structure of the fairy tale.
The assumption that underlies Prop's whole project is that fairy tales have a fairly determinate structure. That beneath their differences, there is something that generally stays the same. Very early in the book, Props gives us some examples of scenes from fairy tales that are different on the surface. but in fact play an identical role in the story. Namely, 1. A Tsar gives an eagle to a hero.
The eagle carries the hero away to another kingdom. 2. An old man gives Suchenko a horse. The horse carries Suchenko away to another kingdom.
3. A sorcerer gives Ivan a little boat. The boat takes Ivan to another kingdom. 4. A princess gives Ivan a ring.
Young men appearing from out of the ring carry Ivan away into another kingdom. In one sense these scenes are clearly different. Different people are interacting with different objects. But there is also a sense in which these scenes are in fact the same. There are always two characters fulfilling the same roles.
Let's call them the hero and the donor. The hero is on a quest, and the donor gives the hero an object that will bring him to where he needs to go. So we have the two same basic characters, hero and donor, and the two same basic story events, or what Propp calls functions.
Namely, the reception of a magical thing and the guidance of the hero to where he needs to go. What Propp goes on to do, is to systematically investigate all the roles and all the story functions that are to be found in Russian fairy tales. Let's look at the roles first. According to Propp, there are exactly seven types of characters in these tales, of which the three most important are the hero, the princess and the villain.
Let's look at them a little more closely. So, what makes a character a hero? You might think that a hero needs to be strong, or smart, or wise, or maybe honorable, or courageous.
And perhaps the hero is most of those things in most of those tales. But that's not really what turns him into a hero. What makes someone the hero of the story is that he struggles against the villain in order to rescue the princess. If there is no villain, and if Ivan just marries Veronica because they love each other, we don't have a fairy tale and Ivan isn't a hero.
On the other hand, if there's no princess, then there is no reason for Ivan to ever leave his uncle's farm or his father's palace, and again, we have no hero. So a character is a hero, Not because of any intrinsic properties, not because of any properties of his own, but because he plays a certain role in the whole structure formed by the hero, the villain and the princess. And maybe by some of the other roles as well.
So we can see here the basic idea of structuralism made, I think, very clear. Your identity as a hero depends not so much on yourself, but on your place in a larger structure. Of course, what is true for the hero is also true for the other roles. You can't be a fairy tale villain if there's no princess to abduct and no hero to defeat you. Just imagine the Aladdin movie without Aladdin.
It would be the story of the evil Grand Vizier Jafar becoming, with no serious resistance, the absolute ruler of the world and forcing Princess Jasmine to marry him. That is not a fairy tale. It's, I don't know, a dark political horror or something, but not a fairy tale.
In that story Jafar certainly would be some kind of villain, but he would not have the role of a fairy tale villain. And so on. No role is defined by any intrinsic characteristics. The villain doesn't have to be evil, the princess doesn't have to be beautiful or even female, but they have to be part of the whole structure of the fairy tale roles. By understanding that structure, we understand the genre of fairy tales better.
Now, let us move from the characters, from the roles, to the narrative functions. The general plot events, if you wish. Here Propp distinguished 31 functions. We already saw two of them. The receipt of a magical agent, in which the hero acquires the use of a magical object because of his good actions.
And guidance, in which the hero is transferred to a location that is vital for his quest. But now I want to look at two others, because they will help to illustrate that PROP doesn't just identify these 31 functions, but also gives us very clear rules for how they can be combined. The two functions I want to look at are interdiction and violation.
Interdiction is a scene in which the hero is warned not to do something. For instance, before the hero approaches the Wood of Darkness, he is warned never to stray from the path, because that would spell disaster. Or the hero is given a magical boat, but he is warned never to fall asleep while he is in it. Something like that.
Violation, on the other hand, is a scene in which the interdiction is violated. The hero does stray from the path, or he does fall asleep in the boat. So, what combinations of violation and interdiction are possible?
Prob points out that first, if you have violation, you also must have interdiction. That's pretty obvious, right? You can't violate an interdiction if there is no interdiction to violate.
Second, he points out that violation can only happen after interdiction, never before it. It never happens that the hero first falls asleep in the boat and is only warned about it afterwards. Third, and more surprisingly, PROP shows that not only does violation require interdiction, but interdiction also requires violation. You cannot have an interdiction that is not violated.
Of course you can have it in real life, but you can't have it in a fairy tale. It never happens that the hero is warned against straying from the path, and then he carefully never strays from the path. Of course not! That would be boring.
Something will happen that makes him stray from the path. Maybe he hears cries for help, or his dog runs off into the woods and he needs to go after it. There is never an interdiction without a violation.
That is simply one of the rules of the genre. Prop! manages to find quite a lot of rules of the genre, which determine which combinations of functions are possible and which are not, and what order they can occur in.
Just as linguists can tell us which combinations of words create a well-formed sentence, Prop can tell us which combinations of story functions create a well-formed fairy tale. So, he has found not just the structure of the roles of the Russian fairy tale, but also the structure of the narrative of the Russian fairy tale. A Propion structuralist analysis obviously works best for genres with rather rigid conventions.
There should for instance be absolutely no problem in applying it to James Bond movies. We have the hero. We have the villain, we have the Bond girl, and so on. We have a scene in which Bond receives some weird technological toys.
And we know that for every toy, there must be a scene in which he uses it. If Bond receives a mobile phone that can explode, it will explode at some time later in the movie. And so on. On the other hand, We can imagine that such a structuralist analysis will be much harder to apply to, say, literary novels or avant-garde movies.
Still, structuralism is an important and influential addition to the toolkit of many parts of the humanities. And its key insight that things often are what they are because of the role that they play in a bigger structure is an insight that can be applied In many, many fields.