Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
This review is from: Morphology of the Folktale (Publications of the American Folklore Society) (Paperback) This is an attempt to work out the underlying structural patterns (types of characters, what they do, how they are ordered) of Russian folktales, based on classic collections made in the nineteenth-century. If you are fortunate enough to have read a large collection of such stories -- preferably in translation, not "retold by ..." -- you will soon see the point of Propp's argument. Other European, and some non-European, traditions provide an almost equally good starting point, although the examples often are not so close as to be immediately convincing. Ideally, "Morphology of the Folktale" would be bound with at least a selection of the Russian folktales Propp analyzes, but this does not seem likely to happen. Taken by itself, however, Propp's exploration is going to seem both dry and confusing. Try to imagine a book about the five-act structure of Shakespeare's tragedies being read by someone who had never seen or read a play before, and you may understand the problem. Although Propp's exposition sometimes seems labored, he presents a convincing case that at least some oral prose narratives are built up of a stock of situations and events which can be slightly reordered, multiplied, and otherwise complicated, but amount to a "language" (a vocabulary, grammar, and syntax) of story-telling. This puts a new light on the problem of the distribution of folktales, and how they develop variants, two of the great issues of folklore studies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite its origins in a single body of oral literature, Propp's methods have been applied to other literature with known or suspected oral roots, sometimes with slightly contradictory results. I know of at least two different Proppian analyses of "Beowulf," for example. This is due at least in part to Propp's attempt to introduce fine divisions between similar plot elements, which, again, seem to work better with his source material than with other groups of stories. (And "Beowulf" has long been recognized to include elements later found in European fairy tales, so the possibility of applying Propp's structures was more intriguing than revolutionary.) In "Feud in the Icelandic Saga" (1983), Jesse Byock reviewed efforts to apply Propp's methods to the Sagas of the Icelanders, another body of prose literature supposed to be grounded in oral techniques. He argued that a different approach is needed to their formally realistic stories about personalities, and the functioning of society; which does not diminish the validity of Propp's approach to the wonder-tale.