VLADIMIR PROPP · JOSEPH CAMPBELL
Morphology of the Folktale;
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
VLADIMIR PROPP WAS A RUSSIAN SCHOLAR OF FOLKLORE who, in a 1928 book called Morphology of the Folktale,* advanced an extraordinarily bold and suggestive idea. He thought that the vast number of different folktales to be found in different traditions and languages all over the world are, at root, just variations on a theme: “All fairy-tales, by their structure, belong to one and the same type.” “Morphology” means the study of shapes. Propp argued that that you could look under the surface and find that the bones of all these different stories were the same.
In effect, he argued that folktales had evolved just like animals from a common ancestor, and that you could classify them just as you classify species of fauna. If you x-ray a bat’s wing or a whale’s flipper, you can recognize in them the same pattern of bones as you see in a human hand. So it would be with folktales: Propp believed that, by looking rigorously at their structures, a “given class [of story] may be discerned from others absolutely accurately and objectively.”
What might that common ancestor be? “A ‘single source,’” Propp writes, “does not positively signify, as some assume, that all folktales came, for example, from India, and that they spread from there throughout the entire world, assuming their various forms in the process of migration. The single source may, as well, be a psychological one.”
It’s quite an idea. To suppose a depth-psychological origin to these stories is to ask serious and fundamental questions about human nature – about the meaning of storytelling and even, which may be related, the religious instinct. If folktales are, as we might conjecture, the primal form of storytelling – a basic set of patterns that underpin the narrative shapes we give to a chaotic world – then the patterns that persist in them are wired deep into the species.
Propp’s work, that said, can seem almost comically dry. A so-called structuralist, he was not remotely interested in the human stories and social worlds of the folktales he studied. All those are historically contingent – random set-dressing, as far as he was concerned. He talks, instead, of “functions” and “moves” in the narrative; of developing a “grammar” of storytelling. The idea of a grammar is a suggestive one. Language allows us to create a limitless number of meaningful utterances from a very restricted set of things – the twenty-six letters of the alphabet or the forty-four phonemes in English. So, narratologists like Propp say, it is with stories. For the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, to follow the metaphor, you might substitute what Propp called “functions,” by which he meant elements of plot: bricks in the storyteller’s Lego box. He decided that there were just thirty-one of them, and he abbreviated them as a series of symbols, so the stories he studied could be boiled down and reduced to their essences.
Once Propp had gone to work on a story, it would end up looking more like a mathematical equation than something that would hold your toddler spellbound over warm milk. Yet Propp’s basic insight – that the same patterns recur again and again across stories in every culture and at every time – is sound. “Folktales possess one special characteristic,” he says. “Components of one tale can, without any alteration whatsoever, be transferred to another.”
A story starts, say, with a safe and stable situation that is disrupted. There is an “absentation”: the hero leaves the safety of home, or the princess is kidnapped. There will be an “interdiction” – don’t take your eye off the baby; don’t open the door to the special room – which will be violated. The protagonist will be tested – asked to capture a unicorn or spin straw into gold. Magical agents will be enlisted to help. The hero will find the antagonist’s lair – Baba Yaga’s chicken-footed hut; the giant’s castle in the clouds; the Green Chapel – triumph over the villain and return home with the prize. There may be further challenges to overcome – pursuit, a false hero to displace. At last there’s what Propp called “the wedding”: the hero gets his final transformation, marrying the princess or taking the throne or both, and lives, well, happily ever after.
In story after story we find some combination of Propp’s seven basic characters. There’s a hero, a villain, a “dispatcher” who will set the hero on his quest, the object of the quest (often a princess), a “false hero” (who will attempt to usurp the hero), a “helper” or sidekick, and a “donor” who gives the hero a magical object to help him overcome his challenges. If this sounds a little schematic – you’ll probably have noticed that many stories have more or fewer than seven characters – it’s worth mentioning that these roles can be played by more than one character at once; and that some characters will take on more than one of the roles. Again, the point is about the roles that any given character takes in the story.
The Shrek franchise, of which Vladimir Propp would I suspect have very much approved, plays gleefully with these categories. Prince Charming appears, there, in the role of the “false hero,” while the ogre is the true hero. Donkey and Puss in Boots are helpers. The fairy godmother – whose cottage must be ransacked for a love potion – plays the role of donor as well as of villain. And Fiona, defying the patriarchal traditions of the fairy story (in which, in Propp’s words, princesses are “obtained” and brides “either earned or given in reward”), is sometimes hero and sometimes helper, not just the object of the quest.
When Propp writes of one folktale that “the enchantment of a boy is not followed by the breaking of the spell, and he remains a little goat for life,” the modern reader might immediately be put in mind of Roald Dahl’s The Witches – in whose closing pages the narrator/protagonist is still a mouse. Propp’s “deceitful proposal” is there as the White Witch seduces Edmund with Turkish Delight in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. When Propp describes function xxIII – “the hero, unrecognised, arrives home or in another country” – you will perhaps think of Odysseus reaching Ithaca.
By dwelling on the abstract formulations of a long-dead Soviet academic, and in looking back through centuries and even millennia to the roots of storytelling, we can glean one of this book’s themes. Children’s stories remain close to those aboriginal forms of storytelling – myths, fairy stories and folktales. They draw their force from them. Where the “literary novel” may, with various degrees of success, seek to do away with quest narratives, happy endings, or heroes and villains, the canon of children’s literature is far more ready to draw on these archetypal story-shapes and characters.
Propp’s argument has been taken up by subsequent writers about narrative: most influentially, perhaps, the Jungian Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). The idea that there are only “seven basic stories” has become common wisdom; and, indeed, gives its name to the UK’s pre-eminent museum of children’s literature, Seven Stories in Newcastle upon Tyne.*
In the pages that follow we’ll meet such patterns again and again: departure, challenge, combat, transformation, and reward. And yet, just as in the history of the folktale, they will come dressed in the clothes of their own era and be given shape by the peculiarities and affinities of the individual storyteller. The abstract becomes concrete. The “function” becomes a dragon so real you can smell the sulfur and scorch of her breath.
I make a distinction between folktale, fairy stories, and myths – and I should set out a little what I mean by those three things. They are categories that substantially overlap. But folktales are what descend to us through the oral tradition: versions of the same story, as folklorists have painstakingly discovered, can be found all over the world in different forms, their accidental aspects local to the area where that version has developed. Fairytales are not just a subset of folklore, and they don’t have to involve fairies; rather, they are what you get when folktales are domesticated and written down.
It’s possible, too, to make a distinction between folktale and myth. What’s characteristic of both these things is that they aren’t single stories – in the sense that there’s a single immutable thing called, say, Daisy Miller by Henry James – but frameworks for stories, patterns for stories, fields of stories.
In a fairytale or folktale, the framework – the irreducible thing – is the basic shape of the plot. The plot stays the same and the characters are indistinct. What makes Cinderella “Cinderella” is not the protagonist’s name or hair color, or how many stepsisters she has, or whether it’s a glass slipper or a wooden clog. It’s that a put-upon drudge goes in disguise to a party, snags the handsome prince, and lives happily ever after.
Myths, in the way I understand them, are slightly different. There’s one distinction you can draw to do with the sheer gravity of meaning. Myths often deal with the doings of gods and superhumans; they can include explanatory accounts of the universe itself. Folktales and fairytales, though they contain magic, operate at the ordinary-folk level, with woodcutters and suchlike at the bottom and royal personages at the top. But the distinction I’m interested in here is a narratological one. With a myth, the plot changes and the characters – or the constellations of characters – stay the same. The core of the Greco-Roman mythologies is their pantheon of gods and heroes, whose qualities are instantiated in a great cloud of different stories. The fixed points are the attributes of, and relationships between, the characters.
Comic book universes are profoundly mythological. What actually happens in any given issue of The Avengers or Fantastic Four or X-Men couldn’t matter less, except to diehard nerds. The same villains will escape and come back. Nobody ever dies for good. The stable elements are the characters. Their accidental details will be reinvented, their costumes redesigned. But Spidey will always recognizably be shooting webs – “thwip” – and wisecracking; Wolverine will – “snikt!” – always have his adamantium claws; Shadowcat will always have a brother–sister relationship with Colossus; Hulk will always, finally, be alone.
Myths are narratologically open-ended. Fairytales and folktales – bookended as they conventionally are with the phrases “once upon a time” and “happily ever after” – come to an end. Children’s stories, as we’ll see, draw deeply on both the narrative shapes of fairytales and the timeless resonance of myth.
* Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, [p].
* Oxford’s Story Museum runs it a gallant second.