A work of art is in many ways too complex to understand all at once. If, if you
write a love poem, and you give to the, the object of your love, the fact of
conveying the poem itself carries meaning regardless of the words on the page. The
words on the page may convey meaning about something, but they also will reflect the
fact that you and she or he speak the same language. There are all kinds of meanings
in every utterance, and to say them all at once is beyond us. So, we try to look at
complicated things in, in pieces. We try to tease them apart so that we can see how
they work. In fact, the word text comes from the Latin word to weave, and we try
to understand a text, we might follow one thread or another. Jean Piaget, a Swiss
born linguist codified what we now call structural analysis. No matter how else
you look at the structure of things there are always at least two ways thankso look
at the structure. You can look at the structure as if something were existing
all at one time. So, you'll look at a story, in which a boy, meets girl boy
loses, falls in love with the girl, boy loses girl, boy suffers in order to gain
the girl's worth and then he was reunited with the girl, and you can see all of that
as if it were a circle. That is a synchronic view of the story. That is the
story taken all at one time. But, you also could say well, the boy meets the girl,
his passion goes higher, he becomes despondent, he has to suffer, and then, he
finally is reunited with her. This is a diachronic view. The structure as viewed
through time. If you view the structure through time, you lose the sense of unity
that you get from looking at the structure all at one time. If you look at the
structure all out one time you lose the sense of the feeling of going through the
story that you get if you view it diachronically. The synchronic view is
only incomplete. It's partial but it's helpful. The diachronic view is only
incomplete. It's partial but it's helpful. All structural analysis depend upon a
reduction of the available inf ormation so that some aspect of it can be highlighted.
And this is a very powerful, powerful method. Most literary structural analyses
are synchronic. They tend to say, the structure of this novel is circular, for
example. However, in 1927. A man named Vladimir Prop, a member of the school of
criticism known as Russian formalism, sat down to read the Afanasyev collection of
folk tales. Just as you undoubtedly noticed that there were elements of these
stories that occurred again and again and again, like the hero being tested, or
someone being given a magical gift. Propp noticed this too, and according to the
introduction to Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale, a word that means for him in
Russian much like what we mean by fairy tale in English, according to him within
the reading of the first ten of these tales he had written down a series of
elements that occurred. And then, when he read the rest of the collection of 400
tales, no new elements ever occurred. This idea that Propp had that there is a finite
number of elements, which today we would call motifs in folk tales, led to one of
the great discoveries in the history of humanities. If you go online and click the
link for Propp, you'll see a list of what he concluded. First, he has four theorems.
One, the functions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale,
independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled. In other words, it doesn't
matter whether the hero is tested by a witch or tested by a brother, just so long
as the testing is going on. Two, the number of functions known to the fairy
tale is limited. That is, there is a finite number of these functions. If you
know what these functions are, you have all the building blocks for every fairy
tale, at least, every true or a tale that ever existed. Three, thankshe sequence of
functions is always identical. Now that's complicated. It turns out that there are
some functions, for example, departure, like Little Red Riding Hood leaving her
mother's house. That if they occur must be met with ano ther one, return. Some of
them are obligatory. Every fairytale has to have an absentation. That is, the
protagonist is somehow absented from the protective authority of the world in which
he or she lives. That may be because the protagonist gets off the straight and
narrow like Little Red Riding Hood. That may be because the mother dies, and the
child is left unprotected as in Cinderella. That may be because the child
runs away as in Tom Thumb. Whatever is the function it must occur, there must be
absentation. So, some are obligatory functions, some are optional functions.
Some if they occur must occur with something else, but the crucial point is
that whichever occur, they must occur in the order in which Propp discovered them,
and all of those functions then are, this is the fourth function, the fourth
theorem, all of them are of one type im regard to their structure. Of course what
Propp means by this is a diachronic structure, a structure through time.
That's rather unusual for a literary analysis, but it's nonetheless true. Since
Propp polished this in 1927, it has been tested by ethnographers around the world,
and with one small exception, it has been found to be true. The small exception is
this, Propp said that some functions might, optionally be triplicated. That is
instead of asking the hero to meet one test, he might have to meet three tests.
It turned out that in South Asia and Amerindia, that is in the native peoples
of the North American continent and the people of Southern India. Instead of
triplicating, there is quadruplicating. And in the peoples of East Asia, there is
duplicating. If Propp had said, some function may optionally be multiplied and
that multiplying factor is culture dependent he would have been absolutely
correct. There are 32 functions. That seems like a lot. But, you know, any
native speaker of English knows 32 prepositions and we learn how to speak
them properly certainly by the time we're three or four. This is a structure that is
universal in groups that have never met each o ther. It is something that is at
the heart of human communication. Now, speaking of the three and the four. One
might ask, how does it develop? It turns out that, historically, the oldest of
those systems is the East Asian one. Were we have say, a yin and yang. Things are
divided into this and not this, sometimes as in Korea inside that swirl of yin and
yang we have circles of contrasting color. As if, we're trying to say, we can divide
things in two and we can continue to divide things in two. The notion that we
can continue to divide things in two occurs in the Swastika which originally
was a symbol used by the Aryans who originally are the lightest skinned, last
conquerors of the Indian subcontinent. If we look at American Indian art, we see
Mandalas divided into four quadrants. In other words, the notion that the world can
be divided into X and not X, is itself, a principle that can be applied again. So,
we take the one division, and we give it the second division. And we have the
Swastika, or the Mandala. But after that, in the Hellenistic period, the notion that
we can divide things in two, is itself, generalized and becomes a new possibility.
We can, in other words, take the two divisions that cross and merge them, so
that we have a division in two and the unitary principle of division. In the
Hellenistic period, we get the characteristic Treskelion, that image of
three legs running, joined at a single hip. That Triskelion figure we see in
Celtic art and so on. In the cultures that divide things in two, jokes have a rabbi
and a priest. In the ones that divide them into four, we have a rabbi, a priest, a
minister, and an imam. And in western culture we have a rabbi, a minister, and a
priest. If you take a look at a standard crucifix, you'll see that Jesus is
pictured on a quadripartite division, but by virtue of His legs overlapping, He
Himself, is tripled like the Triskelion. The image of Jesus arises at a period when
the Hellenizing world is imposing the 3-ness on the culture that had previously
been a four -ness. Now, knowing that we have a structure with this one slight
variation, knowing that we have a structure, thankshat characterizes all
true oral folk tales. The structure that Propp gives us, we can see without a doubt
that the Grimm brothers did not give us oral tales, but scribal tales. Take a look
at the structure of two Grimm tales. Clever Elsa, for example, rises to the
moment when Elsa is in trouble, and then she runs off at the end. It's simple. Take
a look at The Table, The Stick, and The Ass. It's the story of the goat. Who gets
driven out, but inside the story of the goat, there are the three sons. And then,
we have the sons' story as each of them has a journey in return. And then, when
they finally manage to come back with their magical gifts, thanks to the
youngest son, we pick up the goat's story, and she gets driven out three times until,
at the end, the goat is banished into the wilderness, like a scapegoat, like the
story out of the Bible. This interspersing of one story intide another utterly
violates thankshe Proppian structure. We can tell that this is not a true oral
folktale. These are diverse tales that the Grimm Brothers have amalgamated. The Grimm
Brothers are writing stories nominally to give us a pure form of the oral tale by
collecting and collating different reports of what these tales might be. But in fact,
although they use natural symbols, like eyes and rivers, blood. They also use
specifically Christian symbols. The thorns that surround Sleeping Beauty's castle.
The crown of thorns for Jesus is like the thorns that put out the eyes of Rapunzel's
prince. The bread, and the cakes and wine, that Little Red Riding Hood, Little Red
Cap takes to her grandmother are like the Eucharist. Again and again, we see that
the specifics that the Grimm brothers use to put flesh on this Proppian structure is
a Christian set of symbols so that they are writing from within their culture. And
this is of course as it should be. They are trying to say something important
about their culture. Why wou ld the Grimms make the stories the way they want them to
be instead of the way they find them? Well, one of the reasons is that they have
this nationalist project. Let's return to that, the Franco-Prussian War 1870-71
didn't happen by accident. Everyone realizes today that Otto Von Bismark.
Instigated the war so that the French would attack. So that Prussia would have
the justification for bringing the other German speaking principalities into a
single unit and attacking, defending. And modern Germany arises. At the Nuremberg
rallies from 1923 to 1938 we have the Nazi's celebrating what they took to be
thanksheir Aryan heritage. Why did the take the Swastika? Because it stood for
those light skin northern conquerors. They called themselves Aryan from the Sanskrit
word Arya which means noble. What the Germans were doing as late as Hitler was
trying to enforce the notion that they were the master race. They were the
permanent race. The idea of the 1000 year Reich resonates with the idea of the
millennium. It may seem that the scholars, looking back into Indo-European, and
looking back to the Aria, the supposed speaker of that first language,
Indo-European, were simply following their scholarly aims. They were, finding the
stories that they found, and if they messed them up a little bit in their
scribal activities. Well, this was before modern methods of ethnography were
developed. I think that's wrong. There is a story that is included in the complete
Grimm's fairy tales, called in German Der Jude im Dorn, the Jew in the Thorns. It's
translated in Jack Sykes' edition as The Jew in the Tornbush, sometimes it's called
the Jew Among the Thistles. It's a story about a young man, a servant, who works
for three years for a, a master who refuses to pay him year after year. And at
the end of the third year finally this obedient quiet servant speaks up and says,
I really need my money because I want to go and see the world. And the master gives
him three farthings. The servant is so ignorant that he thinks that's a lot of
money. He goes and on the path he manages to encounter a dwarf and the dwarf says
that he's poor and he needs money. And the servant gives him his three farthings in
return the dwarf grants him three wishes. And he winds up with some magical.
Materials including a fiddle that makes people dance whether they want to or not.
He comes upon a Jew, the Jew, as it says in the story. And the Jew has a pot of,
has a bag full of gold. The servant makes the Jew dance so that he gets caught in
the thorn bush and his clothes get ripped. He becomes bloodied, and the servant says
I want the money and I wont stop until I get it. So, he takes the money. The Jew
complains to a judge once he's recovered and gets to town, and the judge has a
trial. And, indeed, the young man is condemned. But, he's granted a last wish.
And he takes the fiddle and begins to play. And everybody has no choice but to
dance including the judge, who finally gasps, stop, and I will give you whatever
you ask. So, he stops and asks for his life. The judge granted to him, and then
the servant goes over to the Jew fiddle in hand, and says now tell the truth, where
did you get the money? And the Jew says, I stole it I stole it. It was yours by
right. Afraid, of course, that he'll be dancing himself into even worse injury.
The judge then condemns the Jew to death instead, and he's hanged. Then the judge
had the Jew led up to the gallows, and he was hanged as a thief. He's not a thief.
The servant is the thief. The Christian master of the servant was the one who
didn't give the money that he was supposed to give. Well, it's just a story that the
Grimms encountered, wasn't it? In their library they had a book of Italian
folktales, and they had exactly the same tale, except that tale had a monk in the
thorn bush. Just as the Grimm Brothers' enforced, a kind of sexual stereotyping,
just as they enforced the notion that high class is better than low class. They
enforced an antisemitism in the very structure of their stories. That is to
say, the structure is so powe rful this Proppian universal structure that they
could hang whatever content flesh they wanted on it just like glass slipper in
Cinderella and it would stick. I don't mean to say that the Grimm brothers main
aim was antisemitism. Their main aim was German nationalism. And the antisemitism
was common enough. In England for example, Walter Crane illustrates Rumpelstiltskin.
A character who gives exactly what he's supposed to give, and then is tricked at
the end by the woman. And we're supposed to think it's good that he dies. But he,
in fact, has been as good as his word. Take a look at Walter Crane's illustration
of Rumpelstiltskin, just as the Grimm's describe him with a long nose, a pointed
beard, a ruffled skullcap, leaning on a cane. And there, that's 1886, and there,
in 1914, is Charles Buckles' portrait of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, a famous actor
as Shakespeare's Shylock from the Merchant of Venice, 1597, with the cane, the long
nose, the pointed beard, the ruffled cap. English antisemitism is just as widespread
and just as long lasting as German antisemitism. The point here is not that
the Grimm brothers were unique in fostering a particular ideology. It's that
the Grimm brothers have created a set of tales, scribal versions of fundamental
oral structures, that are so powerful that we remember every detail of them, and they
shape the culture that we live in to this day. Fairy tales, both as wish fulfillment
and as things that fly below our conscious understanding are crucial to link between
the human mind our modern world.