II. POETICS
Motif, considered as a critical concept, seems to have
enjoyed its longest and fullest relationship with
German literature. That may be attributable, in part,
to the strategic significance of the rich treasury of
household tales collected and edited by the brothers
Grimm. Their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Berlin,
1812-15) constituted both a major landmark in the
newly developed science of philology and—as aug-
mented and systematized by the wide-ranging com-
mentaries of Bolte and Polívka (1913-32)—an indis-
pensable instrument for analytic inquiry into the
world's repertory of narrative. Appropriately, looking
far beyond the boundaries of romantic nationalism, it
was the cosmopolitan Goethe who first brought motif
within the purview of literary criticism, during his
conversations with Eckermann on 18 January 1825. It
may strike us as peculiarly prescient that this conver-
sation should have dwelt on Serbian poetry, in view
of the affinities that Milman Parry and others have
more recently established between the Homeric epic
and Serbo-Croatian oral literature. Here, as not infre-
quently elsewhere, Goethe was expressing certain
friendly reservations with regard to Schiller, who did
not—his friend felt—take sufficient pains over his
motifs. “The true power and effect of a poem consists
in the situation,” Goethe affirmed, “—in the
motifs”
(...
aber die Wahre Kraft und Wirkung eines Gedichts
in der Situation, in den Motiven besteht...). The
apposition would seem to reflect the interrelationship
between the formative and the responsive conception.
Goethe's enormous prestige was bound to prevail
with those among his compatriots who addressed
themselves to the problem. The most determined of
these was Wilhelm Scherer, whose solid and serious
contributions to literary history were rounded out by
a posthumously published outline of his poetic theory
(Poetik, 1888), wherein he accorded due attention to
the general study of motifs (Allgemeine Motivenlehre.)
“What is a motif?” (Was ist ein Motiv?) he asked, and
answered: “An elementary, unitary part of a poetic
matter” (Ein elementarer, in sich einheitlicher Theil
eines poetischen Stoffs). Scherer speaks more generally
and more vaguely when he equates motif with idea
or ethos, or when he calls for a canvass of motifs as
“a full portrayal of human thought and deed” (eine
volle Schilderung menschlicher Denkens und Thuns).
His practical attempts to enumerate or classify Die
Stoffe boil down to a handful of rudimentary instances
from the Bible or classical mythology: the fratricide
of Cain, the matricide of Orestes. Goethe's famous lyric
about the land of lemons and oranges (Kennst du das
Land) is naively categorized, not under its nostalgic
theme of longing for the south (Sehnsucht nach Italien),
but within the academic pigeonhole of botany. Some-
thing like a unitary reduction is proposed, however,
and some concern is manifested for the difference
between a principal motif (Hauptmotiv) and a subordi-
nate one (Nebenmotif).
Less mechanical and more suggestive were the aes-
thetic speculations of the geistesgeschichtliche philoso-
pher Wilhelm Dilthey, who was deeply interested in
the impact of experience on the growth of the poet's
mind. His approach, like that of so many thinkers
following Goethe, focussed on the organic growth of
the individual psyche rather than on the tools and
materials of the poet's craft. Yet, when he came to
formulate his notions about the creative imagina
tion—his own foundations for a poetics, according to
the subtitle, Bausteine für eine Poetik—he was ready
to acknowledge the importance of the stuff with which
the poet actually worked. Under the heading of Stoff
he gave first consideration to Motiv, recognizing that
its function could not fully be understood until it had
been collectively examined. “The number of possible
motifs is limited, and it is a task for comparative litera-
ture to trace the development of single motifs” (Die
Zahl möglicher Motive ist begrenzt, und es ist eine
Aufgabe der vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte, die
Entwicklung der einzelnen Motive darzustellen
[Dilthey, 1887]). The statement that limits motifs to
a finite number opens up the possibility that they might
be usefully surveyed, enumerated, and classified. The
invitation to trace them individually is one to which
comparatists have responded somewhat literally at first,
then with a more skeptical reaction, and since the
mid-twentieth century with a heightened degree of
commitment.
The need was for a methodology which could bridge
the gap between invention and tradition, between the
personal talent of the imaginative writer and the in-
herited store of material that he has drawn upon and
reshaped. A well-informed and stimulating effort to
face that need was made by the Russian scholar,
A. N. Veselovsky, through what he termed “Historical
Poetics.” In a course of lectures, “Poetics of the Sub-
ject” (Poetika sujetov), delivered in 1897 and published
just after his death in 1906, he addressed himself to
a central aspect of literature which is usually either
taken for granted or else ignored. Subject has too often
been identified with the amorphous notion of content,
only to be impaled upon the dilemma of its false oppo-
sition to form, and consequently neglected by form-
minded critics. Veselovsky demonstrated the formal
properties of sujet (the Russian term is borrowed from
the French) by showing how it could be broken down
into structural units. In short, it was “a complex of
motifs,” while motif was defined as “the simplest nar-
rative unit that responds with an image to the differ-
ent demands of the primitive mind or of everyday
observation.” The originality of the insight lay, not in
its application to the primitive mind, but in its sugges-
tion that the proclaimed results of everyday observa-
tion—such as the realistic novel—could be reduced to
the simple constituents of the fairy tale.
It would be a long time, however, before there was
wide acknowledgment of the fact that Balzac and
Dickens were mythmakers as well as social observers.
And, if realists balked at the implication that their
firsthand human documents somehow managed to fall
within a storied pattern, romantics were in no mood
to accept the assumption that the potentialities of
human experience came to something less than infinity.
Veselovsky's formulations were eked out by a massive
sequence of citations from philology, anthropology,
folklore, and comparative religion; but it has taken
about two generations for literary history to catch up
with him. To be sure, the notion of subject matter
(
sujetnost) is formalized whenever we speak of plot:
not just the story or situation but the links in the chain
of events, what is known in Hollywood as “the story
line.” Now a plot in England had originally denoted
a piece of ground; then it became a chart or layout
of that ground; thence it was generalized into any plan
for construction or design for action—not infrequently
villainous, a complot. It enters into the critical vocab-
ulary as a ground plan for drama or narration. There
are meaningful contrasts in the Greek word for plot,
mythos, or the Latin
fabula, which seems much more
didactic, or the French
intrigue, which has sexual or
conspiratorial echoes, or the German
Handlung, which
sounds so businesslike.
The dramatic medium, because it depends so overtly
on construction, has always lent itself most readily to
analysis in terms of structure. Comedy, most self-
evidently, from Menander through the Commedia
dell'arte to Molière and onward, has gained its effects
through standard plots, stock characters, and set gags
or lazzi—a bag of tricks which might otherwise be
described as a collection of motifs. It was asseverated
by Count Gozzi, whose own plays were influenced both
by fairy tales and by the Italian scenarii, that there
were no more than thirty-six elemental situations for
the stage. Schiller protested against this reductionism,
but, on Goethe's challenge, found himself unable to
count as many (Eckermann, 1836). A handbook for
would-be playwrights by Georges Polti circulated
widely under the title The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situa-
tions (1912). A more searching exploration of this ques-
tion, by the Sorbonne aesthetician Étienne Souriau, has
produced a sober monograph entitled Les Deux Cent
Mille Situations dramatiques (Paris, 1950). Round
numbers are suspicious, and the exact figure is not
important. The point is that, numerous as the compo-
nents of storytelling may be, they are not innumer-
able—even with a liberal allowance for modification
and recombination. The Victorian governess in The
Importance of Being Earnest differs almost totally from
the Nutrix of Plautus or Terence, yet functionally both
exist to act out the same motif: the identification of
a long-lost infant.
