III. FOLKLORE
Literary historians were more used to dealing with
chronological than with thematic relationships; literary
critics were more preoccupied with the peculiar char-
acteristics of individual writers than with the common
body of narrative effects; hence they were both slow
in meeting the challenge to develop a Motivenlehre.
The philological quest for sources and analogues, the
researches of medievalists in registering the cycles of
romance helped to make an academic pursuit of
Stoffgeschichte—the German compound seems more
appropriate than the endeavor to translate it into
“thematology.” The Italian comparatist, Arturo Graf,
traced such legendary themes as the earthly paradise
and the devil; but this direction ran counter to the
principles of Croce, whose opposition to comparative
methods was grounded in his ideals of organic expres-
sion. The Francocentric school that had its organ in
the Revue de littérature comparée made much less of
parallels than of influences, and reserved its friendliest
scrutiny for the tracing of synchronic currents and
international movements. The programmatic survey of
Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature (1949),
summed up a widespread reaction: “Stoffgeschichte is
the least literary of histories.” That dictum has worn
thin because it stemmed from the narrowly formalistic
assumptions that the stuff of art is mere content, that
subject matter is somehow less relevant than technique,
and that disparities are somehow less revealing than
similarities.
Meanwhile scholars had learned to look toward
fiction that was anonymous, traditional, and preliterary
for a clearer paradigm of the elements involved. Clas-
sicists like Sir James Frazer and some of his Cambridge
colleagues turned to anthropologists for the light that
ritual had to cast upon mythology. Early collectors of
folklore had been antiquarian hobbyists, recording local
survivals, or travelling amateurs, reporting home from
primitivistic explorations. But, as collections accumu-
lated from all over the world, more scientific ap-
proaches were devised for comparing the lore, for
taking note of its ethnical permutations, and for chart-
ing its geographical diffusion. Those investigations
found their polyglot center in Helsinki, whence an
authoritative series of communications has been issued
under the imprint of the Folklore Fellows. The original
German version of the pioneering classification and
bibliography by Antti Aarne, The Types of the Folktale,
was first brought out in 1910; twice revised, translated
and enlarged by Stith Thompson, in 1961 it contained
some 2340 entries. These are ordered into five major
categories, and subdivided further into a total of thirty-
two lesser ones: e.g., Animal Tales: The Clever Fox.
Aarne's scheme, arrived at by an empirical sifting of
northern European material, fits in equally well with
a wider range of Anglo-American data, as his reviser
affirms. Motifs, in their singleness, tend to be more
universal than the tales they constitute, which are more
closely identified with their respective regions.
On revision, some motifs have been raised to the
status of types, where a tale may hinge upon one salient
trait or underlying situation. Where its subjects over-
lap, it may prove hard to classify. Consequently, the
distinction had to be sharpened between the theme,
wherein motifs are brought together, and the motif
itself as an indivisible unit. Here the Finnish systemati-
zation and the tentative insights of Veselovsky were
pushed further by the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp
in his
Morphology of the Folktale (
Morfologia skazki,
1928). Based on the standard collection of Russian
popular tales by A. N. Afanasyev (1855-64), even as
the commentaries of Bolte and Polívka were based on
the compilation of the Grimms, it was more selective
and rigorously analytic, rather an organon than a
compendium. Propp was able to atomize motifs with
precision and objectivity by redefining them as func-
tions (e.g., interdiction, violation, gift, test) of the
dramatis personae (hero, villain, donor, helper). These
were identifiable by sigla, which could be simply ar-
ranged to tabulate the composition of any given fairy
tale, and thereby to demonstrate a basic uniformity
in the process and the elements of construction. Propp's
techniques, though they have had wide impact, did not
receive much recognition in Soviet Russia until re-
cently because, at a time when Socialist Realism drew
the strictest ideological lines, they savored of For-
malism—an ironic circumstance, in view of the for-
malistic objections lodged against
Stoffgeschichte. But
the notion of motif had meanwhile been critically
refined by one of the Formalists, Boris Tomashevsky.
The past generation has seen the emergence of a
Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, an exhaustive inventory
which lists and classifies incidents drawn from over
40,000 tales, myths, fables, romances, ballads, jestbooks,
exempla, and other modes of narration. This has been
the monumental work of Stith Thompson, an American
scholar trained in medieval English philology, who
prepared himself by studying the lore of the Amerin-
dians and by translating and supplementing the more
limited monograph of Aarne. Thompson uses the
Western alphabet as the outer framework for his list-
ings, which allows him twenty-three classes (I, O, and
Y being omitted to avoid confusion). These are ordered
in a spectrum which ranges “from the mythological
and the supernatural toward the realistic and some-
times the humorous” (1955). Lest it be inferred that
imagination can conceive no more than twenty-three
kinds of activity, the terminal letter Z is left to stand
for miscellaneous addenda. Logically enough, the
inaugural letter A stands for accounts of the Creation,
along with the gods, the cosmos, etc. B covers animals,
including totemism; then C moves on to tabu; and D,
the largest category, is consecrated to magic. The
sequence is filled out through E, the dead; F, other
marvels; G, ogres and witches; H, tests and recogni
tions; J, wisdom and folly; K, deceptions; L, reversals
of fortune; M, judgments, bargains, promises, oaths; N,
luck; P, social; Q, rewards and punishments; R, captives
and fugitives; S, cruelty; T, sex; U, homiletic; V, reli-
gious; W, traits of character; and X, humorous.
This adds up to a conspectus of diverse fortunes and
attitudes which, in the contrasting perspective of
Dickens or Balzac, might help to distinguish the varia-
bles from the constants of human nature. The way in
which the digits fall into place behind the letters indi-
cates the relation between genera and species. Thus
the siglum D 1420 has to do with all cases where
“Magic object draws person (thing) to it,” and there
are about sixty items in the following decade, plus
cross-references. D 1421.16 states an elementary case
where “Magic ring summons genie”; D 1421.5.1, where
“magic horn summons army for rescue,” is slightly
more complex; examples may be sought in the Arabian
Nights or in Grimm. Varying the motif of musical
conjuration, D 1427.1 (“Magic pipe compels one to
follow”) has its famous exemplification in the story of
the Pied Piper, while D 1426.0.1 (“Magic objects help
hero win princess”) is exemplified by an Indian tale—as
it also might have been by Mozart's Magic Flute. One
primary subdivision, X 700-99, “Humor Concerning
Sex,” is left virtually blank, with suggested numberings
near the middle for jokes concerning courtship and old
maids, as well as a note that obscenity is beyond the
scope of the undertaking at hand. This itself would
seem to be a somewhat old-maidish evasion. In his
Rationale of the Dirty Joke the pornographologist
G. Legman has undertaken to fill in the lacunae; but,
significantly, he finds that the space allotted is insuffi-
cient for the missing decades.
Yet the Motif-Index, on the whole, is impressive in
its comprehensiveness, and especially in its linkages of
evidence from East and West, exotic and familiar. Its
taxonomy has already been extended to more literary
spheres, such as that of the novella. In the labelling
and the ordering of topics, it could well be refined upon
by the stricter analysis of Propp. Moreover, with the
motif as with the atom, there is always bound to be
a certain methodological doubt as to the ultimate point
at which the least common denominator may or may
not have been reached. On the analogy of “phoneme”
or “morpheme” as units of sound or verbal structure,
terms like “mytheme” or “narreme” have been pro-
posed to designate the primary segments of myth or
narration. If the suggested term “motifeme” wins
acceptance, despite its ungainliness, the inference may
be drawn that motif itself is not finally an irreducible
element, that it can be further decomposed into what
might be regarded as a motif of motifs (Dundes, 1965).
At all events, it expresses its fullest significance not
in a disjunctive catalogue but in a structural context.
The latter has ordinarily been supplied by the flow
of events as narrated, a procedure which has lately
been labelled “syntagmatic.” The alternative that has
been introduced by Claude Lévi-Strauss, which he calls
“paradigmatic,” is more speculative or intuitive. It
seeks an internal pattern which is often a polarity, a
folkloristic version of “the figure in the carpet.”
