Pierre Maranda

Anthropologie, retraité de l’enseignement, Université Laval

“Soviet Structural Folkloristics :
Introduction.”

in ouvrage sous la direction de Pierre Maranda, Soviet Structural Folkloristics, Volume 1, pp. 9-15. La Haye - Paris : Mouton & Co., 1974, 194 pp.

This book is one of the results of the team work done in the Centre for the Computerised and Semantic Analysis of Myth at the University of British Columbia. Our activity is threefold : (1) investigation, development, and test of theoretical and analytic models ; (2) elaboration of computer programs for the semantic analysis of myths ; and (3) actual analyses of Northwest Pacific Indian and of Melanesian myths. Our search for operational models and testable hypotheses led us to the recent publications of some prominent Soviet colleagues. We found these contributions valuable enough to deserve translation. A subgroup — T. Popoff, S. Reid, G. Quijano, M. Layton, W. Jilek, L. Jilek Aall, and M. Calcowski — studied the articles published in German, French, or Russian, translated them, and tested the approaches. We are happy to make the results available to our fellow anthropologists, folklorists, and semioticians in the hope that better and ever more rigorous approaches will continue to heighten the quality of the procedures in our related fields.

General frameworks for the structural analysis of myth have been proposed elsewhere (Lévi-Strauss 1964, 1966, 1968, 1971a ; see also Maranda and K6ngds Maranda, eds., 1971). Specific procedures are also described in other contributions (Köngäs Maranda and Maranda 1962, 1971 ; Maranda 1968, 1970, 1972a, b, c, d ; Maranda, and Köngäs Maranda 1971). Our Soviet colleagues are in fundamental agreement with the propositions found in the literature just referred to. They additionally provide definitely original developments of Propp's fundamental breakthrough (which, interestingly, was published for the first time in English thanks to T. A. Sebeok, the general editor of this series).

Part One of this volume consists of the four chapters comprising the Soviet contributions. The first chapter offers a survey of recent, i.e. post-Proppian research and appeared originally as the epilogue to the second and revised Russian edition of Propp's Morphology (Moscow, [10]1969 ; French translation, Paris, Seuil, 1970), from the viewpoint of the modern Soviet School. English, French, and Soviet approaches are carefully examined and discussed. This chapter can be used fruitfully as a summary of structuralist research in folkloristics. Although it does not take full account of Lévi-Strauss' Mythologiques, it supplements the previous review article by Fischer (1963) and the more recent and general one by the present author (1972d).

Chapter Two takes up the generic distinction between myth and folktale. An interesting combination of synchronic and diachronic methods renews the treatment of the problem at the same time as it exemplifies a strategy to bring together structural and historical dimensions.

In Chapter three, the focus is on marriage. This "value of the tale" in Meletinsky's terms (Propp's culminating function is "Wedding") is presented as crucial in European folktales. In addition to being a criterion for discriminating between myth and folktale, its individual implications (vs. collective in myth) are given as meaningful for sociological interpretations. Marriage is also a keystone with respect to thematic transformations.

The pièce de résistance, Chapter Four, is a substantial monographic article, output of the Tartu annual colloquia. Meletinsky, Nekludov, Novik, and Segal design a semantic model of the structure of the fairy tale. The authors opt for syntagmatic analysis without ignoring paradigmatic analysis, and restructure Propp's functional analysis in terms of a hierarchy of three basic functions, the 'tests'. Each test is associated to a 'tale value' or goal which in turn enables the hero to take a further test. The hierarchy of tests ----» values usually culminates in the ultimate value, marriage.

Slightly different summaries of Chapter Four are found in the last section of Chapter One and in Chapter Two — the former in general terms, the latter in connection with marriage. It is better to refer the reader to them than to paraphrase them here. Still, I should like to point out the valuable criteria for genre discrimination, the penetrating analyses of dramatis personae and magical objects, and the investigation of contrasts and mediation mechanisms in Sections 8 and 9. Furthermore, an important theoretical point must be emphasized.

Section 13 of Chapter Four is entitled "The Universal Principle of Tale Balance". In it, tale composition is described as a distribution of a finite and constant amount of power between dramatis personae. A balanced allocation of attributes among the actors is tipped in favor of the hero. If we quantify the hero's and other dramatis personae's [11] respective amounts of power in terms of the initiatives they take and of the resources they control, ('emissions' in the language of Digraph Theory) [1] and in terms of the results of their initiatives (counter emissions of the receivers in the same framework), we can indeed be in a position to propose not only rigorous taxonomies but also rigorous analyses of tales and myths.

Two consequences could perhaps be made more explicit than in the text of this Section of Chapter Four.

(1) The first has to do with the generative process. The power of the hero will be slightly greater than that of the villain. This could be formalized as Ph = Pv + 0.1, where P stands for power, h for hero, and v for villain. It means that, simply enough, the more glorious, marvelous, powerful the mythmaker wants to make his hero, the more powerful he will make the villain. To overcome a barking dog is not a great feat, but it becomes such if the dog is Cerberus. The hero of a tale where, e.g. Pv = 0.7 will be more marvelous than that of a tale where Pv = 0.3. In the first case, Ph = 0.8 while in the second it is only 0.4. The amount of power granted to the villain thus exerts structural and stylistic constraints on the narrative — the dramatic interest of a tale would be low whose villain, Pv = 0.3, is overcome by a hero, Pv = 0.8. Let us summarize this first consequence provisionally in the rule

Pv = Ph — 0.1

But this is not necessarily the correct way to look at the phenomenon : the starting point could be not 'how marvelous does the mythmaker wish to make his hero', but how powerful is the villain to be defeated, according to the specific tradition which molds the villain the mythmaker has to cope with. If we adopt the latter standpoint, the rule to generate a folktale would be to determine the amount of power a villain is already endowed with by a given tradition, and to build a hero whose power will exceed it. Thus, the mythmaker must first compute the strength of the villain as it were, and then build a hero with a strength sufficient to overcome it. The rule would therefore be written in this form

Ph = Pv + 0.1

This is probably more correct because of the nature, of folklore, which is an endeavor to reduce "entropy". [2]

[12]

(2) The second consequence is more explicit in the authors' presentation. Let us define h in Ph as (hero + helper + donor + magical object) and v in Pv as (villain + retinue). Let us give arbitrary values to h and v for illustrative purposes, viz. v = 0.6 and h = 0.6 + 0.1 = 0.7. Ph will be distributed among the hero himself, his helper(s), etc., and the same applies to P, with the condition that Ph = Pv, + 0.1. But since the amount of power is finite and can be constant in many different tales, variations will come from the differential allocation of P to the set of dramatis personae defining Ph and Pv. We can have, for example, ranges like the following :

Even the set itself of dramatis personae defining h will vary under the influence of the principle of tale balance. As Meletinsky and his associates point out in the conclusion of Section 13, the principle determines the constitution of paradigmatic sets as well as the syntagmatic structure of the tale. Thus, in our hypothetical example, there would be no helper in tales, the donor in tale₁ would be more powerful than those in tale₂ and tale₃, whereas the magical objects would be equivalent.

The importance of this principle is considerable. We are now in a position to define a metastructure that generates diverse folkloric texts and which underlies not only Lévi-Strauss' canonical formula but also the models Köngäs Maranda and myself have proposed (1962, 1971).

This proposition of a mechanical tipped balance is a breakthrough in folkloristics and probably a major one, which should affect the field deeply in the years to come.

Part Two presents tests of some of the Soviets' propositions. The tests by no means cover the whole approach and its many components.

The Jileks tackle the Soviets' criteria to discriminate between myth and folktale in Chapter Five. They take an Okanagan corpus [3] dichotomized [13] by the tellers themselves into 'myths' and 'legends' ('true stories'). After a summary of the contrasts between the two genres according to the Soviets, the Jileks adopt an entirely different approach. They use a content analysis technique, frequency counts by computers, to define profiles for each of the corpus subsets. (The limitations of the exclusive use of frequency analysis are known well enough ; of interest here is that it is remarkably successful and does provide a means of differentiating between Okanagan myths and legends.) [4]

The Jileks then compare their own description of the two subsets to the results obtained by applying the Soviets' criteria. The latter's basic proposition that 'collectivity' is characteristic of folktale is corroborated. [5] Their other criteria turn out to be too specific, however, to be applied to a society as different from European ones as is the Okanagan society. Correlatively, it can be said that the Soviet model can therefore validly discriminate between European and non‑European folklore. it would be fruitful to apply the approach in order to analyze collections of non-European data influenced by European tales or by European cultures. [6]

It may seem that Reid, in Chapter Six, returns to the ritualist mythogenetic theory. But she goes beyond. The author focuses on the basic dichotomy proposed by the Soviets as discriminatory of myths and folktales, that of the 'collective' vs. the 'individual'. To rephrase her synthetic view of a metastructure of myth and folktale in Lévi-Strauss' and Leach's terms, we could say that myth, folktale, and ritual all formulate and encode the same message. This message is the distribution of a finite amount of power, which, as emphasized by Reid, should be defined cosmologically. By implication, we have a comprehensive theory of the mechanisms of folk thought and of semantics as well.

The cogent way in which Reid brings together the individual and the collective — folktales, and myths — is convincing. With this paper, we see that folktale structure cannot be dissociated from the logical structures Lévi-Strauss and others are investigating.

In Chapter Seven, Layton uses the approach presented in Chapter Four to research a broader problem, that of a corpus of written literature stiff very close to its oral sources. The grid enables her to formulate propositions on folkloric and literary components in the Lays of Marie [14] de France. She sets Equitan apart from eight other lays as in it the hero, villain, and object are functionally merged. However, if the deceived deceivers (seneschal's wife and king in Equitan) seem to belong to written literature, they may still share structural characteristics which actually conform to Lévi-Strauss' canonical formula of myths. In effect, 'hero, undergoes inversion (to 'villain') as he passes from term to function in the outcome, his death consolidating the seneschal's lawful position.

Layton could have expanded on the patterns revealed by the tables she devised after the Soviet model. For example, a comparison of the strings of signs for Gugemar and Werewolf in Table 1 suggests that the husband in the first lay and the wife in the second may be inversely symmetrical (+ - - 000 and - + + 000, respectively). Then, it emerges from Table II that, in the same two lays, 'ship' and 'clothes', respectively, are represented by identical strings, viz. - 000 + - - - -; both are actually operators of transformations, either in space (ship) or in appearance (clothes) - but the difference between motion (ship) and metamorphosis (clothes) is not revealed by the grid. One could carry the analysis still further by contrasting the function, which remains constant, of helper/donor (Table II) to the inversion of the sexes of the spouses (Table 1) which undergoes a functional inversion as a consequence of an inversion of sex, not always the case in the lays (cf. Nightingale's husband, Lanval's queen, and The Lovers' king).

The method could be applied to other such pieces as Boccaccio's and Chaucer's works, Beowulf, etc.

The results of Chapter Five indicate that the approach could be extended to European vs. non-European folklore ; those of Chapter Seven, that it could be extended to oral vs. written literature ; finally, the thesis of Chapter Six suggests that myth and folktale are expressions of a common, underlying mechanism : the distribution of the amount of power found in a given semantic system — a 'culture'.

We hope that the three chapters of Part II will not only demonstrate the applicability of the Soviets' contributions but their intrinsic interest and testability as well.