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Benjamin
Registered User
(6/22/01 1:46:26 am)
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Plots & Characters
Hello I've only recently discovered this discussion board & I've never posted a comment before so bear with me; but your discussions make such interesting reading I'm hoping somebody will be able to help me out.
I've heard that there are seven or ten standard plotlines that reoccur around the world again & again; Cinderella (rags to riches) is one, and Faust (a pact & its consequences) is another. Does anybody know the others? & do many fairytales adhere to these common plotlines? If so, is that what makes fairytales so enduring?
Apologies if this topic is old hat!
Cheers
Benjamin
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janeyolen
Unregistered User
(6/22/01 9:03:48 am)
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Rags to riches
Actually, Benjamin, Cinderella is technically riches to rags to riches.
Jane
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Midori
Unregistered User
(6/22/01 9:10:30 am)
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Difficult question
Benjamin,
First welcome to the board!
I think your question is a little difficult to answer with any certainty. Fairy tales have a remarkable world existence, some of it due to the fact that oral traditions are easily transmittable from culture to culture and also, because what Jung might consider the archetypes and the collective consciousness of human beings. Despite being flung out on different continents and cultures, we are perhaps driven by our human social condition to construct similiar tales. But, I would be hard pressed to reduce such an enormous body of oral and written literature to a handful of plot lines. Cinderella may be about "rags to riches" but I think its more about "rites of passage from adolescent to adulthood," someone else may decide its the classic "marrying the Prince" plot. Two folklorists tried to establish a good comparative index that would allow readers of folktales to find "matching" or similiar tales across cultures for comparative purposes. Stith Thompson and Antii Arne put together the first Motif and Tale Type Index. Here they cross reference tales either according to specific motifs in tales (such as "travelling boots, "magic cows"...) or tale types ("father cuts off daughters arms" , "man brings wife back from the dead"). My point is when you read through the index of tale types (which are based on plot lines) one is struck by the wealth of plots. "Rags to Riches" may in fact incorporate a half dozen tales which are not really alike at all beyond the motif of money (a fool makes money in a trickster tale, Cinderella becomes a princess, a tailor succeeds at a series of tasks, for which he is rewarded wealth but refuses to live a simple life). So I guess what I am saying is, I am nervous about rendering the tales into too narrow a catagory for fear of losing sense of what might be the driving force of the tale. And a single tale may offer many plot interpretations...Cinderella is a rags to riches plot, it is a marriage plot, it is about rites of passage all twisted together. And I think to answer your second question, it is in part these more complicated and layered plot structures, combined with fantastic images and metaphors that have made the tales endure, to be reinterpreted afresh each generation.
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Gregor9
Registered User
(6/22/01 10:11:50 am)
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Re: difficult question
Benjamin,
As Midori said, the Thompson and Arne listing of common elements to the stories might be of help to you, but the nature of the stories--part of the reason for their power--is that they leave open the possibilities of interpretation, so that one story might mean many things to many people. This is why, in fact, Bruno Bettelheim (who I don't care for much in some respects) argued that one should never tell a child the meaning of a fairy tale they've just heard: It could hold an entirely different meaning for the child than for the adult. I'd argue that's true for adults as well.
GF
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Lotti
Unregistered User
(6/22/01 10:44:09 am)
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Fairy tale types
I have read several times references to the types of fairy tales in books, usually saying that this fairy tale was type ... according to ... . Can any one give me a title of a book that classifies fairy tales into categories, like the Thompson and Arne quoted by Gregor? And also this might sound stupid, does any one know if this is rather universal or has been done within different languages? Thompson and Arne does not really ring a bell, but then most of my fairy tale books are in my native German, and I was wondering if there might be another classification quoted in the German-speaking environment. Any ideas???
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Gordon
Unregistered User
(6/22/01 10:55:40 am)
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RE: Plots & Characters
Benjamin,
I'm always reluctant to take too reductionist a view of fairy tales. The simple reason is, I write them and would hate to think I will reach the limit of possible plots after a certain number of tales. (I also hate repeating myself.)
Northrop Fry (in The Anatomy of Criticism) figured there was only one type, the quest tale. My answer to him has always been, duh! and all things are made of matter. Whoop-de-do.
I have to check out the books Midori refers to. I like reading about the patterns others find in theme, character and structure. The fact that there are similarities all boils down to the fact that all fairy tales were written by the same species (us critters) under similar circumstances for similar reasons. They all have traceable histories, a good story was shared among different people and even reinvented by different authors in different places and times (if you like that concept, check out Jorges Louis Borges's tale, "Pierre
Menard, Author of Don Quixote").
But one thing has to be emphasized whenever reductionist stuff pops up: There's nothing better
than a tale well told. When you've got quality, it doesn't matter whether it's fresh off the press or been told a thousand times before. Academia has tends to shy away from this fact because quality's so darn hard to quantify.
...Gordon.
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Midori
Unregistered User
(6/22/01 1:00:36 pm)
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Motif Index
Lotti,
I'd be willing to bet Thompson's motif index has been translated into German. It's just too venerable a text and too widely used not to have been translated into other languages. You might give a try to the German Amazon.com and see if it pops up: the title in English is
"Motif-Index of Folk-literature: A classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables..."
The companion to this was the collaboration between Antti Arne and Stith Thompson, called "The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography."
The first still remains I think in print, but the second book has gone out of print. However a good University library should carry both. They are not easy at first to use, and yes, they include an international data base of folktales. But what is useful is that latter scholars have continued to classify their own collections along the same lines as Thompson and Arne. So someone may use Thompson catagories to examine all 6,000 transcribed tales in a Korean collection. This enables one to find certain motifs in the Korean collection and easily compare them to others in Thompson's original data base and other scholars.
Let me know if you find a copy of it and if you have trouble using it. It can be a bit daunting at first, but it's manageable and quite useful.
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Lotti
Unregistered User
(6/23/01 3:26:16 am)
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Arne-Thompson
Midori,
thank you for your quick and helpful reply! I have not found a Translation into German so far, but I keep on searching. And of course, there is always the original to fall back on! As I said, the names didn't ring a bell, but I was quite humiliated when I realized why: the contributions had quoted Thompson-Arne, and when I looked through my books to find whose classification they referred to, I found it was Arne-Thompson... ;-)
Thanks again!
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Jane
Harrison
Registered User
(6/23/01 5:23:58 pm)
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Re: Academia and plots and characters
Gordon:
I am smiling at your post. When I told my advisor at school that I wished to switch my focus to fairy tales (although I would still include Wuthering Heights somehow), I thought for a moment, "This man is either going to faint or kill me."
He could not talk at all. Wuthering Heights was bad enough. Looking at Angela Carter was treason to America's slice of life tales where region and its voice are everything. Yes, there are probably only so many stories. But there have always been ONLY so many stories, and people have been retelling them in one form or another for thousands of years!
Janie (who hopes she got this post in the right topic area. Where are my glasses?!)
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erectionpants
Registered User
(6/23/01 11:03:07 pm)
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Re: Academia and plots and characters
I agree with what everyone has been saying, particularly Greg, Midori, and Gordon. It's very difficult to classify tales by plotline and motif, simply because it's more or less arbitrary: if you're classifying Red Riding Hood tales, where do you draw the line? Is the red cloak a crucial cpomponent? How about the wolf? Or are all stories about girls threatened by predatory animals "Red Riding Hood" stories? It's an intriguing can of worms.
Re the quest: Among folklorists (the ones I know, anyway), Joseph Campbell, the most famous popularizer of the "quest," is something of a persona non grata. He's not as widely reviled as Bettelheim, but one invariably hears, "He writes beautifully, but he got the part on Turkey/Russia/Africa wrong." He's also criticized for placing an essentially Christian paradigm onto wildly diverse material.
~Catja
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Jane
Harrison
Registered User
(6/24/01 10:17:22 am)
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Re: Plots and characters.
I really admire Joseph Campbell. As for the Christian paradigm, it's really much more. Critics should look much closer. My focus really began with the Mystery Cults and Chthonic myths. (That is why I chose Wuthering Heights. Hell is Heaven. Heaven is Hell). The Christ paradigm is really the Orphic paradigm. I just finished Bettelheim. It was interesting. I can understand his critics, but The Uses of Enchantment is still a valid contribution to fairy tale studies.
I really enjoyed it. This said, I would consider Campbell essential to our study and writing, especially concerning our comments on plots and characters. His background in psychology warrants it. However, I hope we all remember Angela Carter's influences, kick up our legs and smile at all this. I got into this because of her and that remarkable The Sadeian Woman. Feminists still don't know what to do with it. Me either. <G>
Janie
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Benjamin
Registered User
(6/25/01 12:46:13 am)
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Plots, characters, cans, worms...
Thanks for all your responses; it's interesting to think about motifs rather than plots. I'm getting the idea that fairytales (and stories generally) are like Lego bricks, you build them out of staple elements etc into whatever you like. Therefore looking at the building blocks themselves doesn't have to be reductionist.
I'm thinking about how writers & narrators use the same elements in different ways, and this is where Character comes in. If the "rags to riches" plot is an element of the Cinderella story, then another element must be "virtue rewarded" because Cinderella is generally good & beautiful. Change one character element and all the other elements in the tale alter correspondingly. An ambitious, cynical Cinderella combines with the "rags to riches" plot to give you a tale more along the lines of Becky Sharpe in Vanity Fair.
Similarly, Wuthering Heights contains a standard plot motif of adultery, but the other motifs (especially character in this case) completely transform the story.
Has anybody read that poem by Roald Dahl about little red riding hood shooting the wolf and making herself a new fur coat, as well as pigskin carrying cases out of the three little pigs? As a child I read stories like these that were already playing around with fairytales, and its only now that I'm discovering the originals! -I'm working on some fairytales of my own, and I'm finding SurlaLune very inspiring; especially reading Bluebeard for the first time.
Cheers
Benjamin
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Gordon
Unregistered User
(6/25/01 10:49:34 am)
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Plots & Characters
Benjamin,
Your comparison of story, plot & character elements in fairy tales to Lego bricks got me thinking. Even though a body can't help but analyze things (being a curious human bean) I'm one of these guys that will defend the wholeness of a thing to the death. Yup, the whole-is-great-than-the-sum-of-its-parts argument.
(This ain't aimed at you personally, Ben, or your argument in particular, just my own little musings...)
Which part of the brick do you compare? The color, shape, count of connectors?
I grew up with the "basic" Lego set of about ten or twenty different pieces. The other day, my nephew went to a garage sale and bought a "finished" gigantic Lego pirate ship, complete with rigging, cannons, flags, individual pirates and so on. Most fairy tales began as part of an oral tradition. When they were told aloud, facial expressions, voice inflections and all the rest of it turned the "basic" tale into "finished" one.
When they were eventually written down, the writer made certain decisions about what parts should appear basic and what parts finished. His decisions are a big part of what we call comparable components (Lego bricks) - it's color, shape, etc.
Later, when we get to Anderson's "literary" tales and 90% of modern stuff, we get fine finished work.
I have a real hard time with comparisions of written work that ignore the writer's elaborations and treat the structural framework as independent of it.
The whole object of writing or telling a story (or building with Lego) is to make a pirate ship. Lose sight of that fact and you haven't got much. With a little suspension of disbelief, any three-year-old's stuck-together mess can be viewed as a pirate ship. But hey, this is supposed to be the science of literary comparison. We can stop suspending disbelief now and realize that all we've got before us is a pile of bricks.
(There, (whew!) my daily rant's done.)
...Gordon.
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Benjamin
Registered User
(6/26/01 3:15:35 am)
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Snow White & the Seven Lego Bricks
Gordon,
I agree that the whole story is greater than the sum of the parts, but the same parts don't have make the same sum every time. The liberating thing about lego is that you can buy a set of bricks to bulid a pirate ship & decide to build a space-ship instead; so looking at the bricks themselves can help us to use them in new ways. Oh well you know this analogy is getting a bit too deep for me; I think fairytales are evolving through interpretation just as they always have, but I daresay the processes involved aren't all going to be covered by lego in the end.
Besides I 'm a bit old for lego nowadays...
Cheers
Benjamin
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Gregor9
Registered User
(6/26/01 10:24:14 am)
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Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your Legos
Gordon,
I find myself wishing I'd had your Legos for a few classes I've taught on writing. I agree that I don't find deconstruction or reductionist approaches to fiction terribly helpful in many ways. In teaching a course on "how to write" (to the extent that I believe such a thing is possible), deconstruction is inevitable. I have to discuss the parts as parts in order to get at the whole. However, anyone can understand those parts and still not construct a viable story with them when all the parts have been laid out.
Similarly, I guess, as Benjamin says, you can change some of the pieces even one or two and create something brand new, alive and brilliant. Or you can make the whole pirate ship fall apart.
If fairy tales were solid objects, if they were just one thing, I don't think that Jane and Midori and I--and so many others-- would ever have attempted to do something new with them.
Also, I reflect upon a story told me by Harlan Ellison some years ago about being a guest in a unversity class where they had read one of his stories. The instructor explained to the class what Ellison's story was about, described the significant meaning, what he'd been getting at, etc. Turning to Ellison for confimation, he received instead the response that he was dead wrong and didn't know what he was talking about. Overlooking the likelihood that Harlan was enjoying an opportunity to pull down someone's academic pants, I'd guess that maybe both the professor and Harlan were right: What Harlan had intended might have been vastly different from what the professor saw. But it didn't mean that what he saw was necessarily not in there.
G
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Gordon
Unregistered User
(6/28/01 8:45:38 am)
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A Harlan Day's Night
Great story about Harlan Ellison. I think it's pretty funny that he said the prof was dead wrong. If the prof was trying to describe Ellison's intentions, that's one thing (the prof deserved a blasting). But if the prof was just giving his interpretation of the story, well, it was Ellison that blew it. Once your story's is out in the world, hey, your interpretive rights are on the same level as any other reader. As Benjamin said, storys evolve through interpretation.
...Gordon.
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Carrie
Unregistered User
(6/28/01 9:25:36 am)
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Something old, something new
Good morning. I've been sneaking peaks at the board the last couple of months -- missing the lively discussions and interesting ideas. And this is one thread I wanted to add to. I often wonder about the saying that "there are no new stories, just different ways of telling them." When I write I know that I often feel as though I'm pulling things "out of the air." And when I see connections come together in any work or find that several people happen upon similar ideas at the same time -- it seems right that ideas are only borrowed from a "collective unconscious" of some sort. I imagine this sort of comment is bound to piss off many artists, but I think that artists are a type of translator. It seems to me that common truths bind us all together -- whether we like it or not. Otherwise why would a story, a sculpture or a symphony ring true to so many? It still amazes me how many people say that they can't sing or write or paint. I say ANYBODY can do these things and they find little gems just as well as the people that make their livings with their art. It's an odd world that we live in -- a place where people step over a chalk sidealk drawing without seeing the expression and greatness in every line.
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Benjamin
Registered User
(6/29/01 7:05:52 am)
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Something borrowed...
It's very popular nowadays in literary criticism circles to looks into the sources and reading of great writers, to find out their influences. This is useful because it can help define where the writer is coming from & where they're going. And really everybody has their sources, I doubt anybody has ever sat down and written a novel without having read one first; otherwise how would you know the conventions that make it a novel at all?
I think what sometimes annoys writers and artists about this, is the idea that it takes away from the originality of their work, to point out where they got their inspiration, as if all art is plagiarised somehow.
I don't think its a danger & I certainly don't feel threatened by it, because if you look at famous works of art, Shakespeare's plays, Picasso's paintings, Beethoven's symphonies or whatever, you can point out the sources they drew on, and still marvel at the genius and originality of what they produced. All art is in debate or agreement with other artworks, and this debate makes art vital and lively.
It's rather like this message board; you can read a posting in isolation, or consult what came before to get a broader idea; crikes I'm always coming up with daft analogies aren't I.
Cheers
Benjamin
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Gordon
Unregistered User
(6/29/01 10:31:56 am)
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Something pink
Carrie,
I totally agree (after reading waaay too much Jung) that there's a collective unconscious we tap into when creating, even when we think we're being completely original. Embracing it is tough to do but worth it, because to ignore it usually gives you a story with, for lack of a better description, "mixed metaphors" that don't ring true.
Benjamin,
Gotta tell ya, I like a good biography as well as the next person, but it drives me batty when biographers or literary critics try to whittle down the genius of an artist by reference to their opium addiction, their schizophrenia or their friggin hemorrhoids.
Maybe its just me, but I used to like to skip the intro of a classical work and save it till I'd read the book. I know it's petty and subjective of me, but if the author can't paint the picture clear enough for someone this far in the future, hey, in my mind it isn't as universal a work as the academics say it is. Translation and usage notes are one thing, but supposed sources of inspiration are quite another.
I guess what I trying to say is, the oak trees that Shakespeare and Beethoven grew with each of their works are so much bigger than the acorns they came from it must be a little embarrasing to be a source-seeking scholar, camped in the shade poking nutshells.
...Gordon.
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