The Cards of Vladimir Propp in Fairytales!

The cards of Vladimir Propp was the analysis Propp used after studying several Russian fairytales to describe their structure and in some sense their model and archetypal nature, elements that could be found many times. Although it's a theory and not a canon or an unbreakable pattern, it's very powerful in describing the inner voice of the writer.

A characteristic side of the ingenuity of Leonardo Da Vinci, that was being excellently brought to light by an article of the magazine Sientse (Italian Version of Scientific American) is constituted  at his ability to regard for the first time in history every machine not as a unique organism, an unrepeated prototype but as a set of simpler machines.
 
Leonardo analyzed machines in elements, in functions. Thus, he accomplished to study independently, for example, the function of friction and this study led him to design ball bearings spherical and conic, even cylinders with the form of truncated cone, that were being constructed at least in our days for the function of gyroscope, that are necessary for the aviating navigation.
 
With similar studies Leonardo would manage to be entertained as well. It was discovered recently his plan for a funny devising of him: an “amortisseur to brake the fall of a man from above”. It shows a falling man, we don’t know where from, the fall of which brakes a system of wedges that are being connected between them and at the final point of fall, from a woolen ball, the resistance of which at hitting is being controlled and measured from a last wedge. It is probable that we should attribute to Leonardo the invention of “useless machines” that were being constructed for play, to follow a daydreaming, designed with a smile, that were instantly being confronted and rose against the utilitarian canon of technical-scientific progress.
 
Something similar with the Leonardian deconstruction of machines at its functions was actualized, as far as folkloric fairytales are concerned, the Soviet ethnologist Vladimir Propp at his work «Morphology of the tale» and at his study «Transformation at the fairytales of magic».
 
Propp became rightly famous for his book «The historical roots of the wonder tale», at which he exposes with a charming way and, at least from the poetic angle, persuasive, the theory according to which the most ancient core of fairytales originates from the initiation rituals that were being used at the primitive societies.
 
This that fairytales tell – or at the end of transfiguration, hide – would once happen: Reaching a definite age, children would be absent from family and were led into the forest (like in Hop-o’-my-Thumb, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White)… where the wizards of the tribe, dressed in a scaring way, with the face covered by horrible masks (that bring us to mind witches and wizards)… would force them in tough tests and often deadly (all the protagonists of fairytales meet them on their way)… children would listen the storytelling of the tribal myths and were thus ready to bring weapons (the magical presents that supernatural donors at fairytales share to the protagonists that are endangered)… and, finally, would come back at their home often with another name (and the protagonists of fairytales sometimes return incognito)… and finally mature get married (like in fairytales, that nine out of ten times finish with a wedding celebration)…
 
At the structure of a fairytale this of a ritual is repeated. By this observation Vladimir Propp (and not only him) came out with the theory, according to which the fairytale began to live as we know it, since the ancient ritual declined, leaving behind it only narration. Narrators, throughout centuries, would betray more and more the memory of the ritual and would serve the autonomous demands of the fairytale, that with the word of mouth transfigurated, accumulated deviations, followed the nations (Indo-European) at their migrations, absorbed the results of historical and social changes. Thus, the speakers, at the duration of a few centuries, transform a language until they give life to a new language: How many centuries passed since the Latin of roman decline until the Romance languages?

Fairytales, anyway, must be born from the fall of the sacred world to the folkloric: like from the fall reached the children world, having become toys, objects that in previous seasons were ritual and cultural, for example dolls, the spinning top. Doesn’t it exist thus in the roots of theater a same process from the sacred to the desecrated?
 
Around the primitive magical core, fairytales collected other myths that were being deprived of their sacred values, adventurous narrations, legends, anecdotes, next to the wizarding protagonists set up the protagonists of the agricultural world (for example the sly and the silly). There was created a dense and complex magma, a skein of one hundred colors, of which though – Propp says – the primitive thread is what we described.
 
A theory is of equal value with another and maybe none is at the position to give us a complete explanation about fairytales. This of Propp has a special charm because it establishes a deep bond – someone will say of the “collective unconscious” – between the prehistorical child that lived the initiation rituals and at the historical child that lives exactly with the fairytale his first initiation into the world of human. This identification between the young spectator and the Hop-o’-my-Thumb of fairytales that his mother narrates to him, doesn’t only have a psychological excuse, it has a deeper one, where its roots are being found at the darkness of blood.
 
By analyzing the structure of folkloric fairytale – with special caution at the Russian folkloric fairytales (which, moreover, belong widely to the same Indo-European heritage, together with German and Italian)-, Propp managed to state three principles: 1) “the stable elements, permanent in fairytales, are the functions of the protagonists, independent from the executor and the way of executing” 2) “the number of functions that appear in fairytales of magic is limited” 3) “the succession of functions is always the same”.
 
At Propp’s system the functions are thirty-one and are enough, with the variations and their internal structures, to describe the form of fairytales:

1.ABSENTATION
2.INTERDICTION
3.VIOLATION of INTERDICTION
4.RECONNAISSANCE
5.DELIVERY (TREACHERY)
6.TRICKERY
7.COMPLICITY
8.VILLAINY or LACKING
9.MEDIATION
10.BEGINNING COUNTERACTION
11.DEPARTURE
12.FIRST FUNCTION OF THE DONOR
13.HERO'S REACTION
14.RECEIPT OF A MAGICAL AGENT
15.GUIDANCE
16.STRUGGLE
17.BRANDING
18.VICTORY
19.LIQUIDATION
20.RETURN
21.PURSUIT
22.RESCUE
23.UNRECOGNIZED ARRIVAL
24.UNFOUNDED CLAIMS
25.DIFFICULT TASK
26.SOLUTION
27.RECOGNITION
28.EXPOSURE
29.TRANSFIGURATION
30.PUNISHMENT
31.WEDDING
 
Of course, not in all fairytales all functions exist: at the obligatory succession we have jumps, unifications, syntheses, which do not contradict the general line. A fairytale can start from the first, the seventh or the twelfth function, but – if it’s old enough – it’s difficult to make jumps backwards, to reacquire the passages it lost.
 
The function of absentation, which Propp places at the first position, can be fulfilled by one hero that is taken away from home for whatever reason, a prince that starts for war, a father who dies, a parent that goes to work (telling children – here’s the forbiddance (interdiction) – do not open the door to anyone or do not touch anything), a trader that travels for jobs etc. Every “function” can contain its opposite: “interdiction” can be presented through a “positive” order.
 
But we won’t go further with our observations about Propp’s functions, but only to suggest to whoever has the appetite to exercise, by comparing their succession with the plot of any movie with the accomplishments of 007 agent: he will be surprised by finding a big number, almost at the appropriate order, so live and stubbornly present is the structure of fairytale in our education. Many adventure books have the same trace.
 
For us, “functions” interest us because we can use them for the construction of infinite stories, like with twelve notes (ignoring quadrants and remaining always closed at the limited sound system of West before electronic music) we can synthesize infinite melodies.
 
At Reggio Emilia, for us to test the productivity of “functions”, we decreased them motu proprio in twenty, by leaving some and substituting others with the indication of equal in number “themes” of fairytales. Two painters, friends, designed twenty game “cards”, each one noting a word (the generalized title of function) and with a fit symbolic picture or caricature in terms of all the above functions.

Next there was a team that worked to create a story, by using in order the twenty “cards of Propp”. Being entertained a lot, I owe to say and with remarkable parody results.
 
I saw that children manage easily to make a fairytale, by following the trace from the cards, because each word of the order (“function” or “theme of fairytale”) is presented loaded with mythic meanings and is disposed at an endless game of variations. I remember an original interpretation of interdiction: A father leaves the house, by forbidding his children to throw pots with flowers at the heads of passengers from the balcony… And between the “tough tests” there was not absent the obligation to go to the cemetery at midnight: the maximum of horror and courage until a specific age.
 
But children like to mix the cards, by improvising rules: pick up three by luck and creating a full story, begin from the last card of the order, share the bunch with two teams and synthesizing two stories competing each other. Often a card is enough to inspire them a fairytale. That with the magical presents reached a pupil to improvise a story of a pen that would write school assignments on its own.
 
Anyone can create by himself a bunch with “cards of Propp”, with twenty, or thirty or fifty, as many as he wants: as long as he writes each card the title of “function” or the “theme”, illustration is not necessary.
 
The game can only remind by accident the structure of a puzzle or a brain teaser, at which exist twenty or one thousand pieces of a plan mixed, with the duty to resynthesize, as in mosaic, the entire plan. Cards of Vladimir Propp allow oppositely, as we said, the construction of an infinite number of plans, because each piece doesn’t have only one interpretation, but it’s open to many meanings. … …

Source: Book Grammar of Fantasy by Gianni Rodari