Page 37 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
as a prototype of all narrative forms, is based on a fixed number
of components. There are seven spheres of action, associated with
the characters and roles of the 'Villain', the 'Donor', the 'Helper',
the 'Princess and Her Father', the 'Dispatcher', the 'Hero' and the
'False Hero', and thirty-one functions, associated with key
moments in the action, e.g. 'Preparation', 'Complication',
'Struggle', 'Return and Recognition'. No tale contains all thirty-
one functions. However, the ones it does contain occur in the
same order in all tales. What is most intriguing about the folk tale
is its duplicity: its basic form is repetitive, yet it is capable of
producing a limitless number of imaginative and colourful varia-
tions. For Propp, what makes a tale ultimately appealing is not its
unchanging skeleton but the changing features of its characters
and settings. Later critics attempted to identify the semiotic links
connecting various texts by working out elementary structures of
signification. A. J. Greimas's Semantique Structurale (1966), for
example, proposes a model based on the principle of opposition.
The world only takes shape insofar as differences can be perceived
in its fabric. Thus, a tale's elementary structure may lie in opposi-
tions such as 'subject versus object' or 'sender versus receiver'.
The writings of Roman Jakobson are sometimes regarded as a
bridge between Formalism and Structuralism and their discussion
is here accordingly positioned. Following Saussure, Jakobson
argues that language is based on processes of selection and combi-
nation: 'the given utterance (message) is a combination of consti-
tuent parts (sentences, words, phonemes, etc.) selected from the
repository of all possible constituent parts (the code)' (Jakobson
and Halle 1956: 75). One of Jakobson's most innovative contribu-
tions consists of the idea that selection and combination are
underpinned by the principles of metaphor and metonymy. These
are not understood merely as rhetorical figures but actually as the
most fundamental ways of organizing signs in all forms of cultural
production. Metonymy is based on contiguity. An attribute of a
thing that is contiguous to it (next to it) is substituted for the
thing itself ('Crown' metonymically signifies the monarchy). Conti-
guity also sustains the syntagmatic process of combination,
whereby words are placed next to one another in sentences. Thus,
combination is related to the metonymic mode. Metaphor is based
on similarity. A thing is described in terms of another thing
comparable to it ('life is a beach'). Similarity is also at the basis of

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