Page 102 - Culture Society and the Media

92 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
obstacles is less important than their function. ‘Function is understood as an act
of character defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of
the action’ (Propp, 1968, p. 21). Propp establishes that the narrative of the folk tale
follows a certain pattern. The story begins with either an injury to a victim or the
lack of some important object and ends with retribution for the injury or the
acquisition of the thing lacked. The hero is sent for on the occasion of the injury
or the discovery of the lack and two key events follow:

1. He meets the donor (a toad, a hag, a bearded old man, etc.) who after
‘testing’ him, supplies him with a magical agent which enables him to pass
victoriously through his ordeal.
2. He meets the villain in decisive combat or he finds himself with a series of
tasks or labours which, with the help of his agent, he is ultimately able to
solve properly.

The latter part of the tale may constitute a series of retarding devices before the
ultimate transfiguration of marriage or coronation…. Propp identifies 31
narrative functions through which it is possible to classify folk tales.
The main problem of this focus on the internal relationships of a particular
group of texts is that the specificity of any one text both in the context of its
production and its reading, through which meaning is established, is lost. Russian
folk tales become indistinguishable from the latest episode of The Sweeney, from
Star Wars or from a Raymond Chandler novel. Indeed, Eco’s analysis of the
narrative structure of the James Bond novels which suggests that the novels are
fixed as a sequence of moves inspired by a code of binary oppositions comes
remarkably close to Propp’s typical narrative. Eco suggests that the invariable
scheme of the Bond novels is as follows:

A. M moves and gives a task to Bond.
B. The villain moves and appears to Bond (perhaps in alternating forms).
C. Bond moves and gives a first check to the villain or the villain gives first
check to Bond.
D. Woman moves and shows herself to Bond.
E. Bond consumes woman: possesses her or begins her seduction.
F. The villain captures Bond (with or without woman, or at different
moments).
G. The villain tortures Bond (with or without woman).
H. Bond conquers the villain (kills him or kills his representative or helps at their
killing).
I. Bond convalescing enjoys woman, whom he then loses. (Eco, 1960, p. 52)

What takes Eco’s analysis of Bond beyond some universal fairy tale is that Eco
shows that this coded schema, which forms the basis for all the Bond novels
(with the exception of The Spy Who Loved Me) is closely linked to a series of