University of Palermo, Semiotics Handbook, academic year 2008-09, Prof.

Gianfranco Marrone

Formalism and narration: Propp and fairy tales

Russian formalism. One of the foundations of semiotic aesthetics is represented by critical activity and
analysis of the Russian formalists, a group of scholars who, around the 1910s and 1920s, decided to
set aside the abstractness of aesthetic theories to focus on the concrete experience of the texts
literary: the subject of literary studies, according to the Russian formalists, is not in fact literature (term
too vague, allowing for strong ambiguities) but the literariness, that is what makes any
message (oral or written) a literary work. In their opinion, literary critics had until then
act like those police officers who, not knowing what to look for during a search,
they grab a little bit of everything in the hope that it might provide a clue for their investigations: the critics, at
they said, they would now rest on the author's biography, now on his social conditions, now on the
political motivations of his actions, sometimes on the tastes of the public, sometimes on the constraints of tradition
rhetoric, without ever questioning what the specific object of their analysis was. If that object
it can exist, it must be recognized in the language used by the artist and understood by his readers, who
it is related to the ways of expressing oneself typical of a given historical period, with tradition
previous literature, with the perceptual habits of the audience and so on.
According to the formalists, there exists a properly poetic (artistic) language whose laws can be
reconstructed starting from a comparison with common language. It is therefore necessary to identify, through
a system of recurrence, criteria that allow recognizing the specificity of the artistic text. In
particularly, they propose to focus on the estranging effect that the work of art produces on
his reader: the reality recreated in the work, argues one of the sharpest among the formalists, Victor Sklovsky,
it provokes a de-automation of the habitual perception one has of the world. Generally,
argue Sklovskij, we perceive the world in a habitual manner, to the point that most of
Some elements or events seem normal, obvious, natural to us. Art, on the other hand, eliminates every
automation allows us to grasp otherwise hidden aspects: in the face of the transgression of codes
customary stylistics, the interpreter finds themselves "disoriented", "is forced to dwell more on the
the concrete materiality of the expression”, that is, on its form.
According to this view, the literary work acts a bit like that horse in a story by Tolstoy
one wonders how it is possible that, among all the people who take care of him (bringing him
to eat, scolding it or making it gallop) no one uses the word 'mine' in relation to it, while
The only one who uses it never takes care of it and sees it only rarely. What will it mean after all - it
asks the horse - the word 'mine'? With this trick, Sklovskij explains, Tolstoy leads a
criticism of the institution of private property, an institution that the automation of perception (and of
knowledge) presents us now as natural and obvious, and only through the filter of literature does it reveal itself
as a social construction.
The notion of 'alienation', which will have great success especially with Brechtian dramaturgy,
It is of great utility for understanding the implicit aesthetics of the Russian formalists and, more generally, of the
semiotics of art: the linguistic work of the artist, the transformation, the transgression, the betrayal,
the reinvention he performs of common language not only highlights the need to consider
language as an institution, rather than an obvious and natural entity, but above all they manifest
the ability of art to act as a critique of the everyday.
According to Russian formalists, the poetic word (unlike the common one) does not concern itself with referring to.
to an external world, to preach a state of affairs or to communicate an inner psychological situation.
The poetic word, on the other hand, manifests itself, shows itself as such in all its aspects (phonic,
semantic, grammatical, etc.), revealing itself as an atypical sign, both self-reflective and
polysemic. Reducing the communicative intentionality of language to the rank of mere motivation of
artistic procedure (the content, that is, serves only to make the form possible), literature
brings its own language to light by multiplying its meanings. The semantic ambiguity constitutive of the
literary language does not imply that the literary form is empty, devoid of content, but that this
content is the result of a de-automation of the perception of the world: the world to which the

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 University of Palermo, Semiotica Handbook, academic year 2008-09, Professor Gianfranco Marrone

literature alludes to, in short, another world compared to the one referred to by common language, to
richer and less obvious, more precise and more varied.
And if in the case of poetic texts this idea seems to echo the nihilistic positions of art for art's sake
(where the meaning of the word is completely lost in the sound of the verse), narrative art conveys very well the
concept of linguistic alienation of the real.
Formalists explain the literary narrative as the weaving together of a plot: within a
novel, for example, the events recounted do not follow in chronological and causal order in
which have occurred or may plausibly occur (story), but are arranged according to a made order
of foreshadowing, of returns, of pauses, of overlaps etc. (interweaving); the more complex the interweaving,
one detaches oneself from the daily routine, without this implying a total break with the laws of
plausibility. For example, among the various narrative forms, the use of time has its own rules that are little or
They have nothing to do with the temporal laws of daily perception and knowledge.
scientific, from which it is possible to grasp the degree of literariness of a text (and, cautiously,
also mentioning its aesthetic assessment.

Propp. Close to the group of Russian formalists is the philologist and folklorist Vladimir Ja. Propp (1895-1970)
which with its volume Morphology of the Folktale (1928) opened a line of studies destined to have a
great importance in the literary and aesthetic research of our century. With an acute work of
comparison of about a hundred Russian fairy tales of magic, Propp was able to reconstruct a kind of grid
formal that underlies every fairy tale. Rather than addressing the long-standing question of the origin of fairy tales (at
to whom he later dedicated a specific volume in 1946), Propp prefers to focus on the fact
certain fairy tales, within a pre-established corpus, while telling different stories,
they follow a narrative scheme that is always the same. If we consider the actions of the various characters of the
fairy tale from the point of view of the development of the story, that is, looking more at the individual actions,
in all their narrative functions, it is discovered that, deep down, the characters always do the same things, or
the less they always do similar things: whether the hero is a peasant or a prince, that the purpose of his
whether the adventure is to kill a dragon or to conquer a kingdom, whether the story takes place in an enchanted forest or in
a cheerful village, in any case the narrative scheme of functions appears recurring. In other words, the
actions that hold narrative value within the story (which are, that is, necessary to
development of the story, making its continuation possible), despite their different possible
manifestations, they are the same from fairy tale to fairy tale. Thus, if the characters of the fairy tales and their actions are
Extraordinarily numerous, the narrative functions are instead reducible to a very limited number.
and they occur in an almost constant order: a situation of well-being is followed by a
break of order, which causes a lack, followed by a departure of the hero, a struggle with
the antagonist, a removal of lack and so on). To such narrative functions (understood as actions
necessary from the point of view of the continuation of the story), among other things, can be associated with seven
action spheres (that is, seven narrative roles - a sort of archetypal characters - present in every fairy tale): the hero, the
false hero, the antagonist, the donor, the helper, the princess and her father, the sender.
The importance of Proppian research goes beyond its immediate outcome: on one hand, the Morphology
the fairy tale, in fact, debunks the common idea that the universe of the fairy tale is the place of pure
fantasy and free creativity, demonstrating the existence of precise narrative composition criteria;
On the other hand, from a broader perspective, Propp's work has great significance especially from the point of view
from the perspective of the method used. So much so that, when this text was translated into English in 1958,
becoming accessible to Western scholars, it becomes the exemplary model of that analysis of
story that, starting from the research on myths by the ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, experiments within
the dawn of structuralism.
As for the first point, Propp's work marks an essential moment of break with the
Romantic vision, dominant until then, according to which fairy tales (like language)
they would express the specificity (and uniqueness) of the Spirit of the people, varying from culture to culture,
precisely because of this specificity. The romantic vision thus supported the idea that the
the foundation of the culture and identity of a nation is represented by popular narratives

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 University of Palermo, Semiotics Handout, academic year 2008-09, Professor Gianfranco Marrone

of a mythical kind and especially from fairy tales, passed down from generation to generation (there were the fairy tales
typically German, typically Italian fairy tales, etc.). Like every people, it differs for the
own language, so each people also differs in its fairy tales. This concept has been
dominant in European culture for nearly a hundred years, from Romanticism to Positivism.
During this period, in various parts of Europe, efforts have been dedicated, starting from the work of the brothers
Grimm, to a rich activity of collecting and cataloging fairy tales (e.g. Pitrè in Sicily). This
huge collecting work, however, has developed in the direction indicated by Propp, as it has
progressively led to discover analogies and similarities between all the fairy tales, contributing to the
overturning of the romantic theory. Little by little it has been realized that the fairy tales of various countries
they all presented the same structure: even though the names, situations, and environments changed,
the stories were generally the same.
This discovery has sparked a great debate during which various theses have confronted each other, among which
the most accredited was the creationist hypothesis, of a religious type, according to which all peoples
they come from a common root, as they are created by the same divine entity, and this would also explain
the similarities between fairy tales. Beyond the question of whether or not an original fairy tale exists,
from which the 'stories' narrated in each culture would have been derived, many scholars have decided to
put the issue of origin in parentheses, to focus, instead, on their 'similarity'.
Why do we think fairy tales are very similar to each other? In what way are they similar? From here
the need to study fairy tales by comparing them, so that through their comparison
similarity elements that connect them could emerge1And it is in this sense that the
Propp's work is absolutely central.
Propp, in fact, worked at the Institute of Ethnology in Moscow, which was tasked with putting together
the order of the fairy tales of a famous Russian collector, Afanasiev. But what criteria should it have been based on?
cataloging? How to put them in order? Similarly to what Hjelmslev had done in the study
from the language, Propp emphasizes the concept of narrative form: what matters in the study of
content (in this case of fairy tales) are not the substances, but the forms of the content.

His work (and the consequent identification of narrative forms) starts from the observation
the inadequacy of the classification system of fairy tales by Aarne and Thompson, up to that point
widely spread, organized by types. According to this classification, fairy tales should be ordered
for substances of the content (e.g. all animal tales - wild animals, domestic animals,
men, birds, fish, other animals - , then ordinary stories, jokes and anecdotes, etc.), as reported
below:
I Animal Tales
II Ordinary Stories
III Jokes and anecdotes
IV Tales forms

According to Propp, this classification does not account for cases in which a fairy tale contains multiple elements.
transversal to the identified types. Therefore, it is necessary to find another criterion that is not limited
all substances, variables, of the content, but identify the invariant narrative forms. Distinguishing between
the invariant elements and the variable elements present in every fairy tale, Propp has thus developed the
following scheme:
Invariants: -narrative functions
(= characters' actions from the perspective of the continuation of the story)

Variables: - connecting elements

1
A similar thing was happening, at that same time, in the field of linguistics. In this case too, faced with
the undecidability regarding the hypothesis that Indo-European could be the original language from which all would have derived
others, it was decided to set aside the problem of the origin of language, to instead focus on the study of
single languages.

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 University of Palermo, Semiotics Handbook, academic year 2008-09, Prof. Gianfranco Marrone

forms of appearance of the characters

motivation of actions
attributes and accessories of the characters

The definition of narrative functions is based on the simple criterion of the commutation test: if
If we try to remove a part of the fairy tale, do we change its meaning? If we remove the cake.
In the story of Little Red Riding Hood, does the story change? Of course, because the girl would not have gone anymore.
to grandma. But if we say that mom sewed the button on Little Red Riding Hood's coat, we
Is it an essential passage or can we remove it? We can remove it, keeping the ...
story.The narrative function is thus defined as the action of a character from the point of
view of what comes next, of the overall economy of the narrative. The way of reasoning of
Propp is perfectly structural, as the value of each narrative action is not intrinsic, but is
given by the relationship it has with all the other actions within the same story.
How can one not think of Saussure's definition of value in this regard? Propp and Saussure
they come to the same conclusions, following a similar way of reasoning, of a structural type: for
to find the invariants, what Saussure called lalangue, one must conduct tests of
switching. If we remove something from the story, does the narrative continue? If not, then that something
it is important and is part of the skeleton of the story; if so, it means that we are dealing with variable elements,
for example, the connecting elements (actions that serve to link the main functions)
but they have no functional value), or the ways in which the characters appear. Thus, for
for example, the motivations of the characters' actions (the reasons why each character does a certain
things), if on one hand they are fundamental for building the character's traits, on the other hand, from the point
From the perspective of story development, they are not essential. The same applies to the attributes of
characters: whether they are beautiful or ugly, rich or poor, young or old, it doesn't matter from the point of view of
view of the continuation of the story.
It should be clarified that the difference between invariant elements and variables does not involve a type of judgment.
aesthetic or an evaluation of what is more or less important absolutely in the fairy tale; it concerns
rather the distinction between what remains constant and what varies. Everything therefore depends on the criterion of
relevance that we adopt: if, from an aesthetic point of view (the beauty of a fairy tale), they are the
variable elements, the most important ones; from a structural point of view, however, it is the functions that are important.
narrative, that is, the invariant elements. And still, from an anthropological point of view, for example,
It is very important to know if the hero is a young, handsome, blonde or if he is poor and crippled. But what comes from
From an anthropological point of view it is significant, but it is not from a structural point of view. This allows us
to overcome one of the major objections raised against Propp, criticized for not taking into account
he actually does not deny the creativity of fairy tales at all, but
he is simply not interested in it as a subject of study.

The narrative functions

Below we report the main narrative functions identified by Propp.
MAIN NARRATIVE FUNCTIONS OF PROPP

Initial situation

Debut functions:
removal
prohibition
violation
investigation of the antagonist, etc.
Damage or lack
mediation
departure
first function of the donor
reaction of the hero

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 University of Palermo, Semiotics Handbook, academic year 2008-09, Prof. Gianfranco Marrone

supply
transfer
lotta
markings
victory
Removal of the lack of damage
return
Final functions:
persecution rescue
arrival in disguise
unfounded claims of the false hero
difficult task
fulfillment of the task
identification of the hero
unmasking the false hero
transfiguration
Marriage

Propp discovers that in all the fairy tales considered, despite their diversity and variability, the
narrative functions are always the same and always follow the same order. We have already
I understand that we are talking about syntagm and paradigm.
What are these functions? There is an initial situation that is usually a situation of
balance, of well-being ("once upon a time there was a queen who lived in a faraway country, she lived happily
with a beautiful little girl etc."), accompanied by a series of onset issues (enters into
I play the antagonist), until we reach the breaking of the initial balance, fundamental function
(the girl is kidnapped, gets lost in the woods, etc.) The development of the story, therefore, follows a
very simple background schema, which Propp defines as fairy tale movement: equilibrium, break
of balance, restoration of the balance itself.
The disruption occurs when someone, an antagonist, disturbs the initial balance. In every story,
In every fairy tale, in fact, there are at least two characters, two sides: a hero and an antagonist.
If there is no antagonist, there is no story: it is the breaking of the initial balance, in fact, that triggers the
narration, understood as the story of someone (whom we call a hero) who tries to move it
lack, the damage suffered and to defeat the one who caused that damage
(the antagonist)
This implies that in fact it is as if each fairy tale contains two different stories within it.
of the hero and that of the anti-hero, among which the choice of who the protagonist is, good or bad, depends only on
from the perspective one assumes regarding history (thus if for the Catholic world the crusaders are
they can be defined as good heroes, for the Muslim world the situation is exactly
overturned).
The struggle is therefore the central moment of every narrative, but for there to be a struggle, it is necessary that we...
Let there be arms, that the hero possesses the means to defeat the antagonist. The hero can acquire them by himself.
These means (the horse, the armor, a magic sword) can be received as a gift from a third party.
character, the donator.
So every fairy tale is, on one hand, the story of the actions taken by the subject to remove a
lack, on the other hand, smaller, is the story of the ways in which the protagonist obtains the
means to be able to do it. Underneath every story, there is thus a logic of ends and means, of a
objective to be achieved and ways to reach that objective (double logic expressed)
completely our way of thinking and making sense of things).
Another aspect to highlight is that within fairy tales there is always a spatial displacement,
a journey: to defeat the antagonist, the subject must go somewhere else, must
leave, move away from one's own space and face a new, other space, where the
main actions, namely the acquisition of means and then the decisive fight with the antagonist. The stories
myths always tell us about subjects who traverse new places, where the journey is to be understood
as a form of knowledge (those who travel are someone who learns by taking risks), expressed by the two

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 University of Palermo, Semiotics Handout, academic year 2008-09, Prof. Gianfranco Marrone

fundamental functions of departure and return (consider the case of the Odyssey, entirely
centered on the return.
Another aspect to highlight is that the removal of the lack does not close the story: if everything
if they ended in a return to an initial situation, fairy tales would be rather boring. The fairy tales in
realities tell two parallel stories: on one side a story that has to do with a dimension
social, with the community (a family, a people, a kingdom); on the other hand, an individual story, the
the story of the hero who, at the end of the tale (after having accomplished actions, having departed and
having returned home), finds himself profoundly transformed. And this transformation is due to the
the fact that in every story the hero must at least face three types of trials, which can be summarized as follows:
1. must find the means to defeat the antagonist (Qualifying test);
2. must defeat him (Decisive test);
It must be recognized exactly as the one who has managed to carry out those actions.
(Glorifying test).
It is one of the great trials of the hero: the qualifying test is the moment when the hero acquires
the skill (acquire a weapon, equip with a magical means, learn a spell) in order to
to confront his antagonist; the decisive test is the one in which the protagonist faces the enemy; the
the glorifying test is the moment of social recognition of the protagonist as a hero, that is
as the one who has actually defeated the villain of the story and removed the lack.
It is not enough, therefore, for the hero to have known how to defeat the antagonist; he must also demonstrate it.
In fairy tales, there is always a theatrical situation, where the protagonist confronts something for the third time.
with someone else (in a clash between appearing and being), to prove to be the hero: the hero,
In short, it must be recognized as such (e.g. Ulysses returning to Ithaca incognito and must
demonstrate their identity). This recognition is possible thanks to a sign, a trace, for
for example, a scar that the hero has sustained following the fight, which allows to recognize the true
hero of the story, against a whole series of false heroes who would like to attribute to themselves his merits.

The fairy tale, therefore, has a dual structure. (i) A circular structure, which concerns the
social dimension: the story concludes with a return to the initial balance (balance-breakage-
(ii) a linear structure, which instead concerns the individual history of the protagonist:
the hero must transform. At the end of the story, the hero is not the same as they were at the beginning,
he gets married, becomes rich, is somehow rewarded for his actions. This
the social recognition of its role is linked to its final function, which indeed manifests the
award recognized for the protagonist and the change in their status compared to the beginning of
event

The innovativeness of the Proppian model lies in the identification of the monotopic structure.
of the fairy tale: fairy tales all have the same structure, understood as a series of functions that
they all happen in the same order. Therefore, we should not confuse, to put it with Hjelmslev,
the substance with the shape of fairy tales: in every fairy tale there can be countless journeys, departures,
returns, struggles, tasks, but the departure function is only one and it refers to the action of leaving
following the damage. There may also be departures prior to the damage, but
they are not real departures, which perform such a function in the overall economy of
story. The names that identify the functions, in fact, should not be understood literally, but in a sense
structural: thus the functionality is what is given at the end, when the hero is recognized
socially as such and rewarded, and does not necessarily coincide with actual weddings.
Moreover, it should be clarified that not all functions are present in every fairy tale. The thirty-one
Proppian functions have been identified according to an inductive approach (starting from many
fairy tales have reconstructed a common model); but it is not said that they can all be found in one fairy tale,
when the inverse work of deductive type is carried out (from the general model to the analysis of the individual
fairy tale).

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 University of Palermo, Semiotics Handbook, academic year 2008-09, Prof. Gianfranco Marrone

It can happen that some of these functions are not told (due to the mechanism
of the ellipse), but they should still be intuitive and perfectly understandable to anyone
listener, as happens in everyday conversations (e.g. "the phone rang and Piero has
said that..." - it is obvious that I answered the phone). This scheme is a deep skeleton that gives us
allows us to understand a story, even if it is not told to us in detail.
For this, it is necessary to distinguish between the fairy tale text (the fairy tale itself) and its structure.
deeply formal in nature (the model that allows us to understand it, and which more generally accounts for
of our ways of constructing meanings and attributing sense to our existences).

The spheres of action

In addition to the thirty-one functions, Propp also identifies seven spheres of action.

antagonist
donor
assistant
princess or king
principal
hero
false hero

These spheres of action, a sort of archetypal characters, should not be confused with concrete characters.
of a fairy tale. It may happen that each character corresponds to a sphere of action (for example
the hero is Prince Ivan who goes to defeat the villain, the antagonist is the dragon that kidnaps the
princess, for whom there is a one-to-one identification between sphere of action and character), but can
It can also happen that multiple characters correspond to an action sphere (for example in
in many fairy tales, there are three heroes: the first brother sets off, then the second, and then the third or
they all leave at the same time); and so, the villain is not necessarily just one, he can
also be a group of people who perform the same narrative role. It may also be the
the opposite case, in which the same character can embody multiple narrative roles. For example, there are
cases in which the protagonist of the story (defined hero/victim) is both the hero and, simultaneously,
the one who has suffered the damage. It is therefore important to distinguish narrative roles, or spheres of action, from
concrete characters that populate the story, keeping in mind that there is not necessarily among them
a one-to-one correspondence.

The analysis of the fairy tale. An example

Let's conduct a deductive experiment and apply Propp's model of functions.
narrative and spheres of action to a fairy tale. It is a fairy tale by Aleksandr Afanasyev that is
considered by ethnologists as a tale of customs, "The Queen Lutenist". Already from the title emerges
An interesting first aspect, since the luthier must be understood in the context of the culture of the time,
as a male character, necessarily a man who plays the lute. So already the title
proposes a dual path: one concerning a queen and the other a lutenist.

The lute queen

In a certain kingdom, in a certain state, there was once a king and a queen; after having lived with her for quite a while
time, the king thought of going to that distant country where Christ was crucified. He gave orders to the ministers,
He took leave from his wife and set out on his way. He goes and goes, arriving in the distant land where Christ had been.
crucifix; and in that land there reigned a cursed sovereign at that time. As soon as the king saw, he ordered him to be taken.
and to put him in jail. In his prisons there was a bunch of prisoners of all kinds; at night they were kept in
chains, and in the morning the cursed sovereign placed a yoke on them and made them plow the fields until evening. Three years
he lived in those sufferings, and did not know how to get out of them, how to inform the queen about himself. Until,
having found the opportunity, she wrote him a little letter: 'Sell all our belongings, - she writes, - and come to redeem me from the
slavery.
After receiving the letter, the queen read it and cried: - How will I redeem the king? If I go, the cursed sovereign
he sees me and takes me as his wife; I could send the ministers, but I don't trust them! - What did he then come up with?

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 University of Palermo, Semiotics Handbook, academic year 2008-09, Prof. Gianfranco Marrone

She cut her blonde braids, dressed as a musician, took a lute, and without telling anyone began that
long journey. He arrives in the courtyard of the cursed sovereign, and plays the lute; he played it so well that one could not help
they would be tired of listening to it for centuries. As soon as the sovereign heard that wonderful music, he immediately gave orders
to call the luthier to the palace. - Greetings, luthier! From what land are you, from what kingdom? - asks the sovereign.
The luthier replies: - Since I was little, I have traveled the world, Your Majesty, to bring joy to the people; and thus I feed myself. - It remains to
me; stop for one day, two, three; I will give you a generous reward -. The lutenist stayed; play before the king all the
day, and he is never tired of listening. What wonderful music! every boredom, every sadness
they disappear.
The luthier stayed with the sovereign for three days, and then went to greet him. - How will I reward your work? - he asks.
The king. - Sovereign, gift me one of your slaves, you have many in the prisons; and I need a companion
on the road. I go to foreign lands and sometimes I don't know who to exchange a word with. - Please, choose that
What you like! - said the sovereign, and he accompanied him to the dungeons. The lutenist looked at the prisoners, chose the king.
slave, and together they set off on a journey. They approached their state, and the king said: - Free me, good man!
Know that I am not a simple prisoner, but a king; take whatever ransom you want: I will not regret it.
neither money nor servants. - Go with God, - says the luthier, - I do not need your things. - Well, at least be mine.
guest. - The moment will come that I will come -. Here they said goodbye and left, each one to their own path.
The queen, running down a side street, hurried home before her husband, took off her lute player dress and
dressed properly. An hour later the courtiers start running, shouting: the king has arrived! The queen approaches him
He greeted everyone, but she doesn't even look at him. He greets all the ministers and says: - Look,
Gentlemen, what a wife I have! Now she throws herself around my neck, but when I was a prisoner, and I wrote to her to sell
all the goods and to redeem myself, I believe that he did nothing. So what did he think? Or maybe he had
Forgot the husband? - The ministers reported to the king: - Your Majesty! As soon as the queen received your
letter, that same day disappeared, and during all this time has remained hidden who knows where; it has
represented at the palace only today.
The tsar got enraged and ordered: - Ministers! judge my unfaithful bride according to justice and
truth. Where has it gone around the world? why didn't it want to redeem me? You would never see it again
your king, had he not been a young lutenist, I will pray to God for him; I would not mind giving him half of the
my realm -. In the meantime, the queen, having gone to dress as a lute player, had gone out into the courtyard and had begun to
to play the lute. The king heard it, ran to the musician, took him by the hand, and led him into the palace, and said
to his courtiers: - Here is the lutenist who rescued me from slavery! - He threw off his overcoat, and everyone
They immediately recognized the queen. The king was overjoyed, he offered a banquet in celebration, and they made merry.
entire week.

(by Aleksandr N. Afanasyev, Ancient Russian Tales, Turin, Einaudi 1953)

The story is very simple, the fairy tale is as follows: there are a king and queen who live in a place
Far away, the fairy tale says, 'Once upon a time there was a king and a queen. After living with her for quite some time
time, the king decided to go to that distant land where Christ was crucified.
One of the first questions we ask ourselves is: why? What we immediately wonder is the
motivation of the action, but the text does not provide it. Each of us can choose to attribute it
one (he was a crusader, he was leaving to fight against the enemies of Christianity etc.), but this for the
At the moment we are not interested, since the motivations for actions, as Propp highlighted, do not
They are invariant elements. Rather, what should strike us is something else: we have a departure.
But is this the departure function? Looking closely, no, because the departure function must be
after the damage, which we can recognize in the imprisonment of the king by a sovereign
Bad: "Needless to say, as soon as he sees the king, he takes him prisoner and throws him in jail."
Before proceeding, it must be clarified that to analyze any narrative we need to know first
how it will end. Once again, the analysis of a text should not be confused with its enjoyment
aesthetic.
The king, taken prisoner by the cursed sovereign, is desperate. At a certain point, he sends a letter to the
wife and asks her to sell all her belongings and send someone there to redeem him. The wife receives
the letter reflects on it. All in all, she does not trust her ministers; if she were to leave, the sovereign
could imprison her, as the wife of the king. The queen then decides to go to the aid of the
husband dressing up as a lute player: he dresses up as a musician and leaves. He arrives in the kingdom of the sovereign
cursed, he enchants her with his sound and the sovereign is so captivated that he promises her in return
whatever it is: obviously the lute player requests the release of the king. On the way back, the lute player and the

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 University of Palermo, Semiotics Handout, academic year 2008-09, Prof. Gianfranco Marrone

they travel a stretch of road together and the sovereign asks how he can reward him for the favor;
the queen, always in disguise, tells him she wants nothing and goes her own way.
The story is apparently a bit strange. For example, we wonder why the queen does not reveal.
her identity after freeing her husband? In reality, what is important is that the fairy tale, from a
From a structural point of view, it could not have concluded with the liberation of the king and the revelation.
of the queen, because otherwise it would have had a circular structure, meaning the story would have been
returned exactly to the initial situation (the two would have gone home and in the end the king would have)
bored again and would have left). And instead, as we have seen, the hero must transform.
What is the individual reason for the queen's behavior? The text does not tell us; but we can infer.
What is the structural reason: she needs to transform.
Let's see what the queen's journey is. It is she who receives the letter with the request for help; it is she
thus the hero of the story. Then he needs a supply: as a woman, she cannot go to the sovereign,
she must find a way (skill), and for this, she comes up with the disguise that will allow her to
changing sex and role. Playing in front of the evil king, finally, represents the moment of the struggle,
followed by the victory over the anti-subject, expressed by the words of the sovereign who, enchanted, her
asks what he wants in return. The husband's ministers, on the other hand, play the role of false heroes, as
they hinder the recognition of the hero, throwing discredit on the queen.
As in many fairy tales, we notice that a split of planes occurs: on one side the plane
of appearance, on the other hand, the plane of being. Disguises entail this double level, for
to whom every action makes sense now on the plane of being, now on that of pure appearance. All the
The queen's actions are worth something because she is a queen and a little because she is a lutenist.
The glorifying test is the moment when one must break this ambiguity between being and appearing and
it is necessary to reveal the truth: the queen must prove that she is the hero of the story, along with the queen and
guitarist. He must demonstrate that he has been able to change status, that he has been able to solve a problem,
not only positioning herself as a hero, but also as the instigator (it was her idea to set out to save the
husband) and of donor (she equipped herself with the disguise alone)
But why didn't she reveal herself right after her husband's release? To understand the reasons.
we must think in a structured way, that is, by relating the various moments of
fairy tale.
Once freed, the king turns to the lute player to reward him: "Know that I am not a simple
prisoner but a king, take whatever you want as ransom, I will not regret either money or servants,
The lute player refuses, saying: "Go with God, I don't need your stuff" and he insists, "but at least mine
"guest" and she "will come the moment I arrive" "here they said goodbye and went away each for the
own way.
At the end of the story, then, the king, back home, turns against his wife and recalls the generous action.
from the lutenist: "gentlemen ministers, judge my unfaithful bride according to justice and truth? Where has she gone?
and goes around the world? Why didn't he want to redeem me?” and then he says “never again would you
I have revised your king, if it had not been for a young lutenist, I will pray to God for him," but then he says
I wouldn't mind giving him half of my kingdom either. "It's at that point that, in the meantime, the
Regina went to dress as a lute player and began to play. The king heard her, ran to meet her, and took her.
by hand, he led him into the palace, and said to his courtiers: here is the lute player who has brought me into
slavery! He threw away the dress and everyone recognized the queen.
We clearly recognize the unmasking of the false hero and especially the identification.
of the hero. The hero is recognized after he has completed another trial, he has played again. It is at
What a moment when the queen strips off the clothes of a lute player in front of everyone and reveals her true identity.
It should also be noted that the queen disguises herself as a lute player only after the King says that he
he would have given half of his kingdom. In short, we seem to be able to identify in this fairy tale a
story of female redemption: at the end of the fairy tale, the queen is no longer simply the wife of
But the owner of half of his kingdom. Here is the individual transformation of the hero completed.

Propp and Structuralism

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 University of Palermo, Semiotics Handbook, academic year 2008-09, Prof. Gianfranco Marrone

The Morphology of the Fairy Tale was written by Propp in 1928, but for various reasons it was not for a long time.
surpasses the borders of Russia, remaining unknown abroad. Only thanks to the interest of the
linguist Roman Jakobson and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who met at Harvard, the work
was translated (in 1958) into English and finally became famous internationally.
Lévi-Strauss is struck by reading this text, as he realizes that Propp, already 30
Years earlier, he had reached the same conclusions he had arrived at studying the myths of the Native Americans.
Revisiting Propp's scheme, Lévi-Strauss highlights how the author distinguished some levels.
relevant within the narrative: there is a surface level (the fairy tale text), that is the fairy tale
a true one that we can read, listen to, of which we have an empirical experience; then there is a
second level, that of functions, traceable through a reduction operation from
variable elements (many) to the invariant elements (few). And there is a third level, which Propp himself
it had identified as a fairy-tale movement: damage, removal of the damage,
wedding.
Therefore, each fairy tale can be analyzed on three levels:
Level 1 text
Level 2 functions
Level 3 movement
Lévi-Strauss, moreover, recognizing the validity of the Proppian narrative model, argued that the
possibility of extending this method to the entire narrative universe.

Propp, narration, semiotics

This hypothesis was supported and advanced by Hjelmslev and Greimas, according to whom the form
the content has a narrative structure and can be understood precisely only through the
reference to narrativity. And this concerns not only the form of the content of works, stories or
artistic manifestations, but it concerns more generally the structure of our experience itself:
Any meaningful human experience is based on a narrative structure.
In fact, the value of the proppian model lies in having identified a logical structure (on which it
it founds the story) that is only apparently linked to abstract literary issues, since in reality
allows us to understand how our way of giving meaning to things, to the world, to
people, to relationships and to our entire experience.
Based on Propp's studies on Russian fairy tales and the possibility of extending its logic to others
fields of investigation highlighted by Lévi-Strauss, in France in the 1960s, a group of scholars (among
Cui Eco, Barthes, Genette, Todorov, Greimas) has deepened the study of narrativity, showing
the relevance of such a model in the study of very different cultural products. It arises
Thus, "The Analysis of the Narrative," a collection of essays in which narrative models have been used to
studying rather heterogeneous objects, from the stories of James Bond, on which Eco worked, to myths
studied by Greimas, going through the analysis of an epistolary novel done by Todorov, an essay of
Genette on Aristotle's poetics or a Metz analysis of a film text.
In these essays, for the first time, the equivalence between the structure of the stories has been established.
folklorists and the structure of mass media stories, and it has been clarified how the model of the
narrativity can be applied equally to both great aesthetic narratives and to
newspapers, to the films, to the stories of James Bond, proving that the structure of the fairy tale represents roughly
how to structure any narrative.
This does not mean placing a great literary work on the same level as a journalistic article, but
it means recognizing that both can be studied according to the same model, for
the narrative note.

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