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1. the Annotated Propp The Northanger Library Project (NLP) Manuel Aguirre Tools and Frames February 2019 THE ANNOTATED PROPP 1.1 GOTHIC FICTION AND PROPP’S MORPHOLOGY OF THE FOLKTALE Manuel Aguirre, Independent scholar According to the experience of modern linguistics, language patterns exhibit a consistent regularity. The languages of the whole world manifest a paucity and relative simplicity of structural types: and at the base of all these types lie universal laws. This schematic and recurrent character of linguistic patterns finds its explanation first of all in the fact that language is a typical collective property. Similar phenomena of schematism and recurrence in the structure of folktales throughout the world have long astonished and challenged investigators. In folklore as well as in language, only a part of the similarities can be explained on the basis of common patrimony or of diffusion (migratory plots). And, since the fortuity of the other coincidences is impossible, there arises imperatively the question of structural laws that will explain all these striking coincidences, in particular, the repetitive tale plots of independent origins (Jakobson 1945).1 It is usually assumed that literature is free (or perhaps, prescriptively, should be free) from the repetitive, predictable forms that characterize folklore and instead displays (or ought to display) the richness, complexity and uniqueness which are deemed the natural appurtenances of individual creations. Because of this 1 Roman Jakobson, ‘On Russian Fairy Tales’, published as ‘Commentary’ to the 1945 edition of (a selection of) Aleksandr Afanás’ev’s Russian Fairy Tales, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Pantheon Books), 631-51, p. 640. ‘The Annotated Propp I. Gothic Fiction and Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale’ by Manuel Aguirre is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License. The Northanger Library Project (NLP) Manuel Aguirre Tools and Frames February 2019 assumption, no research has yet been carried out on the schematic and repetitive in texts which purportedly belong in the literary field yet are—the case of popular fictions such as Gothic—endowed with a degree of formulaicity. Whenever the Gothic genre fails to exhibit uniqueness—whenever, that is, it vaunts predictability—it is apt to be ear-marked as ‘poorly written’. However, the recognition of formulaic language in Gothic must lead us to questions such as, what are the structural laws—to use Jakobson’s phrase—governing the construction of Gothic texts? Could it be that Gothic authors simply aspire to a lesser degree of ‘uniqueness’ than other literary practitioners do?2 The project The Annotated Propp aims to explore the hypothesis that the Gothic occupies a ‘third space’ halfway between literature and folklore and constitutes a liminal phenomenon. For this, it offers a reappraisal of Propp’s Morphology that may subsequently be applied to Gothic tales. Building on earlier investigations into the concept of liminality as well as on formal analyses of Gothic writing, it is part of a wider project aimed at outlining what can be called the ‘grammar’ of Gothic.3 I shall write of ‘the Gothic genre’, fully aware that since the 1990s this has become a misnomer. The current view in practice restricts literary Gothic to what is, after all, the dominant literary form in the late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries—the novel; and time and again we see ‘Gothic’ identified with an all- too-brief canon of novels by Radcliffe, Lewis and a dozen others. It is of course a matter of historical record that turn-of-the-eighteenth-century Gothic included much more, as Robert Miles reminds us: [W]e are dealing, not with the rise of a single genre, but with an area of concern, a broad subject matter, crossing the genres: drama and poetry, as well as novels.4 2 On the formulaic language of Gothic see my ‘“The Hollow Echo”: Gothic Fiction and the Structure of a Formulaic Pattern,’ European Journal of English Studies 20:1 (2016), 95-110. 3 See my ‘The Lure of the Limen’, in The TRELLIS Papers 1 (2006) and ‘Liminality’ in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Jeffrey R. di Leo (Bloomsbury Publishing: London/Oxford/New York 2018), 553-54. On the role of liminality in folktales see my The Thresholds of the Tale: Liminality and the Structure of Fairytales (Madrid: The Gateway Press 2007) and ‘Mary Robinson’s “The Haunted Beach” and the Grammar of Gothic’, in Neophilologus 98:2 (2014), 1-16. See also ‘A Grammar of Gothic: Report on a Research Project on the Forms of the Gothic Genre,’ in Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780-1840, 21, http://sites.cardiff.ac.uk/romtext/files/2014/07/rt21_n07.pdf and ‘Thick Description and the Poetics of the Liminal in Gothic Tales,’ in Orbis Litterarum Universarum 72:4 (2017), 294–317. 4 Robert Miles, Gothic Writing, 1750-1820: A Genealogy. London: Routledge 1993, p. 4. For Gothic poetry see Steve Eng, ‘Supernatural Verse in English’, in Horror Literature: A Core Collection and Reference Guide, ed. Marshall B. Tymn (New York/London: R. R. Bowker Company 1981), 401-52; Joel Faflak, ‘Gothic Poetry and First-Generation Romanticism’, in Romantic Gothic, eds. Angela Wright and Dale Townshend (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2015), 95-111. ‘The Annotated Propp I. Gothic Fiction and Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale’ by Manuel Aguirre is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License. The Northanger Library Project (NLP) Manuel Aguirre Tools and Frames February 2019 But the claim Miles puts forward is that the term ‘genre’ could not possibly encompass such a multifarious variety, and the call is nowadays for a much more suitable label: Gothic is an ‘aesthetic’ (Miles 1993) or a ‘mode’.5 This of course invites an immediate abrogation of the term ‘genre’ in application to thriller, science-fiction, fantasy and many other manifestations of popular culture since these, too, straddle different genres and even media (film, television, comics, computer games). Taking the argument one notch further, is poetry a genre? Hard to defend, when we have epic, lyric and dramatic poetry, sonnets, dramatic monologues, prose poetry, poetic prose and so forth: poetry, we must conclude, is a mode since it ‘crosses several genres’.6 And what of epic? By the side of Gilgamesh and Dante’s Divina Commedia we have Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Joyce’s Ulysses, Brecht’s epic theatre, and the difficulty of conflating epic poetry, epic novel, and epic film: surely epic is a mode, too. So is drama, since it straddles a variety of genres (comedy, tragedy, etc.) and non-literary forms such as mime, masque or film. And can we speak of the novel genre in the age of the graphic novel?7 Since none of the time-hallowed genres of literature resist the test, a reductio ad absurdum imposes itself: nothing can be called a ‘genre’. Clearly, Gothic is not the problem, rather our notions of genre are. This reasoning does certainly not clear things up, but it puts paid to arguments for a modal understanding of Gothic built on the criterion of variety; yet sidestepping the genre hurdle does not get us out of trouble, and we shall return to the question of how genre is to be defined. It is another brute fact of criticism that until relatively recently the literary status of Gothic was a shaky matter. To be sure, the earlier twentieth century produced ardent defenders of it—from Summers to Varma—8 but there was also much doubt in the critical establishment as to whether Gothic did belong in the history of British For Gothic drama see Stephen Wischhusen (ed.) The Hour of One: Six Gothic Melodramas (London: Gordon Fraser 1975); Paul Ranger, ‘Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast:’ Gothic Drama in the London Patent Theatres, 1750-1820 (London: The Bath Press/The Society for Theatre Research 1991); Jeffrey N. Cox (ed.) Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789-1825 (Athens: Ohio University Press 1992); John Franceschina (ed.) Sisters of Gore: Gothic Melodramas by British Women (London: Routledge 2000). To this set one should add short prose narratives (‘true relations’, ‘fragments’, ‘tales’), such as collected in occasional anthologies like Peter Haining’s Great British Tales of Terror: Gothic Stories of Horror and Romance (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1972). 5 Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge 1995). 6 A quick Google search will easily uncover horror poetry, science-fiction poetry, detective poetry. 7 The term was given currency by Will Eisner’s comic-book volume A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories: A Graphic Novel (New York: Baronet Publishing 1978). 8 Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest (London: Fortune Press 1938); Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England (Metuchen, N.J. & London: The Scarecrow Press 1957). ‘The Annotated Propp I. Gothic Fiction and Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale’ by Manuel Aguirre is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License. The Northanger Library Project (NLP) Manuel Aguirre Tools and Frames February 2019 literature—and, in some respects, this situation has not changed much. For one example, the index for the third edition (a scant thirteen years ago) of The Longman Anthology of British Literature9 does not carry the word ‘Gothic’; two very brief fragments from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein are offered at pages 704-5 as part of a selection of excerpts headed ‘Manfred and Its Time’ (pp. 695-710). There are no references to Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, William Beckford, M. G. Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Dacre, Charles Maturin or James Hogg. In short, according to this work the Gothic novel never existed, or else it does not merit inclusion in a historical anthology of British literature.
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