Fairy Tales, Tragedies and World Histories

The first version of this paper was given as a lecture in the spring of 1975 at the University of Geneva. Further reflections on narrative modeling came from a period of work sponsored by NSF grant;:7806707 to the Center of International Studies at M.I.T. To the many contributors to its several revisions, I am profoundly indebted. Wendy Lehnert’s plot unit codings are also gratefully acknowledged. Of course none of the above is responsible for the views expressed here.

Jay W. Forrester, World Dynamics, Wright-Allen Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1971, Chapter 2 is entitled “Structure of the World System,” while Chapter 4, titled “Limits to Growth,” provides a key concept in subsequent debates.

Relevant commentaries included Karl W. Deutsch, Bruno Fritsch, Helio Jaguaribe, Andrei S. Markovitz (eds.), Problems of World Modeling: Political and Social Implications, Ballinger, Cambridge, Mass., 1977

Christopher Freeman and Marie Jahoda (eds.). World Futures: The Great Debate, Martin Robinson. London, 1978

Donella Meadows, John Richardson, and Gerhart Bruckmann, Groping in the Dark: The First Decade in Global Modelling, John Wiley, New York, 1982.

Published originally in 1949 in France (second revised edition, 1966), this work was described at its original thesis evaluation as “an epoch in world historiography.” Based on the second revised edition, translated by Sian Reynolds, the English version, The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, appeared in 1972.

Samuel Kinser, “Annaliste Paradigm?”, American Historical Review, vol. 86. no. 1 (1981), pp. 63–105, gives the citation for this quote at p. 103f. His otherwise bibliographically rich review of Braudel’s influence makes no mention, however, of Braudel’s considerable following among radical economists, sociologists or political scientists.

A rich body of relevant citations are given in Joshua Goldstein, Long Cycles in War and Economic Growth, Ph, D. dissertation, M.I.T.. 1986.

Three especially relevant alternative theoretical treatments of many of the same issues are Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History, Penguin, London. 1964

Richard Ashley, The Political Economy of War and Peace, Francis Pinter, London, 1980; and

Johan Galtung, The True Worlds, The Free Press, New York, 1980.

Compare the somewhat similar treatment of the compulsive appeals of communist, democratic nationalist, and fascist “myths” in Chapters 2 and 11 of Harold D. Lasswell’s pioneering World Politics and Personal Insecurity, originally published in 1934, reprinted in H.D, Lasswell, C.E. Merriam and T.V. Smith, A Study of Power, The Free Press, Glencoe, 1950. This book is also relevant to the highly dangerous myths about invincibility in total, including nuclear, war. Selected quotes include: [In a war crisis] The flight into action is preferable to treatments of insecurity; the flight into danger becomes an insecurity to end insecurity.” (p. 75) “The dash into... the war pattern offers supposed opportunites for the... release of the blocked aggressions. The war crisis proceeds by redefining th world in terms of... impending dangers.” (p. 82f.)

Ashley Montagu (ed.), at p. vii of his forward to Toynbee and History: Critical Essays and Reviews, Porter Sargent, Boston, 1956. The original study, published in parts by Oxford University Press, London, 193-1-1954, contains 10 volumes. D. C. Somervell’s abridgement in 2 volumes, Oxford University Press, London, 1960, has an especially analytical summary of Toynbee’s “Argument,” pp. 355–393 of the second volume, which makes clear the strong, but now neglected ecological themes in Toynbee’s work.

The role of “models of men” (and women!) in research paradigm complexes is argued in both my “Logics, Dialectics, Politics,” in Hayward R. Alker, Jr., (ed.), Dialectical Logics for the Political Sciences, Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, Volume 7, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1982, pp. 65–94, and Hayward R. Alker, Jr., and Roger Hurwitz, Resolving Prisoner’s Dilemmas, Test Edition, American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., 1980, Chapter 2.

These arguments are reviewed and supported in my “The Dialectical Logic of Thucydides’ Melian Logic,” paper presented at the 1980 meeting of the International Studies Association, Los Angeles.

In my terminology here I make reference to Imre Lakatos’ impressive “rational reconstruction” of Kuhnian philosophy of science, i.e. his “sophisticated methodological falsificationism”, as further developed and criticized in my “Logic, Dialectics and Politics,” loc. cit.

Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vol. 1, Academic Press, New York, 1974. p. 8.

Daniel Schneider has in preparation the only adequate bibliography of these subjects I know. A good start, however, is Robert de Beaugrande and Wolfgang Dressier, Introduction to Text Linguistics, Longman, London and New York, 1981. It should be added that the most technically sophisticated treatments of normatively relevant, sometimes script-based understanding come from speech act philosophers, social psychologists, experts in cross-cultural communication and computationally-oriented linguists; they arc major constituent groups within the new research paradigm complexes of cognitive science and text linguistics. In this introductory review of some of their work, many complexities will not be given their due. Of course doing so is necessary if the scientific promise of these lines of inquiry for history, political science and international studies is to be fulfilled.

Johann Georg von Hahn listed various formulas of folk narratives in 1864, and afterwards; Otto Rank published his psychoanalytic The Myth of the Birth of the Hero in 1909; both writers are briefly discussed in Alan Dundes’ introduction to Lord Raglan, “The Hero of Tradition’ pp. 142–157 in Dundes (ed.), The Study of Folklore, Prenctice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965.

Also cited by Dundes (and many others), V. Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, originally appeared in Russian in 1928, The second edition revised is currently published by the University of Texas, Austin and London, 1977.

For Karl Deutsch’s seminal contributions to this alternative to the realist tradition, see Richard Merritt and Bruce M. Russett (eds.), From National Development to Global Community, Allen and Unwin, London, 1981, especially the chapter by Arendt Lijphart. By way of productive contrast, see also Johann Galtung, The True Worlds, op. cit.

Roman Jakobson, “Commentary,” in Russian Fairy Tales, collected by Atexkandr Afanas’ev and translated by Norbert Guterman, Pantheon Books, Now York, 1973, at p. 636f.

Ibid. Unfortunately, the Pantheon edition does not give numbers corresponding to those cited by even the second revised edition of Propp’s study.

Propp, op. cit., p. 64ff, p. 105f, p. 128ff. The same source is used for the quotations in the next several paragraphs.

Jean M. Mandler and Nancy S. Johnson, “Remembrance of Things Parsed: Story Structure and Recall,” Cognitive Psychology, vol.9 (1977).

pp.111 151, The origins of this rigorous form of story grammar in Chomsky’s transformational syntax, and problems of properly adapting his formalisms to semantic content are ably discussed in Marie-Laure Ryan, “Linguistic Models in Narratology: From Structuralism to Generative Semantics,” Semiotica, 28-1/2, 1979, pp. 127–155; in particular, note her critique of Gerald Prince’s very early Chomskean A Grammar of Stories, Mouton, The Hague, 1973.

Mandler and Johnson, op. cit., p. lia.

Propp. op. cit., p. 111. The next quote is from p. 114.

Ibid., p. 112.

Ibid., p. 78.

On the role of this Leibnizian perspective in communitarian theory, see my “From Political Cybernetics to Global Modeling,” in Merritt and Russett (eds.), op. cit.

Jean M. Mandler and Nancy S. Johnson, “On Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater,” Cognitive Science, vol. 4 (1980), pp. 305 312

a response to John B. Black and Robert Wilensky, “An Evaluation of Story Grammars,” Cognitive Science, Vol. 3 (1979). pp. 213 230, which gives a provocative Chomskean argument for the necessity of context sensitivity in the construction of adequate story grammars.

J.R. Meehan, “The Metanovel: Writing Stories by Computer,” Department of Computer Science Research Report 74, Yale University, New Haven, 1976

Wendy G. Lehnert, “Plot Units and Narrative Summarization.” Cognitive Science, Vol. 4 (1981), pp. 293–331. Both Meehan and Lehnert are Schank students.

See also literature by Carbonell and Dyer generated by Roger Schank and Robert Abelson. Scripts, Pians, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Hitman Knowledge Structures, Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ., 1977.

See the citations of the previous two footnotes, plus Wendy C. Lehnert, Hayward R. Alker, Jr. and Daniel K. Schneider, “The Heroic Jesus: The Affective Plot Structure of Toynbee’s Christus Patiens, Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Computers and the Humanities, Raleigh, North Carolina. 1983. Also, the entire issue of Quademi di Ricerca Linguistica, 46 (1985).

Wendy G. Lehnert, John B. Black, and Brian J. Reiser, “Summarizing Narratives,” mimeo, 1981.

Propp, op. cit., pp. 112–115 for this and the remaining quotations of this paragraph.

Jakobson, op. cit., p. 650f for each quotation in this paragraph.

In a chapter on “Holism and Internal Relations,” Nicholas F. Gier argues (p. 89) that “Wittgenstein believes that all necessity is ‘grammatical’ and is not tied to formal logic...” Unlike logical proposions, grammatical propositions are always synthetic a priori. He then goes on, frontispiece to next chapter, p. 91, to provide quotes that convey much of the Leibniz-Propp-Jakobson perspective of the present paper: “So in philosophy all that is not gas is grammar.” “Essence is expressed by grammar.” “Philosophy as the custodian of grammar can in fact grasp the essence of the world, only not in the propositions of language, but in the rules for this language which exclude nonsensical combinations of signs.” Nicholas F. Gier, Wittgenstein and Phenomenology: A Comparative Study of the Later Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1981.

Jakobson, op. cit., p. 641.

See Harold and Margaret Sprout, The Ecological Perspective on Human Affairs, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1965.

Northrop Frye. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton University Press. Princeton, New Jersey. 1971. The distinction between tragic and comic fictional modes is first made on p. 35 of the first essay, “Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes,” and developed further in that essay, as we shall see below.

Bradley Berke, Tragic Thought and the Grammar of Tragic Myth, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1982. Berke’s most general remarks on tragic thought, which I shall refer to on several occasions, occur in his first chapter, “Tragic Thought.” The quotation reproduced above is from page 9.

Berke’s analysis of Romeo and Juliet is centered around the technical analysis summarized my Figures 3 and 4 below, derived from his pp. 66–73. Tzvetan Todorov, Grammaire du Decameron. Mouton, the Hague, 1969, is obviously one of Berke’s exemplars. Todorov’s earlier work cites Propp, Greimas, Breymond and J. Harris (a transformational grammarian and teacher of Chomsky) as relevant studies earlier than his own. The most thorough review and extension of this post-Propp, largely French literature is probably still

Claude Breymond, Logique du Récit, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1973.

Berke’s reference to Nirvana occurs on p. 14f.

Frye. op. cit., pp. 33–52.

Compare Frye with the complementary views of Joseph Campbell. Occidental judgment is founded on a total misunderstanding of the realities depicted in the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedies of redemption. These, in the ancient world, were regarded as of higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more diffcult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. … Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1972, p. 28.

The implied criticisms here and the examples of the next paragraph are of course illustrative, not exhaustive nor fully developed. In addition to the critical studies of global modeling efforts and Toynbee’s magnum opus mentioned in notes 2 and 6 above, I would like to cite as directly relevant to the discussion of Marxist themes in the present paper; the selected, translated papers of Ernst Bloch, in 4 volumes; Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1969, especially the Marxian dramatist grammar of pp. 211-214

Harold Rosenberg. “The Heroes of Marxist Science,” in his The Tradition of the New, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1965, pp. 78–197

Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1979; and the extremely suggestive analysis of the internal ties between Marx’s several volumes of poetry (!) and his later work in

Leonard P. Wessell, Jr., Karl Marx, Romantic Irony, and the Proletariat: The Mythopoetic Origins of Marxism, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge and London, 1979.

Hayden White, “Interpretation in History,” Chapter 2 in his Tropics of Discourse, Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 1978

Paul Ricoeur, “The Narrative Function,” Chapter 11 in his Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, edited and translated by John B. Thompson, Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Cambridge and Paris, 1981. Both authors cite Aristotle, Gallie. Frye; Ricoeur cites White as well.

Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Volume 6, Annex entitled “Christus Pattens.” An 87 element scripted account of the heroic Jesus story, not closely fitting to Propp’s list, but inclusive of almost all elements in Table 6, has been analyzed in Lehnert, Alker and Schneider, op. cit., on the basis of suggestions contained in an earlier version of this paper. Lehnert’s plot unit summarization techniques appear to work well, suggesting Toynbee’s Jesus to be radically political, revolting against authorities seen to be departing from the laws of God.

Ernest op. cit. This paper is discussed comparatively in Joshua Goldstein, op. cit.