Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

plot
and narra-
tive 
discourse
. It should be noted that this distinction, like many terms developed in
this book, mirrors and to some extent simplifies a number of various parallel
categories available in the stylistics literature. With particular respect to narrative
analysis, my ordering of the elements 
plot
and 
discourse
is designed to correspond to
other comparable pairings like 
fabula
and 
sjuzhet
, 
histoire
and 
discours
, and 
story
and
discourse
. Whatever the precise terminology, the main point is that the first term in
each pair captures the abstract chronological configuration of the core elements of
plot and the second the discourse in and through which that plot is realised. The
many and varied linguistic-stylistic permutations that are afforded by narrative
discourse are covered in strands 6, 7 and 8, but in this unit the emphasis will be
strictly on narrative 
plot
. The unit begins by reviewing an important 
structuralist
model of narrative and then continues with an application of it to two narrative texts.
An important feature of the narrative schema set out in A5 was its acknowledg-
ment that narrative may be encoded in a variety of textual media, which include but
are not restricted to film, cartoon, ballad, comic strip, prose fiction and oral vernac-
ular. The two narrative texts that are to come under scrutiny here are ‘celluloid’
narratives, one film and the other animation, although both narratives have direct
counterparts in prose fiction. There will be more to say on these texts shortly, but
first to the model of analysis.
Propp’s morphology of the folktale
In what became an influential study in structuralist narratology, the Russian scholar
Vladimir Propp published in 1928 a ‘morphology’ of the fairy tale (or the ‘folktale’,
in his terms). Propp’s interest is principally in extrapolating out of a corpus of 115
actual stories a kind of blueprint for the folktale as a whole. Although this blueprint
does not constitute an analysis of any individual story, its categories are designed so
as to capture all of the possible elements available to 
any
fairy story. The result of
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B5

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the study is a finite list of 
thirty-one
narrative functions, no less, and these functions
are undertaken by 
seven
basic types of character roles.
The way Propp sets about developing his list of narrative functions is to isolate
from his corpus the recurring components of each fairy tale. Acknowledging that the
names of the particular ‘dramatis personae’ may change from story to story, Propp
argues that it is the question of 
what
a tale’s characters do that is important, not so
much 
who
does it or 
how
it is done (Propp 1966 [1928]). This orientation therefore
requires the rendering down of narratives into their raw, basic constituents,
producing a kind of grammar of narrative which is indeed indicated by the reference
to ‘morphology’ in the title of Propp’s study.
According to Propp, a tale usually begins with some sort of initial situation after
which some or all of the thirty-one narrative functions follow. The first function, for
example, is where one of the members of a family, normally the character role of
‘Hero’, absents himself from home. This ‘absentation’ (
sic
) may be precipitated by
the death of parents or by some similar calamity, whereupon the Hero may go to
war, to the forest or even, curiously, to work. The second narrative function involves
an interdiction being addressed to the Hero, normally taking the form of a warning
that danger is present and including some instruction about what 
not
to do. Following
from the interdiction is the narrative function: ‘violation of the interdiction’. For
example, in the Walt Disney cartoon