Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook

Oedipus in the Light of Folklore

Oedipus in the Light of Folklore Vladimir Propp The name of Vladimir Propp is well known to folklorists for his pioneering work of 1928, The Morphology of the Folktale, which brought structuralism to the study offolk narrative. Few people realize that Propp, Professor ofFolklore at the University ofLeningrad , also wrote the first major folkloristic essay on the Oedipus story. Published in 1944, it was translated into Italian in 1975, but it remains largely unknown. In reading Propp's essay, one must keep in mind his theoretical bias. Propp accepted the notion of a universal evolution ofhuman society. According to his views, society progressedfrom aprimitive state to a civilized one. This unilinear evolutionary theory, so popular in Europe in the late nineteenth century, assumed that modern "primitive" peoples, e.g., in Africa, represented earlier stages in the evolutionary scale. This is why Propp attaches special significance to a Zulu Oedipal story (though the story's relationship to AarneThompson tale type 931 is tangential). For Propp, the Zulu version represents a form of the Oedipus story earlier than the ancient Greek. Propp also assumes that human societies evolved from an initial state ofmatriliny to a later state ofpatriliny. Propp's view of Oedipus is that the tale represents the historical clash of two conReprinted from Ucenye zapiski Leningradskogo gosudarstvennogo universilela, Serija filologiceskich 72 (1944), fasc. 9, pp. 138- 175. We are greatly indebted to folklorist Polly Coote fpr translating Propp's essay into English. We also appreciate Johanna Albi's translation of the Italian version of the essay into English. 76 Oedipus in the Light of Folklore 77 j1icting social orders, one matrilineal, in which succession to the throne is achieved by the son-in-law who kills his father-in-law, the old king, and the other patrilineal. Accordingly, in the later evolutionary stage, it is a son who succeeds his father rather than a sonin -law who replaced his father-in-law. Regardless ofthe validity of such theories that matriarchy everywhere precedes patriarchy, Propp's skillful and magisterial application of the comparative method is a landmark in Oedipus scholarship. We present here a translation from the original Russian with the addition ofslight changes made by Proppfor the Italian translation. For details of Propp's life, see Reinhard Breymayer, "Vladimir lakovlevic Propp (1895-1970)-Leben, Wirken and Bedeutsamkeit ," Linguistica Biblica 15/16 (April, 1972), 36-66, and Isidor Levin, "Vladimir Propp: an evaluation on his seventieth birthday," Journal of the Folklore Institute, 4 (1967), 32-49. Methodological Premises The relationship between folklore and historical reality is one of the most important problems in folkloristics. The object of studying this relationship, however, is not to discover correspondences between particular elements offolklore and individual events in the historical past, but rather to find in history the causes that produced folklore as a whole as well as individual tale types. The problem of finding historical origins is relatively easily solved if an item in folklore such as a tale directly reflects the past. For example, in many cases one can successfully show that forms of wooing in folklore correspond to forms of marriage that previously existed and have since disappeared. The problem becomes more difficult when we encounter motifs and tale types in folklore that clearly cannot be traced directly to historical reality. Such things as winged horses, magic pipes, clashing mountains, one-eyed giants, and so on, never existed. In these cases either the past has been obscured and deformed, or the motif has been created by some processes of imagination as yet insufficiently investigated and understood . 78 Vladimir Propp The broad study of folklore in historical perspective shows that as in the course of time the new ways of life created by historical development, new economic conditions, and new forms of social relationships penetrate into folklore, the old does not always die out and is not always supplanted by the new. The old continues to coexist with the new, parallel to it, orforming with it various imaginary hybrid combinations impossible both in nature and in history. While these combinations appear to be pure fantasy, nevertheless the same ones come into being completely independent of one another wherever the historical advances that produce them take place. Thus, for example, the winged horse represents a combination of bird and horse that occurred when the cultic role of the bird was transferred to the horse following its domestication. As another example of such a combination, a fairy tale tells that the hero sees a house...