Simple Forms: Legend, Saga, Myth, Riddle, Saying, Case, Memorabile, Fairy Tale, Joke by André Jolles (review)

André Jolles's Simple Forms, first published in German in 1929, is one of the twentieth century's seminal contributions to morphological genre analysis. In terms of importance, it stands shoulder to shoulder with Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928), with which it shares a principal objective—to grasp the fundamental character of literary forms by distinguishing that which is variable and changeable in specific manifestations of a form from that which remains constant and may therefore be regarded as essential. Yet Jolles's morphology is very different from Propp's. Propp sought to isolate fundamental sequences of narrative development; Jolles's objective is to identify the "mental dispositions" that give rise to the recurrent and enduring structures of language that he calls "simple forms" (27).

Readers of Marvels & Tales will perhaps turn first to Jolles's chapter on fairy tales, and they will find a compelling disquisition on the genre. Here Jolles gives an account of a dispute between Achim von Arnim and Jacob Grimm in which Arnim tasks Grimm with having altered the stories in his collection despite his best intentions to be faithful to his sources. Grimm responds by arguing that though superficial alterations may have been made "nothing at all has been added to or changed in the thing itself" (182)—an argument that effectively underlines Jolles's own distinction between "simple forms" ("the thing itself") and superficially changing variations—or "actualizations" of the simple form (36–37). Jolles also proceeds to define this "thing itself" by offering a compelling account of the mental disposition that gives rise to the fairy tale. What need do fairy tales satisfy? Jolles asks. Conventionally, it is thought that they are moral fictions and that morality is therefore the motive for the creation of fairy tales. But fairy tales, for Jolles, are not moral in the ethical sense: "[I]s Snow White so very virtuous," he wonders, "or [is] the Prince who goes about kissing sleeping girls at the drop of a hat?" (193). Rather, in Jolles's conception, the fairy tale arises to satisfy human perceptions of what "should happen in the world" but frequently doesn't because of the injustice of harsh reality (193). Thus, though there is nothing immoral in a fact that the Miller's son in "Puss in Boots" inherits only a cat, the situation nonetheless "gives us a sense of injustice and a feeling that this injustice must be corrected" (193). Fairy tales, therefore, reflect a mental disposition towards "naive morality" (194)—a judgment of feeling about how things ought to be in terms of natural justice.

The chapter on the fairy tale shows Jolles at his most persuasive. His study is not always so consistent, however. As Fredric Jameson observes in his excellent foreword, Jolles is frequently "thinking aloud" and the result is an uneven study, composed of striking insights, half-finished (or unfinishable) thoughts, and cryptic, sometimes opaque, speculations (viii). Many of the preoccupations of Jolles's study, moreover, are distinctly of their time. His assumption that stories have ur-forms that are in some way more authentic than the messy realities of folk storytelling risks tidying the individual performer out of existence. Also problematic is Jolles's dependence upon a relatively narrow sample of evidence. His description of the legend, for instance, is based exclusively upon a collection of Catholic legends from the mid-thirteenth century. Jolles recognizes this limitation, and is troubled by it, since he dwells upon this problem at length in his conclusion. But the problem is never resolved and remains a weakness in his methodology. In fact, Jolles ends up describing, not universal forms, but forms that are specific to Europe in a particular period of European history.

Jolles's study is also a difficult one for readers because it is of its time in another sense, too. Four years after the publication of...