The present study is about essential or generic motifs and the webs of design that keep them together in traditions of oral fable. It is concerned essentially with what fabulous motifs and patterns are, not with their origins nor with their uses in any surroundings other than their own proper ambient of oral narrative tradition. Whether the things described here are innate psychic categories or learned types of imagery is quite beside the present point, because whatever their origins might be, they are the objective fundamentals of oral fable and require to be understood in their own right, apart from anyone’s prepossessions about their ulterior utility.
Much mischief has been wrought in the study of oral narrative by treating it as if it consisted of its applications in religion, witchcraft, history, social organization, the private phantasmas and reminiscences of disturbed individuals, or a dozen other occupations of the mind beside story-telling. Oral fable is so ingenious an instrument that it is capable of many uses, but like other instruments it is not the same thing as its applications. And if it is to be thought of as an instrument of culture or social behaviour, then its instrumentality is that of a highly adaptable vehicle giving conveyance and mobility to many ideas of many kinds, and having a better record of service to the negotiation and exchange of ideas than to their selection or enforcement in particular systems of thought.
I conceive the eldest and most widespread components of oral fable to be story-patterns. I owe the phrase ‘story-pattern’ and my initial understanding of it to Albert Lord. I define a story-pattern as a traditional cluster of generic motifs, and I distinguish among such clusters two kinds, bounded and unbounded. I call the bounded kind of motival clusters themes, and I regard them as the basic small pieces of which oral fables are made, while unbounded patterns constitute the larger, as it were architectural design in oral narrative tradition. I consider generic motifs, like the fibres of a timber or the atoms in a molecule, capable of analytical separation from patterns but incapable of entering into the composition of traditional stories except as integrants of patterns, where they are held indissolubly in their orbits of association with other motifs by the powerful cohesive force of story-telling custom. Nominal motifs are the local varieties of generic motifs found in the same story-patterns, equivalents of each other like the Lamba ogre’s fruit-tree and the Hebrew Yahweh’s tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Finally, there are everywhere associated with oral fable certain interpretative traditions of diverse age and range which attach to some motifs and make them symbols. As symbols, many motifs found in fable have considerable employment outside narrative, in religious ritual for example, or in decorative art, where indeed part of a motif’s symbolic function may be as an economical or compact means of reference to the story-pattern where it belongs. In this manner some narrative motifs do achieve a more or less independent existence in other cultural processes apart from fable, and thereby form important links between fable and other kinds of reasoning. Through the symbolic links with narrative tradition which such single, ‘liberated’ motifs provide, the virtues of narrative patterning can be exploited for various philosophical and practical purposes without the demanding necessity of actually narrating whole fables every time one wants to transfer an idea traditionally maintained in fable to some department of social or intellectual activity other than story-telling.
I therefore find unacceptable the older scholarly fashion of treating as though they were the same thing motifs in oral fable and symbols in other contexts such as ritual. I find this unacceptable even when motifs and symbols reside together in exactly the same images, as they often do. A symbol is by nature a perfectly adequate purveyor of meaning in its own right whenever it passes between persons who are initiate into its symbolism. But a narrative motif by itself means nothing and cannot even be identified apart from the other motifs surrounding it in the story-patterns to which it belongs.
Moreover, when one is not privy to the symbolism of an image used symbolically, it means little or nothing, and no amount of effort will suffice to extract its symbolism from it alone, because symbolism is only meaning associated with an image and not inherent in the image itself. Contrastingly, narrative motifs in their proper patterns carry certain meanings inherent in narrative regardless of whether anyone apprehends that meaning or puts it to any extra-narrative use whatsoever. In order to use a symbol effectively, one must (as in enactments of ritual) be taught in detail exactly what it symbolizes; but to convey the generic ideas in narrative motifs one only learns to tell stories.
In summation, I consider that the meaning of a narrative image derives from its place among other narrative images, while symbolism derives from an image’s conventional associations in other spheres outside narrative. Symbolic reasoning and fabulous tradition meet in nominal motifs, but while they are complementary processes, they are not the same, for each has its own rules of procedure and composition. The long history of oral narrative tradition abundantly demonstrates how closely wed the two cultural processes of symbolic thought and story-telling have been, but it also shows how independently of each other they have functioned. The ponderously weighty symbolism of this or that nominal motif seems today to dominate the minds of a whole people, but it is gone tomorrow, while their neighbors remain oblivious to it the whole time, seeing their most precious values reflected in some other nominal motif instead. Yet both peoples will tell the same traditional tales with the same motifs, because in the long run their tradition of story-telling is more precious to them both than all the high values and all the ethnic peculiarities of themselves which they have sometime associated with some of their tellings of fable. A modern description of oral fable must reveal why this is so.
| COMPONENTS OF FABLE |
MEANINGS OF FABLE |
|
|---|---|---|
| Local Multiforms and Their Uses |
Nominal Motifs | Interpretative Tradition |
| The World Tradition | Generic Motifs in Story-Patterns | Generic Meanings |