Shelly, Freud, Chomsky, Thompson

My approach this blog is to list some of the main points and seemingly random interjections and explamations in class, try to connect them and offer any further suggestoins or links to the material. Last Wednesday we learned that fairy tales have deep structures, or underlying structures that we all know and understand, regardless of how the fairy tale is written. The linguistic topic of surface and subsurface sentence structure was widely explored by Noam Chomsky in Syntatic Structures (. He is the antithesis of postmodernism in a very cynical world and believes that science and the technologies of today are a good way of understanding history and ourselves. Here is an example of two sentences that demonstrate his surface and subsurface (deep) structures as illustrated by Chomsky : "John pets the dog" and "The dog is pet by John." Both sentences have different surface structures but their deep structure is the same. This point was made by Dr. Sexson in class with his reading of Ladle Rat Rotten Hut and also James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. "riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."— The opening line of Finnegans Wake, which continues from the book's unfinished closing line. For those of you in Dr. Sexsons Literary Criticism class, Structuralists and Psychoanalysts love the book. It works as the human unconscious works, that is to say, non-linear with cross references, making it hard to read. Although it is regarded as one of, if not the greatest, novel of all time, it met initial harsh criticism I learned. D.H. Lawrence even said of it "what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!" But that is was Dr. Sexson says it is too...nothing is really new, everything repeats itself and is retold. We hear and use the same mythologies and fairy tales everyday, they permeate our lives and pulse through the circulatory system of our unconscious, the point of arts and literature, the reason for so many versions of the same fairy tale is to make our language new to us again. One of my favorite critical essays, and piece of literature on the whole, A Defense of Poesy by Percy Shelly, says that the entire point of literature and art is to rejuvenate old hackneyed metaphors and to make our language new to us again. This is the type of essay that explains why we are English majors! Some points read: "Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replensihing it with thoughts of ever new delight...", "We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practise...the poetry in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating process...", "Poetry is indeed something diving. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science...", and "Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man...It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chos...and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being." Isn't the great stuff!!!?

Other Vocab Words We Learned:
Dithyrambic=melodic, lyrical songs (originally sung for Dionysus
Didactic=Pedagogical=Intended to instruct
Interpolate=instert something between fixed points (as in the details for our fairy tale displacement)

Quotes from Dr. Sexson "You don't get to go back and be a child, but you must become as a child. You must achieve the condition of a child," and "Its not what does it mean, but how does it mean?"
We understand these quotes in the context of the psychoanalytic aspects of Fairy Tales. Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious," and because fairy tales are so dream like and work subliminally on our minds so much so that they are dictating forces in our lives, we may approach them in the same way we do a dream. Freud believed that one cannot interpret one's own dreams, but should instead lay back on a couch facing away from Freud, who does it for you. It's all very complex and I am completely unable to do it, but if you're interested read Freud's The Dream Work, its also on the MSU top 100.

Dr. Sexson also talked about the Universal Quest (also known as a monomyth or the epic hero's journey) of Separation, Initiation, and Return. We are first separated from the familiar (our backyard, Kansas, or Troy), initiated into the unfamiliar (The land of bOZman, the land of OZ, The Sirens, for instance), and are returned and reunited (with a different perspective and possibly a new moral). This got me to thining back a couple of years ago to a social anthropology class I took. Rites of passage in all cultures are very similar, explained Dr. Carucci, in that they involve a separation and an initiation (into womanhood or manhood), with the exception that they have points of liminality in between. A waiting period, purgatory, or possibly a porthole of sorts. I think we can find the Universal Quest, which is very much like a rite of passage, in all of our lives. When we wean ourselves from our mother (I'll do it, one of these days), leaf the nest (Ha!) and strike out on our own, maybe one day to return.

Sam and Sutter sitting in a tree... Peter and Iona Opie are world reknowned folklorists and children's street culturalists who edited the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes as well as creating some of our favorite patty cake games.

Also in passing Dr. Sexson mentioned the Aarne Thompson Motif Index, or the ATU Classification system which contains over 2000 numbered and catalogued motifs for Folk and Fairy Tales and was first construed in 1928. Because there are so many different types of the same fairy tales (mostly due to geographical location) there needs to be a motif index to help classify different plot points of the same folk tale but for different folk. Snow White is listed as 580 or 709 in English versions (the numbers inbetween denot a subcategory which becomes too convoluted. Here is a list of some of the numbers I got from http://oaks.nvg.org/folktale-types.html to show you how this works:

ANIMAL TALES
Wild Animals 1-99
The Clever Fox (Other Animal) 1-69
Other Wild Animals 70-99
Wild Animals and Domestic Animals 100-149
Wild Animals and Humans 150-199
Domestic Animals 200-219
Other Animals and Objects 220-299
TALES OF MAGIC
Supernatural Adversaries 300-399
Supernatural or Enchanted Wife (Husband) or Other Relative 400-459
Wife 400-424
Husband 425-449
Brother or Sister 450-459
Supernatural Tasks 460-499
Supernatural Helpers 500-559
Magic Objects 560-649
Supernatural Power or Knowledge 650-699
Other Tales of the Supernatural 700-749