Ryan Larson - On the Embedded Story

I've recently been reading Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, and I chanced upon an interesting section that I think could be relevant to this class. For his purposes, Propp organizes myths as a series of events, each represented by a letter of the alphabet and a number. There are hundreds of these. A14, for instance, represents The Villain Commits Murder. The goal, I suppose, is to be able to simplify any mythological story into an alphabetical-numeric string, starting with some variation of A and proceeding in a somewhat chronological fashion to the end. There are some other symbols and ideas that complexify things, but that is the general idea as far as I can tell. Propp then represents a story like this:

ABCDEFGHIJKPrRsLQExTUW

Each character or group of characters represents some event in the story. But things really get interesting when we need to combine two stories together in chapter IX (here is an arbitrary example):

ABCDEFG(ABCDEFGHKRsTUW)HIJKPrRsLQExTUW

As you can see, we've got a story inside a story. The hero must pause their main quest for some reason or other and go through a whole new arc before continuing on toward his or her original goal. Think of it as a side-quest, perhaps. This, of course, opens up all sorts of new horizons for storytelling-- when working with a static system like the hero's journey, you could start to get formulaic. With embedded stories, however, you can make stories much more unique and interesting. Many TV shows or serialized publications are filled with these-- each episode has its own little story/arc so that the audience can be entertained without having to see all of them to get the general idea.

If I were to translate this into the monomyth, perhaps it would look like this:

Call to adventure - departure - crossing of the first threshold - (call to adventure - departure - belly of the whale - the ultimate boon) - the belly of the whale - the return threshold.

In this theoretical story, the hero goes on a separate adventure (in parentheses) to retrieve some item they need to face the belly of the whale. The main story cannot go on until the embedded story is resolved. Think of how Heracles needed to complete his trials before he could be released from service of the king-- or something like that, it's been a while since I've read about Heracles. Or how Odessyus has to fight Polyphemus before he could continue his quest to get back home. 

I'm probably not doing the best job explaining this-- and that's because I don't fully understand everything about it yet. I'll keep reading the book, and maybe I'll make another blog post clarifying or contradicting this one someday.



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