The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology

Abstract

level: entry into enclosed space emergence from it. What is not easily explained is something else: the stability of this schema even in cases where direct link with the world of myth has been consciously broken. When Pushkin in Prophet gave an exceptionally precise and detailed picture of acquiring the gift of Shamanism (that is to say prophecy) and one which has now received confirmation in wide variety of texts right down to such details as the insertion into the mouth of a small snake which embodies magical powers (Propp, 1946: 79), he did not know the sources which the modern ethnographer has at his disposal. In the same way we can understand his poem without calling to mind the parallels from the prophet Isaiah and from the Koran which probably were the closest sources for the images of initiation in Prophet (see Old Testament, Isaiah 6; Kashtaleva, n.d.; Chernjaev, 1898). To appreciate Pushkin's text it is no more necessary to know of the link between its images and rituals of initiation (or consecration as Shaman) than it is necessary for our ability to speak language to know about the origin of its grammatical categories. Such knowledge is useful, but it is not minimal condition for the understanding of the text. The hidden mytho-ritual carcass has turned into formal grammatical foundation for the construction of text about the death of the old man and the re-birth of the clairvoyant. We find this double process on the one hand the forgetting of the content side of the initiation complex to the point of its complete formalization and consequent transformation into something not consciously felt by the reader (not perhaps even by the author), and yet on the other, the presence of this, now unconscious, complex of ideas most conspicuously in Alberto Moravia's novel Disobedience. The story concerns modern youth's growth into manhood. The novel touches upon modern questions of youthful rebellion, of rejection of the world, and the tormented transition from rebellious egotism and the cult of self-destruction to the open acceptance of life. Yet the plot movement is structured according to an ancient schema: the end of childhood (the end of the first life) is marked by constantly increasing attraction to death, conscious breaking of the ties linking the hero to the world, (rebellion against his parents, against the bourgeois world, turns into rebellion against life as such). This is followed by lengthy illness which brings the hero to the point of death and is an unambiguous substitute for it (the pages describing the dying youth's delirium are equivalent to the descent into the world beyond the grave in mythological texts). The first involvement with woman (the sick boy's nurse) signifies the beginning of the return to life, move from nihilism and rebellion to acceptance of the world, to new birth. This clearly mythological schema, reproducing the classical contours of initiation, culminates in the expressive final image of the This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 05:42:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms