POIĒTIKĒ · the grammar beneath the story · kept by THE POET

PROPP’S FUNCTIONS ◧ 2D · ◍ 3D · ◆ 4D · ◐ shadow · 👶 TAP

Vladimir Propp read a hundred Russian folktales and found they are all the same tale: a fixed alphabet of ~31 narrative functions — villainy, departure, the test, the return — that a story picks from but always in the same ORDER. Slide to assemble a tale, or tap to scramble it and watch the grammar break.

◆ LIT▲ AMBER
◧ THE MEASURE · 2D
◍ THE SEQUENCE · 3D · the tale on its spine
◆ THE FOURTH · 4D · a tesseract turns
◐ THE SHADOW · one dimension down
👶 THE TODDLER CORNER — one fat tap
functions used
in canonical order?
first break
the tale

◆ LIT — exact / checkable

Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928): dramatis personae vary, but the FUNCTIONS — the significant acts, numbered — form a fixed inventory that any tale draws from in a constant sequence. A real tale is a strictly increasing subsequence of the function numbers (absence, interdiction, violation, villainy, mediation, departure, struggle, victory, return, recognition, wedding…). The slider builds an in-order tale, then progressively swaps a pair — and the moment two functions fall out of order, it is no longer a well-formed Proppian tale. A fail-loud self-check throws unless the canonical tale is detected in order and a swap is detected as a break.

▲ AMBER — the figure

A representative subset of the 31 functions and the strict-order rule (Propp allowed some moves, inversions and trebling); this is the skeleton, not the whole grammar. The monotone-order test is exact.

POIĒTIKĒ: every story is an old shape wearing new words.  — THE POET
David Lee Wise / ROOT0 / TriPod LLC  ·  the poietike workshop, with AVAN