A "Literary Motif Compass" by Olga Freidenberg as a Tool in Narrative Research
The goal of this article is twofold: first, to revisit the approach proposed by a Russian scholar Olga Freidenberg in her early (1926) article under the name of a “literary motif compass”. I argue that the “motif compass” approach is a valuable tool in modern narrative enquiry. Although it is relatively unknown in the West and is not currently used in the mainstream narratology, the method of “motif compass” offers numerous advantages and can even open new venues in studying formal semantic elements in unrelated and dissimilar narratives (thus, helping in finding a “narrative DNK”). The article examines the situation with Freidenberg’s scholarly legacy and suggests that although Freidenberg is less known in the West than her contemporaries such as Michael Bachtin, Lev Vygotsky, and Vladimir Propp, in narratology her works are of equal value, magnitude and importance. The second goal of the article is to apply the aforementioned Freidenberg’s method to the novel “The Swedish Cavalier” written by the Jewish-Austrian writer Leo Perutz. This novel was chosen, because in it, the universal motifs and narrative schemata are obscured and intentionally disguised by the author. This novel so far is only being studied within a traditional literary theory paradigm. As a result, its innate (“genetic”) similarity to other literary and folklore sources is not dealt with in the relevant literature. I argue that only through the application of Freidenberg’s method to the novel, is it possible to uncover in it several semantic elements / motifs that reveal its parallels in the world literature and folklore. These motifs are as follows: 1) the universal motif of a “(noble) outlaw” and its connection to the motif of “righteousness”; 2) the motif of “changing clothes in order to escape”, which, in its turn, is genetically related to the motif of “double / imposter”; 3) the motif of “punishment for the sacrilege”. Thus, only through the use of Freidenberg’s method, the considerable cluster of universal motifs has been recognized and identified in the novel. The article conclusions are as follows: 1) the semantic method of “motif compass” is a valuable tool in finding similarities and semantic connections in a broad range of unrelated and dissimilar on the surface narratives (world folklore, literature, personal stories, memoirs, etc.); 2) the “motif compass” can be also understood as a manifestation of the mechanism of priming known in psychology as a phenomenon of long-term memory, in which semantically similar information is organized in clusters and stored, and may be consequently retrieved bit by bit, if triggered by the similar stimuli. It is my contention that the “motif compass” is both a scientific method and a mental process, through which a scholar / reader spontaneously recollects similar motifs and narrative schemata in dissimilar narratives.