Ksenia Elisseeva - Bruno Osimo, traduzioni, semiotica della ...

Even if we disregard the variants generated by the order of the cards within the
group and consider only the possibility that cards in the deck have of being the
person's card, or of being in groups like “on the heart”, “what was”, “what is”, or
“what will be”, then according to the formula of combinations the number of
plots will be equal to 12•10 22 . Taking into account all the variants arising from
diverse arrangements or permutations of cards within each of the peripheral
groups, this number must be multiplied yet another one hundred times and
becomes twelve septillions or 12•10 24 . If the three billion inhabitants of the
terrestrial globe were each to make a new distribution of cards every minute,
they would exhaust all the variants after ten billion years of uninterrupted labor;
but it is calculated that the solar system will only last approximately another
eight billion years, and certainly people will find themselves more interesting
and important pursuits during this period.
Moreover, the enormous number of plots are created by thirty-six cards,
a very limited set of signs. Hence arises one of the cardinal questions of the
theory of plots, that of the “primary element”. On the basis of the material of
folklore and of ancient and medieval literature, the academician A. N.
Veselovskij suggested that the primary plot element is the motif, «the simplest
narrative unit which responds figuratively to the diverse inquiries of the primitive
mind or of everyday observation» (Veselovskij 1940: 500). An eclipse of the sun
and abduction of a girl are typical motifs. V. Â. Propp later set himself the goal
of creating a complete list of motifs of fairy tales by analyzing one hundred plots
from Afanas'ev’s collection of tales. He defined his primary elements more
exactly as functions and obtained thirty-one such functions, including “a
member of the family leaves home”, “a ban is imposed on the hero”, “a ban is
broken”, and so on (Propp, 1968: 25-65). It seems that functions can be divided
into even smaller units such as “hero”, “departure”, “ban”, “antagonist”,
“deception”, and “struggle”, which would turn out to be at least half as few
functions as thirty-one. But the fact remains that such units do not aid us at all in
understanding the essence of the fairy tale, for they cannot be freely correlated
with each other: to wit,
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