My Years With Proust - Day 402

I had in any case left my dear Albertine too long alone.  "D'you know," I said to her as I climbed into the carriage, "the seaside life and the life of travel makes me realise that the theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations."

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 891

In carrying out a favor for M. de Charlus, Marcel stumbles across an old acquaintance, in one of those odd happenstances that only happens in Dickens novels and real life, and it causes him to reflect upon the seemingly limited number of different players and scenes in the world. As we all know, William Shakespare told us, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts." Now, as every student in Heroines & Heroes can attest, Vladimir Propp proposed that there are only seven character functions: 1) the villain, 2) the dispatcher, 3) the helper, 4) the princess, 5) the donor, 6) the hero, and 7) the false hero.  It seems to me that I've traditionally done a poor job teaching Propp, because instead of focusing on the character functions my students get side-tracked by the thirty-one different stages (interesting, but I would argue of less interest).  I had the thought recently that one approach would be to have the students consider times in their lives when they have played each of these different roles.  In the last couple years I've started modeling academic activities (and certainly not personal behavior) for my students, which leads me to create a new self-portrait every year.  So, with this in mind, if I'm going to ask my students to identify the times they've played the different Proppian roles (keeping in mind that they're young and may not have played them all; I'm always amazed how few of them have even been in love, let along played the false hero) I should really force myself to undertake the same exercise.  I'll have to revisit this post and report my findings.