LEVERAGING LEVI-STRAUSS

 

Given that I’ve claimed for myself the status of a “myth-critic” (a term that Northrop Frye claimed others foisted upon him), I’ve naturally read heavily into the various approaches to myth by anthropologists, religious historians, psychologists and literary critics. I’ve avoided delving into Claude Levi-Strauss, however, despite his celebrity as a major myth-theorist and as the founder of structuralism, which is also a minor interest of mine. I have a dim memory that some commentator spoke disparagingly of L-S’s tendency to reduce myth to mathematical formulae, and I would imagine that anytime I scanned L-S’s mammoth volumes, mostly on South American myth, his method of presentation would’ve confirmed that bias for me. I may have also been turned off by the fact that he’s a very pedantic writer in comparison with authors like Eliade and Campbell, and thus it’s difficult to find his insights persuasive. Looking back over my few Archive-entries on L-S, I find that I recorded an attempt to read THE ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES OF KINSHIP— which may have srruck me as pretty damn dull, since I don’t even remember cracking the covers.

Recently, though, I girded my cerebral loins (so to speak) and forced myself to plunge into the first two volumes of L-S’s four-volume MYTHOLOGIQUES. I made it through volume one, THE RAW AND THE COOKED, despite the fact that it consists of dozens upon dozens of South American myth-tales with only minimal interpretation, but then gave up halfway through volume two, FROM HONEY TO ASHES, because it all but duplicated the same niggling approach to the subject. However, in the second volume I skipped ahead to see if L-S offered anything in the nature of a summation. I was slightly pleased to see that he (finally) did so—and that said summation confirms my earlier bias.

To be sure, THE RAW AND THE COOKED does offer something akin to a theme statement, buried on page 240:

Myths are constructed on the basis of a certain logicality of tangible qualities which makes no clear-cut distinction between subjective states and the properties of the cosmos.

So far, so good. Most myth-theorists would agree that myth depends on the association between subjective factors in the human psyche and the objective phenomena of the cosmos, though that association is not always deemed “logical,” least of all by theorists of a Romantic bent. L-S goes on:

Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that such a distinction has corresponded, and to an extent still corresponds, to a particular stage in the development of scientific knowledge—a stage that, in theory if not actual fact, is doomed to disappear.

Even when L-S begin writing about myths in the late forties, the idea of a transition from mythical discourse to the discourse of science and theoretical philosophy can be found in Vico, Cassirer, and any number of analysts, even those of opposed methodologies. But it’s certainly odd that someone who’s writing so obsessively about mythology should claim that the impulse that spawned myth was “doomed to die,” even “in theory.”

Volume two more or less gives the answer: L-S comes to do the reverse of Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony, for he’s come not to praise myth, but to bury it, under his own mathematically oriented theory—whle tacitly admitting that many people may find his method enervating.

If any reader, exasperated by the effort demanded by these first two volumes, is inclined to see no more than a manic obsessiveness in the author’s fascination with myths, which in the last resort all say the same thing and, after minute analysis, offer no new opening but merely force him to go round in circles, such a reader has missed the point that a new aspect of mythic thought has been revealed through the widening of the area of investigation.—p. 472.

What is this “new aspect of mythic thought?” L-S tells readers on the next page:

…the demarcative features exploited by the myths do not consist so much of things themselves as of a body of common properties, expressible in geometrical terms and transformanle into one another by means of operations which constitute a sort of algebra.

Thus, L-S would argue, contra Yeats, that you can know the dancer from the dance, because the dance is also a body of common properties expressible in geometrical terms, whereas the dancers merely transmit the algebraic operations. This position proves problematic in that the stories, mythic or otherwise, told by human beings don’t arise out of nothing like the kinetic forces of physics, nor are the stories encoded in our genes like, say, the mating-dances of assorted lower species. L-S observes that the stories surveyed are composef of tropes—he uses the term “mythemes”—and that the tropes are frequently re-arranged by various storytellers, whether for similar or dissimilar effects. Elsewhere L-S used the metaphor of bricklaying—in French, bricolage—which assumes that the tropes are as inert as bricks. But the very fact that the tropes are plurisignative reveals the limitations of that metaphor.

Despite assorted theories, no human knows precisely how the human practice of storytelling originated. I would tend to think that profane stories arose before sacred ones, though even the profane ones may have been touched with elements of mythic imagination, derived from the worldview of primitive humans. But even in prehistoric times not every human would have had the same talents as every other human, and the talent of storytelling would have loomed larger in some persons than in others, resulting in any number of social specializations—the primitive analogues to shamans, priests and traveling bards. Skilled storytellers would know how to pick up on the tropes that their respective cultures favored, and to weave them into an assortment of shapes, whether for personal preference or to earn the storyteller’s daily bread. Some stories are less well-told than others, even allowing for the fact that the earliest stories might have been more like dreams than coherent narratives—but the ones that embed themselves in human cultures come about not because of abstract algebraic operations, but because of human will, playing with the shapes as on a loom, rather than setting them in concrete as one does with bricks.

Even though I reject L-S’s reductionism, I have to give him credit for being aware—again on page 473—that some readers may choose to dismiss his system as the projection of the author, rather than a true “science of mythology,” as he seeks to prove with numerous graphs and anatomical dissections. While I would admit that the more Romantic interpretations of myth may be more obvious in terms of their authors’ projections, they also may be more honest than L-S’s pseudo-scientific flummery.