I had an additional reason for LEVERAGING LEVI-STRAUSS recently. For some time I’ve been meaning to get around to reading THE POETICS OF MYTH by Russian scholar Eleazar Meletinsky. I purchased the book purely because I was intrigued by the title, not knowing anything about the genesis of the project or the author’s background. The title suggests that the author means to produce a poetics for mythology, arguably humankind’s first literature, in a manner analogous to Aristotle formulating his Poetics for Greek art.
I had scanned a few sections of POETICS, though, and I noted that the author expressed an uncritical admiration for Claude Levi-Strauss. This did not in my opinion bode well, but before delving into Meletinsky I wanted to be as grounded as possible—or at least as grounded as I could tolerate—in Levi-Strauss’s work. Now that I have a solid grasp of the French anthropologist’s methodology, I can better understand why this Russian theorist admires him, and how I think that predilection hurts his theory.
Meletinsky’s project is to provide a broad overview of the many ways in which scholars have sought to explain the nature of archaic myth, with some additional material discussing the use of myth in modern literature. (This justifies the inclusion of scholars who are literary rather than religious scholars, such as Northrop Frye.) Meletinsky provides a substantially accurate timeline of the development of myth-analysis, beginning, as do similar timelines, with the 15th-century writer Giambattista Vico. Meletinsky even makes Vico into a sort of “founding figure” for myth-studies:
Vico’s philosophy of myth also contains in embryo … almost all of the main tendencies of later mythological studies… Herder and the Romantic poeticization of myth and folklore; the link between myth and poetic language analyzed by Max Muller, A.A. Potebnja, and Ernst Cassirer; the theory of survivals associated with English anthropology; the work of the folklore historians; and even distant allusions to Durkheim’s collective representations and Levy-Bruhl’s notion of primitive rationality—p. 7.
This is an appealing “cultural myth” on its own, even if Meletinsky expresses the vaguely Marxist idea that Vico had these vital insights because his native land of Italy was “undergoing a general and political decline” in that historical era. The “main tendencies” that the author finds in Vico divide into “two contrasting schools of myth interpretation” in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One of these schools Meletinsky calls “the anthropological school,” whose method inheres in “comparative ethnography.” He doesn’t apply a specific name to the other school but aligns it with Romanticism and linguistic analyses. For my own convenience I will rename them as the Synchronic School and the Diachronic School.
Followers of the Synchronic School are focused upon studying material in a particular time frame. They either collect data about traditional tribal-style societies “in the field” or collate data derived from such anthropological investigations. The “field” types would include such thinkers as Tylor, Malinowski, Levy-Bruhl, Durkheim, and Levi-Strauss, while the armchair analysts would include Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualist School.
The Diachronic School is more concerned with taking the long view of myth in many different and often contrasting cultures, seeking to come to grips with the essence of myth as a human activity. Of the figures Meletinsky names, this school includes Herder, Schegel, Nietzsche, Cassirer, Langer, Frye, Jung and Eliade.
A foreword remarks that the author may have received some hostile scrutiny from Soviet authorities because “any book or theory that privileged thought—the “superstructure” in Marxist jargon—at the experience of empirical contingencies and economic infrastructure was not readily welcomed in Soviet ideology.” I admit that Meletinsky doesn’t come off like a driveling Marxmallow, but some of his remarks suggest that he still had more concern with “empirical contingencies” than with the “poetry” that his book is supposedly concerned with. For instance, he faults Frye for an “anti-historical undercurrent’ (p. 87). Yet he has no problem with Roland Barthes for diminishing myth in favor of “acknowledging the primacy of history” (p. 69). When he began claiming, erroneously, that Cassirer had failed to logically distinguish the form of myth from the forms of literature and philosophy, I quit reading the book.
Meletinsky’s bias toward historicism and the Synchronic School reveal a critical inability to think of myth as a poetic activity, which inability renders his book’s title fatuous. He has almost zero interest in the ways in which myths appeared in the literature of Greeks and Romans, Babylonians and Egyptians, and pole-vaults over centuries of art so that he can address the use of myth in Modenist literature. (He does work in some desultory comments on Defoe and various Romantics.) But even Aristotle’s offhand comparison between the tragedies of his time and old traditions of “goat-songs” is more poetically insightful than anything Meletinsky writes.
Given my voluminous postings on writers like Jung, Frye and Cassirer, plainly I’m as much of the Diachronic Party as Meletinsky is of the Synchronic one. I’m not for a moment claiming that everything those worthies wrote was flawless, and at the very least the approach of the more data-oriented writers might serve as a check on over-Romantic tendencies. But it takes an extreme narrowness of vision to imagine that one can speak meaningfully of the link between myth and poetry without writing SOMETHING about the archaic origins of both.
Of course, one can only approach such origins diachronically, synthesizing general tendencies from such fragmented data as cave paintings and early hieroglyphs. But even if by some miracle we knew more about the general origins of myth and art, such knowledge does not change the fact that myth is not determined by history. Yes, one must presume that every story has come into being within historical time, even when we do not know just when. But the elements making up the stories—elements I’ll call “tropes” for simplicity’s sake—are ahistorical, arising and combining in endless chimerical ways according to the needs of a given audience. Even Levi-Strauss’s tedious anatomical dissections of countless archaic tales don’t testify to the abstruse “mathematics” that Levi-Strauss hypothesizes. Rather, such tales reveal the actions of innumerable nameless storytellers, seeking to please their audiences with patterns and pleasures.
I won’t repeat in detail my conviction that mythology depends upon the evocation of epistemological patterns. But I will add that for tribal humans, these patterns would be the essence of poetry; the fusion of the objective and subjective worlds in which those humans lived. Stories that relate that the sun is really a boat traversing the sky, or that the world was made from the bones of a giant, don’t serve any scientific purpose, nor at base do they serve the purpose of Malinowski’s functionalism (to which Meletinsky seems strongly allied). While myth-stories may eventually be used to support a given culture’s social order, no teller of tales thinks to himself, “Hmm, I think I’ll make up a story about that ball of light in the sky so that this generation and those that follow will have a sense of societal unity.” Nor would any audience listen to such stories for any reason save that imaginative sojourns give them pleasure. One of those pleasures includes the listeners imagining that the mysterious non-human world is at least tinged with human sentiments and priorities—and that may be the base origin of all of the tropes of art and religion, which may precede those stories we moderns would term “myths.” Meletinsky has a long section in POETICS. “The Classic Forms of Myth,” which seems to be nothing but a haphazard list of assorted mythological characters and situations, grounded in the aforementioned functionalism. I suppose this may be his idea of a diachronic overview, but even the most self-indulgent myth-commentaries by Jung and Joseph Campbell are better thematically organized. The author’s inability to discern the pleasurable element in mythic stories keeps his book as distant from being a “poetics of myth” as it’s possible for any single work to be.
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