8 - Lévi-Strauss's mytho-poem

Summary

In the preceding chapter I have argued that the Mythologiques is a book about aesthetics; a treatise on the aesthetic doubling as a study of Amerindian myths. What I will show in this chapter is that if the Mythologiques is concerned with aesthetic problems and, in particular, the mechanisms of aesthetic creation, it is because it is itself, at yet a third level of interpretation, an aesthetic creation. Beyond the anthropological project, beyond the aesthetic treatise, one may also read the Mythologiques as Lévi-Strauss's own mytho-poem.

What critics have often overlooked is that the Mythologiques is the work as much of a creative writer as of a theoretician and critic and that, furthermore, both kinds of ‘work’ are intimately related. It is a text with at the very least a dual identity. The project of the Mythologiques is indeed a scientific one. Lévi-Strauss is the inventor of a method of analysis and provides throughout the Mythologiques a running commentary on his own application of this method (the Mythologiques are characterised by a complex form of reflexivity). In such passages, he writes about ‘hypotheses’, ‘demonstrations’ and ‘proofs’. The scientificity of Lévi-Strauss's method is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in those passages of the Mythologiques where he applies transformational formulas to a myth predicatively, logically deducing one myth from another. This is what Lévi-Strauss calls a ‘transcendental deduction’ and it constitutes an example of the quasi-mathematical rigour with which Lévi-Strauss applies his system of analysis (1981: 549; 1971a: 491–2 and 1973b: 38; 1966a: 31).