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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
At the beginning of structuralism was the word--or rather the phoneme. This "mythical" origin of structuralism is retold by Claude Levi-Strauss in his preface to Roman Jakobson's Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (1978), a volume of lectures given by the linguist in New York during the war, which the then young anthropologist attended. Struggling at the time with his dissertation (later to become the Elementary Structures of Kinship [1969]), Levi-Strauss was struck by the simplicity and power of the Prague school's insights into phonemic structures, and adapted their findings to his own problems, namely kinship relations and the incest taboo. In a series of articles, most of them reprinted in his now famous books, Levi-Strauss would hail structural linguistics as the grail of the humanities, the philosophers' stone that would transform the social sciences into exact ones. In the beginning was the phoneme, and the phoneme was God ...
The direct descent of structuralism from linguistics has, of course, been questioned; in fact, the structuralists themselves raised the issue of paternity. Levi-Strauss's well-known "three mistresses" were not Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson, and Alexis S. Troubetzkoy, but Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and geology. A philosopher by training, he also willingly took as his own Paul Ricoeur's (critical) remark that the anthropologist practiced a "Kantianism without a transcendental subject." Other philosophical influences have been pointed out, notably Edmund Husserl's, (1) and readers of Levi-Strauss's work are well aware of these heterodox presences. Structural linguistics is more often than not an authoritative discourse that Levi-Strauss follows in spirit, but not to the letter. (2) Other theoretical notions are "recuperated" to do the job when no linguistic theory fits--for instance, the use of Freud at the end of the "Structural Study of Myth" to authorize his otherwise unexplained "canonical formula" of all myth.
Of the many sources that flowed together to form structuralist methodology, one has remained largely ignored--history. The reasons for this oversight are well known. It is now a commonplace that structuralism, with its focus on synchrony, was antithetical to history and the diachrony of events. (3) Protest as they may, the structuralists were unable to shake this impression. They could write about history: Levi-Strauss's attack on marxist historiography is widely regarded as one of the first and most successful, (4) while Roland Barthes's article on "Historical Discourse" was equally influential on later historiographic trends. (5) But the god of structural linguistics required a sacrifice, and History was the allotted victim.
In view of the perceived contradiction between history and structuralism, this essay's thesis may come as a surprise: that a historian played a decisive role in the shaping of a key structuralist theory, namely, the structural analysis of myth, one of the longest lasting (and earliest) contributions of structuralism. Myth became an object of study for two founding fathers of structuralism at practically the same time: Levi-Strauss published "The Structural Study of Myth" in 1955, and Barthes published his book on Mythologies in 1957. Barthes presumably had no knowledge of Levi-Strauss's article since it appeared (in English) in the Journal of American Folklore, only to be published in French in 1958, as a chapter of Structural Anthropology. Curiously, the definitions that both authors provide for myth rest largely on historical concepts developed by the nineteenth-century French historian, Jules Michelet. While there is an element of chance in this common reference, a closer look reveals that Michelet was no random choice in the political climate of the fifties. This paper examines the role of Michelet in both Levi-Strauss's and Barthes's definitions of myth, as well as of history, and by demystifying the "linguistic" account of structuralism's genesis, (6) discloses the ties between structuralism's theoretical developments and the intellectual and political context from which it emerged.
Because Levi-Strauss was a prolific writer who dedicated over a thousand pages to the subject of myth, his short, early essay, "The Structural Study of Myth," is often singled out as a summary of his theory of myth. Levi-Strauss is himself somewhat to blame for this tendency: the text, as he later admitted, was written with a didactic goal in mind, and he expressed regret over his foray into Greek mythology, with his analysis of the Oedipus myth (criticized even by his friend and fellow structuralist Jean-Pierre Vernant). To be fair, Levi-Strauss's thought evolved considerably over the years: the last volume of the Mythologicals (1964-1971) advances the controversial hypothesis that all myths are in fact variations ("transformations") of one Ur-myth, the Promethean stealth of fire from the heavens. Later books, such as The Jealous Potter (1986), display a remarkable attention to the effects of environmental change on myths, as cultures move around the world. Nevertheless, many of the author's key theories, which would be abundantly put to use in the four Mythologicals volumes, first saw the printed page in his 1955 article: the famous parallel between music and myth was developed here first (with the musical score analogy), as were other crucial aspects of Levi-Strauss's theory, such as the "mythemes" concept and the (in)famous "canonical formula."
All of these conceptual developments, however, hinge on one fundamental premise, outlined at the beginning of his article. This premise is that myths have a "double structure" with relation to time. Levi-Strauss proposes this premise on the basis of the Saussurean distinction between synchronic langue and diachronic parole--but as usual, linguistics serves more to authorize his statement than to demonstrate it. The only "demonstration" comes via an example. Indeed, as if to prove his claim that his is a "Neolithic" intelligence, much more suited to "the science of the concrete" than to abstract thought, Levi-Strauss often resorts to such demonstratio ad exemplum throughout this article and beyond. The example of the archeologist discovering a musical score and that of the observer who...
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