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.

STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 1

In short, ODKIN SON OF ODKIN is an assortment of odds and ends, lacking the relative unity of KING OF THE WORLD. But certainly many of those conceptual "bricks" possess considerable mythic power by themselves, even if they aren't assembled into a satisfying structure. In contrast to the works I've labeled inconsummate, the symbolic value of the building-blocks has not been distorted. The value merely "lies in state," like one of Atlan's bodies, and fails to come alive.-- NEAR MYTHS: ODKIN, SON OF ODKIN.

This 2016 essay is the only one in which I adapted Levi-Strauss's concept of bricolage to literature. I'm sure other critics have ventured the comparison, though I also tried to tie it to the Aristotelian concept of the "unity of action," which in two essays, here and here, provides my "line between fair and good." In the second essay I compared different examples of Jack Kirby's work, just as in ODKIN I had opposed two examples of Wally Wood's work. It occurred to me, though, that two of my essays on Al Capp's LI'L ABNER might better illustrate both bricolage and unity of action, not least because the two story-cycles-- ["D. Yokum's Visit"] and ["General Bullmoose's Debuts"]-- were produced right on top of one another, at a time when the artist's powers of expression were undiminished (in contrast, say, to Wood's debilitating condition at the time he completed ODKIN).

"Visit," starting in late December 1952 and lasting through March of the next year, is shorter than "Debuts," lasting from March to August 1953. Brevity sounds like it might be conducive to Aristotle's unity of action, since the philosopher argued that the most unified works should focus on one primary action, though not without the potential for assorted subplots. (For instance, the primary action of THE ILIAD is "the wrath of Achilles," though there's room for quite a few subplots about Paris and Helen, Hector and his family, et al.) However, in modern fiction brevity does not necessarily confer unity.

In the second part of THE LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD, I mentioned that the superior works were those that seemed to articulate a sort of "theme statement," though I was careful to distinguish between themes associated with discursive thinking, or "the overthought," from those associated with symbolic discourse, or "the underthought." I also specified that these themes could reinforce one another, though they did not necessarily have to do so. In the case of both Capp story-cycles, Capp succeeded in having them reinforce each other for the most part, though I consider the overthought and underthought weaker in "Debuts" as opposed to "Visits." Thus, since Capp's powers of expression had to be roughly equal when he produced the two sequences, I had to decide what if any factors led him to de-emphasize what I've started calling the "vertical meaning" of "Debuts." And back in RETHINKING THE OVERTHOUGHT, I identified the somewhat competitive partner of vertical meaning, "lateral meaning:"

The literal meaning is, amusingly enough, also the "lateral meaning;" one arrives at it by following the progression of events and expressed feelings from point A to point Z, and that is "what happened"...Most readers quite logically are concerned with lateral meaning, which takes in both "the function of sensation" and "the function of feeling"-- and in truth, the abstractions of both overthoughts and underthoughts are only possible when constructed on the foundation of concrete experience. Thus, I personally can still enjoy many narratives that don't have much in the way of abstract meaning, as long as they excel in terms of sensation, feeling, or some combination thereof. 

Thus it seems to me that Capp's approach to ABNER, from its genesis in 1934 to its conclusion in 1977, was one which, like most comic strips, privileged lateral over vertical meaning, as I mentioned in 2015's STRIP NO-SHOW:

What the elitists missed, however, was that comic strips, even at their greatest levels of excellence, were always hampered by the factors of serial progression. Certainly Sunday pages like NEMO and PRINCE VALIANT could get away with a somewhat "painterly" approach to comics-narrative, but they were the exceptions. Most story-strips, whether they appeared only on weekdays, on Sundays, or in a combined form, chose to pursue a straightforward linear narrative-- again, one designed to seduce the readers into regularly partaking of the newspaper that carried the comic. Caniff may have been the paradigmatic figure here, in part because one can see him channeling the "invisible style" of most Hollywood films of his time.... This linear narrative, in essence, followed the same association I've outlined for the sensation and feeling functions. The visual part of a given strip communicates what kinds of sensations that the characters are experiencing, and the verbal part gives it feeling-context: whether the reader is supposed to be happy or sad when a given character is killed.

While there's no inevitable conflict between vertical and linear meaning, any more than there is between overthought and underthought, such conflict can take place when the artist becomes a little too "workmanlike" in terms of how he assembles the "bricks" of his storylines. This is particularly true of Capp, who shows a particular fondness for piling one story-trope atop another, with no detectable concern for Aristotelian unities.

In the upcoming Part 2, I'll justify the connection of the two types of meaning with my title regarding the nature of strong and weak propositions.

NEAR MYTHS: ODKIN SON OF ODKIN (1981)

To elaborate on his definition of mythical thought, Levi-Strauss drew an analogy to "bricolage": "Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual 'bricolage'" (p. 17). The French verb, "bricoler," has no English equivalent, but refers to the kind of activities that are performed by a handy-man. The "bricoleur" performs his tasks with materials and tools that are at hand, from "odds and ends." He draws from the already existent while the engineer or scientist, according to Levi-Strauss, seeks to exceed the boundaries imposed by society. "The scientist creating events (changing the world) by means of structures and the 'bricoleur' creating structures by means of events" (p. 22).-- Janine Mileaf.

As I said in my previous essay, Wally Wood's second installment of his "Wizard King" concept-- completed at a time when Wood was seriously ill, with considerable fill-in work from his assistants-- was by no means as successful as 1978's THE KING OF THE WORLD.

For my purposes, though, ODKIN is the perfect illustration of the virtues of the "near-myth." Levi-Strauss' view of the process of "bricolage"-- which other sources compare to the idea of a "brick-layer"-- was articulated only with regard to "mythical thought," but in truth it compares to any creative thought, and therefore to the whole of literature. When Aristotle perceives the genesis of the great tragedies in the ritual dramas of the so-called "goat songs," he affirms that simple components can be used to construct larger, more ambitious structures.

Wood, who never found a long-term hospitable berth at any comics company, paid most of his bills by taking on diverse assignments. This may have inclined him to a sort of "handyman" approach to his art. KING OF THE WORLD shows Wood extending himself to emulate the classical rigor of Hal Foster's PRINCE VALIANT, but even in KING there are some rambling, episodic sequences, and a few concepts that don't fit the faux-medieval fantasy-world (more on which shortly). ODKIN, however, really is a work of "odds and ends," comprised of three chapters that have no more rigor than a "Dungeons and Dragons" scenario. In fact, the first chapter-- which barely relates to the other two chapters-- is titled "Table Top Land," and is named for a miniature table-game that a wizard uses against his enemies.

The latter chapters explain the meaning of the title, for Odkin literally dies in chapter two, and is resurrected in chapter three through the technological magic of the wizard Alcazar. So the second Odkin is "odd kin" indeed: Alcazar tells Second Odkin: "in a sense you are your own father and mother." In KING Wood flirted with incest-tropes by claiming that Odkin and his father shared the same mother. In addition, the lost King Atlan was preserved from death in the same way as Odkin: whenever the evil Anark managed to slay the King, the monarch simply came to life in another identical body, also implicitly the creation of Alcazar. This element was the only time I felt one of Wood's "bricks" had been badly laid, for the idea of extra bodies seems purely science-fictional, and was an idea he recycled from the "Noman" feature in 1965's THUNDER AGENTS.

In addition, the big conclusion of Odkin's quest lacks the dramatic heft that Wood set up in the first book. Odkin has been manipulated, albeit out of necessity, into infiltrating the crypt in which Atlan has been placed in an eternal sleep, much like a medieval Arthur waiting for rebirth. However, the only way Odkin can free Atlan is to chop off the head of his sleeping body, so that Atlan's spirit will re-incarnate in one of the bodies controlled by Alcazar. Since Odkin is under the wizard's control when he does the deed, this removes any potential drama from the situation-- and even First Odkin's subsequent death lacks much in the way of pathos. Later, Second Odkin must return to the site of the first one's death, in order to reclaim the magical Sword of Atlan, much as Noman often had to seek out one of his dead android bodies in order to reclaim the irreplaceable invisibility cloak.  Odkin beholds his own dead body-- but Wood can only give the scene a strange detachment. Then the story moves move on to a short-term quest, sending Odkin after a mystic jewel that's been stolen by a dragon, which seems to be little more than an unsatisfying analogue to Bilbo Baggins' encounter with Smaug. Wood also tosses out the names of two opposed gods, "IAM" and "AMNOT," but though these sound like principles of affirmation and negation, Wood refuses to invest any attention to the metaphysical symbolism he himself suggests.

In short, ODKIN SON OF ODKIN is an assortment of odds and ends, lacking the relative unity of KING OF THE WORLD. But certainly many of those conceptual "bricks" possess considerable mythic power by themselves, even if they aren't assembled into a satisfying structure. In contrast to the works I've labeled inconsummate, the symbolic value of the building-blocks has not been distorted. The value merely "lies in state," like one of Atlan's bodies, and fails to come alive.