[00:00:01] INTRODUCER:
On behalf of the University of California and its Department of Anthropology, I’m pleased to welcome you to the second of two Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Foundation lectures to be presented by Professor Claude Lévi-Strauss of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale du Collège de France et de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. It is indeed a thrill to introduce Professor Lévi-Strauss, as I consider him the world’s greatest living anthropologist, and his remarkable research and mythology has had an enormous influence upon all of us who have an academic interest in folklore. Most anthropologists who carry out fieldwork are experts in one culture or perhaps several.
Typically, anthropologists speak somewhat proprietarily of their people, their village. American anthropologists, under the continuing sway of Franz Boas, remain strongly committed to the notion of cultural relativism. According to this hallowed tenet, each culture is an incomparable monad which is unique and which cannot be equated with other cultures.
Boas’s preaching of cultural relativism, despite his comparativist scope, was almost certainly a direct response to what he regarded as the speculative excesses of nineteenth century universalist theories. As a result of this trend, there have been relatively few American anthropologists who would dare to generalize about mankind, preferring instead to restrict their observations to the particular cultures they knew firsthand on the basis of empirical fieldwork. Yet the history of the discipline of anthropology, and also folklore, reveals that it is precisely the universalists whose thinking has continued to have significance and whose ideas stimulate each new generation of students.
Bastian’s notion of Elementargedanken, elementary ideas, Frazer’s laws of sympathetic, that is, homeopathic and contagious magic, van Gennep’s delineation of the rites of passage, right up to Lévi-Strauss’s identification of the binary oppositional structure inherent in the world described in myth, are all part of the clear record. of major breakthroughs in the study of the mind of man cross-culturally. Most of the psychologists and philosophers and others who claim to study the human mind unfortunately tend to limit themselves to Western man only, typically just studying individuals or elite writings of their own cultures.
One need only consult books with the word human in their title to see how few bother to take account of data from non-Western societies. In contrast, when Professor Lévi-Strauss speaks of the human mind, he does so with the knowledge of peoples all over the world. His approach is global, encyclopedic, drawn from ethnographic reports from North and South America, from Oceania, from Africa, from Asia, from Europe.
I want to stress that Professor Lévi-Strauss’s object of study is no less than the nature of the human mind, and in this he is akin to Chomsky searching for the deep structure of language, Freud probing the unconscious, and Jung looking for archetypes. It is his notion that myth is a logical model providing a solution, albeit temporary, for the paradoxical oppositions which plague mankind, that has galvanized a whole generation of mythologists. In his pioneering essay, The Structural Study of Myth, published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1955, he remarked that, quote, “Mythical thought always works from the awareness of oppositions towards their progressive mediation.”
He continues, “We need only to assume the two opposite terms with no intermediary always tend to be replaced by two equivalent terms which allow a third one as a mediator.” End of quote. In 1959, upon assuming the Chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France, Professor Lévi-Strauss chose for the subject of his inaugural address an obscure Tsimshian narrative which Boas had collected and reported several times, the earliest version dating from 1895.
By means of La Geste d’Asdiwal, Professor Lévi-Strauss resurrected and rescued this narrative from near oblivion, so much so that Asdiwal, the hero of the adventures, has become a permanent part of the lexicon of serious students of myth. In this brilliant tour de force, Professor Lévi-Strauss masterfully demonstrates the power of his brand of structural analysis. He shows geographical, techno-economic, sociological, and cosmological sets of oppositions.
It is at once literary criticism and anthropological analysis of the highest order. And what Professor Lévi-Strauss did for Asdiwal, well, he also did for South American Indian mythology. Before Lévi-Strauss, the field of South American Indian mythology was known only to a few specialists.
After Lévi-Strauss, the Bororo Indians of Central Brazil and their myth of the macaws in their nest became the subject of heated debate and interest throughout the academic world. In his magnum opus, the four-volume Introduction to a Science of Mythology, actually in French, the title Mythologiques allows the punning play on myth and logic, myth, logique. Lévi-Strauss demonstrates how myth encodes categories of native thought.
In the first volume, The Raw and the Cooked, Lévi-Strauss drew attention to the, with an apt culinary metaphor, to the critical nature-culture distinction. With respect to the tellers of myth, he does not believe that they necessarily understand the nature of myth. “It is doubtful, to say the least,” he says in the overture to The Raw and the Cooked, “whether the natives of central Brazil, over and above the fact that they are fascinated by mythological stories, have any understanding of the systems of interrelations to which we reduce them.”
He says, “I therefore claim to show not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact.” For Lévi-Strauss, structure is inherent in myth. It is discovered, not invented by the mythologist.
My own admiration for Professor Lévi-Strauss’s splendid achievement in the study of myth stems not just from his ingenious extrapolations of the paradigmatic oppositional sets manifested in myth content, but also from his comparative knowledge of American Indian mythology. For Lévi-Strauss is as much a comparativist as he is a structuralist, even though his fame is largely based upon his structuralist studies. I don’t believe there’s a single scholar today who can match Lévi-Strauss’s extraordinary control of the mythological sources in both North and South America.
Professor Lévi-Strauss also presents what I consider to be the only sensible solution of the ever-vexing myth-ritual controversy. Rather than speculating endlessly about whether myth in a given instance stems from ritual or whether ritual stems from myth, Professor Levi-Strauss has taught us that myth and ritual are but two alternative codes for the expression of a given semantic message, and that is why they may be structurally isomorphic, not because one is necessarily logically or chronologically prior to the other. It has often been noted how elegant and witty Professor Lévi-Strauss is in his writings, although some of the puns and jeux d’esprit do not survive translation from French into other languages.
But even without them, la pensée lévi-straussienne is always imaginative and provocative. The Savage Mind is one of the most exciting books I’ve read in anthropology, and I came away from it with a sense of the importance of native taxonomies, native systems of classification, and native metaphor complexes that I had not encountered elsewhere. I am glad, finally, that Professor Lévi-Strauss is giving two lectures, for that is most appropriate in terms of la pensée lévi-straussienne.
He has taught us all, not just anthropologists, but all of us to be alert for binary oppositions. They occur not just in myth, but in cuisine, in smells and scents, and a host of other cultural features often overlooked by conventional anthropologists. Last time, we learned about history and anthropology, hot and cold cultures, complex developed versus so-called primitive archaic cultures, matrilineal and patrilineal, wife-takers and wife-givers, and so on.
Today, we look forward to mythical thought and social life.
[00:07:36] PROFESSOR DUNDES:
I am honored to present to you an original savant who has changed forever the course of the study of anthropology in general and myth in particular, Professor Claude Lévi-Strauss.
(applause)
[00:08:04] CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS:
Thank you, Professor Dundes. I’m quite overwhelmed with your praises,
(laughter)
and I certainly don’t deserve that. Two days ago, in my first lecture, I have tried to outline new trends of general concern to the social and human sciences, those you call in your country behavioral sciences, I believe, especially to anthropology and history. Today, without getting too technical, I hope, I would like to narrow my scope by commenting upon a criticism which has often been and still is directed against my own work.
Namely, that my theoretical stand amounts to explain the diversity of manners, customs, and beliefs as if they resulted from as many choices made from an ideal repertoire in which all the possible types of social experiences were listed in advance. Now it is said, this way of looking at things is but a rhetorical discourse verging on any misuse of language. This way of stringing together images arbitrarily chosen is held to be all the more aggravating on account of their anthropomorphism and because it is said they cannot be made to apply to concrete reality.
Societies, those critics go on arguing, are not persons. They cannot be depicted in the guise of customers perusing the catalogue of some metaphysical department store, out of which each one would select items of a given kind in preference to similar items, though of a different kind that other societies have chosen or will choose to suit the same needs. There are cases, however, where this figure of speech can be shown to reflect an objective reality so that it becomes valid not only as an expository device, but also in regards to experience.
This occurs when a myth, together with its variants, lays out several formulas, each of which ethnographical observation demonstrates to be actuated by a particular society, belonging to the same cultural context as the myth itself. In such cases, we are confronted with a table of solutions simultaneously given to collective thought, among which social practices have effectively made a choice. For instance, it may happen that a given population devotes several versions of one myth to explore various possibilities except for one which would run counter the particulars of the problem that the population in question has in mind.
Thus, a box is left empty in the table of operations, allowing a nearby population not confronted with the same problem to seize hold of the myth and to fill up the empty box. Thereby, it will divert the myth from its original function. In the process, the nature of the myth becomes completely altered.
As a matter of fact, in the case I am about to discuss, it will no longer exist as a myth, but rather as a family history, and it was rightly so labeled by George Hunt, who recorded it, and by Boas, who published it in Ethnology of the Kwakiutl, that is the thirty-fifth annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, page twelve forty-nine to twelve fifty-five. More precisely, what we have here is a legendary tradition boasted by a noble house to back up or to enhance its prestige. Therefore, this use for practical ends of what was formerly a myth sets it up halfway between speculative thought and political realism.
We observe the means for possible choices conceived by mythical imagination to become actualized as social facts. Professor Dundes was reminding a moment ago that in previous essays dealing with a myth from the Tsimshian Indians of British Columbia, the story of Asdiwal, I tried to show that the myth simultaneously resorted to several codes, cosmological, meteorological, geographical, topographical, so as to make a homology appear between several natural oppositions, highest sky and Chthonian world, upper and lower, mountain and sea, upriver and downriver, winter and summer, and oppositions pertaining to the sociological or economic level, such as descent and affinity, endogamy and exogamy, hunting and fishing, plenty and scarcity, and so forth. It looks as if the myth aimed at demonstrating that marriage with a matrilineal, with a matrilateral cross-cousin, although officially preferred by a society made up of rival lineages, failed to overcome those social antagonisms.
The function of the myth is thus to excuse a sociological failure by pointing out that in the natural world, too, no mediating terms may be found between polar opposites that culture itself has irrevocably set apart. Always in a pessimistic mood, the several known versions of the myth illustrate all the conceivable issues of a basic plot. A hero, unable to reconcile the ways of life he has experienced in succession, dies victim of his yearning after either one or the other, according to the versions.
Or else he regrets neither of them, but fails to assume the mission assigned to him by the myth, which is– wh-which was to impersonate their conflict. Three versions were recorded respectively in 1895, 1912 and 1916 on the Skeena River, a fourth one in 1902, on the Nass River farther north. I have considered elsewhere the differences between the native modes of livelihood here and there, which may explain to a point those variations on a common theme.
From the Tsimshian, who are their northern neighbors, the Kwakiutl have borrowed the myth of Asdivan. Rather, this borrowing was not the doing of the Kwakiutl at large, but of one of their tribes, the Koeksotenok, and within that tribe, of a particular noble house, the, the Naxnaxula, who turned the myth into one of their family traditions. It is worth investigating how this story, while still unmistakable, was modified in form and content so as to suit its new functions.
First, let me briefly summarize the Cocteau version. Two sisters, the elder one married, the younger still a bachelor, were driven by hunger from their respective villages. As they were working toward each other, they happened to meet halfway.
On the road, the younger sister bathed every morning in order to purify herself, expecting to meet on the way some kind of supernatural being. It appeared at last in the guise of a handsome man who supplied her with food and married her. A boy was born.
Before disappearing, his father trained him to become a great hunter and gave him several magic objects. The women’s brothers, who were looking for them, finally found them. Together, they returned to their tribal village where the boy, son of the supernatural being, became a chief.
Once, he gave chase to a grizzly bear, also a supernatural being, who drew him atop a high cliff. The hero could not enter the house of the bears and went back to his village. Later on, he traveled to another Kwakiutl tribe where he married the chief’s daughter.
His brother-in-law took him by boat on a hunting expedition to spear sea otters. However, he became jealous of the hero who was more successful than himself, and he deserted him on an island without food and water. The starving hero was rescued by the underground inhabitants of the island, who looked like seals and sea lions.
They took him to their subterranean kingdom, where he cured a sea lion, the local chief’s head slave, who was seriously ill. He was rewarded with several magic objects and weapons and sent back to his village when he wreaked vengeance on his enemies. The people treated him as a chief, and from now on he went hunting sea otters, which he gave to his people and was well-liked by them.
At first sight, this Kwakiutl version looks like a hodgepodge made up of fragments haphazardly taken out of the four Tsimshian versions. From the 1895 and 1912 versions comes the episode wherein a supernatural being married to a human girl makes his newborn son grow up fast through magic. From the 1895 version comes the supernatural being’s announcement that his help to his son will be subject to the observance of unspecified prohibitions.
However, it is with the 1902 version recorded on the Nass River that the more striking similarities appear. The heroines are sisters instead of mother and daughter. The supernatural helper, married to the younger woman, makes a mistake when fabricating the snowshoe shoes intended for his son, and he also gives the latter two magic dogs which get bigger or smaller at their master’s will.
Only in that Tsimshian version and in the Kwakiutl one does the supernatural helper put to test his son’s hunting abilities by having him compete with a rival. Only in those two versions does the hero fail to enter the house of the supernatural bear he has chased up to a mountaintop? And only in those two versions must he content himself with listening from the outside to the bear’s song.
Furthermore, the words of the song have exactly the same meaning in the two versions, despite the fact that Tsimshian and Kwak’wala are wholly distinct languages. The Kwakiutl and the Tsimshian were great travelers. They sailed to each other’s countries to make war, to trade, or simply for visiting purposes.
At times friendly, at times hostile, they seized slaves, kidnapped women, or intermarried peacefully. Therefore, the Kwakiutl could have heard from the Tsimshian, the same version of the Asdiwal myths which were recorded by Boas, as well as others of which we have no knowledge. However, a puzzling fact remains.
The versions geographically more remote are also those that display the greater similarities. From the mouth of the Nass River, where Boas got the 1902 version, to the Koeksotenok country, the overland distance is about three hundred miles as the crow flies. Yet traveling across those mountainous parts intersected by rivers and fjords was extremely difficult, and sailing along the coast as the Indians used to do took twice as long.
Therefore, this greater similarity between the more distant regions raises a problem to which I shall return. We will then verify that the explanation does not call for special relationships that the Niska, name of the Tsimshian group settled in the Nass Valley, who would have kept up with the Koyukukhotana. The reasons for that strange likeness are of a formal nature.
Although these formal reasons are not the same in each case, they explain why the Kwakiutl version and the Nass version are relatively close to each other, and why altogether they stand apart from the three Skeena versions. If we agree for a moment to treat, to treat the Tsimshian versions as a whole. Significant differences appear between them and the Kwakiutl version.
The story told by all the Tsimshian versions unrolls in river valleys, either the Skeena or the Nass, that is, roughly speaking, along an east-west axis. On the contrary, the Kwakiutl version unrolls far inland and along an approximately north-south axis, cross-cutting the main waterways. It starts in Hada, a place located at the head of Bond Sound.
It then moves southeast to Hekwaken, a village at the head of Thompson Sound. Now, the town of Hekwaken plays an important part in Kwakiutl mythology. This is the place where Thunderbird landed on a mountaintop when he came down from the sky.
No wonder then that the hero of our myth should go upstream and above Hekwaken, that is toward the highest mountains, when undertaking a perilous climb to chase the supernatural bear. Let us not forget either that in the Kwakiutl version, he failed to enter the bear’s house located in the sky world according to the Tsimshian because, say the Kwakiutl version in rather obscure terms, he has transgressed the rules laid down by his father, perhaps because he did not make full use of his magic dogs for the bear hunt, contrary to the direction received. The Kwakiutl version states at the beginning that this younger woman left Hada, where the people were starving, in the hopes that her sister, who had married far away, would be better off.
However, food was also wanting at the latter’s village, and the elder sister had made the same reasoning, so they both met halfway. Contrary to the Tsimshian version, wherein the itinerary followed by the two women is clearly described. The Kwakiutl version does not tell anything about either the elder sister’s point of departure or the direction taken by the younger.
That the elder sister should have started from Hekweken seems unlikely, as she is said to have married in a distant village, while Hada and Hekweken are only about eight miles apart as the crow flies. However, the myth’s silence on those particulars is highly significant. While the Kwakiutl version uses the plot of the Tsimshian, it treats it differently.
The young virgin, as the Kwakiutl call her, soon to become the hero’s mother, gives her food quest a spiritual cast. It is as if its success will be in direct proportion to the dangers incurred by purposefully risking herself into a wild country. A familiar itinerary would run counter to those motivations.
In fact, she bathes and purifies herself at each halting place, and she, she consciously entertains hopes that a supernatural helper will come to her. This is quite different from the Tsimshian versions, according to which the helper appeared on his own initiative and quite unexpected. Only the eighteen ninety-five version lends the women a religious disposition.
They pray and make offerings, but only after a protecting spirit whose advent they had not anticipated made him known in the guise of the bird called Good Luck. For his part, the helper of the Kwakiutl version bear the name Komgillahayo, a compound word of which Boas could offer no translation, nor do the present day’s Indians, as I took care to ascertain. It seems formed after the root kom, meaning rich, in which case the bearer would have some affinity with the undersea world and its ruler, Komogua, the master of wealth, whom we shall soon meet.
This submarine or Chthonian world stands in diametrical opposition to the sky world where the homologous character of the Tsimshian myth unquestionably belongs on account of his bird-like nature. From the start, then, the Kwakiutl name of the supernatural helper points to an orientation from high to low, characteristic of the Kwakiutl version and to which I shall presently return. Those differences notwithstanding, in all the Tsimshian versions, and in the Kwakiutl version as well, the supernatural being assumes a human form, marries the younger woman, begets a son whom he provides with magic implements, and he disappears soon after.
According to the Kwakiutl version, the grown-up son settles among his maternal family in Ek’wak’en, that is to say, the southernmost point of the distance he will travel later. Then he became a head chief, but as I have already explained, he failed in his attempt to visit the sky world. He then resolved to go to another Kwakiutl tribe, the Tsawoutenok, in order to marry their chief daughter.
This will be his only marriage, in contradistinction with the Tsimshian versions, according to which the hero married four times in succession, and his son once, and also according to which each marriage conformed to a different matrimonial formula. The Tsawoutenok lived in the Kingcome Inlet area north of Hada. Therefore, their country where the hero finally settled corresponds to the northernmost point of his journeys.
So the whole plot unrolls between Thompson Sound to the south and Kingcome Inlet to the north, except for the sea otter’s hunting party undertaken with his brother-in-law by the now married hero to Moving Island, probably the small island bearing that name in a place where Georgia Strait widens out toward the ocean. That hunting party entailed the same consequences in all of the known versions. Jealous of the hero’s hunting successes, his brother-in-law or several of them deserts or deserts him on the island.
The inhabitant of the coast chthonian world, which in Kwakiutl eyes is also a marine world. Rescue and welcome him. There he attends and heals one or several wounded seals of sea lions, servants of Komogua, master of the sea and of all the riches.
As a payment, the hero receives many magic objects: the self-paddling canoe, the serpent spear, the food box that is never empty, the death club, the point of which burns hostile villages, the water of life, the house that enlarges or shrinks at its owner’s will, together with a new name from himself, Chief of the Open Sea. His previous name was Prettiest Hunter. Back from the island, by means of his self-paddling boat, the hero set his wife’s village on fire with his death club and transformed his enemy into rocks.
So powerful was his magic instrument that his wife underwent the same fate together with some friendly inhabitants, but the hero used the water of life to restore them. Let us remember that in the Tsimshian version from the Skeena, the hero alone or the hero together with his son and the latter’s wife were changed into rocks, in that case definitely following risky expeditions not at sea, but at high mountains. On the contrary, according to the Kwakiutl version, the hero became a great chief, and thanks to his magic kit, he henceforth provided his tribe with game coming from the sea.
When discussing the Asdiwal story in previous essays, I submitted that the Tsimshian versions started with an initial situation characterized by irrepressible movement and ended in a final situation characterized by perpetual immobility. Those conclusions obviously don’t apply to the Kwakiutl version. It starts with a quest for a supernatural helper, and it describes this quest as a voluntary pursuit for which the famine prevailing in Hada offers but an occasion.
And at the end, the hero is far from frozen in a mineral inertia. His magic implements endow him, so to speak, with a superlative mobility. He has no problem moving his house by sea.
His boat sails by itself. His spear changes into a serpent that rushes toward the sea otters, kills them in succession, and goes back to its owner. On the whole, the story starts with an initiatory quest and ends up with its success.
Thanks to its mother’s religious zeal, the hero is finally granted the full set of those magic objects which the supernatural helpers met with in Kwakiutl myth are accustomed to dispense more sparingly. This particular construction of the plot, markedly directed to an end, is also brought to the fore by the hero’s failure to enter the house of the celestial bears. As I pointed out earlier, this episode faithfully reproduces that of the 1902 Tsimshian version.
However, its function is no longer the same. That version, recorded on the Nass, is concerned with demonstrating that the two cosmological journeys of the hero were equally unavailing. He failed in his attempt to visit the sky world.
His stay with the seals left him unimpressed. On the contrary, the Kwakiutl version emphasizes the contrast between the abortive visit to the sky world and the thoroughly successful sojourn in the Chthonian world. In no other version was the hero so lavishly rewarded.
This discrepancy between the two versions may be accounted for. Generally speaking, in Kwakiutl mythology, the founding ancestors of noble houses came down from the sky. They do not ascend to it.
And willingly or unwillingly, their offspring pay visit to the chthonian kingdom of Komogwa, who makes them precious gift. The construction of the of the Kwakiutl version implicitly respects orientation from high to low instead of from low to high. Where I write in surmising that the hero failed to visit the bears because he did not use his dogs.
A further confirmation would result. For those dogs may be likened to an embryonic pair of mediators, and I have demonstrated elsewhere that when the several types of mediators encountered in American mythology are ranked serially, Dioscuri, that is, twin-like figures, represent a weak term. That the fact that the hero neglects calling to the rescue even the weakest type of mediator.
Later would confirm that in the Kwakiutl mind, the movement from low to high accords with the natural order less well than the movement from high to low. Such being the case, exactly where does the Kwakiutl version stand in respect to the Tsimshian versions? The Skeena versions disclose patterns both extreme in form and diametrically opposed to each other.
According to one pattern, the hero remains unaffected by his marriage amongst the coast people and by his stay in the undersea world. These two experiences leave him unimpressed, and he only has hankerings after the mountains where he lived as a child. He ventures too far in high country, he gets lost, and he is transformed into stone.
On the contrary, in the 1895 version, it is of his undersea sojourn that the hero remains nostalgic, although he was a mountain hunter by vocation. So vivid are his memories of his stay in the undersea kingdom that he betrays its secrets and perishes the victim of a supernatural punishment. The Nass version stands halfway between those two extreme forms, and it neutralizes their opposition.
The hero settles on the coast where he married. He feels nostalgic neither of the mountains where he displayed his hunting talents nor of the undersea kingdom of which he became the favorite. Instead, he put his wanderings to an end and established himself on the coast halfway between high sea and the mountain, where he led a quiet life as one who has retired from business.
Therefore, according to the Nass version, the hero proves unable to impersonate the antinomies which articulate the myth in the same manner as in the Skeena versions, he proves unable to overcome them since he identifies fully with one term and dissociates himself fully from the other. In both cases, Asdival functions as an anti-hero that the Tsimshian versions can only portray either in the epic or in the prosaic mode. In order to change this negative hero into a positive one, the glorious ancestor of a noble house, nothing else was needed than to notice in the table of mythical permutations the empty box that the Tsimshian could not fill.
One. The M stands for mountain, the S stands for sea, and the plus for a positive attitude, and the minus, I’m sorry, and the minus for a negative attitude. So in one version, the arrow is positive, they oriented toward the mountain, negatively toward the sea.
In the other Tsimshian version, it is the opposite. And in the Nas version, it is negatively oriented toward, uh, both. This inability resulted from the fact that the Tsimshian assigned to their myth a negative function, namely to demonstrate that a contradiction inherent in their type of social organization was grounded in the grand scheme of things.
The family history of a Kwakiutl house succeeds filling in the blank quite simply. It inverts the framework of the Nass version, which as we saw, occupies a neutral position in respect to the Skeena versions. Being also static, this neutral position exemplifies in its own way the state of inertia to which all the Tsimshian versions converge.
So, instead of neutralizing opposites, as does the Nass version, the Kwakiutl version performs their synthesis. It reconciles them so that far from canceling each other, the opposites add up. As in the Nass version, the hero demonstrates his hunting talents during the competition planned by his father.
As in the Nass version two, he received payment for curing the wounded seals. But only in the Kwakiutl version does the hero succeed to become a chief, first of his mother’s tribe, then of his wife’s tribe. He thus overcomes the antinomy of filiation and affinity, and another one as well, that of land or mountain and sea, two terms, the synthesis of which he achieves by assuming the part, as the myth ends, of hunter emeritus, but on high sea.
Indeed, the hero’s two successive names, Prettiest Hunter during the first part of his life, and the Chief of the Open Sea, after he visited the seals, encapsulated that conclusion. For the sake of simplicity, I shall limit myself to the last antinomy and distinguish all the versions according to the terms of the antinomy in which respect to the hero appears marked or unmarked. This gives the chart I have drawn on the board, summarizing my whole argument under the condition that thanks to the Quackhoot version, we fill the empty box.
Thus, the Quackhoot version inverts the Nas version on an axis perpendicular to that on which the Scina versions invert each other. This will appear in another drawing. I have put the free Tsimtsian version on the horizontal line.
And, uh, the Kwakiutl version is perpendicularly opposed to, uh, the middle version that is from the Nass. This also reflects the spatial conversion of the east-west axis characteristic of the Tsimshian version to the north-south axis proper to the Kwakiutl version. There is one more detail in the Kwakiutl version, nowhere to be found, nowhere else, and seemingly gratuitous, which fits in the previous interpretation.
The hero, guest of the underwater kingdom, does not need to communicate in words with the inhabitants. They guess his unspoken thoughts. As the tale unrolls, this hyper-communication peculiar to the lower world stands in obvious opposition to the lack of communication which prevented the hero from entering the sky world of the bears because, says Amit, he has disregarded his father’s instruction.
Now, I have demonstrated elsewhere that all the Tsimshian versions of the Asdiwal story assign a salient role to several modalities of communication. They conceive indiscretion as an excess of communication with others; misunderstanding as a lack of communication also with others; forgetfulness as a lack of communication with oneself; nostalgia as an excess of communication also with oneself. The hero of the Kwakiutl version has no ground whatsoever to feel nostalgic of anything.
He has learned to profit fully from his experiences, both as a gifted hunter in high mountains and as the beloved guest of the underwater people. Correspondingly, thought reading, also a hypertrophied mode of communication, is free from all the negative connotations attached to indiscretion, misunderstanding, and forgetfulness. On the contrary, it allows the hero’s benefactors to understand him better than by taking a hint and to anticipate his slightest wishes.
Therefore, in that case too, there is evidence that the Kwakiutl version transformed values elsewhere negative into positive ones. This, the Tsimshians were unable to do for two reasons. In the first place, they formulated the problem of special concern to them in terms which made it impossible to solve.
In the second place, they chose setting it up in the context of their society at large and of a world conceived in the image of that society ridden with insuperable antagonism. It is true indeed that a society consisting in rival houses lives in a state of unstable equilibrium ceaselessly subverted, and that from the standpoint of the society considered as a whole, those insides’ conflicts constitute a negative aspect. On the other hand, enduring rivalries offer a positive value for each house taken separately, as it is through competition that each house has a chance to improve its position and to supersede the others.
Therefore, only two conditions were needed so that the Tsimshian myth, negative at the outset, it would acquire a positive value. It should first be borrowed by another population which did not acknowledge it as a myth and which consequently felt free to treat it as a mere canvas whereon it might embroider its own story. And it was also necessary that the myth were appropriated not by the entire society, but by one of its subgroups, and more precisely by that kind of subgroup, the aristocratic house to which rivalry offers a positive instead of a negative value.
A philosophical system devised to encompass both nature and society may preclude certain combinations of ideas, or it may keep them in a latent state, but there is nothing to prevent those combinations from falling into other hands whereby they will become actuated in two different ways, as a unit of discourse and as a political tool. By way of one example, I have tried to demonstrate that explicitly or implicitly, myths sometimes draw up a table of possible choices. It is as if those myths made such lists available to concrete social groups, societies or subgroup, so that each one might select the formula more likely to help solving internal problems in social organizations or vindicating claims over rivals.
Since those mythical formulas can be practically applied, we may say that, in a sense, mythical speculation anticipates social action. Mythical thought need not be aware that its propositions expressed on the ideological level represent as many answers to a concrete problem which can be solved by selecting one or the other formula. Nor does mythical thought need to know that an, i- as in the case of the Tsimshian versions, from a set of formulas, each one illustrated by a different version of the myth, one possible formula is missing, which could have been deduced from the others through a simple logical operation.
Its place remains nevertheless empty until a neighboring people sets itself to fill it. Even in those borderland cases, then, mythical thought appears endowed with a mysterious fecundity. It would seem that for it, a problem can never be answered in only one way.
The first answer that presents itself is part of a set of, of transformations whereby all other possible answers are generated together in succession. The same concepts get arranged in different ways. Their respective values and functions are being exchanged, opposed, or inverted until the time when the potentialities of that combinatorics deteriorate or become exhausted.
At the outset, a kind of intellectual intuition apprehends the world or part of it in the form of terms opposed to each other in various ways. But it does not stop there. The network of oppositions enlarges or narrows its meshes.
It extends as through the effect of illogical contagiousness, it assumes new aspects included in previous ones or including them, provided that the relation of homology obtains between all of them. That is not all. Like the electric bulbs in an advertisement panel that get alternately lighted up and turned off, so that different images appear either as luminous on a dark ground or dark on a luminous one, a contrivance which, by the way, is also a creation of the human mind.
Mental schematas undergo successive transformations without losing their logical consistency. Some of their elements, either positive or negative, get neutralized. Negative elements acquire a positive value, or the other way around.
In a quite different domain, let us recollect the formidable orchestral burst which puts an end to the brawl scene of Die Meistersinger’s second act. Since it cuts the vocal tumult short, it is perceived not for what it is objectively, an even louder noise, but as the triumph of silence at last restored. It is as if a chain of mental trigger actions aimed at setting up conceptual fragments in all conceivable arrangements provided some kind of symmetrical relationship to be maintained between their parts.
On the whole, it seems that intellectual processes can be lent properties that we recognize more easily when they manifest themselves in the sensory and perceptory fields. A luminous image formed on the retina does not disappear with the excitation that produced it. One may shut one’s eye or look in another direction only to see a green spot in place of the lighted bulb or of the reddish sun sinking behind the horizon.
On a more complex level, it is now known that, as a specialist, Dr. I. Rock wrote recently in Scientific American, I quote, “The perception of form is a process much closer to the cognitive level than has heretofore been recognized.” It cannot be explained as a direct outcome of the physiological processing of contours stimulating the retina. Within a fraction of a second, a geometrical drawing representing a cube or a stairway is perce- is perceived as seen from above or from below, from the front or from the back.
If one intensely stares at a photograph of a strongly modeled object or scenery appropriately lighted, it will appear either in positive or in negative relief. In the so-called Zöllner’s illusion, parallel bars are seen oblique when hatched with oblique lines, the slope of which has been inverted from one bar to the next. There are geometrical or ornamental compositions.
I’m thinking of Martin Escher, where figure and ground exactly balance each other, so that at times the ground looks as if it were the figure, and the figure as if it were the ground. Should the figure and the ground exhibit the same pattern, though inverted, the latter oscillates under the spectator’s eyes and is alternately perceived as a light figure on a dark ground or the reverse. It is as if the mind, given impetus by the action of an innate spring, always went beyond what it had first perceived.
Diverse as they may be, the previous examples foreshadow more complex mental activities, such as those involved in the process of myth creation. Mythical concepts,
(breath)
mythical thought, rather, get first stimulated by a particular relation between two or more concepts, and it sets about generating other relations either parallel or antagonistic to the first one. Should the high appear positive and the low negative, the inverse relation is immediately summoned. Moved by an autonomous activity, the mind ceaselessly permutes on different axes terms belonging to a same set.
No sooner a given combination of terms offers itself, the mind gets on the move. By way of successive rebounds, it generates, cascade-like, so to speak, all the other possible combinations. Out of an initial opposition, for instance, being the higher sky and the lower world, a narrower one emerge between lower sky and land, soon to be followed by a still narrower opposition between hilltop and valley.
It also happens that the sequence of opposition proceed up cascade, if I may say so, from the weaker ones to the stronger. For instance, from the opposition between hilltop and valley to one between land and water, and finally to that between high and low. Like the strings of a musical instrument which vibrates sympathetically, special oppositions may also wake up oppositions of a different kind.
Thus, each cascade flowing either upward or downward releases other cascades harmonically tuned to the first one, although they pertain to different dimensions, such as the temporal instead of the spatial, or else the economic, sociological, ethical dimensions. Transverse connections also link the steps of the cascades together. This kind of mental activity offers some analogy with what is called development in music.
To develop consists in surrounding a simple figure with fuller and complexer one, as in the prelude of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, or else in inserting in a primary figure smaller and more detailed one, as in the prelude of Wagner’s Das Rheingold. To develop is also to modulate from one key into another. All those operations are only valid under the provision that the relation of homology is maintained between those modulations, between the initial figure and those that include it or are included by it, between an enrichment from within and an enrichment from without.
For following that persisting homology, the notion of development would become meaningless. Let me borrow a last example from the fine arts. Amongst several differences between the art of the Pacific Northwest Coast Indians and that of the Western painters, there is one which I find particularly striking.
When a Western artist feels the need for a large surface to paint on, this is generally so as to put together objects more numerous or to represent a wider landscape than those a smaller canvas could conveniently accommodate. The Northwest Coast Indians carve, draw, or paint according to quite different principles. Whatever the size of the field available to them, More often than not, the subject remains the same, and if the surface gets bigger, the subject only spreads out to fill the whole of it.
So the makeup of the picture remains invariant. What is changed is only the number or the complexity of the secondary motives resorted to by the artist to fill in the empty spaces which appear inside the main figure when it expands so as to occupy a wider field. Those secondary motifs are often diminutive replicas of the main figure, or at the very least, they are closely related to it, either by content or by form.
Thus, cultures that are either acquainted or unacquainted with each other make different choices. Among stylistic processes not entirely dissimilar to those processes that mythical thought and musical composition as well are able to combine. One process being based on contiguity as in Western painting, the other on similarity as in the decorative art of the Northwest Coast Indians.
Their polar opposition is akin in rhetorical terms to that between metonymy and metaphor. This was made already conspicuous by the two types of optical illusions I mentioned earlier. One type was shown to result from the presence of contiguous forms contaminating those where the illusion occurs.
The other type, from the power inherent in an image to transform into an analogous one, its chromatic complementary when the image is colored, or when colorless, its symmetrical projection. Traditional psychology used to explain perceptory illusions as if they resulted from a mement- a momentary excess of sensory or mental activity. From the standpoint I have chosen, there would be no excess.
but rather a normal manifestation of an intrinsic power wherefrom proceeds the whole activity of the mind. In that case, the mind’s basic mode of operation would consist in generating and logically ordering an unlimited array of possibilities later to be curtailed and thinned out by experience and education. This is why myth should be of concern to the psychologist and the philosopher as much as to the anthropologist.
They constitute a field among several others, for art should not be left out, where the human mind remains relatively free from external contrain- constraints and is therefore able to display its inborn activity still in full force and as spontaneously as in its prime condition. Thank you.
(applause)
