‘Myth and Meaning’: How Stories Organise Our Reality
A review of ‘Myth and Meaning’, by Claude Lévi-Strauss; University of Toronto Press, 1978.
Myth and Meaning grew out of a 1977 CBC lecture series. Its author, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, was one of the first scholars to borrow concepts built by Ferdinand de Saussure and apply them to the humanities. The result was structuralism, which is something between an intellectual stream and a system of methods that seeks to understand human culture by refracting it through the lens of a broader system. Put simply, structuralists try to discover the social patterns that underlie what humans do, think and feel.
In Myth and Meaning, Lévi-Strauss attempts to show how myth, science and music all spring from the same source. He opens, as Kołakowski does in The Presence of Myth, by setting myth against science. But unlike Kołakowski, he proceeds to collapse the distinction. Kołakowski says that myth and science are different, but complementary. Lévi-Strauss seems them as structurally similar. His claim is that myth is not some primitive groping towards knowledge, but a highly sophisticated system of logic encoded in story. It is a way of organising reality. Science is procedural, explicit, and analytic. Myth is intuitive, symbolic, synthetic. In other words, the difference between science and myth is form, not function. The ‘savage thought’ of the myth-maker is not inferior to science: its method is simply poetic, not procedural.
In Myth and Meaning, Lévi-Strauss attempts to show how myth, science and music all spring from the same source.
In the second chapter, and the second essay, he deals with the paradox of mythical time. Though myth may take place in a fantastical past, its aim is to make sense of the present. Believers in myths are endlessly reworking, updating and contradicting those myths not in spite of logic, but because logic demands it. The myth must change to explain the shifting anxieties of the surrounding culture. This fluidity, says Lévi-Strauss, is not a flaw but a feature of myth. Myth, like tradition, is alive: myths flex and mutate through the centuries. We shape them according to need, as we do with words. He makes the point more than once.
In the later essays he plunges into the deeper waters of language and music. He argues that the mind works through binary distinctions: light and dark, male and female, raw and cooked. Myth resolve these oppositions through narrative. The myth of ‘The Flood’ is pre-Biblical, and deals with one of the most basic tensions in human life: that between chaos and order. The flood restores order by wiping out man-made chaos. A righteous man survives and starts again. Here, the myth names the opposites, stages the conflict and then resolves it, all through story and symbol. Music, claims Lévi-Strauss, does something similar: it works through transformations within constraints, allowing for infinite variation within a closed system.
You will have noticed that through all of this runs a suspicion, perhaps even a warning against, the Western belief in intellectual superiority. Thinkers like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens see myth as primitive, belonging (in the words of the latter) to ‘the bawling infancy of our species’. But Lévi-Strauss says this is not the case. Both the mythical and the scientific mind ask the right questions; neither supplies the answers. The distinction between the two is chiefly stylistic.
You will have noticed that through all of this runs a suspicion, perhaps even a warning against, the Western belief in intellectual superiority.
And yet science does provide answers of a kind. It gives us mechanisms (‘How does this work?’), predictions (‘What might happen if?’) and technology (‘How can I do this?’). As many have noted, what science cannot do is answer fundamental questions, such as ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ or ‘Why do we suffer?’ Myth, particularly myth as expressed in religion, can help us to answer those questions and this is what Kołakowski stresses in his own take on the subject. So science stands on myth. It rests on certain articles of faith that cannot be proven by means of the scientific method: that the world is ordered; that it is knowable; that is discoverable through our senses and reasons; that we are capable of understanding it. The origin of these beliefs is Christian. Through exchange with Islamic Spain and the Byzantine Empire, Europe rediscovered Aristotle, on whom Muslim and Jewish thinkers had commentated, and now had a rigorous logical method. Since the Bible says God’s nature can be learned through nature, the Europeans began to apply reason to theology. Science is downstream of this.
I dare say this is quite a bit more lucid than the explanation offered by Lévi-Strauss. He avoids concrete examples and seems so attached to his system that he is quite willing to gloss over the rougher edges of reality to make it work. His insistence on binary oppositions seems overly schematic. Human beings and human cultures (in case you hadn’t noticed) are messy, even paradoxical. But his book defends and indeed affirms the important truth that life is and perhaps will always be mysterious, that science cannot answer our deepest questions, and that myth is an ancient means by which we can give dramatic expression to those questions and to the dilemmas of our lives. Lévi-Strauss frames myth as what Michael Oakeshott called a conversation: always changing, never conclusive, with no goal in sight, and yet something that gives us order and meaning.
