University of Tartu Department of Semiotics Montana
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University of Tartu Department of Semiotics Montana Salvoni The Myth of Mythology: a semiotic reading of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony Master Thesis Supervisor: Peeter Torop Tartu 2013 I hereby declare that I have written this Master Thesis myself, independently. All of the other authors’ texts, main viewpoints and all data from other resources have been referenced. Author: Montana Salvoni Date: Signature: Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................................... 6 MODEL ............................................................................................................................................................ 11 1.0 Discrete & Continuous ........................................................................................................................ 13 1.1 Characteristics of Discrete and Continuous Texts ...................................................................... 16 2.0 The Problem of Plot(s) ........................................................................................................................ 20 3.0 Mythological Mechanisms ................................................................................................................... 28 3.1 The Structural Study of Myth ......................................................................................................... 28 3.2 Features of Mythological Texts ...................................................................................................... 33 OBJECT ............................................................................................................................................................ 40 Review of the Relevant Literature ........................................................................................................ 41 4.0 Atemporality .......................................................................................................................................... 47 4.1 Nonlinear Organization ................................................................................................................... 48 4.2 Narrative Segmentation ................................................................................................................... 53 5.0 Unconditional Identity ......................................................................................................................... 56 5.1 Single-level Object Description ...................................................................................................... 56 5.2 Integral Wholeness ........................................................................................................................... 60 5.3 Transformational Identity as Narrative Content ......................................................................... 62 6.0 Narrative Self-Sufficiency .................................................................................................................... 70 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................................... 79 References ......................................................................................................................................................... 81 INTRODUCTION The title of this work is drawn from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Overture to that eminent work on and of mythology, The Raw and the Cooked. The anthropologist characterized his own book in these terms, saying “a reader would not be wrong if he took the book itself as a myth: the myth of mythology” (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 12). While he intended to draw out the similarities, with respect to their relationship to language, of myth and the scientific metalanguages, I have chosen his words for a different possibility which they suggest for the representation of mythology. I refer specifically to Tartu-Moscow school text semiotics, in particular to the treatment of myth and the mythological as resulting from a distinctly other type of cognition—that is to say, of semiosis—than that which is today dominant in cultural texts. From this perspective, “myth” designates more than a category of content populated by incredible and obsolete explanations of phenomena. In this paradigm, myth is an entire modality which determines the perception and representation of the world according to its particular logic. Mythology produces and consists of texts in which myth is not only a kind of content but the specific way in which meaning is generated; mythological texts are defined as those which employ mythological semiotic mechanisms. Accounts of mythology which rely on non- mythological perception and representation thus submit their object to a foreign logic that reshapes myth in the image of an opposite modality. This treatment of myths has left a great deal undeciphered, and in order to access that overlooked aspect of mythological texts a representational model is needed which uses the logic native to myth to express mythology in its own terms: a myth of mythology. This thesis is in pursuit of such a model. The problem of our contemporary representations of myth has been posed as a distortion of its historical peculiarity: “It is examined from the point of view of the end of the history of consciousness; it is forced and deformed; it is seen, like the moon, only on the surface” (Freidenberg 1997: 21). This is so because, even in antique literature, “we find in it an entire system of thought which no longer has active meaning for it, but which at the same time cannot be extracted without destroying the literature […] [t]his semantically inactive system of thought is simple to point to and label: it represents mythological imagery” (Freidenberg 1997: 26). This historical approach makes of 6 mythology a system already inaccessible and inactive for the antique, or “classical” literature in which we usually locate it, though it remains present in ever more diluted forms. This “deformation” of myth not only prevents our understanding it with any semblance of depth or completeness, but also sharply restricts the possibility of locating its persistence in contemporary texts. Taken to its extreme, the relegation of myth to a remote historical epoch has inspired discussions of the “construction of myth” as an eighteenth and nineteenth century romanticist invention (Hendy 2001: xi), and a whole literature on the “absence of myth” as all that remains to be discussed (Heller 2006: 1). From this standpoint, myth is placed firmly outside the purview of modern culture: “What we have inherited are concepts and imaginings of myth, as opposed to the concrete, living experience of myth. […] One can see how myth’s applicability has been whittled down to its romantic appeal and entertainment value” (Heller 2006: 1). Although it is probably the most common, the historical perspective on myth is not the only possibility. As Juri Lotman insists, the question of myth’s textual specificity “can be posed both as a historical and as a typological problem” (Lotman 1979: 161). Typologically, mythological thought has been characterized as concrete and image-based, as opposed to the abstract conceptual thought which has come to dominate human perception and representations (Freiberg 1997: 26-31). For Lotman, this typological problem is evident in specific textual modalities, the primordial poles of which he terms “myth” and “plot”, and which are primarily distinguished by their differing relationships to time (Lotman 1979: 163). Lotman’s construct is in fact of great significance for contemporary approaches to mythology and must be considered in light of his broader semiotic theory: It has been established that a minimally functioning semiotic structure consists of not one artificially isolated language or text in that language, but of a parallel pair of mutually untranslatable languages which are, however, connected by a 'pulley', which is translation. A dual structure like this is the minimal nucleus for generating new messages and it is also the minimal unit of a semiotic object such as culture. Thus culture is (as a minimum) a binary semiotic structure, and one which at the same time functions as an indissoluble unit. (Lotman 1990: 2). Here we can see that not only entire cultures but any “minimally functioning semiotic structure” is a necessarily plural one, composed of and engaged with multiple modalities: no single “artificially isolated” language, semantic system, or text, can function semiotically. Thus whether we speak of “the mythological” as a semantic system, a text type, or a perceptive modality, it cannot occur in any semiotic function without, “as contracting party” (Lotman 1979: 163), a structure of demonstrably 7 other orientation. This other-to-myth is variously described as conceptual (Freiberg 1997), rational (Eco 1992), linear (Lotman and Uspenski 1978a), scientific (Heller 2006), et cetera, but scholars have generally agreed that it is both historically and typologically dominant, with regard to myth, today. If indeed some aspects of the mythological persist in our contemporary texts—dominantly linear and conceptual but still necessarily heterogeneous and thus possessed of some other semiotic character themselves—then relegating myth to the inaccessible past is to render some part of even culturally “close” texts inaccessible. This is especially true for the field of literature, which has