Structural anthropology is psychoanalysis on a basis broader than the individual. Both techniques seek to discover the workings of the human mind by examining its unconscious productions, but while psychoanalysis studies patterns inside a single skull, awake or asleep, structural anthropology concentrates on the communal dream that is ritual behaviour. Then, too, psychoanalysis confines itself by and large to its own culture, while anthropology operates by preference at a distance conducive to objectivity, among tribes whose conscious carapace offers relatively little resistance to the anthropologist’s scientific tools. But these are self-imposed limits, and a degree of overlap is common enough; though based in Vienna, Freud felt free to discuss the mental workings of his contemporary, Woodrow Wilson, distant in space, of his European neighbour, Leonardo da Vinci, distant in time, and of course of Oedipus, at a considerable remove of both time and space. In the same way, the techniques of structural anthropology pioneered by Lévi-Strauss can uncover much that is startling in our own culture, if applied with care and thoroughness.
But let us pass from introduction to example. Nurses in a provincial hospital recently took charge of a man who had been bizarrely punished by his wife for infidelity. She had returned unexpectedly to the family home, and could hear him misbehaving. He was engaged in sexual congress that was both noisy and enthusiastic, characteristics which had been missing for some time from his dealings with his wife. She herself made no noise, let herself out of the flat, and returned at her usual time. She cooked a fine dinner, taking care to grind up some sleeping-pills and include them in the mashed potatoes. Her husband retired early to bed, pleading tiredness, and a little later on she stripped him as he slept, and stuck his hand to his penis with Super Glue.
The doctors and nurses faced the problem of separating manual and genital flesh from their tangle, and they had moreover to improvise an arrangement to enable the patient to urinate; plastic surgery was eventually required to restore the appearance of the parts.
And there it is, a little sordid, a little amusing, a story of no great distinction, promising no great yield of insight. But this story moves faster than any story can on its own merits, it travels at high speed, and suddenly it is everywhere; it satisfies a need that runs unexpectedly deep, and someone can even be heard claiming it was current years ago, in another town. It is therefore a myth, even if it happened, and can be guaranteed to explain itself if asked the right questions. But its music will remain mysterious until it is struck with the subtle mallet of structural anthropology, which gives resonances priority over mere sound.
I. NATURE/CULTURE
The crucial opposition, as ever, is nature/culture. Sexuality is wild, tamed in marriage, revealed as wild all along in adultery. The dangerous animal is transformed into a social adhesive, but breaks loose again. The animal parts boiled down into glue threaten no such resurrection; hence the woman’s choice of instrument for her revenge. The actual composition of glue in modern times is rarely organic, but the collective unconscious always is; it refers to the constants of human experience, and not to mere life ‘as it is lived’. The collective unconscious exists independently of chronological sequence, and doesn’t keep pace with developments in glue technology. Nor for that matter is a man excused by his ignorance of Greek mythology from desiring his father’s death and his mother’s body.
2. LIMP/STIFF
The secondary axis of oppositions in our chosen myth is limp/stiff; the married man undertakes to be stiff with his wife, limp in all other contexts. Impotence in the marriage-bed and tumescence elsewhere are symmetrical threats to social order and the next generation. But here, the adulterer is punished for his criminal stiffness with more, with a stiffness he cannot control, for it is precisely his lack of control which is stigmatized. The betrayed woman betrays him to the castrating laughter of the world by parodying his virility, source of his transgression; the permanent erection she gives him nevertheless shows him to be impotent. Hardness and softness are equally laughable, equally disgusting, when they are constant pathological states, unmediated by contract and by alternation.
3. FOOD/DRUG
The married man sacrifices excitement and variety, distraction and unpredictability, in the interests of a higher set of values; he enters an economy of duties and pleasures. He signs a contract to stop playing the field, and to start cultivating it; he must reduce his erotic options to one before he can reproduce himself in the next generation. Energy invested in marriage accrues as capital; in promiscuity it is dissipated and comes to nothing. The married man renounces sex as a drug and binds himself to a life of intimate affection, of sex as food; from this point on, his hunger will be satisfied rather than stimulated. But the adulterous husband violates the metabolism of marriage by continuing to demand excitement instead of sustenance. Very well then; the woman whose power to satisfy appetite he has scorned will retaliate by drugging his food. And she will make use of drugs in their narcotic rather than stimulant aspect; instead of excitement she will deliver sedation, and helplessness instead of a heightened awareness. For her, adultery is, like alcohol, a ‘sedative hypnotic with paradoxical stimulation’, a down that only masquerades as an up; and her revenge necessarily dramatizes her attitudes to betrayal.
4. PRIVATE/PUBLIC
When two people combine as husband and wife, and no longer define themselves as their parents’ children, their changed status must be marked by a ritual; as they move from separate establishments into a shared household they pass through a kind of sacred corridor, which irreversibly differentiates the past from the future. Although they are private individuals making a private decision, they must declare it in public, and though they are drastically loosening their ties with their parents, their wedding is traditionally attended by all the people from whom they are, in effect, receding.
Whether they choose to be married in church or opt for the ceremonial minimum in front of a Registrar, their act is no less ritual, and as such it cannot simply be dropped and not mentioned again. It must be renounced; a formula must be found which symbolically inverts the ritual of binding. Even though the magic has died, the spell must be said backwards for the release of the participants. Their disenchantment must be fully enacted.
And we can see this process at work in our myth. The original ritual impels the couple through a solemn public space and towards the marriage-bed; the counter-ritual starts in that same bed, now a trap for the sinner and not a nest, and expels the guilty party towards a public space purged of all solemnity. The husband drugged in the marriage-bed is already paying the price for his transgression; having preferred excitement to security, he must abide by his choice, and forfeits safety absolutely. But there is more in store for him.
His wife’s selection, for her symbolic inverse of a church, of a hospital, is a masterstroke on the part of the collective unconscious. They are respectively the homes of a mystery resistant to analysis and an analysis resistant to mystery; a suggestive darkness, and an inescapable light.
We may add in passing that only structural anthropology increases mystery in the process of explaining it. Here at last science and religion marry and settle down.
And there is a further excellence to the patterning, in that a man who has spurned his chosen bed and sought sex elsewhere, is immobilized in a bed he hasn’t chosen; a bed in which the body is examined and treated clinically, without a moment’s consideration for the sensual component he has rated so highly. He occupies an asexual bed, then, lying there in limbo, defined by no relationships, and sharing the premises with other transients who at least have the prospect of returning to their interrupted lives. He, however, has sought to combine freedom of action with the security of the hearth, and has been brusquely deprived of both.
5. COMEDY/TRAGEDY
In our study of structural elements we have so far considered the glue, the sleeping-pills, the bed, and the hospital. There remain the hand and the penis. By her sarcastic conjunction of these two organs the wife insists on the comic rather than the tragic aspects of her predicament; she makes the dissolution of her marriage a matter for public laughter rather than private heartbreak. She represents her husband as caught in the act, but the act itself is ironically diminished; his posture convicts him not of adultery but self-abuse. The enforced junction of hand and penis yokes man’s highest ambitions and his betraying weakness.
(It is obviously his dominant hand that she so mockingly cements in place; impossible to imagine her spoiling the symbolism by insulting the left hand of a right-hander. That would be quite foreign to the exhaustive brilliance of a mind that doesn’t even know it is operating!)
She juxtaposes the opposable thumb, which was such an achievement of evolution, with the third leg – those guilty tissues which threaten to slide Man back into the swamp of undifferentiation. The woman declares the marital atrocity simply waste, the crime against herself mere self-indulgence.
In her construction of a counter-ritual the woman has developed a persona whose trademark is the ironic fulfilment of wishes; she has metamorphosed from one folk-tale character into another, from Captive Maiden into Witch. Her husband wants to be stiff elsewhere than in her bed? She can arrange it. He wants an adventure? She will see what she can do.
With her glue she ensures their separation, with the hardness she contrives for him she parodies his virility. But her final coup is her magical ability to use others to work her revenge; there is a superficial mercy to her actions with the tube of glue, but the surgeons must exercise their skills unstintingly. The way in which these members of the community seem to carry out the betrayed woman’s commands gives the punishment an air of impersonality; the woman herself refrains from the knife, but hands him over to her agents for surgery. They collaborate in his humiliation.
The knife is in fact being used to repair damage, but this is not apparent to the victim, except at that lowermost level where words mean two opposite things (compare Freud on the binary meanings of basic words). The patient’s hand cleaves to his penis, the doctors must cleave them apart again.
But the women in the hospital are essentially more important than the men. The surgeons are predominantly male, the nurses by and large female, and it is the nurses who make up the hospital community as perceived by the patient. The doctors pay visits, but the nurses seem to live on the wards. And so the final phase of the adulterer’s punishment is accomplished. With her woman’s laughter his wife hands him over to the laughter of women who re-enact the transformation of the female from subservient employee to ambiguous manipulator: women who touch him without tenderness, who are intimate with him but not interested, who tend without establishing a relationship with the man in their care; who confirm his exile from a world where the female can be taken for granted, and who may even be laughing behind their hands.
What remains of our original story? Certainly nothing of the sordid or trivial; these elements have been absorbed into their opposites. And simplicity too has yielded the complex, without losing its shape. For just below the surface of story, like the succulent separate threads beneath the skin of a perfectly cooked vegetable-spaghetti, lies the tangled richness of myth.