The proponents of structural analysis know they are vulnerable to a criticism to which they really must respond from time to time. They are reproached for what is seen as an inherent weakness in their project: they misuse analogy by confining themselves to the most superficial ones, or they use all means available, resorting to heterogeneous and therefore questionable analogies. For some, the limitless series of associations produced by structural analysis resembles a game in favor among schoolchildren, which consists of exchanging words, each of which begins with the syllable or syllables ending the previous word, while drawing from the most incongruous sectors of the lexicon.
The appeal of that game for young minds would merit consideration. It cannot be explained as a search for assonances that would simply be poetic. Assonance is one of the resources poetry uses to gain access to realities inexpressible in prose. In fact, that game evokes in rudimentary form a versification process with which the old poets were familiar, the use of what were called chained, concatenated, appended, or fraternized rhymes. It also brings to mind the “pivot words,”
kakekotoba, in Japanese versification, in which a single syllable or single group of syllables takes on two meanings simultaneously. Rhyme, which also plays on similarity and difference, highlights relationships of equivalence between sound and meaning: “It would be an unsound oversimplification to treat rhyme merely from the standpoint of sound. Rhyme necessarily involves a semantic relationship” (Jakobson 1960, 14).
You will therefore not get rid of the chains of analogies of structural analysis by relegating them to the subordinate place that, in a different genre, would similarly be misassigned to rhymes, since both are more meaningful than you might imagine. The grounding for these analogies is that, as the terms of a hypothetico-deductive reasoning, they lead to conclusions for which it must be possible to provide the proof. I would like to demonstrate this with an example (Lévi-Strauss 1985).
Let pottery clay serve as our starting point. From there, we move on to Nightjar because, in certain myths, clay is the effect of Nightjar and Nightjar is the cause of clay. The image of Nightjar, as soon as it is formed, reverses into that of Sloth; by virtue of several traits, these two form a pair of opposites. The similarity of Sloth’s way of life to that of other animals then leads to their all being subsumed under the concept of arboreal fauna, which leads to the tribe of dwarfs with no anus, a figural representation of that fauna; and from there, to dwarfs with no mouth, through a relation of inverted symmetry that occurs with a change in hemisphere.
These successive transfers, sometimes logical, sometimes rhetorical or even geographical, are based on relations of contiguity, resemblance, equivalence, or inversion. They are syllepses, metonomies, or metaphors. How are we to convince readers that these choices are not arbitrary, designed for the needs of the cause on an ad hoc basis? Do they not move us further and further away from the starting point, as if along the way we had forgotten pottery, whose mythic status provided the inquiry with its raison d’être? One critic, after recalling the thesis that arboreal fauna may be conceived in American mythology as the transformation of a tribe of dwarfs, objects: “But that is only supposition, since…most of these relationships are merely postulated, without any myths being put forward to justify them…. Considering the strategic place these myths would have to occupy in
The Jealous Potter in terms of providing proof, that cannot fail to be significant” (Abad Márquez 1995, 336).
Yet that circuitous route, on which new postulates and new hypotheses appear at every turn, happens to be immediately and universally validated when a previously unknown myth surfaces that short-circuits the intermediaries and unites the conclusion and the premises. Such is the case for a myth of the Tatuyo Indians from the Vaupés region, collected by Elsa Gómez-Imbert, who, aware of its importance for my argument, communicated it to me before publishing it. I would like to express my thanks to her here.
The myth can be divided into two parts. The second, which I leave aside temporarily, deals with the fabrication of pots, a female occupation, and explains why it became laborious. The first part dates back further in time, to the origin of clay, the raw material for pottery.
An Indian who was out fishing came upon the Forest Spirit, No-Anus. The Indian farted in his presence. The Spirit, astonished, asked to know the origin of the noise. The man explained that his anus was speaking. The Spirit admitted he had no anus. The Indian proposed to make one for him and drove a sharpened wooden rod into the Sprit’s behind with such violence that the Spirit died as a result. From that hole clay is now extracted, the rotted flesh of the Spirit (Gómez-Imbert 1990).
A complex argument extending over a hundred pages was required to demonstrate that the myths on the origin of clay and those on dwarfs with no anus belong to the same series, and then to determine the reasons this is so. The validity of that long trajectory is now proven by a myth that identifies No-Anus with clay.
In the same way, a myth that remained outside the field of inquiry allows us to shed light on a connection that, in this case, I was constrained to postulate between two sets of myths: one on the origin of pottery, the other on the origin of the colors of birds.
I begin by noting that, in the Americas, myths on the origin of pottery are divided into two subsets, one dealing with the origin of pottery, the other—like the second part of the Tatuyo myth—with the fabrication of decorations on pots. That art was taught to women by the supernatural mistress of pottery, whom the myths also represent in the form of the rainbow, a monstrous serpent living at the bottom of the waters. The polychrome motifs adorning the serpent’s skin were copied by the potters, and even today these motifs inspire the decoration of their works.
But other myths depict that serpent in a very different story. Birds, the enemy of the serpent, got together to destroy it. After killing the monster, they divided up its remains and, depending on the piece of skin that fell to each bird (representative of a species), each acquired its distinctive plumage.
By means of polychromy, a connection is thus established between the colors of birds, decorated pottery, and clay. At first sight, nothing makes that connection necessary. Nevertheless, one myth allows us to demonstrate the unity of the two series. It comes from the Maya Indians of the Yucatan. Granted, that is a long way from the Amazon, but after all, our first reflections on the role of polychromy in South American myths led us to Mexico (Lévi-Strauss 1964, 329; 1967, 26).
Several versions of this myth are known to us. According to the most recent, the birds, who quarreled constantly among themselves, were summoned to an assembly by the Great Ancestor to name a king. Wild Turkey proposed himself as a candidate, pointing out his well-proportioned size and his melodious voice—but his feathers were not beautiful enough. He borrowed those of Nightjar and was chosen. Meanwhile Nightjar waited in vain for the favors Turkey had promised him in return. The birds found him hiding in the woods, stripped bare, half dead from the cold. Overcome with pity, each one gave him one of its feathers. That is why today Nightjar has a motley plumage (Boccara 1966, 97). It is true that Nightjar has a plumage in shades of gray, fawn, brown, and black. Its dark and understated hues blend into the color of the ground or of the tree on which these birds squat.
The myth obviously follows a regressive course. Contrary to the myths that recount how birds acquired their distinctive plumage, this one tells how Nightjar lost his and fell back into chromatic indistinction, which was originally the lot of all birds. The approach taken by the myths in the alternate series, the one on the origin of pottery, is the same: they tell how an indiscreet woman (guilty, that is, of oral incontinence) lost the pots received from her supernatural benefactress. They broke into pieces, which turned back into balls of clay, a material identified in the Tatuyo myth with a person afflicted with anal retention (instead of being too open above, he is too closed below).
The path leading back from decorated pottery to clay and the one leading back from the colored plumage of birds to the motley and drab plumage of Nightjar are thus parallel; or, if one prefers, where color is concerned, Nightjar is to the other birds what clay is to decorated pottery. Thus the choice of the Jivaro myths (which combine Nightjar and clay) as a generative cell for the mythology of pottery is validated.
When compared to the long chains of associations that had to be laid out from one myth to another to arrive at a demonstration, the myth serving as proof displays the characteristic of a residue: only the essential remains. As in arithmetic, the proof consists of replacing a complicated operation (in this case, the one that unfolded by means of numerous myths) with a simpler, equivalent operation performed on a single myth, then of verifying that the two results coincide.
But even if the proof provides an accurate result, nothing as yet assures us that it was not obtained by chance or that the links correspond to something real outside the analyst’s mind. To reach that point, one would have to multiply the number of proofs. The comparison with arithmetic is risky; all we can take from it is the warning to be cautious. The mathematical proof known as “casting out nines” (
preuve par neuf) has something in common with the proof by a myth described as new (
preuve par mythe qualifié de neuf) either because it was unknown at the time of the inquiry or because it had not been encountered along the way: namely, it is only plausible and can at most lay claim to a good probability. But that is already a great deal, especially in what are known as the human sciences.
Bibliography
Abad, Márquez, L. V. 1995. La Mirada distante sobre Lévi-Strauss. Madrid: Siglo veintiuno de España Editores.
Boccara M. 1996. “Puhuy, l’amoureux déçu: La mythologie de l’Engoulevent en pays Maya.” Journal d’agriculture traditionnelle et de botanique appliquée 38, no. 2: 95–109.
Gómez-Imbert, E. 1990. “La façon des poteries: Mythe sur l’origine de la poterie.” Amerindia 15: 193–227.
Jakobson, R. 1960. “Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. 1964. Le cru et le cuit. Paris: Plon.
———. 1967. Du miel aux cendres. Paris: Plon.
———. 1985. La potière jalouse. Paris: Plon.
