2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

F ROM LANGUAGE TO MYTH
sents itself. Lévi-Strauss’s irreverent example is the treatment of the Revolution in the dis-
course of the contemporary French Politician: it is both “a sequence belonging to the past
[...] and a timeless pattern which can be detected in contemporary French society and which
provides a clue for its interpretation, a lead from which to infer future developments” (209).
Myth’s strange temporality provides the ground for Lévi-Strauss’s basic hypothesis
about the mythological structure: “The true constituent units of a myths are not the isolated
relations, but bundles of such relations, and it is only as bundles that such relations can be
put to use and combined so as to produce a meaning” (211). A first analogy is provided by
an orchestra score, a piece of writing which can actually be read along two different axis:
the score can be read and is actually executed diachronically from left to right in order to
obtain the melody. But the score can also be “read” from top to bottom, synchronically, to
get at the underlying harmony of the piece. In other words, “all the notes written vertically
make up one gross constituent unit, that is one bundle of relations” (212). The musical no-
tation facilitates immensely the double order of reading: part of what Lévi-Strauss wants to
get at is a system of notation capable of rendering the “double” structure of a myth, e.g. a
narration normally considered only temporal and unilinear. We have reached a crucial point
in the illustration of the structural method:
the myth will be treated as an orchestra score would if it were unwittingly
considered as a unilinear series; our task is to reestablish the correct arrangement.
Say, for instance, we are confronted with a sequence of the type:
1,2,4,7,8,2,3,4,6,8,1,4,5,7,8,1,2, 5,7,3,4,5, 6,8. the assignment being to put
all the 1’s together, all the 2’s, the 3’s, etc.; the result is a chart:
1 2 4 7 8
2 3 4 6 8
1 4 5 7 8
1 2 5 7
3 4 5 6 8
We shall attempt to perform the same kind of operation on the Oedipus
myth. (213)
We should not be misled by the trivial simplicity of the numerical example, which presents
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