2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

F ROM LANGUAGE TO MYTH
spected, and it must be so, for the structure to be such. Indeed, if a newly discovered version
proved irreducible to the analysis, it would not show the insufficiency of the method but
the necessity of a more sophisticated description of the underlying structure. Again, there
is no true, original version of the myth, as well as there is no “authentic” and original game
of chess. Rather, the opposite is true: anyone of the almost infinite series of narrations is a
“true” version insofar as it represents a further example of the combinatorics generated by
the application of the basic rules. 19
The basic rule governing the transformation from one version of a myth to another is
the “canonical formula” we mentioned, with no further discussion, at the beginning of this
section. A particularly clear explanation and explicit application of the law to the mythic
material of the Americas is given by Lévi-Strauss in, “The Jealous Potter,” a study of a se-
ries of South and North American myths written almost 30 years after the publication of the
essays on “The Structural Study of the Myth.” The cycle analyzed in the book begins with
a myth belonging to the Jivaro, a South American population living on the eastern slopes
of the Andes between Ecuador and Peru. It tells the story of a woman named Aôho (a word
meaning Goatsucker, a nocturnal bird) who had two husbands, Sun and Moon; Sun was
warm and powerful, while Moon was cold and weak, and Aôho preferred the former to the
latter. Moon took offence and climbed up to the sky on a vine, blew on Sun and eclipsed it.
Aôho tried to follow Moon into the sky bringing with her a basketful of clay, but Moon saw
her coming and cut the vine. Aôho fell to the ground and was transformed into the bird that
bears her name, the Goatsucker, while the clay scattered on the earth, where it can now be
found. 20
19. An even more “playful” interpretation of Oedipus is presented by Lévi-Strauss in the last chapter of
La potière jalouse (Paris: Plon, 1985): Engl tr. The Jealous Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1988) where the structure of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex is shown homologous to Eugène Labiche’s
farcical play’s The Italian Straw Hat. Lévi-Strauss concludes the analysis by saying: “The
scheme, however, remains the same: it consists of a set of rules aimed at bringing coherence to elements
that are at first presented incompatible or even contradictory.” (264/202). Lévi-Strauss commented
the Oedipus myth in at least one other occasion: his inaugural address at the Collège de France
(1960), now in Anthropologie structurale deux…, 32-35; Engl tr. 21-24.
20. This is of course a summary of the summarized version of the first variant of the first myth retold as
by Lévi-Strauss, but it will suffice to illustrate the application of the canonical formula. See Claude
Lévi-Strauss, La potière jalouse…, 23-24; Engl. tr. 14-15.
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