Myth and Meaning.
Claude Levi-Strauss Routledge 2000

Flaubert tells us not to touch our idols as the gilt will stain our hands. It is indeed an odd feeling to re-visit the work of an intellectual megastar of yesteryear as the Routledge "Classics" series here invites us to do. In this particular case, Levi-Strauss's Massey Lectures of 1977 are opened for us once again. It is all a bit like catching old, forgotten footage of Elvis or Jack Kennedy or Norman Mailer. Can the old troopers still cut it in the 21st century? Were all our youthful enthusiasms misplaced? Are we embarrassed now by what we once admired so? And what was structuralism anyway?

Essentially, the Massey Lectures attempt to bring to a stage of equal credibility and mutually reinforcing value both the marvels of science and the mysteries of mythology. This must have meant more in the 1970's, one suspects, than it does in the 2000's. For the text is burdened by arguments one does not really hear considered anymore. Take, as CL-S invites us, the "world of smells" :-

"We were accustomed to think that this was entirely subjective. Now the chemists are able to tell us that each smell or each taste has a certain chemical composition and to give us the reasons why subjectively some smells or some tastes feel to us as having something in common and others seems widely different".

Rather trivial examples like this apart, CL-S's purpose is to affirm that whereas modern scientific explanation has colonised and de-mystified so much of life this does not mean that all meaning is to be found in relentless irreducibility. You cannot, for example, understand a piece of music by exclusive reference to this note, the note that precedes and the note that follows. The molecular structure of music is not enough to permit understanding of the meaning any piece carries; for the meaning spins and swirls on the listener's memory, involvement, mood, need. Meaning is not necessarily linear, literal and sequential. Meaning can lie in the opposite of irreducibility : systems, connections, relationships, the social rather than the personal, the transactional rather than the transient.

All this fans out into what we think would be generally accepted as a commonplace argument in favour of anthropological relativism : the notion that though science, from age to age, makes progress within itself, all cultures possess the same essential sophistication of thought. Myths hide perceptions no longer useful to the modern mind. But this cannot be thought to make them less valid as explanations of all life's colourful phenomena. We are genetically programmed, one might say, to hoard meaning. And, many of CL-S's reviews of various American myths - about animals, heroes, twins, weather magic - make for good quality diversion.

But even for such a short piece as this there seems to be room for serious self-indulgence. It is all quite readable and persuasive. Nevertheless, the text occasionally creaks like a redbrick bedstead installed in the 1970's. The man who can bring good philosophy is not the same as the man who can bring real wisdom. Does the following outburst mean anything very much to you?

"What threatens us right now is probably what we may call over-communication - that is, the tendency to know exactly in one point of the world what is going on in all other parts. In order for a culture to be really itself and to produce something, the culture and its members must be convinced of their originality and even, to some extent, of their superiority over the others; it is only under conditions of under-communication that it can produce anything. We are now threatened with the prospect of our being only consumers, able to consume anything from any point in the world and from every culture, but losing all originality".

Yes, yes, yes, you can hear the fore-echoes of globalisation in all this. But this is a conservative if not downright reactionary view of our cultural evolution in a (highly) relatively borderless world. CL-S says himself that these are the proof-free opinions of a casual observer. But quite frankly, we would expect a lot more than this from the master of myth-meaning, the man who claims he can help us use logic to decode life.

Though we were disappointed at just how decrepit so much of all this turned out, in contemporary retrospect, to be, we can appreciate just how fresh and classy the Massey Lectures must have seemed at the time. And it is still a good read. The sense prevails that much of CL-S's innovation- in-discourse is no longer any such thing. Does not make you a bad person though to be old-fashioned; or a bad writer; or a bad intellectual. Myth and Meaning does not hold up as well as Vico's New Science (written centuries before on the same basic topic). But we are happy to give it a cheer nonetheless. For all kinds of good reasons, we do, in fact, commend it.