The Structural Study of Myth

”. . . the problem: if the content of a myth is contingent, how are we going to explain that throughout the world myths do resemble one another so much?” (75).

“the Saussurean principle of the arbitrary character of the linguistic signs was a prerequisite for the acceding of linguistics to the scientific level” (75).

“myth is language: to be known, myth has to be told; it is a part of human speech” (75).

“langue: structural, revertible”

“parole: statistical, non-revertible”

“We have just distinguished langue and parole by the different time referents which they use. . . . myth uses a third referent which combines the properties of the first two” (76).

“a myth always refers to events alleged to have taken place in time . . . But what gives the myth an operative value is that the specific pattern described is everlasting; it explains the present and the past as well as the future” (76).

“politics . . . have largely replaced [myth] in modern societies” (76).

“myth, while pertaining to the realm of the parole and calling for an explanation as such, as well as to that of the langue in which it is expressed, can also be an absolute object on a third level which, though it remains linguistic by nature, is nevertheless distinct from the other two” (76).

“Myth is the part of language where the formula traduttore, tradittore [translator traitor] reaches its lowest truth-value” (76).

“in the whole gamut of linguistic expressions [myth is] . . . opposite . . . poetry” (76).

“Poetry is a kind of speech which cannot be translated except at the cost of serious distortions; whereas the mythical value of the myth remains preserved, even through the worst translation” (76).

“[Myth] is language, functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at “taking off” from the linguistic ground on which it keeps rolling” (76).

“the specific character of mythological time . . . is both revertible and non-revertible, synchronic and diachronic” (77).

“the true constituent units of a myth are not the isolated relations but bundles of such relations and it is only as bundles that these relations can be put to use and combined so as to produce a meaning” (77).

“we define myth as consisting of all its versions” (81).

“a myth remains the same as long as it is felt as such [as mythic]” (81).

“If a myth is made up of all its variants, structural analysis should take all of them into account” (81).