Building Religions 10: Claude Lévi-Strauss

Building Religions 10: Claude Lévi-Strauss

This is less a post about how to write myths than about a way to read them, but it's a way that can be useful for those doing some research in their worldbuilding. It's not the only way, or necessarily even the best way, but when it works, it works well. It's the structuralist interpretation of myth, as formulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Lévi-Strauss was interested, as many comparative mythologists are, in why stories from around the world could share certain similarities despite the distance (geographically or historically) between the cultures that told them. Taking a lead from Ferdinand Saussure, the early 20th-century linguist, and some ideas from Émile Durkheim, he suggested treating myths as a kind of language and a way of thinking about the world. Individual stories could communicate ideas, but if you wanted to understand their structure -- their grammar, if you like -- you had to look at as many variants as possible side by side and find their commonalities.

Doing so, however, doesn't get you to the purpose of myth. The purpose, he argued, was to help organize the world of experiences into opposing pairs of concepts that could be resolved or mediated by a third element. (This is where Durkheim, whose belief that the sacred and the profane act as the most basic division of human concepts, appears as an influence.) In looking at myths, then, once you've arranged all of the variations and noticed the underlying structure, the next thing to do is to see what images or concepts turn up in opposing pairs. When you've found those, then you can start to understand the basic question that the myth is trying to answer, or the situation that it's addressing.

As you can imagine, trying to put this approach directly into action as part of a plan of worldbuilding would be difficult. I wouldn't recommend starting with a problem, thinking about how it could be arranged into binaries, then writing variant after variant on a story based on those binaries unless you have a great deal of time on your hands. Still, when applied as a method of interpretation, it can lead to a few interesting discoveries.

Take, for example, Little Red Riding Hood. You may know the story fairly well -- certainly well enough to tell a basic version of it -- but once you read some of the versions of it, a few features start to stand out. There's a nice collection of them here, and I'll use the first five of those to make my point. Take some time to read through them if you like. I'll wait.

First, notice the food that LRRH brings with her. It's right there near the beginning of all the stories, but it's only when you see it repeated over and over that it starts to stand out as something beyond a random detail. She carries some combination of cakes, wine, bread, butter, and milk, or in one version, soup. There's no meat and there are no vegetables: everything that she carries is some product of human effort. As much as her red hat or cloak, the food is a constant part of her story.

The wolf, in contrast, eats people: he eats the grandmother, and often LRRH herself. In two versions of the story, he goes further and tricks LRRH into eating her grandmother's flesh and drinking her blood. Here, then, we have the first theme and its corresponding pair: food for humans, food for beasts.

Second, it's impossible to read this story without paying attention to clothing: LRRH is named for what she wears, even if the actual item of clothing varies. The wolf dresses in grandmother's clothes. In two versions of the story, LRRH is told to undress before climbing into bed. In the variants in which a huntsman rescues her, his reward is the wolf's pelt. Make clothing the second theme, with the pair as being clothed versus unclothed.

It's not accidental that for both of these themes, there are moments in the stories where the order of things is reversed: LRRH eats human flesh and throws away her clothes, while the wolf dresses as a human. That sort of disorder is part of the process of working toward a resolution.

The last theme that I'd point out has to do with the relationship between civilized and uncivilized space. LRRH starts in a village, but after that, she's either on the boundary of civilized and uncivilized (a path in the forest) or she's crossed over (when she strays from the path). The wolf, a creature of the forest, navigates the same boundary, and crosses over into the civilized domain of grandmother's house.

If you put all three of these together, you can read Little Red Riding Hood as a story about what it means to be human versus what it is to be an animal: proper food, clothing, and the inhabiting of civilized space. In some cases, the story ends with the punishment for the main character's transgression, but I find it more interesting to look at the figure who offers a solution. The huntsman is, by nature of his profession, someone who combines the human and animal worlds: he hunts for meat, but doesn't eat it raw; he wears clothes, but makes them from the skins of animals; he moves through the forest, but his loyalty is to the human world.

As with any of the approaches to religion or myth that I've written about before, Lévi-Strauss' method isn't suitable for all problems. What it offers, however, is an extra tool for interpretation. At the very least, it can guide you toward a new reading of an old story, a reading that you can then use as the seed for stories of your own.