Page 139 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

114 Guy Poitevin

nor moral value. They differ in this respect from tales and edify-
ing legends.
3. Patrimony subsisting as pure oral text only (Ricœur 1971:
-
48–49). Most of the time nowadays the Vad . ar narratives reach
us—and even members of the community—as pure oral texts
only, and no more as events of discourse of speakers sharing a
meaning with an audience in a given historical context.
4. Codified linguistics documents. The narrators do not change
their words nor construct them at will. None of them would ever
consider them his/her own utterances. Their texts are stereo-
typed, immutable sentences reported as received, fixed linguistic
data to be transmitted as intangible patrimony. The narratives
run from a beginning to an end as a totality to which nothing
can be added and from which nothing can be subtracted.
5. A signifying totality. Each and every narrative is a discourse
that stands on its own, for itself, significant by itself, at any point
of time, irrespective of whether it makes sense to the listener
or reader. There is no point in looking for an original and true
version to which available narratives should be compared for
assessment of their reliability. The relevance and import of each
narrative is not to be construed against such derivative processes
through tracing it back to its historical source. Each of them is
to be taken as seriously as any other one (Lévi-Strauss 1988:
196), though it remains true that a narrative is the totality of
its versions, derivations and variations. The narrative unfolds
itself, but nobody unfolds it.
6. De-contextualized, autonomous text. We cannot make sense
of our myths through direct identification of the things spoken
about as part of a situation that we would belong to and share
with the author as one of his/her interlocutors. They reach us
essentially as de-contextualized texts. We cannot point out the
audience nor the contexts that our texts mean to address. We
are, therefore, left only with the ‘world of the text’ (Thompson
1981: 139–44). This means a modality of autonomy for the
text with respect to the elusive intention of the author. Posi-
tively, this emancipation means that the ‘world of the text may
explode the world of the author’ (ibid., 139. Emphasis mine).
The text ‘is the projection of a world, the proposal of a mode of