Page 142 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

The Donkey 117

different from the one that any of these elements may have by itself
as a separate unit.
Two cognitive strategies are, therefore, possible in front of the myth
as text. The first strategy is a structural approach; it perceives all the
elements as semiotic signs defined by their internal and oppositional
relations; the logic of these oppositional relations yields the first mean-
ing of the text. I call it structural semantics. The second strategy is
directed towards our self-understanding based on the narrative as a
set of phrases or discourse, which makes statements about referential
realities standing beyond the language of the narrative. I call it the-
matic semantics.

Narrative as Structure, Auto-explanation:
First Cognitive Strategy
A structural analytical perspective treats the text as a wholly world-less
and autonomous self-reference. It is sought to be explained in terms of
its internal relations, its structures. This explanatory attitude is based
on a linguistic model for which there are no absolute terms, but only
relations of mutual dependence between the terms. The text has no
‘outside’, but only an ‘inside’, with no transcendent aim. This attitude is
justified by the myth as pure text deprived of the double transcendence
of discourse towards the world and towards someone. This allows for
a linguistic structural model being applied to the text. 3
The analysis actually proceeds through segmentation of the elements
and the interconnection of actions into a unique structured totality
through different levels hierarchically fitting into one another. I call
these levels by various names: mythemes, sequence, round, part, cluster
of actions, etc. Their series stands as a mutual imbrication or interlock-
4
ing. After Lévi-Strauss, I call mythemes large internal components, a
‘bundle of relations’. ‘Only in the form of combinations of such bundles
do the constituent units acquire a signifying function’ (Lévi-Strauss
1968: 211). This function is simply the ‘arrangement or disposition of
mythemes, in short, the structure of the myth’ (Thompson 1981: 155).
I shall use the word ‘sense’ to refer to this structure as its internal sig-
nificance, obtained, once the deconstruction into elements had been
achieved, through a structural reconstruction of all the unitary sets.
It spells out the logic of the linear sequence of events.