Page 144 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

The Donkey 119

sense of the myth as a semantic mediation directly instrumental to
the recovery of its meaning and (c) the notion of signification implied
in the process of self-understanding once the latter is construed as a
modality of textual interpretation.
The realization of the text as discourse gives the myth dimen-
sions similar to those of speech, as it inaugurates an inter-cultural
interbreeding.
Appropriation, application to the life situation of the reader, here
and now ‘makes one’s own what was initially alien’ on account of tem-
poral and cultural estrangement. It is an enactment of the semantic
possibilities of the text through ‘fusing textual interpretation with self-
interpretation’. The latter is objectively grounded in the statics of the
text, and not on the author’s psychological experience. To interpret is
to comply with the injunction of the text, ‘to follow the path of thought
opened up by the text’. Interpretation is not an act on the text, but the
‘act of the text’. ‘To understand oneself is to understand oneself in
6
front of the text’ (Thompson 1981: 113).
This is in contrast on the other hand to the tradition of the Des-
cartes’s cogito and to the pretence of the subject to know itself by im-
mediate intuition. It must be said that we understand ourselves only
by the long détour of the signs of humanity deposited in cultural works.
The extent of estrangement required in the study of myths points
to ‘the ruin of the ego’s pretention to constitute itself as ultimate
origin’. The key to the constitution of the subject is not with the subject
but with the matter of the text’ (Descarte 2007).

Cognitive Mapping and Re-contextualization

My analytical procedures consist in identifying the variety of cogni-
tive processes that monitor its composition, shape its sequences and
construct its overall configuration. The semantic structural reading
is schematically presented in Table 4.1, which answers the question:
‘What is happening?’ A set of classificatory markers given in Box 4.1
allows for a synthetic reading of each narrative. The title attempts to
summarily locate the subject of the narrative. The category theme tries
to define the central issue to which the narrative addresses itself as
a short answer to the question: ‘What is the narrative dealing with?’