Poetry and Pattern: Structural Analysis of an Ijo Creation Myth

Abstract

tenet-is Levi-Strauss' claim that myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.' It will be difficult to go along with LeviStrauss in giving so little credit to the storyteller's intentions, but any criticism of Levi-Strauss' method must begin by acknowledging the degree of disjunction discernible in many an oral narrative. For instance, a careful look at some of the didactic codas with which many of them end will reveal how gratuitous they are in the light of the overall montage of episodes and effects that constitute the tale. Often, as I have demonstrated elsewhere,2 the didactic statement at the end strains to reflect the society's code of morality, whereas the portrait of the hero in the body of the tale seems geared to enhance the affective appeal of the storyteller in an oral performance. Levi-Strauss prefers to sidestep this affective element and instead argues that there is a mythologique underlying and transcending the surface meaning which both the narrator and the casual audience are inclined to recognize in the tale. By a careful, though controversial, dissection of tales in the Theban cycle, he has proposed an interpretation of the Oedipus myth that seeks to supersede the classic theories of the scholastic and psychoanalytic traditions.3