ABSTRACT

For a critical understanding of the myth it is first necessary that the myth be entirely divorced from the "etiological" function with which it appears to be identified. At first glance, that interpretation seems to dissolve the myth-narration in an undivided consciousness that consists less in telling stories, making myths, than in relating itself affectively and practically to the whole of things. The myth performs its symbolic function by the specific means of narration because what it wants to express is already a drama. The two characteristics of myths that they have just emphasized are fundamental for our investigation of the world of fault. Levi-Strauss does in Tristes Tropiques, that the images which the myth-making imagination and the institutional activity of man can produce are not infinite in number, and that it is possible to work out, at least as a working hypothesis, a sort of morphology of the principal images.