| Chapter 1: | Myth and Theory |
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bird nester. Crucially, the chapter ends by revisiting the myth of Branwen and demonstrates how our understanding of that myth’s structure is transformed through the exploration of other material.15
1.2. AN OVERVIEW OF Lévi-STRAUSS’ APPROACH TO MYTH
Having developed a working definition of what is meant by the word myth, I now turn to explore how this understanding of myth fits with that of Lévi-Strauss and his formulation of a theory for the structuralist analysis of myth, which forms the basis of the technique that is subsequently used to analyse the Mabinogion. This is not intended to be anything as grand as an assessment of Lévi-Strauss’ work or even a summary of his contribution to the field; rather, it is intended as a brief, sympathetic reading of his work, which helps to explain the technique employed in the following analysis.
In his groundbreaking article ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, Lévi-Strauss claimed that it was time to set forth a scientific understanding of myth that would revolutionise our understanding of the field in the same way that Saussure revolutionised linguistics. It is this approach that he was to term structuralism, for he saw it as being part of ‘the same intellectual province as Saussure, Troubetzkoy, Jakobson [and] Benveniste’ (Lévi-Strauss and Eribon 1991, 68).16 Drawing on Saussure, he reasoned that just as language carries culturally specific suppositions which are used to categorise and structure the world, so too does myth (Lévi-Strauss 1963, 211). Just as language analysis identifies the building blocks of the language (phonemes), mythological analysis should begin by identifying the building blocks of the myth, or mythemes (ibid.). Just as phonemes are combined in various ways to create the sound which is significant to the object, so too mythemes combine in various ways to express the underlying structure (ibid.). As with phonemes, it is the combination of the mythemes that is important, rather than any given mytheme alone. Thus, Lévi-Strauss was proposing with his mythemes something radically different from Jung’s archetypes, a point which most of Lévi-Strauss’ critics seem to have missed.17 Mythemes, like