Claude Levi-Strauss on a structuralist approach to Oedipus the King

• The Structural Study of Myth – Levis-strauss
• Gives insight into Sophocles’ play
• Interaction bw linguistics, anthropology, and literature
• Basic problem of contradiction in myth
• In a myth anything can happen
• No logic no continuity
• Any characteristic can be attributed to any subject
• But there is similarity in the myths collected in different regions throughout the world
• Ancient philosophers and language
• Definite sounds related to definite meaning
• But differ across language
• Saussure – relations among units of sounds and not units of sound produces meaning
• Carl Jung’s attempt to find meaning in basic units of myth (archetypes) similar to ancient philosophers
• Saussure - language
• Unchanging elements - grammar
• Changing elements – sequence of words
• Synchronic and diachronic
• Myth expresses meaning both
• diachronically (
• synchronically (part of larger myth)
• Similar to a sentence
• Jack hates Jill
• Jill hates Jack
• Levis-Strauss – basic elements of myth are not isolated relations but “bundles of such relations”
• To read a myth properly need to pay attention to the story as it proceeds and to relations within, btwn, among stories
• Need to see wh happens before and after the story
• Cadmus – Europa –Zeus – Delphic oracle – city – Thebes – kills Ares the god of war – saws teeth – Spartois spring up – flings a stone – they kill each other – Son Polydorus fathers Oedipus
• Oedipus’ sons - Etocles kills Polynieces – denied burial – sister Antigone give funeral – buried alive
• All relations in one column exhibit a common feature
• I column – overemphasized blood relations More intimate than they should be
• II column – (inverted) Underrating blood relations
• III Column – monsters being slain
• IV Column – difficulties in walking straight and standing upright
• Relations btwn and among columns
• I & II logical contrast
• III 0- killing monsters – dragons associated with the earth – a dragon must be slain before men can be born from earth – sphinx will not permit men to live
• Livi- Strauss – Basic origin of human life addressed by many cultures
• Vegetable springs from earth – decays and back into earth – human bodies
• Judeo-Christian culture – man from clay
• Today people are born from union of two
• III- monsters are overcome by men – denial of the origin of humans from the earth
• Myth therefore includes both aspect of human origin of life
• Myths that show humans springing from earth all over the world also talk of initial difficulty of walking
• IV column affirms individual origin in the earth
• III denies it
• Original problem – born from one or born from two?
• Born from different or born from same
• Earlier and later versions of myth
• Both are not true – coz myth made of all its variants
• Freud’s concept of “Oedipus Complex” - latest variation of the myth itself – child trying to overvalue one parent against the other – born of one or two
• Levi-Struss shows issues around and in the play
• Also shows myth as dramatic - both aspects of human expression are less concerned with delivering the message than dramatizing the intractable questions about the meaning of human life.
• Therefore Lev-Struass – another myth