Myth and Music: The Musical Epigraphs to The Raw and the Cooked

In the "Overture" to the first of his four volumes on myth, The Raw and the Cooked, Claude Lévi-Strauss makes the startling remark that "this book on myths is itself a kind of myth" (1969:6). This remark can be interpreted as what the French call a défi , a "challenge": if the book is itself a myth, it can be subjected to the same methods of structural analysis it deploys in the analysis of South American mythology. Indeed, the book's musical epigraphs (Figures 1 and 2) lend themselves perfectly to this kind of analysis; in spite of their apparent insignificance, taken together they expose and develop critical features of Lévi-Strauss's ideas, both in the book and in general. This is not to suggest that the musical epigraphs were chosen with any such purpose in mind. On the contrary, to paraphrase a famous sentence from the book, I wish to show not how Lévi-Strauss thinks in musical epigraphs, but how musical epigraphs operate in Lévi-Strauss's mind without his being aware of the fact (Lévi-Strauss 1969:12).¹

Of course the musical epigraphs also serve a deliberate purpose in the book, underscoring (or, more appropriately, scoring) the playful analogy between myth and music embedded in all the chapter titles of the book: overture, theme and variations, symphony, cantata, fugue, and so on. This analogy calls into question the salience of Lévi-Strauss's earlier linguistic paradigm for the analysis of myths—for example, by breaking them down into "mythemes" in the way linguists might identify phonemes or morphemes. Lévi-Strauss here suggests that music is a more appropriate paradigm than language for exploring the relationship between structure and "meaning." The question "What does a specific utterance mean?" is, taken literally, a perfectly sensible one. However, it is utterly nonsensical to ask what a Beethoven sonata or a Bach fugue, or for that matter any specific musical passage from either work, "means." This is not at all to suggest that music is meaningless, but simply that whatever meaning a work or a passage may convey cannot be translated

Figure 1.

Musical epigraph for The Raw and the Cooked.

Figure 2.

Musical epigraph for part 5, chapter 3 of The Raw and the Cooked.

into words. However, there exists an elaborate vocabulary for the analysis of musical structure in terms of melody, harmony, meter, rhythm, counterpoint, and so on. In other words, we cannot ever state what music means but we can specify quite precisely how it means. This is indeed how we approach its comprehension. Critics who complain that after reading The Raw and the Cooked and Lévi-Strauss's subsequent volumes on myth the reader remains just as unenlightened about the meanings of South and North American myths have either missed the point of the analogy or chosen to ignore it.

Seen in this light, the musical epigraphs might appear to be the frosting on the cake of this elaborate musical joke. There are three epigraphs in all: two texts set to music at the beginning and the end of the book and one text about music in the middle. These three form a symbolic triad, much like raw/cooked/rotten. The two musical passages oppose each another in virtually every respect, both musically and textually; the text about music occupies the mediating position. This is a definition of an understandably extremely rare musical genre, a double inverted canon—a piece that can be read upside down and backward, so that the end becomes the beginning and the bass line becomes the treble. The double inverted canon is clearly a musical metaphor for Lévi-Strauss's own method of "reading" myths as transformations of one another—superficially very distinct but structurally identical—like the forward and backward versions of the canon. It would not, needless to say, be a profitable exercise to attempt to read The Raw and the...