Annotated Bibliography

 

By Tassie Gniady, [The Visual Pig]

 

1. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” Structural Anthropology, trans. by Monique Layton. New York: Basic Books, 1963. 206-231.

 

Lévi-Strauss begins by approaching the idea that myths can be bent to serve any purpose:

If a given mythology confers prominence on a certain figure, let us say an evil grandmother, it will be claimed that in such a society grandmothers are actually evil and that mythology reflects the social structure and social relations; but should the actual data be conflicting, it would be readily claimed that the purpose of mythology is to provide an outlet for repressed feelings (207-208).

Instead he turns to linguistics and the difference between langue and parole, the first “belonging to a reversible time” and the second “being nonreversible” (209). Myth is made up of both langue and parole, but Lévi-Strauss believe the most important “properties [of myth] are only to be found above the ordinary linguistic level, that is, they exhibit more complex features than those which are to be found in any other kind of linguistic expression” (210). Instead he posits the idea of “gross constituent units” or mythemes that occur at the level of the sentence. The myth to be examined is broken down into the shortest possible sentences, and each sentence is written on an index card that has a number reflecting the chronology of the story. The cards are then used to group the sentences to create what Lévi-Strauss calls a “harmony” which may be read “diachronically along one axis—that is, page after page, and from left to right—and synchronically along the other axis, all the notes written vertically making up one gross constituent unit, that is, one bundle of relations” (212). Finally, Lévi-Strauss explains the importances of taking into account all the different iterations of a given tale. He writes:

If a myth is made up of all its variants, structural analysis should take all of them into account….We shall then have have several two-dimensional charts, each dealing with a variant, to be organized in a three-dimensional order…so that three readings become possible: left to right, top to bottom, front to back (or vice versa). (217) 

It is the reading of all of these variants and the correlation of differences that leads to “the structural law of the myth.”  Lévi-Strauss goes on to caution “that it cannot be too strongly emphasized that all available variants should be taken into account” (218). Remember that he includes Freud’s reading of the Oedipus myth by way of example, and this emphasis on every version reveals the work of this chapter: to create a chart or “harmony” for each extant version of the hog-faced woman tale and do for them what Lévi-Strauss does for the Zuni origin myth. I will also use his equation to consider the entire myth:

Fx(a):Fy(b)≈Fx(b):Fa-1(y)

Here, with two terms, a and b, being given as two functions, x and y, of these terms, it is assumed that a relation of equivalence exists between two situations defined respectively by an inversion of terms and relations, under two conditions: (1) that one term be replaced by its opposite (in the above formula, a and a-1); (2) that an inversion be made between the function value and the term value of two elements (above, y and a). (228)

 

 

---

2. Gliffy

 

Gliffy’s flowchart-rendering capabilities remind me of the BASIC programming classes I took in middle school. However, here I have used it’s diagramming capabilities not to construct an input-output flowchart, but to better organize the virtual note cards required by Lévi-Strauss’s mythemic approach. Cards can be any shape and size and manipulated with ease. Unfortunately, due to the diachronic organizational requirements, the movement of one “note card” requires reshuffling of all the note cards that come after it chronologically. For this reason, while Gliffy was useful in sketching out first drafts of mythemic structure, it will not be used other than as a stepping stone to my final project because it is not dynamic enough.

 

---

 

3. SIMILE

 

In trying to organize the iterations of hog-faced women across the centuries, I became convinced that a timeline tool would be helpful. SIMILE’s scroll function and the ease with which annotations may be added makes it seem like a good fit for my work. Ray Siemen’s talk on Friday, February 8, confirmed that SIMILE is a viable, robust visualization tool. His team used it to map different hands in the Devonshire manuscript. As I currently have identified twenty discrete mentions, portraits, or tellings of hog-faced women, an annotated timeline will make the rise and fall of her popularity across centuries much more immediately apparent. SIMILE works when pointed at an XML-file, so this would also be a good time to do some basic mark-up of the iterations for the web.

 

---

4. Derrida, Jaques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge. 278-294.

 

In “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Jaques Derrida takes on structuralism head-on, “or rather the structurality of structure” and points out the reductive aspects of “a process of giving it [the event] a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin.” He claims that this limiting principle only “permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form” (207). For Derrida, this concept of freeplay is not guaranteed or even restricted by the event itself, just as transcendental signified is not guaranteed. Instead, he argues, “The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum” (209). In this essay, he destabilizes the notion that:

… the center, which is by  definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which governs the structure, while escaping structurality. That is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. (208) 

Citing Nietzche, Freud, and Heidegger as “destructive discourses,” Derrida, nonetheless says that these critiques are themselves “trapped in a sort of circle” (208). He notes that Lévi-Strauss attempts to escape the circle by discussing the “absence of any real and fixed center of the mythical and mythological discourse” via his harmonic structure for reading myths so that “The absence of a center is here the absence of a subject and the absence of an author…” (218-219). But instead, what appears is an “ethnographic bricoloage” that “makes the philosophical or epistemological requirement of a center appear as mythological, that is to say, as a historical illusion (219). And it is here that Derrida brings up my own concerns:

If the mythological is mythomorphic, are all discourses on myths equivalent? … We cannot reply—and I do not believe Lévi-Strauss replies to it—as long as the problem between the philosopheme or the theorem, on the one hand, and the mytheme or the mythopoem(e), on the other, has not been expressly posed….I have said that empiricism is the matrix of all the faults menacing a discourse which continues, as with Lévi-Strauss in particular, to elect to be scientific. If we wanted to pose the problem of empiricism and bricolage in depth, we would probably end up very quickly with a number of propositions absolutely contradictory in relation to the status of discourse in structural ethnography. On the one hand, structuralism justly claims to be the critique of empiricism. But at the same time there is not a single book or study by Lévi-Strauss which does not offer itself as an empirical essay which can always be completed or invalidated by new information. (219-220) 

Thus, “totalization” is unachievable; “There is too much, more than one can say” (220). And it is here that Derrida turns to “the concept of freeplay … that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble.” My analyses of a certain subset of the stories surrounding hog-faced women is justified by their containment in time (the seventeenth century) and narrative viability (more than just a few words concerning her appearance). The playing field is narrowed to allow for a more realistic treatment of both that which is and is not present:

The field permits these infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and founds the freeplay of substitutions…. (221) 

Derrida is acknowledging the boundaries of  “the empirical endeavor of a subject or of a finite discourse” but he is also referring the absence of the transcendental signified. Because of this absence,

… One cannot determine the center, the sign which supplements it, which takes its place in its absence—because this sign adds itself, occurs in addition, over and above, comes as a supplement. The movement of signification adds something, which results in the fact that there is always more, but this addition is a floating one because it comes to perform a vicarious function, to supplement a lack on the part of the signified. (221) 

Here Derrida has come back to the “exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling” with which he began his essay (207). This “event” signals the deconstruction of “the structurality of structure” (207) that is signaled by the “superabundance of the signifier, its supplementary character” (222). This leads to Derrida’s ultimate critique of Lévi-Strauss:

More concretely, in the work of Lévi-Strauss, it must be recognized that the respect for structurality, for the internal originality of the structure, compels a neutralization of time and history. For example, the appearance of a new structure, of an original system, always comes about—and this is the very condition of its structural specificity—by a rupture with its past, its origin, and its cause…. In this “structuralist” moment, the concepts of chance and discontinuity are indispensable. (223-224)

Instead he posits freeplay as a positive turn away from the “lost or impossible” presence, rather than the negative aspect of structuralism and its predecessors that cannot determine the “absent origin” (225). He ends:

 

---

5.  Zizek, Slavoj. Tarrying With the Negative. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

 

In his book, Tarrying with the Negative, Slavoj Zizek’s cover picture is the Romanian flag with a hole cut out of its center. Zizek describes the photograph: “the rebels [are] waving the national flag, with the red star, the Communist symbol, cut out, so that instead of the symbol standing for the organizing principle of the national life, there was nothing but a hole at its center.” He goes on to call this moment a “salient index of the ‘open’ character of a historical situation ‘in its becoming,’ as Kierkegaard would have put it, of that intermediate phase when the former Master-Signifier, although it has lost the hegemonical power, has not yet been replaced by the new one” (i). When looking at medieval and renaissance monster-culture, the seventeenth century also marks a watershed moment in the perception of anomalous creatures. Previous understandings of the marvelous fail to hold, or are “cut out,” as the realm of the monstrous moves out of the purview of religious prognostication and out from under the thumb of aristocratic collectors. Instead, cheap print brings monstrosity even to those who are unable to attend fairs and popularizes a new kind of secular monster whose implications are “open.”

 

---

6. Anon, A certaine relation of the hog-faced gentlewoman called Mistris Tannakin Skinker, who was borne at Wirkham a neuter towne betweene the Emperour and the Hollander, scituate on the river Rhyne Who was bewitched in her mothers wombe in the yeare 1618. and hath lived ever since unknowne in this kind to any, but her parents and a few other neighbours. And can never recover her true  shape, tell she be married, &c. Also relating the cause, as it is since conceived, how her mother came so bewitched, STC (2nd ed.) / 22627,  Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com. 

 

Tannakin Skinker’s life is traced from birth to her father’s attempt to marry her off to resolve her deformity. Interestingly, Skinker’s father is prompted to seek help for his daughter only after her strange appearance becomes public knowledge. Then he consults an “Artist, who was both a Mathematician, and an Astrologian.” It is notable that when confronted publicly with his daughter’s deformity and the attention that her appearance and manner of speech draw from crowds of would-be gawkers, the father does not consult a religious figure, who would declaim her deformity as a portent of evil. Instead he seeks out one Vandermast, a man of learning whose fame as a mathematician and astrologer who, for good measure is also “well verst in blacke and hidden Arts who says she must be married as soon as possible (to a gentleman) to remedy her condition. After detailing several unsuccessful comical attempts on the parts of suitors to get past Tannakin Skinker’s deformity, the author of the pamphlet uses John Gower’s “Tale of Florent” as an illustration of the benefits of marrying a supposedly unsuitable wife. He writes, “so I will leave her in this exigent, to acquaint you with a short story, that the carriage of the one, may make the other appeare more probable, they being of like affinity.” 

 

---