VERSIONS AND ORIGINS

Claude Lévi-Strauss, as we saw in chapter 1, posits a close relationship among myths that might appear quite different at the level of manifest content. Hewitt, following Propp, regards the ‘verbal surface’ as subordinate to a narrative's underlying structure. While Lévi-Strauss's mythemes recur across a wide geographical and cultural spread, Hewitt confines himself to the common features of groups of |Xam narratives. In Hewitt's view (1986: 71), not only the differences among versions of a story, but the differences among stories that display the same plot patterns are a matter of aesthetic embellishment rather than substance. Since Lévi-Strauss regards myths with different content as virtually identical at a structural level, we might assume that he does not regard the differences among versions of the same story as especially significant either. Although he is interested in the process of transformation of stories, his main concern is the way in which the basic structure that underlies them survives change. Guenther, too, is more concerned with the elements that narratives have in common than the differences among them. He goes so far as to suggest that gaps in the narratives of one tradition might be filled with details from the ‘corres - ponding’ tale in another tradition (Guenther 1989: 49).

I have argued in the course of this book for a strategy of interpretation that concerns itself with the play of signifiers that occur on the ‘verbal surface’ of the narratives. In this chapter I will contend, using two stories as case studies, that the differences between what appear as versions of the same narrative represent a critical site of the production and contestation of meaning in the narratives. I would disagree with the notion that this level of signification is only incidental to another, hidden structure of meaning. The question of versions is one of two areas of concern in this chapter. The other is one that is related to it: the question of aetiology in the narratives. When the narratives are read as creation stories, then their account of the origin of things is foregrounded and their textual detail is largely ignored. Stories become versions rather than discourse in their own right, since they all attempt to describe the same creation event.