Interestingly, Lévi-Strauss cites genrespecific transformations (to be understood here as cultural conventions rather than narrowly as literary conventions) as examples of the “weakening” of myths. Tracing the changes in the Story of Lynx between several indigenous peoples living in Canada, the anthropologist concludes that the myth can either take the form of the “romance formula,” that is, become “its own metaphor” due to the conventional treatment of the elements of the initial myth (1976a: 265), or move into the convention of legend, that is, to tell a “story” that legitimises the present state or possible future transformations of a given cultural group (1976a: 266–268). “Thus, a myth which is transformed in passing from tribe to tribe finally exhausts itself—without disappearing, for all of that” (Lévi-Strauss 1976a: 268).
Of course, in this case, the key change is to be found within the deep structure, and it is to this aspect that Lévi-Strauss draws attention when comparing his proposal with Vladimir Propp’s formalist analysis of the Russian tale. The anthropologist, while appreciating the Russian theorist’s role as a precursor, maintains the thesis of the analogy between tale and myth, but in his own way reformulates his initial intuition: “[…] myth and folktale exploit a common substance, each in its own way,” for “Tales are miniature myths, where the same oppositions are transposed to a smaller scale” (1976b: 130). This means that in fairy tales the starting point, as in myth, are sequences of oppositions, but these are “minimized oppositions”: “[…] tales are constructed on weaker oppositions than those found in myths. The latter are not cosmological, metaphysical, or natural, but, more frequently, local, social, and moral,” hence all permutations in fairy tales are “compartively freer” (Lévi-Strauss 1976b: 128) (which can be read as a weakening of the code in relation to the message). At the same time, however, Lévi-Strauss stresses that the tale is not a “residual myth,” they rather form a pair, like a planet and its satellite – when the myth disappears “the tale tends to get out of orbit, to let itself be caught by other poles of attraction” (Lévi-Strauss 1976b: 130), which agrees with the contemporary gravitation of the fairy tale between different conventions and media.
The structuralist mechanism corresponds both to the relationship, based on a series of oppositions, between the “classical” myth and the “disenchanting” contemporary discourse in the Western European tradition (perhaps, viewed from this perspective, we should speak of their thickening or loosening) and to the shift proposed in this text between the expedition book and the mountaineering (auto)biography. In the latter case, there is also a weakening of opposition. It seems that the contemporary biographical formula focused on the figure of the mountaineer treats him or her less as a symbolic mediator between widely separated points in physical space and between poles of culture, rather it seeks to present a holistic, coherent picture, where the initial oppositions become an inherent component of human existence, and as a result they become very close to each other. Based on the model of the road, the biography shapes life as a combination of opposites, insists on their seamless identification with each other: the summit becomes the success, the road the essence of existence, “there” and “here” can be reconciled in terms of identity, the world of the mountains becomes the world of a complex human subject – but nevertheless – of a subject. While in the “classical” model “[t]he mountain is a boundary but also a promise of mediation” (Kowalski 1996: 20), which also implies the relationality of the individual elements, here the mountain is somehow subjectively absorbed, it is always the drama or success of the individual. Climbers are no longer monsters, shamans, tricksters who, by overcoming limits, achieve a new form of existence (Kowalski 1996: 8); they are now real people (“of flesh and blood”) who reach the fullness of existence, ascribed to humanity in advance, who lay bare and proofread the text of humanity for coherence.
At this point, it is worth noting another aspect of myth treated as a cultural text. According to Lévi-Strauss, every text is built on the basis of two key logical operations, metonymy and metaphor, in a process of progressive decomposition of the syntagm and increasing generalisation of the paradigm: the former operation (metonymy) makes it possible to move from the particular to the whole and to introduce relations of appropriateness between them by expanding the code, whereas the latter (metaphor) enables synthesis but also recoding from system to system (1990: 678–679). According to the French structuralist, at the core of myth is the process of metaphorisation, but it should be remembered that metaphor and metonymy always work together (Buchowski 2004: 187–202, Czeremski 2009). In this context, the weakening of opposition can be seen as a process of metonymisation, in which binary pairs no longer generate successive sequences of mediation, but rather become their own repetitions, contained within each other, for example, top and bottom become the rungs on the ladder of success, and successive peaks weave into the horizon of biography. As a result, in contemporary mountaineering narratives, the finite code of mountaineering is kept in store, and what is moved to the forefront are the precedents of “bare life.” The progressive metaphorisation of mountaineering in contemporary narratives, on the other hand, primarily serves to metonymise along the line of climbing and life, which is to impose continuity on this construct. Mountaineering – once an exclusive activity – is becoming increasingly pragmatic, and not only epistemologically speaking. Despite the changing proportions, however, it is still up to us to decide whether what we want to read from the mountaineering narratives is a cultural myth or a fable of Man.