David’s Reviews > Mythologies: The Complete Edition, in a New Translation > Status Update

...myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear. There is no latency of concept in relation to the form: there is no need of an unconscious in order to explain myth.

...that solitary weapon of writers: literality: yet it is this weapon alone which can strip the poetic metaphor of its artifice, reveal its fulguration of a truth, won over a continuous nausea of language.

tautology dispenses us from having ideas, but at the same time prides itself on making this license into a stern morality; whence its success: laziness is promoted to the rank of rigor. Racine is Racine: admirable security of nothingness.

...our popular press has hastily spirited away the unaccustomed object by reducing it to a symbol. As soon as it meant something it was less dangerous. And the more apparently the criticism... was addressed to a mass audience (Match, France Soir), the more it has insisted on that play's symbolic character: be reassured, it's only a symbol, the [unaccustomed object] simply signifies...

Most boats of legend or fiction enact, in this regard like the Nautilus, the theme of a beloved enclosure, for it suffices a man to conceive his ship as a human habitat for him to organize the delights of a smooth, round universe of which, moreover an entire nautical morality immediately makes him into the god, master, and owner (solemaster on board, etc.)

By [this gesture] each of us regains the ideality of a world at the mercy of a purely human gestuary, a world which will no longer slacken under the fetters of language: gangsters and gods do not speak, they nod their heads and all is done.

No, syntax, vocabulary, most of the elementary, analytical materials of language blindly seek one another without ever meeting, but no one pays the slightest attention: Etes-vous allé au pont? --Allée? Il n'y a pas d'allée, je le sais, j'y suis été.