Reading is likened to a mist: “I appear on a page which would otherwise be blank. I, the mist, the agent.” As she skims and speed reads, we are given a chunk of pages with most of the words replaced by “- - - -” prefaced by, “I was picking up the meaning without stopping to accumulate words. Speed. I loved it. Soon it would be over. The words stuck to the mist, I to the meaning.” Reading is given a physical form, albeit a nearly invisible one. “She ran through the word spray and touched its streams with her free hand.” The narrative wonders, “These pages. Are they still touching?”

On the other hand, the mythmaker is not concerned with whether the story he or she is telling is rather like a story you have heard before. The mythmaker understands that you always have to give people something of what they know already—that old tiger and the stream—in order for the audience to recognise the starting point: “Ah ha! Here we go again!” The change, the innovation, is defined precisely within that already recognisable structure, just enough difference to keep them interested. It has to remain familiar enough so that people know that you are working on the same ground. And therein arises the pleasure of a great deal of culture: getting back to where you came from. Freud and many modern cultural theories recognise the pleasure of, and the inseparability of, repetition and innovation. No cultural statement entirely sweeps away the past to create a tabula rasa, upon which it can suddenyl make an absolutely unique statement, unrelated to any statement ever made before. Change and innovation come about through transformation, through transforming what is already given, producing the new out of it, leaving some of the old elements out, bringing new element in, making a new rule of combination, and so on. Thus, structuralism proposes a new and important conception fo change.