Jakobson worked at the University of Copenhagen for six months before being forced to flee with his wife to Norway. On the German invasion, they were on the run again, reaching the Swedish border without a passport or any identity papers. After a week imprisoned in a customs post, they were allowed into neutral Sweden to settle in Uppsala, where Jakobson researched aphasia and child speech patterns. A year later he was on a steamer bound for America, but his ordeal was not quite over. German soldiers boarded the ship en route to check the identity of the passengers. As Jakobson and his wife were stateless, they were in a potentially dangerous position, but they managed to convince the officers that they were Russian émigrés and were allowed to proceed to New York.69
When Jakobson arrived in New York, Lévi-Strauss was still struggling with his thesis on the Nambikwara, trying to fit together scraps of kinship and linguistic data collected on his journey across Mato Grosso. In his field notes, he had experimented with a series of different models for describing kinship systems—the conventional family tree, columns of relationships headed “mon père appelle,” “ma mère appelle,” “mon frère appelle,” “j’appelle,” “mon mari appelle” and so on, as well as a checkerboard design that cross-referenced rows and columns of kin terms. He sometimes used stick figures (a stick penis added to distinguish between the sexes) with lines, circles and arrows connecting up relatives across generations.
There was an air of desperation in the successive tables of basic native vocabulary, listing kinship terminology in yet another language with which Lévi-Strauss would have had only fleeting contact. At one point he jotted down “langue semble différente” (language appears to be different), suggesting that he was having problems even identifying which linguistic group he was dealing with.70 When he talked about his difficulties to Alexandre Koyré, a French-Russian academic specializing in the history and philosophy of science, Koyré suggested that he should see Jakobson, who had just begun lecturing at the École libre des hautes études. Koyré had sensed a possible affinity between the two, but he could not have imagined the impact his introduction would have. Lévi-Strauss was expecting technical advice; what he got was a whole new way of thinking.
Jakobson was twelve years older than Lévi-Strauss, and with his vast and varied academic experience in universities across Europe, he became a kind of mentor to the young anthropologist. At first Jakobson thought he had found an ideal drinking partner with whom he could talk into the night, but he soon discovered that Lévi-Strauss, despite cavorting with the surrealists, was a moderate at heart, who didn’t drink and preferred to get to bed early. Yet Jakobson’s hedonism somehow meshed with Lévi-Strauss’s more subdued asceticism and their friendship blossomed, developing into a lifelong attachment. They dined out frequently together, exploring New York’s Chinese, Greek and Armenian restaurants.71 Jakobson also introduced Lévi-Strauss to a new circle of intellectuals. Through Raymond de Saussure, the son of the great linguist, he made contact with New York’s leading psychoanalysts, including Rudolph Loewenstein, Ernst Kris and Herman Nunberg.
From the autumn of 1942, they attended each other’s courses—Jakobson’s on phonetics and Lévi-Strauss’s on kinship. Speaking virtually without notes in fluent French, Jakobson skipped from the poems of Edgar Allan Poe to Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, tossing in philosophers Edmund Husserl and Jeremy Bentham along with the Scholastics. He gave examples of liquids, labiodentals, nasals, hissing and hushing sibilants from the Slavic languages, illustrating his arguments with words drawn from French, Finnish and Korean. And amid this display of European cosmopolitanism and erudition, Jakobson told the story of the emergence of structural linguistics, an approach first outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure and then developed by the Russian linguist Nikolai Trubetskoy and Jakobson himself. “The discipline practised by Jakobson enthralled me like a detective story,” remembered Lévi-Strauss. “I had the feeling I was taking part in a great adventure of the mind.”72
At its core, structural linguistics worked with a simple yet revolutionary idea: the notion that language consisted of a formal system of interrelated elements, and that meaning resided not in the elements themselves, but in their relationships to one another. The solidity of language—of the word, its sound and referent—was dissolved. At root was a system of differences. The classic examples came from phonetics, a field that had forged ahead under the new approach. In the nineteenth century, linguists had focused on the production of sound and describing the sounds themselves. They studied the position of the tongue, the lips and teeth during a given utterance; they filmed, photographed and eventually were able to X-ray speakers’ larynxes; they monitored each subtle modulation, building up finer and finer-grained data, more and more complex notations of subtly different sounds. The end point was a virtual continuum of sound and motion—a jelly of data that offered no theoretical purchase. Under the strictly empiricist approach, “the phonic substance of language becomes as dust,” as Jakobson put it.73
Jakobson likened the previous generation to a character in a story written by the romantic Russian writer Vladimir Odoevsky (and later reprised by Borges in the short story “Funes the Memorious”). A man is given the gift of being able to see and hear everything and promptly descends into a supersaturated, empiricist hell: “Everything in nature became fragmented before him, and nothing formed whole in his mind,” and for this unfortunate man “the sounds of speech became transformed into a torrent of innumerable articulatory motions of mechanical vibrations, aimless and without meaning.”74
Structural phonology, Jakobson went on to explain, offered a way out of this exponential explosion of data. The key problem was to identify the “quanta of language”: the smallest units able to change meanings. Sounds with a “differentiating value” were called phonemes. Pairs of opposing phonemes—like b and v in “bat” and “vat”—operated like gates on a circuit board, switching between alternate meanings. Crucially, it was the relationship between the phonemes that generated meaning, not the phonemes themselves; thus the paradox: “Language . . . is composed of elements which are signifiers, yet at the same time signify nothing.”75 Jakobson went on to demonstrate the progress over the past decade, and the systematization of the phonemes into bundles of features, which could be paired off into basic oppositions—compact and diffuse, open and closed, acute and grave—which underlay all languages. He would later elaborate these relations in an ingeniously simple schema: two triangles, one for vowels and the other for consonants, which distilled fundamental phonetic differences. As newborns gradually tuned in to these distinctions, they began standardizing their multiple combinations into meaningful sounds, the words of their native language, be it French, Japanese or Turkish.
For Lévi-Strauss, the idea that thousands of languages were rooted in an essence—small sets of opposed phonemes—was seductively reductionist. Like the nineteenth-century linguists, Lévi-Strauss had also felt overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of empirical data, condemned “to the endless task of searching for things behind things.”76 The change in focus from objects to the relationships between objects seemed potentially liberating. Structural linguistics had shown that a deliberate foray into abstraction and experimentation with higher-order modeling could yield dramatic results.
As Lévi-Strauss continued his course on kinship, the fit seemed uncanny. Kinship was, after all, a relational system par excellence. Kin diagrams naturally lent themselves to simple oppositions: male/female; in marriage/out marriage; opposing moieties, clans and grades. Running underneath the drama of human relations were unspoken rules, unconsciously observed, which allowed groups of people to communicate with almost mathematical efficiency down the generations. Although the array of bizarre marriage rules seemed baffling in isolation, taken as a set—as contrasting strategies within an overall system—Lévi-Strauss could begin to see the outlines of a grand scheme. Jakobson encouraged him to write down his ideas, and while Lévi-Strauss finished off his thesis on the Nambikwara, he also began
work on Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (The Elementary Structures of Kinship).
The different strands of Lévi-Strauss’s thought were coming together. The new linguistics drew a common thread through his early intellectual history—his fascination for Marx and Freud, as well as his interest in geology. He realized that ethnographic reports that he had been reading, as vivid as they appeared, were mere surface phenomena—as landscape is to geology, historical events are to the Marxist, or desire, revulsion and neurosis to the psychoanalyst.
To these three “mistresses,” he could now add another: the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Through Jakobson’s influence, Saussure’s famous Cours de linguistique générale, which had been compiled by students and posthumously published in 1915, became a cornerstone of his thinking. Key ideas from the Cours became permanent features of Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual arsenal: the distinction between la langue (language as an abstract system) and la parole (language as it is spoken) and the differences between the synchronic (snapshot) and diachronic (historical) approaches were transposed into the ethnographic setting. Henceforth, Lévi-Strauss would focus his attention on comparisons between abstract cultural systems drawn from the ethnographic record rather than individual ethnographies, just as linguists privileged grammars over the background noise of idiosyncratic usage and gradual linguistic drift. Saussure’s concept of “binary pairs”—the contrasts that generate meaning—that had been so useful in phonetics became another Lévi-Straussian staple.
Saussure’s insights, filtered through Jakobsonian structural linguistics, gave Lévi-Strauss the tools with which to float free from the morass of descriptive data and observe the patterns that cut across continents and cultures. The exercise required a massive leap of faith. As Lévi-Strauss began importing wholesale concepts from linguistics into the social sciences, he was setting off on a path into the intellectual unknown.
5
Elementary Structures
Social life imposes on . . . mankind an incessant traveling back and forth, and family life is little else than the expression of a need to slacken the pace at the crossroads and to take a chance to rest. But the orders are to keep on marching.
CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS1
THE WAR LEFT deep scars across France, its progress a source of constant anxiety for those living in exile. In New York, Lévi-Strauss obsessively read news reports and listened to the radio, raking over the situation in Europe. The Jewish question, which he had only recently treated so casually, was now a matter of survival for the friends and family he had left behind. In the early years, Lévi-Strauss received intermittent news from his parents in the Cévennes. He wrote them long letters in his spidery handwriting, replete with photos pasted onto the page and little drawings—street maps and a floor plan of his apartment in Greenwich Village. But all correspondence had come to an abrupt halt upon the invasion of the free zone in 1943.
In retrospect, Lévi-Strauss had been fortunate to leave when he did—a few days after he had embarked from Marseille, the Vichy government had created a General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, followed later by a census and special police force to deal with the Jews. Had Lévi-Strauss somehow managed to secure his teaching job in Paris, as he had wanted to, he might not have survived the war. His involvement with the Musée de l’Homme, where he had worked through the summer of 1939 preparing the Nambikwara artifacts for exhibit, would have placed him at extreme risk. It was there, at the beginning of the occupation, that one of the first Resistance cells had formed. Researcher Anatole Lewitzky, a student of Mauss, led the group with his librarian fiancée, Yvonne Oddon. In December 1940 they had begun printing and distributing the bulletin Résistance on a duplicating machine installed by Rivet in the 1930s for the production of antifascist propaganda. The group was eventually broken up, and despite Mauss’s protestations, Lewitzky was tried and later shot on the Mont Valérien near Nanterre, along with seven accomplices from the Musée network; three women, including Yvonne Oddon, had their death sentences commuted and ended up in Germany’s labor camps.
Even the great Marcel Mauss had difficulties, surviving the war in increasingly straitened circumstances. At the age of seventy, in August 1942, he and his bedridden wife were evicted from their spacious apartment on the boulevard Jourdan, which was requisitioned for the greater comfort of a German general. Students helped Mauss salvage his library, which he stashed at the Musée, before moving into a “cold, dark and dirty” ground-floor flat on the rue Georges de Porto-Riche in the fourteenth arrondissement. That autumn, along with all Parisian Jews, he was forced to sew a yellow star onto his overcoat.2
In New York, the complexities of the wartime politics were projected back onto those who had fled; the exile community became a microcosm of the schisms that would define French political culture for the next generation. There were strong opinions on every aspect of France’s capitulation, as well as on America’s initial policy of recognizing the Vichy government and refusing to negotiate with de Gaulle. For some the terms of Armistice were a betrayal, for others an understandably pragmatic move. Few openly supported Pétain, but some were privately sympathetic. The writer and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was hounded for his tacit acceptance of Pétain and his refusal to back de Gaulle, whom he saw as an illegitimate leader. Many supported de Gaulle as a military man, but worried that his dictatorial tendencies made him a dangerous politician. Gaullists mounted witch hunts against waverers, but also engaged in bitter infighting of their own.
Lévi-Strauss joined the Free French and attended the odd Gaullist meeting in New York. But when Jacques Soustelle tried to recruit him to join the Resistance in London, he politely declined. His mind was buzzing with new ideas. He wanted to write. Besides, the political rigidity of his youth had drained away. A pacifist before the war, Lévi-Strauss had lost faith in his political judgment. “I lived through la drôle de guerre and the French collapse and I realised that it was a mistake to pigeonhole political realities in the framework of formal ideas,” he recalled.3
After the United States entered the war, Lévi-Strauss found work through Waldberg, reading out propaganda broadcasts on the French desk of the Office of War Information on Fifty-seventh Street for the francophone version of the Voice of America. There, an extraordinary collection of French exiles—headed by the future editor of France Soir Pierre Lazareff and including André Breton, philosopher Jacques Maritain, writer Denis de Rougemont and Dolorès Vanetti (who would become Sartre’s lover after the war)—came together a few times a week to write and broadcast. At around $250 a month, work at the Office of War Information was a valuable boost to exiles’ income.
Rougemont remembers working in a room with thirty typewriters, the stutter of teletext machines and harsh lighting. Men with green visors and rolled-up sleeves edited copy before passing the scripts on to the announcers in Studio 16. Each broadcast began, “Voici New York, les États-Unis d’Amérique. Nous nous adressons aux gens d’Europe!,” followed by war news, commentary and speeches by key politicians. Breton, a pacifist, was a reluctant participant. True to his surrealist principles, he refused to read out any references to the pope. “He lent us his noble voice,” remembered Rougemont, “but retained a sense of irony.” Lévi-Strauss read out French translations of Roosevelt’s speeches because it was felt that the clarity and precision of his diction carried best over the jamming. Recorded broadcasts were sent to the BBC in London, from where they were retransmitted in France. It is unclear how many listeners in France actually managed to tune in, but, according to Lévi-Strauss, the broadcast was picked up by a friend of his, who contacted his parents to reassure them that their son was alive and well.4
AT THE ÉCOLE, Lévi-Strauss continued toying with the new ideas to which he was being exposed. He quickly realized that the tools of structural linguistic analysis could be used for any set of systematic relationships. While continuing to analyze kinship data, he turned his hand to another area—the aesthetic properties of
indigenous artwork—where morphological relationships opened up the possibilities of a more formal style of analysis.
“Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America,” first published in Renaissance, the École’s house journal, saw him groping toward a different method of cross-cultural comparison. Examining Northwest Coast Indian masks, motifs on ancient Chinese art, Caduveo face painting and Maori tattoos, Lévi-Strauss drew out formal similarities. Boas had described Northwest Coast Indian portrayals of bears, sharks and frogs, depicted as if sliced lengthwise, flattened out and inverted into two profiles, facing each other as mirror images. Similar patterns featured in ancient Chinese masks, and bronze urns of the Shang dynasty. “Splitting techniques” were also at play in Caduveo face painting, with its complex axes of inverted patterning, and in the more rigorous symmetry of Maori face tattoos. The parallels were striking: the quartered face, the spirals and frets mirroring across the forehead and blossoming around the lips.
Were these patterns, following Boas, due to the gradual diffusion of cultural traits over space and time? Or could the various “splitting techniques” be related to underlying structures, emerging spontaneously through the ages and across continents? Interestingly, at this stage Lévi-Strauss’s explanation was still more classically sociological than cognitive. Maori tattoos “stamp onto the mind all the traditions and philosophy of the group,” just as the more dislocated symmetries found on the Caduveo faces represent the “dying echo” of the group’s decaying feudal order—a transformation running parallel to similar developments in Chinese art and society.5 But there was also a cognitive edge. The “common denominator” was dualism. Lévi-Strauss’s analysis boiled down to sets of Jakobson-like binary pairs, stacked up in analogous relationships: representational and abstract art; carving and drawing; face and decoration; person and impersonation.6
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Page 17