Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory

by Patrick Wilcken

  In the mid-1980s, half a century after he had driven through the region, Lévi-Strauss stopped off in Brasília on a state visit with President Mitterrand. Remarkably, it was the first time he had been back to Brazil since his fieldwork days, not through lack of invitation or opportunity, but through an odd indifference to the country in which he had begun his career as an anthropologist and which had given him the raw material for his best-selling memoir. When I asked him what he had thought about Brasília, it was difficult to gauge any reaction, positive or negative. Probing a possible affinity between the ideas behind Brasília and structuralism, I met with Lévi-Strauss’s hasty repudiation of any links between his own work and modernism. But what about his earlier association with the group of intellectuals that had formed around Mário de Andrade, a figure central to Brazil’s nascent modernist movement in São Paulo? Lévi-Strauss was quick to clarify that he felt drawn to them for political, rather than artistic, reasons. They were a left-leaning oasis in an otherwise authoritarian desert, he explained.3

  Yet Lévi-Strauss was of his time. He influenced and in turn was influenced by a specific cultural moment, a shifting of interests and orientations. In the 1950s a certain austerity reigned. Early modernism’s hectic energy was dissipating, artistic expression cooling off into a more cerebral abstraction. It was a moment of stillness, of formal analysis, of simple furniture and anonymous suits. Echoes of the Lévi-Straussian turn toward disembodied systems were appearing across the arts. His blend of rationalism and mysticism, logic and enigma was in the air. A strain of thinkers, artists and musicians was delving into a more impersonal world of objects, colors and sounds and their relationships.

  In a run-down studio in Paris, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was fiddling with primitive switchboards, shredding melody and cutting and splicing sounds, combining lifeless electronic noises into eerie soundscapes in his quest for “a structure to be realised in an Étude.” Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was in Paris as well, composing a new kind of music that used models from the hard sciences to structure sounds spatially. Waveforms plotted on graph paper were converted into unsettling scores such as Metastasis (1953-55). Similarly, Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen’s serialism involved experiments with mathematical techniques of composition using abstract templates—grids of time codes, levels and pitch. As Alex Ross observed in his history of twentieth-century music, postwar avant-garde composition fit into a Cold War laboratory-experiment aesthetic. Gone were works named in the neoclassical fashion, the scherzos or sinfoniettas—“the archaic titles dropped from sight, replaced by phrases with a cerebral tinge: Music in Two Dimensions, Syntax , Anepigraphe. There was a vogue for abstracts in the plural: Perspectives , Structures, Quantities, Configurations . . . ,4 as well as for high-tech parodies of tradition, such as Stockhausen’s Le Microphone bien tempéré (1952).

  In the visual arts, the baroque fantasies of the surrealists and expressionists gave way to a more distant, contemplative posture. On the canvases of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko great blocks of color substituted visual narrative for rumination, while in France art informel was putting an abstract gloss onto improvisational techniques. Matter painting, the Color Field approach, Group Zero—Cold War art was emptying out content, delving back into an academic discourse around the very act of artistic expression. This was not the modernist optimism of the first-wave geometric abstract art—the Mondrians and the Maleviches—but rather a dimmed pensiveness, a trailing off. It referred not to some promised utopia, but to a mythic present, the mind in communion with itself. French avant-garde fiction, which became known as the nouveau roman, was based on a similarly flattening effect. The novel’s very substance—narrative timelines, plotting and believable characters with motivations—disappeared in a movement, as Alain Robbe-Grillet described it, away from “the old myths of depth” to “a flat and discontinuous universe where each thing refers only to itself.”5

  As the 1950s progressed, a new generation of thinkers was emerging in France. Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus still dominated the scene in the aftermath of the Second World War, but they would soon be challenged by a different way of looking at the world. In 1953, the literary critic Roland Barthes published Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Writing Degree Zero), which saw authentic writing as a constant battle against the stultifying effects of literary conventions. As Lévi-Strauss had already tried to demonstrate in the entirely different contexts of kinship and indigenous culture, in later books Barthes would go on to argue that absolute creativity was an illusion, writing being a game played out within the confines of the literary system. In 1954, the philosopher Michel Foucault was at Uppsala University in Sweden, scouring the Carolina Rediviva library’s massive collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century medical texts for references as he began writing his thesis. His research would eventually result in Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (later published in abridged form in English as Madness and Civilization), an epic study of the relationship between madness and reason through the ages. Foucault saw history less as a series of events than as a set of configurations, which would periodically rupture and metamorphose; madness became an arbitrary concept, drawing meaning only in relation to the shifting social mores of mainstream society. At the same time, Jacques Lacan was developing his heretical psychoanalytic work, reviving Freud through the prism of linguistics. The unconscious, Lacan argued, was “structured like a language.”6 As the self fragmented into chains of signifiers, Lacan continued his journey into the denser, more convoluted realms of the structuralist project.

  Even history, a discipline that Lévi-Strauss had defined himself against, was moving in a more structuralist direction. Pioneered by the Annales school then headed by Fernand Braudel, Lévi-Strauss’s former colleague at the University of São Paulo, the new history had stretched time out along “the calm, monotonous highways of the longue durée.” Like a nouveau roman, incident and personality were eliminated; in their place were century-long trends: the rise and fall of food prices, glacial movements of population or gradual geopolitical realignment. Braudel wrote of “unconscious history,” operating below the threshold of everyday experience at an imperceptibly slow pace. Constraints—of climate, geography, culture, mentality—could pen mankind into long periods of relative stasis.7 This slow petrification fit the cultural mood of the 1950s like a glove. Once again man shrank before epic surroundings, entrapped in systems of which he was unconscious, yet dutifully replicating.

  The fingerprints of Lévi-Strauss were all over these diverse projects. At different points, Lacan, Barthes, Foucault and Braudel openly acknowledged his impact on their thinking. Yet Lévi-Strauss always kept his distance, playing down any affiliation. In fact, with the exception of Lacan, with whom he remained a close friend (the Lévi-Strausses regularly dined with the Lacans in Paris and would visit their country house in Guitrancourt), he largely eschewed personal or intellectual contacts. Even with Lacan, his friendship was based more on the psychoanalyst’s persona as a wealthy aesthete, art collector and bon vivant than as a theorist. Lévi-Strauss professed on several occasions not to understand Lacan’s ideas. When he attended one of his seminars, he was impressed not so much by the content, but by the style:What was striking was a kind of radiant influence emanating from both Lacan’s physical person and from his diction, his gestures. I have seen quite a few shamans functioning in exotic societies, and I rediscovered there a kind of equivalent of the shaman’s power. I confess that, as far as what I heard went, I didn’t understand. And I found myself in the middle of an audience that seemed to understand . . .8

  For such an influential thinker, Lévi-Strauss trod a solitary path. “He was a lonely figure intellectually,” Philippe Descola told me. “He cultivated close ties with Roman Jakobson and Georges Dumézil but was otherwise isolated.”9 And for someone who was profoundly interested in and moved by art and music, his eventual active disassociation from the avant-garde at midcentury is intriguing. In his academic wor
k, traditional narratives were being broken apart, producing models that could be difficult to relate to the original subject matter. The resulting abstractions teetered between art and science. But the further Lévi-Strauss traveled down this route of methodological abstraction, the less he tolerated analogous experimentation in his own cultural milieu.

  1955 WAS LÉVI-STRAUSS’S annus mirabilis. After the success of Tristes Tropiques, he returned to the academic side of his work with another landmark publication, “The Structural Study of Myth,” which appeared in English in the Journal of American Folklore. Like Lévi-Strauss’s article in Word on the application of linguistics to kinship, “The Structural Study of Myth” was a short think piece that laid the groundwork for decades of work. Just as the Word article broke the methodological ground for Les Structures élémentaires, so these twenty-odd pages provided the guiding ideas for Lévi-Strauss’s magisterial Mythologiques quartet. The essay found him at his most radical, demonstrating a method that—although he would never admit it—cannot be dissociated from the prevailing late-modernist moment. It moves from narrative to abstraction, from literature to mathematics, deliberately disrupting a cornerstone of Western culture.

  Myth was an area of growing interest for Lévi-Strauss. The telling of rambling stories peopled by strange animals, supernatural forces and the elements appeared to be deeply embedded in the human psyche. Individually, indigenous myths were chaotic, quirky narratives; collectively, common themes resonated. In one sense myths were dreamlike fantasies. In another, distilled through repetition, they became expressions of pure thought. With myth, Lévi-Strauss had an ample canvas on which to explore a subject that had fascinated him since his early contacts with Freud and the surrealists—the interplay between poetic expression and logic.

  “The Structural Study of Myth” followed a familiar pattern: the statement of a perennial problem, the ridiculing of centuries of clumsy ad hoc theorizing, followed by a bold abstract solution, modeled on structural linguistics, which shifted the entire theoretical terrain. In the opening pages of the article, Lévi-Strauss briskly dispatched previous explanations. Notions that myths were metaphorical religions, collective dreams, reflections of actual social relations or fumbling protoscientific explanations reduced mythology to “idle play or a crude kind of philosophical speculation,” doomed to end up as “platitude and sophism.”10 The core problem of past approaches was the attempt to read off sociological truths directly from the substance of a given myth. Once again, Lévi-Strauss drew the parallel to linguistics and its ill-fated attempts to pin certain sounds down to specific meanings—liquids to water, open vowels to large objects, and so forth. Only when words were detached from referents and language began being modeled as a formal system could real progress be made.

  Following Saussure, Lévi-Strauss proposed breaking down mythic narratives into their constituent parts. These elements, which he coined “mythemes,” were typically short summaries of narrative events (such as “sibling incest” or “brother and sister sacrificed”) or characteristics of protagonists or things (“amorous” or “barren,” “raw” or “cooked”). Once broken down into “mythemes,” the analyst could order them into thematic columns, looking not just at discrete relationships between elements, but—again using a concept drawn from structural linguistics—“bundles of relations” (paquets de relations). Lévi-Strauss preempted criticism by stressing that he was applying linguistic theory to myth by way of analogy rather than direct correspondence. Myths, after all, were themselves made up of language; “mythemes,” as short phrases, could not be analyzed in the same way as phonemes, mere fractions of words. Nevertheless, the carryover of ideas and concepts into a totally new field remained as ambitious and risky as ever.

  To explain what at first reading seems bafflingly esoteric, Lévi-Strauss resorted to a Borgesian analogy. Alien archaeologists visit the Earth, post-apocalypse, and excavate a huge building, stacked with millions of pieces of paper bound in small, bricklike blocks and covered with ink symbols. They begin a long and painstaking analysis, eventually extrapolating an alphabet and key coordinates. The codes flow one way and one way only, they discover, from left to right and from top to bottom, in a flattened coil that—if stretched out—would form an almost endless string of sequences. But then the aliens come across a subset of papers, printed with sets of ruled horizontal lines plotted with squiggles, dots and arcs, which appear not to follow this iron rule. After trying and failing to decipher them, they realize that one line does not follow on from the next, but that the pieces of code have been stacked one upon the other; relationships, they realize, run up and down the page in a complex of harmony and dissonance.

  The orchestral score became a favorite metaphor for Lévi-Strauss. The fact that its gridded staves, rigid time codes and keys could produce swirling, intensely romantic sounds was a paradox that fascinated him. By some mysterious process, logic was converted into emotion. Structurally, the score appealed to Lévi-Strauss’s diagrammatic approach. The stacking up of different yet closely related elements down the score’s page—the parts of the cello, the flute, the timpani and the bassoon, for instance—wending together to form an aesthetic whole, became for Lévi-Strauss a key image for an understanding of how culture was structured.

  Read from left to right like a text, as the alien archaeologists had at first tried to do, the score became a juddering series of inversions, repetitions and thematic variations. In an imaginative leap, Lévi-Strauss found that this resonated structurally with the composition of mythic narrative, which abounded in echoing themes, unexpected plot twists and sudden reversals. If one could only read a myth vertically, in the same way as a musician reads a score, he reasoned, lining up the myth’s narrative harmonies and counterpoints, uncovering its leitmotifs, its essence could be revealed.

  With a theatrical flourish, Lévi-Strauss chose the central Western myth, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, for his demonstration. Like a Brion Gysin cut-up, Lévi-Strauss spliced the myth into a collage of events and characters. From the fragments, certain themes emerged, which he ordered into a table of four columns. The myth could now be read in two directions. From left to right was the familiar narrative—Oedipus’s drawn-out realization of his horrific past. But Lévi-Strauss was more interested in the scorelike columns, where elements of the story were clustered in contrasting themes. The exercise was eccentric but riveting, the essay up to this point a virtuoso display of intellectual acrobatics and intuitive audacity.

  The first column, which included Oedipus marrying his mother and Antigone contravening a ritual taboo by burying her brother, was said to represent an exaggeration of blood relations; the second, which had Oedipus killing his father and Eteocles slaying his brother, expressed an underrating of blood ties. Lévi-Strauss’s explanation of the third and fourth columns, which were headed “Monsters being slain” (Cadmos killing the dragon and Oedipus the Sphinx) and “Lameness” (Oedipus’s swollen feet at birth, his father Laios’s “left-sided” posture) respectively, was more complicated. Difficulty in walking is recurrent in mythology in characters born from the earth, appearing in Pueblo and Kwakiutl myths, explained Lévi-Strauss; monsters are otherworldly. Hence the opposition was between the persistence versus the denial of man’s earthly origins—a line of reasoning that the British anthropologist Edmund Leach later described as “vaguely reminiscent of an argument from Alice through the Looking Glass.”11

  In the closing pages Lévi-Strauss drew the strands together. The Oedipus myth was really about the fundamental conflict between the Greek religious theory that man, like plant life, was born of the earth, and the knowledge that humans result from blood relations in the union between a man and a woman. On the surface, Oedipus Rex told a story—the tragedy of a man who unwittingly marries his mother and kills his father—but underneath, at a deep structural level, the myth was a logical configuration—a portrait of the mind as it subconsciously ruminated on intractable social contradictions, in this case between re
ligious belief and worldly realities.

  Like Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Lévi-Strauss’s project was setting off in an increasingly idiosyncratic direction. How many theorists would have arrived at the same conclusions as his reading of Oedipus, even if they were trying to apply his own structuralist methods? Who, other than Lévi-Strauss, would have made the leap from the slaying of monsters to swollen feet to the earthly origin of man? Or from the binding of Oedipus’s feet at birth to limping in Pueblo and Kwakiutl myths? And yet in his concluding remarks, this essentially interpretive exercise masqueraded as something far more exact, as if Lévi-Strauss was approaching myth as a scientist would a crystal or a gas, divining its behavior through experimentation. The logic of mythic thought, Lévi-Strauss concluded, “was as rigorous as that of modern science”—so rigorous, in fact, that it could be reduced to a single mathematical formula, the “genetic law of myth”: Fx (a) : Fy (b) ~ Fx (b) : Fa-1 (y).12

  It is difficult to grasp Lévi-Strauss’s own brief explanation of what this formula actually means, or see how it could be systematically applied. It seems, in fact, not to be a formula at all—in the sense of being a prescribed method for consistently achieving a given outcome—but rather a modeling of a narrative structure, using mathematical symbols as shorthand, in this case the “torsion surnuméraire” or “double twist”: a kind of warped version of the simpler A is to B as C is to D (A : B :: C : D) that he had used in his analysis of the avunculate.13 But followers of Lévi-Strauss need not have worried about the detail—they would wait ten years before the equation was even mentioned again in the second volume of the Mythologiques series, Du miel aux cendres (From Honey to Ashes). “It was necessary to quote it at least once more as proof of the fact that I have never ceased to be guided by it,” Lévi-Strauss explained, in a curious allusion that has almost religious overtones.14