IT MAY SEEM STRANGE that such a dense and technical book could become a landmark in French thought, but the first and last chapters—a stream-of-consciousness theoretical essay and a polemical attack on Jean-Paul Sartre, respectively—brought La Pensée sauvage to life for a broader readership. The first chapter was frenetic. One moment Lévi-Strauss was discussing Hanunóo plant classification, the next he was analyzing the ruff of a lace collar in a portrait of a woman by sixteenth-century French mannerist painter François Clouet and the inherent aesthetic qualities of miniatures. Lévi-Strauss interspersed references to Charles Dickens, the stage sets of silent-era French filmmaker Georges Méliès, Japanese gardens, the Sistine Chapel and cubism with ethnographic descriptions of a dozen different indigenous groups. “Art lies half way between scientific knowledge and mythical and magical thought,” he declared at one point; “the painter is always midway between design and anecdote” at another. It may not always have been easy to follow, but his eclectic approach was compelling.
There was also a hint of the eccentric in La Pensée sauvage. The selection of illustrations ranged from the intriguing to the bizarre. There were Grandville’s nineteenth-century drawings of humans with animal heads, taken from Les Métamorphoses du jour (1828-29), along with Charles Le Brun’s seventeenth-century experimental sketches of crosses between human and animal physiognomy. The former were labeled, “The opposite of totemism: nature humanised,” and the latter, “The opposite of totemism: man naturalised,” though neither plate was discussed or even ever referred to in the text. More conventional were two carved stone churinga, sacred objects used in Aboriginal ancestor cults. But these were coupled with European-style outback landscapes painted by Australian Aborigines, which Lévi-Strauss described as “dull and studied watercolours one might expect of an old maid” and whose only raison d’être seemed to be a single throwaway comment in chapter three.23
In among the flotsam of Lévi-Strauss’s mind was a philosophical set piece—an extended comparison between scientific and sauvage ways of thinking. Where scientific thought was analytical and abstract, breaking the world down into a series of discrete problems, la pensée sauvage sought a total solution. The scientist measured, weighed and modeled at a remove; the primitive dealt directly in the sensual experiences of his immediate surroundings, balancing them off against each other, ordering them into mytho-poetic formulae. In an interview for a documentary shot in the 1970s, Lévi-Strauss described the process of scientific research as a never-ceasing excavation—the breaking through of the surface reality in search of another analytical world behind, which would in turn yield a further world, and so on. “The progress in science consisted in reaching successive levels of more and more secret maps,” Lévi-Strauss went on, “where explanations were found to the essence of the map we had.” In contrast to this “constant probing, penetration,” la pensée sauvage was all surface and no depth, taking the environment at face value, but nevertheless fashioning its elements into beautifully balanced and rigorously logical objects of the thought.24 With this dichotomy, Lévi-Strauss was approaching the core of his own thinking—an amalgam of the sensual and the logical, which obsessed him throughout his career.
In the field he had jotted down tasting notes from the tropics, from the thirteen different flavors of honey that the Nambikwara gathered, whose aromas he likened to bouquets of burgundy, to appreciations of exotic fruits. The araca had “a turpentine taste with a fizz of faint acidity,” crushed açaí produced a “thick raspberry-flavoured syrup” and the bacuri was “like a pear stolen from the orchards of Paradise.” In the forest he had breathed in the chocolate aromas of decaying leaf litter, which made him think of how soil produces cocoa, and how the gravelly earth of Haute-Provence could beget both the floral scent of lavender and the pungency of truffles. It was there that the expedition team had spent three days cooking and eating, improvising haute cuisine in the depths of the forest, sampling hummingbird roasted on skewers flambé au whiskey and a ragoût of mutum (wild turkey) stewed with palm buds and served with a creamy sauce made from nut pulp au poivre. For all his intellectual austerity, his distrust of direct experience, Lévi-Strauss was alive to the senses.
Instead of fighting these apparent contradictions, he tried to fuse them. In doing so he believed he was solving a venerable philosophical problem: the relationship between abstract intellectual understanding and raw sensory perception, between the “intelligible” and “sensible,” as Plato had framed it, or John Locke’s “primary” and “secondary” qualities. A long line of thinkers, from the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus through to Galileo Galilei, René Descartes and Isaac Newton, had asked whether there was some fundamental distinction between qualities that exist independent of the observer—like geometric shapes, numbers, motion and density—and qualities that are subjective—colors, odors and textures, for instance. The idea of red, bitter or rough seemed fundamentally different from measurable, precisely definable entities like a circle, a square or the number three. While the West had marginalized “secondary qualities” in order to establish science, Lévi-Strauss argued that preliterate groups had transcended this debate, welding the sensual and the logical into a seamless whole.
For Lévi-Strauss, aesthetic sensation was the very currency of la pensée sauvage, but it was applied according to rigorous principles. Though freed to roam at will, untamed thinking had ended up producing a tidy collection of logical propositions, lining up elements in neat oppositions and inversions—fur versus feather, the smooth and the gritty, noise as against silence, fresh as opposed to putrid and so forth—that Lévi-Strauss would map out in a chapter titled “The Fugue of the Five Senses” in his next book, Le Cru et le cuit (The Raw and the Cooked).25 The metaphor was less like the wilds of nature than a Parisian park, with its gravel squares, strips of lawn and rows of topiaried shrubs. His task was to analyze this strange fusion—a logical system built out of pure experience, a grammar of sound, odor and texture, a formal structure made up of perceptions of plants, animals and nature, of bears, seaweed, ants and shooting stars, which he termed “the science of the concrete” (la science du concret). “We have had to wait until the middle of this century for the crossing of long separated paths,” he wrote as he wound up La Pensée sauvage.26 Modern thought was engaging with that of the Neolithic, and human knowledge was at last coming full circle.
IT TOOK FOUR YEARS for La Pensée sauvage to appear in English translation. Rodney Needham, then still Lévi-Strauss’s champion in Britain, gave the job to Sybil Wolfram, an Oxford University philosophy lecturer in her early thirties. Wolfram began work, but immediately fell out with Lévi-Strauss over criticisms he made of early drafts of the first two chapters. She almost left the project at this point, but the publishers persuaded her to complete the translation. When she handed in the script, Lévi-Strauss was damning: “I could not recognise my book as she had rendered it,” he complained in a letter to the journal Man. For her part, Wolfram disassociated herself from the heavily edited version of her work that finally appeared in print, produced by several translators working under anthropologist Ernest Gellner, which she felt was “full of howlers, pieces of sheer nonsense, ungrammatical sentences, extreme infelicities, pointless substitutions, often resulting in absurdity and inaccuracy, the loss of allusions I have carefully preserved.” Wolfram later joked, paraphrasing Lévi-Strauss, that the editing process had miraculously succeeded in “turning the cooked into the raw.”27
The pairing was clearly no meeting of minds, as excerpts of their correspondence published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of Lévi-Strauss’s works reveal. Wolfram accused Lévi-Strauss of having “an inadequate knowledge of English,” calling his suggestion of the word “structuration” a “revolting Americanism.” At one point she sent Lévi-Strauss a long letter explaining the difference between “contingency” and “chance”; at another, she dismissed philosophical terms like être (being) and devenir (becoming) used as substantives
as “meaningless metaphysical expressions.” She found Lévi-Strauss’s corrections infuriating. “If you do not mean what I put, then I do not understand what you mean,” she wrote in exasperation.28
The title’s wordplay produced further problems, with a range of possible permutations in English: The Wild Pansy, Untamed Thinking or Lévi-Strauss’s own suggestion, Mind in the Wild. One of the editors proposed the academic-sounding Natural Ideas—A Study in Primitive Thought,29 but the book would be published as The Savage Mind—a distortion of the original—minus the flowers on the front cover and the appendix, in which Lévi-Strauss had placed a series of historical descriptions of wild pansies. (Lévi-Strauss had the last word on the matter in the 2008 Pléiade edition, inserting a quote from Hamlet in English—“and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts”—on the flyleaf.) Still the only version available in English, The Savage Mind does indeed have a clunky feel to it at times, but to be fair to the translators, taking Lévi-Strauss’s punning philosophico-poetic prose into English was never easy, and was made more difficult by running disagreements with the author.
The Wolfram dispute underlines the enduring gulf between Lévi-Strauss and his British counterparts, Latin and Anglo-American intellectual sensibilities. Lévi-Strauss’s elliptical, poetic style was indeed resistant to more literalist Anglo-American interpretations. His repeated use of hard science metaphors goaded critics who found it impossible to pin down the detail of his arguments and were indeed suspicious that his floral prose masked a lack of rigor.
Part of the problem was a lack of sensitivity to the context in which Lévi-Strauss was working. For him, ethnography worked in the service of ideas, a concept that was familiar to his French intellectual audience but which did not travel well across the Channel. In Britain the high-flown prose that came with the territory was seen as too intellectually showy, but even Lévi-Strauss was happy to admit in the last few pages of the book “there is a little rather false lyricism,” though he never felt it discredited his ideas.30
In an interview in the early 1970s for the journal Psychology Today, Lévi-Strauss gave his interpretation of this French/Anglo-American divide:It happens that in France . . . philosophy makes up a sort of vernacular language that serves as a means of communication between the scientific world, the academic world, and the cultivated public on the one hand, and between different branches of research, on the other. This is not true for England or for the United States. I would even say that the philosophical aspect you point to in my work, which is perhaps attractive to some French readers, is a considerable source of irritation to the English and the Americans.31
The ease with which continental scholars moved between art and science was also alien to the more compartmentalized Anglo-American approaches. In the year that La Pensée sauvage was published, for instance, Lévi-Strauss joined forces with Roman Jakobson in a structural analysis of Charles Baudelaire’s short poem “Les Chats.” After much correspondence on the subject, the two men sat down together in Lévi-Strauss’s study and coauthored an essay deconstructing the poem. A playful exercise, perhaps, but one which ended up being published in L’Homme, the house journal of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie, launched by Lévi-Strauss, Émile Benveniste and Pierre Gourou in 1961 as a French equivalent to Man in Britain and American Anthropologist in the United States.32
While British and American critics often seized on errors of scholarship and interpretation of sources, in France Lévi-Strauss was both attacked and lauded on strictly philosophical grounds. Some of the responses were as dense and theoretical as Lévi-Strauss’s original work. In a debate between Lévi-Strauss and Paul Ricoeur, at that time one of France’s leading philosophers, published in the 1963 Esprit devoted to a critical reading of La Pensée sauvage, Ricoeur told Lévi-Strauss:You salvage the meaning, but it is the meaning of non-meaning [le sens de non-sens], the admirable syntactical arrangement of a discourse that says nothing. I see you at that conjunction between agnosticism and a hyper-intelligence of syntax. This is what makes you at once fascinating and disturbing.33
Ricoeur described Lévi-Straussian structuralism as sometimes a “Kantianism without the transcendental subject”—that is to say, a disembodied version of the mental constraints that Kant argued gave shape to our perception of reality—at other times an “absolute formalism.”34 Lévi-Strauss had long fought against the tag “formalism,” which he felt misinterpreted his position. As to “Kantianism without the transcendental subject,” he liked the label, even adopting it in the first book of the Mythologiques quartet, Le Cru et le cuit, where he also cited approvingly another Ricoeur description of structuralism. Adrift from “the thinking subject,” Lévi-Strauss’s “categorising system” was “homologous with nature”—“It may perhaps be nature,” Ricoeur concluded with an air of mysticism.35
By the end of the Esprit encounter, Ricoeur was fascinated by structuralism, but ultimately disillusioned:I see an extreme form of modern agnosticism. As far as you are concerned there is no “message” . . . you despair of meaning, but you console yourself with the thought that, if men have nothing to say, at least they say it so well that their discourse is amenable to structuralism.36
The vacuum of meaning, the absence of will, the erasure of the “subject”—at that time the focal point of philosophical thinking—these were aspects of structuralism that unsettled some.37 But others, especially a new generation of thinkers who were at the beginning of their intellectual careers, were intrigued. Not only was Lévi-Strauss challenging the assumptions that had underpinned French thought for a generation, but he was proposing their radical opposites. Against the humanist orthodoxy, he was creating an intellectual space where people, himself included, were merely vessels for ideas, transition points of culture. These ideas had been aired to a mixed response through the 1950s. The time was now ripe for an assault on the philosophy of France’s most famous thinker: Jean-Paul Sartre.
A philosopher who wrote of the nausea of being, the struggle for authenticity and personal freedom in a godless world; a very public intellectual whose private life became the stuff of legend; a onetime communist activist who ended up a Maoist sympathizer—it is hard to think of someone more at odds with Lévi-Strauss’s ideas and persona. In public Lévi-Strauss praised Sartre as a great thinker who had “a prodigious capacity to express himself in the most diverse genres: theater, newspapers, philosophy, the novel.”38 Privately, Lévi-Strauss was scandalized by Sartre’s outré lifestyle. While Lévi-Strauss was in America, Sartre’s New York lover Dolorès Vanetti asked him if he liked Sartre. “How do you think I could like him after reading She Came to Stay?” he replied, referring to Simone de Beauvoir’s first novel, L’Invitée, a fictionalized account of her ménage à trois with Sartre and her student Olga Kosakiewicz. “It’s Sartre portrayed in his entirety and he comes over as a vile bastard.” Dolorès duly passed on one of Lévi-Strauss’s rare indiscretions to Sartre himself, who mentioned it in a letter to de Beauvoir. “Thanks a lot, my fine friend, for the portrait,” Sartre added drily.39
In 1960, Sartre published the second of his great philosophical tracts, Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason), sections of which had already appeared Les Temps modernes. Written in part as a response to Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of his work, it attempted the daunting task of marrying existentialism and Marxism into a coherent whole. On its publication, he sent a copy to Lévi-Strauss with the dedication “To Claude Lévi-Strauss. In testimony of a faithful friendship.” He added that the book’s “main questions were inspired by those which occupied you, and especially by the way you posed them.”40 Sartre had cited Lévi-Strauss approvingly several times during the course of Critique de la raison dialectique, including a chapter entitled “Structures—The Work of Lévi-Strauss,” with examples drawn from Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté. There were even hints of structuralism’s influence on Sartre, as he edged toward a more restricted, system-dominated view of freedom.
/> Assisted by Lucien Sebag and Jean Pouillon, Lévi-Strauss devoted his seminar at the École pratique des hautes études to an analysis of Critique de la raison dialectique over the winter of 1960-61, reading and rereading Sartre at the same time as he was writing Le Totémisme aujourd’hui and La Pensée sauvage. To the latter he ended up adding a final, relatively free-floating chapter—“History and Dialectic”—dealing specifically with Sartre’s book. In the preface he described his critique “as a homage of admiration and respect.”41 But far from returning Sartre’s compliment, Lévi-Strauss’s assessment was brutal.
Densely woven with the jargon of another intellectual age, making some passages virtually incomprehensible to the modern-day nonspecialist reader, Lévi-Strauss attempted to bulldoze Sartre’s entire project in the space of two dozen pages. His lines of attack were diverse: a defense of “analogical” primitive thought styles against Western dialectical reason; an attack on the solipsistic focus on the subject; more assaults on the primacy of history and Sartre’s fundamentally ethnocentric outlook. At base many of the arguments were retreads of points he had already made in Race et histoire and Tristes Tropiques, but by now he had both refined and amplified his attack. His most cutting remarks were couched in anthropological Victoriana: Sartre’s privileging of Western history over that of the Papuans was akin to “a sort of intellectual cannibalism much more revolting to the anthropologist than real cannibalism.” His attempt to oppose the primitive and the civilized was an opposition that “would have been formulated by a Melanesian savage.”42 Lévi-Strauss felt he was now working on a far broader canvas than the Marxist/existentialist discourse of historical forces and the possibilities of personal emancipation. For Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, along with much of the Parisian intellectual elite, was engaged in a parochial debate about a few hundred years of Western mores and history. Bus stop queues, strikes, boxing matches—the examples from which Sartre built his “philosophical anthropology”—seemed provincial in comparison to structuralism’s global reach.
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Page 30