Like Leach in his criticisms of Les Structures élémentaires, Maybury-Lewis’s own fieldwork put him in a position to directly challenge Lévi-Strauss’s use of central Brazilian ethnography. A key structural feature of central Brazilian mythology in the first two volumes of the Mythologiques quartet was the fact that the jaguar (who often appears as the keeper of fire, the ur-figure in the origin of cooking) has a human wife. Lévi-Strauss drew the feature from a parenthesis in one version of a Kayapó myth, and then went on to apply it to a whole string of other myths. But according to Maybury-Lewis, informants from the Kayapó, Apinayé, Xerente and Xavante peoples categorically denied the link, stating that the jaguar’s wife was in fact a jaguar.
Aside from ethnographic nitpicking, Maybury-Lewis found the whole basis of the project unsatisfactory. Despite his invocations of science, Lévi-Strauss’s propositions, as highly idiosyncratic interpretations, were essentially unprovable. So broad was his interpretive scope that a whole range of meanings could be elicited. As novelist John Updike wrote in the New Yorker, “With such a hunting license granted, parallels and homologies are easy to bag—child’s play for a brain as agile as M. Lévi-Strauss.”52 But against his better judgment, Maybury-Lewis could not help feeling admiration for Lévi-Strauss’s extraordinary project: “Even if these [ideas] are unprovable or unproven, this does not necessarily mean that they are inconsiderable or even implausible. This is why Du miel aux cendres is so tantalizing. There is so much that feels right.”53
Rodney Needham, then professor of anthropology at Oxford University, was less forgiving of Lévi-Strauss’s intuitive approach to research. An early supporter of his in Britain, Needham had already translated Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (published by Merlin Press as Totemism in 1964) when he began organizing the translation of Les Structures élémentaires, almost twenty years after its original publication. The process was laborious, involving two translators in Australia sending each chapter with queries about language, interpretation and sources back to Oxford for Needham to recheck against the French. Needham picked his way through Lévi-Strauss’s five-hundred-page book, finding numerous discrepancies, mistranscribed quotes and errors in referencing. This was partly to do with Lévi-Strauss’s whole style of operating—his encyclopedic approach and theoretical ambition, the scope of his projects and his intellectual avarice sometimes led to mistakes, a fact that he openly acknowledged. (“No claim is made that the work is free of errors of fact and interpretation,” Lévi-Strauss had written disarmingly in the preface to the first edition; while in the second he had volunteered, “I admit to being an execrable proofreader . . . Once completed, the book becomes a foreign body, a dead being incapable of holding my interest.”) But his on-the-hoof, ideas-driven method was anathema to Needham; an old-fashioned scholar, a stickler for correct referencing and ethnographic accuracy, he began to harbor doubts. “His scholarship was unreliable,” he told me. “If you go back to the examples in the Elementary Structures, they were often wrong, or had the wrong interpretation—you couldn’t send students back to Lévi-Strauss’s works with any confidence.”54
After the Savage Mind debacle, Lévi-Strauss had little to do with the translation process.55 He did, however, find time to add a last-minute preface in which he criticized Needham’s interpretation of his theories, reiterating comments he had made in the Huxley Memorial Lecture he had given in Oxford in 1965. The points he made might now seem arcane—the argument hinged on distinctions between prescribed and preferential marriage systems, theoretical rules and actual behavior. But for Needham its late appearance, in the final edit of a project to which he had devoted so much time and energy, was hurtful.
When I met Professor Needham shortly before his death in 2006 at his Holywell Street flat in the very heart of the Oxford colleges, he was still bitter, decades on. “I was going to read some Lévi-Strauss to prepare for our interview,” he told me as we sat down in his meticulously laid-out apartment, plain but stylish with pared-down 1950s décor, “but I recoiled from it.”56 The dispute clearly ran deep—Needham lined the walls of his study with framed photos of intellectual greats, with the picture of Lévi-Strauss turned toward the wall. Once a champion of Lévi-Strauss and a key figure in the emergence of a British version of structuralism, Needham now felt Lévi-Strauss was a lush, self-conscious, grandiloquent writer. After their falling out, he wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that Lévi-Strauss should not be seen as a renowned exponent of structuralism, but as “the greatest Surrealist of them all.”57 When I asked Lévi-Strauss about Needham, he replied matter-of-factly, “He was kind and helpful in trying to popularize my ideas for the Anglo-Saxon world, but the way he did it misinterpreted my work, so I said so—the same goes for Leach.”58 But perhaps Lévi-Strauss’s successor at the Collège de France, Philippe Descola, had a more convincing explanation: Lévi-Strauss did not like imitators, he told me, and repelled collaborations, even as he attracted them with the programmatic flavor of his research. 59
Underlying the rifts were real differences in intellectual culture between Lévi-Strauss and his Anglo-American counterparts. It is indeed hard to imagine a British or American anthropologist producing a sentence like, “It is in the last resort immaterial whether in this book the thought processes of the South American Indians take shape through the medium of my thought, or whether mine take shape through the medium of theirs.”60 Lévi-Strauss’s long period in the United States had not dimmed his essentially continental philosophical outlook. For all his appeals to the higher authority of the hard sciences, for all his use of metaphors drawn from physics, chemistry, astronomy and, most important, linguistics, his approach was becoming more literary and philosophical as he aged. So much so that when his American publishers, the University of Chicago Press, added the subclause “Introduction to a Science of Mythology” to each volume of the Mythologiques quartet, he was apparently very unhappy. The strictly scientific pretensions of his work were becoming less and less important to him. He was, after all, still using Jakobson’s two-decade-old structural linguistic models as a blueprint for his own theories at a time when linguistics as a discipline was surging ahead.
Linguist Noam Chomsky, who had led the revolution, briefly touched on Lévi-Strauss’s work in Language and Mind (1968), published at the height of French structuralism. Although sympathetic to his general orientation, Chomsky was dismissive of Lévi-Strauss’s use of linguistics. Formal aspects of language identified by structural linguists like Jakobson were, for Chomsky, merely the epiphenomena of deeper rules—the generative grammar that he and his colleagues were then mapping out. “There is nothing to be said about the abstract structure of the various patterns that appear at various stages of derivation,” he concluded. “If this is correct, then one cannot expect structuralist phonology, in itself, to provide a useful model for investigation of other cultural and social systems.” The thought was ironic—could it have been that, for all Lévi-Strauss’s insistence on breaking through surface realities and finding deeper structural truths, the linguistic model he chose represented a mere outer shell of appearance hiding the mechanics of language that were hidden at a deeper level still? It was not an idea that Lévi-Strauss ever stopped to contemplate. His coordinates had already been set and the pace of production was such that there was now no turning back.
Perhaps it is not surprising that one of Lévi-Strauss’s most perceptive critics crossed both the Latin/Anglo-American and the anthropological /linguistic divides. French anthropologist Dan Sperber had studied under Georges Balandier and gone on to work with Rodney Needham in Oxford, as well as attending both Noam Chomsky’s and Lévi-Strauss’s seminars in the 1960s. As a young man he had been seduced by Lévi-Strauss and structuralism, and went on to Oxford to preach the word, but soon found Lévi-Strauss’s theory wanting. “Its model didn’t even work in its initial field, linguistics. Its claim to work for the rest of the universe was altogether doubtful,” he told historian François Dosse.61
In on
e of the most penetrating critiques of Lévi-Strauss, Sperber concluded that although his instincts had been right, structuralism “was an uninspiring frame for an otherwise stimulating and inspired picture.”62 In the 1970s he began working from the ground up, blending contemporary advances in linguistics, cognitive psychology and neuroscience in his attempt to found a true science—what he called an “epidemiology” of ideas. Lévi-Strauss took no interest in his work, even though it had been directly inspired by the core questions that he had built his career around. “As for Sperber,” he told Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in the 1990s, “I don’t understand anything he writes! And this business about epidemiology, this seems to me such a return to the past.”63
On the publication of La Potière jalouse—the second of the petits mythologiques, which he later wrote as companion pieces to the original quartet—Lévi-Strauss told Sperber that the book had been conceived as a response to his ideas. Sperber rushed out to buy a copy, but was disappointed to find there was not a single reference to his work. When I put this to Lévi-Strauss, he laughed. “That was a joke,” he told me. “Sperber had criticized me for the fact that after introducing the canonic formula for myths Fx (a) : Fy (b) ~ Fx (b) : Fa-1 (y)”—first mentioned in his structural analysis of Oedipus Rex, then briefly alluded to in Du miel aux cendres—“I had never referred it again. In La Potière jalouse I mentioned it.” In a final irony, in 2009 Dan Sperber became the first to receive the Prix Claude Lévi-Strauss, awarded for excellence in the social sciences.
OBLIVIOUS TO CRITICISM, Lévi-Strauss forged on and in early 1968 was finishing off his third Mythologiques volume, L’Origine des manières de table. By now he had clocked up more than five hundred myths, each taken apart, sifted for logical affinities and recombined into structural sets. He likened the process to the patient dismantling of the mechanisms of a clock—but this was a strange kind of clock, one whose cogs and wheels seemed to have been thrown together haphazardly, and whose ratios and symmetries became apparent only after exhaustive comparisons between scores of subtly different mechanisms. More plausibly, he described himself as like a photographer working in the darkroom of human consciousness, bringing out the myths’ “latent, but hidden, properties.”64
Ethnographically, Lévi-Strauss had crossed over into North America, leaving the jungles of the Amazon for the Midwestern prairie lands of the Plains Indians, a shift of focus that he described as “almost tantamount to exploring another planet.” Conceptually, volume three added a feature that would complicate an already elaborate scheme: time. Taking his cue from the proliferation of myths involving canoe journeys, Lévi-Strauss moved from the spatial to the temporal. The logical relationships that he was now dealing in were ever-changing configurations between the “here” and the “there,” near and far, the ebb and the flow, the rising and falling of water levels, and so forth.
Myths featuring canoe trips led on to journeys along rivers, to river crossings and floods, to discussions of stock mythic figures—the ferryman, “a semiconductor,” carrying some people across and obstructing others65—and the “clinging woman,” a curious character who attaches herself to the hero’s back. He drew parallels between the sun and the moon and the steersman and the oarsman, both traveling together, but at a fixed distance apart—just like interrelated kin groups. The sun and the moon produced still more oppositions: summer and winter, nomadic and sedentary groups, hunting and cultivating, war and peace, as Lévi-Strauss began moving from simple oppositions to more complex quadripartite structures. Though now working in entirely different cultural milieu, he found that the North American “wives of the sun and moon” myth cycle was in fact a transformation of the original bird-nester series. A panoramic view across the Americas was now emerging, with “the bird-nester myths along a vertical axis, and the Moon’s saga running horizontal.”66
There was more rich scatological material, especially in Lévi-Strauss’s ongoing examination of blockage and blocked characters, like M524, a Guianan Taulipang just-so story explaining the origin of the anus. In the beginning neither men nor animals had anuses, but excreted through their mouths. A disembodied anus sauntered among them, taunting them by farting in their faces and then escaping. But they hunted him down, cutting him up into pieces and sharing him out among all animals—bigger or smaller, in accordance with the size of their orifice today. This is why all living creatures have an anus; otherwise they would be forced to excrete through the mouth or would burst, so the story ran.67
In a final section, which seemed strangely disconnected from the rest of the book, Lévi-Strauss reintroduced his famous “culinary triangle”—a gastronomic version of Jakobson’s structural linguistics—which had first appeared in the journal L’Arc in 1965.68 Using Jakobson’s triangular model of sound distinctions, Lévi-Strauss substituted phonemes for “gustemes.” Vowels and consonants became raw, cooked and rotted, which stood at the triangle’s apexes, with air and water along two sides operating as mediators.
The argument was complex, examining all the various permutations of roasting, boiling and smoking within this scheme. Boiling was compared to rotting, for instance, as, mediated by water, it “decomposed” the raw; smoking, on the other had, was a slow and thorough form of cooking mediated by air, as opposed to the fiery, partial cooking of the roast. In a comparison between boiled and roasted dishes, he argued that while the former was often associated with homely frugality, roasting had a theatrical, ceremonial role. “Boiling provides a means of complete conservation of the meat and its juices,” Lévi-Strauss concluded, “whereas roasting is accompanied by loss and destruction. Thus one denotes economy, the other prodigality; the latter is aristocratic, the former plebeian.”69 To demonstrate his arguments, he juxtaposed examples drawn from Aristotle, Diderot and d’Alembert’s encyclopedia and the Marquis de Cussy with Guayaki, Kaingang, Maori and Jivaro ethnography in what was a tour de force of popular structuralism.
Through a process of constant recapitulation, he moved back and forth through his accumulating stock of myths, comparing, drawing parallels, finding new angles as he incorporated earlier material into later analytical developments. Everything is connected, he wrote in the foreword to L’Origine des manières de table, “M428 links up with M10 in The Raw and the Cooked . . . M495 coincides with a group of myths (M1, M7-12, M24)”—the Bororo and Ge series that began the whole project. As a result, the reader could just as well start with volume three and go on to volume one; “then, if still interested, he can embark on volume two.”70 You could even begin with volume two, Lévi-Strauss explained, then track back to volume one, finishing off with three, or take on volumes two and three in order, leaving volume one until last.
Every few hundred myths, Lévi-Strauss’s argument took a new twist. Running in tandem with his geographical journey across the Americas was a conceptual one, a progressive adding of layers of logic—sensual, formal, spatial—that coursed through the mythic narratives. Comparing myth clusters, he saw that different indigenous groups had not just inverted specific mythic elements, but transposed them into completely new codes, from culinary to astronomical, sexual to cosmological. L’Origine des manières de table represented the most challenging step in the argument, as the point at which the temporal entered the equation. The relationships between the terms became relative, not absolute, oppositions, and in a kind of Native American modernist turn, the myths themselves were meditations on the very nature of these relationships. For Lévi-Strauss, stories about the moon, porcupine quills, the Pink River, a toad and an incontinent old woman were actually vehicles for thought about increasingly abstract properties—conjunction, disjunction and mediation.71
Lévi-Strauss had arrived at the outer limits of la pensée sauvage, the point at which “the science of the concrete” began admitting abstract thought. Up against the periphery, mythic thought began to degrade, its narrative collapsing into a series of short, repetitive episodes that Lévi-Strauss likened to the roman-feuilleton—the serialized n
ovels issued in newspaper supplements, a kind of nineteenth-century equivalent to pulp fiction. For him, the ultimate heir to the collapse of mythic thought was the modern novel. Trapped inside tight genres, with repetitive characters and motifs, the novel fed off mythic elements ripped from their original context, as Lévi-Strauss explained with this lyrical image:The novelist drifts at random among these floating fragments that the warmth of history has, as it were, melted off from the ice-pack. He collects these scattered elements and reuses them as they come along, being at the same time dimly aware that they originate from some other structure, and that they will become increasingly rare as he is carried along by a current different from the one which was holding them together.72
Earlier, in conversations with Georges Charbonnier and in the “Overture” of Le Cru et le cuit, Lévi-Strauss had predicted the death of painting and the onset of a new, apictorial age. Avant-garde music, too, was drifting out of reach of the listener, like a heavenly body accelerating into the distance in an expanding universe.73 Now the novel was fading away, sated on images stolen from the dawn of culture. Lévi-Strauss’s vision was of a cultural apocalypse, an annihilation as severe as the environmental collapse that Western expansion was generating. This profound pessimism was wedded to a yearning for the failing powers of la pensée sauvage, a style of thought once dominant but now barely surviving in the crevices of modernity.
In the age of entropy, all that was left was to climb onto the treadmill of structural exegesis in an attempt to relive vicariously a purer, more integrated thought by unearthing its formal properties. And it was in this contemplative mood that Lévi-Strauss approached the fourth and final volume of the mighty Mythologiques project. Without warning, though, the spell of structuralist meditation was broken by a sudden irruption at the heart of French academic life.
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Page 34