Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory

by Patrick Wilcken

  There was great breadth and scope to Lévi-Strauss’s ideas, but they were fitted into this ultimately claustrophobic intellectual space. Throughout his career, ethnographic descriptions, mythic narratives and his own ideas folded back on one another in an endless process of self-reference. Fellow mythologist Wendy Doniger has likened Lévi-Strauss’s way of thinking to the Klein bottle—a three-dimensional mathematical form made by sticking two inverted Möbius strips together, which Lévi-Strauss reproduces in La Potière jalouse to illustrate the structure of a myth. The comparison is apt. Mathematically generated but with an organic feel, the bottle’s bulbous, undulating form is self-consuming and conceptually difficult to grasp. It has no true inner or outer surfaces. Like Lévi-Strauss’s oeuvre, it eternally feeds back through itself.

  What gave air to Lévi-Strauss’s output, and introduced the lyricism that baffled his Anglo-American critics, was a profound interest in aesthetic expression and appreciation that ran in tandem with the cognitive side of his work. His lifelong quest to reconcile the “sensible” and the “intelligible”—that is to say, how raw sensory perception, which is an especially rich experience in oral cultures, relates to a more abstract intellectual understanding—added an artistic flavor to what could have been a dry academic exercise. In an interview with the film critic Raymond Bellour in the 1960s, he said that the whole myth project was really searching for answers to the perennial questions: What is a beautiful object? What is aesthetic emotion?—problems that preoccupied him more and more as his career progressed. In another interview, he elaborated:Myths are very beautiful objects and one never tires of contemplating, manipulating them or of trying to understand why one finds them so beautiful. And if I spend a long time in the study of myths, it’s with the hope, upon dismantling these aesthetically admirable objects, that one could contribute in a way to understanding what the feeling of beauty is, and why we have the impression that a painting or a poem or a landscape is beautiful.58

  This side of his work came to the fore in his last book, Regarder, écouter, lire (Look, Listen, Read), which largely broke free of Lévi-Strauss’s obsessional exegesis of indigenous culture. Here was the classical side of his modernist/ classicist matrix, moving through a history of aesthetic ideas and theories of sounds, colors and words via musings on the likes of Diderot, Rousseau, Proust, Poussin and a half-forgotten eighteenth-century proto-structuralist musicologist called Chabanon. The tone was conversational, studded with Lévi-Strauss’s intriguing observations, such as, “In France we prefer a golden yellow,” to which he added, quoting the eighteenth-century Jesuit intellectual Louis-Bertrand Castel, “leaving the English to a pure yellow which we find bland,” and fascination for sensory crossover—from the eccentric invention of Castel’s “ocular or chromatic clavichord” to concepts of “coloured hearing” and the meshing of musical and linguistic codes.59

  STRUCTURALISM NEVER embedded itself in the popular culture the way existentialism did. It rather hung in the air, drifting on the winds of intellectual invention. Soaring over existentialism’s anguished quest for authenticity, it claimed the high ground: the authentic would never be found in the petty, self-absorbed choices of the Left Bank intelligentsia because it already existed in the abstract workings of the mind. There was no use striving for it—it was all around us, it was in us, it was us. It had nothing to do with twentieth-century Western philosophy or a tortured soul in a garret—its essence has been effortlessly exercised since the human brain evolved and was set into intellectual play. If anything, Sorbonne-style philosophizing had blunted the mind, Western training polluting a purity of function.

  Structuralism implied depth, but with its interplay of referentless signs, often felt more like a skidding along polished glass. The erasure of the self, atomized in an amalgam of blind structures, produced a floating sensation, unfocused but powerful. Lévi-Strauss, and the many who were influenced by him, brought a late-modernist vertigo as the reference points of the past—God, interior experience, the self, humanity—fell away into a void. Meaning as “an obscure vibration, a dim discharge of deeply enigmatic sense” lost its solidity.60 Some have argued that structuralism was a reversion to a pre-Cartesian, prehumanist world of divine necessity, an ethnographic version of kabbalistic exegesis. But for others it was a return to something very different. In a fascinating exchange in La Quinzaine littéraire in April 1966, Michel Foucault gave his assessment as structuralism took off:Question: When did you stop believing in “meaning?”

  Foucault: The break came the day that Lévi-Strauss demonstrated—about societies—and Lacan demonstrated—about the unconscious—that “meaning” was probably only a sort of surface effect, a shimmer, a foam, and that what ran through us, underlay us, and was before us, what sustained us in time or space was the system.

  [. . .]

  Question: But then, who secretes this system?

  Foucault: What is this anonymous system without a subject, what thinks? The “I” has exploded—we see this in modern literature—this is the discovery of “there is.” There is a one. In some ways, one comes back to the seventeenth-century point of view, with this difference: not setting man, but anonymous thought, knowledge without subject, theory with no identity, in God’s place.61

  One way to approach Lévi-Strauss is as he saw himself—as an artiste manqué, a man who would have loved to have been a painter like his father, or a musician, had he had the talent. In the Massey Lectures he remembered a conversation with the composer Darius Milhaud in the 1940s when they were both in exile in New York. Milhaud told him that he had first realized he would become a composer when, as a child, he was lying in bed falling asleep and heard an unfamiliar musical composition playing in his head—his first, subconscious efforts at composing. The conversation stuck, driving home the fact that musical talent was inbuilt, that whatever Lévi-Strauss did, he would never be able to fulfill his true desires.62

  His experiments writing fiction, as a playwright or a poet, were quickly abandoned, but as a photographer he produced some memorable images—a powerful record of the lives of the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, Mundé and Tupi-Kawahib peoples. They were images captured at an important moment in history, as the Brazilian state moved to complete the long process that European colonialism had unleashed. But toward the end of his life, Lévi-Strauss was dismissive of the art. “I have never attached much importance to photography,” he said in an interview for Le Monde in 2002. “I used to photograph, because it was necessary, but I always had the feeling that it was a waste of time, a waste of attention.” And he was equally skeptical about the moving image in anthropology—“I have to confess, ethnographic films bore me.”63

  Saudades do Brasil, published in 1994, was in many ways the type of book Lévi-Strauss had once excoriated—an old-fashioned photo album of the returning explorer, with captions that sound as if they were written in the 1930s when Lévi-Strauss took the pictures. (“The attractiveness of the Nambikwara, notwithstanding their wicked reputation, is largely explained by the presence in their midst of very young women who were graceful despite their rather thick waists.”)64 In the prologue he spoke of the fact that in comparison to the smell of insecticide coming off his half-century-old notebooks, which instantly recalled his fieldwork experience, the photographs brought back nothing. The only sensation he felt as he leafed through the sixty-year-old prints was “the impression of a void, a lack of something the lens is inherently unable to capture.”65 But for anyone other than Lévi-Strauss, the images are richly evocative and reveal a keen eye for visual expression.

  He eventually found his voice as a writer in Tristes Tropiques, but by this stage his course had been set. He would be a thinker, an academic, a trader in ideas. The inner artist would find expression not just in the way he wrote but in the ideas he produced, the way he pieced together, like a collage, the wealth of ethnographic material he had ingested. An analyst of form, Lévi-Strauss’s own oeuvre was a hymn to proportionality; if it were a pain
ting, it would be one of the Poussin canvases Lévi-Strauss loved, an effortlessly fit-together composition of classical poise. The massive body of work he left behind was a kind of pensée sauvage of academia; roaming the libraries, he picked and mixed, throwing out memorable if speculative ideas—hot and cold societies, bricolage, the science of the concrete—as well as the strange and beautiful images found in the oppositions cooked up in the Mythologiques quartet. His grand theories about the human mind, culture and indigenous thought became more and more impressionistic—an operatic backdrop to the imagery of his work. Just as he did not have the patience for fieldwork, so he never stopped to examine systematically the implications of his own thinking. Instead, he kept moving forward, piling idea upon idea. While his powers of invention might have waned in old age, who could begrudge a thinker who produced something of the caliber of Regarder, écouter, lire in his mid-eighties?

  The stature of Lévi-Strauss is such that even his harshest critics could not help but admire his output. American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, certainly no friend of the structural approach, put it well:Whatever becomes of circulating women, mythemes, binary reason, or the science of the concrete, the sense of intellectual importance that structuralism brought to anthropology, and most especially to ethnography . . . will not soon disappear. The discipline had worked its way into general cultural life before: Eliot read Frazer; Engels read Morgan; Freud, alas, read Atkinson; and in the United States, at least, just about everyone read Mead. But nothing like the wholesale invasion of neighboring fields (literature, philosophy, theology, history, art, politics, psychology, linguistics, and even some parts of biology and mathematics) had ever occurred . . . More than anything else he cleared a space that a generation of characters in search of a play rushed to occupy.66

  In a world of ever more specialized areas of knowledge, there may never again be a body of work of such exhilarating reach and ambition. Few thinkers have been so relentlessly inventive; even fewer have covered so much ground. Lévi-Strauss’s inspired break from mainstream thought at midcentury changed the humanities forever. From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, an era left rudderless after the collapse of the “grand narratives” that drove thought through a good portion of the previous century, one can finally look back at Lévi-Strauss’s extraordinary output with a sense of nostalgia for an age when thinkers still had intellectual space to work in, and were not forced down today’s ever-narrowing corridors of knowledge.

  Epilogue

  When I was six years old, my father gave me a beautiful Japanese print.

  It was, you might say, my first exotic experience with another culture.

  I still have that print. It is very old and in poor condition now—like

  me. All my life I have been seeking to understand the meaning in that

  print. Sometimes I think I have it.

  CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS1

  NOT MUCH REMAINS of the landscape through which Claude Lévi-Strauss traveled during fieldwork in the late 1930s in what are today Mato Grosso and Rondônia states. These dusty scrublands in the far west of Brazil are now at the agro-industrial frontier—a bleak landscape of cane fields and soya plantations, punctuated with hamlets of domed charcoal furnaces burning wood trucked in from the Amazon rain forests farther to the north. Backlit by vivid blue skies, little balls of dust roll along feeder roads through the plantations—the great road trains transporting produce for export—in an otherwise denuded landscape. Many of the strange cerrado orchards that had once dazzled the plains with spectacular mauve and yellow flowers have been plowed under.

  The remains of Rondon’s telegraph line snake through the secondary forests of the indigenous reservations, hundreds of porcelain adaptors lying scattered in the undergrowth. Descendants of the peoples that Lévi-Strauss struggled to understand in his fraught journey across the plateau now live marooned in clapboard settlements, subsisting from food packages delivered by indigenous agency officials. It is hard now to read through Lévi-Strauss’s pocket-sized field notes without a sense of pathos, the pessimism that he was already expressing so well in Tristes Tropiques half a century ago.

  Lévi-Strauss lived long enough to see his worst fears realized—the inexorable rise of the world’s population, the wanton destruction of the environment, the wiping out of cultures that had taken millennia to develop and that he had spent his whole life trying to decipher. “This is not the world I knew, I liked, or can still conceive of,” he said in old age, surveying contemporary realities. “For me it’s an incomprehensible world.”2

  Longevity brought with it an ever-widening disjuncture. As far back as 1987, a New York Times reporter was describing Lévi-Strauss as “alert and nimble,” as if it was a surprise that a seventy-nine-year-old was still in such good shape. On that occasion Lévi-Strauss had quipped that he was toiling at his “posthumous works.”3 But when he reached ninety, the years were beginning to weigh. He had by now largely stopped writing and no longer bothered to renew his passport. At a reception in his honor at the Collège de France, he spoke movingly of his current state of mind:Montaigne said that aging diminishes us each day in a way that, when death finally arrives, it takes away only a quarter of half of the man. But Montaigne only lived to be fifty-nine, so he could have no idea of the extreme old age I find myself in today. At this great age that I never thought I would attain, I feel like a shattered hologram.4

  He described his life as a dialogue between the decrepit ninety-year-old man he had become and an ideal self who was still thinking about intellectual projects that would never see fruition. As he scaled the nineties, the dialogue continued. At ninety-two he said that old age was dimming his intellectual curiosity, but added that he was still reading prodigiously in both English and French—Jane Austen, Thackeray, Trollope and Dickens, as well as Balzac for “the fortieth time with complete enchantment.”5 But at the same time his sense of dislocation was deepening. Two years later, in an interview in Les Temps modernes, he was asked whether he thought about death. “Yes,” he replied. “I’m not calling for death, but I don’t have a place in this world anymore. It is a different world and I’ve finished my work here.”6

  A few months before his hundredth birthday, Lévi-Strauss became one of the few living authors to find a place in Gallimard’s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade—a prestigious collection of annotated editions whose list includes French literary greats and heroes of Lévi-Strauss, such as Marcel Proust, Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. Lévi-Strauss’s choice of which works would go into the seven-book anthology was curious. There were the classics, like Tristes Tropiques and La Pensée sauvage, but he opted for his petits mythologiques over the centerpiece of his career, the monolithic Mythologiques quartet. The only trace of this great work was the inclusion of a short interview he gave Raymond Bellour, in which he explained the labyrinthine logic that had driven the first three volumes. 7 A further absence was Lévi-Strauss’s PhD thesis, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté, the reinterpretation of the field of kinship studies, which had established him as a leading thinker in postwar France. It was as if at the last moment he had chosen to excise the very heart of his life’s work.

  His hundredth birthday was celebrated across the world, but especially in France. President Nicolas Sarkozy visited him at his apartment; Arte, the Franco-German television station, devoted a day’s programming to him, with France 3 featuring a live television debate between the young Columbia professor of French Vincent Debaene, one of the editors of the Pléiade edition, and the eighty-year-old anthropologist and longtime Lévi-Strauss critic Georges Balandier—one of the few dissenting voices on a day of effusive eulogies. Entrance was free for the day at the Musée du quai Branly, where a hundred scholars gathered in the Lévi-Strauss Auditorium to pay homage. By now confined to a wheelchair after breaking his femur, Lévi-Strauss did not appear publicly, but said that he felt there was little to celebrate about reaching such a morbid milestone. It is har
d to imagine a similar outpouring for an intellectual, let alone an anthropologist, in America or Britain. But in France, Lévi-Strauss fit into a long tradition of the literary-philosophical thinker who has always occupied a special place in the soul of a nation.

  Shortly before Lévi-Strauss died, Gilles de Catheu, a French doctor working with the indigenous peoples in Rondônia, visited him in his apartment. In a piece for the Brazilian newspaper O Globo, he described meeting a well-dressed, physically fragile, but intellectually alert Lévi-Strauss, sitting in his wheelchair behind his writing desk. They talked about the Mundé, the tribe Lévi-Strauss had briefly visited during the Serra do Norte expedition. As he left, de Catheu gave Lévi-Strauss a marico—an indigenous bag woven from tucumã palm fiber. “He held the marico, looking at the handles with interest,” remembered de Catheu, “gently touching an object born of a thousand-year-old tradition with hundred-year-old hands . . . I have never seen so much happiness and emotion . . .”8

  Lévi-Strauss died of heart failure two weeks later, just shy of his hundred and first birthday. When his death was announced on November 3, 2009, the tributes poured in once more, with wall-to-wall coverage on television, and Le Monde alone carrying half a dozen pages and three obituaries.9 Among the thousands of homages, President Sarkozy hit a false note, writing in an official communiqué that Lévi-Strauss had been a “tireless humanist.”10

  A public funeral for such a revered intellectual figure would have attracted a grand procession through the streets of Paris, ending in a burial thronged by the great and good—politicians, intellectuals, students, as well as thousands of ordinary members of the public paying their respects to the last giant of mid-twentieth-century thought. But this was not Lévi-Strauss’s style. By the time the news of his death broke, he had already been buried in a small cemetery near his château in Lignerolles. The ceremony was attended by close family—his wife, Monique, his two sons, Laurent and Matthieu, and two grandsons, along with the mayor of the town, Denis Cornibert. His last wishes were to be lowered into the grave in total silence. “That wasn’t easy,” recalled Cornibert.11 A simple gold plaque reading CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS—1908-2009 sits on the gravel burial mound. A stone’s throw away from this bare grave are the forests where, in summers gone by, Lévi-Strauss would go out walking in the afternoons, hunting for wild mushrooms, bundling them into his scarf as he went.