Read Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Online
Authors: Patrick Wilcken
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Professionals & Academics, #Social Scientists & Psychologists, #History, #Americas, #South America, #Brazil, #Politics & Social Sciences, #Anthropology, #Cultural
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (6 page)
BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
2.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
As he progressed through university, Lévi-Strauss’s political engagement matured. In 1928 he became the secretary-general of the Fédération des étudiants socialistes (Federation of Socialist Students), a group that brought together
normaliens
from five Écoles normales supérieures. The same year he organized the Third Congress of Socialist Students of France and began contributing to the Federation’s review,
L’Étudiant socialiste
. To earn money he read the bulletin of the Workers’ International Bureau for Radio Tour Eiffel from a basement of the Grand Palais, on the Champs-Élysées. The following year he secured a job as secretary to the charismatic SFIO deputy Georges Monnet. His duties included running the office, typing up proposals for laws, attending debates at the Chambre des députés (France’s legislative assembly) and writing articles. In 1930, as he neared the end of his studies, he became president of a kind of left-wing think tank, called the Groupe des onze (the Group of Eleven), whose aim was to discuss ways of mobilizing the Left on a global level, through unions, cooperatives and social insurance schemes. He was just twenty-one years old. It seemed at this point that Lévi-Strauss might have a promising political career ahead of him, in the vanguard of the new Left.
normaliens
from five Écoles normales supérieures. The same year he organized the Third Congress of Socialist Students of France and began contributing to the Federation’s review,
L’Étudiant socialiste
. To earn money he read the bulletin of the Workers’ International Bureau for Radio Tour Eiffel from a basement of the Grand Palais, on the Champs-Élysées. The following year he secured a job as secretary to the charismatic SFIO deputy Georges Monnet. His duties included running the office, typing up proposals for laws, attending debates at the Chambre des députés (France’s legislative assembly) and writing articles. In 1930, as he neared the end of his studies, he became president of a kind of left-wing think tank, called the Groupe des onze (the Group of Eleven), whose aim was to discuss ways of mobilizing the Left on a global level, through unions, cooperatives and social insurance schemes. He was just twenty-one years old. It seemed at this point that Lévi-Strauss might have a promising political career ahead of him, in the vanguard of the new Left.
“Did you preach the revolution at the SFIO?” Lévi-Strauss was asked in an interview in the mid-1980s about this period. “It depends what you mean by the word,” he answered diplomatically. “I wasn’t a Leninist, so I rejected violent social change. In contrast, a small group of militants, of whom I was one, formed a movement—today you would call it a tendency [
tendence
]—which was called Constructive Revolution.” The idea, as Lévi-Strauss later explained, was gradual, but nevertheless complete, transformation:
tendence
]—which was called Constructive Revolution.” The idea, as Lévi-Strauss later explained, was gradual, but nevertheless complete, transformation:
If, day after day, we apply ourselves to create institutions in the socialist spirit, little by little they will grow, in virtue of their superiority, like a chrysalis in a capitalist cocoon, which will end up falling like a dead, dried-up envelope.
36
Though he was spending more and more time on politics, Lévi-Strauss never lost sight of his broader cultural interests, inculcated into him by his father. He continued to read widely, visit galleries and think about art and aesthetics. By chance he did a brief spell of work as the assistant of the prolific novelist Victor Margueritte, whom he met through another novelist, André Chamson, then working in an office next door to Monnet’s. Lévi-Strauss was drafted in to promote Margueritte’s pacifist novel
La Patrie humaine
by hand-delivering specially inscribed editions of it to around a hundred influential Parisians and writing and sending out press releases to the media. Margueritte, then a crotchety seventy-year-old, was a cousin of the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and had mixed with Paris’s literary elite all his life. In his grand apartment in the seventeenth arrondissement he regaled the young Lévi-Strauss with family anecdotes featuring Balzac, Zola, the Goncourts and Victor Hugo.
La Patrie humaine
by hand-delivering specially inscribed editions of it to around a hundred influential Parisians and writing and sending out press releases to the media. Margueritte, then a crotchety seventy-year-old, was a cousin of the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and had mixed with Paris’s literary elite all his life. In his grand apartment in the seventeenth arrondissement he regaled the young Lévi-Strauss with family anecdotes featuring Balzac, Zola, the Goncourts and Victor Hugo.
The new “Livres et revues” section of
L’Étudiant socialiste
, which Lévi-Strauss edited and regularly contributed to from 1930 onward, also gave him a more literary outlet. It was there that he wrote of the pleasure he derived from reading Trotsky’s prose (in spite of the fact that he did not adhere to his views), eulogized Dostoyevsky and hailed Conrad as “the greatest novelist of the twentieth century.” Among the many books he reviewed were the American pulp-fiction novel
Crime passionnel
by Ludwig Lewisohn,
Banjo
, a novel written by an African-American, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s
Voyage au bout de la nuit
.
37
Céline’s worldly pessimism would linger on in Lévi-Strauss’s imagination, resurfacing in his descriptions of his own dystopian journey through Brazil in
Tristes Tropiques
.
L’Étudiant socialiste
, which Lévi-Strauss edited and regularly contributed to from 1930 onward, also gave him a more literary outlet. It was there that he wrote of the pleasure he derived from reading Trotsky’s prose (in spite of the fact that he did not adhere to his views), eulogized Dostoyevsky and hailed Conrad as “the greatest novelist of the twentieth century.” Among the many books he reviewed were the American pulp-fiction novel
Crime passionnel
by Ludwig Lewisohn,
Banjo
, a novel written by an African-American, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s
Voyage au bout de la nuit
.
37
Céline’s worldly pessimism would linger on in Lévi-Strauss’s imagination, resurfacing in his descriptions of his own dystopian journey through Brazil in
Tristes Tropiques
.
One of his most interesting early pieces was “Picasso and Cubism,” an article he ghosted for Georges Monnet for Bataille’s short-lived avant-garde magazine,
Documents
. In an unconventional approach, Lévi-Strauss attacked cubism while heaping praise on Picasso. Cubism was not the radical rupture from impressionism that critics imagined, he argued—it was part of a long tradition of bourgeois art styles catering to a select group of insiders. Cubism had merely shifted the focus from visual to intellectual play. Like impressionism, it was a clever way of coding experience, “an aristocratic art, akin to earlier religious art.” Picasso, however, was different. He was an aesthetic genius. He had an incredible eye and a gift for spontaneity. He cut to the heart of reality, bringing out its intensity. Picasso could evoke “the agonizing shame of the most complete nudity, like that of a man who, at the same time as taking off his shirt, is peeling away his skin.” Women became “slabs of flesh” that Picasso somehow made eloquent. Even prosaic objects—bottles, glasses, pipes—were somehow edgy and full of suspense, “immersed in the still, apprehensive atmosphere that precedes accidents, riots and disasters.”
38
Documents
. In an unconventional approach, Lévi-Strauss attacked cubism while heaping praise on Picasso. Cubism was not the radical rupture from impressionism that critics imagined, he argued—it was part of a long tradition of bourgeois art styles catering to a select group of insiders. Cubism had merely shifted the focus from visual to intellectual play. Like impressionism, it was a clever way of coding experience, “an aristocratic art, akin to earlier religious art.” Picasso, however, was different. He was an aesthetic genius. He had an incredible eye and a gift for spontaneity. He cut to the heart of reality, bringing out its intensity. Picasso could evoke “the agonizing shame of the most complete nudity, like that of a man who, at the same time as taking off his shirt, is peeling away his skin.” Women became “slabs of flesh” that Picasso somehow made eloquent. Even prosaic objects—bottles, glasses, pipes—were somehow edgy and full of suspense, “immersed in the still, apprehensive atmosphere that precedes accidents, riots and disasters.”
38
Through this article, Lévi-Strauss brushed against a milieu that would interest him more and more as he got older.
Documents
typified the strange fusions that were then coursing through French avant-garde culture. In its brief fifteen-issue life span, it mixed ethnographic artifact with modern art, popular culture with the bizarre. African masks, Aztec scripts, Picassos and covers of pulp-fiction novels shared pages with photos of slaughterhouses, a close-up of a big toe, and essays on dust and saliva. Michel Leiris described it as a “Janus publication,” with one face turned “toward the lofty spheres of culture . . . the other toward a wilderness where one ventured with no map or passport of any kind.”
39
Contributors to
Documents
included Mauss, Leiris and the ethnomusicologist André Schaeffner. Its editor, Georges Bataille, shared many interests with anthropology and developed a close friendship with the Swiss-French anthropologist Alfred Métraux, a future close friend and colleague of Lévi-Strauss.
Documents
typified the strange fusions that were then coursing through French avant-garde culture. In its brief fifteen-issue life span, it mixed ethnographic artifact with modern art, popular culture with the bizarre. African masks, Aztec scripts, Picassos and covers of pulp-fiction novels shared pages with photos of slaughterhouses, a close-up of a big toe, and essays on dust and saliva. Michel Leiris described it as a “Janus publication,” with one face turned “toward the lofty spheres of culture . . . the other toward a wilderness where one ventured with no map or passport of any kind.”
39
Contributors to
Documents
included Mauss, Leiris and the ethnomusicologist André Schaeffner. Its editor, Georges Bataille, shared many interests with anthropology and developed a close friendship with the Swiss-French anthropologist Alfred Métraux, a future close friend and colleague of Lévi-Strauss.
Another coincidental contact with his future profession came about at around the same time, when Lévi-Strauss helped his father decorate the Madagascan pavilion for the Exposition coloniale. “I was taken on by him as it was done in the Renaissance ateliers,” Lévi-Strauss recalled, “in which everybody got down to the work at hand—family, students and so on.”
40
They worked in the halls of the Musée de l’ethnographie at Trocadéro, which Rivet had already begun remodeling and which would soon become the Musée de l’Homme. With thirty meters of wall space to cover, everyone pitched in. Lévi-Strauss posed for some of the figures in the mural and filled in portions of the vast backdrops, while his father did the more intricate work of painting groups of colonial officers and young Madagascan women.
41
It is not clear how Lévi-Strauss reacted to the idea of the exhibition itself. With its giant replica of the Angkor Wat temple in the Bois de Vincennes, mock-ups of African and Indochinese villages, and, in a bizarre twist, Missouri-born Josephine Baker featured as “the queen of the colonies,” the Exposition coloniale was a popular success, but was not without its critics.
40
They worked in the halls of the Musée de l’ethnographie at Trocadéro, which Rivet had already begun remodeling and which would soon become the Musée de l’Homme. With thirty meters of wall space to cover, everyone pitched in. Lévi-Strauss posed for some of the figures in the mural and filled in portions of the vast backdrops, while his father did the more intricate work of painting groups of colonial officers and young Madagascan women.
41
It is not clear how Lévi-Strauss reacted to the idea of the exhibition itself. With its giant replica of the Angkor Wat temple in the Bois de Vincennes, mock-ups of African and Indochinese villages, and, in a bizarre twist, Missouri-born Josephine Baker featured as “the queen of the colonies,” the Exposition coloniale was a popular success, but was not without its critics.
Some in the avant-garde and on the left were beginning to mobilize against colonialism. A group of surrealists, including André Breton and Yves Tanguy, both of whom Lévi-Strauss would later get to know personally, wrote and distributed a manifesto entitled “Ne visitez pas l’Exposition coloniale.” The manifesto denounced France’s atrocities abroad and called for “the immediate evacuation of the colonies and the putting on trial of the generals and administrators responsible for the massacres in Annam [North Vietnam], Libya, Morocco and Central Africa.” One of the signatories, the poet and novelist Louis Aragon, organized a counterexhibition with displays of sculptures and artworks from Africa, Oceania and the Americas in a pavilion left over from the Art Deco fair of 1925.
At the time, Lévi-Strauss’s own attitude to colonialism was far less radical. “By colonization we mean the subordination by force of less evolved groups, from the social and economic point of view, to more highly evolved, upstart groups,” he wrote in a special edition of
L’Étudiant socialiste
dedicated to the issue. His line was paternalistic: he broadly accepted the need for colonialism, but argued that the profits should go toward helping the indigenous populations, which could be placed under the control of an international socialist protectorate.
42
It was precisely this Europe-centered vision of the world that Lévi-Strauss would later come to reject. Much of his work would be a rhetorical critique of colonialism, whose aftereffects he would soon be experiencing at first hand.
L’Étudiant socialiste
dedicated to the issue. His line was paternalistic: he broadly accepted the need for colonialism, but argued that the profits should go toward helping the indigenous populations, which could be placed under the control of an international socialist protectorate.
42
It was precisely this Europe-centered vision of the world that Lévi-Strauss would later come to reject. Much of his work would be a rhetorical critique of colonialism, whose aftereffects he would soon be experiencing at first hand.
Although a voracious reader, he was still unaware of what was then called
ethnologie
in France. “I knew nothing about anthropology,” he wrote in his memoir. “I had never attended any course and when Sir James Frazer [author of
The Golden Bough
] paid his last visit to the Sorbonne to give a memorable lecture—in 1928, I think—it never occurred to me to attend, although I knew about it.”
43
Missing the chance to see Frazer—whose work Lévi-Strauss would critically reassess in the years to come—would end up being a source of profound regret.
ethnologie
in France. “I knew nothing about anthropology,” he wrote in his memoir. “I had never attended any course and when Sir James Frazer [author of
The Golden Bough
] paid his last visit to the Sorbonne to give a memorable lecture—in 1928, I think—it never occurred to me to attend, although I knew about it.”
43
Missing the chance to see Frazer—whose work Lévi-Strauss would critically reassess in the years to come—would end up being a source of profound regret.
AFTER REGURGITATING GREAT CHUNKS from law books and jumping through philosophical hoops for the examiners, Lévi-Strauss obtained his law and philosophy degrees. Ahead lay the ordeal of the
agrégation
—a set of competitive exams that qualify graduates to teach in the lycée system and eventually become university lecturers. The
agrégation
involved a battery of written and oral tests, which only a small fraction would pass. As a part of the process, Lévi-Strauss spent three weeks back at his old school, Janson, giving a series of probationary classes. His fellow trainees were two other future intellectual giants: the writer Simone de Beauvoir and the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, both (like Lévi-Strauss) in their early twenties. Lévi-Strauss remembered de Beauvoir as “very young, with a fresh, bright complexion, like a little peasant girl. She had a crisp but sweet side to her, like a rosy apple.”
44
He sat the
agrégation
for philosophy in July 1931, along with Ferdinand Alquié (a future Sorbonne professor of philosophy and doctoral supervisor of philosopher Gilles Deleuze) and the tormented writer and philosopher Simone Weil. It might seem like a coincidence that so many future greats would find themselves together on the same course at the same time. But it is in fact more of an indication of how elitist, tight-knit and Paris-centric the French intellectual system was at that time, an arrangement that would begin to weaken only in the 1960s.
agrégation
—a set of competitive exams that qualify graduates to teach in the lycée system and eventually become university lecturers. The
agrégation
involved a battery of written and oral tests, which only a small fraction would pass. As a part of the process, Lévi-Strauss spent three weeks back at his old school, Janson, giving a series of probationary classes. His fellow trainees were two other future intellectual giants: the writer Simone de Beauvoir and the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, both (like Lévi-Strauss) in their early twenties. Lévi-Strauss remembered de Beauvoir as “very young, with a fresh, bright complexion, like a little peasant girl. She had a crisp but sweet side to her, like a rosy apple.”
44
He sat the
agrégation
for philosophy in July 1931, along with Ferdinand Alquié (a future Sorbonne professor of philosophy and doctoral supervisor of philosopher Gilles Deleuze) and the tormented writer and philosopher Simone Weil. It might seem like a coincidence that so many future greats would find themselves together on the same course at the same time. But it is in fact more of an indication of how elitist, tight-knit and Paris-centric the French intellectual system was at that time, an arrangement that would begin to weaken only in the 1960s.
Lévi-Strauss’s topics ranged from “The concept of causality in the work of Hume” to “Should philosophy be seen from an atemporal or historical perspective?”—a subject that he would frequently revisit throughout his career. For his
grande leçon
—a three-quarter-hour talk in front of a panel of examiners—he drew the topic “Is there such a thing as an applied psychology?” After being escorted to the library of the Sorbonne for the seven hours’ preparation for the applied psychology question, Lévi-Strauss took a vial of medicine that the family doctor had given him to cope with the stress. He immediately began feeling nauseous and spent the entire preparation time lying stretched out between two chairs. “Seven hours of seasickness!” he remembered. “I appeared before the jury looking like death, without having been able to prepare a thing, and improvised a lecture that was considered to be brilliant and in which I believe I spoke of nothing but Spinoza.”
45
grande leçon
—a three-quarter-hour talk in front of a panel of examiners—he drew the topic “Is there such a thing as an applied psychology?” After being escorted to the library of the Sorbonne for the seven hours’ preparation for the applied psychology question, Lévi-Strauss took a vial of medicine that the family doctor had given him to cope with the stress. He immediately began feeling nauseous and spent the entire preparation time lying stretched out between two chairs. “Seven hours of seasickness!” he remembered. “I appeared before the jury looking like death, without having been able to prepare a thing, and improvised a lecture that was considered to be brilliant and in which I believe I spoke of nothing but Spinoza.”
45
Lévi-Strauss had passed at his first attempt, coming third—a significant achievement at his age, especially for someone skeptical about the courses he took and who was pursuing a very active life outside the university. As a gesture of defiance, the day he got his results he went out and bought a book on astrology—“Not that I believed in it, but as a kind of retaliation and to prove to myself I hadn’t lost my independence of mind.”
46
But the celebrations were short-lived. Lévi-Strauss arrived home to a somber atmosphere. The Great Depression had finally taken its toll on the extended family’s wealth, wiping out his uncle’s stock investments, which had in the past eased his parents through their regular financial crises. Lévi-Strauss would soon be working as a teacher, but a large slice of his modest earnings would have to be plowed back into the family coffers.
46
But the celebrations were short-lived. Lévi-Strauss arrived home to a somber atmosphere. The Great Depression had finally taken its toll on the extended family’s wealth, wiping out his uncle’s stock investments, which had in the past eased his parents through their regular financial crises. Lévi-Strauss would soon be working as a teacher, but a large slice of his modest earnings would have to be plowed back into the family coffers.
On completing his military service—four months as a low-ranking soldier in Strasbourg, then a posting in Paris as a press monitor—he was offered a choice between teaching posts in Mont-de-Marsan and Aubusson. He opted for the Lycée Victor-Duruy in Mont-de-Marsan, a small town tucked away in the far southwest of France, on the edge of the great Landes Forest. In September 1932, on the eve of starting work, he married Dina Dreyfus. An intellectually oriented couple, they were both in their early twenties setting out on teaching careers in the lycée system, with the possibility of one day becoming university lecturers. Dina still had to sit the
agrégation
, but she would pass the following year. “It was both my first job and my honeymoon,” remembered Lévi-Strauss of the trip down to Aquitaine.
47
agrégation
, but she would pass the following year. “It was both my first job and my honeymoon,” remembered Lévi-Strauss of the trip down to Aquitaine.
47
His brief spell in Mont-de-Marsan was a period of happiness. He was recently married, in a new job, exploring a corner of France that was completely unfamiliar to him. Teaching was still a novelty and he attacked the task of preparing his courses from scratch with enthusiasm. He also had space to pursue his interest in politics, building a lively social life around contacts with local socialist groups. He ran as a councillor (
conseil général
) in the local elections, but the campaign ended in farce when, driving without a license, he ran off the road in a Citroën 5CV given to him by his friend from childhood Pierre Dreyfus.
48
The following year he was posted to Laon, in Picardy, within striking distance of Paris. His wife was appointed to Amiens, so they moved back to the rue Poussin and traveled out to their respective lycées, scheduling their lessons for the same days.
conseil général
) in the local elections, but the campaign ended in farce when, driving without a license, he ran off the road in a Citroën 5CV given to him by his friend from childhood Pierre Dreyfus.
48
The following year he was posted to Laon, in Picardy, within striking distance of Paris. His wife was appointed to Amiens, so they moved back to the rue Poussin and traveled out to their respective lycées, scheduling their lessons for the same days.
BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
2.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Other books
Kinflicks by Lisa Alther
Brain Storm by Warren Murphy, Richard Sapir
The Book of Fires by Borodale, Jane
#TripleX by Christine Zolendz, Angelisa Stone
Armageddon (Angelbound) by Christina Bauer
Latidos mortales by Jim Butcher
The Island of Destiny by Cameron Stelzer
The Last Round by Montes, Emmy L.
El secreto de los flamencos by Federico Andahazi
The Veredor Chronicles: Book 03 - The Gate and Beyond by E J Gilmour