Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (19 page)
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Authors: Patrick Wilcken
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BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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The ship pulled out into the bay. The Brazilian littoral shrank back to a green outline, flickered and then disappeared over the horizon. Ahead lay Europe of the late 1930s—Europe on the brink. In the mid-Atlantic, passenger ships powered past them, bound for the Americas. Crammed into their second-class cabins were Jews, their life’s possessions stuffed into battered suitcases.
4
Exile
No one had told me . . . that New York was an Alpine city. I sensed it
on the first evening of October, when the setting sun ignited the heights
of the skyscrapers with that ethereal orange-like colour that one sees on
the crests of the rocky walls while the valleys fill up with cool shadow.
And there I was at the bottom of a gorge, in that street of blackened
brick through which there passed a bitter yet cleansing wind.
DENIS DE ROUGEMONT
1
1
LÉVI-STRAUSS ARRIVED BACK in Paris toward the end of March 1939, with a post as a teacher at the Lycée Henri-IV held for him for the autumn term. For the last five years he had been on the move—crisscrossing the Atlantic, wandering the wastes of central Brazil. He had returned with a second collection of indigenous artifacts, thousands of photographs, as well as a stack of field notes, still smelling of the creosote he doused his canteens in to protect them from termites. Now, at thirty years old, it was time to take stock, exhibit his collections, put his notes in order and begin writing up his thesis.
In his absence, the Musée de l’Homme had opened as a part of the 1937 Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne. In retrospect, the exhibition had been a foretaste of what was to come. The colossal swastika-draped German pavilion designed by Albert Speer had faced the equally monolithic Soviet pavilion, with its giant statue of peasant workers holding aloft a hammer and sickle. Ironically, Speer had taken the Grand Prix for his model of the Nuremberg rally grounds.
Installed at the Musée de l’Homme, Lévi-Strauss unpacked the half dozen crates he had shipped from Brazil and laid out some seven hundred objects that he had exchanged for colored beads and lengths of fabric. Coming mainly from the Nambikwara, they lacked the theater of his earlier haul. In place of the Bororo bull-roarers, ornamental rattles and clarinets were nose feathers, chipped gourds and rough-weaved baskets. After surveying his collection, he began the painstaking process of sorting and labeling each object, however prosaic, preparing it for display in the new, professional environment of Rivet’s museum.
Perhaps as a counterweight to the rather dry and bureaucratic cataloging exercise, Lévi-Strauss used his spare time to make a start on a novel, a “vaguely Conradian” tale with an ethnographic angle. Based on a newspaper report he had read, the plot was to involve a cargo cult-like situation: a group of refugees would use a phonograph to dupe a tribe on a Pacific island into believing their gods were about to return to Earth. All that remains is the title,
Tristes Tropiques
, the lyrical description of a sunset, written on board the
Mendoza
en route to Brazil, which would later be recycled for his memoirs, and a handful of pages in Lévi-Strauss’s archive held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The pages follow the character Paul Thalamas as he sets off on a voyage to the tropics, just as Lévi-Strauss had done a few years before. The extract is intriguing, combining melodrama—“He breathed deeply” was Lévi-Strauss’s opening sentence—with awkwardly introduced philosophizing: “In a vague way, Paul Thalamas turned his thoughts to Berkeley and the famous theory in which the English bishop tries to prove the relativity of our visual perceptions, by the apparent differences in the size of the moon at the zenith and on the horizon.”
2
Clearly Lévi-Strauss had not yet mastered the flow of fiction, but who knows what he might have been able to achieve had he plowed his formidable intellectual energies into a literary career instead of an academic one. What the extract does show is that Lévi-Strauss’s modus operandi was the same whatever he turned his hand to—a very Gallic blend of drama and philosophy.
Tristes Tropiques
, the lyrical description of a sunset, written on board the
Mendoza
en route to Brazil, which would later be recycled for his memoirs, and a handful of pages in Lévi-Strauss’s archive held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The pages follow the character Paul Thalamas as he sets off on a voyage to the tropics, just as Lévi-Strauss had done a few years before. The extract is intriguing, combining melodrama—“He breathed deeply” was Lévi-Strauss’s opening sentence—with awkwardly introduced philosophizing: “In a vague way, Paul Thalamas turned his thoughts to Berkeley and the famous theory in which the English bishop tries to prove the relativity of our visual perceptions, by the apparent differences in the size of the moon at the zenith and on the horizon.”
2
Clearly Lévi-Strauss had not yet mastered the flow of fiction, but who knows what he might have been able to achieve had he plowed his formidable intellectual energies into a literary career instead of an academic one. What the extract does show is that Lévi-Strauss’s modus operandi was the same whatever he turned his hand to—a very Gallic blend of drama and philosophy.
Like the many other artistic projects he had started, the novel was abandoned fifty pages in, “because it was so bad,” in Lévi-Strauss own words.
3
“I very quickly realized that I wasn’t able to do it, because I lacked imagination and didn’t have the patience to write the descriptive details needed to flesh out a character and create atmosphere.”
4
3
“I very quickly realized that I wasn’t able to do it, because I lacked imagination and didn’t have the patience to write the descriptive details needed to flesh out a character and create atmosphere.”
4
Engrossed in his work at the museum and struggling with his novel, Lévi-Strauss seemed strangely disconnected from the events brewing across Europe. “Did you feel that the war was coming?” he was asked in the 1980s. “No,” he replied. “No more than I sensed the dangers of Hitler or the Fascist threat. I was like most people, totally blind.”
5
Nor did the mounting threats to Europe’s Jewish population strike a personal chord. As German Jews continued to flee across the border into France, Lévi-Strauss explained away Nazi anti-Semitism as petit bourgeois jealousy against Jewish bankers who had profited from the era’s high inflation rates. The ongoing persecution he likened to a kind of natural disaster to be weathered—like a volcanic eruption—rather than some fundamental, catastrophic social change.
6
5
Nor did the mounting threats to Europe’s Jewish population strike a personal chord. As German Jews continued to flee across the border into France, Lévi-Strauss explained away Nazi anti-Semitism as petit bourgeois jealousy against Jewish bankers who had profited from the era’s high inflation rates. The ongoing persecution he likened to a kind of natural disaster to be weathered—like a volcanic eruption—rather than some fundamental, catastrophic social change.
6
Lévi-Strauss’s second exhibition never took place. As he finished documenting his collections, war broke out. The forlorn wail of sirens sounded across Paris skies as civilians went through the paces of air raid drills; barricades and checkpoints sprang up along the boulevards; soldiers piled sandbags high around the city’s famous monuments and carried artwork into storage. For Lévi-Strauss, the drift toward war was accompanied by personal upheaval. In the spring of 1939, he separated from Dina. An eleven-year marriage, a good proportion of it spent in Brazil, was over. The couple had worked closely together, enduring the hazards and pleasures of backland travel, the thrill and tedium of ethnographic fieldwork. Seventy years after they had split, I asked Lévi-Strauss what had happened. At the age of ninety-eight, he spoke in short sentences, with long pauses in between. “She lived in her head,” he told me. “I never knew what she was thinking.” He went on to hint at other problems. Sometime after they had divorced he had been told of the existence of “romantic letters” between Dina and Mário de Andrade.
7
7
By September, British Expeditionary Forces began arriving in northern France, marching over fields still pitted with the divots left from the First World War. French conscripts dug trenches and constructed shelters from the Channel down to the Ardennes, trying to paper over defenses to the north of the Maginot Line. Lévi-Strauss was drafted. He has described his war experience as a kind of continuation of fieldwork. Just as he was settling back into Paris, to the museum, his writing desk and the prospect of the teaching job in the autumn, he was on the move again. Over the next months there would be more travel to uncertain destinations, more bivouacking and tinned food, boredom and discomfort.
He spent the first months of the
drôle de guerre
censoring telegrams for the postal ministry (“utter buffoonery”
8
) before he asked to be trained as a liaison officer for the incoming British Expeditionary Forces. His English was rudimentary, but he managed to pass the exams and was posted behind the tail of the Maginot Line on the Luxembourg border. In the months leading up to the German invasion, there was little to do. During the spring he whiled away his time on long hikes through the surrounding wooded fields. It was on one of these excursions, at the beginning of May, that he claims to have had his first, sketchy intimations of the philosophical basis of structuralism. Gazing at a bunch of dandelions, he fell into intense intellectual contemplation. He examined the gray halo of a seed head with its hundreds of thousands of filaments sculpted into a perfect sphere. How was it that this plant, along with all others, had come to such a regularized, geometric conclusion? “It was there that I found the organizing principle of my thought,” he later remembered.
9
The dandelion was the result of the play of its own structural properties, calibrated into a unique and instantly recognizable form. Subtle variations, changes at a deep genetic level, could give rise to other forms, the different species that multiplied through nature. The idea that culture, like nature, could have its own structuring principles—hidden, yet ultimately determining, like the genetic codes that produced the geometry of nature—would inform much of Lévi-Strauss’s subsequent work, as he began his analysis of sociological/cultural phenomena such as kinship, totemism and myth.
drôle de guerre
censoring telegrams for the postal ministry (“utter buffoonery”
8
) before he asked to be trained as a liaison officer for the incoming British Expeditionary Forces. His English was rudimentary, but he managed to pass the exams and was posted behind the tail of the Maginot Line on the Luxembourg border. In the months leading up to the German invasion, there was little to do. During the spring he whiled away his time on long hikes through the surrounding wooded fields. It was on one of these excursions, at the beginning of May, that he claims to have had his first, sketchy intimations of the philosophical basis of structuralism. Gazing at a bunch of dandelions, he fell into intense intellectual contemplation. He examined the gray halo of a seed head with its hundreds of thousands of filaments sculpted into a perfect sphere. How was it that this plant, along with all others, had come to such a regularized, geometric conclusion? “It was there that I found the organizing principle of my thought,” he later remembered.
9
The dandelion was the result of the play of its own structural properties, calibrated into a unique and instantly recognizable form. Subtle variations, changes at a deep genetic level, could give rise to other forms, the different species that multiplied through nature. The idea that culture, like nature, could have its own structuring principles—hidden, yet ultimately determining, like the genetic codes that produced the geometry of nature—would inform much of Lévi-Strauss’s subsequent work, as he began his analysis of sociological/cultural phenomena such as kinship, totemism and myth.
Lévi-Strauss was awoken from his intellectual reveries by the dramatic opening of Germany’s westward offensive. With news of strikes into Belgium and Holland on the airwaves, a little to the north of where Lévi-Strauss was stationed, columns of tanks sped down the narrow lanes of the Ardennes Forest. Crossing the Meuse at Sedan, German panzer divisions punched effortlessly through the French defenses, leaving a trail of dust and diesel fumes as they broke into open countryside.
The surprising ease of the German conquest traumatized the French. “It was horrible . . . ,” remembered Jean Rouch, who would go on to become a renowned ethnographic filmmaker. “We discovered that what we had learned at school—the invincibility of the French army—was false. The old officers were afraid and were escaping. There was not a real battle. In just one month the whole of France was occupied. We were ashamed to have lost the war.” Then a student of civil engineering, Rouch spent the first months of the occupation traveling around France by bicycle from the Marne River to the Massif Central, blowing up bridges to slow the German advance.
10
10
With the German blitzkrieg penetrating deep into French territory, Lévi-Strauss was relieved by a Scots regiment, which arrived with its own set of liaison officers. Lévi-Strauss’s group set off in search of their corps, tracking them down to a village in the Sarthe. “It probably saved our lives,” he remembered, “for the [Scots] regiment was decimated a few days later.”
11
In the confused weeks that followed, Lévi-Strauss found himself caught up in huge movements of people across France. Cars weaved cross-country through the trees to avoid the lengthening traffic jams. Streams of refugees choked all routes south, trying to outpace the Germans’ spectacular advances. Overnight, eight million were on the move. The historian Gaston Roupnel watched the catastrophe unfold:
11
In the confused weeks that followed, Lévi-Strauss found himself caught up in huge movements of people across France. Cars weaved cross-country through the trees to avoid the lengthening traffic jams. Streams of refugees choked all routes south, trying to outpace the Germans’ spectacular advances. Overnight, eight million were on the move. The historian Gaston Roupnel watched the catastrophe unfold:
I started
Histoire et destin
[
History and Destiny
, his last book] at the very beginning of July 1940. In my little village of Gevrey Chambertin, I had just seen waves of refugees go past along the main road, the whole sorry exodus of unfortunates, in cars, in carts, on foot, a miserable muddle of people, all the wretchedness of the roads, and mixed up with all this were the troops, soldiers without their weapons . . . and this great panic, this was France!
12
Lévi-Strauss’s corps traveled by rail and cattle truck, from the Sarthe through Corrèze and Aveyron as their officers bickered over whether to head for Bordeaux and surrender to the Germans or escape to the Mediterranean. Fortunately, they opted for the south and the trip ended in the relative safety of Béziers. They were quartered on the Larzac plateau. After a disorderly retreat, Lévi-Strauss had miraculously landed on his own doorstep, near the family home in the Cévennes, where his parents had already taken refuge.
He was moved with his corps on to Montpellier. There he left his barracks in search of work at the university, offering his services as an examiner in philosophy for the upcoming baccalaureate examinations. He was hired and, after being demobilized, divided his time between the university and his family home. In Montpellier he met up with René Courtin again, his traveling companion in Brazil. Courtin was in the process of setting up a Resistance network, and after the war would be one of the founders of
Le Monde
.
Le Monde
.
Lévi-Strauss had escaped unscathed, his only experience of the fighting being the splintering of tiles overhead when his position was strafed by German Stukas during the retreat. He was secure in Vichy France, with family nearby and a university job. Yet by the beginning of September he was courting danger once more. He traveled up to Vichy to ask to be reassigned to his old job at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris. Just as French Jews were escaping south, Lévi-Strauss requested to be sent back north, into Nazi-occupied territory. It was an extraordinary move, given the times. In France forty thousand foreign Jews were already interned in camps—makeshift wooden huts in muddy fields, which froze during the winter.
13
Although official persecution of French-born Jews had not yet begun, the screws were tightening under the Nazi occupation.
13
Although official persecution of French-born Jews had not yet begun, the screws were tightening under the Nazi occupation.
In the 1980s Lévi-Strauss claimed that it was his “lack of imagination” that led him on this potentially disastrous attempt to return to Paris. “That helped me during my fieldwork,” he told Didier Eribon. “I was unaware of the danger.”
14
Scarcely believing such an offhand reply, I went back over this with him. “I did know that the Jews were threatened,” he told me, “but I thought you had to hide in the most direct, thorough way possible, by carrying on as normal.”
15
Fortunately for Lévi-Strauss, the official dealing with the request, the director of secondary education, refused to send anyone with such an obviously Jewish name back into occupied France, suggesting a college in Perpignan instead. When Lévi-Strauss arrived in Perpignan, a new mood was in the air. Colleagues were wary, studiously avoiding the subject of the Jewish situation and the Nazi race laws. A gym teacher, who privately sympathized with Lévi-Strauss’s position, became his only confidant.
14
Scarcely believing such an offhand reply, I went back over this with him. “I did know that the Jews were threatened,” he told me, “but I thought you had to hide in the most direct, thorough way possible, by carrying on as normal.”
15
Fortunately for Lévi-Strauss, the official dealing with the request, the director of secondary education, refused to send anyone with such an obviously Jewish name back into occupied France, suggesting a college in Perpignan instead. When Lévi-Strauss arrived in Perpignan, a new mood was in the air. Colleagues were wary, studiously avoiding the subject of the Jewish situation and the Nazi race laws. A gym teacher, who privately sympathized with Lévi-Strauss’s position, became his only confidant.
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