Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (2 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 effacement was in part deliberate: “I share the anti-biographical approach expressed by Proust in
Contre Sainte-Beuve
,” Lévi-Strauss told the French anthropologist Marc Augé in 1990. “What matters is the work, not the author who happened to write it; I would say rather that it writes itself through him. The individual person is no more than the means of transmission and survives in the work only as a residue.”
6
In Lévi-Strauss’s case, though, this residue was a heavy one. His prose is instantly recognizable and impossible to imitate; his approach to his subject matter so idiosyncratic that for much of his career it defied systematic criticism.
Contre Sainte-Beuve
,” Lévi-Strauss told the French anthropologist Marc Augé in 1990. “What matters is the work, not the author who happened to write it; I would say rather that it writes itself through him. The individual person is no more than the means of transmission and survives in the work only as a residue.”
6
In Lévi-Strauss’s case, though, this residue was a heavy one. His prose is instantly recognizable and impossible to imitate; his approach to his subject matter so idiosyncratic that for much of his career it defied systematic criticism.
On film, Lévi-Strauss had an easy, avuncular manner. He would appear on shows like
Apostrophes
, France’s weekly cultural program that ran in the 1970s and ’80s, explaining the ins and outs of his theories. The performances were fluid, at times monotone, at others more animated, when he produced an intellectual trump card or delivered the punch line of a well-worn tale. A dry humor and a certain Gallic charm shone through between patient explanations of anthropological conundrums. This is the image that was sedimented in France’s popular consciousness—Lévi-Strauss as a much-loved national treasure, the father (perhaps now the grand- or even great-grandfather) of French anthropology, an icon from an age in which France’s intellectuals were fêted internationally.
Apostrophes
, France’s weekly cultural program that ran in the 1970s and ’80s, explaining the ins and outs of his theories. The performances were fluid, at times monotone, at others more animated, when he produced an intellectual trump card or delivered the punch line of a well-worn tale. A dry humor and a certain Gallic charm shone through between patient explanations of anthropological conundrums. This is the image that was sedimented in France’s popular consciousness—Lévi-Strauss as a much-loved national treasure, the father (perhaps now the grand- or even great-grandfather) of French anthropology, an icon from an age in which France’s intellectuals were fêted internationally.
Wind the clock back, though, and a different Lévi-Strauss emerges. In a television interview given to Pierre Dumayet for the show
Lectures pour tous
in 1959, we see a far more serious, businesslike operator.
7
Dressed in a somber suit with a waistcoat, he shows an added edge, a hint of arrogance as he responds to Dumayet’s straightforward, factual questions about North American ethnography; his features are stronger, better defined; his delivery fluent and humorless. Here was an intellectual in his prime, on the cusp of entering the prestigious Collège de France, an elite institution that had rejected him twice a decade before; a man who had already “unleashed”
8
his pen on several occasions with vitriolic responses to his critics.
Lectures pour tous
in 1959, we see a far more serious, businesslike operator.
7
Dressed in a somber suit with a waistcoat, he shows an added edge, a hint of arrogance as he responds to Dumayet’s straightforward, factual questions about North American ethnography; his features are stronger, better defined; his delivery fluent and humorless. Here was an intellectual in his prime, on the cusp of entering the prestigious Collège de France, an elite institution that had rejected him twice a decade before; a man who had already “unleashed”
8
his pen on several occasions with vitriolic responses to his critics.
Further back still, there are tantalizing glimpses of Lévi-Strauss in the field. Photographs from Brazil show a different kind of expression, one that seems less confident, more hostile. Against the backdrop of Brazil’s dry savannahs, a young cosmopolitan man stares back at the camera, dusty and flea-bitten. In Brazil, Lévi-Strauss was an awkward
philosophe
standing out against the easy nakedness of the Indians; an embarrassed Frenchman bathing in a stream, fighting with giggling Nambikwara girls for the soap; an adventurer steeling himself against not so much physical discomfort as intellectual privation. In fleeting glimpses on film, he seems detached—an onlooker, an observer, but never a true participant. “My emotional states weren’t that important to me,” Lévi-Strauss later told Didier Eribon, when asked whether he kept a personal diary of his field trip.
9
Taciturn and courteous, Lévi-Strauss could also be aloof—“cold, stilted, in the French academic style,” as his longtime friend and colleague the anthropologist Alfred Métraux noted in his diary on meeting him for the first time in the 1930s.
10
Though Lévi-Strauss mellowed with age, his reputation for traditional French reserve never left him. “Other than his family and school friends, were there people who addressed Lévi-Strauss in the familiar
tu
form? I doubt it,” remarked his successor at the Collège de France, Françoise Héritier, after his death.
11
philosophe
standing out against the easy nakedness of the Indians; an embarrassed Frenchman bathing in a stream, fighting with giggling Nambikwara girls for the soap; an adventurer steeling himself against not so much physical discomfort as intellectual privation. In fleeting glimpses on film, he seems detached—an onlooker, an observer, but never a true participant. “My emotional states weren’t that important to me,” Lévi-Strauss later told Didier Eribon, when asked whether he kept a personal diary of his field trip.
9
Taciturn and courteous, Lévi-Strauss could also be aloof—“cold, stilted, in the French academic style,” as his longtime friend and colleague the anthropologist Alfred Métraux noted in his diary on meeting him for the first time in the 1930s.
10
Though Lévi-Strauss mellowed with age, his reputation for traditional French reserve never left him. “Other than his family and school friends, were there people who addressed Lévi-Strauss in the familiar
tu
form? I doubt it,” remarked his successor at the Collège de France, Françoise Héritier, after his death.
11
I FIRST MET LÉVI-STRAUSS in 2005 at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale, a research institute that he founded in 1960 located in Paris’s fifth arrondissement. The fifth’s streets are littered with references to centuries of learning, from the roads named after Descartes, Pascal, Cuvier and Buffon to the elite institutions that have cultivated France’s most creative minds—the Lycée Henri-IV, the École normale supérieure and the Collège de France, all clustered around the Latin Quarter. At the east of the
quartier
, Paris’s 1980s monument to inclusiveness, the Institut du monde arabe, with its mosaics of metal apertures dilating and contracting to filter the light, stands like a prematurely aging relic of another era; farther on, Mexican hothouses, Art Deco winter gardens and an old-fashioned zoo are arranged into the geometric plots of the seventeenth-century Jardin des plantes.
quartier
, Paris’s 1980s monument to inclusiveness, the Institut du monde arabe, with its mosaics of metal apertures dilating and contracting to filter the light, stands like a prematurely aging relic of another era; farther on, Mexican hothouses, Art Deco winter gardens and an old-fashioned zoo are arranged into the geometric plots of the seventeenth-century Jardin des plantes.
Lévi-Strauss’s office was up a tight spiral staircase leading into a mezzanine, lodged in a section of the roof of a converted nineteenth-century amphitheater. On one side there was plate glass looking over iron light fittings hanging from a central beam; down below, researchers and librarians were at work on dark-stained desks, tapping on laptops or sifting through card catalogs. The back wall was stenciled with stylized flowers, strange coats of arms and medieval armor in burgundy, gold and light brown. The office contained almost no exotica—masks or feathers and the like—just books and loosely bound PhD theses. Lévi-Strauss appeared to be a faithful version of images stretching back decades, only shrunken and a little frailer. He wore a tweed jacket that was now slightly too big for him, and it hung loosely off his body. He was courteous and alert; only a pronounced tremor when he went to reach into his breast pocket to retrieve his address book betrayed his great age. Well into his nineties, Lévi-Strauss was still going into the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, though no longer writing much. Our conversation, which focused on Brazil, was a strange combination of the stories I had read elsewhere, faithfully reproduced word for word, and a sentiment that I was not expecting: an acid, but ironic, nihilism.
We began by discussing
Tristes Tropiques
, the memoir of his fieldwork in Brazil that had brought him fame in the 1950s. It remains his only nonacademic book, written in a literary style that is only hinted at in his more formal work. I asked him why he suddenly lit out into this genre, never to return to it again. “I had a contract to write it, and I needed money” was his frank, though deflating, answer. (The response was atypical. Elsewhere he had given long and complex answers to the same question, going into detail about his motivations and literary aspirations at the time.) We talked about contemporary Brazil’s indigenous populations. “What are their prospects?” I asked. “At my age, you don’t think about the future,” he deadpanned. But he went on to elaborate that, despite their rising population, land demarcations and, in some instances, greater self-determination within the Brazilian state, the indigenous peoples had been culturally impoverished, broken on the wheel of Western expansion.
Tristes Tropiques
, the memoir of his fieldwork in Brazil that had brought him fame in the 1950s. It remains his only nonacademic book, written in a literary style that is only hinted at in his more formal work. I asked him why he suddenly lit out into this genre, never to return to it again. “I had a contract to write it, and I needed money” was his frank, though deflating, answer. (The response was atypical. Elsewhere he had given long and complex answers to the same question, going into detail about his motivations and literary aspirations at the time.) We talked about contemporary Brazil’s indigenous populations. “What are their prospects?” I asked. “At my age, you don’t think about the future,” he deadpanned. But he went on to elaborate that, despite their rising population, land demarcations and, in some instances, greater self-determination within the Brazilian state, the indigenous peoples had been culturally impoverished, broken on the wheel of Western expansion.
I was intrigued by Lévi-Strauss’s reaction to Brasília, the modernist capital that had not even existed during his fieldwork days, but which he briefly visited in the 1980s during a state visit with then president Mitterrand. I wondered whether the city might have chimed with his aesthetic sensibility, the formalism of his structuralist theoretical approach, his interest in patterns and designs. “There was not enough time and the visit was very programmed,” he lamented, “but it would be a complete mistake to link my work with modernism”—an answer that has since come back to me again and again, in the light of the seemingly manifold interconnections between the modernist movement and Lévi-Straussian structuralism. Lévi-Strauss appeared not to want to talk about his theories. When I asked him about the legacy of his work, if there were other people pursuing his ideas, whether he thought his theories would live on, he was disarmingly blunt: “I don’t know and I don’t care.” As I prepared to leave, the mood lightened and he talked effusively about the exhibition Brésil Indien, at Paris’s Grand Palais, urging me to go and see it for myself.
12
12
The following week, I wandered through the dazzling array of feather headdresses. There were plumes in electric reds and blues; fish, bird and jaguar heads fashioned in what looked like papier-mâché, molded around wicker frames; and four-foot-high porcelain funerary urns found on Marajó, a huge island at the mouth of the Amazon. Lévi-Strauss’s collections closed out the exhibition. Under plate glass there were the Nambikwara nose feathers, the Caduveo’s geometric-patterned urns, and ritual ornaments of the Bororo that I had read about in
Tristes Tropiques
. Beautifully composed black-and-white photos, taken on Lévi-Strauss’s Leica, lined the room. The short films that he had shot in the field were projected onto the walls. Silent, overexposed, a little wobbly and interspersed with Portuguese intertitles, the footage was a cross between early newsreel and home movie. In one unforgettable sequence, an old Caduveo woman dressed in a tattered floral dress drew geometric motifs onto her face—designs that fascinated Lévi-Strauss throughout his career. There was little to connect the young bearded figure that flickered on the wall with the man I had just met. The great gulfs that time had opened up seemed unbridgeable, the mountain of work that Lévi-Strauss had produced in the interim only accentuating the sense of distance, the sense that these ghostly images related to another life, lived in another era entirely.
Tristes Tropiques
. Beautifully composed black-and-white photos, taken on Lévi-Strauss’s Leica, lined the room. The short films that he had shot in the field were projected onto the walls. Silent, overexposed, a little wobbly and interspersed with Portuguese intertitles, the footage was a cross between early newsreel and home movie. In one unforgettable sequence, an old Caduveo woman dressed in a tattered floral dress drew geometric motifs onto her face—designs that fascinated Lévi-Strauss throughout his career. There was little to connect the young bearded figure that flickered on the wall with the man I had just met. The great gulfs that time had opened up seemed unbridgeable, the mountain of work that Lévi-Strauss had produced in the interim only accentuating the sense of distance, the sense that these ghostly images related to another life, lived in another era entirely.
A second meeting at his home in the sixteenth arrondissement found Lévi-Strauss much more relaxed. In the intervening period we had corresponded regularly, with Lévi-Strauss diligently replying to questions about his experiences in Brazil. He lived in a large, haut-bourgeois apartment—solid, comfortable and in extremely good taste. The walls were adorned with an eclectic mix of beaux arts and indigenous artifacts—a wooden bowl from British Columbia, an antique rug, a romantic portrait of a girl in an ornate gold frame. We spoke in his study, a podlike room with solid parquet flooring and soundproofed door, a heavy writing table with thick, elaborately carved legs playing off against a modular black sofa. He took my coat and hung it in the hall—an operation carried out in the slow motion of extreme old age.
He spoke of his life in deliberate sentences, halting from time to time for breath. I asked questions about his experiences in Brazil, his flight from Nazi-occupied France and his formative years as a Jewish émigré in 1940s New York, where he mixed with exiled surrealist artists including André Breton and Max Ernst. I moved on to his return to academic life in Paris, and the stalling of his career in the 1950s when he contemplated quitting anthropology altogether and becoming a journalist. He was voluble at first, but when we got on to theoretical issues and the rise of structuralism, he began tiring and his answers became shorter and shorter.
We ended on a contemporary issue—the controversy surrounding the opening of Jacques Chirac’s vanity project, the Musée du quai Branly. Housed in a vegetation-clad building across the Seine from the Musée de l’Homme, variously described as a giant intestine or a nave on stilts, the project pitted ethnographic purists against professional curators; academic fustiness against aesthetic theater. When the museum was first mooted, there was uproar at the Musée de l’Homme. Curators were said to have stashed prized objects in their living rooms rather than give them up to the fine-arts graduates charged with arranging the Quai Branly displays.
The collection, arranged in the grottolike penumbra of the museum’s innards, contains some of Lévi-Strauss’s Brazilian artifacts; in the museum’s basement is the Lévi-Strauss Auditorium. When I put to him the criticism that the museum might exoticize the cultures whose artifacts it was displaying, he became animated once again. “Anthropology is an ethnocentric science par excellence,” he parried. “If the Musée du quai Branly is displaying objects out of context, what about the Louvre and all the religious art there?” So you can approach indigenous art from a purely aesthetic perspective? “If you want,” he replied. The thought seemed to have exhausted him, and the interview came to a halt. I took two pictures of Lévi-Strauss staring blankly back into the lens—identikits of scores of recent photographs.
I had found Lévi-Strauss open, even eager to help me, to fill in details, to recount (no doubt for the nth time) stories from his past. There were glimmers of a fully fleshed-out character, small breaches in the studied front, but still a kind of emptiness, an isolation. Old-world charm was matched by an inner reticence. In the end, the mask had barely moved. Later, when I strayed onto personal territory, asking in a letter about his second marriage and the final illness and death of his father, he politely, but firmly, closed the door.
LÉVI-STRAUSS CAME OUT of an age when universities housed tiny elites, when the branches of the humanities were only semiprofessionalized. Anthropology was in its infancy, fieldwork the preserve of a few score academics working on the edges of the still-extant European empires. The physical world had been mapped, but culturally whole regions were virtual blanks. Ethnographers were scouring the world not for unknown headwaters, sea passages or gorges, but for cosmologies, rituals and art. They were exploring the limits of human experience, documenting the rich alternatives that were emerging from the shadows of nineteenth-century prejudice.
An autodidact, Lévi-Strauss plowed through the classics, both Anglo-American and French—Edward Tyler, Robert Lowie, Sir James Frazer, Marcel Granet, Marcel Mauss—largely on his own. As one of the few French anthropologists of his generation not to attend Mauss’s famous fieldwork seminars, he organized his own ethnographic expedition, deliberately choosing as remote a region as possible. His main thesis, later published in 1949 as
Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté
(
The Elementary Structures of Kinship
), was unsupervised, written in the New York Public Library while in exile from Nazi occupation. (Back in Paris, he had to go hunting for a supervisor after the fact so that he could be examined.) Initially blocked from ascending into the elite Collège de France, he spent much of the 1950s questioning his future as an anthropologist. What emerged were truly innovative ideas, spared the groupthink of a formal critical environment.
Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté
(
The Elementary Structures of Kinship
), was unsupervised, written in the New York Public Library while in exile from Nazi occupation. (Back in Paris, he had to go hunting for a supervisor after the fact so that he could be examined.) Initially blocked from ascending into the elite Collège de France, he spent much of the 1950s questioning his future as an anthropologist. What emerged were truly innovative ideas, spared the groupthink of a formal critical environment.
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