Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (20 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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After only a few weeks in Perpignan, Lévi-Strauss returned to Montpellier, where he taught what would turn out to be the last philosophy classes of his career for a preparatory course at the École polytechnique. It turned into a purely ritualistic exchange between a set of students with no interest in philosophy and Lévi-Strauss, who had already mentally fled the discipline for anthropology. He read out his lecture notes against the hubbub of students chatting among themselves.
Outside classes he caught up on his reading. One book in particular,
Catégories matrimoniales et relations de proximité dans la Chine ancienne
(
Matrimonial Categories and Kin Relations in Ancient China
), written by the doyen of francophone Far Eastern studies, Marcel Granet, struck a chord, setting in motion a train of thought that would follow him into exile. Granet was the leading sinologist of his day, studying Chinese classical texts, traditional numerology and feudalism.
Catégories matrimoniales
was one of the first attempts to rigorously map out classical Chinese kinship relations. Lévi-Strauss had already grappled with kinship in Brazil, observing the Bororo’s fine-tuned moiety system and the small, densely interrelated nomadic families of the Nambikwara. Unlike Lévi-Strauss’s fumbling efforts to pin down their significance, Granet had tried to move beyond description. His goal was to unveil the very mechanics of kin systems, to find a set of objective rules that underpinned what at first glance appeared to be merely the arbitrary outcome of tradition. His book drew together concepts that Lévi-Strauss would later revisit: the symmetry of kinship systems as a kind of mathematical inevitability; the incest taboo as a positive prohibition—a magnetic field of repulsion propelling a system of exchange. Granet also hinted at universality (albeit through an evolutionist paradigm), drawing parallels between ancient Chinese systems and present-day Australian Aboriginal arrangements. The arguments were dense. There were complex diagrams—spirals inside cones, stars embedded in circles, crisscrossing arrows. “I was spellbound,” Lévi-Strauss later recalled.
16
Yet he was also frustrated. He found Granet’s solutions obscure and overly elaborate; complexity had generated yet more complexity; untidy data could be described only by invoking baroque rules. The goal, which would remain a lifelong quest for Lévi-Strauss, was to descend to the next level of abstraction, into a clarifying world beyond description, a purer universe of simple imperatives.
Catégories matrimoniales et relations de proximité dans la Chine ancienne
(
Matrimonial Categories and Kin Relations in Ancient China
), written by the doyen of francophone Far Eastern studies, Marcel Granet, struck a chord, setting in motion a train of thought that would follow him into exile. Granet was the leading sinologist of his day, studying Chinese classical texts, traditional numerology and feudalism.
Catégories matrimoniales
was one of the first attempts to rigorously map out classical Chinese kinship relations. Lévi-Strauss had already grappled with kinship in Brazil, observing the Bororo’s fine-tuned moiety system and the small, densely interrelated nomadic families of the Nambikwara. Unlike Lévi-Strauss’s fumbling efforts to pin down their significance, Granet had tried to move beyond description. His goal was to unveil the very mechanics of kin systems, to find a set of objective rules that underpinned what at first glance appeared to be merely the arbitrary outcome of tradition. His book drew together concepts that Lévi-Strauss would later revisit: the symmetry of kinship systems as a kind of mathematical inevitability; the incest taboo as a positive prohibition—a magnetic field of repulsion propelling a system of exchange. Granet also hinted at universality (albeit through an evolutionist paradigm), drawing parallels between ancient Chinese systems and present-day Australian Aboriginal arrangements. The arguments were dense. There were complex diagrams—spirals inside cones, stars embedded in circles, crisscrossing arrows. “I was spellbound,” Lévi-Strauss later recalled.
16
Yet he was also frustrated. He found Granet’s solutions obscure and overly elaborate; complexity had generated yet more complexity; untidy data could be described only by invoking baroque rules. The goal, which would remain a lifelong quest for Lévi-Strauss, was to descend to the next level of abstraction, into a clarifying world beyond description, a purer universe of simple imperatives.
Three weeks later, Lévi-Strauss was fired under the first Jewish Statute introduced by the Vichy government on October 3, 1940. He returned to his parents’ house, this time with some sense of the very real danger that he and his family were in. “I already felt myself to be potential fodder for the concentration camp,” he later confessed.
17
He entertained romantic notions of being able to survive on the run, scavenging in the countryside, sleeping rough, Nambikwara-style, roaming the Cévennes. But inevitably thoughts turned toward exile. After Georges Dumas intervened to secure him a new posting at the University of São Paulo, another spell in Brazil was an option.
18
He might even have been able to resume fieldwork among the Nambikwara. The nomadic period had shown him only one aspect of Nambikwara life; intensive study of the sedentary camps during the wet season would fill out the picture.
17
He entertained romantic notions of being able to survive on the run, scavenging in the countryside, sleeping rough, Nambikwara-style, roaming the Cévennes. But inevitably thoughts turned toward exile. After Georges Dumas intervened to secure him a new posting at the University of São Paulo, another spell in Brazil was an option.
18
He might even have been able to resume fieldwork among the Nambikwara. The nomadic period had shown him only one aspect of Nambikwara life; intensive study of the sedentary camps during the wet season would fill out the picture.
Lévi-Strauss traveled back up to Vichy, where the Brazilian embassy had set up offices in a cramped ground-floor room. There, in an episode later recounted in
Tristes Tropiques
, he tried, but failed, to renew his visa. In an excruciating scene the ambassador held the stamp in midair, ready to hammer it onto Lévi-Strauss’s open passport, but—reminded by a zealous official of the new rules in place—could not follow through. Lévi-Strauss left empty-handed.
Tristes Tropiques
, he tried, but failed, to renew his visa. In an excruciating scene the ambassador held the stamp in midair, ready to hammer it onto Lévi-Strauss’s open passport, but—reminded by a zealous official of the new rules in place—could not follow through. Lévi-Strauss left empty-handed.
With his options dwindling, he received a letter that turned out to be as life-defining as Bouglé’s phone call had been six years earlier. It was an invitation from the Rockefeller Foundation to teach at the New School for Social Research in New York. Founded after the First World War, the New School had been taking in European intellectuals under threat from the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism. With the outbreak of the Second World War, it began receiving waves of intellectuals from across Europe fleeing war and persecution. Lévi-Strauss was fortunate to have the backing of both Alfred Métraux and Robert Lowie, who had been impressed by his work on the Bororo, as well as family connections in the States—his aunt Aline, widow of the painter Henry Caro-Delvaille, raised money through a wealthy friend to support the application. After the offer Lévi-Strauss wrote to Dina, who was also Jewish, saying that if she wanted to get out of France she could travel with him as his wife.
19
She elected to stay on and ended up playing a role in the Resistance. Lévi-Strauss’s parents would remain in Vichy France, stranded in their holiday house in the Cévennes and unable to return to the rue Poussin apartment until after the war.
19
She elected to stay on and ended up playing a role in the Resistance. Lévi-Strauss’s parents would remain in Vichy France, stranded in their holiday house in the Cévennes and unable to return to the rue Poussin apartment until after the war.
Lévi-Strauss could now enter the States; the problem lay on the French side. As the war progressed, leaving the country was becoming more and more difficult. After the occupation of the north, some Jews and perceived undesirables hiked over the Pyrenees, traveling across Spain and into Portugal to the neutral port of Lisbon, from where they packed onto Cunard liners or, money permitting, took the newly established twelve-hour Pan American Clipper air service. The other route, out through Marseille, was more direct, but still involved mountains of paperwork: affidavits of support, proof of job in the host country, visas, proof of passage and Vichy exit papers, with each document depending on the others in a dispiriting bureaucratic chain.
Artists Max Ernst and André Masson, writer Arthur Koestler and Nobel physicist Otto Meyerhof, among thousands of others, gathered in Marseille to get their papers in order and find a berth out of Europe. They were aided by the inspired work of the American Quaker Varian Fry and his Emergency Rescue Committee, another privately funded organization aimed at rescuing European intellectuals from the deteriorating situation in Europe. Vichy military police scoured the port with orders to arrest any “subversive” who could not produce proof of passage. People had begun disappearing. Russian revolutionary Victor Serge, who sailed with Lévi-Strauss, described lives “hanging by slender threads” in Marseille, where the “talent and expertise of Paris . . . in the days of her prime” were reduced to “hunted, terribly tired men at the limit of their nervous resources.”
20
Despite the difficulties, the artistic communities that would soon set up in exile—in New York, Buenos Aires and Mexico City—were already forming before they set sail. André Breton and assorted surrealists along with Victor Serge and Varian Fry rented the eighteen-room Villa Air-Bel, where they hosted exhibitions, “auctions,” theater and comedy nights.
20
Despite the difficulties, the artistic communities that would soon set up in exile—in New York, Buenos Aires and Mexico City—were already forming before they set sail. André Breton and assorted surrealists along with Victor Serge and Varian Fry rented the eighteen-room Villa Air-Bel, where they hosted exhibitions, “auctions,” theater and comedy nights.
The unusually mild autumn of 1940 gave way to one of the coldest winters on record. A biting mistral blew off the Massif Central, streaming down the Rhône Valley. Snow dusted the Mediterranean. Shortages of food and heating oil signaled the beginning of the long, hard slog through the war years. His papers now in order, Lévi-Strauss came down from the Cévennes and did the rounds of Marseille’s drafty shipping offices. He heard rumors that a ship was about to leave for Martinique and tracked it down to the Compagnie des transports maritimes—the very same shipping company that he and his academic colleagues had used on half a dozen trips to and from Brazil. A company official who remembered Lévi-Strauss from the Brazil days confirmed that a ship was setting sail for the Caribbean the next month, but tried to dissuade him from taking it, being “unable to tolerate the idea that one of his former first-class passengers should be transported like livestock.”
21
21
Lévi-Strauss packed up the remains of his ethnographic materials—notes, card indexes, a travel diary, maps, diagrams, photographs and negatives—for the trip to America. With the help of a smuggler, the crate was spirited into the hold. On March 25, 1941, he boarded the
Capitaine Paul-Lemerle
, ushered down the quai de la Joliette and out of the country by a fascist guard of dishonor:
Capitaine Paul-Lemerle
, ushered down the quai de la Joliette and out of the country by a fascist guard of dishonor:
We went on board between two rows of helmeted
gardes mobiles
with sten guns in their hands, who cordoned off the quayside, preventing all contact between the passengers and their relatives or friends who had come to say goodbye, and interrupting leave-takings with jostling and insults. Far from being a solitary adventure, it was more like the deportation of convicts.
22
A creaking steamer (“a can of sardines with a cigarette butt stuck in it,” according to Serge
23
), the
Capitaine Paul-Lemerle
was loaded up with 350 “undesirables”—“a kind of floating concentration camp”
24
of German, Austrian, Czech, Spanish and French Jews and political agitators whose paperwork had finally come through. Among the hundreds jammed into the hold on makeshift pallets and straw mattresses were Breton, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, German novelist Anna Seghers and Victor Serge, onetime colleague of Lenin. Serge, with his “clean-shaven, delicate-featured face” and a “strangely asexual” voice, confounded Lévi-Strauss’s image of the virile revolutionary.
25
23
), the
Capitaine Paul-Lemerle
was loaded up with 350 “undesirables”—“a kind of floating concentration camp”
24
of German, Austrian, Czech, Spanish and French Jews and political agitators whose paperwork had finally come through. Among the hundreds jammed into the hold on makeshift pallets and straw mattresses were Breton, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, German novelist Anna Seghers and Victor Serge, onetime colleague of Lenin. Serge, with his “clean-shaven, delicate-featured face” and a “strangely asexual” voice, confounded Lévi-Strauss’s image of the virile revolutionary.
25
Arrangements were primitive. Two sets of unventilated cubicles had been rigged up—one on the port side for men, the other on the starboard side for women. A zinc trough leading off into the sea served as the toilet, a miserable dribble of water as the shower. Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss told me that the mood was not bleak, but excited—“more like setting out on an adventure.”
26
A surviving photo from the
Capitaine Paul-Lemerle
’s deck bears this out. Behind a heavy coil of ship’s rope young women smile gaily, chatting and smoking. Men look confidently back into the lens, and a couple of toddlers have been hoisted up at the back of the group, appearing against a backdrop of the open sea.
26
A surviving photo from the
Capitaine Paul-Lemerle
’s deck bears this out. Behind a heavy coil of ship’s rope young women smile gaily, chatting and smoking. Men look confidently back into the lens, and a couple of toddlers have been hoisted up at the back of the group, appearing against a backdrop of the open sea.
Through his connections with the Compagnie des transports maritimes, Lévi-Strauss managed to secure one of the bunk beds in the only two cabins on the vessel. He shared with an Austrian metal magnate and a wealthy Martinican returning home (“the only person on board who could reasonably be presumed to be neither a Jew nor a foreigner nor an anarchist”
27
). The last bunk was occupied by a mysterious North African with a Degas stashed away in his suitcase. While most of the other passengers were treated with disdain, he seemed to have an inside track with all the officials throughout the trip. The man claimed that, after a voyage of several months, he would be spending only a few days in New York. Lévi-Strauss later learned through photos published with his obituary in 1974 that he was Henri Smadja, a French-Tunisian Jew who ended up editing
Combat
, the Resistance paper founded during the war by Albert Camus. It remains unclear exactly what he was doing aboard the refugee ship.
27
). The last bunk was occupied by a mysterious North African with a Degas stashed away in his suitcase. While most of the other passengers were treated with disdain, he seemed to have an inside track with all the officials throughout the trip. The man claimed that, after a voyage of several months, he would be spending only a few days in New York. Lévi-Strauss later learned through photos published with his obituary in 1974 that he was Henri Smadja, a French-Tunisian Jew who ended up editing
Combat
, the Resistance paper founded during the war by Albert Camus. It remains unclear exactly what he was doing aboard the refugee ship.
The
Capitaine Paul-Lemerle
docked briefly at Oran in Algeria and at Casablanca before skirting the African coast for Dakar. While waiting to go ashore in Casablanca, Lévi-Strauss was surprised to hear André Breton give his name to passport control ahead of him in the queue. Breton was by then famous in France, Lévi-Strauss virtually unknown. Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss immediately introduced himself and the two became friends. They were both serious intellectual aesthetes, both cool and somewhat formal in their approach to the world, yet intrigued by a midcentury modernist infatuation with the primitive and the subconscious. Deprived of books, they passed the rest of the voyage chatting on deck, handing each other long, densely theoretical notes, exchanging ideas on art, surrealism and aesthetic appreciation. Lévi-Strauss wrote a detailed commentary on Breton’s doctrine of spontaneous creativity, trying to resolve the contradictions between surrealist “automatic” art (in which the artist simply writes, draws or paints with no preplanned ideas, guided by chance and random events) on the one hand, and the idea of artistic technique or expertise on the other. How could artistic creativity express itself through what was merely a reflex of the subconscious? He concluded with the notion of “irrational awareness” (
prise de conscience irrationelle
)—a kind of creative inspiration that the true artist smuggles into a spontaneous work of art. In reply, Breton wrote of the “para-erotic” aesthetic pleasure derived from art, which distinguished it from impulsive doodles, and concluded that Lévi-Strauss’s idea of irrational awareness might itself be produced at a subconscious or “pre-conscious” level.
28
Even in the difficult circumstances of the crossing, Breton was always on the lookout for random aesthetic events. At one point he was struck by the combination of a hanging carcass of an ox that had been slaughtered on board, flags fluttering over the ship’s aft and the rising sun. “Their somewhat hermetic assembly, in April 1941,” observed Breton, “seemed rich with meaning.”
29
Capitaine Paul-Lemerle
docked briefly at Oran in Algeria and at Casablanca before skirting the African coast for Dakar. While waiting to go ashore in Casablanca, Lévi-Strauss was surprised to hear André Breton give his name to passport control ahead of him in the queue. Breton was by then famous in France, Lévi-Strauss virtually unknown. Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss immediately introduced himself and the two became friends. They were both serious intellectual aesthetes, both cool and somewhat formal in their approach to the world, yet intrigued by a midcentury modernist infatuation with the primitive and the subconscious. Deprived of books, they passed the rest of the voyage chatting on deck, handing each other long, densely theoretical notes, exchanging ideas on art, surrealism and aesthetic appreciation. Lévi-Strauss wrote a detailed commentary on Breton’s doctrine of spontaneous creativity, trying to resolve the contradictions between surrealist “automatic” art (in which the artist simply writes, draws or paints with no preplanned ideas, guided by chance and random events) on the one hand, and the idea of artistic technique or expertise on the other. How could artistic creativity express itself through what was merely a reflex of the subconscious? He concluded with the notion of “irrational awareness” (
prise de conscience irrationelle
)—a kind of creative inspiration that the true artist smuggles into a spontaneous work of art. In reply, Breton wrote of the “para-erotic” aesthetic pleasure derived from art, which distinguished it from impulsive doodles, and concluded that Lévi-Strauss’s idea of irrational awareness might itself be produced at a subconscious or “pre-conscious” level.
28
Even in the difficult circumstances of the crossing, Breton was always on the lookout for random aesthetic events. At one point he was struck by the combination of a hanging carcass of an ox that had been slaughtered on board, flags fluttering over the ship’s aft and the rising sun. “Their somewhat hermetic assembly, in April 1941,” observed Breton, “seemed rich with meaning.”
29
Conditions became primitive as the ship descended into the tropics. Rising temperatures forced everyone up onto deck, now a clutter of clotheslines, children’s nurseries, bedding and open-air dining arrangements. Passengers began using the toilets in the small hours of the morning so as to avoid “collective squatting”; the dribble of water in the shower boxes turned to steam in the tropical air.
30
Breton’s aristocratic sensibilities were tested to the limits. “André Breton, who was very much out of place
dans cette galère
[in this hell],” wrote Lévi-Strauss in
Tristes Tropiques
, “strode up and down the few empty places left on deck; wrapped in his thick nap overcoat, he looked like a blue bear.”
31
Lévi-Strauss, now a veteran of primitive living conditions and in any case traveling in the relative luxury of a cabin, was philosophical. “I learned some anthropology there,”
32
he quipped to a
Washington Post
reporter decades later.
30
Breton’s aristocratic sensibilities were tested to the limits. “André Breton, who was very much out of place
dans cette galère
[in this hell],” wrote Lévi-Strauss in
Tristes Tropiques
, “strode up and down the few empty places left on deck; wrapped in his thick nap overcoat, he looked like a blue bear.”
31
Lévi-Strauss, now a veteran of primitive living conditions and in any case traveling in the relative luxury of a cabin, was philosophical. “I learned some anthropology there,”
32
he quipped to a
Washington Post
reporter decades later.
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