Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (23 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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It was there, in the classic beaux arts building on Fifth Avenue, with its murals, decorated ceilings, carved oak and tiled floors, that Lévi-Strauss hoovered up the vast store of ethnography that had accumulated in the library’s subterranean stacks. “What I know of anthropology I learnt in those years,” he later recalled.
64
On breaks he browsed scientific journals, trying to keep abreast of the latest developments in other fields. As he digested ethnography after ethnography, memorizing obscure native beliefs and practices, a Native American in full feather headdress and buckskin jacket sat a few tables along, jotting down notes with a Parker pen.
65
64
On breaks he browsed scientific journals, trying to keep abreast of the latest developments in other fields. As he digested ethnography after ethnography, memorizing obscure native beliefs and practices, a Native American in full feather headdress and buckskin jacket sat a few tables along, jotting down notes with a Parker pen.
65
It was during this period that he came across another book that fit like a key into his evolving thought: D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s
On Growth and Form
, an eccentric classic that looked at the mathematics of morphology. A Scottish polymath, D’Arcy Thompson showed how both natural and human engineering had arrived at similarly elegant geometric solutions to design challenges thrown up by physical conditions in the world. In a series of beautifully written illustrations of his ideas, D’Arcy Thompson compared the shape of a falling drop of water to a jellyfish, plant fiber to wire, the metacarpal bone from a vulture’s wing to a certain type of truss. Nature’s diversity was generated out of different applications of classical proportions and ratios, which had subsequently been rediscovered in the geometry and mathematics of Pythagoras and Newton. Although some have considered the book scientific heresy because it played down the role of Darwinian evolution, it continues to fascinate to this day.
66
For Lévi-Strauss, D’Arcy Thompson’s blend of aesthetics and theory was hugely appealing.
On Growth and Form
, an eccentric classic that looked at the mathematics of morphology. A Scottish polymath, D’Arcy Thompson showed how both natural and human engineering had arrived at similarly elegant geometric solutions to design challenges thrown up by physical conditions in the world. In a series of beautifully written illustrations of his ideas, D’Arcy Thompson compared the shape of a falling drop of water to a jellyfish, plant fiber to wire, the metacarpal bone from a vulture’s wing to a certain type of truss. Nature’s diversity was generated out of different applications of classical proportions and ratios, which had subsequently been rediscovered in the geometry and mathematics of Pythagoras and Newton. Although some have considered the book scientific heresy because it played down the role of Darwinian evolution, it continues to fascinate to this day.
66
For Lévi-Strauss, D’Arcy Thompson’s blend of aesthetics and theory was hugely appealing.
PRIMED WITH RAW MATERIAL, Lévi-Strauss was ripe for theory. He was in search of a framework, some organizing principle, the inner structure that he had sensed during his fieldwork in Brazil. He was looking for what had triggered the powerful sensations that he had felt while gazing into the bunch of dandelions on the Luxembourg border and while reading Granet’s kinship book. “At the time I was a kind of naïve structuralist,” he later explained, “a structuralist without knowing it.”
67
67
The catalyst was the Russian poet and linguist Roman Jakobson. He was fluent in a dozen languages and had been a key member of both the Moscow and Prague linguistic schools. The world Lévi-Strauss had recently been introduced to in New York had long been Jakobson’s natural milieu—a mix of academia and modern art, lecture halls and bohemia, avant-garde poetry and the then emerging field of structural linguistic analysis. In revolutionary Moscow, Jakobson had mixed with the futurists; in Prague, with Czech surrealists and modernist cabaret artists. He had even dabbled in anthropology, studying folklore in and around Moscow, alongside the Russian ethnologist Petr Bogatyrev.
A bon vivant, “a veritable globe-trotter of structuralism,”
68
Jakobson had arrived in New York after a tortuous flight across Central Europe and Scandinavia, never more than a few paces ahead of the galloping Nazi frontier. On the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, Jakobson had been teaching at Masaryk University in Brno. Well known as a Jewish antifascist intellectual, he burned his papers and went into hiding. He wound up in Prague, spending a month living in a wardrobe at his father-in-law’s apartment. Accompanied by his wife, Svatava, Jakobson traveled on to Denmark, where he had been invited to teach at the University of Copenhagen. The journey took the couple through the Nazi heartlands, forcing them at one point to change trains in Berlin. There, Jakobson took perverse delight in drinking a beer on the platform while posting off letters to friends who were astonished to see a Berlin postmark days after Hitler’s fiftieth birthday celebrations.
68
Jakobson had arrived in New York after a tortuous flight across Central Europe and Scandinavia, never more than a few paces ahead of the galloping Nazi frontier. On the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, Jakobson had been teaching at Masaryk University in Brno. Well known as a Jewish antifascist intellectual, he burned his papers and went into hiding. He wound up in Prague, spending a month living in a wardrobe at his father-in-law’s apartment. Accompanied by his wife, Svatava, Jakobson traveled on to Denmark, where he had been invited to teach at the University of Copenhagen. The journey took the couple through the Nazi heartlands, forcing them at one point to change trains in Berlin. There, Jakobson took perverse delight in drinking a beer on the platform while posting off letters to friends who were astonished to see a Berlin postmark days after Hitler’s fiftieth birthday celebrations.
Jakobson worked at the University of Copenhagen for six months before being forced to flee with his wife to Norway. On the German invasion, they were on the run again, reaching the Swedish border without a passport or any identity papers. After a week imprisoned in a customs post, they were allowed into neutral Sweden to settle in Uppsala, where Jakobson researched aphasia and child speech patterns. A year later he was on a steamer bound for America, but his ordeal was not quite over. German soldiers boarded the ship en route to check the identity of the passengers. As Jakobson and his wife were stateless, they were in a potentially dangerous position, but they managed to convince the officers that they were Russian émigrés and were allowed to proceed to New York.
69
69
When Jakobson arrived in New York, Lévi-Strauss was still struggling with his thesis on the Nambikwara, trying to fit together scraps of kinship and linguistic data collected on his journey across Mato Grosso. In his field notes, he had experimented with a series of different models for describing kinship systems—the conventional family tree, columns of relationships headed “
mon père appelle
,” “
ma mère appelle
,” “
mon frère appelle
,” “
j’appelle
,” “
mon mari appelle
” and so on, as well as a checkerboard design that cross-referenced rows and columns of kin terms. He sometimes used stick figures (a stick penis added to distinguish between the sexes) with lines, circles and arrows connecting up relatives across generations.
mon père appelle
,” “
ma mère appelle
,” “
mon frère appelle
,” “
j’appelle
,” “
mon mari appelle
” and so on, as well as a checkerboard design that cross-referenced rows and columns of kin terms. He sometimes used stick figures (a stick penis added to distinguish between the sexes) with lines, circles and arrows connecting up relatives across generations.
There was an air of desperation in the successive tables of basic native vocabulary, listing kinship terminology in yet another language with which Lévi-Strauss would have had only fleeting contact. At one point he jotted down “
langue semble différente
” (language appears to be different), suggesting that he was having problems even identifying which linguistic group he was dealing with.
70
When he talked about his difficulties to Alexandre Koyré, a French-Russian academic specializing in the history and philosophy of science, Koyré suggested that he should see Jakobson, who had just begun lecturing at the École libre des hautes études. Koyré had sensed a possible affinity between the two, but he could not have imagined the impact his introduction would have. Lévi-Strauss was expecting technical advice; what he got was a whole new way of thinking.
langue semble différente
” (language appears to be different), suggesting that he was having problems even identifying which linguistic group he was dealing with.
70
When he talked about his difficulties to Alexandre Koyré, a French-Russian academic specializing in the history and philosophy of science, Koyré suggested that he should see Jakobson, who had just begun lecturing at the École libre des hautes études. Koyré had sensed a possible affinity between the two, but he could not have imagined the impact his introduction would have. Lévi-Strauss was expecting technical advice; what he got was a whole new way of thinking.
Jakobson was twelve years older than Lévi-Strauss, and with his vast and varied academic experience in universities across Europe, he became a kind of mentor to the young anthropologist. At first Jakobson thought he had found an ideal drinking partner with whom he could talk into the night, but he soon discovered that Lévi-Strauss, despite cavorting with the surrealists, was a moderate at heart, who didn’t drink and preferred to get to bed early. Yet Jakobson’s hedonism somehow meshed with Lévi-Strauss’s more subdued asceticism and their friendship blossomed, developing into a lifelong attachment. They dined out frequently together, exploring New York’s Chinese, Greek and Armenian restaurants.
71
Jakobson also introduced Lévi-Strauss to a new circle of intellectuals. Through Raymond de Saussure, the son of the great linguist, he made contact with New York’s leading psychoanalysts, including Rudolph Loewenstein, Ernst Kris and Herman Nunberg.
71
Jakobson also introduced Lévi-Strauss to a new circle of intellectuals. Through Raymond de Saussure, the son of the great linguist, he made contact with New York’s leading psychoanalysts, including Rudolph Loewenstein, Ernst Kris and Herman Nunberg.
From the autumn of 1942, they attended each other’s courses—Jakobson’s on phonetics and Lévi-Strauss’s on kinship. Speaking virtually without notes in fluent French, Jakobson skipped from the poems of Edgar Allan Poe to Knut Hamsun’s
Hunger
, tossing in philosophers Edmund Husserl and Jeremy Bentham along with the Scholastics. He gave examples of liquids, labiodentals, nasals, hissing and hushing sibilants from the Slavic languages, illustrating his arguments with words drawn from French, Finnish and Korean. And amid this display of European cosmopolitanism and erudition, Jakobson told the story of the emergence of structural linguistics, an approach first outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure and then developed by the Russian linguist Nikolai Trubetskoy and Jakobson himself. “The discipline practised by Jakobson enthralled me like a detective story,” remembered Lévi-Strauss. “I had the feeling I was taking part in a great adventure of the mind.”
72
Hunger
, tossing in philosophers Edmund Husserl and Jeremy Bentham along with the Scholastics. He gave examples of liquids, labiodentals, nasals, hissing and hushing sibilants from the Slavic languages, illustrating his arguments with words drawn from French, Finnish and Korean. And amid this display of European cosmopolitanism and erudition, Jakobson told the story of the emergence of structural linguistics, an approach first outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure and then developed by the Russian linguist Nikolai Trubetskoy and Jakobson himself. “The discipline practised by Jakobson enthralled me like a detective story,” remembered Lévi-Strauss. “I had the feeling I was taking part in a great adventure of the mind.”
72
At its core, structural linguistics worked with a simple yet revolutionary idea: the notion that language consisted of a formal system of interrelated elements, and that meaning resided not in the elements themselves, but in their relationships to one another. The solidity of language—of the word, its sound and referent—was dissolved. At root was a system of differences. The classic examples came from phonetics, a field that had forged ahead under the new approach. In the nineteenth century, linguists had focused on the production of sound and describing the sounds themselves. They studied the position of the tongue, the lips and teeth during a given utterance; they filmed, photographed and eventually were able to X-ray speakers’ larynxes; they monitored each subtle modulation, building up finer and finer-grained data, more and more complex notations of subtly different sounds. The end point was a virtual continuum of sound and motion—a jelly of data that offered no theoretical purchase. Under the strictly empiricist approach, “the phonic substance of language becomes as dust,” as Jakobson put it.
73
73
Jakobson likened the previous generation to a character in a story written by the romantic Russian writer Vladimir Odoevsky (and later reprised by Borges in the short story “Funes the Memorious”). A man is given the gift of being able to see and hear everything and promptly descends into a supersaturated, empiricist hell: “Everything in nature became fragmented before him, and nothing formed whole in his mind,” and for this unfortunate man “the sounds of speech became transformed into a torrent of innumerable articulatory motions of mechanical vibrations, aimless and without meaning.”
74
74
Structural phonology, Jakobson went on to explain, offered a way out of this exponential explosion of data. The key problem was to identify the “quanta of language”: the smallest units able to change meanings. Sounds with a “differentiating value” were called phonemes. Pairs of opposing phonemes—like
b
and
v
in “bat” and “vat”—operated like gates on a circuit board, switching between alternate meanings. Crucially, it was the relationship between the phonemes that generated meaning, not the phonemes themselves; thus the paradox: “Language . . . is composed of elements which are signifiers, yet at the same time signify nothing.”
75
Jakobson went on to demonstrate the progress over the past decade, and the systematization of the phonemes into bundles of features, which could be paired off into basic oppositions—compact and diffuse, open and closed, acute and grave—which underlay all languages. He would later elaborate these relations in an ingeniously simple schema: two triangles, one for vowels and the other for consonants, which distilled fundamental phonetic differences. As newborns gradually tuned in to these distinctions, they began standardizing their multiple combinations into meaningful sounds, the words of their native language, be it French, Japanese or Turkish.
b
and
v
in “bat” and “vat”—operated like gates on a circuit board, switching between alternate meanings. Crucially, it was the relationship between the phonemes that generated meaning, not the phonemes themselves; thus the paradox: “Language . . . is composed of elements which are signifiers, yet at the same time signify nothing.”
75
Jakobson went on to demonstrate the progress over the past decade, and the systematization of the phonemes into bundles of features, which could be paired off into basic oppositions—compact and diffuse, open and closed, acute and grave—which underlay all languages. He would later elaborate these relations in an ingeniously simple schema: two triangles, one for vowels and the other for consonants, which distilled fundamental phonetic differences. As newborns gradually tuned in to these distinctions, they began standardizing their multiple combinations into meaningful sounds, the words of their native language, be it French, Japanese or Turkish.
For Lévi-Strauss, the idea that thousands of languages were rooted in an essence—small sets of opposed phonemes—was seductively reductionist. Like the nineteenth-century linguists, Lévi-Strauss had also felt overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of empirical data, condemned “to the endless task of searching for things behind things.”
76
The change in focus from objects to the relationships between objects seemed potentially liberating. Structural linguistics had shown that a deliberate foray into abstraction and experimentation with higher-order modeling could yield dramatic results.
76
The change in focus from objects to the relationships between objects seemed potentially liberating. Structural linguistics had shown that a deliberate foray into abstraction and experimentation with higher-order modeling could yield dramatic results.
As Lévi-Strauss continued his course on kinship, the fit seemed uncanny. Kinship was, after all, a relational system par excellence. Kin diagrams naturally lent themselves to simple oppositions: male/female; in marriage/out marriage; opposing moieties, clans and grades. Running underneath the drama of human relations were unspoken rules, unconsciously observed, which allowed groups of people to communicate with almost mathematical efficiency down the generations. Although the array of bizarre marriage rules seemed baffling in isolation, taken as a set—as contrasting strategies within an overall system—Lévi-Strauss could begin to see the outlines of a grand scheme. Jakobson encouraged him to write down his ideas, and while Lévi-Strauss finished off his thesis on the Nambikwara, he also began work on
Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté
(
The Elementary Structures of Kinship
).
Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté
(
The Elementary Structures of Kinship
).
The different strands of Lévi-Strauss’s thought were coming together. The new linguistics drew a common thread through his early intellectual history—his fascination for Marx and Freud, as well as his interest in geology. He realized that ethnographic reports that he had been reading, as vivid as they appeared, were mere surface phenomena—as landscape is to geology, historical events are to the Marxist, or desire, revulsion and neurosis to the psychoanalyst.
To these three “mistresses,” he could now add another: the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Through Jakobson’s influence, Saussure’s famous
Cours de linguistique générale
, which had been compiled by students and posthumously published in 1915, became a cornerstone of his thinking. Key ideas from the
Cours
became permanent features of Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual arsenal: the distinction between
la langue
(language as an abstract system) and
la parole
(language as it is spoken) and the differences between the synchronic (snapshot) and diachronic (historical) approaches were transposed into the ethnographic setting. Henceforth, Lévi-Strauss would focus his attention on comparisons between abstract cultural systems drawn from the ethnographic record rather than individual ethnographies, just as linguists privileged grammars over the background noise of idiosyncratic usage and gradual linguistic drift. Saussure’s concept of “binary pairs”—the contrasts that generate meaning—that had been so useful in phonetics became another Lévi-Straussian staple.
Cours de linguistique générale
, which had been compiled by students and posthumously published in 1915, became a cornerstone of his thinking. Key ideas from the
Cours
became permanent features of Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual arsenal: the distinction between
la langue
(language as an abstract system) and
la parole
(language as it is spoken) and the differences between the synchronic (snapshot) and diachronic (historical) approaches were transposed into the ethnographic setting. Henceforth, Lévi-Strauss would focus his attention on comparisons between abstract cultural systems drawn from the ethnographic record rather than individual ethnographies, just as linguists privileged grammars over the background noise of idiosyncratic usage and gradual linguistic drift. Saussure’s concept of “binary pairs”—the contrasts that generate meaning—that had been so useful in phonetics became another Lévi-Straussian staple.
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