Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (24 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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Saussure’s insights, filtered through Jakobsonian structural linguistics, gave Lévi-Strauss the tools with which to float free from the morass of descriptive data and observe the patterns that cut across continents and cultures. The exercise required a massive leap of faith. As Lévi-Strauss began importing wholesale concepts from linguistics into the social sciences, he was setting off on a path into the intellectual unknown.
5
 
Elementary Structures
 
Social life imposes on . . . mankind an incessant traveling back and forth, and family life is little else than the expression of a need to slacken the pace at the crossroads and to take a chance to rest. But the orders are to keep on marching.
CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS
1
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE WAR LEFT deep scars across France, its progress a source of constant anxiety for those living in exile. In New York, Lévi-Strauss obsessively read news reports and listened to the radio, raking over the situation in Europe. The Jewish question, which he had only recently treated so casually, was now a matter of survival for the friends and family he had left behind. In the early years, Lévi-Strauss received intermittent news from his parents in the Cévennes. He wrote them long letters in his spidery handwriting, replete with photos pasted onto the page and little drawings—street maps and a floor plan of his apartment in Greenwich Village. But all correspondence had come to an abrupt halt upon the invasion of the free zone in 1943.
In retrospect, Lévi-Strauss had been fortunate to leave when he did—a few days after he had embarked from Marseille, the Vichy government had created a General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, followed later by a census and special police force to deal with the Jews. Had Lévi-Strauss somehow managed to secure his teaching job in Paris, as he had wanted to, he might not have survived the war. His involvement with the Musée de l’Homme, where he had worked through the summer of 1939 preparing the Nambikwara artifacts for exhibit, would have placed him at extreme risk. It was there, at the beginning of the occupation, that one of the first Resistance cells had formed. Researcher Anatole Lewitzky, a student of Mauss, led the group with his librarian fiancée, Yvonne Oddon. In December 1940 they had begun printing and distributing the bulletin
Résistance
on a duplicating machine installed by Rivet in the 1930s for the production of antifascist propaganda. The group was eventually broken up, and despite Mauss’s protestations, Lewitzky was tried and later shot on the Mont Valérien near Nanterre, along with seven accomplices from the Musée network; three women, including Yvonne Oddon, had their death sentences commuted and ended up in Germany’s labor camps.
Even the great Marcel Mauss had difficulties, surviving the war in increasingly straitened circumstances. At the age of seventy, in August 1942, he and his bedridden wife were evicted from their spacious apartment on the boulevard Jourdan, which was requisitioned for the greater comfort of a German general. Students helped Mauss salvage his library, which he stashed at the Musée, before moving into a “cold, dark and dirty” ground-floor flat on the rue Georges de Porto-Riche in the fourteenth arrondissement. That autumn, along with all Parisian Jews, he was forced to sew a yellow star onto his overcoat.
2
In New York, the complexities of the wartime politics were projected back onto those who had fled; the exile community became a microcosm of the schisms that would define French political culture for the next generation. There were strong opinions on every aspect of France’s capitulation, as well as on America’s initial policy of recognizing the Vichy government and refusing to negotiate with de Gaulle. For some the terms of Armistice were a betrayal, for others an understandably pragmatic move. Few openly supported Pétain, but some were privately sympathetic. The writer and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was hounded for his tacit acceptance of Pétain and his refusal to back de Gaulle, whom he saw as an illegitimate leader. Many supported de Gaulle as a military man, but worried that his dictatorial tendencies made him a dangerous politician. Gaullists mounted witch hunts against waverers, but also engaged in bitter infighting of their own.
Lévi-Strauss joined the Free French and attended the odd Gaullist meeting in New York. But when Jacques Soustelle tried to recruit him to join the Resistance in London, he politely declined. His mind was buzzing with new ideas. He wanted to write. Besides, the political rigidity of his youth had drained away. A pacifist before the war, Lévi-Strauss had lost faith in his political judgment. “I lived through
la drôle de guerre
and the French collapse and I realised that it was a mistake to pigeonhole political realities in the framework of formal ideas,” he recalled.
3
After the United States entered the war, Lévi-Strauss found work through Waldberg, reading out propaganda broadcasts on the French desk of the Office of War Information on Fifty-seventh Street for the francophone version of the Voice of America. There, an extraordinary collection of French exiles—headed by the future editor of
France Soir
Pierre Lazareff and including André Breton, philosopher Jacques Maritain, writer Denis de Rougemont and Dolorès Vanetti (who would become Sartre’s lover after the war)—came together a few times a week to write and broadcast. At around $250 a month, work at the Office of War Information was a valuable boost to exiles’ income.
Rougemont remembers working in a room with thirty typewriters, the stutter of teletext machines and harsh lighting. Men with green visors and rolled-up sleeves edited copy before passing the scripts on to the announcers in Studio 16. Each broadcast began, “
Voici New York, les États-Unis d’Amérique. Nous nous adressons aux gens d’Europe!
,” followed by war news, commentary and speeches by key politicians. Breton, a pacifist, was a reluctant participant. True to his surrealist principles, he refused to read out any references to the pope. “He lent us his noble voice,” remembered Rougemont, “but retained a sense of irony.” Lévi-Strauss read out French translations of Roosevelt’s speeches because it was felt that the clarity and precision of his diction carried best over the jamming. Recorded broadcasts were sent to the BBC in London, from where they were retransmitted in France. It is unclear how many listeners in France actually managed to tune in, but, according to Lévi-Strauss, the broadcast was picked up by a friend of his, who contacted his parents to reassure them that their son was alive and well.
4
 
 
AT THE ÉCOLE, Lévi-Strauss continued toying with the new ideas to which he was being exposed. He quickly realized that the tools of structural linguistic analysis could be used for any set of systematic relationships. While continuing to analyze kinship data, he turned his hand to another area—the aesthetic properties of indigenous artwork—where morphological relationships opened up the possibilities of a more formal style of analysis.
“Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America,” first published in
Renaissance
, the École’s house journal, saw him groping toward a different method of cross-cultural comparison. Examining Northwest Coast Indian masks, motifs on ancient Chinese art, Caduveo face painting and Maori tattoos, Lévi-Strauss drew out formal similarities. Boas had described Northwest Coast Indian portrayals of bears, sharks and frogs, depicted as if sliced lengthwise, flattened out and inverted into two profiles, facing each other as mirror images. Similar patterns featured in ancient Chinese masks, and bronze urns of the Shang dynasty. “Splitting techniques” were also at play in Caduveo face painting, with its complex axes of inverted patterning, and in the more rigorous symmetry of Maori face tattoos. The parallels were striking: the quartered face, the spirals and frets mirroring across the forehead and blossoming around the lips.
Were these patterns, following Boas, due to the gradual diffusion of cultural traits over space and time? Or could the various “splitting techniques” be related to underlying structures, emerging spontaneously through the ages and across continents? Interestingly, at this stage Lévi-Strauss’s explanation was still more classically sociological than cognitive. Maori tattoos “stamp onto the mind all the traditions and philosophy of the group,” just as the more dislocated symmetries found on the Caduveo faces represent the “dying echo” of the group’s decaying feudal order—a transformation running parallel to similar developments in Chinese art and society.
5
But there was also a cognitive edge. The “common denominator” was dualism. Lévi-Strauss’s analysis boiled down to sets of Jakobson-like binary pairs, stacked up in analogous relationships: representational and abstract art; carving and drawing; face and decoration; person and impersonation.
6
 
 
ON JUNE 6, 1944, Lévi-Strauss switched on the radio in his studio flat in Greenwich Village. Over the hiss and crackle of the airwaves, the announcer read the morning news, leading with the latest events from Europe. At first Lévi-Strauss struggled to understand what seemed like an incoherent jumble, “a kind of soup of words, place names and figures,”
7
but as the truth dawned he was overwhelmed by emotion. Under heavy fire, Allied troops were scrambling up the beaches along the Normandy coast. In a rare display of sentiment, Lévi-Strauss broke down sobbing.
When the Allies had wrested their way off the Normandy beaches, they advanced into northern France, which was once more embroiled in heavy fighting. Soon afterward American and French troops landed in Provence in the south, from where they began an advance up the Rhône Valley and into the Alps. By the end of August, Paris had been liberated and two million Allied soldiers were on French soil. As the fighting continued into the autumn of 1944, France slowly emerged from years of occupation.
The run of events in Europe placed the future of the École libre des hautes études in doubt. As it had been founded as a university-in-exile, it was unclear what its postwar role would be. Negotiations over its future were complicated by a rift between the Gaullists, who saw the university as an adjunct to the French government-in-exile, and those wanting to maintain academic neutrality. After all, there were many francophone academics who were not French—such as Jakobson and Koyré—and who had no particular interest in politicizing the university. Nevertheless, Henri Seyrig, the cultural attaché for the French Committee of National Liberation (de Gaulle’s government-in-exile), following orders from Algiers, tried to bring the École under Gaullist control. Lévi-Strauss supported Seyrig, and when the U.S. Department of Justice asked for the École’s political affiliation to be officially registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, he argued that the university should comply. The measure was deeply resented by an opposing faction led by the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who claimed that this was a threat to the principles of academic freedom and impartiality. In an angry board meeting just after the Normandy invasion, the Gaullists won through, and Lévi-Strauss was appointed as secretary-general.
8
A few months later he was sent to the Directory of Cultural Relations in the newly liberated Paris for talks on the institution’s future.
In the dying months of the war, Lévi-Strauss boarded an American naval convoy, which churned its way through the gray seas of the North Atlantic, docking at the port of Cardiff. On clearing customs, he set off through the narrow lanes for the railway station, passing the rows of low, dilapidated houses, taking in the scenes of wartime dereliction. After his years in exile, he was finally back on European soil, his homecoming somehow intensified by a lonely landing in a foreign port.
Lévi-Strauss took the train from Cardiff across Wales and into England, past barren fields, blacked-out villages and war ruins. In London, the last of the V-1 rockets were still buzzing across the skyline; piles of bricks, gutted buildings and shabby, makeshift defenses belied the closeness of victory. He took another train down to the Channel and crossed over to Dieppe, from where he rode into Paris in an American military truck. It was January 1945. Pockets of fierce fighting continued in Dunkirk, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Rochelle and Royan; severe rationing was still in place, and the
épuration sauvage
was under way: the hastily arranged firing squads, the shearing of women’s hair. After the blazing neon lights of New York City, Paris was a ghost town of rolling blackouts and daily shortages. Horse-drawn carts clip-clopped down the boulevards; street urchins rummaged in garbage cans. Liberation celebrations papered over the poverty and collective neurosis of a people recovering from the rigors of the years of Nazi occupation.
Lévi-Strauss met his parents, from whom he had received no word for more than a year, finding his father aged by the privations of the occupation and in poor health. He caught up on the dismal news. Upon the German occupation of the south, they had been forced to leave their house in the Cévennes and hide in a property owned by René Courtin in the Drôme. In the meantime, the family home in the sixteenth arrondissement had been ransacked, and they had been left with nothing, “not even a bed.”
9
The studio flat at 26 rue des Plantes, where he had briefly lived on his return from Brazil, had also been pillaged—among the losses, the field notes he had taken among the Caduveo.
10

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