Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (35 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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In spite of his earlier rejections, through the second half of the 1950s his star began to rise once more. His financial problems now behind him, he moved back into the sixteenth arrondissement with his new wife, Monique Roman, into a solidly bourgeois apartment block where he lived until his death, and where I would meet him on a dark February morning half a century later. He installed his library, by then a formidable collection spanning the world, arranging his books not alphabetically or by theme, but geographically, with North America above Brazil, Africa under Europe. His new home was consecrated with the birth of his second son, Matthieu, in 1957. “My life had changed,” recalled Lévi-Strauss.
42
42
But the mere thought of Lévi-Strauss as a reporter or novelist is tantalizing. Sadly,
Tristes Tropiques
has remained a one-off. Other than the odd short essay, like his later reminiscences about wartime New York, he would never return to the genre. The passion that drove Lévi-Strauss to write
Tristes Tropiques
was extinguished as soon as it had served its purpose, just as its subject matter—his intense relationship with Brazil in the 1930s—had faded on his return to France.
Tristes Tropiques
has remained a one-off. Other than the odd short essay, like his later reminiscences about wartime New York, he would never return to the genre. The passion that drove Lévi-Strauss to write
Tristes Tropiques
was extinguished as soon as it had served its purpose, just as its subject matter—his intense relationship with Brazil in the 1930s—had faded on his return to France.
TRISTES TROPIQUES
gallops to a close. As if receding into a mythical prehistory, the Bororo, Caduveo and Nambikwara disappear back into their remote forests and scrublands. The Brazilian backdrop changes abruptly to that of the Indian subcontinent, where Lévi-Strauss had recently traveled, the empty South American wastes giving way to the human density of the East. Days become centuries stretched into millennia, as Lévi-Strauss talks about all human history, world religions and philosophy.
gallops to a close. As if receding into a mythical prehistory, the Bororo, Caduveo and Nambikwara disappear back into their remote forests and scrublands. The Brazilian backdrop changes abruptly to that of the Indian subcontinent, where Lévi-Strauss had recently traveled, the empty South American wastes giving way to the human density of the East. Days become centuries stretched into millennia, as Lévi-Strauss talks about all human history, world religions and philosophy.
He reserved his harshest judgment for Islam, a religion he saw as dangerously exclusive and xenophobic, incapable of seeing beyond itself and its own suffocating system. Its austerity, its combination of rigid rules, obsessive cleanliness and the marginalization of women made it “an ideal barrack-room religion.”
43
Part of his revulsion had to do with an uneasy self-recognition. In Islam, Lévi-Strauss saw a reflection of certain tendencies in French thought: the same backward-looking orientation, the same blind faith in abstract solutions, the same dogged application of doctrine and a haughty disdain of other cultures.
44
Though himself a nonbeliever, he was not opposed to religion per se. “I get along better with believers than out-and-out rationalists,” he told Didier Eribon. “At least the first have a sense of mystery—a mystery that the mind, it seems to me, is inherently incapable of solving.”
45
But what he saw as Islam’s doctrinaire approach rankled, and throughout his life he would air his dislike of the religion again and again, courting controversy in a progressively more multicultural, multifaith France.
43
Part of his revulsion had to do with an uneasy self-recognition. In Islam, Lévi-Strauss saw a reflection of certain tendencies in French thought: the same backward-looking orientation, the same blind faith in abstract solutions, the same dogged application of doctrine and a haughty disdain of other cultures.
44
Though himself a nonbeliever, he was not opposed to religion per se. “I get along better with believers than out-and-out rationalists,” he told Didier Eribon. “At least the first have a sense of mystery—a mystery that the mind, it seems to me, is inherently incapable of solving.”
45
But what he saw as Islam’s doctrinaire approach rankled, and throughout his life he would air his dislike of the religion again and again, courting controversy in a progressively more multicultural, multifaith France.
In the final pages of
Tristes Tropiques
, Lévi-Strauss searched for an alternative. He returned to his stay in the Chittagong hill tracts, in a small, impoverished Buddhist village where the soft tolling of the gong mingled with the sounds of schoolchildren rote-learning the Burmese alphabet. Accompanied by village priests, he climbed barefoot through clayey soils up a hill to the
jédi
—a rudimentary pagoda composed of earthworks fenced off by bamboo. A thatched hut on stilts, with woven bamboo flooring, brass statues and a stag’s head, served as a temple. After washing the mud from their feet, they went in. “A peaceful barn-like atmosphere pervaded the place and there was the smell of hay in the air,” wrote Lévi-Strauss. The room was like “a hollowed-out haystack,” and the muffled acoustics, the simplicity, the stillness drew him in as he observed the priests prostrating themselves before the shrine.
46
Tristes Tropiques
, Lévi-Strauss searched for an alternative. He returned to his stay in the Chittagong hill tracts, in a small, impoverished Buddhist village where the soft tolling of the gong mingled with the sounds of schoolchildren rote-learning the Burmese alphabet. Accompanied by village priests, he climbed barefoot through clayey soils up a hill to the
jédi
—a rudimentary pagoda composed of earthworks fenced off by bamboo. A thatched hut on stilts, with woven bamboo flooring, brass statues and a stag’s head, served as a temple. After washing the mud from their feet, they went in. “A peaceful barn-like atmosphere pervaded the place and there was the smell of hay in the air,” wrote Lévi-Strauss. The room was like “a hollowed-out haystack,” and the muffled acoustics, the simplicity, the stillness drew him in as he observed the priests prostrating themselves before the shrine.
46
Repelled by Islam, Lévi-Strauss found an intellectual kinship with Buddhism, which he saw as a corollary of his own philosophical outlook.
47
Like a Buddhist priest, he sought the erasure of the self and the dissolution of meaning. His structuralist method operated on a kind of a meditative loop of unanchored existence, endlessly combining and recombining elements, emptying them of their original significance. Buddhism was accepting of a paradox that underlined all human endeavor, summarized in Lévi-Strauss’s unsettlingly convoluted formula: “Truth lies in a progressive dilating of meaning, but in reverse order, up to the point at which it explodes.”
48
Both Buddhist and “savage” thought constantly edged toward this spiritual zone in which all distinctions between meaning and its absence fall away, where “fluid forms are replaced by structures and creation by nothingness.”
49
The quest was one of total immersion, of unintellectualized embodiment. Like the seamless mixing of the religious and the everyday among the Bororo, who would conjure spirits with whirling bull-roarers in the men’s house, where they also slept, worked and socialized, Buddhism appeared to integrate deep spirituality with everyday life, making each mentally attuned to the other.
47
Like a Buddhist priest, he sought the erasure of the self and the dissolution of meaning. His structuralist method operated on a kind of a meditative loop of unanchored existence, endlessly combining and recombining elements, emptying them of their original significance. Buddhism was accepting of a paradox that underlined all human endeavor, summarized in Lévi-Strauss’s unsettlingly convoluted formula: “Truth lies in a progressive dilating of meaning, but in reverse order, up to the point at which it explodes.”
48
Both Buddhist and “savage” thought constantly edged toward this spiritual zone in which all distinctions between meaning and its absence fall away, where “fluid forms are replaced by structures and creation by nothingness.”
49
The quest was one of total immersion, of unintellectualized embodiment. Like the seamless mixing of the religious and the everyday among the Bororo, who would conjure spirits with whirling bull-roarers in the men’s house, where they also slept, worked and socialized, Buddhism appeared to integrate deep spirituality with everyday life, making each mentally attuned to the other.
The blend was seductive: on its own, structuralism could appear brutalist and reductive, but framed within Buddhism it took on an element of mystery. Just as Lévi-Strauss’s raw materials—the dreamlike Pueblo myths, the colorful Bororo funerary rites, sensual body art and so forth—softened the blow of abstraction, so a hint of mysticism would help popularize his theories.
Yet his outlook could also be bleak. “The world began without man and will end without him,” he wrote. Man’s endeavors are merely a “transient effervescence,” a fizzing chemical reaction destined to burn itself out, ending in sterility and inertia. Anthropology should be renamed “entropology,” he concluded, since it is really recording a process of the breaking down, the dismantling of structures, as cultures like the Nambikwara disaggregate, losing their special forms and ideas.
50
The Nambikwara, as Lévi-Strauss had documented them, were already halfway there, scavenging on the edge of a degraded frontier.
50
The Nambikwara, as Lévi-Strauss had documented them, were already halfway there, scavenging on the edge of a degraded frontier.
“And yet I exist,” Lévi-Strauss wrote, offering a glimmer of hope, only to go on, “not, of course, as an individual,” but as a precarious stake “in the struggle between another society, made up of several thousand million nerve cells lodged in the anthill of my skull, and my body, which serves as its robot.” There was no escape. From both the far-off vision of cosmological time to the intimacy of the self, all was infused with fatalism. Between the “transient effervescence” of human history and the “anthill” of Lévi-Strauss’s skull there could be little hope, warmth or joy. In the end, the prose gathering pace for one last grandiose thought, all that we could hope for was direct, unmediated experience, the kind of raw sensuality that was still central to indigenous culture—the scent of a lily, the beholding of a precious stone, “or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.”
51
51
The final chapters of
Tristes Tropiques
completed Lévi-Strauss’s vision—a melancholic fusion of science, philosophy and asceticism. Just as his more academic work was looking forward with optimism to the new scientific horizons being opened up by linguistics and computing, so a backward-looking, romantic strain was merging with shades of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Proust. This middle-aged bass note resonated through his mature work, introducing the hint of darkness and drama to an oeuvre that was finding its shape.
Tristes Tropiques
completed Lévi-Strauss’s vision—a melancholic fusion of science, philosophy and asceticism. Just as his more academic work was looking forward with optimism to the new scientific horizons being opened up by linguistics and computing, so a backward-looking, romantic strain was merging with shades of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Proust. This middle-aged bass note resonated through his mature work, introducing the hint of darkness and drama to an oeuvre that was finding its shape.
8
Modernism
At the middle of the century . . . an orientation away from mankind began. Once again one looked up to the stars and began an intensive measuring and counting.
KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN
1
1
IN THE MID-1930S, Lévi-Strauss had driven René Courtin’s deteriorating Ford through the rust-colored earth of central Brazil. Out on the flats they had sped past a building site—“half vacant lot and half battlefield, bristling with electronic cable poles and survey posts.” The future state capital, Goiânia, was being built from scratch on an empty plain.
2
By the late 1950s, a little to the east of Goiânia, architects had embarked on an even more ambitious project. Engineers marked out Brasília’s
superquadras
onto a grid ruled into a low basin, a thousand kilometers from the coast. As the site was not yet connected by road, construction companies had to fly in thousands of tons of gravel, steel and machinery at exorbitant cost. Workers poured vast quantities of concrete, sculpting it into convex and concave forms, ramps and curved perimeters. By the end of the decade rows of ministry buildings lined the airplane-shaped design’s central fuselage, a cascade of treeless lawns crisscrossed by multi-lane highways and overpasses. Later, geometric neighborhoods duplicated themselves down the wings.
2
By the late 1950s, a little to the east of Goiânia, architects had embarked on an even more ambitious project. Engineers marked out Brasília’s
superquadras
onto a grid ruled into a low basin, a thousand kilometers from the coast. As the site was not yet connected by road, construction companies had to fly in thousands of tons of gravel, steel and machinery at exorbitant cost. Workers poured vast quantities of concrete, sculpting it into convex and concave forms, ramps and curved perimeters. By the end of the decade rows of ministry buildings lined the airplane-shaped design’s central fuselage, a cascade of treeless lawns crisscrossed by multi-lane highways and overpasses. Later, geometric neighborhoods duplicated themselves down the wings.
Brasília was a peculiarly 1950s vision, built around clean lines and mathematical layouts. The era’s models of tidy apartment blocks on stilts, sparse open spaces studded with evenly spaced shrubs, and cars whizzing along empty tarmac were spellbinding in miniature, but disorienting to scale. Architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer’s original proposal had in fact been based on fifteen freehand sketches and a short statement. The detail—the population studies, economic or social-impact assessments, notions of how this blueprint would actually function as a living city—was absent. To this day, Brasília is a difficult city to walk around in.
In the mid-1980s, half a century after he had driven through the region, Lévi-Strauss stopped off in Brasília on a state visit with President Mitterrand. Remarkably, it was the first time he had been back to Brazil since his fieldwork days, not through lack of invitation or opportunity, but through an odd indifference to the country in which he had begun his career as an anthropologist and which had given him the raw material for his best-selling memoir. When I asked him what he had thought about Brasília, it was difficult to gauge any reaction, positive or negative. Probing a possible affinity between the ideas behind Brasília and structuralism, I met with Lévi-Strauss’s hasty repudiation of any links between his own work and modernism. But what about his earlier association with the group of intellectuals that had formed around Mário de Andrade, a figure central to Brazil’s nascent modernist movement in São Paulo? Lévi-Strauss was quick to clarify that he felt drawn to them for political, rather than artistic, reasons. They were a left-leaning oasis in an otherwise authoritarian desert, he explained.
3
3
Yet Lévi-Strauss was of his time. He influenced and in turn was influenced by a specific cultural moment, a shifting of interests and orientations. In the 1950s a certain austerity reigned. Early modernism’s hectic energy was dissipating, artistic expression cooling off into a more cerebral abstraction. It was a moment of stillness, of formal analysis, of simple furniture and anonymous suits. Echoes of the Lévi-Straussian turn toward disembodied systems were appearing across the arts. His blend of rationalism and mysticism, logic and enigma was in the air. A strain of thinkers, artists and musicians was delving into a more impersonal world of objects, colors and sounds and their relationships.
In a run-down studio in Paris, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was fiddling with primitive switchboards, shredding melody and cutting and splicing sounds, combining lifeless electronic noises into eerie soundscapes in his quest for “a structure to be realised in an Étude.” Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was in Paris as well, composing a new kind of music that used models from the hard sciences to structure sounds spatially. Waveforms plotted on graph paper were converted into unsettling scores such as
Metastasis
(1953-55). Similarly, Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen’s serialism involved experiments with mathematical techniques of composition using abstract templates—grids of time codes, levels and pitch. As Alex Ross observed in his history of twentieth-century music, postwar avant-garde composition fit into a Cold War laboratory-experiment aesthetic. Gone were works named in the neoclassical fashion, the scherzos or sinfoniettas—“the archaic titles dropped from sight, replaced by phrases with a cerebral tinge:
Music in Two Dimensions
,
Syntax
,
Anepigraphe
. There was a vogue for abstracts in the plural:
Perspectives
,
Structures
,
Quantities
,
Configurations
. . . ,
4
as well as for high-tech parodies of tradition, such as Stockhausen’s
Le Microphone bien tempéré
(1952).
Metastasis
(1953-55). Similarly, Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen’s serialism involved experiments with mathematical techniques of composition using abstract templates—grids of time codes, levels and pitch. As Alex Ross observed in his history of twentieth-century music, postwar avant-garde composition fit into a Cold War laboratory-experiment aesthetic. Gone were works named in the neoclassical fashion, the scherzos or sinfoniettas—“the archaic titles dropped from sight, replaced by phrases with a cerebral tinge:
Music in Two Dimensions
,
Syntax
,
Anepigraphe
. There was a vogue for abstracts in the plural:
Perspectives
,
Structures
,
Quantities
,
Configurations
. . . ,
4
as well as for high-tech parodies of tradition, such as Stockhausen’s
Le Microphone bien tempéré
(1952).
In the visual arts, the baroque fantasies of the surrealists and expressionists gave way to a more distant, contemplative posture. On the canvases of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko great blocks of color substituted visual narrative for rumination, while in France
art informel
was putting an abstract gloss onto improvisational techniques. Matter painting, the Color Field approach, Group Zero—Cold War art was emptying out content, delving back into an academic discourse around the very act of artistic expression. This was not the modernist optimism of the first-wave geometric abstract art—the Mondrians and the Maleviches—but rather a dimmed pensiveness, a trailing off. It referred not to some promised utopia, but to a mythic present, the mind in communion with itself. French avant-garde fiction, which became known as the
nouveau roman
, was based on a similarly flattening effect. The novel’s very substance—narrative timelines, plotting and believable characters with motivations—disappeared in a movement, as Alain Robbe-Grillet described it, away from “the old myths of depth” to “a flat and discontinuous universe where each thing refers only to itself.”
5
art informel
was putting an abstract gloss onto improvisational techniques. Matter painting, the Color Field approach, Group Zero—Cold War art was emptying out content, delving back into an academic discourse around the very act of artistic expression. This was not the modernist optimism of the first-wave geometric abstract art—the Mondrians and the Maleviches—but rather a dimmed pensiveness, a trailing off. It referred not to some promised utopia, but to a mythic present, the mind in communion with itself. French avant-garde fiction, which became known as the
nouveau roman
, was based on a similarly flattening effect. The novel’s very substance—narrative timelines, plotting and believable characters with motivations—disappeared in a movement, as Alain Robbe-Grillet described it, away from “the old myths of depth” to “a flat and discontinuous universe where each thing refers only to itself.”
5
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