Read Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Online
Authors: Patrick Wilcken
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Professionals & Academics, #Social Scientists & Psychologists, #History, #Americas, #South America, #Brazil, #Politics & Social Sciences, #Anthropology, #Cultural
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (38 page)
BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
2.89Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
He ended on a wistful note, lamenting the fact that the chair had not been created hundreds of years earlier, when Jean de Léry and André Thevet were writing about the Tupi, still padding barefoot through the forests and beaches of Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay. (He later told Didier Eribon that this was also an allusion to the fact that he had been denied a chair a decade earlier.) “Men and women who, as I speak, thousands of miles from here, on some savannah ravaged by brush fire or in some forest dripping with rain,” he wound up, “are returning to camp to share a meagre pittance and evoke their gods together.” It was to these ragged groups, on the brink of extinction, that Lévi-Strauss as “their pupil, and their witness” dedicated his chair.
31
31
He had entered a rarefied world of tradition and protocol. Merleau-Ponty eased him through the first rituals, providing a floor plan of the chamber where the professors met and reserving the chair next to him so that Lévi-Strauss was spared the embarrassment of sitting in someone else’s place. But beyond the old-world ceremonials lay great opportunities in an elite institution devoted solely to the cultivation of the mind. As the 1960s dawned, Lévi-Strauss’s only official duties were to present original courses every year, with the expectation (backed by resources) that he set would up his own research center.
His dominance in the 1960s and early ’70s would rest not just on his originality and intellectual charisma, but on something far more prosaic—his skills as an institution builder at a time when the French academic system was opening up. As a student he had run a left-wing study group before becoming the personal secretary of the socialist
député
Georges Monnet. In New York he had been head of the École libre and cultural attaché at the French embassy. Back in Paris he was assistant director of ethnology at the Musée de l’Homme and secretary-general of UNESCO’s International Social Science Council. Once elected to the Collège, he set about building up his own institutional empire.
député
Georges Monnet. In New York he had been head of the École libre and cultural attaché at the French embassy. Back in Paris he was assistant director of ethnology at the Musée de l’Homme and secretary-general of UNESCO’s International Social Science Council. Once elected to the Collège, he set about building up his own institutional empire.
Its beginnings were humble. Lévi-Strauss’s research center, the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale, was initially housed in a building attached to the Musée Guimet in the sixteenth arrondissement on avenue d’Iéna, not far from the Musée de l’Homme. Inside the main building, thousand-year-old Indian, Cambodian and Japanese Buddha heads were on display, the fruits of the nineteenth-century Lyonnais industrialist Émile Guimet’s collecting expeditions to India and the Far East. The serenity of the gallery space was far from the realities of Lévi-Strauss’s ramshackle offices—the remains of an en suite bathroom that he shared with Jean Pouillon. “Pieces of pipe still stuck out of the walls, which were covered with ceramic tile,” remembered Lévi-Strauss, “and I had what was left of the bathtub drain under my feet.”
32
32
An adjoining room was piled high with the Human Relations Area Files—a vast paper database covering hundreds of cultures that UNESCO had secured for France, produced by a conglomeration of U.S. universities. The files, which cross-indexed individual cultural features such as methods of food preservation (dried, smoked, pickled, and so forth), aspects of religious systems and kin terms, was a structuralist storehouse, perfect for Lévi-Strauss’s style of work, saving hours of library research. With their emphasis on North America, the Area Files would be crucial as he began looking at the western hemisphere more and more as a single cultural block.
33
So bulky was the accumulation of files that there were fears that the floor would give way under them. Isac Chiva, a pioneer of French rural ethnography who would work closely with Lévi-Strauss as his deputy director at the Laboratoire, remembered their astonishment when Susan Sontag described their cramped rooms as “a large and richly endowed research institute” in her review of
Tristes Tropiques
for the
New York Review of Books
in the early 1960s.
34
33
So bulky was the accumulation of files that there were fears that the floor would give way under them. Isac Chiva, a pioneer of French rural ethnography who would work closely with Lévi-Strauss as his deputy director at the Laboratoire, remembered their astonishment when Susan Sontag described their cramped rooms as “a large and richly endowed research institute” in her review of
Tristes Tropiques
for the
New York Review of Books
in the early 1960s.
34
It was in these less than ideal surroundings that Lévi-Strauss met the then up-and-coming literary theorist Roland Barthes, who was looking for a supervisor for his thesis on fashion. Barthes later remembered being received by Lévi-Strauss on the landing on a pair of worn-out lawn chairs while his friend, the semiotician Algirdas Julien Greimas, waited anxiously in a café around the corner. Barthes returned to the café deflated—Lévi-Strauss had turned him down. The meeting, however, would turn out to be influential. During their talk, Lévi-Strauss suggested that Barthes read Vladimir Propp’s
Morphology of the Folktale
, which was first published in the 1920s but had recently appeared for the first time in English translation. The book’s proto-structuralist analysis of folktales would go on to have a major impact on the development of Barthes’s ideas on “narrativity.”
35
Morphology of the Folktale
, which was first published in the 1920s but had recently appeared for the first time in English translation. The book’s proto-structuralist analysis of folktales would go on to have a major impact on the development of Barthes’s ideas on “narrativity.”
35
Despite early similarities between their work, Lévi-Strauss grew progressively more skeptical of Barthes’s project. “I never felt close to him,” Lévi-Strauss later recalled, “and my feelings were confirmed later by the direction that his ideas took.” In the 1970s, Lévi-Strauss was asked to write a preface to Barthes’s book
S/Z
, a structuralist analysis of “Sarrasine,” a short story by Balzac. When Barthes sent Lévi-Strauss a copy of the book, Lévi-Strauss replied with a short parody of the structuralist method, including male/female oppositions, a kin diagram and the conclusion that two characters in the short story, Filippo and Marianina, were in an incestuous relationship. Even though it was written as a joke, Barthes apparently took the analysis seriously, describing it as “stunningly convincing.”
36
S/Z
, a structuralist analysis of “Sarrasine,” a short story by Balzac. When Barthes sent Lévi-Strauss a copy of the book, Lévi-Strauss replied with a short parody of the structuralist method, including male/female oppositions, a kin diagram and the conclusion that two characters in the short story, Filippo and Marianina, were in an incestuous relationship. Even though it was written as a joke, Barthes apparently took the analysis seriously, describing it as “stunningly convincing.”
36
The letter revealed a mischievous side to Lévi-Strauss, which undercut his reputation as a cold, analytical thinker. Toward the end of her life, Margaret Mead told anthropologist Scott Atran that although Lévi-Strauss appeared “aloof and frail,” “he’s more playful than he lets on and he’ll outlive me by thirty years if a day.”
37
(In the event, Lévi-Strauss survived Mead by thirty-one years.) But his practical jokes were not always shared by their intended targets. In the mid-1950s, André Breton was trying to develop a project on magic. He sent out questionnaires, which involved ranking pictures as more or less magical, to his friends, including Lévi-Strauss. By this stage skeptical of Breton’s dilettantish interest in what he considered a serious anthropological subject, Lévi-Strauss ignored the questionnaire. When Breton sent it again, Lévi-Strauss gave it to his seven-year-old son, Laurent, to complete. Breton was furious, firing off a wounded letter to Lévi-Strauss and later sending him a copy of the resulting book,
L’Art magique
, with a brusque dedication to Laurent.
38
37
(In the event, Lévi-Strauss survived Mead by thirty-one years.) But his practical jokes were not always shared by their intended targets. In the mid-1950s, André Breton was trying to develop a project on magic. He sent out questionnaires, which involved ranking pictures as more or less magical, to his friends, including Lévi-Strauss. By this stage skeptical of Breton’s dilettantish interest in what he considered a serious anthropological subject, Lévi-Strauss ignored the questionnaire. When Breton sent it again, Lévi-Strauss gave it to his seven-year-old son, Laurent, to complete. Breton was furious, firing off a wounded letter to Lévi-Strauss and later sending him a copy of the resulting book,
L’Art magique
, with a brusque dedication to Laurent.
38
HIS REPUTATION NOW ESTABLISHED, Lévi-Strauss was also benefiting from a quantum leap in the exposure of intellectual figures to the French public—the advent of arts programming on television.
Lectures pour tous
began broadcasting in March 1953. It ran on prime-time television, going on at nine thirty at night, on what was then the only station on air. Austere, studio-based interviews featured both well-established and up-and-coming thinkers, including the philosophers Gaston Bachelard and Raymond Aron, the philosophical historian Michel Foucault and the writer Albert Camus, as well as Lévi-Strauss himself. For the first time the broader public could actually see these people—from Bachelard’s flowing beard and straggly white hair to Foucault’s more severe balding pate—and construct a living image to fuse with the ideas.
Lectures pour tous
began broadcasting in March 1953. It ran on prime-time television, going on at nine thirty at night, on what was then the only station on air. Austere, studio-based interviews featured both well-established and up-and-coming thinkers, including the philosophers Gaston Bachelard and Raymond Aron, the philosophical historian Michel Foucault and the writer Albert Camus, as well as Lévi-Strauss himself. For the first time the broader public could actually see these people—from Bachelard’s flowing beard and straggly white hair to Foucault’s more severe balding pate—and construct a living image to fuse with the ideas.
In 1959 Lévi-Strauss was interviewed by Pierre Dumayet, discussing the book
Soleil Hopi
, for which he had contributed a preface.
39
Originally published by Yale University Institute of Human Relations in 1942 as
Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian
, the book became one of the early editions in Plon’s Terre humaine series. It followed the life of Don Talayesva, who had told his story to a Yale anthropologist for thirty-five cents an hour. Seated in a dark studio against the backdrop of what appears to be a semiabstract mural of billowing clouds, stars and serpents, Lévi-Strauss responded with efficiency to interviewer Dumayet’s questions, situating Talayesva’s account with overviews of the Hopi, their history and their contemporary problems. He came across as a highly literate technician. In a curious way this worked, as his relative formality played off against the exoticism of his subject matter.
Soleil Hopi
, for which he had contributed a preface.
39
Originally published by Yale University Institute of Human Relations in 1942 as
Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian
, the book became one of the early editions in Plon’s Terre humaine series. It followed the life of Don Talayesva, who had told his story to a Yale anthropologist for thirty-five cents an hour. Seated in a dark studio against the backdrop of what appears to be a semiabstract mural of billowing clouds, stars and serpents, Lévi-Strauss responded with efficiency to interviewer Dumayet’s questions, situating Talayesva’s account with overviews of the Hopi, their history and their contemporary problems. He came across as a highly literate technician. In a curious way this worked, as his relative formality played off against the exoticism of his subject matter.
Later that year, Lévi-Strauss gave a series of radio interviews to producer Georges Charbonnier, which were broadcast on Radiodiffusion-Télévision française (RTF) in the autumn.
40
In a new departure for Lévi-Strauss, the discussion broadened out from anthropology to contemporary culture, including some revealing discussions about modern art and music. As a young man Lévi-Strauss had been fascinated by the developing strands of modernism. But by now he was middle-aged, and disillusionment with modern art was setting in. For Lévi-Strauss, the great ruptures that had thrilled him in his youth had led nowhere. The path to abstraction had become a story of failure as modern art degenerated into a series of follies and empty aesthetic gestures.
40
In a new departure for Lévi-Strauss, the discussion broadened out from anthropology to contemporary culture, including some revealing discussions about modern art and music. As a young man Lévi-Strauss had been fascinated by the developing strands of modernism. But by now he was middle-aged, and disillusionment with modern art was setting in. For Lévi-Strauss, the great ruptures that had thrilled him in his youth had led nowhere. The path to abstraction had become a story of failure as modern art degenerated into a series of follies and empty aesthetic gestures.
In the Charbonnier interviews he sketched out how he saw this process unfolding. The first truly modern movement, impressionism, was an attempt to push past the studied, academicized representation of an object—the rule-bound conventions of the past—and represent reality “in the raw.” For this it scaled back ambition, retreating from the grand, wide-angled landscapes to the more intimate portraits of rural and urban life—the haystacks, railway bridges and parks. But it was an essentially “reactionary revolution,” “superficial and only skin-deep”—and it was merely trying to refine techniques of representation.
41
Cubism had provided the radical break. Cubist artists were genuinely revolutionary in their rediscovery of nonrepresentational aesthetic meaning—the patchwork of sensual and conceptual associations that hung around a given object.
41
Cubism had provided the radical break. Cubist artists were genuinely revolutionary in their rediscovery of nonrepresentational aesthetic meaning—the patchwork of sensual and conceptual associations that hung around a given object.
Art critic Robert Hughes has said that cubism was based on the idea that “reality is not figure and void, it is all relationships, a twinkling field of interrelated events.”
42
The statement has a structuralist flavor, and the fact that artists like Picasso had drawn inspiration from indigenous artifacts hinted at possible affinities. But as his thought developed, Lévi-Strauss became more and more skeptical of the movement. Whereas “primitive” art was a collective enterprise, embedded in the societies in which it was produced and fused with their ritual and religious lives, cubism was a contrived escape into an individualized aesthetic world. While artists like Picasso self-consciously juggled different styles, producing pastiches of previous ideas as they went, others were retreating into arid abstraction. The outlook was bleak. Across the arts, the West had reached an impasse. The fact that people were “deliberately and systematically trying to invent new forms . . . is precisely the sign of a state of crisis,” Lévi-Strauss concluded. It was possible that the West was even entering an apictorial age in which art would disappear altogether.
43
42
The statement has a structuralist flavor, and the fact that artists like Picasso had drawn inspiration from indigenous artifacts hinted at possible affinities. But as his thought developed, Lévi-Strauss became more and more skeptical of the movement. Whereas “primitive” art was a collective enterprise, embedded in the societies in which it was produced and fused with their ritual and religious lives, cubism was a contrived escape into an individualized aesthetic world. While artists like Picasso self-consciously juggled different styles, producing pastiches of previous ideas as they went, others were retreating into arid abstraction. The outlook was bleak. Across the arts, the West had reached an impasse. The fact that people were “deliberately and systematically trying to invent new forms . . . is precisely the sign of a state of crisis,” Lévi-Strauss concluded. It was possible that the West was even entering an apictorial age in which art would disappear altogether.
43
This was not to say that Lévi-Strauss believed that abstraction per se was always bad. A Mongolian shaman who daubed the walls of a sick person’s house with a mural of semiabstract images representing various episodes from his dreams was an example of aesthetic creation of the highest order. But at the same time modern artists’ attempts to return to this unself-conscious expression through experimentation were somehow reprehensible. “We have become divorced from abstract thought,” he lamented. “This schism is light years away from the world of our so-called primitives for whom each color, each texture, each fragrance, each flavour is meaningful.”
44
44
Lévi-Strauss’s own work straddled these contradictions. His criticisms of modern art were eerily similar to the attacks made against his own work—that it was too abstract, that it had become divorced from its context, that it was no more than self-absorbed aesthetic play. His attempts to model “primitive” culture verged on the self-conscious abstraction that he derided in modernism. Primitivism and Wagnerian romanticism, avant-garde cut-and-paste and preimpressionist landscape painters, classical illusions and modern linguistics—Lévi-Strauss mixed a fogeyish sentimentalism with an avant-garde sensibility. His personal aesthetic preferences, revealed during the Charbonnier interviews—Florentine Renaissance art, Poussin’s epic landscapes, the romantic seaport images of the eighteenth-century French artist Joseph Vernet—were a sedately conservative list from such an experimental theorist and writer. When pressed, he evoked nature as his ultimate source of inspiration: “What made me a structuralist was less a viewing of the work of Picasso, Braque, Léger, or Kandinsky, than the sight of stones, flowers, butterflies or birds.”
45
45
The Charbonnier interviews also featured what would become one of Lévi-Strauss’s best-remembered ideas—the distinction between “hot” and “cold” societies. In a long discussion, he described the differences between tribal and modern European societies.
46
“Primitive” societies lived at a figurative absolute zero. Rituals, kin structures and economies were set on rotations, like the tiny cogs inside a clock, their cultures existing on an eternal loop. “Hot” societies, by contrast, worked on the principle of the steam engine. Powered by “thermodynamic” differentials—between masters and slaves, lords and serfs, or the rich and the poor—they surged forward, spewing out energy. Against the gentle ticktock of tribal life, Lévi-Strauss’s boiler room of modernity was continuously stoked up. The West was like a runaway train hurtling through billowing steam down the tracks of history.
46
“Primitive” societies lived at a figurative absolute zero. Rituals, kin structures and economies were set on rotations, like the tiny cogs inside a clock, their cultures existing on an eternal loop. “Hot” societies, by contrast, worked on the principle of the steam engine. Powered by “thermodynamic” differentials—between masters and slaves, lords and serfs, or the rich and the poor—they surged forward, spewing out energy. Against the gentle ticktock of tribal life, Lévi-Strauss’s boiler room of modernity was continuously stoked up. The West was like a runaway train hurtling through billowing steam down the tracks of history.
BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
2.89Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Other books
Broken World Book Four - The Staff of Law by Southwell, T C
Ophelia's Muse by Rita Cameron
Memoirs of a Millionaire's Mistress by Anne Oliver
Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra by Paul D. Gilbert
Confidential: Expecting! by Jackie Braun
Commuters by Emily Gray Tedrowe
The Lost Stars: Imperfect Sword by Jack Campbell
Runner: The Fringe, Book 3 by Anitra Lynn McLeod
Of Dawn and Darkness (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 2) by Will Wight