Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (41 page)
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BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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This was Lévi-Strauss at his most arcane, theoretical discourse at its most French. The model, as complex as it appeared, he went on to explain, represented “only a small portion of a cell,” a “minute fraction” of the possibilities, given the potential numbers of individuals, species and parts of the body that could be analyzed. Modeling such a vast array of logical combinations was a task “reserved for ethnology of the next century,” Lévi-Strauss concluded, which “could not be done without the aid of machines.”
In
La Pensée sauvage,
Lévi-Strauss also returned to the Scottish biologist and mathematician D’Arcy Thompson’s
On Growth and Form
, which he had read in the New York Public Library while writing his thesis,
Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté
. It was from D’Arcy Thompson that Lévi-Strauss elaborated on one of the keystones of structuralism—the idea of transformations. D’Arcy Thompson had shown that the form and structure of different species were mathematical transformations of each other. By warping a geometric grid, systematically elongating, squashing or tapering forms plotted onto its coordinates, a tapir’s skull could be transformed into a horse’s, a horse’s skull into a rabbit’s into a dog’s. Antelope, rhinoceros and goat horns; teeth, tusks and seashells were but logarithmic transformations of each other.
La Pensée sauvage,
Lévi-Strauss also returned to the Scottish biologist and mathematician D’Arcy Thompson’s
On Growth and Form
, which he had read in the New York Public Library while writing his thesis,
Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté
. It was from D’Arcy Thompson that Lévi-Strauss elaborated on one of the keystones of structuralism—the idea of transformations. D’Arcy Thompson had shown that the form and structure of different species were mathematical transformations of each other. By warping a geometric grid, systematically elongating, squashing or tapering forms plotted onto its coordinates, a tapir’s skull could be transformed into a horse’s, a horse’s skull into a rabbit’s into a dog’s. Antelope, rhinoceros and goat horns; teeth, tusks and seashells were but logarithmic transformations of each other.
Again Lévi-Strauss took only the flavor of these insights—the idea of mathematically generated patterns and the logic of form—applying them in his own idiosyncratic way. What he found, looking at the panorama of different ethnographic descriptions, was not so much a gradual evolution or seeping influences from neighboring cultures, but systemic structural change using the same overall symmetries and proportions. “I was soon to notice that this way of seeing was part of a long tradition,” Lévi-Strauss recalled. “Behind Thompson was Goethe’s botany, and behind Goethe, Albrecht Dürer and his
Treatise on the Proportions of the Human Body
.”
22
Treatise on the Proportions of the Human Body
.”
22
IT MAY SEEM STRANGE that such a dense and technical book could become a landmark in French thought, but the first and last chapters—a stream-of-consciousness theoretical essay and a polemical attack on Jean-Paul Sartre, respectively—brought
La Pensée sauvage
to life for a broader readership. The first chapter was frenetic. One moment Lévi-Strauss was discussing Hanunóo plant classification, the next he was analyzing the ruff of a lace collar in a portrait of a woman by sixteenth-century French mannerist painter François Clouet and the inherent aesthetic qualities of miniatures. Lévi-Strauss interspersed references to Charles Dickens, the stage sets of silent-era French filmmaker Georges Méliès, Japanese gardens, the Sistine Chapel and cubism with ethnographic descriptions of a dozen different indigenous groups. “Art lies half way between scientific knowledge and mythical and magical thought,” he declared at one point; “the painter is always midway between design and anecdote” at another. It may not always have been easy to follow, but his eclectic approach was compelling.
La Pensée sauvage
to life for a broader readership. The first chapter was frenetic. One moment Lévi-Strauss was discussing Hanunóo plant classification, the next he was analyzing the ruff of a lace collar in a portrait of a woman by sixteenth-century French mannerist painter François Clouet and the inherent aesthetic qualities of miniatures. Lévi-Strauss interspersed references to Charles Dickens, the stage sets of silent-era French filmmaker Georges Méliès, Japanese gardens, the Sistine Chapel and cubism with ethnographic descriptions of a dozen different indigenous groups. “Art lies half way between scientific knowledge and mythical and magical thought,” he declared at one point; “the painter is always midway between design and anecdote” at another. It may not always have been easy to follow, but his eclectic approach was compelling.
There was also a hint of the eccentric in
La Pensée sauvage
. The selection of illustrations ranged from the intriguing to the bizarre. There were Grandville’s nineteenth-century drawings of humans with animal heads, taken from
Les Métamorphoses du jour
(1828-29), along with Charles Le Brun’s seventeenth-century experimental sketches of crosses between human and animal physiognomy. The former were labeled, “The opposite of totemism: nature humanised,” and the latter, “The opposite of totemism: man naturalised,” though neither plate was discussed or even ever referred to in the text. More conventional were two carved stone
churinga
, sacred objects used in Aboriginal ancestor cults. But these were coupled with European-style outback landscapes painted by Australian Aborigines, which Lévi-Strauss described as “dull and studied watercolours one might expect of an old maid” and whose only raison d’être seemed to be a single throwaway comment in chapter three.
23
La Pensée sauvage
. The selection of illustrations ranged from the intriguing to the bizarre. There were Grandville’s nineteenth-century drawings of humans with animal heads, taken from
Les Métamorphoses du jour
(1828-29), along with Charles Le Brun’s seventeenth-century experimental sketches of crosses between human and animal physiognomy. The former were labeled, “The opposite of totemism: nature humanised,” and the latter, “The opposite of totemism: man naturalised,” though neither plate was discussed or even ever referred to in the text. More conventional were two carved stone
churinga
, sacred objects used in Aboriginal ancestor cults. But these were coupled with European-style outback landscapes painted by Australian Aborigines, which Lévi-Strauss described as “dull and studied watercolours one might expect of an old maid” and whose only raison d’être seemed to be a single throwaway comment in chapter three.
23
In among the flotsam of Lévi-Strauss’s mind was a philosophical set piece—an extended comparison between scientific and
sauvage
ways of thinking. Where scientific thought was analytical and abstract, breaking the world down into a series of discrete problems,
la pensée sauvage
sought a total solution. The scientist measured, weighed and modeled at a remove; the primitive dealt directly in the sensual experiences of his immediate surroundings, balancing them off against each other, ordering them into mytho-poetic formulae. In an interview for a documentary shot in the 1970s, Lévi-Strauss described the process of scientific research as a never-ceasing excavation—the breaking through of the surface reality in search of another analytical world behind, which would in turn yield a further world, and so on. “The progress in science consisted in reaching successive levels of more and more secret maps,” Lévi-Strauss went on, “where explanations were found to the essence of the map we had.” In contrast to this “constant probing, penetration,”
la pensée sauvage
was all surface and no depth, taking the environment at face value, but nevertheless fashioning its elements into beautifully balanced and rigorously logical objects of the thought.
24
With this dichotomy, Lévi-Strauss was approaching the core of his own thinking—an amalgam of the sensual and the logical, which obsessed him throughout his career.
sauvage
ways of thinking. Where scientific thought was analytical and abstract, breaking the world down into a series of discrete problems,
la pensée sauvage
sought a total solution. The scientist measured, weighed and modeled at a remove; the primitive dealt directly in the sensual experiences of his immediate surroundings, balancing them off against each other, ordering them into mytho-poetic formulae. In an interview for a documentary shot in the 1970s, Lévi-Strauss described the process of scientific research as a never-ceasing excavation—the breaking through of the surface reality in search of another analytical world behind, which would in turn yield a further world, and so on. “The progress in science consisted in reaching successive levels of more and more secret maps,” Lévi-Strauss went on, “where explanations were found to the essence of the map we had.” In contrast to this “constant probing, penetration,”
la pensée sauvage
was all surface and no depth, taking the environment at face value, but nevertheless fashioning its elements into beautifully balanced and rigorously logical objects of the thought.
24
With this dichotomy, Lévi-Strauss was approaching the core of his own thinking—an amalgam of the sensual and the logical, which obsessed him throughout his career.
In the field he had jotted down tasting notes from the tropics, from the thirteen different flavors of honey that the Nambikwara gathered, whose aromas he likened to bouquets of burgundy, to appreciations of exotic fruits. The
araca
had “a turpentine taste with a fizz of faint acidity,” crushed
açaí
produced a “thick raspberry-flavoured syrup” and the
bacuri
was “like a pear stolen from the orchards of Paradise.” In the forest he had breathed in the chocolate aromas of decaying leaf litter, which made him think of how soil produces cocoa, and how the gravelly earth of Haute-Provence could beget both the floral scent of lavender and the pungency of truffles. It was there that the expedition team had spent three days cooking and eating, improvising haute cuisine in the depths of the forest, sampling hummingbird roasted on skewers
flambé au whiskey
and a ragoût of
mutum
(wild turkey) stewed with palm buds and served with a creamy sauce made from nut pulp
au poivre
. For all his intellectual austerity, his distrust of direct experience, Lévi-Strauss was alive to the senses.
araca
had “a turpentine taste with a fizz of faint acidity,” crushed
açaí
produced a “thick raspberry-flavoured syrup” and the
bacuri
was “like a pear stolen from the orchards of Paradise.” In the forest he had breathed in the chocolate aromas of decaying leaf litter, which made him think of how soil produces cocoa, and how the gravelly earth of Haute-Provence could beget both the floral scent of lavender and the pungency of truffles. It was there that the expedition team had spent three days cooking and eating, improvising haute cuisine in the depths of the forest, sampling hummingbird roasted on skewers
flambé au whiskey
and a ragoût of
mutum
(wild turkey) stewed with palm buds and served with a creamy sauce made from nut pulp
au poivre
. For all his intellectual austerity, his distrust of direct experience, Lévi-Strauss was alive to the senses.
Instead of fighting these apparent contradictions, he tried to fuse them. In doing so he believed he was solving a venerable philosophical problem: the relationship between abstract intellectual understanding and raw sensory perception, between the “intelligible” and “sensible,” as Plato had framed it, or John Locke’s “primary” and “secondary” qualities. A long line of thinkers, from the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus through to Galileo Galilei, René Descartes and Isaac Newton, had asked whether there was some fundamental distinction between qualities that exist independent of the observer—like geometric shapes, numbers, motion and density—and qualities that are subjective—colors, odors and textures, for instance. The idea of red, bitter or rough seemed fundamentally different from measurable, precisely definable entities like a circle, a square or the number three. While the West had marginalized “secondary qualities” in order to establish science, Lévi-Strauss argued that preliterate groups had transcended this debate, welding the sensual and the logical into a seamless whole.
For Lévi-Strauss, aesthetic sensation was the very currency of
la pensée sauvage
, but it was applied according to rigorous principles. Though freed to roam at will, untamed thinking had ended up producing a tidy collection of logical propositions, lining up elements in neat oppositions and inversions—fur versus feather, the smooth and the gritty, noise as against silence, fresh as opposed to putrid and so forth—that Lévi-Strauss would map out in a chapter titled “The Fugue of the Five Senses” in his next book,
Le Cru et le cuit
(
The Raw and the Cooked
).
25
The metaphor was less like the wilds of nature than a Parisian park, with its gravel squares, strips of lawn and rows of topiaried shrubs. His task was to analyze this strange fusion—a logical system built out of pure experience, a grammar of sound, odor and texture, a formal structure made up of perceptions of plants, animals and nature, of bears, seaweed, ants and shooting stars, which he termed “the science of the concrete” (
la science du concret
). “We have had to wait until the middle of this century for the crossing of long separated paths,” he wrote as he wound up
La Pensée sauvage
.
26
Modern thought was engaging with that of the Neolithic, and human knowledge was at last coming full circle.
la pensée sauvage
, but it was applied according to rigorous principles. Though freed to roam at will, untamed thinking had ended up producing a tidy collection of logical propositions, lining up elements in neat oppositions and inversions—fur versus feather, the smooth and the gritty, noise as against silence, fresh as opposed to putrid and so forth—that Lévi-Strauss would map out in a chapter titled “The Fugue of the Five Senses” in his next book,
Le Cru et le cuit
(
The Raw and the Cooked
).
25
The metaphor was less like the wilds of nature than a Parisian park, with its gravel squares, strips of lawn and rows of topiaried shrubs. His task was to analyze this strange fusion—a logical system built out of pure experience, a grammar of sound, odor and texture, a formal structure made up of perceptions of plants, animals and nature, of bears, seaweed, ants and shooting stars, which he termed “the science of the concrete” (
la science du concret
). “We have had to wait until the middle of this century for the crossing of long separated paths,” he wrote as he wound up
La Pensée sauvage
.
26
Modern thought was engaging with that of the Neolithic, and human knowledge was at last coming full circle.
IT TOOK FOUR YEARS for
La Pensée sauvage
to appear in English translation. Rodney Needham, then still Lévi-Strauss’s champion in Britain, gave the job to Sybil Wolfram, an Oxford University philosophy lecturer in her early thirties. Wolfram began work, but immediately fell out with Lévi-Strauss over criticisms he made of early drafts of the first two chapters. She almost left the project at this point, but the publishers persuaded her to complete the translation. When she handed in the script, Lévi-Strauss was damning: “I could not recognise my book as she had rendered it,” he complained in a letter to the journal
Man
. For her part, Wolfram disassociated herself from the heavily edited version of her work that finally appeared in print, produced by several translators working under anthropologist Ernest Gellner, which she felt was “full of howlers, pieces of sheer nonsense, ungrammatical sentences, extreme infelicities, pointless substitutions, often resulting in absurdity and inaccuracy, the loss of allusions I have carefully preserved.” Wolfram later joked, paraphrasing Lévi-Strauss, that the editing process had miraculously succeeded in “turning the cooked into the raw.”
27
La Pensée sauvage
to appear in English translation. Rodney Needham, then still Lévi-Strauss’s champion in Britain, gave the job to Sybil Wolfram, an Oxford University philosophy lecturer in her early thirties. Wolfram began work, but immediately fell out with Lévi-Strauss over criticisms he made of early drafts of the first two chapters. She almost left the project at this point, but the publishers persuaded her to complete the translation. When she handed in the script, Lévi-Strauss was damning: “I could not recognise my book as she had rendered it,” he complained in a letter to the journal
Man
. For her part, Wolfram disassociated herself from the heavily edited version of her work that finally appeared in print, produced by several translators working under anthropologist Ernest Gellner, which she felt was “full of howlers, pieces of sheer nonsense, ungrammatical sentences, extreme infelicities, pointless substitutions, often resulting in absurdity and inaccuracy, the loss of allusions I have carefully preserved.” Wolfram later joked, paraphrasing Lévi-Strauss, that the editing process had miraculously succeeded in “turning the cooked into the raw.”
27
The pairing was clearly no meeting of minds, as excerpts of their correspondence published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of Lévi-Strauss’s works reveal. Wolfram accused Lévi-Strauss of having “an inadequate knowledge of English,” calling his suggestion of the word “structuration” a “revolting Americanism.” At one point she sent Lévi-Strauss a long letter explaining the difference between “contingency” and “chance”; at another, she dismissed philosophical terms like
être
(being) and
devenir
(becoming) used as substantives as “meaningless metaphysical expressions.” She found Lévi-Strauss’s corrections infuriating. “If you do not mean what I put, then I do not understand what you mean,” she wrote in exasperation.
28
être
(being) and
devenir
(becoming) used as substantives as “meaningless metaphysical expressions.” She found Lévi-Strauss’s corrections infuriating. “If you do not mean what I put, then I do not understand what you mean,” she wrote in exasperation.
28
The title’s wordplay produced further problems, with a range of possible permutations in English:
The Wild Pansy
,
Untamed Thinking
or Lévi-Strauss’s own suggestion,
Mind in the Wild
. One of the editors proposed the academic-sounding
Natural Ideas—A Study in Primitive Thought
,
29
but the book would be published as
The Savage Mind
—a distortion of the original—minus the flowers on the front cover and the appendix, in which Lévi-Strauss had placed a series of historical descriptions of wild pansies. (Lévi-Strauss had the last word on the matter in the 2008 Pléiade edition, inserting a quote from Hamlet in English—“and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts”—on the flyleaf.) Still the only version available in English,
The Savage Mind
does indeed have a clunky feel to it at times, but to be fair to the translators, taking Lévi-Strauss’s punning philosophico-poetic prose into English was never easy, and was made more difficult by running disagreements with the author.
The Wild Pansy
,
Untamed Thinking
or Lévi-Strauss’s own suggestion,
Mind in the Wild
. One of the editors proposed the academic-sounding
Natural Ideas—A Study in Primitive Thought
,
29
but the book would be published as
The Savage Mind
—a distortion of the original—minus the flowers on the front cover and the appendix, in which Lévi-Strauss had placed a series of historical descriptions of wild pansies. (Lévi-Strauss had the last word on the matter in the 2008 Pléiade edition, inserting a quote from Hamlet in English—“and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts”—on the flyleaf.) Still the only version available in English,
The Savage Mind
does indeed have a clunky feel to it at times, but to be fair to the translators, taking Lévi-Strauss’s punning philosophico-poetic prose into English was never easy, and was made more difficult by running disagreements with the author.
The Wolfram dispute underlines the enduring gulf between Lévi-Strauss and his British counterparts, Latin and Anglo-American intellectual sensibilities. Lévi-Strauss’s elliptical, poetic style was indeed resistant to more literalist Anglo-American interpretations. His repeated use of hard science metaphors goaded critics who found it impossible to pin down the detail of his arguments and were indeed suspicious that his floral prose masked a lack of rigor.
Part of the problem was a lack of sensitivity to the context in which Lévi-Strauss was working. For him, ethnography worked in the service of ideas, a concept that was familiar to his French intellectual audience but which did not travel well across the Channel. In Britain the high-flown prose that came with the territory was seen as too intellectually showy, but even Lévi-Strauss was happy to admit in the last few pages of the book “there is a little rather false lyricism,” though he never felt it discredited his ideas.
30
30
In an interview in the early 1970s for the journal
Psychology Today
, Lévi-Strauss gave his interpretation of this French/Anglo-American divide:
Psychology Today
, Lévi-Strauss gave his interpretation of this French/Anglo-American divide:
It happens that in France . . . philosophy makes up a sort of vernacular language that serves as a means of communication between the scientific world, the academic world, and the cultivated public on the one hand, and between different branches of research, on the other. This is not true for England or for the United States. I would even say that the philosophical aspect you point to in my work, which is perhaps attractive to some French readers, is a considerable source of irritation to the English and the Americans.
31
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