Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (43 page)
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BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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In the book’s final pages, the presence of the figure behind
la pensée sauvage
was almost tangible, like an allegorical character in an ideas-driven novel, as Lévi-Strauss resorted to a string of metaphors and comparisons to explain how he saw the mysterious operations of “wild thought.” He is glimpsed in the Aboriginal intellectual—a stock figure in Lévi-Strauss’s writing since
Les Structures élémentaires
—scratching diagrams in the desert sands to represent his complex kinship systems, likened to a poly-technic professor demonstrating a mathematical proof on a lecture hall blackboard. In the final pages he reappears metaphorically, standing in a furnished room, surrounded by mirrors, each slightly off center, reflecting fragments of furniture and decoration that he has to piece together to somehow form a whole, like
imagines mundi
—the medieval allegories of continents with which scholars adorned maps and bibles.
la pensée sauvage
was almost tangible, like an allegorical character in an ideas-driven novel, as Lévi-Strauss resorted to a string of metaphors and comparisons to explain how he saw the mysterious operations of “wild thought.” He is glimpsed in the Aboriginal intellectual—a stock figure in Lévi-Strauss’s writing since
Les Structures élémentaires
—scratching diagrams in the desert sands to represent his complex kinship systems, likened to a poly-technic professor demonstrating a mathematical proof on a lecture hall blackboard. In the final pages he reappears metaphorically, standing in a furnished room, surrounded by mirrors, each slightly off center, reflecting fragments of furniture and decoration that he has to piece together to somehow form a whole, like
imagines mundi
—the medieval allegories of continents with which scholars adorned maps and bibles.
Lévi-Strauss’s savage was an amalgam of his own tastes and preferences—a mix of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of tradition and the avant-garde. It was his alter ego, fragments of who he was and who he wanted to be. The bond was intellectual. Perhaps he had been attracted to anthropology, he had mused in
Tristes Tropiques
, “because of a structural affinity between the civilisations it studies and my particular way of thinking.”
48
Dreamed up in the library rather than the field, this persona bore little relation to the indigenous peoples he had actually met in the flesh and blood a quarter of a century before. When asked in 2005 by academic Boris Wiseman about his experiences as an ethnographer, Lévi-Strauss was frank:
Tristes Tropiques
, “because of a structural affinity between the civilisations it studies and my particular way of thinking.”
48
Dreamed up in the library rather than the field, this persona bore little relation to the indigenous peoples he had actually met in the flesh and blood a quarter of a century before. When asked in 2005 by academic Boris Wiseman about his experiences as an ethnographer, Lévi-Strauss was frank:
Wiseman:
What in particular did you admire about the Caduveo?Lévi-Strauss:
The ceramics and the body art—they were great artists.Wiseman:
Did you admire their way of life?Lévi-Strauss:
Not at all—they lived like poor Brazilian peasants.[. . .]Wiseman:
Did you speak about France [to the Nambikwara]?Lévi-Strauss:
Very little—the means of communication were very limited.Wiseman:
Did you identify with the Indians you studied?Lévi-Strauss:
No, not at all!
49
The image of the allegorical savage flickered faintly under the gloss of the intellect, pure thought, structure, but in the final pages of
La Pensée sauvage
it was snuffed out. The ultimate goal of the human sciences, wrote Lévi-Strauss, was “not to constitute, but to dissolve man.” Four years later, in
Les Mots et les choses
, Foucault would add a lyrical touch to a similar idea: “Man is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order of things,” he argued. “It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief, to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge.” Under a different configuration of knowledge, he concluded, in one of the most quoted lines from the era, “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”
50
La Pensée sauvage
it was snuffed out. The ultimate goal of the human sciences, wrote Lévi-Strauss, was “not to constitute, but to dissolve man.” Four years later, in
Les Mots et les choses
, Foucault would add a lyrical touch to a similar idea: “Man is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order of things,” he argued. “It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief, to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge.” Under a different configuration of knowledge, he concluded, in one of the most quoted lines from the era, “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”
50
10
The Nebula of Myth
Max Ernst built personal myths out of images borrowed from another culture . . . In the Mythology books I also cut up a mythical subject and recombined the fragments to bring out more meaning.
CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS
1
1
WHEN LÉVI-STRAUSS FIRST TURNED his attention to the analysis of myth in the 1950s, he envisaged a machine—a “special device”—consisting of a series of upright boards two meters long and one and a half meters high on which cards containing mythic elements could be “pigeon-holed and moved at will.” As the analysis moved into three dimensions, the cards would need to be perforated and fed through IBM equipment. The whole operation would require a substantial atelier, along with a team of dedicated technicians working to divine the “genetic law of the myth.”
2
2
A decade later, when he started on his famous myth tetralogy, he worked alone. Footage from the era has him crouched over his writing desk in his apartment, sitting in darkness, apart from a reading lamp lighting up piles of heavily annotated typescripts. Beside him, he stored his notes and references in a filing cabinet, with dividers marking off a hodgepodge of tribes, subject matters, animals and places: “sloth,” “tapir,” “Mexico,” “California,” “moon,” “meteors,” “weaving,” “Kaingang,” “Iroquois.” He was now supplementing his anthropological reading with Diderot and d’Alembert’s
Encyclopédie
, Alfred Brehm’s zoology, Pliny and Plutarch, using an antique globe of the heavens to plot astronomical references. “Throughout the
Mythologiques
project I worked night and day nonstop,” he told filmmaker Pierre Beuchot in a documentary shot soon after publication of the final volume,
L’Homme nu
. “I lost all idea of Saturdays or Sundays, of holidays, not allowing myself to let go of the thread . . . so that I could understand the structural properties of the content’s smallest details.”
3
Encyclopédie
, Alfred Brehm’s zoology, Pliny and Plutarch, using an antique globe of the heavens to plot astronomical references. “Throughout the
Mythologiques
project I worked night and day nonstop,” he told filmmaker Pierre Beuchot in a documentary shot soon after publication of the final volume,
L’Homme nu
. “I lost all idea of Saturdays or Sundays, of holidays, not allowing myself to let go of the thread . . . so that I could understand the structural properties of the content’s smallest details.”
3
By the mid-1960s, thoughts of wooden boards, pigeonholes and computing cards had given way to something far more delicate and conceptual: a mobile of wire and thin strips of paper, looping and bending back on themselves. Lévi-Strauss would hang the mobiles from the ceiling in his office, and they turned gently as he worked through the logical possibilities they represented. On paper, the mobiles translated into notionally three-dimensional graphs of myth clusters. In one example four outer points represented “trusting guest,” “wild virgin,” “incestuous brother” and “adventurous husband”; along one axis ran “rolling head,” “moon” and “rainbow”; along another, “moon,” “spots” and “clinging woman.” A dotted line ran diagonally across the axes, dividing the space into “(+) internal (−)” and “(−) external (+)” zones. Lévi-Strauss plotted myths (M
393
, M
255
, M
401
, etc.) at various locations on the graph, according to their narrative properties.
4
393
, M
255
, M
401
, etc.) at various locations on the graph, according to their narrative properties.
4
Almost half a century on, it feels strange to look back on such a quixotic enterprise and realize that it was the centerpiece of a theoretical movement that dominated the humanities at the time. For a period, Lévi-Strauss’s myth mobiles were mainstream theory, at least in France. But as the enterprise went forward, it became clearer and clearer that this was a profoundly personal project, the outcome of one mind and a mass of material.
Ten years of thought, filtered through his seminar sessions on myth in the 1950s, had given Lévi-Strauss an ear for the dissonances and contrapuntal progressions of mythic narrative. The convoluted plots, the baroque and seemingly irrelevant detail, the way myths appeared to be propelled forward by sequences of rapid, not always fully connected events were by now music to his ears. “I read myths with joy,” he told film critic Raymond Bellour, and he read many—several thousand—folding them into the logical models that evolved over a period of decades.
5
5
Lévi-Strauss had theoretical reasons for choosing indigenous myth as his area of study. Myth represented the mind in the act of spontaneous creation, unfettered by reality. Unlike the kinship structures, whose models were tainted by all manner of sociological factors, myth was pure thought, a faithful reflection of the properties of the mind. In a certain sense myth
was
the mind, unveiled through its own impulsive workings.
was
the mind, unveiled through its own impulsive workings.
The
Mythologiques
quartet was really one massive book, with four enormous chapters.
Le Cru et le cuit
(
The Raw and the Cooked
),
Du miel aux cendres
(
From Honey to Ashes
) and
L’Origine des manières de table
(
The Origin of Table Manners
) appeared in quick succession from 1964 to 1968. After a dramatic pause,
L’Homme nu
(
The Naked Man
) concluded the series at the end of 1971, the final
nu
echoing the opening
cru
of the first volume in sound, meaning and structural position. Lévi-Strauss worked fast, writing hundreds of pages a year, an urgency that he later attributed to his desire to finish the project before he died. He wanted to escape the fate of his intellectual hero, the founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, who had spent decades studying Norse mythology but never published a word before his death. Bogged down in the limitless complexities of the subject, Saussure had only got as far as sketching his ideas in a collection of notebooks, which Lévi-Strauss later read on microfilm.
6
Mythologiques
quartet was really one massive book, with four enormous chapters.
Le Cru et le cuit
(
The Raw and the Cooked
),
Du miel aux cendres
(
From Honey to Ashes
) and
L’Origine des manières de table
(
The Origin of Table Manners
) appeared in quick succession from 1964 to 1968. After a dramatic pause,
L’Homme nu
(
The Naked Man
) concluded the series at the end of 1971, the final
nu
echoing the opening
cru
of the first volume in sound, meaning and structural position. Lévi-Strauss worked fast, writing hundreds of pages a year, an urgency that he later attributed to his desire to finish the project before he died. He wanted to escape the fate of his intellectual hero, the founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, who had spent decades studying Norse mythology but never published a word before his death. Bogged down in the limitless complexities of the subject, Saussure had only got as far as sketching his ideas in a collection of notebooks, which Lévi-Strauss later read on microfilm.
6
Although at the beginning of the project Lévi-Strauss was only in his mid-fifties, a series of deaths of close colleagues had sharpened his sense of his own mortality. Two years after Merleau-Ponty had died of a massive stroke as he prepared a class on Descartes, Alfred Métraux committed suicide in 1963 at the age of sixty-one, after writing a long letter with references to friends, including Leiris and Lévi-Strauss. “It overwhelmed me as it did all his friends,” Lévi-Strauss told Didier Eribon. “But now when I think back on it, it seems to me that his private life was a long preparation for suicide.”
7
Two years later, on the eve of giving a series of talks for the Fondation Loubat on the cosmology of the Pueblo Indians, Lucien Sebag—a young, promising intellectual whom Lévi-Strauss had long been nurturing—also took his own life.
8
7
Two years later, on the eve of giving a series of talks for the Fondation Loubat on the cosmology of the Pueblo Indians, Lucien Sebag—a young, promising intellectual whom Lévi-Strauss had long been nurturing—also took his own life.
8
THE
MYTHOLOGIQUES
WAS THE grand exposition of structuralism, an attempt, as Lévi-Strauss put it in the very first sentence of the first volume, “to show how empirical categories—such as categories of the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the decayed, the moistened and the burned, etc. . . . can . . . be used as conceptual tools with which to elaborate abstract ideas and combine them to form propositions.” After the loose theorizing in
La Pensée sauvage
, Lévi-Strauss was ready to apply his ideas systematically, tracing the algebraic forms of a body of culture. He likened the native communities to a laboratory, his work an experiment designed “to prove that there is a kind of logic in tangible qualities, and to demonstrate the operation of that logic and reveal its laws.”
9
It sounded like a process of distillation, of simplification, a conversion of chaos into order, as Lévi-Strauss liked to say, but in fact the
Mythologiques
series lifted his work to new levels of complexity. The mythic narratives were intricate, but Lévi-Strauss’s analyses could be so difficult to follow that they had to be rendered in pseudo-mathematical formulae, used as shorthand for symbolic arrangements. By the third volume the arguments had become so involved that Lévi-Strauss admitted it took him several reads of a draft of
L’Origine des manières de table
before he fully understood his own line of reasoning.
10
MYTHOLOGIQUES
WAS THE grand exposition of structuralism, an attempt, as Lévi-Strauss put it in the very first sentence of the first volume, “to show how empirical categories—such as categories of the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the decayed, the moistened and the burned, etc. . . . can . . . be used as conceptual tools with which to elaborate abstract ideas and combine them to form propositions.” After the loose theorizing in
La Pensée sauvage
, Lévi-Strauss was ready to apply his ideas systematically, tracing the algebraic forms of a body of culture. He likened the native communities to a laboratory, his work an experiment designed “to prove that there is a kind of logic in tangible qualities, and to demonstrate the operation of that logic and reveal its laws.”
9
It sounded like a process of distillation, of simplification, a conversion of chaos into order, as Lévi-Strauss liked to say, but in fact the
Mythologiques
series lifted his work to new levels of complexity. The mythic narratives were intricate, but Lévi-Strauss’s analyses could be so difficult to follow that they had to be rendered in pseudo-mathematical formulae, used as shorthand for symbolic arrangements. By the third volume the arguments had become so involved that Lévi-Strauss admitted it took him several reads of a draft of
L’Origine des manières de table
before he fully understood his own line of reasoning.
10
Peppered with allusions, quotes and epigrams from antiquity, the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, from Virgil to Chateaubriand, from Balzac to Proust, the books gave off an air of erudition, tempered by the odd tongue-in-cheek aside. At the beginning of
L’Homme nu
, Lévi-Strauss slipped in a citation from
Playboy
magazine, a publication he apparently read and enjoyed, with the one-liner “Incest is fine as long as it is kept in the family.”
11
Brooding chapter headings with a hint of science fiction—“The Instruments of Darkness,” “The Harmony of the Spheres,” “Echo Effects” and “The Dawn of Myths”—created a sense of intrigue. The quartet ran to more than two thousand pages, but the project did not end there. The so-called
petits mythologiques
—
La Voie des masques
(
The Way of the Masks
),
La Potière jalouse
(
The Jealous Potter
) and
Histoire de Lynx
(
The Story of the Lynx
)—would follow Lévi-Strauss into old age.
L’Homme nu
, Lévi-Strauss slipped in a citation from
Playboy
magazine, a publication he apparently read and enjoyed, with the one-liner “Incest is fine as long as it is kept in the family.”
11
Brooding chapter headings with a hint of science fiction—“The Instruments of Darkness,” “The Harmony of the Spheres,” “Echo Effects” and “The Dawn of Myths”—created a sense of intrigue. The quartet ran to more than two thousand pages, but the project did not end there. The so-called
petits mythologiques
—
La Voie des masques
(
The Way of the Masks
),
La Potière jalouse
(
The Jealous Potter
) and
Histoire de Lynx
(
The Story of the Lynx
)—would follow Lévi-Strauss into old age.
There were moments of humility. “However ponderous this volume may be,” wrote Lévi-Strauss of
Le Cru et le cuit
, “it does not claim to have done more than raise a corner of the veil.”
12
While he was working on the third volume,
L’Origine des manières de table
, he told Raymond Bellour that his contribution to the field was modest, amounting to no more than “the turning of a few pages of an immense dossier.”
13
But there were also delusions of grandeur. He situated his work at the head of a vast historical process. As myth faded into the background, Lévi-Strauss argued, its function had been taken up by the classical music of Bach, Beethoven and especially Wagner. The avant-garde had subsequently degraded music’s mythic content, leaving structuralism as the heir to a discourse going back millennia.
Le Cru et le cuit
, “it does not claim to have done more than raise a corner of the veil.”
12
While he was working on the third volume,
L’Origine des manières de table
, he told Raymond Bellour that his contribution to the field was modest, amounting to no more than “the turning of a few pages of an immense dossier.”
13
But there were also delusions of grandeur. He situated his work at the head of a vast historical process. As myth faded into the background, Lévi-Strauss argued, its function had been taken up by the classical music of Bach, Beethoven and especially Wagner. The avant-garde had subsequently degraded music’s mythic content, leaving structuralism as the heir to a discourse going back millennia.
THE FIRST PAGES of
Le Cru et le cuit
stand at the very center of Lévi-Strauss’s oeuvre as one of the most beguiling passages of writing in his career. After the freneticism of
La Pensée sauvage
, the
Mythologiques
series opened with a serenity, an inner calm. It was as if he had reached the plateau of his intellectual life, and was contented. Ideally positioned institutionally, he had found an open-ended project—a journey with no beginning and no end, as he put it—a limitless arena in which to practice his structuralist arts.
Le Cru et le cuit
stand at the very center of Lévi-Strauss’s oeuvre as one of the most beguiling passages of writing in his career. After the freneticism of
La Pensée sauvage
, the
Mythologiques
series opened with a serenity, an inner calm. It was as if he had reached the plateau of his intellectual life, and was contented. Ideally positioned institutionally, he had found an open-ended project—a journey with no beginning and no end, as he put it—a limitless arena in which to practice his structuralist arts.
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