Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (46 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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The Laboratoire grew into a major international research center, frequented by scholars from around the world, like the influential American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, who spent the late 1960s in Paris. Its focus would always be anthropology, but it was seen as cutting-edge in the humanities and hosted interdisciplinary seminars, including sessions involving the emerging stars of post-structuralism: the Lithuanian semiotician Greimas, the writer on film Christian Metz, the Bulgarian-French literary critic Julia Kristeva and the cultural theorist Tzvetan Todorov.
37
37
Lévi-Strauss’s work was now being fueled by the field reports from the institute’s scholars—a new generation of ethnographers, many born in the 1930s, when Lévi-Strauss was doing his own fieldwork. Before his suicide, Lucien Sebag along with Pierre Clastres had done fieldwork among the Guayaki, Euyaki and the Ayoré indigenous groups in Paraguay and Bolivia. Arlette Frigout was studying the Hopi in Arizona; another group—including Pouillon, Robert Jaulin, Isac Chiva, Ariane Deluz and Françoise Héritier—was bringing back data from field sites across Africa. From 1967, Maurice Godelier was in New Guinea studying the Baruya, a highlands tribe that had been in contact with outsiders only since the 1950s. It was an arrangement that Lévi-Strauss liked—“They are happy to spend a year in a tropical land, and I am happy to stay in Paris and write in my ‘laboratory,’ listening to classical music,” he told writer Guy Sorman.
38
The Laboratoire’s expansion greatly facilitated Lévi-Strauss’s own work. He now had a large staff supporting the
Mythologiques
project—Pouillon transcribing his lectures, Isac Chiva along with Lévi-Strauss’s wife, Monique, reading and correcting early drafts, and other researchers compiling myths.
38
The Laboratoire’s expansion greatly facilitated Lévi-Strauss’s own work. He now had a large staff supporting the
Mythologiques
project—Pouillon transcribing his lectures, Isac Chiva along with Lévi-Strauss’s wife, Monique, reading and correcting early drafts, and other researchers compiling myths.
But on an intellectual level, the sudden vogue for structuralism rankled. As soon as Lévi-Strauss hit the spotlight, he began publicly distancing himself from what he described as a “journalistic tic” of associating his work with the other thinkers—Lacan, Foucault, Barthes—with whom he was constantly being grouped.
39
Interviewed by de Gramont for the
New York Times
piece, he was forthright in his rejection of his new cult status:
39
Interviewed by de Gramont for the
New York Times
piece, he was forthright in his rejection of his new cult status:
In the sense in which it is understood today by French opinion, I am not a structuralist . . . The best way to explain the current infatuation with structuralism is that French intellectuals and the cultured French public need new playthings every 10 or 15 years. Let’s make one thing very clear. I have never guided nor directed any movement or doctrine. I pursue my work in almost total isolation, surrounded only by a team of ethnologists. As for the others, I don’t want to name names, but to pronounce the name of structuralism in connection with certain philosophers and literary people, no matter how talented or intelligent they may be, seems to be a case of total confusion. I have the greatest admiration for the intelligence, the culture and the talent of a man like Foucault, but I don’t see the slightest resemblance between what he does and what I do.
40
The only true structuralists, according to Lévi-Strauss, were himself, the linguist Émile Benveniste and the mythographer and comparative philologist Georges Dumézil.
41
It was a strange choice. Although he clearly felt an intellectual kinship with Benveniste and Dumézil, who were colleagues and friends, Lévi-Strauss in fact rarely referenced them in his own work, which had an altogether more avant-garde flavor.
41
It was a strange choice. Although he clearly felt an intellectual kinship with Benveniste and Dumézil, who were colleagues and friends, Lévi-Strauss in fact rarely referenced them in his own work, which had an altogether more avant-garde flavor.
What Lévi-Strauss could not see was that the cult around him and his work was in part his own making. Not only was he appearing a great deal in the media, but his mature work introduced a mystical feel to what was already exotic material. Reading Lévi-Strauss—like reading parts of Foucault or Lacan—there was a sense of a prophet hinting at deep truths.
42
Lévi-Strauss may have felt that he was being crudely misrepresented. “Structuralism, sanely practiced, doesn’t carry a message, it doesn’t hold a master key, it doesn’t try to formulate a new conception of the world or even mankind; it doesn’t want to found a therapy or a philosophy,” he told a journalist from
Le Monde
. But the very fact that he felt the need to deny any greater meaning to his work spoke volumes.
42
Lévi-Strauss may have felt that he was being crudely misrepresented. “Structuralism, sanely practiced, doesn’t carry a message, it doesn’t hold a master key, it doesn’t try to formulate a new conception of the world or even mankind; it doesn’t want to found a therapy or a philosophy,” he told a journalist from
Le Monde
. But the very fact that he felt the need to deny any greater meaning to his work spoke volumes.
Even professional anthropologists were not immune to the charismatic aspects of Lévi-Strauss’s thought. Claude Meillassoux remembered attending Lévi-Strauss’s seminars at the height of the
Mythologiques
project:
Mythologiques
project:
I went to Lévi-Strauss’s courses at the Collège de France. He was the king who opened the door; the moment it seemed the philosophers’ stone had been found, he shut the door again and took up another subject in the next seminar. Still, it was fascinating because he came up with intellectually stimulating comparisons and combinations.
43
At his most expansive, Lévi-Strauss talked in vast tracts of time, about Nature with a capital
N,
universal modes of thought, Buddhism, the death of art and the elimination of the self. Yet in his own mind he was a mere artisan of cultural inquiry, a scholar patiently documenting and analyzing indigenous myth. The more he protested, the more commentators and critics saw the outlines of a unified discourse that cut across not just the humanities, but contemporary culture and politics.
N,
universal modes of thought, Buddhism, the death of art and the elimination of the self. Yet in his own mind he was a mere artisan of cultural inquiry, a scholar patiently documenting and analyzing indigenous myth. The more he protested, the more commentators and critics saw the outlines of a unified discourse that cut across not just the humanities, but contemporary culture and politics.
Some saw the rise of structuralism as not simply the birth of a new intellectual movement, but a reflection of contemporary France. After the traumatic end of the war in Algeria, France had entered a period of stasis, headed by the elderly, sclerotically conservative General de Gaulle. Long buffeted by historical forces in the twentieth century, the country was returning to its provincial roots while quietly modernizing. Structuralism’s closed, inert systems fit a time when French history was thinning out, cooling, slowing down; its appeals to science, mathematics and geometry suited a technocratic age. As de Gramont put it in the
New York Times
, “Despite pronouncements of General de Gaulle in both hemispheres, France no longer has much influence in world affairs. De Gaulle seems in fact to want to freeze history . . . perhaps he will be remembered as the first structuralist chief of state.”
44
New York Times
, “Despite pronouncements of General de Gaulle in both hemispheres, France no longer has much influence in world affairs. De Gaulle seems in fact to want to freeze history . . . perhaps he will be remembered as the first structuralist chief of state.”
44
The argument was given a political twist in a piece by François Furet writing for the left-liberal journal
Preuves
. Furet linked the rise of structuralism with the decline of Marxist political aspiration. Revolution was no longer in the air, de Gaulle’s smothering orderliness having silenced the Left.
45
Sartre, finding his footing after the attacks in
La Pensée sauvage
, put it more strongly—structuralism was “the last barrier that the
bourgeoisie
can still erect against Marx.”
46
Preuves
. Furet linked the rise of structuralism with the decline of Marxist political aspiration. Revolution was no longer in the air, de Gaulle’s smothering orderliness having silenced the Left.
45
Sartre, finding his footing after the attacks in
La Pensée sauvage
, put it more strongly—structuralism was “the last barrier that the
bourgeoisie
can still erect against Marx.”
46
AS THE 1960S WORE ON, Lévi-Strauss was drawn deeper and deeper into the
Mythologiques
project. His identification with his work was complete. He rose at five each morning and entered into a communion with the indigenous groups he was working on, inhabiting their world and their myths “as if in a fairytale.”
47
The process was one of absolute immersion. “The myths reconstitute themselves through my mediation,” Lévi-Strauss told Raymond Bellour. “I try to be the place through which the myths pass. I allowed myself to be entirely and totally penetrated by the matter of the myths. I mean the myths existed more than I did during that period.”
Mythologiques
project. His identification with his work was complete. He rose at five each morning and entered into a communion with the indigenous groups he was working on, inhabiting their world and their myths “as if in a fairytale.”
47
The process was one of absolute immersion. “The myths reconstitute themselves through my mediation,” Lévi-Strauss told Raymond Bellour. “I try to be the place through which the myths pass. I allowed myself to be entirely and totally penetrated by the matter of the myths. I mean the myths existed more than I did during that period.”
Lévi-Strauss likened mythic elements to atoms, molecules, crystals and fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope, but in reality his method relied on intuition, flair and intellectual artistry—even chance. “You have to let the myth incubate for days, weeks, sometimes months,” he said in the 1980s, “before suddenly something clicks.”
48
He also spoke of making notes on cards and then dealing them out at random in the hope of finding unexpected correlations.
49
The artistic approach was seductive, but left many professional anthropologists—particularly Anglo-American ones—cold.
48
He also spoke of making notes on cards and then dealing them out at random in the hope of finding unexpected correlations.
49
The artistic approach was seductive, but left many professional anthropologists—particularly Anglo-American ones—cold.
By the second volume of the
Mythologiques
quartet,
Du miel aux cendres
, some were losing patience. British anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis, then a professor at Harvard, was well placed to produce a critique of the evolving
Mythologiques
project. He was a Brazilianist who had done fieldwork among the Xavante and the neighboring Xerente in the mid-1950s—both Ge groups of central Brazil, closely related to the Bororo and squarely in the path of Lévi-Strauss’s analytical sweep. Although sympathetic to the structuralist approach, in 1960 he had written a detailed criticism of Lévi-Strauss’s essay “Do Dual Organizations Exist?” questioning him on both ethnographic and theoretical grounds, to which Lévi-Strauss had responded with a long and at times bruising rebuttal.
50
Mythologiques
quartet,
Du miel aux cendres
, some were losing patience. British anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis, then a professor at Harvard, was well placed to produce a critique of the evolving
Mythologiques
project. He was a Brazilianist who had done fieldwork among the Xavante and the neighboring Xerente in the mid-1950s—both Ge groups of central Brazil, closely related to the Bororo and squarely in the path of Lévi-Strauss’s analytical sweep. Although sympathetic to the structuralist approach, in 1960 he had written a detailed criticism of Lévi-Strauss’s essay “Do Dual Organizations Exist?” questioning him on both ethnographic and theoretical grounds, to which Lévi-Strauss had responded with a long and at times bruising rebuttal.
50
In a review for
American Anthropologist
Maybury-Lewis described reading
Du miel aux cendres
as “one of the most exasperatingly onerous tasks I can remember assuming . . . What was pardonably experimental in
Le Cru et le cuit
,” he went on, “becomes frankly irritating in its sequel.”
Du miel aux cendres
was, indeed, a demanding book, which took Lévi-Strauss’s arguments further and further away from commonsense interpretation. Extending his first-volume investigations into the origin of cooking, Lévi-Strauss injected two further symmetrically opposed elements, honey and tobacco. Honey as a foodstuff found ready-made in nature was “less than cooked,” positioned at “the near-side of cooking”; tobacco, being “more than cooked”—in fact vaporized into ashes and smoke—occupied a structural position at the “far-side of cooking.” They were sensually opposed, one wet and viscous, the other dry and crumbly, leading to further oppositions between rain and drought, glut and fasting. Honey, as nature’s temptation, represented the descent to the earth; tobacco, through the wafting of smoke upward, the ascent to the heavens—hence the interplay in myths between high/low, sky/earth, world/heaven. As Lévi-Strauss struck out beyond the core of Amerindian myths he had examined in
Le Cru et le cuit
, another, more fundamental set of oppositions was appearing: the logic of forms. Container/contained, empty/full, inside/out were thematic—as seen, for example, in the proliferation of empty and filled gourds; or, in a more complex contrast, in the tree trunk stripped of its bark set against bamboo: one a solid cylinder, the other a hollow envelope; one with an outer absence, the other an inner void.
Du miel aux cendres
had more mathematical formulae and
pensée sauvage
logic, as well as moments of poetry: frog is to bee as wet is to dry, for instance.
American Anthropologist
Maybury-Lewis described reading
Du miel aux cendres
as “one of the most exasperatingly onerous tasks I can remember assuming . . . What was pardonably experimental in
Le Cru et le cuit
,” he went on, “becomes frankly irritating in its sequel.”
Du miel aux cendres
was, indeed, a demanding book, which took Lévi-Strauss’s arguments further and further away from commonsense interpretation. Extending his first-volume investigations into the origin of cooking, Lévi-Strauss injected two further symmetrically opposed elements, honey and tobacco. Honey as a foodstuff found ready-made in nature was “less than cooked,” positioned at “the near-side of cooking”; tobacco, being “more than cooked”—in fact vaporized into ashes and smoke—occupied a structural position at the “far-side of cooking.” They were sensually opposed, one wet and viscous, the other dry and crumbly, leading to further oppositions between rain and drought, glut and fasting. Honey, as nature’s temptation, represented the descent to the earth; tobacco, through the wafting of smoke upward, the ascent to the heavens—hence the interplay in myths between high/low, sky/earth, world/heaven. As Lévi-Strauss struck out beyond the core of Amerindian myths he had examined in
Le Cru et le cuit
, another, more fundamental set of oppositions was appearing: the logic of forms. Container/contained, empty/full, inside/out were thematic—as seen, for example, in the proliferation of empty and filled gourds; or, in a more complex contrast, in the tree trunk stripped of its bark set against bamboo: one a solid cylinder, the other a hollow envelope; one with an outer absence, the other an inner void.
Du miel aux cendres
had more mathematical formulae and
pensée sauvage
logic, as well as moments of poetry: frog is to bee as wet is to dry, for instance.
But Maybury-Lewis was not convinced. Too often the oppositions felt forced, only tenuously grounded in the ethnography. Lévi-Strauss seemed more intent on closing his own logical circuits than on faithfully rendering the beliefs of the indigenous peoples he was covering. Part of the problem was his prose style, which glided over contradictions, assumptions and unlikely associative leaps, “just as a conjurer’s patter distracts attention from what is really happening.”
51
51
Like Leach in his criticisms of
Les Structures élémentaires
, Maybury-Lewis’s own fieldwork put him in a position to directly challenge Lévi-Strauss’s use of central Brazilian ethnography. A key structural feature of central Brazilian mythology in the first two volumes of the
Mythologiques
quartet was the fact that the jaguar (who often appears as the keeper of fire, the ur-figure in the origin of cooking) has a human wife. Lévi-Strauss drew the feature from a parenthesis in one version of a Kayapó myth, and then went on to apply it to a whole string of other myths. But according to Maybury-Lewis, informants from the Kayapó, Apinayé, Xerente and Xavante peoples categorically denied the link, stating that the jaguar’s wife was in fact a jaguar.
Les Structures élémentaires
, Maybury-Lewis’s own fieldwork put him in a position to directly challenge Lévi-Strauss’s use of central Brazilian ethnography. A key structural feature of central Brazilian mythology in the first two volumes of the
Mythologiques
quartet was the fact that the jaguar (who often appears as the keeper of fire, the ur-figure in the origin of cooking) has a human wife. Lévi-Strauss drew the feature from a parenthesis in one version of a Kayapó myth, and then went on to apply it to a whole string of other myths. But according to Maybury-Lewis, informants from the Kayapó, Apinayé, Xerente and Xavante peoples categorically denied the link, stating that the jaguar’s wife was in fact a jaguar.
Aside from ethnographic nitpicking, Maybury-Lewis found the whole basis of the project unsatisfactory. Despite his invocations of science, Lévi-Strauss’s propositions, as highly idiosyncratic interpretations, were essentially unprovable. So broad was his interpretive scope that a whole range of meanings could be elicited. As novelist John Updike wrote in the
New Yorker
, “With such a hunting license granted, parallels and homologies are easy to bag—child’s play for a brain as agile as M. Lévi-Strauss.”
52
But against his better judgment, Maybury-Lewis could not help feeling admiration for Lévi-Strauss’s extraordinary project: “Even if these [ideas] are unprovable or unproven, this does not necessarily mean that they are inconsiderable or even implausible. This is why
Du miel aux cendres
is so tantalizing. There is so much that feels right.”
53
New Yorker
, “With such a hunting license granted, parallels and homologies are easy to bag—child’s play for a brain as agile as M. Lévi-Strauss.”
52
But against his better judgment, Maybury-Lewis could not help feeling admiration for Lévi-Strauss’s extraordinary project: “Even if these [ideas] are unprovable or unproven, this does not necessarily mean that they are inconsiderable or even implausible. This is why
Du miel aux cendres
is so tantalizing. There is so much that feels right.”
53
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