Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (49 page)
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
BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
8.63Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Lévi-Strauss had begun thinking about the Bororo mythology more than a decade before he reached the fourth volume of the
Mythologiques
. When he had started on
Le Cru et le cuit
, the choice of the Bororo bird-nester story as the reference myth had been more or less arbitrary—an autobiographical coincidence that had led him to a complex of myths in central Brazil. Now he saw its significance, its pivotal place in the pan-American structures of mythic thought that he had been mapping over the last decade. A simple story of conflict between father and son had ended up containing “the whole system in embryo.”
12
It was as if he had been driven by destiny, or a subconscious urge. “I now understand still more clearly why, of all the available American myths, this particular one should have forced itself upon me before I knew the reason why,” he wrote. The wording is interesting:
forced itself upon me
[
s’est imposé à nous
]—again Lévi-Strauss was presenting himself as an inert receptor, his own mind a sounding board for mythic resonances.
13
Mythologiques
. When he had started on
Le Cru et le cuit
, the choice of the Bororo bird-nester story as the reference myth had been more or less arbitrary—an autobiographical coincidence that had led him to a complex of myths in central Brazil. Now he saw its significance, its pivotal place in the pan-American structures of mythic thought that he had been mapping over the last decade. A simple story of conflict between father and son had ended up containing “the whole system in embryo.”
12
It was as if he had been driven by destiny, or a subconscious urge. “I now understand still more clearly why, of all the available American myths, this particular one should have forced itself upon me before I knew the reason why,” he wrote. The wording is interesting:
forced itself upon me
[
s’est imposé à nous
]—again Lévi-Strauss was presenting himself as an inert receptor, his own mind a sounding board for mythic resonances.
13
Through the tangle of mythic fibers, common themes were now being woven together. The passage from the southern to the northern hemisphere had yielded a transformation from a culinary to a vestimentary code. Raw became naked; cooked, clothed; preoccupations with the body’s innards had transferred to its outer decorations. Even though the myths of the Pacific Northwest Coast dealt with a more sophisticated range of issues—bodily ornaments, trade, warfare, alliance through marriage—at a deep level all were formally analogous. In the end they revolved around perennial problems of a philosophical nature that the myths (and Lévi-Strauss himself) circled around, grappled with and meditated upon, without ever reaching definitive conclusions: the passage from nature to culture and the resulting separation of man from his natural surroundings, heaven from earth.
14
14
Like a collapsing universe, the thousands of pages of analysis rushed toward a point of singularity. “Can we conclude,” he wrote as he wound up his epic study, “that, throughout the entire American continent, there is only one myth, which all the populations have evolved through some mysterious impulse, but which is so rich in details and in the multiplicity of its variants that several volumes barely suffice to describe it?” The question was left begging, but hardly needed to be answered. For Lévi-Strauss, Amerindian myth was one vast conversation murmured from campfire to campfire across continents; a to-and-fro of images and sensations set in logical propositions, which twisted and turned in their passage across the Americas. The world of mythic thought was spherical—whichever direction one set out in, one would return to the starting point; all lines intersected, orbiting through mythological space.
La Pensée sauvage
had found its perfect mathematical form.
La Pensée sauvage
had found its perfect mathematical form.
Nearing the finishing line, Lévi-Strauss switched from
nous
to
je
, from the densely analytical style of mythic exegesis to that of the nineteenth-century philosopher, with its reflections on art, music, its aphorisms and intellectual drama.
15
In the last pages he mounted a final defense of the method that he had pioneered, stressing its embeddedness in concrete, natural processes that modern science was revealing. Even sensory perception was ultimately rooted in logical operations. The scent of roses, leeks or fish was based on different combinations of the seven primary odors—camphoraceous (such as mothballs), musky, floral, peppermint, ethereal (like kerosene), pungent (such as vinegar) and putrid—which were linked to precise shapes of molecules docking with receptor-site counterparts.
16
The faculty of sight worked like a structuralist analysis in reverse: retinal cells, each specialized for particular stimuli, responded to one or other term of a binary opposition—up/down, upright/slanting, moving/still, dark/light and so on—sending the information back to the brain to be processed into an image. “Structural analysis, which some critics dismiss as a gratuitous and decadent game,” Lévi-Strauss summed up, “can only appear in the mind because its model is already present in the body.”
nous
to
je
, from the densely analytical style of mythic exegesis to that of the nineteenth-century philosopher, with its reflections on art, music, its aphorisms and intellectual drama.
15
In the last pages he mounted a final defense of the method that he had pioneered, stressing its embeddedness in concrete, natural processes that modern science was revealing. Even sensory perception was ultimately rooted in logical operations. The scent of roses, leeks or fish was based on different combinations of the seven primary odors—camphoraceous (such as mothballs), musky, floral, peppermint, ethereal (like kerosene), pungent (such as vinegar) and putrid—which were linked to precise shapes of molecules docking with receptor-site counterparts.
16
The faculty of sight worked like a structuralist analysis in reverse: retinal cells, each specialized for particular stimuli, responded to one or other term of a binary opposition—up/down, upright/slanting, moving/still, dark/light and so on—sending the information back to the brain to be processed into an image. “Structural analysis, which some critics dismiss as a gratuitous and decadent game,” Lévi-Strauss summed up, “can only appear in the mind because its model is already present in the body.”
It is a curious paradox in all Lévi-Strauss’s writing that at the very moment he evokes science in his defense, a kind of mysticism is not far behind. “Only its [structuralism’s] practitioners can know, from inner experience,” he wrote, “what a sensation of fulfilment it can bring, through making the mind feel itself to be truly in communion with the body.”
17
It sounded like a religious epiphany—and who can doubt that, as he sat writing the last pages of the fourth and final volume of the
Mythologiques
tetralogy after half a lifetime lived in the rich imaginings of Amerindian minds, he would have experienced some sort of almost religious feeling of oneness, of intellectual euphoria?
17
It sounded like a religious epiphany—and who can doubt that, as he sat writing the last pages of the fourth and final volume of the
Mythologiques
tetralogy after half a lifetime lived in the rich imaginings of Amerindian minds, he would have experienced some sort of almost religious feeling of oneness, of intellectual euphoria?
THE SUMMER OF 1974 found Lévi-Strauss in an exclusive salon being fitted out in the ceremonial robes of the Académie française. Two tailors, one with a pincushion strapped to his arm and a tape measure draped around his neck, fussed around Lévi-Strauss’s thin frame, fitting the famous
habit vert
wore by Academicians down the centuries. They helped him into a white waistcoat, followed by a fitted jacket with tails and heavily embroidered green lapels, and then a long black shoulder cape, fastening buttons, smoothing each item into place. The final touch was the bicorne—a cocked hat covered in black feathers—last fashionable in nineteenth-century military circles.
habit vert
wore by Academicians down the centuries. They helped him into a white waistcoat, followed by a fitted jacket with tails and heavily embroidered green lapels, and then a long black shoulder cape, fastening buttons, smoothing each item into place. The final touch was the bicorne—a cocked hat covered in black feathers—last fashionable in nineteenth-century military circles.
As he stood before the salon’s antique mirrors, Lévi-Strauss looked wooden—awkwardly himself, rather than transformed by such a flamboyant outfit, just as he had in the many publicity shots that he had posed for over the years.
“I can’t say I feel at ease,” he told the fitters as he stood uncomfortably. “I’ll have to practice wearing it.”
“How do you feel? Strange?” asked a journalist off camera.
“A suffocating heat . . . that’s all . . . I feel like a harnessed horse.”
“Apart from feeling hot, how do you feel?” the journalist persisted.
“I like it,” Lévi-Strauss replied without much conviction. “I think men should dress more gaily than they do now. After all, it’s one of the rare occasions in our civilization when a man can dress like a woman.”
18
18
Jean-Paul Sartre had turned down the Légion d’honneur and refused the Nobel laureate on principle—the first to have done so. In contrast, Lévi-Strauss, now in his mid-sixties and already a member of the Légion d’honneur, positively relished taking up the Académie’s twenty-ninth
fauteuil
, vacated by the death of writer Henry de Montherlant, and joining
les immortels
in one of France’s oldest and most conservative intellectual institutions. For Lévi-Strauss, receiving the
épée
(ceremonial sword) was like being entrusted with a Bororo bull-roarer. The importance of tradition, ritual, ceremony, the preservation of culture, of language chimed with his own experiences as an anthropologist. With age he was becoming “more and more British,” as his biographer put it, admiring Oxford and Cambridge, as well as a certain outdated image of England in general, as “a society that still knows how to leave a place for ritual.”
19
(Or at least he liked the
idea
of traditions and rituals—he loathed actually attending ceremonial events, with their interminable speeches and empty protocol. After a presidential dinner at the Élysée Palace, Lévi-Strauss told a colleague that he had only accepted the invitation because he had to, and that he had not said a single word during the whole evening.)
20
fauteuil
, vacated by the death of writer Henry de Montherlant, and joining
les immortels
in one of France’s oldest and most conservative intellectual institutions. For Lévi-Strauss, receiving the
épée
(ceremonial sword) was like being entrusted with a Bororo bull-roarer. The importance of tradition, ritual, ceremony, the preservation of culture, of language chimed with his own experiences as an anthropologist. With age he was becoming “more and more British,” as his biographer put it, admiring Oxford and Cambridge, as well as a certain outdated image of England in general, as “a society that still knows how to leave a place for ritual.”
19
(Or at least he liked the
idea
of traditions and rituals—he loathed actually attending ceremonial events, with their interminable speeches and empty protocol. After a presidential dinner at the Élysée Palace, Lévi-Strauss told a colleague that he had only accepted the invitation because he had to, and that he had not said a single word during the whole evening.)
20
The previous year’s only candidate and the first anthropologist ever to be put forward, Lévi-Strauss had edged in by three votes (sixteen out of a possible twenty-seven), helped by Roger Caillois, with whom he had battled in the 1950s. In a gesture of thanks, Lévi-Strauss asked Caillois to give the reception speech—normally a short, ritualistic heaping of praise on the incoming Academician. Instead, Caillois reserved the last part of his speech for an attack on Lévi-Strauss and structuralism. Alluding to their earlier feud, Caillois said that
Race et histoire
had “perhaps been written too quickly,” but he saved his harshest words for structuralism:
Race et histoire
had “perhaps been written too quickly,” but he saved his harshest words for structuralism:
The structural method does not escape from the social sciences’ original sin, which is to move little by little from plausible conjecture to a kind of inexcusable reductiveness [
déductivité
], infallible in all circumstances . . . It seems to me, however, that doubt has never ceased to torment you. You have been less and less inclined to go beyond pure description. You have taken to task those of your followers whose excesses have alarmed you. You have been frightened by the expansion of structuralism ...
21
In an interesting passage, Caillois defined structuralism as a kind of intellectual/spiritual antimatter: “a collection of intuitions or aspirations . . . which are not in fact a science, but without which science would hardly be conceivable; which are not in the least religious but which no religion ignores; which do not constitute a philosophy, being more abstract and limited.” Structuralism was, rather, a product of a part-empirical, part-fanciful mind-set, “constantly on the lookout for echoes, reflections, harmonies which they sense constitute the framework of the universe.”
22
According to Lévi-Strauss, Caillois’s address was far milder than the written version he had submitted, but which he had subsequently been persuaded to tone down. One wonders, after this outburst, why Caillois had voted for Lévi-Strauss in the first place.
22
According to Lévi-Strauss, Caillois’s address was far milder than the written version he had submitted, but which he had subsequently been persuaded to tone down. One wonders, after this outburst, why Caillois had voted for Lévi-Strauss in the first place.
Many of Lévi-Strauss’s colleagues at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie felt a certain resentment at his election, but for different reasons than Caillois’s. The Académie française was, after all, a French gentlemen’s club of letters (no woman had yet been admitted when Lévi-Strauss was elected)—a stuffy, elitist institution, which did not sit well with the generally progressive tone of the new discipline of anthropology. More and more, though, this was the man whom Lévi-Strauss was becoming. He now owned a substantial property in Lignerolles, Burgundy, with iron gates and a driveway leading up to a classically proportioned château where he spent his summers. After a hearty English breakfast of eggs, bacon and toast, he would go for long walks through the surrounding woodlands. In the afternoons, he would retire to his spacious living room, bathed in natural light from large windows and French doors, where he would catch up on his writing, go through a backlog of correspondence or browse through his seventy-two-volume early-nineteenth-century encyclopedia of the natural sciences.
23
23
As he moved into old age, certain ideas that he had long harbored solidified. His fears of demographic explosion, the homogenizing of culture and environmental destruction were bound up in acid antihumanist and anti-Western rhetoric. “I think humanity is not that different from worms that grow inside a sack of flour and start poisoning themselves with their own toxins well before food and even physical space are lacking,” he said on one occasion. On another, he likened the West to a virus, a “processor of a certain formula which it injects into living cells [that is, indigenous cultures], thereby compelling them to reproduce themselves according to a particular model.” Humanism, an ideology that he had grappled with after the war, subjecting it to a critique that “gradually emptied it of its substance,” became a particular target of Lévi-Strauss.
24
“I don’t believe in God,” he said in the
Time
magazine piece, “but I don’t believe in man either. Humanism has failed. It didn’t prevent the monstrous acts of our generation. It has lent itself to excusing and justifying all kinds of horrors. It has misunderstood man. It has tried to cut him off from all other manifestations of nature.” And in an interview for
Le Monde
, he was more specific: humanism had culminated in colonialism, fascism and the Nazi death camps.
25
24
“I don’t believe in God,” he said in the
Time
magazine piece, “but I don’t believe in man either. Humanism has failed. It didn’t prevent the monstrous acts of our generation. It has lent itself to excusing and justifying all kinds of horrors. It has misunderstood man. It has tried to cut him off from all other manifestations of nature.” And in an interview for
Le Monde
, he was more specific: humanism had culminated in colonialism, fascism and the Nazi death camps.
25
Once more Lévi-Strauss found himself swimming against the tide, this time as a radical conservative. In 1971 he had been invited to give the inaugural lecture of UNESCO’s International Year for Action to Combat Racism, in what the organization expected to be an uncontroversial reprise of ideas he had expressed in
Race et histoire
almost two decades before. But when Lévi-Strauss sent in the text to UNESCO forty-eight hours before the event, René Maheu, the director general, was dismayed. Lévi-Strauss used the address to question whether the fight against racism, as it had been conceived, was not feeding a process of cultural decay—“driving towards a world civilisation, itself likely to destroy the ancient individualism to which we owe the creation of the aesthetics and spiritual values which make our lives worthwhile.”
26
Although vehemently opposed to racism, Lévi-Strauss trod a fine line, arguing that a degree of cultural superiority, even antipathy, between groups was necessary to maintain a distance that would preserve customs and ideas otherwise degraded through contact. The modern world’s embrace of mutual acceptance and multiculturalism was snuffing out the sparks of creativity generated by cultural exchange. The obvious reference was to Count Gobineau’s warnings about the dangers of miscegenation in his racist nineteenth-century tract
Essai sur l’inégalité des races
, a playful homage that was hardly appropriate for the opening of a campaign against racism.
27
Mortified, Maheu gave a long opening address in a desperate attempt take up some of Lévi-Strauss’s allotted time.
Race et histoire
almost two decades before. But when Lévi-Strauss sent in the text to UNESCO forty-eight hours before the event, René Maheu, the director general, was dismayed. Lévi-Strauss used the address to question whether the fight against racism, as it had been conceived, was not feeding a process of cultural decay—“driving towards a world civilisation, itself likely to destroy the ancient individualism to which we owe the creation of the aesthetics and spiritual values which make our lives worthwhile.”
26
Although vehemently opposed to racism, Lévi-Strauss trod a fine line, arguing that a degree of cultural superiority, even antipathy, between groups was necessary to maintain a distance that would preserve customs and ideas otherwise degraded through contact. The modern world’s embrace of mutual acceptance and multiculturalism was snuffing out the sparks of creativity generated by cultural exchange. The obvious reference was to Count Gobineau’s warnings about the dangers of miscegenation in his racist nineteenth-century tract
Essai sur l’inégalité des races
, a playful homage that was hardly appropriate for the opening of a campaign against racism.
27
Mortified, Maheu gave a long opening address in a desperate attempt take up some of Lévi-Strauss’s allotted time.
Other books
Trip Wire by Charlotte Carter
Not Exactly a Love Story by Audrey Couloumbis
Degeneration by Campbell, Mark
Love and Magick, A Short Story Double Feature by Andrew Michael Schwarz
Serving HIM Vol. 6: Alpha Billionaire Romance by Parker, M. S., Wild, Cassie
Battle Dress by Amy Efaw
IF YOU WANTED THE MOON by Monroe, Mallory
Get Some by Pam Ward
Lady Vixen by Shirlee Busbee
Blood Memory: The Complete Season One (Books 1-5) by Perrin Briar