Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (51 page)
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BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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Lévi-Strauss still had drawers full of ideas, offcuts from the
Mythologiques
project, avenues never pursued, outlines of books he had never written. Nevertheless, he felt his work was nearing its end. Maranda remembers Lévi-Strauss’s telling him after the publication of
La Voie des masques
that this would be his last book. But after so many years at his desk, Lévi-Strauss found the idea of not writing existentially difficult. “Working doesn’t make me any happier,” he told Didier Eribon. “But at least it makes the time pass.”
39
Mythologiques
project, avenues never pursued, outlines of books he had never written. Nevertheless, he felt his work was nearing its end. Maranda remembers Lévi-Strauss’s telling him after the publication of
La Voie des masques
that this would be his last book. But after so many years at his desk, Lévi-Strauss found the idea of not writing existentially difficult. “Working doesn’t make me any happier,” he told Didier Eribon. “But at least it makes the time pass.”
39
IN DECEMBER 1977, Lévi-Strauss recorded the Massey Lectures, a series of five talks in English for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s program
Ideas
. “Once again I was forced to realise how poor my English was . . . ,” he later lamented, “disgusted as I am even by my broadcasts in French.”
40
He actually spoke English fluently, albeit with a slow delivery and a thick French accent, and in this case the simplifying effect of expressing himself in a second language worked in his favor. The lectures, published as
Myth and Meaning
, stand out as one of the clearest expositions of Lévi-Strauss’s thought. In among the familiar ideas was a deflating humility. Structuralism was but a “very faint and pale imitation of what the hard sciences are doing.” After ten books and scores of articles, his efforts boiled down to a simple and extremely modest claim: “My problem was trying to find out if there was some kind of order behind this apparent disorder—that’s all. And I don’t claim that there are conclusions to be drawn.”
41
Ideas
. “Once again I was forced to realise how poor my English was . . . ,” he later lamented, “disgusted as I am even by my broadcasts in French.”
40
He actually spoke English fluently, albeit with a slow delivery and a thick French accent, and in this case the simplifying effect of expressing himself in a second language worked in his favor. The lectures, published as
Myth and Meaning
, stand out as one of the clearest expositions of Lévi-Strauss’s thought. In among the familiar ideas was a deflating humility. Structuralism was but a “very faint and pale imitation of what the hard sciences are doing.” After ten books and scores of articles, his efforts boiled down to a simple and extremely modest claim: “My problem was trying to find out if there was some kind of order behind this apparent disorder—that’s all. And I don’t claim that there are conclusions to be drawn.”
41
When Lévi-Strauss finally retired in 1982, leaving behind him a career spanning half a century, structuralism was petering out. The following year he published his third and final book of essay compilations.
Anthropologie structurale deux
had come out in 1973, but this time around Lévi-Strauss felt he could not follow it up with a book entitled
Anthropologie structurale trois
. “The word ‘Structuralism’ had become so degraded and was the victim of such abuse that nobody knew what it meant,” he told Eribon. “The word had lost its content.”
42
The book, dedicated to Roman Jakobson who had died the previous year, ended up with the elegiac title
Le Regard éloigné
(
The View from Afar
).
Anthropologie structurale deux
had come out in 1973, but this time around Lévi-Strauss felt he could not follow it up with a book entitled
Anthropologie structurale trois
. “The word ‘Structuralism’ had become so degraded and was the victim of such abuse that nobody knew what it meant,” he told Eribon. “The word had lost its content.”
42
The book, dedicated to Roman Jakobson who had died the previous year, ended up with the elegiac title
Le Regard éloigné
(
The View from Afar
).
Interviewed in 1985 by the anthropologist Bernadette Bucher, a former student of his, even Lévi-Strauss gave off a certain ambivalence about his chosen career. “If I may ask, what interests you at present?” Bucher floated, to which Lévi-Strauss responded:
I don’t know. Stage-setting. Once I had a chance to make stage sets, and I never had such fun in my life as when I was working on the stage, not only with carpenters and painters but technicians as well, setting the lightings and that sort of thing. I have a kind of repressed vocation for manual work and if I could . . . Anyway I am too old and there is no chance of anything of the kind coming up, so I will remain an anthropologist to the end of my life.
43
Structuralism may have been on the wane, but Lévi-Strauss’s reputation in France was stronger than ever. After the death of Jean-Paul Sartre in 1980, the literary magazine
Lire
asked six hundred intellectuals, politicians and students to nominate the three most influential contemporary thinkers. Lévi-Strauss topped the poll, followed by Raymond Aron and Michel Foucault, with Jacques Lacan and Simone de Beauvoir close behind. The first half of the 1980s swept away the competition. In February 1980, Roland Barthes died in the hospital after being struck by a delivery van as he crossed the rue des Écoles, near the Collège de France. The following year Jacques Lacan died at the age of eighty. Jakobson was the next to go, in 1982, followed by Aron in 1983, Foucault in 1984, Braudel in 1985 and Dumézil and de Beauvoir in 1986. As the 1980s drew to a close, Lévi-Strauss remained one of the only living representatives of an extraordinary postwar intellectual generation.
Lire
asked six hundred intellectuals, politicians and students to nominate the three most influential contemporary thinkers. Lévi-Strauss topped the poll, followed by Raymond Aron and Michel Foucault, with Jacques Lacan and Simone de Beauvoir close behind. The first half of the 1980s swept away the competition. In February 1980, Roland Barthes died in the hospital after being struck by a delivery van as he crossed the rue des Écoles, near the Collège de France. The following year Jacques Lacan died at the age of eighty. Jakobson was the next to go, in 1982, followed by Aron in 1983, Foucault in 1984, Braudel in 1985 and Dumézil and de Beauvoir in 1986. As the 1980s drew to a close, Lévi-Strauss remained one of the only living representatives of an extraordinary postwar intellectual generation.
IN OCTOBER 1985, Lévi-Strauss returned to Brazil on a five-day state visit, accompanying the then president François Mitterrand. The entourage visited São Paulo and Brasília, where it was received by Brazilian president José Sarney. While in São Paulo, in among the stream of official meetings, dinners and photo opportunities, Lévi-Strauss managed to escape one morning, taking a taxi down to the Avenida Paulista in search of his old house on Cincinato Braga. The São Paulo he had known and loved in his youth, with its rolling hills and colonial architecture, had all but disappeared. Viaducts now connected the hilltops; highways filled in the ravines. Any sense of natural undulation had been eliminated by the high-rise blocks, fitted into the landscape like the levers of a lock over a key. The city, teeming with buses, trams and cars, had grown more than fifteenfold. Lévi-Strauss ended up stuck in a traffic jam and was forced to turn back.
In a trip organized by the national newspaper
Estado de São Paulo
, he was flown in a light aircraft from Rondonópolis in Mato Grosso out to the Bororo village where he had carried out fieldwork in the mid-1930s. Arriving over the site, the plane circled over half-cleared scrub, clumps of forest and a muddy river looping back and forth into the distance. Lévi-Strauss could just make out a group of Bororo huts set in a clearing when the pilot told him over the din of the engines that, although he could land, he would not be able to take off again. It was another abortive return to the past. Lévi-Strauss’s only brush with the Bororo would be from above, as he peered down at the village. The aerial view was not unlike the bicycle-wheel-like plans he had reproduced in his books and articles; straggly dirt paths radiated from the longhouse at the hub out to the huts positioned around the rim. After half a century’s absence, it seemed like an anticlimax. Another two decades on, I asked him if he was disappointed by Brazil. “No,” he replied. “I was moved.”
44
Estado de São Paulo
, he was flown in a light aircraft from Rondonópolis in Mato Grosso out to the Bororo village where he had carried out fieldwork in the mid-1930s. Arriving over the site, the plane circled over half-cleared scrub, clumps of forest and a muddy river looping back and forth into the distance. Lévi-Strauss could just make out a group of Bororo huts set in a clearing when the pilot told him over the din of the engines that, although he could land, he would not be able to take off again. It was another abortive return to the past. Lévi-Strauss’s only brush with the Bororo would be from above, as he peered down at the village. The aerial view was not unlike the bicycle-wheel-like plans he had reproduced in his books and articles; straggly dirt paths radiated from the longhouse at the hub out to the huts positioned around the rim. After half a century’s absence, it seemed like an anticlimax. Another two decades on, I asked him if he was disappointed by Brazil. “No,” he replied. “I was moved.”
44
For such an inquisitive mind, it seems extraordinary that Lévi-Strauss had never returned to Brazil, even to lecture or attend a conference, and that when he did return it would be in this stage-managed state visit as a representative of France, rather than on his own terms. In a similar way, he had waited until the very end of his academic career to visit British Columbia, another region whose art and ethnography he had heavily drawn on throughout his writing life. When he was there, he took a ferry across to Vancouver Island, and while surveying the forested coves from the deck he told Pierre Maranda, “the ecology is so important for me, and I think it plays such a part in the myth that there are a lot of things that should be not only seen but lived in, if I may say, so as to understand them.”
45
The sentiment was there, but the desire to follow it through was somehow absent.
45
The sentiment was there, but the desire to follow it through was somehow absent.
This lack of curiosity for firsthand cultural experiences was belied by his late fascination with Japan. Between 1977 and 1988 he visited Japan five times, giving talks but also setting aside time to explore the country. He described Japan as a kind of inversion of the West. Perched on the far eastern edge of the Eurasia continent, it mirrored France, which lay at the western margins of the land mass. With its sculptured landscapes layered with rice paddies, tea plantations, bamboo stands and cherry blossoms, and its ancient culture of stilted ceremony, Japan meshed with Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual and aesthetic sensibility. A society of feather-light screens, lacquer masks, aestheticized ritual and self-denial—it was no wonder it attracted a series of structuralist thinkers, most famously Roland Barthes, but also Michel Foucault.
ON HIS RETURN FROM BRAZIL, Lévi-Strauss published the second installment of the
petits mythologiques
,
La Potière jalouse
, which he likened to ballet against the operatic tetralogy. Pithier and more playful, this was Lévi-Strauss enjoying himself with material that he had “kept in reserve” from the 1960s. During that period he had been working blind, moving from one cycle of myths to another on a voyage of intellectual discovery; now he had perspective and, working off a base of his past “proofs,” he indulged in what he loved most—free-associating around big ideas and big thinkers.
petits mythologiques
,
La Potière jalouse
, which he likened to ballet against the operatic tetralogy. Pithier and more playful, this was Lévi-Strauss enjoying himself with material that he had “kept in reserve” from the 1960s. During that period he had been working blind, moving from one cycle of myths to another on a voyage of intellectual discovery; now he had perspective and, working off a base of his past “proofs,” he indulged in what he loved most—free-associating around big ideas and big thinkers.
The book revisited Freud, a reference point since he had discovered his work as a lycée student in the 1920s. Apart from the general theoretical thrust of Freud’s work, throughout his career Lévi-Strauss had used specific Freudian concepts, such as inversion, displacement, secondary elaboration and transformation. Just as Freud would extrapolate from his primary sources with unexpected and revealing associations or metaphors (for instance, the theme of the legend of the labyrinth is really an anal birth, with the maze’s winding paths being the intestines and Ariadne’s thread the umbilical cord), so Lévi-Strauss made similar inventively lateral connections. As he put it, Freud’s greatness lay in the fact that “he could think the way myths do,” an ability that Lévi-Strauss also claimed for himself.
46
46
A scatological joust with psychoanalysis,
La Potière jalouse
had the sloth and the goatsucker bird in South American Jivaro mythology as symbols of anal and oral retention and incontinence. Human jealousy became a form of psychological retention, the body akin to a potter’s kiln, but for cooking excrement rather than clay. Freud’s theories, Lévi-Strauss concluded, had already been invented by the Jivaro centuries before psychoanalysis was presented as a revolutionary technique in the West. “How wise are the Americans in calling psychoanalysts ‘headshrinkers,’” Lévi-Strauss quipped, “thus spontaneously associating them with the Jivaro!”
47
La Potière jalouse
had the sloth and the goatsucker bird in South American Jivaro mythology as symbols of anal and oral retention and incontinence. Human jealousy became a form of psychological retention, the body akin to a potter’s kiln, but for cooking excrement rather than clay. Freud’s theories, Lévi-Strauss concluded, had already been invented by the Jivaro centuries before psychoanalysis was presented as a revolutionary technique in the West. “How wise are the Americans in calling psychoanalysts ‘headshrinkers,’” Lévi-Strauss quipped, “thus spontaneously associating them with the Jivaro!”
47
More seriously, he argued that the central mistake made by Freud—along with a long line of thinkers who had tried to decipher myths: Müller, Frazer and Jung—was to try to ascribe specific meanings to each element, interpreting each myth (or dream) in terms of a single code. For Lévi-Strauss, this was a hopeless task. Universals could not be sought at the level of surface imagery. The grist lay in the “mythemes” relationships to each other and in the interplay between different codes that myths simultaneously deployed. It was the invariant logic of these relationships that strung together a mass of baroque images and plots. Mythic thought floated free through space, twisting, turning and tumbling over, rotating, but never losing its overall structural shape, “free from the concern of anchoring itself to an outside, absolute reference, independent of all context.”
48
48
LÉVI-STRAUSS HAS OFTEN BEEN portrayed as a recluse, not least by himself—“I don’t have much of a taste for socializing,” he once said. “My initial instinct is to avoid people and go back home.”
49
But as he turned eighty he gave a book-length interview to the writer and journalist Didier Eribon, which was published as
De près et de loin
. He had been impressed by a similar work on his mentor Georges Dumézil,
Entretiens avec Didier Eribon
, and indebted to Eribon “for enabling me to hear Georges Dumézil’s voice from beyond the grave.” (Dumézil had died in 1986, a year before the book was published.) Lévi-Strauss was also curious:
49
But as he turned eighty he gave a book-length interview to the writer and journalist Didier Eribon, which was published as
De près et de loin
. He had been impressed by a similar work on his mentor Georges Dumézil,
Entretiens avec Didier Eribon
, and indebted to Eribon “for enabling me to hear Georges Dumézil’s voice from beyond the grave.” (Dumézil had died in 1986, a year before the book was published.) Lévi-Strauss was also curious:
What questions would I be asked, what aspects of my life and work would interest a young writer who might have been my son, or even my grandson? It was amusing, I confess, to discover how many of the events in which I had been involved or witnessed had taken on a legendary colouring for someone of a later generation. And so I made a rule not to evade any of the questions, even if they did not accord with the angle of vision from which I myself would have looked at the past.
50
Although studiously avoiding his private life, Lévi-Strauss gave long and thoughtful answers to a wide range of questions about his life, work and ideas. Many of the answers had already been rehearsed in the scores of interviews that he had given to the press throughout his career. But at times he went further, talking frankly about his aesthetic preference for certain racial types (Japanese) over others, admitting his lack of patience for fieldwork, and lamenting his “hateful accent” in English and his general lack of talent for languages.
51
51
When pressed, he spoke of his sense of his own Jewishness, not in religious or ancestral terms, but as a state of mind. Being a part of a traditionally persecuted group brought a heightened awareness and a sense that he would have to overachieve in order to have a chance to compete fairly. He was nevertheless fascinated by the idea of Israel. “I hesitated for a long time before going to Israel because re-establishing physical contacts with one’s roots is an awesome experience.” When, however, in the mid-1980s he finally made it, chairing a symposium at the Israel Museum on art and communication in preliterate societies, there was no resonance. His sense of connection had been “reduced to abstract knowledge” by the vast stretches of time between when his ancestors had left Palestine and when they had arrived in Alsace at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
52
52
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