Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (52 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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While on the Jewish question, Eribon brought up a letter Lévi-Strauss had written to Raymond Aron, and which subsequently resurfaced in Aron’s published memoirs. In it, Lévi-Strauss expressed his support for the Palestinian cause, albeit while reiterating his dislike for Islamic culture. “It is obvious that I can’t feel the destruction of the Indians as a fresh wound in my side,” he had written, “and feel the opposite reaction when the Palestinian Arabs are involved, even if (as is the case) the brief contacts I have had with the Arab world have inspired within me a profound distaste.” Lévi-Strauss explained the remark by saying that he had exaggerated because “I didn’t want Aron to get the wrong idea about my attitude by attributing pro-Arab sympathies to me.”
53
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During the Eribon interviews he described the outline of yet another work on indigenous myth that he was preparing, a companion piece to
La Potière jalouse
. He wondered out loud “whether it really is necessary to add another mythological proof to all the others,” and said that the fact that he had not yet come up with a title was holding him back. “It’s the title that gives the tone to the work,” he explained.
54
La Potière jalouse
. He wondered out loud “whether it really is necessary to add another mythological proof to all the others,” and said that the fact that he had not yet come up with a title was holding him back. “It’s the title that gives the tone to the work,” he explained.
54
Published in 1991,
Histoire de Lynx
drew together the threads from fifty years of scholarship, knitting them into a tidy conclusion. In the 1940s and ’50s Lévi-Strauss had grappled with the problem of dual systems of social organization—an example of which he had seen firsthand among the Bororo, with their symmetrically organized hut plans, which worked as blueprints for the exchange of rights, obligations, marriages and funerals.
55
In the 1960s he had considered, then set aside, a series of Salish myths involving fog and wind, the lynx and the coyote, and twins who progressively diverge. Now he realized that they were all in fact the same problem, differently stated. All fed in to a concept that had been thematic in his earlier work on kinship, the idea of an inherently unstable compact between reciprocity and hierarchy. This was the uneasiness at the heart of structuralism. Although cultural invention appeared poised on an equilibrium, a perfect balance of social and cultural symmetries, it always threatened to tip over into hierarchies of castelike divisions.
Histoire de Lynx
drew together the threads from fifty years of scholarship, knitting them into a tidy conclusion. In the 1940s and ’50s Lévi-Strauss had grappled with the problem of dual systems of social organization—an example of which he had seen firsthand among the Bororo, with their symmetrically organized hut plans, which worked as blueprints for the exchange of rights, obligations, marriages and funerals.
55
In the 1960s he had considered, then set aside, a series of Salish myths involving fog and wind, the lynx and the coyote, and twins who progressively diverge. Now he realized that they were all in fact the same problem, differently stated. All fed in to a concept that had been thematic in his earlier work on kinship, the idea of an inherently unstable compact between reciprocity and hierarchy. This was the uneasiness at the heart of structuralism. Although cultural invention appeared poised on an equilibrium, a perfect balance of social and cultural symmetries, it always threatened to tip over into hierarchies of castelike divisions.
On this disquieting note of cooperation masking inequality, of a superficial symmetry papering over structural discord, of concealed conflict, Lévi-Strauss ended his great myth enterprise. The detail, complexity and inventiveness of a project that now spanned two decades and some twenty-five hundred pages were undeniable. But by the 1990s Lévi-Strauss was virtually the only man left standing. Since the mid-1970s his followers had begun to drop off. The
petits mythologiques
were still popular—especially
La Potière jalouse
—but the ideas were no longer new, no longer cutting-edge. “The imaginative incitement is gone, and in its place there is the appearance of just going through the motions,” wrote Needham of his late work.
56
For the wider public, Lévi-Straussian structuralism had become virtually like an intellectual brand—familiar, reliable, almost comforting. Like a gifted writer who had found his voice or a great painter hitting his stride, he was forgiven for turning out the same work over and over again, with slight variations of plot or palette.
petits mythologiques
were still popular—especially
La Potière jalouse
—but the ideas were no longer new, no longer cutting-edge. “The imaginative incitement is gone, and in its place there is the appearance of just going through the motions,” wrote Needham of his late work.
56
For the wider public, Lévi-Straussian structuralism had become virtually like an intellectual brand—familiar, reliable, almost comforting. Like a gifted writer who had found his voice or a great painter hitting his stride, he was forgiven for turning out the same work over and over again, with slight variations of plot or palette.
A rump of interested scholars—mainly in France and Brazil—went on to pursue aspects of his work, but essentially Lévi-Strauss ended up as a one-man school, peddling a type of analysis that had become so utterly idiosyncratic that it was impossible to build on. The enormous energies he had devoted to modeling the world of myth have never been systematically followed up, a fact that one would imagine would have been at the very least disappointing, but as he reached the end of his life he appeared sublimely unconcerned about his legacy.
ASSESSING LÉVI-STRAUSS’S INFLUENCE is difficult. In the popular French imagination he will forever be associated with the Caduveo, the Bororo and the Nambikwara, peoples that he spent a matter of months studying more than seventy years ago; or with structuralism, an idea borrowed from structural linguistics circa 1940 and, despite the subsequent rapid advances in linguistics, never really renewed. He is also known as the master theoretician, but he denied that structuralism was even a theory, or a philosophy. It was a method of analysis, he said repeatedly, a tool for uncovering “hidden harmonies.” He was known for his impenetrability, but the overall model that Lévi-Strauss worked with throughout his career was remarkably simple.
Responding to a query from British anthropologist Edmund Leach in the 1960s, Lévi-Strauss summarized his approach with a prosaic metaphor. Reality, he wrote, was like a club sandwich. It was composed of three similarly structured strata: nature, the brain and myth. Each of these elements cascaded from the other—the brain being merely one aspect of nature, and mythic thought a subset of mental function. These strata were separated by “two layers of chaos: sensory perception and social discourse.”
Beyond the disorder of our first impressions, beyond the eccentricities of a living culture, were logical relationships—the symmetries, inversions and oppositions that Lévi-Strauss never tired of identifying. These structures underlined the order of all natural phenomena, be they crystals, organisms, language, kinship systems or the free flow of human thought in oral cultures as a shaman retold a myth for the thousandth time by a communal fire in the depths of the Amazon rain forest or on the North American prairies. “I am much closer to eighteenth-century materialism than to Hegel,” concluded Lévi-Strauss, since the human brain’s “laws of functioning are the same as the laws of nature.”
57
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There was great breadth and scope to Lévi-Strauss’s ideas, but they were fitted into this ultimately claustrophobic intellectual space. Throughout his career, ethnographic descriptions, mythic narratives and his own ideas folded back on one another in an endless process of self-reference. Fellow mythologist Wendy Doniger has likened Lévi-Strauss’s way of thinking to the Klein bottle—a three-dimensional mathematical form made by sticking two inverted Möbius strips together, which Lévi-Strauss reproduces in
La Potière jalouse
to illustrate the structure of a myth. The comparison is apt. Mathematically generated but with an organic feel, the bottle’s bulbous, undulating form is self-consuming and conceptually difficult to grasp. It has no true inner or outer surfaces. Like Lévi-Strauss’s oeuvre, it eternally feeds back through itself.
La Potière jalouse
to illustrate the structure of a myth. The comparison is apt. Mathematically generated but with an organic feel, the bottle’s bulbous, undulating form is self-consuming and conceptually difficult to grasp. It has no true inner or outer surfaces. Like Lévi-Strauss’s oeuvre, it eternally feeds back through itself.
What gave air to Lévi-Strauss’s output, and introduced the lyricism that baffled his Anglo-American critics, was a profound interest in aesthetic expression and appreciation that ran in tandem with the cognitive side of his work. His lifelong quest to reconcile the “sensible” and the “intelligible”—that is to say, how raw sensory perception, which is an especially rich experience in oral cultures, relates to a more abstract intellectual understanding—added an artistic flavor to what could have been a dry academic exercise. In an interview with the film critic Raymond Bellour in the 1960s, he said that the whole myth project was really searching for answers to the perennial questions: What is a beautiful object? What is aesthetic emotion?—problems that preoccupied him more and more as his career progressed. In another interview, he elaborated:
Myths are very beautiful objects and one never tires of contemplating, manipulating them or of trying to understand why one finds them so beautiful. And if I spend a long time in the study of myths, it’s with the hope, upon dismantling these aesthetically admirable objects, that one could contribute in a way to understanding what the feeling of beauty is, and why we have the impression that a painting or a poem or a landscape is beautiful.
58
This side of his work came to the fore in his last book,
Regarder, écouter, lire
(
Look, Listen, Read
), which largely broke free of Lévi-Strauss’s obsessional exegesis of indigenous culture. Here was the classical side of his modernist/ classicist matrix, moving through a history of aesthetic ideas and theories of sounds, colors and words via musings on the likes of Diderot, Rousseau, Proust, Poussin and a half-forgotten eighteenth-century proto-structuralist musicologist called Chabanon. The tone was conversational, studded with Lévi-Strauss’s intriguing observations, such as, “In France we prefer a golden yellow,” to which he added, quoting the eighteenth-century Jesuit intellectual Louis-Bertrand Castel, “leaving the English to a pure yellow which we find bland,” and fascination for sensory crossover—from the eccentric invention of Castel’s “ocular or chromatic clavichord” to concepts of “coloured hearing” and the meshing of musical and linguistic codes.
59
Regarder, écouter, lire
(
Look, Listen, Read
), which largely broke free of Lévi-Strauss’s obsessional exegesis of indigenous culture. Here was the classical side of his modernist/ classicist matrix, moving through a history of aesthetic ideas and theories of sounds, colors and words via musings on the likes of Diderot, Rousseau, Proust, Poussin and a half-forgotten eighteenth-century proto-structuralist musicologist called Chabanon. The tone was conversational, studded with Lévi-Strauss’s intriguing observations, such as, “In France we prefer a golden yellow,” to which he added, quoting the eighteenth-century Jesuit intellectual Louis-Bertrand Castel, “leaving the English to a pure yellow which we find bland,” and fascination for sensory crossover—from the eccentric invention of Castel’s “ocular or chromatic clavichord” to concepts of “coloured hearing” and the meshing of musical and linguistic codes.
59
STRUCTURALISM NEVER embedded itself in the popular culture the way existentialism did. It rather hung in the air, drifting on the winds of intellectual invention. Soaring over existentialism’s anguished quest for authenticity, it claimed the high ground: the authentic would never be found in the petty, self-absorbed choices of the Left Bank intelligentsia because it already existed in the abstract workings of the mind. There was no use striving for it—it was all around us, it was in us, it
was
us. It had nothing to do with twentieth-century Western philosophy or a tortured soul in a garret—its essence has been effortlessly exercised since the human brain evolved and was set into intellectual play. If anything, Sorbonne-style philosophizing had blunted the mind, Western training polluting a purity of function.
was
us. It had nothing to do with twentieth-century Western philosophy or a tortured soul in a garret—its essence has been effortlessly exercised since the human brain evolved and was set into intellectual play. If anything, Sorbonne-style philosophizing had blunted the mind, Western training polluting a purity of function.
Structuralism implied depth, but with its interplay of referentless signs, often felt more like a skidding along polished glass. The erasure of the self, atomized in an amalgam of blind structures, produced a floating sensation, unfocused but powerful. Lévi-Strauss, and the many who were influenced by him, brought a late-modernist vertigo as the reference points of the past—God, interior experience, the self, humanity—fell away into a void. Meaning as “an obscure vibration, a dim discharge of deeply enigmatic sense” lost its solidity.
60
Some have argued that structuralism was a reversion to a pre-Cartesian, prehumanist world of divine necessity, an ethnographic version of kabbalistic exegesis. But for others it was a return to something very different. In a fascinating exchange in
La Quinzaine littéraire
in April 1966, Michel Foucault gave his assessment as structuralism took off:
60
Some have argued that structuralism was a reversion to a pre-Cartesian, prehumanist world of divine necessity, an ethnographic version of kabbalistic exegesis. But for others it was a return to something very different. In a fascinating exchange in
La Quinzaine littéraire
in April 1966, Michel Foucault gave his assessment as structuralism took off:
Question:
When did you stop believing in “meaning?”Foucault:
The break came the day that Lévi-Strauss demonstrated—about societies—and Lacan demonstrated—about the unconscious—that “meaning” was probably only a sort of surface effect, a shimmer, a foam, and that what ran through us, underlay us, and was before us, what sustained us in time or space was the system.[. . .]Question:
But then, who secretes this system?Foucault:
What is this anonymous system without a subject, what thinks? The “I” has exploded—we see this in modern literature—this is the discovery of “there is.” There is a
one
. In some ways, one comes back to the seventeenth-century point of view, with this difference: not setting man, but anonymous thought, knowledge without subject, theory with no identity, in God’s place.
61
One way to approach Lévi-Strauss is as he saw himself—as an
artiste manqué
, a man who would have loved to have been a painter like his father, or a musician, had he had the talent. In the Massey Lectures he remembered a conversation with the composer Darius Milhaud in the 1940s when they were both in exile in New York. Milhaud told him that he had first realized he would become a composer when, as a child, he was lying in bed falling asleep and heard an unfamiliar musical composition playing in his head—his first, subconscious efforts at composing. The conversation stuck, driving home the fact that musical talent was inbuilt, that whatever Lévi-Strauss did, he would never be able to fulfill his true desires.
62
artiste manqué
, a man who would have loved to have been a painter like his father, or a musician, had he had the talent. In the Massey Lectures he remembered a conversation with the composer Darius Milhaud in the 1940s when they were both in exile in New York. Milhaud told him that he had first realized he would become a composer when, as a child, he was lying in bed falling asleep and heard an unfamiliar musical composition playing in his head—his first, subconscious efforts at composing. The conversation stuck, driving home the fact that musical talent was inbuilt, that whatever Lévi-Strauss did, he would never be able to fulfill his true desires.
62
His experiments writing fiction, as a playwright or a poet, were quickly abandoned, but as a photographer he produced some memorable images—a powerful record of the lives of the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, Mundé and Tupi-Kawahib peoples. They were images captured at an important moment in history, as the Brazilian state moved to complete the long process that European colonialism had unleashed. But toward the end of his life, Lévi-Strauss was dismissive of the art. “I have never attached much importance to photography,” he said in an interview for
Le Monde
in 2002. “I used to photograph, because it was necessary, but I always had the feeling that it was a waste of time, a waste of attention.” And he was equally skeptical about the moving image in anthropology—“I have to confess, ethnographic films bore me.”
63
Le Monde
in 2002. “I used to photograph, because it was necessary, but I always had the feeling that it was a waste of time, a waste of attention.” And he was equally skeptical about the moving image in anthropology—“I have to confess, ethnographic films bore me.”
63
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