Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory

by Patrick Wilcken

  As Lévi-Strauss edged toward adulthood, the avant-garde blossomed. At one of the first performances of Stravinsky’s Les Noces at the Théâtre du Châtelet, he heard the spare abstractions, the choppy interchanges of chorus, percussion and piano that scandalized Parisian audiences when it debuted in 1923. Lévi-Strauss was fourteen years old, and was bowled over. The performance made such an impression on him that he went straight back the following night. Years later he wrote in his memoir that the experience “brought about the collapse of my previous musical assumptions.”19 In middle age, as he wrote in Le Cru et le cuit (The Raw and the Cooked), he still felt the “shattering” impact of hearing Les Noces along with Claude Debussy’s symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande.20

  He began making a pilgrimage up to Rosenberg’s gallery on the rue La Boétie in the eighth arrondissement, where the latest Picasso would be propped up in the window. He later described seeing Picasso’s still-life canvases of the mid-1920s as “the equivalent of metaphysical revelations.”21 When a friend of the family, the influential art critic Louis Vauxcelles, suggested that Lévi-Strauss write a piece for a review journal he was trying to launch, Claude proposed “the influence of Cubism on everyday life.”22 While researching the piece, Lévi-Strauss interviewed the artist Fernand Léger. “He received me with extreme kindness,” remembered Lévi-Strauss. “Was the article ever published? I forget.”23

  What was fresh, irreverent and intellectually challenging for the young Lévi-Strauss spelled ruin for his father. Raymond Lévi-Strauss had been shocked by what he saw in the art salons on his return from Versailles after the war. In the interim, modern art had gone from the fringes of the avant-garde into the heartlands of the city’s best-known galleries. Incomprehensible canvases of splintered shapes and clashing colors were being bought up by collectors like Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, whom Lévi-Strauss’s father had met during his years at the Bourse. By the 1920s changing tastes, along with the rise of mass photography, meant that the demand for realist portraiture was shrinking rapidly and Raymond Strauss’s already precarious income was beginning to erode. He was left to improvise, often with the help of his son, turning his hand to a variety of more or less desperate business ventures, as Lévi-Strauss remembered years later:For a time the whole house became involved in printing fabrics. We carved linoleum blocks and smeared them with glue. We used to print designs on velvet on which we sprinkled metallic powders of various colours . . . There was another time when my father made small Chinese-style tables of imitation lacquer. He also made lamps with cheap Japanese prints glued onto glass. Anything that would help pay the bills.24

  Intellectually precocious, Lévi-Strauss started reading the master thinkers early. While still at Janson, he discovered Freud through Dr. Marcel Nathan, a pioneer of Freudian psychoanalysis in France and the father of one of his school friends, Jacques. It was through his recommendations that Lévi-Strauss read the early French translations of A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis and The Interpretation of Dreams. The influence would be profound and long-lasting. In the first half of his career Lévi-Strauss would revisit many of Freud’s areas of theoretical interest—the incest taboo, the myth of Oedipus, and totemism; a late book, La Potière jalouse (The Jealous Potter), would be an extended dialogue with Freud, whom he admired and criticized in equal measure.

  In the summer of 1925, when Lévi-Strauss was sixteen, another element was added: politics. It was then that he met the Belgian Workers’ Party militant Arthur Wauters, through friends of the family. When Lévi-Strauss asked him to explain his ideas, Wauters took the young man under his wing “like an older brother,” introducing him to the socialist cannon, from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Jean Jaurès and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.25 He arranged for Lévi-Strauss to spend two weeks in Belgium as a guest of the Belgian Workers’ Party, where he learned about how the party functioned institutionally and saw socialist ideals in action through party affiliations with workers’ syndicates. Later he described the experience as “a complete revelation”: a “new world was being unveiled to me, intellectually and socially.”26 Back in Paris, he read Das Kapital while studying philosophy at the lycée. “I didn’t understand it all. In reality, what I discovered in Marx were other forms of thought also new to me: Kant, Hegel ...”27

  From political theory to the avant-garde to the classics, his reading was filling out, mixing French classics, such as Rousseau and Chateaubriand, with Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Conrad. He was not intimidated by sheer literary bulk, at one point becoming fixated on Balzac’s La Comédie humaine—seventeen volumes of interlinked stories, which served as a kind of literary ethnography of France between the revolution and the reign of Louis-Philippe. He read it from beginning to end—ten times. Another major influence was Gide’s Paludes—a literary satire of the symbolist movement, to which Lévi-Strauss would also become attracted.

  By nature, Lévi-Strauss was proving to be an intellectual omnivore, a grazer eternally on the move, roaming the vast plains of Western culture—moving from French literature to philosophy to modernism across the arts. It was clear that he was gifted, capable of soaking up theories, new ideas and culture at a time of explosive change and creativity in Paris. But as he neared the end of his school days, it was not so clear what this inquiring mind would settle on and pursue. “I was too disorganized,” he later confessed.

  In the autumn of 1925, after passing the baccalaureate, Lévi-Strauss entered France’s fast track into the intellectual elite. He moved from Janson to the Lycée Condorcet’s hypokhâgne—the preparatory classes for the entrance exams of the prestigious École normale supérieure. The École normale supérieure on the rue d’Ulm in Paris’s fifth arrondissement was founded after the French Revolution as the grande école for the humanities. Graduates—known as normaliens—have since filled the top positions in France’s cultural elite. The high-flying academics, the heads of publishing houses, the directors of museums or government appointees to the top echelons of the education system—the vast majority have been members of an exclusive École normale supérieure club.

  Lévi-Strauss was to have spent two years at Condorcet studying a broad range of subjects for some of the toughest exams in the French system, but faltered after the first. He later described being overawed by his fellow students, intimidated by the sense that he was surrounded by future normaliens . “I had the feeling that I could never be in their class,” he remembered. 28 More practically, he felt unable to compete academically. He struggled with math, and Greek did not appeal—two subjects required for the entrance exams. In a fascinating glimpse into the eighteen-year-old mind of Claude Lévi-Strauss, his history and geography teacher Léon Cahen wrote notes on his progress, or lack thereof:Has worth, will develop. Knows a lot. Sharp, penetrating mind. But these qualities are often spoiled by a rigor that is, as a rule, almost sectarian, assertion of absolute, black-and-white theses, and sometimes the thinking makes do with a rather banal style, without precision or nuance.29

  In the spring of 1926, on the advice of his philosophy teacher André Cresson, Lévi-Strauss gave up the idea of entering the École normale supérieure. Instead he enrolled in the law faculty, in the colonnaded neoclassical buildings on the place du Panthéon, while taking a parallel degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne.30 It was there that he met his future wife, Dina Dreyfus, a French Jew of Russian extraction who had spent some of her early life in Italy. A strong-minded, introspective woman, she was, like Lévi-Strauss, an ardent socialist and philosophy student.

  Lévi-Strauss later explained that he chose philosophy because it was easier and more open to his other interests: “I had a taste for painting, music, antiques—all that more or less married with the study of philosophy, more easily than another speciality which would have forced me to compartmentalize my existence and my curiosity.”31 There was also a more practical element—at that time philosophy offered “the only way for a young bourgeois intellectual to earn a living,” a pressing concern given his
family’s shaky financial situation.32 But after the excitement of growing up on the rue Poussin, his university years were uninspiring, spent learning thick law books by rote, ingesting philosophical formulae without truly understanding what they meant, and being trained in a style of exposition that sounded sophisticated but was ultimately empty and mechanical.

  He filled the void left by Parisian academicism with a period of intense political engagement, just as the modern French Left was coalescing. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the catastrophe of the First World War, blamed by many on capitalist infighting, the Left had become a force in French politics. The Parti communiste français (French Communist Party) was founded in 1920, but Lévi-Strauss leaned toward the more moderate Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière, or SFIO (French Section of the Workers’ International). As Lévi-Strauss began working in the student movement, the SFIO was tasting real power as a part of the Cartel des gauches, a left-wing coalition that held a majority in the chamber of deputies in the mid-1920s.

  Encouraged by Georges Lefranc, who headed a group of left-wing students at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, another preparation school for the École normale supérieure, Lévi-Strauss began participating in the Groupe socialiste interkhâgnal—an assortment of socialists, communists and members of the Christian movement, La Jeune République. Each Thursday afternoon they would hold meetings at the Société de géographie on the Left Bank for talks and seminars about factory working conditions, workers’ cooperatives, unions and colonialism. Prestigious guest speakers, including socialist luminaries Marcel Déat and Léon Blum, gave the forum a weight and credibility far beyond a mere student association. Lefranc later described it as a kind of “parallel university,” run by “political and economic autodidacts.”33 Lévi-Strauss was active from the outset, contributing to debates, intervening from the floor and making speeches. His first published work dates from this period—a laudatory essay on the radical French revolutionary egalitarian, agitator and writer Gracchus Babeuf. Written originally as a dissertation for Léon Cahen at the Lycée Condorcet, it was published in the Belgian Workers’ Party house journal, L’Églantine, as Gracchus Babeuf et le communisme—a piece that Lévi-Strauss later dismissed as “an accident,” “which I would rather forget.”34

  During this period Lévi-Strauss alternated between the dry lectures at the Sorbonne and the excitement of the political meetings at the Société de géographie. He attended courses on psychology, morals and sociology, logic and the history of philosophy; at the place du Panthéon there were classes on civil, criminal and constitutional law. In his spare time he read socialist journals and grappled with Marx. Combining his interests, Lévi-Strauss chose to write his dissertation, “The Philosophical Postulates of Historical Materialism with Specific Reference to Karl Marx,” under the direction of the sociologist and future head of the École normale supérieure Célestin Bouglé. Bouglé, himself a socialist and key collaborator in Durkheim’s Année sociologique project, accepted what would have been a radical topic at a time when the ideas of Marx were not yet well established in France, with the proviso that Lévi-Strauss also write a dissertation on the safer, more classical thinker Saint-Simon. Lévi-Strauss was already thinking big. He saw himself as a potential philosopher of the Left, a synthesizer of classical and radical thought:The idea of building a bridge between the great philosophical tradition—by that I mean Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant—and political thought, as represented by Marx, was very seductive. Even today I understand how I could have dreamed of it.35

  As he progressed through university, Lévi-Strauss’s political engagement matured. In 1928 he became the secretary-general of the Fédération des étudiants socialistes (Federation of Socialist Students), a group that brought together normaliens from five Écoles normales supérieures. The same year he organized the Third Congress of Socialist Students of France and began contributing to the Federation’s review, L’Étudiant socialiste. To earn money he read the bulletin of the Workers’ International Bureau for Radio Tour Eiffel from a basement of the Grand Palais, on the Champs-Élysées. The following year he secured a job as secretary to the charismatic SFIO deputy Georges Monnet. His duties included running the office, typing up proposals for laws, attending debates at the Chambre des députés (France’s legislative assembly) and writing articles. In 1930, as he neared the end of his studies, he became president of a kind of left-wing think tank, called the Groupe des onze (the Group of Eleven), whose aim was to discuss ways of mobilizing the Left on a global level, through unions, cooperatives and social insurance schemes. He was just twenty-one years old. It seemed at this point that Lévi-Strauss might have a promising political career ahead of him, in the vanguard of the new Left.

  “Did you preach the revolution at the SFIO?” Lévi-Strauss was asked in an interview in the mid-1980s about this period. “It depends what you mean by the word,” he answered diplomatically. “I wasn’t a Leninist, so I rejected violent social change. In contrast, a small group of militants, of whom I was one, formed a movement—today you would call it a tendency [tendence]—which was called Constructive Revolution.” The idea, as Lévi-Strauss later explained, was gradual, but nevertheless complete, transformation:If, day after day, we apply ourselves to create institutions in the socialist spirit, little by little they will grow, in virtue of their superiority, like a chrysalis in a capitalist cocoon, which will end up falling like a dead, dried-up envelope.36

  Though he was spending more and more time on politics, Lévi-Strauss never lost sight of his broader cultural interests, inculcated into him by his father. He continued to read widely, visit galleries and think about art and aesthetics. By chance he did a brief spell of work as the assistant of the prolific novelist Victor Margueritte, whom he met through another novelist, André Chamson, then working in an office next door to Monnet’s. Lévi-Strauss was drafted in to promote Margueritte’s pacifist novel La Patrie humaine by hand-delivering specially inscribed editions of it to around a hundred influential Parisians and writing and sending out press releases to the media. Margueritte, then a crotchety seventy-year-old, was a cousin of the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and had mixed with Paris’s literary elite all his life. In his grand apartment in the seventeenth arrondissement he regaled the young Lévi-Strauss with family anecdotes featuring Balzac, Zola, the Goncourts and Victor Hugo.

  The new “Livres et revues” section of L’Étudiant socialiste, which Lévi-Strauss edited and regularly contributed to from 1930 onward, also gave him a more literary outlet. It was there that he wrote of the pleasure he derived from reading Trotsky’s prose (in spite of the fact that he did not adhere to his views), eulogized Dostoyevsky and hailed Conrad as “the greatest novelist of the twentieth century.” Among the many books he reviewed were the American pulp-fiction novel Crime passionnel by Ludwig Lewisohn, Banjo, a novel written by an African-American, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit.37 Céline’s worldly pessimism would linger on in Lévi-Strauss’s imagination, resurfacing in his descriptions of his own dystopian journey through Brazil in Tristes Tropiques.

  One of his most interesting early pieces was “Picasso and Cubism,” an article he ghosted for Georges Monnet for Bataille’s short-lived avant-garde magazine, Documents. In an unconventional approach, Lévi-Strauss attacked cubism while heaping praise on Picasso. Cubism was not the radical rupture from impressionism that critics imagined, he argued—it was part of a long tradition of bourgeois art styles catering to a select group of insiders. Cubism had merely shifted the focus from visual to intellectual play. Like impressionism, it was a clever way of coding experience, “an aristocratic art, akin to earlier religious art.” Picasso, however, was different. He was an aesthetic genius. He had an incredible eye and a gift for spontaneity. He cut to the heart of reality, bringing out its intensity. Picasso could evoke “the agonizing shame of the most complete nudity, like that of a man who, at the same time as taking off his shirt, is peeling away
his skin.” Women became “slabs of flesh” that Picasso somehow made eloquent. Even prosaic objects—bottles, glasses, pipes—were somehow edgy and full of suspense, “immersed in the still, apprehensive atmosphere that precedes accidents, riots and disasters.”38

  Through this article, Lévi-Strauss brushed against a milieu that would interest him more and more as he got older. Documents typified the strange fusions that were then coursing through French avant-garde culture. In its brief fifteen-issue life span, it mixed ethnographic artifact with modern art, popular culture with the bizarre. African masks, Aztec scripts, Picassos and covers of pulp-fiction novels shared pages with photos of slaughterhouses, a close-up of a big toe, and essays on dust and saliva. Michel Leiris described it as a “Janus publication,” with one face turned “toward the lofty spheres of culture . . . the other toward a wilderness where one ventured with no map or passport of any kind.”39 Contributors to Documents included Mauss, Leiris and the ethnomusicologist André Schaeffner. Its editor, Georges Bataille, shared many interests with anthropology and developed a close friendship with the Swiss-French anthropologist Alfred Métraux, a future close friend and colleague of Lévi-Strauss.

  Another coincidental contact with his future profession came about at around the same time, when Lévi-Strauss helped his father decorate the Madagascan pavilion for the Exposition coloniale. “I was taken on by him as it was done in the Renaissance ateliers,” Lévi-Strauss recalled, “in which everybody got down to the work at hand—family, students and so on.”40 They worked in the halls of the Musée de l’ethnographie at Trocadéro, which Rivet had already begun remodeling and which would soon become the Musée de l’Homme. With thirty meters of wall space to cover, everyone pitched in. Lévi-Strauss posed for some of the figures in the mural and filled in portions of the vast backdrops, while his father did the more intricate work of painting groups of colonial officers and young Madagascan women.41 It is not clear how Lévi-Strauss reacted to the idea of the exhibition itself. With its giant replica of the Angkor Wat temple in the Bois de Vincennes, mock-ups of African and Indochinese villages, and, in a bizarre twist, Missouri-born Josephine Baker featured as “the queen of the colonies,” the Exposition coloniale was a popular success, but was not without its critics.