Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory

by Patrick Wilcken

  Some in the avant-garde and on the left were beginning to mobilize against colonialism. A group of surrealists, including André Breton and Yves Tanguy, both of whom Lévi-Strauss would later get to know personally, wrote and distributed a manifesto entitled “Ne visitez pas l’Exposition coloniale.” The manifesto denounced France’s atrocities abroad and called for “the immediate evacuation of the colonies and the putting on trial of the generals and administrators responsible for the massacres in Annam [North Vietnam], Libya, Morocco and Central Africa.” One of the signatories, the poet and novelist Louis Aragon, organized a counterexhibition with displays of sculptures and artworks from Africa, Oceania and the Americas in a pavilion left over from the Art Deco fair of 1925.

  At the time, Lévi-Strauss’s own attitude to colonialism was far less radical. “By colonization we mean the subordination by force of less evolved groups, from the social and economic point of view, to more highly evolved, upstart groups,” he wrote in a special edition of L’Étudiant socialiste dedicated to the issue. His line was paternalistic: he broadly accepted the need for colonialism, but argued that the profits should go toward helping the indigenous populations, which could be placed under the control of an international socialist protectorate.42 It was precisely this Europe-centered vision of the world that Lévi-Strauss would later come to reject. Much of his work would be a rhetorical critique of colonialism, whose aftereffects he would soon be experiencing at first hand.

  Although a voracious reader, he was still unaware of what was then called ethnologie in France. “I knew nothing about anthropology,” he wrote in his memoir. “I had never attended any course and when Sir James Frazer [author of The Golden Bough] paid his last visit to the Sorbonne to give a memorable lecture—in 1928, I think—it never occurred to me to attend, although I knew about it.”43 Missing the chance to see Frazer—whose work Lévi-Strauss would critically reassess in the years to come—would end up being a source of profound regret.

  AFTER REGURGITATING GREAT CHUNKS from law books and jumping through philosophical hoops for the examiners, Lévi-Strauss obtained his law and philosophy degrees. Ahead lay the ordeal of the agrégation—a set of competitive exams that qualify graduates to teach in the lycée system and eventually become university lecturers. The agrégation involved a battery of written and oral tests, which only a small fraction would pass. As a part of the process, Lévi-Strauss spent three weeks back at his old school, Janson, giving a series of probationary classes. His fellow trainees were two other future intellectual giants: the writer Simone de Beauvoir and the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, both (like Lévi-Strauss) in their early twenties. Lévi-Strauss remembered de Beauvoir as “very young, with a fresh, bright complexion, like a little peasant girl. She had a crisp but sweet side to her, like a rosy apple.”44 He sat the agrégation for philosophy in July 1931, along with Ferdinand Alquié (a future Sorbonne professor of philosophy and doctoral supervisor of philosopher Gilles Deleuze) and the tormented writer and philosopher Simone Weil. It might seem like a coincidence that so many future greats would find themselves together on the same course at the same time. But it is in fact more of an indication of how elitist, tight-knit and Paris-centric the French intellectual system was at that time, an arrangement that would begin to weaken only in the 1960s.

  Lévi-Strauss’s topics ranged from “The concept of causality in the work of Hume” to “Should philosophy be seen from an atemporal or historical perspective?”—a subject that he would frequently revisit throughout his career. For his grande leçon—a three-quarter-hour talk in front of a panel of examiners—he drew the topic “Is there such a thing as an applied psychology?” After being escorted to the library of the Sorbonne for the seven hours’ preparation for the applied psychology question, Lévi-Strauss took a vial of medicine that the family doctor had given him to cope with the stress. He immediately began feeling nauseous and spent the entire preparation time lying stretched out between two chairs. “Seven hours of seasickness!” he remembered. “I appeared before the jury looking like death, without having been able to prepare a thing, and improvised a lecture that was considered to be brilliant and in which I believe I spoke of nothing but Spinoza.”45

  Lévi-Strauss had passed at his first attempt, coming third—a significant achievement at his age, especially for someone skeptical about the courses he took and who was pursuing a very active life outside the university. As a gesture of defiance, the day he got his results he went out and bought a book on astrology—“Not that I believed in it, but as a kind of retaliation and to prove to myself I hadn’t lost my independence of mind.”46 But the celebrations were short-lived. Lévi-Strauss arrived home to a somber atmosphere. The Great Depression had finally taken its toll on the extended family’s wealth, wiping out his uncle’s stock investments, which had in the past eased his parents through their regular financial crises. Lévi-Strauss would soon be working as a teacher, but a large slice of his modest earnings would have to be plowed back into the family coffers.

  On completing his military service—four months as a low-ranking soldier in Strasbourg, then a posting in Paris as a press monitor—he was offered a choice between teaching posts in Mont-de-Marsan and Aubusson. He opted for the Lycée Victor-Duruy in Mont-de-Marsan, a small town tucked away in the far southwest of France, on the edge of the great Landes Forest. In September 1932, on the eve of starting work, he married Dina Dreyfus. An intellectually oriented couple, they were both in their early twenties setting out on teaching careers in the lycée system, with the possibility of one day becoming university lecturers. Dina still had to sit the agrégation, but she would pass the following year. “It was both my first job and my honeymoon,” remembered Lévi-Strauss of the trip down to Aquitaine.47

  His brief spell in Mont-de-Marsan was a period of happiness. He was recently married, in a new job, exploring a corner of France that was completely unfamiliar to him. Teaching was still a novelty and he attacked the task of preparing his courses from scratch with enthusiasm. He also had space to pursue his interest in politics, building a lively social life around contacts with local socialist groups. He ran as a councillor (conseil général ) in the local elections, but the campaign ended in farce when, driving without a license, he ran off the road in a Citroën 5CV given to him by his friend from childhood Pierre Dreyfus.48 The following year he was posted to Laon, in Picardy, within striking distance of Paris. His wife was appointed to Amiens, so they moved back to the rue Poussin and traveled out to their respective lycées, scheduling their lessons for the same days.

  As he began work in Picardy, Lévi-Strauss was immediately restless. The setup was less than ideal—on teaching days he was forced to take a room in a shabby hotel near the lycée. But his anxiety was more psychological. The realization that he would have to teach the same courses over and over again was sinking in. In October 1933 he made vague moves back toward a university career, enrolling for a doctoral thesis in philosophy, but this too seemed like more of the same. Outside teaching and academia, his interest in politics was drying up. In the spring of 1934, he left the Groupe des onze in protest against the group’s radicalization and its hardening stance toward the SFIO. The decision effectively ended his political engagement—eight years of meetings, talks and publications, of youthful indignation and idealistic fervor.

  ALTHOUGH GENERALLY SHORT of money, in the mid-1920s Lévi-Strauss’s father had received a substantial payout for the Madagascar pavilion commission. From the proceeds he had bought an abandoned silk farm near Valleraugue in the Cévennes for five thousand francs. “It was in ruins, and all we ever did was camp there, but it was very important to me because I was a teenager. And that’s when I realized what wilderness could be.”49 As a young man, Lévi-Strauss would unwind from the rigors of his life in Paris by hiking into the surrounding mountains. Heading off the paths, he followed the natural fault lines of these ruggedly beautiful landscapes, skirting limestone flanks, scrambling up escarpments and stumbling down
the boulder-strewn hillocks, mapping the geological formations in his mind.

  Away from Paris, his thinking synthesized. In different forms, the same idea kept coming back to him, an idea that he grasped hold of early, and never gave up on. For Lévi-Strauss there would always be two levels—reality and a kind of analytical subtext. Time and again their relationship would be found to be complex and counterintuitive: a random scattering of boulders, jagged cracks running through rock faces, a patch of dry brush turning to woodland—all this was an outward manifestation of tectonic movements, the ebb and flow of oceans, the heating and cooling of subterranean shafts. A landscape’s surface was but a sea of fragments, transformations and analogues of a hidden geological “master-meaning”—what one writer has called “a kind of unconscious mind for the world.”50 The grotesque skewing of the economy’s rewards, the resulting social and political unrest, this was one reality. Its analytical counterpart was Marx’s ingeniously abstract schemes—his theories of value, surplus value, labor alienation and commodity fetishism. A patient presents with irrational feelings of hysteria and frigidity; she recounts strange dreams involving a house fire, the recovery of a jewelry box, a frustrating journey to a railway station, a dense wood. Again, the answer lay at another level of analysis, in Freudian relationships between the ego, the superego and the id.

  Lévi-Strauss would later call geology, Marxism and Freud his trois maîtresses—three mistresses (rather coyly translated in the English version of Tristes Tropiques as his “three sources of inspiration”51)—the muses that guided him through his intellectual life. Influenced by the philosopher Henri Bergson, his university lecturers had been wrapped up in their own perceptions, grappling with the very process of our access to reality—the mechanics of perception, meaning and reason. Lévi-Strauss systematically rebelled against this position. Aided by his “three mistresses,” he found that he could look right through reality’s confusing gloss. On the other side there was the tantalizing prospect of discovering the organizing principles that he would devote his life to deciphering.

  AS LÉVI-STRAUSS SEARCHED for a career, he was dimly aware of the emergence of a new field of inquiry on the periphery of the humanities. “At that time, it was known among the philosophy agrégés that ethnology offered a way out [une porte de sortie],” he said later.52 In the 1930s, ethnographic research was finally opening up in France, decades after Anglo-American anthropologists had first ventured into the field. Much publicity had surrounded the Dakar-Djibouti expedition, a two-year sweep up the Niger River, through what was then a string of mainly French colonial possessions, and on to Ethiopia. Headed by a former pilot, Marcel Griaule, and joined by Michel Leiris as scribe, the team of nine scholars was instructed “to study certain black populations and their various activities” and “fill the gaps in the Musée d’ethnologie”—a duty they duly fulfilled, with a haul of thirty-five hundred artifacts. As the Dakar-Djibouti expedition wound up, the first generation of students to attend Mauss’s influential courses on fieldwork technique were fanning out across the world. Jacques Soustelle, a philosophy agrégé like Lévi-Strauss, had left for Mexico to study Aztec civilization; Alfred Métraux had returned to Argentina, where he had grown up, to found an ethnology institute; and others traveled as far afield as Greenland, French Indochina and the Malay states.

  The idea solidified after conversations with the writer Paul Nizan, who was married to one of Lévi-Strauss’s cousins. Nizan had just published his first book, Aden Arabie (1931), a memoir of his Paris education and escape to Aden, shades of which would resurface decades later in Lévi-Strauss’s own memoir, Tristes Tropiques. Like many left-leaning thinkers of the times, Nizan had been disillusioned with traditional French academia. In Aden Arabie he described the École normale supérieure, where he had studied, as a “ridiculous” and “odious” institution, and lamented the fraudulent emptiness of classical philosophy that he had been taught there. As a result of his elite education, he wrote, at the age of twenty he had been let loose on a “pitiless world” with nothing but “a few graceful accomplishments—Greek, logic and an extensive vocabulary.”53 A restless radical of his time, Nizan saw a certain authenticity in anthropology and suggested to Lévi-Strauss that this might suit his temperament. At the same time Lévi-Strauss was reading Robert Lowie’s Primitive Society (a rather dry text to serve as an inspiration, it has to be said) and was struck by its freshness. Lowie’s book described an intellectual endeavor that was not based on the juggling of worn ideas, but was charged with a reference outside itself—the anthropologist’s experience in the field. The lure of fieldwork was potent. It combined travel and the intellect, theory and practice; in the French tradition, it could even include philosophy and art. Intellectually intriguing, anthropology could also free Lévi-Strauss from the treadmill of lycée teaching and enable him, for first time in his life, to leave Europe.

  “BRAZIL WAS THE most important experience of my life,” Lévi-Strauss said in an interview for Le Monde in 2005, “not only because of the remoteness, the contrast, but also because it determined my career. I owe that country a profound debt.”54 Yet as he admitted, the destination was arbitrary—if the offer had been the South Pacific or Africa, he would have taken the post without a second thought. When Célestin Bouglé phoned on an autumn morning in 1934 to say that the psychologist Georges Dumas was recruiting academics to teach at the newly formed University of São Paulo, Lévi-Strauss already had his bags mentally packed, but with no clear destination in mind. There was even, at this point, something arbitrary about his choice of anthropology. Before Bouglé’s phone call he had written to Marcel Mauss for advice, saying that he wanted to travel, even if he could not do so as an anthropologist. Lévi-Strauss had suggested, interestingly, journalism as a possible alternative profession.55

  Bouglé enticed Lévi-Strauss with a vision of São Paulo that was a century out of date, telling him that Indians still roamed the city’s suburbs. Filled with his own fantasies of palm thatch, “bizarrely designed kiosks and pavilions,” and the burning perfumes of the tropics (an association he later described, in an allusion to Proust,56 as coming from the similarities between the words Brésil and grésiller, “to sizzle”), Lévi-Strauss contacted Dumas, who offered him the sociology chair.57

  Lévi-Strauss traveled in the second of three batches of French scholars sent out to give European cultural credibility to the fledgling university. It included Fernand Braudel, then an up-and-coming historian, the philosopher Jean Maugüé, and the specialist in Portuguese and Brazilian literature Pierre Hourcade. With the exception of Braudel, all were provincial lycée teachers on the lower rungs of the academic ladder. Maugüé was amazed to receive a letter from Dumas out of the blue, tempting him with a post combining “the climate of Nice” with “substantial remuneration.”58 Even for Braudel, the trip was fortuitous: “They were looking for a professor at the Sorbonne and weren’t finding one. I was an auxiliary professor at the Sorbonne, slightly above the level of the concierge—so they finally got down to me.”59

  In preparation for the trip, the young French academics attended a farewell dinner held in a disused mansion on avenue Victor-Emmanuel (now avenue Franklin Roosevelt), hosted by the Comité France-Amérique. In the musty atmosphere of the abandoned building, caterers cleared a space, setting up a small table in the middle of an enormous room. Dumas tried to put them at ease, explaining that, as French cultural ambassadors, they would be expected to hobnob with the Brazilian elite, frequenting casinos, racecourses and clubs—a surreal prospect for junior teachers who had been living a hand-to-mouth existence in the provinces. He finished by offering fatherly advice. Always be well dressed, he told them, recommending Á la Croix de Jeannette, a shop near Les Halles where he used to buy good-quality tailored suits in his youth.60

  While still in Paris, Lévi-Strauss scavenged for information about a country about which he knew virtually nothing. He was introduced to the Brazilian ambassador, Luís de Sousa Dantas, who to
ld him, contra Bouglé, that Brazil’s native population had already been wiped out—strapped to cannons and blown apart—by barbarous sixteenth-century Portuguese colonists. (The irony was that the ambassador himself had indigenous ancestry.) He joined the Société des Américanistes and began reading up on the topic, mixing the work of North American anthropologists—Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie—with impressionistic accounts of explorers, shipwreck tales and early visitors to Brazil, such as the German soldier Hans Staden’s experiences as a captive of the Tupinambá in the 1500s and the French historian André Thevet’s descriptions of Villegagnon’s ill-fated French colony in Rio de Janeiro, France Antarctique.61

  But the book that really captured his imagination was Jean de Léry’s L’Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil. Léry was a theological student who had spent eight months in France Antarctique, living in the colony and studying the native people around the bay. Published as a corrective to Thevet, Léry’s book was a vivid proto-ethnography. It contained poetic descriptions of the Tupi Indians, a still-muscular and healthy people on the cusp of colonial catastrophe. As one of the strongest first-contact accounts of native Brazilians, Léry’s book chimed with Lévi-Strauss’s attraction to the romantic notion of the “noble savage” in the tradition of Rousseau—ideas to which he would cling, even after witnessing the cultural wreckage of the Brazilian frontier. “Reading Léry helped me escape my century,” Lévi-Strauss later remarked, “and regain contact with what I will call the surreal—not the surreal that the surrealists talk about: it’s a reality more real than the one I had witnessed.”62