Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory

by Patrick Wilcken

  11

  Convergence

  In everything I have written on mythology I wanted to show that one never arrives at a final meaning. Does that ever happen in life?

  CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS1

  IN THE FIRST WEEKS of May 1968 the streets around the Collège de France became the stage for the famous événements. Near the offices of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie student groups carrying pipes and wooden planks and using garbage can lids as shields charged into rows of CRS riot police, in a boiling-over of dissatisfactions with an antiquated university system and the ultraconservatism of de Gaulle’s France. Hails of cobblestones pelted the ranks of the police, with tear gas canisters streaming back in the other direction.

  After nights of rioting, the atmospheric Latin Quarter was a mess. Protestors had dug up piles of cobblestones to be used as ammunition dumps, uprooted trees and pulled down fences. The remains of torched cars, tipped onto their sides, zigzagged down one street in a series of makeshift barricades. Throughout the quartier the walls were daubed with graffiti that would become famous: “Sous les pavés, la plage” (Under the cobblestones, the beach), “La poésie est dans la rue” (Poetry is in the streets) and “J’ai quelque chose à dire mais je ne sais pas quoi” (I have something to say, but I don’t know what). Between the clashes students walked through the streets, putting up posters, holding sit-ins and convening discussion groups. By mid-May the Sorbonne was occupied, and in a separate dispute one-third of the French workforce was on strike, as de Gaulle’s regime tottered. In the most theatrical way possible, historical forces had burst back on the scene, irrupting from within a grid of conservative repression.

  The semiotician Algirdas Greimas remembered bumping into Lévi-Strauss as the protest movement got under way. “It’s over,” Lévi-Strauss told him. “All scientific projects will be set back twenty years.”2 In his youth, Lévi-Strauss would have been manning the barricades. Now, approaching his sixtieth birthday, he wandered around the occupied Sorbonne as a complete outsider, looking on with what he described as “an ethnographer’s eye.” He withdrew to his apartment, where he waited to be recalled by his colleagues at the Laboratoire. His only involvement was a meeting held with, among others, the liberal public intellectual Raymond Aron and the classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant, in which they passed a motion condemning the use of violence. “I found May 1968 repugnant,” he later remarked. He was particularly upset by the wanton destruction in the streets in the Latin Quarter, the felled trees and desecrated buildings. To Lévi-Strauss, it was a return to a kind of mob rule. “I still have the tripe [guts] of a man of the left. But at my age I know it is tripe and not brain,” Lévi-Strauss had said in 1967.3 It now seemed that even in his tripe he was a conservative.

  It was Sartre’s moment—the only intellectual with the credibility to enter the occupied Sorbonne and, with the aid of a hastily improvised sound system, connect with the crowds of students who spilled out into the corridors and pavements. With the exception of Michel Foucault,4 whose relative youth and growing sense of political engagement gave him kudos, the so-called structuralist thinkers were seen as a part of a discredited, elitist university system. This was no time for abstract analyses of myth or a semiology of narrative.

  Barthes’s and Greimas’s students rebelled, setting up their own more politicized discussion groups. Barred from speaking during their own seminars, these great thinkers were reduced to answering questions when required. One day a student scrawled, “Structures don’t take to the streets,” across the blackboard; another day someone pinned up a poster reading, “Barthes says: structures don’t take to the streets. We say: neither does Barthes”—a slogan that subsequently appeared on lecture-theater blackboards across the United States during Greimas’s lecture tour in the autumn. A sensitive man who feared crowds and violent protest, Barthes was wounded by this sudden turn against him and his work, especially since he considered himself more authentically grounded in Marxism and the Left than his unruly students.5

  Some felt a sense of schadenfreude at what they saw as the sudden exposure of the limitations of structuralist thought. The psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, who had split from Lacan accusing him of obscurantism, felt vindicated, declaring: “It is not only a student strike in Paris . . . but a death warrant of structuralism as well.” Later in the year Le Monde published a supplement entitled “Le structuralisme, a-t-il été tué par Mai ’68?” (Has structuralism been killed by May ’68?),6 in which longtime Lévi-Strauss skeptic Georges Balandier wrote, “The whole idea of 1968 belied the structural world and structural man.”7 Much of this was in the broad brushstroke spirit of the times, with its sloganeering and political posturing, but May ’68 did indeed jar with the feel of structuralism. France had been rocked by the return of the subject, the return of history writ large. Structuralism, broadly defined, along with the emerging post-structuralist thought, would remain dominant in the French academy in the years to come because those influenced by Lévi-Strauss had all risen to hold key positions in the university system, but the optimism around the project had been punctured.

  Even Lévi-Strauss felt the turning of the tide:In the following months, I clearly sensed that the press and the so-called cultivated public which had hailed structuralism—wrongly moreover—as the birth of a philosophy of modern times turned abruptly away from it, with a kind of spite at having bet on the wrong horse. It’s true, the May youth proved to be far removed from structuralism and much closer to positions, even though old ones, which Sartre defined right after World War II.8

  But at the same time he welcomed the respite from the media frenzy that had enveloped structuralism in the run-up to May ’68. He believed that his work existed on another plane entirely, floating high above the political squabbles of a changing France. May ’68 was merely an inconvenience, an interruption, which, along with a bout of illness that he suffered the following year, had slowed the pace of his work on the Mythologiques project. As he began writing his fourth and final volume, his mind was elsewhere. “I was a monk,” he said of the period.9

  DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY of his father and to his mother (who, then eighty-five, had lived to see her son’s success), L’Homme nu opened with a pan across the northwest of the United States. From the Rockies to the windswept Pacific coast of Oregon and Washington states, it glided over volcanic folds, Jurassic rock formations, deep gorges and basalt outcrops. From here, Lévi-Strauss’s journey would work its way up the coast, crossing the border into British Columbia to straits and fjords around Vancouver Island. Over the course of the Mythologiques quartet, tropical forests had turned to prairies, the grasslands to estuaries and ocean passages. The jaguars, tapirs, parrots and monkeys that had peopled the central Brazilian narratives were by now grizzly bears, otters, salmon and woodpeckers. Although the characters had changed, they still trod the same structural pathways, hewn through the byways of a panhuman subconscious.

  Based on lectures given at the Collège de France between 1965 and 1971,10 L’Homme nu was a difficult book to write. After the third volume Lévi-Strauss had feared he would never finish the series, so complex had the analyses become. Each new strain of mythic thought begged another, each set of myths posed fresh questions, suggesting further axes sheering off in new directions. At the beginning of the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss had criticized Marcel Granet’s Catégories matrimoniales et relations de proximité dans la Chine ancienne for its overly elaborate attempts at modeling kin relations. Now he appeared to be falling into the same trap. He had been striving to achieve order from chaos, but had found himself stumbling through a set of interconnected chambers of logic, lost in a maze of reason. If this was not to be a Sisyphean task—like Saussure’s Norse research—Lévi-Strauss had to be pragmatic. What eventuated was a book brimming with ideas, some ambitious, all-encompassing summaries of the Mythologiques project, others lightly sketched as notes for further research.

  As fragmentary and imperfect as the Mythologiques had been, by
the end of L’Homme nu the mythic substance had begun to yield. By strange symmetry, the further Lévi-Strauss had traveled from his starting point in central Brazil, the more structurally similar the myths had become. As he moved up the Pacific coast from northern California to British Columbia, from the Klamath-Modoc to the Salish indigenous groups, he began to make out a kind of structural convergence. The original Bororo bird-nester myth with which Lévi-Strauss had led off the series reemerged, but as with the analogy of optical projections through a light box that he had used in relation to “La Geste d’Asdiwal,” many of the “mythemes” had flipped over.

  In broad narrative outline, the original Bororo myth (M1) and the Klamath variations (M530, M531), for instance, were uncannily similar. Both told the story of a young man or a boy tricked into climbing to a high place to capture birds. After being stranded, he is rescued by animals and returns to seek revenge on his deceiver. But in Lévi-Strauss’s reading, each element in the narrative had been inverted. In the Bororo myth the birds were macaws; in Klamath myth, eagles, a prototypical fruit-eating bird for a generic bird of prey. The boy in M1 has his buttocks chewed off by vultures, while in the Klamath variation he is starved, hence privation through external aggression versus internal decay. In the South American myth he is saved by male cannibalistic vultures; in the North American ones his rescuers are harmless butterfly women. At the end of the Bororo myth the hero’s revenge is to call on the rains, while in Klamath variations the hero summons a firestorm.11 Taken together, the myths fit together like pieces of a puzzle.

  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

  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

  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.

  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.”

  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?

  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.

  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

  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

  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: 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