Nostalgia for the Absolute

by George Steiner

  Lévi-Strauss clarifies his meaning by reference to two myths—and it is surely acutely witty or worrying for us that the two myths Lévi-Strauss chooses should be precisely those which Marx and Freud respectively had picked as their main emblems. You remember that to Marx, Prometheus was the symbol of revolutionary intelligence, of the rebellion of intellect against ignorance and arbitrary tyranny. Freud lights on the erotic intimations in the theme. He tells of the rapture of fire in a hollow phallic reed, of the sexually laden symbolism of the devouring bird, and the daily renewal of Prometheus’s potency. Lévi-Strauss’s reading is totally different. The Promethean appropriation of fire to human needs and wishes encodes the catastrophic step whereby man acquired control over the principal factors in his biological setting. Having stolen fire, man can now have light during hours of darkness; having hunted his prey, with fire he can now preserve the meat in smoked or cooked form and need not eat it on the spot; having fire from Prometheus, he can bring warmth into his dwelling, thus overcoming constraints of winter. The control of fire is the premise of social-cultural progress, surely. But it has been achieved, says Lévi-Strauss, at a formidable cost. Possessing a hearth and the art of cooking, man has broken with the animal world, with the immediate shared relationships of consumer to food. Having altered the binary polarities of light and dark, of heat and cold, of night and day, man finds himself in an unnatural power-relation to his environment and to his own animal origins. This ambiguity is symbolized by Prometheus’s half human, half divine status. The divorce from the natural order brought on by his theft of fire (and the notion of theft is primal to the legend) is punished by Prometheus’s isolation and by the assaults on him of the eagle.

  Go back to the great myths which have engaged the human imagination and whose thematic elements turn up in all languages and ethnic groups, says Lévi-Strauss, and you will find at their roots some trace of man’s cultural break with the natural world, and of the deep discomforts which this break has left in our souls. Discomfort—Freud’s word was Unbehagen, Marx’s word alienation. The Oedipus myth is another case in point—and Lévi-Strauss’s gloss on Oedipus is an undisguised critique and correction of his great rival, Freud. Lévi-Strauss fixes on just those motifs which Freud’s decipherment neglects. Oedipus’s answer to the riddle of the Sphinx, you remember, was the word “man”. That is one feature which Freud pays no attention to. And the second feature which Freud does not even mention, is the fact that Oedipus limps. And it is precisely these features that excite Lévi-Strauss.

  As Lévi-Strauss reads it, we have here yet another myth, another structural ordering of man’s divided being. Once all of us were walkers or runners on all fours. Man then compelled his backbone to be erect. We now move on two limbs only, we dominate the landscape, we dominate the animal species. But no less than the rape of fire, this sovereign singularity has left us, quite literally, off balance. The hominids, as it were, limped into the state of humanity. Thus the incest theme in the Oedipus story is not, as Freud would have it, a dramatization of suppressed infantile sexuality. It points to the all-decisive coming into being of defined kinship categories. Oedipus assumes the burden of the transition of the human species from indiscriminate couplings, as in so many animal kinds, to the economic and generational continuities of a familial code.

  The prohibition of certain degrees of incest determines, and indeed defines, man’s identity as a social-historical consciousness. It is wholly inseparable from the human speech evolution. And here Lévi-Strauss makes one of his inspired guesses. He says that we can only prohibit that which our vocabulary and grammar are exact and rich enough to designate. In other words, not until you have a sufficiently rich sentence structure and enough words to define the third cousin four times removed of the mother’s uncle can you have incest and kinship rules. So that grammar, in a way, is a necessary condition for basic moral law. Kinship rules are, literally, the semantics of human existence. But once again, the break with Nature, the advance into Culture, has been one of estrangement from the environment and from the animal in ourselves. Language is the necessary condition of human excellence, but man can neither communicate with his animal kindred nor cry to them for help.

  Even these abbreviated, simplified examples should indicate something of the breadth of Lévi-Strauss’s “anthropo-logy”—always that hyphen—and of his own mythopoetic instincts. Formally, his work elucidates the structure of meaning, the transformational rules, the relations to ritual and to development of written narrative, of some 800 American-Indian myths. It is through this elucidation that Lévi-Strauss seeks to establish the principles of correspondence which connect man’s psychosomatic evolution, the structure of our brain, the nature of language, and the physical environment. But though he likes to define himself merely as a student of myths, Lévi-Strauss is, in fact, a creator of mythology, and the comparison with Frazer’s role in The Golden Bough is at once obvious and, from the point of view of Lévi-Strauss’s technical status in the field, somewhat disturbing. If I do not mistake his meaning, Lévi-Strauss has been voicing a prophetic vision of apocalypse as vengeful, as persuasive, as any conceived since the Book of Revelation and the millenarian panics of the tenth century.

  As I say this, I touch on what is, of course, a very worrying problem—the question again: Are we dealing with a scientific, systematic body of thought? Being an outsider, it would be entirely impertinent for me to do more than refer to the differences which nowdivide Lévi-Strauss’s conception of what an anthropologist does, from that conception in the lives and professional activity of his academic colleagues. To them he is a spinner of purple fantasies. He, on the contrary, regards them as people so wretchedly unimaginative that they actually have to go and sit in tents or savannahs or deserts, looking at moribund natives, in order to find out what they already knew was there. I do not think we should try and judge.

  From our point of view what is fascinating is to follow in Lévi-Strauss the evolution of a great post-religious, pseudotheological explanation of man. It goes something like this. The fall of man did not, at one stroke, eradicate all the vestiges of the Garden of Eden. Great spaces of primeval nature and of animal life did persist. The eighteenth-century travellers succumbed to a kind of premeditated illusion when they thought to have found innocent races of men in the paradise of the South Seas or in the great forests of the New World. But their idealizations had a certain validity. Having existed, as it were, outside history, having abided by primordial social and mental usages, possessing a profound intimacy with plant and with animal, primitive men did embody a more natural condition. Their cultural divorce from nature had of course occurred hundreds and thousands of years ago, but it was less drastic than that of the white man: to be precise, their cultural modes, their rituals, myths, taboos, techniques of food-gathering, were calculated to assuage nature, to comfort her, to live with her, to make the break between nature and culture less savage, less dominant.

  Coming upon these shadows of the remnants of Eden, Western man set out to destroy them. He slaughtered countless guiltless peoples. He clawed down the forests, he charred the savannah. Then his fury of waste turned on the animal species. One after another of these was hounded into extinction or into the factitious survival of the zoo. This devastation was often deliberate: it resulted directly from military conquest, from economic exploitation, from the imposition of uniform technologies on native life-styles. Millions perished or lost their ethnic heritage and identity. Some observers put at twenty million the number of victims in the Congo alone, from the start of Belgian rule. Languages, each of which had encoded a unique vision of the world, were steam-rollered into oblivion. The egret and the whale were hunted almost to annihilation. Often also, destruction came accidentally or even out of benevolence. The gifts which the white man had brought—medical gifts, material, institutional—proved fatal to their recipients. Whether he came to conquer or to proselytize, to exploit or to medicate, Western man brought devastation. Possesse
d, as it were, by some archetypal rage at his own exclusion from the Garden of Paradise, by some torturing remembrance of that disgrace, we have scoured the earth for vestiges of Eden and laid them waste wherever we have found them.

  Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of this desolation has a special, ironic poignancy. For the anthropologist himself has played his own ambivalent part in the affair of destruction. The notion of travelling to far places in order to study alien peoples and cultures, is unique to Western man; it springs from the predatory genius of the Greeks; no primitive peoples have ever come to study us. This is, on the one hand a disinterested, intellectually inspired impulse. It is one of our glories. But it is, on the other, part and parcel of exploitation. No native community survives intact after the anthropologist’s visit—however skilful, however self-effacing, however tactful he may be. The Western obsession with inquiry, with analysis, with the classification of all living forms, is itself a mode of subjugation, of psychological and technical mastery. Fatally, analytic thought will adulterate or destroy the vitality of its object. Lévi-Strauss’s Tnstes Tropiques turns on this melancholy paradox.

  With the years, Lévi-Strauss’s visionary anger has intensified. The ravage of the vegetable and animal orders in the name of technological progress, the exploitation of a major part of humanity for the benefit of a few, the scarcely examined Western assumption of superiority over the so-called primitive, underdeveloped communities—all these fill Lévi-Strauss with contemptuous loathing. The political barbarism of the twentieth century, such phenomena as the holocaust and the nuclear arms race, seem to Lévi-Strauss to be no accident. They are the direct correlatives of the white man’s murderous treatment of ecology. Having ravaged what little remained of Eden (and this is the logic of Lévi-Strauss’s punitive metaphor or myth), the Western predator must now turn on himself.

  We can surely answer “yes”, but we are now conscious of the ruin we have brought. We can say that the more thoughtful of Western men, and the young in particular, are trying to save the natural environment, to rescue animal species, to protect what pitiful islands of virgin earth are still to be found. Too late, says Lévi-Strauss, much too late. Our very experiments in salvage—witness the Indian reservations in Amazonia—bring with them new dislocations, new erosions. Where economic-political interests are at stake—be it in the whaling industry, in the Alaskan pipe line, or in the emancipation of New Guinea—cynicism and destruction will prevail. We are, says Lévi-Strauss, in consequence, doomed. Anthropology, the science of man, will culminate, he says, in “entropology”. In French the pun is perfect, you can’t tell the two words apart—anthropologie—entropologie. It will culminate in the science of entropy, the science of extinction. This black pun leads to a culminating image of the earth, devoid of humanity, cleansed of the garbage of human greed and self-destruction, whirling cold and void in empty space. I would like to quote the passage in full. It comes at the end of volume 4 of Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques, and may I quote it in French, as we are, after all, together in a Canadian context. Also the rhythm and splendour of this passage almost defy translation:

  * L’opposition fondamentale, génératrice de toutes les autres qui foisonnent dans les mythes et dont ces quatre tomes ont dressé 1’inventaire, est celle meême qu’ énonce Hamlet sous la forme d’une encore trop credule alternative. Car entre l’être et le non-être, il n’appartient pas à I’homme de choisir. Un effort mental consubstantiel à son histoire, et qui ne cessera qu’avec son effacement de la scéne de I’univers, lui impose d’assumer les deux évidences contradictoires dont le heurt met sa pensée en branle et, pour netraliser leur opposition, engendre une série illimiteée d’autres distinctions binaires qui, sans jamais résourdre cette antinomie premiére, ne font, à des échelles de plus réduites, que la reproduire et la perpétuer: réalité de l’être, que I’homme éprouve au plus profond de luimême comme seule capable de donner raison et sens à ses gestes quotidiens, à sa vie morale et sentimentale à, a ses choix politiques, à son engagement dans le monde social et natural, à ses entreprises pratiques et à ses conquêetes scíentifiques; mais en même temps, réalité du non-être dont l’intuition accompagne indissolublement 1’autre puis-qu’il incombe à l’homme de vivre et lutter, penser et croire, garder surtout courage, sans que jamais le quitte la certitude adverse, qu’il n’était pas présent autrefois sur la terre et qu’il ne sera pas toujours, et qu’avec sa disparition ineluctable de la surface d’une planete elle aussi vouée à la mort, ses labeurs, ses peines, ses joies, ses espoirs et ses œeuvres deviendront comme s’ils n’avaient pas existé, nulle conscience n’étant plus là pour préserver fût-ce le souvenir de ces mouvements éphémeres sauf, par quelques traits vites effacés d’un monde au visage désormais impassible, le constat abrogé qu’ils eurent lieu c’est-à-dire rien.

  * The fundamental alternative, the alternative which generates all those other opposing sets which crowd myths and of which these four volumes have been an inventory, is that set forth by Hamlet, though in too credulous a form. It is not for man to choose between being and non-being. He is compelled, by a mental stress which is incarnate in his history and which will not cease until his own disappearance from the universe, to take upon himself these two contradictory alternatives. It is the clash between being and non-being which sets human thought in motion. It is the attempt to reconcile this inherent contradiction which, in turn, generates a limitless series of further binary distinctions which, without ever reconciling the primal antithesis, only reproduce it and perpetutate it on an ever diminishing scale. There is the reality of being which man experiences in his inmost depths as being alone capable of affording rationality and meaning to his daily acts, to his moral and emotional life, to his political choices, to his implication in the social and natural world, to his practical enterprises and scientific conquests. But there is, at the same time, the reality of non-being, whose perception is indivisible from that of being, since it is man’s lot to live and struggle, think and believe, above all, keep steadfast, without ever losing the destructive certainty that he was not, in times past, present on this earth, that he will not endure forever, and that with his ineluctable disappearance from the surface of a planet itself destined to extinction, his labours, his pains, his joys, his hopes, and his accomplished works shall become as if they had never been. No consciousness will survive to preserve, be it no more than a remembrance of man’s ephemeral doings, except by the token of a few rapidly effaced traces. Swept from a world whose features will thenceforth be expressionless and perfectly indifferent, these will have been nothing but a brief testimony that such doings did occur—in short, they will be nothing.

  Listeners to these first three talks will have observed that there is, between the three mythologies we have looked at so far, what could be called a genetic link. It would require extreme discriminatory finesse and a scope beyond the present for me to assess contrastively and in depth, the Judaism of Marx, of Freud, and of Lévi-Strauss. Notoriously, Marx turned on his own ethnic-spiritual past. He came to produce a virulent text on the Jewish question, identifying Judaism with the vices of capitalism and calling, quite literally, for a final solution in terms of complete assimilation. The extremity of this proposal does, to be sure, suggest the depth of Marx’s personal malaise in regard to his own status. Freud’s attitudes were, as we have seen with reference to his treatment of the Moses theme, complex and, very probably, subconsciously motivated. Profoundly Jewish in his temperament, Jewish in his style of feeling and private life, he endeavoured to give to the psychoanalytical movement a larger ethnic basis, a respectability in the Gentile world. In the Preface to the Hebrew edition of Totem and Taboo in 1930, Freud described himself—and I quote—“as completely estranged from the religion of my fathers”. But he went on—and I quote again—“If asked, ‘What is left to you that is Jewish?’ I would have to reply, ‘A very great deal and probably the essence.’” By which he seems to have meant, the ideal of intellectual pursu
it and of high moral seriousness. So far as I am aware, Lévi-Strauss has not pronounced himself on the issue; indeed he seems studiously to avoid it. His very insistence on the fact that the holocaust has no privileged status, either historically or metaphysically, that it is only a part of the general structure of massacre and extinction, shows a wish to distance himself from any Jewish particularity. I have heard him speak with disdain about those who seek to separate the holocaust in the Second World War from that continuity of massacre of human peoples, animal species, and natural forms, which in his great myth of vengeance is the principal guilt of modern man. Bitterly he will say that, of all men, the Jew should be the one most profoundly alert to, aware of, the universality of murder that surrounds him.

  Nevertheless, there are specific Judaic aspects, indeed marked ones, in each of the three cases. Marx’s utopian messianism, his rage for justice, his conception of the drama and logic of history, have strong roots in the prophetic and Talmudic traditions. Marx’s promissory vision, which we compared to Isaiah, of the exchange of love for love, of trust for trust, his promise that history is finally rational, that it has a design and that it is a design of human liberation, these have their profoundly rich precedent and parallel in every aspect of Jewish thought. Freud’s relentless intellectuality, the pessimism and severity of his ethics, his unswerving trust in the power of the word, these too relate to key aspects of Jewish sensibility. Only a man of his particular background would have believed as deeply as he did, even in the face of mounting barbarism, in the supremacy of the human word over ignorance and death and destruction. He was supremely, in the rabbinical sense, an interpreter of texts, a creator of parables. In Lévi-Strauss there is the obsessive sense of retribution, of man’s failure to observe his contractual responsibilities to creation. We have never in modern times had a more powerful, a more explicit, reading of man’s breach of covenant with the mystery of creation, and of his own borrowed being in a world which he should guard and preserve, in a garden which was his to cultivate and not to destroy.