Books & the Arts. Library Man by Thomas Meaney hen Claude Lévi-Strauss died a series of musical movements that promised Claude Lévi-Strauss little over a year ago at age 100, he a key to all mythologies. For such critics, The Poet in the Laboratory. left behind a curious and contested the very scale of Lévi-Strauss’s ambition By Patrick Wilcken. legacy. For the French, he was the belongs to a particularly heady moment in Penguin Press. 388 pp. $29.95. intellectual equivalent of royalty. In French thought. 2008,W editions of his works were published Patrick Wilcken’s new biography, Claude his limited means, Raymond gave Claude a in the gilt-lettered Pléiade collection, an act Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory, is an rich grounding in the arts. He schooled him of canonization rare for a living French au- ambitious attempt to navigate between these in the grand masters at the Louvre, immersed thor; in his last appearances on television, two extreme perspectives. An Australian his- him in the operas of Wagner and encouraged he was less a commentator than an object of torian of Brazil with a background in anthro- his sketching of set designs for the theater. veneration; shortly before the end, President pology, Wilcken is well positioned to deliver But the young Lévi-Strauss was also Nicolas Sarkozy paid him court to wish him a coolheaded account of Lévi-Strauss’s life tempted by the world beyond his father’s ken. happy birthday. “All French anthropologists and career. He interviewed Lévi-Strauss He admired the novels of Louis-Ferdinand are the children of Lévi-Strauss,” proclaimed twice for this book, and while his subject re- Céline and André Breton and made the Le Monde in its obituary—which was an un- mained almost comically aloof during their rounds at the studios and galleries of avant- derstatement, as there is scarcely a field in the sessions—“My emotional states weren’t that garde painters. In an early article published humanities and social sciences Lévi-Strauss important to me,” he once remarked— in Georges Bataille’s journal Documents, he left unaltered. His ideas about myth dramati- Wilcken ­ is alive enough to his dissembling made a case for Picasso as the greatest painter cally collapsed the distinction between Eu- ironies to read him profitably against the of the age but criticized Cubism for pretend- ropean high culture and so-called primitive grain. If Lévi-Strauss was able to make scien- ing to be a break from Impressionism when society, and weaned a generation of French tific discoveries about aboriginal cultures, it it was simply another manifestation of bour- thinkers off Marxist orthodoxy and Sartrean was not despite his artistic predilections, geois art tailor-made for a band of insiders. By existentialism. Though he did not like to Wilcken convincingly argues, but because age 21, Lévi-Strauss was already playing the claim intellectual patrimony, the careers of of them. Countless anthropologists combed detective, deciphering the clues of culture. Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Louis Al- through the remains of the last aboriginal Lévi-Strauss’s early academic expe- thusser and Michel Foucault are impossible societies in the course of the twentieth cen- riences were less exhilarating than his to imagine without him. tury, many of them with more experience in ­extracurricular­ escapades. In his memoir But for readers outside France, including the field than Lévi-Strauss. But they lacked Tristes Tropiques (1955), he bitterly recalled many Anglo-American critics, the nature his trained sensibility: the sharp eye for cul- the “claustrophobic, Turkish bath-like at- of his achievement is harder to define. No tural patterns, the novelistic feel for the mosphere” of the French university system one doubts Lévi-Strauss was the author of shape of a story, the patience for synthesiz- and its scholastic pretensions. After choos- important works and the purveyor of power- ing masses of abstruse data into meaningful ing to study philosophy—“the result less of ful insights, but the suspicion remains that wholes. This is what Wilcken means when a genuine vocation than of a dislike for the behind his fantastically rigorous analyses of he calls him “the poet in the laboratory,” other subjects”—he prepared for the “inhu- Amerindian culture there operated a deeply even if, as Lévi-Strauss liked to joke, his lab man ordeal” of the Aggregation, the com- impressionistic and idiosyncratic mind at was inconveniently located 6,000 miles petitive examination that allows students in odds with any general theory. Some accused outside Paris. France to become university lecturers. “I him of reducing the meaning of human ex- was confident that, at ten minutes’ notice, istence to an arbitrary stock of contrasting laude Lévi-Strauss was groomed to I could knock together an hour’s lecture flavors: the raw and the cooked, the fresh be an artiste. He grew up in a secular with a sound dialectical framework, on the and the rotten, the wet and the dry. Others Jewish household on the edge of Paris’s respective superiority of buses and trams,” took his structuralist program to be a scien- sixteenth arrondissement­ , surrounded he remembered. Wilcken’s retelling of the tific alibi that concealed his fundamentally by his ­father’s exotic curios and half- period offers glimpses of the coming attrac- artistic enterprise. This was a man, after Cfinished projects. Raymond Lévi-Strauss was tions of postwar French thought: we see all, who once, while in the middle of the a portraitist with a weakness for pastels. Lévi-Strauss brush shoulders with Simone Amazon, wrote a tragedy about Augustus, His livelihood was endangered by the rise Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone and whose magnum opus, the four-volume of photography, and when his commissions de Beauvoir (“Very young, with a fresh, Mythologiques (1964–71), was composed in a dried up in the 1920s, his son helped him use bright complexion, like a little peasant girl,” scraps around the house to make a series of he remembered). Like many of his genera- Thomas Meaney is a doctoral candidate in history haphazard, artful knickknacks to pay the bills tion, Lévi-Strauss was intimately involved at Columbia University and an editor of The (a homegrown example of what the anthro- in politics: he served as the secretary general Utopian. pologist would later call “bricolage”). Despite for the Socialist student union, worked for 28 The Nation. February 7, 2011 a Socialist deputy and became president of contemporary novelist Paul Nizan and the use to shatter a generation-old consensus in a left-wing advocacy group dedicated to sixteenth-century missionary-explorer Jean anthropology. Whereas functionalist anthro- mobilizing students worldwide. But with de Léry, Lévi-Strauss dreamed of the possi- pologists following Bronislaw Malinowski these solid leftist credentials came remark- bility of not only philosophizing about Rous- believed the social lives of indigenous peoples ably conventional views. The young Lévi- seau’s noble savage but of actually going out were determined by basic needs like sex Strauss emerges in Wilcken’s portrait as an to find him. In 1934, when an opportunity and hunger, Lévi-Strauss found something advocate of the sort of mild paternalistic came his way to teach at the University of São close to the opposite in the tribes he en- colonialism he would later abhor, and a Paulo in Brazil, he jumped at the chance. countered: even in the most dire conditions, champion of a vague kind of gradual social they were driven above all by an intellectual change he called “Constructive Revolution .” t is astonishing how much of Lévi- need to understand the world around them. If Lévi-Strauss was a radical in anything, it Strauss’s reputation still hinges on a When Amerindians chose animals for their was in his course of study. He eventually nine-month voyage through the Mato totems, it was not because they were “good decided to abandon his pursuit of a doctor- Grosso of western Brazil that was, in to eat,” Lévi-Strauss argued, but because ate in philosophy—the traditional rite of many respects, a failure. The objective they were “good to think.” The Nambikwara passage for France’s intellectual elite—and Iwas to travel along an abandoned telegraph were every bit as scientifically minded as the cast about for an escape route. line and conduct a rigorous survey of the ethnographers who studied them (their men- The relatively uncharted waters of an- little-known Nambikwara tribe, but a series tal inventory for honey, for instance, included thropology made it an appealing refuge for of setbacks meant Lévi-Strauss could spend thirteen different varieties). The only major the intellectually adept but rudderless Lévi- only a few days among them. His account difference, Lévi-Strauss claimed, was the Strauss. In later years, he made it seem like of his sole sustained fieldwork experience— “totalitarian ambition of the savage mind,” which makes up the bulk of which operated on the assumption that if Tristes Tropiques—presents you couldn’t explain everything, you hadn’t If the young Lévi-Strauss was a challenge to any biogra- explained anything. Lévi-Strauss witnessed pher who wants to cover this rage for order in everything from their radical in anything, it was in his the same territory with face-painting to the layout of their camps, matching vividness. But it’s and most especially in their myths, which course of study: anthropology. in Brazil that Wilcken is at they pieced together with borrowed scraps his best, providing the miss- of older ones in the same way a computer he was hard-wired for the match: ing parts of Lévi-Strauss’s narrative, includ- programmer might patch together code. ing his on-the-spot field notes, and filling Lévi-Strauss left the Nambikwara with a I sometimes wonder if anthropology in the supporting cast barely mentioned in hoard of impressions about their culture, but did not attract me, without my realiz- the book. We watch as Lévi-Strauss, low he hadn’t yet cracked their riddles. The major ing this, because of a structural affin- on money and bartering supplies, placates a theoretical breakthrough would come from ity between the civilizations it studies planted spy from the Brazilian government in an unexpected source during his wartime and my particular way of thinking. I the convoy, and copes with broken recording exile in New York City. He spent the war years have no aptitude for prudently cul- equipment and unreliable mules. After his teaching at the New School, having barely tivating a given field and gathering young ethnographer wife, Dina, contracts a scrambled out of occupied France alive. It in the harvest year after year: I have sight-threatening eye infection, he wastes no was there that his colleague Alexandre Koyré a neolithic kind of intelligence. Like time dispatching her back to São Paulo. For introduced him to Roman Jakobson, a globe- native bush fires, it sometimes sets a thinker who would be an armchair anthro- trotting Russian linguist who specialized in unexplored areas alight; it may fertil- pologist for the rest of his life—“I realized the structural analysis of language developed ize them and snatch a few crops from early on that I was a library man,” he once by Ferdinand de Saussure. Jakobson thought them, and then it moves on, leaving told an interviewer—Lévi-Strauss displayed he had found a dependable drinking partner scorched earth in its wake. a remarkable toughness in the bush. Wilcken in Lévi-Strauss; he was disappointed on that For Lévi-Strauss, anthropology was a vo- treats us to a digression on the fate of another front—Lévi-Strauss was a teetotaling early cation akin to music or mathematics: you member of the expedition, a young Columbia riser—but their friendship blossomed into a had to discover the aptitude for it within graduate student named Buell Quain, who rich intellectual exchange. yourself. It was perhaps an advantage that he would later commit suicide from the pres- Lévi-Strauss learned from Jakobson how barely had any formal training in the field. sures likely related to fieldwork. language could be broken down into simple He was too young to have signed on to the When Lévi-Strauss at last reached the components called phonemes. As Wilcken first major French ethnographic expedition Nambikwara after an 800-mile trek, the en- explains, the “r” in “rat” and the “m” in across North Africa, undertaken by Marcel counter shattered his romantic expectations. “mat” operated like control gates on a cir- Griaule and Michael Leiris, and he neglected “I had been looking for a society reduced to cuit board, indicating alternate meanings. It to attend the seminars of Marcel Mauss, who its simplest expression,” he wrote, and “that was not the phonemes themselves that held did pioneering work on reciprocity and gift of the Nambikwara was so truly simple that the meaning of words but the relationship exchange, at the Collège de France. Instead, all I could find in it was individual human among them. This shift from studying single he imbibed a mixed brew of the latest field beings.” The men of the tribe greeted him objects—whether it be a syllable, a sentence, reports by American anthropologists along laughing; the women tried to steal his soap a family or a culture—in favor of analyzing with the Surrealist accounts of French writ- as he washed in the river. Malnourished, and the relations among them was the essence of ers who had made contact with indigenous on the brink of a breakdown, he neverthe- structuralism. Lévi-Strauss applied its logic peoples. Inspired by the travel books of the less started to gather the material he would to the workings of myth, which he took to be 30 The Nation. February 7, 2011 another form of language. ­Mythology, in his Bridge, conducting a mock-ethnography of thinking. “Power was passing from a chain- view, is an elaborate attempt to make cogni- Fire Island and reading out translations smoking, pill-­popping haunter of Left Bank tive sense out of our chaotic impressions of of President Roosevelt’s speeches on Free café society to a sixteenth-arrondissement­ the natural world. We respond to our envi-­ French radio (the clarity of his diction made aesthete,” writes Wilcken. But how exactly, ronment by breaking it down into manage- him a good fit for the job). He easily could and under what conditions, did the exchange able dualisms, which makes it possible to have made a career for himself in his adopted take place? ­orient our existence in the world. By “cook- homeland, but after the war he took a post Sartre was an early hero of postwar ing” the “raw” material of nature, we translate at the École practique des hautes études, French intellectuals for a reason. By ar- it into culture. Lévi-Strauss came to ­consider where he rejoined his old tribe as a more ticulating a philosophy based on acting re- indigenous myths, as a form of aesthetic formidable member. sponsibly in the face of history, he restored creation, superior to the West’s ­precarious the confidence of a damaged intellectual investment in more dubious expressions of ack in Paris in the early 1950s, Lévi- elite and helped it prepare for its confron- individual artists, since individual-centered­ ­Strauss wrote Tristes Tropiques—a tation with the nation’s colonial past. The meaning was almost guaranteed to pale in memoir of his voyage to Brazil dis- impossible ambition of the Critique was to comparison to the power of a myth that had guised as an anti-travel book—in a reconcile Sartre’s existentialist ethics with been fashioned by an entire community over moment of despair, when he felt his the Marxist dictates of historical necessity. time. There may have been no Tolstoy of the Bacademic career had stalled and he could In Sartre’s system, history presents us with Nambikwara, but the culture and language risk a wider audience. From its opening line a limited range of possibilities and we act they had made and shared was more fecund (“I hate traveling and explorers”) to its dis- within them, which in turn gives rise to a than War and Peace. enchanted declarations (“the tropics are less new set of possibilities. For Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson’s structural method became exotic, than out of date”), the book dealt in this blend of historical determinism and ­Lévi-Strauss’s prize intellectual tool and the cultural pessimism that would become his personal agency was doubly problematic. brought anthropology closer to becoming trademark. While Lévi-Strauss rails against First, it put the individual front and center a hard science. Lévi-Strauss could now the Western myth of the self-authorizing in the historical process, whereas, as Lévi- process the huge amounts of data in his individual, he allows his subjectivity to shim- Strauss believed he had shown, the underly- colleagues’ field reports by plugging their mer throughout Tristes Tropiques. The prose ing structures of society left little room for findings into his elaborate charts and ta- bears a heavy Surrealistic stamp: two moun- the whimsy of subjectivity. “The self is not bles. He wrote The Elementary Structures of tains outside Rio de Janeiro are like “stumps only hateful,” he wrote in Tristes Tropiques, Kinship (1949) in the now-vanished North sticking up here and there in a toothless channeling Pascal, “there is no place for it American reading room of the New York mouth”; the precipices between the sky- between us and nothing.” Second, Sartre was Public Library, where he shared a table with scrapers of New York are “sombre valleys, still propagating the old European idea of a Native American chief taking notes in a dotted with multi­coloured cars looking like history as a progressive narrative, whereas buckskin jacket and full feather headdress. flowers.” Lévi-Strauss shares with Proust Lévi-Strauss held up indigenous cultures as The Elementary Structures remains the most the ability to cycle through the styles of great examples of other, possibly more appealing forbidding of Lévi-Strauss’s major works, French writers, whether he is teasing out ways of organizing human experience. The but it revolutionized the way anthropolo- the colors of a sunset à la Chateaubriand or myths of tribes such as the Nambikwara gists under­stood kinship and caste systems. sharpening an insight to the fine point of a and the Bororo were designed to insulate Instead of focusing on lineage and descent, Pascalian pensée. Wilcken, a beautiful stylist, their seemingly unchanging social orders Lévi-Strauss showed how indigenous fami- is well attuned to these shifts but also alert from the disruptions of history. By mak- lies developed on a horizontal plane, with to the places where Lévi-Strauss feigns non- ing history always be “for” something, and men exchanging their sisters and daughters in chalance or veers into preciousness. privileging the breakneck speed of Western order to avoid the incest taboo, which Lévi- The question remains: how did a rela- history over the slow, recycling world of in- Strauss interpreted as humanity’s most basic tively obscure, taciturn anthropologist, who digenous peoples, Sartre was committing “a attempt to rein in the randomness of nature. had written an unsupervised dissertation sort of intellectual cannibalism much more When he was not unraveling the myster- on a recondite subject and maintained only revolting to the anthropologist than real ies of kinship systems, Lévi-Strauss led a minimal ties with the French intellectual cannibalism.” cheerful bohemian existence in New York. establishment, manage, within the course of He spent weekends prowling antique shops, a decade, to dethrone the leading thinker of or French academics and intellectu- surprised to find museum-quality Indian the age? Jean-Paul Sartre hardly considered als coming of age in the 1960s, it was artifacts and pottery available for next to Lévi-Strauss a threat. He sent the anthro- difficult to avoid the impression that nothing. Anthropologists and Surrealists pologist an inscribed copy of his Critique of Lévi-Strauss, by painstakingly drawing shared a passion for cultural fragments and Dialectical Reason (1960) “in testimony of a lessons from indigenous peoples from provocative juxtapositions. With his friends faithful friendship,” and cited The Elementary Facross the world, was working on a much Max Ernst and André Breton, he sought out Structures approvingly in the course of his grander scale than Sartre. “Bus-stop queues, the most enchanting pockets of the city’s argument. But Lévi-Strauss was in no mood strikes, boxing matches—the examples flourishing cultural ecosystem, stumbling to return favors. By then installed at the pres- out of which Sartre built his ‘philosophi- on communities that preserved traditions tigious Collège de France, he devoted a year- cal anthropology’—seemed provincial in long ago abandoned in the old country. In long seminar to a detailed study of Sartre’s comparison to structuralism’s global reach,” his mini-memoir “New York in 1941,” Lévi- Critique, and when his Savage Mind appeared writes Wilcken.­ While Sartre concentrated Strauss fondly recalled attending Chinese in 1962 it ended with a twenty-page assault on working out the problem of individual Operas under the first arch of the Brooklyn on the fundamental underpinnings of Sartre’s emancipation within the narrow confines of February 7, 2011 The Nation. 31 the Western philosophical tradition, Lévi- Barthes mildly absurd. (Lévi-Strauss once Strauss never seriously considered returning Strauss, by peeling back the divergent ex- performed a structuralist analysis of a Balzac to some primitive golden age, but there is pressions of a common human nature all story and sent it to Barthes, who responded little doubt he scanned native societies for el- over the world, was able to reveal how much with enthusiasm and urged Lévi-Strauss to ements that could contribute to the ongoing of Western culture was an unhealthy aber- publish it—until, Wilcken tells us, he was ethnographic critique of Western culture. ration. This self-critical stance in the face of informed it was a joke.) It was only with For this Lévi-Strauss has continually other cultures became a more compelling May 1968 that structuralism’s star began to come under attack from critics as a cultural form of anticolonialism than ­Sartre’s calling fade, relieving Lévi-Strauss of his place at relativist of the worst order. The charge was for third world revolution from his table at center stage. There was widespread agree- first leveled in the 1950s by the writer Roger the Café de Flore. Ours was the only civiliza- ment among the student protesters that his Caillois, who condemned him as an inverted tion, argued Lévi-Strauss, whose attempts to thought held no revolutionary potential— ethnocentrist. Lévi-Strauss, he argued, epito- release humanity from the bonds of nature “Structures don’t take to the streets,” read mized Western hypocrisy by putting primi- led to gross delusions that have underwrit- a famous pronouncement—and they began tive cultures on a pedestal, when the very ten everything from the destruction of the to question whether it even impeded so- existence of anthropology as a discipline was environment to the Holocaust. To Sartre’s cial progress. Some of Lévi-Strauss’s more proof of Western cultural superiority. This “Hell is other people,” Lévi-Strauss an- fanciful critics claimed that structuralism pablum would become the familiar conserva- swered: “Hell is ourselves.” was the theoretical expression of the stat- tive rebuke of anthropology throughout the The other reason for Lévi-Strauss’s un- ic authoritarian technocracy of de likely triumph was that structuralism served Gaulle’s government. “Structuralism as a convenient halfway house for disen- is the last barrier the bourgeoisie have chanted Marxists. Those who had lost faith erected against Marx,” wrote a reha- Dorothy Wordsworth in the iron laws of historical materialism bilitated Sartre, momentarily back in during the war now placed their bets on the spotlight, where he would soon The daffodils can go fuck themselves. structuralism as a more credible form of proselytize for Mao, his version of a I’m tired of their crowds, yellow rantings social criticism for resisting the advances of noble savage. about the spastic sun that shines and shines Anglo-American liberalism. Structuralism also exercised a hold on their minds because ut Lévi-Strauss’s politics re- and shines. How are they any different its core concept of social codes was a closed main badly misunderstood. system invulnerable to empirical testing. He had an intensely political from me? I, too, have a big messy head Its “imperialism of significance,” as René project that Wilcken, stressing on a fragile stalk. I spin with the wind. Girard has called it, could explain almost aesthetic concerns, fails to ap- anything, and turned Lévi-Strauss’s corpus Bpreciate. While his hopes of becom- I flower and don’t apologize. There’s nothing into the intellectual buffet from which the ing a socialist functionary may have funny about good weather. Oh, spring again, next generation selected its defining ideas. died early, Lévi-Strauss admired the For Lacan, structuralism revealed the sys- “savage mind” largely because he tem of symbolic forms that the mind uncon- believed it proposed remedies for the critics nod. They know the old joy, sciously mapped onto reality. For ­Althusser, specifically Western maladies. For that wakeful quotidian, the dark plot it helped explain how the capitalist mode example, when considering cannibal- of future growing things, each one ism, he argues that the indigenous of production drew on an intricate code labeled Narcissus nobilis or Jennifer Chang. of agreed-­upon meanings that bore little practice of eating part of one’s par- relation to the actual reality of workers. ent’s deceased body, so that they For Foucault, who was deeply attracted to might continue to live symbolically in If I died falling from a helicopter, then the anti­humanist element in structuralism their progeny, indicates more respect this would be an important poem. Then despite claiming not to be a structuralist, for humans than the scalpel work of the ex-boyfriends would swim to shore Lévi-Strauss showed how concepts like the dissection table. In return, Lévi- “madness” were arbitrary constructions Strauss writes, Amerindians would be declaiming their knowledge of my bulbous whose salience depended on a complex web mystified by modern prison practices, of shifting social values. Meanwhile, Barthes which separate lawbreakers from so- youth. O, Flower, one said, why aren’t you used its more formal techniques to unveil ciety and attempt to reform them the realist conceits of the modern novel and by destroying their social ties. The meat? But I won’t be another bashful shank. champion the “novels-without-a-subject” of Plains Indians, argues Lévi-Strauss, The tulips have their nervous joie-de-vivre, Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet. had a more effective way of reha- the lilacs their taunt. Fractious petals, stop Lévi-Strauss had little time for all this. “I bilitating criminals. By temporarily don’t know and I don’t care,” he tells Wilcken ridding them of their possessions or when asked about his legacy. He never read a living quarters, they put them in a interrupting my poem with boring beauty. “structuralist” novel and confessed to finding tightly bound reciprocal relationship All the boys are in the field gnawing raw Lacan’s seminars incomprehensible (“to his with society. The criminal would bones of ambition and calling it ardor. Who fervent admirers, ‘understand’ means some- then perform a form of community the hell are they? This is a poem about war. thing other than it does to me”). He consid- service until the community had in- ered Althusser politically perverse, Foucault curred a debt to him and so restored an illuminating but dubious historian and him to his place in society. Lévi- JENNIFER CHANG 32 The Nation. February 7, 2011 culture wars—right up to the present. Last “Just as Islam has kept its gaze fixed on a as a one-man school,” he writes, “ped- year the French social critic Pascal Bruckner society which was real seven centuries ago, dling a type of analysis that had become so published a book that singled out Lévi-Strauss and for the problems of which it then in- utterly idiosyncratic that it was impossible as one of Europe’s leading “guilt-peddlers.” vented effective solutions,” he wrote, “so we to build on.” But his frustration with Lévi- For Bruckner, the West’s self-flagellation has [French] are incapable of thinking outside Strauss’s overall project is understandable. made it nearly impossible to criticize non- the framework of an epoch which came to an The scientific side of Lévi-Strauss expected Western societies. This claim not only mis- end a century and a half ago.” By contrast, his work to be superseded, but in practice he characterizes Lévi-Strauss’s position but also certain indigenous societies, he argued, have stubbornly resisted updating his thinking or fails to grasp that he long ago anticipated the more salient lessons than others to teach responding to revisions proposed by thinkers objection. In Tristes Tropiques he successfully when it comes to integrating mankind into a like Noam Chomsky and Clifford Geertz. answers the charge: more intimate relationship with the world— In Wilcken’s telling, Lévi-Strauss comes to and many of these are by definition societ- resemble a medieval scholastic, rummaging Other societies are perhaps no better ies that have safeguarded themselves from through structures of his own imagining as he than our own; even if we are inclined outside influences. twirls three-dimensional “myth mobiles” that to believe they are, we have no method hang from the ceiling of his office. The best at our disposal for proving it. However, till, the fusillades Lévi-Strauss aimed Wilcken can say, in the end, is that “in a world by getting to know them better, we are at his critics didn’t deter him from of ever more specialized areas of knowledge, enabled to detach ourselves from our ­settling into his own brand of conser- there may never again be a body of work of own society. Not that our own society vatism toward the end of his life. As such exhilarating reach and ambition.” is peculiarly or absolutely bad. But it is Wilcken points out, Lévi-Strauss père’s But Lévi-Strauss’s legacy is more than a the only one from which we have a duty Sreverence for established forms reasserted monument of aging intellect for us twenty-­ to free ourselves: we are, by definition, itself with renewed force in his son, whose first-century pygmies to marvel at. Lévi- free in relation to the others. youthful taste for the avant-garde proved to Strauss is better remembered as a moraliste As for the claim that only the West har- be spent. In 1980 Lévi-Strauss voted against in the tradition stretching back to Diderot bors interest in “the others,” Lévi-Strauss Marguerite Yourcenar’s nomination to a seat and Montaigne. The French moralistes have pointed to, among others, the Flathead in the Académie française because it went fulfilled a uniquely corrective function in the Indians of the Rocky Mountains, who were against “centuries of tradition.” (Yourcenar West: they are not the custodians of social so intrigued by what they heard about white was the first woman to be elected.) A backslide mores but the refurbishers, eager to scrap settlers that they sent a series of expeditions into traditionalism is not unusual among old faulty moral assumptions. When Lévi- to make contact with the Christian mis- men. But less expected was that Lévi-Strauss’s Strauss surveyed indigenous cultures, he did sionaries at St. Louis. In the closing pages scientific work would later be co-opted for so in the hope of expanding awareness of the of Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss argues that explicitly conservative political ends: in the repertory of social arrangements beyond not all cultures are equally humane—the ’80s, French deputies quoted from The El- the West’s increasingly monocultural civili- ­Aztecs, modern Europeans and modern ementary Structures of Kinship in their argu- zation. From the practices most stigmatized Muslims occupy low rungs on his ladder. In ments in favor of traditional marriage as the by racism—wedding rites, initiation ceremo- a comparison that would become notorious, cornerstone of the Fifth Republic. nies, creation myths—Lévi-Strauss extracted he equated the intransigent utopianism of Wilcken concludes his biography on a precepts for understanding, if not sympa- Islam with that of postrevolutionary France. dismissive note. “Lévi-Strauss ended up thizing with, the internal logic of the most Sonnet of Exemplary Sentences From the Chapter Pertaining to the Nature of Pronouns in Emile Benveniste’s Problems in General Linguistics (Paris 1966)

This time I forgive you but I shall not forgive you again. I observe that he forgives you but he will not forgive you again. Although I eat this fish I don’t know its name. Spirits watch over the soul of course. I suppose and I presume. I pose and I resume. I suppose I have a horse. How in the world can you afford this house I said and she said

I had a good divorce. Strangers are warned that here there is a fierce, fast dog. Whores have no business getting lost in the fog. Is it to your ears or your soul that my voice is intolerable? Whether Florinda lays a hand on his knee or his voluble, he pleads a headache and the narrator concludes, The problem is insoluble.

ANNE CARSON February 7, 2011 The Nation. 33 compulsive need to wipe the slate clean and foreign cultures. The sheer scientific rigor of Lévi-Strauss in The View From Afar (1983), start again—as an obstacle for the fiction his analyses—and the respect for his subjects “it sooner or later spells doom for both his writer. “Manhattan,” she would later write, it implied—was ultimately more effective in and my creativity.” Lévi-Strauss never ceased “is not altogether felicitous for fiction. It is combating racial prejudices than the pro- to mourn the loss of original wellsprings of not a city of memory, not a family city.… Its nouncements of grand penseurs like Sartre. aesthetic and moral meaning that could be skyscrapers and bleak, rotting tenements are Lévi-Strauss was more forthright than found only in societies that turned a deaf a gift for photographic consumption, but for many political thinkers today in spelling out ear to the rest of the world. Nevertheless, he the fictional imagination the city’s inchoate the paradox of his antidiscrimination efforts. came to see his work and that of anthropol- density is a special challenge.” The struggle against racism, which enjoined ogy in general as making us more cautious None of which deterred Hardwick in the humanity to adopt the norms of global civi- and careful as we inevitably come into closer first of these stories, “The Temptations of lization, was also, he believed, responsible contact with them. The charms of civiliza- Dr. Hoffmann” (1946). The narrator, like the for destroying the very cultural differences tion may be “due essentially to the various author, is a Southerner who has established a antidiscrimination was meant to protect. As residues it carries along with it,” but for fragile beachhead in Manhattan, living in one human societies become more aware of the Lévi-Strauss this does not absolve us of the of those furnished rooms whose “left-over, importance of preserving one another’s par- duty to reform it. For this realistic sense of dim, vanquished” occupants Hardwick would ticularisms, their differences become harder responsibility and unwillingness to provide later recall in the autobiographical hybrid to justify. “When integral communication false comforts in a time of totalizing prophets, Sleepless Nights. Lonely, and less than capti- with the other is achieved completely,” wrote he can still be read with much reward. n vated by her studies, the narrator becomes friendly with Dr. Hoffmann—a German émigré and theologian whose fresh-faced disciples like to congregate in his apartment. Perfect-Bound Surrounded by these “ordinary boys who would later be in the Presbyterian pulpits by James Marcus throughout America,” the good doctor is in fact quite bored. Perhaps that is why he wel- lizabeth Hardwick’s name is so synony- The New York Stories of Elizabeth comes the narrator, a self-described “village mous with the essay—especially with Hardwick atheist,” into his household. the errant, genre-busting, quicksilver Selected and with an introduction The stage is set for a clash, or at least a sort of undertakings that she brought by Darryl Pinckney. close encounter, between faith and faithless- to perfection during her long career— New York Review Books. 224 pp. ness. Yet this is a story in which nothing hap- Ethat it’s hard to believe she made her initial Paper $15.95. pens. The narrator, having smuggled herself breakthrough with a short story. Yet it’s true. into the Hoffmann ménage like a surveillance In 1939 she arrived in New York City from McCarthy and James Baldwin. Soon enough camera, records a number of domestic dis- Lexington, Kentucky, with the avowed goal the preternaturally witty, gimlet-eyed essay- putes between the theologian and his wife and of transforming herself into a New York ist, who gave to the form “everything and daughter. She tells us, too, about her encoun- Jewish intellectual. (She went two for three: more than would be required in fiction,” ters with a young man from her Kentucky not bad.) Her initial idea was to get a doctor- nudged aside the writer of short stories. hometown, now a seminary student and one ate from Columbia, where she studied John Yet she kept writing them, in an on-and- of Hoffmann’s eager ecclesiastical beavers. Donne and the rest of the metaphysical posse. off, left-handed manner. The collection that But again, the only thing we come to under- But Hardwick eventually drifted away from Darryl Pinckney has assembled in The New stand about the narrator and Dr. Hoffmann academia, and in 1944 she published her first York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick does not is that she can’t understand him: “I lacked short story, “The People on the Roller Coast- include all the short fiction by Hardwick specific details of his experience and even if I er,” in The New Mexico Quarterly Review. published before her death in 2007 (it omits had known him forever I could never have felt These days, a debut in a respectable but “The People on the Roller Coaster” and certain of my abstraction.” somewhat off-the-radar quarterly would be several other stories). Presumably Pinckney the occasion for a well-deserved pat on the made these cuts in the name of quality con- his seems less like the utterance of back plus two free copies of the magazine. trol and geographical unity. an unreliable narrator and more like In Hardwick’s youth, it was possible to make Hairsplitting readers will protest that a veiled cri de coeur on the author’s more of a splash—or so she told Hilton Als in four of the thirteen tales in the collection part. Hardwick, then 30, simply hadn’t a 1998 New Yorker profile. “If you published are not set in New York. No matter—the figured out what to do with fiction. a story then,” she noted, “even in The New thematic logic is still irresistible. The city AnT obvious model would have been Mary Mexico Quarterly, the publishers would call.” always had a special claim on the author’s ­McCarthy, a close friend of the era with Soon Hardwick obtained a contract for her imagination, long before she arrived there. whom she shared numerous literary tastes, a first novel, The Ghostly Lover, whose appear- “As a Southerner,” she once confessed, “I fading attachment to the Communist Party ance in 1945 caught the attention of Partisan had in my earliest youth determined to and several high-profile love interests. But Review editor Philip Rahv. He admitted the come to New York, and it has been, with McCarthy was too successful, having already newcomer to his stable of sharpshooting interruptions, my home for most of my hit the big time with The Company She Keeps critics, which included James Agee, Mary adult life.” An exile of sorts, she felt exceed- (1942). And anyway, Hardwick had little ingly comfortable in the Valhalla of displaced stomach for the sexual shenanigans and an- James Marcus is deputy editor of Harper’s people that was postwar New York. Yet she thropological zest that were her friend’s stock Magazine. also saw the city’s jittery impermanence—its in trade. Staking out her own, comparatively