Library Man: on Claude Lévi-Strauss

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.

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