Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (32 page)
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BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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PIERRE MAC ORLAN
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THE FRENCH EMPIRE, which had been in limbo through the occupation, had begun to unravel at the end of the Second World War. From the late 1940s on, there was unrest in Morocco, Cameroon, Madagascar and Algeria, with growing Vietminh resistance in French Indochina. In 1954, at Dien Bien Phu, a basin sunk into the hills of the modern-day Vietnamese-Laotian border, the French Empire went into retreat. After parachuting thousands of men in to secure a dilapidated Japanese-built airstrip, the French Expeditionary Forces were humiliatingly overpowered by Ho Chi Minh’s army—pounded by artillery from the high ground and reduced to trench warfare in the jungle valleys. Months after losing Indochina, France faced rebellion in her North African
départements
. The National Liberation Front
maquisards
(guerrillas) launched attacks across Algeria, beginning the traumatic and drawn-out loss of what was then seen as an integral part of France itself. By the mid-1950s the colonial paradigm, which had shaped not just geopolitical arrangements, but French attitudes and culture, was beginning to fall apart.
départements
. The National Liberation Front
maquisards
(guerrillas) launched attacks across Algeria, beginning the traumatic and drawn-out loss of what was then seen as an integral part of France itself. By the mid-1950s the colonial paradigm, which had shaped not just geopolitical arrangements, but French attitudes and culture, was beginning to fall apart.
Postwar France was gripped by a renewed sense of pathos and disillusionment, but it was coupled with a growing interest in the non-Western cultures then emerging from beneath the imperial boot. Anthropologists became well-placed witnesses to this moment of revelation. Their field sites were at the margins of collapsing empires; the people they studied, after years relegated to bit parts in colonial sagas, were finding their voice. Culturally, the world was bending back on itself, rediscovering its own diversity, as one by one the imperial blocks began to disaggregate. The renaming of Lévi-Strauss’s chair was symbolic of the shifting sensibilities. When he took up the post it was called Religions of Uncivilized Peoples (
Religions des peuples non civilisés
), a title that became less and less tenable. On several occasions Lévi-Strauss remembered having his interpretations challenged by the “uncivilized” people themselves—African students studying at the Sorbonne. He eventually succeeded in modernizing the chair’s title to Comparative Religions of Peoples without Writing (
Religions comparées des peuples sans écriture
)—a firmer, more scientific designation, less likely to offend.
Religions des peuples non civilisés
), a title that became less and less tenable. On several occasions Lévi-Strauss remembered having his interpretations challenged by the “uncivilized” people themselves—African students studying at the Sorbonne. He eventually succeeded in modernizing the chair’s title to Comparative Religions of Peoples without Writing (
Religions comparées des peuples sans écriture
)—a firmer, more scientific designation, less likely to offend.
ONE OF THE many thinkers and writers who were sensing the changing mood was the geographer and ethnohistorian Jean Malaurie, a ruggedly handsome man with strong Gallic features, then in his late twenties. In the aftermath of the Second World War he had taken part in a series of scientific expeditions to Greenland. At around the same age as Lévi-Strauss when he had set off for Brazil, Malaurie had gone solo, traveling into the labyrinth of hummocks around Thule in the higher latitudes of the Arctic, in an expedition that had none of the trappings of Lévi-Strauss’s adventures. “I landed in Thule on July 23, 1950 . . . after twenty-three days at sea,” wrote Malaurie. “I immediately decided to spend the winter 150 kilometers farther north, in Siorapaluk: thirty-two inhabitants, six igloos . . . My equipment? There was none. I extracted permission from the Danish authorities to spend the winter there for one year once I was there.”
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In spite of the remoteness of their territories, the Inuit were also living on the edge of empire. While traveling through the region by dogsled, Malaurie had stumbled across what at first appeared to be a monstrous mirage—a fenced-off compound housing an anonymous steel installation, the noise of machinery muffled by the snowfields. It turned out to be a top secret U.S. Air Force nuclear base, one of the many springing up as part of a developing Cold War logic. Even in these Arctic wastes, the West was on the move, bumbling blithely into Inuit territories, with no thought of the impact this might have. Although not trained as an ethnographer, Malaurie produced the first written genealogical records of these Inuit groups and became a passionate advocate of their culture.
On his return, Malaurie was out walking in Paris when, on the spur of the moment, he knocked on the door of the publishers Plon and proposed an account of his adventures. At the same time he put forward a new idea for a series of books to be called Terre humaine. His timing was perfect. Postwar, publishers in France were reworking their nonfiction lists, turning for inspiration to the new wave of the humanities to meet the needs of an expanding educated readership. In 1950 Gallimard launched Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s Bibliothèque de philosophie. The Bibliothèque de psychanalyse et de psychologie clinique and the Bibliothèque de sociologie contemporaine came out under the imprint Les Presses universitaires de France in the same year. Soon afterward Plon responded with two new collections: Recherches en sciences humaines (1952) and Civilisations d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (1953).
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Terre humaine would be subtly different from what had gone before. Malaurie envisaged a series that would be a collection of “
voyages philosophiques
” for the twentieth century, featuring modern-day savants on the move through the cultural hinterlands. The books would be intellectual but autobiographical, scientific yet engaged, feeding off the rich and largely unexplored literary terrain of indigenous cultures and ethnographic research.
voyages philosophiques
” for the twentieth century, featuring modern-day savants on the move through the cultural hinterlands. The books would be intellectual but autobiographical, scientific yet engaged, feeding off the rich and largely unexplored literary terrain of indigenous cultures and ethnographic research.
By chance, Malaurie had come across Lévi-Strauss’s complementary thesis on the Nambikwara while browsing in Paris’s old university press library. He later confessed that he had found it boring, but while the ethnographic descriptions had left him cold, he had been captivated by the photographs—Lévi-Strauss’s expressive images of the nomadic Nambikwara. Perhaps as a counterpoint to his own experiences in the Arctic, Malaurie looked to the tropics for one of the first books in the new series, asking Lévi-Strauss if he could write a nonacademic book about his experiences in Brazil.
Lévi-Strauss’s
Tristes Tropiques
joined the collection’s early titles along with Jean Malaurie’s own
Les Derniers rois de Thulé
; Victor Segalen’s docunovel about his turn-of-the-twentieth-century experiences in Tahiti,
Les Immémoriaux
; and
Afrique ambiguë
, by anthropologist Georges Balandier. Later Malaurie mixed in the autobiography of Native American Don Talayesva,
Soleil Hopi
, for which Lévi-Strauss would write a preface, as well as Margaret Mead’s
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies
and her controversial classic
Coming of Age in Samoa
, under the title
Moeurs et sexualité en Océanie
.
Tristes Tropiques
joined the collection’s early titles along with Jean Malaurie’s own
Les Derniers rois de Thulé
; Victor Segalen’s docunovel about his turn-of-the-twentieth-century experiences in Tahiti,
Les Immémoriaux
; and
Afrique ambiguë
, by anthropologist Georges Balandier. Later Malaurie mixed in the autobiography of Native American Don Talayesva,
Soleil Hopi
, for which Lévi-Strauss would write a preface, as well as Margaret Mead’s
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies
and her controversial classic
Coming of Age in Samoa
, under the title
Moeurs et sexualité en Océanie
.
Tristes Tropiques
was a book of loss, of mourning, a middle-aged lament for the passing of time. It came out of a particular period in Lévi-Strauss’s personal life. On top of his divorce and related financial problems, his father, Raymond, had died in 1953. He had been hugely influential in Lévi-Strauss’s early years, something that he would fully realize only much later. The cultural references that Raymond had imparted to his son would shape the latter part of Lévi-Strauss’s career, and in interviews he would come back again and again to his experiences with his father.
was a book of loss, of mourning, a middle-aged lament for the passing of time. It came out of a particular period in Lévi-Strauss’s personal life. On top of his divorce and related financial problems, his father, Raymond, had died in 1953. He had been hugely influential in Lévi-Strauss’s early years, something that he would fully realize only much later. The cultural references that Raymond had imparted to his son would shape the latter part of Lévi-Strauss’s career, and in interviews he would come back again and again to his experiences with his father.
Ironically,
Tristes Tropiques
represented a lowering of expectations around his career. Had he believed he was still in contention for the Collège de France, he later confessed, he would never have dared embark on something that could be seen as intellectually lightweight, but as it stood he felt he had nothing to lose. He had already dabbled with a more literary style of writing, with his abortive attempts at a novel. His notes from Brazil that had followed him around the world were still boxed up, a good deal of the material as yet unused. He was just entering middle age, trying to settle down and put his eventful past behind him. “I had a full bag that I wanted to unpack,” he later said.
4
Tristes Tropiques
represented a lowering of expectations around his career. Had he believed he was still in contention for the Collège de France, he later confessed, he would never have dared embark on something that could be seen as intellectually lightweight, but as it stood he felt he had nothing to lose. He had already dabbled with a more literary style of writing, with his abortive attempts at a novel. His notes from Brazil that had followed him around the world were still boxed up, a good deal of the material as yet unused. He was just entering middle age, trying to settle down and put his eventful past behind him. “I had a full bag that I wanted to unpack,” he later said.
4
Lévi-Strauss had also sensed that his academic work lacked a human dimension. In spite of his aloofness, he was, after all, flesh and blood. “I was sick of seeing myself labelled in universities as a machine without a soul,” he told the historian François Dosse, with uncharacteristic feeling, “good only for putting men into formulas.”
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Nevertheless, he wrote
Tristes Tropiques
consumed by guilt, feeling that it was taking up time that should really have been devoted to proper academic work, like the second volume of his kinship studies, which he would never in fact write. This combination of guilt and liberation, the feeling that he was shirking his professional duties and the thrill that he might be burning his bridges once and for all produced an adrenal rush of activity. Over the winter of 1954-55, working at the astonishing pace of more than a hundred pages per month, he hammered through the first draft in “a permanent state of intense exasperation, putting in whatever occurred to me without any forethought.”
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5
Nevertheless, he wrote
Tristes Tropiques
consumed by guilt, feeling that it was taking up time that should really have been devoted to proper academic work, like the second volume of his kinship studies, which he would never in fact write. This combination of guilt and liberation, the feeling that he was shirking his professional duties and the thrill that he might be burning his bridges once and for all produced an adrenal rush of activity. Over the winter of 1954-55, working at the astonishing pace of more than a hundred pages per month, he hammered through the first draft in “a permanent state of intense exasperation, putting in whatever occurred to me without any forethought.”
6
Written on a small German typewriter that Lévi-Strauss had picked up in a bric-a-brac shop in São Paulo, the resulting manuscript, held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, is one continuous stream of words, with the occasional “
changer de page
” or “chapitre” typed midpage the only indication of a break in the narrative. As if working up a collage, Lévi-Strauss cut and pasted sections from old papers and notes onto the page, using strips of sticky tape, now brittle and yellowing with age. Whole chunks of his
petite thèse
,
La Vie familiale et sociale des Indiens nambikwara
, were included verbatim, stuck onto blank pages, modified only by replacing the academic
nous
with the more intimate
je
. Lévi-Strauss incorporated lectures, course notes and old articles. Chapter seventeen, for instance, which describes Lévi-Strauss’s first disappointing fieldwork experiences among the Tibagy and the Kaingang in the state of Paraná, was culled from “Entre os selvagens civilizados” (“Among the Civilized Savages”), an article he had written for the culture supplement of the Brazilian national newspaper the
Estado de São Paulo
. Since his own notebooks on the Caduveo had disappeared during the war, parts of chapters eighteen and nineteen were lifted from his wife Dina’s notes. And he filled out discussions of Nambikwara familial relations with an early Freudian interpretation of tribal dynamics, “The Social and Psychological Aspects of Chieftainship in a Primitive Tribe,” published during the war in
Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences
.
changer de page
” or “chapitre” typed midpage the only indication of a break in the narrative. As if working up a collage, Lévi-Strauss cut and pasted sections from old papers and notes onto the page, using strips of sticky tape, now brittle and yellowing with age. Whole chunks of his
petite thèse
,
La Vie familiale et sociale des Indiens nambikwara
, were included verbatim, stuck onto blank pages, modified only by replacing the academic
nous
with the more intimate
je
. Lévi-Strauss incorporated lectures, course notes and old articles. Chapter seventeen, for instance, which describes Lévi-Strauss’s first disappointing fieldwork experiences among the Tibagy and the Kaingang in the state of Paraná, was culled from “Entre os selvagens civilizados” (“Among the Civilized Savages”), an article he had written for the culture supplement of the Brazilian national newspaper the
Estado de São Paulo
. Since his own notebooks on the Caduveo had disappeared during the war, parts of chapters eighteen and nineteen were lifted from his wife Dina’s notes. And he filled out discussions of Nambikwara familial relations with an early Freudian interpretation of tribal dynamics, “The Social and Psychological Aspects of Chieftainship in a Primitive Tribe,” published during the war in
Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences
.
Many of the aphorisms that seem to crop up spontaneously were actually copied directly from a green notebook that Lévi-Strauss used to jot down ideas as they came to him, such as: “The tropics are less exotic, than out of date”; “Napoléon is the Mohammed of the West”; and “
Le moi est haïssable
” (The self is detestable). Above this last he wrote, in red, “
Pas de moi = ilyaun
rien
et un
nous” (The absence of self = there is a nothingness and an us), which reappeared at the end of
Tristes Tropiques
as, “The self is not only hateful: there is no place for it between
us
and
nothing
.”
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(However, other interesting thoughts, like the cryptic “travel = the same and the reverse of a psychoanalysis,” were left out.)
8
But there was much that was new, including a wealth of personal reminiscence, largely about Brazil, but also from his university days.
Le moi est haïssable
” (The self is detestable). Above this last he wrote, in red, “
Pas de moi = ilyaun
rien
et un
nous” (The absence of self = there is a nothingness and an us), which reappeared at the end of
Tristes Tropiques
as, “The self is not only hateful: there is no place for it between
us
and
nothing
.”
7
(However, other interesting thoughts, like the cryptic “travel = the same and the reverse of a psychoanalysis,” were left out.)
8
But there was much that was new, including a wealth of personal reminiscence, largely about Brazil, but also from his university days.
In between the spurts of speed-writing, some sections were labored over—particularly the often complex concluding sentences in which Lévi-Strauss tried to encapsulate his ideas on a given topic. In the preparatory notes he made for the book, there are five different versions of the last sentence in the section on Caduveo face painting, for instance. He ended up with a labored finale,
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but perhaps he would have been better off with one of the versions he rejected—the less cumbersome and more lyrical “In this charming civilization the fashions of the female beauties evoke a golden age; laws are turned into poetry, and rather than be expressed in codes, are sung through their finery as they reveal their nudity.”
10
But what is remarkable about the original manuscript is that it is in fact only lightly edited. Comments in crimson ballpoint and blue pencil are mainly minor tightening of language—
semble
becomes
est
, for instance, or redundant adverbs like
sans doute
,
complètement
,
profondément
are scored out, as are the odd flippant remarks. After a discussion of the erotic effect of Caduveo face designs, for example, Lévi-Strauss exclaimed, “Our powders and rouges pale in comparison!,” but then decided against it.
11
9
but perhaps he would have been better off with one of the versions he rejected—the less cumbersome and more lyrical “In this charming civilization the fashions of the female beauties evoke a golden age; laws are turned into poetry, and rather than be expressed in codes, are sung through their finery as they reveal their nudity.”
10
But what is remarkable about the original manuscript is that it is in fact only lightly edited. Comments in crimson ballpoint and blue pencil are mainly minor tightening of language—
semble
becomes
est
, for instance, or redundant adverbs like
sans doute
,
complètement
,
profondément
are scored out, as are the odd flippant remarks. After a discussion of the erotic effect of Caduveo face designs, for example, Lévi-Strauss exclaimed, “Our powders and rouges pale in comparison!,” but then decided against it.
11
The extraordinary speed of production showed up in the finished product. The first edition was littered with misspelled Portuguese words, many of which were simply rendered phonetically. There were no notes or bibliography—a great shame in a book that drew liberally from such a wide range of sources. At times Lévi-Strauss fell prey to the errors that creep in when passages are lifted from old, dimly remembered notebooks. He had evidently forgotten that he had lightly fictionalized a number of anecdotes that he had planned to use in his novel, changing the names of protagonists. These episodes were reimported unchanged into
Tristes Tropiques
. And his thoughts on the relationship between Chopin and Debussy are remarkably similar to an exchange in
Sodome et Gomorrhe
, the fourth volume of Proust’s
À la recherche du temps perdu
, although this may have been an intentional allusion.
12
Tristes Tropiques
. And his thoughts on the relationship between Chopin and Debussy are remarkably similar to an exchange in
Sodome et Gomorrhe
, the fourth volume of Proust’s
À la recherche du temps perdu
, although this may have been an intentional allusion.
12
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