Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (5 page)

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Authors: Patrick Wilcken

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BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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Raymond Lévi-Strauss gave his son an enviable cultural grounding on slender means. He would book the cheapest obscured-view seats at the opera, introducing his son to Wagner’s repertoire from an early age. They went every week to the Colonne and Pasdeloup classical concerts at Châtelet, spent long afternoons in the Louvre, and in adolescence Claude took violin lessons at the Opéra. His father’s friends—a lively group of critics, writers and artists—would mill around the apartment in the evenings and on the weekends. Many took to the boy, indulging his curiosity, recommending books, paintings and music.
Encouraged by his father, the young Lévi-Strauss tried his hand at all the arts. “Working with bits of pastels that were lying around the studio, I began to draw what I imagined were cubist works . . . I can still see my naïve compositions—everything was flat, two-dimensional, with no attempt to convey volume.”
16
As an adolescent he took and developed his own photographs, invented film scenarios and composed trios for two violins and piano. He drew costumes and painted sets for operas, and even began work on a libretto, which he abandoned after writing the prelude.
After the First World War, Lévi-Strauss enrolled in the Lycée Janson de Sailly, a few kilometers from his house, where he studied until sitting the baccalaureate. In contrast to the bohemian milieu of the rue Poussin, his education at Janson was strict, the atmosphere in the classroom imbued with an old-world formality. The beginning and end of lessons were announced by the beat of a drum; compositions were written “with anguish,” with the results solemnly read out in front of the class by the headmaster accompanied by his deputy, “leaving us despondent or overjoyed.” Indiscipline was severely punished.
17
In the afternoons Lévi-Strauss would range around Paris, exploring the neighboring arrondissements on foot, “like Jalles and Jerphanion in Jules Romains novels.”
18
He would jump on buses and ride the open platforms at the back as the bus weaved through Paris. When he was older, he set off with friends on voyages of discovery into the outer suburbs, getting as far as the gypsum quarries of Cormeilles-en-Parisis, some sixteen kilometers from the sixteenth arrondissement.
As Lévi-Strauss edged toward adulthood, the avant-garde blossomed. At one of the first performances of Stravinsky’s
Les Noces
at the Théâtre du Châtelet, he heard the spare abstractions, the choppy interchanges of chorus, percussion and piano that scandalized Parisian audiences when it debuted in 1923. Lévi-Strauss was fourteen years old, and was bowled over. The performance made such an impression on him that he went straight back the following night. Years later he wrote in his memoir that the experience “brought about the collapse of my previous musical assumptions.”
19
In middle age, as he wrote in
Le Cru et le cuit
(
The Raw and the Cooked
), he still felt the “shattering” impact of hearing
Les Noces
along with Claude Debussy’s symbolist opera
Pelléas et Mélisande
.
20
He began making a pilgrimage up to Rosenberg’s gallery on the rue La Boétie in the eighth arrondissement, where the latest Picasso would be propped up in the window. He later described seeing Picasso’s still-life canvases of the mid-1920s as “the equivalent of metaphysical revelations.”
21
When a friend of the family, the influential art critic Louis Vauxcelles, suggested that Lévi-Strauss write a piece for a review journal he was trying to launch, Claude proposed “the influence of Cubism on everyday life.”
22
While researching the piece, Lévi-Strauss interviewed the artist Fernand Léger. “He received me with extreme kindness,” remembered Lévi-Strauss. “Was the article ever published? I forget.”
23
What was fresh, irreverent and intellectually challenging for the young Lévi-Strauss spelled ruin for his father. Raymond Lévi-Strauss had been shocked by what he saw in the art salons on his return from Versailles after the war. In the interim, modern art had gone from the fringes of the avant-garde into the heartlands of the city’s best-known galleries. Incomprehensible canvases of splintered shapes and clashing colors were being bought up by collectors like Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, whom Lévi-Strauss’s father had met during his years at the Bourse. By the 1920s changing tastes, along with the rise of mass photography, meant that the demand for realist portraiture was shrinking rapidly and Raymond Strauss’s already precarious income was beginning to erode. He was left to improvise, often with the help of his son, turning his hand to a variety of more or less desperate business ventures, as Lévi-Strauss remembered years later:
For a time the whole house became involved in printing fabrics. We carved linoleum blocks and smeared them with glue. We used to print designs on velvet on which we sprinkled metallic powders of various colours . . . There was another time when my father made small Chinese-style tables of imitation lacquer. He also made lamps with cheap Japanese prints glued onto glass. Anything that would help pay the bills.
24
 
Intellectually precocious, Lévi-Strauss started reading the master thinkers early. While still at Janson, he discovered Freud through Dr. Marcel Nathan, a pioneer of Freudian psychoanalysis in France and the father of one of his school friends, Jacques. It was through his recommendations that Lévi-Strauss read the early French translations of
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
and
The Interpretation of Dreams
. The influence would be profound and long-lasting. In the first half of his career Lévi-Strauss would revisit many of Freud’s areas of theoretical interest—the incest taboo, the myth of Oedipus, and totemism; a late book,
La Potière jalouse
(
The Jealous Potter
), would be an extended dialogue with Freud, whom he admired and criticized in equal measure.
In the summer of 1925, when Lévi-Strauss was sixteen, another element was added: politics. It was then that he met the Belgian Workers’ Party militant Arthur Wauters, through friends of the family. When Lévi-Strauss asked him to explain his ideas, Wauters took the young man under his wing “like an older brother,” introducing him to the socialist cannon, from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Jean Jaurès and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
25
He arranged for Lévi-Strauss to spend two weeks in Belgium as a guest of the Belgian Workers’ Party, where he learned about how the party functioned institutionally and saw socialist ideals in action through party affiliations with workers’ syndicates. Later he described the experience as “a complete revelation”: a “new world was being unveiled to me, intellectually and socially.”
26
Back in Paris, he read
Das Kapital
while studying philosophy at the lycée. “I didn’t understand it all. In reality, what I discovered in Marx were other forms of thought also new to me: Kant, Hegel ...”
27
From political theory to the avant-garde to the classics, his reading was filling out, mixing French classics, such as Rousseau and Chateaubriand, with Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Conrad. He was not intimidated by sheer literary bulk, at one point becoming fixated on Balzac’s
La Comédie humaine
—seventeen volumes of interlinked stories, which served as a kind of literary ethnography of France between the revolution and the reign of Louis-Philippe. He read it from beginning to end—ten times. Another major influence was Gide’s
Paludes
—a literary satire of the symbolist movement, to which Lévi-Strauss would also become attracted.
By nature, Lévi-Strauss was proving to be an intellectual omnivore, a grazer eternally on the move, roaming the vast plains of Western culture—moving from French literature to philosophy to modernism across the arts. It was clear that he was gifted, capable of soaking up theories, new ideas and culture at a time of explosive change and creativity in Paris. But as he neared the end of his school days, it was not so clear what this inquiring mind would settle on and pursue. “I was too disorganized,” he later confessed.
In the autumn of 1925, after passing the baccalaureate, Lévi-Strauss entered France’s fast track into the intellectual elite. He moved from Janson to the Lycée Condorcet’s
hypokhâgne
—the preparatory classes for the entrance exams of the prestigious École normale supérieure. The École normale supérieure on the rue d’Ulm in Paris’s fifth arrondissement was founded after the French Revolution as the
grande école
for the humanities. Graduates—known as
normaliens
—have since filled the top positions in France’s cultural elite. The high-flying academics, the heads of publishing houses, the directors of museums or government appointees to the top echelons of the education system—the vast majority have been members of an exclusive École normale supérieure club.
Lévi-Strauss was to have spent two years at Condorcet studying a broad range of subjects for some of the toughest exams in the French system, but faltered after the first. He later described being overawed by his fellow students, intimidated by the sense that he was surrounded by future
normaliens
. “I had the feeling that I could never be in their class,” he remembered.
28
More practically, he felt unable to compete academically. He struggled with math, and Greek did not appeal—two subjects required for the entrance exams. In a fascinating glimpse into the eighteen-year-old mind of Claude Lévi-Strauss, his history and geography teacher Léon Cahen wrote notes on his progress, or lack thereof:
Has worth, will develop. Knows a lot. Sharp, penetrating mind. But these qualities are often spoiled by a rigor that is, as a rule, almost sectarian, assertion of absolute, black-and-white theses, and sometimes the thinking makes do with a rather banal style, without precision or nuance.
29
 
In the spring of 1926, on the advice of his philosophy teacher André Cresson, Lévi-Strauss gave up the idea of entering the École normale supérieure. Instead he enrolled in the law faculty, in the colonnaded neoclassical buildings on the place du Panthéon, while taking a parallel degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne.
30
It was there that he met his future wife, Dina Dreyfus, a French Jew of Russian extraction who had spent some of her early life in Italy. A strong-minded, introspective woman, she was, like Lévi-Strauss, an ardent socialist and philosophy student.
Lévi-Strauss later explained that he chose philosophy because it was easier and more open to his other interests: “I had a taste for painting, music, antiques—all that more or less married with the study of philosophy, more easily than another speciality which would have forced me to compartmentalize my existence and my curiosity.”
31
There was also a more practical element—at that time philosophy offered “the only way for a young bourgeois intellectual to earn a living,” a pressing concern given his family’s shaky financial situation.
32
But after the excitement of growing up on the rue Poussin, his university years were uninspiring, spent learning thick law books by rote, ingesting philosophical formulae without truly understanding what they meant, and being trained in a style of exposition that sounded sophisticated but was ultimately empty and mechanical.
He filled the void left by Parisian academicism with a period of intense political engagement, just as the modern French Left was coalescing. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the catastrophe of the First World War, blamed by many on capitalist infighting, the Left had become a force in French politics. The Parti communiste français (French Communist Party) was founded in 1920, but Lévi-Strauss leaned toward the more moderate Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière, or SFIO (French Section of the Workers’ International). As Lévi-Strauss began working in the student movement, the SFIO was tasting real power as a part of the Cartel des gauches, a left-wing coalition that held a majority in the chamber of deputies in the mid-1920s.
Encouraged by Georges Lefranc, who headed a group of left-wing students at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, another preparation school for the École normale supérieure, Lévi-Strauss began participating in the Groupe socialiste interkhâgnal—an assortment of socialists, communists and members of the Christian movement, La Jeune République. Each Thursday afternoon they would hold meetings at the Société de géographie on the Left Bank for talks and seminars about factory working conditions, workers’ cooperatives, unions and colonialism. Prestigious guest speakers, including socialist luminaries Marcel Déat and Léon Blum, gave the forum a weight and credibility far beyond a mere student association. Lefranc later described it as a kind of “parallel university,” run by “political and economic autodidacts.”
33
Lévi-Strauss was active from the outset, contributing to debates, intervening from the floor and making speeches. His first published work dates from this period—a laudatory essay on the radical French revolutionary egalitarian, agitator and writer Gracchus Babeuf. Written originally as a dissertation for Léon Cahen at the Lycée Condorcet, it was published in the Belgian Workers’ Party house journal,
L’Églantine
, as
Gracchus Babeuf et le communisme—
a piece that Lévi-Strauss later dismissed as “an accident,” “which I would rather forget.”
34
During this period Lévi-Strauss alternated between the dry lectures at the Sorbonne and the excitement of the political meetings at the Société de géographie. He attended courses on psychology, morals and sociology, logic and the history of philosophy; at the place du Panthéon there were classes on civil, criminal and constitutional law. In his spare time he read socialist journals and grappled with Marx. Combining his interests, Lévi-Strauss chose to write his dissertation, “The Philosophical Postulates of Historical Materialism with Specific Reference to Karl Marx,” under the direction of the sociologist and future head of the École normale supérieure Célestin Bouglé. Bouglé, himself a socialist and key collaborator in Durkheim’s
Année sociologique
project, accepted what would have been a radical topic at a time when the ideas of Marx were not yet well established in France, with the proviso that Lévi-Strauss also write a dissertation on the safer, more classical thinker Saint-Simon. Lévi-Strauss was already thinking big. He saw himself as a potential philosopher of the Left, a synthesizer of classical and radical thought:
The idea of building a bridge between the great philosophical tradition—by that I mean Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant—and political thought, as represented by Marx, was very seductive. Even today I understand how I could have dreamed of it.
35
 

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