Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Read online

  WHO WAS LÉVI-STRAUSS on the eve of his trip to Brazil? On the face of it, he was a newly married lycée teacher of modest means who had been given a lucky break to teach abroad. Like many before and since, his political idealism had dissipated, barely surviving to the end of his university years. He had been initiated into a range of French institutions, attending a famous Parisian lycée, studying at the Sorbonne, doing military service and beginning his teaching career in the provinces. Temperamentally, he had the severity of a young Parisian intellectual of the period, softened by a dry sense of humor. De Beauvoir remembered the young Lévi-Strauss’s demeanor as a kind of mock seriousness: “[His] impassivity rather intimidated me, but he used to turn it to good advantage. I thought it was very funny when, in his detached voice and with a deadpan expression on his face, he expounded to our audience the folly of the passions.”63

  Below the surface there was already a deposit of ideas and influences building up. Culturally, he had been seduced by the avant-garde, but the modernist rupture would always be an ambivalent one for Lévi-Strauss. In the mid-nineteenth century, his forebears had been part of the cultural elite; by the 1920s his father was scraping by, building furniture in his living room and reliant on his newly qualified son for help, his chosen trade virtually extinguished by the vogue for modernism. Lévi-Strauss’s early experiences straddled these two eras, a mix of his father’s nostalgia for the ballrooms and opera houses of the Third Republic and his own fascination with the ramshackle artist studios of the new wave. As he grew older, his father’s influence would reassert itself, but although Lévi-Strauss would subsequently repudiate modernism in the arts, certain elements of the avant-garde would be forever imprinted on his style of thought.

  From the outset he was fascinated by the arts, especially music. “I have always dreamed since childhood about being a composer, or at least, a conductor,” he said, but it was not to be. His early experimental compositions showed up a fundamental limitation—“something lacking in my brain.”64 In compensation, he would inject an artistic sensibility into his academic work both in form and content, from his use of textual collage and literary allusions to the parallels that he would repeatedly draw between indigenous cultural artifacts and classical music and art.

  Lévi-Strauss often said that as a student he was in revolt against what he later called the “claustrophobic, Turkish bath atmosphere . . . of philosophical reflection” found in the French university system. Yet at the same time he had been grounded in this very style of thought. In spite of his oft-professed contempt for philosophical intellectual games, he was clearly at home with abstract arguments and metaphysical concepts, and all his subsequent work would end up having a philosophical ring to it. His study of the law, however halfhearted, had given him a systematic—at times dogmatic—approach to intellectual arguments. In skirmishes with intellectual opponents later in his career his approach could be bruising, like a barrister taking apart a witness.

  Lévi-Strauss clearly had an exceptional intellect, but it was not without shortcomings. He absorbed ideas quickly and economically, but in the process stripped them of their content, converting them into a kind of intellectual shorthand. After consuming a huge amount of material, he would boil it down into a demi-glace of axioms and intellectual reflexes. His “three mistresses”—Freud, Marx and geology—had been reduced to simple principles: that surface reality deceives, that truth lies in an under-girding of abstraction. It is worth looking back for a moment at some of the words used in Léon Cahen’s assessment: “knows a lot,” “sharp, penetrating mind,” a “rigour” that is “almost sectarian,” a tendency to argue “absolute, black-and-white theses” and a lack of “nuance”—harsh, perhaps, but a recognizable assessment, especially in relation to Lévi-Strauss’s early intellectual output.

  It was Lévi-Strauss’s great fortune that he had a chance early on to gain some perspective on his multiplicity of interests. As he prepared to leave for Brazil, after years cooped up in the French university system, the New World beckoned. But what he found there would at first baffle him. It would only be through the slow burn of intellectual discovery—more than a decade of reading and reflection—that he would finally grasp its significance.

  Claude Lévi-Strauss in Brazil (1935-39)

  2

  Arabesque

  My memory calls them by their names, Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, Mundé, Tupi-Kawahib, Mogh and Kuki; and each reminds me of a place on earth and a moment of my history and that of the world . . . These are my witnesses, the living link between my theoretical views and reality.

  CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS1

  IN EARLY FEBRUARY 1935, accompanied by his wife, Dina, Lévi-Strauss boarded the Mendoza at the port of Marseille, pulling out into the Mediterranean for the first leg of the journey. In his memoir, Tristes Tropiques, he recalled the moment as a haze of sensations, which was in reality a blend of memories of the many departures for the Americas that he would subsequently make. As the ship eased into the Mediterranean, the oily odors of the port vanished on the sea air. Drifting in and out of sleep, he breathed in a mix of salt, fresh paint and cooking smells rising from the galley while listening to “the throbbing of the engines and the rustling of the water against the hull.”2 He was twenty-six years old, leaving Europe for the first time, setting out for Brazil.

  He traveled first-class as one of a handful of passengers on the eight-thousand-ton two-funneled steamer, which was freighting cargo across the Atlantic. Free to stroll the empty decks, he and his colleagues enjoyed long lunches in ballroom-sized refectories and smoking rooms, and spent hours reading in their substantial cabins. Mustachioed stewards dished out huge portions of suprême de poularde and filets de turbot; sailors dressed in blue overalls cleaned the empty corridors and dabbed paint onto ventilator shafts as the Mendoza slipped through the Mediterranean. From the passengers’ perspective, it was a luxury ghost ship, whose limitless space and amenities Lévi-Strauss would fully appreciate only after he had suffered the squalor and overcrowding of the refugee boat that rescued him from Nazi Europe.

  After calling at Algiers and ports along the Spanish and Moroccan coasts, loading cargo by day, sailing through the night, the Mendoza dropped down to Dakar. Once on the high seas, the schools of dolphins and seabirds vanished, leaving only the “adjoining surfaces” of ocean and overcast sky.3 Lévi-Strauss spent much of the three-week crossing in a state of intense intellectual excitement, “strolling on the bridge, almost always alone, his eyes wide open, but his being shut off to the world, as if he was scared of forgetting what he had just seen.”4 In a strange inversion, he would later describe the ship as the fixed point around which the changing scenery was maneuvered—like rotating theater sets on a stage.

  On one occasion he jotted down notes as he watched the sun sink behind the ocean in a welter of color. His long, lyrical description of the sunset survives, reprinted in Tristes Tropiques, a passage that is an intriguing intimation of what could have been. Like many early attempts at creative writing, it is a heaping of literary effects, a runaway production of images, metaphors and ideas. In the space of seven pages he likens clouds to pyramids, flagstones, dolmens, celestial reefs, vaporous grottoes and even, at one point, an octopus. There are invisible layers of crystal, ethereal ramparts, blurred blues, and “pink and yellow colours: shrimp, salmon, flax, straw.” An extended theater metaphor involves floodlights, stage sets and a postperformance “overture” (as they apparently used to be performed in old operas).5 Amid this overwrought experiment were stylistic elements that would later reappear. Even in his densest academic articles, Lévi-Strauss had an eye for descriptive detail and a fondness for metaphor, as well as a fascination for natural forms and processes.

  Long before the Brazilian littoral was visible, he had picked up the scent of forest, fruit and tobacco, drifting off the landmass out into the ocean. In the early hours of the following day, a dim outline of the coast came into view—the jagged cordillera of the Serr
a do Mar escarpments. The Mendoza followed the ranges down the coast, gliding past stretches of beach, tropical forest and blackened rock. Dodging a scattering of globe-shaped islands, the ship approached the famous heads of Rio’s Guanabara Bay, with its backdrop of polished mounds, fingerlike peaks and granite slabs.

  Years later Lévi-Strauss wrote of the thoughts that ran through his mind as he viewed this spectacle, so alien from the European panoramas that he was familiar with. Here was landscape of a different order, on a grander scale than anything he had experienced before. Its appreciation, he wrote, required a mental adjustment, a rejigging of perspective and ratio, as the observer shrank before nature’s immensity. But when the ship pulled into Rio’s harbor, Lévi-Strauss was famously disappointed. Despite his mental efforts, the scenario offended his sense of classical proportions. The Sugarloaf and Corcovado mountains were too big in relation to their surroundings, like “stumps . . . in a toothless mouth,” as if nature had left behind an unfinished, lopsided terrain. The towering rocks and supersized bay had left little room for the city itself, which was forced into the narrow corridors, “like fingers bent in a tight, ill-fitting glove.”6 Rio’s palm-lined boulevards and turn-of-the-century architecture were like nineteenth-century Nice or Biarritz. “The tropics,” he later wrote, “were less exotic than out of date.”7 (His dismissal of the beauties of Rio de Janeiro still smarts in Brazil, even featuring in a famous Caetano Veloso song: “Claude Lévi-Strauss detestou a baía de Guanabara”—meaning “Lévi-Strauss hated Guanabara Bay”). But Lévi-Strauss told me that this was merely a first impression, and that in subsequent visits he came to love the city.8

  He spent a few days in Rio, exploring the city on foot. The walkways were inlaid with small off-white and slate-colored stones from Portugal hammered into the pavement, arranged into a repeating pattern of swirls and organic shapes, like a mosaic from antiquity. Wending his way through the backstreets, he was impressed by the apparent lack of distinction between inside and outside, with shops spilling onto the pavement and cafés piling up green coconuts on the street. “My first impression of Rio was of an open-air reconstruction of the Gallerias of Milan, the Galerij in Amsterdam, the Passage des Panoramas, or the concourse of the Gare Saint-Lazare,” he wrote.9

  Armed with a copy of Jean de Léry’s L’Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, Lévi-Strauss tried with difficulty to imagine the Tupinambá villages that had once dotted the bay. From the busy downtown commercial district, a smattering of favelas were visible on the hillsides—more like rustic wattle and mud villages than the breezeblock slums of today. The more affluent suburbs of Flamengo and Botafogo clustered around the bay, while on the ocean-facing side, through a connecting tunnel, lay Copacabana, then a bucolic town beginning its rapid ascent as a super-Cannes.

  On his last evening in Rio, Lévi-Strauss took the funicular halfway up Corcovado Mountain, where he dined with some American colleagues on a platform with sumptuous views over the bay. Later that night he embarked on the Mendoza for the final leg to Santos. Rain sluiced down as the ship tracked down a barely settled coastline, passing run-down colonial ports built during the eighteenth-century gold rush. The flagstone roads that had once connected them to gold fields in the interior were now lost, hidden under the leaf litter of the rainforest. All that remained of the mule trains that had plied the route were rusty horseshoes strewn about the forest floor. The wealth that had built the towns was long gone, siphoned off across the Atlantic into the follies—the monasteries, palaces and villas—of the Portuguese court.

  The Mendoza reached the port of Santos, docking beside cargo boats piled high with sacks of coffee beans. In pouring rain, the French entourage disembarked onto the quays where Júlio Mesquita, the owner of the newspaper Estado de São Paulo and one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the university, was waiting to receive them. Mesquita drove them on to São Paulo, a hundred-kilometer trip along the now disused Caminho do Mar. After crossing a humid plain of lush banana plantations, the road rose steeply through wisps of vapor into the cooler airs of the Serra do Mar tropical forests. Lévi-Strauss was captivated, marveling through the car window at the galleries of novel vegetation “arranged like tiers of specimens in a museum.”10 From the summit there were spectacular views back toward the sea; “water and land mingled like in the world’s creation,” wrote Lévi-Strauss, “veiled in a pink mist that barely cloaked the banana plantations.”11 From here the road rolled down the gently sloping plateau on the other side, past exhausted coffee plantations and the odd hut of a Japanese settler, down into the outskirts of São Paulo.

  Mesquita delivered them to the suitably named Hotel Terminus, where the group would stay while they settled in. They had arrived with the carnival in full swing, and on their first night they ventured out into the soupy air to explore the surrounding streets. In a nearby neighborhood, music boomed out of the open window of a house. They approached and were told by a tall Afro-Brazilian man at the door that they could come if they wanted to dance, but not just to watch. Lévi-Strauss remembered dancing awkwardly, stumbling over Afro-Brazilian women who accepted his invitations “with complete indifference.”12

  WHEN LÉVI-STRAUSS ARRIVED in São Paulo, Brazil was modernizing, emerging from the shadows of its colonial past. But the process had been sporadic and uneven. Robbed of the lure of the Pacific, westward migration had ended inconclusively, petering out in the marshlands and forests of the South American hinterland. The bulk of the population still lived within striking distance of the sea—in cities and towns along the coast and around the coffee plantations, cane fields and cattle ranches that rolled back into the countryside.

  There were just three million people in the vast interior through which Lévi-Strauss would travel. Part-indigenous communities, the product of a now exhausted rubber boom, subsisted along the main waterways of the Amazon Basin. Clapboard mining towns had been left stranded in the scrublands of the central west. Farther south, colonization schemes were gradually opening up Paraná state, reducing great forests to pasturelands. Dwindling groups of indigenous Brazilians either had been drawn into settler society or were in flight from it. Herded into government reservations, they had become prey to missionaries, or exploited as cheap labor.

  With an influx of European migrants and the beginnings of industrialization, Brazil’s biggest cities were forging their identities: Rio as a pleasure city, São Paulo as its industrious cousin—a Milan to Rio’s more sensual Rome. But the vestiges of traditional rural society were everywhere. On the outskirts of São Paulo there were campsites for mule trains arriving from the interior; saddle shops traded downtown. On Rio’s hillsides, the poor tended their gardens, chicken coops and pigpens. There was little modern infrastructure. Trucks were only just beginning to replace the mule trains, spending days shuddering in low gear along rutted, overgrown dirt tracks. On a journey from Rio de Janeiro to Belo Horizonte in Minas Gerais state in 1940, the famous Brazilian modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer remembered having to yoke his sedan car to a team of oxen to drag it through the bog.13

  The Great Depression had ravaged Brazil’s commodity-based market, and by the time Lévi-Strauss arrived, the country was suffering the same political turbulence that was then spreading through Europe. Amid collapsing agricultural prices, gaúcho Getúlio Vargas had seized power by a coup in 1930. Flirting with fascism, he would survive the 1930s with difficulty, negotiating the demands of the Nazi-inspired Integralists and repressing the communists while placating the powerful farming block and the emerging urban elites. It was an environment in which left-wing intellectuals would become increasingly uncomfortable. Culturally, though, the French would be able to relax. In a hangover from the nineteenth-century empire years, France was still seen as the height of European refinement. Lévi-Strauss and his colleagues would not even have to worry about mastering Portuguese—they would lecture in French, a lingua franca among the educated urban elite.14

  In contrast to
Rio, Lévi-Strauss felt drawn to São Paulo. “It was an extraordinary city,” he remembered much later, “still middle-sized, but in complete upheaval, where you crossed over within a few feet of each other from the Iberian world of the eighteenth century to the Chicago of the 1880s.”15 São Paulo was fast evolving into Brazil’s industrial hub. The population had just topped one million, the first skyscrapers were appearing on the skyline and rapid expansion was in the air. With waves of mainly Italian immigration priming the pumps, houses were going up by the hour, turning the surrounding farmland into a patchwork of construction sites and garden plots, cow pastures and concrete. “The air is brisk; the streets clang; electric signs challenge the stars with hyperbole,” wrote one traveler.16 There were nouveau-riche extravaganzas, like a marina on an artificial lake and the luxury housing developments of the Jardim Europa that had begun springing up in what were then the suburbs. But there was old wealth too, dating back to the slave plantations of the nineteenth century. Weathered coffee-baron-built mansions lined the streets of the well-to-do suburbs, interspersed with gardens of eucalyptus and mango.

  Lévi-Strauss captured the bustle of the immigrant town in a series of black-and-white images taken on a Leica that he had brought with him from Paris, occasionally adding a 75mm Hugo Meyer f1.5 lens, which he found “practically unusable because of its weight.”17 In the photos, a selection of which was later published in Saudades de São Paulo, crowds surge down the avenues: men in crumpled white suits; women wearing heavy frocks, brooches and pearl necklaces, clasping small leather handbags. Herders on horseback maneuver cattle past a downtown commuter tram. There are smokestacks, run-down buildings and slums. The pink Art Deco Martinelli Building, then nearing completion, stands alone as a symbol of things to come, topped by rickety neon advertisements. Lévi-Strauss’s father, who joined him in Brazil during his first year, appears enigmatically in two of the photos—one at the jasmine-laced iron gates of his son’s house, looking down through the lens of his camera, and the other standing in front of a sign stenciled on a concrete wall saying “Plots of Land for Sale.” According to Lévi-Strauss, they would go out together taking pictures, competing to see who could produce the sharpest images.18