ORPHEUS WITH HIS MYTHS: CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS
There can be no doubt of Monsieur Lévi-Strauss’s influence on the life of ideas in France. It is, perhaps, second only to that of Sartre. But the exact nature of that influence is not easy to define. Much of Lévi-Strauss’s work is highly technical. In their manner of expression and in the range of reference they assume, his more recent writings are exceedingly intricate, almost hermetic. How many among those who invoke Lévi-Strauss’s name and what they take to be the method of his thought have, in fact, read La Pensée sauvage, the whole of the Anthropologie structurale, let alone Le Cru et le cuit? The difficulty itself may be part of the spell. As did Bergson, Lévi-Strauss has been able to project a certain tone, a presence nearly dramatic, in a culture which has traditionally seen ideas as highly individualized and which, unlike England, gives to philosophic discussion a public, emotionally sharpened context.
A page of Lévi-Strauss is unmistakable (the two opening sentences of Tristes tropiques have passed into the mythology of the French language). The prose of Lévi-Strauss is a very special instrument, and one which many are trying to imitate. It has an austere, dry detachment, at times reminiscent of La Bruyère and Gide. It uses a careful alternance of long sentences, usually organized in ascending rhythm, and of abrupt Latinate phrases. While seeming to observe the conventions of neutral, learned presentation, it allows for brusque personal interventions and asides. Momentarily, Lévi-Strauss appears to be taking the reader into his confidence, derrière les coulisses, making him accomplice to some deep, subtle merriment at the expense of the subject or of other men’s pretensions in it. Then he withdraws behind a barrier of technical analysis and erudition so exacting that it excludes all but the initiate.
But through his aloof rhetoric, with its tricks of irony and occasional bursts of lyric èlan, Lévi-Strauss has achieved a fascinating, sharp-etched individuality. Rejecting the Sartrian view of ordered, dialectical history as yet another myth, as merely another conventional or arbitrary grouping of reality, Lévi-Strauss adds: “Cette perspective n’a rien d’alarmant pour une pensée que n’angoisse nulle transcendance, fût-ce sous forme larvée.” The sentence is characteristic in several ways: by its mannered Pascalian concision and syntax; by the implicit identification which Lévi-Strauss makes between his own person and the “abstract concretion” of une pensée; but principally by its note of stoic condescension. It is that note, the cool inward and downward look, the arrogance of disenchanted insight, which fascinates Lévi-Strauss’s disciples and opponents. As the young once sought to mime the nervous passion of Malraux, so they now seek to imitate the hauteur and gnomic voice of the Professor of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France.
In making of anthropology the foundation of a generalized critique of values, Lévi-Strauss follows in a distinctive French tradition. It leads from Montaigne’s subversive meditation on cannibals to Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes and to his use of a comparative study of cultures and mores as a critique of ethical, political absolutism. It includes the large use made by Diderot, Rousseau, and the philosophes of travel literature and ethnography, and extends to the moral polemic so carefully plotted in Gide’s narratives of his African journeys. The moraliste uses “primitive” cultures, personally experienced or gathered at second hand, as a tuning-fork against which to test the discord of his own milieu. Lévi-Strauss is a moraliste, conscious in style and outlook of his affinities with Montesquieu and Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville. The concept does not translate readily into “moralist.” It carries a literary, almost journalistic stress which has no immediate analogy with, say, the Cambridge Platonists. The moraliste can use fiction, journalism, drama, as did Camus. Or he may, like Lévi-Strauss, work outward from what is, in its origin and technical form, a highly specialized field of interest.
Only the comparative anthropologist and ethnographer are equipped to pass judgment on the solutions which Lévi-Strauss puts forward to complex problems of kinship and totemism, of cultural diffusion and “primitive” psychology. The technical literature which has grown up around the work of Lévi-Strauss is already large. But the bearing of that work on the notion of culture, on our understanding of language and mental process, on our interpretation of history is so direct and novel that an awareness of Lévi-Strauss’s thought is a part of current literacy. “Like Freud,” remarks Raphaël Pividal, “Claude Lévi-Strauss, while solving special questions, has opened a new road to the science of man.”
That road begins with the classic achievement in sociology and social anthropology of Durkheim, Hertz, and Mauss. In the latter’s “Essay on Certain Primitive Forms of Classification” (1901–2) we see outlined important aspects of the study of taxonomy and “concrete logic” in La Pensée sauvage. As he makes clear in his own “Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss,” it is to Mauss’s way of thinking about kinship and language, and above all to Mauss’s Essai sur le don of 1924, that Lévi-Strauss owes certain assumptions and methodologies which inform his entire work. It is in this essay that Mauss puts forward the proposition that kinship relations, relations of economic and ceremonial exchange, and linguistic relations are fundamentally of the same order.
Beginning with his paper on structural analysis in linguistics and in anthropology (Word, 1945) and his first full-scale treatise, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté in 1949, Lévi-Strauss has made this conjecture of essential identity the core of his method and world-view. Examining a specific problem of kinship nomenclature and marital taboos, Lévi-Strauss argues that the evidence can only be sorted out if the women exchanged in marriage are regarded as a message, allowing two social groups to communicate with each other and to establish a vital economy of rational experience. Beginning with the particular instance, Lévi-Strauss has elaborated the view that all cultural phenomena are a language. Hence the structure of human thought and the complex totality of social relations can be studied best by adopting the methodology and discoveries of modern linguistics. What political economy is to the Marxist concept of history (the circumstantial, technical basis underlying an essentially metaphysical and teleological argument), the work of Saussure, Jakobson, M. Halle, and the modern school of structural linguistics is to Lévi-Strauss.
As summarized in the chapters on “Language and Kinship” in the Anthropologie structurale, Lévi-Strauss’s image of culture can be expressed, quite literally, as a syntax. Through our understanding of this syntax particular rites, processes of biological and economic exchange, myths and classifications as they are set forth in native speech may be analyzed into “phonemes” of human behavior. This analysis will disclose the true interrelations of otherwise disparate or even contradictory elements, for like structural linguistics Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology regards as axiomatic the belief that each element of social and psychological life has meaning only in relation to the underlying system. If we lack knowledge of that system, the particular signs, however graphic, will remain mute.
Speaking to the Conference of Anthropologists and Linguists held at the University of Indiana in 1952, Lévi-Strauss evoked the ideal of a future “science of man and of the human spirit” in which both disciplines would merge. Since then he has gone farther, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that he regards all culture as a code of significant communication and all social processes as a grammar. According to Lévi-Strauss, only this approach can deal adequately with the question asked in each of his major works: how do we distinguish between nature and culture, how does man conceive of his identity in respect of the natural world and of the social group?
The actual way in which Lévi-Strauss applies the tools of structural linguistics, or, more precisely, the analogue of linguistics, to deal with problems of kinship, totemism, and ecology among the Indian peoples of North America and the Amazon basin has been much debated. The attack of George C. Homans and David M. Schneider on Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (Marriage, Authority, and Final Causes, 1955) has been met in Rodney Need-ham’s Structure and Sentiment (1962). A more subtle critique is argued in E. R. Leach’s fascinating paper on Lévi-Strauss in the Annales for November-December 1964. Dr. Leach shows how strongly Lévi-Strauss’s “linguistics of culture” reflect the techniques and logical presuppositions of contemporary information theory and linear programming. Myths and behavior patterns in primitive society store and transmit vital information as does the electronic circuit and magnetic tape in the computer. Lévi-Strauss regards mental and social processes as fundamentally binary, as coded in sets of positive and negative impulses, finally balancing out in an equation of belief or folk custom which is at once harmonious and economic. Hence the binary elements which seem to govern so much of his argument: animality / humanity, nature / culture, wet / dry, noise / silence, raw / cooked. But, as Dr. Leach points out, the binary is not the only or necessary system of relations and information coding. Analogue computers perform tasks which digital computers are not suited for. In particular, says Dr. Leach, the matrices which Lévi-Strauss sets up to tabulate linguistic-ethnic relations, or totemic and mythical conventions, do not allow for gradations of value, for partial choices between alternatives which are not unambiguously positive or negative.
This is a controversy from which the layman would do well to abstain. What is striking are the rich suggestions which Lévi-Strauss’s “meta-linguistics” bring to a general theory of culture, to poetics and psychology. In the Anthropologie structurale, for example, we find the notion that our civilization treats language with immoderation, wasting words in a persistent recourse to speech. Primitive cultures tend to be parsimonious: “verbal manifestations are often limited to prescribed circumstances, outside which words are used only sparingly.” And it is characteristic of Lévi-Strauss’s ironic moralism that the discussion of the grammar of marriage in primitive cultures—words and women being set in analogy as media of communication—should end with the aphorism: “A l’inverse des femmes, les mots ne parlent pas.”
Increasingly, the thought of Lévi-Strauss can be understood as part of that revaluation of the nature of language and symbolism whose antecedents may be traced to Vico and Liebniz, but whose most radical effects have been modern. No less than Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, La Pensée sauvage and Le Cru et le cuit infer that man’s place in reality is a matter of syntax, of the ordering of propositions. No less than Jung, Lévi-Strauss’s studies of magic and myth, of totemism and logique concrète, affirm that symbolic representations, legends, image-patterns, are means of storing and conceptualizing knowledge, that mental processes are collective because they reproduce fundamental structural identities.
Where “domestic” and scientific thought strives toward the economy of a single code, “savage” thought is a semantic system perpetually regrouping itself and rearranging the data of the empirical world without reducing the number of discrete elements. Scientific methodology is obviously different from the “concrete logic” of primitive peoples. But not necessarily better or more advanced. Lévi-Strauss insists that “the science of the concrete” is a second major way of apprehending nature and natural relations. He argues that the great achievements of neolithic man—pottery, the weaving of cloth, agriculture, the domestication of animals—cannot have been the result of hazard or randomly perceived example. These brilliant “conquests” which “remain the substratum of our civilization” are the product of a science different from ours, but continuing a parallel life of its own. If magic had not proved to be a supple and coherent mode of perception, why should science in the experimental-deterministic sense have begun so late in man’s history?
Lévi-Strauss does not see history as a case of linear progression (this is the crux of his debate with Hegelianism and Sartre’s dialectical historicism). By making of history a transcendental value, a concealed absolute, Sartre excludes a major part of past and contemporary humanity from the pale of significant experience. Our sense of history, with its dates and implicit forward motion, is a very special, arbitrary reading of reality. It is not natural but culturally acquired. Chronology is an ever-changing code. The grid of dates we use for pre-history is based on an entirely different scheme of values and admissible data than the grid we use to conceptualize the period from, say, 1815 to the present. It is of the essence of primitive thought to be intemporelle (timeless, untimely), to conceive of experience in simultaneous and partial imagines mundi. But as Lévi-Strauss observes, such a mental praxis may not be unrelated to the world-picture of quantum mechanics and relativity.
Since Tristes tropiques (1955), if not before, Lévi-Strauss has done little to mask the general philosophic and sociological implications of his technical pursuits. He knows that he is arguing a general theory of history and society, that his specific analyses of tribal customs or linguistic habits carry an exponential factor. Of late, as if by some instinct of inevitable rivalry, he has challenged Sartre and the relevance of the existentialist dialectic. This may, in part, reflect the circumstances of contemporary French intellectual life. More pervasive has been Lévi-Strauss’s concern to delimit his own thought from that of the two principal architects of rational mythology, Marx and Freud. His work is in frequent self-conscious dialogue with theirs.
One of the crucial statements occurs in the opening, autobiographical section of Tristes tropiques (in their ironic, detached intimacy, these chapters recall The Education of Henry Adams, and it is Adams’ fastidious agnosticism which Lévi-Strauss’s own posture most resembles). Unfortunately, the entire argument is of extreme concision and difficulty. Lévi-Strauss records his initiation to Marxism at about the age of seventeen:
a whole world was revealed to me. Since which time, my passionate interest has never lapsed; and I rarely concentrate on unravelling a problem of sociology or ethnology without having, beforehand, braced my thought by reading some pages of the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte or of the Critique of Political Economy.
Marx has taught us
to build a model, to study its properties and the different ways in which it reacts in the laboratory, in order to apply these observations to the interpretation of empirical data which may be far removed from what one had foreseen.
(This is, one should note, a rather curious gloss on Marx, making of his concrete historicism an almost abstract phenomenology.)
In the Anthropologie structurale, Lévi-Strauss cites Marx’s well-known remark that the value of gold as repository and medium of wealth is not only a material phenomenon, but that it also has symbolic sources as “solidified light brought up from the nether world,” and that Indo-Germanic etymology reveals the links between precious metals and the symbolism of colors. “Thus,” says Lévi-Strauss, “it is Marx himself who would have us perceive and define the symbolic systems which simultaneously underlie language and man’s relations to the world.” But he goes on to suggest, and this is the crux, that Marxism itself is only a partial case of a more general theory of economic and linguistic information and exchange-relations. This theory will be the framework of a truly rational and comprehensive sociology of man. Not surprisingly, the Marxists have challenged the “totalitarian” claims of Lévi-Strauss’s “science of man” and have attacked its irrationalist, “anti-historical” aspects (the general issues are carefully set out in Lucien Sebag’s Marxisme et Structuralisme).
In Tristes tropiques, Lévi-Strauss relates Marxism to the two other main impulses in his own intellectual development and conception of ethnography: geology and psychoanalysis. All three pose the same primary question: “that of the relation between the experienced and the rational (le sensible et le rationnel), and the aim pursued is identical: a kind of super-rationalism seeking to integrate the former with the latter without sacrificing any of its properties.” Which may be a very abstract way of saying that Marxism, geology, and psychoanalysis are aetiologies, attempts to trace the conditions of society, of physical environment, and of human consciousness, to their hidden source. Social relations, terrain, and collective imaginings or linguistic forms are, in turn, the primary coordinates of Lévi-Strauss’s étude de l’homme.
As Lévi-Strauss advances more deeply into his own theory of symbolism and mental life, the Freudian analogues grow more obtrusive and, probably, irritating. Hence the sporadic but acute critique of psychoanalysis throughout the Anthropologie structurale, the argument that Freudian therapy, particularly in its American setting, does not lead to a treatment of neurotic disturbance but to “a reorganization of the universe of the patient in terms of psychoanalytic interpretations.” Hence also, one may suppose, Lévi-Strauss’s determination to appropriate the Oedipus motif to a much larger context than that put forward by Freud. In Lévi-Strauss’s ethnic-linguistic decoding of the legend, and of its many analogues among the North American Indians, the primary meaning points to the immense intellectual and psychological problem faced by a society which professes to believe in the autochthonous creation of man when it has to deal with the recognition of the bisexual nature of human generation. The Oedipus motif does not embody individual neurosis, but a collective attempt to regroup reality in response to fresh and perplexing insights. Again, as in the case of Marxism, the Freudian theory of consciousness emerges as a valuable, but essentially specialized and preliminary chapter in a larger anthropology.
How does Le Cru et le cuit fit into this powerful construct? It is a detailed, highly technical analysis of certain motifs in the mythology of the Indians of the Amazon, more exactly, in the creation myths of the Bororo and Ge peoples. The first volume is the start of a projected series and deals with one sub-topic of the larger binary unit: nature/culture. This sub-topic is the discrimination between raw and cooked foods as reflected in Indian myths and practices. Starting with one Bororo “key-myth,” Lévi-Strauss analyses significant elements in 187 Amazonian legends and folk-tales; by means of complex geographical, linguistic, and topical matrices, he shows that these myths are ultimately interrelated or congruent. The argument leads to the proposition that the discovery of cooking has profoundly altered man’s conception of the relationship between heaven and earth.
Before the mastering of fire, man placed meat on a stone to be warmed by the rays of the sun. This habit brought heaven and earth, man and the sun into intimate juxtaposition. The discovery of cooking literally set back the sphere of the gods and of the sun from the habitat of man. It also separated man from the great world of animals who eat their food raw. It is thus an immensely important step in the metaphysical, ecological, psychic severance of the genus Homo sapiens from his cosmic and organic surroundings. That severance (there are definite echoes from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Civilization and its Discontents) leads to the differentiation and strenuous confrontation between the natural and cultural stages of human development.
But the design of the book reaches beyond even this large theme. To what Lévi-Strauss defines as the “primary code” of human language and the “secondary code” of myths, Le Cru et le cuit aims to add “a tertiary code, designed to ensure that myths can be reciprocally translated. This is why it would not be erroneous to regard this book itself as a myth: in some manner, the myth of mythology.”
The formula is lapidary and obscure, but the idea itself is not new. It crops up in Giordano Bruno, in Bacon’s De Sapientia Veterum in which myths or “fables” are regarded as a transparent veil occupying “the middle region that separates what has perished from what survives,” and in Vico. Lévi-Strauss is seeking a science of mythology, a grammar of symbolic constructs and associations allowing the anthropologist to relate different myths as the structural linguist relates phonemes and language systems. Once the code of myths is deciphered and is seen to have its own logic and translatability, its own grid of values and interchangeable significants, the anthropologist will have a tool of great power with which to attack problems of human ecology, of ethnic and linguistic groupings, of cultural diffusion. Above all, he may gain insight into mental processes and strata of consciousness which preserve indices (the fossils or radioactive elements of the palaeontologist and geologist) of the supreme event in man’s history—the transition from a primarily instinctual, perhaps pre-linguistic condition to the life of consciousness and individualized self-awareness. This, and the flowering of human genius and “concrete logic” during the neolithic era are, for Lévi-Strauss, realities of history far more important than the brief adjunct of turmoil and political cannibalism of the past 3000 years.
Proceeding from the linguistic axiom that all elements in a complex system are related, and that their sense can be derived only from an analysis of their interrelations, of the place which the unit can occupy in the set, Lévi-Strauss weaves a host of apparently disparate Amazonian and North American hunt- and creation-myths into a unified pattern. In the course of the argument, he seeks to demonstrate that successive variants of a myth cannot be discarded as irrelevant, that the sum of related tales is a living aggregate, a code of cultural reinterpretation in which single elements are regrouped but not lost (the analogy being that of mathematical topology which studies those relations that remain constant when configurations change). The result is a kind of moiré pattern which we learn to read as the physicist reads superimposed photographs of cloud-chamber particles.
Philosophically and methodologically, Lévi-Strauss’s approach is rigorously deterministic. If there is law in the world of the physical sciences, then there is one in that of mental processes and language. In the Anthropologie structurale, Lévi-Strauss presages a time when individual thought and conduct will be seen as momentary modes or enactments “of those universal laws which are the substance of the human unconscious” (des lois universelles en quoi consiste l’activité inconsciente de l’esprit). Similarly, Le Cru et le cuit concludes with the suggestion of a simultaneous, reciprocal interaction between the genesis of myths in the human mind and the creation by these myths of a world-image already pre-determined (one might say “programmed”) by the specific structure of human mentality. If human life is, basically, a highly developed form of cybernetics, the nature of the information processed, of the feedback and of the code, will depend on the particular psychosomatic construct of the mental unit. Digital computers and analogue computers may learn to have different dreams.
Once more, the substance and empirical solidity of Lévi-Strauss’s case can be judged only by the qualified anthropologist (is he right about this or that aspect of Bororo life and language?). But the general implications are wide-ranging. This is particularly true of the first thirty pages of Le Cru et le cuit, entitled “Ouverture.” They constitute the richest, most difficult piece of writing Lévi-Strauss has produced so far. It is not easy to think of any text as tightly meshed, as bristling with suggestion and fine intricacy of argument since the Tractatus. At various points, in fact, the themes of the two works come into contact.
Some of the difficulty seems gratuitous. There is hardly a proposition in these opening pages which is not qualified or illustrated by reference to mathematics, histology, optics, or molecular chemistry. Often a single simile conjoins several allusions to different scientific concepts. Looked at closely, however, a good many of the scientific notions invoked are elementary or vaguely pretentious. How much mathematics does Lévi-Strauss really know or need to know? But this constant use of mathematical and scientific notations points to a much larger and more urgent motif. In “Ouverture” Lévi-Strauss is articulating a radical distrust of language. A theme which has been latent in much of his work now comes to the fore: set against the pure syntax and tautological efficiencies of mathematics, of symbolic logic, and of scientific formulas, traditional discourse is no longer a predominant or wholly satisfactory medium. By universalizing structural linguistics, Lévi-Strauss is, in fact, diminishing the unique genius and central authority of common speech. As storehouses and conveyors (the vacuum tube and the electronic impulse) of felt life and human conjecture, myths embrace words but go beyond them toward a more supple, inventive, universal syntax.
Yet even they fall short of the “supreme mystery among the sciences of man” which is music. That arresting formula concludes a dazzling rhetorical flight in which Lévi-Strauss contends that “to think mythologically” is to think musically. Wagner has proved the quintessential kinship of myth and musical statement. Among all languages, only music “unites the contrary attributes of being both intelligible and untranslatable.” It is, moreover, intelligible to all—a fact which makes “the creator of music a being similar to the gods.”
In consequence, Le Cru et le cuit is given the formal structure of a piece of music: overture, theme and variations, sonata, fugue, three-part invention, rustic symphony in three movements. The conceit is not new: one finds it in Baudelaire’s theory of “correspondance” (to which Lévi-Strauss implicitly refers), in Mallarmé, and in Broch’s Death of Virgil, a novel divided in analogy with the changes of mood and rhythm in a string quartet. Lévi-Strauss does little, moreover, to enforce the musical mimesis. It remains a rather labored jeu d’esprit. But the underlying concept has a deep fascination. The idea that music and myth are akin, that they build shapes of being more universal, more numinous than speech, haunts the Western imagination. It is incarnate, as Elizabeth Sewell has shown, in the figure of Orpheus. He is myth himself and master of life through his power to create harmony amid the inertness of primal silence or the ferocity of discord (the fierce beasts pause and listen). His presence—order and perception as the condition of the mind when that condition is nearest music—is discernible in Pythagorean doctrine and in Bacon’s Magna Instauratio; it has the energy of living myth in Rilke and Valéry. In its celebration of music and mathematics, in its proud obscurity and claim to be itself a myth unfolding, a song of the mind, Le Cru et le cuit is, in the literal sense, an Orphic book. Would that its opening measures were quoted from a stronger source than Emmanuel Chabrier’s À la musique.
Le Cru et le cuit is work in progress, and it would be fatuous to pass any general judgment on the complex ensemble of Lévi-Strauss’s achievement to this date. That it is one of the most original and intellectually exciting of the present age seems undeniable. No one seriously interested in language or literature, in sociology or psychology, can ignore it. At the same time, this newest book exhibits to a disturbing degree characteristics latent in Lévi-Strauss’s work, certainly since the early 1950s. It is prolix, often arbitrary, and maddeningly precious (a technical discussion of the relations between Amazonian myths and the zodiac is entitled “L’Astronomie bien tempérée”). The argument is decked out with an apparatus of pseudomathematical notations which appears to carry more weight and relevance than it actually does. At times, the hard astringent scruple of Lévi-Strauss’s best style yields to an odd, post-romantic lyricism (Chabrier after Satie). It is as if the prophet were pausing to draw his mantle close.
Perhaps this is both the genius and the danger of the enterprise. It is not, primarily, as anthropology or ethnography that this fascinating body of work may come to be judged and valued, but as extended poetic metaphor. Like so much in Marx and Freud, the achievement of Lévi-Strauss may endure, to use a term from La Pensée sauvage, as part of “the mythology of our time.” It is too early to tell; Le Cru et le cuit ends with a catalogue of myths, not with a coda.