THE LOST GARDEN

CERTAIN SENTENCES IN the book were right from the outset objects of legend and of parody. There was the opening, astounding in a work of anthropology and Amazonian travel: “Je haïs les voyages et les explorateurs” (“I hate travelling and explorers”). There was the coda—a leviathan of a sentence, clause piling on ornate clause, a baroque sforzando quavering to rest in the image, at once ludicrous and magical, of “the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat” (a good stab at translation, yet one that misses both the pathos of “alourdi de patience” and the hint of almost theological grace in “pardon réciproque qu’une entente involontaire permet parfois”). “Tristes Tropiques” is now almost twenty years old. In the intervening period, Claude Lévi-Strauss has largely accomplished that revolution in anthropology, that renovation in the vocabulary, in the directions of argument proper to “the study of man” which “Tristes Tropiques” called for. He is, so far as the general climate of literacy goes, not only the most celebrated of living anthropologist-ethnographers but a writer whose apparently specialized technical treatises have penetrated sensibility at large. Lévi-Strauss’s “structuralism,” a term more fashionable than clearly defined, seems somehow pivotal to the current enterprise in linguistics and psychology, in social studies and aesthetics. But Lévi-Strauss’s fame, the influence he exercises on the tone of our culture and our high gossip (the suave, nerveless sheen that the mass media reflect hack on the life of the mind), has a paradoxical form. It has grown inversely to his standing with his own professional peers. From the point of view of fellow-anthropologists and ethnographers, the curve goes something like this: Though his field work in Brazil in the nineteen-thirties was brief and his methodology perhaps controversial, Lévi-Strauss later produced a classic study of kinship relations—“Les Structures Elémentaires de la Parenté,” published in 1949. Together with a number of technical papers written during his years in America and shortly thereafter, this opus constitutes a fundamental development of the understanding of kinship and of primitive society initiated by Marcel Mauss, Émile Durkheim, and the British school of anthropology. In the early nineteen-fifties, in collaboration with Roman Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss began arguing for seminal analogies, for reciprocities of method and conception, between linguistics and anthropology. This again was a stimulating move. There is clearly a good deal to be learned from the possible concordance between the formal structure of a language and the social structures it organizes and mirrors (Lévi-Strauss’s observation that a society cannot prohibit that which it cannot name and classify, and that recognitions of allowed or forbidden kinship depend on a corresponding exactness of linguistic designation, is of obvious depth and value). But such parallels, where they can be shown to exist, must he handled with extreme caution. To leap from the monographic scale to a universal model of how the human mind operates, to erect a vast theory of mind and evolution on so fragile a base, is to abandon the ideals of science. This, say the anthropologists, is what Lévi-Strauss has done with, and since, “Tristes Tropiques.” He may be a writer of genius, a shaper of modern myths, a philosopher of sorts, but he is no longer an anthropologist—responsible to the opaque boredom of detail, to “that which is the case.” A famous precedent lies at hand. To poets and dramatists, to the general public, Sir James Frazer was the prince of anthropologists; to his professional colleagues and immediate successors, he was a word-spinner trapped in a purple haze of his own making. Thus “Mythologiques,” the four-volume “mythology of myths,” which has occupied Lévi-Strauss over the past fifteen years, will—when the translation is complete—be our “Golden Bough.”

This is a kind of constellation we recognize: a specialist transcends his own technical discipline and achieves great renown; the colleagues he has left behind close ranks in fastidious dismissal. It is the story of Marx and the academic economists, of Freud and the contemporary psychologists, of Toynbee and the historians. Matters are not sweetened when the new “star” expresses his impatience at the pettiness, at the guild-parochialism, of his sometime peers. (Lévi-Strauss happens to be a virtuoso of disdain.) After a spell—so, say intellectual history and hagiography—the work of the great outsider is seen to have altered the whole of the field from which it broke away, and the detractors survive as acid footnotes in the Master’s memoirs.

To this the answer must be a troubled yes and no. Whether or not Marx’s analyses of social conflict are in any way “scientific,” whether or not his predictions have had any verifiable force remain vexed questions. No one would doubt the stature of Freud’s achievement, the shaping powers of his philosophic-literary vision on the prevailing climate of Western feeling. But the therapeutic model he sought to universalize, and the neurophysiological foundations he strove to establish for it, are proving increasingly elusive. The “hard-edged” currents in recent studies of the mind and of human behavior are not Freudian. The picture is not one, or not unambiguously one, of individual genius, jealous rejection by lesser colleagues, and subsequent apotheosis. What seems to happen is a development within one sensitive area of a traditional field. This development, which at first observes the conventions and professional idiom of the field, soon becomes too large, too problematic, to be located within established categories. It breaks away, pulling part of the field after it. New orderings emerge: “anthropological linguistics,” “semiotics” (which is the systematic investigation of signs and symbols) have emerged from the crisis in classical anthropology, and from Lévi-Strauss’s “gravitational pull’ toward a combined view of language and biological-social structure. The quarrel between the great man and his pragmatic colleagues is often a symptom of transition and readjustment. There is a sense in which Lévi-Strauss’s relation to anthropology was from the beginning as ambivalent, as inherently subversive as, say, was Marx’s to classical economic and monetary theory. This “duplicity,” this provocation make for the opaqueness and importance of “Tristes Tropiques.”

Its new edition and translation (Atheneum) supersedes the version of 1961. For reasons that have never been entirely clear, several chapters were omitted from the original English-language edition; these are now restored. Alterations made by Lévi-Strauss in the 1968 French edition are incorporated. To translate Lévi-Strauss is not only an arduous task but one performed under the exacting, censorious shadow of the begetter. Though their method is now and again somewhat ponderous and inflationary, precisely because it aims to clarify, to dissect the sinuous rhetoric of the original, John and Doreen Weightman have done an admirable job. One finds oneself reverting from Lévi-Strauss’s language to their own when particular difficulties obtrude. And, being the translators of “Mythologiques,” the Weightmans have an unrivalled sharpness in rendering the genesis of Lévi-Strauss’s vocabulary, in seeing how and where some of his characteristic attitudes began.

At one level, “Tristes Tropiques” is an intellectual autobiography, ironically perceptive of the distortions, of the self-dramatizations, complacent or condemnatory, that inevitably inflect a self-portrait. But Lévi-Strauss’s recollections of his academic career, at once brilliant and innerly void, lead to a passage that comes as near as any to giving the key to his lifework. Around the age of sixteen, he became acquainted with Freud’s theories and the crucial writings of Marx. He saw in both a kind of geology, a promise of understanding in depth, a strategy of penetration below the crust of the apparent in man and in social history:

At a different level of reality, Marxism seemed to me to proceed in the same manner as geology and psychoanalysis (taking the latter in the sense given it by its founder). All three demonstrate that understanding consists in reducing one type of reality to another; that the true reality is never the must obvious; and that the nature of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive. For all cases, the same problem arises, the problem of the relationship between feeling and reason, and the aim is the same: to achieve a kind of super-rationalism, which will integrate the first with the second, without sacrificing any of its properties.

Difficult as it is, the passage affords an unmistakable clue. Combining Marx and Freud (toward both of whom Lévi-Strauss has a somewhat egalitarian attitude), using the paradigm of geology, with its sense of surface and underlying, formative strata—a paradigm already suggestive of modern linguistics—we must develop a kind of organic, unifying understanding of how “things mean.” At this earlier stage in his thinking, Lévi-Strauss called this comprehension of structure a “superrationalism,” which is not a helpful term. Today he might call it a “mythologique,” a rational logic of the ways (“myths”) in which man pictures, articulates, and masters his biological, psychic, social condition. Only such comprehension (a word that entails “completeness”), only such understanding (a word that implies “going deep, going beneath”) could justify the proud name “anthropology,” study of man. To be an anthropologist in this total sense was to fulfill and conjoin the social-economic analyses of Marxism with Freud’s reading of consciousness. For this, the young Lévi-Strauss was prepared to abandon philosophy and to head for a minor teaching post in São Paulo.

The conflict between this vision and that of the normal fieldworker and ethnologist is all too obvious. Lévi-Strauss went on far-reaching, physically taxing expeditions into the interior of Brazil. “Tristes Tropiques” contains a detailed record of his life with several groups of Indians. In one case, this may well have been the first contact with a white man made since chance encounters in the sixteenth century. His notations of native diet, sexual mores, artifacts were copious and disciplined. He ate verminous food, was parched on the great plateaus, and stumbled through untouched forest. But the focus, the framework of diagnosis, was never that of the traditional anthropologist: confronting the elaborate facial designs traced by the Caduveo women, no “scientific” fieldworker would conclude that these women “trace the outlines of the collective dream with their makeup; their patterns are hieroglyphics describing an inaccessible golden age, which they extol in their ornamentation, since they have no code in which to express it, and whose mysteries they disclose as they reveal their nudity.” No behavioral psychologist observing the isolated hamlets in the Brazilian interior would confidently affirm that these dusters of inhabitants “developed different forms of madness” in order to cope with rain, malnutrition, and desolation. As Lévi-Strauss traverses the lunar wastes of the interior, moreover, it is not so much the ethnography of the Nambikwara party with whom he is travelling that fascinates him: it is the relation to the Amerindian world of the telegraph line that threads, half abandoned, the barren wastes before them. “Completely virgin landscapes have a monotony which deprives their wild ness of any significant value. They withhold themselves from man; instead of challenging him, they disintegrate under his gaze. But in this scrubland, which stretches endlessly into the distance, the incision of the picada, the contorted silhouettes of the poles and the arcs of wire linking them one to another seem like incongruous objects floating in space, such as can be seen in Yves Tanguy’s paintings.”

The symbolism is crucial. Like Joseph Conrad’s famous image of a gunboat plopping absurd shells into a shoreline of impenetrable African forest, Lévi-Strauss’s evocation of the telegraph line across the Mato Grosso states a fundamental doubt. It speaks of the rapacious illusions of the white man and of technology in their relation to the primitive world. But the rapacity and the illusions extend to, are perhaps most ironically manifest in, the very business of anthropology. Lévi-Strauss’s obsessive insight at this point is, as he himself emphasizes, a rediscovery; the dubious nature of the anthropological approach, of the rational study of man as the West has developed it, was already apparent to Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss’s true master. Only Western man—beginning as far back as Herodotus—has generated a systematic curiosity about other races and cultures; he alone has gone out to explore the remotest corners of the earth in quest of classification, of a comparative and contrastive definition of his own preëminence. This quest, so often disinterested and sacrificial, has, however, brought conquest and destruction with it. Analytic thought has in it a strange violence. To know analytically is to reduce the object of knowledge, however complex, however vital it may be, to just this: an object. It is to dismember. More than any other “knower,” the anthropologist carries destruction with him. No primitive culture survives his visitation intact. Even the gifts he brings—medical, material, intellectual—are fatal to the life forms as he found them. The Western hunt for knowledge is, in a tragic sense, the final exploitation.

It is this fatality that gives to “Tristes Tropiques” its valedictory, even apocalyptic register. “A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silence of the seas once and for all.” Wherever the white traveller goes he finds the desolation, the cruel vestiges of the plundering and disease brought by his previous conquests. The Indian tribes, the landscapes the young Lévi-Strauss encountered were not Edenic, not “primitive” in the pure sense. They embodied a long chronicle of infection, ecological waste, and forced dislocation. It was not so much geographical isolation or the difficult terrain that made the forest people inaccessible. It was the brutal fact that complex linguistic-ethnic groups, once at home in a large territory, had now been reduced to a handful. “As far as I know, no one has seen the Mundé again since my visit, apart from a woman missionary who encountered one or two of them just before 1950 along the Upper Guaporé, where three families had taken refuge.” Decimation has been the white man’s irreparable guilt. But not entirely. Lévi-Strauss is too subtle, too ironic an observer not to suggest that there is in the ruin of primitive cultures a more secret mechanism of limitation, of destined inadequacy. The first explorers to reach Brazil and Central America found civilizations that had “reached the full development and perfection of which their natures were capable.” The qualification is obscure but charged with an almost Calvinist edge of fatalism.

This “Calvinism” (Lévi-Strauss himself would prefer to call it “Schopenhauerian pessimism”) generates its own punitive allegory. What the ethnographer found in his Amazonian forays was not paradise lost but a parody and a willful destruction of the last groves in the Garden of Eden. It was as if man, having been expelled from the Garden because he grasped the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge—a seizure that defines his eminence and solitude in the organic world—had turned back in rage and set out to uproot whatever traces there were in his landscape of the lost Eden. Lévi-Strauss senses in the ecological catastrophe, in our murderous yet also suicidal treatment of the environment, far more than mere greed or stupidity. Man is possessed of some obscure fury against his own remembrance of Eden. Wherever he comes on landscapes communities that seem to resemble his own image of lost innocence he lashes out and lays waste.

If “Tristes Tropiques” is, therefore, among the first classics of the current ecological anguish, it is also much more, being, in the final analysts, a moral-metaphysical allegory of human failure. It looks forward with haughty melancholy to the image of the globe—cooling, emptied of man, cleansed of his garbage—that appears in the coda of “Mythologiques.” There is melodrama in this anticipation and a touch of pomp (it is beautifully right that the chair Lévi-Strauss will in a few weeks occupy at the French Academy should be that of Montherlant). But there is also profound, authentic sorrow. “Anthropology,” says Lévi-Strauss in concluding “Tristes Tropiques,” can now be seen as “entropology”: the study of man has become the study of disintegration and certain extinction. There is no darker pun in modern literature.