Claude Levi-Strauss

WHEN LÉVI-STRAUSS FIRST TURNED his attention to the analysis of myth in the 1950s, he envisaged a machine—a “special device”—consisting of a series of upright boards two meters long and one and a half meters high on which cards containing mythic elements could be “pigeon-holed and moved at will.” As the analysis moved into three dimensions, the cards would need to be perforated and fed through IBM equipment. The whole operation would require a substantial atelier, along with a team of dedicated technicians working to divine the “genetic law of the myth.”²

A decade later, when he started on his famous myth tetralogy, he worked alone. Footage from the era has him crouched over his writing desk in his apartment, sitting in darkness, apart from a reading lamp lighting up piles of heavily annotated typescripts. Beside him, he stored his notes and references in a filing cabinet, with dividers marking off a hodgepodge of tribes, subject matters, animals and places: “sloth,” “tapir,” “Mexico,” “California,” “moon,” “meteors,” “weaving,” “Kaingang,” “Iroquois.” He was now supplementing his anthropological reading with Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, Alfred Brehm’s zoology, Pliny and Plutarch, using an antique globe of the heavens to plot astronomical references. “Throughout the Mythologiques project I worked night and day nonstop,” he told filmmaker Pierre Beuchot in a documentary shot soon after publication of the final volume, L’Homme nu. “I lost all idea of Saturdays or Sundays, of holidays, not allowing myself to let go of the thread . . . so that I could understand the structural properties of the content’s smallest details.”³

By the mid-1960s, thoughts of wooden boards, pigeonholes and computing cards had given way to something far more delicate and conceptual: a mobile of wire and thin strips of paper, looping and bending back on themselves. Lévi-Strauss would hang the mobiles from the ceiling in his office, and they turned gently as he worked through the logical possibilities they represented. On paper, the mobiles translated into notionally three-dimensional graphs of myth clusters. In one example four outer points represented “trusting guest,” “wild virgin,” “incestuous brother” and “adventurous husband”; along one axis ran “rolling head,” “moon” and “rainbow”; along another, “moon,” “spots” and “clinging woman.” A dotted line ran diagonally across the axes, dividing the space into “(+) internal (−)” and “(−) external (+)” zones. Lévi-Strauss plotted myths (M₃₉₃, M₂₅₅, M₄₀₁, etc.) at various locations on the graph, according to their narrative properties.⁴

Almost half a century on, it feels strange to look back on such a quixotic enterprise and realize that it was the centerpiece of a theoretical movement that dominated the humanities at the time. For a period, Lévi-Strauss’s myth mobiles were mainstream theory, at least in France. But as the enterprise went forward, it became clearer and clearer that this was a profoundly personal project, the outcome of one mind and a mass of material.

Ten years of thought, filtered through his seminar sessions on myth in the 1950s, had given Lévi-Strauss an ear for the dissonances and contrapuntal progressions of mythic narrative. The convoluted plots, the baroque and seemingly irrelevant detail, the way myths appeared to be propelled forward by sequences of rapid, not always fully connected events were by now music to his ears. “I read myths with joy,” he told film critic Raymond Bellour, and he read many—several thousand—folding them into the logical models that evolved over a period of decades.⁵

Lévi-Strauss had theoretical reasons for choosing indigenous myth as his area of study. Myth represented the mind in the act of spontaneous creation, unfettered by reality. Unlike the kinship structures, whose models were tainted by all manner of sociological factors, myth was pure thought, a faithful reflection of the properties of the mind. In a certain sense myth was the mind, unveiled through its own impulsive workings.

The Mythologiques quartet was really one massive book, with four enormous chapters. Le Cru et le cuit (The Raw and the Cooked), Du miel aux cendres (From Honey to Ashes) and L’Origine des manières de table (The Origin of Table Manners) appeared in quick succession from 1964 to 1968. After a dramatic pause, L’Homme nu (The Naked Man) concluded the series at the end of 1971, the final nu echoing the opening cru of the first volume in sound, meaning and structural position. Lévi-Strauss worked fast, writing hundreds of pages a year, an urgency that he later attributed to his desire to finish the project before he died. He wanted to escape the fate of his intellectual hero, the founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, who had spent decades studying Norse mythology but never published a word before his death. Bogged down in the limitless complexities of the subject, Saussure had only got as far as sketching his ideas in a collection of notebooks, which Lévi-Strauss later read on microfilm.⁶

Although at the beginning of the project Lévi-Strauss was only in his mid-fifties, a series of deaths of close colleagues had sharpened his sense of his own mortality. Two years after Merleau-Ponty had died of a massive stroke as he prepared a class on Descartes, Alfred Métraux committed suicide in 1963 at the age of sixty-one, after writing a long letter with references to friends, including Leiris and Lévi-Strauss. “It overwhelmed me as it did all his friends,” Lévi-Strauss told Didier Eribon. “But now when I think back on it, it seems to me that his private life was a long preparation for suicide.”⁷ Two years later, on the eve of giving a series of talks for the Fondation Loubat on the cosmology of the Pueblo Indians, Lucien Sebag—a young, promising intellectual whom Lévi-Strauss had long been nurturing—also took his own life.⁸

THE MYTHOLOGIQUES WAS THE grand exposition of structuralism, an attempt, as Lévi-Strauss put it in the very first sentence of the first volume, “to show how empirical categories—such as categories of the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the decayed, the moistened and the burned, etc. . . . can . . . be used as conceptual tools with which to elaborate abstract ideas and combine them to form propositions.” After the loose theorizing in La Pensée sauvage, Lévi-Strauss was ready to apply his ideas systematically, tracing the algebraic forms of a body of culture. He likened the native communities to a laboratory, his work an experiment designed “to prove that there is a kind of logic in tangible qualities, and to demonstrate the operation of that logic and reveal its laws.”⁹ It sounded like a process of distillation, of simplification, a conversion of chaos into order, as Lévi-Strauss liked to say, but in fact the Mythologiques series lifted his work to new levels of complexity. The mythic narratives were intricate, but Lévi-Strauss’s analyses could be so difficult to follow that they had to be rendered in pseudo-mathematical formulae, used as shorthand for symbolic arrangements. By the third volume the arguments had become so involved that Lévi-Strauss admitted it took him several reads of a draft of L’Origine des manières de table before he fully understood his own line of reasoning.¹⁰

Peppered with allusions, quotes and epigrams from antiquity, the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, from Virgil to Chateaubriand, from Balzac to Proust, the books gave off an air of erudition, tempered by the odd tongue-in-cheek aside. At the beginning of L’Homme nu, Lévi-Strauss slipped in a citation from Playboy magazine, a publication he apparently read and enjoyed, with the one-liner “Incest is fine as long as it is kept in the family.”¹¹ Brooding chapter headings with a hint of science fiction—“The Instruments of Darkness,” “The Harmony of the Spheres,” “Echo Effects” and “The Dawn of Myths”—created a sense of intrigue. The quartet ran to more than two thousand pages, but the project did not end there. The so-called petits mythologiques—La Voie des masques (The Way of the Masks), La Potière jalouse (The Jealous Potter) and Histoire de Lynx (The Story of the Lynx)—would follow Lévi-Strauss into old age.

There were moments of humility. “However ponderous this volume may be,” wrote Lévi-Strauss of Le Cru et le cuit, “it does not claim to have done more than raise a corner of the veil.”¹² While he was working on the third volume, L’Origine des manières de table, he told Raymond Bellour that his contribution to the field was modest, amounting to no more than “the turning of a few pages of an immense dossier.”¹³ But there were also delusions of grandeur. He situated his work at the head of a vast historical process. As myth faded into the background, Lévi-Strauss argued, its function had been taken up by the classical music of Bach, Beethoven and especially Wagner. The avant-garde had subsequently degraded music’s mythic content, leaving structuralism as the heir to a discourse going back millennia.

THE FIRST PAGES of Le Cru et le cuit stand at the very center of Lévi-Strauss’s oeuvre as one of the most beguiling passages of writing in his career. After the freneticism of La Pensée sauvage, the Mythologiques series opened with a serenity, an inner calm. It was as if he had reached the plateau of his intellectual life, and was contented. Ideally positioned institutionally, he had found an open-ended project—a journey with no beginning and no end, as he put it—a limitless arena in which to practice his structuralist arts.

The idea was to analyze clusters of myths, linking up, comparing and superimposing them. Tracing a pattern resembling a rose curve—a mathematical formula that produced flowerlike figures—Lévi-Strauss would start with a single myth and move outward, taking in neighboring myths on all sides, analyzing a blossom of mythic material. Through the quartet he would inch northward, cluster by cluster, in an unbroken chain stretching the length of the Americas. The journey was not just geographical, but structural. Like D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s mathematical transformations of the morphology of neighboring species,¹⁴ each cluster represented a structural variation of the other, with some elements shifting, others inverting, still others dropping out altogether.

Axes of “guiding patterns” ran like ley lines through mythic thought, connecting up sets of myths. Nodes sprouted further axes, running perpendicular and intersecting with yet more axes at higher levels, like a coral reef forming on the ocean bed. “It follows that as the nebula spreads, its nucleus condenses and becomes more organised,” wrote Lévi-Strauss, switching metaphors. “Loose threads join up with one another, gaps are closed, connections are established, and something resembling order is to be seen emerging from the chaos.” He saw myth, en bloc, as a kind of substance. He described the proliferation of themes in myths as “irradiation,” likening their splintering transformations to refracted light rays. Remoter myths were like a “primitive organism,” “enclosed within a membrane,” distending their protoplasm as they “put forth pseudopodia.”¹⁵

This effusion of scientific vocabulary was enveloped in Lévi-Strauss’s favorite metaphor—music—which he used to structure the text. The introduction to Le Cru et le cuit was in fact the “Overture,” followed by chapter titles like “The Bird-Nester’s Aria,” “The ‘Good Manners’ Sonata,” “The Opossum’s Cantata” and “Well-Tempered Astronomy.” When asked by the literary critic George Steiner in a BBC interview in the mid-1960s why he had called a chapter after a sonata, Lévi-Strauss brushed off the question saying that it was “a joke—because I found it so boring.”¹⁶ But in the “Overture” he gave a long, serious explanation. Both myth and music transcended articulate expression with their timeless combinations of logic and aesthetics; they worked in tandem, posing and solving analogous structural problems. Striving for the “feeling of simultaneity” that orchestral music inspired when diverse parts fused into a whole, Lévi-Strauss modeled his book along the lines of a multipart composition with alternations in rhythm and key, variations on themes and contrasts between movements. More specifically, it was in opera—with its arias and instrumental ensembles, its alternating melodies and recitatives, its leitmotifs—that he had found a ready-made device for presenting the complexity of mythic discourse.

The ultimate model, though, was derived from his experiences as a child, when his father had taken him to the Opéra to hear Wagner’s mighty Ring Cycle—a tetralogy, like Lévi-Strauss’s own Mythologiques. At the time Lévi-Strauss had rejected Wagner’s lush melodrama in favor of the new wave of modernism, but by middle age he was returning to Wagner’s operas, and not just for aesthetic pleasure. He would listen to Wagner while he wrote, the music fusing with his own thinking about myth. Lévi-Strauss went as far as saying that Wagner was the “undeniable originator of structural analysis of myth.”¹⁷ Later he would cite a verse from Wagner’s Parsifal, “Du siehst, mein Sohn / zum Raum wird hier die Zeit” (You see, my son / here time turns into space), as “probably the most profound definition ever given of myth.”¹⁸

His use of the metaphor of music made for an experimental—one could even say modernist—text, whose sudden changes in style and genre, abrupt shifts between ethnography, analysis and transcripts of myths, did the reader no favors. In a long aside about musique concrète and serialism—the avant-garde movement that began in the 1920s with Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositional technique—Lévi-Strauss did, in fact, finally link his work to modernism, only to swiftly negate any affinity. There were similarities between serialism and structuralism; both shared “a resolutely intellectual approach, a bias in favor of systematic arrangements, and a mistrust of mechanistic or empirical solutions.” It was precisely for this reason that special care was needed to distinguish the two. As a kind of formal idealism, serialism was actually “at the opposite pole” from structuralism, which Lévi-Strauss still insisted was a purely materialist science.¹⁹

Structuralism was, however, a strange kind of science, one that built its proofs out of poetic interpretations and refused definitive conclusions at every turn. At the end of the “Overture” Lévi-Strauss apologized for “these confused and indigestible pages,” which he likened to esoteric sleeve notes on a record. Should the reader become discouraged, he urged him to return to its source, the indigenous myths themselves, “the forest of images and signs . . . still fresh with a bewitching enchantment.”²⁰

LÉVI-STRAUSS SET OFF on this marathon where he had begun, among the Bororo of Mato Grosso, Brazil. He had originally planned to start off in New Mexico with a series of Pueblo myths that he had run seminars on in the early 1950s, but he had found them too closed in on themselves. In 1957-58, when he had returned to the Bororo myths they had stood out as a natural departure point for future research. There was, of course, an elegiac undertone to the choice, drawing him back to his youth, when he had visited the Bororo as a twenty-seven-year-old aspiring anthropologist and felt the “giddiness” of the ethnographer’s first moments in a recognizably anthropological setting: the clusters of virtually naked bodies smeared in paint, the thatched huts, the feather headdresses, the semiferal dogs and smoldering campfires. Then he had been more interested in the Bororo social organization, studying their circular hut plans, mapping a geometry of exchange and mutual obligation. Now he turned to the Bororo for M₁, “the key myth,” and its variations (M₇-M₁₂), known as the bird-nester myths, the first and, as it subsequently turned out, pivotal links in a chain of analyses that would stretch across the western hemisphere, ending more than eight hundred myths later in the freezing Salish waterways of British Columbia.

His material came not from his own field notes, but from I Bororos Orientali , written by the Italian Salesian missionary Antonio Colbacchini in the 1920s. The book was of its time, with awkward photographs of indigenous people in the process of being Christianized—a Bororo woman in a full wedding dress, her bridegroom in a white suit, during a “Christian wedding”; three Bororo two-year-olds holding hands, dressed in ankle-length smocks over the caption “Tre bambine salvate dall’infanticidio e allevate dalle Suore” (Three children saved from infanticide and brought up by the nuns). Even so, the Salesian missionaries had been more sensitive than most to their exotic congregation, cultivating a profound interest in Bororo culture. Lévi-Strauss later jested that it could be said that the Salesians were converted by the Indians, and not the other way around.²¹ Along with the missionary propaganda was a painstaking ethnography. Colbacchini included grammars, translations of color charts, notes on rituals and drawings of artifacts. Most important for Lévi-Strauss, he had transcribed more than one hundred pages of myths—some of them in the original language with a line-by-line parallel translation into Italian.²²

M₁, “O xibae e iari” (The Macaws and Their Nest), was typical of the type of material Lévi-Strauss would be working with—a surreal series of non sequiturs, apparently superfluous incidents and sudden lurches into the fanciful. The hero steals some jingling bells made from the hooves of a wild pig and is helped by a large grasshopper; vultures chew off his buttocks, which are restored by a dough made from pounded tubers; and he later turns into a deer. The imagery is vivid—after the hero’s father is eaten by carnivorous fish, all that remains are his bones on the bed of the lake, and lungs “in the form of aquatic plants” floating on the surface. At one point the hero awakes “as if from a dream,” and indeed there is something dreamlike in the myth’s woozy, surreal qualities. Seeping through Lévi-Strauss’s analyses are echoes of a previous generation’s obsessions: Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, surrealism, free association and automatism. Significantly, M₁ even has Oedipal overtones—in the opening paragraph the “hero” rapes his mother while she collects palm fronds to make penis sheaths; toward the end he kills his father, impaling him on his deer horns.

The plot is complex, but the elements that would prove fundamental to the whole Mythologiques enterprise were as follows: after violating his mother, the boy is lured by his irate father up a cliff on the pretext of capturing macaws; there he is stranded and suffers great privations before he is rescued by vultures to return to his village and exact his revenge on his father. In the final scene, in one version of the myth, his vengeance extends to the whole village. He unleashes “wind, cold and rain” while spiriting his faithful grandmother away to a “beautiful and distant land.”²³

In this Freudian world, scatological references abounded. The loss of the hero’s rectum in the opening myth was a hint of what was to come, from the widespread occurrence of the “anus stopper” to the role of vomiting, farting, defecating, menstruation and ejaculation in mythic narrative. Like Freud, Lévi-Strauss reveled in this kind of material; its multiple entrances and exits seemed built for structural analysis. The grandmother character in M₅ (The Original of Diseases) tries to kill her grandson by farting in his face while he sleeps, only to be skewered with a sharp-pointed arrow “plunged so deeply into her anus that the intestines spurted out.” For Lévi-Strauss, this was an example of “triply inverted incestuous promiscuity”—grandmother instead of mother, back passage instead of front, aggressive woman rather than man.²⁴

Lévi-Strauss rounded off the long and involved first chapter—a compendium of half a dozen myths, loosely connected ethnographic digressions, diagrams and pseudo-mathematical proofs—with what at first appeared to be a clear goal: “I propose to show that M₁ (the key myth) belongs to a set of myths that explain the origin of the cooking of food.” But he then added, in parentheses, “although this theme is to all intents and purposes absent from it.” Or rather, he went on to explain, the theme was “concealed” in the form of an inversion of myths from neighboring Ge communities. The reference myth was, in fact, about the origin of rainwater, a reversal of the Ge cycle’s origin of fire (hence cooking) myths. Perhaps it was appropriate, given the escalating complexity of his work, that the whole project was to be built around an absence, a negative example, which would form the crux of a riddle unfurling not just across the Americas, but through what Lévi-Strauss called “the curvature of mythological space.”²⁵

The rest of the book took on the first batch of 187 myths, submitting them to a pitiless analysis. The origin of cooking straddled the most elemental opposition of them all: nature/culture, as seen in the transformation of the raw (nature), through fire, into the cooked (culture), a central motif in indigenous mythology. Although he identified many other structural arrangements—oppositions related to each of the five senses, for instance, or to the heavenly bodies, or to north-south and east-west axes—it was this “gustatory code” which predominated, as it stood symbolically at the very birth of human society. In origin myths the raw/cooked polarity expressed not just man’s passage from nature to culture, but also man’s loss of immortality. Cooking processed the living into the dead; it involved the burning of wood—dead or rotten trees—on campfires, echoing death by natural causes; or the burning of a live tree, (tabooed in many hunter-gatherer groups as an act of aggression against the vegetable kingdom) often equated to death through violence.

Lévi-Strauss interpreted the terms loosely, as ideas that recurred metaphorically in many cultures in rituals at key times in the life cycle. In Cambodia, a “cooked” woman—one who had just given birth—slept on a raised bed mounted over a slow-burning fire; in contrast, girls were considered “raw” at the time of their first period, and were confined to the cool of the shade. Pueblo women, on the other hand, gave birth over hot sand—a symbolic “cooking” of the newborn baby.²⁶ The raw and the cooked spawned a whole complex of related oppositions in the “gustatory code,” from the fresh and the decayed to the edible and the inedible, to different modes of cooking such as smoking, roasting and boiling, ideas that Lévi-Strauss would examine in later volumes of the Mythologiques quartet.

Once in place, these grids shaped Lévi-Strauss’s interpretations of myths. Under his analytical gaze, the raw and the cooked, the moistened and the burned, fire and water spun out of the mythic matter, as if it were acted upon by some centrifugal force. Where oppositions did not obviously exist, they were creatively manufactured: rock and wood became “anti-foods”; ornaments, like bracelets and necklaces, were for Lévi-Strauss the “anti-matter of cooking,” as they were made from the inedible parts of animals—shells, teeth and feathers.

Where, though, was this elaborate exercise actually leading? With all his formulae, graphs and arrows, Lévi-Strauss worked as if he were building up a case for a final proof. But any expectation of a definitive solution was undercut in the book’s conclusion:

Each matrix of meanings refers to another matrix, each myth to other myths, and if it is now asked to what final meaning these mutually significative meanings are referring—since in the last resort and in their totality they must refer to something—the only reply to emerge from this study is that myths signify the mind that evolves them by making use of the world of which it is itself a part.²⁷

WHILE LÉVI-STRAUSS WORKED on the second volume of the quartet, he gave a long interview to the journalist Henri Stierlin for the television show Personnalités de notre temps, shot partly in the dilapidated offices of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie in the Musée Guimet and partly in the book-lined study of his sixteenth-arrondissement home. Now in his mid-fifties, dressed soberly in a dark suit, Lévi-Strauss was developing a certain fluency on camera. Sitting behind a small metal desk wedged into a corner in front of a tiled wall—the remnants of the bathroom—or standing in front of the rows of metal catalog drawers, he explained the work of the Laboratoire. In another segment, filmed in his study, Lévi-Strauss stood holding the lapel of his jacket in front of an ornate Indian mural and answered questions about how he became an anthropologist (“by chance”) and whether man could really be studied scientifically. Studying mankind was like studying a mollusk, he explained—an amorphous, glutinous jelly that secretes a shell of perfect mathematical form, just as the chaos of humanity produced structurally perfect cultural artifacts. Lévi-Strauss left the sluglike body to the sociologists and psychologists, while the ethnographer’s more elevated task was to fathom the geometric beauty of the shell. The scenes were interspersed with slow pans of the banks of archives that made up the Human Relations Area Files at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie, and of footage from Borneo of an indigenous woman lying down to have an ornate figure tattooed on her throat—not dissimilar to scenes that Lévi-Strauss had filmed among the Caduveo thirty years earlier. Brooding, dissonant music gave off an air of intrigue and intellectual gravity. It was interviews like this one that were beginning to establish the mystique of anthropology. Lévi-Strauss, as the only recognized figure outside academic circles, was emerging as the discipline’s spokesperson, structuralism as the new vogue.

As abstruse as his academic books were becoming, Lévi-Strauss was a great simplifier of his ideas for the general public—ideas that were at root easy to grasp and philosophically satisfying. Myth is like a musical score, kinship a variation on a theme; culture is nature mediated by the mind; structuralism is the search for “hidden harmonies”; simplicity underlies complexity, order chaos, and so on. Indeed, it seemed that the more convoluted his written work became, the simpler his explanations. His pithily titled short essays written for the UNESCO Courier—such as “These Cooks Did Not Spoil the Broth,” “Witch-doctors and Psychoanalysis” and “Human Mathematics”—were clarity and accessibility exemplified.²⁸ Interviews in Le Monde, Le Figaro littéraire, Le Nouvel Observateur, L’Express and Le Magazine littéraire brought this pared-down version of Lévi-Strauss to wider and wider circles of readers.

As Lévi-Strauss immersed himself more and more deeply in the Mythologiques project, the theoretical seeds he had sown in the 1950s were bearing fruit in unexpected ways across diverse fields. He stood at the center of what appeared to outsiders to be a sudden coalescence of ideas.The watershed period was 1965 to 1967. The year 1965 saw the publication of French-Algerian philosopher Louis Althusser’s structuralist rereadings of Marx, Lire le capital and Pour Marx. The following year came Foucault’s “archaeology” of knowledge, Les Mots et les choses, with its disappearing face-in-the-sand conclusion, and Lacan’s collection of papers, the nine-hundred-page Écrits. Despite their length and density—even impenetrability—both sold well. In 1967, the same year that Lévi-Strauss published his second volume of the Mythologiques quartet, L’Origine des manières de table, Roland Barthes’s famous “The Death of the Author” piece appeared, an essay that echoed Lévi-Strauss’s own claims that his books were “written through him” rather than positively authored, as well as his whole approach in the Mythologiques. Myths were authorless artifacts par excellence. Perhaps one day someone did think up elements of the fantastic stories to which Lévi-Strauss was devoting his life. But myths quickly evolved into unanchored cultural conversations, floating in the cognitive ether, as he explained with his contention that in the last instance “myths think one another” (les mythes se pensent entre eux).²⁹

In Système de la mode, published the same year, Barthes attempted a structuralist take on fashion—the same project that Lévi-Strauss turned down years earlier. Not everyone was impressed; as the Brazilian writer José Guilherme Merquior, who attended Barthes’s lectures, later wrote: “Some unkind wits went as far as suggesting that while it became more or less obvious that structuralism had failed to explain fashion, fashion might very well be able to explain structuralism.”³⁰

More promising were the structuralist readings of modern Western mythologies—not the operas of Wagner, but classic films. Raymond Bellour took the West’s own mythemes—the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho, Melanie (Tippi Hedren) motoring across Bodega Bay in The Birds, Cary Grant’s famous crop duster sequence in North by Northwest, or Philip Marlowe played by Humphrey Bogart talking to Vivian (Lauren Bacall) in a studio mock-up of a car journey in Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep. Bellour’s frame-by-frame analysis looked at how the camera alternated between static and moving, distant and close, the speaker and the listener, short and long takes. With columns, diagrams and axes, he took Lévi-Straussian structuralism into new and fertile territory. Jim Kitses’s Horizons West (1969) adopted the bulk approach in a study of the western, examining the works of directors like John Ford, Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone. Structured around contrasts between society and the frontier, civilization and wilderness, the genre was a natural target for structuralist analysis. Kitses teased out a series of key polarities—the West/ the East, nature/culture, the individual/the community—which generated further oppositions: purity/corruption, self-knowledge/illusion and humanity/savagery. He looked at common motifs, such as the imperiled community, the outsider and the sacrifice. Like much of Lévi-Strauss’s work, it was not so much the conclusions as the close analysis that was so revealing. Subjecting these overfamiliar scenes and genres to a detailed reading, breaking them apart into their constituent units and examining their hidden structural properties brought them to life in a new way.³¹ It was almost like wandering through the director’s subconscious.

Landmarks in linguistics and psychology were also appearing, with Piaget’s Le Structuralisme and Noam Chomsky’s Language and Mind both published in 1968, along with Payot’s new edition of Saussure’s famous Cours de linguistique générale. There were a slew of commentaries, PhD theses and books on structuralism, including Jean-Marie Auzias’s Clefs pour le structuralisme and an edited collection of reflections from different disciplines, Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? Literary journals ran special editions on the phenomenon, with Les Temps modernes, L’Arc and Esprit all devoting whole issues to the work of Lévi-Strauss. Everyone was turning toward the metaphor of language, anonymous matrixes, systems of interrelations, the logical, diagrammatic view of culture. “Structuralism was the air we breathed,” remembered Anne-Christine Taylor, director of research at the Musée du quai Branly, whose doctoral research had been supervised by Lévi-Strauss in the 1970s.³²

In July 1967, Maurice Henry’s illustration in the literary journal La Quinzaine littéraire portrayed caricatures of Michel Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes as tribesmen in grass skirts, sitting together in a tropical forest. Foucault is smiling, explaining something; Lacan, bare-chested except for his trademark bow tie, looks on disapprovingly; Lévi-Strauss is engrossed in a sheet of paper, with Barthes leaning casually back on his hands. With an average age of more than fifty (Lacan was already in his mid-sixties), they were not exactly a new generation, but they were nevertheless at the intellectual vanguard. Henry captured the moment: a group of outwardly conservative, middle-aged men dealing in densely intellectualized exotica—a blend of tribal culture and psychoanalysis, literary theory and anthropology.

As structuralism peaked in the late 1960s, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was released. With its sense of anonymous mystery, its characters who seemed dimmed by their surroundings—ultimately dominated by a machine—and György Ligeti’s frenetic but impersonal soundscape, it captured the awesome emptiness of a posthumanist world. It was also at around this time that early minimalist music arose, when composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich broke away from the anguished dissonance that had long characterized modern music and started experimenting with new forms of expression. Looping melodies gradually falling out of step, repetition with periodic ruptures, the drone effect—it was the aural equivalent of the succession of similar-but-different models that appeared through the Mythologiques quartet, or the Caduveo tattoos, as they moved through their hundreds of subtle variations on a theme. At once modern and ancient, religious and atheistic, cold and romantic, the structuralist aesthetic signaled an easing off, a release of spiritual tension—not through a soothing reassurance, but as a result of being cast into the void.

ACCORDING TO THE HISTORIAN François Dosse, structuralism peaked as early as 1966, and by 1967 intellectuals were beginning to distance themselves from the label:

Some players sought less-trodden paths in order to avoid the epithet “structuralist.” Some even went so far as to deny ever having been structuralist, with the exception of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who pursued his work beyond the pale of the day’s fashions.³³

There were already rumblings of what would become known as post-structuralism, with Jacques Derrida’s opening salvos against Lévi-Strauss and Foucault in De la grammatologie and L’Écriture et la différence, both published in 1967 (although many of the essays were in fact written much earlier). Dosse went on to argue that it was precisely at this moment of disaggregation that the media really picked up on the phenomenon.³⁴

Uniquely, for a French anthropologist—indeed, for any anthropologist—Lévi-Strauss achieved global fame. English versions of his books were now appearing: the controversial translation of La Pensée sauvage, The Savage Mind, came out in 1966, and The Elementary Structures of Kinship was belatedly published in 1969, along with The Raw and the Cooked. Newsweek ran a piece, “Lévi-Strauss’s Mind,” on the publication of The Savage Mind. Time magazine responded with the essay “Man’s New Dialogue with Man,” the New York Times following with the more penetrating feature “There Are No Superior Societies,” written by French-American writer and biographer Sanche de Gramont (aka Ted Morgan—an anagram of de Gramont). Lévi-Strauss went on American television, interviewed on NBC by Edwin Newman on the chat show Speaking Freely, and he appeared in Vogue’s “People Are Talking About . . .” photo-essay page, shot by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Meanwhile, honorary degrees flooded in—from Yale, Columbia, Chicago and Oxford—and Lévi-Strauss symposia spread through the world’s universities. As one American anthropologist put it, by the late 1960s Lévi-Strauss “was as unavoidable at cocktail parties as cheese dip.”³⁵

For Lévi-Strauss, the exposure was a double-edged sword. It undoubtedly consolidated him institutionally. After securing funding from Braudel’s Sixth Section and the CNRS, the Laboratoire d’anthropologie finally moved out of its shabby quarters in the Musée Guimet at the beginning of 1966 and into the Collège itself, taking up rooms that had hosted the chair in geology. The roomy offices, decked out with solid oak tables and antique mahogany cabinets in which Louis XVIII had stored his mineral collections, was like a dream come true for Lévi-Strauss. He was taken by its old-world feel, its “aura of a mid-nineteenth-century library or laboratory.” It fit with his image of the hallowed wings and arcaded courtyards of the Collège, where great scholars had labored down the centuries. “That was how I saw the Collège de France I aspired to enter: the workplace of Claude Bernard, Ernest Renan . . . ,” he remembered after his retirement.³⁶ Although the furniture was bequeathed to a stately home in Meudon, outside Paris, Lévi-Strauss oversaw the refurbishing of the woodwork and antique bookcases in his office. As his Mythologiques project moved up into North America, he pinned a three-meter-by-two-meter map of the United States behind his huge desk. As if in a war room, he could plot the coordinates of new myths on the march northward.

The Laboratoire grew into a major international research center, frequented by scholars from around the world, like the influential American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, who spent the late 1960s in Paris. Its focus would always be anthropology, but it was seen as cutting-edge in the humanities and hosted interdisciplinary seminars, including sessions involving the emerging stars of post-structuralism: the Lithuanian semiotician Greimas, the writer on film Christian Metz, the Bulgarian-French literary critic Julia Kristeva and the cultural theorist Tzvetan Todorov.³⁷

Lévi-Strauss’s work was now being fueled by the field reports from the institute’s scholars—a new generation of ethnographers, many born in the 1930s, when Lévi-Strauss was doing his own fieldwork. Before his suicide, Lucien Sebag along with Pierre Clastres had done fieldwork among the Guayaki, Euyaki and the Ayoré indigenous groups in Paraguay and Bolivia. Arlette Frigout was studying the Hopi in Arizona; another group—including Pouillon, Robert Jaulin, Isac Chiva, Ariane Deluz and Françoise Héritier—was bringing back data from field sites across Africa. From 1967, Maurice Godelier was in New Guinea studying the Baruya, a highlands tribe that had been in contact with outsiders only since the 1950s. It was an arrangement that Lévi-Strauss liked—“They are happy to spend a year in a tropical land, and I am happy to stay in Paris and write in my ‘laboratory,’ listening to classical music,” he told writer Guy Sorman. ³⁸ The Laboratoire’s expansion greatly facilitated Lévi-Strauss’s own work. He now had a large staff supporting the Mythologiques project—Pouillon transcribing his lectures, Isac Chiva along with Lévi-Strauss’s wife, Monique, reading and correcting early drafts, and other researchers compiling myths.

But on an intellectual level, the sudden vogue for structuralism rankled. As soon as Lévi-Strauss hit the spotlight, he began publicly distancing himself from what he described as a “journalistic tic” of associating his work with the other thinkers—Lacan, Foucault, Barthes—with whom he was constantly being grouped.³⁹ Interviewed by de Gramont for the New York Times piece, he was forthright in his rejection of his new cult status:

In the sense in which it is understood today by French opinion, I am not a structuralist . . . The best way to explain the current infatuation with structuralism is that French intellectuals and the cultured French public need new playthings every 10 or 15 years. Let’s make one thing very clear. I have never guided nor directed any movement or doctrine. I pursue my work in almost total isolation, surrounded only by a team of ethnologists. As for the others, I don’t want to name names, but to pronounce the name of structuralism in connection with certain philosophers and literary people, no matter how talented or intelligent they may be, seems to be a case of total confusion. I have the greatest admiration for the intelligence, the culture and the talent of a man like Foucault, but I don’t see the slightest resemblance between what he does and what I do.⁴⁰

The only true structuralists, according to Lévi-Strauss, were himself, the linguist Émile Benveniste and the mythographer and comparative philologist Georges Dumézil.⁴¹ It was a strange choice. Although he clearly felt an intellectual kinship with Benveniste and Dumézil, who were colleagues and friends, Lévi-Strauss in fact rarely referenced them in his own work, which had an altogether more avant-garde flavor.

What Lévi-Strauss could not see was that the cult around him and his work was in part his own making. Not only was he appearing a great deal in the media, but his mature work introduced a mystical feel to what was already exotic material. Reading Lévi-Strauss—like reading parts of Foucault or Lacan—there was a sense of a prophet hinting at deep truths.⁴² Lévi-Strauss may have felt that he was being crudely misrepresented. “Structuralism, sanely practiced, doesn’t carry a message, it doesn’t hold a master key, it doesn’t try to formulate a new conception of the world or even mankind; it doesn’t want to found a therapy or a philosophy,” he told a journalist from Le Monde. But the very fact that he felt the need to deny any greater meaning to his work spoke volumes.

Even professional anthropologists were not immune to the charismatic aspects of Lévi-Strauss’s thought. Claude Meillassoux remembered attending Lévi-Strauss’s seminars at the height of the Mythologiques project:

I went to Lévi-Strauss’s courses at the Collège de France. He was the king who opened the door; the moment it seemed the philosophers’ stone had been found, he shut the door again and took up another subject in the next seminar. Still, it was fascinating because he came up with intellectually stimulating comparisons and combinations.⁴³

At his most expansive, Lévi-Strauss talked in vast tracts of time, about Nature with a capital N, universal modes of thought, Buddhism, the death of art and the elimination of the self. Yet in his own mind he was a mere artisan of cultural inquiry, a scholar patiently documenting and analyzing indigenous myth. The more he protested, the more commentators and critics saw the outlines of a unified discourse that cut across not just the humanities, but contemporary culture and politics.

Some saw the rise of structuralism as not simply the birth of a new intellectual movement, but a reflection of contemporary France. After the traumatic end of the war in Algeria, France had entered a period of stasis, headed by the elderly, sclerotically conservative General de Gaulle. Long buffeted by historical forces in the twentieth century, the country was returning to its provincial roots while quietly modernizing. Structuralism’s closed, inert systems fit a time when French history was thinning out, cooling, slowing down; its appeals to science, mathematics and geometry suited a technocratic age. As de Gramont put it in the New York Times, “Despite pronouncements of General de Gaulle in both hemispheres, France no longer has much influence in world affairs. De Gaulle seems in fact to want to freeze history . . . perhaps he will be remembered as the first structuralist chief of state.”⁴⁴

The argument was given a political twist in a piece by François Furet writing for the left-liberal journal Preuves. Furet linked the rise of structuralism with the decline of Marxist political aspiration. Revolution was no longer in the air, de Gaulle’s smothering orderliness having silenced the Left.⁴⁵ Sartre, finding his footing after the attacks in La Pensée sauvage, put it more strongly—structuralism was “the last barrier that the bourgeoisie can still erect against Marx.”⁴⁶

AS THE 1960S WORE ON, Lévi-Strauss was drawn deeper and deeper into the Mythologiques project. His identification with his work was complete. He rose at five each morning and entered into a communion with the indigenous groups he was working on, inhabiting their world and their myths “as if in a fairytale.”⁴⁷ The process was one of absolute immersion. “The myths reconstitute themselves through my mediation,” Lévi-Strauss told Raymond Bellour. “I try to be the place through which the myths pass. I allowed myself to be entirely and totally penetrated by the matter of the myths. I mean the myths existed more than I did during that period.”

Lévi-Strauss likened mythic elements to atoms, molecules, crystals and fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope, but in reality his method relied on intuition, flair and intellectual artistry—even chance. “You have to let the myth incubate for days, weeks, sometimes months,” he said in the 1980s, “before suddenly something clicks.”⁴⁸ He also spoke of making notes on cards and then dealing them out at random in the hope of finding unexpected correlations.⁴⁹ The artistic approach was seductive, but left many professional anthropologists—particularly Anglo-American ones—cold.

By the second volume of the Mythologiques quartet, Du miel aux cendres , some were losing patience. British anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis, then a professor at Harvard, was well placed to produce a critique of the evolving Mythologiques project. He was a Brazilianist who had done fieldwork among the Xavante and the neighboring Xerente in the mid-1950s—both Ge groups of central Brazil, closely related to the Bororo and squarely in the path of Lévi-Strauss’s analytical sweep. Although sympathetic to the structuralist approach, in 1960 he had written a detailed criticism of Lévi-Strauss’s essay “Do Dual Organizations Exist?” questioning him on both ethnographic and theoretical grounds, to which Lévi-Strauss had responded with a long and at times bruising rebuttal.⁵⁰

In a review for American Anthropologist Maybury-Lewis described reading Du miel aux cendres as “one of the most exasperatingly onerous tasks I can remember assuming . . . What was pardonably experimental in Le Cru et le cuit,” he went on, “becomes frankly irritating in its sequel.” Du miel aux cendres was, indeed, a demanding book, which took Lévi-Strauss’s arguments further and further away from commonsense interpretation. Extending his first-volume investigations into the origin of cooking, Lévi-Strauss injected two further symmetrically opposed elements, honey and tobacco. Honey as a foodstuff found ready-made in nature was “less than cooked,” positioned at “the near-side of cooking”; tobacco, being “more than cooked”—in fact vaporized into ashes and smoke—occupied a structural position at the “far-side of cooking.” They were sensually opposed, one wet and viscous, the other dry and crumbly, leading to further oppositions between rain and drought, glut and fasting. Honey, as nature’s temptation, represented the descent to the earth; tobacco, through the wafting of smoke upward, the ascent to the heavens—hence the interplay in myths between high/low, sky/earth, world/heaven. As Lévi-Strauss struck out beyond the core of Amerindian myths he had examined in Le Cru et le cuit, another, more fundamental set of oppositions was appearing: the logic of forms. Container/contained, empty/full, inside/out were thematic—as seen, for example, in the proliferation of empty and filled gourds; or, in a more complex contrast, in the tree trunk stripped of its bark set against bamboo: one a solid cylinder, the other a hollow envelope; one with an outer absence, the other an inner void. Du miel aux cendres had more mathematical formulae and pensée sauvage logic, as well as moments of poetry: frog is to bee as wet is to dry, for instance.

But Maybury-Lewis was not convinced. Too often the oppositions felt forced, only tenuously grounded in the ethnography. Lévi-Strauss seemed more intent on closing his own logical circuits than on faithfully rendering the beliefs of the indigenous peoples he was covering. Part of the problem was his prose style, which glided over contradictions, assumptions and unlikely associative leaps, “just as a conjurer’s patter distracts attention from what is really happening.”⁵¹

Like Leach in his criticisms of Les Structures élémentaires, Maybury-Lewis’s own fieldwork put him in a position to directly challenge Lévi-Strauss’s use of central Brazilian ethnography. A key structural feature of central Brazilian mythology in the first two volumes of the Mythologiques quartet was the fact that the jaguar (who often appears as the keeper of fire, the ur-figure in the origin of cooking) has a human wife. Lévi-Strauss drew the feature from a parenthesis in one version of a Kayapó myth, and then went on to apply it to a whole string of other myths. But according to Maybury-Lewis, informants from the Kayapó, Apinayé, Xerente and Xavante peoples categorically denied the link, stating that the jaguar’s wife was in fact a jaguar.

Aside from ethnographic nitpicking, Maybury-Lewis found the whole basis of the project unsatisfactory. Despite his invocations of science, Lévi-Strauss’s propositions, as highly idiosyncratic interpretations, were essentially unprovable. So broad was his interpretive scope that a whole range of meanings could be elicited. As novelist John Updike wrote in the New Yorker, “With such a hunting license granted, parallels and homologies are easy to bag—child’s play for a brain as agile as M. Lévi-Strauss.”⁵² But against his better judgment, Maybury-Lewis could not help feeling admiration for Lévi-Strauss’s extraordinary project: “Even if these [ideas] are unprovable or unproven, this does not necessarily mean that they are inconsiderable or even implausible. This is why Du miel aux cendres is so tantalizing. There is so much that feels right.”⁵³

Rodney Needham, then professor of anthropology at Oxford University, was less forgiving of Lévi-Strauss’s intuitive approach to research. An early supporter of his in Britain, Needham had already translated Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (published by Merlin Press as Totemism in 1964) when he began organizing the translation of Les Structures élémentaires, almost twenty years after its original publication. The process was laborious, involving two translators in Australia sending each chapter with queries about language, interpretation and sources back to Oxford for Needham to recheck against the French. Needham picked his way through Lévi-Strauss’s five-hundred-page book, finding numerous discrepancies, mistranscribed quotes and errors in referencing. This was partly to do with Lévi-Strauss’s whole style of operating—his encyclopedic approach and theoretical ambition, the scope of his projects and his intellectual avarice sometimes led to mistakes, a fact that he openly acknowledged. (“No claim is made that the work is free of errors of fact and interpretation,” Lévi-Strauss had written disarmingly in the preface to the first edition; while in the second he had volunteered, “I admit to being an execrable proofreader . . . Once completed, the book becomes a foreign body, a dead being incapable of holding my interest.”) But his on-the-hoof, ideas-driven method was anathema to Needham; an old-fashioned scholar, a stickler for correct referencing and ethnographic accuracy, he began to harbor doubts. “His scholarship was unreliable,” he told me. “If you go back to the examples in the Elementary Structures, they were often wrong, or had the wrong interpretation—you couldn’t send students back to Lévi-Strauss’s works with any confidence.”⁵⁴

After the Savage Mind debacle, Lévi-Strauss had little to do with the translation process.⁵⁵ He did, however, find time to add a last-minute preface in which he criticized Needham’s interpretation of his theories, reiterating comments he had made in the Huxley Memorial Lecture he had given in Oxford in 1965. The points he made might now seem arcane—the argument hinged on distinctions between prescribed and preferential marriage systems, theoretical rules and actual behavior. But for Needham its late appearance, in the final edit of a project to which he had devoted so much time and energy, was hurtful.

When I met Professor Needham shortly before his death in 2006 at his Holywell Street flat in the very heart of the Oxford colleges, he was still bitter, decades on. “I was going to read some Lévi-Strauss to prepare for our interview,” he told me as we sat down in his meticulously laid-out apartment, plain but stylish with pared-down 1950s décor, “but I recoiled from it.”⁵⁶ The dispute clearly ran deep—Needham lined the walls of his study with framed photos of intellectual greats, with the picture of Lévi-Strauss turned toward the wall. Once a champion of Lévi-Strauss and a key figure in the emergence of a British version of structuralism, Needham now felt Lévi-Strauss was a lush, self-conscious, grandiloquent writer. After their falling out, he wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that Lévi-Strauss should not be seen as a renowned exponent of structuralism, but as “the greatest Surrealist of them all.”⁵⁷ When I asked Lévi-Strauss about Needham, he replied matter-of-factly, “He was kind and helpful in trying to popularize my ideas for the Anglo-Saxon world, but the way he did it misinterpreted my work, so I said so—the same goes for Leach.”⁵⁸ But perhaps Lévi-Strauss’s successor at the Collège de France, Philippe Descola, had a more convincing explanation: Lévi-Strauss did not like imitators, he told me, and repelled collaborations, even as he attracted them with the programmatic flavor of his research. ⁵⁹

Underlying the rifts were real differences in intellectual culture between Lévi-Strauss and his Anglo-American counterparts. It is indeed hard to imagine a British or American anthropologist producing a sentence like, “It is in the last resort immaterial whether in this book the thought processes of the South American Indians take shape through the medium of my thought, or whether mine take shape through the medium of theirs.”⁶⁰ Lévi-Strauss’s long period in the United States had not dimmed his essentially continental philosophical outlook. For all his appeals to the higher authority of the hard sciences, for all his use of metaphors drawn from physics, chemistry, astronomy and, most important, linguistics, his approach was becoming more literary and philosophical as he aged. So much so that when his American publishers, the University of Chicago Press, added the subclause “Introduction to a Science of Mythology” to each volume of the Mythologiques quartet, he was apparently very unhappy. The strictly scientific pretensions of his work were becoming less and less important to him. He was, after all, still using Jakobson’s two-decade-old structural linguistic models as a blueprint for his own theories at a time when linguistics as a discipline was surging ahead.

Linguist Noam Chomsky, who had led the revolution, briefly touched on Lévi-Strauss’s work in Language and Mind (1968), published at the height of French structuralism. Although sympathetic to his general orientation, Chomsky was dismissive of Lévi-Strauss’s use of linguistics. Formal aspects of language identified by structural linguists like Jakobson were, for Chomsky, merely the epiphenomena of deeper rules—the generative grammar that he and his colleagues were then mapping out. “There is nothing to be said about the abstract structure of the various patterns that appear at various stages of derivation,” he concluded. “If this is correct, then one cannot expect structuralist phonology, in itself, to provide a useful model for investigation of other cultural and social systems.” The thought was ironic—could it have been that, for all Lévi-Strauss’s insistence on breaking through surface realities and finding deeper structural truths, the linguistic model he chose represented a mere outer shell of appearance hiding the mechanics of language that were hidden at a deeper level still? It was not an idea that Lévi-Strauss ever stopped to contemplate. His coordinates had already been set and the pace of production was such that there was now no turning back.

Perhaps it is not surprising that one of Lévi-Strauss’s most perceptive critics crossed both the Latin/Anglo-American and the anthropological /linguistic divides. French anthropologist Dan Sperber had studied under Georges Balandier and gone on to work with Rodney Needham in Oxford, as well as attending both Noam Chomsky’s and Lévi-Strauss’s seminars in the 1960s. As a young man he had been seduced by Lévi-Strauss and structuralism, and went on to Oxford to preach the word, but soon found Lévi-Strauss’s theory wanting. “Its model didn’t even work in its initial field, linguistics. Its claim to work for the rest of the universe was altogether doubtful,” he told historian François Dosse.⁶¹

In one of the most penetrating critiques of Lévi-Strauss, Sperber concluded that although his instincts had been right, structuralism “was an uninspiring frame for an otherwise stimulating and inspired picture.”⁶² In the 1970s he began working from the ground up, blending contemporary advances in linguistics, cognitive psychology and neuroscience in his attempt to found a true science—what he called an “epidemiology” of ideas. Lévi-Strauss took no interest in his work, even though it had been directly inspired by the core questions that he had built his career around. “As for Sperber,” he told Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in the 1990s, “I don’t understand anything he writes! And this business about epidemiology, this seems to me such a return to the past.”⁶³

On the publication of La Potière jalouse—the second of the petits mythologiques, which he later wrote as companion pieces to the original quartet—Lévi-Strauss told Sperber that the book had been conceived as a response to his ideas. Sperber rushed out to buy a copy, but was disappointed to find there was not a single reference to his work. When I put this to Lévi-Strauss, he laughed. “That was a joke,” he told me. “Sperber had criticized me for the fact that after introducing the canonic formula for myths F_x (a) : F_y (b) ~ F_x (b) : F_a-1 (y)”—first mentioned in his structural analysis of Oedipus Rex, then briefly alluded to in Du miel aux cendres—“I had never referred it again. In La Potière jalouse I mentioned it.” In a final irony, in 2009 Dan Sperber became the first to receive the Prix Claude Lévi-Strauss, awarded for excellence in the social sciences.

OBLIVIOUS TO CRITICISM, Lévi-Strauss forged on and in early 1968 was finishing off his third Mythologiques volume, L’Origine des manières de table. By now he had clocked up more than five hundred myths, each taken apart, sifted for logical affinities and recombined into structural sets. He likened the process to the patient dismantling of the mechanisms of a clock—but this was a strange kind of clock, one whose cogs and wheels seemed to have been thrown together haphazardly, and whose ratios and symmetries became apparent only after exhaustive comparisons between scores of subtly different mechanisms. More plausibly, he described himself as like a photographer working in the darkroom of human consciousness, bringing out the myths’ “latent, but hidden, properties.”⁶⁴

Ethnographically, Lévi-Strauss had crossed over into North America, leaving the jungles of the Amazon for the Midwestern prairie lands of the Plains Indians, a shift of focus that he described as “almost tantamount to exploring another planet.” Conceptually, volume three added a feature that would complicate an already elaborate scheme: time. Taking his cue from the proliferation of myths involving canoe journeys, Lévi-Strauss moved from the spatial to the temporal. The logical relationships that he was now dealing in were ever-changing configurations between the “here” and the “there,” near and far, the ebb and the flow, the rising and falling of water levels, and so forth.

Myths featuring canoe trips led on to journeys along rivers, to river crossings and floods, to discussions of stock mythic figures—the ferryman, “a semiconductor,” carrying some people across and obstructing others⁶⁵—and the “clinging woman,” a curious character who attaches herself to the hero’s back. He drew parallels between the sun and the moon and the steersman and the oarsman, both traveling together, but at a fixed distance apart—just like interrelated kin groups. The sun and the moon produced still more oppositions: summer and winter, nomadic and sedentary groups, hunting and cultivating, war and peace, as Lévi-Strauss began moving from simple oppositions to more complex quadripartite structures. Though now working in entirely different cultural milieu, he found that the North American “wives of the sun and moon” myth cycle was in fact a transformation of the original bird-nester series. A panoramic view across the Americas was now emerging, with “the bird-nester myths along a vertical axis, and the Moon’s saga running horizontal.”⁶⁶

There was more rich scatological material, especially in Lévi-Strauss’s ongoing examination of blockage and blocked characters, like M₅₂₄, a Guianan Taulipang just-so story explaining the origin of the anus. In the beginning neither men nor animals had anuses, but excreted through their mouths. A disembodied anus sauntered among them, taunting them by farting in their faces and then escaping. But they hunted him down, cutting him up into pieces and sharing him out among all animals—bigger or smaller, in accordance with the size of their orifice today. This is why all living creatures have an anus; otherwise they would be forced to excrete through the mouth or would burst, so the story ran.⁶⁷

In a final section, which seemed strangely disconnected from the rest of the book, Lévi-Strauss reintroduced his famous “culinary triangle”—a gastronomic version of Jakobson’s structural linguistics—which had first appeared in the journal L’Arc in 1965.⁶⁸ Using Jakobson’s triangular model of sound distinctions, Lévi-Strauss substituted phonemes for “gustemes.” Vowels and consonants became raw, cooked and rotted, which stood at the triangle’s apexes, with air and water along two sides operating as mediators.

The argument was complex, examining all the various permutations of roasting, boiling and smoking within this scheme. Boiling was compared to rotting, for instance, as, mediated by water, it “decomposed” the raw; smoking, on the other had, was a slow and thorough form of cooking mediated by air, as opposed to the fiery, partial cooking of the roast. In a comparison between boiled and roasted dishes, he argued that while the former was often associated with homely frugality, roasting had a theatrical, ceremonial role. “Boiling provides a means of complete conservation of the meat and its juices,” Lévi-Strauss concluded, “whereas roasting is accompanied by loss and destruction. Thus one denotes economy, the other prodigality; the latter is aristocratic, the former plebeian.”⁶⁹ To demonstrate his arguments, he juxtaposed examples drawn from Aristotle, Diderot and d’Alembert’s encyclopedia and the Marquis de Cussy with Guayaki, Kaingang, Maori and Jivaro ethnography in what was a tour de force of popular structuralism.

Through a process of constant recapitulation, he moved back and forth through his accumulating stock of myths, comparing, drawing parallels, finding new angles as he incorporated earlier material into later analytical developments. Everything is connected, he wrote in the foreword to L’Origine des manières de table, “M₄₂₈ links up with M₁₀ in The Raw and the Cooked . . . M₄₉₅ coincides with a group of myths (M₁, M_7-12, M₂₄)”—the Bororo and Ge series that began the whole project. As a result, the reader could just as well start with volume three and go on to volume one; “then, if still interested, he can embark on volume two.”⁷⁰ You could even begin with volume two, Lévi-Strauss explained, then track back to volume one, finishing off with three, or take on volumes two and three in order, leaving volume one until last.

Every few hundred myths, Lévi-Strauss’s argument took a new twist. Running in tandem with his geographical journey across the Americas was a conceptual one, a progressive adding of layers of logic—sensual, formal, spatial—that coursed through the mythic narratives. Comparing myth clusters, he saw that different indigenous groups had not just inverted specific mythic elements, but transposed them into completely new codes, from culinary to astronomical, sexual to cosmological. L’Origine des manières de table represented the most challenging step in the argument, as the point at which the temporal entered the equation. The relationships between the terms became relative, not absolute, oppositions, and in a kind of Native American modernist turn, the myths themselves were meditations on the very nature of these relationships. For Lévi-Strauss, stories about the moon, porcupine quills, the Pink River, a toad and an incontinent old woman were actually vehicles for thought about increasingly abstract properties—conjunction, disjunction and mediation.⁷¹

Lévi-Strauss had arrived at the outer limits of la pensée sauvage, the point at which “the science of the concrete” began admitting abstract thought. Up against the periphery, mythic thought began to degrade, its narrative collapsing into a series of short, repetitive episodes that Lévi-Strauss likened to the roman-feuilleton—the serialized novels issued in newspaper supplements, a kind of nineteenth-century equivalent to pulp fiction. For him, the ultimate heir to the collapse of mythic thought was the modern novel. Trapped inside tight genres, with repetitive characters and motifs, the novel fed off mythic elements ripped from their original context, as Lévi-Strauss explained with this lyrical image:

The novelist drifts at random among these floating fragments that the warmth of history has, as it were, melted off from the ice-pack. He collects these scattered elements and reuses them as they come along, being at the same time dimly aware that they originate from some other structure, and that they will become increasingly rare as he is carried along by a current different from the one which was holding them together.⁷²

Earlier, in conversations with Georges Charbonnier and in the “Overture” of Le Cru et le cuit, Lévi-Strauss had predicted the death of painting and the onset of a new, apictorial age. Avant-garde music, too, was drifting out of reach of the listener, like a heavenly body accelerating into the distance in an expanding universe.⁷³ Now the novel was fading away, sated on images stolen from the dawn of culture. Lévi-Strauss’s vision was of a cultural apocalypse, an annihilation as severe as the environmental collapse that Western expansion was generating. This profound pessimism was wedded to a yearning for the failing powers of la pensée sauvage, a style of thought once dominant but now barely surviving in the crevices of modernity.

In the age of entropy, all that was left was to climb onto the treadmill of structural exegesis in an attempt to relive vicariously a purer, more integrated thought by unearthing its formal properties. And it was in this contemplative mood that Lévi-Strauss approached the fourth and final volume of the mighty Mythologiques project. Without warning, though, the spell of structuralist meditation was broken by a sudden irruption at the heart of French academic life.