Against Interpretation (10 page)

Needless to say, it does neither. Literature usually begets literature. Whatever the therapeutic value of his self-exposure in
Manhood,
Leiris’ mode of operating upon himself did not end with this book. His literary work since the war does not show a resolution of the problems set forth in
Manhood,
only further types of complication. Under the general title
La Règle du Jeu
(The Rules of the Game), Leiris has been writing essays on sense memories of his childhood, private images of death, sexual fantasies, the associative meanings of certain words—more discursive and more complex autobiographical forays than
Manhood.
Two of the projected three volumes have appeared:
Biffures
(Deletions) in 1948, and Fourbis (Odds and Ends) in 1961. The mocking titles tell the story. In Fourbis, one finds again the old complaint: “If there is nothing in love—or taste—for which I am ready to face death, I am only stirring up empty space and everything cancels itself out, myself included.” The same theme is continued in his recent
Vivantes Cendres. Innomées
(Living Ashes, Unnamed), a cycle of poems which are a “journal” of Leiris’ attempted suicide in 1958, and illustrated with line drawings by his friend Giacometti. For, it seems, the greatest problem Leiris faces is the chronic thinness of his emotions. The life which he dissects in all his books is polarized between what he calls his “huge capacity for boredom, from which everything else proceeds,” and a staggering burden of morbid fantasies, memories of childhood injuries, fear of punishment, and failure ever to be at home in his own body. By writing about his weaknesses Leiris courts the punishment which he dreads, hoping that he will rouse in himself an unprecedented courage. One has the impression of a man flogging himself just in order to make his lungs consent to draw air.

The tone of
Manhood,
however, is anything but vehement. Leiris speaks somewhere in the book of preferring English clothes, of affecting a sober and correct style “actually a little stiff and even funereal—which corresponds so well, I believe, to my temperament.” This is not a bad description of the style of his book. The extreme coldness of his sexual disposition, he explains, entails a profound distaste for the feminine, the liquid, the emotional; a lifelong fantasy is that of his own body becoming petrified, crystalline, mineralized. Everything that is impersonal and cold fascinates Leiris. For example, he is attracted to prostitution because of its character as a ritual; and “brothels are like museums,” he explains. It seems his choice of the profession of anthropology also owes to the same taste: he is attracted by the extreme
formalism
of primitive societies. This is evident in the book which Leiris wrote about his two-year field trip,
L’Afrique Fantôme
(1934), as well as in several excellent anthropological monographs. Leiris’ love of formalism, reflected in the cool underplayed style of
Manhood,
explains a seeming paradox. For it is surely remarkable that the man who has dedicated himself to ruthless self-exposure has written a brilliant monograph on the use of masks in African religious rituals (“Possession and Its Theatrical Aspects among the Ethiopians of Gondar,” 1958), that the man who has carried the notion of candor to its most painful limits has also concerned himself professionally with the idea of secret languages (“The Secret Language of the Dogons of Sanga,” 1948).

This coolness of tone—combined with a great intelligence and subtlety about motives—makes
Manhood
an attractive book in a fairly familiar sense. To its other qualities, though, we may react with impatience, for they violate many preconceptions. Apart from the brilliant prefatory essay,
Manhood
meanders, circles, and doubles back; there is no reason for it to end where it does; such types of insight are interminable. The book has no movement or direction and provides no consummation or climax.
Manhood
is another of those very modern books which are fully intelligible only as part of the project of a life: we are to take the book as an action, giving on to other actions. This type of literature, item by item, rather than retrospectively viewed as part of a body of work, is often hermetic and opaque, sometimes boring. Now, it is not hard to make out a defense for hermeticism and opaqueness as a possible condition for literary works of an extreme density. But what about boredom? Can that ever be justified? I think it can, sometimes. (Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.) We should acknowledge certain uses of boredom as one of the most creative stylistic features of modern literature—as the conventionally ugly and messy have already become essential resources of modern painting, and silence (since Webern) a positive, structural element in contemporary music.

[
1964
]

The paradox is irresoluble: the less one culture communicates with another, the less likely they are to be corrupted, one by the other; but on the other hand, the less likely it is, in such conditions, that the respective emissaries of these cultures will be able to seize the richness and significance of their diversity. The alternative is inescapable: either I am a traveller in ancient times, and faced with a prodigious spectacle which would be almost entirely unintelligible to me and might, indeed, provoke me to mockery or disgust; or I am a traveller of my own day, hastening in search of a vanished reality. In either case I am the loser … for today, as I go groaning among the shadows, I miss, inevitably, the spectacle that is now taking shape.

from
Tristes Tropiques

The anthropologist as hero

M
OST
serious thought in our time struggles with the feeling of homelessness. The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo. And the only way to cure this spiritual nausea seems to be, at least initially, to exacerbate it. Modern thought is pledged to a kind of applied Hegelianism: seeking its Self in its Other. Europe seeks itself in the exotic—in Asia, in the Middle East, among pre-literate peoples, in a mythic America; a fatigued rationality seeks itself in the impersonal energies of sexual ecstasy or drugs; consciousness seeks its meaning in unconsciousness; humanistic problems seek their oblivion in scientific “value neutrality” and quantification. The “other” is experienced as a harsh purification of “self.” But at the same time the “self” is busily colonizing all strange domains of experience. Modern sensibility moves between two seemingly contradictory but actually related impulses: surrender to the exotic, the strange, the other; and the domestication of the exotic, chiefly through science.

Although philosophers have contributed to the statement and understanding of this intellectual homelessness—and, in my opinion, only those modern philosophers who do so have an urgent claim on our interest—it is mainly poets, novelists, a few painters who have
lived
this tortured spiritual impulse, in willed derangement and in self-imposed exile and in compulsive travel. But there are other professions whose conditions of life have been made to bear witness to this vertiginous modern attraction to the alien. Conrad in his fiction, and T. E. Lawrence, Saint-Exupéry, Montherlant among others in their lives as well as their writing, created the métier of the adventurer as a spiritual vocation. Thirty-five years ago, Malraux chose the profession of the archaeologist, and went to Asia. And, more recently, Claude Lévi-Strauss has invented the profession of the anthropologist as a total occupation, one involving a spiritual commitment like that of the creative artist or the adventurer or the psychoanalyst.

Unlike the writers mentioned above, Lévi-Strauss is not a man of letters. Most of his writings are scholarly, and he has always been associated with the academic world. At present, since 1960, he holds a very grand academic post, the newly created chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France, and heads a large and richly endowed research institute. But his academic eminence and ability to dispense patronage are scarcely adequate measures of the formidable position he occupies in French intellectual life today. In France, where there is more awareness of the adventure, the
risk
involved in intelligence, a man can be both a specialist and the subject of general and intelligent interest and controversy. Hardly a month passes in France without a major article in some serious literary journal, or an important public lecture, extolling or attacking the ideas and influence of Lévi-Strauss. Apart from the tireless Sartre and the virtually silent Malraux, he is the most interesting intellectual “figure” in France today.

So far, Lévi-Strauss is hardly known in this country. A collection of previously scattered essays on the methods and concepts of anthropology, brought out in 1958 and entitled
Anthropologie Structurale,
and his
Le Totémisme Aujourd’hui
(1962) have been translated in the last year. Still to appear are another collection of essays, more philosophical in character, entitled
La Pensée Sauvage
(1962); a book published by UNESCO in 1952 called Race et Histoire; and the brilliant work on the kinship systems of primitives,
Les Structures Élémentaires de la Parenté
(1949).
7
Some of these writings presuppose more familiarity with anthropological literature and with the concepts of linguistics, sociology, and psychology than the ordinary cultivated reader has. But it would be a great pity if Lévi-Strauss’ work, when it is all translated, were to find no more than a specialist audience in this country. For Lévi-Strauss has assembled, from the vantage point of anthropology, one of the few interesting and possible intellectual positions—in the most general sense of that phrase. And one of his books is a masterpiece. I mean the incomparable
Tristes Tropiques,
a book that became a bestseller when published in France in 1955, but when translated into English and brought out here in 1961 was shamefully ignored.
Tristes Tropiques
is one of the great books of our century. It is rigorous, subtle, and bold in thought. It is beautifully written. And, like all great books, it bears an absolutely personal stamp; it speaks with a human voice.

Ostensibly
Tristes Tropiques
is the record, or memoir rather, written over fifteen years after the event, of the author’s experience in the “field.” Anthropologists are fond of likening field research to the puberty ordeal which confers status upon members of certain primitive societies. Lévi-Strauss’ ordeal was in Brazil, before the Second World War. Born in 1908 and of the intellectual generation and circle which included Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and Paul Nizan, he studied philosophy in the late twenties, and, like them, taught for a while in a provincial lycée. Dissatisfied with philosophy he soon gave up his teaching post, returned to Paris to study law, then began the study of anthropology, and in 1935 went to São Paulo as Professor of Anthropology. From 1935 to 1939, during the long university vacations from November to March and for one period of more than a year, Lévi-Strauss lived among Indian tribes in the interior of Brazil.
Tristes Tropiques
offers a record of his encounters with these tribes—the nomadic, missionary-murdering Nambikwara, the Tupi-Kawahib whom no white man had ever seen before, the materially splendid Bororo, the ceremonious Caduveo who produce huge amounts of abstract painting and sculpture. But the greatness of
Tristes Tropiques
lies not simply in this sensitive reportage, but in the way Lévi-Strauss uses his experience—to reflect on the nature of landscape, on the meaning of physical hardship, on the city in the Old World and the New, on the idea of travel, on sunsets, on modernity, on the connection between literacy and power. The key to the book is Chapter Six, “How I Became an Anthropologist,” where Lévi-Strauss finds in the history of his own choice a case study of the unique spiritual hazards to which the anthropologist subjects himself.
Tristes Tropiques
is an intensely personal book. Like Montaigne’s
Essays
and Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams,
it is an intellectual autobiography, an exemplary personal history in which a whole view of the human situation, an entire sensibility, is elaborated.

The profoundly intelligent sympathy which informs
Tristes Tropiques
makes other memoirs about life among pre-literate peoples seem ill-at-ease, defensive, provincial. Yet sympathy is modulated throughout by a hard-won impassivity. In her autobiography Simone de Beauvoir recalls Lévi-Strauss as a young philosophy student-teacher expounding “in his detached voice, and with a deadpan expression … the folly of the passions.” Not for nothing is
Tristes Tropiques
prefaced by a motto from Lucretius’
De Rerum Natura.
Lévi-Strauss’ aim is very much like that of Lucretius, the Graecophile Roman who urged the study of the natural sciences as a mode of ethical psychotherapy. The aim of Lucretius was not independent scientific knowledge, but the reduction of emotional anxiety. Lucretius saw man as torn between the pleasure of sex and the pain of emotional loss, tormented by superstitions inspired by religion, haunted by the fear of bodily decay and death. He recommended scientific knowledge, which teaches intelligent detachment, equanimity. Scientific knowledge is, for Lucretius, a mode of psychological gracefulness. It is a way of learning to let go.

Lévi-Strauss sees man with a Lucretian pessimism, and a Lucretian feeling for knowledge as both consolation and necessary disenchantment. But for him the demon is history—not the body or the appetites. The past, with its mysteriously harmonious structures, is broken and crumbling before our eyes. Hence, the tropics are tristes. There were nearly twenty thousand of the naked, indigent, nomadic, handsome Nambikwaras in 1915, when they were first visited by white missionaries; when Lévi-Strauss arrived in 1938 there were no more than two thousand of them; today they are miserable, ugly, syphilitic, and almost extinct. Hopefully, anthropology brings a reduction of historical anxiety. It is interesting that Lévi-Strauss describes himself as an ardent student of Marx since the age of seventeen (“Rarely do I tackle a problem in sociology or ethnology without having first set my mind in motion by reperusal of a page or two from the
18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
or the
Critique of Political Economy
”) and that many of Lévi-Strauss’ students are reported to be former Marxists, come as it were to lay their piety at the altar of the past since it cannot be offered to the future. Anthropology is necrology. “Let’s go and study the primitives,” say Lévi-Strauss and his pupils, “before they disappear.”