[guignol]

guignol is 200 years old this year, but today is the 100th birthday of someone who is anything but a guignol: claude levi-strauss. funny thing, a 100th birthday: what attracts so much attention is that he’s still alive, but the articles about him everywhere read like obituaries... not that he would likely be bothered by that; to paraphrase his epigram about man and the world, ethnology began without levi-strauss, and it will end without him.

in case you don’t know, this levi-strauss had nothing to do with blue jeans: through his “serious” work (structures élémentaires de la parenté, anthropologie structurale, la pensée sauvage…) he was one of the most important intellectual figures of our time, as influential as freud, heidegger or sartre. His one book for the general public, tristes tropiques, is as elementary a part of the literature of the century as proust, celine or joyce.

By century I mean the 20th. we’re no longer there of course, but his last work, histoire de lynx, was published in the 1990’s. when he felt he had had his say, he stopped talking. in his only public appearance of this century he simply reiterated things he had said earlier but no idle radotage, his remarks are more cogent today than ever:

What I note is is the damage we are doing; the horrifying disappearance of living species, whether vegetable or animal; and the fact that due to its present density, the human species is submitting itself to a kind of internal poisoning, like certain species of meal worms who die in the sack from their own toxins long before space and food runs out. I think of the present, and of the world in which I am coming to the end of my existence. It is not a world I love.

giving the impression of a sour misanthropic curmudgeon which couldn’t be more mistaken. because like proust (or even celine in my mind), his scathing critique of man and his world springs forth from a deep love of same. And his most ominous and pessimistic statements he uttered with the gleam of humor, and of hope, in his eye.

A final quotation, one of my favorites:

the white man proclaimed the indians to be animals, the indians suspected the white men might be gods. all ignorance being equal, the second reasoning is certainly more worthy of human beings.

hard to imagine the icon was once young, but here he is

[Pierre-Henri]

"Tristes Tropiques" is one of my favourite books, one that gave me the will to be a scholar (*). I still know full passages by heart (Voyages, coffrets magiques aux promesses rêveuses). The ternary rythm of Levi-Strauss sentences, his broad, clear and precise use of vocabulary... everything is perfect.

And the mezzo voce humor, too. "Tristes tropiques" is one of the very best travel books ever written, and it keeps repeating how travel books are uninteresting.

I'm less impressed by the structuralism, though. Probably because it gave so poor results when applied to literature. Some people thought you just had to classify bidulèmes, pipeautèmes and nimportequoitèmes to understand literature. His collaboration with Jakobson was anecdotal in his career ; unfortunately, it was far too productive. Not because of him, but because of far less inspired followers.


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(*) I made my Phd jury laugh when I told them I did this partly thanks to Levi-Strauss... We laughed because the old time when researchers used to travel in first-class ocean liners and used to walk across uncharted continents is long gone. Today, we are petty bureaucrats who teach dumb students how to articulate a sentence.