Free Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory by Patrick Wilcken Page B

the hidden symmetries that underlay all culture. In Tristes Tropiques Lévi-Strauss captivated readers with early sketches of this method, in the process giving an unexpected coherence to the apparent confusion of indigenous ideas and practices.
     
     
    “ON THE WHOLE, and all things considered, the interview is a detestable genre,” Lévi-Strauss once said in an interview, “to which the intellectual poverty of the age obliges one to submit more often than one would like.” Yet as his fame grew with the success of Tristes Tropiques and the subsequent march of structuralism, he spoke regularly to journalists and academic colleagues. In the 1960s and ’70s he often appeared on French television, participated in a series of documentaries and, after his retirement, gave the writer and philosopher Didier Eribon extraordinary access, resulting in a book-length interview, published as De près et de loin in 1988.
    The more one reads, though, the less one seems to be able to grasp the person behind the words and images. In print and on film Lévi-Strauss was at once forthcoming and elusive. Over the years he produced many details, but little substance. One is left with the impression of strong surface imagery—a vividness without depth. His anonymous Semitic features (he came from a Jewish family, originally from the Alsace) have been endlessly photographed in the same noncommittal pose. The images that have been staged—Lévi-Strauss standing in front of banks of metal card-reference drawers in a Paris archive, for instance, or in a jacket with a parrot perched on his shoulder—seem out of character, as if Lévi-Strauss was resistant to the crafts of publicity. In 1970, Vogue photographer Irving Penn posed Lévi-Strauss sunken into an overcoat, his head enveloped by artfully turned-up lapels, his glasses perched on his forehead, the left side of his face disappearing into the shadows. Compared to Penn’s identically posed portrait of Picasso—whose one visible eye, unmoored from the rest of the face, fixes the viewer with a piercing stare—Lévi-Strauss’s expression is difficult to read. Not even the manufactured intimacy of celebrity photography, with someone as talented as Penn behind the lens, could offer a glimpse of his inner being.
    The effacement was in part deliberate: “I share the anti-biographical approach expressed by Proust in Contre Sainte-Beuve ,” Lévi-Strauss told the French anthropologist Marc Augé in 1990. “What matters is the work, not the author who happened to write it; I would say rather that it writes itself through him. The individual person is no more than the means of transmission and survives in the work only as a residue.” 6 In Lévi-Strauss’s case, though, this residue was a heavy one. His prose is instantly recognizable and impossible to imitate; his approach to his subject matter so idiosyncratic that for much of his career it defied systematic criticism.
    On film, Lévi-Strauss had an easy, avuncular manner. He would appear on shows like Apostrophes , France’s weekly cultural program that ran in the 1970s and ’80s, explaining the ins and outs of his theories. The performances were fluid, at times monotone, at others more animated, when he produced an intellectual trump card or delivered the punch line of a well-worn tale. A dry humor and a certain Gallic charm shone through between patient explanations of anthropological conundrums. This is the image that was sedimented in France’s popular consciousness—Lévi-Strauss as a much-loved national treasure, the father (perhaps now the grand- or even great-grandfather) of French anthropology, an icon from an age in which France’s intellectuals were fêted internationally.
    Wind the clock back, though, and a different Lévi-Strauss emerges. In a television interview given to Pierre Dumayet for the show Lectures pour tous in 1959, we see a far more serious, businesslike operator. 7 Dressed in a somber suit with a waistcoat,