Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009)

I mentioned the death of Claude Levi-Strauss in the Daily News this morning, and I'd love to be able to add a lot more to the story, but mainly I'll just link to some people who know him better than I. The Literary Saloon points to a few of the substantial obituaries that have already appeared, e.g. the LA Times, the Telegraph, and the WSJ. And Rob(ert) Mackey at the NYT's The Lede (who happens to be a great old friend who I'm still beholden to for, among other things, turning me on to Flann O'Brien), links to Edward Rothstein's NYT obit (which I think is the best of all these, if you're reading just one), as well as a number of French-language tributes and video clips. Here's a short snippet from Rothstein's piece:

“French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss responded. “Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth. And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else. I practically don’t dare use the word ‘structuralist’ anymore, since it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism.”

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving poststructuralism, just as he survived most of its proponents. His monumental work “Mythologiques” may even ensure his legacy, as a creator of mythologies if not their explicator.

And here, for what it's worth, is my experience of C. L-S. Somehow I never took that anthropology course where you hear about his ideas and maybe even read his books, and in six years of grad school I managed to pretty much ignore the whole structuralism/post-structuralism debate (or, as it was assumed, progression) that his name was tied to. But after all that was done, I finally ended up with a copy of Tristes Tropiques and opened it up and was immediately gripped by a brilliantly barbed and detailed storytelling mind that had nothing to do with what I had assumed the great theorist Claude Levi-Strauss was like. I read the first 10 or 20 pages standing up right wherever I was. I still haven't gone further (it's an enormous book, and perhaps I've been afraid to break the spell of that great opening), but I've read those opening pages many times since. Whatever lasting theoretical contributions he may or may or may not have contributed, I do know one thing: that guy could write. Rob has already quoted the justly famous opening paragraph, which begins, "I hate traveling and explorers," and which, really, can hold its own with the opening of Moby-Dick and all the rest of them. So I'll quote instead a passage from the second page, which is nearly the opening's equal. Levi-Strauss has just discussed, with contempt, the recent vogue for traveler's illustrated lectures, but says it was not always so:

Twenty years ago or so, people travelled very little and it was not halls like the Salle Pleyel, filled to capacity five or six days running, which extended a welcome to tellers of tales. The only place in Paris which catered for this kind of thing was a small, gloomy, icy, and dilapidated amphitheatre in an ancient building at the far end of the Jardin des Plantes. There, the Societe des Amis du Museum held--and perhaps still holds--weekly lectures on the natural sciences.

The projector, which was fitted with inadequate bulbs, threw faint images on to an over-large screen, and the lecturer, however closely he peered, could hardly discern their outlines,  while for the public they were scarcely distinguishable from the damp stains on the walls. A quarter of an hour after the advertised starting-time, the lecturer would still be desperately wondering if there would be any audience, apart from the regular attenders scattered here and there among the tiered rows. Just when he was about to abandon hope, the lecture-room would fill up to half-capacity with children accompanied by their mothers or nursemaids, some eager for a free change of scene, others weary of the dust and noise outside. To this mixture of moth-eaten ghosts and restless infants the lecturer was privileged--as the supreme reward for so much effort, care and hard work--to reveal his precious store of memories, which were permanently affected by the chill of the occasion, and which, as he spoke in the semi-darkness, he felt slipping away from him and falling one by one like pebbles to the bottom of a well.

--Tom