When Claude Lévi-Strauss died a little over a year ago at age 100, he
left behind a curious and contested legacy. For the French, he was the
intellectual equivalent of royalty. In 2008, editions of his works were
published in the gilt-lettered Pléiade collection, an act of
canonization rare for a living French author; in his last appearances on
television, he was less a commentator than an object of veneration;
shortly before the end, President Nicolas Sarkozy paid him court to wish
him happy birthday. “All French anthropologists are the children of
Lévi-Strauss,” proclaimed Le Monde in its obituary—which was an
understatement, as there is scarcely a field in the humanities and
social sciences Lévi-Strauss left unaltered. His ideas about myth
dramatically collapsed the distinction between European high culture and
so-called primitive society, and weaned a generation of French thinkers
off Marxist orthodoxy and Sartrean existentialism. Though he did not
like to claim intellectual patrimony, the careers of Jacques Lacan,
Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault are impossible to
imagine without him.But for readers outside France, including many Anglo-American
critics, the nature of his achievement is harder to define. No one
doubts Lévi-Strauss was the author of important works and the purveyor
of powerful insights, but the suspicion remains that behind his
fantastically rigorous analyses of Amerindian culture there operated a
deeply impressionistic and idiosyncratic mind at odds with any general
theory. Some accused him of reducing the meaning of human existence to
an arbitrary stock of contrasting flavors: the raw and the cooked, the
fresh and the rotten, the wet and the dry. Others took his structuralist
program to be a scientific alibi that concealed his fundamentally
artistic enterprise. This was a man, after all, who once, while in the
middle of the Amazon, wrote a tragedy about Augustus, and whose magnum
opus, the four-volume Mythologiques (1964–71), was composed in a
series of musical movements that promised a key to all mythologies. For
such critics, the very scale of Lévi-Strauss’s ambition belongs to a
particularly heady moment in French thought.Patrick Wilcken’s new biography, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory, is an ambitious attempt to navigate between these two extreme perspectives.
