Patrick Wilcken

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Ramona Koval: Welcome to The Book Show, Patrick.

Patrick Wilcken: Hi, it's a pleasure to be here.

Ramona Koval: Patrick, Lévi-Strauss seemed to me to be a rather forbidding character to try and do a biography about—complex, private, contrarian—why did you take it on?

Patrick Wilcken: Well, I think that I had, I'd long been fascinated by Lévi-Strauss. I, like many people, were very taken by Tristes Tropiques, his memoir that you mentioned, and also there was a Brazil connection. I've had a long, enduring contact with Brazil and Tristes Tropiques, for me, apart from being a kind of anthropological book, it was a very evocative portrait of Brazil in the 1930s.

And my initial idea was, I was quite aware, as you say, that he was a very austere and forbidding figure in some ways, and his ideas were known to be very complex and dense—although I think that there are some kind of simple principles at work there. But my initial interest was through Brazil, and I had this... the first idea was a kind of 'in the footsteps of.' And I went to Brazil about five years ago and went on a very, very long trip down the potholed highways of the back country Brazil where he, in fact, did his fieldwork in the thirties, and travelled around Mato Grosso do Sul and Mato Grosso and up towards the Amazon.

But what I found there was actually, I thought would be extremely difficult to write about at length, because the whole area, as Lévi-Strauss predicted in Tristes Tropiques, has been converted into a kind of giant agro-business: there's a huge sugar cane plantations, soy plantations and massive ranches. So I rethought the project and I thought in the end that it had to be about his ideas, that it was very difficult to get behind the mask that he had, that he'd erected during his life. Um, he was a very private man, he didn't believe in kind of personal emotion and biographical detail, and he was very devoted to his own thought, his own thinking, and to his life as a scholar.

But having said that, I thought that the first half of his life lent itself to a kind of narrative, literary biography, because he spent that first half, as you said, on the move, basically. He was, spent very formative and influential periods in Brazil, doing his fieldwork in the thirties, and then he returned to Paris but was immediately forced into exile and spent the war years in New York, another very influential period for him. So I think up until New York and when he returned to Paris, there was a very strong and driving narrative. Thereafter, he settled into his life as an academic in Paris, and he really was quite reclusive...

Ramona Koval: Which is so funny for someone who's theorising about human societies, isn't it?

Patrick Wilcken: Well, I think that he...

Ramona Koval: I mean, he's not someone who really enjoyed human society, or the society of others.

Patrick Wilcken: Certainly, um, in terms of his fieldwork, he fully admitted that he wasn't really a kind of fieldwork man.

Ramona Koval: He said he was a library man, didn't he?

Patrick Wilcken: He was a library man and he said later in his life that he was very happy to sit in his office listening to classical music, doing his, writing his books, while his students went out to the tropics to do all the fieldwork.

So, yeah, he was a strange combination in a way; but on the other hand, the very sort of currency of his thinking and his thought was a kind of disembodied kind of abstract notion of culture that wasn't about individuals, it was about a kind of collective, cultural ether that he was trying to map out.

Ramona Koval: Tell us about the cultural ether that was Paris in his early years, because the interest in Africa was everywhere, wasn't it? Josephine Baker, Picasso, jazz—there's a whole lot of people were thinking about Africa and thinking about ways to do things differently. He was interested in the sort of modernism of Stravinsky and Picasso, and he was taking it all in, wasn't he?

Patrick Wilcken: Yeah. As a young boy and a young man, he was growing up in a Paris that was exploding with ideas, with modernism, the avant-garde. And there was this notion of Africa that was recycled through jazz, through primitivism, through the cubist painters. And Lévi-Strauss really was the son of a portrait painter, but a very, very conservative portrait painter who looked back to the nineteenth century, really, and was a bit aghast at the avant-garde. But Lévi-Strauss as a young man was very, very interested in the avant-garde, and the one strain that he really picked up, that was hugely influential in his later work, was surrealism. And surrealism used primitivism and had the notion that indigenous artefacts were somehow more spontaneous than western art. And Lévi-Strauss, when he went to New York, he went into exile on the same boat as André Breton and he had a long and close friendship with André Breton and they both became very interested in the aesthetics of indigenous artefacts. And they were both avid collectors, and in New York they collected many masks and other pieces of work from the Pacific Coast indigenous peoples of Canada.

Ramona Koval: But if we go back then to his early years though, when he went off to Brazil he said, what, geology, Marxism and Freud, at that stage, were his three mistresses.

Patrick Wilcken: Yes.

Ramona Koval: So he's interested in things that happen underneath the ground of things—you know, forces: unconscious forces; forces of... economic forces I suppose that make us do things, make us arrange ourselves; and the forces underneath the earth.

Patrick Wilcken: Exactly. And he read Marx and Freud at school, when he was attending a lycee in Paris, and he also developed, as you said, an interest in geology. And the common thread was that all these ideas thought the kind of the surface manifestations were driven by underlying structures. In geology you had this kind of—if you looked at a landscape, there was this apparently random mix of boulders and mountains and cliffs, but they were actually the products of very precise subterranean forces. Freud, the dreams seemed to be random, baroque constructions that didn't seem to have any meaning, but for Freud there was an abstract scheme of the id, the superego, and so forth, that generated these strange images. And Marx similarly, that the inequalities that we saw in history, the great movements, revolutions, were actually products of quite abstract notions about the relations of production and surplus value and all those concepts that he coined.

And Lévi-Strauss picked up on this notion and working through linguistics in fact... when he was in New York he met Roman Jakobson, who was a Russian linguist and working in structural linguistics, and he picked up on this notion that the kind of apparently random constructions of culture and the diversity of culture around the world could be pinned down to a kind of depth grammar, a deep syntax. And he devoted his entire life to trying to map that deep syntax underlying indigenous cultures.

Ramona Koval: He said he thought he'd always been a structuralist, even as a child. What was the evidence for that? Meccano sets or something? What was he thinking?

Patrick Wilcken: I think there was an interesting side to Lévi-Strauss that tried to mythologise a bit the notion of structuralism. I mean, it's clear that in his early writings and when he was in the field in Brazil, he was not working within a structuralist framework, so I think that was a bit of an exaggeration [and] that he only developed those ideas after coming into contact with Jakobson in New York.

But in some of his writing he did, he very much identified with structuralism personally, in a strange kind of way, and he often said that before New York he had inklings of structuralism but he didn't know how to articulate them. There was one part that he often talked about: On the eve of the Nazi invasion of France he was on the Maginot Line, he was conscripted and serving in the French army and he gazed at a bunch of dandelions and he wondered how the regularities of flowers could come about, and wondered about depth, genetic structures that would produce such beautiful and symmetrical forms. And he said that that was the kind of inkling that he had. He didn't know how to apply it to his own field, which was anthropology, but he was always having these inklings; even when he was a child reading Freud and Marx, that he distrusted the surface manifestations and was always searching for something deeper.

Ramona Koval: Yes. I'm speaking with Patrick Wilcken here on The Book Show on ABC Radio National about his book, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory. And you're on ABC Radio National. Did I say that? I'm Ramona Koval.

Now, let's just talk a little bit about his attitude to, his short-lived attitude to fieldwork. He sort of went off, but he's not really made for difficult work, difficult travel, is he? He's not really happy.

Patrick Wilcken: Well, I think that he wasn't happy with the kind of systematic Malinosky style fieldwork that had already been pioneered and was established in the discipline when he went to Brazil.

Ramona Koval: The sitting down and observing and being, you know, and taking part and becoming part of the group and learning the language.

Patrick Wilcken: Certainly participation, I think, did not come easily to him and he was much more a cerebral character. He was a good observer but he, in his fieldwork in Brazil, he never really spent more than a couple of weeks with any particular group.

Ramona Koval: Can I just quote this letter? You've got, 'A candid account of the first day among the Nambikwara survives in a letter sent from the field.' He says, 'Of the journey I will say nothing. This region of Brazil is a god forsaken, deserted bush land, through which we drove for 700 km. We were warmly welcomed by the telegraph team,'—he likes all the telegraph stations, doesn't he? Because he sort of presumably can get a shower or something. He says:

I'm writing to you in the midst of fifteen men, women and children who are stark naked (but that's a shame since their bodies are not beautiful), with an extremely welcoming nature given that they are the same group (and probably the same individuals) who had slaughtered a Protestant mission in Juruena five years ago. Unfortunately, work promises to be extremely difficult: there is no interpreter at hand, a total ignorance of Portuguese and a phonetic language that seems impossible to understand. But we have only been here for 24 hours.

[Laughs] I think that's a killer! Don't you think?

Patrick Wilcken: Yeah and that really intrigued me, the whole language question. Because I did ask him about Portuguese and he said that he had a kind of rough and ready Portuguese. He was often working through an interpreter through Portuguese into French, which is obviously not ideal if you're trying to do a sort of fine-grained ethnography of an indigenous group. Ah, and so he wasn't doing the kind of depth ethnography that someone like Malinosky, where they actually learn the language, participate in the rituals, and get to have the feel of the indigenous cultures... And I had assumed that this meant that his limited kind of ethnographic work that was produced from the Brazil journeys would be panned by modern anthropologists working on these groups, but I did speak to some anthropologists who are working on the Nambikwara today and they were... they said that there were certain things that were not quite right but that he had been a great observer, even kind of on the hoof, he'd been, he'd observed things very, very accurately and that there was a lot of worth to his ethnographic work, even though he himself admitted that he only came up with very rudimentary findings.

But he said that, like a psychoanalyst who has to go through analysis in order to become a psychoanalyst, just for the experience, he used his voyage as a kind of, just to know what ethnography was about rather than actually do it.

Ramona Koval: Well you say in Tristes Tropiques he implies he travelled more or less alone, but he was part of a vast expedition, much of the time outnumbering the numbers of native he was studying.

Patrick Wilcken: Yeah, this was a very curious fact that I was very interested in. Because he was a kind of solitary intellectual and he probably would have preferred a more Malinosky-style fieldwork, but he mounted this massive expedition that did have a kind of nineteenth century flavour. And it was full of pack horses and mules and trucks with equipment, and they went along this disused telegraph line into a very, very remote area of the far west of Brazil. And yes, there were 30 or 40 mules involved in this, the first stages of the expedition, and sometimes they were just studying a couple of families of indigenous people. So it was an almost comical situation at the beginning.

Ramona Koval: And he was really annoyed that everything had to go on the slow pace of the animals. He was pretty frustrated by this, wasn't he?

Patrick Wilcken: He didn't have any feel for the rhythms of the Brazilian back country where things were very, very slow. He was a born metropolitan. He liked São Paulo, at that time a very fast-growing immigrant city, and he did make links with this sort of intellectual world and circles in São Paulo. But this very languid back country, spending weeks and weeks travelling, having to wait for the mules to be fed and watered—that was definitely not Lévi-Strauss's style.

Ramona Koval: He had a go at writing a play earlier on, and then he comes back to Paris in 1939, he tries to write a novel. You subtitle the book, 'The poet in the laboratory,' and even though a lot of his writing was very complicated and complex, you say that he has a lyricism in his writing. Is that why you call him a poet?

Patrick Wilcken: I think that there is definitely that dimension to Lévi-Strauss and I think that's one of the reasons why he was so feted in France, because [in] France they like their intellectuals to be literary, to be philosophical, and Lévi-Strauss fitted that bill. He was a kind of artist manqué. He wanted to be a musician, a conductor; he talked about his desire to be a novelist; he flirted with journalism on several occasions. But he, in his own words, realised that you needed something kind of inborn to pursue these... to become an artist, and he felt that he didn't really have what it took.

But he was a great writer and Tristes Tropiques is a classic of that genre. And I think that in his academic work, he did infuse—especially the work on myth, where he was dealing with a very kind of evocative materials—he did infuse that work with a kind of lyricism. And there's just one example that comes to mind. When he, concluding some very elaborate and complex analysis of a myth he says, 'Therefore wet is to dry as frog is to be.' And there's a lot of those kinds of very kind of interesting, almost poetic conclusions from very dense and sometimes mathematical analyses of indigenous myth.

Ramona Koval: You know, there's that other part of the subtitle, 'The poet in the laboratory'—the laboratory part. I mean, he was working at a time when I think a lot of the humanities were desperate to have some kind of scientific foundation. He was looking for a universal law wasn't he?

Patrick Wilcken: Yeah, and I think again that explains why he was taken up with such enthusiasm, especially in the early sixties. There was a kind of frustration with existentialism—with the kind of polemical style of philosophising that de Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus were expressing—and also the kind of focus on introspective, subjective philosophies—talking about the self, talking about very loose notions, like authenticity and freedom. And Lévi-Strauss came in using the tools of the only discipline in the humanities—linguistics—that really seemed to have made scientific progress; that really seemed to be building models that worked and that got progressively better. And he imported a lot of the ideas from linguistics into the humanities and a lot of thinkers around that time, including the next crop of kind of post-structuralist thinkers—Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes—saw in Lévi-Strauss a kind of precision, or the potential for precision and model-building in disciplines that had been quite fuzzy and vague. And I think there were many people, including Lévi-Strauss—I think early in his career he talked in a very ambitious, one might say over-ambitious, way about the humanities finally joining up with the hard sciences, about a kind of Copernican moment where the humanities will finally be able to build models that are every bit as precise as atomic science, for instance. He talked about the period table of cultures that he could, that he was constructing. And he talked also about indigenous cultures being a kind of laboratory from which he could divine laws of culture.

So there was that huge enthusiasm in the sixties and I think every generation looks to kind of all-embracing theories, and today that has fallen to evolutionary psychology, Darwinism—those are the sorts of theories that are purporting to explain culture—but in Lévi-Strauss's time it was linguistics, it was linguistic models, it was ideas like binary oppositions. It was a very cognitive approach, saying he was, his basic argument was that the mind imitates itself as an object in culture, that it mirrors... the sort of structures within the mind or the brain are mirrored in cultural artefacts like myth so that myth was a kind of magnifying glass on basic operations of the brain. So there was a real solidity in the end to his ideas, but he was writing at a time when neurology, psychology was in its infancy and he was writing in a very grand, philosophical and very speculative way, but it was exciting.

Ramona Koval: When he was exiled to America—'39 I think—and gets on that boat in Marseilles and goes off with Roman Jakobson and others and he settles in Greenwich Village in New York for a few years until he goes back to Paris in 1948. What's life like in Greenwich Village? It sounds pretty wild.

Patrick Wilcken: Yeah. No, I think New York really came of age during the Second World War, because there were floods of artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazi Europe. And many of them ended up in New York and there was a real conglomeration of new ideas and new connections between different groups. Lévi-Strauss taught at the New School for Social Research and that was a real Mecca of kind of continental artist émigré culture. And there were filmmakers, there was the surrealist psychoanalysts that were working there, and I think Lévi-Strauss had a fantastic time in the early years, mixing with this very kind of flamboyant surrealist set.

And then in the latter years he had a very interesting time when he had met Jakobson and began working on this kind of fusion between linguistics and anthropology. But certainly it was a very formative time for Lévi-Strauss. And he did say when he returned to Paris that he found Paris very provincial and run-down—it was after all just in the aftermath of the Second World War, there was still shortages—but there was a very... he felt that the intellectual atmosphere was very staid and conservative and I think that his experiences in New York meant that he could inject some kind of energy and novelty into an intellectual scene in Paris that had become moribund.

Ramona Koval: So he gets involved in this fantastic, typical French, high[ly] ambitious arts broadcasting, in 1953, 'Lecture pour tous', these programs that people like Lévi-Strauss would be on, arguing and discussing and... So he becomes quite a figure on French television, doesn't he?

Patrick Wilcken: Well I think that was the birth of French television and cultural broadcasts. And perhaps that was a bit early, I think it was more in the sixties when he really, as a result of... I mean in '55 Tristes Tropiques gave him a certain fame. When he entered the Collège de France in '59 and he produced... La Pensée Sauvage was the really big book that really broke him through.

Ramona Koval: 'The Savage Mind'.

Patrick Wilcken: 'The Savage Mind'. And by that stage he was appearing very regularly on television—he did documentaries, interviews with journalists—and that in itself was interesting for someone who was otherwise quite reclusive and...

Ramona Koval: And, and given that he's... the levels of complexity in his theory, that sometimes even he had trouble working out what he'd written, what he'd meant later on when he was looking at his work. But he was a great simplifier to the public. He must have been a bit of a simplifier too.

Patrick Wilcken: Yeah, he had developed a certain fluency on camera and he was, he did give very, very clear summaries of the principles of his ideas. And as I was working through his ideas I came to the conclusion that in principle there was nothing too difficult to understand. The idea of a deep grammar, the idea of common structures underlying cultural artefacts, the idea of indigenous peoples being a kind of window on a kind of free style of thinking, which he called 'the pensée sauvage' that was particularly...

Ramona Koval: That was the same as all of us, though, which was like, 'we're all the same under the skin.' That was pretty important, too.

Patrick Wilcken: That was, yeah. And the idea also, he told Time magazine, 'whatever man is he always was.' The idea, yeah, that there was, there was no kind of progression, there was no evolution. Still, when you think about in the fifties, it was still common currency to think about culture in terms of Australian Aborigines often on the bottom rung of the ladder, making, working your way up to sort of cosmopolitan London, Paris, New York—western culture. And he totally debunked those ideas through 'Race and History', which was a kind of pamphlet on race, and Tristes Tropiques. And he also popularised this first wave of real fine-grained ethnography that was produced post-Malinovsky. And it was an incredible moment really in the humanities. It was the first time people could talk about indigenous cultures not in completely speculative ways, but based on actual research that had gone on for years in various corners of the world. So he was a great populariser...

Ramona Koval: Although he didn't want to get that travel-writing prize for Tristes Tropiques in 1958. Why not?

Patrick Wilcken: He didn't. I think he saw himself, I think he probably saw that as a trivialising of his work. He was quite embarrassed about writing Tristes Tropiques, even though it's probably his one classic book that is very widely read. But he wrote it at a period of his life when he thought that his academic career was not really taking off and he wrote feeling incredibly guilty that he was not doing another very technical book on kinship; he was planning on doing a sort of sequel to The Elementary Structures of Kinship, which was his first book. And he thought it was a bit of a kind of taking a holiday from academia. But it was very fortunate that he was given the opportunity to write in a much looser way, but still I think he considered it as a serious book that encapsulated his ideas.

Ramona Koval: Why didn't he want to claim the status of sort of originator of ideas that people like Lacan and Barthes and Foucault were offering him. Why was he aloof from them?

Patrick Wilcken: I think he was an intellectual loner. I spoke to Phillipe Descola, who was his kind of his successor at the Collège de France, and he said that he didn't like imitators; he didn't like people who were trying to kind of, trying to be structuralists and citing him as a great influence. But he also I think felt distanced from the next wave. He didn't like Michel Foucault, he voted against Foucault when he was trying to enter the Collège de France. He said that he didn't have any affinity with Barthes' thinking, although I think there are definite parallels. Lacan he was friends with and he went on holidays with Lacan, but he liked Lacan more as a kind of aesthete and a wealthy art collector than a thinker. And he kept on saying that he didn't understand Lacan. He said it would take too long to get into...

Ramona Koval: Pot calling the kettle black, perhaps? [Laughter]

Patrick Wilcken: Yes. Too long to get into, so he couldn't be bothered.

Ramona Koval: What about your meeting with him? What was he like when you interviewed him?

Patrick Wilcken: Well, he was, he was a very charming, very traditional French man. He was reaching the end of his life. It was a shame; I felt that it would have been great to have seen him about 10 years ago, because he was quite frail, he didn't really want to engage intellectually with his ideas and he gave very short answers. But at the same time, he did talk—he was very lucid, he was 96, 97, but he's totally lucid—and he talked...

Ramona Koval: Did he know you were writing this?

Patrick Wilcken: He did. He was... I kind of pitched the project to him as an intellectual biography and we didn't really go into anything personal. And the first talk that I had with him was principally about Brazil, about his time in Brazil, and he talked very eloquently and with great detail, actually, about Brazil. And then I met him a second time in his apartment in the Sixteenth Arrondissement—a beautiful apartment that was decked out in superb but very eclectic taste, with...

Ramona Koval: Eclectic how?

Patrick Wilcken: Indigenous artefacts mixed with nineteenth century paintings and modern furniture and antiques, but very beautifully done out.

Ramona Koval: I guess you collect a lot when you're 100.

Patrick Wilcken: I think so. There was many layers of his life there. But... And he was very attentive and I wrote him many letters and he was very kind to me, actually. I sent him a copy of my first book and he wrote me a very charming letter, basically saying that he'd read it and enjoyed it. And he was still intellectually curious; he was still reading, but not writing at that stage. He was still, he was most voluble and kind of animated when talking about indigenous art, and we had a long conversation about the Quai Branly Museum, which is a kind of indigenous museum that's been, was opened a few years ago in Paris, that has incredible works from around the world and that has the Lévi-Strauss auditorium in the basement and has some artefacts that he collected when he was travelling around Brazil. And he waxed lyrical about the whole project, which had been criticised as kind of aestheticising indigenous culture and taking it out of its context, but he said that he didn't see any reason why you couldn't look on indigenous artefacts as just artworks. And he also talked at length to me, the first meeting, about another exhibition that I went to see that was of Brazilian artefacts, that was superb and that he found very moving and very aesthetically satisfying.

Ramona Koval: So were you never tempted to get behind the man to get his—I mean, he was married three times; he had a couple of kids—something about how he functioned as a human being?

Patrick Wilcken: I think I did make some attempts and there was not much material made available to me. I was working in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris and Lévi-Strauss kindly allowed me to see his fieldwork notes and some manuscripts, manuscripts of Tristes Tropiques. And there was...

Ramona Koval: And they were pretty interestingly messy?

Patrick Wilcken: They were very, very almost artist-like, with little drawings of animals and plants and little notes, aphorisms that he jotted down in the margins. Not much in the way of systematic note-taking that I could see, but fascinating nevertheless.

But in that archive there is also a lot of correspondence that I did ask to see that they didn't let me see. So... But on the other hand I felt, going through the project as I progressed, that I wasn't sure whether... I would have liked to have had some just contextualising detail on some of his personal life, but I wasn't sure that there was really much there that would change the picture of Lévi-Strauss. He was not a flamboyant figure, like Sartre or Foucault, he didn't seem to have hidden demons, he wasn't questioning his sexuality or anything like that as far as I could work out. And he did devote himself to his intellectual endeavours and his scholarly projects. So in some ways I did make quite a...

Ramona Koval: He was a library man, actually, it turns out.

Patrick Wilcken: ...I made a strategic decision that I had to focus on... which a very interesting side I think, of him as a kind of pivotal figure in twentieth century intellectual thought.

Ramona Koval: Yes, absolutely. And Patrick Wilcken, you've done a fantastic job; thank you so much for being on The Book Show today.

Patrick Wilcken: Oh, thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Ramona Koval: And Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory is published by Bloomsbury.

Publications

Title: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory

Author: Patrick Wilcken

Publisher: Bloomsbury