Monthly Archives: March 2010

claude lévi-strauss, “tristes tropiques”

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Claude Lévi-Strauss
Tristes Tropiques
(trans. Doreen Weightman & John Weightman)
(Atheneum, 1974)

There are books that make one wonder what would have happened if one had read it earlier. What would I have made of this book in high school? There was no one to give it to me then, so this is a rhetorical question. Read then, it might have made me want to run off to be an anthropologist; but I wonder how receptive to the book, or how ready for it, I would have been then. I hadn’t traveled then, which helps to appreciate this book; nor had I read much Surrealist prose, to which this has affinities. Being unversed in anthropology, I can’t really speak to this book’s success or failure as anthropology; but one can’t help but admire this book as part of a continuum that goes back to Nerval’s Aurélia, narratives that try to elude both the reader and the writer.

Start at the beginning. “I hate travelling and explorers” is the famous first line of Lévi-Strauss’s book, though the book the reader continues would appear to be as much about travel and exploration as it is anthropology. This is a book that seems to be running away from itself: not so much in denial, for L&eavute;vi-Strauss realizes that one can never run away from oneself, but more in its realization that the writer can never quite escape the text. Similarly, the photograph on the cover of this edition demands scrutiny: cropped, it is an image of a group of natives who seem to have turned their backs to the photographer and us. The back cover only identifies the photographer, René Silz; turning to the book’s “plates,” it turns out to be an image of a Bororo funeral ceremony. The final section of the book, “The Return,” sees Lévi-Strauss move from Brazil (where he observed the last days of the western Bororo people) to Ancient Rome to Martinique to Pakistan to what would become Bangladesh, with digressions to Paris and New York, seemingly in an attempt to throw the reader off any travel narrative that might emerge. Time is uncertain: a reader with a firm grasp of Lévi-Strauss’s biography could pin down exactly when everything in this book happens, but that seems immaterial. Tristes Tropiques is an investigation of loss, both cultural and personal; and Lévi-Strauss realizes that as a Westerner and as an observer he can’t help but be complicit in that loss.

Lévi-Strauss is always acutely aware of his position as an observer, as someone who’s never quite as outside as he wishes he might be. Visiting a newly independent India he notes, for example, how being surrounded with servants makes the served anxious: it’s exactly the same response I had in Delhi a few years ago, which at the time I chalked up to a Midwestern upbringing. Lévi-Strauss points out that this is natural consequence of the relationship. Or again when he looks at the the ever-present problem of dealing with a huge number of people:

India tried to solve the population problem some three thousand years ago by endeavouring, by means of the caste system, to change quantity into quality, that is, to differentiate between human groups so as to enable them to live side by side. . . . It is tragic for mankind that this great experiment failed; I mean that, in the course of history, the various castes did not succeed in reaching a state in which they could remain equal because they were different – equal in the sense that there would have been no common measure between them – and that a harmful element of homogeneity was introduced which made comparison possible, and consequently led to the creation of a hierarchy. Men can coexist on condition that they recognize each other as being all equally, though differently human, but they can also coexist by denying each other a comparable degree of humanity, and thus establishing a system of subordination. (p. 149)

This is an old book now – it’s fifty-five years old – and the world that Lévi-Strauss was describing was vanishing even then, but sections, like this enquiry into the problem of equality, still feel fresh. Parts resonate more strongly now: in a section on the role of the chief in polygamous society, he wanders into the idea of national health care, which he sees as “a return to the fundamental nature of social and political organization”. And here he describes the historical problem of scarcity, which we seem to be confronting now from the opposite direction:

In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically little worth, such as brasil or brazilwood (from which the name Brazil was derived) – a red dye – and also pepper which had such a vogue in the time of Henry IV of France that courtiers used to carry the seeds in sweetmeat boxes and eat them like sweets. The visual or olfactory surprises they provided, since they were cheerfully warm to the eye or exquisitely hot on the tongue, added a new range of sense experience to a civilization which had never suspected its own insipidity. We might say, then, that, through a twofold reversal, from these same lands our modern Marco Polos now bring back the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking futher into boredom, but that this time they take the form of photographs, books and travellers’ tales. (p.38)

I like the turn that Lévi-Strauss executes in this paragraph: moving from the colonies back to the colonizers, and their own self-recognition, which they almost certainly wouldn’t have stated in the same words. And then to bring it further: to see the same impulse in ourselves, the readers of travel books, including this travel book. We are not exempt: but how do we value scarcity now, when we are deluged with “photographs, books and travellers’ tales”? 

Writing itself comes into question: in an extended section, he wonders what writing historically does to people. This isn’t the restatement of Socrates’ position in the Phaedrus, as one might expect. Rather:

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. Such, as any rate, is the typical pattern of development to be observed from Egypt to China, at the time when writing first emerged: it seems to have favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment. This exploitation, which made it possible to assemble thousands of workers and force them to carry out exhausting tasks, is a much more likely explanation of the birth of architecture than the direct link referred to above. My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery. The use of writing for disinterested purposes, and as a source of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, is a secondary result, and more often than not it may even be turned into a means of strengthening, justifying or concealing the other. (p. 299)

This is an astonishing argument, and one that I haven’t seen resurrected in all the present talk about what’s happening to reading and writing in their present explosions. It’s an argument that could be cogently made today: I’d rather see someone arguing from this inflammatory position than from the tired old position that all reading is good reading. Perhaps it’s only an argument that can be buried in a book like this.

Tristes Tropiques is a valedictory book: Lévi-Strauss saw the world disappearing around him. It’s odd to read this book, originally published in 1955, and to realize that Lévi-Strauss would live longer after having written it than he would before: one senses that he never expected that. 

the problem of health care

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“But, in the case of marriage, there is something more. By conceding the privilege of polygamy to the chief, the group exchanges the individual elements of security guaranteed by the rule of monogamy for collective security, which they expect to be ensured by the leader. Each man receives his wife from another man, but the chief receives several wives from the group. In return, he provides a guarantee against want and danger, not for the individuals whose sisters or daughters he marries, nor even for those men who are deprived of women as a consequence of his polygamy, but for the group considered as a whole, since it is the group as a whole which has suspended the common law for his benefit. Such considerations might be of some interest for a theoretical study of polygamy; but their chief importance is as a reminded that the conception of the state as a system of guarantees, which has been revived in recent years by discussions about systems of national insurance (such as the Beveridge Plan and other proposals), is not a purely modern development. It is a return to the fundamental nature of social and political organization.”

(Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. Doreen Weightman & John Weightman, p. 315.)

the problem with servants

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“Every European in India finds himself surrounded, whether he likes it or not, by a fair number of general manservants, called bearers. I cannot say whether their eagerness to serve is to be explained by the caste system, the tradition of social inequality or the demand for service on the part of the colonizers. However, their obsequiousness very quickly has the effect of making the atmosphere intolerable. If necessary, they would lie down on the ground to let you walk over them, and they suggest a bath ten times a day – if you blow your nose, eat fruit or dirty your fingers. Each time, they are there at once, begging for orders. There is something sexual in their anguished submission. And if your behaviour does not correspond to their expectations, if you do not behave on all occasions like their former British masters, their universe collapses: What, no pudding? A bath after dinner and not before? The world must be coming to an end&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp. Dismay is written all over their faces. I would have quickly to countermand my original instructions, abandon my usual habits and forgo rare opportunities. I would eat a pear as hard as a stone or swallow slimy custard, since to ask for a pineapple would have caused the moral collapse of a fellow human being.”

(Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. Doreen Weightman & John Weightman, p. 138.)

gérard de nerval, “aurélia & other writings”

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Gérard de Nerval
Aurélia & Other Writings
(trans. Geoffrey Wagner, Marc Lowenthal & Robert Duncan) 
(Exact Change, 2004)

I first read Nerval about ten years ago in the Richard Sieburth edition from Penguin; I was on my way to reading Proust, and “Sylvie” is a natural stop along that way. I like the Sieburth Nerval; but one wonders what other Nervals might sound like. The Exact Change book is one that I’m constantly picking up in bookstores – one always hopes that by mistake one might discover something new in the Nerval section – but despite its splendid cover and my general love of Exact Change, I’ve always put it back in favor of something else: too many books to read. A few years ago I did find the Kendall Lapin translation of “Aurélia” and “Sylvie”; I didn’t like Lapin’s versions of these as much as I remembered liking Sieburth’s. But finally I actually bought the Exact Change edition. 

The Nerval that emerges here isn’t quite the same as Sieburth’s Nerval, even though there’s a fair amount of overlap in what the two books include. Both include “Aurélia,” “Sylvie,” “Octavie,” “Pandora,” and versions of “The Chimeras”. The Exact Change edition adds “Isis” and “Walks & Memories”. Eight pieces in the Sieburth edition aren’t in the Exact Change. There’s a fair amount of Nerval that doesn’t exist in English: a Selected Writings translated by Wagner adds “Emilie” to “Aueélia” and “Sylvia,” and a couple of smaller books have appeared over the years, but the Penguin edition remains the most comprehensive collection of his work in English. That book roughly follows the course of his life, with a little of everything – making me wish for something more comprehensive – concluding with “Aurélia” and a coda of the poetry, presented in French with an English crib. The Exact Change edition starts with “Aurélia” – Nerval’s memoir of his madness, ostensibly his last piece of writing – and then proceeds through the stories and “The Chimeras” (here in facing-page unrhymed translation by Robert Duncan) before finishing with another autobiographical piece from near the end of his life, “Walks & Memories”. The narrative that emerges is an autobiographical one: the names that Nerval uses for the overlapping loves in his life – Aurélia, Sylvie, Adrienne – bounce across pieces that are explicitly fictional and those that are not. Notes suggest how the fictional pieces were based on his life and how the non-fictional play with the verifiable truth. 

This Nerval is the Nerval loved by the Surrealists – it feels particularly like a precursor of Michel Leiris’s Aurora. There’s an obvious power in narratives of madness; but somehow I don’t like this Nerval as much as I remember liking the Sieburth Nerval. Maybe it’s that madness no longer seems as romantic as it once did: Aurélia no longer speaks to me as much as it once did. It’s as much, though, that this feels like a conflation of the authorial persona with the person of the author: too much a history of the different facets of one man’s work, unified by madness. It’s useful, perhaps, to know that Aurélia was Jenny Colon, minor star of the stage, but I don’t know what this really tells us about Nerval’s work, save that he was obsessed. From Sieburth’s introduction to his collection:

Catering to a readership increasingly eager to enter into the intimacy of its favorite writers – as Coleridge grumbled, literature had now entered into ‘the age of personality’ – Nerval discovered there was no deeper resource of fiction, no more powerful strategy of illusion than the autobiographical ‘I’. If he therefore adopted the first person in virtually all of his texts, it was paradoxically the better to guarantee his invisibility. Late in life, having come across a lithograph portrait of himself in a recently published biography, he inscribed the frontispiece with the enigmatic phrase ‘Je suis l’autre’ (‘I am the other’). It is perhaps a caveat addressed to any potential reader of his work: beware of mistaking me for myself. (p. ix)

To make Nerval autobiographical seems a misstep: especially as these pieces seem to be profoundly self-contained. When not presented as one stop on a man’s trip to the grave, “Sylvie” still seems perfect to me, prefiguring the wistful pastoral of Le Grand Meaulnes. Proust was glad that Sainte-Beuve hated it, and wished that the dream-logic of the story could remain his own private secret. Proust recognizes himself in the story:

. . . what we have here is one of those rainbow-painted pictures, never to be seen in real life, or even called up by words, but sometimes brought before us in a dream or called up by music. Sometimes in the moment of falling asleep we see them, and try to seize and define them. Then we wake up and they are gone, we give up the pursuit, and before we can be sure of their nature we are asleep again as though the sight of them were forbidden to the waking mind. (pp. 110–111 in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s translation)

There’s a universalism here that still works, but it’s harder to get at this when it immediately follows “Aurélia”; the reader can’t help but notice that Nerval is still talking about Jenny Colon in the first section of “Sylvie,” and the temptation is to continue reading the story in this fashion. We read “Sylvie,” of course, knowing that the one who wrote this would write “Aurélia” and kill himself; but in “Sylvie” this is held at bay, something the reader knows but doesn’t want to apply to the text. We know that the pastoral must end, as does the narrator of the piece; but we want to believe that it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Any Nerval is welcome, of course, and I feel like I shouldn’t be so hard on the presentation of this book. Wagner’s translations of “Sylvie” and “Aurélia” don’t seem quite as fluid as Sieburth’s; it’s those that I’ll return to, I suspect. But it’s fitting, perhaps, that one should seek to return to one’s first Nerval.

jules verne, “the green ray”

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Jules Verne
The Green Ray
(trans. Mary de Hauteville ) 
(Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1883)

I found Jules Verne’s The Green Ray, as I suspect most of this book’s readers are now found, through Rohmer’s film of the same name. It’s been a long time since I read Verne, if I ever did – possibly the editions of Voyage to the Center of the Earth and so on that I remember reading as a child weren’t actually his work at all. The Green Ray seems to have been mostly forgotten, though there’s no shortage of cheap new editions on Amazon. Google has a copy of an 1883 edition: it’s a short book & not hard to read on a screen.

The first few paragraphs of Chapter I, “The Brothers Sam and Sib,” promisingly seem to prefigure the Hardy Boys:

“Betty!”
“Bess!”
“Betsey!”
One after another these names re-echoed through the hall of Helensburgh; it was the way the brothers Sam and Sib had of summoning their housekeeper.”

“Sib” isn’t quite right as a name, of course: it feels a little too meta, though we soon learn that it’s actually short for “Sebastian”. And the single-sentence paragraph after next sends the reader rushing to the dictionary, suspecting all is not right with Google’s scan: “It was Partridge the factor, who with his hat in his hand, made his appearance at the hall-door.” A factor is, exactly as you might expect, a “doer or agent”, as the OED‘s first definition has it. 

Sam and Sib Melville, “Scotchmen of the old school,” are uncles of the eighteen-year-old orphan Helena Campbell, as much the Thompson and Thomson of Tintin as the Hardy Boys:

For her sake they remained celibates, being of that number of estimable persons whose earthly career is one long course of self-denial. And does it not say much for them when the elder brother constituted himself father, and the younger one mother to the child, so that it came quite naturally to Helena to address them with,—
“Good morning, Papa Sam. How are you, Mamma Sib?”

Sam & Sib are trying to marry off Helena, hopefully to someone with the fine name of “Mr. Aristobulus Ursiclos”; with a name like that he is cursed to be a popinjay. But Helena refuses to be married until she has seen the green ray. In Verne’s Scotland, the green ray “has the virtue of making him who has seen it impossible to be deceived in matters of sentiment; at its apparition all deceit and falsehood are done away, and he who has been fortunate enough once to behold it is enabled to see closely into his own heart and read the thoughts of others” (p.33). (This is, more or less, the precis of the book delivered in Rohmer’s film.) 

There’s a lack of suspense in this book: really, most of the time is spent maneuvering the characters into such a place where they can see an unobstructed sunset over water, which turns into a general tour of the western coast of Scotland while they try to find a view that is not blocked by other islands, or sailboats, or clouds. There’s a croquet party, which has been fixed to let Sam & Sib win; nonetheless, it drags on and on, eventually providing the pretext for meeting Oliver Sinclair, painter and naval hero, who is clearly a more suitable match than Aristobulus. Helena and Oliver have conversations like this:

“Ah! Mr. Sinclair, I am like you, passionately fond of our archipelago! it is magnificent, especially when lashed by the fury of tempests.”
“It is indeed sublime,” replied Oliver Sinclair. “There is nothing on the way to obstruct the violence of the gales which vent their force here after travelling three thousand miles! The American coast faces Scotland, and though great storms may rise there, it is the western coast of Europe which gets the first benefit of their fury! But what can they do against our Hebrides, which are not like that man of whom Livingstone speaks, who had no fear of lions, but was afraid of the sea? These isles, with their solid granite bases, can laugh to scorn the violence of wind and sea.”
“The sea! A chemical combination of hydrogen and oxygen with two and a half per cent. of chloride of sodium! Indeed, nothing can be more sublime than the violent agitations of chloride of sodium!” (p. 180)

There’s a lot of excitement in this book. It can be hard to tell how to read this: the last speech there is an interjection by the scientifically-minded Aristobulus, who is determined to put an end to Oliver and Helena’s fledgling romance, and possibly is intended to be funny, but it seems of a piece with the previous exclamations on the beauty of everything. When they reach Iona, Aristobulus becomes an iconoclast in the name of geology:

“I am by no means an iconoclast,” he tells the disapproving Helena, “but a geologist, and as such I am anxious to know the nature of this stone.”) Science frequently gets in the way of the sublime. It’s unclear quite why Aristobulus should be so villainous; there’s a profit motive, as Sam and Sib have a fortune that will be passed on, but Aristobulus betrays no interest in this. He is quite simply an enemy of the good, denying, for example, that eyes can smile (no Facial Action Coding System for him), that ghosts and fairies might exist, or the charms of Ossian “whose genius united poetry and music” and who is quoted with loving repetition. “Mr. Ursiclos will spoil my Green Ray with his explanation,” complains Helena. The narrator, however, is more than happy to insert digressions into the geology of caves around the world: a time and a place for everything, perhaps. 

A climax is concocted: Oliver saves Helena from tidal misadventure in Fingal’s Cave. One is impressed with how well the illustration of the cave accords with the photographs in Wikipedia from the same perspective:

Helena swoons; she is rescued. The scene is set for the finale: Aristobulus has been left on Iona, Helena and Oliver are in love. Oliver, now a hero, is fine with Sam and Sib. They might finally see the green ray if Helena has recovered from her ordeal. Nothing blocks the view; and finally, the green ray is seen by the brothers and the servants. Helena and Oliver are too busy looking into each other’s eyes to notice.

*     *     *     *     *

Verne’s The Green Ray isn’t particularly good: one can see that it would have once had value as a travelogue of Scotland, but as fiction it is sorely disappointing. It’s interesting, then, that it can be used to such good effect in Rohmer’s Le rayon vert: perhaps because it’s the idea of the book, rather than the book itself, which comes into play. Delphine, the heroine, has almost certainly not read The Green Ray when she hears people talking about it. (This clip, with Spanish subtitles, is the book’s complete appearance in the film.) The old people discussing the book admit they thought it boring; but now they find it fascinating as a story of love, the idea of trying to find something almost impossible to actually see. Then an old man, the incarnation of Aristobulus Ursiclos, explains to everyone exactly what the green ray is. (Should you like your Green Ray spoiled with explanation, see Wikipedia, which insists that the phenomenon should be called a “green flash” rather than a “green ray.”)

The idea of The Green Ray is more interesting than the book itself; and when Delphine finally ends her slump by allowing a man to approach her, he does so ostensibly because of what she’s reading, Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, which she seems to have nearly finished. Later, she is reminded again of the green ray by a shop with that name; she tells the man what she’s heard about the book, asking him if he’s read it – he hasn’t – but not revealing whether or not she’s read it, though she gives the impression of that. Rohmer rather miraculously manages to capture the green ray on film: perhaps it’s appropriate that it doesn’t show through the graininess of a YouTube clip of the movie’s ending: