Centennial Sauvage: The Survival of Tristes tropiques
The French Modernist
In the first act, Lévi-Strauss describes how he taught himself to do what he is doing. He was trained in “mental gymnastics” at the Sorbonne where he took the agrégation, an exam that is unique to the French education system. The candidates spend a year studying a general topic. If the candidate survives the written exam – an essay on a question within the chosen topic, he wins the chance to perform the oral examination. For the oral, the candidate draws a question at random, has a few minutes of preparation, and then presents an hour-long discourse. Lévi-Strauss tells us he passed the exam on the first try, as the youngest candidate. “I was confident that, at ten minutes notice, I could knock together an hour’s lecture with a sound dialectic framework, on the respective superiority of buses and trams.”[2] The French State awards the agrégé a guaranteed teaching position for life. And so, when he was chosen in his mid-20s to fill a teaching position at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, he was already a master at describing, bifurcating, comparing and moving on.
This first act contains the marvelous “Sunset” chapter, an exam which tests the reader’s patience and attention. It is marvelous in the way it demonstrates the technique Lévi-Strauss brought to his chosen field and frustrating in the way it embodies the very boredom he describes. The chapter begins by telling the story of his first journey by ship from France to Brazil, but quickly switches to an account of the anxiety (though he never calls it as such) felt by a young man about to face the new trial of ethnographic observation. The ethnographer must be able to quickly and precisely describe what he sees and does not understand. The virgin ethnographer decides to train himself by describing the rising and setting of the sun.
If I could find a language in which to perpetuate those appearances, at once so unstable and so resistant to description, if it were granted to me to be able to communicate to others the phases and sequences of a unique event which would never recur in the same terms, then – so it seemed to me – I should in one go have discovered the deepest secrets of my profession: however strange and peculiar the experiences to which anthropological research might expose me, there would be none whose meaning and importance I could not eventually make clear to everybody.[3]
At which point he switches from the memoir into the moment and reproduces a description and comparison of sunrise and sunset “written on board ship.” It was the young writer’s self-applied exam, and it is a trial for the reader to complete. What is to be learned by going on? The sun rises and the sun sets. The light changes. The reader who succumbs to boredom and skips ahead to the next chapter is missing the point. The value of this chapter is not in the description it presents, it is in the pattern. Actions and shapes are described in pairs. Sentences are built from words that alternate color, texture and direction. Metaphor is inserted to stretch and pivot the mind’s eye from one moving piece to the next.
Innumerable networks of vapor suddenly appeared in the sky; they seemed to be distributed in all directions horizontally, obliquely, perpendicularly and even spirally. The sun’s rays, as they gradually declined (like a violin bow which is placed at different angles to touch different strings), made each network in turn explode into a spectrum of colors that one would have said was the arbitrary and exclusive property of each. At the moment when it showed itself, each network had the clearness of outline, the exactness and fragile stiffness of spun glass, but then it slowly dissolved, as if its substance, overheated through exposure in a flame-filled sky, were darkening in color, losing its individuality and spreading out in an ever-thinner layer until it disappeared from the scene, at the same time revealing another, freshly spun network. At the end, all that was left were blurred blues running into each other, just as liquids of different colors and densities, poured one over the other into a transparent bowl, slowly begin to blend, in spite of their apparent stability.[4]
The pattern of this one paragraph is a violin bow on spun glass melting into liquid colors mixing in a glass bowl. If the reader passes this trial by fire, he is a convert ready to enter the New World.
REFERENCES
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes tropiques. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. Penguin Books, 1973. 52.
- Ibid,,62.
- Ibid, 66.
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