In “The Structural Study of Myth,” a paper presented the year before publishing his memoir, Lévi-Strauss demonstrated a form of analysis that is so radically a-historical that it seems to leave folklore, ethnography and narrative behind. “What if patterns showing affinity,” he asks, “instead of being considered in succession, were to be treated as one complex pattern and read as a whole?”^[5] What if I took all the stories in the world, cut them up into pieces, and arranged them into patterns that explained not what any one story means but what the human mind is actually saying by telling stories? Think of folklore studies as a card game, a magnificent game of Human Solitaire.

The aesthetic he proposes, if we think of it for a moment as an aesthetic rather than a method of scientific or philosophical analysis, is the aesthetic of Modernist poetry. This was being done by many European poets of the time, but none had Lévi-Strauss’ sense of irony nor his scientific ambition. In this scientific paper, which became a chapter in his book Structural Anthropology, he promised to demonstrate the patterns of affinity in myth. He deliberately chooses a myth more closely associated with Classics and Literature (not to mention Freudian psychology) than with anthropology: the Oedipus myth, and then qualifies his demonstration with a metaphor.

His conclusion – that the Oedipus stories are about two irreconcilable beliefs – that mankind comes from the Earth and at the same time comes from human parents – is brilliant and convincing. It is surprising to have an ethnographer, whose domain is the thought of primitive cultures, explain the myth of a culture that every educated European knows is the foundation of his superior worldview. But it is less surprising than the irony of his comparison. A scientist presenting a paper at an academic conference is like a street peddler selling mechanical toys. If Lévi-Strauss had read more Mark Twain and less Rousseau he could have added something about selling snake oil.

The three chapters omitted from the first act by the first British translation of Tristes tropiques are a leap from Brazil in 1937 to India (and the unnamed country of Pakistan) in 1950. Lévi-Strauss sees in India a cultural apocalypse. Civilization begins in this cradle of the Indo-European Old World and now it is the complete degradation of human culture that he senses as a visitor. “The Magic Carpet,” a view of the earth seen from an airplane moving from France across Egypt to Pakistan and across India to the frontier of Burma, ends with an analysis of why this region is so destitute. “Europe, India, North America and South America” the author informs us, “can be said to illustrate the possible range of combinations between geographical settings and density of population.”^[7]

He is appalled and revolted by what he finds in India. He sees colonial history and parliamentary democracy as so much veneer covering a social arrangement that has been in place for thousands of years. His analysis is based entirely on the density of population in relation to the physical resources. People in India treat each other in an inhuman way in order to reduce the number of humans per square foot.