In 2008, just prior to his hundredth birthday, an immortality of sorts was conferred on the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss when his Oeuvres were published—leather-bound, gold-embossed, on Bible paper—in Gallimard's Pléiade collection. He died the following year and we are now beginning to see, for the first time, assessments of his achievement—including the two volumes under review—in a world without Lévi-Strauss. Patrick Wilcken's stylishly written biography is considerably shorter than Denis Bertholet's French biography of 2003, but is nonetheless the first in a position to take in the entire arc of the anthropologist's career—from his nineteenth-century-style expeditions to the Brazilian interior in the 1930s, via his wartime exile in New York, where the twin influences of the linguist Roman Jakobson and assorted surrealists led to the writing of a groundbreaking thesis, to the vanguard structuralist project, the international celebrity, the eventual disillusionment with modernism, the unexpected late references to Gobineau (from an antiracist ideologue), and the final years, when he claimed to feel like a “shattered hologram” and received the visit of a notoriously philistine president of France on his hundredth birthday. Wilcken steers his biography skillfully between the pitfalls of reverence and dismissiveness. It is useful, for instance, to be reminded by a skeptical John Updike that “with such a hunting license granted, parallels and homologies are easy to bag—child's play for a brain as agile as M. Lévi-Strauss” (quoted at 299). But it is equally good to learn of the frequency with which what Wilcken calls Lévi-Strauss's “hit-and-run tactics” would pay off, generating fresh perspectives (75).

The biography is particularly good at situating Lévi-Strauss's work in an Anglo-American context. The anthropologist's polemical letters against the translator of La pensée sauvage, Sybil Wolfram, who gave as good as she got, are as revealing as they are painful. As is the about-face of one-time disciple Rodney Needham, who ultimately turned against the “unreliability” of Lévi-Strauss's “on-the-hoof ideas-driven method,” a circumstance that earned him an attack by the author in a last-minute preface to Elementary Kinship Structures, which Needham himself had translated. Beyond that, it is helpful, in contextualizing structuralism, to be served such English-language references as Robert Hughes on cubism (“all relationships, a twinkling field of interrelated events”) and Alex Ross on the “Cold War laboratory-experiment aesthetic” of postwar avant-garde music (227, 245). Finally, the strength of Wilcken's book lies less in any new information provided than in the author's ability never to lose contact with the sensibility behind Lévi-Strauss's effort and the metaphors best able to convey it: from the affinity for “similarities between sets of differences” to myth as a Calder-inspired mobile or, better yet, as a crystal growing “spiral-wise” until the impulse that produced it is exhausted . . . (235, 257).

Vincent Debaene's sprawling L’adieu au voyage: L’ethnologie française entre science et littérature is an altogether different affair. Debaene is an editor of the Pléiade edition of Lévi-Strauss and a professor of French literature at Columbia University, at whose faculty club, during the war, Lévi-Strauss sustained the shock, at lunch, of witnessing the collapse and death of Franz Boas, from whom, he said, “all of American anthropology issued” (138). Debaene's volume is an impressively erudite exercise in literary and intellectual history. A third (and final) division of the book ranges far and wide on the issue of French literature's vexed relations with the human sciences—from Durkheim's sociology and the Catholic, right-wing reaction to its usurpation of literature's claims to wisdom at the beginning of the twentieth century to a polemical configuration complicated by the fact that Lévi-Strauss's prose style was deemed to resemble nothing so much as that of the ur-romantic Chateaubriand. But the heart of the book is an effort to forge for literary history the genre that culminates in the anthropologist's classic memoir of 1955, Tristes tropiques, and it is that principal focus that is most deserving of attention.

Consider first the specific mournfulness at the heart of the tristes tropiques that give a name to Lévi-Strauss's book. It famously relates to a history of failed encounters between Europe and America, an ongoing fiasco attributable to the fact that such engagements have invariably occurred either too early or too late. On the one hand, an encounter with a pristine America that Europe, in its anthropological naivety, was in no way equipped to assess. On the other, a confrontation with an America thoroughly contaminated by Europe, an object that might be amenable to understanding by a Europe at last adequate to the task were it not for the fact that that object was so vitiated in its integrity by years of exploration and exploitation that little remained of it to be understood.

The temporal impasse of engaging the other too early or too late would issue in an attempted solution in the form of what Wilcken calls the “hymn to proportionality” of structuralism (338). The best access to the otherness of the other would be by way of an appreciation of our own otherness to ourselves; that is, via a version of the unconscious that as often as not seems to be a dandified and hyper-syntactical take on the spatial opposition between “too close” and “too far.” Thus medieval Perceval, the myth of a male who brings about a “waste land” by being too slow to ask a question, is construed symmetrically as an inversion of ancient Oedipus, the myth of a male who brings about a plague by being too incestuously quick to provide an answer . . .

To read Debaene's book is, for this reader, first of all, to be aware that one is approaching Tristes tropiques, a classic of structuralism, in an age that is not merely post-structuralist, but post-post-structuralist. It is, that is, to be reminded of the temporal disjunction attendant on Lévi-Strauss's belated encounter in the 1930s with the variously decimated tribes of Brazil. For what strikes one initially is just how much what might be called the homological frisson and the specific thrill it could elicit, which for many of us was the raison d’être of structuralism, appears to have waned as a writerly impulse even among those whose expertise on Lévi-Strauss is beyond question. Debaene treasures his Tristes tropiques and would shield it from what he seems to regard as the cultural junk of “literary structuralism.” He takes special pleasure in quoting the master himself on the various “coherent delusions” that litter the cultural landscape of speculative thought under the name of “structuralism” (452). The principal offender appears to be Roland Barthes, severely chastised by Debaene, who accuses him of working at a “thousand leagues’ distance from genuine structuralism” (465). (And no doubt, he might savor the episode in Wilcken's biography that sees Lévi-Strauss turning down a request from Barthes that he direct the thesis that became Le système de la mode (242–43)). Beyond Barthes, and serving as testimony that his book is not so much post-structuralist as post-post-structuralist, Debaene takes pleasure in mocking Derrida: “One might amuse oneself by assembling adverbs of time in Barthes's article or in the contemporary reflections of Derrida: there is a quasi-messianic dimension in the promised advent of écriture” (465). Or in ignoring him: for anyone who recalls the polemical tensions generated around Derrida's attempted deconstruction of the “Leçon d’écriture” in Tristes tropiques, the fact that a would-be history of Tristes tropiques, intent on fully contextualizing it, should omit mention of De la grammatologie is stunning.

The contextualization that Debaene has in mind is quite different. His focus is the “second” and more autobiographical volumes written by a slew of French anthropologists which together constitute a literary genre unto themselves. These include Alfred Métraux's Ile de Pâques (1941), which Bataille considered one of the masterpieces of French literature of the day; Jacques Soustelle's Mexique, terre indienne (1936), prefaced by Paul Rivet, founder of the Musée de l’homme; Marcel Griaule's idiosyncratic Les flambeurs d’homme, which won the Prix Gringoire in 1934; Michel Leiris's monument to the futility of travel, L’Afrique fantôme (1934); and Tristes tropiques itself, viewed as something of the culminating achievement of a tradition constituted, after the fact, around it. By the end of his study, Debaene is able to conclude provocatively—indeed almost deconstructively—that “le deuxième livre,” to the extent that it appears to open up unsuspected literary or intellectual possibilities to its author, functions less as a “secondary” text than as a primal or initiatory achievement. And to the extent that the disappointments of L’Afrique fantôme (with its insistence on “a small constellation of things that one tends to reproduce, in different forms, an unlimited number of times”) make it an experimental laboratory for what would become the first volumes of La règle du jeu, or that Tristes tropiques seems pregnant with the future of Lévi-Strauss's structuralism, this is arguably (and intriguingly) the case (275). But to the extent that the terms invoked to characterize these “second books” entail more often than not an appeal to the “evocativeness” of the “living document,” a trend that begins, in L’adieu au voyage, with a contemporary description of Mexique, terre indienne, as “joining the emotion of the man to the observation of the expert,” there is a certain predictability or thinness in the characterization of many of the books evoked (16). Indeed, not even the insistence on the future flowering of L’Afrique fantôme in and as Biffures, the first volume of La règle du jeu, can quite redeem the tedium of the oft-mentioned ennui characterizing the traveler's (but also the reader’s) experience of Leiris's travel journal. (279, 291).

Leiris and Lévi-Strauss are on several occasions twinned by Debaene as offering a way beyond the consolidation of the ego's experience, beyond the opposition between self and other, and toward what might be called a beneficent expropriation in or as the “unconscious” (300, 474). And he is surely right to do so. But the constraints of the doctoral thesis that his book originally was are such that the future glories of La règle du jeu (in the case of Leiris) or of structural analysis, what I have called the homological frisson (in that of Lévi-Strauss), are no more than alluded to in passing. Unless, of course, this having been a thesis written in a post-post-structuralist age, they have been forgotten.

Perhaps it is time, in the interest of full disclosure, for the reviewer to confess that he too is the author of a doctoral thesis, submitted more than forty years ago (1971) at Yale University, culminating in a reading of Tristes tropiques, and oriented by an intuition of the profound resonance between the efforts of Lévi-Strauss and Michel Leiris. My Structural Study of Autobiography is a very different sort of book from Debaene's (which appears to be unaware of its existence, or perhaps has long since consigned it to the dustbin of “literary structuralism”), but it does have one significant element in common with his: a failure to take into account Derrida's critique of the “Writing Lesson” in Tristes tropiques.Footnote ¹ If Debaene's thesis, that is, may have arrived too late on the scene to take an interest in Derrida's chapter on Tristes tropiques, mine may have been a case of arriving too early to realize its import. To find oneself, en route to structuralism, between encounters too early and too late, in any event, offers a precise harmonic with the principal temporal configuration of Tristes tropiques, and is a spur to pursue whatever overtones it may afford. A thesis too early? Debaene had the modesty, in discussing Leiris, to restrict himself to L’Afrique fantôme, which emerges as a series of “disappointing” prolegomena to the rich trove of textual ramifications, barely alluded to, in La règle du jeu. (And in restricting himself to his announced subject, the “second books” of a number of anthropologists, he was certainly right to do so.) In New Haven in 1971, I felt no compunction about pursuing the richest literary deposits to be found in Leiris—to wit, the various transformations of the chain that took him from “Perséphone” to “perce-oreille” to “phonographe.” Indeed the riches to be culled from La règle du jeu, deliberately neglected by Debaene, were irresistibly such as to occasionally remind me of an early critique of the style of reading I felt myself to be trying out and which was described by Roger Shattuck as so much “strip-mining”—which would place my all too early encounter with Lévi-Strauss fully in harmony with the exploitative cast of the all too early European despoilers of the Americas evoked by Lévi-Strauss as his predecessors in Tristes tropiques.

There is, however, a common intertextual link characterizing both efforts, Debaene's and mine, and it involves Proust. Debaene nicely notes a deviation in Lévi-Strauss from an original aspiration to follow in the footsteps of Conrad—as though anthropology's original literary vocation entailed a Polish connection, one that had Malinowski claiming to embark on a journey to the “heart of darkness.” The “extreme point of sauvagerie” that Lévi-Strauss would engage eventually gives way, at a turning point of the memoir, to an acknowledgment of a fundamental frustration, which is epistemological in nature (316). Standing before the Tupi natives, Lévi-Strauss realizes:

Such is what Debaene, in his chapter on Proust, calls the “impasses of empiricism,” the impossibility of knowing the other as other. But what he shies away from developing is the intuition that precisely that epistemological bind is what spells the doom of romantic love in Proust. Lévi-Strauss stands before the Tupi natives, that is, much as Swann does before Odette. For the Proustian passion was to know the unknown woman as unknown. And Swann's eventual knowledge of Odette's life coincides with the death of his passion for her. The comparison is thematically grotesque but homologically (i.e. structurally) precise, and it is precisely one that Debaene resists engaging. Instead he retreats to a comparison, nicely developed, between two set pieces: one is the famous passage in which changing perspectives on the steeples of Martinville serve, in Proust, as the pretext for the narrator to try himself out as a prosateur, and the other Lévi-Strauss's bravura prose evocation of a sunset at sea, which, in its phenomenological richness, is as far from structuralism as might be imagined.

There is, to be sure, a pressure toward structure—beyond the solipsism of Swann in love or the anthropologist confronting his natives—in Tristes tropiques. It may take the form of the hieroglyphics hinting at an as yet inexistent structure of exchange and painted on the faces of the Caduvean women of the Amazon, endowing them with an erotic charge. Or of a moiety system, in the case of the Bororos, that ends up surviving the hierarchical caste system it was forged to conceal. Both cases point to the role of Marcel Mauss, theorist of the mode of reciprocal exchange that would lie at the core of Lévi-Strauss's notion of the structural unconscious. That unconscious, through which the subject partakes in his own otherness to himself, was Lévi-Strauss's key to the communication that might dispel the “impasses of empiricism.” It was a realm intuited by Mauss, according to Lévi-Strauss, who figures, in the anthropologist's “Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss,” as a “Moses leading his people up to a promised land whose splendor he would never contemplate.”Footnote ³ Lévi-Strauss's structuralism would lie in a forcing of what was merely implicit, received but not articulated, in the works of Marcel Mauss.

Which brings us unexpectedly back to Proust. On 19 August 1916, Durkheim, who will play a significant role in Debaene's book, sent a letter to Marcel Mauss, his nephew, from the beach at Cabourg, the model of Proust's Balbec. The salutation reads, “Mon cher Marcel.” The letter's closing reads, “The beach is encumbered [encombrée] with Jews. I know more than thirty Semites of every sex [trente sémites de tout sexe] in Cabourg.”Footnote ⁴ After Cabourg (or Balbec), Combray (encombrée), followed by a reduction of the longest simile in the novel: “sémites de tout sexe” or the twinned “cursed races” (in Sodome et Gomorrhe) of Jews and/as “inverts.” All transmitted to a “cher Marcel.” Mauss appears to have been the unwitting or unconscious recipient (from Durkheim via what Lévi-Strauss would call the avunculate) of a summary (or, in 1916, an anticipation) of Proust's novel. And it is precisely the imperative of introducing Mauss's “unconscious” at the turning point in Tristes tropiques that finds Lévi-Strauss helplessly confronting the Tupis, in an epistemological homologue of the predicament of the doomed lover in Proust. From which miniature of Proust's novel, in a letter that has interested us not at all for its content, but solely for its frame (salutation, heading, and closing), we would derive or purloin—to use a favorite word of Lévi-Strauss's friend, Jacques Lacan—the essence of Proust's novel.

Cabourg encombrée/Balbec-en-Combray: the space of the letter received by Mauss, even beyond questions of plot (i.e. its “Semites of every sex”), is like a dreamt conflation of the principal loci of Proust's novel. But encombrée deserves to be read also as a reminder that the key to the “unconscious” that Lévi-Strauss would derive from Mauss is the notion of the “floating signifier,” precisely what, in the case of Durkheim's letter from the beach, binds Tristes tropiques to Proust's novel.

We are not yet done with Mauss's correspondence as it impinges on the labyrinthine subject of Debaene's book. For we shall see that one of the most striking passages in the volume involves nothing other than a fragment of a letter from Mauss in June 1938, and its resonances in the years that would follow. The circumstance is as follows. The central section of L’adieu au voyage deals with three “exceptional” books: Tristes tropiques, as we know, is the central focus of Debaene's volume and is on more than one occasion paired with L’Afrique fantôme and its role in preparing the astonishing post-egological pages of La règle du jeu. But it is concerning the third book, Marcel Griaule's Les flambeurs d’hommes, that Debaene brings his most interesting news. Griaule, a student of Mauss, was the leader of the pioneering Dakar–Djibouti mission to Ethiopia from 1931 to 1933. It was an expedition on which he was in fact accompanied by Leiris (with whom he later broke over Leiris's denunciation of the wholesale seizure of archeological artifacts for nonscientific ends.) Les flambeurs d’hommes relates the tribal punishment for an alleged assassination attempt by setting the culprit, wrapped in mosquito netting swathed in hot wax, aflame in public (243). Griaule's reaction is worth noting: “A vision of Hell, the expression is not too strong: it will be conceded that in an atmosphere of such exaltation it is enough for a flame emitted by a man to reach five meters in height for it to appear infernal.”Footnote ⁵ Of Debaene's comments on Griaule's book, the most striking is that the episode of the human torch is, in fact, a shameless invention. In addition, there is the “enunciatory strangeness” of the book, a memoir written in the third person, and the fact of the author's scandalous empathy with the brutality he portends to convey (252). Before long, Debaene has opened up a lengthy “digression” on what he calls “Sociology and Cruelty.” It is the most interesting section of the book.

“Sociologie et cruauté,” prompted by the legend of the “people-burners” of Abyssinia, feels like a regression to the Conradian identification of the Malinowski tradition in anthropology. But in fact Debaene makes a literary connection between Griaule's book and Stendhal's Chroniques italiennes, a pseudo-history of Renaissance Italy as reported in a doctored chronicle of unusual violence. The Stendhal who would eventually derive La Chartreuse de Parme from the Chroniques italiennes would be to Les flambeurs d’hommes what Proust is to Tristes tropiques. But the Stendhal connection, with its investment in a kind of precivilized anarchy or savagery, was bound to enter into contact with the cult of the human “beast” as elaborated by Italian fascism. It is not coincidental that the principal historian of Stendhal's evolution from the Chroniques italiennes to La Chartreuse, who is cited by Debaene, is Maurice Bardèche, a notorious fascist apologist and Holocaust denier. In Debaene's vision, Griaule, then, would substitute Ethiopia, about to be invaded by fascist Italy, for Stendhal's “precivilized” Italy, the novelistic world that would eventually give us a Mosca, in La Chartreuse, doing his best to earn the nickname of “Cruel.”Footnote ⁶

As the analysis progresses, Debaene brings things into contact with Griaule's palpable contempt for the petty bureaucrats of the League of Nations, his assumption of pedagogical duties in ethnology at the Sorbonne under the Vichy regime, and provocative observations by Michel Beaujour to the effect, concerning Leiris in the 1930s, that the ambiguity of the times was such that a “fascist virtuality” seemed part of the very air breathed by intellectuals. Whereupon he confronts us with a little-known and stunning letter of 22 June 1938 from Marcel Mauss to his sometime student Roger Caillois. After praising Caillois for his interpretation of the myth of the praying mantis, he offers the following criticism:

Caillois was, of course, Leiris's associate at the Collège de sociologie; and the third member of the collective tous whom Mauss appears to be designating in his misgivings about the influence of a Nazified Heidegger, as Debaene notes, is surely Georges Bataille. Nor was Mauss alone, it should be noted, in his worries about where Caillois seemed to be heading in 1938. Reacting to Caillois's essay “L’aridité” at the time, Walter Benjamin confessed his fascination with the Frenchman in a letter to Horkheimer, but characterized him as at bottom a Balzacian arriviste, an intellectual Rastignac to whom it had fallen to reckon with the “Goebbels clique” rather than the oligarchy of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.Footnote ⁸ (But then Mauss's warnings about the limits of the political validity of what he calls a “philosophy of Paris” might just as well have applied to Benjamin's Arcades Project as to Caillois's “Paris, mythe moderne”). Benjamin, of course, would end up a suicidal victim of Hitler's persecution on the Spanish border, and Caillois a Gaullist ideologue of Resistance in Argentina, but the terms of the critiques offered by Mauss and Benjamin have the cumulative effect of sketching a virtuality that meshes nicely (or disquietingly) with the tutelary role ascribed to Griaule's Les flambeurs d’hommes by Debaene. Small wonder that Griaule should assume the chair in ethnology under Vichy's governance of the Sorbonne.

For all its commercial success, Griaule's “second book” receives rather harsh treatment from Debaene. He describes it as lacking “minimal coherence” and affirms, “Les Flambeurs d’hommes is not a good work of scholarship [un bon livre savant]” (265, 268). This is sufficiently the case to set the reader wondering why it retains the crucial role it does in his study. For it should not be forgotten that the center of Debaene's voyage to his melancholy anthropological hell consists, in fact, of three concentric circles: at dead center, Tristes tropiques; then, twinned with it, the “disappointing reading” of L’Afrique fantôme; and finally, Griaule's fictive (and incoherent) holocaust of human body-burning. Might the architectonic role attributed to it be a response to other constraints than its strict anthropological importance? It is here that the digression on “sociology and cruelty,” with its remarkable extended quotation from Mauss's letter to Caillois, the prospective Hitlerian (who would end up a Gaullist), deserves closer attention.

Caillois surfaces to interesting effect in Wilcken's biography, where we learn that Caillois had gone head-to-head with Lévi-Strauss in competition for Mauss's old chair, which Lévi-Strauss ended up securing. When one recalls that Lévi-Strauss's way out of the impasses of empiricism was by way of dislodging the concept of the unconscious which he had already located in Mauss's Essai sur le don at a turning point in Tristes tropiques, situating himself as the heir to the “Moses” of the promised land of structuralism, one begins to understand the ferocity of the polemic between Caillois and Lévi-Strauss. In 1954, Caillois, editor of Diogène, accused Lévi-Strauss of perversely exaggerating the achievements of primitive cultures in a two-part review of Race et histoire in La nouvelle revue francaise.Footnote ⁹ Lévi-Strauss responded with unexpected polemical violence in a piece, titled “Diogène couché,” in Les temps modernes (1955). The piece survives largely because of a single line: “America had its McCarthy, and we have our McCaillois.”Footnote ¹⁰ The implication was that Caillois was a dangerous apologist for the West.

Our reason for concentrating on Caillois, it will be recalled, is that he is the focus of the most striking passage in the most idiosyncratic section of L’adieu au voyage: Mauss's epistolary warning in 1938 to Caillois and his associates (“vous . . . tous”), cited in the context of Debaene's digression on sociology and cruelty, that they were straying in dangerous proximity to a Heidegger already in the orbit of Hitler. The associates of Caillois in 1938 were preeminently Georges Bataille and Leiris, cofounders with him of the Collège de sociologie. But to recall as much is immediately to recall that Lévi-Strauss and Bataille were crucially champions of very different interpretations of Mauss's essay on Le don: on the one hand, Lévi-Strauss and reciprocal, almost homeostatic, exchange—of women—as the principle of social stability; on the other, Bataille and potlatch as a ruinous principle of competitive expenditure or destruction viewed as the transgressive core of humanity itself. One could write a whole history of recent French thought (at least in its structuralist and post-structuralist phases) in terms of the divided legacy of Marcel Mauss.

The Caillois–Lévi-Strauss polemic was curiously enduring in its ambivalence. Lévi-Strauss eventually invited Caillois to deliver the address welcoming him to the French Academy when he was narrowly elected in 1974. The address turned out to be a protracted critique. As quoted by Wilcken,

Structuralism was “constantly on the lookout,” according to Caillois in his address, “for echoes, reflections, harmonies” assumed to constitute “the framework of the universe.”

Perhaps it is time to pause in our review of Debaene's provocative book and recall where it has taken us. On the one hand, we have found ourselves fixated on a letter sent by Durkheim to Mauss in 1916, which we have infused with the distilled essence of Proust's novel, the work that serves as the intertext of the central focus of Debaene's study, Tristes tropiques. On the other, the bizarrely charged letter of Mauss to Caillois, written in 1938 and excavated by Debaene, which seems pregnant with what scholars would eventually call the Vichy syndrome. The first letter does not even appear in Debaene's book, but appears to make the argument for the Proust intertext—to discover Proust while mining the legacy of Mauss—as effectively as might be hoped for. The second—the Mauss letter (on and) to a seemingly Nazified Caillois and Company—is strikingly lodged in the least-expected section of Debaene's volume. For the student of French letters, they together appear to encapsulate with barely imaginable concision an entire swathe of French culture in the twentieth century. In order to perceive them, however, one might have to be on the lookout, to quote the lines of Caillois that many assumed to be a critique, for that sensitivity to “echoes, reflections, and harmonies” that may have been the lasting legacy of Lévi-Strauss and that Debaene's book, at its most intriguing, invites us to ponder.