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PARTISAN REVIEW
structures in France and in Brazil,
to
the quality of mind of the geologists
themselves. Levi-Strauss is not unaware of his pursuit of truth by association,
for he says of Freud that his flair for free association led not only
to
many of his
insights but acrually
to
his entire theory of psychoanalysis. This, it seems
to
me , is the source of most of his difficulties-this identification of his
" method" with his intellectual habits , his associative powers. The result
amounts almost to a methodological tautology, that is, one in which the
demonstration of ideas lies in their connection. Nor are the difficulties
resolved by describing them, as Levi-Strauss does in
Tristes Tropiques,
as "his
own, special type of rigor."
It
is not surprising, therefore, that when the
theory is questioned the person is also criticized, since the two are hopelessly
intertwined. This confusion becomes particularly obvious at the end of his
Mythologiques,
where he constructs his ultimate
" tableau vivant,"
to
connect physical and psychic matter, with a
melange
of "self-analysis" and
what seems to me a "super-structuralism of structuralism" .
Levi-Strauss was on safer ground when he first expanded on Mauss's
theories to develop his structural anthropology which earned him his place at
the
College de France.
But clearly, he shifted his style as well as his method in
his later
Mythologiques.
As Levi-Strauss himself says, he "transforms" his
childhood passion for collecting and sorting stones, pieces of glass , marbles,
and whatever else might catch the eye of an imaginative child who can then,
with thought and sensibility, construct all sorts of things into a
bricolage
of
theories. And this grown-up
bricolage-a
whole that amounts to more than
its parts-is, of course, vulnerable
to
all the criticism any such mixed bag
would be subject to.
It
includes anthropological theories and Kant's basic
Anschauungen
with their unchangeable" givens" and it reinterprets specific
parts of Marxism and Freudianism, and borrows from Durkheim's collective
unconscious and from Koehler's Gestalt, and proposes an un
-J
ungian kind of
archetype. The overall rationale of the system, that proposes, ultimately , to
explain mythic thinking, the principle, it might be said, that holds all this
together, is derived from Saussurean structural linguistics.
It
not only pro–
vides, but adds to, structuralism's universalist aura. Undoubtedly the
" descent " ofstructuralism from structural linguistics, which itself transcends
the usual departmentalization of knowledge, appealed to those ideologists
who were concerned about the overspecialization and the increasing frag–
mentation of thought . The theory's original acclaim cane from those' 'glob–
aI" minds who wanted, once again, to reunify our intellectual universe , and
who hoped that structuralism might provide a plausible and inclusive
ideology which could explain all of the current social and individual malaise,
and which could, finally, answer the basic questions about the origins of
humanity and of culture .
