By Janet Maslin
Published: New York Times, October 17, 2010
Patrick Wilcken first interviewed the celebrated French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in 2005. For Mr. Wilcken an audience with the great man must have been a daunting occasion: Mr. Wilcken had a biography in the works, and his subject was then well into his 90s. (He died in 2009, just short of his 101st birthday.) And even at that late date Mr. Wilcken wanted Lévi-Strauss to address some of the fundamental issues raised by his work.
Claude Lévi-Strauss is the subject of a new biography.
The Poet in His Laboratory
By Patrick Wilcken
Illustrated. 404 pages. The Penguin Press. US$29.95.
But Lévi-Strauss was known to regard the interview as “a detestable genre.” And if Mr. Wilcken expected much cooperation, he was in for a surprise. “Lévi-Strauss appeared not to want to talk about his theories,” Mr. Wilcken writes of this encounter. “When I asked him about the legacy of his work, if there were other people pursuing his ideas, whether he thought his theories would live on, he was disarmingly blunt: ‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’ ”
Mr. Wilcken’s own research and observations, however, are enough to make “Claude Lévi-Strauss,” subtitled “The Poet in His Laboratory,” an illuminating study. This book has been conceived as an intellectual biography, which gives it a lot of ground to cover. Mr. Wilcken describes the formative experiences and anthropological research (in remote regions of Brazil in the 1930s) from which Lévi-Strauss would extrapolate his theories. Later the book describes the enormous impact of his structuralism on the French thinkers he would influence (Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault) and supplant (Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus). In one of his more benign moods Lévi-Strauss equated existentialism with “shopgirl metaphysics.”
The full review at NYT.
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