BOOKS Culture as a hot meal

ANTHONY BURGESS

Claude Levi-Strauss is one of the doyens of modern French thought, if by modern French thought is meant an almost un- exportable blend of myth and mysticism and emotion and Marx-like dialectic and manic categorisation which has little to do with what Englishmen think of as Gallic Logic. Another doyen is Jean-Paul Sartre. and, as Sartre's name in a word-association test is the dominant which expects the tonic Existen- tialism, so Levi-Strauss means Structuralism. The second term, as was the first, is much heard in pseudo-intellectual conversation. and though it is probably now too late to ask what Sartrean existentialism is. there is still time to find out about Levi-Straussian structuralism without, in the asking..expect- ing a response of superior sneers. Still time, but the time is diminishing. More and more of Levi-Strauss's works are appearing in English—The- Raw and the Cooked, trans- lated by John and Doreen Weightman (Cape 65s), is the latest, six years after the original Le Cru et le Cuit—and structuralism is a word heard increasingly at cocktail parties. It is a smart thing to get in quickly with taxonomies and culinary triangles and the relationship between stilton cheese and incest.

Structuralism is about the structures that the human brain imposes on the world about it. Nowadays we neither follow Beiteley in holding that the world has no existence independent of the perceiver. nor. With Dr Johnson, confute such idealism by kicking a rock. What we do instead is to accept that the external world is a- continuum with an existence of its own. but that we're com- pelled. by the way our brains are made, to segmentalise this continuum into structures which tell us more about the human mind than about inhuman matter. Our cerebral structuring of the outside world is not some- thing clever, or educated, or scientific. and the modern West is no better at doing it than was, or is (forget about was. which brings in time and history, and these are not im- portant), tribal Africa. Man is everywhere and always man-.

As an anthropologist. Levi-Strauss is con- cerned with humbling our civilised preten- sions. What invention. of the nuclear age can compare with man's first learning how to cook his meat? To render oneself indepen- dent of nature—the edibilisation of food by putrefaction or the sun's heat—through the discovery of how to use fire: this was' so vast. so traumatic, ad achievement that our liVers, as a punishment from the gods of nature. are still being pecked for it. Take your choice—Prometheus or the haute cuisine. Both lead the same way; everything does since the coming of Lkvi-Strauss.

But back to this segmentation. We are given. as natural raw material, the continuum of the spectrum, but the brain is so con- structed that it feels a need to divide this into disjunct. and even opposed, colours. Similar- ly- with the sounds of which the human mouth is capable: the phonic stream is ordered, or structured, into phonemes—in- ventoried speech-elements which too are accented as disjunct and opposable. As with fire. man is confronting nature with culture, and culture is largely a matter of signs and symbols, devices of communication. nThe

segmentation of colour for a social purpose is seen clearly in our traffic signals; without phonemes there could be no intelligible human speech. One of the Levi-Strauss theses is that all the structures which are fathered by an inbuilt cerebral quirk on the natural continuum are fundamentally alike. All cultural orderings are kinds of language, though we ought not to think of language as essentially a business of transmitting 'meaning' in the narrow semantic sense (a military or restaurant order, for instance. or a governmental directive). Music is a language. a structuring of raw sounds, and though music is almost univer- sally intelligible. nobody knows what music is trying to say.

One of Levi-Strauss's followers. who has become a cult-figure in his own right. is Roland Barthes. In Barthes's book on semiology. you w ill find speech, furniture, architecture. clothes and food submitting to an analysis in terms of systems or grammars and syntagms or sentences. You combine. let us say. a noun-blouse and an adjective-jacket

• and a verb-skirt to form a syntagm which has a social meaning. You order a dinner in a restaurant. By reading the bill of fare hori- zontally—choosing an item from each group of 'parts of speech'. soups. entrees. desserts —you are able to construct your own syntagm or menu. whose pattern or order corresponds to a vertical reading of the bill of fare. The syntagm has a meaning in the sense that inherited culture prescribes a com- bination of different kinds of food to form the total pattern of a meal. In local cultures. which correspond to local languages or dia- lects, certain combinations are inescapable— roast beef with Yorkshire pudding. mutton with red currant jelly (an example of syn- chronic sweet and savoury, unknown to the French culinary language but common in the Anglo-Saxon)

Pursue this kind of structuralism far enough—and Barthes has pushed it very tar —and modes of communication appear in the most unexpected activities, from solving a crossword to solitary gin-drinking (dia- chronic and synchronic converse with other gin-drinkers). Also one finds that the old pre-eminence of verbal language has to be seriously challenged. We may use terms from linguistics to designate the elements and functions of other semiological systems, but this is a matter of metaphorical extension. a mere convenience. These systems aren't imitating verbal language; they resemble it because all the cultural media are structurally conditioned by the nature of the human brain. What looks like a Gallic joke or Gallic over-earnestness is really a profound state- ment about the nature of man—which is the

true inquiry of the Structuralists. One of Levi-Strauss's recurring themes is his distrust of verbal language. It is there in the 'Over- ture to The Raw and the Cooked. Myth tells us more than any attempt to order words rationally. meaning abstractly. So does music, which, as it seems to deal with universal 'truths' at an infra-rational level. is akin to myth.

Levi-Strauss pays homage to music in the nomenclature of each section of his book

'Six Arias Followed by a Recitative', 'Double inverted Canon and so on. What looks like fancy is a hint that we should take The Raw and the Cooked not as something like The Critique of Pure Reason but as a kind

of myth in itself. a my th about myth. Thus we are eased. into an attitude which accepts inconsistency. ambiguity. subjectivity, self- contradiction and. at the same time, a strict notation which conjoins music and mathe- matics. not as failures in regular communica- tion but as a set of tools exactly suited to a subject which is not quite anthropology or psychology or sociology or philosophy or linguistics or. indeed. quite anything we have met before.

The Raw and the Cooked is a close, highly technical, highly imaginative analysis of

Amazon Indian myths. chiefly of the Borero and Ge peoples. Levi-Strauss takes nearly two hundred folk-legends about the origins of fire and cooking. an'd discovers identity or

at least similarity over vast geographical areas where there was no possibility of cultural

transmission. The human brain has been at

its work of imposing the same fundamental structure. Ignoring Charles Lamb's infuriat- ingly whimsical essay on the origins of roast

pig. how would we set about telling a child a story about the coming of cooked meat to the world? Whether we posited fire stolen from heaven (Prometheus or a lightning- struck tree), or taken from some inhuman order of magical creatures (like Amazonian jaguars). we would probably not end up with a story that was wholly happy. The sun. that used to help man to break down the fibres of his raw meat. is no longer needed : heaven and earth pull apart. The animals. who were once close to man and shared his eating habits. now stand fearfully in the darkness beyond the cooking fires. An irreversible

change, exciting And terrifying. has taken

place in man's view of himself in relation to the entire cosmos. Directly or obscurely (in symbols which ii is Levi-Strauss's task to interpret). the Amazonian legends depict disturbance and alienation.

A binary structure has been established in which cooked/raw or cukure/nature repre- sent a kind of phonemic opposition. But be- tween the opposed theses there must be a sort of synthesis. or mediation. since man— whether he likes it or not—is part of nature as well as of his own culture. So. between the fully cultural activity of boiling meat (the artifact of a cooking-pot is involved) and the natural process of letting it soften through putrefaction. there stands roasting, which requires no cultural implements and uses only the near-natural process of part-burning (which, says, Levi-Strauss, means that roast meat is only partly cooked: ergo. it is partly raw). These three points make a simple triangle, but it is typical of Livi-Strauss's approach that there should• be more than one culinary triangle—including a highly developed one much calibrated on its sides— and that they should belong to a highly fluid geometry which seems to involve com- plexities of a self-contradictory kind. this. • to the British reader, sounds like Gallic mad- ness, or., more intelligibly a Higher Game,

let him consider the peculiar solemnity with which he approaches roast meat—beef on Sunday, turkey at Christmas. On those days he remembers the source of his own life— the sun or heaven—and his food reflects it. Boiling, a fully cultural, fully human, pro- cess, he tends to despise: it is for weekdays and weak stomachs; it is untouched by the numinous. Take it or leave it.

It is not Levi-Strauss's aim to simplify man's makeup, and, in the palimpsestuous picture of human culture which makes up his still-emerging oeuvre, there is an open invita- tion to misunderstanding. One must not worry too much about this: one cannot go very far wrong. The head-spinning that be- gins when we push on from the fundamental crulcuit opposition to others that are pre- sented as cognate—this is not appropriate to cold science, but it is wholly in order when we read the symboliste poets, one of whom Levi-Strauss may be said to be. Read the opening of 'Bird Chorus'—one of the later chapters—and you'll find this: ... the problem of noise led to the problem of reprehensible unions—the occurrence of which in the Bororo myths Mi, M2, and M3 had already aroused my curiosity—punished by charivari, and also to that of eclipses which give rise to noise-making. And now eclipses, by way of incest, then culinary utensils and prepared food bring us back to the domestic hearth.'

Structurally, it all makes sense. Let me sug- gest exactly, or inexactly, how.

In many cultures, including, in my own observation, the Chinese, a loud din is made during an eclipse. This is to frighten off the eclipsing, or killing, agent. Now the cooking- fire is a mediator between sun and earth, ensuring that there -shall be NS disjunction between the two: it 'saves man from the world of rottenness in which he would find himself if the sun really disappeared.' Noise for eclipses; silence for cooked food. Does not noise derive from Latin nausea? Is it not reprehensible to make a hell of a row at dinner? A reprehensible sexual union, like incest, used to be greeted by charivari, or pot-and-pan music. Incest, in some Amazonian legends, is mythicised into an eclipse story—sister escapes brother's_ atten- tions by fleeing into sky; brother follows and covers, or eclipses, her. Failure to observe correct family degrees in marital unions leads to chaos or putrefaction, the world of rotten- ness which the cooking-fire staves off. In Malaya, a woman who has just given birth is placed above a cooking-fire. In many parts of France, a girl who had seen her younger sister get married first had to danser stir le cul du four. One could go on for ever, and Levi-Strauss would, were he not courteous, a Frenchman, and a poet.

He is one of the few men writing today who dare not be ignored. This admirable translation has been a long time cooking, but it was worth waiting for. Greet it in apprecia- tive quiet, chewing every mouthful.