TANGIBLE CATEGORIES: CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS AND GÜNTER GRASS

William G. Plank

Forty years ago I asked my mother if she would fix some turnips for dinner; but she refused. She explained that she had eaten too many turnips during the Great Depression and that some people had lived on turnips and that she associated turnips with despair. We never grew turnips, bought turnips, served or ate turnips and I do not remember associating with people who did.

From that time on, the Great Depression in my mind became reality in the turnip, in people who cooked turnips and in boiled, mashed, and raw turnips. I still cannot consider people who like turnips and who serve them without a certain uneasiness and suspicion.

Three questions may now be asked concerning the turnip:

1. Is my experience with this vegetable a psychological phenomenon from my childhood, nothing more than an association, a memory?
2. Is it a tangible category which expresses itself with the character and the power of myth, since I participate in that culture and am a Barthesian scriptor and signature of that language which in structural terms speaks itself as an independent organism? Or…
3. Is the whole thing a figment of my imagination, something which I concocted to make my point, to get your attention, to more effectively and intensely communicate my experience, because the technique of expression which imitates myth is more immediately concrete that the historical and psychological--as Hosterey suggests in her "Aspekte einer Romanfigur: Der Butt im Butt?" ¹ These same three questions must be asked when assessing Grass' experience of centuries of history and prehistory of the area around Danzig as realized in The Flounder.

The empirical category as Lévi-Strauss describes it or uses it is a tangible category which upon further reading we see to be a sensual category, particularly gustatory or musical, The Raw and the Cooked being organized as if it were a symphony with its overture, sonatas, choruses, toccatas, and fugues. It goes without saying that this procedure or methodology is not congenial to American empirical and unpoetic comportment in the human sciences. Now such sensual categories have the great advantages that it is practically impossible to reduce them to any more basic level of meaning, for these tastes and sounds are of the nature of direct perceptions to which meanings need not be assigned for them to be "intelligible" on a very basic level, that of the physiological. This procedure strikes a blow at rationalism, as well, and one may conclude that Lévi-Strauss is not a very good representative of the famous, self-conscious traditional French Cartesianism.

These categories almost avoid the problem of meaning, which when considered from the point of view of a certain metaphysic of representation, may be criticized as a non-problem. We see that Deleuze, in his book on Nietzsche, did just such a criticism in his chapter on Nietzsche's positive theory of meaning. In fact, music is "a language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator…being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mastery of the science of man…." ⁴ I am not prepared to quarrel with this idea, but it is certainly advantageous to have such irreducible categories at hand when seeking intelligibility in such a large corpus of data, categories which moreover have "some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind…." ⁵ Neither am I prepared to accuse Lévi-Strauss of begging the question of intelligibility, for it may be that he has discovered that true understanding of even abstract data is accessible to a somatic being only on the physiological level, on a sensual level where the question of intelligibility is not even asked. These are interesting and crucial question that exceed the limits of time here, except to insist that this is the real meaning of Nietzsche's remark that the body is real--with the results that the pseudo-problem of meaning, inherited from a Platonist dualism is thereby avoided.

Lévi-Strauss appears to be the first to define the tangible category and to attempt to apply the concept to the structuring of scientific data--but he certainly did not invent it. Although unnamed, we see it used in the later 19^th century by Huysman's character, des Esseintes, in the novel A Rebours , the work which gave form to the Decadence in France. Des Esseintes prepared for a trip to England, packing his bags and getting his tickets. Then getting under way, he took his bags to the station, went to the docks to smell the tar and the sea, then to a British restaurant for a British boiled dinner. Then…he went home. He had reduced British culture to the irreducible--to the tangible, sensual categories of smells and tastes, and one might well suggest therefore that he was the first structuralist anthropologist, except for Jean-Jacaques Rousseau, "our master and our brother," ⁶ whom Lévi-Strauss suggests was an anthropologist.

A case has been made that structuralism in its use of sensual categories is related to the Decadence, particularly in Barthes' Plaisir du texte, and that sensual categories are a reaction to the proliferation of data. ⁷Des Esseintes' use of the tangible category is precisely the same as that of Lévi-Strauss: it is the creation of intelligibility in a large corpus of heterogeneous and abstract ethnographic information. Indeed the problem which the tangible category addresses is an ancient one of the general organization and structuring of data and events. We may see a similar approach in the "correspondances" of Baudelaire, wherein the sear4ch for the symbol and the analogie universelle was a parallel methodological problem of the externalization of ineffable experiences into sensual (tangible) categories. Symbolism, being a profoundly Platonist posture, caused Baudelaire to choose this way out of the problems created by the Platonist metaphysic and its accompanying problems of meaning and the reality of the body. The tangible category is thus seen to provide a methodology for the structuring of myth, for the technique of the novel of Grass, and for understanding the basis of symbolism. The human sciences, literature and myth find a common ground in the tangible category.

Is Baudelaire a scientist? Is Lévi-Strauss a poet, a seer, who subscribes to the privileged perception of synesthesia? He very nearly admits as much in Tristes Tropiques:

Space has values peculiar to itself, just as sounds and scents have their colours and feelings their weight. The search for correspondences of this sort is not a poet's game (my emphasis) or a department of mystification, as people have dared to say of Rimbaud's "Sonnet des voyelles": that sonnet is now indispensable to the student of language who knows the basis, not of the colour of phenomena, for this varies with each individual, but of the relation which unites one phenomenon to another and comprises a limited gamut of possibilities. ⁸

The physiological basis of intelligibility, or what we might call "absolute" intelligibility is stated quite clearly by Nietzsche in The Gay Science:

The unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloaks of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual goes to frightening lengths--and often I have asked myself whether, taking a large view philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and misunderstanding of the body. ⁹

And in the Will to Power:

All thought, all judgment, perception, as comparison has as its precondition a "positing of equality," and earlier still a "making equal." The process of making equal is the same as the incorporation of appropriated material in the amoeba…and corresponds exactly to that external, mechanical process (which it its symbol) by which protoplasm continually makes what it appropriates equal to itself and arranges it into its own forms and ranks.¹⁰

Spivak sum up Nietzsche thus:

Appropriation and its symbol, making equal, positing as equal--the process operates in the organic universe for its own preservation and constitution before the human consciousness appropriates it and declares it the process of the discovery of truth, the establishment of knowledge. ¹¹

According to this theory, knowledge is then a kind of disguise of tangible categories and Lévi-Strauss is quite right when he states that he observes a "close link in such matters between their empirical and systematic aspects," ¹² and that "the organizational principles governing the subject matter of mythology are contained within it…."¹³

Such titles than as The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, and The Origin of Table Manners take on fresh meaning and we cannot help remembering Salvador Dali's gastronomic metaphors (or tangible categories) in Les Cocus du vieil art moderne--not to mention all kinds of oral behavior from the condemned man's last mean to

The most recent and most striking example of the tangible category must be in The Flounder of Günter Grass. It is impossible to miss the statement concerning the tangible categories on the first page of the novel, and a key as it were to what Grass intends to do:

I remember our first quarrel, toward the end of the Neolithic, some two thousand years before the incarnation of our Lord, when myths were beginning to distinguish between raw food and cooked food. ¹⁴

He then proceeds to write a novel structured around tangible categories. And in the poem, "What I write about," Grass gives us, in effect, the key to the novel:

I will write about us all at a table eaten bare,

And about you and me and the fishbones in our throats.¹⁵

Whether Grass has read Lévi-Strauss or not is of passing interest, but it is quite interesting to point out that The Flounder is an account of the region around Danzig as a microcosm of world history from the Neolithic to the present, with its wars, its movements of peoples, its class struggles, etc., and especially the confrontation between the sexes--all structured in nine chapters corresponding to the nine months of a pregnancy and to nine female cooks from prehistory to the present. I am reluctant to go beyond a simple suggestion t hat if the raw is the natural and t he cooked is the cultural (in Lévi-Strauss' terms), then The Flounder is the story of the role of woman as a civilizing influence and her ultimate attempt to pass that culinary role on to men--who may not be ready for it--and to abdicate it herself in the name of liberation…although I have little sympathy with George Gilder and the theories he exposes in The Naked Nomad and Sexual Suicide, or with his conservative theory of economics.

Whatever critics may finally decide, or however the novel as écriture and Barthesian texte riche evolves as a separate organism, it remains clear that Grass has used tangible categories to make four thousand years of prehistory and history "intelligible." He does this without claims to scientificity, but one wonders if his subject matter in the cultural events of four millennia, especially in the sense that they have been mythologized by our textbooks, professors, and political leaders are not as concrete as the myths Lévi-Strauss structures and renders intelligible in the volumes of Mythologiques. Grass does for European civilization what Lévi-Strauss does for the New World; and in the sense that intelligibility through tangible categories is the prestated goal of Lévi-Strauss' structural analysis, we might wonder whether the understanding of the past as an absolute event is possible or desirable. Considering Derrida's rejection of a transcendental signified and the structuralist's concept of the constantly changing organism of the text as écriture, it might easily appear that intelligibility provides its own justification as a self-validating structure.

The confrontation of the Mythologiques with The Flounder makes it difficult to judge between the epistemological value of science (Lévi-Strauss claims to be a scientist) and art (Günter Grass the novelist). When both art and science lead to the goal of intelligibility in the human sciences, any choice between the two would approach the realm of the metaphysical or amount to a political choice in which the culture chooses the theory of knowledge which is consonant with its power structure and method of production and distribution of wealth. When tangible categories become the basis for intelligibility, the difference between science and art becomes less apparent unless we appeal to an epistemology which has its basis in power, not an unthinkable situation if we consider the ideas of Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man.

Grass emphasized the tangible category and anticipates critical reaction when he writes in The Flounder:

A good deal has been written about storytelling and narrative style. There are scholars who measure the length of sentences, pin down leitmotifs like butterflies, cultivate word fields, excavate language formations as if they were strata of the earth's crust, and take psychological soundings of subordinate clauses. They are suspicious of all fiction and at pains to expose all tales of the past as escapism, flight from reality.

But speaking of my Mestwina's evocations, of Fat Gret's undamned flow of speech, and of Amanda Woyke's mumblings, I must insist that in every case (for all their reprehensible attachment to the past), the style was determined by work being done in the present.

For example, the act of pounding acorns in a stone mortar imposed its rhythm on Mestwina's delivery and so made her couch her mythical evocations of Awa in succinct, telegraphic sentences. ¹⁶

Grass has tried to avoid the abstractness of Western official history in his myth-like organization of events. This history which The Flounder is is a kind of bricolage history of the area around Danzig and becomes an attack on official history, destroying the difference between history as a social science and the structure and origin of myth--whereas official Western history is a colonization of the intellect and an appropriation of a transcendental humanism which is a myth itself and which must take its place in a Lévi-Straussian cultural relativism. Michel Serres was directly dealing with this problem when he wrote that every text is a scientific text, and when he remarked one day that the categorization of books in a library is an artificial and spurious organization.

In an interview published in Le Monde, Lévi-Strauss said: "Structuralist thinking tries to reconcile the perceptible level and the level of the intelligible," which means, comments Jean-Marie Benoist, that "myth is a shifter between concrete and intellectual levels: Neither a concept nor an image." ¹⁷

The Flounder thus becomes a shifter between intellectual and concrete, and takes on the aspect of myth in order to present abstract official history as concrete event assisted by the tangible category. I must insist, however, that the concept of myth as shifter between intellectual and concrete may be utilized by a writer as an organizer of data, that is, as a narrative technique. And the three questions asked at the beginning of the paper about the Great Depression-as-turnip must be asked about the Thirty Years War-as-potato.

The problem then comes down to this: Can an author, by imitating the mood and structure of the myth, lay claim to having created a myth? By structuring and organizing and expressing a corpus of data and events in the manner of a myth, what can he, in fact, lay claim to having done? And can he lay claim to having come into contact with that profound Lévi-Straussian matrix of combinatory power which is Nature? May the critic and scholar praise him for his genius as a kind of seer in the manner of a Baudelaire, as a kind of shaman of European culture, or must we simply write it all off as a clever use of a mythic format and call it a literary technique? In every successful shaman, in the forests of Brazil, among the coastal Indians and the plains Indians of North America, there is a mixture of genius and mystifier, of prophet and charlatan. Perhaps it is the same with Günter Grass.

NOTES