If, five years ago, you’d asked me to name the most important French mid-20th century writer, I’d have mentally dipped a hand into a hat in which names of contenders such as Camus, Genet, Duras and Robbe-Grillet had been tossed, and pulled one out at random. Not any more. Right now I’d answer without hesitation: Claude Lévi-Strauss. An odd choice, perhaps: an ethnographer by calling, Lévi-Strauss wrote neither plays nor novels. Yet, for my money, his work displays a richer, deeper literary sensibility than that of his “proper” literary contemporaries. Not only is his prose better than theirs (his lyrical descriptions of the “leprous crusts” of buildings or the “supernatural cataclysms” of sunsets and sunrises), it is also infused with meditations on the very act of writing – the blindspots that it opens up, the traps or pitfalls that it sets. Infused, too, with a sense of structure, pattern, system (the narrative of Tristes Tropiques, for example, zaps from culture to culture, continent to continent, as it remaps the entire globe along lines of association: between the layout, concentric or concyclic, of a village’s huts, the transgenerational rhythms of exogamy and endogamy of the tribe to whom these huts belong, and the symmetry or asymmetry of a caste system on the far side of the world). And infused, beyond even this, with a tantalising sense that, if only he could correlate it all, plot the whole system out, some universal “master-meaning” would emerge, bathing both him and his readers in an all-consuming, epiphanic grace.
As a novelist, I am fascinated by the figure of the anthropologist. What he or she embodies for me is a version of the writer minus all the bullshit, all the camouflage or obfuscation – embodies, that is, the function of the writer stripped down to its bare structural essentials. You look at the world and you report on it. That’s it. You spend time with a tribe, observe the way they fish and hunt, discern the contours of their rituals, beliefs and superstitions, tune into their unspokens and taboos. Then, after a year or so of this, you lug your note-packed trunk down to a dilapidated jetty from which a series of small rubber-trading boats and giant ocean liners carry you back to your study, where, khakis swapped for cotton shirt and tie, saliva liquor for the Twinings or iced scotch your housekeeper purveys you on a tray, you write the Book on them: the Great Report that maps the world you have been observing at its deepest and most intimate level, sums the tribe up, speaks its secret name.
Certainly, Bronisław Malinowski, the father of modern anthropology, understood the discipline that he was forging as essentially a literary one. His first commandment was: write everything down. You never know (he reasoned) what will turn out to be important and what won’t; the smallest, most trivial-seeming episode or situation might contain the key to understanding larger cultural enigmas – so capture it all, turn it all into data, into text. In this respect, his thinking was remarkably close to that of the man many would credit as the father of modern literature, Stéphane Mallarmé.
In his landmark essay-cum-manifesto The Book, Spiritual Instrument, Mallarmé claims that everything that exists does so in order to end up in, or as, a book. This book-to-come, he continues, using language that foreshadows Lévi-Strauss’s, would be “an immaculate grouping of universal relationships come together for some miraculous and glittering occasion”, in which typography itself “becomes a rite” (he also calls the book “a tomb in miniature for our souls”). Mallarmé spent the final decades of his life plotting the form this uber-book might take: books in their current state being inadequate for the task of containing everything, he called for a radical dismantling and reconfiguration of the shape and format of the medium itself, envisaging ways in which the page might be unfolded and expanded into performance, social practice, even cult activity. In so doing, he laid the foundations for the 20th-century avant garde, from Cage’s extra‑literary activities or Burroughs’s revolutionary ethnographically inflected provocations to that most immaculate and glittering grouping of all universal – and quotidian – relations, Ulysses, in which Joyce repeatedly states his ambition to make a whole culture, at micro- and macro-level, from its advertising slogans or the small talk in bars to its funerary rituals and the way the entire past and future are imagined, to use Mallarmé’s words, aboutir dans un livre.