In Honor of Levi-Strauss

Reading the obituary of Levi-Strauss today in the New York Times, I was struck with an epiphany of my own--one that reached across the chasm of time and space, and which lead me finally to James Joyce. There is something of Joyce’s epiphanies in the theorist’s own conception of storytelling. To Levi-Strauss, human consciousness is shaped by the realization of a few essential binaries common to all peoples that exert force on unconscious understanding, and which manifests itself in myths across disparate cultures and traditions. Images that appear in the myths of secluded South American tribes also appear in Russian folktales or, say, Homer. The idea of an essential truth revealed to the understanding and given form in an image removed from its narrative context sounds a lot like the platonic ideal Joyce delineated in his early explanation of the epiphany. Interestingly, the cultural philosophy of the 20th century repeated a conceptual journey Joyce seems already to have tread. The poststructuralists eventually displaced Levi-Strauss; writers like Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida rejected “timeless universals” and argued that “history and experience were far more important in shaping human consciousness than universal laws.” For Joyce, the inspiration offered by the epiphany was at first a metaphysical phenomenon, an essential “whatness” achieved by the beholder which emanated from the essence underlying the objective world. The mature theory of epiphany as it was manifested in his work, however, was something quite different: no longer a platonic essence, it was an internal event occurring in the mind--as susceptible to delusion as any other subjective experience. Levi-Strauss was certainly not concerned with platonic essences, but the appearance of a universal subconscious meant that psychology achieved similar effects. Structuralism matters to Joyce because both are interested in the way particular knowledge and experience is pitted against the universal. Joyce finally winds up, I think in a similar place as Levi-Strauss, realizing that stories, though diverse in their details, and varied in their particular effects on readers coming from diverse individual histories, are told and consumed for reasons wrought deeply in the makeup of our species. It is why Ulysses is a myth retold. It is the very reason why Joyce’s epiphanies and those of his characters, though reliant on the subjectivity of those who experience them, have as much dignity as our own. The particular details and assembly of each one may differ--indeed, the epiphanies Joyce builds for us may manifest themselves differently in our minds than they did when they were first ignited in his--but the basic feeling, the radiance, the quidditas is the same. Like Bloom and Stephen, the ideas common to our species make individuals consubstantial. Particular differences matter little; everyone, when myth is at its most distilled, is everybody else.