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Breton's Structuralism Stamos Metzidakis ... on pourrait parler d'activité structuraliste comme on a parlé d'activité surréaliste (le surréalisme a peut-être, d'ailleurs, produit la première expérience de littérature structurale). —Roland Barthes1 AT THE START of his two-volume Histoire du structuralisme François Dosse writes: "Le structuralisme pour triompher devait, comme dans toute tragédie, tuer."2 Insisting that the dominant post-World War II thinker was Jean-Paul Sartre, Dosse then refers to the 1948 Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire on "L'Internationalisme de l'esprit," which brought together not only existentialists like Camus and Sartre, but others like David Rousset and André Breton. This meeting was significant because it demonstrated how a "belle unité [politique ]" reigned at the time among most French intellectuals. Dosse's first chapter studies the progressive eclipse of Sartre's star, while the next chapters document "la naissance d'un héros: Claude Lévi-Strauss." To be sure, one may question who the real heroes were during this turbulent period. One could argue, for instance, that Sartre had a powerful impact on international thought well into the Sixties. Nevertheless, a consensus has arisen among historians of structuralism that makes of Lévi-Strauss 's work the principal starting point for this movement. I shall not argue against this well-founded belief. Even so, one would like to know how it happens that André Breton, with his strong interest in primitive cultures and the so-called "savage mind"—the very cornerstones of Lévi-Strauss' thought—has mostly disappeared from contemporary accounts of structuralism.3 As Anna Balakian and Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron have shown, many parallels exist between the two œuvres, especially the belief in a continuum between the real and the supernatural or mythical.4 In his 1962 work, La Pensée sauvage, Lévi-Strauss himself recognized the analogies between his ideas on "bricolage," which would become so important to future structuralists, and "le hasard objectif." He also speaks of the connections between his views of primitive art and the Surrealist "ready made."5 As if this were not enough, in 1949, shortly after the years both men spent in New York, Simone de Beauvoir also noted 32 Winter 1996 Metzidaris the similar views of Breton and Lévi-Strauss in regard to male-female relations. Indeed, from the introduction on, Le Deuxième sexe uses notions of nature and culture that first appeared in proofs of Les Structures élémentaires de ¡aparenté, which Lévi-Strauss had lent to Beauvoir before publication. When the finished book appeared, the latter wrote an exceedingly laudatory review of it. The anthropologist's proto-structuralist ideas, analogous to Breton's, were employed to support Beauvoir's now-classic critique of Woman's "Otherness." (Of course, later in her study, she cites Breton's Arcane 17 [1947] as a literary example of this conception of Woman, one that, admittedly, she strove to debunk.) It is thus clear that Breton greatly inspired the earliest hero of structuralism , Lévi-Strauss, especially during the war, when the two men worked together at the Voice of America, and on projects like the review VVV. Beginning on board the ship they took from Marseilles, they also discussed at length notions of aesthetic beauty and absolute originality.6 These ideas were very much alive for Lévi-Strauss when he began work on Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté and on subsequent founding-texts of the structuralist movement, like Tristes tropiques, La Pensée sauvage, and Les Mythologiques. Yet, as Mark Polizzotti has shown recently, this connection between Breton and structuralism's "father" was not without problems. For one thing, Lévi-Strauss remembered how seriously Breton took Surrealist games like Truth or Consequences, prompting the former to liken them to the kinds of initiation rites he had witnessed in primitive societies. Breton was "mortally offended" when anyone spoke out of turn.7 This habitual taking-things-seriously caused breaks, not only in the early Surrealist circle, but also a bitter rupture between Breton and Lévi-Strauss. This occurred in 1957 when the then-famous anthropologist chose not to take...

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