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173 Poetry and Reality Roman O. Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss Andrew Lass This story has no beginning and may not be able to end. I would like to tell it, stuck as I am on one of its many tangents, if only it would sit still at least for a brief moment while it continues to expand. It is the story of chance meetings, some fortuitous, some foretold, and several others missed along the way. It was in 1941, in New York City, that the young French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss first encountered the charismatic Russian linguist and onetime poet Roman Osipovich Jakobson.He attended his lectures on“Sound and Meaning” at the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York, and they spent endless hours in conversation sipping tea served by the distinguished folklorist Svatava-Pírková Jakobson, the Russian linguist’s Czech wife. The friendship between the linguist and the anthropologist developed as their conversations continued on the campus of Mount Holyoke College and, I would assume, on the way there and back to the city. There were many other exchanges between them, at other times and places, but just as important were the conversations with other distinguished scholars and artists with equally convoluted life trajectories. In other words, in order to appreciate what it was that got sparked when their wires crossed—and I do intend the other possible meaning of this expression—one would need to know what other crossings they brought to this one and what impact their collaboration had on their future encounters. If God does not play dice, as Einstein insisted, how about billiards? While theirs was not the first confluence of linguistics and anthropology— one could argue that the histories of both disciplines are from the beginning intimately linked—the impact of this particular encounter was decisive. On one side semiotics and on the other structural anthropology would hold center stage for a quarter of a century and rattle the foundations of a broad spectrum of knowledge for much longer. And then, like other fads, it slowly faded into the background as it gave way to a series of other hotly debated terms. There are many reasons why scientific paradigm shifts occur and plenty of other paradigms that try to address them. From the simple fact that ideas compete for their fifteen minutes of fame no less than Andy Warhol, to the seemingly more legitimate reason that they are subject to change like anything else and, vulnerable to critique, get replaced by a logic that seems to do better, 174 AndrewLass at least for a time. And where intellectual history tends to follow the internal logic as well as the social, political, and economic background of the developmental changes, recent scholarship—perhaps itself reflecting a general concern with globalization and the postmodern—draws our attention to their movement through complex networks in which a variety of couriers and intersections play their decisive part. It is not just the individuals themselves, their ideas, and the social networks of their flow, but the letters, telegrams, and telephone calls, the radio broadcast and the printed word-image, trains, boats, and cars, even the occasional coffin, play their important part as the enablers and transporters, as do the places they mediate: the café or pub, classrooms , corridors, and, of course, the lawn chairs in front of Mount Holyoke’s Porter Hall. The genealogy of influence demands a concern for the would-be trivia in order that we might better understand the play of chance, in the language of structuralism, the point of articulation where the contingent and the necessary meet. It’s like the magic touch: it threatens to draw everyone who comes in contact with it into its fold, including the storyteller. It is the profound irony of crisis, of the devastating madness of the two world wars and what seems like an endless string of massacres that continue to this day, that it enables, so to speak, by force, new and productive encounters to emerge. As with all of the individuals who attended the Pontigny seminars at Mount Holyoke College, the intellectual trajectories of these two formidable minds were certainly matched by the meandering paths of their lives. Between the complexity and wide range of topics that they covered and the equally extensive secondary literature, any attempt to do justice to their scholarship seems daunting to me. With that in mind, I have decided to explore here but a few loose...

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