Rose likes Soup

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When Claude Lévi-Strauss was a child, his father, Raymond Lévi-Strauss, a portraitist and genre painter whose works were exhibited in the Salons de Paris in the early part of the twentieth century, gave his son a Japanese etching. The young boy used it to adorn the bottom of a box. Later, when he was old enough to be given pocket-money, he would spend it on miniature items of furniture bought from a Parisian shop called The Pagoda. Little by little, he assembled, in his box, a miniature Japanese house. Lévi-Strauss (2003) tells the story himself, age 77, adding that the etching is still in his possession – carefully preserved like the memory itself.

The significance of this biographeme is perhaps best viewed in the light of a passing comment made by Baudelaire in his essay ‘A Philosophy of Toys’, itself the recollection of a childhood memory but also a meditation on the role of the imagination in aesthetic perception. The essay, which in many ways anticipates future psychoanalytic insights into the importance of a child’s play, is about the way in which children create imaginary worlds by acting on and through their toys. All children, Baudelaire remarks, talk to their toys. Baudelaire, who was fascinated by toy shops – ‘Is not the whole of life to be found there in miniature – and far more highly coloured?’ (Baudelaire 2003c: 199) – presents the child’s relationship to his toys as a prototype of the adult’s relationship to the work of art. Having characterised different forms of child-play and different kinds of toys – the cheap, improvised toys of the poor are those that spark the imagination the best, says Baudelaire – he goes on to remark that if children act on their toys, the toys may also act on the children, in particular when it comes to literary or artistic predestination (2003c: 202). It would not be astonishing, Baudelaire continues, that a child brought up among puppet theatres, grows up to view theatre as the highest form of artistic expression (202).

Was Lévi-Strauss’s Japanese house a formative object of this kind? Did this paternal gift play a part in the shaping of the son’s own psyche? One is here in the realm of pure conjecture. However, a number of strands of Lévi-Strauss’s thought may indeed be traced back to this unusual toy, from which they seem to emerge. I am thinking, here, not only of personal preferences, such as his love of all things Japanese (1990; 1993b), or of specific aspects of his system of thought, such as his theory of the work of art as a ‘modèle réduit’ (1962b), or his assimilation of creation to a form of bricolage (1990; 1993b), but of the general orientation of his thought, its openness to the exotic and the distant. There is, however, yet another sense in which Lévi-Strauss’s father’s gift shaped his destiny, which Lévi-Strauss himself explains in the interview mentioned above, one that takes on particular significance in the context of the argument of this book. As he explains, it was this gift that was at the origin of his fascination for rare objects. Since that day, he has maintained with them, as he puts it, ‘the most intimate of relations’ (2003: 7). It was this gift, in other words, that turned Lévi-Strauss into a collector.

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