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Such conclusions are registered, with impressive clarity and lyricism, in Tristes Tropiques, a book described by its author as his "intellectual vacation." Laymen have turned to it as a painless introduction to his thought. All his other works demand rigorous intellectual effort as well as a basic understanding of anthropology. They also require something akin to an act of faith.
Only faith, for instance, will carry most readers past Lévi-Strauss's tenet that the mind may be the prisoner of a secret code, locked in the unconscious, that often has as little to do with conscious reality as the rules of grammar have to do with the function of speech. If order exists anywhere—in the behavior of the atom, the dance of heated particles, the orbit of the stars—then, say the structuralists, order must exist everywhere, even in the brain. Just as the law of gravity determined the fall of Newton's apple, so the laws of the intellect imperiously mold human thought.
Lévi-Strauss postulates two orders of reality, only one of which is susceptible to human control. At the controllable level, man applies his intellect to the universe about him and builds social systems to suit his needs. But at a deeper level, the implacable pattern that is ingrained in the human intellect, much like the program that decrees the functioning of a computer, directs the shape of everything built by social man. It may work, says Lévi-Strauss, like "the least common denominator of human thought."
This approach relies heavily on the spadework done in structural linguistics, a new science, born in this century, that has set out to crack the hidden code of speech. Freud's explorations of the unconscious may also have made a contribution to structural theory. Like the taproots of culture, the foundation of speech exists beneath the level of awareness and the superimposed discipline of grammatical rules. The linguists and the structural anthropologists are united in the suspicion that the origin of human speech and of human society may have been equivalent events. Lévi-Strauss's books reflect his conviction that communication is the sine qua non of society, and that speech is only one of many ways by which society explicates itself. Music, art, ritual, myth, religion, literature, cooking, tattooing, the kinship systems founded on intermarriage, the barter of goods and services—all these, and others, can be considered languages by which society is elaborated and maintained.
No one has as yet unlocked the code that the human mind obeys. But Lévi-Strauss presents fascinating speculation on how the code may work. It seems based, for instance, on a universal human desire to organize the chaos of the universe—to attach meaning to things. "The thought we call primitive," he writes, "is founded on this demand for order. This is equally true of all thought."
But while all humans apply the same basic code, they can reach dramatically individual and divergent conclusions. The so-called primitive mind, for one example, abhors change. It builds societies designed to repeal history: "What primitive man seeks above all is not truth but coherence; not the scientific distinction between true and false but a vision of the world that will satisfy his soul."
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