An unwritten Tristes Tropiques: Claude Lévi-Strauss and Joseph Conrad

In an interview with Didier Eribon, Claude Lévi-Strauss admitted that he wished he had written Joseph Conrad’s books. It seems that once he even started writing a “Conradian” novel entitled Tristes Tropiques, but the only known fragment of this novel would seem to be the description of a sunset, which has become part of another book of the same title containing reminiscences from his journeys. In what way, then, did Conrad influence this unusual book by Lévi-Strauss? There are certainly similarities between the works of both writers. Apart from a similarity of literary form and cultural substance, we can find a unique “optical experience” (Dariusz Czaja) in their descriptions of sunsets, which I interpret as a substructure of their studies of the world, culture and human knowledge.