The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  Fibrils

  Fibrils

  The Rules of the Game, Volume 3

  MICHEL LEIRIS

  TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY LYDIA DAVIS

  The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.

  English translation copyright © 2017 by Lydia Davis.

  Originally published in French as La Règle du jeu III: Fibrilles, copyright © Editions GALLIMARD, Paris, 1966.

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944312

  ISBN 978-0-300-21239-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  Contents

  Translator’s Note

  La Fière, la fière . . .

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  Translator’s Note

  1.

  In his massive, four-volume autobiographical project, La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game), Michel Leiris anticipated certain works very much of the moment in our twenty-first century: this is a writer’s multivolume, ruthlessly honest examination of himself that admits into its arena the banal and quotidian as well as the dramatic and rare. But beyond the fact that Leiris’s work was begun some seventy-five years ago, there are a couple of other important critical considerations: Leiris, by the time he began La Règle, had rejected fiction and embraced realism—he called what he was doing not a “novel” but an “autobiographical essay.” And second, the project extended over thirty-five years—begun when he was barely forty and completed when he was in his seventies—so that it had the scope and endurance to contain his reflections and objectives as they changed over time: we are fully brought into his mind, and we accompany his thinking as it matures.

  As he was writing volume one, Leiris evidently foresaw a second volume, but not more. Similarly, in Fibrilles (Fibrils), the third volume, published in 1966, he appears, from the tone of his conclusion, not to have anticipated volume four. But after that one, was the work finished? Not quite, since the fourth was followed by separate but related work in 1981. Le Ruban au cou d’Olympia (The Ribbon around Olympia’s Neck)—which takes its title, and one of its recurring subjects, from Manet’s painting of a recumbent prostitute clothed only in a black ribbon—centers upon the expressive power of fetishism in a broader, not merely erotic, sense. (It includes, for example, a brief text on the act of writing as hurling a lasso, and another about the urgent desire to smoke when one is already smoking.)

  In addition, extending the scope of the project backward in time, the four volumes of La Règle were in fact preceded not by a trial run but by a first exploration by Leiris into the territory of himself, this one concentrating specifically on his sexuality: L’Age d’homme (1939). Published in English, in Richard Howard’s translation, as Manhood in 1968, it depicts the full range of sexual obsessions of a man—or this man, in any case—as he grows into manhood: daydream, masturbation, impotence, celibacy, homosexuality, prostitution, marriage.

  2.

  Michel Leiris was born in 1901, within a comfortable bourgeois family in Paris. He was educated at the Lycée Janson de Sailly (in philosophy), the Sorbonne, and the Ecole pratique des hautes études. After a tentative sortie into the study of chemistry, he cast his lot with the world of writing and art, with the ambition of becoming a poet, as he describes in the present volume. When he was not yet twenty, he met Max Jacob and through him became involved in a circle of Dadaists and Surrealists, identifying himself as a Surrealist until he broke with the group in 1929. A somewhat emotional decision in 1931 to take part, as secretary-archivist, in a two-year ethnographic expedition across sub-Saharan Africa led, after extensive further coursework, to a career as professional ethnographer. He continued that career, occupying a post at one division of Paris’s natural history museum, the Musée de l’Homme, until late in his working life, pairing it with his equally full career as writer.

  Throughout his long life, prolific and productive until close to his death at age eighty-nine, Leiris wrote a variety of works in different genres: essays on jazz, the theater, literature, and art; volumes of poetry and poetic prose; the vast, rich journal that resulted from his African expedition, L’Afrique fantôme (Phantom Africa); an eccentric dictionary of personal definitions evolving from wordplay and private associations called Glossaire: J’y serre mes gloses; the surrealist novel Aurora; a collection of his dreams and his dreamlike waking experiences, Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour (translated by Richard Sieburth into English under the title Nights as Day, Days as Night); essays and book-length studies in the field of ethnography; prefaces and catalogue texts, book reviews, political texts; and most regularly appreciations of artists and writers, particularly within the wide circle of those he knew personally—among them André Masson, Miró, Raymond Roussel, Francis Bacon, Raymond Queneau, Picasso, Michel Butor, Sartre, Duchamp, Giacometti.

  It was in the midst of this other writing activity, in the early 1940s, that Leiris embarked upon what was to be his masterwork, the work on which his enduring literary reputation would rest: the autobiographical essay—as he later described it—called The Rules of the Game. Most of the first volume was written during the German occupation of France; the final volume was completed in 1975. He was henceforth to divide his life among his continuing autobiographical project; his multifarious other writing; his editorial activities; his political activities; his family and friendships; his travels; and his ethnographic work.

  3.

  With Biffures (Scratches), volume one of La Règle, Leiris began his extended project, the objectives of which fully emerge only over the successive volumes—to write in order to see more clearly into himself, to work out his personal identity, at the same time to unite the two tendencies in himself between which he felt divided: on the one hand, poetry, the attraction to the over-there, to myth, to timelessness; and on the other, morality, knowledge, the right-here, lived reality; and to formulate a definitive “golden rule,” the rule that, he hoped, would both govern his ars poetica—his poetics—and be a rule for living, a savoir-vivre, an ethics, the code by which he would live.

  He opens the book with one of his continuing central preoccupations, language in all its aspects: language as the raw material of poetry; the mysteries of language; the sounds of words, taken in themselves; the elusive and personal meanings of these sounds and of words themselves; private language versus shared language; language as connection to others; the discoveries possible through language; the failure of language. Cataloguing, or inventorying, his memories from various periods of his life, but especially from his childhood, he begins the book with the mystery he found in lan
guage when he was a child, in his misunderstandings of names, songs, scraps of speech—misunderstandings that created for him an alternate universe of things, people, customs, emotions. In this volume, he comes to define the literary use of speech as a way of sharpening one’s consciousness “in order to be more—and in a better way—alive.” The relationship, then, is reciprocal: the writer lives in order to write, but also writes in order to be more fully alive.

  The next volume, Fourbis (Scraps), continues the inventory, though its preoccupations have inevitably shifted a little with the passing years. Its main themes and subjects of inquiry, as described by Leiris, are now “to trim the claws of death, to behave like a man, to break one’s own walls”—in other words, to tame death, to take action, to break through the circle of the self. This volume begins to reflect the attraction exerted on him by external, historical events, including political activism. It also tells of his continuing preoccupation with the erotic, specifically detailing the story of his liaison with an Algerian prostitute, Khadidja, when he was a soldier stationed near Beni-Ounif during World War II, describing what he saw as her moral as well as physical beauty. In this volume, as in the first, he brings to his method of composition his training as ethnographer, working from slips of paper on which he had previously made notations—of facts, memories, ideas—which he then takes as starting points for his explorations.

  In the third and present volume, Fibrilles (Fibrils), though Leiris worries that his objective itself has shifted over the years, the problem becomes clearer: how to reconcile literary commitment and social commitment. Here he looks in particular to the example of his close friend the poet Aimé Césaire, who combines both without compromising either. Having opened the book with an account of his participation in a delegation to China, his attraction to that country, and his hopes for its future, Leiris continues with an exploration, again, of contrasts: his perception of China (representing morality, constraint, reason) as one of two poles between which he is divided, the other represented by the large market town of Kumasi, in Ashanti country (symbolizing sentiment, dilection, imagination), and the thronged Easter service Leiris attended there in its (ugly, he calls it) cathedral. The heart of Fibrils, however, the story that dominates this volume, is that of an emotional dilemma and its consequences: his division of loyalties between the woman with whom he has been having an affair, and his wife, called only “Z.” He describes his impossible situation—being frank and honorable with either woman would betray the other—and his resultant suicide attempt, as well as its aftermath and the ramifications of both. The associative explorations in this book delve deep into several significant dreams, including some he had while half-awake in his hospital room in the days following his suicide attempt, but his discussion of these dreams always circles out to include other narratives from his past, accounts of travels, or of friendships. (Leiris’s preoccupation with his erotic life and, more broadly, love, as well as his suicidal tendencies and his avowed cowardice in the face of his own “annihilation,” began early, showing up, for instance, in L’Afrique fantôme, when he was barely thirty and already married to Louise “Zette” Godon.)

  We realize, in the course of this volume, that the subject here is not only Leiris himself, and his actions, feelings, and thoughts, but also Leiris in the act of writing, and the writing of this essay itself. He talks about this book in the act of writing it. He describes the slips of paper, he quotes from them, allowing each to lead by association to more “data” for his explorations. He hopes to establish between them connecting threads, the “fibrils” of the title. In this volume, he fears that he will nearly die of the effort it costs him, even before fate finishes him off. Whereas he had hoped by writing to escape time, he is nevertheless subject to time—the past of his life, his present life in the changing world, and the time of the writing itself. Perhaps, he also realizes, the rules he seeks will be directives implied by the game itself. Perhaps he should settle for a “professional morality” as opposed to a more universal Morality.

  In the last volume, Frêle Bruit, more ample, at four hundred pages, than the previous, Leiris again defines the purpose of the whole of The Rules of the Game as to “expose as thoroughly as possible the sample of humanity that he is.” He describes this volume not as a logical or chronological sequel to the other volumes, but as a peninsula or constellation; it is not a rational construction, but a “florilegium” drawn from all periods of his life. The form of the final book, therefore, is unlike that of the other volumes of The Rules: whereas they are continuous, with only a few breaks into separate parts, the last volume includes many very brief sections, some less than a page, as though Leiris were bringing his last, disconnected thoughts together into one place. It contains, for instance, stories, chants, curses, poems, meditations, lists of titles, scraps of memory, and bits of his journal. But there could be no “last thoughts”; the ongoing autobiographical project, which included several more shorter works even after Le Ruban au cou d’Olympia, would not be so much ended as finally interrupted by death. And after his death, his vast, self-reflective and self-critical journal was published, at his instruction—more than eight hundred pages.

  In the pages of Frêle Bruit, Leiris is all the more acutely conscious of the passage of time, even more relentlessly haunted than in the other volumes by the fear of his own death; because by now, as he concludes the book, he is, in fact, in his mid-seventies—an old man. But he has also managed, over the course of the four volumes, to clarify certain things for himself: he has recognized in himself, he says in this volume, a need “to merge the yes and the no,” a need that sometimes seems to denote “a perverse inclination to find enjoyment only in ambiguity and paradox . . . sometimes . . . sanctified by the idea that a marriage of contraries is the highest summit one can metaphysically attain.”

  4.

  Both Manhood and The Rules of the Game were preoccupied with the horror of the author’s own mortality, the specter of his own death. It is possible to imagine Leiris, even more than most chroniclers of their own lives, as wanting to complete the work that can never be completed, by writing about his death. But as the writer can’t find a vantage point from which to look upon his death except one that precedes it in time, it seems that Leiris’s whole endeavor, in this work, was somehow to get around that difficulty, somehow to comprehend, embrace death beforehand in such a way as to have documented as completely as possible what he might also have liked to document as it was happening or after it had happened. The voice that said this, so lucidly and so frankly, has been silenced by Leiris’s actual death in 1990, and in a way that is not yet clear, this changes the voice one hears in the pages of his work. This voice both does and does not come to us from beyond the grave.

  On the other hand, it is also possible that Leiris wished to write in precisely the situation in which he did write: documenting his life in the shadow of his death. For a kind of completeness is certainly achieved here in The Rules of the Game through the avoidance of closure, changing the terms of the work so that the motion is infinite insight inward, infinitely continuing investigation. No event is “closed,” no thought, no datum. Progress is inward, and circular, rather than forward, involving the close examination of all sides of things: not only people and events but motives, effects, interpretations, and the nuances thereof. And digression, as well as expansion outward, is a natural part of this close examination.

  Amplification away from the main narrative track throws light on what is being described, fills in the picture, at least, of how Leiris himself reacted to what went on. Amplification can be infinite, of course, and even infinitely justified. It not only illuminates but also works dramatically to suspend the action, to delay satisfaction. It gives the event, which may be quite banal in itself, an added richness and depth; it may extend its meaning from personal to public. Amplification strays from the point but it also particularizes and nuances the subject.

  In fact, Leiris’s close attention to doc
umenting the ordinary elevates it into something so particular that it becomes strange. As he came to distrust the exotic, he found otherness in the familiar, foreignness in the domestic.

  Although his main subject is himself writing these works, part of the activity of his exploration is to bring the world into the discussion: it is through oneself that one gains knowledge of the “other” and of the world. His examination of himself is not exclusive but inclusive. He does not reject politics, history, or culture as part of his own self-portrait. Throughout his life, he was fully involved, literarily and politically, in the world outside himself—particularly with his fellow artists and as an activist against the “flagrant” injustices of society and “our Western arrogance,” as he put it—and he includes his political activities and his friendships in his account of himself, as well as the non-Western cultures he studies as an ethnographer.

  What is our sense of the narrator himself? It is curiously paradoxical: his constant elaboration and qualification, his ruthless honesty, his stated doubts express or imply a certain modesty, self-recrimination, apology—yet at the same time he effectively and relentlessly commands our steady attention by involving us in his thoughts as they unfold. The play of opposites is in effect here, too, as it is throughout The Rules of the Game and in Leiris’s work in general: the pendulum swings between reticence and self-display, private and public, inside and outside, self and other.

  5.

  Leiris is rarely brief, rarely plain, in Fibrils, since every thought seems to produce a possible counterthought that should be included. One problem for the translator is, of course, that Leiris’s amplifications and qualifications enter into the structure of the sentence itself. Extended pyramidal constructions are common; the work is an accumulation of syntactical architectures, sometimes very long and complex. For the translator, then, one constant exercise of wits involves syntactic acrobatics: most specifically, or most often, to be sure a given phrase or clause ends with the key word from which the next clause must hang.