The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  Leiris’s attempt at extreme precision, as he tracks his thoughts and his reactions to events, can produce a heavy weight of material within one sentence, paragraph, or sequence of pages, and an impression almost of excess. The sentences are most often graceful, but they can be close to unwieldy, given their burdens of qualifying subordinate clauses. With a certain pleasure in the challenge, however, I have reproduced them as closely as I could, avoiding any simplification and retaining Leiris’s formality both in structure and word choice. I have rarely changed the order in which information was presented—only in extremis, when I could not otherwise make the sentence hang together—because that order reflects the order in which Leiris’s thought unfolds. I have also respected his punctuation as far as the difference between the languages permits; he took great care with it. The reader may want to read some sentences more than once in order to gather up all their meaning.

  Wordplay was an essential part of Leiris’s relationship to language. His punning and associative pairing are never arbitrary, but constitute so many knots where some of the multiple threads of Leiris’s remembrances and ideas come together. His was a life lived in the French language, so even a translation of his work into English must retain some of his French, must be tied back to the original text with these same knots. For this reason, I have occasionally included the French word that Leiris is discussing, alongside its English equivalent, or have inserted a few words of explanation in brackets. I have also italicized, when it seemed necessary, a word or phrase that Leiris wrote originally in English.

  6.

  Leiris maintained a separation between his work as writer and his work as ethnographer. He constructed his days themselves as alternations between work at home, as writer (in the mornings), and work at his office, as ethnographer (in the afternoons), the two spaces “stirring up different ideas,” as he said: he was rarely an ethnologist when at home and rarely a writer when at the museum. The two spaces were connected, physically, by the familiar, daily reiterated path of the number 63 bus.

  It was in this office, a small room below ground level at the Musée de l’Homme, that I met Leiris for the only time, on a day probably in the mid-1980s that I can no longer pinpoint. To judge only from appearances, his preoccupation with the erotic, his periodic love affairs at home in Paris, and, even more, his liaison with the Algerian Khadidja, would seem quite incongruous for this cloistered scholar, this awkward, reserved man, in tailored clothing so correct and elegant, with his skin so pale, bony skull so naked, expression so tense and haunted, eyes so fearful: this was how he appeared to me that day. The museum, next to the Trocadéro Gardens and across the Pont d’Iéna from the Eiffel Tower, was surrounded by tourists milling about in the morning sun and by African vendors flying uncannily lifelike mechanical birds. Leiris’s voice trembled when he greeted me outside the elevator in the basement corridor. He was shy, as I had been warned, and he fell into silence often. He was deaf in one ear—forewarned of this, too, I probably spoke too loudly. The single window, above some radiator pipes, was now and then filled with the faces of curious tourists shading their eyes to see in. They would have seen a woman sitting nervously erect on her chair across from a thin old man, his bald head slightly bowed.

  Khadidja herself had at first mistaken him for a monk. But the opposition between external appearance (tailored, spotless, sumptuous) and internal being (emotionally chaotic, uncertain, vulnerable) is inherent to Leiris’s central preoccupation, well explored in Fibrils, and this apparent contradiction is a part of Leiris’s more general complexity, a complexity he was at such pains to try to understand and demonstrate in The Rules of the Game.

  Leiris wrote me a postcard early in the final year of his life, nearly three decades ago (on this, there is a date), signed in shaky, spidery black script. In it, he offered, most graciously, and with a typical qualification, typically inserted with syntactical elegance into the sentence—dans la mesure du possible, “insofar as possible”—to give me whatever assistance I might need with my translation of his work. I was then completing a translation of his collected occasional writings, Brisêes: Broken Branches (which includes, among other colorful and beguiling offerings, a brief piece on metaphor, one on human saliva, and a decoding of the captivating, to him, Fred Astaire). I never asked him for help, in the end, but there are a few points in Fibrils I would not mind checking with him, now that it is too late. But it is too late.

  Fibrils

  La Fière, la fière . . .

  I

  November 1955.

  I am back from another trip whose theater, this time, was the Far East, behind what the bourgeoisifying newspapers of our countries still call the “iron curtain.” Of all the trips I have taken, this is certainly the one that has made me the happiest. But if it pleased me so, why is this also the one that, now that I am back, has probably left me the most confounded?

  Five weeks of roaming around in China, which, because of its antiquity as much as its vast size, is for us a sort of older sister. Five weeks of contact with people who at full gallop are carrying out a project of taming the forces of nature and rationalizing society which I would call promethean if that reference to one of the central themes of our mythology did not summon up, even more than the heroic image of the acquisition of fire, that of a defeat penalized by an endless torture. Five weeks of close conversation with communism as it transforms Asia, and of such euphoria that I was led to think that, had I been younger and in sole charge of what I did, I would conceivably have tried to settle in the People’s Republic of China, which had invited me, along with numerous other delegates from the East and the West, to judge both the extent of its effort and the reality of the progress it had made.

  Well, now that those five weeks have passed, and a few more have elapsed since my return, I am still convinced that in just a few years China will be the foremost—instead of merely the oldest—of all the great nations; but I notice that after thinking I was almost on the threshold of a new life (and not having refrained, by any means, from telling my hosts this in the form of toasts, each of which I would have wished to be, without its seeming to be anything much, a perfect work of art, in the manner of a Chinese poem) I find myself once again perceptibly at the point where I was earlier; and that, my trip becoming more questionable as it recedes in time and increases the already considerable separation it derived from mere distance, a brief period (during which I have breathed the air of Paris while my lungs were still quite impregnated with that of Peking) has sufficed for its charm to be broken. How could something that had appeared to me rock-solid be capable of disintegrating so quickly? How can those five weeks of plenitude, after the short vacillation I mentioned, have so emptied themselves of their substance that I would be inclined to wonder whether I had not dreamed them? I will drop everything else and examine this question, even if the plan I had drawn up, for organizing how I would approach my “rules of the game,” is disrupted by this or even if—with regard to other questions raised unexpectedly—this plan appears to me to embrace only an ineffectual mass of trifles, so that I would have to admit I was constrained to recast it if not to abandon it, though I would lose face. For it is quite possible that in tackling this problem I am directly (or almost) touching the crux of my research and that I would thus see proof (which would cut short all literature) of the uselessness of continuing on a path that I had perhaps conceived to be so long, and burdened with so many ramifications, only out of perversity, coquetry, or reticence toward myself, if not out of an artistic concern for a sort of symphonic composition.

  Without lingering too much over all my “pre-China” before coming to China itself, and without yielding more than halfway to this mania I still have for tackling obliquely—most often after many detours—a question I consider important, I will confide here some chinoiseries drawn from my recent or distant past and almost all noted down (as though the enunciation of what I have to say demanded this preamble) when the trip to China was already
behind me, while before me was a new stage of the nonlocalized trip I am taking with my work table as flying carpet.

  Seizing first a compact and well-balanced object, I will describe a trinket that is scarcely old at all and not of much calculable value, but which I would rather have received than any other of the family relics that may be passed down to me: a ceramic depicting a recumbent fighter, on a pedestal-bed whose color I have not forgotten, of a dull green tinged with brown, with white and black for the figure, as well as with a purplish-blue tone, one of those Chinese tones (vermilion, currant, indigo, turquoise, olive) which are enticing because of their tiny discrepancy in relation to the apparently purer tones we are used to. At the time of his trip around the world, during which he paid serious attention only to the panorama that was unfolding inside himself, Raymond Roussel, a very marginal representative of our intellectual mandarins, brought this souvenir back from Peking to give to my mother, and for a long time I saw it in her home, placed on a console or some other small piece of furniture, before it disappeared when the Germans occupied the house she lived in for a time at Meudon during the last war. Very slightly concave, the four sides of the pedestal-bed, from which moldings jutted out, were similar to the roofs curved in at their corners which, it seems, are the features of Chinese buildings that the eye seizes most immediately. But more than its typical form or its place of origin, what attached me to this object was the personality of the man who had given it, whom I had admired once I was grown up after having known him when I was a small child: the author of the bizarre and extravagant Impressions of Africa, the man who was referred to in my home by the name of “Ramuntcho” (a name lifted by him from Loti, whose stories, with their exotic settings, he much admired), the misunderstood soul who was to end his life tragically in a grand hotel in Palermo, a life that was one of the best endowed by the fairies, but also one of the unhappiest because he could not resign himself to being famous only in his own eyes, the richest of men, elegant and of a princely affability, who for years came almost every week to play music at the house. Accompanying himself at the piano and making marvelous use of a thin voice, he would sometimes sing Le Roi des Aulnes, sometimes fragments from operas (the death of Isolde, for instance, or some tune from the Tales of Hoffmann) which he would couple, in his programs, with Tout autour de la tour Saint-Jacques or some other sentimental romance, along with folk songs arranged by Jaques-Dalcroze like Sur la route de Nyon or:

  Les fillettes d’Estavayer

  Beau château feuillé, beau château feuillé . . .

  Little girls from Estavayer

  Lovely castle in the trees, lovely castle in the trees . . .

  one of the ones I liked best, quoted here only approximately, since it lies far back in the time that I have passed by.

  A knickknack or rather a toy—of almost no value, since its price could not have exceeded a fraction of a dollar—was the jointed wooden snake I brought back from New York as I was returning from my first trip to the Antilles. I had bought it in a small shop in Chinatown, from a friendly shopkeeper whose very glossy black hair, straw-colored complexion, mongoloid eyes, and perhaps the exquisiteness of her apparently unaffected smile proclaimed her to be the rather particular American she was. I had just dined Chinese-style with a French friend and two New York friends, a man and a woman: he, a sort of sylph, small and round as a tobacco pot and a real Kleinzach-like drinker, but one whose batrachian face was illuminated by the softest eyes, of the most richly layered depths, that one could imagine (as though he were already experiencing his end, which was premature); she, much taller, whose image has remained with me as that of a beautiful Valkyrie without armor, and, of course, uncorseted, who would walk next to you holding your hand in order to protect you from all danger. During the party that had followed the dinner (a party given for me by that European New York–transplant who is now no more than a handful of ashes in a northern Italian cemetery, and who left all his companions the memory of a most intelligently zealous friend and a man with the most refined taste behind his dissipated appearance) we had indulged in—as the jargon of the writers of newspaper fillers would put it—abundant libations, and it was perhaps for that reason that we soon managed to break the thin and supple thread on which were strung the pieces of painted wood representing the rings of the snake, which I had to take back to Paris hastily repaired but henceforth forever lacking the almost disquieting mobility it had originally had. I was sorry I could not have preserved intact that fragile souvenir of the thirty-six hours I spent in New York in 1948, a visit that I would have liked to extend but that a mistrustful decision of the San Juan immigration office in Puerto Rico (where I had gotten off the airplane with a communist from Martinique reencountered at the embarkation by pure chance) reduced to proportions I have always deplored because of the extraordinary beauty of the Atlantic city, less stifled in its stony heights than one might believe.

  Either a knickknack or a toy (but this time in the figurative sense, for it has no materiality beyond the piece of paper on which I described it the day after its intrusion into my sleep), here is a dream I had in May last year, when I did not yet know that shortly afterward I would be going to China: I am being received by the philosopher Confucius, a sort of glabrous old Anglo-Saxon, precious and pederastic, who has apparently dressed up as a mandarin with glasses and a long robe for some masked ball; as is suitable with Confucius, the interview—which takes place in a disused drawing room with a vaguely oriental decor—is all about courtesy. I had this dream in Cannes, where my wife and I had gone to spend a few days with Picasso, whose new house (a large villa with exaggerated moldings) we did not yet know. In the afternoon I had had, with him, who, as far as I knew, had not drawn any Chinese figures but that of one of the tumblers in the ballet Parade, and who, in his Massacres in Korea, had painted only the massacre without for a moment thinking about local color, a rambling conversation touching on very diverse subjects none of which, however, I’m quite sure, had any direct relation to Asia. Still, we talked for a good while about the drugs (opium, hashish) which he had on occasion used in his youth at gatherings of artists and poets. We had had lunch in a very southern manner in a restaurant in Antibes, where our little group included notably Paulo—the painter’s son—with his two children; in the course of the lunch, Paulo’s little boy had given the ceremonious appellation of “Monsieur Yan” to Picasso’s boxer, whose name Yan one might easily think was chosen for its Asiatic sound whereas it is actually a Breton name, dictated, quite simply, to those who decided upon it by the obligatory protocol concerning pedigreed dogs. A canine treated like a respectable Chinese gentleman (which, after all, suited his old gentleman’s face with its wrinkled forehead and chops), remarks about maunderings due to opium and hashish, the overloaded masonry, and the comically elaborate windows, are obviously not unrelated to the dream I had that night, an anecdote fabricated from the immediate past and not a confused premonition having to do with the trip that would soon be proposed to me by the Association des Amitiés Franco-Chinoises.

  Connected to an event that will be outstanding in the history of our theater—the visit which, at the beginning of last summer, the foremost troupe of the Peking Opera made to Paris, where it taught a large audience what immense joy one can derive from a total spectacle—is the following scene, at which I was present, during the reception given by the artists of the troupe in the rooms adjoining the Théâtre des Ambassadeurs, for a fashionable Paris crowd mingling all social classes and all intellectual viewpoints. In addition to an endless succession of solid and liquid foods (among them rice wine, a wine the color of dead leaves whose savor is enhanced by its slight bitterness, a beverage related to the Spanish manzanilla with its completely flamenca dryness and one that I would rediscover with pleasure in China, where ordinarily it is served tepid or warm in porcelain cups from teapots), a concert was performed for the guests, and a Chinese singer opened it by singing, and very prettily too, the great aria from Madame Butterfly.
Several of us experienced a sort of vertigo: a Chinese woman singing for a French audience an aria from an Italian opera set in Japan which associates the American colors with the white flag and its red circle—clearly picturing to oneself such a cascade of multiple layers, it was difficult not to feel one was about to faint! But for our hosts, it was evidently a most normal form of homage by the East to the West.

  Speaking of coincidences (which we enjoy seeking out because the encounter of two events whose only connection is analogy or similitude suggests the poetic idea of destiny), I will note that shortly before my departure I was afflicted with a benign but exasperating malady of which I’m afraid I have not yet succeeded in definitively ridding myself: the mycosis commonly called athlete’s foot, because it is often caught from walking barefoot on the wet and infected boards of pools, an ailment that in numerous cases (as I have learned to my cost) proves very tenacious and that, widespread in warm and humid regions, is known in southern Asia by the name of Hong Kong foot, as I was told by the dermatologist I consulted. Of course, this Hong Kong foot that I picked up I don’t know where (but certainly not in China, nor at a pool) left me completely in peace when I was in the country to which it owes the more picturesque of the names bestowed on it.

  Will I go clear back to Ali Baba, abductor of children, that brigand of whom a foxtrot fashionable at the end of the war of 1914, Chu Chin Chow, invited us in its refrain to beware, if I am incapable of approaching China—and what I think now that I am back from China—without yet again resorting to one of those anecdotal and personal handholds that allow me not so much to evade an open conflict with the real subject as to explore the ground in some way and not commence that conflict except after making a connection between what has for so long been my customary world and the heretofore rather rebellious thing which I would like to talk about? To seek out, from my years before China, all that could be closely or distantly related to that country—this is what I at first embarked upon, as though by doing so I were finding a way of incorporating it, and as though this sort of greedy thrusting of tentacles were a preliminary stage that I could not avoid. But I understood very soon that by proceeding this way I would scarcely manage to do more than bring together elements that had no real relation to me or to my subject: padding or ornaments, whose effect would be more or less happy, but which would show up my efforts to justify them, however hard I tried to disguise those efforts. I will therefore give it up, and I will not extract from this file, henceforth closed, more than two pieces of information the rejection of which seems to me inopportune, not only because, once they were noted, they acquired for me the value of facts (which, after that promotion, it would pain me to discard, as though I were demoting myself) but because by means of them I make my way along two paths that are equally direct, though opposite in direction, into China, instead of first gaining entry, by slipping timidly through some hidden gate, into a backyard of the palace to which I covet access.