The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, which I read in a French translation when I was twenty-some years old, corresponded for a long time to what was my first requirement with regard to books of philosophy: that the system proposed should be formulated in sibylline maxims, apparently simple and based on our everyday experience, but at the same time curling in on themselves and endowed with strange extensions, as though the laws thus enunciated came from very far away, laden with a truth too ancient and too elementary not to be incontestable, but also with a mystery equal, in this case, to that of the ideograms that served to set it down and, like them, impossible to decipher for anyone not armed with a good dose of patience and sagacity; maxims, then, with the authority of dicta and with a structure perfectly clear and balanced, but concealing as much as they reveal and rich with a content so profound that it cannot be brought to light without a hard effort of decortication. It was at the time of the beginnings of surrealism that I read the Tao Te Ching, when, like my companions, I was looking toward Asia as symbol of knowledge plunging back into the night of time, just as Black Africa and Oceania would soon seem to me symbols of a primitiveness also calculated to ruin Western logic, a logic that had succeeded in engendering only coercion and machines. Tibet, with its high-perched monasteries and its living Buddhas, was truly the “roof of the world” (if one means by that the high place par excellence), and I would be, a little later, amazed by the meditation exercises in which, I learned, its ascetics were trained: to dismantle piece by piece and reconstruct in the same way the image of a garden which one has sufficiently observed to see it mentally in all its details, to repeat the operation going more and more quickly but always detail by detail, until this oscillation between luxuriance and the complete absence of terrestrial support brings one to a physical comprehension of emptiness; to stare at a point of light shining in the dark room in which one is enclosed, to transfer oneself mentally into this point, which is now I and I-who-look-at-myself, to move back and forth many times in succession faster and faster so that at the end of this gymnastics the gulf between subject and object has been abolished. I was thinking very precisely of what the testimony of a European visitor to Lhasa, Mme Alexandra David-Neel, had taught me, certain or tentative, about Tibetan mysticism when I noted, in May 1929, on the subject of the, strictly speaking, Chinese puzzle which is the problem of poetic technique: To become used to a certain multiplication of consciousness, and to confront one’s heart as one ordinarily confronts a tree or a house. I have the impression, in my case, of a kind of revolution taking place in me—a turning movement in which my mind seems to describe a half-circle and thus stands face to face with itself. It is then that words, instead of combining mechanically (parrotlike), take on weight and color: they move even me, and no longer count as words.

  From the bizarre and perverse China of my childhood—the one associated with porcelain pagodas, convicts carrying cane, skulls with long pigtails, and Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden, a work of which I knew by hearsay a few of the cruelties it contains—I passed, almost without transition, to the metaphysical China in which yin and yang confront each other and unite, then to the China of war and revolution as it figures in two of the most celebrated novels by my contemporary Malraux. In order to discover a China with a sunnier face, it was necessary for me to round, in my body, the cape of fifty years, hardly very cheering, and for China in turn—as though by an inverse movement—to become, by undertaking the development of its enormous, henceforth divided garden, the habitat of a less unhappy people.

  In 1952—during some cold, gray days—I was present at the Peace Congress that brought together in Vienna people of all countries and all colors coming as delegates, guests, or observers; but when, separate from the sessions, a documentary on a meeting of the same sort, held in Peking for Asia and the Pacific, was shown courtesy of the Chinese delegation (which included many men whose heads were crenelated with beautiful fur caps like those the Tartars must have worn at the time of the invasions), it was the exuberance, the good-natured jollity of the whole crowd that one saw in this film, and the tribute it paid to laughter, that amazed me this time.

  There were country dances performed by a host of young Chinese women and men; a host of bouquets waved during endless ovations; the sky tumbled by that nondetonating firecracker—the sudden flight of a host of doves; the lengthy handshakes, with a profusion of deliveries of a profusion of gifts: badges, scarves, necklaces of flowers, and sometimes even clothes. There were rounds of applause, almost simultaneously reciprocal in accordance with the ritual prevailing in the countries of the East, for whom (if one trusts in the letter of protocol) the joy shown by a single one of the parties present as he beat his palms together, if it did not immediately provoke a response and thus become the first term of an exchange between equals, could only be taken for a joy that stopped in midcareer. Throughout this film—shot, of course, for purposes of edification, but too unreserved for one to be able to perceive its instructional aspect—there was one long explosion of merriment. Cordiality, laughter, health in hearts and bodies, and even those burlesque interludes that it did not disdain to show in quite a long sequence: the “numbers” that were performed for one another outside the Congress by members of the various delegations during quiet social gatherings. Naturally, a Japanese who, coiffed in a Mexican sombrero, tries his skill at dancing the bolero does not display a very highly inventive humor; but it must be said, after all, that a revolutionary such as Lenin was probably also quite lacking in humor when—according to Trotsky’s work on him which, thirty years ago, disclosed to me a few features of Marxist thought at the very moment when a writer of my generation revealed to me a demummified China—he was overcome by a fit of crazy laughter in the presence of the comrades at the end of a heavy work session. The most essential thing, here, is that there should be not a piquant flash of comedy but rather a plunge into comedy, and that as one emerges from serious occupations one step down from one’s pedestal in order to relax in the most banal fashion, when necessary, rather than assume the guise of the pedant whose bearing reflects the too superior opinion he has of his person and seems to strain desperately to make one take everything very seriously. For a long time I, in fact, have thought that scarcely anything, of any kind, can be done without at least a touch of buffoonery. It is not immaterial that Mozart qualified his Don Juan as a dramma giocoso (in other words, a merry tragedy) and that the Romantics had (even if it was sarcastic) their “irony.”

  That simple style which Lenin, sworn enemy of grandiloquence, practiced like a master, and of which the documentary on the Peace Congress of the peoples of Asia and the Pacific had furnished me an illustration that seemed to demonstrate that Mao Tse-tung’s China could—on this point at least—teach us something, was one I came across again and again in the course of the trip I took. Of those men and women whom we chanced to meet because we moved around so much, no one greeted my companions and me otherwise than with a cordial smile: they look at you, and the face in which those two eyes shine as they embrace you in their field of vision, instantly lights up. I admit that a joviality so immediate and unanimous (among the old scarcely less than among the young) may not necessarily be a spontaneous expression, but perhaps rather a matter of politeness; nevertheless, even if there was nothing but convention in those displays of joy provoked (or meant to be provoked) by the arrival of foreign guests, it is still true that one must regard as extremely civilized a country in which an attitude that is good-humored—and not in the least stiff—is in such circumstances required by etiquette. And it seems to me undeniable that a certain basis of true cordiality is, after all, necessary to anyone who plays this game: the actor who, too conscious of his craft, keeps his distance from his role only rarely manages to deceive, if indeed by chance he succeeds at all.

  Of the vast fiesta—of almost continental or planetary dimensions—whose image had enchanted me from the very first minutes during that soiree in which it was presented on a screen, reduced to the
relative poverty of a succession of black-and-white images, I saw an equivalent from which nothing was lacking, neither color, nor substance, nor any life-affirming qualities, when at Peking, on October 1 last year, I watched for nearly four hours by the clock the procession of the Chinese national festival.

  Day after day we had seen the city hang up its lights, framing many a doorway with red and gold (thus dressing them in colors of which one was not sure if they were those of China or those of the Revolution); groups of male and female students, schoolboys and schoolgirls, practiced their dances in all sorts of places, including on the flat roof of our hotel; on the square where the procession would pass, and where people would be dancing that evening, great lengths of canvas (of the same oxblood tone as the walls of the old Imperial Palace and those of the adjoining constructions against which they had been stretched) formed the improvised partitions of street urinals capable of accommodating, together, hundreds of people. In overpopulated Peking, the everyday animation (that pullulation which is not hasty, not rough) was further increased, but on September 30 at midnight everything grew quiet, a part of the city having indeed been neutralized because some of the troops that were to march in the procession were housed there, along with their matériel.

  In the morning, at the stroke of ten, the ceremony began with salvos of artillery thundering at will (as though to remind one that China was the original source of gunpowder); thus, the sky, already very mixed up, half cloudy and half sunny, was for a long time made heavier and somehow even lower by the great layers of smoke that hovered close to the ground. A big fat Chinaman placidly inhabiting his imposing frame, Mao Tse-tung, surrounded by other personalities of the regime, stood in the center of his platform, a sort of vast veranda hung with enormous spherical Chinese lanterns, near the top of the old restored edifice that bears the famous name of Tiananmen or Gate of Heavenly Peace.

  The first movement—allegro—consisted of a very strict but rather unobtrusive military parade, without any provocative exhibition of warlike machinery and limited (it seemed) to what was indispensable for conveying the fact that one has well-trained soldiers and possesses modern weaponry. Next came—allegretto—the briefer parade of pioneers, little boys and girls in red silk scarves who saluted the Head of State by releasing before him balloons of all shades of color as well as doves (which one soon saw perched on the roof of the building where the officials were standing).

  Whether the consequence of an elaborate staging or the happy result of chance, similar to those I would later come upon unexpectedly and which led me to believe that any crowd of Chinese was curiously apt to transform into a bed of flowers or some other work of art—not far from a train station, for example, a group of workers in blues, squatting amid heaps of red peppers, and behind them a drying structure like a house with no façade, its ridges hidden by clusters of peppers hanging in curtains, the whole forming a gay bouquet, with touches of black from crows or jackdaws in flight at the top of the picture—now, with the arrival of a cortège of people, in a confused and arrhythmical flood like a mass demonstration, after the marvelous parade of armed soldiers and the scarcely less orderly parade of children, the avenue was filled, so to speak, to the brim.

  Workers, peasants, students pass, following a first wave of men and women representing all the national minorities of the Republic, arm in arm, presenting themselves in such disorder that the diversity of the traditional costumes they are wearing resolves into a single, shimmering medley. As had the young pioneers, the members of each delegation salute by waving or simultaneously raising sheaves of artificial flowers, and this produces sudden spatterings of foam—sometimes pink, sometimes red, sometimes yellow. Male and female workers alike wear the classic cotton outfit of a sort of blouse, but the skirts of the women students, of varying tints and designs, agglomerate into a motley pattern whose trompe l’oeil is continually formed, broken, formed again, and broken again with the stamping of their legs. A quantity of unnecessary flags, of which many are very short and very high, emerge from the cortège, much less standards than scraps of cloth (tender green, candy pink, pale blue, straw yellow) carried on poles for pleasure, as one would play with kites. Through the air move the multicolored constellations created by the balloons constantly being released, some of which, having reached a certain altitude, themselves release a small airplane that glides or a parachute from which is suspended a vertical streamer on which can be read a slogan such as: “Free Taiwan!” On the ground, I watch for a few moments one man among others who is walking on the right flank of the cortège with a child perched on his shoulder, as though—in this upside-down world that communist Asia doubly represents in relation to capitalist Europe—it were natural, for a civilian, to take part in a review with the same casualness as though this were a dull recurrence of Bastille Day. Some hot-air balloons take flight, and I observe with an increase of delight that there are balloons gleaming black as fresh ink among the colored balloons which have little by little composed a scene in perpetual motion and without any link to the ground. There are portraits of great men (Marx, Engels, Lenin, and several others, Soviet and Chinese), maxims composed by series of placards on each of which is inscribed an ideogram, doves of cutout wood carried at the ends of sticks by bonzes with shaved skulls and saffron robes, statistics on panels, simulacra of manufactured objects (machine tools, locomotives, houses), men at work represented in groups that one might think had been cast from life had they not been a little larger than life-size, fruits and vegetables immoderately amplified, a giant goose, a cow in silhouette, and other emblems of worker and peasant production, together forming, in this part of the procession, something reminiscent—though in a style at once larger and more graceful—of what was not very long ago in our country a popular procession like that of the First of May and, also, of that advertising caravan the occasion for which is the sort of circumambulatory ritual constituted by the Tour de France.

  This compact crowd that transported or carried along on its current various heteroclite burdens was succeeded without a hiatus by a group of strange creatures: factitious lions (each one represented by two men enclosed in the same imitation skin) came forward rolling grotesquely on the pavement and confronting individually an equal number of make-believe wild-beast tamers, who kept them at a respectful distance with some type of party-favor bludgeon. This surprising circus entry inaugurated the carnivalesque part of the procession, the part for which folklore groups and theater companies (professional or amateur) served as performers and whose chief attraction was, in my opinion (after some tableaux vivants presented on floats and many examples of the traditional game of fake dragons made of paper, cardboard, and light wooden armatures which young people caused to undulate over their heads by controlling them with a series of sticks), the appearance, in this case almost fairylike, of a row of equilibrists, mounted on high unicycles, and then the appearance, even more diverting, of the famous army of monkeys, marching in very good order and at the same time creating delicate rosettes with their long whirling canes, and displaying their faces painted in all sorts of wild colors, just as in the classic opera, where one sees those inferior and caricatural brothers victoriously attack the well-equipped troops of celestial gods, offering an image of the battles fought by the humble people against the feudal lords.

  As though it had been thought morally or aesthetically necessary to show that legality regained its rights after the saturnalia, the sports organizations were the ones who closed the procession, in a species of da capo or at the very least a reminder of the handsome arrangement of the beginning: behind a flag bearer appeared a group of tall, strong girls in white leotards and pants, who advanced in step, flinging out their closed-fisted arms alternately left and right, in a very accentuated symmetry, as the soldiers had done with their free arms; other groups of adults and adolescents followed, maneuvering with a great deal of elegance and precision, some twirling their scarves, others knocking their barbells together in cadence. While firew
orks exploded (noise and smoke in the brightness of broad daylight) and a new flowering of parachutes and streamers deployed, projected by the rockets, the festival ended with a sprint of all the civilian participants who, gradually assembling at the bottom of the square, walked to the foot of the grandstands waving bouquets and cheering. In the same way, at the end of certain shows, the entire troupe of actors will sometimes salute the audience standing in a line parallel to the footlights that moves forward from the back of the stage toward the spectators. At Tiananmen, however, there were neither saluters nor saluted (for all were applauding one another), and many hundred thousand actors surged to the far edge of the theater where they had just performed their maneuvers, in the extraordinarily sharp and at the same time silky light characteristic of Peking autumns.