The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  Their faces allusively bound, and painted just enough so that they are no longer ordinary, these girls of wax [cire] (or of Saint-Cyr) glide from west to east, dividing the meridian of the stage. Exit to the side without change in level, as though on a conveyor belt [tapis roulant], since they lack the flying carpet [tapis volant] on which the goddesses take flight.

  In contrast to the very natural gait of the girls of the new China (who seem happy to step firmly on the ground which the atrophied feet of their female elders touched only with pain, walking cautiously forward, something one still sees here and there among old women who stumble like birds who are ill), in contrast to this placid and slightly swaying gait (the weight of the body bearing down freely on one leg and then the other), to this motion which ill-tempered people will call clumsy whereas I would identify it as precisely the way people walk who are in the process of emancipating themselves, there is the sophisticated gait of the actresses, of those, at least, who in classical theater play the parts of female characters of the feudal era. A perfectly horizontal gait, the sight of which gives one a pleasure similar to that which is sometimes offered by the sight of the trail of light left by certain meteors which, apparently larger than shooting stars, cross the sky of the warm regions with a slowness that is of course illusory but, at first glance, stupefying. A body in motion animated by a movement of translation . . . If it weren’t that their rectilinear gliding is just as nuanced as, in declamation, the fascinating modulations (between speech and song) of their high-pitched voices, such a formula—a vestige, I think, of the wording of problems I used to find in my math books when I was in school—would more or less account for the way these sovereign creatures displace themselves, creatures you are surprised to discover, when you see them offstage and without their beautiful pallid faces and carmine-painted cheekbones, are girls similar in bearing and dress to those you might meet in the street, and endowed, not with a faculty for propelling themselves that is in some way astral, and disembodied, but with the same good and likable swaying gait. So that we are now charmed—and doubly so—by the lack of reserve of those who just a moment ago captivated us with their extremely refined gestures and diction. How can one pass from a disguise that is perfect because its wearer seems to have no reality except disguised, to an equally perfect absence of disguise? Mystère et boule de gomme [heaven only knows]: this is what Wang Yuen-chen might whisper to me, if she were present, since she had been taught this expression by one of my companions and used it somewhat randomly without ceasing to be amused by it.

  Although (strictly) half in disguise, the lovers already halfway turning into beetles . . . It is in male clothing that Chou Ying-tai spends a year with a professor in the capital, for during the period in which her legendary love is situated, the studies that she has resolved to pursue were not open to girls. It is therefore to a dissimulated boy that her fellow pupil Liang Chan-po becomes attached, moved by a feeling that he will not recognize for what it is until the moment when he will at last have grasped the secret of the cunning metamorphosis. Now, all masquerade having been put aside, it is through a metamorphosis in which nature joins mythology that the idyll will end: when the lover, whom the father has rejected in favor of a wealthier suitor, has died of sorrow, and when, amid thunderclaps, the beloved has ended her dance of death by throwing herself into the dead man’s tomb (that hemisphere of stone next to which she has ordered her wedding procession to stop, and whose cocoon has just been cracked open by a bolt of lightning), two butterflies will flutter in the sunshine of a lull in the storm; two butterflies that are the two lovers, incarnated by two actresses now enveloped in filmy veils and moving in front of a stage set of flowers and rainbow, two actresses of whom only one will have been more than half a young man (the other having played only a temporary simulacrum) and who both have abandoned their cast-off clothing of tragicomedy for a dance whose silent spinning represents the earthly apotheosis of the transfigured couple (the old beliefs relating to metempsychosis merging here with the idea of biological transmutations), a dance which, at the same time, expresses the triumph of the two actresses whom we see smiling at the ovation and crossing with hasty little steps the entire expanse of the stage, describing vast insect circles with drunken wingbeats. A “happy end” in two senses, since the timeless happiness of the lovers reunited in the form of butterflies is identified with the present joy of the protagonists, and since the cheers of the public applaud the actresses’ talent as much as the happy outcome of a story that made it weep.

  The state of ignorance in which most women were kept, the omnipotence of the parents determining conjugal unions as they pleased—such are the failings of feudal society exposed in the old tale of The Love of Liang Chan-po and Chou Ying-tai, the source, early on, of the play I saw performed in the most common of its modern versions. A representation of a way of life outmoded today, since the emancipation of women and the liberalizing reform of marriage are part of the great progress that the Chinese people owe to their present leaders, that comedy of manners, of which each fragment attains the lapidary poetry of a motto or proverb, conceals a critical meaning in harmony with the new faith. Even its conclusion, in which the marvelous comes fully into play, can (if necessary) be reconciled with Marxist-Leninist ideas: if immortality is only a dream and if a materialist cannot possibly believe in the eventuality of a rebirth, is it forbidden to him to seek, at least, a shadow of consolation in the thought that a human body is not condemned to disappear completely and that the elements of which it was composed will be embraced anew in a series of combinations whose infinite diversity constitutes what we commonly call nature, nature that is divided into three kingdoms in one of which is ranked, among other living creatures, the delicate little winged beasts that are butterflies? Closer to the real truth than Tamino and Pamina passing victoriously through fire and water by the power of the magic flute, Liang Chan-po and Chou Ying-tai share a fate that scarcely departs from the law of nature, in this case not so much violated as bent, as in the case of those pagan dead who are destined to recover a small bit of existence in the form of plant food that will grow in the very field where they have been buried.

  As though I had taken for my model one of those Chinese paintings stretched on rolls too long for the eye ever to be able to do anything else but travel across the succession of mountains, valleys, and watery surfaces that are depicted in them, I reel off a succession of notations introduced—in the manner sometimes of explanatory commentaries, sometimes of elaborated glosses or free marginalia—with a few of the bits of text with which I tried, once I was back in France, to give a little solidity to certain of my too fluid impressions. Since I have been pegging away like this, working on a few details without managing to raise myself to any sort of general view, and also without coming upon one of those personal strings which you have only to let vibrate once they have been touched (when everything, if it hasn’t organized itself, at least insists upon itself as a succession of truths of which the first that one succeeds in grasping makes one guess there are others of the same family that, by paying out the right amount of application and wisdom, one will also be able to grasp), what surprises me a little more at each new effort is, precisely, that I don’t manage to go beyond these details, whereas my trip had appeared to me in the very beginning as an event that, in a happy sense, would mark the rest of my life—this was (it is true) once I had “torn myself away,” for though I still believe in the need to travel, I experience any departure more and more as a wrench, even if its destination is a nearby country and my absence will not last long.

  But wasn’t it exactly because there was a danger of a gross disillusionment—as for someone playing his last card—that I had so much trouble tearing myself away when I left for China? And isn’t it, also, because I feel such aversion to this disillusionment that I now cling to details like someone clutching at debris to survive a shipwreck? The fact is, however, that the details in question represent what, in China, was for me a
certainty that I experienced and that touched me to the quick. What else should I talk about, therefore, if not those things that moved me and to which, despite their exiguity, I can firmly attach myself? If I am devastated today, the disaster probably remains entirely in the limpid glass of water of this twofold statement: my life hasn’t changed because of the mere fact that I saw a part of the great progress that a great country is in the process of making, and I believe that it would not be more changed if extensive observations had freed me of all uneasiness as to the purity of the means—only through persuasion, I was told constantly—by which this great country is pursuing its modernization; for my life to have a chance to rectify itself, it would be necessary that in the chosen lands things would be so arranged that the work, for instance, to which I am dedicating myself when I seek to define my Chinese experience on the basis of details that are tiny, but precise, and moving to me, be judged by my friends from that place (if they knew about it) otherwise than as a kind of bad workmanship compared with the militant testimony they evidently hoped for from me and that alone would tally with the idea of a literature whose sole standard of value is the help it brings to the people. Posing the problem this way, I pose—as usual, indirectly—this fundamental question: am I forever incapable of having faith in anything at all that would be sufficient for my personal anguish to melt away, or is it the socialist construction that I must incriminate, insofar as it is effected—even in China—along paths too geometrically traced for such a vital anguish, with all the technologically useless products that may derive from it, not to be eliminated from consideration from the beginning by the heroic artisans of that construction? That socialism provide a remedy for everything (including the anguish of knowing oneself to be mortal)—such a demand amounts to asking for the moon, and if it falls short, one cannot take that as a pretext for abandoning it. But wouldn’t it be natural to expect that labors whose aim is to fill, somehow or other, the hole of that original anguish should in any case be accepted by a Marxist society, since such a society ought by definition to be making it its goal to achieve the true human society? Nothing, of course, was asked of me, and I am completely free in testifying (as well as, moreover, in refraining from testifying). Nevertheless, everything I saw there, of the titanic enterprise in which the Chinese are engaged, incites me to believe that there they concede, at best, only a small and precarious place to anything that does not directly serve that enterprise. A great deal of importance (I am happy to stress this) is granted to the theater, to archeology, to the traditional arts, in short, to the various aspects of national culture, and an often brilliant cinematographic production proves, too, that even outside the immense effort to educate the masses, an intense cultural activity is taking place in this country which so many Westerners imagine to be inert. But the central factor, in all this, remains the building of socialism in China, and I have trouble seeing how an activity of the kind that absorbs me could be categorized there otherwise than among those bourgeois residues—or even feudal ones—that call for rehabilitation. Here, I agree, I am reasoning as an egocentric, and it will be quite easy for one to tell me that the man of letters is showing, in this case, a little more than the cloven hoof. On the scale of the collectivities and on the level of their immediate needs, it is only too certain that I am wrong, for what is urgent is—of course—to give a better life to hundreds of millions of people. Bad conscience aside, the rigorousness of the creators of plans makes me uneasy and obliges me personally to ask myself this question: is one pursuing the right path (for oneself as well as for those who will come after) if one works at something of which one knows that each person must devote himself to it fully (half measures being excluded where revolution is concerned) but of which one also knows that to adhere to it without reserve may lead one to deny oneself in what is most intimately one’s own and thus to nip in the bud what would be one’s real contribution to the collective work? Liang Chan-po and Chou Ying-tai, in the legend that portrays them dying and then changing into butterflies, benefit from this wonder: to undergo metamorphosis without thereby ceasing to be themselves. Must I draw a line through all hope of reconciling myself, or, on the other hand, must I affirm that it is in no way fantastic to imagine, on the level of militant action, an equivalent of the two lovers’ miraculous metamorphosis?

  De vos jardins fleuris fermez les portes,

  Les myrtes sont flétris, les roses mortes!

  Of your flow’ring gardens, the gates now close,

  The myrtle is withered, and dead the rose!

  On the eve of our departure for Europe, our interpreters had given us a banquet at which the toasts had been numerous and we went so far as to sing songs over dessert. In reply to a number by one of my companions (who, by exhibiting himself thus, had no other thought than to start the ball rolling), the small Chouang Sien—that pretty female translator of the English language whose parents lived in Shanghai, whereas her colleague Wang Yuen-chen came from Kunming, in Yunnan—sang a Chinese song for us, in a voice richer than her childlike face would have allowed one to expect, then in my turn I stood up for that tune from the past century that seemed to me, mediocre and fragmentary as may have been the execution that I was able to give it, to express better than my too prosaic declarations the melancholy in which I was plunged by the prospect of the imminent separation. “I ask you to drink to the health of my courage,” I had said during dinner, in a toast whose theme was the pain I felt and the courage I would need the next day to leave this country, where I did not doubt I would have liked to put down roots. Thinking now about the whole path traveled since that moment of effusion in one of those restaurants in Peking whose courtyard is also its poultry yard, since upon occasion one sees limping about in it, fully alive, the ducks that are destined to be eaten lacquered, I wonder whether my comradeship, apparently so frank and so destined to last, with our interpreters, will not suffer the same fate as—when one is young—so many beautiful (but soon to fade) vacation friendships!

  Meal finished and tables abandoned, we had chatted for some time without constraint and I, expressing myself like someone who is determined to follow the golden thread of his emotion, had set my heart on explaining to comrade Wang what I had learned from this trip, which was to end the next day: that the building of socialism, instead of being accomplished in boredom and with rigidity, could be done with good humor and gaiety (as testified by the very attitude of the woman I was talking to, as of all those who had gone out of their way to satisfy our many desiderata without ever departing from their smiling eagerness)—this was the great lesson I had learned from our few weeks in the new China. But the good Wang, initiate in ideas which were as regular as the cut of her hair, answered me that, where the building of socialism was concerned, it could not be otherwise. The admiration I was professing for something that, to her, was quite natural had to appear to her to be the surprise of a perfect philistine, and I realized this at the very moment I was talking to her; thus, I insisted strongly on this point, on the one hand in order to demonstrate to her that there was nothing in this so obvious that it would be superfluous to mention it, and then, on the other, in the hope of leading her to measure in a useful way what would be amazing about China’s success were it to conduct its revolution from beginning to end without deviating from such a style. The young fanatical follower of the magus the color of ripe wheat or the color of the first moments of a September twilight over the North Lake Park on the outskirts of Peking would have been closer to winning me to her cause if she had shown herself more conscious of the good fortune that appears to be presently that of Chinese communism and less sure of the benefits, in some sense automatic, of the doctrine in which I cannot doubt that by devoting herself to it body and soul she found a great moral comfort.

  The little sugar candy girl, with braids of licorice, takes our hand to lead us to the club of the butterflies, a Marxist-Leninist Monelle.

  What anarchy and nihilism (of which Marcel Schwob became one of the prop
hets with his Le Livre de Monelle) were for French intellectuals of the symbolist period, communism will have been somewhat the equivalent for those of my generation: in whatever way we judge the present conjuncture, and even if we were to consider this great movement to be misguided today, it is impossible for us, anyway, not to regard the revolution of October 1917 as the major event of our epoque, the one that for the most perceptive of us will have marked the beginning of a new age or, at least, will have represented the last hope of seeing humanity apply itself to a task certainly fraught with perils and difficulties but defensible in its aims. I was sixteen when this overthrow took place, and I really have to say that at the time I attached no special importance to it, compared with the other events reported by the dailies and periodicals, solely concerned with the fortunate or unfortunate developments of the war being fought by the Allies. After the assassination of the monk Rasputin, there had been the takeover by Alexander Kerensky (whom I would encounter a few years later in the streets of Passy when, having fallen from office as chief of state, he had been reduced to the condition of an exile, and would walk along the peaceful sidewalks of the sixteenth arrondissement, a gray, sour-faced would-be Napoleon). Bourgeois opinion had at first been optimistic about the fall of the tsar, expecting that the result for Russia would be a recovery in the way it was conducting its war; but it had soon become disillusioned, worried by the intrigues of those who were called “maximalists” and “minimalists,” and soon it had given vent to its indignation, when the Kerenskyite government had been toppled by the maximalists (those who, of those two extreme left groups, were in the minority, contrary to what seemed to me indicated by their French name, an approximate translation of the term bolshevik as opposed to that of menshevik). Lenin, who had crossed Germany in a sealed railway car, Trotsky the Jew, jumbled together with the pacifists of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, soon took their places alongside the spies and defeatists, the flashy foreign adventurers Almereyda and Bobo-Pacha, Mata-Hari the beautiful Indonesian, and others of smaller size, including the actress Suzy Depsy or the “traitor Guilbaut,” whose name was never printed except preceded by that epithet comparing him to a modern Ganelon. When the characters of Lenin and Trotsky acquired some substance for me, a long time had already passed since Saint Petersburg had become Leningrad, after the transitory and now almost forgotten period in which its name was “Petrograd.” At that time I had learned, from my contacts with a few artists and writers with whom I had allied myself, for reasons at first completely aesthetic, that one cannot limit oneself to being a nonconformist where art alone is concerned, and that one should assert independence also in the face of certain realities of a social or political kind; militarism, with the particularly revolting forms it assumes when it becomes disciplinary (as in the Bat’ d’Af’) or colonial (as in the Moroccan war), was the most emblematic of these realities, and, for me, everything probably crystallized around that one: before being the great leader of the proletariat, Lenin was, in my eyes as in those of the surrealists, the man who had dared sign the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk. However much I may have vacillated since then (as I sometimes become indignant at the authoritarianism of Stalinist methods, sometimes believe them justified by the need to protect and strengthen Russia on its way toward socialism), I have never ceased to consider Lenin the apostle or the saint of this, the twentieth century, which is crossed by such diverse currents but of which, deep inside the capitalist world, an Andalusian and a Londoner—Picasso and Chaplin—are the two glorious and fully alive purveyors of imagery.