The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  At Tientsin—baptized with another name since the new regime, like many other Chinese cities—we were taken to visit a community center for children, and there we were received, with great demonstrations of friendship, by a crowd of little boys and girls, the latter delicately made up (lips reddened and cheeks touched with pink) even though most of them were barely adolescents. The boldest of the little gang, grasping our hands and not releasing them, busied themselves guiding us and doing the honors of their club for us. As a sign of welcome, we were given some of those little plush birds dyed in bright colors (as are found in Peking and elsewhere in shops), nice presents to which were added gifts of a more comical nature: pretty apples with good ripe tones that melted into liquid if you held them in your hand for very long. Those of us who actually wanted to take part were dragged into folk dances, and fresh bursts of laughter, too frank to be in any way offensive, greeted the clownish efforts that several of my companions and I made to play our part in figures difficult to execute without some instruction, despite their relative simplicity. During the whole of my visit, my companion was a very small girl who, when I first arrived, had given me a plush bird and had seized my left hand, which, sometimes, she squeezed tightly, lifting her eyes to me and smiling at me with her whole face. Between her and me, there was not, of course, any possibility of conversation, but the pressures of fingers made up for it. We walked about in the courtyard and then, for a little while, I left my young escort to take part in the dances to which other children invited me. As soon as these frolics were over, her hand found mine again without my needing to look for it, and in this way we continued our walk, now touring the inside of the building, going from room to room and sometimes passing through a recreation room, sometimes a room for studying, this, as far as I can remember, and if indeed I have precisely identified these different locations, whose intended purpose, for lack of a common language, could not be indicated to me by my little guide. To the walls of one of these rooms were affixed some chromolithographs representing revolutionary scenes, and visible in one of them—a reproduction of a Soviet picture—was some episode or other from Lenin’s public life. We marked a pause before this one, and the little girl, squeezing my hand a little harder, pronounced distinctly the word “Lenin,” as though she had been happy to find in her vocabulary a term by which our accord could at last be expressed in speech, since I evidently knew this famous name and recognized it all the more effectually because it designated someone who must be, in her eyes, almost my compatriot. In the same way that Latin was for Christianity a sort of esperanto and the symbol of the fish served as a sign of recognition for the champions of the new faith, a name such as that of Lenin and symbols like the hammer and sickle or the dove inspired by Picasso’s engraving can today form a living link between people separated by race, language, and even age. The inestimable virtue of communism, in my opinion, is that it effectively connects, through their having something in common, individuals who, without that, would remain altogether foreign to one another, scattered as they are to the four corners of the globe. But, completely based as it may be on social realities and not the vapors of religion, such a community is nonetheless fluid, for this world too possesses its theologians, who have been quick to excommunicate those they regard as heretics.

  A crime every five days and the highest prices in Italy. I am in Palermo when I read this on a propaganda sign, in the trim English Gardens where the local section of the Communist Party is giving a fête to benefit the newspaper L’Unità, a sort of fair with merry-go-rounds, lotteries, and various attractions, including the election of “Miss Palermo Vie Nuove 1956” (but just as I will not see the happy winner, I will not know if these vie nuove are the new paths opened by socialism or the new streets of a neighborhood recently constructed or planned, in this city that abounds in slums). I am at the end of a vacation here with my wife, and for this last week we have settled in a place quieter than the one where we lived during our first trip to Sicily and where we stopped off again at the time of our arrival not long before: the “Grand Hôtel et des Palmes”—Grande Albergo e delle Palme—a palatial establishment that fell into disrepair some time ago, and where one can still see the apartment occupied by Wagner while he was finishing the composition of Parsifal, and where we had visited, nine years ago, the room within the four bare walls of which, in 1933, Roussel died in circumstances that suggest that it was in fact death he was seeking by consuming (as he did) too large a quantity of barbiturate. The hotel where we are now is a vast collection of buildings of an outmoded ostentation, in a park that overlooks the sea and is encircled by suburbs so poor that the presence of such a stately caravanserai in the midst of neighborhoods literally in ruins has something absurd at the same time as profoundly shocking about it; in a spacious room with “modern-style” decor whose walls depict scenes of ancient Sicily, with pretty girls in enticing tunics populating an improperly flowery spot also frequented by swans and peacocks (whereas the dining room exhibits decors vaguely reminiscent of Pompeii mingled with chinoiseries dating from a fake eighteenth century and refinements more difficult to classify), a meeting of jurists is being held today. A small problem of the sort (neither legal nor moral but relating rather to civility) that often present themselves to bourgeois people like me who are imbued with “leftist” ideas and too disturbed by the excess of injustice not to be communist sympathizers: if, as I walked among the booths of the Party fête, I had been asked to buy a badge, I would certainly have acquiesced; but wouldn’t I, who would also not want to wear a decoration or any other sign of affiliation in my buttonhole, have felt it highly unsuitable to keep that badge pinned to the lapel of my jacket when, returning from our walk, the moment came to enter the hotel lobby and ask for the key to our room from the little man with gray hair and sad mouth who wears with so much dignity his black porter’s livery? A crime every five days and the highest prices in Italy . . . Whether determined or not to display it permanently on my clothing—and even if, by not resolving to do it, I would have evinced most prominently an unfortunate fickleness—I can only align myself with those who have written this slogan, for the sight of the wretchedness so extensive in certain parts of Palermo serves to confirm it.

  “Lenin,” had said the little girl who was leading me through the various parts of her children’s club as though fate had designated her to be my cicerone in the magical country which was the source of the bird she had given me—a red country instead of the white country of which Monelle speaks to her historiographer. “Lenin,” had said the chromo, accurate but unlovely, in which the great revolutionary was identifiable at first glance by anyone and everyone. The not very engaging product of an art conforming to the principles of socialist realism, that (and nothing more) is what this banal image would have been for me, had the little girl not endowed it with a function quite other than illustrative by pronouncing the word “Lenin,” which was, in the most limited sense, only a useless subtitle but, in a larger sense, elevated the undistinguished educational chromo to the dignity of a symbol through which a positive understanding at last became possible.

  I, who, in even my most ordinary courses of action, suffer from an almost maniacal doubt about my capacity to explain myself as I should (to the degree, for example, that I can scarcely enter a shop to buy something without first going over and over the turn of phrase, innocuous though it may be, and without any aspiration to elegance but merely simple rigorousness, by means of which I will indicate what I want, so that it often happens to me, doing an errand on foot in Paris, that I lose a good part of the pleasure of my walk in thus ruminating, instead of enjoying the spectacle of the street, over a phrase very different, anyway, from the one that will come to me once I’ve crossed the threshold); I, who converse only with embarrassment—except by chance or having a rare trust in the person I am talking to—because of my very fear of not knowing what to say or how to say what I may have to say; I, who, in addition, prefer, in semipublic places where I go (resta
urant, barber, shirt-maker, tailor, or any sort of supplier) that the person serving me not only treat me like a customer too well known for one not to agree to trust him blindly should the occasion arise, but, if possible, that he give proof of our personal relationship by calling me by my name (as though having a name, for people before whom a quantity of clients file past, and being, for them, defined by syllables that do not have the impersonality of a registry office label, but cleave strictly to your skin, signified that they acknowledged in you something like a soul and was thus reassuring)—it goes without saying that I, more than most, was induced to listen, with as much emotion as though a key word had been spoken, to the enunciation of this name whose meaning was rich and universal enough to be common coin between an urchin of the yellow race and the awkward Westerner I was. I’m quite sure that in response to this word, whose sudden blossoming simplified everything, and which derived its vitality even less from an idea than from the living memory of the man it continues to designate, I said nothing. What would I have answered, anyway, except “Lenin” in turn, and could I therefore have done any better than to squeeze the little girl’s hand a bit more, in a gesture identical to hers?

  The liveliness of the children, the cordiality of the men, the charm of the girls and women, free of vain coquetry, count among the firmest reasons I have for loving China and, if these are virtues that did not require a revolution in order to manifest themselves, one must at least recognize that this revolution has not annihilated them—far from it. The girls and women, whose condition has to such a degree been transformed, can furthermore be regarded, in large measure, as products of this new China; had it only produced this, it would be a great and beautiful thing that ought to be set down to the credit of Chinese communism. And the news that has appeared in the French papers this month, October of 1956 (shaken by so many convulsions since the latent war persists in bloodying North Africa and, while there is increasing agitation in the Near East, Hungary is mounting a rebellion because it was governed with too harsh a hand for so many long years), the news, still vague, that has come from China regarding the democratization of the statutes of the Communist Party can, on the other hand, only tend to restore the confidence of those who, like me, have begun to wonder whether this revolution, too, was not going to lose sight of its humanism in its too immediate concern for developing national production at whatever cost. The match has not been won—far from it!—for the supporters of a free communism, whose adversaries are the partisans of an iron-fisted socialism as well as those of the classical reaction. But news of this kind suggests that in fact something has changed in a happy direction since what is conventionally known, in our circles, as “destalinization.”

  A single thread that has never been broken, from Sinanthropus Pekinensis to comrade Mao Tse-tung. It was close to Peking that, in the first half of the century, the bones and various other remains were discovered that defined Sinanthropus, which seems to represent the oldest known attestation of humankind and is now for the Chinese a sort of national glory. Little history textbooks intended for children include as prefatory illustration its reconstructed profile—something like a snout—and end with the portraits of the principal artisans of the revolution. Even though there is ample matter for discussion here, and one must also take into account the change of perspective that discoveries in other parts of the world might possibly entail, China can be proud of the fact that this Adam appeared here: the first being intelligent enough to produce fire and to fabricate a stock of tools. From a glance at these history books—the sort I saw in Chongqing when I was on my way toward Yunnan—it would seem that the Chinese educators were determined to show that their country had not waited for the modern era to place itself in the avant-garde of civilization, since the very existence of the remains of Sinanthropus or “China Man” proves that it was already there, really, at the dawn of time.

  I am prepared to assert that there is a continuity to China, that the communist revolution did not descend on it like a disease; I am prepared to declare that the ancient wisdom and precious art of living that, for many of us, have long conferred on it a great prestige, find in what is happening in the new China their true culmination, as though a single thread connected, through the quiet periods and the sudden upheavals of its history, the various incarnations through which this part of the world has passed. And now, for me, a thread that has been leading me for several decades and that was entangled most intimately with that other thread, has abruptly been severed: the Soviet army has crushed the Budapest uprising, and apparently that army from a socialist country was, in the eyes of the Hungarian people, what an army of occupation is for a people that sees itself as independent. At first reticent, China has ended by aligning itself with the Soviet Union, and today it is applauding the action of the Russian soldiers, praising them for not having hesitated to spill their blood once again in combating fascism. After despairing of so many things, has the time decidedly come to despair of communism, too?

  Self-confidence, without fanatical violence. At the bottom of one of my working notes (one of those with the heading “Bit of China” on which are consigned the tenuous observations I am using here), I had inscribed these few words, an aide-mémoire for the optimistic conclusion to be drawn from the note that forms the essence of the content of the slip of paper: “At the Mountain of the West, near Kunming, a fully active Buddhist temple (presence of bonzes, offerings of fruits on the altars, sticks of incense burning, etc.). Among the various buildings—which include the lodgings of the bonzes, a restaurant for the pilgrims, etc.—there is a progressive reading room with a portrait of Mao Tse-tung.” Let the pilgrims, if they like, indulge in their masquerades, and let the bonzes draw a supplementary profit from the management of their table-d’hôte! No one forces anyone else, and one only hopes that the reading room will also be visited. That truth which sooner or later will be revealed has only to be put within reach of the people (more and more numerous) who are now capable, thanks to the method of accelerated teaching invented by a soldier, of deciphering the indispensable quantity of ideograms, if not all of them in their huge numbers.

  But—just as I was at that point in my critical examination of China, and as though, in my perplexity, I had vaguely summoned up a diversion—a dream comes this very night, slipping in and presenting itself like an ideogram that I must urgently decode. A dream that has (as is often the case) fragmented since my awakening into disparate pieces not always immediately identifiable, but originally, I know, constituting a single whole. A dream, of course, with references to events from my real life (sometimes obvious, sometimes tricky to separate out); with references also (more vivid but whose meaning is no less problematic) to a past dream that seems to be linked to an even older dream by the fragile footbridge thrown from one to the other by an aspect of the Mountain of the West as I saw it at Yunnan—the farthest point of my Chinese trip—six months after the manifestation of the second of those dreams which an interval of almost thirteen years separates from the first, but which shares with it, as with the other links of that chain, a curious family resemblance.

  A more or less vertical wall of rock, which is sometimes the natural balcony at which I arrive after a long journey on foot and from which I see, unfolding below, a fascinating spectacle; sometimes the high façade whose grandiose ornaments I contemplate, at the end of my climb, with a feeling of ecstasy mingled with an anguish that is not merely vertigo. This is the element common to my three irregularly spaced dreams, as well as to the walk I took in the environs of Kunming, during one of the obstinately rainy days we spent in that region where (according to our friend Wang Yuen-chen, who was affected almost to the point of tears by the mediocrity of the view that we thus had of her native country) we were supposed to encounter an eternal springtime.