The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  The man with a complexion the color of brown bread, in a gray uniform with the collar closed under his chin (wearing a sailor-style cap of the same material and the same color), the civil servant—or something approaching it—somewhat surly, unlike most of the Chinese we had met up to then, the lusterless president of the local section of the organization whose guests we were, could not have been telling the entire truth, or, if he was correct in what he said, had transmitted to us a message that must have been distorted at one or several points along the way from him to the interpreter Wang Sien and from Wang Sien to us. To the same extent as seemed believable—in its guise as legend—the touching anecdote he had told us about the young buffalo whose statue we had seen during our climb (that little buffalo which, in tears, had begged the butcher to spare it, and, hiding under its belly the tool for cutting its throat, had so deeply moved its executioner that the latter, realizing that animals, too, have feelings, had given up his cruel profession and retired to the mountain to become a bonze), the story of the suicide was suspect, without one being able to tax with ignorance or bad faith an informant whose cultural functions did not empower him, for all that, to inform us about the folklore relating to the various constructions of the temple. Perhaps it went without saying that the unfortunate lover did not discover in himself a vocation as an artist except through that of monk, and that it was only within the framework of pious contemplation that his work was, temporarily, meaningful to him? When he threw himself to the bottom of the mountain, was it really as a man disabused, who sees that art cannot heal sorrow, or as a mystic who is pushing his asceticism to an extreme and flees life after having given up his ordinary ways, as though it was not possible to achieve fullness except through the extreme gesture in which the individual denies himself forever? In other words, had this act been the quasi-accidental result of a disappointment or the culminating point that the monk artist had already obscurely determined for himself when he had undertaken to decorate the chapel? If the object placed in the right hand of the statue is really a paintbrush that was not included originally, to see it as an offering to the god who is represented here, or as one of his attributes added belatedly, appears more sensible than to make of it what our guide did: a commemorative sign identifying the work as a self-portrait of the sculptor. The story of the suicide of the Mountain of the West, as I have set it down, thus presents many disputable points and no doubt many gaps. It is not, however, for this purely logical reason that I cannot be satisfied with it, but because the very appearance of the statue—the central part of the whole story—incites me to rethink the melodrama: whatever the dead man’s fate may have been exactly, his work is in no way that of the pitiful victim of despair over love.

  I had not noticed it immediately, but there was a glaring discrepancy between that sad story of the unconsoled widower and the exuberant passion of the figure whose author he was. Supported by his right foot alone, the personage seemed to have been captured in midbound toward a goal that was unknown, perhaps nonexistent, and not distinct from the pure joy of bounding forward in that way, his whole being tense with the animation of an excess of life. His radiance would have made one think he was invulnerable, were it not for the instability of his pose, which, in itself, evoked a danger. But the radiance would not have gone beyond what it was—a vulgar gilding on a sculpture without great style, a little taller than life-sized—if there had not been this impetuous movement, with its inherent risk (so it seemed) for the very one who was abandoning himself to it. Someone expert in the subject of Oriental religions and philosophies would perhaps have identified the personage—god or sage—right away from the marine monster on which he was standing, from the shrub that sprang up from his left foot, from the supposed money, more conch or horn of plenty, and from the problematic paintbrush. But I, forced to confine myself to what I had before my eyes and what was hardly illuminated by the remarks of our guide, was sensitive only to the unbridled ardor that emanated from that creature apparently devoted solely to the intoxication of living and of spending himself.

  Taken to an extreme, such a rage to live does not differ from the rage to destroy oneself: the moth fuddled by a source of light and consumed by it is a common symbol of that fusion of opposites also conveyed, in familiar language, by the expression to burn the candle at both ends, applied to the person who shortens his days by abandoning himself excessively to his thirst for pleasure. In a realm apparently less deleterious, can we not regard as the composition of a coat of arms of suffering and death those classical emblems of romantic enthusiasm: fires and flames, lightning bolts, an arrow piercing a heart, verbal or graphic accessories of which the last, when one carves it in bark, is nevertheless equivalent to a tree of life? And if, most often, to die of love, to love till we die are only pious hyperboles, do they fail, for all that, to indicate what a sinister vanishing point old-fashioned lovers, when they reach the height of exultation, give to the perspective of their paradise? From the pleasure seeker who seeks only to “live his life,” but does so without stinting, to the legendary hero of the type of Tristan or Liang Chan-po, who dies love (so to speak) rather than lives it, certainly the distance is great. Still, in one as in the other, the great impetus is a desire that consumes and that finally acts as a summons to death.

  The vertigo of love, experienced physically when a man takes a woman in his arms in order to forget, to deny the disturbance—in some way chemical—caused by the almost tactile sensation of her presence and when to cling to this animate pillar seems the only means of reestablishing his disrupted equilibrium. The vertigo of death, or more exactly of the notion of death, hardly less dizzying than the view of an abyss, of which the horror itself that one has of it is doubled by the temptation to throw oneself into it to cut short the uneasiness it engenders. The vertigo of art, peculiar to that thing which is neither game nor religion but discovery and exhibition of indecipherable realities which can only be brought out by giving them a form, so that, at once powder in the eyes and revelation, illusion and truth, it is a tightrope walk for anyone who devotes himself to it without too much naïveté. To palliate the effects of a presence by increasing its proximity, to flee the fear of a fall by falling on purpose, to change into a categorical instability the accidental lack of a stable position (evident in the artist, and especially in the poet, for, in a life in which everything should cohere, how can one detach oneself from things and transcend them), these motions can only betray the existence of certain fundamental ambiguities, unless they arise from vulgar foolishness or display the talon of the famous demon of perversity, which, in many a case, malignly changes the desire to escape a feeling of anguish into a desire to enter its ways (a demon whom, from the point of view of current history, one could easily take for an éminence grise of Western politics, prodigal in bad farces of this sort: the proponents of an ultra-French Algeria acting in such a way as to deepen still further the gulf between Algerians and French, or the American anticommunists throwing Cuba into the arms of the Soviet Union, to cite only those two examples—to laugh at or to cry over—of apparently deliberately swapping a false menace for the very thing one was dreading).

  Each generating its own vertigo (or perhaps the same vertigo, since the embrace is not only a refuge but also a whirlpool in which one believes one can annihilate oneself, and because aesthetic creation, that funambulist’s trick, puts one in touch with a world beyond, where the laws of nature are abolished), love, art, and death seem linked by a delicate web of reciprocal demands: the fact that we must die increases our need to love (either in order to find oblivion, or so that something may still happen before we disappear) but the lovers’ fever is expressed by many in the vow to die together (in order to attain the impossible fusion or because they cannot accept a future in which one survives the other); sharpening a thirst that it slakes only metaphorically, art induces us to seek its satisfaction in passion, which in turn opens out onto art because passion must, we believe, be surrounded by enchantments
and because, in its beautiful castle (also, and just as much, a thatched cottage), etiquette would have us express ourselves otherwise than in a profane language (as witness, besides the flowers and gifts, so much talk and so many love letters, even the most awkward of which are works of poetry); lastly, if art presupposes a refusal of the mortal condition (denying the erosion of time, suffering and the final checkmate by escaping from the current world, or, more greedily, producing something a little less transitory than a human life), in practice it may experience crises and—in the same way as drunkenness, eroticism and other common ways of escaping oneself—divert one toward a simulacrum of death. I felt this strongly in earlier times when, seeing the poetic state as a sort of fury (a notion that seemed to me to correspond better to the very basis of the surrealist spirit than that of revolt, already too ideological), I was, when I wanted to write, seized by a desire for a trance that would be accompanied by violent outward signs—scratching on the walls or jumping up to the ceiling, tipping over backward—as though I felt that the gesticulations of a man suffering from some kind of epilepsy could trigger its mental equivalent and cause me to move onto a plane, if not exterior to life, at least such that my limits there would be obliterated.

  Not without difficulty, I am trying to rationalize what was given me, as pure feeling, in a single mass instead of coming to me by way of reflection: starting in my childhood (as I have already said), love, art, and death were presented to me in one cluster by everything I knew about the great arias of opera, for me summits of art, and which hardly spoke to me about anything else but love and death. In variable forms, this mythology, which says, in sum, that true beauty is tragic in its essence, has not ceased to impress me, and when, about fifteen years ago, I gave up bullfights, seeing them only occasionally, whereas my afición (far from fading) was transferred to Italian opera, this was in fact a return to the source, because I rediscovered there, in its first freshness, the absolutely dionysiac philter which, as a young child, I had been permitted to taste. However, if I now prefer, to the bloody reality of the taurine tragedy, the fictive tragedy of opera, it is not simply because of the fact that my age, and the atrocious turn taken by events, with this latest war, which has not yet subsided, have made me more sensitive to the sight of death and have increased my attachment to the period when my consciousness was still awakening; it is also because it has become apparent to me that one experiences at the theater—in the presence of its flagrant trompe-l’oeil—an emotion paradoxically more authentic (given the smaller degree of ambiguity) than in the plaza de toros, where one so readily believes oneself on the same level as the tragedy that one is experiencing when it is others who are experiencing it. Rejecting this comfortable illusion, and turning, a little ironically, toward a dilettantism that is no longer of our century, did not distance me from the splendors of tragedy: one evening, I hurled myself into it, thoughtlessly, in order to escape, of course, problems that I felt powerless to resolve, but especially (I am now persuaded) because art and love—poetry and its most direct illustration, the twofold object of my covetousness even before I became a writer—were, in me, the source of an exaltation too tender and too piercing not to be confused with the desire to die from it. Crammed with what I had drunk like a gluttonous child, and with the drug apt to make me literally dead drunk, I lay down between the sheets that would have been my tragedian’s peplum, if not my gisant’s robe, and was engulfed in them without thinking that it is also in the whiteness of the bed that, in adolescence, one feverishly experiences those mysteries of which, later, I wanted the occupation of poet to restore to me at least a distant glimmer: the heavy sorrows in which one loves to become lost, plunging one’s face in the pillow, the fleeting joys crowning the carnal enchantments that, in a hallucinated delirium, one gives to oneself alone, as much in order to drive away the fear of the night, open as it is to a parade of nightmares and apparitions of all sorts, as for the pleasure itself.

  The sky has detained its guests, said the president of the association courteously, observing at the time of the final goodbyes the rainy weather that called for (he explained) the use of this dictum and of which his gray uniform, as well as the boredom emanating from his whole person, seemed the accompaniment required by the celestial protocol. The fires of the sun, in that region which had been overtaken by a wave of cold temperatures, had perhaps condensed in the golden statue which, beyond rain and fair weather, pursued without moving its inexorable course and gave quite a different lesson from the mediocre apologue for which it had been the pretext. The fact that it was endowed with such brilliance and such movement makes it impossible for me, at a distance, to see its author as someone whom adversity had finally crushed. Much rather, it bears witness to the resources of art to fuse good and ill fortune in a single entity and admit death as one of the dimensions of life. Thus, neglecting to seek out its positive meaning—what man or what god?—and retaining only its tacit response to the question that worries me, I have in the end classified it in my personal pantheon, as a sublime male counterpart of the heroines to whom my aunt the singer lent her voice and the richnesses of her physique: Carmen who attacks with a knife and later appears to run straight to the fatal blow of the navaja, Salome in ecstasy before the severed head and even beneath the soldiers’ shields, Tosca who kills, believes she is saving, then with a great maenad cry hurls herself from the top of the ramparts, and finally, those women who are led by a passionate devotion to throw themselves into the waves, the lover of the Flying Dutchman and her epigone Vita.

  All the sorrow of the world in a single cup of wine. The despairs one ruminates on with one’s face buried in the childish pillow. The Latin maxim Est quaedam flere voluptas (translated by one of our humorists as There are ladies one sniffs with most sensual pleasure). To see Naples and die. To listen on one’s deathbed to Bellini’s Casta diva (as Chopin or some other famous romantic wished to do, and as I too would formulate the desire to do, if I had to fill out a questionnaire about preferences). That fury which, in the mid–nineteen twenties, I held to be a necessary condition—was it the more masculine form which I wanted to give to a depth of sadness that dates back to my earliest youth and represents the ancient foundation on which all that I do is built? An unconditional sadness, which could not simply be thrust away, and to which, from the outset, I was connected by the times—full of disturbance, it seems to me, and sweetness—when, before sleeping, I dampened my pillow with tears and pressed it with my mouth, open as though to bite. A sort of original sorrow, perhaps as determining for me as, on the universal scale, was the first sin, according to the Scriptures and many other mythologies.

  Whether the rain was a hospitable gesture of the sky or (as I would more readily believe) a sign of its ill humor, our excursion to the Mountain of the West was not at all spoiled by it. But the fact is that we had a vision of Kounming that in no way corresponded to the promises of Wang Yuen-chen: the city of eternal springtime where our interpreter was born appeared to us—in the image of his first name, Cloud color of pearl—bathed in a damp grayness and I retain a memory of it as murky as was the atmosphere itself. If it were not for the testimony of my notebooks, I might ask myself if it was really there that we were presented, because of a chance encounter in the street, with a spectacle by which I was charmed, despite my little taste for things military: in one of the main thoroughfares, a group of soldiers without weapons proceeding, as is proper, in ranks; all identical, except that certain ones—mixed in among the others and walking with the same slow pace—wore the double pigtail, a difference that nothing allowed one to assume before one saw them from the back. These soldiers, men and women, were on their way, we were told, to a lecture (which one could guess to be Marxist-Leninist), and this no doubt explained their look of well-behaved schoolchildren. The martial appearance, which I hardly appreciate in the representatives of the stronger sex, seems to me still less admissible in those of the weaker sex, and as for women soldiers (carrying rifles or simple auxiliar
ies like the “gray mice” of the Occupation), they remind me, almost all of them, of a scene of the 1914 mobilization that shocked me by its disorderly crudeness, even though I was at the time too young to find the war in itself repugnant: near me, in the boulevard Suchet, where there was a barracks, a regiment parading “flowers in their rifles” flanked by a woman, probably drunk, whose chauvinistic excitation and, perhaps, her condition as soldiers’ girl had led to wear gaily on her head a policeman’s cap. There was nothing reminiscent of a farce among the young infantrywomen I saw in Kounming; except for the color, close to khaki, their uniform differed little from the overall-style dress so widespread for both sexes in the new China and, above all, they seemed to assume their role with a perfect naturalness, as though this was only one duty among their ordinary duties: work in the fields or in the factory, political education, tasks more militant or less, family occupations. These, we were told, were women who had remained in the army since the Liberation or were soldiers’ wives employed at functions such as nursing. That women should change so gently into soldiers—even if only as simple menders of the war force—may seem worse than when a carnivalesque note, by showing them disguised rather than metamorphosed, attests to the incongruity of their militarization. But this apparently outrageous affront to femininity on the part of the Chinese is justified by the framework in which it is inscribed: the great movement that animates the whole life of their country and that would not be a truly popular emancipation if certain activities remained, as with us, the almost exclusive prerogative of the men.