The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  On one side, the old dream of perpetuity; on the other, the preparation of a more just future. I have been convinced for a long time now that what Marxism-Leninism opposes to the mystiques of the past is another mystique, for a doctrine of pure reason is without motivating power, like a machine lacking a combustible or other source of energy. But this new religion, which does not allow itself to be one and cynically accords more importance to the economic factor than the nobler factors of the evolution of societies, requires a positive knowledge of the contradictory world that one cannot validly reform except by starting from its very tensions and discords. This is why, being a science as well as a form of messianism, it has the special property of being paradoxically a true religion, both a means of pulling life out of the mud and also the revelation of natural processes. Whence this law of primary importance, which in my opinion all militants—and sympathizers, among whom I rank myself—ought to regard as absolutely imperative: to avoid the situation in which the usual practice of resorting too quickly to lies, which the demands of the struggle may appear to justify, places the whole enterprise decisively within the control of mythology and, all rigor abolished, so disorients it as to make it miss its goal, which is to end the exploitation of man by man, real only when there are no longer either mystifiers or mystified.

  These perceptions are too abstract and, certainly, quite cloudy, in this day and age when our vocabulary is spangled with borrowed words that are striking in their brutal dryness (putsch, clash, twist, jet, which would seem to have emerged from the same mold, even though the last two are fairly innocent, one designating only a dance with vehement hip-wiggling, the other those aerial craft that in six or seven hours by the clock hurl Parisians to New York and vice versa), in this day and age when terms formerly completely anodyne are tinted with sinister gleams: “sigle” [set of initials], of rare usage a few years ago but in current use now in the dailies and essentially evoking the man with legs spread and chest crossed by a rifle SS-fashion whom one imagines, flanked by an imbecilically rounded eye and a snake about to release its saliva or venom, at the center of the inscription O.A.S. [Organisation Armée Secrète, or Organization of the Secret Army, opposing Algerian independence from France]; “arts plastiques” [plastic arts], which one cannot read or utter without the adjective [plastiques] changing to the singular, detaching itself and becoming a substantive [plastique], no longer colored with a touch of eroticism through the forms it designates in the feminine, but weighted, in the masculine [plastic explosive], with the effective substance which the fascists, in France as in Algeria, use in their assaults. Perceptions which—now that what is known as “decolonization” is provoking such unrest and bloody convulsions—are merely pale generalities, ill attuned to the great striking of the gong, so deep and so muffled that, at the time, many had not heard it: Bandung, otherwise known as the conference that was held between Africans and Asians rebelling against the supremacy of the West, a primacy especially dubious since in spreading its culture it has, materially, delivered up a part of its arms and, spiritually, lost the monopoly it pleaded in order to claim the right to have the upper hand.

  Whether the flood of events pushes me to a semblance of action or whether an ebb returns me to the thread of my musings, at each instant I remain torn between two sorts of affinities that are opposed in the manner of two factions, of which one continues its schemings while the other holds the power. Sensitive to this image, as to the plates of an old atlas whose maps are embellished with figures representing men of various races, animals fierce or pleasantly odd, dolphins, sirens, and monsters of other species, I have baptized them—a pastiche in debatable taste—my “Mao Tse-tung’s way” and my “Kumasi way,” thinking I can better define them thus than by the coldness of a formal exposition. On the one hand, the wish to acquire—in order to be truly a man—the practical intelligence and courage of which the builders of the new world set the example; on the other hand, the desire for a recovered freshness that my Ashanti Easter satisfied doubly, since that yearning carries me just as much toward the far reaches of memory as toward the far reaches, period. In sum, two ways for which two festivals in which I mingled with an end-of-time crowd provided me with the references, two ways that correspond approximately to the poles of the dream in which, after a walk on the mountain, I found myself in a house with garden: a house that was the site of an intrigue having to do with politics, since there I harbored Césaire the tribune and since I saw it invaded, no doubt in an electoral period, by people whom I found both agreeable and a little wearisome, experiencing with respect to them a feeling as mixed as that which I feel toward militant activity (one is not manly unless one takes sides, but what tedium and what constraints when one has taken sides); a garden in which nothing happened and which—indistinct, beyond its tangle of underbrush—was there like a simple reminder of other gardens, as much of the day as of the night, gardens that concealed times of amazement, fear, or throbbing pain. A house without mystery, where the presence of these Antilleans—not to mention the relic of my first trip to Africa, the laced boots—introduced, nevertheless, a little elsewhere or in other times, as though there were between the house and the garden (strangely diffuse though very close) a little more than the link that organically joins the architectural part and the terran part of a single country property. And the fact is that if I turn my back on the anachronistic glamour of Kumasi and look toward the actuality of the communists of Peking, the enchantments that have emanated from remote countries or ages are not unrelated to this conversion. In order for me to take a few steps down a path upon which a consideration of wretchedness close at hand had been powerless to engage me, have I not had to be shown the need for a wholesale transformation in countries which, including China, gave me an ample measure of enchantments of that sort?

  More and more headlong, the course of events around me in which I take part as an individual bobbing about among thousands of others has the effect of retarding, if not blocking, the course I am following here. Not only do I become worried and waste my leisure time listening to the news (the radio set being supplemented by the diabolical transistor, which is always within hand’s reach and which one can, almost without moving, turn on as easily upon awakening as at the moment of going to sleep), not only have I, like a miser, transferred into our country house—a precaution against those present-day risks, explosive plastic and police searches—the notes and the notebooks that are respectively the bases of my work and the receptacles for its results (so that I am physically cut off from it, and only the intermission of the weekend allows me a real contact with this book, woven of my life and having become my life itself, not so much because it contains the story of it and because I spend the greater part of my time fabricating it, but because it is at once what I remember and the memory that I want to leave, a substitute for my strength, which will die without ever having truly existed, and the tomb I am building for myself), it is certain, furthermore, that a threat like the fascist one, with the prospect of a massive descent into stupidity and cruelty opened by this exacerbation, half delusional, half coordinated, of group feeling at its most archaic, makes me doubt more than ever the validity of an effort as compartmentalized as mine. Between the self that I am and the self that I write, a twofold gap therefore appears: with these pages that jam and get stuck in one place, a crazy advance that, over the eternal laggard that is the narrated I, is made by the narrating I, drawn along by the course of events today even more rapid than yesterday; the loss of interest that distances me from this self-portrait, diminished in value as much as its model is reduced to insignificance when everything tells me that I am only a wisp of straw tossed about by the great wind of the Algerian affair, itself a mere detail in the vast movement that is shaking our familiar world to its foundations.

  Supposing we possessed—like a Tibetan ascetic—the art of seeing ourselves from outside as though we were not ourselves, then to compose our written portrait would remain an illusion, if by that
we mean to paint in his interiority the one who at that moment is holding the pen and not another whom, already, one knows only from memory when he is outlined on the paper. Because of the fact that, even before the transcription is finished, the thing to be transcribed has changed, this radical impossibility has, in truth, no practical consequence from which one should seriously protect oneself: if one has changed, it is not to such a point that the image thus traced resembles us as little as the reflection sent back by a distorting mirror; on the other hand, a portrait of this sort does not have to imitate the photographic snapshot, since one is aiming for a sort of timelessness rather than timeliness when one tries (as I am doing here) to define one’s own features by attaching oneself to the circumstantial in order to extract from it what it contains that is constant. However, despite these reassuring reasonings, the inevitable disjunction between the moment in which one describes and the moment that one describes can become a harsh dissonance for one who, like me, does not know how to go otherwise than more slowly when it is a question of taking his bearings within himself, of drawing up an account of the events in relation to which he situates himself, even of establishing any sort of statement in which lyrical effusion would be unsuitable. What I am writing in the present being only too often from the past long passed by, I see myself (not without uneasiness) divided between two sorts of duration, the time of my life itself and the time of the book, which I almost never manage—even approximately—to make coincide.

  That I am conforming to two different clockworks, each going its own speed—this is to some extent what I am feeling. It is a position all the more uncomfortable since in addition to the disharmony there is the irregularity of these movements: life that sometimes drags and sometimes gallops, despite the calendar imperturbably keeping time, the book that is suddenly blocked when it seemed sufficiently well launched to arrive rapidly at its end. This would still be nothing if the time of the book were not itself divided into two durations: the time of the author, very long when a page costs me many hours (even days) of work, shorter when, by chance, the writing is not too difficult; the time of the reader, for whom the flow of the lines is as uniform as that of sand in an hourglass, so that at each moment he finds himself misaligned with respect to me, who would like to be grasped in the present—a true present and not one of convention—in all parts of this book that do not deal expressly with old things. A specific example will make it easier to understand me and will show to what absurdity I may be led by these flashes having to do with the context of practical life that it seems to me in certain cases I cannot leave in the shadow.

  Several weeks ago, I wrote that as a precautionary measure I had transported to the country my notes in immediate use and my fair copy notebooks; however, about two weeks ago, as the threat became less distinct, I brought back to Paris all those papers whose absence, by removing from me the possibility of handling them daily, prevented the sort of hypnosis by which I might become one with my task, and without which I am as disarmed before it as before a schoolmaster’s assignment of a written paper presenting a reasoned argument. Thus at the moment when I spoke about the transfer (effected already some time ago), I was about to make the opposite decision, and I am bothered by this, as though, reporting it as though it were the latest news, I had been in bad faith, since I was contemplating going back on my first decision at the very same time that I was mulling over the sentences that would describe that decision. What is more, the few weeks in question, leaped over here in a few lines, occupy—measured by the eye as it reads—a space whose slenderness corresponds neither to the cataract of events (provoking dumbfounding collisions of hope, rage, and disgust) nor to my own tergiversations. This is, certainly, a fine result: confusion and discord falsifying a passage which, in principle, should enhance the truthfulness of my remarks by indicating what their surroundings are.

  So as not to neglect anything I will mention, although the thing is obvious, another trick that time can play on me, even in the short term: everything happens so fast these days that several of my allusions to circumstances (allusions capricious and often indirect, for it is only by fits and starts and almost furtively that I mingle an element altogether journalistic with a piece of writing whose point of view is very different) will perhaps have become strangely sibylline by the time of publication or will refer only to realities obliterated by other realities that will prove historically more prominent but to which I will not have paid any attention, either because another theme then in the works did not leave me the freedom, or because I felt repugnance at seeing strictly informative sentences multiply in my text. Corrections made within the proper interval would in part remedy this disadvantage. However, owing not only to such cuts, additions or substitutions but also to the purely compositional couplings that such changes would impose, the book would lose some of its authenticity (or, to put it better, would lose all of it, for in such an area there is no middle term). And this remedy, worse than the ill, would be all the less justified given that my purpose is not that of a memorialist, since I would like, rather than to reconstruct my life by following it step by step, to gain mastery over it by embracing it with a single glance (a glance situated in time but already outside of time, comparable to the glance attributed to a drowning man who sees once again, in the blink of an eye, his entire life unfolding).

  Now this glance in which everything ought suddenly to be condensed and assume the fixedness of a panorama—I cast it over these Scratches, these Scraps, these Fibrils that I am writing not simply in time (in this epoch that is mine and furnishes me my language), but, I may say, with time, since I need long intervals to adjust these materials I have fished from all parts of my life and to link reflections each one of which, far from offering itself in a solid block, is a movement that can be decomposed into several phases. To expect from a discursive, prosaic method the impression of absolute presence and total captivation that can be given only by poetry, in its apparently rootless upwelling, is—of course—to hope for the impossible . . . But if the word “expect” [attendre, also “wait for”] relates here to a vain expectation, reading it over many times at the head of that sentence which it begins and whose negative content I ran up against (so that I kept coming back to it in order to discover in it the link that would allow me to continue), I have finally connected it to something more concrete: the continual waiting [l’attente] to which I am consigned by a process so slow that it almost always makes me miss my appointments with myself—the latest implication of a word that I had used almost by chance without foreseeing that an effect of double meaning would lead it to betray, in an indirect way analogous to that of an involuntary slip, the flaw in my method.

  These notes that I keep in a box, waiting to use them, and whose content, when I return to them, has lost its freshness. The elements of my conclusion which I have already noted down—in advance, therefore, of the evolution of this series of writings—but that I leave waiting as a bureaucrat leaves dormant an unworkable portfolio as long as it is incomplete. A patience masking, perhaps, a sort of laziness or the desire to elude the hour of truth, a tactic after the fashion of Fabius (that cunctator whose story the De Viris during my first year of lycée had told me, at the same time that it taught me what it was to temporize), the wait for the ripening of some phrases that, coming in lightning succession, ought to culminate like the embrace with regard to which what has gone before will represent, at the very most, skilled approaches. On the very verge of my work, a wait that was closely and directly related to the century itself, since it was at the beginning of the Occupation that I set to my task, thinking—all projects in suspense—I could not better employ than in an extended tour of the inner horizon the time that would elapse before our emergence from the tunnel, this without seeing that I was entering another tunnel: this book that would soon aim at the invention of a rule of life based—taking into account my weaknesses—on my most real desires, but which is turning out to be too complicated to materialize within
a useful time and because of which, perhaps, worn out more than helped by the constant sifting that it demands, I will have nearly died before fate undertakes to eliminate me. Tired of waiting to reach my goal, I condemn any waiting that, from the beginning, may have played a part in the drafting of these pages. A certain position taken that nevertheless allows me to arrive at this: to establish the main headings, to let things come, to plan an investigation to be conducted in stages and for which one soberly takes notes, is to put off until later the attainment of what must, if writing is other than a vulgar tool, be realized at each instant and without any deferment. Nothing in common between the due date prepared by these approaches and the eternal noon or midnight sovereignly decreed by poetic creation. And if I thus shake in my dice box rubble from my past, clots of the living present and grains of the gestating future, instead of provoking the throw of the dice by which rotations round the clock face and horizons would at last be dominated, I flounder about in a time that one could call unsettled if one were talking about meteorology.