The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  For very different reasons, doesn’t all this indicate at the very least my antipathy toward the regularity of the straight line, a feeling perhaps of the same kind as that of the woman, who was, after all, intelligent and discriminating, who worked for a long time in our house at Saint-Hilaire and who (no doubt believing that parallel or perpendicular arrangements and pleasing arrangements are not compatible) systematically replaced in oblique positions the objects she had displaced to wipe the top of a piece of furniture? In many areas, I myself react as though, disheartened by the shortest distance between two points, I look with special favor on the roundabout schoolboys’ route, more personal, with its arabesques, zigzags, and deviations, and its rhythm broken by the sudden stop or about-face of a dog invaded by some unknowable idea or attracted by something or other he has smelled or seen. But isn’t it the case that to choose a path other than the most direct, or expressly to put askew what would be normal to put straight, is a property of art, which only really begins when one is allowed to add a surplus or to give a few twists to the forms demanded by the needs of a technique or a ritual (a sophistication which at a more advanced stage the baroque illustrates in an exemplary manner since it shows at once the rule and what violates it, the straight line and the curved or broken lines that tend to be substituted for it)? If this is so, and if art—like eroticism, too—responds to this need to complicate things uselessly, by which man stands out from the other animals, I betray myself when, out of a desire to justify myself, I reduce to the level of reasonable means of inquiry what I ought to take, on the contrary, in all its living gratuitousness.

  Mao Tse-tung’s way, namely (according to my conventions) that of morality and knowledge. The Kumasi way, to which I am attracted by sentiment and gratuitous preferences. Those two domains which I would like to be as little separated as, in the theater, stage left and stage right—one of my blunders is to have believed sometimes that I was joining them in what I was writing whereas I was mixing them at the wrong time, subjecting material that had completely to do with sensibility to a gloomy regime of reason, or broaching by way of an emotional reaction, or even by way of the picturesque, the thorny problems that are continually posed by the course of political events. I could, of course, make the opposite choice: give up these amalgams and follow my whim, try to save what is indispensable from the realm of poetry and abandon the other realm, by far the more disagreeable. But that would not resolve anything, for to eliminate themes that preoccupy me solely in order not to be constricted any longer would shame me, and that shame would obstruct me more than anything else. It is not the first time I have found myself in this sort of difficulty, but I have always set off along my path again, after a shorter or longer abeyance. Yet it seems to me that if the same question, in various guises, periodically comes along to stop me, it is because I have never been able to ask it with enough frankness and distinctness to be able, at the very least, to reject it as a question which one knows will remain without an answer.

  For a long time now—it must be said without hedging—I have no longer hoped to attain what, hesitantly extracted, had gradually affirmed itself as the ultimate goal and raison d’être of a piece of writing which, in the beginning, I did not suspect would become, at least, a trilogy: to unite the two sides between which I feel I am divided, to formulate a golden rule that would at the same time be an art of poetry and of knowing how to live, to discover a means of making the over-there coincide with the right-here, of being in the myth without turning my back on the real, of creating instants each of which would be an eternity. To want that was to obey a natural impulse: the desire for a complete and perfect life is the reason why most men have a god, in one form or another (even if that of a leader around whom is created a “cult of personality”). But as for me, I cannot rely on anything like that, knowing that a god supplies too well what we lack not to have been invented quite expressly. Thus my demand went beyond the allowed limits: when one does not admit of any deus ex machina of that kind, the astounding marriage of the carp and the rabbit which is what my intention amounted to is doubly untenable. Yet this naïveté is not my only mistake.

  Seeking what would be my truth, I started from my own examination, and I was threatened by a danger from which I did not, moreover, guard myself very well: to allow myself to be captivated by the portrait I would make, and no longer attach myself to anything but it. On the other hand, the truth of a single person being no more than a dream, it was necessary that others be able, if not to adopt mine (perforce distinct from theirs), at least to recognize the value of its bases. Whence the urgency of enlarging the perspective and the necessity for presenting my arguments. This is why, as I went along, I initiated—if not in so many words, at least between the lines, even during the intermissions—what amounted to debates, general ones, however particular the pretext may have been. But rather than to preside over a trial, what I wanted, even while it seemed to me I was calling everything into question again, was to support or to be quite clear about a choice I had made in the very beginning, since if it had been different, I would not have been primarily interested in the mysteries of language, the raw material of poetry. My gross mistake—worse than the one that consisted in asking for the moon—was to have misunderstood that (or refused to realize it) and to have lingered over false problems that my need for philosophizing led me all the more easily to pose because I sometimes found in them an occasion for shaking myself awake, at the same time as a terrain from which to take off again. Tending to proceed by alternatives (for my convenience and because contrasts have always enchanted me), I would bring face to face—on paper or in my head—two apparently equivalent terms which I believed to be such but which, in fact, were not. It is toward poetry, the over-there, and myth that my preferences indubitably go, and the second direction—that of morality and knowledge—is not a counterpart of the first: the myth that one knows to be mythical no longer has anything exalting about it, the over-there that one loves one must have right here, the true poet can be neither a swine nor an idiot—this was my thought before it was dressed up in its Sunday best, myth, over-there, and poetry being for me the axes of reference and the other term—reality, undeniable presence, acute awareness of what is and of what must be done—having only a secondary role, as a condition that must be fulfilled and not as the object of my possible covetousness.

  Except for a very small part of it, what I am saying here is not new: the recollection of ideas expressed along the way, and the deduction that is called for. It is curious, certainly, that I was able to stray from my path to such a point that returning to it gives me, almost, an impression of discovery. But if I deviated thus, was it not because I got it into my head I ought to demonstrate, and not merely show? With the ceremony called for by the need to find reasons for myself, I distanced myself, in fact, both from poetry and from lived realities in order to manipulate mere notions, that is to say, shadows whose forms and dimensions varied according to the lighting, so that there was a moment when, among those silhouettes all equally without flesh and only the more deceptive because of that, I wandered as in a carnival where those very people you know best have become strangers to you. A charade whose dupe, now, I could no longer naïvely be, since I know which false maneuver makes me responsible for it: having rigged the weights without fully realizing it, when, for example, holding the scales to be equal between Kumasi and Peking, I presented as two poles whose attractions I experienced symmetrically that thing to which I have always been attached, I may say without great exaggeration, and that other thing toward which I am borne along, in the absence of a truly militant fervor, by fleeting impulses to which the goads of self-love are surely not alien, the situation being such, today, that one could not fail, except through total renunciation, to be politically “engaged.” My mistake, in short, is to have envisaged a conclusion that would answer everything (none of my concerns as a twentieth-century European being set aside) and that, with whatever incisive or subtly periphrastic f
ormulation it might be adorned, could not help being dogmatic, a serious error for two reasons: I could not succeed in this except through a cycle of reasonings, a mode of linking thoughts that is less akin to the flight of an eagle than to the plodding of a beast of burden, and this meant—a fault even worse—obliging myself, in the guise of judging fairly, to pose too abstractly the questions I had to debate for the truth not to suffer. It is patent that, originally, my program was more modest and that, when I thought I had to go farther, I did not know what an abyss there was between the desire to condense into an immediately prehensible block the essential part of what I am and what I value, and the ambition (ineluctably that of a logician) to articulate a system that would be proved equitable and the only one appropriate to my aspirations as well as my possibilities. To make the magical world of adventures in language coincide with the naked and shocking world of the bird fallen from the nest—this was expressly my final view at the period, already remote now, when, on the same slip of paper, I noted, first, my belief in the need to make the frivolous play that takes place between words coincide with something of a vital seriousness, then expressed my wish to derive from this attitude toward words a more intense way of life and a rule for living, a reflection with which a morality is explicitly affirmed, but which no less explicitly subordinates morality to poetry, since it is in a certain attitude toward words that I intend to find the indication of a manner of behaving, at the same time as the source of an enrichment of life. Morality = a rule of the game, that is, that without which there would not even be a game, I remarked also, playing at seeing in the game—in other words in what seems, in essence, the most contrary to the serious—a justification for ethics, since, in the absence of a demarcation, quite unremarkable anyway, between deeds permitted and deeds forbidden, life would be no more than an almost automatic montage of scenes spaced out from birth to death, and not that contest that can impassion us by reason of the very difficulty one finds in conducting it without moral lapses.

  Kumasi and Peking, tender love and constraint, intersections of the imagination and cruxes of reason. If it is clearly in the direction of the imaginary that my scales tips, and if, like those for whom the practice of an art, whatever it may be, is the activity of choice, I give myself up to a game that leads me to neglect many duties, I am, at least, far from being unaware that there can be no game without rules and that failing, consequently, to respect prescriptions that are foreign to what I love above all else, it is to directives implied by the game itself that I must submit. I thus arrive at the idea (glimpsed for a long time now) that, since blind acceptance disqualifies one just as much as the negation of all principles, a professional morality—more disengaged from theology than a morality with a capital M—is alone capable of constituting the rudimentary code which I cannot do without. All things considered, now that this troubling question (after so many others) has been exposed, my desire to arrive at something more alive than a theoretical insight is not a reason that can excuse me from giving a sketch of one here. In other words: to indicate what laws I am obliged to conform to in order to “play the game” in the framework that I have chosen for myself, the few laws that in a practical sense I cannot infringe, under pain of seeing my work lose all value in my eyes, and perhaps, finally, all virtue (if one admits that the words of a cheat, soon noticed, quickly lose, in the eyes of another person, the capacity to convince, move, or transfigure that they might unduly have had). Of course, the games of beauty would not be able to bend to external injunctions without failing in their essential role of surpassing all, but if this authorizes one to take them as sovereignly immoral, the artist must still pay for the right to devote himself to the immorality of beauty, by being pitilessly rigorous in his observance of the “rules of the game.”

  A list of prohibited acts, a statement of certain refusals—such has always been this code, starting from its old states of being and continuing right up to the present clarification (anachronistic, for it has revealed itself to be more dubious as I gave it form):

  not to lie;

  not to promise anything that one is not sure of carrying out;

  not to pay with words or pay oneself with words (things that the writer above all must regard as too precious to turn into joking substitutes for real money);

  not to talk lightly, and to distrust ill-natured gossip as well as the thoughtlessness that produces gaffes (grotesque sins against speech, in the same way as there are sins against the spirit);

  not merely to respect the envelope, which does not need to be sealed with red for its violation to be a bloody offense, but to give proof in all circumstances of that basic discretion;

  to exclude the intellectual cowardice that would lead one to pad one’s talk with locutions in the style of the day, and also the affectation that would be represented by the opposite, the use of language either too scholarly or too pure;

  to hold one’s tongue to the extent of being able to suffer without bestially giving way to crying, and if necessary to keep a secret despite torture or risk of death;

  finally, to forbid oneself, more severely than might anyone else when one practices the literary art, that which in real life is a crime of injury against language, and to succeed in being not merely master of one’s words and perfect confederate of speech, but a “man of his word” as the current sense of that expression may require.

  One can adopt these taboos—or that morality of speech which, ideally, the person cannot contravene without the work being thereby degraded—as foundation for a poetic art (in the very broad sense in which I mean it), as well as for a savoir-vivre:

  not to lie, and therefore to scorn the artful dodges likely to deceive the reader, who—if he must be seduced—must be so in other ways than by maneuvers aiming at effect alone and comparable (minus the heroic flame) to those of the legendary burlador of Seville, condemned much less for having been a corrupter than for having been a glib talker whose false oath was one of his principal weapons;

  no empty promises, and consequently to reject, in favor of the most exact expression, all verbal inflation, the poet being, anyway, his own first dupe if he takes himself for a seer, no writer being excused from forgetting that the earth continues to turn while he indulges in his games;

  to treat words as something other than wind and, hence, to proscribe pieces of bravura for the same reason as redundancies, embellishments, and filler words;

  not to talk thoughtlessly, whence the incongruity of making literature into an art of the dilettante Jack-of-all-trades;

  no sacrilegious attack on the thinking of another person, and thus not to alter a text in the least through reshaping, prudish pruning, tendentious quotation, or deceptive interpretation;

  to avoid a blowsy style (pointlessly picturesque) or the fluency of another kind offered by a philosophical or scientific vocabulary to formulate certain thoughts (thus put in a glass case), whereas to make a strict rule for oneself to express them in natural language leads one to delve into them and thereby discover ramifications one had not suspected;