The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  to hold one’s tongue enough so that the little (or relatively little) that one allows to come out on paper may have all the strength of a substance not diluted, an infinitesimal strength on the scale of the forces that control us but one capable of provoking a change in some hearts and some minds;

  avoiding deception, sophistication, and carelessness in their various guises, to write like someone who knows what speaking means, and not to make use of language—a means of human commerce and a mechanism without which humankind would not even exist as it is—except with the greatest rigor and loyalty, in order that there may be some chance of communicating authentically to others what one says to oneself.

  These principles, whose meaning always implies rejection, and each of which is a no rather than a yes, I believed for a long time to be very firm and dependable. More modest than positive prescriptions, since they were only very general prohibitions or warnings bearing on a few transgressions not to be committed, they seemed less vulnerable because of the very fact that their aspirations appeared more moderate. This was an illusion which would probably soon have been dissipated had I immediately submitted them to an examination instead of conserving them, treating them as a definite acquisition, within a general outline, and one that I would not study until later, when the time came to reach my conclusion.

  Not to lie. However, unless, by chance, it is enough to say nothing at all, one must necessarily lie in a case where there is only harm to be expected from the confession of a truth: to cast into despair an ill person who is doomed and was not anxious to know it, to hurt a respected person who finds himself in difficulty, to cause the failure of an act that was just but could not be carried out openly, to throw oneself stupidly in the maw of police repression. In one’s private life, it also happens that lying and not lying may both be forms of betrayal: of course one owes the whole truth to the woman with whom one lives, but is it praiseworthy to act as her informer, betraying another woman to whom one is connected by the secrecy of a collusion? This is a pernicious dilemma for someone who wishes neither to destroy that precious complicity by a disclosure (should the person in whom one confided feel that knowing was enough for her, and no formal legal demand would result from the revelation) nor adapt himself to duplicity . . . I cannot fail to recognize, either, that many writers and poets whom I admire were arrant liars: Defoe, as much a hypocrite as his name in French would signify [de faux, “false”], since he was a double agent, a hired pamphleteer, and the author of apocryphal Memoirs; Chateaubriand, whose autobiography is not a document one can always trust, even though the far side of the grave may be its guarantee; Nerval himself, who despite his purity did not fail to arrange his childhood memories as it suited him, as well as the tales of his travels to the East, and those of his incursions into the underbrush of dream and madness; Apollinaire, for whom lying was part of the enchanter’s apparatus.

  Not to promise anything that one is not certain one will abide by: a good excuse for refusing every commitment! Isn’t it better to accept the possibility that one may not honor a promise than to behave so prudently that one will never even put oneself in a position to lose one’s nerve? And in the case of many literary texts, what would be left of them if every impulse that had risked being excessive had been deliberately strangled in the cradle and if a correct manner of expressing oneself had not been supplemented by a surplus which was in fact beauty itself?

  To proscribe ornamentation, so that words might be treated as something other than mere inconstant and empty wind. That rule—how could I reconcile it with my love of the baroque and of profusion, which needs above all to avoid being necessary? And could I (even in my own case) distinguish between what is accessory and what is essential, knowing that all sorts of ingenious ways of padding, even while using the most concise style, have been creative resources for someone like Raymond Roussel and that blatantly obvious filler words have served him as climbing pitons to reach the highest summits?

  Not to speak lightly. But what, in the realm of sociability, would a conversation be without any portion of lightness? Hardly anyone but a pedant would forbid himself any lack of restraint in a casual conversation, and it is often through the most unexamined remarks, even the most trivial or inopportune, that real communication takes place between the speakers. In the same way, an art totally sure of itself and never refreshed by the uncertainty of a whim or a gamble could not be anything but a dead art.

  No sacrilegious assault on the thoughts of another person? Yet of how many posthumous jewels, brought out into the light despite their authors’ expressed desire for burial, would literature be deprived, if this order had always been followed! What is more, elementary discretion would bid us keep silent about private journals and bodies of correspondence, which in many cases would be not only a serious loss but the source of errors concerning the exact signification of literary works.

  To avoid, equally, both a language too affected and also a language tainted with those locutions whose only purpose is to show that one is up to date on things and thus denote the worst vulgarity: the least contestable (it would seem) of all these precepts, because, being in the realm of taste rather than morality, it displays an ambition more limited than the others.

  To be sparing of one’s words and to keep, if necessary, a heroic silence. The Spartan child who did not unclench his teeth while the fox gnawed at his chest. The Christian martyrs who suffered and died without retracting, and sometimes without flinching, or proffering only prayers. The death of the wolf. Michel Strogoff, from whom the reddened blade held up before his eyes does not wrest his secret. The great exemplary figures of verbal economy: Sparta and laconicism; the historian Tacitus; William the Taciturn, whose motto I was taught by the Breviary of a Pantheist, by Jean Lahor (pseudonym of a friend of the not very prolix Mallarmé, Doctor Cazalis): “One need not have hope in order to act, nor success in order to persevere,” which appears to express all the silent obstinacy evoked by the word “taciturn,” which tinges with darkness and mystery the harmless first name of the defender of the Low Countries; the monk—Spanish, it seems to me, and perhaps a famous saint—of whom it is told how he stopped a fire by commanding the flames, thus breaking the silence which it had been his strict rule to observe for many years. There, no doubt, my system is revealed for what it is. It is a symbolic link (and verges almost on a pun) that I am establishing between ways of holding one’s tongue, of which some are a matter of morality, others of rhetoric, still others of tactics: stoically to keep one’s mouth shut against the whole world and say only what one wants to say, to rarefy one’s words in order to increase the power of the few one writes or utters, to be silent as long as necessary in order to bring to a successful conclusion an action to which one has dedicated oneself. Based on feeling, as it is, this link would not be based on reason unless, speech being not merely an instrument of exchange, but truly the sacred mediator I would like it to be, all the various ways of compromising it were subject—like so many profanations—to one and the same unconditional reprobation. Yet things being what they are, and since my mystique of language reflects pious desires rather than the reality, my system, which, moreover, ought to be reinforced by numerous supporting reasons and a whole casuistry, looks to me like a bastard assemblage of rules for writing and rules for conduct, more circumstantial than it had seemed to me, since they are aimed—most of them—either at errors that, in order to express myself, here, in such a way as to be understood, I must not make, or at errors alien to literature but of which I ought to know I am incapable, in order not to have the impression of being a fraud as I write these pages, which continually claim total authenticity.

  These rules, which, I might have believed, would, except for their number, be my Ten Commandments, have thus not stood this test: their transcription into commandments distinct enough to appear on Tables of the Law. But wasn’t my folly the fact that I tried to fix into articles of catechism the bubbles of thought that issued from this desire which m
ounts into my head like an exhalation from all my fibers: not to do anything that would amount to taking licenses with one’s own speech or with the speech of someone else, an insult (in both cases) to the quasi-divine nature that I attribute to language?

  “Quasi-divine nature”: a phrase that is timid, mitigated, because it results from a conflict between feeling and reason. To have the desire to write “divinity” (out of a need to valorize what the writer wields and, thus, to validate the choice I have made of this profession), not to give in to that desire (for, unless one believes in the Word as creator, it would be too absurd to deify language), to remove the difficulty by opting for a compromise: admitting as an adjective what one rejects as substantive, and, in addition, distancing oneself by means of the slight reservation of the quasi, with the notion of divinity that nevertheless—subject to this twofold precaution—one will not fail to suggest. What is more, it is in a sentence written in the first person and in the tone of a confession that this phrase appears, so that, in thus proposing something which, it is understood, concerns only me (as I am, with my tastes, my weaknesses, my idiosyncrasies), I commit myself less than by an assertion to which I would assign—whether explicitly or not—a general influence. No doubt this is an ill-disguised form of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. If I were to dismiss it, I would leave behind me an equivocation awkward in itself and capable, besides, of becoming larger and more serious. Better, therefore, that instead of avoiding it I immediately clarify.

  In the rigorous exercise of my profession—and in no other domain—I can attain my goal, which is, in sum, to believe in what I love and to love what I believe in: an old reflection that I can take up again today without changing anything essential about it, but that seems too general for me not to have to be more specific about it.

  To love without illusions, to militate without joy—these things are commonplace, and one must conclude from this that it is far from being true that to love and to believe always go hand in hand. Only if one lives in accordance with one’s vocation (exercising an activity that captivates one and seems valid), can these terms—whose duality affects the person who recognizes it like a division—be joined together indefinitely, at least within the limits of this activity. To say this seems like beating down an open door. Still, the very manner in which I noted this truism shows how very premature was any Eureka! To refer to the “rigorous” exercise of my profession is a restriction that would prove, in itself alone, that the thing is less simple than it seems here: there is no need to demand rigor if I must be overjoyed simply to follow this path I have chosen for myself. Yet that is still only a theoretical objection, and the real obstacle appears as soon as I try to see what my rigor will consist of. Will I practice this rigorousness in the domain of pure technique or will I extend it to what one may believe to be the duties of the writer, as a person whose works are the object of commerce, whether he wants that or not, and may possibly win him enough of an audience so that he has to take part openly in public affairs, he who does not disdain to offer himself to all and sundry through the channel of publication, when it is a matter of broadcasting his personal lucubrations? To limit oneself to technical rigor amounts to practicing art for art’s sake, but the other rigor leads to social commitments that quickly take precedence over strictly literary concerns. Fleeing this twofold danger, I have tried to construct for myself a poetics and an ethics which overlap and are capable, without divergence, of guiding me in all areas. My aberration was that, into a system which, in order to satisfy me, had to plunge its roots into the heart of my elected activity but would have failed in its function had it not also covered with its branches a much vaster area, I introduced rules whose only logical relationship to literature was that they concerned situations in which the agent of literature is challenged. I was proceeding, in short, like a painter who forbids himself to be an exhibitionist or a voyeur with the pretext that his art has to do with sight and that one must not offend the latter either in another person or in oneself. No other way of justifying myself but the following: to postulate speech as an absolute against which no species of assault would be tolerated. Thus I would have needed more rigor than I possess, in order to thrust away my old demon and not indulge in hypostatizing language. Often, an unfortunate circumstance is enough to make one return to a vice of which one imagined one had long since been cured, and it is thus that I have come back—or very nearly—to the ideas of a period very early in my youth, when I believed I would find in nominalism the proof that the word is the ultimate reality, a decisive argument for a defense of poetry.

  If I, a lost rambler trying to get out of his difficulty by reconstructing his route, review what was dictated to me by the idea of forging for myself a code at once literary and moral, I see that, as soon as it seemed to me that my construction was not holding together, I adopted these fallback positions: lacking a more direct connection between my writing taboos and my behavior taboos, to recognize that the latter respond in an interior way to a requirement of writing, since their observance must permit me to work without too bad a conscience; as the system failed to work smoothly even in its details, to make it more flexible by presenting it as the expression of a personal inclination, basically legitimate (I implied) but that I made the mistake of proposing as a sort of catechism. In both cases, in short, it was to myself that I referred, recognizing implicitly that what matters is the man, with the use he makes of language, and possibly what he thinks of it, and not the language itself. Thus, without realizing it, I effected the conversion that may permit me to emerge from the impasse.

  Already, one point at least is gained: I had built up my system of prohibitions on a misuse of language, it has to be said. That writer’s morality with which I wanted to equip myself, it seemed to me to go without saying, had to be based, since it was a morality of language, on the refusal to degrade the latter in any way at all. But it was in that that I was mistaken: how to deduce from language a specifically “professional” morality, since it is a thing belonging to everyone, and since in fact it is only an intermediary useful for all tasks, the worst as well as the best? Instead of trying to accommodate, I must therefore make a radical change in my point of view and seek within myself—I who make a profession not of merely using it, but of using it for special ends—what language refused me when I relied on it, as though, instrument of my profession, it should all on its own yield me my golden rule. It is from my own past that I have always wanted to isolate a lesson, applicable (if it comes in time) to the future that I hope to have available to me still. Thus a frank return to myself—who am the alpha and omega of the investigation—is better than this middle term: to theorize by referring, when I see that I have theorized badly, to particularities of this self, sometimes in order to legitimize myself, sometimes to make my mea culpa.

  A journey back more than fifty years, in the direction of the North Sea—such is the immediate form that this return will take.

  About ten years old, I am at Heist, not very far from Zeebrugge (for us, at that time, a simple dike closing a horizon, but which the shelling of the First World War would extract from its geometry and its dark gray color), also not far from Blankenberge (whose name I liked in black and white) and from Knokke (that same Knokke-le-Zoute which is now so popular, the site, every year, of an international conference which, with the nobly disinterested tone of the talks that are held there, seems to me a sad poetry festival), small beaches both connected to ours by a light tramway running behind the line of dunes that half hid the sea. Either because of bad weather or because of an end-of-season plan (at the time when everyone was buckling their suitcases, getting together with other summer people, whom in principle one would see again or gratify with news, but whom in truth one would never meet again), we have gathered, my parents, my two brothers, perhaps my sister and her husband, in a parlor or bedroom in company with three other inhabitants of the hotel who are, it seems, Russians, but whom nothing, in their clothing any more
than in their physiques, would lead one to regard as belonging to the Slavic world: the man, rather corpulent and generally wearing a cap (I do not know why, but we wondered afterward, in my family, whether he was not a spy or some other sort of suspicious personage with whom we had innocently compromised ourselves); the woman, also chubby, and who must have worn (unless this is an invention due to my too keen desire to restore substance to this trio so that it may help me to relive the whole of the episode in which it was involved) a woolen cap, perceptibly cylindrical and topped by a fat pompom; the little boy, probably so anodyne that I cannot recall—even imagine recalling—the least of his features, except for a sickly air ill-matched to the solid appearance of his father and mother. No doubt we have all had tea together and have now come to that great recourse of people who haven’t much to say to one another: parlor games. Card tricks, I am almost sure, for it is a trick of this sort—probably one element of a series—that is the subject of the memory on account of which the afternoon in question retains for me, despite the gaps and the doubts about certain details, the same definition as, for example, the outings with heroic gallops that my brothers and I took on rented ponies or donkeys along the beach, largely exposed during the hours of low tide. Though I did not know any tricks and could only gape at those with which one or two of the grown-ups must already have regaled us, this was what I accomplished: they invited me to leave the room, where a deck of cards was spread out on a table, and, in my absence, someone touched one of those cards; after which they summoned me, I came back, and I indicated on which card a finger had been thus put, going perhaps even so far as to name the author of the gesture that had been hidden from me by the opacity of the wall. Hesitating a little, but without ever having to correct myself, I guessed right every time. As much as the success itself, what enchanted me was the power of intuition to which it testified, and, even though I was only an instrument in the hands of the game’s organizer, I was proud of this talent, as though what had been involved was a marvelous mediumistic faculty possessed only by a few elite beings. If they had taught me to perform one of those tricks that astonish the shrewdest as well as the most naïve, I would certainly have been less happy than to reveal myself capable, without the slightest fakery, of an act that had to do with what I would call, in my vocabulary of today, double vision or magic. Mine was a proud euphoria, comparable to what is experienced by the gambler on a winning streak or the man in love discovering that each of his remarks, from moment to moment, renders more attentive and closer the erstwhile stranger: to feel oneself inhabited by luck. Thus I was horribly disappointed when someone told me, a little later, that it was only a farce, all of them having agreed not to touch any card and to declare, when I pointed to one, that it was truly that one which had been touched.