The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  Certainly, I had faith in the new China and I was awestruck by the old China, or rather—for to express myself thus gives the impression that there existed for me two Chinas—I saw in China a country that was not only, because of its past, a rich theme for reverie, but also, because of its present, allowed for a confident hope. About Black Africa I had built a myth even before going there, and I had remained attached to that sentimental construction to such a degree that, on the day on which, in the rail car that was taking me back to Le Havre, I was overcome by such great anguish, it was when I thought that even this myth would henceforth be powerless to excite me that I believed I had reached my lowest point. With China, nothing like that: throughout my entire stay, I had been able to restrain my imagination even as I was waxing enthusiastic, and I was observing, not in order to rediscover what I had already invested in the object I was contemplating, but simply in order to try to judge; thus the bond that I thought I had formed with at least some people from there seemed to me a concrete bond of comradeship, a bond that was actively valid, in relation to an immense work in progress, and not as the seal of a unilaterally imagined fraternization. Now, in Copenhagen, direct experience had shown me that if I was at home somewhere, it could be only in a city belonging to the capitalist world and in the presence of what such cities offer that is least useful to communities. That this sparkling foam appears on the surface of an indefensible state of things I was convinced, and communist China remained for me a definite value. But the fact was evident: I loved that foam. Between feeling and idea a shocking divergence appeared, so that I was soon prevented from acting, since I could hardly tolerate such a contradiction, not wanting hypocritically to make light of it, and not knowing—I who am incapable of writing on the basis of ideas that are only ideas—how to discuss this China, too exciting for me not to be compelled to speak of it at length and about which, after a discovery relating to myself alone, I did not have to change my judgment, but which I had realized was situated outside my chosen sphere. Not without employing some ruses, I passed beyond this difficulty, but I never did mend what had come apart in Denmark, when China suddenly slipped to the periphery, however strongly it might still continue to occupy me.

  Invitations to go on trips (from the ships to the travel lap robes); places for people without roots or who are not at home except outside their homes; melodies which—inciting one to pleasure, to love, or explicitly expressing a Negro yearning—filled me in earlier days with diffuse desires, and which, in the ridiculous form in which I heard them again, led me to smile at the same time that they imbued me with homesickness for the period in which they had stoked these desires in me. What I had perceived during this stopover, which was still unforeseen even that morning and had no preestablished program (for we had at first expected to return by way of Sweden), was of course certain aspects of the modern West, but aspects that struck me as ironic allusions to the vanity of things: whether you are here or there, and in whatever way you occupy yourself killing time, time which laughs at you while waiting to kill you, you will always play the fool. If they affected me so, it is because they gratified in me, the casual stroller, a taste for futility too obvious to deceive and acted like a sort of homeopathic drug, palliating what seems to be my uneasiness as a man, and not only as a Westerner, by making my awareness of it most acute.

  When one gives, one does not take back. But: “Drive away one’s natural disposition, and it will come galloping back!” [What’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh.] Thus one can never be sure of anything: the left hand will take back what the right hand has given, one burns what one has adored, one adores what one has burned, after the rain comes the fair weather, one who laughs on Friday will weep on Sunday. A seesaw motion, governing my flights up and my tumbles down, my marches out and marches back, my false departures and false exits: I, the other; inside, outside; poetry, morality; preferences and obsessions, opinions and duties. A pendular movement, to which is added another back-and-forth motion, so routine that I barely think of talking about it: from my office in the Musée de l’Homme to my long table of bare wood at 53 bis quai des Grands-Augustins; from a work on ethnography (the history, not yet finished, of the plastic arts in Black Africa) to this volume 3 of the book in which I am trying to express what touches me the most intimately, so that I have to go—a change of task connected to the change of locale—from a kind of writing whose aim is to give an objective account of a mass of facts especially difficult to organize because they concern me very distantly, to an opposite kind which in truth I am not managing to prevent completely from being contaminated by the first, this style constantly hampered by my fear of being caught in the act of omitting or mistaking something; from a work carried out under contract and as part of my official job as researcher, as it is also part of my earlier commitment to those who once were colonized peoples, to a freer work in which what I seek to bring together—a decision I can revoke at any moment—is myself and my own attitude toward what is around me. This is the most troubling division just at present, but not the only one, for my life is subject to many other acts of balancing, on all sorts of levels and conforming to various different rhythms: hours of work and hours of relaxation (reading to the little extent that I can, meeting a few people I like very much, sometimes going to the theater); waking and sleeping, with, between the two, the gray area of dream, though only when I am lucky; mornings often mired (at least at the start) in bad ruminations and evenings generally more unconstrained; working days and country weekends during which, not always for my own good, I have ample leisure to think only about my personal research; the hectic time of my life in Paris and the time, in principle more open, of vacations and trips; beyond all this, the ascendant phases and the depressive phases which (without my being immediately warned) have their correlations in what I write here, and, certainly, explain in part the alternation of my feelings of ardor and my feelings of remorse. Segments of years, months, weeks, or simply days, stretches of time which, most of them, are also stretches of mood affecting my very being and consigning it to instability, whence my fear of being an erratic instrument for weighing almost equal to the scales from whose beam a pleasant Antillean woman helped me to suspend a heteroclite heap of objects, during a dream of which the beginning had as its setting the mountain and the end a house flanked by a garden. But, if the best is the enemy of the good, isn’t nitpicking, which is what I am doing, the thing that prevents me most surely from achieving a fair weight?

  De vos jardins fleuris fermez les portes,

  Les myrtes sont flétris, les roses mortes!

  Of your flow’ring gardens, the gates now close,

  The myrtle is withered, and dead the rose!

  I had sung this song at the farewell dinner we gave our Peking friends, and, if I sang this one, it was for several reasons. First of all, the limited repertory I have available to me is of the most undependable kind, and limiting myself to this quotation—which does not need a context—seemed preferable to embarking on something longer, which a gap in my memory would perhaps have forced me to leave in suspense. Furthermore, it is a song that Max Jacob showed me sometime in the past, so that, thus associated with the image of the writer who was my first guide, it bears a specific sentimental value and seems to me richer in poetry than if I had discovered it another way. Finally, I was quite sure that those two lines would be understood by my listeners as an allusion to the departure which, the next day, would close off the flowering days I had lived in China. No choice, therefore, could be better: a pretty song to which I am particularly attached, very French, and completely suited to the occasion—what friendlier homage could I pay to our Chinese hosts and hostesses? What I had not foreseen, despite certain misgivings, was that the period during which I took this trip—that in which Mao Tse-tung’s maxim Let a hundred flowers bloom and let the new emerge from the old set the general tone—would soon be followed by a less liberal period; tolerance, then, would no longer be in season and, seeing
the “Hundred Flowers” fade behind gates, henceforth closed, I would say to myself that by singing that song—whose sad and tender simplicity I was taught to love by a man who remained present through his works and through the equal beauty of his legend—I was uttering, without knowing it, prophetic words. Certainly, in the China of today (the China of industrialized communes, which has just now in its turn reached the age of unreason in which the people are manufacturing their atomic bomb), I would be less at ease than in the China of almost ten years ago. Certainly, also, if I went back there I would experience upon my return, with even more acuity than in 1955, the impression of having returned to the fold. But it is no less certain that, even while knowing how much it would cost me to give up certain forms of civilization governed by the law of supply and demand, I am decidedly not close to separating myself from China: it seems to me impossible that it should have, today, lost everything of what I saw there. In any case, how could I turn away from this country when it represents, more than ever, the red spot of hope for the Asiatic and African nations that are no longer officially subjugated, but that people are endeavoring to put back under the yoke in other ways?

  Among various questions that have remained in suspense, this one at least has been clearly stated: even though indelibly European, I remain faithful to China as to all the countries whose exoticism had, in the beginning, attracted me. But it is no less clear that this statement, the final polishing of an idea that does not follow from any decision, is just as conventional as the information given in an epilogue by authors of earlier times, for whom a novel could not close without the reader being informed about the fate of all the characters who had wriggled about in it like shadows. Even though I had decided not to conclude, didn’t I believe that it was impossible for me to be done, here, with an essay begun some twenty-five years ago without saying what had happened, not to puppets that I had imagined, but to the various elements that I have been mixing up along a path followed with a perseverance at which I am the first to be surprised? As for the Chinese idea, I have just pointed out that it now lives tranquilly in its hole, like the honest person of whom one learns that after his multiple tribulations he is at last spinning out peaceful days in his little house in the country. Must I report that a certain other idea, in just recompense for its merits, is having a brilliant career, even explain—in the way one recounts that a wicked man has been converted to good or vice versa—how yet another (what would be revealed, perhaps, by a close examination) has been transformed into its opposite, undergoing the metamorphosis that affects so many thoughts when one takes them as far as they can go? To draw up a report of this kind would oblige me to reread everything and would lead to my getting bogged down again. Thus, thrusting away all systematic research, I will confine myself to a few of the addenda that would be called for by the practice of narratives of earlier times.

  Even though still eager for walks, the bitch Dine is no longer as alert as at the time when I saw her in a dream rushing headlong from the top of a cliff. In human years, she would now be at least seventy-five, and, for quite a long time, I have thought that instead of having in one’s home a creature whose life is merely an abridged version of our own, it would be better—because this would be less depressing—to have one (an elephant, for example) superior enough to us in longevity so that its decline would not be perceptible to us.

  In several temples of Kyoto and Nara, there were statues that reminded me of other statues of an exacerbated baroque style which I had seen in China. But not one of them touched me as much as the strangely leaping figure of the Taoist chapel of the environs of Kunming, even though they were of a higher quality and manifestly older. The paintbrush this one was carrying I found again on one of those Japanese sculptures, so that it cannot be a question of a purely circumstantial attribute, as we had been given to understand by our very uncertain guide of the Mountain of the West as he told us the dramatic story of the author of the gilded statue.

  Sinanthropus Pekinensis, whose cave I had visited at Zhoukoudian like that of an Adam or a Prometheus, saw his record for antiquity beaten, and by far, by Zinjanthropus Boisei first, then by Homo habilis, both of whom left behind, in the region of Tanganyika (today joined with Zanzibar to form Tanzania), remains because of which Africa has assumed the rank of the continent where there came into being, among other curious examples of the animal kingdom, the first adumbrations of humanity (in other words of a species capable of fabricating tools and endowed with enough cerebral substance to be supposed to be capable of speaking, if not already of discoursing).

  For a long time I preserved in my bedroom (above my bed, on one of the boards of a set of bookshelves) the prettily imitated bird that a little Chinese girl had given me. Yet it simply disappeared one day and this flight seemed to me bizarre. But an electrician had come to install an outlet there and I said to myself that as he was working he had knocked down the bird—very light and rather poorly balanced on its feet—and that this pleasing simulacrum, dropped in a corner and reduced to scarcely more than a formless little heap, had then been carried off and thrown out inadvertently when, the worker having left, the housecleaning had been done.

  Stranger, certainly, was the disappearance, in the course of subsequent works, of the provision of barbiturates that I had reconstituted during a trip to Berne, where I had procured some for myself at two pharmacies without the least formality except that in the second of these shops, I had to assure the young saleswoman that I was a foreigner and just passing through, as though only the natives or inhabitants of Switzerland were worth protecting against the possible damages of a toxic product. No one in my home could have filched this provision, concealed with care, and I wondered if, without my remembering it, I had not hidden it again, this time with such cunning that it was no longer possible for me to know where. My investigations coming to nothing, I ended by imagining that after all it was not out of the question that I had myself done away with it in a fit of somnambulism or in a state bordering on it. But that is a hypothesis of last resort and, as far as I know, of such improbability that the enigma remains intact.

  If there are vanished objects which one would tend almost to doubt really existed, so inexplicable does their absence remain, there are, on the other hand, some that one believed to be mythical and whose real existence one suddenly discovers. This is the case of the “drum-trumpet,” the toy that I had ardently coveted when I was a child and which, later, I admitted belonged to the domain of reverie. Yet since I told that story, I have had the surprise of finding such a toy in the hands of a little Algerian boy whose mother placed him in our care for a few days while the father, who was fighting for independence, was imprisoned in Fresnes. One blows into the trumpet while maneuvering a pull-knob, which activates the little stick that strikes the very flat body of the drum incorporated into the instrument. But little Malik, dreaming perhaps as much as I had done at his age of a wonder that he did not possess, preferred to use it as if it were a camera.

  The fact that from a distance we may no longer be able to decide whether the thing that inflamed us with a mad longing existed as a thing that was the object of a desire or, on the other hand, as the pure expression of that desire—such an uncertainty may trouble us, but not, by far, to the same degree as being induced, by testimony that does not accord with our own, to doubt the reality of a fact that one has considered certain. At a dinner party in the home of mutual friends, someone rather young and likable tells me that the gymnasium at 5 rue Pierre-Guérin—situated for me in a time almost as remote as that of the “drum-trumpet”—still exists and that it still matches the portrait I drew of it; but this conscientious reader adds that he found nothing there resembling the stairwell cage I spoke of, that cage into which (dashing out of his house like a whirlwind because his wife, giving birth and bleeding abundantly, needed immediate help) the director of the gymnasium had leaped in a single bound. For several days, I was very disturbed by this statement, which undeniably contradicted what
I had written. I felt I had been caught in the act, if not of lying, at the very least of making a mistake, and this mistake seemed to me not only the sort of mistake that could render my entire work suspect but, in my own eyes, a sign of a disquieting capacity to drift. Thus it was with real pleasure that, after reflecting at length on the possible causes of my false report, I recalled that the director in fact lived in a building in the rue des Perchamps, quite close to the rue Pierre-Guérin, whence the fusion of the two places that had been effected in my memory, an error, finally, venial enough so that the authenticity of my tale was only slightly damaged by it.

  No doubt, the fragile edifice I have raised with materials that are often old needs more than one replastering of this kind. But the few instances of poor workmanship by which it remains certainly affected hardly count, compared to a defect more serious than an inexactness, here and there, of detail: this book (which ought to be my own truth, and about which I have occasionally gone so far as to think that, writing it being enough to justify me, it perhaps authorized me to lie concerning what was not part of it) keeps escaping me, for it is traversed by certain themes of which—since I am seized by them rather than they seized by me—I am not managing to unearth the secret, probably because they extend down to a level as deep as the unformulated taboo that would perhaps have obscurely restrained me, had my mother still been here, from paying the most deadly insult to the life she gave me by trying to rid myself of it.

  If I announce that I have at last written the article on Césaire but that the overview of the African arts remains incomplete (because of an excess and no longer because of a deficiency, for, too prolix, my coauthor and I are being obliged to do some major reworking), these eleventh-hour pieces of information have only an anecdotal value. What one ought to do is not to satisfy one’s professional conscience according to protocol, with clarifications and revelations that have no more weight than standard formulae inserted into a contract, but to be able to say, for example, why this ambiguous female image has retained so much charm for me ever since my adolescence: the moving spirit of Alexander’s Ragtime Band, a group of probably English minstrels that appeared in the old Alhambra in the rue de Malte, when each attraction there was still a “number,” announced on either side of the stage by illuminated numerals corresponding to the position it occupied in the program. A blond figure whose delicacy and vivacity contrasted with the deliberately loutish looks of the musicians in full plantation dress, she first appeared decked out as a young boy. Then, after a procession in silhouette and the flight by leaps of all the members of the troupe (including her), no doubt jumping over the source of light by which the silhouettes were formed, one saw her in an elaborate evening gown at the front of a stage box isolated by one projector, and each instrumentalist went from the wings to the hall to address his serenade to her. Led by this pretty creature in a new guise, dressed, I believe, in a sort of sailor’s costume of pink material (the garb of a chorus girl and almost of a little child that seems to me now to have been the tunic of a kindly Hermes Psychopomp guiding the souls with songs and dances), the finale had as its setting a backdrop reproducing a page of music: the famous song I want to be down home in Dixie, which belongs to the music-hall repertory of some fifty years ago, unless it is one of those American “coon songs” of which, at about the same period, I possessed a collection; each of the notes legible on the great white page opened like a porthole to frame the face of an instrumentalist, daubed with an intense black except for the periphery of the mouth, which, very pale, simulated thick gluttonous lips.