Now more than ever, they in fact respond to an immediate need, and, if they are capable of holding fast when the other reasons for living have crumbled away, this is a proof of their strength. I am talking here, of course, about an art or a poetry that cannot be reduced to art for art’s sake or to a pure classicism: art and poetry cannot be made, as my torment demands that they do, bearers of the limitless unless they are animated by that immeasurable ambition—to measure oneself (whatever form may be taken by this challenge) against the incommensurate. The cloud on the horizon is that one would have to be sure, for the trick to work, that the crushing defeat spared that particular faculty, and this would be to ignore the terrible pressure of physiological contingencies and to gamble on a miracle.
Aside from this, the proximity of my annihilation (the destiny of all living beings), what, then, do I have a right especially to complain of? Materially, and in my love life, I have suffered, up to the present, only damages whose sum does not exceed the norm; my regular job is one of the least tiresome conceivable and, what is more, I have become a writer, in other words a variety of artist, namely what I dreamed of being when I was very young, while fretting and fuming at the idea that I would never succeed in this, at least with a more glittering title than that of stubborn amateur. The hitch is that I have not become in any way the artist (or the poet) that I imagined: someone who has stepped through the looking glass. But here again, it is not a matter of a particular curse of which I have been the victim. I now know enough great artists, and I believe I know them well enough, to perceive that I was the dupe of an illusion: even if he is a genius, the artist, within himself, does not live as a legend or a cartoon; despite his occasional getaways, he remains mired down in our congenital swamp just as much as those who, contemplating him from outside, may suppose that his art transforms everything for him. A great disappointment, certainly, considering what my childish naïveté allowed me to anticipate in case I were to take my place, even if in a modest rank, in the phalanx of the elect. Nevertheless, the fact is that my capacity for enthusiasm with respect to the beauty that issues from a human brain has not been diminished by this to the degree that, ordinarily, I tend to think it has. Stumbling in my own work, I have often despaired of literature in general and not only of mine. However, there are books that I read, theater performances that I attend, pictures that I look at, or pieces of music that I listen to with a profound joy. There is no longer any question, in these minutes of spontaneous reconciliation with art, of thinking that literature has no meaning or is a perpetual misinterpretation. What I vilify when I see it from the inside retains all its value when I see it from the outside. If the writings that cost me so much pain and irritation were equal to those which, when they come to me from others, procure me this joy, and if I could know it, I would then have some reason for believing that by conducting myself, in my area of specialization, in somewhat the same way as those shock workers honored by the countries of the East, I am a thousand leagues from having obtained what I originally desired, but have not entirely wasted the time that was allotted to me. In which direction the future will decide this, I can hardly imagine; but I foresee that in any case its response will not be that which, if I could know it, might satisfy me. Pointless as it may be to grill myself about this, to pose such a question is nevertheless not absolutely negative, for it proves to me that the flood of my pessimism allows there to emerge the rock of at least one article of faith: to ask myself if some Last Judgment will or will not classify me among those who have not wasted their time is to admit in effect that the game is not so incoherent that there may not be winners or losers.
Inside, outside. My life as, in detail, it unfolds within me and as, broadly, it appears to others. In becoming a writer, I opted for a certain representation of the world or rather for a particular way of representing it (reading it through a grid more sensitive than the grids of rationality). I opted at the same time for a certain morality (the rejection of calculations too stingily reasonable), and, even though I decided not to raise it to the level of a system, it continues to direct my actions. The same was true of becoming an ethnographer, a profession which, much more than from the scientific angle, had attracted me as a means of coming into contact with living realities, and which in the end became an auxiliary of the first profession, by accustoming me to observe and by helping me to broaden as well as to humanize my conceptions. From this inner morality that governs me without, or almost without, my knowledge, though it has not spared me from lowering myself to several vile actions (which I would perhaps not cover with this shamed half-silence if they had been more boldly criminal) and also has not stopped me from stewing ridiculously about trifles in my daily routine, what has resulted, outwardly? A conduct whose positive aspects oscillate between a somewhat boy-scoutish doing-good and a somewhat lady-patronness good behavior: obeying the main commands of the union to which I belong; participating from time to time, without great energy, in a street demonstration; signing statements, petitions, and protests whose purpose is to defend sometimes the rights of individuals, sometimes the freedom of nations; subscribing the support of a few progressive or antiracist organizations; contributing my legal testimony to people fighting against repression; in private life, opening myself to confidences and giving comfort, by taking care to establish (with arguments that scarcely have an impact on me) that life is worth living and by affirming, if necessary, that to kill oneself would only be an avowal of defeat; when the opportunity presents itself, showing myself to be financially helpful or obliging; without being able to flatter myself, in this case, that I am giving assistance to someone who deserves it, but moved solely by the fear of being taxed with niggardliness, giving generally large tips and, when it appeals to me, or sometimes also moved by superstition (“the good Lord will repay you”), dropping a coin into the wooden bowl or palm of a beggar. So, a lot of fuss about nothing. I have sweated blood and water, and hurled fire and flame, to end up, in my daily practice, being a man like any number of other bourgeoisie who claim to be progressive, an author accepted into the anthologies and in whom perhaps his effort at sincerity will be praised, his exactness of expression, even his ingenious junctions and interconnections, in the absence of that mysterious thing which (in the work of certain people) fulgurates in even the least phrase and which I believe to be the most important thing.
A poor gift which fate has presented to me, I am left, however, with the scar inscribed on my neck that I have compared to an initiatory mark: a sort of “tree of life,” as was, in its ambiguity, the black equilateral triangle that my half-sleep had shown me, resting successively on one of its sides and on one of its points. If there is no great poetry except that which is total (conjoining life and death), how could one make life and poetry truly coincide without putting, at least, the tip of one of his shoes on the threshold of death?
Must I, who will have as posthumous viaticum neither hanged-man’s rope nor revolver bullet, any more than a Harar or cut ear—because I would be making up my mind too late, now, for it to have any meaning other than the suicide of a ruined man or a doomed invalid—view this scar, since I lack an attribute of the sort included in the figures of saints displayed in churches and museums, as something analogous to the cross of the brave or the Tonkin medal, which in other times and places one buried with the old dotard parent to whom it belonged? Empty boasting aside, it seems to me to constitute in any case the fibula (the jewel, whether clasp or brooch, with which one may close a garment by bringing together its two edges, otherwise separated like the two lips presented by my throat, which had been split over several centimeters), the fibula with which everything that I have on my mind is summed up, gathered by means of a sign drawn on my very flesh that will excuse me—but this is not to say I know what the future will actually bring—from committing myself to the tedious composition of the Fibulae that I was planning to write in order to attach firmly, and dominate at last, my scattered perceptions.
This mar
k, whose curiously clawed form calls to mind an insect with six legs that has incrusted itself under my Adam’s apple, remains for me the object not of a retrospective horror, but of a pride out of proportion to an act only half accomplished (a failure without which, in truth, there would certainly be a he whose image a few people would preserve, but not the shadow of an I to talk about my pride or my horror). Like those veterans who dwell on their war because they have not known any other great adventure, and who, should the occasion arise, like to display the traces of their wounds, I refer back to my failed suicide as to the great, adventurous moment that represents, in the course of my life, so nearly free of difficulties as it has been, the only major risk I have ever dared to take. And it also seems to me it was at that moment, as I married life and death, drunkenness and sharpness of vision, fervor and negation, that I embraced most closely that fascinating thing, always to be pursued because never altogether grasped, which one might think was deliberately designated by a feminine noun: poetry.
MICHEL LEIRIS (1901–1990), born in Paris, was an early surrealist, an ethnographer, and a prominent and influential writer of poetry, essays, a novel, and, most important, the four-volume, thirty-five-year project of autobiographical and linguistic self-reflection The Rules of the Game, of which Fibrils is the third volume to appear in English.
LYDIA DAVIS, recipient of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for her fiction, is the author of, most recently, Can’t and Won’t (2014) and The Collected Stories (2009). She has translated many works from French and other languages, including Proust’s Swann’s Way (2003) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (2010).
The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3 Page 37
