Essays One

by Lydia Davis

  The next volume, Fourbis (Scraps), continues the inventory, though its preoccupations have inevitably shifted a little with the passing years. Its main themes and subjects of inquiry, as described by Leiris, are now “to trim the claws of death, to behave like a man, to break one’s own walls”—in other words, to tame death, to take action, and to break through the circle of the self. This volume begins to reflect the attraction exerted on him by external, historical events, including political activism. It also tells of his continuing preoccupation with the erotic, specifically detailing the story of his liaison with an Algerian prostitute, Khadidja, when he was a soldier stationed near Beni-Ounif during World War II, describing what he saw as her moral as well as physical beauty. In this volume, as in the first, he brings to his method of composition his training as ethnographer, working from slips of paper on which he had previously made notations—of facts, memories, ideas—which he then takes as starting points for his explorations.

  In the third, and present, volume, Fibrilles (Fibrils), though Leiris worries that his objective itself has also shifted with the passing of time, the problem becomes clearer: how to reconcile literary commitment and social commitment. Here, he looks in particular to the example of his close friend, the poet Aimé Césaire, who combines both without compromising either. Having opened the book with an account of his participation in a delegation to China, his attraction to that country, and his hopes for its future, Leiris continues with an exploration, again, of contrasts: his perception of China (representing morality, constraint, reason) as one of two poles between which he is divided, the other represented by the large market town of Kumasi, in Ashanti country (symbolizing sentiment, dilection, imagination), and the thronged Easter service Leiris attended there in its (ugly, he calls it) cathedral. The heart of Fibrils, however, the story that dominates this volume, is that of an emotional dilemma and its consequences: his division of loyalties between the woman with whom he has been having an affair, and his wife, called only “Z.” He describes his impossible situation—being frank and honorable with either woman would betray the other—and his resultant suicide attempt, as well as its aftermath and the ramifications of both. The associative explorations in this book delve deep into several significant dreams, including some he had while half awake in his hospital room in the days following his suicide attempt, but his discussion of these dreams always circles out to include other narratives from his past, accounts of travels, or of friendships. (Leiris’s preoccupation with his erotic life and, more broadly, love, as well as his suicidal tendencies and his avowed cowardice in the face of his own “annihilation,” began early, showing up, for instance, in L’Afrique fantôme, when he was barely thirty and already married to Louise “Zette” Godon.)

  We realize, in the course of this volume, that the subject here is not only Leiris himself, and his actions, feelings, and thoughts, but also Leiris in the act of writing, and the writing of this essay itself. He talks about this book in the act of writing it. He describes the slips of paper, he quotes from them, allowing each to lead by association to more “data” for his explorations. He hopes to establish between them connecting threads, the “fibrils” of the title. His punning and his associative pairing—wordplay was an essential part of Leiris’s relationship to language—are never arbitrary, but constitute so many knots where some of the multiple threads of remembrances and ideas come together. In this volume, he fears that he will nearly die of the effort it costs him, even before fate finishes him off. Whereas he had hoped by writing to escape time, he is nevertheless subject to time—the past of his life, his present life in the changing world, and the time of the writing itself. Perhaps, he also realizes, the rules he seeks will be directives implied by the game itself. Perhaps he should settle for a “professional morality” as opposed to a more universal Morality.

  In the last volume, Frêle bruit (Frail Noise), more ample, at four hundred pages, than the previous, Leiris once again defines the purpose of the whole of The Rules of the Game as to “expose as thoroughly as possible the sample of humanity that he is.” He describes this volume not as a logical or chronological sequel to the other volumes, but as a peninsula or constellation; it is not a rational construction, but a “florilegium” drawn from all periods of his life. The form of the book, therefore, is unlike that of the previous volumes of The Rules: whereas they are continuous, with only a few breaks into separate parts, this last volume includes many very brief sections, some less than a page, as though Leiris were bringing his last, disconnected thoughts together into one place. It contains, for instance, stories, chants, curses, poems, meditations, lists of titles, scraps of memory, and bits of his journal. But there could be no “last thoughts”; the ongoing autobiographical project, which included several more shorter works even after Le Ruban au cou d’Olympia, would not be so much ended as finally interrupted by death, since even after his death, his vast, self-reflexive, and self-critical journal was published, at his instruction—more than eight hundred pages.

  In the pages of Frêle bruit, Leiris is all the more acutely conscious of the passage of time, even more relentlessly haunted than in the other volumes by the fear of his own death; because by now, as he concludes the book, he is, in fact, in his midseventies—an old man. But he has also managed, over the course of the four volumes, to clarify certain things for himself: he has recognized in himself, he says in this volume, a need “to merge the yes and the no,” a need that sometimes seems to denote “a perverse inclination to find enjoyment only in ambiguity and paradox … sometimes … sanctified by the idea that a marriage of contraries is the highest summit one can metaphysically attain.”

  * * *

  Both Manhood and The Rules of the Game were preoccupied with the horror of his own mortality, the specter of his own death. It is possible to imagine Leiris, even more than most chroniclers of their own lives, wanting to complete the work that can never be completed, by writing about his death. But as the writer can’t find a vantage point from which to look upon his death except one that precedes it in time, it seems that Leiris’s whole endeavor, in this work, was somehow to get around that difficulty, somehow to comprehend, embrace death beforehand in such a way as to have documented as completely as possible what he might also have liked to document as it was happening or after it had happened. The voice that said this, so lucidly and so frankly, has been silenced by Leiris’s actual death in 1990, and, in a way that is not yet clear, this changes the voice one hears in the pages of his work. This voice both does and does not come to us from beyond the grave.

  On the other hand, it is also possible that Leiris wished to write in precisely the situation in which he did write: documenting his life in the shadow of his death. For a kind of completeness is certainly achieved here in The Rules of the Game through the avoidance of closure, changing the terms of the work so that the motion is infinite insight inward, infinitely continuing investigation. No event is “closed,” no thought, no datum. Progress is inward, and circular, rather than forward, involving the close examination of all sides of things: not only people and events but motives, effects, interpretations, and the nuances thereof. And digression, as well as expansion outward, is a natural part of this close examination.

  Amplification away from the main narrative track throws light on what is being described, fills in the picture, at least, of how Leiris himself reacted to what went on. Amplification can be infinite, of course, and even infinitely justified. It not only illuminates but also works dramatically to suspend the action, to delay satisfaction. It gives the event, which may be quite banal in itself, an added richness and depth; it may extend its meaning from personal to public. Amplification strays from the point, but it also particularizes and nuances the subject.

  In fact, Leiris’s close attention to documenting the ordinary elevates it into something so particular that it becomes strange. As he came to distrust the exotic, he found otherness in the familiar, foreignness in the domestic.

&
nbsp; Although his main subject is himself writing these works, part of the activity of his exploration is to bring the world into the discussion: it is through oneself that one gains knowledge of the “other” and of the world. His examination of himself is not exclusive but inclusive. He does not reject politics, history, or culture as part of his own self-portrait. Throughout his life, he was fully involved, literarily and politically, in the world outside himself—particularly with his fellow artists and as an activist against the “flagrant” injustices of society and “our Western arrogance,” as he put it—and he includes his political activities and his friendships in his account of himself, as well as the non-Western cultures he studies as an ethnographer.

  What is our sense of the narrator himself? It is curiously paradoxical. Leiris is rarely brief, rarely plain, in Fibrils, since every thought seems to produce a possible counterthought that should be included, and his constant elaboration and qualification, his ruthless honesty, his stated doubts express or imply a certain modesty, self-recrimination, apology. Yet at the same time he effectively and relentlessly commands our steady attention by involving us in his thoughts as they unfold. The play of opposites is active here, too, as it is throughout The Rules of the Game and in Leiris’s work in general: the pendulum swings between reticence and self-display, private and public, inside and outside, self and other.

  * * *

  Leiris maintained a separation between his work as writer and his work as ethnographer. He constructed his days themselves as alternations between work at home, as writer (in the mornings), and work at his office, as ethnographer (in the afternoons), the two spaces “stirring up different ideas,” as he said: he was rarely an ethnologist when at home and rarely a writer when at the museum. The two spaces were connected, physically, by the familiar, daily reiterated path of the number 63 bus.

  It was in this office, a small room below ground level at the Musée de l’Homme, that I met Leiris for the only time, on a day probably in the mid-1980s that I can no longer pinpoint. To judge only from appearances, his preoccupation with the erotic, his periodic love affairs at home in Paris, and, even more, his liaison with the Algerian Khadidja, would seem quite incongruous for this cloistered scholar, this awkward, reserved man, in tailored clothing so correct and elegant, with his skin so pale, bony skull so naked, expression so tense and haunted, eyes so fearful: this was how he appeared to me that day. The museum, next to the Trocadéro Gardens and across the Pont d’Iéna from the Eiffel Tower, was surrounded by tourists milling about in the morning sun and by African vendors flying uncannily lifelike mechanical birds. Leiris’s voice trembled when he greeted me outside the elevator in the basement corridor. He was shy, as I had been warned, and he fell into silence often. He was deaf in one ear—forewarned of this, also, I probably spoke too loudly. The single window, above some radiator pipes, was now and then filled with the faces of curious tourists shading their eyes to see in. They would have seen a woman sitting nervously erect on her chair across from a thin old man, his bald head slightly bowed.

  Khadidja herself had at first mistaken him for a monk. But the opposition between external appearance (tailored, spotless, ascetic) and internal being (emotionally chaotic, uncertain, vulnerable) is inherent to Leiris’s central preoccupation, well explored in Fibrils, and this apparent contradiction is a part of Leiris’s more general complexity, a complexity he was at such pains to try to understand and demonstrate in The Rules of the Game.

  Leiris wrote me a postcard early in the final year of his life, some three decades ago (on this, there is a date), signed in shaky, spidery script. In it, he offered, most graciously, and with a typical qualification, typically inserted with syntactical elegance into the sentence—dans la mesure du possible, “insofar as possible”—to give me whatever assistance I might need from him. I was then completing a translation of his collected occasional writings, Brisées: Broken Branches (which includes, among other colorful and beguiling offerings, a brief piece on metaphor, one on human saliva, and a decoding of the captivating, to him, Fred Astaire). I never asked him for help, in the end, but there are a few points in Fibrils I would not mind checking with him, now that it is too late. But it is too late.

  2017

  THE BIBLE, MEMORY, AND THE PASSAGE OF TIME

  As I Was Reading

  Some time ago, I was reading a history of France, beginning, with a misguided zealousness, at the very beginning of this book, three inches thick, with the intention of reading it straight through. I was startled to discover, by page 30, how very little happened in a thousand years, back in the last Ice Age.

  Our present millennium, the twentieth century, was creeping and climbing and halting toward its end. Every hundred years of it had been so fought-over, so exceedingly complicated, filling history books. Not only had it been eventful, but each event had given rise to so much interpretation. But back then, it seemed, in what I thought of as those Paleolithic times (I was not really sure what Paleolithic meant), very little happened in a millennium.

  What about this thing, a millennium? Before I continued reading this 679-page book, I decided to spend a little time investigating. I wanted to find out some things—what other millennia had been like, how long a millennium really was, whether it was longer at different times, how much happened during one, what happened. So I started looking here and there to see what I could find out.

  I wanted to start with the word millenary. But as I was already slightly befuddled and more familiar with the word millinery, I immediately lost my way, and instead of reading about a period of a thousand years I began reading about hats. I already knew that hats used to be important in the United States, or more important than they are now. I did not know that the simplest form of head coverings, in antiquity, were the cap and the hood. Hats developed from these. The first known type of hat (Greek) was distinguished as such by having a brim. (This hat tied under the chin and was worn by travelers.) In the nineteenth century, women’s hats increased in size with their coiffures. With the advent of the closed automobile, hats became smaller. I knew that Danbury, Connecticut, had been a center of hatmaking. I remembered this because I had a cousin Louise who lived in Danbury. I thought about it every time I drove near the city. I did not know that its hat industry began all the way back in 1780. In the 1960s, the industry declined. I thought I knew that the decline began with JFK not wearing a hat at his inauguration.

  All this was interesting, although I wanted to know when, exactly, the Greek hat was developed. What, exactly, did they mean by antiquity? Elsewhere it was defined as “in ancient times.” But when was “in ancient times”? Roughly, they said, before the Middle Ages.

  Next, I discovered that the millennium can refer to the thousand years in which, according to Revelation 20, Christ will reign again gloriously on earth and holiness will prevail. A millennium can also be a period of great happiness or human perfection. The article referred me to “Judgment Day.”

  I thought I knew what Judgment Day was, but I decided to refresh my memory. On Judgment Day, this world will come to an end, the dead will be raised up in the general resurrection, and Christ will come in glory to judge the living and the dead; then the sinners will be cast into hell, and the righteous will live in heaven forever. Glory, specifically, means the splendor and beatific happiness of heaven. It can also mean a ring or spot of light. I did not know which meaning applied to Christ coming in glory—perhaps both. There was apparently no generally accepted teaching among Christians as to when the Second Coming would take place, but many individuals had ventured to prophesy its dates. Those who lay stress on the end of the world are called adventists, chiliasts, or millenarians.

  I wanted to know what the word chiliasm meant. I thought I could remember this word by thinking of chili and chasm. But instead of chiliasm, I looked up chiasma, meaning “crossing over.” Crossing over occurs in the first division of meiosis. Two chromosomes of a homologous pair exchange equal segments with each other. Crossing
over results in recombination of genes found on the same chromosome. Under the microscope, a crossover has the appearance of an X and is called a chiasma. Chiasma is Greek for “crosspiece” and comes from the Greek chiazein, to mark with a chi, or X.

  Once I found chiliasm, I learned that it comes from the Greek chilioi, meaning “one thousand.” Belief in the millennium is called chiliasm by historians of the ancient church. Looking back from chiliasm I saw chiliad, a period of a thousand years. Looking ahead from chiliasm I saw chili con carne and chili sauce. Before chiasma came chiaroscuro and before that chiaroscurist, before that chiao, a Chinese coin, Chianti, and chi. After chiasma came chiasmatype, the spiral twisting of homologous chromosomes during zygotene that results in chiasma formation and provides the mechanism for crossing over; chiaus, a Turkish messenger; Chibcha, a Chibchan people of central Colombia; chibouk, a long-stemmed Turkish tobacco pipe with a clay bowl; chic; Chicago; and chicalote, a white-flowered prickly poppy of Mexico.

  A few days before, I had heard from a Romanian visitor how the history of his country had been affected by having such neighbors as Turkey and Russia. I also learned that Romania was successively overrun, after the Romans left it in the third century, by the Goths, the Huns, the Avars, the Bulgars, and the Magyars. I was eating in a Salvadoran restaurant. Our waitress was of Swedish descent. Our host was English. His wife, who was American, apologized because she had to leave in the middle of dinner to attend a class in Sanskrit. She explained that the students were taught not just the language but also the concepts behind certain of the words. How interesting, I thought. But what did I know about Sanskrit, really? I knew it was very old. The only other thing I knew was that in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in a work of fiction that was based on a real account, the sixty-seven royal children of the king of Siam were purportedly studying Sanskrit. I learned this from reading Anna and the King of Siam.