The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  All the sorrow of the world in a single cup of wine, a tempest in a copper basin and, under a bird’s plumage, the fragility of all those whose existence I hold dear. Having thus delivered my long commentary, I would gladly congratulate myself on having topped off with a moral lesson the little drama I dreamed. However, I cannot do it, knowing very well that—precisely when I was preparing to conclude—I was neglecting, for my convenience, an essential element of the question. It is impossible, in fact, to wash my hands of the bird’s death, for I, too, had wanted to capture it. If I was as moved as I was, wasn’t it because of the blood-red remorse that colored my pity? In a single piercing thrust, I identified myself not only with the bird but with the person who in his eagerness had been too rough, whence this nameless sadness, close to that of a child who is not unaware that it is his own fault, because of his extravagant boisterousness, and not in complete innocence, that he has broken his toy. The words around which my emotion crystallized certainly constituted an implicit reproach, or even, if indeed it was my wife who uttered them, a bitter allusion to moral havoc which—the oneiric mask being cast aside—I believe she would actually have good reason for holding against me.

  Starting from a garden that was not the one at Saint-Hilaire but rather the one at Saint-Pierre (which I have dreamed about once again, encountering my mother there standing straight up on one of the flowerbeds and restored almost to life but even smaller than she was and deformed here and there by swellings like a mandrake or a survivor of some plague), I have arrived, by traversing other gardens, at the ordinary stretch of walkway where, through the intermediary of a bird, I have now been confronted with this reality: correlating to my love of life, as well as to my horror at seeing how precarious it is, my enduring attachment to people whose fate I recognize is closely bound up with mine, and my inverse tendency to be unkind or detached when the idea of what awaits us, one and all, becomes intolerable to me. In one encroachment after another, and adding one slight modification to another, I have tried to fill, with the substance of my experiences, which for me take the place of arguments, the emptiness which is always carved out again after each attempt at a response to a question. In so doing, clearly I have discovered nothing I did not already know; but it is no less clear that, in order to elucidate certain facts I feel are important, I needed the evidence of that deserted garden whose calm (as much as its apparent uselessness) contrasted so with the bustle of the Antilleans. Now these details take their place among those of the problems concerning which my trips have forced me to question myself, whether those trips were attempts to find solutions for what was already obscurely worrying me, or whether they were the means by which I was led to ask myself other questions that in the end appeared to me inseparable from the first.

  Apart from my two missions to the Antilles (from which issued the crowd that pushed into my dream), if I do not include a brief interval such as the visit I was invited to make not far from Blidah in the valley of the Chiffa (whose great attraction was the band of monkeys that at a certain point on the route, and in response to the simple call of a peanut seller, descended from its mountain to be regaled by the tourists), and if I also disregard two earlier stopovers in Spanish Morocco (with the encounter, on the outskirts of a village that was not, however, very remote, of a group of children among whom there was a very small girl who, having never seen Europeans before, touched fearfully with her brown fingers the paler hand of my wife), it has always been as a single man that I have traveled outside Europe, as though I were constrained to return for a time to an old vocation as a person uprooted from his home environment.

  When I left for Egypt, still very young and married not even a year and a half, it was a flight—so to speak—to a pure state, in response to a violent need for a change of air, without my being really curious about the country I was going to see. My wife and I occupied, at Boulogne-Billancourt, a room fitted up especially for us in the house my wife’s family lived in, surrounded by modern paintings and sculptures side by side with a quantity (excessive in my opinion) of bibelots and old things, including a medieval German Pietà, some glasses painted with religious or profane subjects and, next to other exotic objects, most of which belonged to African paganism, a wooden figure from Easter Island. Like many of my surrealist friends, I had belonged to the Communist Party, so one evening each week I attended the meeting of the street cell to which I was assigned. Although it might appear justified by the idea of transforming a rebellion that had been until then completely ideal into a revolutionary practice, this semblance of militant activity was, in fact, only one more form of servitude in a life that I regarded—precious as may have been many elements of its setting—as a sort of engulfment in familial banality. Whereas I had wanted to be a poet, I was now a publisher’s representative, which (of course) left me enough leisure to write but could signify only an abdication, for me who, very surrealistically, had denigrated work in the name of poetry. Having posed as a person who yearned for the absolute, whom nothing could tie down, I was uncomfortable at seeing myself settled in married life, and I experienced the shame of having thus demonstrated that I had abandoned my furious intransigence. Given my partisan spirit, I also reproached those around me for their opinions on art and how life should be lived, opinions that I judged to be more conformist than mine, in that they did not go as far as those of the movement whose guiding principle was Rimbaud’s idea of “changing life.” Less assiduous with respect to my Parisian friends, now that I was living in the suburbs, I felt I was guilty of a twofold betrayal for which—it goes without saying—I tended to blame my wife and her family. To this was added the impression of lamentable deficiency from which I have suffered since before that time: a small-scale Hamlet, a coward as lover, a would-be rebel—such were the images of myself that no mirror needed to reflect back at me for their daily contemplation to give rise to an uneasiness that would soon verge on suffocation.

  So many years have intervened by now between me and the crisis that led to that first departure that it is impossible for me to say what its immediate motive was. My job bored me, and it also humiliated me insofar as it was a job that bored me and that I nevertheless accepted (bringing to it, moreover, less and less zeal). A member of the union, as is proper, I could certainly tell myself that by thus playing my part as a cognizant and organized wage earner I was avoiding what is degrading about the exercise of a profession, but that did not help anything: the official who had seen me when I had gone to register at the union of traveling salesmen and business representatives had in fact asked (a natural thing since I flattered myself that I was a writer) whether I would contribute to the bulletin he edited, and I had agreed, for lack of a valid argument to answer him with; however, I could not without feeling sick imagine writing something that would be suitable for this professional paper, so that my membership in the vast workers’ organization which is the C.G.T. gave me only, in the end, another reason for having a bad conscience. In the ranks of the Communist Party at that time, we discussed the arguments of the Trotskyite opposition, and I was sent as a delegate, along with one of my comrades from the cell, to an area assembly. This took place on a Sunday, on the premises of a school in the boulevard Jean-Jaurès. For hours I listened to the speakers from the two opposing groups dispute the question of the Russian kulaks, the balance of prices between town and country, what opportunity there was for Chinese communists to stay or not stay within the Kuomintang. A few images seemed convincing: one, offered by the members of the minority, was to bring together urban and rural prices like the two branches of a pair of scissors as it closes, and another, by the members of the majority, China as the rising main cable carrying the electricity of the Revolution. In theory, I sympathized with the oppositionists, but the plain commonsense arguments of those who would soon be called the Stalinists, and the appeal they made to the grand theme of the October Revolution to justify the decisions of the Russian comrades, those people who obviously knew more about it than we, si
nce they had behind them that formidable experience, seemed to me unanswerable. In order to put myself openly on the side of the opposition, moreover, it would have been necessary for me to be better informed, for if one takes the part of a member of the minority, one really must be able to hold one’s own. Whether what is involved here is an insufficiency of dialectic, too scrupulous a propensity to weigh pros and cons precisely, a fundamental doubt which leaves the door open to any challenge, or a simple lack of character, it is certain, anyway, that I have never been able to help allowing myself to be persuaded, in a discussion, and not for nothing has my companion often thought it useful to remind me how important it is to have the “courage of one’s convictions.” I therefore limited myself to listening as attentively as I could and remained quiet from beginning to end of the session, not emerging from my apathy even when a delegate from one of the cells from Renault challenged the street cells by saying that we weren’t doing much. What most depressed me was the report I later had to give of this assembly to my comrades in the cell: endeavoring to sum up the debate, I became lamentably muddled when describing the error (denounced by some) that would be committed in underestimating the kulak danger, the need (affirmed by the same ones or by the others) for measures to be taken so that the two branches of the scissors could close, and that Chinese electric cable in which one should have confidence (as was declared by the last speaker, a representative of Soviet orthodoxy). No one understood a word of my account, and, in the end, I was sharply reproached for not having protested vigorously when our cell was criticized. On this point, I wouldn’t have had to turn my tongue in my mouth seven times before replying, and the blame was only too justified; so that there was only one thing to conclude about my conduct during the whole of that Sunday, that I was annoyingly lacking in presence of mind and in the other virtues, intellectual as well as moral, without which one will perhaps be a devoted partisan but never a true militant.

  To help the proletarians cast off the yoke of the bourgeoisie presented itself—logically—as a solution to a number of my problems: wouldn’t it mean leaving my grotesque situation as eternal misfit in order to join those whose efforts are directed toward a healthier adaptation of things, to move from a completely verbal denunciation to a positive struggle, and, in the sphere of my private life, to react against the gentrification that marriage signified for the romantic I had remained? But I still would have had to be somewhat more than a mere shadow of a militant for this fine edifice of reason to have any chance of holding up. However, on that count too, I proved to be a failure. So the day came when escaping in one way or another from this imbroglio imposed itself as a vital necessity.

  Had I returned, once again, to our house in Boulogne-Billancourt a little too visibly agitated by the drinks I had consumed with one (or several) of the poets and painters who, despite my relative remoteness, continued to be my friends? Had I yielded to one of those fits of disturbance in which the horizon seems so closed off that you feel like an animal caught in a trap and you make remarks so uniformly pessimistic that the person who shares your life must deduce from them that she is no help to you? Determining exactly which drop of water made the vase overflow would have, in truth, only an anecdotal interest, and it is therefore without regret that I am able to give up that useless research. There is nothing else to say but this: to go join, in Cairo, where he was teaching French, someone I have always regarded as having emerged pretty much without retouching from the mold in which Rimbauds are made, my friend Georges Limbour, seemed to me likely to put me to rights again, and it was my wife herself who advised me to take this trip.

  I thus left everything behind, or, at least, made the gesture that seemed equivalent to this when the idea of “departure” had assumed some appearance of reality for me after having been for a long time only a romantic subject for daydreaming. What I accomplished remained, in fact, closer to playing hooky than to any tabula-rasa fresh start, for it was understood that I would come back as soon as I had drunk my bowlful of air and crossed out the scrawl of equations that had managed to spoil a brand new page of my life. But the thought of such a spoiling—without remedy other than absence—did not cease to be overwhelming and it was with an unsteady heart that I envisaged loosening—even for a time scarcely longer than the summer vacation—an emotional bond that had scarcely just been tied. Beyond that, a concern that was at the very least without nobility: having ceased to live with my mother only to take my place in another family, I had never had to count only on myself; and here, this time without any framework, I was going to have to shift for myself in the waters where I had been thrown by what a remnant of childish helplessness presented to me as a vertiginous plunge. In short, when I embarked (not as an emigrant but as a second-class passenger) on the steamship Lamartine bound for Alexandria, the very excess of my mental distress gave rise to exaltation, the thing occurring in my eyes as though a most tragic fate—a burning sign of the gods’ attention—had led me to undertake a fabulous long journey. It was, in fact, to the degree that the petty bourgeois homebody I had always been had trouble leaving that he thought he was a great traveler and decorated with fantastic colors a displacement in itself quite without any element of adventure.

  La fière . . . La fière . . . This was one of the almost immemorial fragments of the time that I persist in hauling along inside me and that comes, in this case, from one of the installments of Morgan the Pirate, a tale of adventures at sea and on land that used to be published by Editions Eischler, in medium-sized booklets of which other series were devoted to the detective Nat Pinkerton and the Indian Sitting Bull. Somewhere in Central America, in that area where buccaneers made certain names famous, like those of Vera Cruz and the Isle of the Tortoise (which was governed by the famous M. d’Ogeron whose fortified residence of Basse-Terre took the form of a wretched hamlet where one could still see, in 1948, long, heavy cannons half buried near sections of crumbling walls), the companions of Captain Morgan painfully sought their way through the inhuman region into which they had strayed, moving their feet like masses of lead as though they were sleepwalkers half dead of hunger, thirst, and fatigue, ills to which was added the torment of the fever [fièvre] of which, perhaps, they complained in their half-delirium in a sort of litany limited to the gloomy repetition of the word designating the fire that was overwhelming them. I myself said “la fière” [the proud], either because of a misprint attributable to the inattention of the typographers, or because of my own erring ways as an unskillful reader or listener in whom many words were deformed at the pleasure sometimes of his ignorance and sometimes of his imagination (for I don’t know if it was really I who would decipher the mediocrely printed installment of the series whose general title was Under the Black Flag or my brother who would read it to me). Was it at about the same time that our sister, invited to visit a girlfriend who was staying at Noirétable in the mountains of Forez, went to see the Gorges du Fier? It would be dishonest of me to offer it as proof, but I believe I can say that between this “Fier” [proud] in the masculine and that “fière” in the feminine, one as arid and steeply sloping as the other, a link was established such that this single syllable summed up for me all that one could find that was bitter and magical when one approached remote and difficult places.

  Begun in a state of distress that, as soon as the thread was cut, became lyrical intoxication after having brought me so low that, not long before my departure, I had been very close to throwing myself on the rails at the moment when the metro came in to one of the stations on the elevated line that passes through La Motte-Picquet, this trip, whose pretext had been to rejoin a friend whom I admired literarily and of whom the marginal life he had chosen seemed to me exemplary, ended up in a solitude greater than I had anticipated: once the school year was over, Georges Limbour left Egypt to spend his vacation in Europe and as for me, I went to Greece, a country of which I was wary because of my anticlassical ideas but whose beauties Limbour had praised to me, saying also that the
summer would be less torrid there than that of Cairo and that there, in drachmas, I would live more economically than here in Egyptian pounds. It was at the end of this solitary tour through Attica, Argolis, and the Peloponnesus that I encountered, without recognizing it at first but as though my true rendezvous were with it, the species of fever of all fevers which is malaria.