The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  In the railway car, knowing I was finally embarked on the last stage, what I felt was a great wave of euphoria. I who ordinarily avoid as much as I can any conversation of the sort that so often comes into being among people who are traveling together, chattered abundantly with my traveling companions. There was in my compartment a troupe of musicians dressed in blazers such as are frequently worn by those who perform in music halls or in casinos, and there was in addition a needlewoman who also, now that the season was over, was returning from the Lido in Venice. The fact that they thus had somewhat itinerant jobs endowed them for me with the charm one ideally attaches to those of whom one can say to oneself that they are “charlatans” and “children of the trade.” I exchanged with them, as with other strangers encountered in the corridor, impassioned remarks about what is intoxicating about the fact of traveling. A sort of profession of faith which was easy for me to make now that I was returning to my home in all tranquility, leaving behind me the trip and its hazards. I believe that on certain of those I talked to I made the impression, if not of a madman of whom it was best to be wary, at least of one of those terrible bores whose overtures I am usually careful to reject, whether they are made to me on the bridge of a ship or in the compartment of a railway train.

  At Paris, descending onto the station platform, where no one was waiting for me (which was natural, since I had not announced the hour of my arrival, but even so was unpleasant to me), I felt really uprooted: the ground sliding beneath my crepe soles (those soles of which it amused me to say that they were made of “calves’ lungs,” like the rails on which rests the statue made of corset whalebone described in Impressions of Africa), my clothes continuing to fray around a thinness in keeping with the idea I had always formed of the sort of asceticism involved in a stay in a “hot country,” the fatigue that I was experiencing and the absence of anyone close to me come to welcome me made me think that my first attempt at a departure had perhaps made me more of an outsider than I had wanted.

  The very day after my return, I was reduced to taking to my bed. I had a fever of over 40 degrees centigrade, and the doctor summoned to examine me declared in favor of an attack of malaria. He treated me energetically, and a few days sufficed for my temperature to fall. I who ordinarily read only very slowly and at the cost of great efforts of attention occupied my period of reclusion reading, at the rate of about one volume per day, a part of the Parisian romancero in which are narrated the adventures of Fantômas, the bandit with many and varied experiences. I have not forgotten the proud impression of extreme acuity of mind that I experienced during this whole period. There were, of course, moments of slackening in which I projected on one or another of the walls of my room a succession of images issuing from my plunges into a half delirium, but a conscious effort always allowed me to recover my lucidity as soon as someone entered the room and spoke to me. When the fever relinquished me, I sweated so much that my sheets were quite wet and one might have thought that the disease that had left me, sucked up by some other blotting pad after that of my bed linen fit to be wrung out, was resolving into an immense spot of dampness spreading over the wallpaper against which the couch where I lay was placed.

  In a position, now, to look at this with a cooler eye, and knowing myself better (for I have taken, with the passage of time, a clearer and clearer view of my narrow repertory of gestures repeated with few variants), I can say to myself that beyond any deliberate trickery, but as though I had astutely gotten out of a venture without loss, I emerged gaining rather than losing from an escapade in which the adventure had been experienced without seriously testing me: in effect, because of this crisis involving malaria, a disease that was certainly benign but that had swooped down on me like a punishment from heaven, I ended in a blaze of glory my several months of leisurely wandering and I was anointed in my own eyes as one-greatly-pursued-by-a-fate-that-will-never-grant-him-rest.

  To appropriate the world symbolically by roaming through it, to live in new settings in order to enlarge my mental perspectives and break the thread of the calendar, to slake a certain thirst as cerebral as it is emotional by establishing other human contacts—these are, on a level deeper than the immediate need for change, some of the most important reasons I have for traveling. But I am discovering, in the light of this first departure, which at first had Egypt alone as its goal, another reason, more secret but no less decisive, that I had for effecting, even though nothing obliged me to do this, distant displacements that substantially removed me from those close to me.

  To substitute, for my presence, which I managed so badly, an absence that was certainly not total, since I continued to exist for those I had left, but such that I existed henceforth at a distance—this natural consequence of my first departure was also one of its most exciting aspects: moving about in a world different from that in which my family lived, I escaped them, without, however, entirely burning my bridges—quite the contrary, since between us there was now the connection created by the flattering notion which my letters and postcards, with what they said about my unsystematic way of living and my itineraries, would lead them to form of the traveler I had become, and by the notion (on my part), almost mythological and no longer simply social, which, through being without her, I would form of the companion from whom I was separated. As though—having for a long time now been impressed by a famous example—I had wanted to relive, in my own way, that biblical legend of which a transcription in the form of silhouettes had been published, toward the end of the previous century, in an album that I had, in the old days, complete freedom to leaf through, among the works in my father’s library acknowledged to be within my reach, I was playing, in sum, the Prodigal Son in his period of destitution, the runaway who will see his return fêted by the slaughter of the fatted calf and will be looked upon with an eye all the more tender because he has gone wandering off in a foolhardy way. But unlike the Prodigal Son, who has not foreseen the fatted calf and risks everything when he goes away, in my case I had always planned on returning and pursued an end fundamentally alien to the satisfaction of a curiosity of which you do not know where it may lead: wanting to be not there, yet not at all expressly enticed by what I might find elsewhere, I had left home not so much in order to see as to be seen traveling, taking, without cutting any ties, a little distance from the one who would follow my journey with the eyes of Penelope, and bent, certainly, on being a solitary creature but being so only for a time.

  Thus, even in the course of this flight (if I may designate by such a name a voyage that truly had as its principal object to withdraw me from my family circle but was accomplished in broad daylight and not surreptitiously, as flights are), I took care not to do away with the thread that, over broad expanses of sea and land, connected me to my household gods, those gods who in my recent dream showed through under cover of a garden and who, after the fashion of most gods, present a double face, since they are at once that for which, out there, I feel homesick and that, in which, here, I do not want to root myself.

  “How one seeks to break through one’s isolation, to be no longer alone, to be understood by another. How, once one has revealed everything (or has believed one is revealing everything), been understood, it is even worse: an impression of promiscuity, and that the other has all rights over one.” When—in the very middle of the year 1934—I wrote down this reflection, in which this same I (who speak now as such, no longer taking cover behind the least defined of the third-person pronouns) made the scales lean in the direction, not of communion, but of silence and withdrawal into oneself, it had been a good sixteen months since I had returned from the longest of the trips I took: the one during which I was initiated in the ethnography of Black Africa and which, begun in 1931 and completed in 1933, will have occupied in truth a large part of my life, if one includes not only the period of preparation and the period, just as tumultuous, that followed my return, but all the sequelae of an episode that represented a serious turning point in the course of my life,
if only to the extent that it endowed me with a profession.

  This second departure—the one that in a certain sense I ought to call the last, since none of those that followed assumed the romantic tint that could legitimize the use of the lovely word “departure”—this second departure, even more distinctly than the first, was motivated by the need to violate my parole. Things going from bad to worse, for me, without my being able seriously to incriminate external circumstances or the attitude of those around me, I had had to recognize that at the source of my breakdowns and more and more frequent outbursts, there was something rather pathological—an observation that was humiliating but that did not exclude a touch of optimism, for, if there was an illness, there was at the same time a chance of curing myself of it. I therefore had recourse to the care of a psychoanalyst, and it was from him, naturally, that I asked for advice when I had to answer with a yes or no the offer that was made to me to join, as secretary, a mission whose goal was to work in Ethiopia, where it would go by way of Dakar instead of taking a more direct route. Thinking that such a change of air, and long months of studies, combined with an active life, would be beneficial for me, it was yes that my adviser urged on me.

  The length of this voyage (foreseen as necessarily occupying us for a year and a half or two years); the character of the countries traveled (those black countries with “indigenes” similar to those described to me at one time by my Uncle Prosper, the sergeant in the colonial army who had served in Madagascar under Gallieni, whose name was almost as thick with tropical heat as the word “indigenes” itself or the words “Cochin China,” thrust back to the far end of the world by its ricochet of syllables; with “indigenes” whom, despite what I had learned about the too-quickly-dubbed-primitive peoples of Africa, Oceania, or America from reading a certain vulgarizing exposé of the theses of Lévy-Bruhl, I was quite prepared to imagine endowed with the conventional features of the savages one sees in Châtelet-type spectacles in chocolate tights to imitate negro skin; that unsubjugated country that was called Abyssinia or Ethiopia and whose sovereigns up to Menelik II, to whom Rimbaud sold arms, traditionally traced their genealogy back to Solomon and to the Queen of Sheba); the harmful climates and harsh living conditions that I would have to confront (I, whose taste for a burning-hot sun, for strongly spiced dishes, for non-liqueurlike alcohols, for meat that was red and rather firm, this taste that has always deterred me from those too soft beds in which one sinks down and for a long time induced me to regard a military bed with supple steel springs as representing the height of comfort, I, whose taste apparently hostile to all softness does not prevent me from being a sybarite revolted by violent exercises as well as by cold water or from loving to linger lazily in overheated baths)—these were the essential traits that placed this new departure in a more rigorous perspective than the kind of trompe-l’oeil to which the first had more or less conformed. Mingled with the idea of accomplishing my redemption by performing my role on a team that demanded certain manly qualities from its participants, was the idea of a sort of perdition: to plunge, as I was going to do, into the heart of the black continent, to grapple with its reality, sometimes too dry, sometimes too luxuriant, to live on an equal footing with men apparently closer than I to a state of nature, was to break the circle of habits in which I was locked, to reject my mental corset as a European for whom two plus two makes four is the ABC of wisdom, to throw myself body and soul into an adventure from which I could tell myself in a sense I would never return, since it seemed out of the question that I would be intellectually and spiritually the same when I emerged from this swim in the waters of primitivism. If the voyage I was undertaking was likely to give me direct knowledge of that negro world which, ever since the advent of jazz, had won me over beyond all reason and if, far from being a solitary flight marked by the stamp of misanthropy, it had the signification of a humanist quest that the team of researchers of which I was going to be part would fervently pursue while straying as little as possible from a preestablished plan, it remains true that, despite its indisputable justification and the eminently academic auspices under which it would be effected, I attributed to it the same flame color as to a daredevil enterprise, if not one of desperadoes, a color scarcely attenuated by what constituted for me, as for my companions, the very basis of this voyage: the somewhat heterodox science that ethnography was at that time. Beyond all desire for study, it is certain that I was preparing myself to play the parts—without concern for the flagrant incompatibilities among these characters—of various of Conrad’s heroes: the sailor, fallen, then regenerated, in Lord Jim; the perfect gentleman in tropical suit in Victory; the hothead whom, in Heart of Darkness, the narrator discovers negrified “in the outposts of civilization.”

  These reflections on the spirit in which I prepared myself to cross Africa—a state of mind I am trying to summon up again, since that would be desirable if I am to talk about it, but in vain, so anachronistic does its naïveté seem to me—are being written during a trip. However, this circumstance is of no help to me, for this trip is, in truth, too different from the one whose amplitude would almost have permitted me to think myself possessed of the whole world, and, isolated to the point where I soon felt it, despite living within a group and having multiple contacts, something like God or like Lucifer in exile: the sojourn that my wife and I are presently making in Florence (after the hydrotherapy that took me, at the beginning of this month, to the waters of Montecatini) has, in fact, no other purpose but rest and amusement. Such a sojourn—merely a way of relaxing among monuments and other products of culture just as one relaxes in the mountains or at the seaside—is thus as distinct from the “committed” trip I took when I visited the new China (since to participate in that tour made in a delegation was implicitly to declare oneself a sympathizer) as from the voyage made, if not in solitude, at least in celibacy, from the west to the east of Africa, driven by a need that was neither to occupy leisure time as a dilettante nor to seek a sort of salvation in the contemplation of a country presumed to be less removed than the others from perfection.

  However keenly I experience it, this dissimilarity would not in itself be capable of thrusting Africa and what I expected from it so far away that, in the present conditions, such an evocation would appear as an anachronism. But it so happens that my stay in Tuscany, of which the tourist phase is only an extension of a medical phase, followed, without a break, an episode adventurous enough so that I may say to myself, with respect to it, with more certainty than for any other of my geographically locatable peregrinations, that I returned from afar when, like a dead man who is wrested by magical operations from his plunge, I emerged from the darkness into which I had ventured.

  Am I in a fit state, right now, to relate this episode, or would I do better to let it lie, waiting until the wound that caused it, as it might have caused a bad fever, has finished closing over? Whether or not I have the distance that would allow me to make out its design rigorously (at least the larger elements of it) and without in the process scorching myself too badly, it turns out, in any case, that I cannot speak of anything here without its having a false ring to it, after what will have been for me—almost literally—a descent into hell. What is more, the wound in question is probably not close to scarring over. Why, therefore, would I wait, and what would I gain from a suspense whose end I cannot foresee in any near future, and which, as long as it prevailed, would be for me a sort of paralysis? If it is still too soon for me to be capable of telling everything, it is nevertheless possible for me to explain myself regarding the most important thing: how, one day, my sempiternal reverie on the theme of departure as a means of drawing a line through the equation—when one’s life seems too tangled for one to find a way out of it, even temporarily—took concrete form in the most desperate of acts.

  Speaking of the difficulty I had detaching myself in order to go off to China, and of the happiness, so quickly disintegrated, that I derived from the five weeks spent in that country, I
have already indicated how profound was the illness from which I suffered: having opened, with harsh creaks and groans, the parentheses of that trip (which seemed to me the last of my great displacements, the one after which I would no longer have either the occasion or even the wish to make any important moves, and the accomplishment of which would have led me once again to distance myself from my companion, whereas the years remaining to us to live together are now terribly numbered), it was with creaks and groans no less harsh that I closed the parentheses at the time of my return. Depressed when the time came to fulfill the desire I had had to fly to Peking, I was equally so when I returned to Paris, everything occurring, again, as though, whichever way I turned, I encountered nothing but uneasiness and could not avoid it except almost by chance, for rare and ephemeral satisfactions.

  To be or not to be: this is not the question that is giving me so much trouble. To be or not to be there, to be here or to be elsewhere: this, rather, would be the burning question, where I’m concerned. When I would like to be elsewhere, I’m afraid of going away from here, and elsewhere, when I am there, scarcely brings me any rest, whether because it continues to be elsewhere and I feel disoriented there, or whether I am followed there by a regret for what I have left behind, or whether that elsewhere cannot be a here except in a manner too fleeting for me to regard it as other than derisory. Whatever is involved, whether the most benign things or the most serious, those having to do only with my surroundings or those involving the plot (daily occupations, large changes in mind or heart, and not merely journeys), this useless action of the pendulum, wherever I may be, whatever I may be doing, allows me only with difficulty to escape from its devastating exactitude.