The recent release, in English translation, of the final major work by French poet, essayist, critic and ethnographer Michel Leiris served as a welcome excuse for me to spend part of my summer in the company of one of my very favourite writers. A related, but indirectly connected, follow up to his masterful four part autobiography, Rules of the Game, The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat is a fragmented, often playful meditation on Eduard Manet’s infamous painting Olympia. But it is more than an intuitive assessment of the timeless appeal of an important piece of art, it is also an opportunity for Leiris to return to themes that are woven throughout his singular autobiographical works—writing and language, sex and fetish, aging and death. Though he would live another nine years after its publication, Olympia is very much the work of a writer nearing the end of his life, worried not only about his own fate, but that of the world he fears he might be leaving behind.
With a politically and intellectually engaged life that spanned the better part of the twentieth century, and intersected closely with some of the most important thinkers, artists, and writers of French and Parisian society, Leiris, in his autobiographical writing, turned a remarkably modest, at times even self-deprecating, lens on the world. He is a deeply internalized writer armed with an abiding affection for the power and subtleties of words, sounds, and meanings, but it is his humanity, insecurity, and intelligence that make him wonderful company.
The result of my summer spent revisiting Leiris, is an essay that has just been published at The Critical Flame. This is the first major work I have written in over a year, and stands, for me, as a counterpoint to my analysis of Phantom Africa, the extensive journal a young Leiris maintained over the course of a two year journey across North Africa in the early 1930s with an anthropological mission. It was this project, his first major published work that, as I argue in essay published at 3:AM Magazine in 2017, not only made him an ethnographer—the profession he would practice for the rest of his life—but also set the groundwork for his influential autobiographical writing. With The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat, the threads of Michel Leiris’ literary finally life come together, as well as they ever can.
My new essay, “The rope that keeps me from floundering”: On Michel Leiris is intended as an overview Leiris’ work and an analysis of Olympia in light of his varied career. My affection for him as a writer is hard to disguise.
The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat by Michel Leiris is translated by Christine Pichini and published by Semiotext(e).
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