Tag: Michel Leiris

At last, the final volume of Michel Leiris’ The Rules of the Game is available in English—a few (well, more than a few) words about it and a link to my review at Minor Literature[s]

As a reader, I do not tend to be a completest, collecting and diligently making my way through the complete works and associated letters and journals of a particular writer, but if I have made one exception, it is for French poet, novelist, essayist, ethnographer, and critic Michel Leiris. However, as English language Leiris enthusiasts will know, his most important work—the four-volume autobiographical essay to which he devoted thirty-five years of his writing life, The Rules of the Game—was not yet translated in full. That is, until now. This spring, Yale University Press released the final volume, Frail Riffs in Richard Sieburth’s translation.

Sieburth, who translated the book that served as my introduction to Leiris, his 1961 dream diary, Nights as Days, Days as Nights, takes over the Rules of the Game translation enterprise from Lydia Davis, who translated the first three parts of the project, plus Leiris’ novel Manhood. But, if there is any stylistic shift, it is not an issue because Frail Riffs itself marks a sharp shift in approach and style from the dense, labyrinthine prose that characterizes the first volume, Scratches, Scraps and Fibrils toward the fragmented, eclectic form of Leiris’ late work which will be familiar to readers of The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat (which I wrote about at length for The Critical Flame).

Leiris was, throughout his long life which spanned most of the twentieth century, deeply engaged with the political, intellectual and artistic culture of Paris. Yet, his influential autobiographical endeavour was self-focused, scrupulous and often obsessive and critical. It’s not an accounting of his life, per se, but rather of episodes that strike him as important or interesting, against which he can analyze or dissect himself. A love of language and a concern about truthfulness and discretion in the autobiographical exercise are critical. He draws on, among many things, his childhood experiences, travel (as an ethnographer or as part of political or artistic delegations) and, in a particularly vulnerable section of the third volume of Rules, on his suicide attempt, the affair that triggered it and his difficult recovery.

Frail Riffs continues in this vein, but in a more open manner, with short essays and observations, typically grouped thematically, and interspersed with poems, lists, and passages of word play. One of the aspects of Leiris’ character that becomes more apparent in this book and again in Olympia, is his deep despair with the ongoing state of war and violence in the world. He is, as he ages, increasingly confirmed in his anti-colonial and anti-racist convictions. He knows he is too afraid of pain and death to be a true “revolutionary” but as students take to the streets of Paris in 1968, he watches from his well-placed apartment with admiration and offers what refuge he can (the irony of his own bourgeois contradictions never lost on him). I’ve thought about his observations a lot in recent weeks. He would, were he here now, still be in despair.

Anyhow, this long introduction stands as an invitation to follow up with my review of The Rules of the Game Volume 4: Frail Riffs, which has been published at Minor Literature[s]. Thank you to everyone for welcoming my work back to this great literary journal .

The Rules of the Game Volume 4: Frail Riffs is translated from the French by Richard Sieburth and published by Yale University Press.

The allure of a simple black ribbon for a writer who was anything but: A few words about my essay about Michel Leiris for The Critical Flame

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).

Some thoughts on Michel Leiris’ Phantom Africa and a link to my review at 3:AM

It’s no secret to my literary friends that I have been somewhat obsessed with French writer Michel Leiris this year. I will address this fact further at a later date, but essentially, it is his autobiographical writing that fascinates me—it’s a very internalized, yet sharply observant form of writing about language, memory, and experience. In his epic journal project, Phantom Africa, a detailed, personal record of his experience as part of the Dakar-Djibouti ethnographic expedition in the early 1930s, one see him develop as a writer as the weeks and months past. With a background as a Surrealist poet and an essayist, he was a strong writer at the outset; what evolves over the course of the journey is an uncanny ability to lay himself open on the page with a distinct, idiosyncratic honesty. A discussion of this development forms the primary thread of my review of this critical work, published earlier this week at 3:AM Magazine.

However, the publication of this valuable document  in English, at this point in the ongoing post-colonial narrative, holds an importance that I only allude to in my critique. Leiris’ primary role on the expedition was as secretary-archivist. Ethnographic study was, for all intents and purposes, a mechanism of colonial control and exploitation. Thousands of artifacts, many with profound cultural and spiritual meaning, were collected for display in museums back in France. Some items were purchased, others taken by force or deceit, but in the end, it was all facilitated by an exercise of the power of the colonizer over the colonized. Leiris is not unaware of this fundamental inequity and he does express considerable concern and discontent with the ethics of the entire colonial enterprise, but he also admits to enjoying the thrill of the raid. Of course, it is not appropriate to measure a man outside the context of his times. Leiris’ true gift here lies in is his candid, unedited, record of the events he knows of or takes part in. It forms a vital contribution to the argument in favour of the repatriation of lost art and artifacts to Africa.

Phantom Africa, translated by Brent Hayes Edwards, is published by Seagull Books. My 3:AM review can be found here.

Dream on: Nights as Days, Days as Nights by Michel Leiris

I am lying in bed exactly as I would in reality, except that my forehead is pressed against the white powdery wall of a large cylinder made of lime, a cistern of sorts, exactly my height, and which is nothing other than myself, actualized and exteriorized. I feel this other exterior forehead pressing against my own, and thus I imagine my head is pressing against the very substance of my mind. [Undated]

A curious thing happened as I ventured into the dream writings of French author, Michel Leiris. I expected, perhaps, a surrealist-inspired fascination with the stuff of dreams, the settings, the strangeness, and the symbolism of nocturnal (or aided hallucinogenic) adventures. And there are, among the fragments and the longer descriptive accounts he collected between 1923 and 1960, many vivid images and observations. But this is not a self-indulgent, introspective endeavour. Nights as Day, Days as Nights demonstrates a psychoanalytical restraint, and an observational interest in the quality of dream life (and its echoes in the half-awake and “real life” realms). Consequently, as I made my way through his recorded recollections, I could not help but reflect on my experience of dreamed realities. In sharing Leiris’ journey, I caught glimpses of my own.

Born in 1901, Michel Leiris is widely regarded as a pioneer of confessional literature, known for his extensive autobiographical writings. He was drawn into the sphere of the surrealists early in his literary career, and although he broke with them before long, their influence would linger. He was also an accomplished ethnographer, who participated in anthropological missions into Africa in the 1930s, and worked at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris for much of his life. Given this context, his dream writings which, remarkably, span almost four decades, were nurtured in a rich, fertile soil. But, as translator Richard Sieburth indicates in his introduction, Leiris preferred to classify these notes, collected and published in 1961, among his poetic works, casting a different light on his lifelong exploration of the self. In his essay “Dreaming, Writing,” written to accompany the original release of Nights, Maurice Blanchot remarks that the reserve that Leiris shows in his transcribing of his dreams—not attempting to dissect them—should be respected in the reading. What he offers here is literary, not autobiographical or analytical: “These were once dreams, they are now signs of poetry.”

For Leiris, language plays an important role, not only in the translation of the remnants of dreamed (or fantasized) experience, but in the very substance of dreams. At times he plays linguistic games to escape or alter the events unfolding in his sleeping imagination, at other times he may reflect on the words used to his record remembered scenarios:

 The word rêve (dream) has something cobwebby to it, as well as something akin to gossamer veil that clogs the throats of persons suffering from the croup. This is no doubt due to its sonority and to certain formal connection between the v and the circumflex accent that precedes it (this accent being nothing more than a smaller, inverted v); hence the idea of interlacing, of a finely woven veil. Dreams are spiderlike, given their instability on the one hand and their veil-like quality on the other. If dreams are like the croup, it is probably because they are linked to the notion of nocturnal disturbances (like those bouts of false croup from which I suffered during the night as a very small child). [July 27–28, 1924, Real-life]

Leiris’ dreams are, essentially, recognizable to anyone who remembers their own dreams (since some people seem to be unable to do so). We have all likely had dreams that were bizarre, where a reality we think we know is distorted or shifts, situations that are sexually tinged, or charged with anxiety, or so terrifying that we awake with a start. And what about those dreams that feature people or places that are familiar, but oddly out of time? Or the multi-layered dreams, those that seem to descend or surface to different levels of consciousness—dreaming you are awake, only to discover you are still asleep? The beauty that comes through (and it is not always beautiful in the aesthetic sense of the word), is the sensitivity with which Leiris records his experiences. He is capturing the thoughts, images, memories or ideas that come to him, whether he is awake, half-asleep, or sleeping—his dream life is not confined to one realm of the day—with little intervention or commentary. He may muse about an interpretation of some aspect, but only in passing. Most offerings are presented raw, so to speak, and in vivid detail:

By a pool, a row of giant toads the size of chimpanzees, all covered with moss. They would appear to be part gorilla, and their colours range from green to gray to brown. The finest specimen—to the extreme left of the row—is bottle-green with huge eyes like frosted lightbulbs. They are all getting ready to dive into the water and crawl back into their shells (?). It occurs to me that if I dressed up in knickerbockers and wore a large green felt cap, I would look like a toad. [September, 1933]

Having a record, albeit at times sporadic, that spans a significant period of one man’s life, from roughly the age of twenty-two to sixty, offers insight into another important quality of the dream space. Figures from his “waking life,” as he puts it, appear—and for Leiris this is a fascinating cast, he knew Georges Bataille, Georges Limbour, Picasso, Simone de Beauvoir, and countless other well-known writers, poets and artists. But it is his wife, Louise Godon, whom he calls “Z,” who is the abiding presence throughout, whether she is out with him, waiting to meet him somewhere, or comforting him when he awakens with a scream. Other, often anonymous, women may attract his attention in his dreams, but she is never far away, so it seems, from his heart or mind.

Of course, events in the real world also infiltrate the realm of dream and fantasy. During the war years, Leiris’ accounts show a striking amplification of military imagery and themes of impending death, ranging from the allegorical to the theatrical to the disturbingly realistic. This is to be expected, but these records collected and presented, chronologically as they are, map the interior response to exterior terror, in real time. The dreamer, now in mid-life, evolves during these years. He almost seems to become a more astute listener to his own anxious imagination. The entries recorded in the post-war years feature longer, more detailed, but no less surreal, narratives.

When Michel Leiris organized and published this collection in 1961, he would still live, and continue to dream, for another twenty-nine years. Alongside his autobiographical writings, he engaged in a rigorous and formal journal keeping project that spanned seventy years (1922-1989), but Nights as Days, Days as Nights stands as a particularly engaging poetic gift. The invitation to spend time in someone else’s dreams may seem odd, after all, our own dreams are typically of less interest to others than they are to us. But Leiris has a rare ability to transmit these imagined episodes in a way that is not only interesting, but encourages us to recall the way we experience ourselves and others in our own dreams, to become alert to the recurrences, the insecurities, and the wonder that lingers. As such, this very personal project becomes universal, enriching the nights and days of those who are open to it.

Nights as Days, Days as Nights by Michel Leiris, translated by Richard Sieburth, with a foreword by Maurice Blanchot, is published by Spurl Editions.