Leiris, Michel (1901-90). Leiris is a key figure in 20th-c. French culture whose work combines poetry, ethnography, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and autobiography in strikingly innovative ways. Brought up in a well-heeled Paris suburb, a background which always made him uneasy, he was influenced early on by the examples of Raymond Roussel (a family friend) and Max Jacob, who encouraged him to write. The painter André Masson introduced him to the Surrealists, and here his fascination with language found expression in the remarkable verbal experiments of Glossaire j'y serre mes gloses (1925), a fantastic lexicon based on potential analogies between the physical properties of words and their meanings, and Aurora (1946), where he constructs a dream-like narrative on the basis of extravagant linguistic permutations. Haut mal (enlarged edn., 1969) collects the bulk of Leiris's verse.
Various factors, including a turbulent personal life which led him to undergo psychoanalysis, and a collaboration with Georges Bataille, at that time editor of the interdisciplinary review Documents, lie behind the sudden decision to become secretary to the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, an ethnological field-trip across Africa in 1931-3. Although Leiris's own record of the journey, the strongly subjective diary L'Afrique fantôme (1934), annoyed the professionals, the expedition led to a position at the Musée de l'Homme and a distinguished career marked by notable publications on Black Africa and the Caribbean (Cinq études d'ethnologie, 1969).
From the 1930s onwards Leiris adopted autobiography as his principal form of literary activity, and the radical approach he took to the genre was to prove immensely productive and influential. Through autobiography, with its dual commitment to literary form and documentary fact, Leiris sought to explore his conflicting desires for the transcendent intensities of poetic language, and for radical transformation in both the personal and the socio-political spheres. L'Âge d'homme (1939) jettisoned conventional chronological structure and featured a method combining Surrealist collage, psychoanalytical free association, and ethnographic description. Starting from feelings inspired by a painting, Cranach's diptych of Judith and Lucretia, Leiris excavates the ‘mythology’ of his erotic life, identifying deep-rooted fears and desires behind his liking for opera, bull-fighting, allegories, or classical myth. Yet, as he ruefully explained in ‘De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie’, a brilliant preface added to the 1946 reissue, he had wanted the composition of L'Âge d'homme to liquidate rather than consolidate his fantasies and fears. His aim had been that writing autobiographically should involve a risk analogous to that of the bullfighter (Miroir de la tauromachie, 1938, is a remarkable philosophical meditation on the corrida). Conscious that this had not been the case, he embarked on a further experiment in autobiography, La Règle du jeu, the four-volume work widely regarded as a master-piece to be compared with Montaigne's Essais and Rousseau's
Biffures (1948) opens with a series of densely written essays focused initially on Leiris's subjective experiences in the field of language. Entitled ‘…reusement’ (the child's erroneous construal of the word ‘heureusement’), the first piece concerns his discovery of the irremediably social aspect of language; in ‘Perséphone’ Leiris constructs an elaborate network out of a wide range of memories concerning his imaginary relationship to natural phenomena. As in L'Âge d'homme, chronology is replaced by associative patterning, but here, rather than juxtaposition and classification, what predominates is an intricate weaving together of small data—things seen, heard, or imagined, and at some point recorded in a journal or card-index.
The method is basically the same in Fourbis (1955) and Fibrilles (1966), although in these works thematic analysis is applied increasingly to particular events or periods in the author's life whose ‘mythic’ character is elicited by minute scrutiny: a deathly sound heard as a child, a relationship with a prostitute during the drôle de guerre, a suicide attempt. Leiris constantly questions his motives and methods, interrupting his narration and evaluating his progress in a quintessentially modern way, but always in the light of long-term objectives, which are ultimately ethical in character, bearing on death, art, memory, writing, and revolution. In Frêle bruit (1976), the fragmentary coda to La Règle du jeu, and in such late works as Le Ruban au cou d'Olympia (1981), Langage tangage ou Ce que les mots me disent (1985), and A cor et à cri (1988), Leiris reaffirms his enduring conviction that poetic aspiration and political change, while necessarily at loggerheads, are vitally connected. His diaries began to be published posthumously in the 1990s.
The visual arts played an important part in Leiris's life (his wife Louise was a leading Parisian art dealer), and with customary lucidity he wrote illuminatingly on his friends Picasso, Giacometti, and Francis Bacon.
[Michael Sheringham]
Bibliography
- P. Lejeune, Lire Leiris (1975)
- R. H. Simon, Orphée médusé (1984)
