Radical Shadows Read online

  What’s the prettiest thing in all the land?

  A pink pink pink silk garter.

  And on it, and on it?

  A sweet, obedient jumping jack,

  A jumping jack, a pumping jack,

  A jumping, kicking, pumping jack,

  To pull, to pull

  For little Miss—

  So, you have to rhyme with that. Marie? Stefanie? Melanie? Rosemarie? My mother was also called Rosemarie. So what’s your name?

  GIRL. Guess!

  MAN. Guess, guess! I bet you’re only looking for a good-looking man up that tree!

  GIRL. A good man and a little baby, a golden baby, that he will make for me.

  MAN. And what’s the little baby going to become? Something big? Yes, something that brings happiness and freedom. You remind me of something; if I only knew what.

  Like the dress of a dead cousin of grandfather’s,

  Soft chamber, so secret and remote,

  You hung in the fragrant closet of the world.

  Oh childhood glow, divided by darkness,

  Oh loneliness under silk skirts placed above us

  Shimmeringly lit

  By the beloved’s body of golden dates.

  I must have seen a picture of you once, from my grandparents’ time. Who are you, who awakens such sweet memories?

  GIRL. (In the tone of the earlier scene.) Don’t you know that I’m your mother?

  MAN. What—!

  (The vision disappears. One by one, the enemies become visible, standing by the trees lining both sides of the road. All in formal fur coats. The JUDGE wearing a beret, the PROFESSOR with uncovered skull, the BLACK MARKETEER in a top hat, the SERVANT in a stiff, round hat, the GENERAL in a general’s hat, the POLITICIAN in a black floppy hat.)

  MAN. Are you here too?

  BLACK MARKETEER. I wanted to have a look at you.

  MAN. Sure, come freeze along with me.

  BLACK MARKETEER. Don’t worry, I’m keeping warm.

  MAN. If I had on a fur coat like yours, I’d think of something better than just thinking that I’m warm while others freeze.

  BLACK MARKETEER. That’s why you don’t have a fur coat; don’t you know that, you blockhead?

  MAN. Oh! Judge! If I get my rights, you’ll come out all right. Tie him up, wind his bloody guts out of his belly, brand his hide with the iron of justice! Like you were able to do with me.

  JUDGE. Not so heavy-handed, my dear fellow. There was a tangle of paragraphs ready and waiting for you—whenever society can’t fit a person into any category, it finally sticks him safely in the courtroom category! But that person is only an overzealous exaggeration of an indispensable foundation of order, the sense of acquisition and sticking together.

  MAN. Oh? And how you grabbed hold of me for trifles! Shook me back and forth between the bars for immoral thoughts, revolutionary thoughts, subversive thoughts, bitter thoughts!

  JUDGE. Don’t start acting up again, malcontent! One can live quite comfortably anywhere in a martyr’s clothes! You need to have a right to improve the world!

  BLACK MARKETEER. Have money!

  PROFESSOR. Be right! This scoundrel had talent. Today he might even have been a professor. But he never had the scientific notion of honor.

  MAN. Being a curator in a corner’s corner, a lighthouse for shipping on a drop of water, spending decades untying a tiny knot in life’s belt while others are yanking it into bed along with the other clothes: what a paragon of human ambition!

  PROFESSOR. You weren’t pure enough for the abstract exercise of spiritual power: to be right!

  JUDGE. (Interrupting, like a glockenspiel.) To be right!

  BLACK MARKETEER. (In musical counterpoint.) To have money!

  SERVANT. (In descant.) Saved up! Saved up!

  MAN. What, you too? You thief! Didn’t you steal the money out of my pockets?

  SERVANT. Saved up! Saved up! You left it lying around. I used it to start my business, let it flow into the general circulation of goods, contributed it to the people’s prosperity! Gentlemen, I call upon you as witnesses!

  MAN. Rogue! Swine! Scraped like a mole in broad daylight, and you thought that the moon was a gold coin! You viper! You possum! You preening pheasant! You money-mouse! You vole! (Laughs.)

  SERVANT. (Apologetically.) Saved up!

  BLACK MARKETEER. (Reinforcing him.) To have money!

  JUDGE, PROFESSOR. (Growling.) To be right!

  SERVANT. Saved up! Saved up!

  GENERAL. Pennied up! Pennied up!

  MAN. You?

  GENERAL. I give orders.

  BLACK MARKETEER. (Waving off the GENERAL.) He has no money.

  JUDGE, PROFESSOR. (Doing likewise.) He has no respect for the law.

  MAN. (Mildly.) He and I were in school together.

  GENERAL. (Rasps at him.) Stand up straight! Stand at attention! I am power.

  PROFESSOR, BLACK MARKETEER, JUDGE. I am! I am! I am!

  MAN. Watertight. An honorable burial. Where’s the politician?

  POLITICIAN. L’état, c’est moi.

  MAN. Simply put—and it does you great credit.

  GENERAL. None of you knows this man. If he isn’t constantly forced to wash himself, to keep things organized, to eat with knife and fork, he’d be running around again on all fours.

  MAN. You’re half right, on all twos. But you’re altogether right. Oh, if only I had had power just one time! Listen! Listen!

  ALL. We have no time.

  SERVANT. You’ve always talked, and never worked!

  BLACK MARKETEER. A person must act!

  GENERAL. That’s the way it is.

  SERVANT. It’s time that people like you disappeared!

  GENERAL. That’s the way it is.

  MAN. I’ll live longer than all of you! Me!

  ALL. It’s time for you to die.

  MAN. No, you!

  ALL. No, you! You! You!

  MAN. You! You! You!

  (The wind, meanwhile, howls its cheerfully horrifying summons.)

  ALL. (Like a glockenspiel, swelling stronger and stronger. Under their hats, their hair stands on end, they pull like raging dogs chained to their trees and point their fingers at the man, while he answers with the same gesture.) It’s time for him to lie down and die!

  MAN. (Jubilantly.) I’m immortal! (He collapses. The stage is plunged into darkness. The MAN crouches, exhausted, at the foot of the tree. The snowflakes come. A youth and a maiden speak. Fantastic costumes. They radiate light.)

  BOY FLAKE. There he’s cowering, cover him up!

  GIRL FLAKE. It makes me sick. He stinks of schnapps!

  BOY FLAKE. Come on, we have orders!

  GIRL FLAKE. I wish it were an animal. They make such pretty, clean patterns with their feet.

  BOY FLAKE. YOU should be an icicle! The master has ordered us.

  GIRL FLAKE. The wind should ruffle you up; let the master try and catch me!

  BOY FLAKE. Come on, be good, do it quickly. Then we can melt together. Please, pretty snowflake!

  (Ballet: STORM and COLD appear, a shaggy old man in a machinist’s outfit and an ugly old crone.)

  STORM. (Sits down on a pile of gravel and calmly lights his stubby pipe.) Thank God, a break. The master has been pinching me in all my limbs to make me howl right and lay about me.

  COLD. You’re not really a storm at all, just a wind.

  STORM. Of course. In civilized regions people don’t die on the roads any more. Unless by automobile. But sometimes the master has terrific ideas. Thank God that we did manage to carry out his order and blow out the light of this tough fellow’s life. Eh, pal? (He claps his hands encouragingly. The ballet, drooping, whirls around.)

  BOY FLAKE. Come, glider!

  GIRL FLAKE. I don’t want to any more.

  BOY FLAKE. Hey, you have to make storm and cold, otherwise we’ll melt.

  STORM. I’d much rather do that, play around a little bit with warm smoke.

 
; COLD. I’d like to take a rest too, for once.

  GIRL FLAKE. Lazy bones! Oh, how warm you’re letting it get; I’m expiring!

  COLD. Humans claim that’s the highest experience they can have together.

  BOY FLAKE. But we’re supposed to kill a man!

  STORM. It’s done already.

  (All go over to the fallen man, whom the snow has covered. Both snowflakes melt together in blissful fatigue on his grave. Beside the surrounding trees, all the figures of the play again become visible.)

  MOTHER. (Stretching out her arms.) My child! My child!

  BLACK MARKETEER. Gentlemen, I think I express what we all feel when I say: not one more evil word about a dead man!

  MOTHER. (One arm painfully extended, slowly raises her other hand to cover her eyes.)

  ALL. (With their hats solemnly on their breasts.) O God, O God, O God, another one dead!

  (Curtain.)

  1944 Journal

  [The Liberation of Paris]

  Michel Leiris

  —Translated from French by Lydia Davis

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  TO KNOW HIMSELF, ACCORDING to Michel Leiris (1901-1990), was to know the other, and to know the world. His life’s writings were dominated by the project of exploring himself with the same scrupulous care, curiosity and objectivity he brought to his work as ethnographer. His complete Journal 1922-1989 (edited by Jean Jamin, Gallimard, 1992), many hundreds of pages and as yet untranslated, constitutes only one form of his autobiographical writing. Some of the material from the following extract was later reworked and incorporated, for instance, in a “diary” of over a hundred short dreams called Nuits san nuits et jours sans jours (Nights as Day Days as Night, translated by Richard Sieburth, Eridanos Press, 1987); and in Volumes I, II and IV of his vast “autobiographical essay,” La Règle du jeu (Rules of the Game): Biffures, 1948 (Scratches, translated by Lydia Davis, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Fourbis, 1955 (Scraps, translated by Lydia Davis, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); and Frêle Bruit, 1976. (The third volume is Fibrilles, 1966.)

  More autobiographical volumes preceded and followed Rules of the Game. Early ventures into Surrealism and a fascination with the fertile possibilities of language and the unconscious led to a volume of poems and a novel, as well as inventive “glossaries.” Participation in the first major ethnological expedition through Africa (Dakar-Dklbouti) in 1931-1933, in order to measure himself against reality, as he said, resulted in the astonishing 1934 “personal chronicle,” L’Afrique fantôme—as yet untranslated.

  After serving in Algeria for one year in 1939, Leiris spent most of the war in Paris writing and working as an ethnologist at the Musée de l’Homme at the place Trocadéro, where he would continue to work until 1971. An explanation of some of the names mentioned in the extract: Zette, often referred to in the diaries as Z, was Leiris’s wife, Louise (née Kahnweiler); Le Castor, “the Beaver,” was Sartre’s pet name for Simone de Beauvoir, punning on her last name; Jeannette was Jeannette Druy, later to become a secretary at the Galerie Louise Leiris, Leiris’s wife’s art gallery. The city of Ys, referred to in the May 20 entry, was a legendary city in Brittany said to have been swallowed up by the waves in the fourth or fifth century. The T.C.R.P. is the Paris transport authority. The “Lewitzky-Vildé-Oddon affair” refers to several colleagues of Leiris who were arrested and executed by the Germans in 1942.

  One more word of explanation: beginning on September 19 and ending on November 30, Leiris evidently wrote out in more complete form the notes he had taken during the dramatic days of August 15 to 26. The “{ }” brackets indicate insertions he made as he rewrote the notes after the fact. Two instances of interpolations made still later are signalled by regular brackets and the words “Author’s Footnotes,” as in the original French text.

  The entire extract can be regarded as a “true” or “factual” context for the roughly extemporaneous event related as eerie dreamlike or nightmarish fiction or quasi-fiction by Maurice Blanchot that follows in this issue of Conjunctions. But the real or true (as for instance Leiris’s image of the turbaned woman directing traffic) is often no less dreamlike than the fictional or the dreamed event, as Leiris was at pains to show most especially in Night as Day Days as Night but at every point in his oeuvre.

  January 28

  I IMAGINE—without intending to make use of it—the following subject for a story: in an oppressed town the inhabitants are finally obliged to make an absolute choice between being part of the firing line and being among those shot; in fact, nothing remains but these two groups confronting each other.

  March 20

  Tomorrow at eleven o’clock, at the Eglise Saint-Roch, religious service in memory of Max Jacob, who died in the Drancy camp.

  May 2

  Learned of the death of D[eborah] L[ifchitz] in the Auschwitz camp.

  May 6

  “Each human reality is at the same time a direct project of metamorphosing its own For-itself into an In-itself-For-itself and a project of appropriating the world as a totality of being-in-itself, under the guise of a fundamental quality.”

  (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp. 707-708.)

  May 17

  Dream.—I am to be shot. This happens to the accompaniment of a sort of fiesta […]. I say my goodbyes to Z[ette], very harrowing; I say goodbye (or look for her in order to say goodbye?) to Castor. I am not under guard: apparently completely free. In front of my friends, who line the streets as though for the arrival of the Tour de France, I make my way, accompanied by Z (who escorts me as though I were a child in need of reassurance), to a rockface (very irregular and covered with outcrops) that is the execution wall. I press my back against it with all my strength, as though I were trying to embed myself in it, not so much in order to disappear as to draw into myself some of its rigidity, not a physical but a moral rigidity, in other words, courage. The hoofbeats of horses are heard and perhaps the sound of troops marching; it’s the firing squad arriving. I am suddenly sickened with panic, feel my desire to make a good appearance dissolve, then I grow angry and tell Z I will not let myself be killed like this. Now I rush away and plunge, head down, into an alley below street level, parallel to the line of my friends, the spectators. The fall awakens me, or rather sends me into another dream in which I explain to someone this method I have of making my dreams end by deliberately falling. Then I run this dream through my mind again, I redo certain parts of it, with other details. This second version involves, for instance, a rectangle of white paper given to those who are about to be executed, on which they are permitted to write down their last words, this rectangle of white paper will be glued to their mouths (like a gag) when the time comes for them to be executed.

  May 20

  Coming home at 11:40 with Z by bike, after dinner at J.-L. Barrault’s, encountered at our doorstep a fellow in a cap 30-35 years old, drunk or a little nuts (or maybe both), who claimed to be a “lad from up north” and asked us the way to “the lost city, the audacious city.” All of this in cordial terms.

  Z thinks he’s a guy from the barges. Moreover, I realize when I mull it over that by “the lost city, audacious city,” he must mean the city of Ys. A drunken waterman in search of the sunken city?

  May 29

  Bataille’s lapse, yesterday, in a discussion during which he called me an “idealist” and a “Kantian”: “the categorical aperitif.”

  Characters in disguise, characters not in disguise:

  Castor, Lucienne Salacrou, Zette are not women in disguise.

  Jeannine, Françoise L, the Kosakiewicz sisters, Pauline are women badly disguised.

  Sylvia is a woman cunningly disguised and Dora a woman aesthetically disguised in her portrait by Picasso.

  Far greater difficulty in making the same classification for men, no doubt because in their case the disguise is less exterior. However:

  Picasso and Reverdy are not men in disguise.

  Braque is a man admirably
disguised.

  Language tic, observed lately in Dora Maar. Under the pretense of making a jest (she began doing this, it seems, in order to imitate—mockingly—Marie-Laure de Nouailles), she inserts into many of her phrases the interjection: “Say I.” In reality, she must do this out of a need to refer perpetually to herself.

  June 11

  “I write so that I will be loved” (said Jean Genet the other evening).

  September 19 (and following)

  Notes on the Liberation of Paris, written over these recent days and completed today.

  Tuesday August 15 (Assumption)

  Posters calling upon all able-bodied men to join the F[orces] F[rançaises] de l’I[ntérieur].

  {As for me, some time ago I enlisted in the patriotic militia organized by the Comité du Théâtre du F[ront] N[ational], signing up under the name of “Gérard,” serial no. 1092, with Salacrou as intermediary. I’m also waiting for a liaison in order to form an F.N. at the Musée de l’Homme.}

  Lunch at Salacrou’s with Sartre, Castor, Zette and Merleau-Ponty. Zette and I came back home for dinner. Salacrou, apropos of the uprising: “It should not be done eight days before, but one hour before” {implied: before the arrival of the regular troops (allusion to the situation of the Warsaw patriots, which is becoming disastrous)}. I agree. No policemen in the streets; they have been on strike since this morning.

  Wednesday the 16th

  Zette tells me about the Ober-Quartier moving out of 29, rue d’Astorg. The spectacle of Paris without policemen, without visible Germans, and still without Allied troops.

  Via a telephone call from my niece, I learn that my brother Pierre has left Paris with the youngest of his sons to go join a group of F.F.I. (operating, I will later learn, in the area of Château-Thierry); his other son is to leave the next morning for the same destination. My niece and I go to my mother’s home and persuade her to leave her apartment at 102, rue Erlanger (because we think the Allied troops will enter by the porte de Saint-Cloud) and move in with my niece at 23, quai Voltaire.