Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility

147 Pages·1992·1.01 MB·English

by  Michel Leiris

Manhood
A JOURNEY FROM CHILDHOOD INTO THE
FIERCE ORDER OF VIRILITY
Michel Leiris
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY
RICHARD HOWARD

WITH A FOREWORD BY
SUSAN SONTAG
To Georges Bataille who is at the origin of this
book
The University of Chicago Press Translation copyright © 1963, 1984 by Richard Howard Translator's Note
copyright © 1983 by Richard Howard Originally published in French under the title of L'Age d'homme,
copyright © 1939, 1946 by Editions Gallimard Foreword is "Michel Leiris' Manhood" from Against
Interpretation by Susan Sontag. Copyright © 1964, 1966 by Susan Sontag. Reprinted by permission of
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Leiris, Michel, 1901- (Age d'homme. English) Manhood : a journey from childhood into the fierce order of
virility / Michel Leiris : translated from the French by Richard Howard, p. cm.
Translation of : L'âge d'homme. Includes bibliographical references.
1. Leiris, Michel, 1901 Biography. 2. Poets, French— 20th century—Biography. 3. Anthropologists
—France—
Table Of Contents
Foreword
Translator's Note, 1983
PROLOGUE
OLD AGE AND DEATH
SUPERNATURE
INFINITY
THE SOUL
SUBJECT AND OBJECT
I Tragic Themes
II Classical Themes
WOMEN OF CLASSICAL TIMES
HEROIC WOMEN
SACRIFICES
BROTHELS AND MUSEUMS
THE GENIUS OF THE HEARTH
DON JUAN AND THE COMMENDATORE
III Lucrece
MY UNCLE THE ACROBAT
EYES PUT OUT
PUNISHED GIRL
MARTYRED SAINT
IV Judith
CARMEN
LA GLU
SALOME
ELECTRA, DELILAH, AND FLORIA TOSCA
THE FLYING DUTCHMAN
NARCISSUS
V The Head of Holofernes
THROAT CUT
PENIS INFLAMED
HURT FOOT, BITTEN BUTTOCK, CUT HEAD
NIGHTMARES
MY BROTHER MY ENEMY
MY BROTHER MY FRIEND
STITCHES
VI Lucrece and Judith
VII The Loves of Holofernes
KAY
HOLOFERNES' FEAST
VIII The Raft of the Medusa
THE TURBAN-WOMAN
THE BLEEDING NAVEL
AFTERWORD
The Autobiographer as Torero
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Author
Foreword
Arriving in translation in the year 1963, Michel Leiris's brilliant
autobiographical narrative L'Age d'homme is at first rather puzzling. Manhood,
as it is called in English, appears without any covering note. There is no way for
the reader to find out that Leiris, now in his sixties{1} and the author of some
twenty books, none of which are yet in English, is an important poet and senior
survivor of the Surrealist generation in Paris in the 1920s, and a fairly eminent
anthropologist. Nor does the American edition explain that Manhood is not
recent—that it was in fact written in the early 1930s, first published in 1939, and
republished with an important prefatory essay, "Literature Considered as a
Bullfight" [published in this volume as an afterword: "The Autobiographer as
Torero"], in 1946, when it had a great succès de scandale. Although
autobiographies can enthrall even though we have no prior interest—or reason
for becoming interested—in the writer, the fact that Leiris is unknown here
complicates matters, because his book is very much part of a life history as well
as a lifework.
In 1929, Leiris suffered a severe mental crisis, which included becoming
impotent, and underwent a year or so of psychiatric treatment. In 1930, when he
was thirty-four years old, he began Manhood. At that time, he was a poet,
strongly influenced by Apollinaire and by his friend Max Jacob; he had already
published several volumes of poetry, the first of which is Simulacre (1925); and
in the same year that he began Manhood, he wrote a remarkable novel in the
Surrealist manner, Aurora. But shortly after beginning Manhood (it was not
finished until 1935), Leiris entered upon a new career—as an anthropologist. He
made a field trip to Africa (Dakar and Djibouti) in 1931-33, and upon his return
to Paris joined the staff of the Musée de l'Homme, where he remains, in an
important curatorial post, to the present day. No trace of this startling shift—
from bohemian and poet to scholar and museum bureaucrat—is recorded in the
wholly intimate disclosures of Manhood. There is nothing in the book of the
accomplishments of the poet or the anthropologist. One feels there cannot be; to
have recorded them would mar the impression of failure.
Instead of a history of his life, Leiris gives us a catalogue of its limitations.
Manhood begins not with "I was born in . . ." but with a matter-of-fact
description of the author's body. We learn in the first pages of Leiris's incipient
baldness, of a chronic inflammation of the eyelids, of his meager sexual
capacities, of his tendency to hunch his shoulders when sitting and to scratch
his anal region when he is alone, of a traumatic tonsillectomy undergone as a
child, of an equally traumatic infection in his penis; and, subsequently, of his
hypochondria, of his cowardice in all situations of the slightest danger, of his
inability to speak any foreign language fluently, of his pitiful incompetence in
physical sports. His character, too, is described under the aspect of limitation:
Leiris presents it as "corroded" with morbid and aggressive fantasies
concerning the flesh in general and women in particular. Manhood is a manual
of abjection—anecdotes and fantasies and verbal associations and dreams set
down in the tones of a man, partly anesthetized, curiously fingering his own
wounds.
One may think of Leiris's book as an especially powerful instance of the
venerable preoccupation with sincerity peculiar to French letters. From
Montaigne's Essays and Rousseau's Confessions through Stendhal's journals to
the modern confessions of Gide, Jouhandeau, and Genet, the great writers of
France have been concerned to a singular extent with the detached presentation
of intimate feelings, particularly those connected with sexuality and ambition.
In the name of sincerity, both in autobiographical form and in the form of
fiction (as in Constant, Laclos, Proust), French writers have been coolly
exploring erotic manias, and speculating on techniques of emotional
disengagement. It is this long-standing preoccupation with sincerity—over and
beyond emotional expressiveness—that gives a severity, a certain classicism
even, to most French works of the romantic period. But to see Leiris's book
simply in this way does it an injustice. Manhood is odder, harsher than such a
lineage suggests. Far more than any avowals to be found in the great French
autobiographical documents of incestuous feelings, sadism, homosexuality,
masochism, and crass promiscuity, what Leiris admits to is obscene and
repulsive. It is not especially what Leiris has done that shocks. Action is not his
forte, and his vices are those of a fearfully cold sensual temperament—wormy
failures and deficiencies more often than lurid acts. It is because Leiris's
attitude is unredeemed by the slightest tinge of self-respect. This lack of esteem
or respect for himself is obscene. All the other great confessional works of
French letters proceed out of self-love, and have the clear purpose of defending
and justifying the self. Leiris loathes himself, and can neither defend nor justify.
Manhood is an exercise in shamelessness—a sequence of self-exposures of a
craven, morbid, damaged temperament. It is not incidentally, in the course of
his narration, that Leiris reveals what is disgusting about himself. What is
disgusting is the topic of his book.
One may well ask: who cares? Manhood undoubtedly has a certain value as a
clinical document; it is full of lore for the professional student of mental
aberration. But the book would not be worth attention did it not have value as
literature. This, I think, it does—though, like so many modern works of
literature, it makes its way as anti-literature. (Indeed, much of the modern
movement in the arts presents itself as anti-art.) Paradoxically, it is just its
animus to the idea of literature that makes Manhood—a very carefully (though
not beautifully) written and subtly executed book—interesting as literature. In
the same way, it is precisely through Manhooďs unstated rejection of the
rationalist project of self-understanding that Leiris makes his contribution to it.
The question that Leiris answers in Manhood is not an intellectual one. It is
what we would call a psychological—and the French, a moral—question. Leiris
is not trying to understand himself. Neither has he written Manhood to be
forgiven, or to be loved. Leiris writes to appall, and thereby to receive from his
readers the gift of a strong emotion—the emotion needed to defend himself
against the indignation and disgust he expects to arouse in his readers. Literature
becomes a mode of psychotechnics. As he explains in the prefatory essay "De la
litérature considérée comme une tauromachie," to be a writer, a man of letters, is
not enough. It is boring, pallid. It lacks danger. Leiris must feel, as he writes, the
equivalent of the bullfighter's knowledge that he risks being gored. Only then is
writing worthwhile. But how can the writer achieve this invigorating sense of
mortal danger? Leiris's answer is: through self-exposure, through not defending
himself; not through fabricating works of art, objectifications of himself, but
through laying himself—his own person—on the line of fire. But we, the
readers, the spectators of this bloody act, know that when it is performed well
(think of how the bullfight is discussed as a preeminently aesthetic, ceremonial
act) it becomes, whatever the disavowals of literature—literature.
A writer who subscribes to a program similar to Leiris's for creating literature