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Title
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Anthropology as the a Mask, a Costume, a Metaphor:the case of Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois/ Polska Sztuka Ludowa - Konteksty 2014 Special Issue
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Description
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Polska Sztuka Ludowa - Konteksty 2014 Special Issue
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Creator
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Szerszeń, Tomasz
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Date
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2014
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Format
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application/pdf
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Identifier
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oai:cyfrowaetnografia.pl:6091
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Language
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ang
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Publisher
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Instytut Sztuki PAN
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Relation
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oai:cyfrowaetnografia.pl:publication:6519
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Rights
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Licencja PIA
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Subject
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anthropology of memory
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pamięć - aspekt antropologiczny
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Leiris, Michel (1901-1990)
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Caillois, Roger (1931-1978)
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Type
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czas.
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Text
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During the epoch of my artistic beginnings in about
1930 it was demanded that a person should be predomi
nantly authentic. (...) I, however, remember that already
as a boy I knew - and this was instinctive knowledge —that
it is impossible to be “authentic" or “defined”...
I admire science, (...) but I fear that it is impossible to
eliminate that word “I”, it is a much too strong part of us.
(Witold Gombrowicz,
Byłem pierwszym strukturalistą)
I
n Byłem pierwszym strukturalistą Witold Gombro
wicz conducted an interview with himself, and
responding to successive questions he "justified”
his philosophical inspirations and assumed the langu
age of scientific discourse. This is a “game played with
the scientific”: the author simultaneously scoffed and
spoke quite seriously. In his witty, brief text, science
- philosophy, anthropology - is used as a manner of
keeping a distance towards oneself. The characteristic
feature of this instrument is a split of the language,
which creates the distance. A fissure.
That, which Gombrowicz regarded as a merely epi
sodic game with the convention of “the scientific” one of the many cases in his "laboratory of the form”
- became a fundamental creative strategy (but also
a life strategy) for several protagonists connected in
their youth with Surrealism. Michel Leiris and Roger
Caillois are the authors of two strange autobiogra
phies: L ’Âge d’homme and an autobiographical essay
unpublished during the author’s lifetime: La Nécessité
d’esprit. Leiris began working on L ’Âge d’homme before
he was thirty years old, while Caillois wrote La Néces
sité d’esprit, his first book, while aged less than twenty.
Two books, treating autobiography in a truly Surreal
istic manner, tell the story of a non-experienced life,
which had actually just started.
L ’Âge d’homme and La Nécessité d’esprit also pertain
to another theme, albeit in a manner far from obvious:
the attitude of the authors to "the scientific”. Regard
less how one perceives this, Leiris and Caillois were,
after all, scholars (an ethnographer and a sociologist).
Their learned analyses could yield the impression that
science - in this case, anthropology - is not a purpose
in itself, that things are not as they should be. This is
the case of some sort of insincerity, of ’’something else”
being at stake: here, anthropology can be a metaphor,
a mask or a theatrical costume. A t times, the texts are
closer to the mocking quasi-scientific nature of Gombrowicz’s Byłem pierwszym strukturalistą than to genu
ine “Science”. How is one to trust Leiris if in the wake
of his extremely subjective L ’Afrique fantôme, whose
premise was a negation of all scientific methods, he
wrote two academic and meticulous books about the
language of the Dogon people and Ethiopian posses
sion cults?
193
TOMASZ SZERSZEŃ
Anthropology as a
Mask, a Costume, a
Metaphor: the Case of
Michel Leiris and
Roger Caillois
In the case of Leiris, interest in ethnography co
incided in time with the commencement of work on
L ’Âge d’homme. This was also the moment when he
became involved in editing the avant-garde periodical
"Documents”, in which anthropology and ethnogra
phy were for the first time applied as a sui generis quasi
scientific quality, a scientific discourse shifted, opened,
sometimes mocked and simultaneously illusively proposed
precisely as a scientific discourse. 1 It was for the needs
of "Documents” that Leiris "assumed the guise of an
ethnographer” and adapted himself - in the manner
of one of the insects described by Caillois - to “writing
science”.
Interpreters ignore the fact that the publication
of L ’Âge d’homme more or less coincided with Leiris
winning the title of a professional ethnographer. The
time in which he wrote his curious autobiography thus
ideally overlaps with becoming an ethnographer - first
studied publications, first written texts, an expedition
to Africa, and successive passed exams. The Leiris
Bildungsroman is, therefore, also a metaphor of initia
tion into ethnography, a literary equivalent of rite de
passage. After the publication of L ’Âge d’homme Leiris
began work at the Parisian Musée de l’Homme where
he held a high post. “Being an ethnographer” thus be
came a fact, a social role, a permanent mask, which
the author of L ’Afrique fantôme treated very seriously,
as evidenced by the fact that his studies at the Musée
were used only for scientific pursuits; he wrote poetry
at home.
Leiris was deeply concerned with becoming an eth
nographer and the ensuing consequences. Paradoxi
cally, probably the most interesting commentary are
his theses in a book about zâr cults: La Possession et
ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar, with
Leiris developing some of the conceptions from Sar
tre’s L ’Etre et le néant: in the fashion of Sartre’s waiter
the possessed plays with his status in order to realise it.
2 While describing the cult and its participants Leiris
metaphorically depicted his personal situation: he
constantly played with the status of man of science, of
Tomasz Szerszeń • ANTHROPOLOGY AS A MASK, A COSTUME, A METAPHOR: THE CASE OF MICHEL LEIRIS AND ROGER CAILLOIS
“being an ethnographer”, in order to realise this situa
tion. Similarly as in the zâr cult where, as he wrote, it
is sometimes difficult to distinguish cases of authentic
possession (“the experienced theatre”) and possession
feigned for the sake of gaining some sort of benefit
("the performed theatre”), reading texts by the author
of L ’Afrique we never know for certain whether he was
not merely performing the role of an ethnographer.
The case of Roger Caillois is much more complicat
ed since the costume of the scholar which he donned
fits him perfectly. This personality trait was excel
lently captured by Emil Cioran in his sketch: Caillois
commenced fittingly, by studying and even behaving
like a student, as testified by the reservations he made
in L ’Âge d’homme (1939), in which he put his teach
ers’ minds at rest by requesting that they ignore the
last pages of the book in which he took the liberty of
transgressing the limits of “positive thought” and de
veloped several metaphysical reflections. A t the time,
he produced the impression that he believed the his
tory of religion, sociology and ethnology... .3 Cioran,
therefore, refused to be seduced and did not really
have faith in in the scientific guise of Caillois: there,
where others saw an academician he observed an ac
tor wearing a costume. Accounts by some students at
the College of Sociology reflect this feeling of malad
justment: at the time of the lectures Caillois was only
slightly over twenty years of age - “too little” for a seri
ous scholar and desperately clinging onto theoretical
language and academic distance. True, the attitude of
the author of L ’homme et le sacré to “the scientific” is
something of an obsession. In his works from that early
period Caillois incessantly posed and opted for the de
fensive. He not only ”calmed the teachers”, as Cioran
noticed, but also performed a series of reservations:
in a preface to La Nécessité d’esprit he wrote that his
work was a document, whose interpretation was also a
document. 4 We find ourselves in a domain of science
to the umpteenth degree, science with a capital S. The
same motif was broached by Denis Hollier in his essay:
Crainte et tremblement à l’âge du surréalisme: Caillois’
work is hard to categorize. But not for the same reason as
Bastille’s, Blanchot’s or even Sartre’s; Caillois does not mix
registers of discourse, nor does oscillate between theory and
fiction. Instead, his work is hard to categorize because of
the perverse way he chooses to play, almost excessively, in
the less literary of those two registers: the theoretical. (...)
These defensive origins may explain why it is so difficult to
situate his work within the typology of theoretical writings.
There is something heterodoxical, oblique, disquieting, and
even occasionally hypocritical in the relation to knowledge
that Caillois’ writing puts into play. In his essays erudition
tilts toward destabilising adventures that function quite dif
ferently from a search for truth. Caillois was one of Jorge
Luis Borges’ first French translators. I order to exorcize
the temptations of fiction he adapted the mask of science in
a way that recalls Borges’ imaginary encyclopaedias. But
the science in question is unrecognizable; it seems to have
become its own double. 5
The author’s self-portrait as a thorough academi
cian ceases, however, to be uniform and obvious when
we reach for his posthumously published La Nécessité
d’esprit, in which Caillois tried to capture the essence
of poetic imagination in statu nascendi as exemplified
by his own person. This poetic imagination is to be
X-rayed and described with the assistance of the most
scientific instruments possible - scientific rigour is to
be a response to écriture automatique while an exami
nation of inner “necessities” and “rigours” is to replace
an unfettered game of the imagination, that prime slo
gan of the Surrealists.
La Nécessité d’esprit, a strange, marginal attempt at
redefining Breton’s vision of Surrealism, is mysterious
ly connected with another text by Caillois. In his bril
liant analysis contained in the essay: Crainte et tremble
ment à l’âge du surréalisme Denis Hollier drew attention
that La Mante Religieuse, one of the earliest and, at the
same time, best known texts by the author of L ’homme
et le sacré, was originally planned as part of the auto
biographical La Nécessité d’esprit. The first version of
La Mante Religieuse was issued in “Minotaure” in 1933,
and at the end of the text Caillois announced that the
next part would deal with his ”personal experiences”.
There was no subsequent part, however, since Caillois
resigned from the publication of La Nécessité d’esprit
and La Mante Religieuse appeared in the collection: Le
Mythe et l’homme, but already without any personal or
autobiographical allusions.
From the very first moment the praying mantis
draws man’s attention to its silhouette 6 - Caillois
wrote. True, Hollier recalled that during the vaca
tions of 1928 Caillois actually saw a praying mantis
for the first time. The same day, we must believe the
systematic researcher, marked Caillois’ sexual initia
tion. The connection between the praying mantis and
autobiography thus becomes obvious. We are dealing
with another, after Leiris’ Judith, astonishing autobio
graphical component involving a woman killing a man
and the motif of decapitation since, the author argued,
a praying mantis can live without its head. Here is a
comment by Denis Hollier: Indeed, it is difficult to avoid
an impression of defeatism when one sees a man choose
to expose his first person, choose to expose himself in the
first person, in front of a maneater. And what the material
history of the text relates, what happened to the text itself
between the time Caillois wrote it and the time he pub
lished it, is, literally, the defeat of the first person, since the
versions published by the author in his lifetime eliminate all
personal references. It is as if the first person of the autobi
ography (The Necessity of the Mind) had been gnawed
away, dissolved from within, before being absorbed and
assimilated by the third person of the study on the pray
194
Tomasz Szerszeń • ANTHROPOLOGY AS A MASK, A COSTUME, A METAPHOR: THE CASE OF MICHEL LEIRIS AND ROGER CAILLOIS
ing mantis (Le myth et homme). It is difficult, here, not
to speculate on this double disappearance, the coincidence
that inflicts on the author’s first person the fate that befalls
the masculine partner of the tragic love he relates. (...) The
female’s devouring (outside the text) of her sexual partner
is echoed by the text’s devouring of its foretext. It is as if
the meeting with the mantis had the effect of depersonal
izing Caillois’ voice: his first person, at least his literary
first person, did not survive The Necessity of the Mind.7
Ending his analysis, Holier returned to La Nécessité
d’esprit, which he described as: the autobiography of a
subject literally possessed by his own absence. 8 The pray
ing mantis, in the fashion of Judith, is thus associated
with an autobiographical project of describing empti
ness, a life not yet experienced, whose place was taken
by science.
Science - sociology, anthropology - was for Caillois a mask concealing the temptation of writing an
autobiography, a metaphor of his existential situation.
Underneath the costume of a thoroughgoing scientific
stance something else is hidden. A t the time of his ear
liest works Caillois admired St. Ignatius of Loyola. The
author of La Mante Religieuse recalled that Loyola’s ex
ample first inspired him to start the periodical “Inqui
sitions”, and then, in 1937, to establish the College
of Sociology. Caillois described the science pursued at
the College as “holy sociology”. Could it be that Caillois, that exemplary researcher, authentically, albeit
in a cleverly concealed manner, experienced the force
of vocation? In 1947 the critic Roland (sic!) Caillois
published in “Critique” an article about Caillois and
the College: Roger Caillois ou l’inquisiteur sans église.9
It describes Caillois’ severe intellectual rigour by com
paring him to Loyola but the kind of Loyola who be
came familiar with Durkheim and attended courses
held by Marcel Mauss. It is highly likely that inspired
by the Jesuit spirit Caillois treated writing/studies as
“spiritual exercise” of sort, which, after all, as Roland
Barthes proved in his sketch about St. Ignatius, is a
“search for the language” (The invention of a language this is then the object of the Exercises 10). Jesuit discipline
and severity implemented by Caillois at the College
had a second, darker, and certainly less well-known
side: it involved political motifs carefully camouflaged
by a scientific costume. Years later, Caillois described
that strange commitment on the very eve of the war
(recall, the College was active in 1937-1939): It was
particularly true among those of us who had founded the
College de Sociologie, dedicated exclusively to the study of
closed groups: societies of men in primitive populations,
initiatory communities, sacerdotal brotherhoods, hereti
cal or orgiastic sects, monastic or military orders, terrorist
organisations, and secret political associations of the Far
East or from the murky periods in European history. We
were enthralled by the resolve of those men who, from time
to time throughout history, apparently wished to give firm
195
laws to the undisciplined society that could not satisfy their
desire for rigor. With sympathy we observed the progress
of those people who withdrew from such a society in dis
gust and went to live elsewhere, under harsher institutions.
However, some among us, who were full of fervour, could
not readily resign themselves to merely interpreting; they
were impatient to act for themselves.11
While discussing stands of the French intellectuals
during the 1930s, Zee Sternhell, an historian of French
political thought, drew attention to the fact that resist
ance against fascism was never frontal, but assumed
assorted forms of mimetic subversion, which adapts
and reverses the direction of the words uttered by the
enemy in an attempt to precede him in his own ter
rain and vanquish him while deploying his weapons.12
This chameleon strategy was applied at the time by
Bataille and, predominantly, by Caillois. During those
years, their political ideas, disturbing and genuinely
schizophrenic, oscillated between two extremes: com
munism and fascism. The ambivalence was expanded
to such a degree that J acques Bénet, a reviewer writing
for Cahiers du Sud and discussing the views expounded
by Caillois, accused him of fascist sympathies; then, in
an erratum he significantly corrected his opinion by
admitting that Caillois did harbour communist sym
pathies, adding that this in no way changed his thesis.
13 This authentic story says much about Caillois: we
shall not commit abuse if we say that he suffered from
psychasthenia - a psychological disorder characteristic
for an inability to make a decision. Caillois rendered
psychasthenia the topic of one of his first texts (also
published in “Minotaure”): Mimétisme et psychastenie
légendaire, linking it with mimicry - the assumption of
camouflage. Could it be that the costume of a scholar
and the mask of methodical knowledge were to serve
Caillois for a masterful description of his own psychic
and existential situation? Was the theory of the am
bivalence of the sacrum and its bipolar features - re
call: right and left, two elements of the sacrum: in the
heart of one we always find a particle of the other initiated during lectures at the College and expanded
in L’homme et le sacré, actually a description of political
ambivalence in which two extremities (right and left)
were close and radically opposed the profanum, i.e.
the (democratic) centre? Did the timid young scholar
dream not only about secret societies but also about
solutions far exceeding the rules of democracy?
The texts by Leiris and Caillois are the reason
why we remain helpless. We shall never know for
certain the nature of that, which had been proposed
for a scientific discourse. Perhaps it is a metaphor, a
mask? A game played with textual mirrors, in which
the authors supplied the best keys for the interpreta
tion of their texts that, in turn, function as perverse
self-comments? This is a science, which, as in the case
of the headless Acephale, is always missing something,
Tomasz Szerszeń • ANTHROPOLOGY AS A MASK, A COSTUME, A METAPHOR: THE CASE OF MICHEL LEIRIS AND ROGER CAILLOIS
7
in which something is not in its right place: shifted,
multiplied, treated lightly. This is a science created to
destroy the naïve researcher just as the cruel praying
mantis would do.
8
Endnotes
1 K. Rutkowski, Paluch, "Konteksty” 3-4/2007, p. 257.
This text is a commentary to Bataille's essay: The Big Toe
in the last issue of "Documents” (no. 8/1930).
2 J. Jamin, Introduction, in: M. Leiris, Miroir de l’Afrique,
Gallimard 1996, pp. 40-44.
3 E. Cioran, Ćwiczenia z zachwytu, Warszawa 1998, p. 94.
4 R. Caillois, La Nécessité d’esprit (avant-propos), Gallimard
1981, p. 18.
5 D. Hollier, Crainte et tremblement à l’âge du surrealism, in:
Les Dépossèdes (Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, Malraux, Sartre),
Paris 1993, pp. 131-132.
6 R. Caillois, Modliszka, in: Odpowiedzialność i styl,
Warszawa 1967, p. 151.
9
10
11
12
13
196
D. Hollier, Crainte et tremblement à l’âge du surrealism, in:
op. cit., p. 134.
D. Hollier, Crainte et tremblement à l’âge du surrealism, in:
op. cit., p. 136. It is worth mentioning that the leitmotif
of Hollier's book is composed of forms of this paradoxi
cal presence-absence of the subject of an autobiography.
The French title: Les Dépossèdes and its English language
version: Absent without Leave, excellently reflect this
experience of emptiness: there is no need to lose one's
life in order to die.
In: “Critique, no. 8-9/1947, p. 29.
R. Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, p. 54.
R. Caillois, Approches de l’imaginaire, Paris 1974, pp.
92-93.
Z. Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche, p. 267. Cf. also D.
Hollier, De l’équivoque entre literature et politique, in: Les
Dépossèdes (Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, Malraux, Sartre),
Paris 1993, pp. 109-130.
P Missac, Avec des cartes truquées, “Cahiers du Sud”, no.
216/1939.
