Out of Europe: the African palimpsest in Michel Leiris's L’Afrique fantôme

Abstract

In his travel journal classic, L’Afrique fantôme (1934), after a year of travel through sub-Saharan Africa, the French writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris listed a group of texts under the simple heading ‘African imagery’. The author never explicates the meanings of the imagery thereby giving the reader the opportunity to reflect on their possible implications, or to leave them as they are. The aim of this paper is to examine the indications of this heterogeneous list, and its framing in the travel journal, as a palimpsest that states itself, but that also has the potential to call into question the writer's prior knowledge of Africa. Moreover, the paper sets the list's contents in relation to Leiris's other writings so as to tease out some finer implications of the specific textual ‘ambience’ to which the author refers as he presents the inventory of African imagery to his reading public.

Keywords:

• Michel Leiris
• Dakar-Djibouti mission
• exoticism
• ethnography
• colonialist discourse
• intertextuality
• palimpsest
• narrative authority
• Raymond Roussel

Notes

Notes

1. Michel Leiris, ‘Glossaire: j’y serre mes gloses’, in Mots sans mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 71–116. Unless otherwise indicated, the translations are mine.

2. Michel Leiris, ‘Souple mantique et simples tics de glotte. En supplément’, in Langage Tangage (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 7–68.

3. Michel Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 365–66. Further page references will be given parenthetically in the text.

4. Towards the end of L’Afrique fantôme, Leiris refers to the mirage exotique, meaning the desire to ‘go to Calcutta’ and the desire for ‘femmes de couleur’, as an illusion that no longer obsesses him. The same concept is also used in the footnotes (L’Afrique fantôme, 629, 655).

5. Including the Battle of the Pyramids in 1789, the coup of Agadir in 1911, the Algeciras conference in 1906, the exile of queen Ranavalo of Madagascar, the capture of Samori Ture in 1898 and the 1894 surrender of King Behanzin and his amazons of Dahomey.

6. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 170

7. Seán Hand, Michel Leiris: Writing the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 59.

8. Seán Hand, ‘Phantom of the Opus: colonialist traces in Michel Leiris's L’Afrique fantôme’, Paragraph 18, no. 2 (July 1995): 174–93 (179). Further page references will be given parenthetically in the text.

9. Leiris starts his 1930 essay ‘L’œil de l’ethnographe’ with a memory of a theatre production of Roussel's novel that he saw at the age of 11 (in May 1912). Comparing Roussel's imagery of ‘Africa’ with Helen Bannerman's story ‘The Little Black Sambo’ and André Mouëzy-Eon's play Malikoko roi nègre he points out the distorting Western perspective in such representations, while emphasising the promise in ethnographic research and travel to ‘dissiper pas mal de ces erreurs et, partant, à ruiner nombre de leurs conséquences, entre autres les préjugés de races, iniquité contre laquelle on ne s’élèvra jamais assez’ [‘clear up many of these mistakes and, thus, prevent a good number of their consequences, including racial prejudices, iniquity that we can never fight enough’] (Michel Leiris, ‘L’œil de l’ethnographe’ [1930], in Zébrage [Paris: Gallimard, 1992], 33).

10. On Leiris's thoughts on opera, see Michel Leiris, ‘L’opéra, musique en action’ [1965], in Brisées [1966] [Paris: Gallimard, 1992], 315–22.

11. Before the study of the zar cult in Godar, that is. As for instance in this ‘orientalising’ description of the village of Sanga: ‘Formidable religiosité. Le sacré nage dans tous les coins. Tout semble sage et grave. Image classique de l’Asie’ (122) [‘Wonderful religiosity. All corners are filled with a sense of sacred. Everything seems sage and serious. A classical image of Asia’]. See also Michel Beaujour, Terreur et Rhétorique. Breton, Bataille, Leiris, Paulhan, Barthes & Cie. Autour du surréalisme (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1999), 124.

12. Michel Beaujour, Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait [1980], trans. Yara Milos (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 4. This means not only the way the self-portrait, unlike the typical autobiography, may not have a clear notion of direction or continuous narrative, but the way the writer's culture may ‘provide him with the ready-made categories that enable him to classify the fragments of his discourse’ (Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, 5).

13. See David Bate, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 187, 193.

14. Michel Leiris, ‘L’ethnographe devant le colonialisme’, in Brisées [1966] (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 149.

15. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 5, trans. Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH and London: Dartmouth College, 1995), 5.

16. Michel Leiris, ‘Message de l’Afrique’ [1948] in Miroir de l’Afrique (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 880.

17. By the desire to live out a myth through the other, I refer specifically to Leiris's often ambivalent wish to fully participate in a ritual of spirit possession, that is, to be possessed, during his stay in Gondar, from July to December 1932. On Leiris's ambivalent identification with the practitioners of the zar cult, see Irene Albers, ‘Mimesis and alterity: Michel Leiris's ethnography and poetics of spirit possession’, French Studies LXII, no. 3 (2008): 271–89.

18. Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3.

19. Michel Leiris, ‘L’œil de l’ethnographe’ [1930], in Zébrage (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 26–34.

20. ‘L’Abyssinie intime’ [1935], in Zébrage (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 48–56, 48.

21. Fabian defines a ‘denial of coevalness’ as ‘a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse’, in Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 31. I would like to thank the anonymous reader of Studies in Travel Writing for drawing my attention to the problematic nature of the term ‘archaic’ in Leiris's essay.

22. Marie-Denise Shelton argues for the central role of a ‘primitivist’ function of Africa in L’Afrique fantôme that would assert ‘the radical opposition of civilized and primitive’ (336). I find this hypothesis, as well as the references to Leiris's supposed fear of losing a sense of superiority vis-à-vis the colonised Africans, to be unconvincing. While Leiris certainly used Africa and Abyssinia for self-mythologising purposes throughout his early career, and, as Shelton's essay makes apparent, L’Afrique fantôme is deeply involved in a colonialist project at many levels, it is the authority of the observing subject and the ‘authenticity’ of the primitive object that are increasingly called into question in this travel journal. See ‘Primitive self: colonial impulses in Leiris's L’Afrique Fantôme’, in Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, ed. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 326–38. The same volume includes an important corrective by Marjorie Perloff to Marianna Torgovnick's critique, in Gone Primitive (1990), of Leiris's ‘exoticism’. See 339–54.

23. ‘le voyage ne nous change que par moments, la plupart du temps vous restez tristement pareil à ce que vous aviez toujours été’ [‘Travel changes us only momentarily. Most of the time you remain sadly similar to the person you have always been’] (L’Afrique fantôme, 225).

24. While visiting the Dogon, Leiris explains that ‘Ce qui empêche, à mes yeux, les femmes noires d’être réellement excitantes, c’est qu’elles sont habituellement trop nues et que de faire l’amour avec elles ne mettrait en jeu rien de social’ [‘What prevents, in my eyes, the black women from being really exciting is that they are usually too naked, and to make love with them would not bring into play anything social’] (L’Afrique fantôme, 148). Leiris points out Emawayish's charm and beauty despite her ‘peasant appearance’ (L’Afrique fantôme, 586) and later, in his memoirs L’Âge d’homme, he reinterprets his feelings toward her as love. It is possible to see Emawayish representing the ultimate sign of primitive exoticism that Leiris finally rejects. For instance, Vincent Kaufmann argues that Emawayish, since she emerges as a kind of extreme form of simulacra, allows Leiris to remain European to the end. Vincent Kaufmann, Michel Leiris: “on ne part pas”, Revue des Sciences Humaines 90/214 (1989): 145–62 (150–51). For more on Leiris's constitutive ambivalence vis-à-vis Emawayish, see Sébastien Côté, ‘Michel Leiris et la fuite impossible. Ethnographie, autobiographie et altérité dans L’Afrique fantôme’, MLN 120, no. 4 (2005): 849–70 (859–67).

25. Leiris explains the double interest in Roussel's imaginary vision of Africa: ‘d’une part une Afrique telle, à peu de chose près, que nous pouvions la concevoir dans notre imagination d’enfants blancs, d’autre part, une Europe de phénomènes et d’inventions abracadabrantes telle que peut-être elle se trouve figurée dans l’esprit de ceux que nous nommons avec dédain des “primitifs”’ [‘on the one hand, almost exactly a kind of Africa that we were able to imagine as white children and, on the other hand, a Europe of ludicrous phenomena and inventions of the kind that can perhaps be imagined to be discovered in the minds of those whom we call, with sneer, the ‘‘primitives’’’] Michel Leiris, ‘L’œil de l’ethnographe’ [1930], in Zébrage (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 27.

26. See ‘Entretien sur Raymond Roussel’, in Roussel & Co, ed. Jean Jamin (Paris: Fata Morgana/Fayard, 1998), 268, and Leiris's thank you letter to Roussel signed on February 10, 1931, in Roussel & Co, 290–91.

27. Michel Leiris, ‘Cahier Raymond Roussel’, in Roussel & Co, 65–197, 122.

28. The experience of foreign places only mattered to Roussel if they corresponded with this particular universe. Upon Roussel's visit to Tahiti, his main interest was to see the tomb of Pierre Loti's fictive heroine. In his Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres Roussel famously states ‘Or, de tous ces voyages, je n’ai jamais rien tiré pour mes livres. Il m’a paru que la chose méritait d’être signalée tant elle montre clairement que chez moi l’imagination est tout’ [‘I have gained nothing from these travels as regards to my books. It is worth pointing this out since it shows clearly how imagination is everything to me’] Raymond Roussel, Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres [1935] (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 27. Roussel was also not interested in hearing Leiris's impressions of Africa. See ‘Entretien sur Raymond Roussel’, in Roussel & Co, 268.

29. See Michel Leiris, ‘De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie’ [1946] in L’âge d’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 9–22.

30. Leiris's writings on Roussel reveal a deep interest in the question of the relation between inspiration and process: how word play and rules of composition could function as sources of writing and as the suspension of the everyday experience. Roussel's emphasis on the opposition between inspiration and process (power of transmutation) attracted but also troubled Leiris. On the one hand, Leiris adhered to Roussel's idea of literature as a process and an act. The small difference between ‘two words that are almost similar’ (‘deux mots presque semblables’) and ‘similar words but used for two different meanings’ (‘des mots pareils mais pris dans deux sens différents’), promoted by Roussel, finds its equivalence in Leiris's emphasis on poetic play and the decomposition of words, for instance in the latter's parodic glossaires. On the other hand, Leiris's interest in Roussel's instinct de jeu and associative play was not surrealist at all, that is, not based on the gratuitous rapprochement between the elements but on the idea of strict rules of composition.

31. For Clifford, in Leiris's sketch for a Conradian novel, the ‘process of collecting and telling a personal story becomes itself the focus of narration’ (Predicament of Culture, 171).

32. David Scott, ‘Writing the exotic: the example of Leiris in Afrique fantôme’, paper given at the conference ‘Pluralism & Equality’ at the University of Helsinki, Finland, May 18–21, 2005, 1. I am grateful for the author's permission to quote from his unpublished essay.