Rules of the Game: Scratches: A Self-Portrait

No writer other than Luis Borges managed to change the way we relate to language, the self and autobiography the way Michel Leiris did. Michel Leiris (1901-1990) is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. Most are aware of this but few are acquainted with his four part autobiographical ludic fiction. Leiris was a famed French anthropologist and an art critic who combined the human sciences and literature in his narratives. He was a member of the famed group that included Bataille, Lacan, de Bouvoir, Sartre, Camus, Gris, Picasso, Max Jacob and Aime Cesaire and Salvador Dali. His writing is serendipitously balanced between deliberate choice and fortuitous discoveries, while his writing constantly harbors an exploration in language that is at once ambivalent and repulsive. That is to say he manages to divest language of political and functional traits and allows the reader to see but the vestiges of a memoir of tension and awesome absorption. Objects and scenes, people and relations are regarded with an eye of poetic bliss that somehow manages to eradicate the illusory statement of fictional briefings. The author breaks down the barriers between life and art by describing the practices that make the human, the absurd quandaries that we inhere within in order to give meaning to situations and circumstances. In this first installment of The Rules of the Game, titled Scratches, Leiris weaves memories of his childhood with the semiotics of language to psychologize memory and the archive that comprises the self, its mode of being and its performative essence. The familiar is rendered strange, the usual looked from a vantage point that makes it lack credibility, the opportune tested and taxed into innocent and naive expositions of a life that bewilders and amazes, where the ordinary is exotic and intricately folded within desires we hide from ourselves. Scratches is a personal statement that is merciless towards the self and others but in doing so frenzied with delight and consternation. Every time you lose your orientation of meaning you find the veil removed and the scene stands before you in all its sheer timidity and awkwardness. A narrative like no other you will encounter, and an encounter with the ploys of narrative, the art of fiction availing of such art to show its most intimate core unadorned of any cultural or semiotic raiment.