Michel Leiris

Michel Leiris (born April 20, 1901, Paris, France—died Sept. 30, 1990, Saint-Hilaire) was a French writer who was a pioneer in modern confessional literature and was also a noted anthropologist, poet, and art critic.

Leiris studied at the Sorbonne (University of Paris) and at the School for Advanced Scientific and Religious Studies. While associated with the Surrealists, Leiris published a collection of poems, Simulacre (1925; “Simulacrum”), and, in the late 1920s, wrote a novel, Aurora, published in 1946. The novel and his numerous collections of poems all show his fascination with puns and wordplay and with the associative power of language. In precarious mental health, Leiris temporarily abandoned literary life in 1929 and drew on his university training as an ethnologist to join the Dakar-Djibouti expedition of 1931–33. Upon his return to France he was employed at the Museum of Man (Musée de L’Homme) in Paris and resumed writing.

In 1939 Leiris published the autobiographical L’Âge d’homme (Manhood), which attracted much attention and was reissued in 1946. Self-deprecating and punitive, the work catalogs Leiris’ physical and moral flaws; he introduced the 1946 edition with an essay, “De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie” (1946; The Autobiographer as Torero), comparing the courage required to write with that required of a matador. In 1948 he began another autobiography, La Règle du jeu (“The Rules of the Game”), which was published in four volumes as Biffures (1948; “Erasures”), Fourbis (1955; “Odds and Ends”), Fibrilles (1966; “Fibrils”), and Frêle Bruit (1976; “Frail Noise”) and which was replete with memories of childhood humiliations, sexual fantasies, and contemplations of death.

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Leiris served as director of research at the National Centre for Scientific Research from 1935 to 1970. His Journal 1922–1989 was published in 1992. His anthropological essays include L’Afrique fantôme (1934; “Phantom Africa”), Le Sacré dans la vie quotidienne (1938; “The Sacred in Everyday Life”), and Race et civilisation (1951; “Race and Civilization”).