Litterature et tauromachie: Une lecture de Michel Leiris. (French text);

Abstract

My dissertation attempts to find a way of analyzing the work of Leiris, a difficult contemporary author who is also a remarkable self-critic, without falling into the trap of repeating or paraphrasing him, as most critics have done to date. To do so, and in fact to examine why Leiris chose autobiography as a means of expressing his conception of poetry, I use and extend the metaphor that he privileged in "On Literature, Considered as Tauromachy." This ancient, agonistic, ritualized image of the process of writing and its significance provides the vehicle for the various stages of my analysis. Thus, the relation between the bull and the bull fighter that Leiris describes underscores the divisions of the self, and forces us to rethink the very notion of "a writer" in terms of a split identity. Furthermore, the movement of the cape and the passes of the bullfighter serve to figure the subtle movement and the elliptical style of Leiris' writing. By miming the bullfighter's passes, writing brings into relief, as if by analogy, the object enveloped in these passes: the bull's horn ("la corne de taureau"), performing at the same time a movement of dissimulation and envelopment which is that of the cape as well. The horn, a product of the simulacrum in writing, can be seen as the symbolic image of what is refered to in the expression "toucher le fond" (roughly, "get to the bottom of things"), and would correspond to what Leiris defines as poetry. No less important are the role of the spectator, the theme of the spectacle, and the notion of sacrifice that are dramatized in Leiris' work, and which lead to a final discussion of the strategies of seduction in his writing. Finally, the unceasing dialectic which the text strives to bring to light is seen as the putative equivalent of a revolutionary dialectic. A type of analysis such as this tries to overcome the difficulty of contemporary writing, which integrates elements of modern criticism, and challenges accepted notions of author, literary genre, indeed of literature itself.