Manhood: A Journey from Childhood Into the Fierce Order of Virility [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Michel Leiris-- a French ethnographer who also was affiliated with the surrealist literary movement-- penned this often morbidly self-castigating memoir in the proclaimed hope that he might confront and largely master the many deep-seated fears and obsessions that contributed to his "growth" into manhood. Of course, like a number of works within such a genre-- Rousseau's Confessions would provide a paradigm of this-- one often feels suspended between such a cathartic motive and the manner in which the narrative betrays a strange masochistic pleasure as well: a phenomenon that Leiris perceives himself, and which often serves to amplify his self-criticism even further. In accounting for his motives, Leiris proposes an analogy between his own activity and that of a bullfighter whose ritualistic behavior must to some extent mimic the very violent or threatening forces that it wishes to subdue. If in a writer like Hemingway this narrative attempt to regain some sense of virility or manhood sometimes betrays an underlying fear of castrating women, Leiris clearly indulges in this fear in a much more overt and graphic fashion, even as he acknowledges the bizarre mixture of desire that transforms such fear into its eroticized counterpart. Thus we see so many of his early experiences organized around the symbolic figures of Lucrece and Judith, two female figures from ancient myth who in their own ways serve to highlight the ambivalent significance of violent feminine sexuality in the male imagination. As Leiris connects these figures with his own childhood fears and fantasies, as well as with their many counterparts in the opera or musical drama of the author's youth, we not only get an interesting intertwining of psycho-auto-biography and literary criticism, but an illuminating cross-section of the many masculine sexual hang-ups which seem to linger within such cultural images. Or do such neuroses reside primarily within Leiris's own fevered imagination? In any case, this book allows the reader to consider this question in a very rich manner, with only a few slow passages here and there. If such a form of writing can degenerate into egomaniacal farce in the case of Norman Mailer, Leiris seems to avoid this for the most part-- he allows himself much more vulnerability in our evaluation of him, and in the process appears much more complex of a person. As the current enthusiasm for memoirs looks like it's still in full swing, Leiris is worth checking out.

This was and is a beautifully written and excellently translated autobiography of Michael Leiris from childhood to 35 years of age. I like the theme of a writer as a toreador or bullfighter in relationship to life, which is the bull.

I particularly liked the first half of this book's involvement with opera stories and the paintings by Cranach of Judith and Lucretia. Michael Leiris underwent pscychoanalysis. The book ends with a couple of dreams.

Michael Leiris writes, "I did not quite admit to myself then that what aroused my fury against my life was not the condition which the natural and social laws had created but simply death. I vaguely hoped that the poetic miracle would would intervene to change everything and that I would enter into 'eternity' alive, having conquered my destiny as a man with the help of words. I also, and contradictorily, retained a vague image of happiness of a purely human paradise, like the one from my earliest childhood to which an everlasting mutual love would give us the key. I perceived in the deepest part of my being this calm, this gentle utopia, like an illustration from a children's book, and if I regarded myself as a doomed man, it was actually because I was sure this Eden would be pitilessly denied me rather than because of any attempt I might entertain toward such happiness."

In another passage, Michael Leiris writes, "Always beneath or above events, I remained a prisoner of this alternative. The world as a real object which dominates and devours me like Judith, in suffering and in fear, or else the world as a pure fantasy which dissolves in my hand and which I destroy, like Lucretia, thrusting home the dagger, without ever succeeding in possessing it. Perhaps, above all, the question for me is to escape this dilemma by finding a way in which the world and myself, object and subject, confront each other on an equal footing as the matador stands before the bull."

Lastly, and in relationship to psychoanalysis, Michael Leiris has this to say: "I am in better health apparently and am no longer a continuously haunted person, haunted by the tragic themes and by the idea that I can do nothing that will not humiliate me. I measure my preferences by these true values. I no longer abandon myself to those ridiculous follies and yet everything happens as if the fallacious constructions on which I based my life had been undermined at their source without anything having been given to replace them. As a result, I act certainly with more sagacity, but the void in which I move is all the more apparent, with a bitterness I did not use to suspect. I have come to realize that only a certain fervor could save me, but that this world has nothing in it for which I am capable of dying."

164 pages

Although I'm not a huge fan of philosophy, Manhood is a page turner. Leiris autobiographical account of his life is delightfully disturbing.