Reading Order
L'Âge d'hommeL'Âge d'homme Reading Order
L'Âge d'homme (Manhood, 1939) by Michel Leiris is the founding text of French autofiction and one of the strangest and most influential autobiographical works of the twentieth century — an essay in which the author applies the rules of the Spanish bullfight to the writing of autobiography. Leiris, who was a member of the surrealist movement, a poet, an ethnographer (he went on the Dakar-Djibouti ethnographic mission of 1931–1933), and the secretary of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, decided that autobiography as conventionally practiced was dishonest — it selected the flattering and suppressed the shameful. L'Âge d'homme is an attempt to write an autobiography without self-censorship, organized around the mythological figures of Judith and Lucretia (violent women who fascinated Leiris) and the erotic and shameful episodes that conventional autobiography excludes. Leiris prefaced the 1946 reissue with an essay, 'De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie' (Literature Considered as a Bullfight), which is the central theoretical document of his project: to write in a way that puts the author at genuine risk, as the torero puts himself at genuine risk in the ring.
Where to start
Read L'Âge d'homme after reading the preface essay 'De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie' — the essay explains the program and makes the strange organization of the main text comprehensible. Then read La Règle du jeu (1948–1976), the four-volume autobiographical work that extends the same project over thirty years; and Ziste et Zeste (1969) for the late poetry.
Complete L'Âge d'homme Book List
- 1Buy
L'Âge d'homme
Michel Leiris·1939·Start here — read the preface essay first; the autobiography as bullfight; Judith and Lucretia; the shameful and the erotic; the founding autofiction text - 2Buy
La Règle du jeu
Michel Leiris·1948·The four-volume autobiographical work (Biffures, Fourbis, Fibrilles, Frêle bruit) that extends L'Âge d'homme over 30 years; the definitive Leiris; approach after the shorter work - 3Buy
Afrique fantôme
Michel Leiris·1934·Ghost of Africa — the journal of the Dakar-Djibouti ethnographic mission; Leiris the ethnographer observing himself observing Africa; the ethnographic mirror - 4Buy
De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie
Michel Leiris·1946·Literature as Bullfighting — the preface essay; the central theoretical text; read before L'Âge d'homme; explains the program - 5Buy
La Possession et ses aspects théâtraux
Michel Leiris·1958·The ethnographic study of spirit possession in Ethiopia — Leiris's most important scholarly work; the counterpart to the autobiographical project
L'Âge d'homme — Frequently Asked Questions
What does it mean to write autobiography as a bullfight?
Leiris's preface essay argues that conventional autobiography is dishonest because it selects the flattering and suppresses the shameful — the autobiographer is not genuinely at risk. The bullfight is the model for an honest autobiography because in the ring the torero is genuinely at risk: if he fails to execute the pass correctly, the bull will injure or kill him. The literary equivalent of this risk is to write about oneself in a way that genuinely exposes one to shame — to include the sexual failures, the cowardice, the unworthy desires, the shameful episodes that conventional autobiography excludes. L'Âge d'homme is the attempt to write in this mode: to expose oneself to the reader's judgment as the torero exposes himself to the bull's horns.
Who are Judith and Lucretia in L'Âge d'homme?
Judith is the Jewish widow who decapitated the Assyrian general Holofernes to save her city; Lucretia is the Roman matron who was raped by Tarquin and killed herself to preserve her honor. These two mythological figures — one violent and active, one violated and passive — are the organizing principles of Leiris's self-examination: they represent two forms of relation between women and violence that he found himself fascinated by and that he used to organize the autobiographical material. L'Âge d'homme is arranged around meditations on paintings and myths of Judith and Lucretia, and the autobiographical episodes are organized around these two poles of fascination.
What is autofiction?
Autofiction is the French literary term for a form of writing that is neither pure autobiography nor pure fiction but uses fictional techniques (invention, formal composition, narrative distance) to write about the author's own life. The term was coined by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977, but Leiris's L'Âge d'homme is generally considered the founding text of the genre — it precedes the term by 40 years. The genre became extremely important in French literature from the 1970s: Doubrovsky, Duras, Annie Ernaux, Christine Angot, and Édouard Louis are all associated with it. The defining feature of autofiction is the author's name on both the cover and the narrator's identity — the book announces that it is simultaneously autobiographical and a literary construction.
What was the Dakar-Djibouti ethnographic mission?
The Dakar-Djibouti ethnographic mission (1931–1933) was the major French ethnographic expedition of the interwar period, led by Marcel Griaule and including Michel Leiris as secretary-archivist. The mission crossed Africa from Dakar on the Atlantic coast to Djibouti on the Red Sea, collecting ethnographic objects (controversially, by methods that were sometimes close to theft) for the new Musée de l'Homme in Paris, and documenting ritual practices, languages, and material cultures. Leiris's journal of the mission — Afrique fantôme (1934) — is a remarkable document in which the ethnographer observes himself observing Africa, becoming increasingly aware of the colonial violence of the enterprise and of his own desires and projections.
What is La Règle du jeu?
La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) is Leiris's four-volume autobiographical work published between 1948 and 1976: Biffures (1948), Fourbis (1955), Fibrilles (1966), and Frêle bruit (1976). The title comes from a Renoir film. The four volumes extend the project of L'Âge d'homme over thirty years: the same refusal of self-censorship, the same organization around mythological and verbal obsessions, the same attempt to find a prose that risks the author's dignity and self-image. La Règle du jeu is generally considered Leiris's masterpiece — richer, stranger, and more formally developed than L'Âge d'homme — but it requires patience and familiarity with the shorter work to approach.
Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.