Aurora

Michel Leiris' Aurora, seemingly prompted by the unleashing of verbal forces and the powers of imagination, paradoxically owes its existence to the narrator's precarious resistance to boredom, the most redoubtable enemy of inspiration. The writer, referring repeatedly to boredom or spleen, fears spiritual inertia or acedia, as everyman dreads death and immorbility. Beaudelairian spleen, which prevents man from making distinctions and from shaking himself out of paralysis, assumes, within the framework of the text, the dimensions of threatening force. Leiris, even more than Baudelaire, insists on the physical impact of boredom, capable of cracking a solid wall. Aurora belongs to those works of fiction which avoid all forms of stability and relate only to motion, expressing everyone of its multifarious aspects, morbid as well as vigorous. The narrator's statements imply rejection not only of what is fixed but of all that is foreseeable1. The reader experiences constant metamorphoses through the tracing and effacing of lines and contours, through the ebbing and flowing of verbal fluxes. Moments of spontaneity alternate with self-awareness; and thus, the first reaction to parallelism appears like an impatient outburst, whereas later it becomes a coherent 'opposition to an invariable relationship? We cannot deny, however, that a number of fixed elements enter into the structure of Aurora: by and large, in geographically definable lands and definable characters make their appearance. The author who communicates, as in his better known writings, Biffures and L'Age d'homme, experiences of an apparently personal nature, does not obfuscate them by means of undecipherable glossaries. Leiris even introduces characters by the most reliable of traditional descriptive methods: portraiture

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