Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

The man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are. Their resultant lack of imagination is appalling…. If something exists in one place, it will exist everywhere.

This phrase has a particular resonance for me. For the last five years, I have been engaged in a long, gruesome battle with Belgian officialdom (Belgium — the “Stateless State,” as the regretted Tony Judt aptly called it — is my country of origin). The blunder of a consular official had illegally deprived two Belgian citizens by birth of their sole nationality — reducing them to statelessness. It would have been easy enough to correct the original mistake, but (as Liu Xiaobo remarked in different circumstances) the main concern and industry of bureaucrats is not to rectify their mistakes, but to conceal them. The fate of these two young men, suddenly turned stateless by sheer administrative stupidity, is of particular concern to me: they happen to be my twin sons.

A Chinese friend who knows of my predicament remarked that, since over the years I have spent much time denouncing Chinese abuses of power, it would be sensible for me now to look closer to home. He has a point; yet reading Liu Xiaobo has not been a diversion from my duty toward my family: it gave me added awareness that, in the defense of human rights, our fight is universal and indivisible.

One interesting twist in the unfolding of the Belgian government’s denial of my sons’ rights: the diplomat who was the main architect of a cover-up (which still delays the judicial resolution of the affair) recently obtained the posting he long coveted, as a reward for his zeal — he is now ambassador in Peking, where he ought to feel like a fish in the water. Our present Belgian ambassador in Australia, also knowing the truth, came to apologize privately . Unfortunately, he cannot do so publicly; as he said, this would be the end of his career. Why?

February 2012

*Review of Liu Xiaobo: No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems , edited by Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao, and Liu Xia, foreword by Václav Havel (Cambridge: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2012).

*

OBJECTS AND LIMITS OF THIS ANTHOLOGY

JOSEPH Conrad remarked that the love of literature does not make a writer, any more than the love of the sea makes a sailor. This is cruelly true: poor frustrated lovers — failed writers and armchair sailors — may this anthology at least bring you some consolation!

In my undertaking, I set myself three rules, while allowing myself two infractions, which I ought to mention at the outset.

First rule: in principle, all the selections in this anthology deal with the sea . In practice, however, I did not narrowly limit myself to salt water; here and there, my readers will also encounter lakes, rivers and canals. Strictly speaking, the title of my anthology should thus be modified — putting Water instead of The Sea —but such a title would lose in flavour what it could gain in accuracy.

Second rule: this is not an anthology of sea literature, it is a literary anthology of the sea. One could very well compile a collection of documentary writings, narratives and accounts by navigators, adventurers, seamen, sportsmen, oceanographers, yachtsmen, castaways, etc.; such a collection could provide diverse and fascinating information, but it would constitute an altogether different enterprise. As a rule, my selection draws exclusively from the works of writers . On this point, I am afraid you might quarrel with me here and there: “Why,” you might say, “do you grant Marteilhe, Duguay-Trouin, Garneray[1] the qualification of ‘writer’ which you deny Gerbault, Bombard, Moitessier or Tabarly?”[2] Of course, I could attempt to justify myself, invoking the fact that, in the past, amateur memorialists often wrote with more verve and style than many modern writers, but I ought better honestly admit that, in some cases, I broke my own rule: some pages should perhaps have been omitted. If I retained them, it is simply because they pertain to books that I admire and love, but which I feel have been unfairly ignored or forgotten and deserve to be revived.

Third rule: all the pieces selected (even when written by foreigners) were originally written in French.[3] This rule has suffered no exception.

My very first intention had been to make a universal anthology of the sea in literature — the Bible, Homer, Virgil, Li Bai, Su Dongpo, Camoens, Defoe, Hugo, Dana, Melville, Conrad… but I soon realised the huge naïveté and incoherence of such a project; furthermore, as regards the Anglo-American domain, it has already been covered by a number of excellent anthologies.[4] Last but not least, from a first random survey, I began to perceive that French sources would provide rich and original material, which alone would easily justify being gathered in one volume (actually I ended up with two, totalling more than 1,500 pages).

In contrast with Great Britain, where, for obvious geographical and historical reasons, language and culture have always been closely related to the sea,[5] France, whose maritime ventures were hardly less impressive, never succeeded in integrating these into the national consciousness. The problem was that French seafaring activities were essentially confined to the provinces — Flanders, Normandy, Brittany, Gascogne, Basque country, Provence — whereas from the point of view of Paris, which, alas, commands everything, the sea remained generally invisible. And yet it never ceased to inspire writers, including some of the greatest: Rabelais, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Baudelaire, Michelet, Valéry… The sea is truly present in French literature, though its actual importance is still not sufficiently appreciated, and I hope that my anthology may be a first step towards remedying this ignorance.

MAN AND THE SEA

The fascination that the sea exerts upon even the most insensitive landlubbers is a universal phenomenon which can be observed on all the shores of the world. Robert Frost captured this everyday mystery in a poem of mesmerising simplicity (by the way, do not be surprised to find an abundance of English and American quotes in this introduction to a French anthology: since they were eventually excluded from the main body of my work, this is a way for me to salvage at least some of the material I had originally selected):

The people along the sand

All turn and look one way;

They turn their back on the land,

They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass

A ship keeps raising its hull;

The wetter ground like glass

Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more,

But wherever the truth may be

The water comes ashore

And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far

They cannot look in deep,

But when was that ever a bar

To any watch they keep?[6]

Should we therefore conclude that the love of the sea is a common feature of all mankind? Edmund Wilson denied this with a strange sort of angry passion in a short essay on “Things I Consider Overrated”:

I believe that a genuine love for the sea is one of the rarest things in the world; it is a special and bizarre taste, very seldom acquired. Of course, everybody loves the sea as it appears from the shore:… here the sea is romantic and beautiful because one does not have to see too much of it. But what can be said for it in its absolute state, with no beach to civilize it? How can one enjoy its colossal stupidity, its monotony, its flatness?… It is as sterile as the Sahara; its lifelessness is overpowering. On a sea voyage one finds oneself shut in and oppressed by the presence of a great nothingness. It is really not picturesque: it is too empty for that… all the waves resemble one another perfectly and there are millions of them in sight; it makes one uncomfortable to see them all behave in precisely the same manner. The human soul is appalled and ashamed by the primal stupidity of Nature. On board ship, the spirit of man, baffled and repelled by the ocean, feels its life swept uncomfortably bare by the disappearance of its proper setting. It is a prisoner, a slave, — with an unassailable jailor, a jailor who is incorruptible because it cannot feel or understand, because it is not sufficiently intelligent to accept a bribe…[7]