Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

LITERARY PRESENCE

In Taiwan, some time ago, a historical literary magazine published an article analysing a little-known aspect of the life of Han Yu, a great writer of the ninth century (Tang dynasty). The author of this study said that Han Yu had contracted venereal disease while frequenting prostitutes during his stay in southern China, and that the drugs (derived from sulphur) which he took in the hope of curing himself eventually caused his death.

A descendant of Han Yu, from the thirty-ninth generation, considered that the reputation of his ancestor had been defamed by the magazine. Acting in the name of the illustrious victim, he took the magazine to court and won the case. The editor was sentenced to a fine of $300, or a month in jail. The editor appealed, but the appeal was rejected.

In this particular case, one may naturally deplore the restriction that was imposed upon freedom of expression. But one should also admire a society in which historical awareness is so keen that it makes it possible to treat the memory of a writer who has been dead for nearly 1,200 years as if he were our contemporary.

SONATA FOR PIANO AND VACUUM CLEANER

One day, as he was practising at his piano, the young Glenn Gould — he was fourteen at the time — had a revelation. The maid who was cleaning the room suddenly switched on her vacuum cleaner quite close to the piano. At once the dreadful mechanical noise drowned out Gould’s music but, to his surprise, the experience was far from unpleasant. Instead of listening to his own performance, he suddenly discovered that he could follow it from within his body through a heightened awareness of his music-making movements. His entire musical experience acquired another dimension that was both more physical and more abstract: bypassing his sense of hearing, the fugue he was playing soundlessly transmitted itself from his fingers to his mind.

Analysing this episode afterwards, he said, “I could feel, of course — I could sense the tactile relation with the keyboard, which is replete with its own kind of acoustical associations, and I could imagine what I was doing, but I couldn’t actually hear it. The strange thing was that all of it suddenly sounded better than it had without the vacuum cleaner, and those parts which I couldn’t actually hear sounded best of all.” (Mark Twain once said that the music of Wagner was better than it sounded; I agree with Twain but fear this is not quite the point Gould was trying to make.)

Gould’s sudden discovery of the difference between music heard in the abstraction of the inner mind and music produced concretely by playing an instrument, though it was enjoyable in his particular case, was not unlike the tragic predicament of Beethoven, whom deafness compelled to explore this other dimension of the musical experience. Or, to take a pictorial comparison, one thinks of the great paintings of water lilies that Monet executed at the end of his life, with his vision severely impaired by cataracts. There are also the superbly forbidding landscapes in dark ink which the twentieth-century Chinese master Huang Binhong created in complete blindness in his early eighties. Surgery eventually restored part of his vision, but even before this intervention, he never stopped painting; though he could not see the actual effect of his brushstrokes, he relied on the rhythmic sequence of the calligraphic brushwork, which he had mastered through the daily exercise of a lifetime. For him, painting had disappeared as a visual experience, but it remained as a vital breathing of his whole being. In their fierce blackness, these late landscapes of Huang Binhong are to the eye what the harsh complexity of Beethoven’s last quartets are to the ear.

The silent music that Beethoven and Gould had discovered through very different accidents has been known for ages among Chinese musicians. Perhaps it came more naturally to them because the scores of Chinese classical music do not indicate notes: they are fingering charts. Today, masters of the zither ( guqin ), in their daily practice, occasionally play the “silent zither”: they go soundlessly through the various moves of an entire piece, letting hands and fingers fly above the instrument without ever touching the strings.

In the early fifth century, one great eccentric, Tao Yuanming, who is also China’s most beloved poet, went one step further: he became famous for the stringless zither which he used to carry everywhere with him. When people asked what such an instrument could be good for, he replied: “I seek only the inspiration that lies within the zither. Why should I strain myself on its strings?”

FAITH

People who go to church to pray for rain seldom bring their umbrellas along.

INDIGENEITY

On the thorny issue of indigeneity and its painful and poisoned sequels of nationalistic fever, flag crazes, racism and hatreds, the old surrealist writer Scutenaire said something which, if it is not the final word, remains at least worth pondering: “Let everyone stay home: Maoris in Greenland, Basques in Ethiopia, Redskins in New Guinea, Eskimos in Slovakia and Celts in Siberia.”

HOW TO READ?

It is very frustrating to watch someone who, being nearly right, proves nevertheless to be totally wrong. To borrow Chesterton’s image, the feeling is as irritating as the sight of somebody’s hat being perpetually washed up by the sea and never touching the shore. I experienced it the other day in a bookshop, as I was browsing Harold Bloom’s latest book, How to Read and Why . The book contains many robust and salubrious observations that deserve to be heartily applauded, such as, “I would fear in the long run for the survival of democracy if people stopped reading” or “watching a screen is not reading.” And at first I was delighted to note that, in his selection of the world’s greatest literary masterpieces, Bloom rightly ranked Chekhov’s short story “The Student.” But when he proceeded to explain the reasons for his choice, he immediately gave such an obtuse reading of the story he professed to admire that, at once, it cancelled all the credit one might have been tempted to grant his literary perception.

As is often the case with Chekhov’s best works, “The Student” is very short — barely three pages — and virtually devoid of events. A young student in theology has returned to his village for Easter: on Good Friday, having spent the afternoon hunting in the woods, he walks back home at dusk. The weather is still bitterly cold and he stops briefly to warm himself by a bonfire which a widow and her grown-up daughter have lit in their courtyard. Standing by the fire and chatting with the two women, he is suddenly reminded of the Passion Gospel which was read in church the day before, and he retells it to them: on the night Jesus was arrested, Peter had also stood by such a fire in the courtyard of the High Priest’s palace. As he was warming himself among the guards and servants, they started asking him questions: he took fright and denied three times having ever had any acquaintance with Jesus. At that moment, a cock crowed, and realising what he had done, “he went out and wept bitterly.”

As the student takes leave of the women, he is surprised to see that the widow is quietly sobbing and her daughter looks distressed, “as if holding back a terrible pain.” Walking into the incoming darkness, he ponders the women’s emotion:

Their weeping meant that all that happened to Peter on that terrible night had a particular meaning for them… Obviously what he had just told them about happenings nineteen centuries ago had a meaning for the present, for both women and also probably for this God-forsaken village, for himself, for all people. It had not been his gift for poignant narrative that had made the women weep. It was because Peter was near to them… Joy suddenly stirred within him… Crossing the river by ferry, and then climbing the hill, he looked at his home village and the narrow strip of cold crimson sunset shining in the west. And he brooded on truth and beauty — how they had guided human life there in the garden, and in the High Priest’s palace, how they had continued without a break till the present day… A sensation of youth, health, strength — he was only twenty-two years old — together with an anticipation, ineffably sweet, of happiness, strange, mysterious happiness gradually came over him. And life seemed enchanting, miraculous, imbued with exalted significance.