Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

6. Needless to say, I have no desire lightly to pass a negative judgement upon editors who have accomplished a gigantic task, successfully assembling a mass of materials, texts and information otherwise inaccessible to general readers. (Without this indispensable reference tool, for instance, I should never have been able to write the present essay.) But still, from an aesthetic and literary standpoint, the great monument that they have erected seems very much like a tomb containing not a few eviscerated mummies.

7. L’Île noire in its successive revisions is a particularly sad illustration of this process.

8. [The English translation by Sylvia Beach (New York: New Directions, 1949; reprint, 1986) is of the original version. Beach’s translation is used here throughout, with occasional modifications— Translator .]

9. The reference to Bruegel here is more than a mere analogy. Michaux may very well have derived the idea of the diarrhoea of the Ourgouilles from Bruegel’s painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels (in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, which the poet knew well): this work shows (among other figures) a hideous big-bellied demon who, as he plunges head-first down into hell, is devouring his own foot while firing off great fuliginous farts. Michaux acknowledged to François Cheng that, although he had scant interest in oil painting (he preferred ink washes, and most of all Chinese painting), Flemish art was well known to him, and he had a very special liking for Bruegel and his mastery of the art of combining the real and the imaginary. (See Cheng Baoyi, Ye Dong [ La Nuit remue ], introduction, p. x.)

10. Chateaubriand (who was no fool) gives us an eloquent sample of this national consciousness. During the retreat of the Armée des Princes (in whose ranks he had enlisted as a volunteer), wounded and sick, Chateaubriand collapsed by the side of the road near Namur; goodhearted Walloon peasant women took him up and cared for him. The Vicomte described this in the following terms: “I noticed that these women treated me with a kind of respect or deference: there is in the nature of the French something elevated and sensitive that other peoples recognise” ( Mémoires d’outre-tombe , X, 2). It is hard to picture Plume abroad being led to voice a thought of that kind.

ON READERS’ REWARDS AND WRITERS’ AWARDS

1. These are the words of Joseph Conrad, in what remains the classic manifesto of the art of the novel — his famous preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus. ” The first sentence reads in full: “Art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.”

THE CHINESE ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE PAST

1. The civilisations of Egypt, the Middle East, Persia and ancient India are no less ancient, but their continuity has been broken. Only the Jewish tradition may present a significant parallel to the phenomenon of spiritual continuity which I am trying to study here.

2. “I have travelled a great deal in my life, and I should very much have liked to go to Rome, but I felt that I was not really up to the impression the city would have made upon me. Pompeii alone was more than enough; the impressions very nearly exceeded my powers of receptivity… In 1921 I was on a ship sailing from Genoa to Naples. As the vessel neared the latitude of Rome, I stood at the railing. Out there lay Rome, the still smoking and fiery hearth from which ancient cultures had spread, enclosed in the tangled root-work of the Christian and Occidental Middle Ages. There classical antiquity still lived in all its splendour and ruthlessness.

“I always wonder about people who go to Rome as they might go, for example, to Paris or to London. Certainly Rome as well as these other cities can be enjoyed aesthetically but if you are affected to the depths of your being at every step by the spirit that broods there, if a remnant of a wall here and a column there gaze upon you with a face instantly recognised, then it becomes another matter entirely. Even in Pompeii, unforeseen vistas opened, unexpected things became conscious, and questions were posed which were beyond my power to handle.

“In my old age — in 1949—I wished to repair this omission, but was stricken with a faint while I was buying tickets. After that, the plans for a trip to Rome were once and for all laid aside.” C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (London: Collins, 1973), pp. 318–19.

3. AUX DIX MILLE ANNÉES

Ces barbares écartant le bois, et la brique et la terre, bâtissent dans le roc afin de bâtir éternel!

Ils vénèrent des tombeaux dont la gloire est d’exister encore; des ponts renommés d’être vieux et des temples de pierre trop dure dont pas une assise ne joue.

Ils vantent que leur ciment durcit avec les soleils; les lunes meurent en polissant leurs dalles; rien ne disjoint la durée dont ils s’affublent, ces ignorants, ces barbares!

Vous! fils de Han, dont la sagesse atteint dix mille années et dix mille dix milliers d’années, gardez-vous de cette méprise.

Rien d’immobile n’échappe aux dents affamées des âges. La durée n’est point le sort du solide. L’immuable n’habite pas vos murs, mais en vous, hommes lents, hommes continuels.

Si le temps ne s’attaque à l’oeuvre, c’est l’ouvrier qu’il mord. Qu’on le rassasie: ces troncs pleins de sève, ces couleurs vivantes, ces ors que la pluie lave et que le soleil éteint.

Fondez sur le sable. Mouillez copieusement votre argile. Montez les bois pour le sacrifice; bientôt le sable cèdera, l’argile gonflera, le double toit criblera le sol de ses écailles:

Toute l’offrande est agréée!

Or, si vous devez subir la pierre insolente et le bronze orgueilleux, que la pierre et que le bronze subissent les contours du bois périssable et simulent son effort caduc:

Point de révolte: honorons les âges dans leurs chutes successives et le temps dans sa voracité.

V. Segalen, Stèles (Paris: Crès, 1922), pp. 29–31.

4. By “antiquarianism” I mean not only the taste and passion for all things antique but also their various corollaries: the development of archaeology, the activities of art collectors, dealers and forgers, the aesthetics of archaism (“ancient is beautiful,” the poetry of the past, meditation over ancient ruins as a literary theme, etc. etc.).

5. A telling illustration of this point can be found in Li Qingzhao’s moving memoir, Jin shi lu houxu (1132). After the fall of the Northern Song, as Li was fleeing south, she had to carry with her the precious collections of her husband. The latter, who was prevented by his official duties from accompanying her, gave her precise instructions concerning those parts of the collections that could be discarded, and those that should be retained at all costs, should the situation force her to reduce her luggage. The most dispensable possessions were the printed books (as opposed to handwritten copies); then the pictorial albums (as opposed to individual paintings); then the bronzes that carried no epigraphs ; then the printed books published by the Imperial College; then the paintings of average quality… The most treasured items — besides the vessels and relics pertaining to the ancestors cult (under no conditions were these ever to be discarded) — were the antique bronzes with epigraphs, precious paintings and calligraphies and rare manuscripts. Li Qingzhao ji jiaozhu (Peking: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1979), pp. 179–81.

6. The classic study on art collecting in China is R. van Gulik, Chinese Pictorial Art as Viewed by the Connoisseur (Rome, 1958). (Reissued by Hacker Art Books: New York, 1981.) On the particular subject of the imperial collections, see L. Ledderose, “Some observations on the imperial art collection in China,” in Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society 43 (1978–1979): pp. 33–46.