Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

ORIENTALISM AND SINOLOGY

1. The words “European” and “American” are to be understood here as abstract categories, not as geographical notions. Actually, I wonder to what extent the European academic tradition can still be found in Europe. Quite recently, the dean of the Asian Studies Faculty of one of the oldest and most prestigious European universities sent me a warm and generous invitation to come and lecture on Chinese classical culture. In his innocence, he added, “As our university has now established with the People’s Republic of China an important exchange program, which should not be put in jeopardy, it would be best if your lectures would not touch on contemporary issues.” What shocked me most was that he obviously felt this was a perfectly sensible and decent proposition.

2. The passages in italics summarise various points made by Said (when quotation marks are used, they reproduce his own words). Some readers may rightly feel that my approach to this serious topic is selective, arbitrary, incoherent and flippant. I could not agree more with such criticism — I merely tried to imitate Said’s method.

ROLAND BARTHES IN CHINA

1. Roland Barthes, Alors, la Chine? (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1975).

2. Roland Barthes, Carnets du voyage en Chine , ed. Anne Herschberg Pierrot (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2009). English translation by Andrew Brown: Travels in China (Cambridge, England, and Malden, MA: Polity, 2012).

THE ART OF INTERPRETING NON-EXISTENT INSCRIPTIONS WRITTEN IN INVISIBLE INK ON A BLANK PAGE

1. Looking at this phenomenon from an East European angle, Kazimierz Brandys made similar observations in his admirable Carnets (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).

2. Epilogue: in 1982, a People’s Daily survey revealed that over 90 per cent of Chinese youth do not have an inkling of what Marxism is.

3. New York Review of Books , 26 April 1990.

ANATOMY OF A “POST-TOTALITARIAN” DICTATORSHIP

1. Two books, actually; a similar (yet not identical) collection, in French, appeared earlier in 2011: Liu Xiaobo, La philosophie du porc et autres essais , selected, translated, and introduced by Jean-Philippe Béja (Paris: Gallimard). Since the contents of both volumes do not completely overlap, one would wish for a third collection that could combine both. For more information on Liu himself — his life, activities, arrest, and trial, see Perry Link, Liu Xiaobo’s Empty Chair (New York Review Books, 2011).

2. On December 23, 2011, the writer Chen Wei, who had been arrested in February after posting essays online calling for freedom of speech and other political reforms, was convicted of the same crime of “inciting of subversion of state power” and sentenced, following a two-hour trial, to nine years in prison.

FOREWORD TO THE SEA IN FRENCH LITERATURE

1. Jean Marteilhe (1684–1777), a young Protestant who, trying to escape religious persecution in France, was arrested at the border and sentenced to serve on the galleys. Faithful to his religion, he rowed as a slave-convict for twelve years; eventually freed, he exiled himself to Holland, where he published a most remarkable narrative of his ordeal, well described in his long title, Mémoires d’un Protestant, condamné aux galères de France pour cause de religion, écrits par lui-même: Ouvrage dans lequel, outre le récit des souffrances de l’Auteur depuis 1700 jusqu’en 1713, on trouvera diverses Particularités curieuses, relatives à l’Histoire de ce Temps-là, & une Description exacte des Galères & de leur Service (Amsterdam, 1757).

René Duguay-Trouin (1673–1736), a famous Breton privateer who fought at sea against the English and the Dutch. Educated by the Jesuits, he knew how to write; his terse, vivid autobiography is a minor classic.

Louis Garneray (1783–1857), a distinguished painter (seascapes and naval battles). He ran away from home and went to sea at age thirteen; served as a privateer under the great Surcouf; lived through countless extraordinary adventures — battles, mutinies, shipwrecks — before eventually being captured by the English (age twenty-three) and spending nine years on the notorious and barbaric prison-ships of Portsmouth. Finally freed in 1814, he wrote of his early adventures at sea ( Voyages, aventures et combats ) and of his ordeal in captivity ( Mes pontons ). Garneray, as a memorialist and story-teller, is simply fabulous!

2. Alain Gerbault (originally a tennis champion), Bernard Moitessier (yachtsman of genius) and Éric Tabarly (originally a navy officer) all became famous for their solitary voyages under sail. Alain Bombard is a medical doctor who, in 1952, crossed the Atlantic Ocean on an inflatable raft, without any supplies of water or food, to demonstrate scientifically the possibility of survival at sea. The author of Naufragé volontaire , his visionary daring decisively modified traditional practices which, for centuries, had needlessly condemned countless shipwreck victims to death.

3. Joseph Conrad, for instance; one of his letters is featured. Interesting, though not exactly his greatest literary work, it was originally written in French (like a significant part of his correspondence) and it provided me with a good pretext to include his irreplaceable presence in the anthology.

4. I am thinking first and foremost of Jonathan Raban, The Oxford Book of the Sea (Oxford University Press, 1992).

5. “This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and the sea interpenetrate, so to speak — the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of breadwinning.” Thus begins Youth , one of Conrad’s most perfect sea narratives. Before him, R.L. Stevenson developed the same notion, in a different mode: “If an Englishman wishes to have such a patriotic feeling, it must be about the sea… The sea is our approach and bulwark; it has been the scene of our greatest triumphs and dangers, and we are accustomed in lyrical strains to claim it as our own. The prostrating experiences of foreigners between Calais and Dover have always an agreeable side to English prepossessions. A man from Bedfordshire who does not know one end of the ship from the other until she begins to move, swaggers among such persons with a sense of hereditary nautical experience… We should consider ourselves unworthy of our descent if we did not share the arrogance of our progenitors, and please ourselves with the pretension that the sea is English. Even where it is looked upon by the guns and battlements of another nation, we regard it as a kind of English cemetery, where the bones of our seafaring fathers take their rest until the last trumpet; for I suppose no other nation has lost as many ships or sent as many brave fellows to the bottom.” ( The English Admirals , 1881, quoted by J. Raban, op. cit. p. 284.)

6. “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep,” in A Further Range (New York: Holt, 1936).

7. “Things I Consider Overrated,” in From the Uncollected Edmund Wilson (Ohio University Press, 1995), pp. 120–21. Wilson ends his diatribe with the observation that sea literature is unreadable. Well before him, Théophile Gautier made the same point, with much more wit (see my anthology, Vol. 1, pp. 501–3). Americans often consider Wilson as a prince of modern criticism; he seems to me a rather vulgar mind.

8. Boswell, Life of Johnson (entry of March 1759). And again: “A ship is worse than a gaol. There is, in a gaol, better air, better company, better conveniency of every kind; and a ship has the additional disadvantage of being in danger. When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land” (Boswell, Life of Johnson , entry of 19 March 1776). And this conversation between Johnson, Boswell and William Scott (entry of 10 April 1778):