Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

In any case, it was surely better to be a Navy doctor than a pharmacist in Brest, as his mother had originally wanted for him. And he had no reason for complaint with respect to the French Navy, which treated him generously, and underwrote the two most fruitful episodes in his career, namely the revelation of Polynesia and the revelation of China, which would successively inspire and nourish his entire literary output.

In Polynesia he discovered a paradise in agony and, simultaneously, the work of Gauguin, who had just died there. In the islands he experienced a kind of happiness — or was it perhaps simply the fact of being young, and released at long last from the oppressive bigotry of his provincial childhood? Many years later he could still write to a friend about that time: “I have told you that I was happy in the Tropics. That is violently true. For two years in Polynesia I slept badly from joy. I had awakenings in tears at the arriving light of day. .. I felt gaiety coursing through my muscles. Thinking was itself a delight. .. I had my work in hand, I was free, recovering, fresh, and sensually rather well practiced. The whole island came to me like a woman. And from women indeed I received gifts that more complete countries no longer offer. Apart from the traditional Maori wife with her sweet fresh skin, smooth hair, and muscular lips, I experienced caresses [etc.].”

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This lyrical outpouring is no doubt partly due to the writer’s distance in time from what he is recalling. His original letters from Tahiti tell a rather different story. Following the usual custom of officers at that time, he had indeed set out by taking a native mistress, but he seems to have tired of her rather quickly, as he confided in various somewhat caddish letters to an old pal of his: “For the time being I have left the full-blooded Tahitian vahine as being too far removed from our own race. They would be perfect, these brown-skinned girls with their long sleek hair, long eyelashes and velvet skin, if only, instead of launching a full-scale courting ritual, replete with palaver and haggling, they would comply with simple commands, just as they used to in the past. .. They are dishonest, egoistic, and obviously not very intellectual or even intelligent. What is the use, then, of showing them the same respect as would be appropriate towards a lover very close to us, submissive, devoted, such as we are surer to find among female species less far removed from our own. .. In six months, after experiencing the Tahitian, then the half-White, I came back to the White woman, and now from her too, willingly, I am drawing away. ..” Furthermore, “the sexual act is indifferent to me, it takes too long, and then those women who truly please me I would rather have as friends than as mistresses.”

Clearly, for all his intelligence, all his heart, Segalen was also, willy-nilly, a child of the stupid nineteenth century. Later in the correspondence, moreover, there are more signs of this, no less distressing, in his reactions to China.

But at the same time he was too sensitive not to intuit, albeit confusedly, just how inadequate, vulgar and low his own world was. From Polynesia he brought back his first book, Les Immémoriaux , which is explicitly intended to counteract the literature of “colonial impressions” so much in favour at the time. In contradistinction to the writer-tourist, Segalen sets out to depict less the effect of the surroundings on the traveller than the effect of the traveller on the surroundings: “I am distinctly not one for the brief visions that delight Pierre Loti and thanks to which he in turn delights his female readers. I need to know, over and above the way a country appears, just what that country thinks. ..” Loti and Co. “have told what they saw, what they felt in the presence of unexpected things and people the shock of whose encounter they had sought out. But have they revealed what these things and people thought themselves, or what they thought of them, the visitors? For there is perhaps also a shock delivered by the traveller to the spectacle before him, a reverse shock that affects what the traveller sees.”

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This is a splendid program, but Segalen’s letters from Polynesia reveal just how far short he fell of carrying it out. Among those vahines with their long hair and stunted ideas, did he really ever discover “what the country really thought”? And how do the superb evocations of Tahitian landscapes and atmospheres that lend so much life and colour to his letters truly differ from Loti’s finest descriptions?

The same contradiction between the traveller’s lofty ambitions and his disappointingly meagre achievements was to be repeated, and on a monumental scale, when he confronted China. At the same time China played a decisive part in Segalen’s spiritual development. In the first place, it saved him from the dismal swamp of the “literary world” into which he had briefly been tempted to plunge. On his return from Polynesia, in fact, he very nearly turned into an homme de lettres: Les Immémoriaux appeared to have attracted the attention of the jury of the Prix Goncourt, and this prompted him to fling himself briefly into a round of literary and fashionable social events.[5] Thank heavens, Segalen’s book garnered not a single vote, and he came to his senses. Had he won the Prix Goncourt, one may only imagine how long it would have taken him to rediscover his true path.

At this juncture, Segalen persuaded the Navy to post him to Peking as an interpreter in training. Before leaving, he wrote to Jules de Gaultier, his mentor and the inventor of Bovarysme (“the power granted man to conceive of himself as other than he is”): “I have started to learn Chinese. All in all, I expect a great deal from this apparently thankless task, for it can deliver me from a danger: in France, once my projects have been put into practice, what will there be left for me to do except ‘literature’? I am afraid of the search for a ‘subject.’… In China, tackling the most antipodal of matters, I expect a great deal from this extreme exoticism.”

The “exoticism” that Segalen expected from China, and that was to remain the philosophical underpinning of his entire work, has nothing to do with the picturesque of impressionistic travel writing — it is the exact opposite. “Exotic knowledge” is a perception of difference that operates like a dike, blocking the flow of consciousness and thus raising its level and intensifying its energy. The “feeling of diversity,” which is the source of all the savour of life, is threatened by habit, proximity, satiation, homogenization, and the nightmare of ultimate entropy, as prefigured by the universal degradation of anthropological diversity. According to Segalen, “exoticism is thus not adaptation, not the perfect understanding of an outside-oneself that one can embrace within oneself, but rather the acute and immediate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility. Let us start from such an acknowledgement of impenetrability. Let us not flatter ourselves by thinking that we can assimilate customs, races, nations, others; on the contrary, let us rejoice in our never being able to do so, and thus guarantee the enduring pleasure of experiencing Diversity.”

Here a warning is in order: any reader who approaches Segalen in hopes of finding some sort of introduction to China is knocking at the wrong door. Segalen was certainly right to describe the Chinese universe as “the most antipodal of matters”: China does indeed constitute, in the cultural sphere, “the other pole of human experience.”

But the correct conclusion to be drawn from this observation was stated half a century later, by Professor Joseph Needham, the immensely erudite author of the monumental Science and Civilization in China , a veritable encyclopaedia of Chinese knowledge: “Chinese civilization presents the irresistible fascination of what is totally other, and only what is totally other can inspire the deepest love, together with a strong desire to know it.” Segalen, by contrast, starting from the assumption that China was “impenetrable”—and that it was desirable that it stay that way — had gone straight down a dead end.