Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

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He spent five years in China (1909–1914), but it was the first six months of his stay that constituted its high point while at the same time defining its limits once and for all. Before embarking on the study of Chinese for which the Navy had sent him to Peking, he undertook, with his friend Auguste Gilbert de Voisins, a long expedition across the most ancient of Chinese lands, the provinces of the West and Southwest almost as far as the borders of Tibet, then back down the Yangtze from Sichuan to the coast. This long and exciting adventure, admirably described in the almost daily reports that Segalen composed for his wife when the travellers halted for the night, constitutes a great sporting feat; yet even though Segalen had studied and planned the itinerary with great care and intelligence, the two friends were engaged for six months in the equivalent of today’s “safaris” for millionaires which take affluent tourists from one splendid site to another, all barely accessible to ordinary foreign visitors.

Voisins, who disposed of a vast fortune, financed the whole enterprise, which was mounted, armed and equipped on the grandest scale: five saddle horses, one pack horse, eleven mules, a donkey, and a whole retinue of helpers — intendant, interpreter, cook, two “boys,” two ostlers, five muleteers; and with that a whole raft of furniture, tables and beds, guns, and provisions as if for a crossing of the Sahara. Nothing had been overlooked: they even had butter in cans and powdered yeast to raise Western-style bread (since the delicious mantou —the Chinese steamed buns commonly eaten in the provinces through which our travellers passed — were adjudged inedible…).

By way of contrast, one cannot help thinking of the Australian journalist Dr. G.E. Morrison, the legendary “Morrison of Peking” (1861–1920), a near contemporary of Segalen’s, a doctor like him, whose destiny was likewise transformed by China.[6] Fifteen years before Segalen, Morrison had made an equally ambitious journey, though his was ultimately far more fruitful in terms of human experience. He went alone, on foot, from Shanghai to the Burmese frontier through the Chinese Southwest. He left with only eighteen pounds in his pocket (a budget a thousand times smaller than that of the later French travellers); all he had on his back was an ample Chinese robe and a simple umbrella of bamboo and oil paper; all along the way, he relied for food and lodging on the hospitality of local people, and by and large had no complaints. ..

As for Segalen, who also crossed an enormous swath of China, he seems, paradoxically, to have conversed with no Chinese people at all, with the sad exception of his own servants, who naturally could do nothing but endorse the clichés that all colonials, in every latitude, use to characterize the “natives”—calling them born liars, thieves, swindlers and cowards. Still, there is no denying that the two friends took real physical risks: it takes endurance and courage to ride for thousands of kilometres, braving every weather, following precipitous mountain paths and fording wild rivers.

But even though they bravely exposed themselves to all the hazards of their adventure, one gets the impression that they were traveling in a kind of hermetic cocoon isolated from the humanity around them. The fact that there were two of them — two very close friends speaking the same language, sharing the same passion for literature (Voisins was a novelist then enjoying a certain vogue; his works, mercifully, have since fallen into oblivion) — eventually transformed their bivouacs into a kind of countrified version of a Parisian salon.

Once back in Peking, where his wife soon joined him, with their older boy — a daughter and a second son would be born in China in the following years — Segalen turned to his study of Chinese. He seems to have focused on the classical language, which would serve him well in his archaeological and epigraphic researches. As for spoken Chinese, it is hard to know what level of competence he achieved, but the contempt he evinced for the study of it is hardly a good sign. Soon, sad to say, material considerations obliged him to abandon Sinology temporarily and resume medical practice, which had come to be an abomination for him, and, what was worse, he found himself forced to leave Peking, which he loved, and go and work in Tientsin, a sinister town where he rediscovered everything that he had fled: a hateful atmosphere of “Swiss or Belgian provincial mediocrity.”

In 1914, just after he had at last succeeded, with his two friends Voisins and Lartigue, in mounting another expedition, more systematically archaeological this time, he was recalled to France by the First World War. But in 1917 he was sent back to China, in an official capacity, for a few months. This would be his last visit, and the occasion for him to make a rather bitter summary: writing to his wife, he concluded that “China, for me, is over, sucked dry. .. I am detaching myself from it, withdrawing, going away. There are other countries in the world. Above all, there are other worlds.”

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A few years previously, he had witnessed the collapse of the Manchu Dynasty. He had not taken the establishment of the Republic seriously — he viewed it as a deplorable lapse of good taste. “Sun Yat-sen is a perfect cretin,” he had promptly averred at the sight of the president’s frock-coat and detachable collar, which he considered too ordinary. As for the Revolution, it seemed to him no more than “one of those uprisings that China absorbs, digests and eructs from time to time like wind from some great flatulent gut.”

The overthrow of the Empire appalled him and filled him with despair — not that he had had any illusions about the Manchu regime, whose corruption, negligence and obscurantism were only too obvious; it was just that “the sublime fiction of the Emperor as the son of a Pure Sovereign Heaven was too admirable to be allowed to disappear. .. I hate the rebels for their conformist attitudes, their humanitarianism, their Protestant obsession with cleanliness, and above all because they help diminish the difference between China and us; and you know how exoticism alone is truly dear to my heart.”

In conclusion, Segalen said that his only hope was “soon to see a new despot arise who will spur his little yellow citizens on — I would welcome such a man with the deepest gratitude!” In the meantime, however, “the whole of the so-called modern, new and Republican China must be deliberately eliminated. .. This is sheer apery, pitiful Bovarysm, small-mindedness, cowardice of every sort, and boredom — boredom most of all.”

Well before the Revolution, however, Segalen had been disillusioned by the China of the present; as compared with his Polynesian experience, he wrote, “it is true, this country is devoid of all sensual gratification.” Even Peking had only the mythical prestige of its “imperiality” with which to offset “the bleak sadness of its filthy orgies with their croaking chanteuses.” As for the people, “the Chinese character is not to my liking… It inspires in me neither admiration nor any sense of grandeur or strength. Its every manifestation in my vicinity is tainted by infantilism or senility. [The Chinese] cry like little girls, fight like pug dogs, grimace like clowns, and are an irredeemably ugly people.”

So why was Segalen over there at all? “At bottom it was not China that I came here to find, but a vision of China. That vision is now mine, and I have sunk my teeth into it.” This is a key statement, and one that solves a mystery: this subtle poet had absolutely no knowledge of the sublime poetry of the Chinese; this fine connoisseur of art seems never to have looked at a single Chinese painting.[7] (In his whole correspondence he makes but one reference to that incomparable art, and then only in abstract terms, and accompanied by a foolish remark: “I am working on Chinese painting. Ancient, naturally. Contemporary does not exist.”)