Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

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Michaux’s excisions are frequently combined with rewriting. The new version of A Barbarian in Asia sets out to file down all sharp points, smooth all angles, and dull the tone overall. So much effort expended to humour everyone, to offend no sensitive ear! No indecency, no familiarity! Respect all taboos! Tread on no one’s toes! Consideration for the old and the crippled, compassion for every widow and orphan! Thus the Brahmins, originally described as “jealous as hunchbacks, but always ignorant as carp,” are now taxed soberly with being merely “jealous, often ignorant.”

Or again: “The priest is a pimp and his temple is full of women” is demurely reduced to “the temple has women.”

In the original, as compared with the natural nobility of Arabs and Hindus, “the Europeans here all look like plain workmen or errand-boys.” Revised version: “the Europeans seem fragile, secondary, transitory.”

In the original, as opposed to the exquisite modesty of Bengali women, “European women seem like whores.” The newer text, after likewise evoking the modesty of Bengali women, is content to interject a chaste “How different from European women!”

The idiom becomes academic and starchy. Where the original has “a poor blind man in Europe automatically arouses a distinct compassion. In India, if he thinks he can count on his blindness to move people, just let him try ,” the revised version reads: “In India, let him not count on his blindness to move people.”

The delightful sideswipes vanish. For instance, “The poetry of a people is more deceptive than its dress; it is manufactured by aesthetes, who are bored and who are only understood among themselves ” is prudently neutralised: “The poetry of a people, which at any period is manufactured by aesthetes, is more deceptive than its dress.”

Vigorous expression gives way to reverences (along with gratuitous cultural parentheses as guarantors of the author’s good breeding). For example, consider this original text: “While many countries that one has liked become, as the distance from them increases, almost ridiculous or insubstantial, Japan, which I frankly detested , grows almost dear to me.”—and compare it with the revision: “While many countries that one has liked tend, as the distance from them increases, to fade away, Japan, which I rejected, now takes on greater importance (the memory of an admirable Noh play has made its way into my mind and is extending its sway over me).”

Strong words are replaced by feeble ones. “Who will gauge the weight of the imbeciles in a civilisation?” becomes “Who will gauge the weight of the mediocre in a civilisation?”

With the passage of thirty-five years, the poet is a convert to the use of soap. Originally, he had noted approvingly that the Chinese “ detests water (dirt, moreover, is excellent for the personality) ”—words that disappear completely in the revised version. Elsewhere in Barbarian , he had written: “ In the opinion of a relatively dirty man like myself , washing, like a war, is a trifle puerile, because it has to be done all over again after a while.” In the corrected version, the general idea is retained, but the touching personal allusion goes by the board.

A scatological tendency had long been spontaneous and natural for Michaux, but the revision meant purging his prose of any reference, even the most figurative, to alimentary functions. The Indians, he had written, “are all constipated. .. This constipation is the most irritating of all, a constipation of the breath and the soul.” This is turned in the corrected version into “The Indians are all rigid, set in concrete. .. This constriction, the most irritating of all, that of the breath and the soul. ..” The same obsession with decency led him, in the case of Ailleurs , to suppress “La Diarrhée des Ourgouilles”—a whole section of earthy Bruegelian imagining describing “diarrhea accompanied by autophagy: man is digested and evacuated little by little by his own gut.”[9]

By cutting and rewriting so many passages, Michaux certainly damaged A Barbarian in Asia , but what put the finishing touches to the destruction were his additions. I have shown how he disavowed his critical vision of Japan — a distinctly perverse disavowal when one considers that in 1932 he had very accurately grasped the nature of a society suffocating under a sinister military-fascist regime. (By analogy, intelligent and sensitive visitors to Berlin in the late 1930s who testified in all honesty to their revulsion would scarcely need to apologise today!) But on the subject of China, things are even worse: Michaux unquestioningly accepts the image of China put about by Maoist propaganda in France during the “Cultural Revolution.” He denies a reality he so clearly perceived in the past on the basis of crass lies being fed him in the present. From the start, in the new preface, he strives to invalidate his masterpiece: “In China, the [Maoist] revolution, by sweeping away habits and ways of being, acting and feeling unchanged for centuries, even for millennia, has also swept away a great many opinions, including not a few of mine. Mea culpa —not only for not seeing well enough, but even more for failing to feel what was gestating, what was about to undo the seemingly permanent. Did I really see nothing? Why? Ignorance?…” This is enough to make one weep. And then, throughout the book, Michaux inserts new notes intended to rectify, in the light of the sacred revelations of Maoism, everything heretical in his earlier thoughts.

“In a single generation,” he writes, “politics, economics and the transformation of the social classes have created a new ‘man in the street’ in China. The man I once described and the one that I and other visitors once observed is no longer recognisable. .. China has returned to life. We should be happy no longer to recognise it, to perceive it differently: as ever startling, ever extraordinary.” Michaux comments as follows on a passage in which he had evoked the fear that restrained the Chinese from making connections with foreign visitors: “How extraordinary it must feel for anyone returning there now — in the very towns where people once shrank away from them — to encounter self-confident faces, no longer evasive but smiling, friendly, open.” By a grim irony, Michaux added this note while the “Cultural Revolution” was in full spate, at a time when passers-by in the street dared not give you directions, because the mere act of exchanging a couple of words with a foreigner could immediately be treated as a crime. Similarly, whereas the first edition of Barbarian simply stated that “No city has gates as massive as Peking,” the revised version embellishes: “No city in the world has gates as massive, as beautiful, or as reassuring as those of Peking.” How true! But how in the world could Michaux have made these additions at the very moment when the “Cultural Revolution” was completing the demolition of those very gates?

The poet who fifteen years earlier had so very well understood that “One who sings in a group will, when asked, put his brother in prison,” now joined the vast chorus of “useful idiots” singing the praises of Chairman Mao — that “man of boldness, author of the Little Red Book, so simple, so reasonable. .. Mao Zedong who turned China around, utterly transforming a thousand-year-old society in a few years, who conceived the boldest of projects, some of which were unrealisable, but were realised [ sic ], others almost harebrained in their audacity, as for example the setting up of small village blast-furnaces to produce steel, an idea that bucked the advice of all the technicians, or the creation of new villages with collective dormitories. ..”