Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

For more than two thousand years, Chinese emperors have set and promoted the official cult of Confucius. It became a sort of state religion. Now the emperors have gone (or have they?), but the cult seems very much alive: as recently as October 1994, the Communist authorities in Peking sponsored a huge symposium to celebrate the 2,545th anniversary of Confucius’s birth. The main guest speaker was the former prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan-yew. He was invited apparently because his hosts wished to learn from him the magic recipe (supposedly found in Confucius) for marrying authoritarian politics with capitalist prosperity.

Karl Marx once warned overenthusiastic followers that he was not a Marxist. With better reason, one should say that Confucius was certainly not a Confucianist. Imperial Confucianism only extolled those statements from the Master that prescribed submission to the established authorities, whereas more essential notions were conveniently ignored — such as the precepts of social justice, political dissent and the moral duty of intellectuals to criticise the ruler (even at the risk of their lives) when he was abusing his power, or when he oppressed the people.

As a result of these ideological manipulations, in modern times many enlightened and progressive-minded Chinese came spontaneously to associate the very name of Confucius with feudal tyranny; his doctrines became synonymous with obscurantism and oppression. All the great revolutionary movements in twentieth-century China were staunchly anti-Confucian — and it is easy enough to sympathise with them. Moreover — if I may invoke here a personal experience — I still remember the dismay expressed by various Chinese friends on learning that I was translating the Analects of Confucius*: they wondered how I could suddenly sink into that sort of intellectual and political regression.

I certainly feel no need to justify the orientation taken by my work. Yet such a justification would be all too easy to provide, for an obvious reason: no book in the entire history of the world has exerted, over a longer period of time, a greater influence on a larger number of people than this slim volume. With its affirmation of humanist ethics and of the universal brotherhood of man, it inspired all the nations of Eastern Asia and became the spiritual cornerstone of the most populous and oldest living civilisation on earth. If we do not read this book, if we do not appreciate how it was understood through the ages (and also how it was misunderstood) — how it was used (and how it was misused) — in one word, if we ignore this book, we are missing the single most important key that can give us access to the Chinese world. And whoever remains ignorant of this civilisation, in the end, can only reach a limited understanding of the human experience.

This consideration alone would more than justify our interest in Confucius, even if he should have been every bit as distasteful a character as so many leading Chinese intellectuals portrayed him as being earlier in this century. Whether he was such is not for me to say. Confucius can speak for himself — and the marvellous fact is precisely that, across twenty-five centuries, it seems at times he is directly addressing the very problems of our age and of our society.

But this modernity of Confucius is an aspect which, paradoxically, non-Chinese readers may be in a better position to appreciate. The only advantage that can be derived from our status as ignorant foreigners is precisely the possibility of looking with a kind of unbiased innocence at this book — as if it were all fresh and new. Such innocence is denied to native readers. For them, the Analects is the classic par excellence . And before proceeding further, we should first briefly consider what is implied by the notion of a “classic.”

THE NATURE OF A CLASSIC

A classic is essentially a text that is open-ended — in the sense that it lends itself constantly to new developments, new commentaries, different interpretations. With the passing of time, these commentaries, interpretations and glosses form a series of layers, deposits, accretions, alluvions, which accumulate, accrue, superimpose on one another, like the sands and sediments of a silting river. A classic allows for countless uses and misuses, understandings and misunderstandings; it is a text that keeps growing — it can be deformed, it can be enriched — and yet it retains its core identity, even if its original shape cannot be fully retrieved anymore. In an interview, Jorge Luis Borges once said:

Readers create anew the books they read. Shakespeare is more rich today than when he wrote. Cervantes too. Cervantes was enriched by Unamuno; Shakespeare was enriched by Coleridge, by Bradley. That’s how a writer grows. After his death, he continues to develop in the minds of his readers. And the Bible, for instance, today is richer than when its various parts were first written. A book benefits from the passing of time. Everything can be of benefit to it. Even misunderstandings may help an author. Everything helps — even readers’ ignorance or carelessness. After you have read a book, you may retain an inaccurate impression of it — but this means that it is being amended by your memory. That happens often to me. Caramba! I don’t know whether I dare to confess this — but whenever I quote Shakespeare, I realise that I have improved on him!

In a sense (if I may use such a trivial image) the way in which every statement in a classic can gather the comments of posterity may be compared to a hook, or a peg on the wall of a cloakroom. Successive users of the cloakroom come one after the other and hang on the peg hats, coats, umbrellas, bags and whatnot; the load swells up, heavy, colourful, diversified, and eventually the hook disappears entirely under it. For the native reader the classic is intricate and crowded, it is a place filled with people, and voices, and things and memories — vibrating with echoes. For the foreign reader, on the contrary, the classic often presents the forlorn aspect of the cloakroom after hours — an empty room with mere rows of bare hooks on a blank wall, and this extreme austerity, this stark and disconcerting simplicity, accounts in part for the paradoxical impression of modernity which he is more likely to experience.

THE ANALECTS AND THE GOSPELS

The Analects are the only place where we can actually encounter the real, living Confucius. In this sense, the Analects are to Confucius what the Gospels are to Jesus. The text, which consists of a discontinuous series of brief statements, short dialogues and anecdotes, was compiled by two successive generations of disciples (disciples and disciples of disciples), over some seventy-five years after Confucius’s death — which means that the compilation was probably completed a little before, or around, 400 BC. The text is a patchwork: fragments from different hands have been stitched together, with uneven skill — there are some repetitions, interpolations and contradictions; there are some puzzles and countless loopholes. But on the whole there are very few stylistic anachronisms: the language and syntax of most of the fragments is coherent and pertains to the same period.[1]

On one essential point the comparison with the Gospels proves particularly enlightening. Textual problems have led some modern scholars to question the credibility of the Gospels and even to doubt the historical existence of Christ. These studies provoked an intriguing reaction from an unlikely source: Julien Gracq — an old and prestigious novelist, who was close to the Surrealist movement — made a comment which is all the more arresting for coming from an agnostic. In a recent volume of essays,[2] Gracq first acknowledged the impressive learning of one of these scholars (whose lectures he had attended in his youth), as well as the devastating logic of his reasoning; but he confessed that, in the end, he still found himself left with one fundamental objection: for all his formidable erudition, the scholar in question had simply no ear —he could not hear what should be so obvious to any sensitive reader — that, underlying the text of the Gospels, there is a masterly and powerful unity of style, which derives from one unique and inimitable voice; there is the presence of one singular and exceptional personality whose expression is so original, so bold that one could positively call it impudent . Now, if you deny the existence of Jesus, you must transfer all these attributes to some obscure, anonymous writer, who should have had the improbable genius of inventing such a character — or, even more implausibly, you must transfer this prodigious capacity for invention to an entire committee of writers. And Gracq concluded: in the end, if modern scholars, progressive-minded clerics and the docile public all surrender to this critical erosion of the Scriptures, the last group of defenders who will obstinately maintain that there is a living Jesus at the central core of the Gospels will be made up of artists and creative writers, for whom the psychological evidence of style carries much more weight than mere philological arguments.