Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

In fact to invoke Stendhal in this context strikes me as particularly interesting. The perfection of the work of art depends entirely on the true human worth of the artist; this moral notion at the basis of all Chinese aesthetics is found also in the West, but here it is more the mark of a few exceptional minds, of which Stendhal is a perfect example. His whole aesthetic sense is passionately and furiously moral — remember for example his condemnation of Chateaubriand: “I have never been able to read twenty pages of Chateaubriand… At seventeen I almost had a duel because I made fun of la cime indéterminée des forêts which had many admirers in the 6th Dragoons… M. de Chateaubriand’s fine style seems to me to tell a lot of little fibs. My whole belief in style lies in this word.” In this same spiritual family of geniuses both sublime and “eccentric” (in the Chinese sense of the word), we must also include Simone Weil (a whole aesthetic could be constructed from the rich mine of her Cahiers ) — or again Wittgenstein, one of whose statements seems to me particularly appropriate as a conclusion to this little article, for indeed it proposes a criterion for literary criticism that is as original as it is effective (speaking of Tolstoy): “There is a real man, who has a right to write.”

2004

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EDWARD Said’s main contention is that “no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim the author’s involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances.” Translated into plain English, this would seem to mean simply that no scholar can escape his original condition: his own national, cultural, political and social prejudices are bound to be reflected in his work. Such a common-sense statement hardly warrants debate. Actually, Said’s own book is an excellent case in point; Orientalism could obviously have been written by no one but a Palestinian scholar with a huge chip on his shoulder and a very dim understanding of the European academic tradition (here perceived through the distorted prism of a certain type of American university, with its brutish hyper-specialisation, non-humanistic approach, and close, unhealthy links with government).[1]

My task here is not to write a review of Orientalism (thank God!), but merely to see whether Said’s arguments present any relevance for Chinese studies.

Said seems to include “sinology” implicitly in his concept of “orientalism.” (I insist on the word seems ; the point remains obscure, like a great many other points in his book.) Said’s contention is that whenever an orientalist makes a statement in his own specialised area, this statement accrues automatically to the broader picture of a mythical “East.” I do not know whether this is true for scholars involved with Near and Middle East studies, but it certainly does not apply to sinologists. The intellectual and physical boundaries of the Chinese world are sharply defined; they encompass a reality that is so autonomous and singular that no sinologist in his right mind would ever dream of extending any sinological statement to the non-Chinese world. For a serious sinologist (or for any thinking person, for that matter) concepts such as “Asia” or “the East” have never contained any useful meaning. No sinologist would ever consider himself an orientalist. (Some sinologists, it is true, may occasionally be seen participating in one of those huge fairs that are periodically held under the name of “International Orientalist Congress,” but this is simply because similar junkets undertaken under the mere auspices of the Club Méditerranée would not be tax-deductible.)

Orientalism is a colonialist-imperialist conspiracy. [2] Quite possibly. To some extent, it may also be true for sinology. Who knows? One day it will perhaps be discovered that the best studies on Tang poetry and on Song painting have all been financed by the CIA — a fact that should somehow improve the public image of this much-maligned organisation.

Orientalists hate and despise the Orient; they deny its intellectual existence and try to turn it into a vacuum. Whether most sinologists love China or hate it is largely irrelevant. One important fact is absolutely evident: Western sinology in its entirety is a mere footnote appended to the huge sinological corpus that Chinese intellectuals have been building for centuries to this day. The Chinese are our first guides and teachers in the exploration of their culture and history; fools who ignore this evidence do so at their own risk and pay dearly for it. Further, it should be noted that today a significant proportion of the leading sinologists in the Western academic world are Chinese; through their teaching and research, they play a decisive role in Western sinology.

The notion of an “other” culture is of questionable use, as it seems to end inevitably in self-congratulation, or hostility and aggression. Why could it not equally end in admiration, wonderment, increased self-knowledge, relativisation and readjustment of one’s own values, awareness of the limits of one’s own civilisation? Actually, most of the time, all of these seem to be the natural outcome of our study of China (and it is also the reason why Chinese should be taught in Western countries as a fundamental discipline of the humanities at the secondary-school level, in conjunction with, or as an alternative to, Latin and Greek). Joseph Needham summed up neatly what is the common feeling of most sinologists: “Chinese civilisation 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.” From the great Jesuit scholars of the sixteenth century down to the best sinologists of today, we can see that there was never a more powerful antidote to the temptation of Western ethnocentrism than the study of Chinese civilisation. (It is not a coincidence that Said, in his denunciation of “illiberal ethnocentrism,” found further ammunition for his good fight in the writings of a sinologist who was attacking the naïve and arrogant statement of a French philosopher describing Thomistic philosophy as “gathering up the whole of human tradition.” Indignant rejection of such crass provincialism will always come most spontaneously to any sinologist.)

“Interesting work is more likely to be produced by scholars whose allegiance is to a discipline defined intellectually and not to a field like Orientalism, [which is] defined either canonically, imperially, or geographically.” The sinological field is defined linguistically; for this very reason, the concept of sinology is now being increasingly questioned (in fact, in the John King Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard, I recently heard it used as a term of abuse). Perhaps we ought to rejoice now as we see more historians, philosophers, students of literature, legal scholars, economists, political scientists and others venturing into the Chinese field, equipped with all the intellectual tools of their original disciplines. Still, this new trend is encountering one stubborn and major obstacle that is not likely ever to disappear: no specialist, whatever his area of expertise, can expect to contribute significantly to our knowledge of China without first mastering the Chinese literary language. To be able to read classical and modern Chinese it is necessary to undergo a fairly long and demanding training that can seldom be combined with the acquisition and cultivation of another discipline. For this reason, sinology is bound to survive, in fact, if not necessarily in name, as one global, multidisciplinary, humanistic undertaking, based solely upon a specific language prerequisite. Actually, this situation, imposed by the nature of things, does have its advantages. Chinese civilisation has an essentially holistic character that condemns all narrowly specialised approaches to grope in the dark and miss their target — as was well illustrated a few years ago by the spectacular blunders of nearly all the “contemporary China” specialists. (In this respect, it is ironic to note that it was precisely the so-called Concerned Asian Scholars — on whom Said set so much store in his book, as he saw in them the only chance of redemption for the orientalist establishment — that failed most scandalously in their moral responsibilities toward China and the Chinese people during the Maoist era.)