Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Fantastic! He is even better than myself, a hundred, a thousand times better than myself! What he perceives is the innermost nature of the animal. He looks for and sees what he needs to see. He ignores what he does not need to see. Not distracted by external appearances, he goes straight to the inner essence. The way he judges horses shows that he should be judge of more important things than horses.

And, needless to say, this particular animal proved to be a super-horse indeed, a horse that could run a thousand miles a day without leaving tracks and without raising dust.

In reflecting on the ways by which our minds apprehend truth, you may feel that a 2,300-year-old Chinese parable is of only limited relevance. But if so, let us consider something closer to hand: the mental processes followed by modern Western science.

Claude Bernard, the great pathologist whose research and discoveries were of momentous importance in the development of modern medical science, one day entered the lecture hall where he was going to teach and noticed something peculiar: various trays were on a table, containing different human organs; on one of these trays, flies had gathered. A common mind would have made a common observation, perhaps deploring a lack of cleanliness in the room or instructing the janitor to keep the windows shut. But Bernard’s was not a common mind: he observed that the flies had gathered on the tray which contained livers — and he thought, There must be sugar there. And he discovered the glycogenic function of the liver — a discovery that proved decisive for the understanding and treatment of diabetes.

I found this anecdote not in any history of medical science, but in the diaries of the greatest modern French poet, Paul Claudel. And Claudel commented: “This mental process is identical to that of poetical writing… The impelling motion is the same. Which shows that the primary source of scientific thought is not reasoning, but the precise verification of an association originally supplied by the imagination .”

Note that when I refer to “poetry,” I am taking this word in its most fundamental sense. Samuel Johnson, in his monumental dictionary of the English language, assigns three definitions to the word “poet,” in decreasing order of importance: first, “an inventor”; second, “an author of fiction”; and last, “a writer of poems.”

Truth is grasped by an imaginative leap. This applies not only to scientific thinking but also to philosophical thought. When I was a naïve young student in the first year of university, our Arts course included the study of philosophy — a prospect that excited me much at first, though I was soon disappointed by the mediocrity of our lecturer. However, through family acquaintances I had the good fortune to know personally an eminent philosopher of our time, who happened to be also a kind and generous man. On my request, he drafted for me a list of basic readings: one handwritten page with bibliographic references of a selection of classic texts, modern works, histories of philosophy and introductions to philosophy. I treasured this document; yet, over the years, wandering round the world, I misplaced it and, like many other treasures, eventually lost it. Now, half a century later, I have long forgotten the actual items on the list. What I still remember is the postscript the great philosopher had inscribed at the bottom of that page — I remember it vividly because, at the time, I did not understand it and it puzzled me. The postscript said (underlined), “Most important of all, don’t forget: do read a lot of novels.” When I first read this note, as an immature student, it shocked me. Somehow it did not sound serious enough. For, naïvely, we tend to confuse what is serious with what is deep . (In the editorial pages of our newspapers, leading articles are serious, while cartoons are funny; yet quite often the cartoon is deep and the leader is vapid.) It took me a long time to appreciate the full wisdom of my philosopher’s advice; now I frequently encounter echoes of it. And to the observation I have already quoted elsewhere, that one should prefer a medical practitioner who reads Chekhov, I would add that, if I commit a crime, I hope to be judged by a judge who has read Simenon.

Men of action — people who are totally involved in tackling what they believe to be real life — tend to dismiss poetry and all forms of creative writing as a frivolous distraction. Our great Polar explorer Mawson wrote in a letter to his wife some instructions concerning their children’s education. He insisted that they should not waste their time reading novels, but should instead acquire factual information from books of history and biography.

This view — quite prevalent, actually — that there is an essential difference between works of imagination on the one hand, and records of facts and events on the other, is very naïve. At a certain depth or a certain level of quality, all writings tend to be creative writing, for they all partake of the same essence: poetry.

History (contrary to the common view) does not record events. It merely records echoes of events — which is a very different thing — and, in doing this, it must rely on imagination as much as on memory. Memory by itself can only accumulate data, pointlessly and meaninglessly. Remember Jorge Luis Borges’s philosophical parable “Funes the Memorious.” Funes is a young man who, falling on his head from a horse, becomes strangely crippled: his memory hyper-develops, he is deprived of any ability to forget, he remembers everything; his mind becomes a monstrous garbage dump cluttered and clogged with irrelevant data, a gigantic heap of unrelated images and disconnected instants; he cannot evacuate any fragment of past experiences, however trifling. This relentless capacity for absolute and continuous recollection is a curse; it excludes all possibility of thought. For thinking requires space in which to forget, to select, to delete and to isolate what is significant. If you cannot discard any item from the memory store, you cannot abstract and generalise. But without abstraction and generalisation, there can be no thought.

The historian does not merely record; he edits, he omits, he judges, he interprets, he reorganises, he composes. His mission is nothing less than “to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.” Yet this quote is not from a historian discussing history writing; it is from a novelist on the art of fiction: it is the famous beginning of Joseph Conrad’s preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus ,” a true manifesto of the novelist’s mission.

The fact is, these two arts — history writing and fiction writing — originating both in poetry, involve similar activities and mobilise the same faculties: memory and imagination; and this is why it could rightly be said that the novelist is the historian of the present and the historian the novelist of the past. Both must invent the truth.

Of course, accuracy of data is the pre-condition of any historical work. But in the end, what determines the quality of a historian is the quality of his judgement. Two historians may be in possession of the same data; what distinguishes them is what they make of their common information. For example, on the subject of convict Australia, Robert Hughes gathered a wealth of material which he presented in his Fatal Shore in a vivid and highly readable style. On the basis of that same information, however, Geoffrey Blainey drew a conclusion that is radically different — and much more convincing. Hughes had likened convict Australia to the “Gulag Archipelago” of the Soviet Union, but Blainey pointed out that whereas the Soviet Gulag was a totally sterile machine designed solely to crush and destroy its inmates, in Australia, out of a convict system that was also brutal and ferocious, a number of individuals emerged full of vigour and ambition, who rose to become some of their country’s richest citizens. In turn, they soon generated a dynamic society and, eventually, a vibrant young democracy. What matters most in the end is how the historian reads events — and this is where his judgement is put to the test.