The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (12 page)

Clearly, for all his intelligence, all his heart, Segalen was also, willy-nilly, a child of the stupid nineteenth century. Later in the correspondence, moreover, there are more signs of this, no less distressing, in his reactions to China.

But at the same time he was too sensitive not to intuit, albeit confusedly, just how inadequate, vulgar and low his own world was. From Polynesia he brought back his first book,
Les Immémoriaux
, which is explicitly intended to counteract the literature of “colonial impressions” so much in favour at the time. In contradistinction to the writer-tourist, Segalen sets out to depict less the effect of the surroundings on the traveller than the effect of the traveller on the surroundings: “I am distinctly not one for the brief visions that delight Pierre Loti and thanks to which he in turn delights his female readers. I need to know, over and above the way a country appears, just what that country thinks. . . .” Loti and Co. “have told what they saw, what they felt in the presence of unexpected things and people the shock of whose encounter they had sought out. But have they revealed what these things and people thought themselves, or what they thought of them, the visitors? For there is perhaps also a shock delivered by the traveller to the spectacle before him, a reverse shock that affects what the traveller sees.”

* * *

This is a splendid program, but Segalen’s letters from Polynesia reveal just how far short he fell of carrying it out. Among those vahines with their long hair and stunted ideas, did he really ever discover “what the country really thought”? And how do the superb evocations of Tahitian landscapes and atmospheres that lend so much life and colour to his letters truly differ from Loti’s finest descriptions?

The same contradiction between the traveller’s lofty ambitions and his disappointingly meagre achievements was to be repeated, and on a monumental scale, when he confronted China. At the same time China played a decisive part in Segalen’s spiritual development. In the first place, it saved him from the dismal swamp of the “literary world” into which he had briefly been tempted to plunge. On his return from Polynesia, in fact, he very nearly turned into an
homme de lettres: Les Immémoriaux
appeared to have attracted the attention of the jury of the Prix Goncourt, and this prompted him to fling himself briefly into a round of literary and fashionable social events.[
5
] Thank heavens, Segalen’s book garnered not a single vote, and he came to his senses. Had he won the Prix Goncourt, one may only imagine how long it would have taken him to rediscover his true path.

At this juncture, Segalen persuaded the Navy to post him to Peking as an interpreter in training. Before leaving, he wrote to Jules de Gaultier, his mentor and the inventor of
Bovarysme
(“the power granted man to conceive of himself as other than he is”): “I have started to learn Chinese. All in all, I expect a great deal from this apparently thankless task, for it can deliver me from a danger: in France, once my projects have been put into practice, what will there be left for me to do except ‘literature’? I am afraid of the search for a ‘subject.’ . . . In China, tackling the most antipodal of matters, I expect a great deal from this extreme exoticism.”

The “exoticism” that Segalen expected from China, and that was to remain the philosophical underpinning of his entire work, has nothing to do with the picturesque of impressionistic travel writing—it is the exact opposite. “Exotic knowledge” is a perception of difference that operates like a dike, blocking the flow of consciousness and
thus raising its level and intensifying its energy. The “feeling of diversity,” which is the source of all the savour of life, is threatened by habit, proximity, satiation, homogenization, and the nightmare of ultimate entropy, as prefigured by the universal degradation of anthropological diversity. According to Segalen, “exoticism is thus not adaptation, not the perfect understanding of an outside-oneself that one can embrace within oneself, but rather the acute and immediate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility. Let us start from such an acknowledgement of impenetrability. Let us not flatter ourselves by thinking that we can assimilate customs, races, nations, others; on the contrary, let us rejoice in our never being able to do so, and thus guarantee the enduring pleasure of experiencing Diversity.”

Here a warning is in order: any reader who approaches Segalen in hopes of finding some sort of introduction to China is knocking at the wrong door. Segalen was certainly right to describe the Chinese universe as “the most antipodal of matters”: China does indeed constitute, in the cultural sphere, “the other pole of human experience.”

But the correct conclusion to be drawn from this observation was stated half a century later, by Professor Joseph Needham, the immensely erudite author of the monumental
Science and Civilization in China
, a veritable encyclopaedia of Chinese knowledge: “Chinese civilization 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.” Segalen, by contrast, starting from the assumption that China was “impenetrable”—and that it was desirable that it stay that way—had gone straight down a dead end.

* * *

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 Yang
tze 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.”

* * *

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.”)

What is even more bewildering is that this passionate music lover was ignorant of
the very existence
of classical Chinese music—the music of scholars, a music of the soul and of silence, as played on a seven-string zither, the
guqin
. And he dared complain of living in “a country without musicality” which knew nothing but noise! He never sought to meet Chinese masters who could have initiated him into the varied disciplines of their culture; he had no social contact with either scholars or artists; indeed he seems never to have had a single conversation with any educated Chinese person.

So it was not China that was finished—“over, sucked dry”—for him, a China that he had never bitten into, but solely his “vision.” And what was that vision? He described it in what he conceived as his magnum opus,
Le Fils du Ciel
(The Son of Heaven). Unfortunately, Segalen’s Son of Heaven resembles the Emperor of China much as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado resembles the Emperor of Japan—except for the fact that the former is not very amusing.

Yet, for all that, Victor Segalen left us the miraculous accident of his
René Leys
,[
8
] a novel of failure and derision—and one faithful, this time, to the author’s actual experience: the narrator, striving desperately to penetrate an impenetrable China, eventually succeeds only in getting himself led down the garden path by a seductive if pathetic trickster. This masterpiece escaped Segalen almost involuntarily, and in retrospect left him perplexed: a month before his death, after having his great friend Hélène Hilpert read the manuscript, he wrote her: “I find it amusing that René Leys amused you a little. But how far away it seems, how youthful . . .”