The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (44 page)

To take only one example, on a question which has particularly far-reaching implications: Billeter rightly observes that Chinese traditional aesthetics dispenses altogether with the concept of beauty. On this theme, he presents a mutually illuminating series of references to both Chinese and European writers. Fu Shan, a great calligrapher of the seventeenth century, declared: “Rather than clever, gracious, deft and proper, I prefer being awkward, unpleasing, disconnected but true to myself.” Such a view, Billeter suggests, would have met with the approval of Stendhal, who always put authenticity above all other values: “I think that to be great in anything at all,
one has to be oneself
.” For Billeter, a similar idea of true originality was evoked by Nietzsche: “Each of us carries within himself a productive originality which is the very core of his being; and if he becomes aware of this originality, a strange aura, the aura of the extraordinary, shapes itself around him.”

In the quest for originality, the first requirement is to eschew vulgarity. Billeter quotes the nineteenth-century calligrapher Liu Xizai, who said: “The difficult thing about calligraphy is not how to please, but how to avoid trying to please. The desire to please makes the writing trite, its absence makes it ingenuous and true.” At this point, I feel tempted to mention Braque’s remark to a visitor who was showing him a fake Braque and insisted that it looked genuine. The painter replied: “How could I possibly have ever painted a thing like this—it is the exact opposite of a Braque: it is
beautiful
!”

I also found much of interest in the abundant and remarkable footnotes of Billeter’s book. To the common reader, this may sound (I am afraid) like some sort of veiled irony, but no sinologist will ever mistake the sincerity and weight of this particular praise. Which one of us would not dream that it might be said of his work of a lifetime: “He wrote a few good footnotes”?

1996

*
Review of Jean François Billeter:
The Chinese Art of Writing
(New York: Skira Rizzoli, 1990).

L
U
X
UN
(who is rightly considered to be the greatest writer of modern China; he died in 1936, and—by the way—strongly disliked Confucius for reasons that will be noted in a moment) observed that whenever a truly original genius appears in this world, people immediately endeavour to get rid of him. To this end, they have two methods. The first one is
suppression
: they isolate him, they starve him, they surround him with silence, they bury him alive. If this does not work, they adopt the second method (which is much more radical and dreadful):
exaltation
—they put him on a pedestal and they turn him into a god. (The irony, of course, is that Lu Xun himself was subjected to both treatments: when he was alive, the Communist commissars bullied him; once he was dead, they worshipped him as their holiest cultural icon—but this is another story.)

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:

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.

WHO WAS CONFUCIUS?

Having noted why and how a novelist could perceive an essential aspect of the Gospels which a scholar had failed to grasp, it is time now
to return to Confucius. There is naturally no need to defend his historical existence—it was never put into question—but any reader of the
Analects
ought certainly to develop the sort of sensitivity that Gracq displayed in his reading of the Gospels and become similarly attuned to Confucius’s unique voice. The strong and complex individuality of the Master is the very backbone of the book and defines its unity. Elias Canetti (to whom I shall return later) summed it up neatly: “The
Analects
of Confucius are the oldest complete intellectual and spiritual portrait of a man. It strikes one as a modern book.”

Traditional historiography tells us that Confucius was born in 551 and died in 479 BC. (These dates may not be accurate, but modern scholarship has nothing better to offer.)

Over the centuries, the official Confucian cult has created a conventional image of the Master and, as a result, many people have tended to imagine him as a solemn old preacher, always proper, a bit pompous, slightly boring—one of these men who “push moderation too far.” In refreshing contrast with these common stereotypes, the
Analects
reveals a living Confucius who constantly surprises. In one passage, for instance, the Master provides an intriguing self-portrait: the governor of a certain town had asked one of the disciples what sort of man Confucius was, and the disciple did not know how to reply, which provoked Confucius’s reaction: “Why did you not simply tell him that Confucius is a man driven by so much passion that, in his enthusiasm, he often forgets to eat and remains unaware of the onset of old age?”

That Confucius should have chosen
enthusiasm
as the main defining aspect of his character is revealing, and is further confirmed by other episodes and statements in the
Analects
. For example, after Confucius listened to a rare piece of ancient music, we are told, the emotion took him by surprise; “for three months, he forgot the taste of meat.” Elsewhere again, he stated that love and ecstasy were superior forms of knowledge. On various occasions he could also upset and shock his entourage. When his beloved disciple Yan Hui died prematurely, Confucius was devastated; his grief was wild, he cried with a violence that stunned people around him; they objected that such an excessive reaction did not befit a sage—a criticism which Confucius rejected indignantly.