The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (49 page)

Primacy of expression over invention is thus a fundamental aspect of Chinese aesthetics. The best example can be found in calligraphy,[
17
] which—as everyone knows—is considered in China as
the
supreme art of the brush. No other art is more narrowly governed by formal and technical conventions, leaving less room to the artist’s imagination and initiative: not only are calligraphers not allowed to invent the form of any written character, but the number of brushstrokes and the very order in which the brushstrokes must follow each other are rigorously predetermined. On the other hand, paradoxically, calligraphy is also the art that can afford an individual with the greatest scope to display in a direct and lyrical way his unique personality, mood and temper, and all the subtle, intimate nuances of his sensibility.

A similar phenomenon is to be found in painting and in poetry. For a layman, at first sight, Chinese painting may appear rather limited and monotonous; landscapes, for instance, are invariably built on a combination of mountains and rivers, organised on the basis of a few set recipes. These stereotyped formulas are themselves filled with conventional elements—trees, rocks, clouds, buildings, figures—whose treatment is standardised in painting handbooks that are straightforward catalogues of forms. The range of poetry is equally narrow: it uses a rigidly codified symbolic language, a set of ready-made images (the song of the cuckoo that makes the traveller feel homesick; the wild geese that fail to bring news from the absent lover; the east wind with its springtime connotations; the west wind and the funereal feelings of autumn; mandarin ducks suggesting shared love; ruins of ancient monuments witnessing the impermanence of human endeavours; willow twigs exchanged by friends as a farewell present; moon and
wine; falling flowers; the melancholy of the abandoned woman leaning on her balcony). In a sense, one could say that Chinese poetry is made of a narrow series of clichés embroidered upon a limited number of conventional canvases. And yet such a definition, although it would be literally accurate, would nevertheless miss the point; a deaf man could as well describe a Bach sonata for cello as a sequence of rubbings and scratching effected upon four gut-strings stretched over an empty box.

Poetry is, of course, untranslatable by its very nature; in the case of Chinese poetry, however, this impossibility is further compounded with a basic misunderstanding. Here, indeed, translation operates like a perverse screen that saves the chaff in order to eliminate the grain. What the translator offers to the reader’s admiration is precisely the least admirable part of the poem: its subject matter (generally trite) and its images (borrowed, nine times out of ten, from a conventional catalogue and hence utterly devoid of originality). The specific quality of the poem necessarily escapes the translator, since (as is also the case with painting and calligraphy)
it does not reside in a creation of new signs, but in a new way of using conventional signs
. For a poet, the supreme art is to position, adjust and fit together these well-worn images in such a way that, from their unexpected encounter, a new life might spark.

In this sense, one should say that in Chinese art, the emphasis is always on
interpretation
rather than on
invention
. “Interpretation” should be understood here in the musical sense of the word. Ivan Moravec, let us say, is not a lesser artist for not having himself composed the Chopin nocturnes that he interprets. And yet, it is through the very fidelity of his interpretation that he manages to express his own individuality and sensibility. It is his
creative
genius that is different from the one of Claudio Arrau, or of any other musician interpreting this same piece.
By narrowing the field of its invention, an art intensifies the quality of its expression
—or rather, it shifts creation from the first arena to the second. (Actually, this axiom has a validity that goes beyond Chinese aesthetics: see, for instance, in modern European art the beginnings of Cubism. For Braque, Picasso and Gris, the world suddenly seemed to shrink to the mere dimensions of a
guitar, a newspaper and a fruit dish—the very conventions that freed these artists from the need to define a new subject matter allowed them to concentrate entirely on the problem of elaborating a new language. Earlier, one mountain and twelve apples had already fulfilled the same function for Cézanne.)

For a painter or a poet, the question is not how to eliminate stereotypes, but how to handle them in such a way that, through the stereotypes, the “current” may flow. Under the efficient power of
qi
, a conventional mountain-and-water combination can then become a microcosmic creation, the worn-out image of falling flowers can turn into a poignant and universal metaphor of fate, and the old cliché of the abandoned woman on her balcony becomes an effective summing-up of the entire human condition.

THE POWER OF EMPTINESS

Earlier, we pointed out that in Chinese philosophy the Absolute only manifests itself “in hollow”: only its absence can be circumscribed. We met a first important application of this conception in the precept that recommends the painter always reveal only half of his subject in order to better suggest its totality. Not only can the message reach its destination without having to be fully spelled out, but it is precisely because it is not fully spelled out that it can reach its destination. In this sense, the “blanks” in painting, the silences in poetry and music are active elements that bring a work to life.

There is something more important than a finished work of art: it is the spiritual process that preceded it and guided its execution. The poet Tao Yuanming (372–427) used to carry everywhere with him a zither without strings, on which he played mute music: “I only seek the meaning that lies at the heart of the zither. Why strain myself to produce sounds on the strings?”

The finished work is to the spiritual experience of the artist as the graph recorded by the seismograph is to an earthquake. What matters is the experience; the work itself is a mere accidental consequence, a secondary result, a visible (or audible) leftover—it is nothing but “the
imprint left perchance in the snow by a wild swan.” This is the reason why sometimes the ink of the brushstroke, the sound of the musical note are divested of part of their material substance; they are thinned out in order better to reveal the actual gesture that originates and underlies them. (To achieve this result in painting and calligraphy, the brushstroke is applied with an ink load that is deliberately insufficient; in this way, the ink mark is striated with “blanks” that show the inner dynamics of the stroke; this technique is called
fei bai
, which means “flying white.” A similar effect is found in music, when the sound of the fingernail modulating the vibrato on the string becomes louder than the original sound of the note.)

Literature, too, has its “blanks.” Sometimes they function as hinges for the composition; sometimes they enable the poem to suggest the existence of another poem that lies beyond words. To a degree, Western literature also knows these two uses of emptiness. A good illustration of the latter one was provided by Virginia Woolf when she presented Vita Sackville-West with what she called her best work—a splendidly bound volume, made purely of blank pages. As to emptiness used as a compositional device, Proust very subtly describes how Flaubert handled this technique: “To my mind, the most beautiful thing in
Sentimental Education
is not a sentence, it is a blank . . . [by which Flaubert finally] rids the narrative of all the deadwood of storytelling. He was thus the first writer who succeeded in giving it a musical quality.”[
18
]

In turn, Proust’s observation was well commented upon by Maurice Nadeau: “Proust noticed it: the ‘blanks’ in the narrative of
Sentimental Education
as well as in
Madame Bovary
are their supreme achievement . . . At every subtle turn of Emma’s fate, whenever a secondary narrative accompanies the main story, we encounter this ‘unsaid.’ The same current pervades objects and consciousness, the material world and the psychological world exchange their respective qualities; reality and the expression of reality merge into one single totality that rests upon ‘the inner dynamics of style.’”[
19
] The Flaubertian notion of “inner dynamics of style” irresistibly calls to mind the Chinese concept of
qi
; it should be observed that it is precisely
emptiness
that provides the best conductor for this “current.”

Void is the space where the poem-beyond-the-poem can develop; Chinese poetry has various devices to create it. Thus, for instance, at the beginning of the famous four-line poem by Wang Zhihuan describing the immense scenery that can be seen from a tower at the mouth of the Yellow River, the first two verses outline the widest possible horizon:

At this point the reader feels that the poet has reached the utter limit of his vision; actually, the real function of these two verses is merely to tighten a spring whose sudden release, at the end of the poem, is going to launch the reader’s imagination into the infinitely vaster spaces of the unseen:

The last verse is not a point of arrival, but a point of departure. This “trampoline effect” is often used by poets, especially in the four-line poems whose extreme compactness (the entire poem may have twenty syllables only) is thus prolonged with an infinite echo.

Another method consists in building the poem around a central core of emptiness, where a truth resides that cannot be approached or expressed. The traditional metaphor used for this purpose is that of the unsuccessful attempt to meet a hermit-sage who possesses the ultimate answer. The hermit’s presence is real and near—it is attested by various clues, even by his direct messengers—and yet he himself remains invisible and unreachable. A good thousand years before Kafka’s
Castle
, Jia Dao summarised this myth in a well-known four-line poem:

Since the essential point is beyond words, a poem can only talk
beside
the subject—it describes a desire. Thus, in Tao Yuanming:

The same theme found a new expression with Wang Wei:

Any work of art—poem, painting, piece of music—plays the part of a “fisherman’s song”: beyond the words, forms and sounds that it borrows, it is a direct, intuitive experience of a reality that no discursive approach can embody.

In our time, the subtlest of all modern critics, Zhou Zuoren (1885–1968), summarised in one pithy sentence this living tradition of
which he himself was a product: “All that can be spelled out is without importance.”

This axiom—needless to say—is also valid for essays that deal with Chinese aesthetics.

1983

*
Gauss Seminars in Criticism, Princeton University, 1980.

†
See
“Lies That Tell the Truth
.”

The Chinese Lesson

I
N THE
catalogue of an individual retrospective held a year and a half ago at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, there is a striking statement by the painter to whose memory the exhibition was devoted. At a crucial turning point in his career, the artist in question sent a batch of recent paintings to a friend and explained to him: “The next lot has to be better and I just don’t feel capable of being better yet . . . I have the awful problem now of being a better person before I can paint better.”

No, it wasn’t a Chinese scholar-painter from another century who wrote these lines. It was in fact Colin McCahon (1919–87), an important New Zealand painter of our age. The author of the catalogue, Murray Bail—a true connoisseur of Western art—in quoting this statement could not hide his puzzlement: can one imagine Michelangelo or Rubens, Ingres or Delacroix, Matisse or Picasso making such an extraordinary statement?

For traditional Chinese aesthetes, on the other hand, such a notion goes without saying, and McCahon was doing little more than repeating a truth which, in their eyes, should be obvious to any serious artist. How the self-taught New Zealand painter, locked away in the isolation of his far-off land, had come to develop, without realising it, such a “Chinese” view remains an enigma which we will not try to elucidate here. We will simply note that he read a great deal and that since the middle of the twentieth century, numerous philosophical and aesthetic elements of Chinese and Japanese thought have been filtering into Western consciousness via countless works of vulgarisation, indeed even best-selling novels. Remember, for example, Robert Pirsig and his famous
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
(an
astonishing best-seller in the ’70s, the book, even today, retains its freshness and originality; it bears re-reading): “You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect, and then just paint naturally.”