The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (60 page)

* * *

In a last short piece written in November 2008, Liu looked “Behind the ‘China Miracle.’” Following the Tiananmen massacre, Deng Xiaoping attempted to restore his authority and to reassert his regime’s legitimacy after both had melted away because of the massacre. He set out to build his power through economic growth. As the economy began to flourish, many officials saw an opportunity to make sudden and enormous profits; their unscrupulous pursuit of private gain became the engine of the ensuing economic boom. The most highly profitable of the state monopolies have fallen into the hands of small groups of powerful officials. The Communist Party has only one principle left: any action can be justified if it upholds the dictatorship or results in greater spoils. Liu concludes:

One month after writing this, on December 8, 2008, Liu was arrested and eventually charged with “inciting subversion of state power”—whereas his only activity was, and has always been, simply to express his opinions. After a parody of a trial—which the public was not allowed to attend—he was sentenced to eleven years in jail on December 25, 2009.[
2
] When, one year later, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Chinese authorities acted hysterically: his wife, his friends, and his acquaintances were all subjected to various forms of arbitrary detention to ensure that none of them would be able to go to Oslo to collect the prize on his behalf. Today his wife, Liu Xia, is in her second year of house arrest without charges. These dramatic measures had one clear historical precedent: in 1935, the Nazi authorities gave the same treatment to the jailed political dissenter Carl von Ossietsky.

At the Oslo ceremony, an empty chair was substituted for the absent laureate. Within hours, the words “empty chair” were banned from the Internet in China—wherever they occurred, the entire machinery of censorship was automatically set in motion.

Foreign experts in various intelligence organizations are trying to assess the growing strength of China, politically, economically, and militarily. The Chinese leaders are most likely to have a clear view of their own power. If so, why are they so scared of a frail and powerless poet and essayist, locked away in jail, cut off from all human contacts? Why did the mere sight of his empty chair at the other end of the Eurasian continent plunge them into such a panic?

POSTSCRIPT

More than half a century ago, Czesław Miłosz (who was particularly well placed to comment on such matters) warned us that, contrary to what we tend to assume, our traditions, our social and legal institutions, cannot ensure us any real or permanent protection against gross abuses of state authority:

This phrase has a particular resonance for me. For the last five years, I have been engaged in a long, gruesome battle with Belgian officialdom (Belgium—the “Stateless State,” as the regretted Tony Judt aptly called it—is my country of origin). The blunder of a consular official had illegally deprived two Belgian citizens by birth of their sole nationality—reducing them to statelessness. It would have been easy enough to correct the original mistake, but (as Liu Xiaobo remarked in different circumstances) the main concern and industry of bureaucrats is not to rectify their mistakes, but to conceal them. The fate of these two young men, suddenly turned stateless by sheer administrative stupidity, is of particular concern to me: they happen to be my twin sons.

A Chinese friend who knows of my predicament remarked that, since over the years I have spent much time denouncing Chinese abuses of power, it would be sensible for me now to look closer to home. He has a point; yet reading Liu Xiaobo has not been a diversion from my duty toward my family: it gave me added awareness that, in the defense of human rights, our fight is universal and indivisible.

One interesting twist in the unfolding of the Belgian government’s denial of my sons’ rights: the diplomat who was the main architect of a cover-up (which still delays the judicial resolution of the affair) recently obtained the posting he long coveted, as a reward for his zeal—he is now ambassador in Peking, where he ought to feel like a fish in the water. Our present Belgian ambassador in Australia, also knowing the truth, came to apologize
privately
. Unfortunately, he cannot do so publicly; as he said, this would be the end of his career. Why?

February 2012

*
Review of Liu Xiaobo:
No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems
, edited by Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao, and Liu Xia, foreword by Václav Havel (Cambridge: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2012).

OBJECTS AND LIMITS OF THIS ANTHOLOGY

J
OSEPH
Conrad remarked that the love of literature does not make a writer, any more than the love of the sea makes a sailor. This is cruelly true: poor frustrated lovers—failed writers and armchair sailors—may this anthology at least bring you some consolation!

In my undertaking, I set myself three rules, while allowing myself two infractions, which I ought to mention at the outset.

First rule: in principle, all the selections in this anthology deal with
the sea
. In practice, however, I did not narrowly limit myself to salt water; here and there, my readers will also encounter lakes, rivers and canals. Strictly speaking, the title of my anthology should thus be modified—putting
Water
instead of
The Sea
—but such a title would lose in flavour what it could gain in accuracy.

Second rule: this is not an anthology of
sea
literature, it is a
literary
anthology of the sea. One could very well compile a collection of documentary writings, narratives and accounts by navigators, adventurers, seamen, sportsmen, oceanographers, yachtsmen, castaways, etc.; such a collection could provide diverse and fascinating information, but it would constitute an altogether different enterprise. As a rule, my selection draws exclusively from the works of
writers
. On this point, I am afraid you might quarrel with me here and there: “Why,” you might say, “do you grant Marteilhe, Duguay-Trouin, Garneray[
1
] the qualification of ‘writer’ which you deny Gerbault, Bombard,
Moitessier or Tabarly?”[
2
] Of course, I could attempt to justify myself, invoking the fact that, in the past, amateur memorialists often wrote with more verve and style than many modern writers, but I ought better honestly admit that, in some cases, I broke my own rule: some pages should perhaps have been omitted. If I retained them, it is simply because they pertain to books that I admire and love, but which I feel have been unfairly ignored or forgotten and deserve to be revived.

Third rule: all the pieces selected (even when written by foreigners) were originally written in French.[
3
] This rule has suffered no exception.

My very first intention had been to make a universal anthology of the sea in literature—the Bible, Homer, Virgil, Li Bai, Su Dongpo, Camoens, Defoe, Hugo, Dana, Melville, Conrad . . . but I soon realised the huge naïveté and incoherence of such a project; furthermore, as regards the Anglo-American domain, it has already been covered by a number of excellent anthologies.[
4
] Last but not least, from a first random survey, I began to perceive that French sources would provide rich and original material, which alone would easily justify being gathered in one volume (actually I ended up with two, totalling more than 1,500 pages).

In contrast with Great Britain, where, for obvious geographical and historical reasons, language and culture have always been closely related to the sea,[
5
] France, whose maritime ventures were hardly less impressive, never succeeded in integrating these into the national consciousness. The problem was that French seafaring activities were essentially confined to the provinces—Flanders, Normandy, Brittany, Gascogne, Basque country, Provence—whereas from the point of view of Paris, which, alas, commands everything, the sea remained generally invisible. And yet it never ceased to inspire writers, including some of the greatest: Rabelais, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Baudelaire, Michelet, Valéry . . . The sea is truly present in French literature, though its actual importance is still not sufficiently appreciated, and I hope that my anthology may be a first step towards remedying this ignorance.

MAN AND THE SEA

The fascination that the sea exerts upon even the most insensitive landlubbers is a universal phenomenon which can be observed on all the shores of the world. Robert Frost captured this everyday mystery in a poem of mesmerising simplicity (by the way, do not be surprised to find an abundance of English and American quotes in this introduction to a
French
anthology: since they were eventually excluded from the main body of my work, this is a way for me to salvage at least some of the material I had originally selected):

Should we therefore conclude that the love of the sea is a common feature of all mankind? Edmund Wilson denied this with a strange sort of angry passion in a short essay on “Things I Consider Overrated”:

Yet this idea that the sea is a jail—or, more precisely, that a sailor’s condition is the condition of a convict—is not a new one. Samuel Johnson had already expressed it in most memorable fashion: “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned. . . . A man in a jail has more room, better food and commonly better company.”[
8
] But it must be said that, in Johnson’s time—and until not so long ago—life at sea was barbarous indeed. The catalogue of its miseries makes one shudder: stinking discomfort, inhumane crowdedness, permanent humidity, the heat and the cold, rats, vermin, mouldy and rotting food, brackish water, brutishness of the company, sadistic ferocity of the ship’s discipline, constant risk of breaking one’s neck or drowning when falling from a yard in heavy weather, danger of shipwreck, permanent menace of scurvy on long voyages, death after slow, hideous agony . . .

Johnson’s utterances on this subject do not merely reflect the prejudices of an eccentric genius who had no experience of the sea;[
9
] they were constantly confirmed by countless reliable witnesses, and it is quite impressive to note that, more than a century later, a writer as superbly qualified as Robert Louis Stevenson could state it again: life at sea is not liveable. After having explored the Pacific for six months on board a superb schooner he had chartered for this very purpose, he confessed in a letter to a friend: “And yet the sea is a horrible place, stupefying to the mind and poisonous to the temper; the sea, the motion, the lack of space, the cruel publicity, the villainous tinned foods, the sailors, the captain, the passengers—but you are amply repaid when you sight an island, and drop anchor in a new world.”[
10
]

Still, whenever Stevenson evokes the sea in his writings, he does it with convincing expressive power. Is it not precisely because his personal experience had freed him from the illusions and stereotypes that too often mar or adulterate the images of the sea offered by even some of the greatest writers? Think of Baudelaire, for instance. Baudelaire’s youthful seafaring adventure was less serious than is often assumed; he later drew some magnificent metaphors from the sea, but he also made bombastic statements, the hollowness of which make true seamen laugh. On his famous and grandiloquent apostrophe “
Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer!
” one is tempted to pour cold water, such as this description of a nasty squall by the great sailor Éric Tabarly: “. . . down below [on board
Pen Duick II
] the drenched sails spill water everywhere: it is a fucking mess, but now is not the time for housekeeping. All through the night, in turns, I lie down, taking off my wet-weather gear, then putting it on again and climbing back on deck to reset the tension of the sheets to match the ceaseless wind-shifts. To the naïve dreamers who believe they will find freedom on the high seas, I have only this advice: look for it elsewhere!”[
11
]