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

by Leys, Simon

  As to the indefatigable activity of Madame Joly-Segalen, Bouillier is hardly exaggerating when he speaks of a “prodigious filial love from beyond the grave” and “the miraculous resurrection of a father by his daughter.” But he is, I feel, on much less certain ground when he adds that “it was thanks to her” that “Segalen has become one of the century’s greatest poets.” In the previous century Rimbaud had only a sister (a blundering busybody to boot), while Laforgue had no one, and surely both these poets have endured solely by virtue of their poetry?

  The three high points of Segalen’s existence—the two years in Polynesia (1903–1905), his first great Chinese adventure (1909), and finally his anguished quest on the threshold of the beyond, in the last twelve months of his life—provide the finest and most intense pages of this enormous correspondence. The remainder (and the two volumes of letters, along with the supplemental Repères [Reference Guide] comprise 2,850 pages), though perhaps not always of burning interest, nevertheless serve to confirm John Henry Newman’s dictum that “the true life of a man is in his letters.”

  Segalen’s prime correspondents, from his adolescence up until his return from Polynesia and marriage, were his parents, especially his mother. Thereafter his wife became the soul mate to whom he wrote almost daily during his frequent and prolonged absences; his last letter to her was written on the eve of his death. His close friends—and Segalen attached great importance to friendship—included his fellow naval officers (Henry Manceron, Jean Lartigue) but also admired elders, intellectuals and artists (Daniel de Monfreid, Debussy, Jules de Gaultier, Claudel, etc.).

  Segalen was born in Brest into a modest middle-class family with deep Breton and Catholic roots. His father was a gentle and self-effacing civil servant and an amateur painter. His mother, somewhat musical—she played the church organ and the piano—was a formidable and frighteningly possessive person, and she long wielded tight control over her son (who as a twenty-one-year-old medical student was still obliged to write her, not only to justify his smallest expenditures but even to explain on one occasion what had prevented him from receiving Holy Communion at Mass, a tale-bearing chaplain having duly reported this misdemeanour to Madame Segalen).

  * * *

  Segalen’s background was certainly narrow and smothering in many respects, but it is worth bearing in mind that this provincial bourgeoisie did know how to sacrifice for the education of its offspring. Thus Victor received a solid literary, classical and scientific education; he was also introduced in childhood to music and painting, which remained passions of his throughout his life. Nor must we overlook the essential: he benefited from what only the warm affection of a united family can supply, a happy childhood, which arms one to face life and, once adult, to eliminate the risk of losing time in some fatuous and vain quest for happiness.

  But Segalen had a frail and nervous disposition, and he was prone all his life long to bouts of melancholy. At boarding school, far from home, he was laid low by depression. While he was a student at the Bordeaux School of Naval Medicine, his sister and mother had to come and support him during another attack. He needed his family, yet at the same time he longed to take wing. This desire for emancipation manifested itself in various ways—in his rejection of the organized Church as in his liaisons with young women (liaisons which he had to conceal from his mother—another source of anxiety).

  True freedom from the family’s grip came only, in the nature of things, with his great departure for Polynesia, his first overseas posting. But loving ties with his parents were maintained by letter well beyond that moment, and right up until his marriage. Thereafter, however, though still respectful and courteous, his communications became rare and more distanced. Five years before his death, Segalen confided to a very dear friend that “Nothing at all has been a disappointment to me except my mother (the reluctant affection I once felt for her perished long ago).” Two years before his death, in a letter to his wife concerning the education of their older son, in whom he wished to instil high standards, he remarked that “I feel that my parents were satisfied with mediocrity, and for that I shall never forgive them.”

  Segalen became a Navy doctor for simple practical reasons: his family could not have afforded extended study for him. In point of fact he liked neither the sea nor medicine. He suffered from seasickness, and he cursed the time-consuming demands of a profession that distracted him from his true passions. On both matters his correspondence is explicit.

  The sea: “I find the open sea boring, nauseating and stupid.” “My Pacific crossing was bleak, banal, and long.” “Fifteen stupid days on this stupid sea. How horribly monotonous the South Pacific is as a mass of water!” “I shall relish with ever-renewed joy the charm of a night on land, cool and with no rolling.” “Ah! How good the solid, fragrant earth is after five days on the high seas! Decidedly, the sea is beautiful only as seen from the coast, or framed by shores, beaches, and rocks. The open sea is paltry and odourless. . . . And the vast horizon shrinks and squeezes you like an iron ring.” “Life at sea gives me the slightly stale feeling of a pious old maid in religious retreat. . . . The open sea is really and truly imbecilic. Its only virtue is that it conveys you ‘elsewhere.’”

  As for medicine, Segalen hardly ever speaks of it in any but exasperated terms: “For me medicine means oppressive and monotonous boredom.” At one point he complains of “the vile butchery of medical practice” that prevents him from playing his piano; at another, he fancies that “Sinology, an exact science” might “save him once and for all from the vileness of medicine.” It should be noted, nevertheless, that Segalen was a good doctor who combined competence with compassion. During the struggle against an outbreak of plague in northeast China he distinguished himself by his courage, devotion and organizational skill.

  In any case, it was surely better to be a Navy doctor than a pharmacist in Brest, as his mother had originally wanted for him. And he had no reason for complaint with respect to the French Navy, which treated him generously, and underwrote the two most fruitful episodes in his career, namely the revelation of Polynesia and the revelation of China, which would successively inspire and nourish his entire literary output.

  In Polynesia he discovered a paradise in agony and, simultaneously, the work of Gauguin, who had just died there. In the islands he experienced a kind of happiness—or was it perhaps simply the fact of being young, and released at long last from the oppressive bigotry of his provincial childhood? Many years later he could still write to a friend about that time: “I have told you that I was happy in the Tropics. That is violently true. For two years in Polynesia I slept badly from joy. I had awakenings in tears at the arriving light of day. . . . I felt gaiety coursing through my muscles. Thinking was itself a delight. . . . I had my work in hand, I was free, recovering, fresh, and sensually rather well practiced. The whole island came to me like a woman. And from women indeed I received gifts that more complete countries no longer offer. Apart from the traditional Maori wife with her sweet fresh skin, smooth hair, and muscular lips, I experienced caresses [etc.].”

  * * *

  This lyrical outpouring is no doubt partly due to the writer’s distance in time from what he is recalling. His original letters from Tahiti tell a rather different story. Following the usual custom of officers at that time, he had indeed set out by taking a native mistress, but he seems to have tired of her rather quickly, as he confided in various somewhat caddish letters to an old pal of his: “For the time being I have left the full-blooded Tahitian vahine as being too far removed from our own race. They would be perfect, these brown-skinned girls with their long sleek hair, long eyelashes and velvet skin, if only, instead of launching a full-scale courting ritual, replete with palaver and haggling, they would comply with simple commands, just as they used to in the past. . . . They are dishonest, egoistic, and obviously not very intellectual or even intelligent. What is the use, then, of showing them the same respect as would be appropriate towards a lover very
close to us, submissive, devoted, such as we are surer to find among female species less far removed from our own. . . . In six months, after experiencing the Tahitian, then the half-White, I came back to the White woman, and now from her too, willingly, I am drawing away. . . .” Furthermore, “the sexual act is indifferent to me, it takes too long, and then those women who truly please me I would rather have as friends than as mistresses.”

  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 Yangtze 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 b
ut 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.”