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

by Leys, Simon

  Half a century later, however, Stendhal introduced a cool distrust of all cant in exploring the self. With its swift and casual elegance, the opening of his Mémoires d’un touriste offers the best antidote to Rousseau’s egomania:

  It is not out of egotism that I say “I”; it is simply the quickest way to tell the story.

  Accusations of complacency directed at the authors of autobiographies and memoirs were deftly deflected once and for all by Alexander Herzen in The Pole Star, with:

  Who is entitled to write his reminiscences?

  Everyone.

  Because no one is obliged to read them.

  * * *

  The overtures of some novels have become virtual proverbs. Think, for instance, of the first words of A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”; and I suppose even those who have never read Anna Karenina would recognise its opening sentence:

  All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

  Sometimes, lesser writers are also capable of a stroke of genius. The first words of The Go-Between are in all memories—even in the memories of those who have never heard the name L.P. Hartley:

  The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

  Conversely, there are masterpieces that begin in a most inconspicuous manner, and it is only in hindsight that their low-keyed openings have come to acquire the magical resonance they have for us today. When Proust wrote, “For a long time I used to go to bed early . . .” his first readers could hardly have foreseen where this deceptively bland and modest statement would take them. Some 4,000 pages later, however, they found themselves in the position of a swimmer who, having slipped quietly into the waters of a lazy river, is soon overwhelmed by an invisible current and carried away to the middle of the ocean.

  In philosophical fables, however, the usual aim is to puzzle readers and catch their attention from the outset. In Metamorphosis, for example, Kafka entraps us at once in an inexorable nightmare:

  As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

  Grown-up fairytales observe the same method. When you read the first sentence of a story by Marcel Aymé, you immediately react like a child—you must find out what happens next. The Dwarf begins:

  As he reached the age of thirty-five, the dwarf of the Barnaboum Circus started to grow.

  * * *

  Some writers find the initial spark in words, others in ideas, and others again in an image—an inner vision. The latter are perhaps the quintessential fiction writers. For them, very often, writing is an obsessive activity, sometimes performed as if in a trance, and generally conducted under the blind dictation of their subconscious. Writing is the safety valve that preserves their very sanity; if they did not write, they would hardly survive: Graham Greene, Georges Simenon, Julien Green—however different as individuals—are typical of this remarkable breed. Their novels—and particularly their opening scenes—linger hauntingly in the memory. Yet what we remember is not words or phrases; it is the visual impact of cinematic frames on the screen of our imagination. When Greene was still an obscure journalist and met the film producer Alexander Korda, he was abruptly asked if he had any story in mind that might be turned into a film. Greene immediately improvised the opening scene of a thriller: “Early morning on Platform 1 at Paddington; the platform is empty—except for one man who is waiting for the last train from Wales. From below his raincoat a trickle of blood forms a pool on the platform.” “Yes, and then?” asked Korda. “It would take too long to tell you the whole plot,” Greene replied, not having a clue how he would go on: “It still needs some more working out.” But a friendship was struck that eventuated in the making of The Third Man. We will never know what the bleeding man on the platform was up to, but his image remains with us, as it did with Korda.

  The impeccable wordsmith and original thinker Paul Valéry’s preamble for his philosophical essay “Monsieur Teste” stays etched in the mind when the essay itself is a blurry impression:

  Stupidity is not my strong point. I have seen many people; I have visited a few countries; I have taken part in various undertakings without liking them; I have eaten nearly every day; I have caressed a few women. Today I can still recall a good hundred faces, two or three great shows, and perhaps the gist of some twenty books. What I remember is neither the best nor the worst of these things: simply what has managed to remain, remains. This arithmetic relieves me of any surprise that I am growing old.

  But the hyper-rationality of Valéry’s intelligence produced in him a strong prejudice against the art of fiction. To his mind, a novelist’s invention was deplorably devoid of intellectual necessity. He toyed with the idea of compiling an anthology of first lines from famous novels, to demonstrate the asinine triviality of a literary genre in which a book may begin with a statement as vacuous as: “The marchioness went out at five o’clock,” a phrase that became a shorthand indictment for a certain type of fiction. The surrealist movement appropriated Valéry’s gibe in its ferocious literary crusade against all novels and novelists—but these inquisitorial outbursts had no noticeable impact upon the general health of European and American fiction, which continued to flourish. Here are two brilliantly effective novel openings from the 1930s (one could think of many dozens more). First, Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies:

  It was clearly going to be a bad crossing.

  With Asiatic resignation, Father Rothschild S.J. put down his suitcase in the corner of the bar and went on deck. (It was a small suitcase of imitation crocodile hide. The initials stamped on it in Gothic characters were not Father Rothschild’s for he had borrowed it that morning from the valet-de-chambre of his hotel. It contained some rudimentary underclothes, six important new books in six languages, a false beard and a school atlas and gazetteer heavily annotated.)

  We sense that the book will contain resources just as surprising and diverse. Or again, George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air:

  The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

  One could not suggest with greater economy the mood of gloom and despair that is going to pervade this prophetic indictment of a modern world poisoned by synthetic food, cretinised by commercial advertisements and ransacked by real-estate developers.

  * * *

  Chekhov remarked that writers would often benefit by cutting off the beginnings and the endings of their stories—for these are usually the weakest parts in their work. It would not only be inconceivable but simply impracticable to effect such surgical interventions on Chekhov’s own stories; their beginnings and endings are all the more effective for being virtually invisible—and there lies one of the secrets of his art.

  Lopping off the introductory sentences of a narrative is a conceit often used to startling effect in eighteenth-century literature. We don’t really begin to read Sterne’s Sentimental Journey: we are casually and unexpectedly dumped into it:

  “They order,” said I, “this matter better in France.”

  This sort of abrupt opening produces the youthful and exhilarating feeling one experiences when jumping into a train already in motion. We are carried away with similar speed and whimsicality by Diderot at the beginning of Jacques le fataliste—and, quite significantly, here again it is travel that provides the leading metaphor:

  How did they meet? Perchance, like everybody. What were their names? What does it matter to you? Where did they come from? From the nearest place. Where did they go? Who knows where he is going? What were they saying? The master said nothing; and Jacques said, that his Captain used to say, that whatever happens to us on earth, good and bad, was already written in heaven.

  As we just saw, Chekhov used to put the difficulty of the ending on a par with that of the beginning. Yet it is impossible to present here any exemplary selection of endings: the emotional impact, the artistic excellence of a great ending is totally dependent upon the entire
book that precedes it. To my mind, the ending of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is sublime; but either you have read the book, and naturally agree with me—or you have not read it, and my pronouncement will merely amount to a fatuous exercise in name-dropping. I must simply limit myself to a few marginal observations on some unusual forms of ending.

  First is the delayed-release ending in which the real ending does not occur with the last sentence on the last page of the book but takes place a few seconds later, in the imagination of the reader. This technique somehow operates on the model of a very nasty type of bomb, whose truly devastating explosion is not the one that is produced on impact, but the second one that is delayed by a few minutes. Example: in Greene’s Brighton Rock, Rose, a naïve and kind girl, hopelessly in love with a young gangster, receives for the first time a present from her callous lover: a six-penny gramophone record on which he has recorded what she assumes to be a personal message of love. But the reader has already been told that what the little punk recorded was a dirty flow of savage abuse aimed at the innocent girl. The young man is killed, Rose returns to her sordid lodgings in a state of utter despair, her only comfort the thought that she still has the record of his voice—her only treasure—which, now at last, she will listen to; the book ends on this sentence describing her journey home:

  She walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all.

  Alternative endings are a trick famously performed by John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. He proposes two options: gloomy or happy; the reader can take his pick. It is a cheeky display of savoir faire by a virtuoso of story-telling, but it is precisely the sort of artifice that helped give a bad name to the art of the novel. Perhaps Valéry had a point after all when he complained that fiction writing was essentially frivolous, since one can imagine different endings to the same novel—whereas the closure of a good poem has an immutable necessity.

  Weird endings are a third category. In the exceptionally rich field of modern Japanese fiction, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro occupies a towering position and The Makioka Sisters (1948) is generally considered to be his masterpiece. Yukiko, the third of the four sisters, is in danger of becoming an old maid, when finally a suitable fiancé is found for her. The book ends as she prepares to go to Tokyo for her marriage:

  [Yukiko’s] stomach had for some time been upset, and even after repeated doses of wakamatsu and arsilin, she was troubled by diarrhoea on the twenty-sixth [the day of her departure]. The wedding kimonos arrived on the same day. Yukiko looked at them and sighed—if only they were not for her wedding.

  Yukiko’s diarrhoea persisted through the twenty-sixth and was a problem on the train to Tokyo.

  Finally, there are missing endings. Two great novels that endeavour to tackle the ultimate questions of the human condition have remained without an ending—which, in retrospect, may be a most fitting conclusion.

  Kafka, in his final masterpiece The Castle, tells the story of a young man who repeatedly attempts—always in vain—to overcome arcane hurdles to gain access to a mysterious castle. Will his persistence succeed? We shall never know, for Kafka died before he could complete his manuscript.

  In Bouvard et Pécuchet, Flaubert describes how two old bachelors living in retirement, after a dreary career as menial clerks, launch themselves into an encyclopaedic survey of all human knowledge. Their naïve venture soon becomes a circumnavigation of the immense, uncharted continent of human idiocy. At the start of his mad and desperate enterprise, Flaubert’s intention had been to portray his characters as two despicable fools—but the creatures soon rebel against their creator and reclaim their individual dignity. This momentous change occurs halfway through the book, when we are told that “a pitiful ability began to develop in their minds—the ability to detect stupidity, and not to tolerate it.” From that moment, Bouvard and Pécuchet become Flaubert himself, whose task, gigantic and hopeless, turned into mental—and physical—agony. He died at work, collapsing under the strain like a donkey crushed by its burden.

  In his last work, Kafka described the search for salvation; Flaubert, the quest for meaning. But these pursuits take us into mysteries no mortal can fathom. It seems strangely appropriate that death should have intervened, ensuring these heroic explorations remain open—forever.

  Part III

  CHINA

  THE CHINESE ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE PAST

  Le Tibre seul, qui vers la mer s’enfuit,

  Reste de Rome. O mondaine inconstance!

  Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps détruit,

  Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait résistance.

  —JOACHIM DU BELLAY, Les Antiquités de Rome (1558)

  CHINA is the oldest living civilisation on Earth.[1] Such a unique continuity naturally implies a very complex relation between a people and their past. It seems that there is a paradox at the heart of this remarkable cultural longevity: cultivation of the moral and spiritual values of the ancients appears to have most often combined with a curious neglect of, or indifference (even at times downright iconoclasm) towards, the material heritage of the past. (Whether the spiritual continuity was achieved in spite of, or thanks to, a partial destruction of the material expressions of tradition is itself another issue, which will only be briefly evoked later on.)

  This essay attempts a preliminary exploration of the parallel phenomena of spiritual preservation and material destruction that can be observed in the history of Chinese culture. The topic being vast, I shall merely outline here some of the directions and themes which a fuller inquiry ought to pursue. At this stage, my intention is not to provide any answers, but simply to define the question.

  SPIRITUAL PRESENCE AND PHYSICAL

  ABSENCE OF THE PAST IN CHINA

  In his autobiography, Carl Gustav Jung described how, in his old age, he wished to go to Rome, which he had never visited before. He had always postponed this project, fearing that he might not be able to withstand the emotional impact of such an encounter with the living heart of Europe’s ancient culture. Eventually, as he entered a travel agency in Zurich to buy his ticket, he fainted and remained unconscious for a short interval. After this experience, he wisely decided to abandon his plans—and he never saw Rome.[2] Most sinologists are not endowed with antennae as subtle as Jung’s—and yet, even without being possessed of such sensitivity, it would be difficult for whoever studied classical China to approach the China of today and not to feel constantly touched, moved, overwhelmed by the extraordinary aura that seems to emanate everywhere from a land so suffused with history.

  The presence of the past is constantly felt in China. Sometimes it is found in the most unexpected places, where it hits the visitor with added intensity: movie-theatre posters, advertisements for washing machines, televisions or toothpaste displayed along the streets are expressed in a written language that has remained practically unchanged for the last 2,000 years. In kindergarten, toddlers chant Tang poems that were written some 1,200 years ago. In railway stations, the mere consultation of a train timetable can be an intoxicating experience for any cultural historian: the imagination is stirred by these long lists of city names to which are still attached the vivid glories of past dynasties. Or again, in a typical and recent occurrence, archaeologists discovered in a 2,000-year-old tomb, among the foodstuff that had been buried with the deceased, ravioli which were in every respect identical to those that can be bought today in any street-corner shop. Similar examples could be multiplied endlessly.

  Yet, at the same time, the paradox is that the very past which seems to penetrate everything, and to manifest itself with such surprising vigour, is also strangely evading our physical grasp. This same China which is loaded with so much history and so many memories is also oddly deprived of ancient monuments. In the Chinese landscape, there is a material absence of the past that can be most disconcerting for cultivated Western travellers—especially if they approach China with the criteria and standards that are naturally developed in a European env
ironment. In Europe, in spite of countless wars and destruction, every age has left a considerable amount of monumental landmarks: the ruins of classical Greece and Rome, and all the great medieval cathedrals, the churches and palaces of the Renaissance period, the monuments of the Baroque era—all these form an unbroken chain of architectural witnesses that perpetuate the memory of the past, right into the heart of our modern cities. In China, on the contrary, if we except a very small number of famous ensembles (the antiquity of which is quite relative), what strikes the educated visitor is the monumental absence of the past. Most Chinese cities—including and especially those which were ancient capital cities or prestigious cultural centres—present today an aspect that may not look exactly new or modern (for, if modernisation is a target which China has now set for itself, there is still a long way to go before it can be reached), yet they still appear strangely devoid of all traditional character. On the whole, they seem to be a product of late-nineteenth-century industrialisation. Thus, the past which continues to animate Chinese life in so many striking, unexpected or subtle ways seems to inhabit the people rather than the bricks and stones. The Chinese past is both spiritually active and physically invisible.

  It should be noted that, when I mention this physical elimination of the past, I am not trying to refer once more to the widespread and systematic destruction perpetrated by the “Cultural Revolution.” During the last years of the Maoist era, this destruction, it is true, literally resulted in a cultural desert—in some cities 95 to 100 per cent of historic and cultural relics were indeed lost forever. However, we must immediately point out that, if in so many cities it was possible for mere gangs of schoolchildren to loot, burn and raze to the ground the near totality of the local antiquities, it was because in the first instance there had not been much left for them to destroy. Actually, very few monuments had survived earlier historical disasters and, in consequence, the Maoist vandals found only rare targets on which to expend their energy. In this perspective, it might even be a mistake to look at the “Cultural Revolution” as if it was an accidental aberration. If we place it in a broader historical context, it may appear in fact as the latest expression of a very ancient phenomenon of massive iconoclasm, which was recurrent all through the ages. Without having to go very far back in time, the Taiping insurrection in the mid-nineteenth century produced a devastation that was far more radical than the “Cultural Revolution”—I shall come back later to this question of the periodic destruction of the material heritage of the past, which seems to have characterised Chinese history.