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

by Leys, Simon

  Two hundred and fifty years later, it came into the hands of a monk who made copies of it, had these distributed and thus laid the ground for Wang’s subsequent artistic reputation.

  Three hundred years later, Wang’s calligraphic style aroused the enthusiasm of Emperor Tang Taizong. Taizong avidly hunted for his calligraphies and gathered the most exhaustive collection of his autographs (2,290 items—all to be eventually scattered). However, the crowning jewel, the Orchid Pavilion, was still missing from this collection. After devious manoeuvres, combining deception and violence, the emperor finally succeeded in securing possession of the masterpiece—at the cost of a human life.[18] Taizong treasured the Orchid Pavilion and ordered copies to be made from it (both tracing copies and free-hand copies); these copies were then carved on stone and rubbings were taken from the stone tablets. Eventually the original stones were lost or destroyed, but new tablets were carved from the original rubbings. As the original rubbings themselves disappeared, new rubbings were taken from later engravings—and with the passing of time, the study of the pedigree of these copies of copies of copies, and the establishment of their genealogical tree, became a specialised discipline of mind-boggling complexity.

  Meanwhile, Wang Xizhi’s original manuscript had long ceased to be available for reference. Tang Taizong, who died in 649, had demanded that the Orchid Pavilion be buried with him in his grave at Zhaoling—some 30 kilometres north of what is now Xi’an, where it should still be lying today (if the imperial records told us the truth).

  Remarkable paradox: it was only after it finally disappeared forever in the imperial grave that this particular work (which very few calligraphers ever saw in its original form) began to exert its strongest influence, through various indirect and questionable copies. It eventually had its greatest impact at the beginning of the Song period (eleventh century)—700 years after Wang Xizhi’s time. It was then popularised by a calligrapher of genius, Mi Fu, who, under the guise of propounding Wang’s calligraphic style, displayed in fact his own personal creations. The educated public was unable to distinguish the Mi product from the Wang label, as, by this time, practically nothing remained of Wang Xizhi’s original works, with the exception of a few very small, uncertain fragments. From then on, the prestige and influence of the Orchid Pavilion continued to grow steadily. As L. Ledderose neatly summarised it: “It seems somehow uncomfortably symptomatic that it was the lost Orchid Pavilion that was to emerge as the most celebrated work in the history of Chinese calligraphy . . . What is even more astonishing is that the Orchid Pavilion in addition to being glorified also became a stylistic model: it has been studied by calligraphers for centuries although nobody has ever seen the original!”[19]

  Furthermore, there was a final, ironic twist to the story. In 1965, the famous scholar and archaeologist Guo Moruo ignited a bomb that threw the Chinese academic world into turmoil and initiated a heated and still unresolved debate. According to Guo’s findings, not only is the calligraphy of the Orchid Pavilion, as we know it through its Tang and Song copies, from a much later date than Wang Xizhi, but even the text itself could not have been composed by him: in other words, Wang Xizhi neither wrote it nor calligraphed it. The sublime model which inspired the entire development of Chinese calligraphy, the aesthetic and technical cornerstone of this art, may in fact never have existed!

  Whether or not this conclusion is accurate (there are some flaws in Guo’s argumentation, but let us leave that aside), it can still provide us with an important clue to the broader issue we have attempted to address: the vital strength, the creativity, the seemingly unlimited capacity for metamorphosis and adaptation which the Chinese tradition displayed for 3,500 years may well derive from the fact that this tradition never let itself be trapped into set forms, static objects and things, where it would have run the risk of paralysis and death.[20]

  In a sense, one of the best metaphors for this tradition could be provided by the description of a Chinese garden which a Ming scholar wrote in the sixteenth century. It was a fashion among intellectuals and artists to write records of beautiful gardens, but in the case of our writer, there was a new dimension added to the genre. The garden he described was called the Wuyou Garden—which means “The Garden-that-does-not-exist.” In his essay, the author observed that many famous gardens of the past have entirely disappeared and survive only on paper in literary descriptions. Hence, he wondered why it should be necessary for a garden to have first existed in reality. Why not skip the preliminary stage of actual existence and jump directly into the final state of literary existence which, after all, is the common end of all gardens? What difference is there between a famous garden which exists no more, and this particular garden which never existed at all, since in the end both the former and the latter are known only through the same medium of the written word?[21]

  Western visitors in China seem to have been irritated to the point of obsession with what came to be called “Chinese lies” or the “Chinese art of stage-setting and make-believe.” Even intelligent and perceptive observers did not completely escape this trap; in a clever piece written a few years ago by a good scholar,[22] I came across an anecdote which, I think, has a much deeper bearing than the author himself may have realised. A great Buddhist monastery near Nanking was famous for its purity and orthodoxy. The monks were following a rule that conformed strictly to the original tradition of the Indian monasteries: whereas, in other Chinese monasteries, an evening meal is served, in this particular monastery every evening the monks received only a bowl of tea. Foreign scholars who visited the monastery at the beginning of this century much admired the austerity of this custom. These visitors, however, were quite naïve. If they had had the curiosity actually to look into the bowls of the monks, they would have found that what was served under the name of “tea” was in fact a fairly nourishing rice congee, similar in every respect to the food which is being provided at night in all other Chinese monasteries. Only in this particular monastery, out of respect for an ancient tradition, the rice congee was conventionally called “the bowl of tea.”

  I wonder if, to some extent, Chinese tradition is not such a “bowl of tea,” which under a most ancient, venerable and constant name can in fact contain all sorts of things, and ultimately anything but tea. Its permanence is first and foremost a permanence of names, covering the endlessly changing and fluid nature of its actual contents.

  If this observation is correct, it could also have interesting implications in other areas, and you would naturally be free, for instance, to read in it a forecast regarding the eventual fate of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. This essay, however, was only concerned with China’s past.

  POSTSCRIPT

  As this essay was going to the printers, I belatedly obtained a remarkable article by F.W. Mote, “A Millennium of Chinese Urban History: Form, Time and Space Concepts in Soochow.”[23] Reading some of the conclusions which Professor Mote drew fifteen years ago from a case study in Chinese urban history, one will realise that the ideas I ventured here are both less original and more sound than might have first appeared!

  Having quoted a Western writer who observed at the beginning of the twentieth century that there were no ancient ruins in Suzhou, Mote comments:

  His observation is largely correct. Is Soochow then a city of ancient monuments, or a city in which the awareness of antiquity comes from something else? In our tradition we tend to equate the antique presence with authentically ancient physical objects. China has no ruins comparable to the Roman Forum, or even to Angkor Wat, which is a thousand years younger. It has no ancient buildings kept continually in use such as Rome’s Pantheon and Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia. It does not have those, not because of incapacity to build with “hewn stone, as in Athens and Rome” as du Bose suggests. It does not have those because of differences in attitude—a different attitude toward the way of making the monumental achievement, and a different attitude toward the ways of achieving the enduring monument.

>   Mote then illustrates his point by sketching the history of Suzhou’s Great Pagoda—with a history going back to the third century AD, it was modified, destroyed and rebuilt many times during the ages, ending up as a twentieth-century construction:

  This history is typical of China’s ancient monuments. No building with such a pedigree would count for much as an authentic antiquity even in the United States, much less in Rome. It certainly would not count for much among Ruskin’s Stones of Venice.

  Mote concludes:

  The point most emphatically is not that China was not obsessed with its past. It studied its past, and drew upon it, using it to design and to maintain its present as has no other civilization. But its ancient cities such as Soochow were “time free” as purely physical objects. They were repositories of the past in a very special way—they embodied or suggested associations whose value lay elsewhere. The past was a past of words not of stones. China kept the largest and longest-enduring of all mankind’s documentations of the past. It constantly scrutinized that past as recorded in words, and caused it to function in the life of its present. But it built no Acropolis, it preserved no Roman Forum, and not because it lacked the materials or the techniques. Its enduring structures of cut stone in antiquity were most characteristically burial vaults secreted underground, and, in the later imperial era, were bridges. Those vaults and bridges were called upon to serve a different level of utility; enduring public monuments to man’s achievements did not call forth those means.

  Chinese civilization did not lodge its history in buildings. Even its most grandiose palace and city complexes stressed grand layout, the employment of space, and not buildings, which were added as a relatively impermanent superstructure. Chinese civilization seems not to have regarded its history as violated or abused when the historic monuments collapsed or burned, as long as those could be replaced or restored, and their functions regained. In short we can say that the real past of Soochow is a past of the mind, its imperishable elements are moments of human experience. The only truly enduring embodiments of the eternal human moments are the literary ones. [My emphasis throughout.]

  This final point is then illustrated by the concrete example of Soochow’s Maple Bridge which became a poetical topic in literary history:

  In all that psycho-historical material associated with the Maple Bridge, the bridge as an object is of little importance . . . No single poem refers to its physical presence. The bridge as idea was an item in the consciousness of all Chinese . . . yet, its reality to them was not the stones forming its span so much as the imperishable associations with it; those eternal moments realized in words. The physical object is entirely secondary. Anyone planning to achieve immortality in the minds of his fellow men might well give a lower priority to building some great stone monument than to cultivating his human capacities so that he might express himself imperishably in words, or at least be alluded to in some enduring line by a poet or essayist of immortal achievement.

  1986

  ONE MORE ART*

  Chinese Calligraphy

  THE DISCOVERY of a new major art should have more momentous implications for mankind than the exploration of an unknown continent or the sighting of a new planet.

  Since the dawn of its civilisation, China has cultivated a particular branch of the visual arts that has no equivalent anywhere else in the world. On first encounter, Westerners misnamed it “calligraphy” by false analogy with a mere decorative craft that was more familiar to them. Although it was always one of the most sublime achievements of the Chinese genius, only today are art lovers outside China progressively beginning to prospect the riches of this artistic El Dorado that has finally opened up to them.

  Like painting (which, being born of the same brush, is its younger brother rather than its twin), Chinese calligraphy addresses the eye and is an art of space; like music, it unfolds in time; like dance, it develops a dynamic sequence of movements, pulsating in rhythm. It is an art that radiates such physical presence and sensuous power that it virtually defies photographic reproduction—at times even, its execution can verge on an athletic performance; yet its abstract and erudite character also has special appeal for intellectuals and scholars who adopted it as their favourite pursuit. It is the most elite of all arts—it was practised by emperors, aesthetes, monks and poets—but it is also one of the most popular. Its tools—brush, ink and paper—can be simple and cheap and are within the reach of nearly anybody—schoolchildren, women, modest townsfolk, bohemian drunks, hermits. Its manifestations are ubiquitous and diverse—from the refined studio of the aristocratic connoisseur to the gaudy signs of the marketplace. In China, the written word lives and reigns everywhere—on the walls of palaces and temples, as well as on those of wine shops and teahouses, and at new-year time, its inspiring and sacred presence graces the doors of even the poorest farmhouses in the most remote hamlets.

  The practice of the art of writing is not the exclusive preserve of specialists. The calligraphic brush can yield rewards that are as multiform as the human quest itself. To the unworldly, it affords a path of spiritual cultivation, and for the ambitious it is a prerequisite to climbing the ladder of a political career. Until recently, no Chinese statesman could truly command respect without being also master of the brush; social prestige as well as intellectual and artistic reputations could not be secured without a skilful handwriting. Thus, for centuries, literally millions of Chinese have devoted themselves to the exercise of calligraphy; in the practice of this art, they have sought self-expression or social promotion, self-oblivion or inner concentration; they practised calligraphy out of necessity or out of passion—as a solace, as a convention, as an escape, as an obsession, as a liberation; for many, it was a drug, an ascesis, a private madness, an austere discipline, a way of life; the best of them found in it the perfect paradigm of efficient activity, a method for achieving the harmonious integration of mind and body, the key to supreme enlightenment.

  The very centrality of the place calligraphy occupies in Chinese life and culture paradoxically explains why the West took such a long time to appreciate it as an art. When two great civilisations, utterly foreign to each other, come into direct contact, it seems that, at first, they cannot exchange anything but blows and trinkets. Mutual access to the core of their respective cultures necessitates a lengthy and complex process. It demands patience and humility, for outsiders are normally not allowed beyond a certain point: they will not be admitted to the inner chambers of the spirit, unless they are willing to shed some of their original baggage. Cultural initiation entails metamorphosis, and we cannot learn any foreign values if we do not accept the risk of being transformed by what we learn.

  In the case of Chinese calligraphy, the difficulty is further compounded by two more obstacles. First, by its very nature, calligraphy is intimately linked with Chinese language; its full appreciation may at times require a certain familiarity with a rich and intricate network of historical, philological and cultural references. To what extent is it necessary to be able to read Chinese in order fully to enjoy Chinese calligraphy? A preliminary (and crude) answer may be provided in the form of another question: To what extent is it necessary to be able to read music in order to enjoy a musical performance? Such knowledge would naturally help, without being strictly indispensable; the degree of sensitivity of the spectator (or the listener) can, to some degree, make up for what he may be lacking in intellectual information.

  In the appreciation of calligraphy, the main advantage that can be derived from the ability to read Chinese is not so much that the viewer has access to the content of the calligraphic inscription (this content can be quite indifferent, as we shall see immediately). It is rather that, knowing the rules and graphic mechanisms of the Chinese script, he is able to follow and to reconstruct in his mind the successive movements of the calligrapher’s brush.

  The relation between calligraphic form and literary content (i.e. between the calligraphy itself and the text it conveys
) might in a way be compared to the relation between painters and their models in Western portrait painting. There are exceptional encounters where the genius of the sitter may add an extra sparkle to the genius of the painter—think, for instance, of the portrait of Thomas More by Holbein, or of Chopin by Delacroix. Most of the time, however, the very identity of the model is largely irrelevant. (Who was Mona Lisa? Who cares?) Similarly, there are some instances of great calligraphies inspired by admirable texts; usually, however, the nature of the text which provided a base—or a mere pretext—for the calligraphic performance has no significant bearing upon the artist’s achievement, and there are many examples of sublime calligraphies that took flight from dull and trite dissertations.

  Furthermore, there is even a style of calligraphy—a particularly exciting and creative one—which renders the original text practically illegible for most viewers: the so-called grass-script (cao shu) in its “crazy” form (kuang) is a sort of frenzied stenography, dashed in a wild outburst of intoxicated inspiration. Only practitioners and specialists can decipher it—and yet, even for the common viewer, it is one of the most spectacular and appealing styles. Its illegibility poses no obstacle to the enjoyment of the ordinary public, since—as we have just said—this enjoyment does not reside in a literary appreciation of the contents but in an imaginative communion with the dynamics of the brushwork. What the viewer needs is not to read a text but to retrace in his mind the original dance of the brush and to relive its rhythmic progress.

  A second, even more fundamental, obstacle to appreciating calligraphy derives from a fact I have already mentioned: with their writing the Chinese actually possess one more art—calligraphy has no parallel in any other of the great literate civilisations. As a result, the very existence of this art could not immediately register in the consciousness of early Western travellers. The reason is that, usually, people do not see, they only recognise. And what they do not recognise remains invisible to them. For centuries, foreign visitors to China, even if they were highly educated, remained simply blind to the Chinese art of calligraphy—or when they took notice of it, they betrayed a staggering incomprehension. Thus, for instance, in the mid-nineteenth century, a French missionary who, otherwise, was a fluent linguist and an exceptionally perceptive observer, with a long and intimate experience of China, could still express this typical comment: “Chinese writing is displayed everywhere for decoration, but it is unpleasant at first sight and shocks by its oddity.” In the long run, however, he admitted that one could progressively “become used to” this weird sight.