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

by Leys, Simon

  According to Terrill, Maoism has worked miracles in all areas: it “feeds a quarter of the world population and raises industrial output by 10 per cent per year”; it has achieved “thirty years of social progress”; thanks to it, even the blind can now see and the paralytic can walk, as Terrill himself observed when visiting a hospital: “The myth of Mao is functional to medicine and to much endeavour in China . . . it seemed to give [the patient] a mental picture of a world he could rejoin, and his doctors a vital extra ounce of resourcefulness . . .” In conclusion, “there are things to be learned [from Maoism]: a public health system that serves all the people, a system of education that combines theory and practice, and economic growth that does not ravage the environment.”

  The impossibility of substantiating these fanciful claims never discouraged Terrill; for him, it was enough to conjure up those mythical achievements by a method of repetitive incantation, reminiscent of the Bellman’s in Lewis Carroll:

  Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:

  That alone should encourage the crew.

  Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:

  What I tell you three times is true.

  Alas! After he had said it three times, there came the turn of the Chinese to talk, and they told the world quite a different story. Not only the dissenters writing on the Democracy Wall in Peking, but even the Communist leadership itself was to expose in gruesome detail the dark reality of Maoism: the bloody purges, the random arrests, tortures and executions; the famines; the industrial mismanagement; the endemic problems of unemployment, hunger, delinquency; the stagnation and regression of living standards in the countryside; the corruption of the cadres; the ruin of the educational system; the paralysis and death of cultural life; the large-scale destruction of the natural environment; the sham of the agricultural models, of Maoist medicine.

  As a result of these official disclosures, Terrill has now to a large extent already effected his own aggiornamento: his latest book, Mao, as well as some of his recent articles, reflects this new candour. Sometimes it does not square too well with the picture presented by his earlier writings—but who cares? Readers’ amnesia will always remain the cornerstone of an Expert’s authority.

  The People’s Daily has already apologised to its readers for “all the lies and distortions” it carried in the past, and has even warned its readers against “the false, boastful and untrue reports” that it “still often carries.” The China Experts used to echo it so faithfully—will they, this time again, follow suit and offer similar apologies to their own readers?

  Or perhaps they were living in a state of pure and blessed ignorance. It is a fact that official admissions of Maoist bankruptcy are a very recent phenomenon; nevertheless, for more than twenty years, voices of popular dissent have been heard constantly in China, turning sometimes into thunderous outcry. These voices were largely ignored in Terrill’s works; having first carefully stuffed his ears with Maoist cotton, he then wonders why he can hear so little, and concludes, “To be sure, it is very hard for us to measure the feelings of the Chinese people on any issue”!

  Terrill’s approach ignores the very existence of Maoist atrocities. Whenever this is not feasible, two tactics are simultaneously applied.

  Tactic number one: similar things also happen in the so-called democracies—“The Chinese had their own Watergate, and worse.” (Note the use of “worse”; compare with “Smith cut himself while shaving, Jones had his head cut off with the guillotine; Jones’s cut was worse.”) Or again, “Red Guards smash the fingers of a pianist because he has been playing Beethoven’s music. To a Westerner who expects to be able to do his own thing, such action suggests a tyranny without equal in history. In New York City, two old folk die of cold because the gas company turned off the heat in the face of an unpaid bill of twenty dollars. To a Chinese who honours the elderly, it seems callous beyond belief.” Terrill has curious ideas about the Chinese; his statement logically means that in China, smashing the fingers of a pianist is a practice that provokes no revulsion because Chinese do not cultivate individual taste in music; moreover, he would have us believe that, for the Chinese, it is perfectly acceptable to smash a pianist’s fingers so long as the pianist is reasonably young . . . As regards the elderly New York couple, it would not be true to say that their tragedy met only with indifference in the West: actually, it created a feeling of scandal to the point that it was reported in the press and hence could come to Mr. Terrill’s attention; I do not believe that the kind of thing that happened to the elderly New York couple would attract much attention in China. Not because the Chinese are particularly callous, but for the simple reason that they have already used up all their tears, mourning for hundreds and thousands of elderly people—cadres, teachers, etc.—who died not as a result of neglect and administrative indifference, but because they were tortured to death by Red Guards on the rampage. Moreover, if a moral equivalence can be drawn between accidental death and wilful murder, I suppose that the next step for Terrill would be to write off political executions in totalitarian regimes by putting them on a par with traffic casualties in democracies.

  The second tactic develops directly out of the notion according to which the smashing of pianists’ fingers should be somewhat more acceptable in countries that have no individualistic tradition: we should endeavour “to perceive China on her own terms.” Once more, the idea is not to hear what the Chinese have to say on the subject of Maoism—an initiative that Terrill never takes (“it is very hard for us to measure the feelings of the Chinese people on any issue”), but merely to see the People’s Republic through orthodox official Maoist eyes. A logical extension of this principle would be to say that Nazi Germany should be perceived in a Hitlerian perspective, or that, to understand the Soviet system, one should adopt a Stalinist point of view (so sadly missing in, for example, the works of Solzhenitsyn or Nadezhda Mandelstam). Here we come to Terrill’s fundamental philosophy: it is indeed (in the words of one of his titles), “the China difference.”

  Things happened in Maoist China that were ghastly by any standard of common decency. Even the Communist authorities in Peking admit this much today. Terrill maintains, however, that, China being “different,” such standards should not apply. Look at the cult of Mao, for instance—it was grotesque and demeaning, and the hapless Chinese experienced it exactly as such. Not so, says Terrill, who knows better; being Chinese and thus different, they ought to have thoroughly enjoyed the whole exercise: “To see these pictures of Mao in China is to be less shocked than to see them on the printed page far from China. This is not our country or a country we can easily understand, but the country of Mao . . . The cult of Mao is not incredible as it seems outside China. It becomes odd only when it encounters our world . . . It is odd for us because we have no consciousness of Chinese social modes . . .” (Meanwhile, Mr. Terrill has changed his mind on this question; in his latest book, he now qualifies the cult of Mao as “grotesque.” Such a shift should not surprise—earlier on, he told us that we always “evaluate China from shifting grounds”; he recalls, for instance, that when he first visited China in 1964, he was still a churchgoer and, as such, felt critical of the fact that the Maoists closed churches; but a decade later, as he was no longer going to church, the closed churches did not bother him anymore: “I saw the issue under a fresh lens. I did not put the matter in the forefront of my view of China, and as a result, I saw a different China.” One should pass on this recipe to the Chinese churchgoers; it might help them to take a lighter view of their present condition.)

  Following the fall of Madam Mao, the Chinese expressed eloquently the revulsion they felt for her “model operas” (and indeed, it seems that mere common sense should have enabled anyone to imagine how sophisticated audiences normally react to inferior plays); yet Terrill prefers to consider the issue from the angle of “the China difference” and thus produces this original comment: “When Mao’s last wife rode high in the arts, ther
e were only nine approved items performed on China’s national stage. Such a straitjacket over the mental life of hundreds of millions of people seems amazing to a Westerner. Why did the theatre-loving Chinese people put up with it? Again, we can glimpse the size of the gulf between Chinese values and our own by considering one of their questions: How can a people with the traditions of the American Revolution tolerate the cruelty and inefficiency of having some 7 per cent unemployed?” I wonder if the thought of the 7 per cent unemployed in America ever helped frustrated theatregoers in China to put up with idiotic plays; I even doubt that this same thought ever helped the millions of unemployed Chinese to put up with their own condition, which is much worse than the Americans’ since the Chinese state does not grant them any unemployment benefits.

  Having analysed at length Terrill’s method and philosophy, I have very little to add concerning his latest effort. Up to the time of the “Cultural Revolution,” the life of Mao had already been studied by a number of serious and competent scholars. In this area, Terrill does not shed new light; he produces rather an anecdotal adaptation of his predecessors’ works, with plenty of dialogue, local colour and exotic scenery.

  It is only on the subject of Mao’s last years that Terrill might have provided an original contribution. Unfortunately, the diplomatic constraints that he imposed upon himself when dealing with topics that are still taboo for the Peking bureaucracy prevented him from tackling seriously the two central crises of Mao’s twilight: on the one hand his attempts at destroying Zhou Enlai, and on the other the emergence of a popular anti-Mao movement that culminated in the historic Tian’anmen demonstration of 5 April 1976. On the first point, though he has already noticeably shifted his views, Terrill remains unable to confront the issue squarely—as this would entail the admission that the “Gang of Four,” which persecuted Zhou until his death, was actually a “Gang of Five” led, inspired and protected by Mao himself. On the second point, he entirely ignores the vast, spontaneous and articulate movement of anti-Maoist dissent (the famous “Li Yizhe” manifesto of 1974 is not even mentioned) and curtly dismisses its climax—the April Fifth Movement, whose importance in Chinese contemporary history already ranks on a par with the May Fourth Movement—terming it a mere “riot,” a “mêlée” barely worth one page of sketchy and misleading description.

  If these failures tend to disqualify Mao as historiography, the book still presents in its form and style a quaint charm that will certainly enchant readers of the old Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat series: chronological indications are mostly provided in terms of “Year of the Rat” or “Year of the Snake”; Terrill’s disarming weakness for zoomorphic similes finds new outlets: since Mao once described his own character as half tiger and half monkey, we are kept informed, at every turn of his career, of what the tiger does, and what the monkey thinks (“It irritated the monkey in him that Lin Biao spoke of absolute authority,” and so forth). These touches will delight Terrill’s younger readers, while adolescents may find more enjoyment in passages such as this description of Mao’s accession to full power: “Jiangxi had been mere masturbation, alongside this full intercourse with the radiant bride of China.”

  1981

  ROLAND BARTHES IN CHINA

  Sed perseverare . . .

  IN APRIL and May of 1974, Roland Barthes made a trip to China with a small group of his friends from the review Tel Quel. This visit coincided with a colossal, bloody purge launched nation-wide by the Maoist regime. This was the famous and sinister “campaign of denunciation of Lin Biao and Confucius” (pi Lin pi Kong). Upon his return, Barthes published an article in Le Monde which offered a strangely jolly view of this totalitarian violence: “Its very name—Pilin-Pikong in Chinese—has the joyful tinkle of a sleigh-bell, and the campaign comprises made-up games: a caricature, a poem, a children’s sketch during which, suddenly, a little girl in make-up assails the ghost of Lin Biao between two ballet dances: the political Text (and it alone) gives rise to these little ‘happenings.’”

  At the time, reading this immediately put me in mind of a passage from Lu Xun, the most inspired Chinese pamphleteer of the twentieth century: “Our Chinese civilisation, so highly vaunted, is nothing but a feast of human flesh prepared for the rich and powerful, and what we call China is merely the kitchen where this stew is concocted. Those who praise us are to be excused only inasmuch as they do not know what they are talking about, like those foreigners whose high positions and pampered lives have rendered them completely blind and obtuse.”

  Two years later, Barthes’s article was republished as a luxurious slim volume intended for collectors.[1] The author had added a postface, which prompted me to make the following remarks:

  Mr. Barthes explains what made his report so original (an originality that vulgar fanatics so badly misapprehended at the time): his objective, he tells us, was to attempt a new kind of commentary, a “commentary in the register of ‘no comment’” which would be a way of “suspending an utterance without thereby nullifying it.” Mr. Barthes, who already has many claims on the esteem of scholars, now seems to have acquired another one, which should earn him immortality, by inventing the unheard-of category of a “discourse neither affirmative, nor negative, nor yet neutral”—“the desire for silence as a special form of discourse.” By virtue of this discovery, all of whose implications are not immediately discernible, he has contrived—amazingly—to bestow an entirely new dignity upon the age-old activity, so long unjustly disparaged, of saying nothing at great length. It surely behooves us, in the name of all those old biddies who chatter away every afternoon between five and six in their tea shoppes, to offer Mr. Barthes a resounding thank you. Finally, in the same postface—and there must be many people for whom this is the strongest reason of all to be grateful to Mr. Barthes—he defines the intellectual’s proper role in the world of today, his true function, his honour and his dignity, as the valiant maintenance—in face of and in opposition to “the never-ending parading of the Phallus” by the politically committed and other unpleasant proponents of “brute meaning”—of an exquisite trickle of lukewarm water from a tiny spigot.

  And now the same publisher has offered us the text of notes that Barthes made daily about various events and experiences on that famous trip.[2] I wondered whether reading this journal might perhaps alter my opinion.

  In his notebooks, Barthes scrupulously records, one after the other, the endless servings of propaganda dished up during visits to agricultural communes, factories, schools, zoos, hospitals, and so forth. For example: “Vegetables: last year, 230 million pounds + apples, pears, grapes, rice, maize, wheat; 22,000 pigs + ducks. . . . irrigation works: 550 electric pumps; mechanisation: tractors + 140 monoculturalists.. . . Transport: 110 trucks, 770 teams of draught animals; 11,000 families = 47,000 people . . . = 21 production brigades, 146 production teams. . . .” And precious information of this kind is supplied over some two hundred pages, punctuated by brief, very elliptical personal notes, e.g.: “Lunch: look, it’s French fries!”; “Forgot to wash my ears”; “Pissotières”; “What I’m deprived of: no coffee, no salad, no flirting”; “Migraines”; “Nausea.” Only the rarest rays of sunshine interrupt the fatigue, greyness, and ever-worsening boredom—as for instance a long and tender squeeze of the hand from a “charming worker.”

  Could the spectacle of an immense country terrorised and stupefied by the rhinoceritis of Maoism have entirely anaesthetised Barthes’s capacity for outrage? The only trace of indignation seems to have been reserved by him for the atrocious food served on the flight home: “The Air France lunch is so vile (pear-shaped rolls, exhausted chicken in a greasy sauce, dyed salad, floury cabbage tasting of chocolate—and no more champagne!) that I’m on the verge of writing a letter of complaint.” [My emphasis.]

  But let us not be unfair: anyone may write down a mass of nonsense for private use; we can reasonably be judged only on our public pronouncements. Whatever one might think of Barthes, no one can deny that he had intellige
nce and good taste. No wonder, therefore, that he carefully refrained from publishing these jottings. But then who in God’s name decided to proceed with this dismaying exhumation? If this strange initiative originated with his friends, we should probably recall Vigny’s warning that “A friend is no more malicious than the next man.”

  In the January 2009 issue of Magazine Littéraire, Philippe Sollers claimed that these notebooks exemplify the virtue of “common decency,” as lauded by George Orwell. It seems to me, to the contrary, that by virtue of what he fails to say Barthes manifests an uncommon indecency. In any case Sollers’s comparison is incongruous: Orwell’s “common decency” is grounded in simplicity, honesty and courage; Barthes certainly had qualities, but not those particular ones. The only words of George Orwell that spring readily to mind apropos of the “Chinese” writings of Barthes (and of his friends at Tel Quel) are these: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”