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

by Leys, Simon

  The films that were shown on these rare and festive occasions were old Hollywood productions from the ’30s and ’40s—with femmes fatales holding white telephones and cigar-chomping gangsters in pinstripe suits. Did they come with a soundtrack? I do not remember now, but in any case it would have been of limited use, since the spectators understood only Kiyaka. Nevertheless they managed to invent for themselves, on the sole basis of these bleary black-and-white images flickering on a makeshift screen under the stars, in the warm night full of screeching insects, prodigious stories that no screenwriter could have conceived, even had he let his imagination run wild.

  In these ancient American productions, black actors were rare and they were invariably confined to minor parts: doormen, shoe-shiners, cooks, railway porters. Yet it was on them that the passionate interest of the public entirely focused. To their eyes, these fleeting walk-ons were the true protagonists of the film. The very scarcity of their visible interventions would only confirm the occult and central importance of the roles that the collective inspiration of the audience was bestowing on them. Whenever they unexpectedly reappeared on screen for a few seconds, a roar of enthusiasm greeted their return, which had been awaited with intense expectation. Sometimes the black supernumerary would make only one appearance, and never come back. But it did not matter: he became all the more free to pursue his adventures in that other film, invisible and fabulous, of which the screen could only show the feeble negative image.

  HAWAII STOPOVER

  The most depressing thing is to watch these crowds of tourists, who paid a not inconsiderable amount to come here and secure for themselves eight days of happiness. In the motley uniforms of holiday convicts, they patrol lugubriously this huge Luna Park while trying hard to persuade themselves that they are getting their money’s worth of fun.

  Léon Bloy commented on the famous passage of St. Paul—“In this life we perceive things obscurely, as if in a mirror”—wondering whether the main point of the apostle’s observation was that our world presented an inverted image of the other world. This would suggest, for instance, that the pleasures of the living are merely a reflection of the torments of the damned.

  And when you come to think of it, it is easy to see how the delights of Hawaii, a cruise ship or a holiday resort could provide a fairly convincing image of hell.

  COINCIDENCE

  I was working on my translation of The Analects of Confucius and I had just reached the passage (12.18) “Lord Ji Kang was troubled by burglars. He consulted with Confucius. Confucius replied, ‘If you yourself were not covetous, they would not rob you even if you paid them to.’” On that same day, my little boat was broken into, and I lost a few small things to which I had the weakness to be attached.

  I should have drawn some comfort from this coincidence. Indeed, I cannot help but feel that, at times, the supreme teacher is merely addressing one side of my psychology, which resembles to a deplorable extent that of Ah Q, the famous satirical character (created by Lu Xun) who invented a way to transform all the defeats of his wretched existence into as many “moral victories.”

  Nevertheless, it remains true that one should own only those things one can possess casually.

  SHADES OF SALAZAR

  I just found in an old notebook a press clipping that I must have cut from a news magazine about thirty-five years ago. At the time I thought it might provide one day an interesting argument for a play or philosophical tale. Here it is:

  SHADES OF SALAZAR

  Though the 36-year rule of Portugal’s Antonio de Oliveira Salazar ended last year, the old man is not yet aware of it. Still immobilised after a stroke and a coma 13 months ago, Salazar calls cabinet meetings, and his old ministers faithfully attend—even though some of them are no longer in the cabinet. No one has found the courage to tell the 80-year-old dictator that he has been replaced.

  But I never managed to do anything with it. There are realities upon which no fiction can improve.

  DEADLY PERFECTION

  The Pazzi Chapel is probably one of the purest expressions of the Florentine Renaissance; the austere clarity of its lines, the balance of its forms, the refinement of its proportions, the rigorous unity of its composition organise all the various decorative elements and subordinate them to a leading concept. Nothing has been left to chance, and therein may lie its only flaw. Such perfection stands like a no-entry sign, barring the way to any interference from life, to any improvised initiative that could disrupt this serene harmony.

  The problem is even more evident in the admirable church of San Spirito (another Brunelleschi masterpiece, on the other side of the Arno), because this monument happens also to be an active parish church. There is therefore no possibility of turning it into a museum insulated from the vulgar contaminations of everyday life. And one can immediately gauge the extent to which its very perfection makes it vulnerable to the slightest aggressions from common reality. An exuberant and florid baroque altar in a side chapel, an ugly modern plaster saint daubed in garish colours in a corner, an original window that has been walled in for some trivial reason of convenience, another window that has been arbitrarily enlarged—all these clumsy additions and transformations make a cacophony of jarring notes; they amount to as many outrages. To borrow a boxing term, the monument cannot absorb any punches; every minute alteration is a savage blow that stuns and disfigures.

  In contrast, the great medieval cathedrals, which were not designed as individual solutions to aesthetic problems but presented a collective attempt at embracing a cosmic totality, were usually left unfinished. By definition, it should not be possible ever to finish them. They remain in a state of openness; they have a limitless capacity to welcome and integrate the contributions of successive generations; they have strong stomachs; they happily swallow and digest the alluvia of the centuries, the styles of diverse ages.

  In this sense, the great cathedrals—disparate and alive—are truly transpositions into stone of St. Augustine’s vision: “I no longer wished for things to be better, because I began to consider the totality. And in this sounder perspective, I came to see that, though the higher things are obviously better than the lower ones, the sum of all creation is better than the higher things alone.”

  LIVING IMPERFECTION

  Perfection demands it be preserved in a sterile glass case, sheltered from the weather, untouched by time, abstracted from life, mummified in a museum. By its very nature, it is rigid, brittle and unadaptable. But if perfection can be deadly, the corollary is that it is imperfection that ensures the survival of an artistic creation. For only what is imperfect, incomplete, unfinished, remains susceptible to modification and adaptation. It affords a margin for compromise and transformation.

  Instead of being fatally dented by the various accidents of life, imperfection can be harmoniously completed by them. Michelangelo said that a statue was not really finished unless it had rolled down from a mountain. In different places, at different times, great artists have always remained aware of this. In classical Japan, a famous master of the art of gardens instructed one of his disciples to clean the garden. The zealous disciple executed his task to perfection. The master came to inspect his work and frowned. Without a word, he walked to a young tree and gave its trunk a vigorous kick. Three dead leaves fell upon the immaculately manicured grass. The master smiled at last: “Now it looks a little better.”

  Degas used to curse the deadly pervasiveness of impeccable taste: “They will eventually design artistic piss-pots that will make their users suffer from retention of urine.” And Auden, visiting I Tatti, the Italian mansion of the great aesthete and art collector Bernard Berenson, suggested one improvement for the exquisitely decorated sitting room: “One should just add on the sofa a purple satin cushion embroidered with Souvenir from Atlantic City.”

  We rightly deplore the degradation of so many admirable monuments of the past, but we should also derive some comfort from the thought that many hideous modern structures will ma
ke quite attractive ruins one or two hundred years from now.

  The beauty of Angkor is truly beyond words. Neither descriptions nor photographs can capture it, for Angkor is also made of all the scents and sounds of the forest, the drumming of a sudden downpour on the leaves, the buffaloes bathing in the moats at sunset, the sound of water dripping from the stone vaults after the late afternoon storm, the millions of insects whose concert turns the evening air into a massive block of deafening noise, with stunning breaks of pure silence. That said, one must also acknowledge that Khmer art is not always of supreme quality. The miracle of Angkor is the product of a fortuitous encounter between the work of man and the work of nature. The French curators who formerly looked after the site understood this. What they were preserving with so much skill and sensitivity was not the original Angkor built by the sometimes pedestrian Khmer sculptors and architects, but the inspired and fragile ghost of Angkor, which was created by the erosion of eight centuries and the invasion of the jungle.

  To an extent, one could say the same thing about Venice. Venice is so much more than the sum of its parts, or rather it is quite different from that sum. I am not being sacrilegious when I venture to state what is, after all, historical evidence: 500 years ago, Venice was very much the equivalent of what are today Chicago or Dallas. This dream world, this exquisite shimmering mirage of water and marble cupolas, was once a brutal display of entrepreneurial wealth, a nouveau-riche show of arrogant opulence, a flashy triumph of parvenu bad taste.

  LITERARY PRESENCE

  In Taiwan, some time ago, a historical literary magazine published an article analysing a little-known aspect of the life of Han Yu, a great writer of the ninth century (Tang dynasty). The author of this study said that Han Yu had contracted venereal disease while frequenting prostitutes during his stay in southern China, and that the drugs (derived from sulphur) which he took in the hope of curing himself eventually caused his death.

  A descendant of Han Yu, from the thirty-ninth generation, considered that the reputation of his ancestor had been defamed by the magazine. Acting in the name of the illustrious victim, he took the magazine to court and won the case. The editor was sentenced to a fine of $300, or a month in jail. The editor appealed, but the appeal was rejected.

  In this particular case, one may naturally deplore the restriction that was imposed upon freedom of expression. But one should also admire a society in which historical awareness is so keen that it makes it possible to treat the memory of a writer who has been dead for nearly 1,200 years as if he were our contemporary.

  SONATA FOR PIANO AND VACUUM CLEANER

  One day, as he was practising at his piano, the young Glenn Gould—he was fourteen at the time—had a revelation. The maid who was cleaning the room suddenly switched on her vacuum cleaner quite close to the piano. At once the dreadful mechanical noise drowned out Gould’s music but, to his surprise, the experience was far from unpleasant. Instead of listening to his own performance, he suddenly discovered that he could follow it from within his body through a heightened awareness of his music-making movements. His entire musical experience acquired another dimension that was both more physical and more abstract: bypassing his sense of hearing, the fugue he was playing soundlessly transmitted itself from his fingers to his mind.

  Analysing this episode afterwards, he said, “I could feel, of course—I could sense the tactile relation with the keyboard, which is replete with its own kind of acoustical associations, and I could imagine what I was doing, but I couldn’t actually hear it. The strange thing was that all of it suddenly sounded better than it had without the vacuum cleaner, and those parts which I couldn’t actually hear sounded best of all.” (Mark Twain once said that the music of Wagner was better than it sounded; I agree with Twain but fear this is not quite the point Gould was trying to make.)

  Gould’s sudden discovery of the difference between music heard in the abstraction of the inner mind and music produced concretely by playing an instrument, though it was enjoyable in his particular case, was not unlike the tragic predicament of Beethoven, whom deafness compelled to explore this other dimension of the musical experience. Or, to take a pictorial comparison, one thinks of the great paintings of water lilies that Monet executed at the end of his life, with his vision severely impaired by cataracts. There are also the superbly forbidding landscapes in dark ink which the twentieth-century Chinese master Huang Binhong created in complete blindness in his early eighties. Surgery eventually restored part of his vision, but even before this intervention, he never stopped painting; though he could not see the actual effect of his brushstrokes, he relied on the rhythmic sequence of the calligraphic brushwork, which he had mastered through the daily exercise of a lifetime. For him, painting had disappeared as a visual experience, but it remained as a vital breathing of his whole being. In their fierce blackness, these late landscapes of Huang Binhong are to the eye what the harsh complexity of Beethoven’s last quartets are to the ear.

  The silent music that Beethoven and Gould had discovered through very different accidents has been known for ages among Chinese musicians. Perhaps it came more naturally to them because the scores of Chinese classical music do not indicate notes: they are fingering charts. Today, masters of the zither (guqin), in their daily practice, occasionally play the “silent zither”: they go soundlessly through the various moves of an entire piece, letting hands and fingers fly above the instrument without ever touching the strings.

  In the early fifth century, one great eccentric, Tao Yuanming, who is also China’s most beloved poet, went one step further: he became famous for the stringless zither which he used to carry everywhere with him. When people asked what such an instrument could be good for, he replied: “I seek only the inspiration that lies within the zither. Why should I strain myself on its strings?”

  FAITH

  People who go to church to pray for rain seldom bring their umbrellas along.

  INDIGENEITY

  On the thorny issue of indigeneity and its painful and poisoned sequels of nationalistic fever, flag crazes, racism and hatreds, the old surrealist writer Scutenaire said something which, if it is not the final word, remains at least worth pondering: “Let everyone stay home: Maoris in Greenland, Basques in Ethiopia, Redskins in New Guinea, Eskimos in Slovakia and Celts in Siberia.”

  HOW TO READ?

  It is very frustrating to watch someone who, being nearly right, proves nevertheless to be totally wrong. To borrow Chesterton’s image, the feeling is as irritating as the sight of somebody’s hat being perpetually washed up by the sea and never touching the shore. I experienced it the other day in a bookshop, as I was browsing Harold Bloom’s latest book, How to Read and Why. The book contains many robust and salubrious observations that deserve to be heartily applauded, such as, “I would fear in the long run for the survival of democracy if people stopped reading” or “watching a screen is not reading.” And at first I was delighted to note that, in his selection of the world’s greatest literary masterpieces, Bloom rightly ranked Chekhov’s short story “The Student.” But when he proceeded to explain the reasons for his choice, he immediately gave such an obtuse reading of the story he professed to admire that, at once, it cancelled all the credit one might have been tempted to grant his literary perception.

  As is often the case with Chekhov’s best works, “The Student” is very short—barely three pages—and virtually devoid of events. A young student in theology has returned to his village for Easter: on Good Friday, having spent the afternoon hunting in the woods, he walks back home at dusk. The weather is still bitterly cold and he stops briefly to warm himself by a bonfire which a widow and her grown-up daughter have lit in their courtyard. Standing by the fire and chatting with the two women, he is suddenly reminded of the Passion Gospel which was read in church the day before, and he retells it to them: on the night Jesus was arrested, Peter had also stood by such a fire in the courtyard of the High Priest’s palace. As he was warming himself among
the guards and servants, they started asking him questions: he took fright and denied three times having ever had any acquaintance with Jesus. At that moment, a cock crowed, and realising what he had done, “he went out and wept bitterly.”

  As the student takes leave of the women, he is surprised to see that the widow is quietly sobbing and her daughter looks distressed, “as if holding back a terrible pain.” Walking into the incoming darkness, he ponders the women’s emotion:

  Their weeping meant that all that happened to Peter on that terrible night had a particular meaning for them . . . Obviously what he had just told them about happenings nineteen centuries ago had a meaning for the present, for both women and also probably for this God-forsaken village, for himself, for all people. It had not been his gift for poignant narrative that had made the women weep. It was because Peter was near to them . . . Joy suddenly stirred within him . . . Crossing the river by ferry, and then climbing the hill, he looked at his home village and the narrow strip of cold crimson sunset shining in the west. And he brooded on truth and beauty—how they had guided human life there in the garden, and in the High Priest’s palace, how they had continued without a break till the present day . . . A sensation of youth, health, strength—he was only twenty-two years old—together with an anticipation, ineffably sweet, of happiness, strange, mysterious happiness gradually came over him. And life seemed enchanting, miraculous, imbued with exalted significance.

  Chekhov wrote some 250 short stories; among all of them, he singled out “The Student” as his favourite. Harold Bloom finds his choice surprising: “Why did Chekhov prefer this story to scores of what seem to many of his admirers far more consequential and vital tales? I have no clear answer . . . Nothing in ‘The Student,’ except what happens in the protagonist’s mind, is anything but dreadfully dismal. It is the irrational rise of impersonal joy and personal hope out of cold and misery, and the tears of betrayal, that appear to have moved Chekhov himself . . .” Yet Bloom remains puzzled: “The rejoicing has no trace of authentic piety or of salvation.”