by Leys, Simon
10. A.D. Hope, The Pack of Autolycus (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1978).
11. Quoted by Maurice Nadeau in his introduction to the new edition of Madame Bovary (Paris: Folio, 1981), p. 6.
12. P. Claudel, Journal 1 (Paris: Pléiade, 1968), p. 473.
13. F. Gilot, Vivre avec Picasso (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1965), p. 69.
14. Quoted by D. Kahnweiler, Juan Gris (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), p. 188.
15. On this question, see D. Pollard, “Ch’i in Chinese Literary Theory,” in A.A. Rickett, ed., Chinese Approaches to Literature from Confucius to Liang Ch’i-ch’ao (Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 56.
16. Quoted by Nadeau in his introduction to Madame Bovary, p. 8.
17. Or in music. A good introduction to this topic can be found in R.H. van Gulik, The Lore of the Chinese Lute (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1968). The melodic repertory of the zither is limited, although it presents extraordinarily rich variations and nuances of timbre: “The [zither] is not easy to appreciate, chiefly because its music is not primarily melodical. Its beauty lies not so much in the succession of notes as in each separate note in itself. ‘Painting with sounds’ might be a way to describe its essential quality. The timbre being thus of the utmost importance, there are very great possibilities of modifying the colouring of one and the same tone. In order to understand and appreciate this music, the ear must learn to distinguish subtle nuances: the same note, produced on a different string, has a different colour; the same string when pulled by the forefinger or the middle finger of the right hand, has a different timbre. The technique by which these variations in timbre are effected is extremely complicated: of the vibrato alone, there exist no less than twenty-six varieties.” (van Gulik, The Lore of the Chinese Lute, pp. 1–2.)
18. M. Proust, “A propos du style de Flaubert,” in Contre Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Pléiade, 1971), p. 595: “To my mind, the most beautiful thing in Sentimental Education is not a sentence, it is a blank. Flaubert has just described in many pages the minutest moves of Frédéric Moreau. Then he tells us that Frédéric sees a policeman charging with his sword against a rebel who falls dead: ‘And Frédéric, open-mouthed, recognised Sénécal.’ Then, a ‘blank,’ a huge ‘blank,’ and without the slightest transition, suddenly time is no longer measured in quarters of an hour but in years, in dozens of years; I repeat the last words I just quoted in order to show this extraordinary shift of speed for which there was no preparation: ‘And Frédéric, open-mouthed, recognised Sénécal. He travelled. He came to know the melancholy of the steamboat, the cold awakening in the tent, etc. . . .’”
19. Maurice Nadeau in Introduction to Madame Bovary, pp. 15–16. Claude Roy made similar observations on Stendhal (Stendhal par lui-même [Paris: Seuil, 1971], p. 47): “A novel by Stendhal is written in a way that is the exact opposite of nine out of ten of the great novelists who came before him. The narrative progresses as much through what is said as through what is omitted. There are two novels within Red and Black—the novel of the events that are printed, and the novel of the events that are eluded: the latter are no less important. One could write another version of Julien’s story, simply by filling in all the blanks of the narrative. Just imagine another writer describing the first night which Julien spent with Mathilde: all the things he would have to write, Stendhal puts in a semicolon: ‘Julien’s prowess was equal to his happiness; “I cannot go down the ladder,” he said to Mathilde when he saw the dawn appear . . .’ A semicolon alone accounts for a whole night, two lovers in each other’s arms, their ecstasy, their mutual love-confessions, their pleasure, etc. In Vanina Vanini, the entire story ends with a two-minute scene that occupies three pages of dialogue. Then, two lines only: ‘Vanina stood dumbfounded. She returned to Rome; and the newspaper is reporting that she just married Prince Savelli.’” Stendhal’s latter quote is remarkably similar to the Flaubert passage that Proust admired so much (see previous note). Strange power of litotes! Because it relies on the reader’s imagination, it is more effective than an explicit description. Claude Roy pursues: “What seems to us discretion on Stendhal’s part appeared in his time as impudence. He shocked his readers, who felt that he was telling too much.” Splendid illustration of the aesthetic principle “less is more.” If literature has its litotes, and painting its blanks, music also has its silences: it may be apposite to quote here Daniel Barenboim’s warning to the musicians of his orchestra that they should carefully observe the pauses of a score: “Silence is the paper on which all music is written.”
ORIENTALISM AND SINOLOGY
1. The words “European” and “American” are to be understood here as abstract categories, not as geographical notions. Actually, I wonder to what extent the European academic tradition can still be found in Europe. Quite recently, the dean of the Asian Studies Faculty of one of the oldest and most prestigious European universities sent me a warm and generous invitation to come and lecture on Chinese classical culture. In his innocence, he added, “As our university has now established with the People’s Republic of China an important exchange program, which should not be put in jeopardy, it would be best if your lectures would not touch on contemporary issues.” What shocked me most was that he obviously felt this was a perfectly sensible and decent proposition.
2. The passages in italics summarise various points made by Said (when quotation marks are used, they reproduce his own words). Some readers may rightly feel that my approach to this serious topic is selective, arbitrary, incoherent and flippant. I could not agree more with such criticism—I merely tried to imitate Said’s method.
ROLAND BARTHES IN CHINA
1. Roland Barthes, Alors, la Chine? (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1975).
2. Roland Barthes, Carnets du voyage en Chine, ed. Anne Herschberg Pierrot (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2009). English translation by Andrew Brown: Travels in China (Cambridge, England, and Malden, MA: Polity, 2012).
THE ART OF INTERPRETING NON-EXISTENT INSCRIPTIONS WRITTEN IN INVISIBLE INK ON A BLANK PAGE
1. Looking at this phenomenon from an East European angle, Kazimierz Brandys made similar observations in his admirable Carnets (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).
2. Epilogue: in 1982, a People’s Daily survey revealed that over 90 per cent of Chinese youth do not have an inkling of what Marxism is.
3. New York Review of Books, 26 April 1990.
ANATOMY OF A “POST-TOTALITARIAN” DICTATORSHIP
1. Two books, actually; a similar (yet not identical) collection, in French, appeared earlier in 2011: Liu Xiaobo, La philosophie du porc et autres essais, selected, translated, and introduced by Jean-Philippe Béja (Paris: Gallimard). Since the contents of both volumes do not completely overlap, one would wish for a third collection that could combine both. For more information on Liu himself—his life, activities, arrest, and trial, see Perry Link, Liu Xiaobo’s Empty Chair (New York Review Books, 2011).
2. On December 23, 2011, the writer Chen Wei, who had been arrested in February after posting essays online calling for freedom of speech and other political reforms, was convicted of the same crime of “inciting of subversion of state power” and sentenced, following a two-hour trial, to nine years in prison.
FOREWORD TO THE SEA IN FRENCH LITERATURE
1. Jean Marteilhe (1684–1777), a young Protestant who, trying to escape religious persecution in France, was arrested at the border and sentenced to serve on the galleys. Faithful to his religion, he rowed as a slave-convict for twelve years; eventually freed, he exiled himself to Holland, where he published a most remarkable narrative of his ordeal, well described in his long title, Mémoires d’un Protestant, condamné aux galères de France pour cause de religion, écrits par lui-même: Ouvrage dans lequel, outre le récit des souffrances de l’Auteur depuis 1700 jusqu’en 1713, on trouvera diverses Particularités curieuses, relatives à l’Histoire de ce Temps-là, & une Description exacte des Galères & de leur Service (Amsterdam, 1757).
René Duguay-Trouin (1673–1736), a famo
us Breton privateer who fought at sea against the English and the Dutch. Educated by the Jesuits, he knew how to write; his terse, vivid autobiography is a minor classic.
Louis Garneray (1783–1857), a distinguished painter (seascapes and naval battles). He ran away from home and went to sea at age thirteen; served as a privateer under the great Surcouf; lived through countless extraordinary adventures—battles, mutinies, shipwrecks—before eventually being captured by the English (age twenty-three) and spending nine years on the notorious and barbaric prison-ships of Portsmouth. Finally freed in 1814, he wrote of his early adventures at sea (Voyages, aventures et combats) and of his ordeal in captivity (Mes pontons). Garneray, as a memorialist and story-teller, is simply fabulous!
2. Alain Gerbault (originally a tennis champion), Bernard Moitessier (yachtsman of genius) and Éric Tabarly (originally a navy officer) all became famous for their solitary voyages under sail. Alain Bombard is a medical doctor who, in 1952, crossed the Atlantic Ocean on an inflatable raft, without any supplies of water or food, to demonstrate scientifically the possibility of survival at sea. The author of Naufragé volontaire, his visionary daring decisively modified traditional practices which, for centuries, had needlessly condemned countless shipwreck victims to death.
3. Joseph Conrad, for instance; one of his letters is featured. Interesting, though not exactly his greatest literary work, it was originally written in French (like a significant part of his correspondence) and it provided me with a good pretext to include his irreplaceable presence in the anthology.
4. I am thinking first and foremost of Jonathan Raban, The Oxford Book of the Sea (Oxford University Press, 1992).
5. “This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and the sea interpenetrate, so to speak—the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of breadwinning.” Thus begins Youth, one of Conrad’s most perfect sea narratives. Before him, R.L. Stevenson developed the same notion, in a different mode: “If an Englishman wishes to have such a patriotic feeling, it must be about the sea . . . The sea is our approach and bulwark; it has been the scene of our greatest triumphs and dangers, and we are accustomed in lyrical strains to claim it as our own. The prostrating experiences of foreigners between Calais and Dover have always an agreeable side to English prepossessions. A man from Bedfordshire who does not know one end of the ship from the other until she begins to move, swaggers among such persons with a sense of hereditary nautical experience . . . We should consider ourselves unworthy of our descent if we did not share the arrogance of our progenitors, and please ourselves with the pretension that the sea is English. Even where it is looked upon by the guns and battlements of another nation, we regard it as a kind of English cemetery, where the bones of our seafaring fathers take their rest until the last trumpet; for I suppose no other nation has lost as many ships or sent as many brave fellows to the bottom.” (The English Admirals, 1881, quoted by J. Raban, op. cit. p. 284.)
6. “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep,” in A Further Range (New York: Holt, 1936).
7. “Things I Consider Overrated,” in From the Uncollected Edmund Wilson (Ohio University Press, 1995), pp. 120–21. Wilson ends his diatribe with the observation that sea literature is unreadable. Well before him, Théophile Gautier made the same point, with much more wit (see my anthology, Vol. 1, pp. 501–3). Americans often consider Wilson as a prince of modern criticism; he seems to me a rather vulgar mind.
8. Boswell, Life of Johnson (entry of March 1759). And again: “A ship is worse than a gaol. There is, in a gaol, better air, better company, better conveniency of every kind; and a ship has the additional disadvantage of being in danger. When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land” (Boswell, Life of Johnson, entry of 19 March 1776). And this conversation between Johnson, Boswell and William Scott (entry of 10 April 1778):
Johnson: As to the sailor, when you look down from the quarter deck to the space below, you see the utmost extremity in human misery; such crowding, such filth, such stench!
Boswell: Yet sailors are happy.
Johnson: They are happy as brutes are happy, with a piece of fresh meat,—with the grossest sensuality . . .
Scott: We find people fond of being sailors.
Johnson: I cannot account for that, any more than I can account for other strange perversions of the imagination.
9. Johnson was a landlubber to an almost Continental degree. He was from Lichfield, one of the very few English cities that are located more than 100 miles from the nearest shore. Though he became a Londoner quite early in his career, it is only at age fifty-nine that he saw the sea for the first time in his life—during an excursion to Plymouth, on which he had been dragged by his old friend, the painter Joshua Reynolds.
10. Letter to Sidney Colvin, written from Tahiti, 16 October 1888. See Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (Yale University Press, 1997), p. 382.
11. Éric Tabarly, Mémoires du large (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1997), p. 126. Also in the same book, these lines of equally refreshing sincerity: “One often asks lone sailors what they think about when out at sea, and their answers are nearly always awkward. As for myself, I don’t think at all. Or rather, I only think of the boat; my ears are attuned to its every sound; my only concern is to make it sail as fast as possible. All the time, I only think of the boat, because on board the tasks are absorbing. Contrary to what most people believe, a boat is not synonymous with freedom. To sail means to accept constraints one has freely chosen. It is a privilege: most people must bear with the constraints which life is imposing on them.” (Ibid., p. 122.)
12. “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by / And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking / And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking. / I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide / Is a wild call and a clear call that cannot be denied; / And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, / And the flung spray and the blown spume and the seagulls crying. / I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, / To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; / And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover, / And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.”
13. Quoted in David Hays and Daniel Hays, My Old Man and the Sea (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), p. 197.
14. Joseph Conrad, “The Torrens: A Personal Tribute,” in Last Essays (London & Toronto: Dent & Sons, 1926).
15. Joseph Conrad, “The Secret Sharer,” in ’Twixt Land and Sea (London & Toronto: Dent & Sons, 1912). Conrad repeatedly evoked this paradoxical feeling of security: “The peace of the sea . . . a sailor finds a deep feeling of security in the exercise of his calling. The exacting life of the sea has this advantage over the life of the earth, that its claims are simple and cannot be evaded.” Joseph Conrad, Chance (London: Methuen & Co., 1914), Chap. 1.
16. Hilaire Belloc, The Cruise of the “Nona” (London: Century Publishing, 1983), new edition with an introduction by Jonathan Raban. The original edition was published in 1925.
IN THE WAKE OF MAGELLAN
1. Deus escreve direto por linhas tortas.
INDEX
The links below refer to the page references of the printed edition of this book. While the numbers do not correspond to the page numbers or locations on an electronic reading device, they are retained as they can convey useful information regarding the position and amount of space devoted to an indexed entry. Because the size of a page varies in reflowable documents such as this e-book, it may be necessary to scroll down to find the referenced entry after following a link.
Abetz (Otto) 121
Adorno (T.W.) 501
Alain (E.A. Chartier) 516
Allégret (Marc) 129, 152–53
Allégret (Yves) 152
Allston (W.) 454
St. Ambrose 307, 553
Amiel (H.F.) 500
An Lushan 289
Aragon (Louis) 182, 221
Archilochus 241
Arendt (Hannah) 235
Arrant (R.) 414
Asselineau (Charles) 517
Auden (W.H.) 493
St. Augustine 165, 307, 492, 542
Austen (Jane) 144
Aymé (Marcel) 277
Bach (J.S.) 128, 348, 481, 534, 543
Badiou (A.) 416
Bail (M.) 354
Balboa (Vasco Nuñez de) 443
Balthus (Balthazar Klossowski) 500
Balzac (Honoré de) 7, 18, 61–70, 83–84, 143, 206, 234, 266, 482, 509, 515–16, 536, 551
Barenboim (D.) 557
Barthes (R.) 8, 245, 248, 375–78, 511, 558
Baudelaire (Charles) 61–62, 67, 69, 73–74, 78, 148, 228, 245, 249, 251, 258–59, 266, 434, 437, 475, 481, 517, 520, 535, 538
Beck (Beatrix) 117, 123, 132, 136, 139, 164, 525–26, 528, 531, 533, 541–42
Beckett (Samuel) 246
Beethoven 371, 495–96
Behan (Brendan) 487
Belloc (Hilaire) 192, 197, 203, 209, 269, 544, 562
Bellour (Raymond) 220
Bennett (Alan) 488
Bennett (Arnold) 536
Berenson (Bernard) 493
Bernanos (Georges) 209, 452, 531, 544
