'Fortress Besieged' Qian Zhongshu

January 30, 2014, 9:02 pm

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Hell is a Chinese family, and the Devil is a Chinese woman.

Apocryphal saying

If this book had been written by a foreigner, the writer would have been accused of racism at worst, or cultural chauvinism at least. In reviewing it, I am conscious that I will lay myself open to the same charges because Qian Zhongshu sees many of the same features and voices many of the same criticisms that foreigners do about Chinese culture. Published in 1947 at the height of the civil war in China, Qian Zhongshu’s classic Chinese novel is an extended examination of Chinese mores and culture, in which that culture is subjected to a savage critique which is at once bitterly accurate and very funny.

After a few years in Europe studying, Fang Hung-chien returns home to China with a fake phd diploma in his pocket, no money and little prospects. It is 1937, the year the of the Japanese invasion of China, and Hung-chien’s homeland is in turmoil. After a spell in Shanghai making new friends and reuniting with old ones, he is offered a job in a new university in the interior. He travels there with some of his friends who have also been offered jobs there. Following a grueling journey, he finds the job was not everything he had believed it to be, and after his friend and colleague is fired following a scandal, he is bounced rather unwillingly into a marriage with another colleague. They leave the university and return to Shanghai to Hung-chien’s family to settle into a routine of family life of constant bickering between in-laws. This structure allows Qian Zhongshu to cast his satirical eye over several essential facets of Chinese life: the institution of marriage, family relationships and structures, the life of the literati/scholar, which has always been a staple of Chinese literature, the nature of the Chinese language. The many scenes of social interaction allow him to examine the way social relationships are formed and maintained, while the travel scenes provide an opportunity to look at life outside the enclaves of civilization in the cities, affording the reader a glimpse of the vast ignorance and poverty of the rural population.

Nastiness

The title of the novel refers to a French proverb which is the subject of a discussion among Hung-chien and his friends on the subject of marriage. Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those inside are trying to get out, while those outside are trying to get in. But the title has wider ramifications than just marriage, referring to the position of the individual within Chinese society in which the individual is crushed by the weight of 5000 years of culture, in which everything is ruled by precedent and tradition, in which the individual is imprisoned by formulas laid out for life choices and social interaction. This, of course, is a common view of China in the eyes of the Westerner, but here it is a Chinese (in fact two Chinese, Qian Zhongshu and his protagonist) who is articulating this view. “I still remember that time Chu Shen-ming or Miss Su said something about a ‘fortress besieged’. Lately I’ve been having that feeling about everything in life,” remarks Hung-chien to a friend. Most of us are not aware of the ideology restricting the choices and modes of being open to us; it takes a foreign eye (or a very great writer) to see what is invisible to the native. Hung-chien’s status as a returning student is important in this regard. The protagonist with Western experience allows the author to foreground a certain aspect of Chinese life which remains invisible to the Chinese, but which is often noted by Western observers, namely, nastiness. Nastiness appears in the novel in various forms, most obviously in the revolting descriptions of bodily fluids of which the book is full -the shitting and vomiting and spitting is relentless – but also in the deliberate nastiness that characterises most forms of social interaction depicted.

Two Chinese encounter one another in the park. One calls out to the other, “Eh, Ah Chow, long time no see! You are getting fatter and fatter! You must be getting richer and richer!” Greetings often take the form of extremely personal remarks broadcast out loud to the public at large in this way. Chinese social situations usually take the form of the group picking on one person and making fun of him, pointing out his thinning hair, his old shoes, his lack of children, his henpecking wife. Everyone laughs uproariously as witticism follows witticism – with the loudest and most appreciative laughter sycophantically reserved for the witticism of the most senior person present rather than the funniest remark. Meanwhile the victim, often compelled to stand while the others bully him, nods and smiles bashfully. It appears good natured fun only, but there is an undercurrent of real victimization: the struggle session is never far away from these kinds of social encounters. Episodes like these, which I have personally witnessed time and time again, are viciously lampooned in the novel’s scenes of social interactions, in which the characters engage in a form of small talk that appears to consist of non-sequitur and mundane generalisations but is in actuality full of one-upmanship, sycophancy, backstabbing, teasing and goading: they were talking as though expounding the truths of Zen with subtle jabs hidden underneath , which was enough to send one’s head reeling just listening to it…

One  of the virtues most esteemed by the Chinese is that of sincerity, a virtue that Westerners are more indifferent to because Western social interaction is not so two-faced as Chinese interaction is. Sincerity in Chinese culture is so highly prized because it is so rarely encountered, while the obverse is true of Western culture. This nasty two-facedness appears often in the novel, in scenes in which characters suddenly reveal their true selves, or in moments where Hung-chien suddenly realises that he has been the victim of double dealing.

This is most prominent in the scenes describing his marriage. Hung-chien marries Miss Sun, who up until this time has been merely a secondary character, a teaching assistant who accompanies Hung-chien and the others on their grueling journey to the interior, who remains in the background, blushing, bashful, and rather helpless. However, after her marriage she is revealed as a champion manipulator, one of the most memorable passive-aggressives in literature, rivaling only Martha Varden for her ability to reduce her husband to speechless anguish. This marriage has been called Nabokovian by Western critics of the novel, who seek thereby to cast it in the light of a distorted exaggeration, a kind of marital grand guignol. But it is actually an accurate, clinically realistic portrayal of most Chinese marriages I know of. There are moments during the courtship when Hung-chien has a suspicion of his future wife’s true character, but he dismisses it: Hung-chien’s suspicion flitted by without stopping, like a swallow over water. Miss Sun not only sought his advice, but was ready to follow his every word as well. This pleased him so much, it left no room in his mind for suspicion. And after the marriage, when Miss Sun has secured her man, she tells him: “After trying every ‘trick and scheme’ to get myself married to a husband like you, you think I wouldn’t look after him carefully? ….”

The Constraints of Language

It’s not that Chinese are incapable of anything other than nastiness – there are incidents of real kindness and genuinely sincere friendship in the novel. Hung-chien’s only true friend becomes his friend only after they have been bitter enemies and jealous rivals for the same woman, a woman who refuses both of them to marry someone more eligible. However, there is only a narrow range of formulas available for people to use as they navigate the minefields of social interaction. These formulas are so entrenched that they make genuine expression of self extremely problematic. Questions of status, seniority, precedence and family connections are more important than a true, equal meeting of individual selves. Part of the strength of these restrictive formulas lies in the very language the characters use:  characters (and narrator) are restricted by their language. Again, this judgment might be taken as simply a Westerner’s biased reading of Chinese culture. Consider for example this extract from Backhouse and Bland’s wildly popular Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking (1914), in which the authors are describing the language used by the annalists of the official histories: [they] all use the same stock phrases, metaphors and arguments derived one and all from the classical authors of antiquity…. Later they say: we find the same set phrases, the same artificial gestures and the ready made emotions….events become stereotyped in fixed grooves and rigid patterns… But in this novel, again, it is a Chinese making the same observation about his own culture.

Hung-chien reflects that it is impossible for him to truly communicate his feelings because the very words and phrases he is using are so old, so set, that they are incapable of expressing the newness and uniqueness of his individual experience:

I just wish I could invent a fresh and fleeting expression that only I could say, and only you could hear, so that after I’ve spoken it and you’ve heard it, it would vanish and in the past, present or future there would never be another man using the same expression to another woman. I’m so sorry that to you who are without equal in the whole world, I can only use clichés which have been worked to death for thousands of years to express my feelings. …

At another point in the novel, when Hung-chien is trying to write a letter to the woman he is courting, he reflects: he wished he could have written it in English, since the tone of a letter in literary style was so impersonal, while the tone of a letter in the colloquial style too easily turned into obnoxious familiarity. The range of choices, of voices, open to him when he writes in Chinese, and the range of interpretations of his writing, is highly restricted.

Qian Zhongshu is conscious as a writer of the great weight of tradition and encrusted meaning lying behind every word he uses, and he laments that fact that despite its great age, Chinese grammar is still immature and incapable of making clear distinctions, again, another criticism of Chinese laid against it by foreigners.

Kao Sung-nien was an old science scholar. The word’ old’ here is quite bothersome. It could describe science or it could just as well be describing a scientist. Unfortunately there is a world of difference between a scientist and science. A scientist is like wine. The older he gets, the more valuable he is, while science is like a woman. When she gets old she’s worthless.  Once Mandarin grammar reaches its full development, the time will come when ‘old science scholar’ can be clearly distinguished from ‘scholar of old science’, or one will say ‘science old scholar’ or ‘old science scholar’. But as it’s still too early for that yet, a general term of reference will have to do in the mean time.

Other modern Chinese writers have felt the same constraints about their medium, which is why, possibly, Qian Zhongshu’s great contemporary Zhang Ailing wrote her masterpiece The Rice Sprout Song in English rather than Chinese. Qian Zhongshu’s solution to the problem of the dead weight of Chinese is to enliven his text with quotations from Western sources and balance these with quotations from Chinese sources, so that the text is melangeof Western languages and references and Chinese references to classical sources. One would of course expect this, given that most of the novel’s characters are educated Chinese of the scholar class. But then Qian Zhongshu goes even further by parodying his solution. One of the female characters at a polite social gathering makes Hung-chien nauseous with her strong body odor for which there is an elegant expression in classical Chinese as well as an idiom in Latin, both using the goat as a comparison: yun-ti and olet hircum (smelling like a goat). Another character is a Chinese who loves to throw American idioms into his discourse; there is also a parody of a Chinese poet who wants to write in the style of Eliot’s Wasteland, with fragments of quotations put together to form a new poem (with footnotes, of course): “There’s not one word without a source”  remarks Hung-chien on reading it. Qian Zhongshu is aware that despite his efforts he cannot inject new life into old Chinese: what looks like an original solution is simply an old trick in a new guise: “It’s almost like what poets call ‘scholars poetry’. Isn’t that style neo classicism ?” (which it might be in Chinese, but in Western literature, it’s Modernism.) Qian Zhongshu underlies the irony of his failed attempts to invigorate Chinese by infusing it with Western languages by having one of his characters remark: “For some reason all the good things from abroad always go out of whack when they come to China.”  Which is a common complaint amongst ex pats in China, but one that is being made in this case, again, by a Chinese.

oooOOOooo

The novel is as much about Hung-chien’s awakening to the true character of Chinese life as it is an indictment and satire on it. After watching his wife interacting (nastily) with the wives of his two brothers in the family home, he suddenly realizes: he’d been too accustomed to his family all along to realize how much enmity and meanness lay underneath…“What I can’t figure out is why someone like you, who grew up in a big family, know nothing about all the scheming and plotting that go on there” Hung-chien’s wife tells him after a particular nasty exchange with her sister-in-laws. It’s this series of realizations that provide the character with growth and change manifested as an increasing sense of loneliness, an awareness of self separated off from those around him but always under unremitting pressure to submit to the rigid formulas of social exchange, a fortress besieged.

Man was created to be lonely. Each one has to keep to himself and never have anything to do with anyone else to his dying day.

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'Decadence Mandchoue: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse' Part 1

February 6, 2014, 7:11 pm

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December 1942 Beijing. With the Japanese occupation of Beijing, Edmund Backhouse takes refuge in the various foreign legations, first in the compound of the British Legation, then in the French Hospital of St Michael, where he is attended and befriended by Dr Reinhard Hoeppli, also a long term expat, former medical intendant of the Peiping Union Medical College, and now acting Honorary Swiss Consul for the duration. Realizing that Backhouse – now 71- was the co-author of two of the most influential and widely read books on China of the first half of the century -China under the Empress Dowager published in 1910, and Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking published in 1914 - Dr Hoeppli commissions Backhouse to write his memoirs, primarily as a way of occupying him, and as a way of giving the proud old man financial assistance without insulting his poverty.

Backhouse completes two manuscripts and gives them to Dr Hoeppli, who is so horrified and fascinated in equal degree by their contents that he deposits copies in three major academic libraries around the world, with instructions that they are only to be opened and made available to the public after his death. Decadence Mandchoue: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, is the first volume, made public for the first time in 2011, in an exceptionally well produced edition by the Shanghai-based publishing house, Earnshaw Books.

Part 1: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse

Memory, fond memory, when all things fail we fly to thee…

Rabindranath Tagore

So what is it about the book that so shocked and gripped Hoeppli? Backhouse had been in Beijing off and on since 1898, had been an eyewitness to the fall of the Qing and the early days of the Republic of China, had had dealings with the first post- Qing government, had managed to lie low during the uncertain warlord era, and was generally a fascinating Old China Hand. He was also a well- known author, and a linguistic genius, fluent in Mandarin, Mongolian, Manchu, Russian and Japanese, as well as the usual European languages, and of course Greek and Latin. His linguistic gifts had been made use of by just about all interested parties in the scramble for China. He was also an English Baronet, and openly gay. All these elements form the heady elixir of his text.

The China Memoirs consist of 19 chapters – their ordering is uncertain - covering a narrative arc that extends from 1899 to 1908, with flashbacks right back to the early part of Empress Dowager Cixi’s life, and a final chapter set in 1928. Backhouse details his experiences in the gay brothels and bathhouses of Beijing. He details his nuits d’amour and love affairs with actors and sing-song boys in graphic detail. He claims to have been the lover of several prominent Princes of the Manchu dynasty, to have enjoyed relations intime with many of the eunuchs of the court, including the chief eunuch Li Lien Ying. Most controversially, however, he claims to have been the secret lover of the Empress Dowager Cixi –despite his homosexuality and her advanced age- and gives an intimate portrait of the Old Buddha, as she was called, and her circle, with detailed descriptions of orgies in the Forbidden Palace. We learn for example, that Cixi was endowed with an abnormally large clitoris, which she liked to stimulate by placing in Sir Edmund’s anal crease, simulating penetration. Perhaps too much information. But Backhouse holds nothing back.

The prose is a repository of languages, an artifice of code-switching between English, French, Chinese, including ideograms and Wade Giles Romanization, Latin, Greek, some Italian, some German, some Russian; embedded within it are quotations from Horace, Virgil, Lucretius, Confucius, Mencius, Chuangtzu, The Dream of the Red Chamber,The Book of Changes, Dante, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Buddhist sutras, and references to classical and modern European and Chinese history. Sometimes these references are highlighted in the text with quotations, sometimes they form part of the very fabric of the syntax, in the use of collocations or phrases borrowed from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Tagore, for example. Backhouse’s language is a treasure house of learning and culture that embraces Eastern and Western civilizations, and moves effortlessly between them. It is also unabashedly erotic and transgressive. Here is a ‘menu’ of services available at the gay brothel ‘The Hall of Chaste Joys’:

Then Mr Tsai explained to me the tariff: simple or unipartite copulation with the pathic costs Taels 30; reciprocal copulation costs Taels 45; P’in Hsiao品簫(flute savouring, an allusion to the shape of a Chinese flute which resembles the male organ) or fellatio is Taels 10 extra if limited to the pathic; Taels 15 if practiced by the latter on the client; irrumatio or ciotio per buccam is Taels 30 inclusive of Feuilles de Rose, or what we call “Cinnamon Leaves”, Kuei Yeh桂葉if applied by the client to the pathic’s anal, pubic, and perineal region but if the client requires this labial business on his verge, posterior etcetera, he must disburse Taels 45…

This is not just a case of an English text embroidered with a few French and Chinese words. At a rough estimate, foreign languages make up between a quarter and a third of the entire text, with Chinese taking up around half of that, with the rest distributed among French and Latin, and a sprinkling of German, Russian, Greek etc. Even the work’s title is bilingual. But don’t worry, everything is footnoted and translated: the editing is impeccable.

The Double Vision: ‘The China Memoirs’ and‘China Under the Empress Dowager’

Backhouse’s earlier book China under the Empress Dowager covers much of the same period as that covered by the China Memoirs. The earlier book gives a more acceptable version of events, a more conventional, historically oriented version of the life and death of Cixi; while Backhouse’s memoir gives a more private and intimate – in a literal sense- of the same person and events. Taken together, the two books add up to an amazing record of an amazing era: a double vision, one public, one private.

We can see how this works by looking at one chapter in detail. In The Mantle of Cagliostro, Backhouse accompanies Cixi and the two eunuchs Li Lien Ying, and Tsui Te Lung to a fortune teller, where Cixi is given glimpses of the future in a crystal ball.  But first, she is given 12 scenes of the past, as the seer says, in order to establish the veracity of his predictions. If his visions of the past are accurate, then his auguries of the future can also be taken as true.

Each scene reveals some key incident in the Empress’s biography, and at the same time stands as a symbol of the divergence of vision between the two texts. Space precludes us from comparing in detail all the scenes offered by the seer with the same incidents described in China Under the Empress Dowager, but comparison of a small selection will suffice to show what I mean.

Three Visions in a Crystal Ball

·      The fourth vision seen in the crystal ball describes the death of Cixi’s son, the Tongzhi Emperor, who was held to have died of smallpox in China Under the Empress Dowager, but is revealed in The China Memoirs, to have died of syphilis.

·      In the fifth scene, the death of the Tongzhi Emperor’s widow is described. Here, it is revealed that she had been murdered on Cixi’s orders, and the foetus of the late Emperor’s child untimely ripped from her womb. China Under the Empress Dowager, however, reports her death as a suicide, although that text does note that court and city were awash with rumours that Cixi had had her poisoned.

·      In the eighth scene, Cixi sees the death of her Co-Regnant, the Eastern Empress Dowager, and confesses that she herself had poisoned her with arsenic to avenge the murder of her favourite. In China Under the Empress Dowager, the death of the Eastern Empress Dowager is attributed to a sudden and mysterious illness only, and there is no suggestion of foul play.

Most controversially, however, is the description in chapter 17 of The China Memoirsof the deaths of the Guanxu Emperor, and of Old Buddha herself, who had both died within one day of each other. Backhouse writes here that he had heard the real story of their deaths from Chief Eunuch Li, who claimed to have been present. According to Li and Backhouse, the Emperor had been strangled to death on the orders of Cixi herself, and then Cixi had been shot point blank with a pistol by Yuan Shih Kai the next day in the throne room. The official version given out at the time – and the version given in China Under the Empress Dowager - was that both had died peacefully in their beds (both at 3.00 in the afternoon) surrounded by family members and retainers.

What all these scenes from The China Memoirs have in common, and what differentiates them from the earlier China Under the Empress Dowager, is the presence of the lurid, the fantastical, the horrible, the bizarre, the salacious, the outrageous. They also incorporate elements that might have originated in local gossip. Naturally, after these incidents, Beijing was alive with rumour, scandal and hearsay, most of which would have been unknown to the foreign community, but which someone like Backhouse, with his knowledge of Chinese and his intimate relations with the locals, would have heard.

Backhouse and the truth

Before the scenes with the crystal ball, Backhouse gives a preamble in which the theme of truth is highlighted. What I am about to describe may seem incredible, he begins, then refers to Confucius, Saint (‘doubting’) Thomas, difficulty of  belief in the doctrine of the Resurrection, and the god of death Yen Wang. He refers to his own impeccable bona fides, and the presence of the two eunuchs as witnesses to confirm his version of the events, and ends thus: I know that my record is true.

While ostensibly, this preamble refers to the specific context, to the possibility that the seer was fraudulent, and that the visions in the crystal ball merely the result of tricks with smoke and mirrors, it can also more generally refer to the status of truth within the whole text.

In 1976 Hugh Trevor-Roper, aka Lord Dacre, published his fascinating account of Backhouse’s life, The Hermit of Peking: The Hidden life of Sir Edmund Backhouse, exposing him as one of the most accomplished con men and hoaxsters of the early 20^thcentury. Among Sir Edmund’s many cons, two concern us here, the case of the diary of Ching Shan, on which his book with Bland was heavily based, and his presentation to the Bodleian Library in Oxford of a trove of Chinese documents and books.

Con 1: The Diary of Ching Shan

One of the great selling points of China Under the Empress Dowager was the inclusion of a large section of a diary of an official in the Forbidden Palace, Ching Shan, which Backhouse claimed to have found in the house where he was staying, and which he translated for the book. Rumours about the doubtful authenticity of the diary had been started soon after the book’s publication by G. E. Morrison, the Times correspondent in Peking (who knew absolutely no Chinese, and was dependent on Backhouse for information he then passed off as his own scoops). Backhouse rigorously denied that he had forged the document, but Morrison’s insinuations stuck, damaging Backhouse’s reputation among the foreign community in Beijing. Although the diary, long the subject of controversy, has now been conclusively revealed as a forgery, historians are still in disagreement about whether Backhouse forged it himself or not; and if he didn’t, the question remains whether he knew it was a forgery at the time he used it for his collaboration with Bland.

Con 2: The Bodleian Bequests

In 1913 twenty nine crates of manuscripts and books arrived at the Bodleian Library, a generous donation of material, which, Backhouse claimed, came from the  Palace Library in Beijing. In the turmoil after the collapse of the Qing the year previous to the donation, the Chinese were selling off their treasures, and Backhouse – and others- had no compunction about buying them up and moving them abroad to safety. Although the provenance of the material was vague, its quality was not. Contemporary sinologists were overawed by the condition and rarity of the documents, and the Chinese collection of the Bodleian Library was now declared the best collection in Europe. In 1914 another cache of priceless documents arrived from China, and in 1918 another, followed in 19919 by yet another. However, now Backhouse was receiving payment for his ‘bequests’ and was offering ever more tempting goodies for ever higher prices. To cut a long and complex story short, questions about the provenance of the library began to be raised, and an enquiry into the authenticity of the documents was set up, the result of which was that the same experts who had enthused over the quality of the bequest now declared that the later purchases were forgeries. Backhouse insisted on their authenticity; and scholars today are still undecided on the question of whether the forgeries were by Backhouse or someone else, and if the latter, did Backhouse know they were forgeries at the time he sold them to the University.

Three things are important in these two cons. First, if Backhouse himself forged them, it proved that he was a literary genius in Chinese. The quality of the calligraphy and the contents of the documents were regarded as examples of the highest literary art by the experts of the day, and even now their status is uncertain but their quality – as real documents or later forgeries- is not. Second, long before the time of writing The China Memoirs Backhouse’s reputation had been irredeemably tarnished by both controversies, and since the end of WWI he had been rejected by the foreign community in Beijing as a prankster, a madman and a mischief maker. Third, is the problematic nature of the truth both as it regards events and texts.

These controversies are reflected in the text of The China Memoires by an insistence on the truth of the revelations contained in it. In the author’s Forward to the Reader, Backhouse writes: I… hereby positively affirm on my honour and on that of my respectable family…. That the studies which I have endeavoured to write for Dr Hoeppli contain nothing but the truth, the whole truth and the absolute truth. He refers directly to the Ching Shan diary episode, and emphasizes repeatedly Ching Shan’s artless but truthful narration. He refers constantly to his credentials, his bona fides as he calls them, and to his relationship with the great and mighty, Lord Grey in particular, citing a letter he claims to have received from the peer testating to its recipient’s learning and honesty, the original of which letter is now lost, but a copy of which is helpfully included by Backhouse in his text. He also takes the opportunity to castigate his enemies, especially Morrison. He is careful, whenever he presents some particularly salacious or outrageous piece of information, to present its provenance, although, characteristically, as Trevor-Roper pointed out, the provenance he refers to is usually in the form of documents which have now been lost, or to witnesses who have long since died. (The loss of his library forms a consistent minor chord in the text.)

Trevor-Roper’s considered opinion, delivered after due textual analysis of the manuscripts, was that the details they contained, of Backhouse’s relationship with Cixi and of the revelations contained for example, in the Cagliostro chapter, and the chapter on the deaths of the Emperor and Empress Dowager were not true. He wrote: I was able to satisfy myself that the memoires  were not merely erroneous here and there, not merely coloured by imagination in detail but pure fantasy throughout – and yet fantasy which was spun with extraordinary ingenuity around and between true facts accurately remembered or cunningly bent to sustain it.(296) He concluded that The China Memoires was the last explosion of arepressed and distorted sexuality.

In order to further understand the complex nature of the truth of Backhouse’s text, it is necessary to turn to the only full-length biography of Backhouse that has so far appeared, and I offer now a review within a review of this work.

 “Hermit of Beijing: the hidden life of Sir Edmund Backhouse” by Hugh Trevor-Roper 

At first glance, Trevor-Roper appears to be right. After all, he is Lord Dacre, and Sir Edmund’s text is simply too fantastical to be regarded as literal historical truth. But in his excellent introduction to the text, Derek Sandhaus gives an important and much needed corrective to Trevor-Roper’s assessment of Backhouse’s life and work. Sandhaus points out the connections between The China Memoirs and the lively gay scene in turn of the century Beijing, emphasizing the accurate, realistic aspects of Sir Edmund’s descriptions. He emphasizes the way that The China Memoirssituates itself in Chinese literary genres of gay life and love, of which there is a rich tradition, both classical and contemporary with Backhouse. And he dwells on Backhouse’s early association with Oscar Wilde and the circle of Decadents at Oxford, and his reaction to Wilde’s fall from grace. He argues most plausibly that it was the shock of this scandal- Backhouse was directly involved in raising money for Wilde’s defence - that motivated Backhouse’s self-imposed exile from British life – as it did many other gay men of the time- and his subsequent wariness of the British.

Sandhaus is right to point out that whatever Backhouse was, he was certainly not a ‘repressed’ homosexual; a better description might indeed be a ‘rampant’ homosexual. The China Memoirs flaunts its author’s sexuality –indeed it rubs the reader’s face in it. Likewise, Backhouse in his life made no secret of his proclivities, finding Beijing’s gay scene highly liberating, and it was this openness, this refusal to live by European, or most especially Anglo-Saxon hypocritical sexual mores, that scandalized the foreign community in Beijing, and led to Backhouse’s rejection by this community, along with the scandals of the fraudulent diary and Oxford bequests.

Why does Trevor-Roper call Backhouse a repressed homosexual?  He does so because in his mind and language, the adjective ‘repressed’ always goes with the noun ‘homosexual’. Trevor-Roper belongs to that class of person who thinks that homosexuals are abnormal, that homosexuals are always repressed by their very nature, but good people, nonetheless. Trevor-Roper’s judgment is motived by unstated prejudices, both sexual and class. Trevor-Roper’s brother was openly gay, and one of the chief witnesses in the enquiry that lead to the Wolfenden Report, which argued for and eventually achieved the decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain in 1957. It’s safe to assume, surely, that the involvement of Patrick Trevor-Roper in the enquiry placed unwelcome scrutiny on the whole family. Trevor-Roper was a relentless and unscrupulous social climber, and although he was given a peerage three years after his book on Backhouse appeared,his peerage was for life only, while Sir Edmund’s was hereditary. Someone of Trevor-Roper’s stolid middle class arriviste background would find it hard to resist the temptation to disapprove of the aristocratic insouciance with which Backhouse swindled and forged his way through the antebellum world. 

Another gulf fixed between biographer and subject is the misunderstanding between the long-term expat, and the stay-at-home, in which both sides regard the other as losers in the business of life: the expat regards the stay-at-home as provincial and parochial, lacking in breadth of experience, while the stay-at-home regards the expat as someone rather beyond the pale, corrupted by foreignness, a betrayer of the values of home, someone, perhaps, who can’t ‘make it’ at home. For the long-term expat, of course, the concepts of ‘making it’ and ‘home’ have completely other meanings.  

Trevor-Roper calls Backhouse a ‘hermit’, and his life ‘hidden’. To be sure, the historian is referring to Backhouse’s hoaxes and cons, but what of them? Are they really so reprehensible?  No one died or was injured as a result of them, and all they did was to leave some rather pompous businessmen, academics and other self-appointed guardians of propriety with egg all over their faces. So a hermit in what sense, then, and hidden from whom? Only in the sense that Backhouse did not associate with foreigners, and there is no record of what he was up to for most of the years in Beijing. He lived there off and on for nigh on 45 years. What did he get up to? There is no reason to assume that he did not have a full social life, like any other person, and a wide circle of friends and acquaintances - among the Chinese, who of course were invisible to the foreigners. In fact, Backhouse tells us about these friends: My friends not infrequently ask me why I am nervous during electric storms… DM9

Photographs of Backhouse in his old age show a dignified old man in Chinese garb. Underneath all the Sage-like hair is the rosy healthy face of a kind old uncle, apple cheeked, dimpled and with smile creases around the eyes and a friendly, somewhat vaguely mischievous glint therein. It is not the wild, ascetic, lunatic face of an eremite crazed by solitude that Trevor-Roper’s portrait conjures up.  Trevor-Roper’s characterization of Backhouse as roguish, sly, in love with money, not to be trusted, up-to-his-old-tricks-again is couched in exactly the kind of language that British commentators had used to describe the Chinese right back from the start of their dealings with them. In artifice, falsehood and an attachment to all kinds of lucre, many of the Chinese are difficult to be paralleled by any other people… wrote George Anson, captain of the 60 gun man-o’-war HMS Centurion, who arrived in China in 1743. This description could well summarise Trevor-Roper’s portrait of Backhouse.

Calling Backhouse a hermit is rather like the modern parallel of the press accusing Pynchon of being a recluse, and Pynchon retorting he’s not a recluse, just that he doesn’t want to talk to the media, who thereupon call him a recluse…

Also, Sir Edmund’s  linguistic gifts and culture vastly outweighed Trevor-Roper’s own. Backhouse wrote this work sitting in a hospitable bed, remember, with no access to reference works or a library, quoting copiously in about 9 different languages including Chinese characters-  from memory. Trevor-Roper writes with disapproval of the ‘ideograms’ Sir Edmund had so liberally sprinkled through his work. For Trevor-Roper, these characters have no purpose, they are merely an inconvenience, an added printing expense; he is blind to the layers of meaning and flavour they give the text, uninterested even, as to what they might represent. Trevor-Roper never even went to China to research his biography (admittedly difficult in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, but not impossible), and his acknowledgements page -incredibly for a book about someone who spent their whole adult life in China -includes not a single Chinese name (although an improbably named Laetitia, Lady Lucas Tooth, is thanked) and showed in his book no understanding of Chinese culture or the aspects of it that might have attracted Backhouse, an astonishing omission, given the fact that Backhouse devoted his life to China and her culture. 

Everywhere in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s biography, then, this disapproval and incomprehension of his subject and his subject’s work and milieu comes through. Most damagingly, however, is the historian’s incompetence as a literary critic, and it is to this which we now turn.

Part 2 to follow.

Edmund Backhouse on religion

April 22, 2013, 8:50 pm

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Religion is inspired by sentiment, and not by intelligence. It speaks to the senses and thus brings us down to a common level; whereas intelligence engages in disputation and argument.

Oscar Wilde on the Wade-Giles System of Romanization

April 26, 2013, 9:28 am

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Chuang Tzu, whose name must be carefully pronounced as it is not written...

Fragment 1042013

March 31, 2013, 6:55 pm

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Chinese categorisation:

Baojia social categories in Guanxi province in the 1840s included the following categories:

those who are truly talented and knowledgeable
those who are foolish and cowardly
those who are violent
those who know things
those who are afraid of things
those who like things to happen
those who are troublemakers
wandering bandits from Guangdong province
guest people

Kang You Wei on the world

April 17, 2013, 7:49 pm

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Our whole world is nothing but a world of grief and misery, and its inhabitants are nothing but grieving and miserable people. The living beings on this earth are all destined for slaughter. The azure heaven and the round earth are no more than a slaughter-yard, a great prison.

'Decadence Mandchoue: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse' Part 2

February 9, 2014, 3:03 am

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Part 2: Decadence Mandchoue

Link to Part 1

What is the mark of every literary decadence? That life no longer resides in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, and the page comes to life at the expense of the whole – the whole is no longer a whole. This, however, is the simile of every style of decadence: every time there is an anarchy of atoms.

Nietzsche

The Case of Wagner 7

I am writing in the somber close of that voluptuous day which it has been my pleasure to adumbrate, without the skill of a Bourget or a Barres, which allures the reader to pursue the same path (or to vary the metaphor) to sound the depths and shoals of exoteric passions…

DM8

Trevor-Roper tells us that the unpublished manuscripts were seen by two experts, who both pronounced it a work of literary genius. The historian then says that had they known about Backhouse’s career as a forger and swindler, they might not have given this assessment. Trevor-Roper even goes so far as to propose an alternative title to the work: “The Imaginary Sexual Life of E.T. Backhouse…”

By his own admission, then, Trevor-Roper falls prey to the biographical fallacy, which interprets a work solely in terms of what is known about the author’s life. Modern critical theory discounts this view, as we do here, especially when that view of the author’s life and milieu is hopelessly compromised by prejudice and ignorance, as we have seen. Trevor-Roper then claims that he assessed the manuscripts by testing them internally by their content. However, after the Hitler diaries fiasco, we now know that Trevor-Roper’s skills as a textual scholar were not as acute as he would have us think they were. Trevor-Roper seems to have been blinded by his own professional interests as a historian, and by the work’s subtitle: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, and by the fact that Dr Hoeppli had asked Backhouse to write his memoirs. But just because the good doctor had asked for memoirs does not mean that that is what Backhouse gave him.

Modern critical theory asserts that a work should be judged on its own merits as a discrete, autonomous entity; or at least by situating it within a genre and looking at its relationship with other works from the genre; and that it should not be judged by how it does or does not fulfill an authorial intention – a risky concept in theoretical terms- or by how it does or does not correspond to a real truth – another risky theoretical concept.

I will argue that Decadence Mandchoue is to be regarded in its entirety as a successful work of self-conscious, deliberate literary fiction – a novel - and not as a failed work of history or autobiography. I suggest that presented with an opportunity- and a reader- by Dr Hoeppli’s kind offer, Backhouse set out to put to paper a work he had long planned in outline and detail in his mind, a work that would bring to life and preserve the artistic movement of his youth.

Decadence and the Decadents

I would fain hope that the Goncourt Freres, Baudelaire, Flaubert, even Gautier, would have found in my narratives a certain appeal (Bog Znayet - God knows,) not because of much literary skill in them inherent, but owing to l’accent de la verite de laquelle j’ose me flatter.

DM 14

Backhouse’s achievement is best brought out by focusing on the first part of the title he gave his work: Decadence Mandchoue. Although it was written in 1943, the work’s whole style and atmosphere is of the 1890s, of The Yellow Book, of the Symbolists, and in particular, the Decadents. In fact, as we will see, Decadence Mandchoue has a strong claim to be regarded as one of the great Decadent masterpieces, along with Huysman’s A Rebours and Wilde’s DorianGray.

An outcrop of the Symbolist movement, the Decadents were a loosely collected group of writers and works who took their cue from Baudelaire, Poe, and De Quincey, and included some of the people Backhouse had known in his youth: Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Verlaine, Huysman, Pierre Loueys, and Aubrey Beardsly to name a few. Decadence reached a pitch of concentration in the fin de siècle- that is, the period covered by the narrative arc of Decadence Mandchoue-  but it didn’t start or end there. Decadent art can be found in all periods of Western history: the novels of Petronius and Apuleius are just as Decadent as the movies of Kenneth Anger.  It was the dominant artistic movement of Backhouse’s youth, and he was attracted to it by force of circumstance and friendship, and by temperament, as Decadence Mandchoue shows.

In what follows I will use ‘Decadent’ to denote the artistic movement or certain characteristics which conform to it, and ‘decadent’ to refer to decline in the real historical and social world.

Decadent art is characterized by the following elements: an obsession with artifice over nature; an obsession with the erotic; the movement of what is marginal to the centre and vice versa; an obsession with the darker side of life, a kind of nostalgie de la boue balanced by a surface sheen of glamour; inversion, both aesthetic, in which ugliness is made beautiful and the beautiful is made ugly, and moral, in which deviance becomes fascinating while what is conventionally correct is seen as banal; an obsession with the androgyne, the hermaphrodite, and the femme fatale; an obsession with the occult and heightened spiritual or emotional states; a taste for Rome, with its cannibalism, drag, and officially sanctioned sexual corruption of the young; a corroding use of irony; a breakdown in the barriers between what is accepted as ‘taste’ and what is not; an obsession with the exotic and an Orientalist perspective on it; a nostalgia for the past and a delight in decline; a preference for the ruined and a prevailing mood of mould; a delight in paradox; an obsession with obsession itself, perhaps, if the energy required for real obsession was not being constantly sapped by the enervating presence of ennui or the torpor induced by drugs; an interest in states of  (deliberately) altered consciousness and synesthesia; …

The text signals its Decadent antecedents in the very first paragraph of Chapter 1, which contains references to Decadent artists, both in the text and in Backhouse’s own footnotes, including Wilde, Robbie Ross, Huysmans, Verlaine, Anatole France and Swinburne. The narrator tells us that the impulse to put pen to paper comes not from unholy lust nor decadence raffinee, but so much as from instinctive curiosity and the spirit of Shakespeare’s sonnets (these last of course form the basis of another great Decadent work: Wilde’s Portrait of Mr. W.H., another text couched in the form of an oral confession.)

Chapter 14 begins with a long disquisition on the Decadents, in which the narrator specifically mentions the Decadent aesthetic of favoring artifice over nature and describes the mood of his own work in distinctly Decadent terms: I definitely have in my mind the tint of mouldiness; wherein the woodlouse thrives and multiplies. He quotes de Goncourt, la nature pour moi est ennemie, and gives a brief analysis of the difference in their attitude to nature between Flaubert, Baudelaire and Goncourt; he repeats once again his generic insistence that he is writing truth, but does so in the context of Flaubert’s disgust of nature, which is of course Decadent.

Resolutely apolitical, elitist and anti- democratic, Decadence emphasizes the primacy of individual experience over historical and social processes. All of these elements are characteristic of Decadence Mandchoue, as we will see. In what follows I will first look at how the text’s assertion of veracity is part of the Decadent aesthetic; then  we will see how this aesthetic informs the structure, language and imagery of the text.

Decadent Truth

Flaubert exists in petto in these my studies, rich, according to normal conception, in human depravity but owing nought to art, since they all happen to be true.

DM 14

The biggest obstacle to regarding Decadence Mandchoue as a successful work of art and not as a failed historical document, is, paradoxically, the text’s own claims that it is a true historical document.

But.

The insistence on the veracity of the events revealed is simply an aesthetic gesture: it is not real truth, but artistic truth: this is not a memoir, but an imitation of a memoir. The insistence on truth in Backhouse’s China Memoirs should be understood as part of an artifice of verisimilitude, one that is a characteristic maneuvre of Decadent art, which favours the fictional autobiography and confession as a form: consider De Quincey’s Confessions; consider Cleland’s Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, consider Abbe Jules by Octave Mirbeau, consider Teleny, which has the form of an oral confession; consider Balzac’s Sarrasinewith its nesting narratives. We are no more to take the text’s autobiographical form as real than we are to understand, say, Dostoevsky’s underground man’s notes as real. Backhouse’s China Memoirsare no more memoirs than The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr are really written by a cat. When Fanny Hill asserts in her Memoir that everything she says is the stark naked truth, we don’t take this literally because we know that this is a standard Decadent trope. The same goes for Backhouse’s China Memoirs.In fact, we can go one step further and say that the appearance of attempted veracity Backhouse gives his text is a species of hoax, one that Trevor-Roper swallows hook line and sinker because he reads it as a clumsily authentic but really spurious historical document, and not as the finely wrought work of Decadent art it really is.

Backhouse includes the use of his own name and experiences for the narrator and events of the text because he recognizes their potential for Decadent art, as we shall see. But the narrator is not Backhouse himself, but ‘Backhouse’, in the same way that Victor Segalen in Rene Leys is not the author Victor Segalen, but the character ‘Victor Segalen’. The text only appears to be the crazy visions of an exhausted Old China Hand, in which the boundary between imagination and memory, between fact and fantasy, is constantly dissolving. This appearance of rambling exhaustion is fully in keeping with the Decadent aesthetic, which values decline and nostalgia and digression.

I an old man A dull head among windy spaces T.S.Eliot  Gerontion

 I… hereby positively affirm on my honour and on that of my respectable family…. That the studies which I have endeavoured to write for Dr Hoeppli contain nothing but the truth, the whole truth and the absolute truth.

Forward to the Reader DM

If we look again at the Forward to the Reader in more detail, Backhouse seems to be signaling this artificial nature of the work quite clearly.  We know that Backhouse absolutely detested his family, so his remark about his respectable family is to be understood as a sarcastic inversion of values centered on the word ‘respectable’, a piece of Victorian, Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy which Backhouse despised for obvious reasons, and which he transgresses and mocks in the text that follows. The last sentence of the Forward similarly is to be understood as a piece of sarcasm: Such an action i.e of fiction supplanting facts, would assuredly be despicable and indicative of no sense of honour whatsoever, rendering me unworthy of decent people’s society! That exclamation mark speaks volumes. We can imagine, from his rejection of the foreign community in Beijing, what Backhouse thought of ‘decent people’s society’. The whole ethos of Decadence is to reject what is ‘decent’.

Decadent Structure

In his study of Decadent writers and the Decadent aesthetic, Affirmations(1915) Havelock Ellis writes that one of the key characteristics of Decadence is that the whole is subordinated to the parts. He takes his cue here from Nietzsche, who in turn was paraphrasing Bourget, whom Backhouse mentions in the quote I gave at the beginning. 

Derek Sandhaus notes that there is some uncertainty as to the correct ordering of the chapters, which can be taken as isolated descriptions of events or scenes from the narrator’s life in Beijing. The text refuses an overall narrative arc, and at the same time thereby refuses the chronological development of an autobiographical narrative. Instead, what we have is a series of atomized vignettes, which could conceivably be read in any order. The narrator constantly refers to his work as ‘his studies’, or ‘this paper’, showing he that he thinks of it in terms of a multiplicity of collected smaller units rather than one big one. A quick glance at the chapter titles also signals the work’s Decadence, with the inclusion of standard Decadent terms and tropes: interlude, nocturne, vampire, cabinet secret, demons, eunuchs, temple, palace, hammam  and so on. While a sense of an overall design is refused, however, a close reading of any of the chapters reveals careful planning and patterning and a sense of a design within each chapter, a sense of each chapter as a discrete, atomic entity.

We’ve already seen how the Cagliosotro chapter takes key scenes from Cixi’s life and adds Decadent elements to them. A close reading of another chapter, The Fire From Heaven, Chapter 9 describes an incident in which two young lovers in a pavilion on an island in the lake in the Forbidden City are obliterated by a lightning bolt in flagrante delictoduring a fierce storm. The gathering storm clouds, both real and metaphorical, are carefully built up during the narrative, which describes a pleasure jaunt across the lake in a barge with Cixi, Li Lien Ying, the narrator, and a beautiful young actor who is one of the doomed lovers, and who has just been pleasuring Cixi. Present also is one of the Empress Dowager’s chamber maids, who will be the other doomed lover, and a host of servants. As the storm builds, they discuss the Confucian belief that only bad people are struck by lightning, and then several antecedents are given. The most important of these is the erotic tale of the death by lightning of the Jiaqing Emperor, in the arms of his male lover. In this prefiguring narrative the Emperor and his favorite are reduced to a pile of white ash.

After the lightning strikes, there is a terrible fire in which the pavilion is burnt to the ground. As the storm recedes,  a lurid red sunset – the sunset of Decadence itself- illuminates the turbulent waters of the lake.  ‘Backhouse’ in a footnote describes the sinister illumination of the fire which was then still burning fiercely and the lurid rays of an angry sunset, like a lost soul that shall always suffer…and then describes how the lovers have also been reduced to a pile of white ash. The chapter is beautifully crafted, with all the details adding to the meaning of the whole, with a series of prefigurings and echoes, and a carefully built up mood. This is self- conscious techne, craft, art, not the mere ramblings of fond memory.

Decadence Mandchoue, then, consists of a series of exquisitely documented parts dissolving the whole, as Camille Paglia puts it in Art and Decadence.

Decadent Language

All style, that is, artifice, is, ultimately, epicene.

Susan Sontag

Notes on Camp

Backhouse’s prose is the linguistic equivalent of Des Essientes’s tortoise.

The great dilemma for Decadent literature is this: how can one truly achieve a Decadent aesthetic, how can one really get at or get to Decadence in language that is itself not corrupted by decadence? How can Decadence really be achieved by using language that is utterly colonized by the middle-class, democratic forces of the majority, the decent, the powerful, embodied in the two faced idol of usage and prescription. Doesn’t the very inertia of the language, long accustomed to a process of ‘normalization’, either under the heel of the censor or the compulsion of market forces, fatally undermine the very ethos of Decadence? What could a Decadent writer do to make language itself decadent? What would a truly Decadent/decadent language even look like?

Mallarme’s way out of this dilemma was to obliterate the norms of syntax and typesetting by scattering his words across the page in a kind of to-hell-with-the-expense gesture.

Oscar Wilde’s solution in Dorian Gray was to empurple the prose and create lists of fabulous objects and words, indeed making words fabulous objects.

Huysman’s was to compromise the poetic purity of his text by introducing an alien element of extreme objectivity of description, a fascination with taxonomy and chronology, and to include medical and scientific, Latin terminology, and words from obscure technical discourse fields.

Backhouse uses several methods to render his language Decadent. The first is to blend Wilde’s tumescent approach with Huysman’s scientific curiosity. In keeping with the Decadent parody of scientism, the narrator appears to believe that he is writing a paper for an academic conference: It is I think germane to the present paper… and includes footnotes by ‘Backhouse’.

His second approach is to infect an English text with other languages, especially dead languages such as Latin and Greek and Decadent languages such as French and Chinese (for a respectable, decent, Anglo-Saxon reader, nothing is more Decadent than French –pretentious, moi?). The Chinese adds salt to the characterisation of Cixi and the other Chinese personages: nearly everything they say is repeated three times, in English, Chinese characters, and Wade Giles. They speak in their own tongue directly, and as it is refracted (twice) through another tongue. Backhouse, in his use of Chinese, brings to the fore the artifice of the language and its (ortho)graphical system, emphasizing in many places the relationship between its extreme ornamental quality and how this effects its meaning: 

T’ung  統does indeed mean ‘line’, and especially succession (as in Hsuan T’ung宣統, succession to Hsuan Tsung宣統Tao Kuang 道光), but unfortunately the words for President, Tsung T’ung 總統  also contain this character where it means supreme chief. The same thought struck the Old Buddha who riveted her attention on the writing. “What T’ung does he (or she) mean?” p.217

The third way Backhouse renders his language Decadent is to create, hovering above the narrative, as it were, a multilingual discourse field of references to other texts, by means of direct quotation or stylistic echoes. Space and time precludes us here from looking in greater depth at these, but a cursory glance reveals that they point, for the most part, to the theme of a decline from a golden age, and come largely from other Decadent texts, both classical and ‘modern’.

What Mallarme, Wilde, Huysmans and Backhouse have in common is that they all create an artifice of language that foregrounds itself as Decadent:  the word becomes sovereign, as Nietzsche writes. However, where Backhouse goes further than either Wilde or Huysmans is first in the sheer range of his references, and second, in the bravura way he handles camp. For a Decadent aesthetics to extend to language, the language must also become decadent, and camp is one of the places  you end up when you make language decadent.  Sontag writes in her seminal essay Notes on Camp: Camp is art that proposes itself too seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much’, a remark that seems designed to apply specifically to areas of Backhouse’s prose and project in Decadence Mandchoue. The fin de siecle Decadents were too early to discover the potential of camp for the Decadent aesthetic (although Wilde was moving in that direction in Salome), but Backhouse, writing in 1943, used it as a subtle parody of the Decadent voice, entirely in keeping with the Decadent aesthetic of parodying other discourses, but in this case, parodying Decadence itself:

“Now I am going to have my evening meal and an opium pipe: Good appetite and good digestion. You shall attend upon me at the hour of the Rat (11pm); don’t forget that I expect much better results than yesterday.”

“Oh, your Majesty, my tool was dry as your own rainless Gobi desert.”

“Well, we will investigate it on the spot. I will expound to you the twenty-two divers postures in the ‘Clouds and the Rain”, while you in your turn, discourse to me with your inimitable humour the subject of which you are master; I mean that puzzling vocabulary and nomenclature of your beloved homosexual and pederastic preoccupations.” DM 14

Decadent Imagery

Oh the Tired Hedonists, of course, It is a club to which I belong. We are supposed to wear faded roses in our button holes when we meet, and to have a sort of cult for Domitian…

Oscar Wilde

The Decay of Lying

‘The Cult of Domitian’ Wilde mentions in his parody stands more generally for the obsession with Imperial Rome and its decline, which formed a historical reference point for the Decadent movement of the fin de siecle. But Backhouse had no need of Imperial Rome to underpin his version of Decadence: he had his own decadent empire right to hand: China in the late Qing Dynasty.

China in the Decadent imagination was a site of mystery, magic and the all-important exotic. Chinoiserie in Decadent texts functions as a symbol of extreme artifice and aestheticism. Wilde’s 1886 poem Le Panneau describes a Chinese screen with a little ivory girl/Pulling the leaves of pink and pearl/with pale green nails of polished jade. Yeats’s 1938 late Decadent poem Lapis Lazuli uses Chinese imagery to establish a world of artificial beauty quite remote from everyday life. China was also a symbol of decadence, dissolution and depravity. The works of Pierre Loti had created a vogue for the decadent exotic, and in his book Les Derniers Jours De Peking, he had described the bird droppings on the sumptuous carpets in the golden throne rooms inside the Forbidden City. China allowed the Decadents to dream of their own personal empires, and even in some cases to create them, as Loti did, leaving Peking with cartloads of treasure looted from the Forbidden City, writing: I leave Peking tomorrow, and this will be the end of my little imperial dream… 

It was also the origin of opium, both as a material substance and as a cultural trope, a nexus involving visions and inspiration but also debilitation and decline. Gautier and Baudelaire both noted in their essays on opium how the drug induced a vague melancholy when the visions wore off. Opium of course features heavily in Decadence Mandchoue. In fact there are times when it reads as a kind of opium-induced tribute to the Orientalist visions of Gautier and De Quincey. Oscar Wilde, in a very revealing essay on Zhuangzi (unfortunately, the essay is wrongly anthologized as ‘Confucius’) saw the Daoist philosopher as a prototypical Decadent, someone who preached a paradoxical doctrine very similar to the Decadents’, of the immorality of consciously doing good, and the virtues of extreme idleness. Zhuangzi also appears in Wilde’s 1889 essay The Decay of Lying as a symbol of the man who does nothing useful, rather like Des Essientes himself, or an Eastern version of that great Russian sage Oblomov.

By the end of the 19^th century, aside from the imagined Decadence in Western eyes, China was also deeply steeped in real decadence, with an overwheening, corrupt bureaucracy only interested in matters of protocol and face, putting up a determined resistance to the modern world. It had an ancient and archaic culture characterized by extreme artifice, ornamentation, and a populace stupefied by opium addiction. Desiree Nisard, one of the early theorists of Decadence in Europe, defined decadence in 1834 as a condition where verbal ingenuity has replaced moral vision, ornament replaced substance and false complexity replaced clarity of thought and language, a description that applies perfectly to late 19^thcentury China, and to Decadence Mandchoueitself.

This view of China was not only held by the West, however. Chinese intellectuals of the early 20th century also regarded their culture and country as decadent. Liang Ji, a scholar of the Beijing opera, committed suicide out of despair at the irreversible decline of his country, declaring that the four cardinal virtues of Chinese culture: loyalty, filial piety, chastity and righteousness, had been replaced by the four decadent virtues of eating, drinking, amusement, and pleasure.

China as a symbol of decadence, then, had a rich potential, and Backhouse saw this. With his unparalleled knowledge of the culture, the people and the languages, he saw that he was perfectly placed, by education, experience and inclination, to create a work in which Western Decadence could interact with Chinese decadence.

If one is looking for the moment when the Qing dynasty turned from greatness and began its inexorable decline towards decadence, it is the reign of the Xianfeng Emperor that springs to mind. After the pinnacle of greatness had been achieved in the reigns of the Three Great Emperors: Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong, followed by a period of stablisation or stagnation during the reigns of Jiaqing and Daoguang, the rot really sets in during the reign of Xianfeng and accelerates inexorably thereafter, infecting irredeemably the reigns of the syphilitic Tongzhi, the doomed and tragic Guangxu, and the infant puppet Puyi. What links all these decadent Emperors together is the figure of Cixi, the Lady Yehonala, consort of Xienfeng, mother of Tongzhi, nemesis and enemy of Guangxu, and kingmaker on her deathbed of the infant Puyi. She is the thread running through all the later reigns and overseeing –causing? – the decline of the Qing. She is also Backhouse’s coherent nexus, the figure that links together all the chapters of Decadence Mandchoue and its central embodiment of Decadence.

Doubly exotic (a Celestial in a Western context, a Manchu in a Chinese context) she is also a woman, and powerfully rapacious one at that. This is why Backhouse writes about her in the way that he does, not because of his sick sexual fantasies, or to titillate his tired old age with memories of his youthful debauchery, as the text spuriously asserts, and as Trevor-Roper fell for, but because for Backhouse, seeking to unite Western and Eastern modes of Decadence within a literary work, she is, conveniently, a potent symbol of both decadence and Decadence. Presenting her though the lens of personal, erotic memoir is a merely a convention of the genre, as we have seen, so the question of whether Backhouse actually met her, and whether the various congresses he describes with her are based on fact or deluded fantasy therefore becomes irrelevant.

For a work of art that aims at Decadence, a more powerful and resonant symbol cannot be imagined. For what could possibly be more apt as an image of decadence, and as a Decadent image, than an aged Empress locked in sexual congress with a young homosexual, aristocratic foreigner? This symbol provides the focus of many kinds of deviance and inversion: in power relations, in gender and sexual relations, in age and cultural differences. It summons up feelings of disgust in the soul of the literal minded, and feelings of transgressive delight in the soul of the devotee of Decadence. Also, given the history of relations between China and Britain specifically, and the Western powers generally, from the Opium Wars of 1842 onwards, what image could be more compelling, more richly, historically ironic? Exactly who is being exploited when Cixi and the narrator perform their osculations on each other’s private parts?

The Decadent Erotic

Style is quite sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance.

Oscar Wilde

The Decay of Lying

Critics have noted the connection between the Naturalism and Decadence, by noting how Decadent texts frequently include a kind of scientific or medical curiosity about depravity. The great taxonomies and histories of A rebours spring to mind here. Decadent writers like to include spurious academic references, couching their lurid descriptions of deviance in medical or scientific jargon. This has a twofold reason: an Aesopian use of language to get Decadent texts past censors, but also to infect such respectable scientific discourse with the spirit of Decadence itself, by incorporating (parodies of) realistic elements into a thoroughly imaginative text. Decadence Mandchoue employs the same strategy, as we have seen in the extract on the menu of the gay brothel quoted in part 1 of this essai.  Decadence Mandchoue everywhere shows an exhaustive interest in the naming of parts and positions involved in all kinds of sexual congress, in a number of different languages. It also includes lurid and fascinating quasi-scientific – medical, anthropological, sociological - information about eunuchs.

The erotic scenes hark back to the anonymous novel Teleny, Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves, John Bloxam’s story The Priest and the Acolyteand ‘Jack Saul’s’ autobiography Sins of the Cities of the Plain, the ‘artistic’ pornography of Jean Lorrain,and the exotic erotica of Pierre Louys and Pierre Loti: all notorious Decadent works. What distinguishes Decadence Mandchoue from these erotic works, however, is that it is not really erotic. The prose style, the constant code switching and quoting, is so artificial, so rococo, that it disallows an imaginative reconstruction in the mind that is truly arousing. The sex scenes all follow the same pattern and involve a lack of clear division between active and passive partners (unusual in real life, one hears, but very common in gay lit), and whipping. The same sequence of activities and elements are found for instance in Jack Saul and Teleny. This, then, is conventional, literary, genre sex, in which language and structure foreground themselves, not a description of real sex.

The androgynes, hermaphrodites and femmes fatale of Decadent art are transformed in Decadence Mandchoue. Cixi is of course the ultimate femme fatale: an Empress who has her previous lovers murdered. The anxiety that this will happen to the narrator surfaces in several places in the novel, and one of the ways he assuages this is by keeping Cixi amused by regaling her with stories of his gay life, in a Decadent reversal of Scheherazade’s situation. The clitoromegalous Cixi is also a symbol of the hermaphrodite, as is the homosexual narrator, who is sometimes passive and sometimes active in his relations with her, and with his male lovers. Cixi during her lifetime was regarded as the earthly incarnation of Guang Ying or Avalokiteśvara, a Bodhisattva who appears sometimes in male guise, sometimes in female form. Her/His presence is ubiquitous all over Asia. Cixi, the great Decadent Queen, is a Chinese version of Balzac’s hermaphroditic character Seraphita, uniting the sensual and the occult within a Chinese, Taoist context rather than a Swedenborgian one.  The text abounds in descriptions of beautiful boys and eunuchs, the androgynes of Decadent art: Balzac’s castrato Sarrasine is reincarnated as any number of candidates: Li Lien Ying, for example.

Conclusion

Does the setting sun of decadence deserve our contempt and anathema for being less simple in tone than the rising sun of morning?

Theophile Gautier

Histoire du romantism

Ironically, because he didn’t mean it this way, Trevor-Roper was right to saythat Decadence Mandchoue is not merely coloured by imagination in detail but pure fantasy throughout – and yet fantasy which was spun with extraordinary ingenuity around and between true facts accurately remembered or cunningly bent to sustain it. But is this not a description of any work of art? Is this is not how any artist works in consciously creating a work of fiction, especially historical fiction, which is what Decadence Mandchoue is? Trevor-Roper’s inept misreading of the work is likely to stick to it, like guano on a monument. Sterling Seagrave, for example, who should know better as a long seasoned Old China Hand himself, calls Decadence Mandchoue the inflamed sexual fantasy of a mind completely unhinged and calls it lunatic graffiti, unthinkingly following Trevor-Roper, and making it clear that he had not actually read the work he is describing.

This might stand as a general response of those who are ultimately hostile or unsympathetic towards the Decadent aesthetic.

An important corrective here might be to look at how the Chinese language translation of the book has been received. In his introduction to the Chinese translation, the Taiwanese writer Luo Yijun praises the work’s artistic cohesion.

The Chinese dissident writer Bao Pu (editor of the banned Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang) praises Backhouse’s contributions to Western understanding of Chinese culture, - he is referring to Backhouse’s other two books- and also deplores Trevor-Roper’s hatchet job on Backhouse. A new generation of scholars in the field of East Asian studies from Pacific universities is also reassessing Backhouse’s life and career. 

A closer study of this work will reveal more secrets, for instance: the presence of Daoist ideas and patterns, the interaction between Backhouse’s European languages and use of Chinese, and a closer comparison of the work with Rene Leys and other Decadent and Modernist texts about China suggest themselves. Meanwhile, it is to be hoped that Earnshaw Books will produce the second volume Backhouse gave to Hoeppli.

Memory and imagination: the first counts as nothing without the second, which is verily the ode of the agnostic to immortality and gilds old age with the after- glow of youth. These dear phantoms of the past, if they cannot restore happiness to one who moveth in what is certainly not an ampler ether a diviner air, at least make life easier to be borne.

DM 8

'The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci ' Jonathan D. Spence

March 2, 2014, 9:02 pm

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The memory palace stands on its elevation, suffused in an even light. The reception hall is still silent, yet inside there is more for the mind to dwell on…

Jonathan Spence has made a name for himself as the author of books on various aspects of Chinese history which aspire to be more than informative works of scholarship or historiography, works which aim at the status of literature. He does this by eschewing a conventional exposition in which narrative is balanced by analysis, and looks for a more thematic, artistic, human approach. In this way he reveals new insights into the culture he is writing about, and has created a new kind of genre, one that sits between literature and history, and shares the best of both. It helps that Spence can also write really vividly.

Here he casts his eye on the story of Matteo Ricci’s interaction with the Ming Dynasty, using as his basis four images that Ricci described in his work on memory palaces, mental images that he designed in order to teach his Chinese listeners/readers how to design their own memory palaces; and four drawings that Ricci designed for inclusion in a book called The Ink Garden, published by one of his Chinese friends in 1606. The book alternates between a description of image and drawing, teasing out as much information as possible about the background of the image/drawing, and using it as a springboard to look at various aspects of Ricci’s life, work, and the interaction between two cultures.

In his analysis, for example, of the third picture from The Ink Garden, ‘The Men of Sodom’, Spence compares the Biblical passage which prompted the picture, and Ricci’s own verbal descriptor of the picture, drawing out the changes that Ricci made to the story that he believed would appeal to his audience, the suppressions of material that he felt would be beyond them – or inconvenient to explain, such as the incest between Lot and his daughters, and the inexplicably cruel death of Lot’s wife by salination. Spence also then compares the final version of the drawing Ricci made with another drawing Ricci used as a basis for his own, the engraving of Crispin de Pas which Ricci had with him, again, expanding on the changes Ricci made, and which he felt were necessary to get his message across to his audience.

This method of close readings supplemented with descriptions of the world of Ricci’s youth and the world of Ming Dynasty China recreates a wonderfully detailed and vibrant portrait of the world in the sixteenth century, both the outer world of externalities of shipping and horrible sea voyages, for example, and the inner world of mentalities and ideologies, a recreation that doesn’t only focus on Europe, but one that shows how Europe and China were slowly drawn together by the inexorable pull of trade, profit and the desire for exploration and conquest, both territorial and ideological. The book is not only interesting for students of Ming China, but also for students of Renaissance Europe.

Spence is fecund with his use of detail, and scrupulous with his judgments. He makes no comments on the dreadful lies that Ricci told about his religion; he voices no disapproval of the strong profit motive underlying the Jesuit mission to China (the Jesuits established their own trading cycles with Japan and India, reaping enormous profits, giving rise to the rumours among the Chinese that the Jesuits were alchemical wizards who had mastered the art of turning base metal into silver – the basis of Chinese currency-, for how else could they explain the seemingly endless inflow and outflow of specie into the Jesuit coffers?); he conveys no sense of outrage at how the Jesuits threw overboard any ‘unsuitable’ books they found their shipmates reading on the long, dangerous and very boring voyage out. Spence simply presents the facts and lets them speak for themselves, citing for example, a letter from a Chinese scholar to Ricci, suggesting that Ricci’s attacks on Buddhism are wrong headed, and politely requesting Ricci to actually read some of the Buddhist texts, and helpfully appending a list of relevant sutras, and then Ricci’s reply to him, with all its rudeness, self-importance and narrow-mindedness.

Ricci, in spite of his learning, linguistic gifts, scientific accomplishments and personal courage, considered as an embodiment of a culture that believed itself superior to China’s, comes across as arrogant, dull-minded, unscrupulously foxy, a people user, a bearer of a creed replete with blood and cruelty that is crude in comparison with the subtlety of Buddhism and the liberal minded-openness of Daoism. With each set-back the mission encounters, the reader rejoices that the spread of Christianity has been foiled or hindered in some way, and that its noisome nonsense has been minimized. And yet one can’t help but feel sorry for Ricci the man, or at least empathize with his experience as a despised foreigner in a culture vastly superior to his own, with his loneliness and isolation, with the hatred he encountered amongst ordinary Chinese – which even resulted in an attack on the Jesuit compound in Shaozhou by a howling angry mob – and by his efforts to learn the language.

Ricci’s guiding dream, his goal throughout all the long years of his life in China was eventually to effect a conversion of the Emperor Wanli to Christianity, a goal which shows at once his hubris and naivety, in imagining for one second that the Son of Heaven, the highest human embodiment of a culture much older and wiser than Ricci’s own, would stoop to listen to Ricci’s pablum about a virgin birth and worship of a man who died on an instrument of torture. When Ricci was finally admitted to the Presence, he met only an empty chair. The Wanli Emperor lived in total seclusion and never gave personal audiences, not to anybody, not even to the highest princes of his realm, and certainly not to a greasy, hairy, sweaty, long-nosed foreigner with overweening ambitions; and Ricci had to make obeisance to a piece of furniture, which is an image of an encounter between cultures that stays with you long after you read about it.

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'The City of Light' Jacob D'Ancona

March 28, 2014, 12:26 am

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Naturally, a manuscript

Umberto Eco

The Name of the Rose

In 1990, renowned Jewish scholar David Selbourne is shown a manuscript that has lain hidden for seven centuries in a private collection. The manuscript is in medieval Italian and purports to be the first-hand account of a journey made by a Jewish merchant from the town of Ancona in Northern Italy to the city of Zaitun in China in the years 1270  to 1273.

The manuscript details the perilous journey made by Jacob and his fellow merchants by ship to the eastern end of the Mediterranean, then by camel caravan across the Syrian desert, then by ship again down the coast of Asia Minor, across the Indian Ocean, through the Java Straits and up the coast of Vietnam to the coastal city of Zaitun, modern day Quanzhou, in Fujian province. The travellers are beset by tempests, pirates, plague, boredom; they are feasted by relatives and business associates among the Jewish diaspora in every major port they call at; they conduct their business, selling and buying and exchanging goods for specie or gemstones that they sew into their clothes and keep secret. All through the voyage, Jacob maintains his Jewish observances, celebrating the Sabbath – which means not drinking water or disembarking on that day – studying his Torah and keeping to a kosher diet. 

Once arrived in Zaitun, the City of Light, Jacob becomes involved in the dispute currently raging in the city between two parties. The first is the party of merchants – the new and very rich middle class who are clamoring for a greater say in the city’s affairs and for a higher status generally; the second is the party of the traditional scholar elite, led by the elderly former prefect Pitaco, who decry the loss of traditional Confucian values and who are determined to put a stop to the encroachment of modernity and internationalism represented by the merchant party. During the debates, various themes are aired; including the role of education, the differences between Judaism, Islam and Christianity (Jacob indulges in some rather juicy rants against that man as he calls Christ and his followers), the best way to deal with the poor, the nature of duty, the best form of government and so on. One of the most interesting aspect of these central sections is the emphasis on a Jewish response to Chinese culture. Most medieval or pre-modern accounts of China are by Christian and usually Jesuit sources, and they interpret China through the lens of Christianity. It’s refreshing and important to have another light shed from a different direction. Jacob is a follower of Maimonides, and his speeches to the Chinese reflect that.

The debate between the two parties is given focus and urgency by the fact that the Mongols are every day coming nearer to the city to conquer it, as they have already conquered Northern China, and to bring Zaitun within the fold of their newly established Yuan Dynasty. We are in the last days of the Southern Sung, and there is a mood of impending doom and change. The argument between the two parties develops into full blown civil riot, and Jacob is compelled to flee the city precipitously in fear of his life.

Jacob gives us a detailed description of the city, its inhabitants and their way of life, especially the seedy underbelly of the city with its prostitutes, singsong boys and thieves. He describes the quality and enormous variety of the goods he buys and trades there, and although he is rather vague about the full extent and details of his profits, we understand that they are considerable. He is full of information about the Jewish trading diaspora, about the economics of long distance trade, about his travelling companions, about the perils of sea travel and trading patterns between Asia and Europe. The manuscript gives a fascinating account of a voyage not unsimilar to that made by Marco Polo at around the same time to Northern China, and reinforces many of the observations Polo makes about his sojourn in China. It adds considerably to our knowledge of Jewish trading practices in the thirteenth century, rounds out our knowledge of the Southern Sung, confirms many of the details given by Polo in his narrative, and is generally a fascinating and intriguing read.

But.

Is it genuine? No one else except David Selbourne (and its mysterious owner) has seen the manuscript, for reasons Selbourne outlines in his first chapter, and its veracity has been called into question by several specialists on China, not least among them Jonathan Spence, who pointed out in a review in the New York Times in 1997 that Jacob’s manuscript could easily have been pieced together from various contemporary sources by someone who knows those sources intimately. Spence argues that the appearance of novelistic elements undermines the realism of the work as pure reportage. Other reviewers have suggested that the whole thing might be a very ingenuous post-modern novel, in the manner of say, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which also purports to be based on a newly discovered manuscript in medieval Italian. While Western sinologists, economic historians and historians of Jewish culture have pointed out inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the text, Chinese commentators, on the other hand, have been much more positive, praising the accuracy of the description contained within it of daily life in the Southern Sung.

Selbourne has responded to all these criticisms in detail in an afterword to the paperback edition. He has pointed out that the original document of Marco Polo’s travels has never been found (we only have copies of copies of copies) but very few doubt the authenticity of that account, so why doubt the authenticity of this manuscript, which has also not been seen by scholars? Selbourne refutes in detail many of the accusations of inaccuracy or anachronicity pointed out by reviewers and scholars, and wittily deflects the suggestion that it is a novel. But the question remains: if it’s not genuine, is Selbourne himself the author of the text, or is he the victim of a forger? The answer will never be known until an independent eye can also see Jacobo’s manuscript, and as Selbourne has repeatedly asserted that this will never happen due to circumstances beyond his control, the status of the text remains undecided.

There are times when the text reads as an authentic document, when it confirms or adds to what we know about European trade with China in the thirteenth century, specifically those sections of the text that describe the voyage out and home, and the descriptions of trading practices, and of the city of Zaitun. But there are others - especially the long central section in the debates between the two parties contending for control of the city - when it reads more as a novel, a Philippic, a Jeremiad, a satire in the style of Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes.

In this debate, the long speeches given by the Confucian scholar Pitaco can be read in two ways: as an example of the standard kind of criticism Confucian scholars leveled against merchants – who throughout Chinese history have traditionally been regarded as scum- and also at the same time as an example of a cranky old man lamenting the sorry state of the modern world, you know, ‘the youth of today have no respect for their elders’, kind of thing. The speeches given by the merchants, on the other hand, sound like the typical justification for naked greed given by today’s neocon libertarians.

Here is Pitaco:

The world under heaven falls; princes grow feeble and the Tartars approach, but sage leaders do not appear. In the past, a man of noble feelings and wise counsel but poor in possessions was admired, but now others look upon him with contempt as if he had lost his way. For men and women now do as they please, thinking that even marriage is a curb upon their desires. Moreover, those without learning now feel no shame to make known their foolish judgments as though they were wise.

Isn’t this the kind of thing elitists and conservatives say nowadays, about the decline of values and the growth of stupidity?

Here is Ociuscien, a prominent merchant:

By his trading, the merchant creates riches for others as well as for himself. From these riches spring many benefits for the poor, while, from his getting, carrying and selling, like an ant, he sets an example to others of constant labour and gain. In addition, through his powers and those of his brother merchants, a means is gained not for the pillage of the city or for the destroying of its ways, but for the protection of the city from the tyrant who would seek to oppress its citizens with unjust tithes and dues….

Isn’t this a typical Randian, small government, tickledown view of economics?

There is the sense in reading these debates that Jacob is not just speaking of his own times, but also to ours; and indeed one perceptive critic noted that By coincidence, much of what Jacob d'Ancona dislikes in thirteenth century China is what David Selbourne dislikes in late-20th century Britain. However, if it is a novel, why would Selbourne persist in claiming that it is not, given that, if it is, it’s an astounding work of great complexity, profundity and originality. If it’s a forgery, on the other hand, what would motivate such a complex hoax, and who would hope to gain from it?

Either way, the City of Light is not only Zaitun, but more generally is the blazing commercial center of a London, a New York, or a Shanghai, all glitter and pleasure, but with a heart of darkness and barbarians mustering at the passes. Considered as genuine historical pronouncements, the debates exemplify the circularity of history, that there is nothing new under the sun; considered as fiction, the text articulate some of the tensions of our present moment of late stage global capitalism.

 

Crowds of men day and night run through the streets in the search of prey, while each fears the next, so great is the suspicion that one man has for the other. For this is the City of Light, which you, sires, have created, in which although the lanterns glitter in every place, there is only darkness inside men’s souls.

Zhang Tao on the times

April 3, 2014, 7:15 pm

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One man in a hundred is rich, while nine out of ten are impoverished. The poor cannot stand up to the rich who, though few in number, are able to control the majority. The lord of silver rules heaven and the god of copper cash reigns over the earth. Avarice is without limit, flesh injures bone, everything is for personal pleasure, and nothing can be let slip. In dealing with others, everything is recompensed down to the last hair. The demons of treachery stalk…

Late Ming 

John Selden on marriage

April 8, 2014, 6:12 pm

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Of all actions of a man's life, his marriage does least concern other people. Yet of all actions of our life it is most meddled with by other people.

"The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China" Timothy Brook

April 14, 2014, 1:19 am

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Brook takes as his starting point two texts. First, stanza 80 from the Dao Der Jing:

Keep the kingdom small, its people few

Make sure they have no use for tools

That do the work of tens or hundreds.

Nor let the people travel far

And leave their homes and risk their lives.

Boat or cart, if kept at all, best not to ride;

Shield and blade best not to show.

Guide them back to early times

When knotted cords served for signs,

And they took relish in their food

And delight in their dress,

Secure in their dwellings,

Content in their customs.

Although a neighbor kingdom stood in view

And the barnyard cries of cocks and dogs

Echoed from village to village,

Their folk would never traffic to and fro

Never, to the last of their days.

trans: Moss Roberts

This was the favourite stanza from Lao Tzi of the first Ming Emperor Hongwu, and he built his new Ming dynasty following its percepts: a rural agrarian society composed of small villages with minimum contact between them, a population largely supine and uninterested in the wider world. The world the Hongwu  Emperor created out of this vision was pretty nasty: a 14^th century version of Mao’s China, with utter uniformity in dress and food and culture, the strongest restrictions on movement of people and information – uncertified travel was punished by death –and increasingly heavy corveeson the people, in effect a totalitarian system avant la lettre.

The Ming dynasty was a Chinese Dynasty sandwiched between two foreign dynasties: the Mongol Yuan and the Manchurian Qing. It was appropriate that as its guiding ethos stood this quintessential Chinese text, motivating Hongwu and all his successors, even as the reality gradually slipped away from this vision, and the dynasty succumbed to weak rulers, strong eunuchs, and decadence.

The second text is the writings of the gazetteer Zhang Tao. Every county throughout Chinese history has had its gazetteers: newsletters of local events and news put together by the staff of the county magistrates based on reports sent in from the literati of the neighborhood. Brook has based his history of the Ming on a study of these local gazetteers. Zhang Tao was the compiler of a gazetteer from Sheh county just south of Nanjing who wrote at the beginning of the seventeenth century. What distinguishes Zhang Tao from other gazetteers is his literary ability. Brook uses an essay Zhang wrote on the ‘Seasons of the Ming’ for the 1609 gazetteer. In this essay, Zhang Tao looks back over the history of his dynasty and divides the dynasty into three seasons: winter, spring, summer. (Zhang Tao is writing in what he considers to be the autumn of the dynasty – he doesn’t know the end is coming, but he can sense it in the wind.)

Winter

Every family was self-sufficient, with a house to live in, land to cultivate, hills from which to cut firewood, and gardens in which to grow vegetables. Taxes were collected without harassment and bandits did not appear. Marriages were arranged at the proper times, and the villages were secure. Women spun and wove and men tended the crops. Servants were obedient and hardworking, neighbors cordial and friendly.

Spring

Those who went out as merchants became numerous, and the ownership of land was no longer esteemed. As men matched wits using their assets, fortunes rose and fell unpredictably. The capable succeeded, the dull-witted were destroyed; the family to the west enriched itself while the family to the east was impoverished. The balance between the mighty and the lowly was lost as both competed for trifling amounts, each exploiting the other and everyone publicizing himself.

Summer

Those who enriched themselves through trade became the majority, and those who enriched themselves through agriculture were few. The rich became richer and the poor, poorer. Those who rose took over and those who fell were forced to flee. It was capital that brought power… trade proliferated and the tiniest scrap of profit was counted up. Corrupt magnates sowed disorder and wealthy shysters preyed…Purity was completely swept away.

One can see in Zhang Dao’s essay the gradual falling away from the ideal expressed in stanza 80 of the Dao Der Jing, from an agrarian society to one ruled by money and profit. Zhang Dao knows that the Hongwu Emperor would have been horrified at the state of the Empire towards the end of his dynasty had he but been able to see it.

Brook writes: I have ended up writing this history of the Ming dynasty in order to understand [Zhang Tao’s] history of the dynasty and why it made sense to him.This is the great strength of Brook’s book: a social and economic history focusing on the things that those peopleliving though those times regarded as important. Brook covers everything: printing and publishing, silk production, travel and communications, the gradual growth of internal trade and merchanting, something the Chinese have always traditionally looked down on, the impact of the increasing demand for silver on the Ming economy and the surrounding nations, the structures of rule and control, taxation, corruption, the status of women, prostitution both male and female, food, clothes, the status and changing role of the literati and so on. Brook’s great strength is that he combines a long duree approach with the judicious inclusion of primary sources, including travellers tales, the gazetteers already mentioned, literary essays, poetry and excerpts from the huge compendia of knowledge that were popular during the last third of the dynasty. He goes over much familiar ground, to be sure, but he brings such interesting texts as supporting evidence, and it’s this that makes his book so good: the bringing to light of a whole world of Ming literary endeavor that is little known in the West, but which has so much to tell us about our own (end) times.

Autumn

One man in a hundred is rich, while nine out of ten are impoverished. The poor cannot stand up to the rich, who, though few in number, are able to control the majority. The lord of silver rules heaven, and the god of copper cash reigns over the earth. Avarice is without limit, flesh injures bone, everything is for personal pleasure, and nothing can be let slip. In dealings with others, everything is recompensed down to the last hair. The demons of treachery stalk…

Fragment 2504

April 24, 2014, 8:04 pm

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In a short story from his Berlin collection (1924 -1933) called Letter about a Mastiff Brecht has his narrator say: I have always been convinced that if one lets things take their course without interfering while at the same time snapping up any chances that may occur, things are bound to take care of themselves. This is an expression of the Daoist concept of effortless action: Wu wei 無為. In Stanza 10, for example, of the Dao Der Jing, Lao Tzu speaks of the best way to govern: to care for the people and rule the kingdom, must you not master underacting? Brecht’s narrator here is heavily ironic, as he has just had his neighbors evicted so that he can steal their dog. He just casually mentioned to the concierge that his neighbors were sub-letting, and asked him innocently if it is legal. The concierge wrote to the management company of the building about the matter, and the result was that neighbors and lodger were all evicted. Is this underhand way of going about things what Lao Tze means?

'Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo' Routledge Performance Practitioners

May 28, 2014, 8:33 pm

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A comprehensive and detailed summary of the birth and history of butoh focusing on the interaction and individualities of its two founders. The origins of butoh, from its recasting of Kabuki and Noh and its rejection of Western balletic practices, the liberation of the body from a visual focus – how does this movement look – to an internal meditative practice – how does this movement feel, what does it express in and of itself – are all well explained, with plenty of excerpts from the writings and workshop words of Hijikata and Ohno.

The last chapter includes descriptions of working practices and theories of contemporary butohists, both Western and Japanese, showing how Hijikata’s and Ohno’s impetus has taken new directions, assimilated new forms. This testifies to the great strength of butoh as an idea and a practice: an art form that is at once a meditation on the relationship between the body, the mind, and the world.

The authors give detailed descriptions of some of the key performances in butoh history:  from Kinjiki (1959) to Suiren (1987). The book is lavishly supplied with photographs of performances, a glossary of key terms (but do we really need to have avant garde explained to us?) and a useful bibliography. A chronology of Hijikata and Ohno’s performances would also have been useful.

Most valuable for its explication of butoh-fu and the role it has in the butoh world. Essentially scrapbooks of notes, haiku, images culled from art books, newspaper clippings, photographs, butoh-fu exists as a kind of notation whose job is to stimulate a somatic response. Here is an example of a butoh-fu from Hijikata:

You Live Because Insects Eat You

A person is buried in a wall.

He becomes an insect.

The internal organs are parched and dry.

The insect is dancing on a thin sheet of paper.

The insect tries to hold falling particles from its own body,

And dances, making rustling noises.

The insect becomes a person who is wandering around,

So fragile, he could crumble at the slightest touch.

The butoh dancer dances these images, not representing them for an audience, but using them as a stimulus for the transformations of movement of the purest kind. Hijikata’s butoh-fu are still not available to the public; I have seen extracts from them in an exhibition in Taipei in winter 2014, but I’m itching now to see more.

Butoh is a dead body standing desperately upright.

Hijikata

Butoh means to meander, or to move, as it were, in twists and turns between the realms of the living and the dead.

Ohno

Fragment 29052014

May 29, 2014, 7:29 am

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Artaud writes in Chapter 4 of The Theatre and its Double:

These metaphysicians of natural disorder who in dancing restore to us every atom of sound and every fragmentary perception as if these were now about to rejoin their own generating principles, are able to wed movement and sound so perfectly that it seems the dancers have hollow bones to make these noises of resonant drums and woodblocks with their hollow wooden limbs.

Here we are suddenly in deep metaphysical anguish, and the rigid aspect of the body in trance, stiffened by the tide of cosmic forces which besiege it, is admirably expressed by that frenetic dance of rigidities and angles, in which one suddenly feels the mind begin to plummet downwards.

As if waves of matter were tumbling over each other, dashing their crests into the deep and flying from all sides of the horizon to be enclosed in one minute portion of tremor and trance – to cover over the void of fear.

He is writing about Balinese dancers, but the description also fits closely, like a tissue between two palms, the ethos and movement of Hijikata’s butoh.

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'The Theatre and its Double' Antonin Artaud

June 9, 2014, 12:25 am

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Is theatre a branch of literature or an art in its own right?

The most important work of theatre theory of the 20^th century, theatre historians divide the history of their subject into ‘before’ and ‘after’ Artaud’s seminal text. Before Artaud, theatre (especially, but not only in France) was a branch of literature; the text was all important, and that text was psychological: characters talked about their inner states, and conflicts arose as a clash between different aims and intentions of the characters. The playwright was king, actors and directors were subsidiary supporting ‘workers’, whose job was to bring the text to life.

Artaud held that theatre should be an art form in its own right, and he sought to inject theatre with some of the pagan, atavistic, magical, sacrificial, ritual, ceremonial, cathartic power that it had once had in Ancient Greece, and which he saw as still existing in the theatre of the East, especially Balinese theatre, which exercised an incalculable influence on Artaud’s ideas.

For Artaud, the text is irrelevant; the theatre must create a new language of theatrical signs, in which the mise en scene predominates over the text, a language (what later theorists would call semiotics) consisting of music, design, space, props, lighting and sound effects, movement and gesture. This total theatre, this new theatrical grammar, liberated from the stifling power of the psychological word, will work directly on the audience’s entire nervous system, cleansing and purifying.

It’s Artaud’s ideas which gave rise to what used to be called ‘director’s theatre’, a theatre in which the ideas or interpretation of the director takes precedence over the text, or indeed in which there is no text, but the work is devised in workshop as a collaborative process between director, designer, writer and actor. Chief examples of this are the productions of Grotowski, Brecht, Joan Littlewood, Peter Brook, and in our own time, the theatre of Robert Lepage and possibly, Le Cirque du Soleil (although this has become merely watered down entertainment now.)

Central to Artaud’s vision of a real theatre (as opposed to a staged text) is the notion of cruelty, and it’s this idea that makes The Theatre and its Double such a powerfully important literary text – apart from Artaud’s fabulous, incandescent prose – outside the immediate field of theatre studies. It’s also an idea that was –and continues still to be – much misunderstood. The term appears in his Manifesto for a Theatre of Cruelty from 1938 and is later developed in a series of letters to J.P. ( I do not know who this is – a critical and academic apparatus to the Grove Press edition of the English translation is woefully non- existent.)

For Artaud, cruelty is a metaphysical condition, a necessary concomitant to consciousness. There is no cruelty without consciousness and without the application of consciousness. It is consciousness which gives to every act of life its blood-red colour, its cruel nuance…. For Artaud, cruelty arises from the consciousness of ones acts, and from a range of mental attitudes with which one does those acts, especially the determination to carry acts through.  He lists these mental attitudes thus: rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination. The dual notion of determination (determination in its every day sense of ‘intention’, determination in its technical philosophical sense as ‘necessity’) is crucial here. If, as philosophers maintain, free will is an illusion and everything is determined, then this is an act of cruelty on the part of some creator/nature; to be conscious of this is to suffer cruelty: The most current philosophical determinism is, from the point of view of our existence, an image of cruelty.  For Artaud, our life is bounded by, infused by cruelty as a result of our consciousness of our lack of free will.

Life itself is cruelty, then. (This was unfortunately so for Artaud himself, who spent years locked away in mental institutions, often against his will, and who probably took his own life, although we are not sure about this). A theatre such as that envisioned by Artaud would break down the life-culture dichotomy, and would allow culture – which Artaud sees as actually smothering the true nature of life -  to really represent life: A protest against the idea of culture as distinct from life – as if there were culture on side and life on the other, as if true culture were not a refined means of understanding and exercising life. 

The theatre will never find itself again – i.e. constitute a means of true illusion – except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out, on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior.

'Les Chants de Maldoror' Comte de Lautreamont

June 22, 2014, 5:03 am

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 “All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,


And study of revenge, immortal hate,


And courage never to submit or yield:”

Satan in Paradise Lost Book 1, 106-8

Milton

These are the songs of Maldoror: prose poems in the style of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen De Paris, organized into six cantos of between 5 to 16 stanzas each, first published in 1868, to almost universal neglect and uninterest.

Who is Maldoror? The text tells us that he was born evil; that he never cuts his fingernails so that he can pierce the breast of a child more easily therewith to drink its blood; that his breath exhales poison; that his forehead is furrowed green; that his face is like the face of some hideous deep-sea fish; that he lives alone in a cave, shunned by and shunning humanity; that he prowls the city at night wrapped in black; that he hasn’t slept for thirty years; that he was born deaf but that he developed the ability to hear; that he likes to have sex with prepubescent boys; that he is permanently tumescent; that he changes his clothes twice a week so as to save mankind from dying of their stench; that he is a shape-changer wanted by an army of spies and agents throughout Europe; that he loves the cold purity of mathematics; that he has assisted at the revolutions of the globe and been a silent witness to cataclysms and disasters; that he only has one eye in the centre of his forehead; and finally, in the last canto, there is the suggestion that Maldoror is Lucifer himself, the devil with a myriad names, this particular one conjured up by Lautreamont himself, and compounded of (echoes of) the French words for sickness or evil (mal), gold (or), and  horror (horreur). We let these words, then, as defined by Littre’s Dictionary (first edition published 1863-72, coterminous with the publication of Maldoror) stand as symbols of various aspects of the text, and our responses to it.

1.) MAL: that which is contrary to virtue, probity and honour,that which wounds, which hurts. A symbol of transgression and pain.

Maldoror’s text transgresses not least in the shocking power of its images, to which we will return later, but in the general violation and blurring of traditional literary boundaries such as genre and structure, such as the relationships between author and protagonist, and between reader and text.

Genre and Structure

As prose poems, the writing violates the traditional distinctions between poetry and prose. To be sure, Lautreamont is taking Baudelaire as his model here, but he does so in a quite self-conscious way, in which the discourse is aware of its own ambiguous status as song, chant, lay, and text, and in which it proclaims a synesthesia between speaking and writing, reading and hearing: I propose to proclaim in a loud voice and without emotion the cold and grave chant that you are about to hear. 1.8 We are reading prose, but the spirit of poetry saturates language and protagonist: the fundamental accents of poetry preserve none the less their intrinsic sway over my intelligence. 5.1.

Although Maldoror present his texts to us as songs, he also highlights the process of writing: I find it stupid that it should be necessary…. to place before me an open ink stand and several sheets of uncrumpled paper. 6.2

In an ironic dig at the late 19^thcentury doctrine of art for art’s sake, he proclaims the ‘usefulness’ of his ‘poems’, calling them Dramatic Episodes of implacable utility! 6.2 blurring the distinction between the lower reading for pleasure (titivation) or the loftier reading for improvement (cultivation). If Maldoror is the devil, from his point of view, the utility of the verses must lie in their poisonous, damning effect upon the reader.

Baudelaire’s prose poems were written as sketches and published randomly in various journals over a period of time. Maldoror’s prose poems have the same appearance of being occasional pieces, but they are in fact carefully structured into a whole, as Maldoror himself tells us: Now the synthetic section of my work is complete and sufficiently paraphrased…Today I am about to invent a little novel of thirty pages 6.1

The first three cantos have a different character from cantos 4 and 5, and use various repeated lines or sentences within each stanza as a quasi poetic device, one used frequently in chants. Cantos 4 and 5 exchange this device for another one: a parody of French Academic prose, which –both parody and target- is often impenetrable. Maldoror here employs embedding, double negatives, parentheses and other rhetorical devices; he starts sentences that get longer and longer, and then he simply abandons them:

By that very fact, depriving myself of the light and skeptical mannerisms of ordinary conversations, and sufficiently prudent not to ask… I no longer recall what I was intending to say, for I do not remember the beginning of the sentence. 6.2

Canto 6 contains a story spread out over several stanzas – up till now, each stanza has been totally self contained with no reference to others around it. This ‘novel’ is supposed to embody the themes and images in the preceding part of the work. The work thus has certain similarities in structure with another contemporary work, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, which also foregrounds ‘metaphysical’ matter by placing it in front of a narrative. In its form, then, and by appearing to be something which it is not, the text transgresses notions of literary probity.

Relationship between author and protagonist

Throughout the text there is the disconcerting suggestion that Maldoror is a portrait of the author himself, but of course, one must always guard against such readerly naivete. The danger of identifying protagonist with author is not mitigated by the fact that almost nothing is known about the author. Lautreamont is a pseudonym which covers the real name of Isadore Lucien Ducasse, an indigent writer who was kicking around Paris in the late 1860s but who doesn’t seem to have made many friends, or made much of a mark on his times. His death certificate dated 24 November 1870 states that he was found dead in his lodgings, was a bachelor, and then contains these highly suggestive, emblematic words, so suitable for a writer who left virtually no other trace of his existence on earth except for this one vile, sublime masterpiece: no further information.

Matters are not helped by a deliberate inconsistency in the use of pronouns and point of view. In some stanzas, Maldoror is being observed/described by another party (pronoun ‘he’; mocking title ‘Our Hero’); in others he is presenting himself or events from his viewpoint (pronoun ‘I’). This blurring of boundaries between viewpoint and selves of protagonist and author can take place in the middle of a stanza, in the middle of a sentence, even, with no warning or explanation, and the reader has to be alert. Madmen, savants and children often refer to themselves in the third person. So the question stands: is Maldoror referring to himself in the third person, or is Lautreamont referring to his creation? It’s this slippage of pronouns and resulting ambiguity that does much to create the transgressive mood of the work on a rhetorical, structural level.

Relationship between reader and text

For a text to break frame and address the reader directly is of course not new in 19^th century literature, but Maldoror/Lautreamont’s handling of this device is quite original. Surely no reader in 19^th century fiction has been so abused or treated with such contempt, bile and venomous rancour by an author; and surely no reader has been so well understood by his author. This attitude can be seen in its most concentrated and brilliant form in stanza 5.1, a long meditation on the nature of the reader and our interaction with the work. Maldoror anticipates the disgust and confusion of the reader in our encounter with his text: since the instinctive repulsion that manifested itself during my first pages has noticeably diminished in depth in inverse ratio to your application to the reading,…we must hope that your recovery will soon have reached it final stages. And he suggests a remedy for those readers whose sensibility does not allow them to enjoy these rancid visions. This remedy involves first ripping off your mothers arms and eating them. After he has effectively called the reader’s sister a whore, he provides a recipe of a potion the reader must drink in order to fully enjoy the work:

A basin full of lumpy blennorrhagic pus in which was first dissolved a hairy ovarian cyst, a follicular chancre, an inflamed prepuce skinned back from the glans by paraphimosis, and three red slugs. 5.1

Once you have drunk this evil brew, he crows, you will appreciate my poetry!

Maldoror’s ideal reader is one who knows how to unite enthusiasm with an internal coldness, [an] observer with a concentrated disposition (an accurate and sensitive description of any careful reader, it seems to me), and Maldoror tells us that he finds us perfect, even though – or perhaps because- the reader refuses to understand him. Paradoxically, and as a supreme transgression of the normal relationship between reader and text, the text simply does not wish to be understood; it refuses this kind of assimilation.

But it’s really in the second meaning of our emblematic word mal that the work really transgresses, for Maldoror sings of his utter hatred for God and Man. My poetry will consist only in the attack by all means in my power upon Man, that wild beast, and the Creator, who should never have created such vermin. 2.4 Maldoror, we learn, has suffered pain, a wound from both God and Man, and he sings about his resulting anger, humiliation and despair. Not since Milton’s Satan has wickedness and lust for revenge sung itself so powerfully. In one sense, the work is a long dark paean to revenge, the revenge of a soul outraged that consciousness has been thrust upon him; that he has to endure life on such unequal terms in a body marred by atrocious ugliness; revenge for being outcast.

Maldoror begins his text by warning the reader that he will be negatively effected by the work to come: the deadly emanations from this book will imbibe his soul as sugar absorbs water 1.1, and this is no empty rhetorical boast. The sickening power of Maldoror’s images and the virulent hatred for everything under the sun (with some notable exceptions as we shall see) does indeed cast a spell on the reader, altering forever the way he sees the world. The reader is literally sickened, as we have seen in the extract quoted above. By singing his pain and hatred so lucidly, Maldoror transfers it to his reader. Maldoror, his Creator (Lautreamont) and Man (the reader) are locked into an inescapable and terrible trinity.

2.) HORREUR: a physical sensation which causes goose bumps on the skin and the hair to rise, something which causes a sense of dread mixed with admiration and respectA symbol of physical revulsion produced by a text for which one has admiration.

The text is full of images of horror straight out of Bosch or the images of war photographers. To be sure, Lautreamont is using conventions well established by the Gothic literature of Maturin and Radcliffe, but he lifts them to a whole new level of gratuitous cruelty.

In one canto a young man is hung from a tree by his hair while two women – his mother and his wife- tar him and whip him; in another we are treated to an image of God sitting on a throne made of human excrement and gold holding the corpse of a man which he is eating, his feet bathed in a pool of boiling blood in which other living men are swimming or drowning; the text abounds with lice, spiders, tapeworms, grubs, all eating each other or eating man or being eaten by him; there are countless cruel murders and swollen corpses, rapes of prepubescent boys and virgin girls, acts of bestiality; disembowelment, torture, and death by a thousand different inventive means. The text is a catalogue of cruelty, a handbook of techniques for the depraved. Metaphors and similes all involve acts of violent cruelty: [the Creator] would show much wisdom if, during the time strictly necessary to  smash a woman’s head with hammer blows, he would forget his sidereal majesty… 2.3 Maldoror’s horreuris intensely physical: the text abounds with descriptions of body parts and fluids. There is a stench arising from the pages. (Ironically, when composing this piece my automatic spell checker kept ‘correcting’ Maldoror to ‘malodor’.)  You who are now gazing upon me, stand back, for my breath exhales poison.1.8

Maldoror strips away the conventional pieties of culture and civilization and reveals the true basis of life: horror and cruelty, nature red in tooth and claw. (It’s this aspect of the work which had such a profound effect on Artaud’s thinking.) Perhaps the only other writer to approach this level of depravity is De Sade, but Lautreamont goes further than De Sade because the Marquis always stays firmly in the realm of the real: De Sade’s perversions are limited to the physical reality of the body and what it is capable of enduring or doing. Maldoror’s cruelties transcend human capabilities, however, and enter the realm of the surreal: his anus is colonized by a crab, his testicles have been emptied, dried and turned into a dwelling for two cute little hedgehogs; Maldoror fucks a talking shark, the only being, he says, that can match his own evil; God comes to visit earth and falls into a drunken sleep by the side of the road whereupon a passerby shits on his face for three days…Throughout, Maldoror accuses the Creator of having created this cruel world: Maldoror’s own evil is no match for the Creator’s (although, god knows, he tries hard enough).

Ironically, this is a profoundly religious work  because it is not atheist. Maldoror/Lautreamont knows for sure that God exists, and his belief is sustained not by love of God but by an absolute implacable hatred of God.

3.) OR: metal of brilliant yellow and great weight, which one makes the currency of the highest value. A symbol of imperishable beauty and weighty value.

The work is not all depravity and disgust, however, for such a work would be indeed be unreadable. Buried in the middle of the syllables that make up the name of Maldoror, like gold in the pile of excrement of God’s throne, is the syllable for gold. Among Maldoror’s chants of unremitting hatred and cruelty are three that celebrate something positive, something good that Maldoror loves. The first of these is the stanza in which Maldoror sings of the sea, which he loves because its brine has the same taste as gall, because men have not been able to plumb its profundities, and because, deep though it is, it is still not as deep as the human heart. I salute you, ancient ocean. 1.8

The second is the stanza  in which he celebrates friendship. Friendship, and the betrayal of it, is a recurring theme throughout the work. Maldoror has been betrayed by a friend - the Creator- and he retaliates by describing incidents where he befriends a being and then betrays it in the most savagely cruel way, in incidents of transgression. This is the main action of the ‘novel’ in the last canto, for example. But in stanza 3.1 he describes a friendship that is not betrayed, that is not perverted. He and his friend Mario are riding along the beach on two horses, inseparable, united. They light a fire and share a cloak, they become the angel of the land and the angel of the sea. The text has this to say about them:  What do two hearts that love say to each other? Nothing…. Each takes as much interest in the life of the other as in his own life. 3.1

The third stanza where Maldoror sings the good, is his astonishing hymn to the abstract power and beauty of mathematics, the luminous triangle of Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry 2.10. Math for Maldoror is something extremely cold, prudent and logical; it disperses the smoke in his mind and makes him more intelligent; it is unchanging, impersonal and eternal. The words he uses to describe math are the words used by other beings to describe God, but Maldoror cannot talk about God in this way because he is tied forever to God by the strength of his hatred for him. Math is Maldoror’s religion, cruelty and hatred his mode of being. It is with math that he was finally able to dethrone his Creator and unmask the evil that is the Creator’s true nature. Interestingly, in this stanza he mentions Descartes in passing, which seems to suggest that perhaps Maldoror’s Cruel Creator is Descartes’s demon, le dieu trompeur.

For the reader, then, what gives the text its beauty, its weight and value? First, is the power of Lautreamont’s language. Maldoror describes his depravities and cruelties in the most exquisite, limpid, purely nuanced French. The text is widely regarded as one of the great glories of the language, rendered impeccably into English by Guy Wernham in the NDP translation. Second, is the depiction of a kind of sensibility that is entirely modern, it seems to me, a psychology in which consciousness is foregrounded and which describes the dualism of mind and body as intrinsically problematic:I feel that my soul is padlocked in my body and cannot free itself to flee far from coasts beaten by the human sea 3.1. We can call this an ‘underground sensibility’, after Dostoevsky’s underground man, the character in 19^thcentury literature who bears the closest psychological resemblance to Maldoror. Lautreamont gives us strings of beautifully crafted epigrams and insights into the kind of sensibility that experiences life as a wound:

How long it has been since I ceased to resemble myself. 3.1 If I exist, I am not someone else. I will not admit any equivocal plurality within myself. I wish to dwell alone within my intimate reason. Autonomy! 5.3I received life like a wound, and I have forbidden suicide to heal the gash. 3.1

Finally, the value of the work lies in its utter uniqueness. To be sure, Lautreamont has spawned a host of imitators, from Huysmans to Genet, from Burroughs to Bukowski, from the Decadents to the Surrealists; and his metaphysics opens the way for the existentialism of Kafka and Camus; but really, none of these can approach Lautreamont for sheer intensity of writing, technical brilliance and bravura originality of conception and performance. The only contemporary writer who comes close to Lautreamont in mood and matter is Dostoevsky. Some of the things Dostoevsky’s more jaundiced characters say would be well understood by Lautreamont’s Maldoror: When Ipolit Terentyev in The Idiotremarks: Isn’t it possible to simply eat me without demanding that I praise that which has eaten me? we hear also the mocking vengeful singing of Maldoror.

He who is singing now does not claim that his songs are new. On the contrary, he is proud in the knowledge that all the lofty and wicked thoughts of his hero reside within all men.

Oh if only instead of being a hell, the universe had been an immense anus! 5.5

Nietzsche on Christianity

December 6, 2013, 1:30 am

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Christianity is, essentially and fundamentally, the embodiment of disgust and antipathy for life, merely disguised, concealed, got up as the belief in an 'other' life, or a 'better' life. Hatred of the world, the condemnation of the emotions, the fear of beauty and sensuality, a transcendental world invented the better to slander this one, basically a yearning for non-existence, for repose until the 'sabbath of sabbaths' - all of this, along with Christianity's unconditional resolve to acknowledge only moral values, struck me as the most dangerous and sinister of all possible manifestations of a 'will to decline', at the very least, a sign of the most profound affliction, fatigue, sullenness, exhaustion, impoverishment of life. 

楚辭 'Chu Ci''The Songs of the South'

February 14, 2015, 6:08 am

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It has to be said, really, that considered as poetry, the Songs of the South  is exceptionally boring. An anthology of poems from the Warring States period, usually attributed to the poet Qu Yuan, or ‘school of’, it takes its tone from the first poem, Li Sao, the only poem in the collection that modern scholars can confidently attribute to Qu Yuan.

In the Li Sao, the poet bemoans the fact that his loyalty, integrity, knowledge and generally exceptional character has not been recognised by his employer, the Prince of the State. The poet leaves his home (banished or not, it doesn’t matter, he cannot return) and goes on a journey which ends, usually, with the resolve to drown himself. Qu Yuan did in fact drown himself for this reason, and his death is celebrated to this day in the Qing Ming festival, or Dragon Boat festival, held all over South China on the 5^th day of the 5^th lunar month. Thus is born the figure of the lofty Confucian scholar, stubbornly resisting the necessity to taint his soul with the common things of the world, and choosing a lonely, watery martyrdom instead of compromise and socialisation.

The Li Sao spawned a whole genre of Sao poems, all based on the same theme, of the unregarded Confucian scholar (usually but not always Qu Yuan himself) choosing death over compromise. The problem is that the other Sao poets included in the anthology don’t have Qu Yuan’s imagination. Common tropes include flower imagery, the analogy of Prince and servant to lover and beloved, the use of a clearly delineated set of similes, the spirit journeys and real journeys, all are exactly the same. None of the other poets in the anthology are doing anything creative with the elements of the genre: it seems to be enough just to provide a checklist of elements for the reader to recognise. Jade and pebbles are mixed together (jade being the Confucian scholar the man of virtue, pebbles being the common riff raff of the court, his enemies), warlike steeds stabled with nags (ditto), orchids grown alongside millet (ditto) etc etc. One longs to shake the poet and tell him to get over himself.

The problem is not one of translation: David Hawkes miraculously manages to catch differences in tone and style in his translations – his introduction and notes are fascinating and indispensable for students of early Chinese history. But, as he puts it:

The conventions of …the symbolism of plant and flower and the parallels drawn from ancient history and mythology – seem in these poems to have become an end in themselves. The result is a long, almost unrelieved litany of complaint which progresses by mere accumulation and ends only when poet, reader and metaphor are all three exhausted.

An old man here once told me an old Chinese legend about a man on a journey who comes to a mountain he cannot traverse. Unwilling to give up his journey, he decides to remove the mountain stone by stone out of his way, and he spends his life doing so. The story was held up to me as an example of perseverance, patience, dedication to an ideal and the refusal to give up or stray from a path, the classic Confucian virtues, in short. My old man was sure I would regard it as a model to follow, but I was thinking only of the stupidity inherent in the enterprise. Surely it would be more sensible to walk around the mountain than to try to remove it? I get the same feeling from the Sao poems. There’s a point where commitment and dedication become mere boneheaded stubbornness and inflexibility; and the obverse of stubbornness is not flexibility but inertia. The Chu Ci provides fruitful ground for speculations as to the historical origin of the inertia found in the Confucian/Chinese character. 

Enough! There are no true men in the state: no one understands me.

Why should I cleave to the city of my birth?

Since none is worthy to work with me in making good government,

I shall go and join Peng Xian (Taoist immortal) in the place where he abides.

There’s something, dare I say it, pubescent in this. It reminds me of an adolescent who is bitter at the world for not recognising his genius, a sense of teenage entitlement. To kill yourself because the world doesn’t recognise your genius, in our culture this is a sign of great immaturity, illness even. (Sylvia Plath anyone?)

The Chu Ci does however, contain seeds of dissent, a hint of an ironic Taoist corrective to the Confucian ideal. The Li Sao itself contains a beautiful  description of a spirit journey made by a shaman, and the poem is interesting also for the use it makes of ancient Taoist tales and legends, some of which are now lost and which have only survived here in this anthology. In a poem called Yu Fu, Qu Yuan (Confucian ideal) encounters a fisherman (Taoist recluse). Qu Yuan is bellyaching in his usual manner: “How can I submit my spotless purity to the dirt of others? I would rather cast myself into the waters of the river… than hide my shining light in the dark and dust of the world”. The fisherman can put up with this no longer, smiles faintly, and sings as he paddles away:

When the Cang-Lang’s waters are clear

I can wash my hat-strings in them.

When the Cang-Lang’s waters are muddy

I can wash my feet in them.

The Taoist ideals of adaptability and non-interference in the flow of nature are contrasted beautifully with the Confucian ideals of steadfastness and loyalty.

Fragment 21022015

February 21, 2015, 7:05 am

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There are two places in the Chu Ci where the interaction between Confucianism and Taoism becomes most acute and obvious. The first is the poem called Bu Ju(Divination) the second is the poem called Yu Fu, (The Fisherman). They appear side by side in the middle of the anthology, and are the only pieces in the anthology that contain prose and dialogue. They both are anecdotes aboutQu Yuan, and therefore cannot have been written by him. Authorship is unknown, but there are similar parables concerning encounters with Confucians and Taoists in the Zhuang Zi.

Bu Ju is interesting because it concerns the I Jing. It is, as far as I know, one of the earliest depictions in Chinese literature of the I Jing in use, and it gives us a picture of how to use the Oracle, or rather how not to use it.

Qu Yuan (Confucian ideal) consults a famous diviner (Taoist ideal). “I have an uncertainty in my mind which I should like you to resolve for me”, he says. The Diviner readies his yarrow stalks. “What are your instructions”, he says, when he is ready. Qu Yuen asks eight questions concerning his dilemma, seven of which are framed in the same way: ‘Is it better to X or to Y?’; and the eighth is a kind of summary of the previous seven: “Of these alternatives, which is auspicious and which is ill-omened. Which is to be avoided and which is to be followed?”

The Diviner’s reaction is to throw away his divining stalks and excuse himself, with a speech in which he says: “There are things to which my calculations cannot attain, over which the divinity has no power. My lord, for one with your mind and with resolution such as yours, (…) the divining stalks are really unable to be of help.”  

Why does the Diviner react in this way?

The answer lies in the way the questions are framed, and in the last sentence spoken by the Diviner.

Commentaries of the I Jing, repeatedly note the importance of the way the question is framed, and this is arguably the most important part of the process of consulting the oracle. The Diviner usually works with the person consulting the Oracle to make sure the question is framed in the correct way. John Blofeld writes: Above all, the either/or type of question is to be avoided. Other commentators stress the same thing and also that the same question cannot be asked more than once. (Some who consult the Oracle as a game ask the same question more than once to ‘test’ the Oracle to see if it will give the ‘same’ answer.) Qu Yuan makes both these mistakes, with his string of either/ or questions all on the same problem: is it better to remain unsullied, or is it better to go with the things of the world?

In the comment the Diviner makes to Qu Yuan: My lord, for one with your mind and with resolution such as yours, the divining stalks are really unable to be of help.” The Diviner notes from Qu Yuan’s questions that his mind is already made up about the best course to follow: resolution such as yours. The question has been answered before it has been put. 

This is not the way to approach the Oracle, which requires an openness of mind for its power to work. In the Da Chuan commentary to the I Jing, it is written:

First take up the words

Ponder their meaning

Then the fixed rules reveal themselves.

But if you are not the right man,

The meaning will not manifest itself to you.

Qu Yuan is not the right man because he is not in a position mentally to be able to ponder  anything. He is obsessed with his either/or choices. This is why the Diviner cuts short the consultation.

But there is another deeper level to this encounter between Confucianism and Taoism. After he has framed his questions, Qu Yuan breaks into poetry, describing the times as out of joint: ‘The world is turbulent and impure,’ he begins. Turbulence is another word for change. But the I Jing, or the Book of Changes does not see change as turbulent, or impure, as the Confucian does. The Taoist sees change as the basis of life the universe and everything. For the Confucian, change is negative; for the Taoist, who abhors catgegories, it is neither positive nor negative, it simply is.