The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (50 page)

As they are the products of our common human nature, it is quite normal that all the great civilisations should cultivate values that are basically similar, but they go about it in different ways and without necessarily attaching to them the same importance. What one may consider a basic axiom, regard as fundamental and embrace as a tenet may appear in the other only as a brilliant intuition, grasped by a few exceptional individuals.

This idea that the aesthetic quality of the work of art reflects the ethical quality of its author is so essential to Chinese thought that it sometimes runs the risk of becoming an oft-repeated cliché whose meaning can end up being distorted through mechanical and simplistic application. In the West, on the other hand, though not entirely unheard of, this same notion rarely undergoes methodical development. Thus Vasari, for example, can quite naturally point to a link between the spiritual beauty of Fra Angelico’s painting and the saintliness that characterised his monastic existence, but, by the same token, it would hardly occur to him to attribute the artistic shortcomings of other works to the moral failings of their authors.

China’s four major arts—poetry, calligraphy, painting (in ink, by means of a calligraphic brush) and music for
qin
(seven-stringed zither)—are practised not by professionals but by amateurs belonging to the scholarly class. Traditionally, these various disciplines could not be performed as a profession: an artist who would accept payment for his art would disqualify himself and see himself immediately reduced to the inferior condition of artisan. Although the poet, musician, calligrapher and painter (and quite often the same man is all of these at once) may let connoisseurs or a few chosen friends enjoy gratis the products of their art (sometimes, also, it is this limited but talented public that fires their inspiration), the fact remains that the prime aim of their activity is the cultivation and development of their own inner life. One writes, one paints, one plays the zither in order to perfect one’s character, to attain moral fulfilment by ensuring that
one’s individual humanity is in harmony with the rhythms of universal creation.

The Chinese aesthetic, which, in the field of literary, calligraphic, pictorial and musical theories has produced a wealth of philosophical, critical and technical literature, developed without making any reference to the concept of “beauty” (
mei
; the term
meixue
, “study of beauty,” is a modern one, especially coined to translate the Western notion of aesthetics). When this concept crops up it is often in a pejorative sense, since to strive for beauty is, for an artist, a vulgar temptation, a trap, a dishonest attempt at seduction. Aesthetic criteria are functional: does the work do what it does efficiently, does it nourish the vital energy of the artist, does it succeed in capturing the spirit that informs mountains and rivers, does it establish harmony between the metamorphoses of forms and the metamorphoses of the world?

But even as he is creating his work, it is always and essentially on himself that the artist is working. If one realises this, one can understand the meaning and
raison d’être
behind the numerous statements and precepts which, through the ages, constantly associate the artistic quality of the painting with the moral quality of the painter. One could give any number of examples: “If the man is of high moral quality, this will inevitably be reflected in the rhythm and spirit of his painting”; “the qualities and flaws of the painting reflect the moral superiority or mediocrity of the man”; “he who is of inferior moral worth would not be able to paint”; “those who learn painting put the development of their moral self above all else”; “the painting of those who have succeeded in building this moral self breathes with a deep and dazzling sense of rectitude, transcending all formal aspects. But if the painter lacks this quality, his paintings, charming as they may superficially appear, will give out a kind of unwholesome breath which will be obvious in the merest brushstroke. The work reflects the man: it is true in literature and it is just as true in painting.”

But some critics have gone even further and have tried to identify in the works of famous artists either the expression of particular virtues they have shown in their lives or a reflection of their moral failings. For instance, the eighteenth-century scholar-poet Zhang Geng wrote:

This last passage, contrasting two emblematic figures—Ni Zan and Zhao Mengfu—opens a dangerous trend in criticism: the deep meaning of an ethical reading of the work of art is lost only to be replaced by a sort of narrow and dogmatic “political correctness.” There is no doubt that the art of Ni Zan is sublime—a limpid and distant vision of pale, empty landscapes, cleansed of all worldly blemishes—but very little is known about the historical person Ni Zan himself, and the anecdotes attesting to his purity and his detachment could well be no more, on the whole, than an imaginary projection of the virtues suggested by his paintings. The case of Zhao Mengfu is even more curious: an aristocrat who agreed to put himself at the service of the Mongol invaders, he was traditionally regarded by posterity as a vile traitor, but the problem is that, in his painting and especially in his calligraphy, he also proves himself a prodigiously talented artist. In order to resolve this embarrassing contradiction, it is conventional for critics generally to choose to condemn, despite the evidence before their eyes, the “vulgarity” of his overly splendid calligraphy (a judgement that tends to bring to mind the famous condemnation pronounced by the Surrealists against Paul Claudel: “One cannot be
French ambassador and poet”—as if Claudel hadn’t been both one and the other!).

But even such naïve and simplistic rantings have failed to affect the deep understanding the great Chinese artists have always retained regarding this ethical dimension of their work. And the calligraphers, in particular, are all the more conscious of it, since the practice of their art constitutes for them a daily asceticism, a genuine hygiene of their whole physical, psychic and moral being, whose efficacy they themselves can measure in an immediate and concrete fashion. Moreover, in this sense calligraphy is not just the product of their character—their character itself becomes a product of their calligraphy. This reversal of the “graphological causality” has been noted by Jean-Francois Billeter in his
Art chinois de l’écriture
, and he has supported his observation with aptly chosen quotations. The supreme beauty of a piece of calligraphy indeed does not depend on beauty. It results from its natural appropriateness to the “truth” that the calligrapher nurtures within himself—authenticity, original purity, absolute naturalness (what the Germans call
Echtheit)
: “In calligraphy, it is not pleasing that is difficult; what is difficult is not seeking to please. The desire to please makes the writing trite, its absence renders it ingenuous and true,” wrote the calligrapher Liu Xizai, quoted by Billeter, who further illustrates these words with a statement by Stendhal: “I believe that to be great in anything at all, you must be yourself.”

In fact to invoke Stendhal in this context strikes me as particularly interesting. The perfection of the work of art depends entirely on the true human worth of the artist; this moral notion at the basis of all Chinese aesthetics is found also in the West, but here it is more the mark of a few exceptional minds, of which Stendhal is a perfect example. His whole aesthetic sense is passionately and furiously moral—remember for example his condemnation of Chateaubriand: “I have never been able to read twenty pages of Chateaubriand . . . At seventeen I almost had a duel because I made fun of
la cime indéterminée des forêts
which had many admirers in the 6th Dragoons . . . M. de Chateaubriand’s fine style seems to me to tell a lot of little fibs. My whole belief in style lies in this word.” In this same spiritual family of geniuses both sublime and “eccentric” (in the Chinese sense of the
word), we must also include Simone Weil (a whole aesthetic could be constructed from the rich mine of her
Cahiers
)—or again Wittgenstein, one of whose statements seems to me particularly appropriate as a conclusion to this little article, for indeed it proposes a criterion for literary criticism that is as original as it is effective (speaking of Tolstoy): “There is a real man, who has a
right
to write.”

2004

E
DWARD
Said’s main contention is that “no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim the author’s involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances.” Translated into plain English, this would seem to mean simply that no scholar can escape his original condition: his own national, cultural, political and social prejudices are bound to be reflected in his work. Such a common-sense statement hardly warrants debate. Actually, Said’s own book is an excellent case in point;
Orientalism
could obviously have been written by no one but a Palestinian scholar with a huge chip on his shoulder and a very dim understanding of the European academic tradition (here perceived through the distorted prism of a certain type of American university, with its brutish hyper-specialisation, non-humanistic approach, and close, unhealthy links with government).[
1
]

My task here is not to write a review of
Orientalism
(thank God!), but merely to see whether Said’s arguments present any relevance for Chinese studies.

Said seems to include “sinology” implicitly in his concept of “orientalism.” (I insist on the word
seems
; the point remains obscure, like a great many other points in his book.) Said’s contention is that whenever an orientalist makes a statement in his own specialised area, this statement accrues automatically to the broader picture of a mythical
“East.” I do not know whether this is true for scholars involved with Near and Middle East studies, but it certainly does not apply to sinologists. The intellectual and physical boundaries of the Chinese world are sharply defined; they encompass a reality that is so autonomous and singular that no sinologist in his right mind would ever dream of extending any sinological statement to the non-Chinese world. For a serious sinologist (or for any thinking person, for that matter) concepts such as “Asia” or “the East” have never contained any useful meaning. No sinologist would ever consider himself an orientalist. (Some sinologists, it is true, may occasionally be seen participating in one of those huge fairs that are periodically held under the name of “International Orientalist Congress,” but this is simply because similar junkets undertaken under the mere auspices of the Club Méditerranée would not be tax-deductible.)

Orientalism is a colonialist-imperialist conspiracy.
[
2
] Quite possibly. To some extent, it may also be true for sinology. Who knows? One day it will perhaps be discovered that the best studies on Tang poetry and on Song painting have all been financed by the CIA—a fact that should somehow improve the public image of this much-maligned organisation.

Orientalists hate and despise the Orient; they deny its intellectual existence and try to turn it into a vacuum.
Whether most sinologists love China or hate it is largely irrelevant. One important fact is absolutely evident: Western sinology in its entirety is a mere footnote appended to the huge sinological corpus that Chinese intellectuals have been building for centuries to this day. The Chinese are our first guides and teachers in the exploration of their culture and history; fools who ignore this evidence do so at their own risk and pay dearly for it. Further, it should be noted that today a significant proportion of the leading sinologists in the Western academic world
are
Chinese; through their teaching and research, they play a decisive role in Western sinology.

The notion of an “other” culture is of questionable use, as it seems to end inevitably in self-congratulation, or hostility and aggression.
Why could it not equally end in admiration, wonderment, increased self-knowledge, relativisation and readjustment of one’s own values,
awareness of the limits of one’s own civilisation? Actually, most of the time, all of these seem to be the natural outcome of our study of China (and it is also the reason why Chinese should be taught in Western countries as a fundamental discipline of the humanities at the secondary-school level, in conjunction with, or as an alternative to, Latin and Greek). Joseph Needham summed up neatly what is the common feeling of most sinologists: “Chinese civilisation presents the irresistible fascination of what is totally ‘other,’ and only what is totally ‘other’ can inspire the deepest love, together with a strong desire to know it.” From the great Jesuit scholars of the sixteenth century down to the best sinologists of today, we can see that there was never a more powerful antidote to the temptation of Western ethnocentrism than the study of Chinese civilisation. (It is not a coincidence that Said, in his denunciation of “illiberal ethnocentrism,” found further ammunition for his good fight in the writings of a
sinologist
who was attacking the naïve and arrogant statement of a French philosopher describing Thomistic philosophy as “gathering up the whole of human tradition.” Indignant rejection of such crass provincialism will always come most spontaneously to any sinologist.)