The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (68 page)

LITERARY PRESENCE

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

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

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

SONATA FOR PIANO AND VACUUM CLEANER

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

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

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

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

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

FAITH

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

INDIGENEITY

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

HOW TO READ?

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

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

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

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

If the story seems mysterious, it is because the simplicity of the soul is the greatest mystery under heaven. Otherwise, it presents only one genuine enigma: Chekhov, who was a confirmed agnostic, displays here an intuitive grasp of the religious experience, reaching to its very essence—which usually escapes the learned speculations of theologians. We may naturally assume that the student in the story was pious and learned; he sincerely believed that the events surrounding
Peter’s denial took place 1,900 years ago in the courtyard of the High Priest’s palace; his faith had already taught him that the Gospel narrative is
true
; then, suddenly, the tears of the women showed him that this story is
real
: it is happening to all of us, now. The tears of the women enable the young theologian to effect a giant leap: from abstract knowledge to actual experience, from truth to reality—which is the ground of all truths. (As C.S. Lewis put it: “Truth is always about something, but reality is what truth is about.”) Instead of pondering dogmas and doctrines, the student suddenly faced evidence. Hence his joy, which was overwhelming and mysterious indeed, but which presented nothing “irrational” (contrary to Bloom’s strange assessment).

Yet Chekhov—with his scrupulous intellectual honesty—did not altogether discount other elements in the student’s ecstatic happiness: “youth, health, strength”—for, after all, “he was only twenty-two years old.”

URINALS AND EDITORIAL PRACTICES

At the end of the nineteenth century, as France was swept by a wave of fanatical anticlericalism, many town councils and municipalities adopted the policy of erecting
urinoirs
along the walls of local cathedrals and churches; under the pretext of ensuring hygiene and public decency, the brilliant idea was to have the entire male population of the town pissing day and night against the most venerable monuments that the religious had built.

It seems to me that many modern editors of classic works of literature—and also many film-makers adapting literary masterpieces to the screen—are impelled by a somewhat similar desire for desecration. They append impertinent and preposterous introductions, they impose cover designs and presentations in complete contradiction with the expressed intention of the authors, they write film scripts that negate the meaning of the book they are supposed to adapt, they coolly chop off the epigraphs that the authors had lovingly selected—they generally display patronising arrogance and crass ignorance; they behave as if they were the proprietors of the works they should serve
and preserve. Here are some examples (in no particular order). In the cinema, we recently saw what became of Graham Greene’s masterpiece
The End of the Affair
—no need here for further comment. With books, it is in the paperback reprints of classics that most sins are committed. Just a glance at my humble shelves brings at random
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, with a lurid cover on which is printed in characters larger than the title, “Now a sensuous film starring Sylvia Kristel.” Poor Lawrence; you really did not deserve such an indignity. A new reprint of
Lolita
carries on its cover a reproduction of one of Balthus’s most patently paedophiliac paintings: a little girl caressing herself with an ambiguous smile—yet Nabokov, in his correspondence with his publishers, had taken pains to discuss at great length the question of the dust-jacket of this book, and he stipulated with utter firmness and clarity: “There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl” (letter, 1 March 1958).

As if later editors would bother to follow authors’ instructions—they do not even read their writing. Conrad is particularly ill-treated, it seems; without any warning or justification, in a Penguin reprint of
Almayer’s Folly
, the editor took the liberty of simply dropping the famous epigraph that Conrad had borrowed from Henri-Frédéric Amiel:
Qui de nous n’a eu sa Terre promise, son jour d’extase et sa fin en exil?
(Who among us did not have his Promised Land, his day of ecstasy and his end in exile?) Not only is the sentence magnificent and provides the key to the entire novel, but it also supplies an important biographical clue to Conrad’s literary creation (Amiel, whose diaries Conrad first read during an early stay in Geneva, reappears, in a metamorphosed shape, as the placid Swiss narrator who witnessed the ravings of Slavic terrorists in
Under Western Eyes
). The paperback reprint of
Heart of Darkness
(Oxford Classics) carries a scholarly introduction that is grotesque and delirious: it proposes an elaborate phallic reading of the novel. I paraphrase: “Look at the Congo River on the map; don’t you see? It is obviously a huge, creeping phallus!” and so on. Literary scholars are particularly adept at cultivating this sort of nonsense: they seem permanently drunk on the psychedelic milk they keep sucking from the twin
mammelles
of Freud and Marx. Amazing examples of this merry art are too numerous to be quoted here.

The resolute and invincible blindness of some editors can also be quite impressive. Stendhal’s treatise
On Love (De l’Amour
, 1822) is invariably presented under this title; yet, when Stendhal published
La Chartreuse de Parme
(1839), he printed at the beginning of his novel a list of his other works in which he indicated the full and final title under which he intended his essay on love to be known thereafter:
De l’Amour et des diverses phases de cette maladie
. It was studiously ignored by all subsequent editors—though it should certainly not be irrelevant for us to know that Stendhal viewed love as a sort of illness.