by Leys, Simon
There is something more important than a finished work of art: it is the spiritual process that preceded it and guided its execution. The poet Tao Yuanming (372–427) used to carry everywhere with him a zither without strings, on which he played mute music: “I only seek the meaning that lies at the heart of the zither. Why strain myself to produce sounds on the strings?”
The finished work is to the spiritual experience of the artist as the graph recorded by the seismograph is to an earthquake. What matters is the experience; the work itself is a mere accidental consequence, a secondary result, a visible (or audible) leftover—it is nothing but “the imprint left perchance in the snow by a wild swan.” This is the reason why sometimes the ink of the brushstroke, the sound of the musical note are divested of part of their material substance; they are thinned out in order better to reveal the actual gesture that originates and underlies them. (To achieve this result in painting and calligraphy, the brushstroke is applied with an ink load that is deliberately insufficient; in this way, the ink mark is striated with “blanks” that show the inner dynamics of the stroke; this technique is called fei bai, which means “flying white.” A similar effect is found in music, when the sound of the fingernail modulating the vibrato on the string becomes louder than the original sound of the note.)
Literature, too, has its “blanks.” Sometimes they function as hinges for the composition; sometimes they enable the poem to suggest the existence of another poem that lies beyond words. To a degree, Western literature also knows these two uses of emptiness. A good illustration of the latter one was provided by Virginia Woolf when she presented Vita Sackville-West with what she called her best work—a splendidly bound volume, made purely of blank pages. As to emptiness used as a compositional device, Proust very subtly describes how Flaubert handled this technique: “To my mind, the most beautiful thing in Sentimental Education is not a sentence, it is a blank . . . [by which Flaubert finally] rids the narrative of all the deadwood of storytelling. He was thus the first writer who succeeded in giving it a musical quality.”[18]
In turn, Proust’s observation was well commented upon by Maurice Nadeau: “Proust noticed it: the ‘blanks’ in the narrative of Sentimental Education as well as in Madame Bovary are their supreme achievement . . . At every subtle turn of Emma’s fate, whenever a secondary narrative accompanies the main story, we encounter this ‘unsaid.’ The same current pervades objects and consciousness, the material world and the psychological world exchange their respective qualities; reality and the expression of reality merge into one single totality that rests upon ‘the inner dynamics of style.’”[19] The Flaubertian notion of “inner dynamics of style” irresistibly calls to mind the Chinese concept of qi; it should be observed that it is precisely emptiness that provides the best conductor for this “current.”
Void is the space where the poem-beyond-the-poem can develop; Chinese poetry has various devices to create it. Thus, for instance, at the beginning of the famous four-line poem by Wang Zhihuan describing the immense scenery that can be seen from a tower at the mouth of the Yellow River, the first two verses outline the widest possible horizon:
The sun sinks beyond the mountains
The Yellow River flows into the ocean . . .
At this point the reader feels that the poet has reached the utter limit of his vision; actually, the real function of these two verses is merely to tighten a spring whose sudden release, at the end of the poem, is going to launch the reader’s imagination into the infinitely vaster spaces of the unseen:
However, if you wish to see an even greater scene
Climb one more story!
The last verse is not a point of arrival, but a point of departure. This “trampoline effect” is often used by poets, especially in the four-line poems whose extreme compactness (the entire poem may have twenty syllables only) is thus prolonged with an infinite echo.
Another method consists in building the poem around a central core of emptiness, where a truth resides that cannot be approached or expressed. The traditional metaphor used for this purpose is that of the unsuccessful attempt to meet a hermit-sage who possesses the ultimate answer. The hermit’s presence is real and near—it is attested by various clues, even by his direct messengers—and yet he himself remains invisible and unreachable. A good thousand years before Kafka’s Castle, Jia Dao summarised this myth in a well-known four-line poem:
Under a pine tree, the boy-servant, having been asked where his master was,
Answers: “He went to collect medicinal herbs;
I only know that he is somewhere in this mountain.
Where? Mist hides everything.”
Since the essential point is beyond words, a poem can only talk beside the subject—it describes a desire. Thus, in Tao Yuanming:
I built my hut among people
And yet their noise does not disturb me.
How is this possible, I ask you?
Solitude can be created by the mind, it is not a matter of distance.
Plucking chrysanthemums at the foot of the hedge,
I gaze toward the faraway mountains.
At dusk the mountain air is beautiful,
When birds are returning.
Truth is at the heart of all this:
I wish to express it, yet find no words.
The same theme found a new expression with Wang Wei:
In the evening of life, I am only fond of silence;
I do not care anymore for the business of the world.
Having measured my own limits,
I merely wish to return to my old forest.
The wind that blows in the pine trees plays with my belt.
In the mountain, I play the zither under the moon.
You ask what is the ultimate answer?
It is the song of a fisherman sailing back to shore.
Any work of art—poem, painting, piece of music—plays the part of a “fisherman’s song”: beyond the words, forms and sounds that it borrows, it is a direct, intuitive experience of a reality that no discursive approach can embody.
In our time, the subtlest of all modern critics, Zhou Zuoren (1885–1968), summarised in one pithy sentence this living tradition of which he himself was a product: “All that can be spelled out is without importance.”
This axiom—needless to say—is also valid for essays that deal with Chinese aesthetics.
1983
* Gauss Seminars in Criticism, Princeton University, 1980.
† See “Lies That Tell the Truth.”
ETHICS AND AESTHETICS
The Chinese Lesson
IN THE catalogue of an individual retrospective held a year and a half ago at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, there is a striking statement by the painter to whose memory the exhibition was devoted. At a crucial turning point in his career, the artist in question sent a batch of recent paintings to a friend and explained to him: “The next lot has to be better and I just don’t feel capable of being better yet . . . I have the awful problem now of being a better person before I can paint better.”
No, it wasn’t a Chinese scholar-painter from another century who wrote these lines. It was in fact Colin McCahon (1919–87), an important New Zealand painter of our age. The author of the catalogue, Murray Bail—a true connoisseur of Western art—in quoting this statement could not hide his puzzlement: can one imagine Michelangelo or Rubens, Ingres or Delacroix, Matisse or Picasso making such an extraordinary statement?
For traditional Chinese aesthetes, on the other hand, such a notion goes without saying, and McCahon was doing little more than repeating a truth which, in their eyes, should be obvious to any serious artist. How the self-taught New Zealand painter, locked away in the isolation of his far-off land, had come to develop, without realising it, such a “Chinese” view remains an enigma which we will not try to elucidate here. We will simply note that he read a great deal and that since the middle of the twentieth century, numerous philosophical and aesthetic elements of C
hinese and Japanese thought have been filtering into Western consciousness via countless works of vulgarisation, indeed even best-selling novels. Remember, for example, Robert Pirsig and his famous Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (an astonishing best-seller in the ’70s, the book, even today, retains its freshness and originality; it bears re-reading): “You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect, and then just paint naturally.”
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:
What a man writes presents a reflection of his heart, allowing one to perceive his vices and virtues. Painting, which comes from the same source as writing, also holds up a mirror to the heart. In the beginning, whenever I looked at the paintings of the Ancients, I still doubted the soundness of this opinion, but after studying the lives of the painters, I venture to say that it is correct. Indeed, if we look at the different artists of the Yuan period (that is to say a period of national humiliation, under the Mongol occupation) we see Ni Zan had broken all ties with the ordinary, everyday world, and his painting is also characterised by a severe austerity and a detached elegance stripped of all ornamentation. Zhao Mengfu, on the other hand, could not resist temptation (he collaborated with the invaders) and his calligraphy, like his painting, is tainted with prettiness and a vulgar desire to please . . .
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
ORIENTALISM AND SINOLOGY*
EDWARD 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]