Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  Father Fillo walks on. His progress has become too baldly a pilgrim’s, a self-absorbed pilgrim who doesn’t need a novel’s furniture around him. The little book has the seriousness but not the movement and society of a novel. In the end, certain semi-abstract scenic effects do for an epiphany. The Atlantic Ocean and evening are approached: “the night, half day at the top, darkness at the base, seemed to have emerged from the ocean rather than from the sky.” This black immensity of sea serves to emblematize the universe and prompts a page of cosmological meditation and such mind-twisters as: “He found himself in a hell he feared was eternal, which revolved around two poles: the relativity of nothingness and the absoluteness of the universe.” His unrest now seems, like Hamlet’s, centered on a faint doubt of oblivion: “In an odd return to prayer, he asked only that the God Whom he found guilty of creating pain should also create oblivion.” The scene before him has “the palliative nightmare of reality, a peaceful mirror whose obverse was violence; and in it he saw himself.” At last, in a final tortured twist of perception and of language, Joaquin Fillo sees himself as part of the landscape he often viewed from his window at the monastery, and this goads his thought and the hard-working translator to such terms as “topologic,” “metonymy,” and “alterity,” and brings him peace. “Flight became possible through the transmutation of place into image, of reality into illusion. He could escape into the fiction he had pulled from the truth of the setting, vanish beyond the field, beyond all the fields of the canvas framed by the sash of his window.…”

  Overwritten and underdramatized as it is, Parrot’s Perch engages us, invites us into its strife, where the richer-textured and more skillful Flaubert’s Parrot suavely puts us off. Neither gives us much action in the way of those nineteenth-century novels that assumed Man and his environment to be in opposition and men and women to be obliged to act in order to save themselves. The notion of the world as a testing stage has faded, and with it much that gave even the crudest adventure tale a certain dignity. Helplessness characterizes the typical modern hero; the most energetic and human acts that Dr. Braithwaite and Father Fillo perform are verbal acts of protest, registering, in their differing styles, their astonishment that, as Flaubert said, the function of the sun is not to help the cabbages along.

  Memory Palaces

  SEVEN NIGHTS, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated from the Spanish by Eliot Weinberger. 121 pp. New Directions, 1984.

  THE MEMORY PALACE OF MATTEO RICCI, by Jonathan D. Spence. 350 pp. Viking, 1984.

  For nearly four decades, Jorge Luis Borges has been delivering lectures in public, even though, being blind, he must speak and quote from memory. Seven talks he presented in the summer of 1977 at the Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires were taped without his permission, sold as pirated records, and printed in cut and mangled form; an approved version, edited with his help, was published in Mexico in 1980 and now appears in English, under the title Seven Nights. These lectures make an enchanting small book, more loose and open in texture, more affectionate and frank in tone than the gnomic written criticism collected in Other Inquisitions and in the Borges reader edited by Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid; Reid has provided a sensitive, informative introduction to Seven Nights. The seven topics will not be strangers to those readers who have already trod the narrow, circling paths of the Borgesian universe: in literature, “The Divine Comedy” and “The Thousand and One Nights”; in religion, “The Kabbalah” and “Buddhism”; and, in his most personal vein, “Nightmares,” “Poetry,” and “Blindness.” His own blindness, he tells his audience, is “modest”—“Modest, because it is total blindness in one eye, but only partial in the other. I can still make out certain colors; I can still see blue and green. And yellow, in particular, has remained faithful to me. I remember when I was young I used to linger in front of certain cages in the Palermo zoo: the cages of the tigers and leopards. I lingered before the tigers’ gold and black. Yellow is still with me, even now.” A color he does not see is black, the color of night. “I, who was accustomed to sleeping in total darkness, was bothered for a long time at having to sleep in this world of mist, in the greenish or bluish mist, vaguely luminous, which is the world of the blind.”

  His blindness descended gradually. “That slow loss of sight … began when I began to see. It has continued since 1899 without dramatic moments, a slow nightfall that has lasted more than three quarters of a century.” Mr. Reid’s introduction states that by 1946, when Borges was dismissed from a suburban library post and first turned to lecturing for a means of livelihood, he was already “unable to read a written text.” Borges seems to put the crucial moment somewhat later: “In 1955 the pathetic moment came when I knew I had lost my sight, my reader’s and writer’s sight.” Prior to that moment, he had managed to read with the passion and rapture of a cabalist. Attracted to the labyrinthine and duplicitous, to texts as enigmatic as nightmares and as infinite as mirrored mirrors, Borges the reader “had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.”

  His own mind has become, in his blindness, a library, whose volumes he consults with a charming freedom of association, returning always to the allied sensations of enchantment—“Without enchantment, the rest is useless”—and of horror, of what Mr. Reid spells out as “asombro or sagrada horror, ‘holy dread.’ ” Captured within the friendly vessel of Borges’s discursive voice (“talking not to all of you, but rather with each one of you”), the genie of dread is less alarming than in the abruptly dizzying spaces of the poetry and fiction. An elderly stoic speaks in comforting accents: “A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end.” In the role of teacher, Borges has tried to teach his students “how to love literature, how to see literature as a form of happiness.” In his cosmology, literature replaces the ordering principle that used to be called Fate or Providence: “We are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different.” Bibliophilia satisfies his own deep needs: “I am a hedonist reader; I look for emotion in books.” Will the foreseeable future yield another reader so passionately content within the echoing library walls? Listening, via the printed word, to these relaxed and yet highly explicit discourses, one realizes that never again will there be a mind and memory stocked in just this way, with such benign and extensive curiosity, such patient and expectant attention to ancient texts. Bent upon conveying treasure, Borges reveals himself as a treasure.

  The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci also leads us to reflect upon the immensity and perishability of minds, each of which constructs in the course of a lifetime a unique store of knowledge. Ricci was one of the first Jesuit missionaries to penetrate China, and he carried with him not only the Christian good news but European clocks, crystal mirrors, eyeglasses, and maps; a mental treasure of Ricci’s, and one with which he hoped to beguile the mandarins into friendliness and receptivity, was the system of memorization which European scholars of the Middle Ages and Renaissance had inherited from antiquity. The system called for the attachment of each piece of information to a decoration, tableau, or piece of furniture within a visualized “memory palace,” which could be as simple as a single room or as complex as an entire town, containing thousands of rooms. Purportedly this technique of mental storage was invented by the Greek poet Simonides, who, having luckily departed a hall which forthwith collapsed upon a large party of revellers, was able to recall where each had been sitting, and thus could identify the disfigured bodies. Pliny, Quintilian, and the author of Ad Herennium described and extolled the method, and twelve centuries later Thomas Aquinas advocated “corporeal similitudes” to fix devotional sequences. The idea of memory systems lurks behind cathedral layouts, Giotto’s iconography, the highly structured afterworlds described by Dante, and the procedures of Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. When Matteo Ricci was a Jesuit student in
the early 1570s, De Arte Rhetorica, by Cypriano Soarez, was used to inculcate memory training. The adult Ricci, we are told, was capable of “running through a list of four to five hundred random Chinese ideograms and then repeating the list in reverse order, while Chinese friends described him as being able to recite volumes of the Chinese classics after scanning them only once.” Toward the end of his life, after decades of living remote from the libraries of the West, he was able to recall and translate into Chinese numerous paraphrases of Epictetus and, almost word-for-word, Planudes’s life of Aesop. In 1596, to curry favor with the Lu Wangai, the governor of Jiangxi, whose three sons were preparing for the advanced government examination, Ricci composed a brief book on the art of building memory palaces. On the basis of the four ideograms that he used by way of example, and of four religious illustrations that Ricci contributed a decade later to a collection of Chinese calligraphy and graphics entitled The Ink Garden, Jonathan D. Spence has constructed a beautifully intricate, boldly non-chronological portrait of the erudite missionary of whom The Encyclopedia Britannica states: “Probably the name of no European of past centuries is so well known in China as that of Li Ma-tou (Ricci Matteo).”

  Professor Spence has published five other distinguished and original works on aspects of Chinese history. In each book he has sought, with a wide learning carried lightly, to rescue the Chinese from our hazy and stylized notions of them. He is a researcher with the flair of a novelist; out of the vast mounds of perennial Chinese documentation he manages to sift the surprising, humanizing detail. In The Emperor of China (1974) he took the rare personal threads in the voluminous imperial records left by the sixty years’ reign of the Manchu Emperor K’ang-hsi and wove a remarkably smooth-flowing and affecting apologia, in the Emperor’s own words. In The Death of Woman Wang (1978) he brought to life an obscure and impoverished county of northern China, merging a local history of T’anch’eng, in Shantung Province, with the short stories of P’u Sung-ling, who wrote in an adjoining county. A certain woman Wang, who deserted her husband and then returned and was killed by him, found her way into a magistrate’s memoir; out of discrete fragments of P’u Sung-ling’s fiction Mr. Spence not only composed background music for the woman Wang’s sad dim tale but assembled her stream of consciousness at the moment of her murder—his most daring work of collage. Even such a relatively straightforward historical study as The Gate of Heavenly Peace (1981) explores its period, the last, turbulent century of Chinese history, through the lives and personal testimony of individuals—intellectuals and writers—on the edges of the political stage.

  Matteo Ricci, too, was in a sense peripheral: he arrived at Macao at the age of thirty, and the following year he and Michele Ruggieri became the first Western missionaries allowed to live within China. Beset by bribe-hungry officials and hostile commoners, confronted by the all-but-impregnable indifference of the Buddhist bonzes and Confucian mandarins, Ricci edged his way north toward Peking and the Emperor Wan-li, whose conversion was his fondest dream. By virtue of his dazzling intellectual accomplishments, which came to include a fluent literacy in Chinese, he did make a number of friends and a few converts among the ruling intelligentsia; but he never made his way into the Emperor’s presence. In his closest approach, he was allowed, at one dawn audience in 1602, to prostrate himself before the empty dragon throne. Ricci did get to know, however, a number of the court eunuchs, through whose intermediacy he was permitted to give presents to the Emperor (three religious paintings, a large clock, a gilded breviary, prisms and hourglasses, a small harpsichord, a rhinoceros horn, and more), to contribute the lyrics to eight songs to be sung by court eunuchs accompanied on the donated harpsichord, and to reside in Peking. Wan-li (whose own rather stalemated history was recently related by Ray Huang in his 1587, A Year of No Significance) appears to have been distantly amused by the missionaries: not willing to meet them, he had his court painters prepare portraits of the Jesuits in Peking and, glancing at the result, said merely, “They are huihui”—a xenophobic term generally used for the Muslims of western China. When informed, via his eunuchs, that the rulers of Europe “sometimes lived on the upper floors of their high buildings,” the Emperor burst into laughter at such grotesque behavior. Ricci resided for nine years in Peking, and his rather early death, in 1610, at the age of fifty-seven, is ascribed by Mr. Spence to the strains of the hospitality he enjoyed there. “For Ricci the search for acceptance was now over, but exhaustion mounted under the press of social commitment and constant intellectual exegesis. One Chinese contemporary noted that the Jesuit ‘ate and drank exuberantly’ on these occasions, and there is little doubt that the ceaseless social rounds took their toll.” On his deathbed, as he sank into delirium, Ricci spoke of the Jesuit Pierre Coton, who had become the confessor of the King of France after Henry IV renounced Protestantism. “It is probable that in his last hours Ricci dreamed of being confessor to China’s long-lived emperor Wanli. Coton’s seems to have been the last name Ricci uttered. On May 11, in the evening, he sat up straight in bed, closed his eyes, and died.”

  The winding yet winning way in which this biography covers the ground of Ricci’s life almost defies description. In brief, each of the four ideograms discussed in the book on mnemonics that Ricci presented to Governor Lu and each of the four religious illustrations contributed to Cheng Dayue’s Ink Garden inspires an essayistic chapter that deals with an aspect of Matteo Ricci’s life experience. The first ideogram, wu, representing war and construed by Ricci to show two warriors grappling, leads Mr. Spence to discuss: the violent atmosphere of Macerata, an Italian town in the papal domain where Ricci was born and grew up, amid blood feuds and banditry and war refugees from the north and rumors of Turkish attack on the Adriatic coast; the changes in military technology during Ricci’s youth and the political turmoil in these times of Counter-Reformation; the Spanish siege of Antwerp, the Ottoman defeat at the naval battle of Lepanto, and the disastrous battle between the Portuguese and the Moors at Alcazarquivir; the bustling, tawdry Portuguese settlements at Goa and Macao, where Ricci prepared for his mission to China; his impressions of China’s indifferent warrior spirit and cruel corporal punishments; the competition among both missionaries and traders in the Far East; the Spanish slaughter of close to twenty thousand Chinese in the Philippines in 1603; and a personal incident in 1592 when a gang of youths invaded Ricci’s compound in Shaozhou and was repelled by a bombardment of roof tiles, but only after Ricci suffered an ax cut and a twisted ankle, which ever after caused him to limp.

  For another example, the third picture, showing an angel blinding the men of Sodom, leads Mr. Spence into fascinating disquisitions upon the moral and religious condition of Rome in the late sixteenth century, the same of Lisbon, the social make-up of Goa and Macao, Chinese slavery, Ricci’s ambivalent attitude toward Chinese institutions, the Emperor Wan-li’s colossal tomb, eunuchs in China, drunkenness and misery and poverty and prostitution in Peking, Chinese accusations of sexual immorality among the Jesuits, Oriental toleration of homosexuality as contrasted with Christian abhorrence and Inquisitorial persecution, Loyola’s proposed exercises in the correct contemplation of sin, and Ricci’s Chinese translation of “Thou shalt not commit adultery” as “Thou shalt not do depraved, unnatural, or filthy things.”

  Each chapter pursues its theme with a similar wandering through the palace of fact. Mr. Spence’s powers of correlation and connection are dazzling. Ricci’s limp returns in a later chapter as a counterpart of Loyola’s crippled right leg, the surgery upon which gave rise through the pain to a vision of Mary and her Child that left his heart ever serene. These instances of lameness then suggest the limp that Dante seems to describe in the Infernal line “Si che’l piè fermo sempre era ’l più basso” (“So that the firm foot was always the lower”). From these anatomical considerations Mr. Spence effortlessly hops to holy relics, to the relics Ricci carried with him, to Marian sodalities in China and elsewhere, to the Counter-Reformation cult of the Virgin
, to the observation by a Chinese contemporary of Ricci’s that “the image used for the Christian God is the body of a woman.” Quite dazzlingly, Mr. Spence shows that Ricci’s fourth ideogram (hao, meaning “goodness” and represented by a servant girl with a child in her arms) and his fourth religious picture (Virgin and Child) converge and embody the same unsatisfied longing, a longing obliquely exposed by a misprint that Ricci allowed to remain in the etching of the Virgin—“plena” became “lena,” a noun meaning “a woman who allures or entices.” To convey so much information about a man, a religious fraternity, and two globally opposite cultures three hundred years ago by means of eight images and the themes that ramify from them is a rare tour de force, achieved by a scholar determined to refresh not only our knowledge of the past but the very forms in which history is presented.