Simon Leys (1935–2014)
Author of The Death of Napoleon
About the Author
Pierre Ryckmans was born on September 28, 1935 in Brussels, Belgian. He studied law and art history at the Catholic University of Louvain. At the age of 19, he was one of a delegation of young Belgians invited to China on a trip that included a meeting with Zhou Enlai, the premier under Mao. He show more spent 12 years in the Far East, where he became an expert on Chinese painting, calligraphy and poetry. In Hong Kong, he monitored the Chinese press on behalf of Belgian diplomats. He taught at the Australian National University in Canberra in 1970. He primarily wrote under the pen name Simon Leys. He criticized Mao's cultural revolution in his first two books, Les Habits Neufs du Président Mao (The Chairman's New Clothes) and Ombres Chinoises (Chinese Shadows). His other works included The Death of Napoleon and The Wreck of the Batavia. He died of cancer on August 11, 2014 at the age of 78. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Works by Simon Leys
Associated Works
On the Abolition of All Political Parties (1940) — Translator, some editions — 349 copies, 5 reviews
The Execution of Mayor Yin, and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Chinese Literature in Translation) (1978) — Introduction, some editions — 133 copies, 1 review
Madame Chiang Kai-Shek : Un siècle d'histoire de la Chine (2010) — Preface, some editions — 14 copies
National Geographic World Cultures and Geograph (Australia, The Pacific Realm & Antarctica) Teacher's Edition (2016) — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Ryckmans, Pierre
- Birthdate
- 1935-09-28
- Date of death
- 2014-08-11
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
National Taiwan University - Occupations
- sinologist
university professor
translator
art historian - Organizations
- Australian National University
University of Sydney - Awards and honors
- Prix mondial Cino Del Duca (2005)
Fellow, Australian Academy of Humanities
Member, Academie Royale de Literature Francaise - Relationships
- Ryckmans, Han-fang Chang (wife)
- Cause of death
- cancer
- Nationality
- Belgium (birth)
Australia (naturalized) - Birthplace
- Brussels, Belgium
- Places of residence
- Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Taiwan
Belgium
Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia - Place of death
- Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
Members
Reviews
A novella set in an alternate past, where Napoleon escapes St Helena, leaving a body double in his place and returning disguised to Europe in the hopes of regaining his throne. His plans go awry, and Napoleon gets a bit of a comeuppance since he cannot assert his identity without being thought mad. This is a wryly melancholic piece that plays with idea of celebrity, humanity, and identity: Napoleon, who really is Napoleon, is nevertheless delusional in thinking he could be Napoleon once show more more. Simon Leys' prose is mostly pleasurable, but I wish the translator had made a different choice in how to render the names of one of the characters into English—"Nègre-Nicolas" could have been translated in a less uncomfortable way or a more uncomfortable way, and the translator opted for the second way even though I don't think it added anything to the narrative or even made for more verisimilitude. show less
Simon Leys is a carefully kept secret by anyone who loves contradictory people, people who are averse to fashionable or politically correct thinking, just go their own way and are not ashamed to row against the tide. This Belgian writer, - with his real name Pierre Ryckmans (1935-2014) -, was an eminent sinologist, one of the best connoisseurs of China in the 20th century. He was among the first to uncover and denounce the cruel excesses of Mao's ideological campaigns, but he was not taken show more seriously by the predominant, especially Sartre-controlled omertà of the sixties and seventies. That he was a professing Catholic probably didn't help either. His analyses of China and Chinese culture were not appreciated until the 1980s, but his influence always stayed limited, partly due to a form of charming unworldliness.
This bundle of essays naturally includes several excellent articles on China and Chinese culture, but the main emphasis is nevertheless on his literary criticism. Because it appears that Leys was enormously well-read, and also expressed opinions about the "monstres sacrés" of Western literature that regularly went against prevailing opinions. It is no coincidence that this book opens with an ode to Don Quixote, who is not a "loser" at all for Leys, but someone who in all simplicity has set a goal and consistently adheres to it. It’s odd, but when I look at images of Leys at a later age, I can see a certain physical similarity between him and the classic representations that have been made of the Spanish anachronistic knight. Or is that my imagination?
If I have to ascertain 2 attractive qualities in Leys, then these are his authenticity and his humanism. To a large degree both are old-fashioned these days. This is foremost a characteristic of his literary criticism: writers such as Chesterton, Orwell and Simenon are lauded for their astute authenticity, others such as André Malraux and Roland Barthes are ruthlessly cracked for their mythomania and ideological conformity.
Reading these essays, one is impressed by Leys’ erudition and lucidity. But I have the impression that in the course of time he has started to somewhat cultivate his own obstinacy. He regularly – in an ironic way of course – refers to his lack of knowledge and insight, which he invariably blames on laziness (in my opinion rather a form of complacency), but he uses this weapon to deal mercilessly with people of another opinion. And apparently, he knows all too well how his blatant Catholicism deviated from the spirit of the times: just look at his sharp, provocative polemic with Christopher Hitchens about the latter’s critical book on Mother Teresa.
Oh well, perhaps these are just the petty traits of a brilliant genius. I am pleased that thanks to this collection of essays I have been able to become acquainted with the valuable, be it somewhat old-fashioned universe of Simon Leys. show less
This bundle of essays naturally includes several excellent articles on China and Chinese culture, but the main emphasis is nevertheless on his literary criticism. Because it appears that Leys was enormously well-read, and also expressed opinions about the "monstres sacrés" of Western literature that regularly went against prevailing opinions. It is no coincidence that this book opens with an ode to Don Quixote, who is not a "loser" at all for Leys, but someone who in all simplicity has set a goal and consistently adheres to it. It’s odd, but when I look at images of Leys at a later age, I can see a certain physical similarity between him and the classic representations that have been made of the Spanish anachronistic knight. Or is that my imagination?
If I have to ascertain 2 attractive qualities in Leys, then these are his authenticity and his humanism. To a large degree both are old-fashioned these days. This is foremost a characteristic of his literary criticism: writers such as Chesterton, Orwell and Simenon are lauded for their astute authenticity, others such as André Malraux and Roland Barthes are ruthlessly cracked for their mythomania and ideological conformity.
Reading these essays, one is impressed by Leys’ erudition and lucidity. But I have the impression that in the course of time he has started to somewhat cultivate his own obstinacy. He regularly – in an ironic way of course – refers to his lack of knowledge and insight, which he invariably blames on laziness (in my opinion rather a form of complacency), but he uses this weapon to deal mercilessly with people of another opinion. And apparently, he knows all too well how his blatant Catholicism deviated from the spirit of the times: just look at his sharp, provocative polemic with Christopher Hitchens about the latter’s critical book on Mother Teresa.
Oh well, perhaps these are just the petty traits of a brilliant genius. I am pleased that thanks to this collection of essays I have been able to become acquainted with the valuable, be it somewhat old-fashioned universe of Simon Leys. show less
I read this last year, and wrote a short essay about it that I then failed to have published anywhere. I'd forgotten about it. Well, here are my thoughts about Leys and 'World Literature,' and a few other things. I haven't edited it.
**
When I was a teaching assistant for a class on world literature, we had our students define the subject in a short paper. One freshman argued, more or less, that “world literature was invented by Goethe to exclude literature from outside Western Europe.” show more Precocious, but this really happened. “World literature makes it impossible for Eastern European, African, and Asian writers to gain the audience they deserve. The concept must be destroyed.” Pierre Ryckmans, the sinologist, novelist and essayist who publishes as Simon Leys, would have been aghast. Leys was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. His pen name comes from Victor Segalen’s novel René Leys, whose narrator, Victor Segalen, is a sinophile living in Pei-king under the final Qing emperor. René Leys fools Segalen, telling him that he’s had a child with the Empress and is head of the secret police in the Forbidden City. Leys dies, and Segalen realizes he’s been duped, but he chooses to idealize his friend rather than remember him as a liar.
Just as Segalen kept his faith in René, Simon Leys still believes in literature’s power and importance. Of course, he’s not alone. This quarter’s n 1, for instance, includes a history of world literature: despite Goethe’s efforts, literature ended up becoming less international, and less political, in the 19th century. Today’s world literature is an apolitical sop to the middle class; politics turns up only in historical fiction, because “past horrors, unlike contemporary ones… tend to be events liberal readers agree about”—and liberal readers buy world literature. The market demands that contemporary world literature ignore contemporary injustices. Just as my freshman did, n 1 argues, not without cause, that this depoliticized ‘Global Lit’ needs to be destroyed and replaced with an “internationalist literature of the revolutionary left” that will oppose power, tell the truth, and create a taste for revolutionary politics. Most importantly, it will not treat “literature as a self-evident autonomous good.” Leys would disagree, obstinately, but sensitively.
Many of the best essays in The Hall of Uselessness are about writers who were particularly open to the languages and literatures of other peoples, and Leys shares their openness. The Hall includes formal academic essays, literary criticism, public lectures, reviews, polemic, parables and forewords about, among other things, European and East Asian literature, history, and politics. Leys knows that, because of this breadth, specialists might suspect him of frivolity or irresponsibility; his essay on Chinese aesthetics suggests a response. It describes the sinologist’s conundrum: “specialisation is necessary” because no individual can hope to understand all of Chinese culture; but “specialisation is impossible” because “if he is not guided by a global intuition, the specialist remains forever condemned to the fate of the blind men in the well-known Buddhist parable,” who each grope one part of an elephant, and then argue about what they’re touching: a snake? A pillar? A broom?
This is also the conundrum of world literature. If we want to read, we need to specialize to some degree. We can’t read everything. But we also can’t just read at random; we need to be guided by a global intuition. For Leys, we should be guided by the apolitical idea that the literary tradition is an autonomous, useless, and self-evident good. We should read and write literature for its own sake.
That’s not to say that politics has no place in Leys’s essays. Many of them are political, though many of the political essays are, unfortunately, among his least likable. Leys writes well about the tyrants of Asia; his essay on Mao is as balanced as anyone could expect. But that only makes his splenetic attacks on the intellectuals who covered up the famines and genocides of China and Cambodia more bizarre. It often seems that Leys is more offended by the fools—e.g., Alain Badiou telling us not to allow “reactionary critics to neutralize and negate” Stalin, Mao, Tito and Hoxha—than he is by the executives of genocide.
To his credit, Leys tries to understand why people like Badiou say what they do; his best answer is that they suffer a “failure of the imagination.” Even when they know all about atrocities, some intellectuals don’t really grasp what they know. Here Leys follows Orwell, who said that people without expertise (e.g., according to himself, Orwell) can still have “the power to grasp what kind of world we are living in.” Even if you don’t know how many people the Khmer Rouge murdered, you can still grasp that the Khmer Rouge was a brutal, horrible regime. This is the imaginative grasp that people like Badiou don’t have.
Literature can help us remedy that lack by stimulating our imagination. Leys uses Don Quixote as an example. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in order to make money and mock knights and damsels stories. Such profiteering and parody aren’t usually conducive to greatness, but we still read Don Quixote, because Quixote transcends Cervantes’s aims. Cervantes began with the thought that Quixote is a madman, and a fool; we follow him when we use ‘quixotic’ to mean “hopelessly naïve and idealistic.” But “hopelessly naïve and idealistic” can also be a complimentary description of literature, set against the world, insisting that we should be more just, more beautiful, and more loving than we are. Cynics dismiss Quixote as naïve and idealistic, but for most readers his naivety and idealism are as inspiring as they are amusing. And Quixote’s imagined world looks much more charming than the one we have to live in.
So, ultimately, politics and literature come together in Leys’s essays, because he thinks that the imaginative power we develop through reading helps us better understand social and political events. It also gives us ideals by which to judge them. The Chinese writer (and political prisoner) Liu Xiaobo, for instance, had an epiphany when he was teaching in New York. He realized both that his own learning was nothing compared to “the fabulous riches of the diverse civilizations of the past,” and that the “Western answers to mankind’s modern predicament” were no better than China’s. So he vowed to “use Western civilization as a tool to critique China”, and to use his “own creativity as a tool to critique the West”—the ideals of the West and those of China can be used to criticize the societies of each. I don’t know if Liu will be able to hold on to those ideals while he suffers in prison; I doubt I could. But his imprisonment does show that a broad engagement with world literature gave him a great capacity for critical thought. If, like Liu, we can understand the ideals and flaws in the thought and art of different peoples, we’ll give ourselves the best chance we have to criticize injustice.
So where revolutionaries demand a new world literature, Leys points to what we already have: a tradition that started long before writing, and will continue long after everybody’s bêtes noires, Naipaul and Rushdie. And, rather than demand democratization, Leys argues that the products and subjects of world literature—truth, intelligence, beauty and love—are elitist. They are the goals of an education, “ruthlessly aristocratic and high-brow”, in which “a chance is given to men to become what they truly are.”
All this can sound like a humanistic platitude. But Leys’s elitist, formalist understanding of world literature actually has far-reaching, radical political content: literature helps us to understand and hold onto an ideal of human happiness, in which as many people as possible are at leisure to be liberal, but ‘liberal’ in the ancient sense—to be free from poverty and oppression, and so able to act in one’s own interests. In recent years this ideal has been threatened by one of the paradoxes of capitalism: “the wretched lumpenproletariat is cursed with the enforced leisure of demoralizing and permanent unemployment, whereas the educated elite, whose liberal professions have been turned into senseless money-making machines, are condemning themselves to the slavery of endless working hours.” Those who have the time to be happy have no money; those who can afford to be happy have no time for it.
Today’s radicals tend to ignore the paradox and reject the ideal, but at least one old revolutionary understood the problem and sought a solution for the former, rather than the destruction of the latter. At the end of Capital’s third volume, Marx wrote of his hope that, one day, we’d be able to enter “the true realm of freedom,” and accept “the development of human powers as an end in itself.” Bad press to the contrary, he wasn’t talking about our ability to produce ever more rubber widgets. The ‘human powers’ are the artistic and moral abilities that Marx, among many others, thought were exemplified in the traditions of world literature. When we find an old conservative like Leys defending the same ideals as an arch-revolutionary like Marx we should probably conclude that there’s something to them.
Note: Leys isn’t immune to failures of imagination. In one essay here, published in 2000, he suggests that clergy should remain celibate, because married clergy would be “too cruel and unfair to their children.” Aside from ignoring the experiences of protestant churches and Maronite Catholics, Leys must have known about the child abuse taking place in too many Catholic dioceses in Australia: the group Broken Rites has been publicizing cases since 1993. His homophobia is another case of this failure. show less
**
When I was a teaching assistant for a class on world literature, we had our students define the subject in a short paper. One freshman argued, more or less, that “world literature was invented by Goethe to exclude literature from outside Western Europe.” show more Precocious, but this really happened. “World literature makes it impossible for Eastern European, African, and Asian writers to gain the audience they deserve. The concept must be destroyed.” Pierre Ryckmans, the sinologist, novelist and essayist who publishes as Simon Leys, would have been aghast. Leys was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. His pen name comes from Victor Segalen’s novel René Leys, whose narrator, Victor Segalen, is a sinophile living in Pei-king under the final Qing emperor. René Leys fools Segalen, telling him that he’s had a child with the Empress and is head of the secret police in the Forbidden City. Leys dies, and Segalen realizes he’s been duped, but he chooses to idealize his friend rather than remember him as a liar.
Just as Segalen kept his faith in René, Simon Leys still believes in literature’s power and importance. Of course, he’s not alone. This quarter’s n 1, for instance, includes a history of world literature: despite Goethe’s efforts, literature ended up becoming less international, and less political, in the 19th century. Today’s world literature is an apolitical sop to the middle class; politics turns up only in historical fiction, because “past horrors, unlike contemporary ones… tend to be events liberal readers agree about”—and liberal readers buy world literature. The market demands that contemporary world literature ignore contemporary injustices. Just as my freshman did, n 1 argues, not without cause, that this depoliticized ‘Global Lit’ needs to be destroyed and replaced with an “internationalist literature of the revolutionary left” that will oppose power, tell the truth, and create a taste for revolutionary politics. Most importantly, it will not treat “literature as a self-evident autonomous good.” Leys would disagree, obstinately, but sensitively.
Many of the best essays in The Hall of Uselessness are about writers who were particularly open to the languages and literatures of other peoples, and Leys shares their openness. The Hall includes formal academic essays, literary criticism, public lectures, reviews, polemic, parables and forewords about, among other things, European and East Asian literature, history, and politics. Leys knows that, because of this breadth, specialists might suspect him of frivolity or irresponsibility; his essay on Chinese aesthetics suggests a response. It describes the sinologist’s conundrum: “specialisation is necessary” because no individual can hope to understand all of Chinese culture; but “specialisation is impossible” because “if he is not guided by a global intuition, the specialist remains forever condemned to the fate of the blind men in the well-known Buddhist parable,” who each grope one part of an elephant, and then argue about what they’re touching: a snake? A pillar? A broom?
This is also the conundrum of world literature. If we want to read, we need to specialize to some degree. We can’t read everything. But we also can’t just read at random; we need to be guided by a global intuition. For Leys, we should be guided by the apolitical idea that the literary tradition is an autonomous, useless, and self-evident good. We should read and write literature for its own sake.
That’s not to say that politics has no place in Leys’s essays. Many of them are political, though many of the political essays are, unfortunately, among his least likable. Leys writes well about the tyrants of Asia; his essay on Mao is as balanced as anyone could expect. But that only makes his splenetic attacks on the intellectuals who covered up the famines and genocides of China and Cambodia more bizarre. It often seems that Leys is more offended by the fools—e.g., Alain Badiou telling us not to allow “reactionary critics to neutralize and negate” Stalin, Mao, Tito and Hoxha—than he is by the executives of genocide.
To his credit, Leys tries to understand why people like Badiou say what they do; his best answer is that they suffer a “failure of the imagination.” Even when they know all about atrocities, some intellectuals don’t really grasp what they know. Here Leys follows Orwell, who said that people without expertise (e.g., according to himself, Orwell) can still have “the power to grasp what kind of world we are living in.” Even if you don’t know how many people the Khmer Rouge murdered, you can still grasp that the Khmer Rouge was a brutal, horrible regime. This is the imaginative grasp that people like Badiou don’t have.
Literature can help us remedy that lack by stimulating our imagination. Leys uses Don Quixote as an example. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in order to make money and mock knights and damsels stories. Such profiteering and parody aren’t usually conducive to greatness, but we still read Don Quixote, because Quixote transcends Cervantes’s aims. Cervantes began with the thought that Quixote is a madman, and a fool; we follow him when we use ‘quixotic’ to mean “hopelessly naïve and idealistic.” But “hopelessly naïve and idealistic” can also be a complimentary description of literature, set against the world, insisting that we should be more just, more beautiful, and more loving than we are. Cynics dismiss Quixote as naïve and idealistic, but for most readers his naivety and idealism are as inspiring as they are amusing. And Quixote’s imagined world looks much more charming than the one we have to live in.
So, ultimately, politics and literature come together in Leys’s essays, because he thinks that the imaginative power we develop through reading helps us better understand social and political events. It also gives us ideals by which to judge them. The Chinese writer (and political prisoner) Liu Xiaobo, for instance, had an epiphany when he was teaching in New York. He realized both that his own learning was nothing compared to “the fabulous riches of the diverse civilizations of the past,” and that the “Western answers to mankind’s modern predicament” were no better than China’s. So he vowed to “use Western civilization as a tool to critique China”, and to use his “own creativity as a tool to critique the West”—the ideals of the West and those of China can be used to criticize the societies of each. I don’t know if Liu will be able to hold on to those ideals while he suffers in prison; I doubt I could. But his imprisonment does show that a broad engagement with world literature gave him a great capacity for critical thought. If, like Liu, we can understand the ideals and flaws in the thought and art of different peoples, we’ll give ourselves the best chance we have to criticize injustice.
So where revolutionaries demand a new world literature, Leys points to what we already have: a tradition that started long before writing, and will continue long after everybody’s bêtes noires, Naipaul and Rushdie. And, rather than demand democratization, Leys argues that the products and subjects of world literature—truth, intelligence, beauty and love—are elitist. They are the goals of an education, “ruthlessly aristocratic and high-brow”, in which “a chance is given to men to become what they truly are.”
All this can sound like a humanistic platitude. But Leys’s elitist, formalist understanding of world literature actually has far-reaching, radical political content: literature helps us to understand and hold onto an ideal of human happiness, in which as many people as possible are at leisure to be liberal, but ‘liberal’ in the ancient sense—to be free from poverty and oppression, and so able to act in one’s own interests. In recent years this ideal has been threatened by one of the paradoxes of capitalism: “the wretched lumpenproletariat is cursed with the enforced leisure of demoralizing and permanent unemployment, whereas the educated elite, whose liberal professions have been turned into senseless money-making machines, are condemning themselves to the slavery of endless working hours.” Those who have the time to be happy have no money; those who can afford to be happy have no time for it.
Today’s radicals tend to ignore the paradox and reject the ideal, but at least one old revolutionary understood the problem and sought a solution for the former, rather than the destruction of the latter. At the end of Capital’s third volume, Marx wrote of his hope that, one day, we’d be able to enter “the true realm of freedom,” and accept “the development of human powers as an end in itself.” Bad press to the contrary, he wasn’t talking about our ability to produce ever more rubber widgets. The ‘human powers’ are the artistic and moral abilities that Marx, among many others, thought were exemplified in the traditions of world literature. When we find an old conservative like Leys defending the same ideals as an arch-revolutionary like Marx we should probably conclude that there’s something to them.
Note: Leys isn’t immune to failures of imagination. In one essay here, published in 2000, he suggests that clergy should remain celibate, because married clergy would be “too cruel and unfair to their children.” Aside from ignoring the experiences of protestant churches and Maronite Catholics, Leys must have known about the child abuse taking place in too many Catholic dioceses in Australia: the group Broken Rites has been publicizing cases since 1993. His homophobia is another case of this failure. show less
She goes forward admirably, she does not go backwards successfully — Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice
On Adventures in Fixity
Gertrude Stein, who is driving, quite excellently, one of the first Fords imported to France in the so-called "interwar period," often remarks on how certain young male artistic types, though they drive forward well enough in Aix-en-Provence, don't develop the skills for movement in reverse. In a certain sense, this kind of limitation might be a good thing; show more forcing creative energies to move in a single direction. Simon Leys's description of Chinese calligraphy exemplifies this relationship, in which a certain fixity is found to be productive: Not only is [the calligrapher] not allowed to create new graphic structures, but this limited material is itself strictly predetermined: each character must be written with a specific number of brushstrokes that are arranged in a precise pattern, and follow each other in preordained sequence. [...] The resources of invention and creation are exclusively channeled into expression (282). Knowing Leys for a sinologist, we are perhaps not surprised to find his style consistent with the "good taste" which is finding new expression in the oldies and goodies. In one Leys's exemplary essays in this collection (the one on Revel) he references the fable from Archilochus: "The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing". Yet, the more he writes about Revel, heaping praise upon praise, the subject somehow gains all the advantages of both. The fox in Revel, who knows many things, comes to learn one big thing, and the hedgehog in Revel, who knows one big thing, comes to learn many things as well. In this sense, by going beyond Archilochus in superlative praise, he has accomplished the feat of Cratylus, who, in his attempt to improve upon Heraclitus, asserted that, "No man ever can step into the same river even once."
Sometimes people talk about Scholarship as if it were a large meal served in a house of ill repute (if we're not already tired of mixed metaphors). One might venture to partake with caution, expecting a provisional nutritional value, but also possibly a bad taste. (The absence of the former is more forgiving than the presence of the latter.) Simon Leys, like Susan Sontag's "husbandly" writers, is often critical of such repasts, particularly when cooked up by certain "western visitors." "They were much impressed by the austerity of the monks who subsisted on a 'bowl of tea,' for their evening meal. These visitors, however, were quite naïve. If they had had the curiosity actually to look into the bowls of the monks, they would have found that what was served under the name of 'tea' was in fact a fairly nourishing rice congee (271)." In a certain sense, Leys is producing a comparatively more nutritive scholarship, especially in his essays on calligraphy and Chinese writing, which happen to corroborate much of Derrida's discourse on writing and speech in Of Grammatology. (i.e. Chinese speech cannot be said to have preceded Chinese writing.) Other successes: Leys's perspective on Chinese history. The sense that historical treasures are always being destroyed with remarkable frequency allows him to place the Cultural Revolution in context. (Whereas the "western visitor" has often portrayed it as a unique holocaust (burning).) His essay on Mao is perhaps the best in the collection, and is worth quoting at length for its analysis of Chinese wordplay (unfortunately absent from many other essays), his limpid perspective on the Chairman aside.
Some misunderstandings acquire historical dimensions. In the celebrated interview he granted Edgar Snow, Mao Zedong allegedly described himself as “a lonely monk walking in the rain under a leaking umbrella.” With its mixture of humorous humility and exoticism, this utterance had a tremendous impact on the Western imagination. Snow failed to recognize in this “monk under an umbrella” evoked by the chairman a most popular Chinese joke. The expression, in the form of a riddle, calls for the conventional answer “no hair” (since monks keep their heads shaven), “no sky” (it being hidden by the umbrella)—which in turn means by homophony (wu-fa wu-tian) “I know no law, I hold nothing sacred.” The blunt cynicism shown by Mao in referring to such a saying to define his basic attitude was as typical of his bold disregard for diplomatic niceties as its mistaken and sentimental English adaptation by Snow is revealing of the compulsion for myth-making (347).
In one of the last public appearances before his death in 2014, Leys delivered a lecture at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne in which he reiterates many of his thoughts on literature found in this collection. (The speech is also notable for an Australian English still surprisingly spoken with a strong Belgian accent.) Yet this lecture, in which our author grips the lectern at such a low angle that he appears to be standing with arms akimbo, concludes with a notable display of (bad) taste in the form of a quotation from Normon Mailer: "I would never dream of not reading reviews of my books. it would be like not looking at a naked woman if she happens to be standing in front of an open window." The inclusion of this prurient quotation from our practicing Catholic author suggests that, perhaps for a long while, Leys has been wanting to have it both ways — both universal esteem and lighthearted chauvinism. (Notably, of the seventeen essays on Literature in this collection, none feature women.)
Roland Barthes is quoted in one of the essays in this collection (the one on Barthes), in which he presents a perspective on a style of writing: “[literature that is] neither affirmative, nor negative, nor yet neutral — the desire for silence as a special form of discourse” (341). As we may recall, the Tel Quel group, of which Barthes was a member, has made some perhaps lamentable statements in support of Maoism. This, I suspect, is driving Leys, whose position on Mao is certainly not equivocal, to produce an exemplary misreading of R.B. When Barthes, as part of Tel Quel's visit to China, reserves his invective for the poor quality of his in-flight sandwich on Air France, Leys subsequently remarks, tongue-in-cheek, that perhaps it would've been just as good if R.B. hadn't written anything at all. This is particularly provocative coming from the author who has begun this collection with a maxim from Zuang Zi: "Everyone knows the usefulness of what is useful, but few know the usefulness of what is useless" (9). Letting resentment cloud his judgment — why doesn't Leys recognize the similarity between R.B. and Zuang Zi — perhaps he's limited by thought which can only think in one direction. Yet, had he been able to take Barthes to heart (i.e. writing as a reservation of judgment when you know you might be in the wrong), one might hope that our author wouldn't have written those unsuccessful backwards-moving ventures in praise of smoking (and against Edward Said’s Orientalism), which ended for him in embarrassment.
'Does Heaven speak?' I have certainly spoken too much (298). — Simon Leysshow less
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