His humour enchanted his readers, but kept disconcerting the more pompous pundits. The French greatly value wit, which they display in profusion, but humour often makes them uneasy, especially when it is applied to important subjects; they do not have a word for it, they do not know the thing. Whereas wit is a form of duelling — it aims to wound or to kill — the essence of humour is self-deprecatory. Once again, a Chestertonian saying could be apposite: Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or in short jokes is analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or German.
One of his close friends and collaborators said he doubted if Revel, in his entire career, had written a single sentence that was obscure. And, in their eyes, how could one possibly say something important if one is not self-important? With the accuracy of his information and the sharpness of his irony, Revel deflated the huge balloons of cant that elevate the chattering classes.
They felt utterly threatened, for he was exposing the puffery of the latest intellectual fashions upon which their livehood depended. At times they could not hide their panic; for instance, the great guru of the intelligentsia, Jacques Lacan, during one of his psychoanalytical seminars at the Sorbonne, performed in front of his devotees a voodoo-like exorcism.
A paradoxical situation developed: His books were not reviewed, his ideas were not discussed, if his name was mentioned at all it was with a patronising sneer, if not downright slander. And yet what strikingly set him apart from most other intellectuals of his generation was his genuinely cosmopolitan outlook. He had spent abroad the best part of his formative and early creative years, mostly in Mexico and Italy. In addition to English spoken by few educated Fench of his time he was fluent in Italian, Spanish and German; until the end of his life he retained the healthy habit to start every day he rose at 5am by listening to he BBC news and reading six foreign newspapers.
On international affairs, on literature, art and ideas, he had universal perspectives that broke completely from the suffocating provincialism of the contemporary Parisian elites. In the 18th century, French was the common language of the leading minds of continental Europe; 20th-century French intellectuals hardly noticed that times had changed in this respect; they retained the dangerous belief that whatever was not expressed in French could hardly matter. At the root of this attitude he detected a subconscious resentment: By vocation and academic training Revel was originally a philosopher he entered at an exceptionally early age the Ecole Normale Superieure, the apex of the French higher education system.
He taught philosophy and eventually wrote a history of Western philosophy eschewing all technical jargon, it is a model of lucid synthesis. However, he became disenchanted with the contemporary philosophers who, he flet, had betrayed their calling by turning philosophy into a professional career and a mere literary genre. How should I live? Ancient Greek poet Archilochus famously said: The belief that each individual destiny, as well as the destiny of mankind, depends upon the accuracy — or the falsity — of the information at their disposal, and upon the way in which they put this information to use.
He devoted one of his books specifically to this issue, La Connaissance Inutile Useless Knowledge , but this theme runs through nearly all his writings. Politics naturally absorbed a great amount of his attention. From the outset he showed his willingness to commit himself personaly, and at great risk: After the war, his basic political allegiance was, and always remainded, to the Left and the principles of liberal democracy. He was sharply critical of Charles de Gaulle and of all saviours and providential leaders in military uniforms. Yet, like George Orwell before him, he always believed that only an uncompromising denunciation of all forms of Stalinist totalitarianism can ensure the ultimate victory of socialism.
Thus — again, like Orwell — he earned for himself the hostility of his starry-eyed comrades. The portrait he paints of Mitterrand in his memoirs is hilarious and horrifying. Mitterrand was the purest type of political animal: He had a brilliant intelligence, but for him ideas were neither right or wrong, they were only useful or useless in the pursuit of power. The object of power was not a possibility to enact certain policies; the object of all policies was simply attain and retain power.
Revel, having drafted a speech for his own electoral campaign, was invited by Mitterrand to read it to him. In politics never acknowledge that your opponent has any merit. This is the basic rule of the game. Revel understood once and for all that this game was not for him and it was the end of his political ambition.
Which proved to be a blessing: And one could have said exactly the same about his close friend Mario Vargas Llosa, who — luckily for literature — was defeated in presidential elections in Peru. Dead writers who were also friends never leave us: I had many conversations and discussions: The matter is trifling and frivolous for which I apologise , but what touches me is that I found the answer many years later, in his writings. I told him that one scene had impressed me, by its acute psychological insight into the truth that love-making without love is but a very grim sort of gymnastics.
He stopped abruptly and gave me a long quizzical look, as if he was trying to find out whether I really believed that, or was merely pulling his leg. Many years later, reading his autobiography, I suddenly understood. When he was a precocious adolescent of 15, at school in Marseilles, he was quite brilliant in all humanities subjects but hopeless in mathematics. Every Thursday, pretending to his mother that he was receiving extra tuition in maths, he used to go to a little brothel.
He would first do his school work in the common lounge and, after that, go upstairs with one of the girls. One Thursday, however, as he was walking up the stairs his maths teacher came down. The young man froze, but the teacher passed impassively, merely muttering between clenched teeth: I belatedly realised that, from a rather early age, Revel had acquired a fairly different perspective on the subject of our chat.
Bashing an elderly nun under an obscene label does not seem to be a particularly brave or stylish thing to do. Besides, it appears that the attacks which are being directed at Mother Teresa all boil down to one single crime: She occasionally accepts the hospitality of crooks, millionaires, and criminals. But it is hard to see why, as a Christian, she should be more choosy in this respect than her Master, whose bad frequentations were notorious, and shocked all the Hitchenses of His time.
Instead of providing efficient and hygienic services to the sick and dying destitutes, she merely offers them her care and her love. When I am on my death bed, I think I should prefer to have one of her Sisters by my side, rather than a modern social worker. She secretly baptizes the dying. The material act of baptism consists in shedding a few drops of water on the head of a person, while mumbling a dozen simple ritual words.
Either you believe in the supernatural effect of this gesture—and then you should dearly wish for it. Or you do not believe in it, and the gesture is as innocent and well-meaningly innocuous as chasing a fly away with a wave of the hand. If a cannibal who happens to love you presents you with his most cherished possession—a magic crocodile tooth that should protect you forever—will you indignantly reject his gift for being primitive and superstitious, or would you gratefully accept it as a generous mark of sincere concern and affection?
Jesus was spat upon—but not by journalists, as there were none in His time. In Defense of Mother Teresa from the September 19, issue. In my book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa In Theory and Practice, I provide evidence that Mother Teresa has consoled and supported the rich and powerful, allowing them all manner of indulgence, while preaching obedience and resignation to the poor. Nobody was happy anyhow. That vote, quite apart from its importance in separating Church from State in the Irish Republic, had an obvious bearing on the vital discussion between Irish Catholics and Protestants as to who shall make law in a possible future cooperative island that is threatened by two kinds of Christian fundamentalism.
Evidence and argument of this kind, I have discovered, make no difference to people like Mr. Instead, they make vague allusions to the gospels. Here I can claim no special standing. The gospels do not agree on the life of the man Jesus, and they make assertions—such as his ability to cast demonic spells on pigs—that seem to reflect little credit upon him.
Did he ever accept a large subvention of money, as did Mother Teresa from Charles Keating, knowing it to have been stolen from small and humble savers? Did he ever demand a strict clerical control over, not just abortion, but contraception and marriage and divorce and adoption? On my related points—that Mother Teresa makes no real effort at medical or social relief, and that her mission is religious and propagandistic and includes surreptitious baptism of unbelievers—I notice that Mr.
Leys enters no serious dissent. Leys must try and make up his mind. To represent her as a woman defiled with spittle for her deeds or beliefs is—to employ the term strictly for once—quite incredible. But it accords with the Christian self-pity that we have to endure from so many quarters Justice Scalia, Ralph Reed, Mrs. Other faiths are taking their place in that same queue, to claim that all criticism is abusive, blasphemous, and defamatory by definition. Leys may not care for some of the friends that he will make in this line. Or perhaps I misjudge him? Also, given that I have been criticizing Mother Teresa since she was middle-aged and publicly denounced the senile Khomeini in his homicidal dotage , can he advise me of the age limit at which the faithful will admit secular criticism as pardonable?
Not even the current occupant of the Holy See has sought protection from dissent on the ground ofanno domini. Mother Teresa from the December 19, issue.
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Hitchens were to write an essay on His Holiness the Dalai Lama, being a competent journalist, he would no doubt first acquaint himself with Buddhism in general and with Tibetan Buddhism in particular. In this respect, his strong and vehement distaste for Mother Teresa reminds me of the indignation of the patron in a restaurant, who, having been served caviar on toast, complained that the jam had a funny taste of fish. The point is essential—but it deserves a development which would require more space and more time than can be afforded to me, here and now.
However, I am working on a full-fledged review of his book, which I shall gladly forward to him once it comes out in print. Hitchens asked me to explain what made me say that The Missionary Position is an obscene title. His question, without doubt, bears the same imprint of sincerity and good faith that characterized his entire book. Therefore, I owe him an equally sincere and straightforward answer: Hitchens having no need for such a tool in the exercise of his trade probably does not possess a copy of it.
It will therefore be a relief for his readers to learn that his unfortunate choice of a title was totally innocent: It was conducted via correspondence between Daniel Sanderson, the editor of the Newsletter, and Pierre Ryckmans. China Heritage Quarterly takes pleasure in reproducing it here with permission and adding it to our archive related to New Sinology. In The Hall of Uselessness: Discussing the tension between intellectual creativity at universities and the creep of managerialism that has increasingly benighted the life of the mind at universities he made the following observation:.
Near to the end of his life, Gustave Flaubert wrote in one of his remarkable letters to his dear friend Ivan Turgenev a little phrase that could beautifully summarise my topic. Throughout his career, Ryckmans has combined meticulous scholarship and a vigorous public engagement with contemporary political and intellectual issues. His elegant yet forthright style is evident in these responses to questions submitted by the CSAA Newsletter. Can you tell us about your childhood and teenage years? Where were you born? Where did you grow up? What kind of family life did you have as a child?
I was born and grew up in Brussels; I had a happy childhood.
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Was China in any way an element of your childhood? Was there, for instance, any scope to study Chinese history or politics, or the Chinese language, at school? This seems an unusual combination. What drew you to these subjects? Were you influenced particularly by any of your teachers? I studied Law to follow a family tradition, and Art History to follow my personal interest. At university, personal contacts, intellectual debates and exchanges with friends and schoolmates many of whom came from Asia and Latin America were far more important, enriching and memorable than most lectures.
Lately I noted with pleasure that John Henry Newman already made a similar observation in his great classic The Idea of a University How was this visit arranged? What was your impression of the New China at that time? Did you ever return to the PRC? If so, under what circumstances? Do you think that some experience of living in China is necessary for the scholar of China? The Chinese Government had invited a delegation of Belgian Youth 10 delegates—I was the youngest, age nineteen to visit China for one month May The voyage—smoothly organized—took us to the usual famous spots, climaxing in a one-hour private audience with Zhou Enlai.
My overwhelming impression a conclusion to which I remained faithful for the rest of my life was that it would be inconceivable to live in this world, in our age, without a good knowledge of Chinese language and a direct access to Chinese culture. What did you do after completing your undergraduate degree? Did you progress directly to further study? Did you ever consider a career outside the academy? I started learning Chinese. Since, at that time, no scholarship was available to go to China, I went to Taiwan.
I simply wished to know Chinese and acquire a deeper appreciations of Chinese culture. I would like to learn something about your PhD. What was your topic? Why was it important to you? Loving Western painting, quite naturally I became enthralled with Chinese painting and calligraphy — and I developed a special interest for what the Chinese wrote on the subject of painting: We are often tempted to do research on topics that are somewhat marginal and lesser-known, since, on these, it is easier to produce original work.
But one of my Chinese masters gave me a most valuable advice: Why does one paint? How should one paint? Among all my books, this one, first published forty years ago, has never gone out of print—and, to my delight, it is read by painters much more than by sinologists! You lived for some years in Taiwan, also spending time in Hong Kong and Singapore. During some twelve years, I lived and worked successively in Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong plus six months in Japan. It was a happy period of intense activity—living and learning in an environment where all my friends became my teachers, and all my teachers, my friends.
I am fond of a saying by Prince de Ligne a writer I much admire: If he is happy, it is because his wishes have not been granted. You arrived in Australia in to take up a position at the Australian National University. How did this come about? What was your role? Can you tell me a little about the atmosphere at ANU during your early years there? Thus, with my wife and four very young children, we moved to Canberra for what was supposed to be a three-year stay, but turned out to become our final, permanent home.
Professor Liu was not only a great scholar, he was also an exquisite man; for me, working in his department till his own retirement fifteen years later was sheer bliss—it also coincided with what must have been the golden age of our universities. Later on, the atmosphere changed—for various politico-economic and other reasons—and I took early retirement. The crisis of Higher Education is a vast problem, and a world phenomenon; I have spoken and written on the subject—there is no need and no space to repeat it here.
The s were a period of great political division within the field of Chinese Studies, and across society at large. The iconoclasm of the Cultural Revolution was attractive to many in the West. This was followed in by the equally controversial Chinese Shadows. Both these works stirred considerable debate in Europe. What was the reaction in Australia, particularly within the Chinese Studies community? Were you ever attracted to the Maoist experiment yourself? My own interest, my own field of work is Chinese literature and Chinese painting.
When commenting on Chinese contemporary politics, I was merely stating common sense evidence and common knowledge. But at that time, this may indeed have disturbed some fools here and there—which, in the end, did not matter very much. Do you think political engagement is a necessary part of the intellectual life? The political views of the greatest philosopher on earth may well be more silly than those of his ignorant housekeeper. You spent seventeen years at ANU and a further six years at the University of Sydney engaged in the study and teaching of Chinese literature.
Can you comment on the changes you saw within Chinese Studies at those institutions, and in Australia more generally, during that time? I am poorly informed on more recent developments I left academic life sixteen years ago. When things began to change education becoming mere training and took an orientation that corresponded no longer to what I always believed a university ought to be, I opted for early retirement.
In front of younger colleagues who keep bravely fighting the good fight, I feel like a deserter, ill-qualified to make further comments. It is perhaps a reductive question, but I wonder whether you could tell me what it is about the literature of China that you find appealing? The virtue and power of the Chinese literary language culminates in its classical poetry.
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Chinese classical poetry seems to me the purest, the most perfect and complete form of poetry one could conceive of. Furthermore, like painting, it splendidly occupies a visual space in its calligraphic incarnations. It inhabits your mind, it accompanies your life, it sustains and illuminates your daily experiences. Why, in your opinion, is the study of China necessary in Australia? Or, indeed, is it necessary at all? Why is scholarly knowledge necessary in Australia? A large proportion of your writing has been aimed at a general readership. Do you think academics, and China scholars in particular, bear a responsibility to communicate with the public?
Sidney Hook said that the first moral obligation of an intellectual is to be intelligent. Regarding academics and China scholars one might paraphrase this statement and say that their first duty is to master their discipline. Yet communicating with the public is a special talent; very learned scholars do not necessarily possess it. Though based in Canberra, you continue to take part in European political and cultural life through your writings in French. Do you think your physical distance from Europe affects your approach to these issues? Mote, China and the Vocation of History in the Twentieth Century—A Personal Memoir; and for bedside reading, I keep constantly dipping into two huge collections of sardonic aphorisms gloriously incorrect!
When you reflect on your career as a whole, what makes you proudest? Usually what we regret is what we did not do. Let me think about it. What are your thoughts on the current state of Chinese Studies in Australian universities? Do you think Australian scholars have particular strengths or weaknesses when it comes to the study of China?
As I said earlier, I left academe some sixteen years ago. I am really not in a position to assess the current state of Chinese Studies in Australian universities. May cultural exchanges further develop! In our capital city, ANU seems particularly well placed for discharging this important task. First of all, learn the Chinese language to the best of your ability and spend as much time as possible in a Chinese-speaking environment. Language fluency is the key which will open all doors for you—practically and spiritually. What do you mean, obscene?
You know perfectly well, answers Leys. And so on and on. What interested me about this exchange was not the relative merits of the arguments put forth by two writers who had at least one thing in common—a love of George Orwell and G. Chesterton, possibly for the same reasons, to which I shall return a little later. Leys describes this event as a kind of epiphany. He is sure that philistinism does not result from the lack of knowledge. Indeed, he did what he did precisely for that reason.
The desire to destroy beauty, according to Leys, applies not just to aesthetics but as much, if not more, to ethics: Classical Beijing, much of it built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was deliberately planned to reflect this order. It survived almost intact until the s. Apart from a few pockets, such as the Forbidden City, nothing of this old city remains. Critics over the years have attacked Leys for being an elitist, a Western mimic of Chinese literati, an aesthete who cares more about high culture than people, more about walls and temples than the poor Beijingers who had to live in dark and primitive alleys, oppressed by absolute rulers and feudal superstition.
But this misses the point. On the contrary, he lamented the fact that Maoists decided to smash the extraordinary artifacts of the past instead of the attitudes that made feudalism so oppressive in the first place. The stones were destroyed; many of the attitudes, alas, remained, albeit under different rulers. Iconoclasts, not only in China, are as enthralled by the sacred properties of the objects they destroy as those who venerate them.
This much we know. But Leys goes further. Yet beauty, as Leys himself insists, is rarely neutral. Leys quotes Guo Moruo, one of the most famous mandarins of the Chinese Communist revolution, on the city walls in Sichuan where the scholar and poet grew up. Guo was a Communist, but not a vandal.
He paid a common price for his love of the wrong kind of beauty. Persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, he was forced to declare that his books were worthless and should be burned. The point about the walls is, of course, not merely aesthetic, nostalgic, or even to do with awe. His targets are never uneducated barbarians, people too ignorant or stupid to know what they are doing.
The objects of his devastating and bitterly funny barbs are fellow intellectuals, often fellow academics, most often fellow experts on China, people who faithfully followed every twist and turn of the Chinese Communist Party line, even though they knew better. Such people as the writer Han Suyin, for example, who declared that the Cultural Revolution was a Great Leap Forward for mankind until she observed, once the line had changed, that it had been a terrible disaster. I recognize the type, since they were to be found among the Dutch professors who taught me Chinese literature and history at Leyden University in the early s, when the Cultural Revolution was still raging.
But China, whose unique culture my professors spent their lives studying, was different. Ordinary Chinese, one world-famous expert of early Chinese Buddhism explained to us, loved the revolutionary operas that replaced the popular classical operas, which were banned. In any case, was it not a smug illusion to think that we were so free in our Western democracies?
And yet, in the fierce debate that followed, they kept curiously aloof. They simply dismissed Leys. One conspicuous feature of the European Maoists in the s was their obliviousness to actual conditions in China. The Chinese were discussed almost as an abstraction. Leys, who cared deeply about the Chinese, became a hate figure in Paris. I remember watching him on a French television chat show. The host, Bernard Pivot, asked him why he had decided to take on what seemed like the entire Parisian intellectual establishment.
Leys replied with one word: He fell in love with Chinese culture when he visited China as part of a student delegation in After studying law at the Catholic university in Louvain, Leys became a scholar of Chinese, living for several years in Taiwan, Singapore, and in Hong Kong, where he made friends with a young Chinese calligrapher who, in a traditional flourish of stylish humility, named his own slum dwelling the Hall of Uselessness. Few, if any, contemporary scholars of Chinese write as well about the classical Chinese arts—calligraphy, poetry, and painting—let alone about European literature, ranging in this collection from Balzac to Nabokov.
None, so far as I know, have written novels as good as his Death of Napoleon. Leys is perhaps unique in that his prose in English is no less sparkling than in French. Was it a matter of excusable ignorance about what was then a very closed society? Leys has a tendency to overdo his expressions of humility, a bit like Chinese mandarins in old comic books: But he is surely right in claiming that his insights into the Maoist terrors inflicted on the Chinese people owed very little to superior expertise. They cultivate illusions out of idealism—and also out of cynicism.
So one looks the other way. This aspect of dealing with China, or any other dictatorship where interests might be at stake, has not changed. But this, too, would pass: Well, not long, as it turned out. Businessmen, politicians, academics, and others soon came flocking back. Orwell has served as a model for many soi-disant mavericks who like to depict themselves as brave tellers of truth. The case for Chesterton, as Hitchens acknowledged in his very last article, is a little more complicated.
Whatever one thinks of euthanasia or homosexual marriage, lust surely has very little to do with it.
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Still, the reasons why Leys finds Orwell attractive might be applied in equal measure to Leys himself: Leys is right about that: His jokes were irrefutable; he could invent at lightning speed surprising short-cuts to reach the truth. If the names are not correct, if they do not match realities, language has no object. If language is without an object, action becomes impossible—and therefore, all human affairs disintegrate and their management becomes pointless.
If this reading is right, Confucius wanted to strip the language of cant, and reach the truth through plain speaking, expressing clear thoughts. But Leys believes that he also did more than that: This was a revolutionary idea; the right to rule would no longer be a matter of birth, but of intellectual and moral accomplishment, tested in an examination system theoretically open to all.
We commonly assume that speech preceded the written word. In a way this is still true. The same custom persists not only in Japan but even in North Korea, where words of the Great Leader, or his son, the Dear Leader, or soon, no doubt, his son, General Kim Jong-un, are to be seen everywhere. To be sure, words are used to obfuscate and lie, as well as to tell the truth.
Leys believes that grasping the truth is largely a matter of imagination, poetic imagination. Fiction often expresses truth more clearly than mere factual information. Leys identifies a basic difference between the Chinese and what he calls, perhaps a bit too loosely, the Western traditions.
Classical Chinese poetry or paintings do not set out to mimic reality, to make the world look real in ink, or in poetry to express new ideas or come up with fresh descriptions. The aim is, rather, to make art into a manifestation of nature itself, or indeed vice versa—the found object in the shape of a perfect rock, for instance. This is almost impossible to convey in translation, because the same images expressed in another language can lose their spark and easily become banal or incomprehensible.
Western artists often arrived by instinct at a similar understanding of art. Claudel was a devout Catholic, and thus perhaps like Chesterton especially dear to Leys, who makes his attachment to the Roman Church quite clear. But in this, as in other matters, Leys has a cosmopolitan spirit. Although keen to stress Chinese uniqueness in many respects, Leys also stretches himself as far as he can to find common spiritual ground between East and West.
He is sensitive to the spirituality of many other traditions though perhaps not so tolerant of people who reject organized religion per se, hence his spat with Christopher Hitchens. Or at least, when it comes to spirituality, plain speaking clearly reaches its limits. The spiritual truth of Chinese art—and not only Chinese art—often lies in what is left unsaid or unpainted, the spaces deliberately left blank.
In modern Western art, one thinks of the early paintings White on White, say by Malevich. But then he came from a Russian tradition, which also sees artworks as spiritual objects. In any case, he quotes a modern Chinese critic, named Zhou Zuoren, to illustrate an essential part of classical Chinese aesthetics that would apply to many Western modernists as well: And yet the word remains. India and Europe are full of historic churches, temples, cathedrals, castles, forts, mosques, manor houses, and city halls, while contemporary China has almost nothing of the kind.
European travelers already complained in the nineteenth century of the fatalistic indifference displayed by Chinese toward their ancient monuments. People in the Chinese cultural sphere, and perhaps beyond, did not traditionally share the common Western defiance of mortality. The idea of erecting monumental buildings meant to last forever would have seemed a naive illusion. Everything is destined to perish, so why not build impermanence into our sense of beauty?
The Japanese took this aesthetic notion even further than their Chinese masters: Chinese capital cities in the past were frequently abandoned, and new ones established elsewhere. What is considered to be historic in China is the site, not the buildings that happen to be there at any given time. But if even the strongest works of man cannot in the end withstand the erosion of time, what can?
Sometimes memories replace great works of art. Leys mentions the legendary fourth-century calligraphy of a prose poem whose extraordinary beauty was celebrated by generation after generation of Chinese, centuries after the original work was lost. Indeed, it may never even have existed. With a civilization built on such an adaptable, supple, constantly self-replenishing, and indeed beautiful basis, who needs big city walls? But I would not wish to end my tribute to a writer I much admire on such a note of sacrilege.
You, sons of Han, whose wisdom reaches ten thousand years, no tens of tens of thousands of years, beware of such contempt. Pierre Ryckmans parlait peu des raisons de son exil en Australie, mais …. Il a voulu le dire haut et fort. Remember that no one living in a free society ever has a full understanding of life in a regimented society. Look at China through Chinese spectacles; if one looks at is through foreign glasses, one is thereby trying to make sense of Chinese events in terms of our own problems.
Learn something about other Communist countries. Study the basic tenets of Marxism. Keep in mind that words and terms do not have the same meaning in a Marxist society as they do elsewhere. Keep your common sense: People are not less important than issues; they are probably more so. A group may adopt the programme of those who oppose it in order to retain power. Do not believe that you know all the answers. China poses more questions than it provides answers. Do not lose your sense of humour. A regimented press is too serious to be taken very seriously.
Above all, read the small print! Le couple eut quatre enfants: Etienne, Jeanne, et des jumeaux, Louis et Marc. Dix lignes seulement, mais dix lignes assassines. Are books essentially useless? I suggest that we indeed subscribe to such a conclusion. But so long as we remain aware that uselessness is also the hallmark of what is truly priceless.
Zhuang Zi summed it up well: The other day, I was reading the manuscript of a forthcoming book by a young journalist — a series of profiles of women living in the Outback — farmer wives battling solitude and natural disasters on remote stations in the bush. In this passing remark, there is something which I find simply heartbreaking. And on what ground would we dare to challenge her view? Oddly enough, this disarming remark on the uselessness of literature unwittingly reduplicates, in one sense, a provocative statement by Nabokov.
In fact the brave woman from the outback here seems to echo a sardonic paradox of the supreme literate aesthete of our age. Nabokov wrote this which I shall never tire of quoting, perhaps because I myself taught literature for some time: And yet even Professors of Literature, when they are made of the right mettle, but find themselves in extreme situations — divested of their titles, deprived of their books, reduced to their barest humanity, equipped only with their tears and their memory — can reach the heart of the matter and experience in their flesh what literature is really about: I know of one Professor of Literature at least, who would be qualified to teach the good woman from the outback how, even for people in her situation, particularly for people in her situation, there may be a very real need for reading Shakespeare.
The name of that Professor is Wu Ningkun. He is an elderly Chinese scholar. Nearly 50 years ago, moved by patriotism, he gave up a promising, and cosy, academic career in the United States where he was teaching English literature, and returned to China, knowing that his talents and expertise were sorely needed there. But under Maoism, there was no place in China for refined, cultivated and cosmopolitan minds. He was immediately suspected, ostracised, persecuted, and for the next 30 years became a victim of the totalitarian paranoia that sees humanist culture as a betrayal, intelligence as an ideological crime, and presumes that whoever reads T.
Eliot in the original must be a dangerous international spy. He has written a book about his experiences, A Single Tear , which is, to my mind, the best written and most essential reading on a subject on which so much has already been published, and yet so little is understood. The darkest depth of his ordeal was reached when he was sent to a labour camp in the barren wilderness of North-Eastern China, close to the Siberian border. Around him, many inmates were crushed to death by the horrors of the camp — they were dying of starvation, brutal treatment, exhaustion and despair.
Under such conditions, physical resilience was not enough to stay alive — one needed spiritual strength. Wu Ningkun sustained his spirit with poetry. He had succeeded in smuggling with him two small books: Formerly, he had only studied Shakespeare; now, for the first time, he was truly reading it. Occasionally, when a blinding blizzard blew from Siberia, and the prisoners had to spend the day cooped up in a cell, he could come back to Hamlet:. Read in a Chinese labour camp, however, the tragedy of the Danish prince took on unexpected dimensions.
All the academic analyses and critiques that had engrossed me over the years now seemed remote and irrelevant. The Ghost thundered with a terrible chorus of a million victims of proletarian dictatorship. Rozencrantz and Guildenstern would have felt like fish in the water had they found their way into a modern nation of hypocrites and informers.
As to Hamlet himself, his great capacity for suffering gave the noble Dane his unique stature as a tragic hero pre-eminently worthy of his suffering. That a man may survive for quite a while without food, but cannot live one day without poetry, is a notion which we tend to dismiss too lightly, as a sort of 19th century romantic hyperbole. But our gruesome century has provided enough evidence: One day, as Levi and another inmate were on duty to fetch soup for the entire barrack, on their way to the kitchen, with the heavy soup bucket hanging from a pole which they carried on their shoulders, they enjoyed the brief respite of a summer day, and started chatting.
The other prisoner was a clever young Frenchman with a gift for languages. Levi, who had been teaching him some Italian, suddenly was moved by a crazy and irresistible impulse to introduce him to Dante. He began to recite a passage from The Divine Comedy, the Canto of Ulysses, clumsily translating it for the other man, verse by verse: For a moment I forget who I am and where I am.
The companion begs me to repeat it. How good he is, he is aware that it is doing me good. Or perhaps it is something more — perhaps he has received the message, he has felt that it had to do with him, that it has to do with all men who suffer, and with us in particular; and that it has to do with us two, who dare to reason of these things with the poles for the soup on our shoulders.
I try to reconstruct it through the rhymes, I close my eyes, I bite my fingers, but it is no use, the rest is silence. The depth and truth of this particular moment were such that thirty years later — the year before he died — Levi returned to it in the last book he wrote, The Drowned and the Saved. I really would have given bread and soup — that is, blood — to save from nothingness those memories which today, with the sure support of printed paper I can refresh gratis whenever I wish, and which therefore seem of little value. In Auschwitz, the forgotten poem became literally priceless.
Pierre Ryckmans is an internationally renowned novelist, writing under the name Simon Leys, as well as a scholar, Sinologist, artist and calligrapher. From he was Chair of Chinese Studies at University of Sydney from where he has recently retired. The book and cassettes of the six Boyer lectures are now available from all ABC bookshops. Should the Bible Have a Trigger Warning?
May contain war, slavery, rape, deceit, plagues, smiting or apocalypse. Elissa Strauss May 25, You know what could use a trigger warning? If any book merits a note of caution it is the one that is colloquially referred to as good. Instead we get war, slavery, rape, deceit, plagues, smiting, apocalypses and, in some ways the most threatening of them all: And yet, historically speaking, how many soldiers, victims of sexual assault and believers have found comfort in its words? If not by way of slapping a warning on the cover, at least in the editing of the text?
The bible is a raw, sometimes bleeding text, pulsing with fear and bitterness and the crumbling of will in the face of temptation. I believe that this very rawness is responsible for its endurance. Because what is raw is also tender, and it is in this tender place where real transformation happens. The bible does not shy away from our vulnerabilities, nor does it seek to accommodate them. Instead, when read with an honest mind which is, regrettably, not a universal phenomenon , it exposes us to them, and ultimately ourselves.
It is this intrinsically unapologetic nature of the text, its refusal to soothe or conceal, which not so long ago took me by great surprise and ultimately drew me in. Until five years ago, I had never read the bible and knew of it only through the second-hand sanitized versions I learned at Hebrew school or from watching Disney movies. So entranced I became with the unsparing nature of the text on human behavior, I eventually became co-director of the house of study.
Every year as new fellows come study with us, many of whom who have also never read the text, I see them go through the same experience of being caught off guard and shaken up by the piercing directness of the bible. They are triggered, and it is from that place that they are inspired to create. I lack the vitriol some feel against those who are trying to make trigger warnings happen. Those students are well-meaning and want to protect the people among them who have experienced trauma.
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But the question is, what are they really protecting them from? With exception, of course, of serious cases of PTSD. We choose to live in particular neighborhoods or regions in part because we want neighbors who share our values. When everyone is vulnerable, everyone grows, through the development of empathy for others or a reckoning with their past. This is how we prepare students for a big bad world filled with wounded people and devoid of trigger-warnings. The bible has long-served a similar role. Its nakedness pushes those of us who study it to strip down too, and contemplate just what is at stake for ourselves and those around us.
It does not shy away from the dark matter of life, and so we should not shy away from it or any other of the good books that do the same, because reading them together is how we grow. Valerie Strauss WP May 23 Special Victims Unit noting that the material may be sexually graphic, violent or in some other way upsetting.
This month The New York Times ran a story by Jennifer Medina about the warnings that has sparked a stream of articles in magazines, newspapers and blogs about the subject, many of them ridiculing the idea. For example, a piece written by Philip Wythe, a sophomore, in the student newspaper at Rutgers University last February, said:. Trauma trigger warnings are a minimalistic description that tag articles, literature and other works of art for traumatic content.
There was trigger activity on some other campuses too. Triggers are not only relevant to sexual misconduct, but also to anything that might cause trauma. Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.
Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand. In March, the student newspaper at the University of California Santa Barbara, The Daily Nexus, published a letter by the student who initiated the resolution, Bailey Loverin, explaining her reasons for taking the action. In early April, the student newspaper published another article, by Marissa Wenzke, further explaining the resolution, saying:.
Two days after The New York Times article was posted to the newspaper website on May 17, the newspaper published a piece on its website by Loverin defending the resolution again. What followed was a flood of negative commentary by critics concerned that trigger warnings would amount to censorship, prior restraint and an assault on academic freedom, including an editorial by The Los Angeles Times with this title: College students, this editorial may upset you.
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The student resolution is only advisory, a recommendation that campus authorities can turn into policy or reject. They should not only choose the latter course but should explain firmly to students why such a policy would be antithetical to all that college is supposed to provide: Trigger warnings are part of a campus culture that is increasingly overprotective and hypersensitive in its efforts to ensure that no student is ever offended or made to feel uncomfortable. Social media, which mostly acts as an agreement machine whenever the liberal consensus squares off with a more radical cousin, seemed to confirm my annoyance [at the idea of trigger warnings].
Then there was this reaction on the blog of the UCLA Faculty Association, which raises an issue that may put the idea of trigger warnings in some perspective: What kind of trigger warning would be put on the Bible. Sarah Dictum wrote in New Statesman that Shakespeare would surely need a trigger warning too, if trigger warnings ever became policy anywhere:. But then there are the comedies, which even at their merriest contain intimations of rape.
More like problematic play. Get behind the tape. Therefore this is a pertinent and widespread issue that should be acknowledged on campus. Trigger Warnings should be used for content not covered by the rating system used by the MPAA or TV warnings such as contains violence, nudity or, language. Having memories or flashbacks triggered can cause the person severe emotional, mental, and even physical distress.
College level courses may contain materials with mature content. These particularly affect students if material is being read in the classroom or a film is being screened, as the student cannot choose to stop being exposed to the material. Including trigger warnings is not a form of criticism or censorship of content. In addition, it does not restrict academic freedom but simply requests the respect and acknowledgement of the affect of triggering content on students with PTSD, both diagnosed and undiagnosed.
Being informed well in advance of triggering content allows students to avoid a potentially triggering situation without public attention. Having a trigger warning on a syllabus allows a student the choice to be presentgives a student advance notice of possible triggers and the choice to be present or not instead of having to leave in the middle of a class or lecture. Therefore let it be resolved by the Associated Students in the Senate Assembled:. That the Associated Students of UC Santa Barbara urge the instructor of any course that includes triggering content to list trigger warnings on the syllabus.
Let it further be resolved that: AS Senate directs AS President Jonathon Abboud to bring this to the attention of the Academic Senate and advocate for a policy change to reflect the directions of this resolution. Let it finally be resolved that: AS Senate recognizes the support and passing of this resolution as a stronger stance taken by UCSB against issues of sexual harassment and violence. Should students who are ardent pacifists be made to read about warfare in Tolstoy and Stendhal, or for that matter the Iliad?
As for gay and lesbian students, or students who have suffered sexual abuse, or those who have a physical handicap. Pointing out the potentially damaging effects of books began, like so much these days, on the Internet, where intellectual Samaritans began listing such emotionally troublesome books on their blogs. Before long it was picked up by the academy. At the University of California at Santa Barbara, the student government suggested that all course syllabi contain trigger warnings.
At Oberlin College the Office of Equity Concerns advised professors to steer clear of works that might be interpreted as sexist or racist or as vaunting violence. Movies have of course long been rated and required to note such items as Adult Language, Violence, Nudity—ratings that are themselves a form of trigger warning. Why not books, even great classic books?
The short answer is that doing so insults the intelligence of those supposedly serious enough to attend college by suggesting they must not be asked to read anything that fails to comport with their own beliefs or takes full account of their troubled past experiences. Trigger warnings logically follow from the recent history of American academic life.
This is a history in which demographic diversity has triumphed over intellectual standards and the display of virtue over the search for truth. So much of this history begins in good intentions and ends in the tyranny of conformity. Sometime in the s, American universities determined to acquire students from less populous parts of the country to give their institutions the feeling of geographical diversity.
In the s, after the great moral victories of the civil-rights movement, the next obvious step was racial preferences, which allowed special concessions to admit African-American students. In conjunction with this, black professors were felt to be needed to teach these students and, some said, serve as role models. Before long the minority of women among the professoriate was noted. This, too, would soon be amended. All this, most reasonable people would concur, was fair enough. Then things took a radical twist. Read more Read less. Here's how restrictions apply. Be the first to review this item Would you like to tell us about a lower price?
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