This essays have a Borgean Je ne se quais. I enjoyed this collection very much ( )

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.

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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.” 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. ( )

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 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. ( )

Probably a review brought Simon Leys, the Belgian writer long resident in Australia, born Pierre Ryckmans, to my attention, though I long ago had heard of his Chinese Shadows and thought of him as, in his words, a Sinologist. But he is much much more, as this engaging collection of essays, enigmatically but enticingly and eventually humorously titled The Hall of Uselessness , reveals.

Having spent a decade or so in Asia, I realized the essays on China might be less interesting to those without that experience of proximity both physical and cultural. But they are nevertheless well worth reading, not least for revisiting the Mao worship that so blinded the left in the west. When it was not popular to do so, Leys described what was actually happening during the "Cultural Revolution" and similar euphemistically named phenomena.

But even if readers skip those essays, or read very selectively (for example, about Barthes in China and a few others of wider interest), we have the literary and miscellaneous essays. These consistently afford the deep pleasure arising from intelligent, articulate, and attractive description of new people and works, and of those already somewhat known. "Portrait of Proteus: A Little ABC of Gide" is a longer entry, as compelling as fiction in the story it tells, yet with many duly documented facts and details, in the text and in extensive notes. "I Prefer Reading" is perfect for this reader, and many others, I suspect.

It's somehow nice to know that, given the author's multilingual background and education, we can think what originally appeared in a language other than English was, if not translated by Leys himself, checked by him. At first I was unhappy with the notes, most of which are very substantive and might have become part of the narrative itself, being at the back of the book, but I came to realize that location allows for a smoother development of main ideas, with additional information available in the notes to those who want it.

The NY Review of Books has done its usual excellent job of presentation, with an attractive and relevant cover, strikingly colored endpapers, and good-quality paper well bound into this rather thick volume.

Highly recommended – read slowly, it provides the companionship of a lively mind over several weeks, or longer...and selectively re-reading is rewarding.

Simon Leys is a charming writer, and can enliven almost any topic. I only wish I knew enough about ancient Chinese calligraphy (for example) to engage with his essays on the same level they are written. As it is, I often felt like I was reading a review of a book I hadn't read (in some cases, that's literally true), but I loved it all the same.

Unfortunately, on the one topic I did feel sufficiently knowledgeable about (university funding) I found Leys position to be marked by lazy-thinking and blinkered self-interest. He writes about the "decline of the university" without balance, without addressing the social and economic causes behind the changes, nor proposing a single alternative. The whole essay could be summarised by the words 'in my day ...", and a wistful look. The concluding 'Fable from Academe' is woefully shallow, unfunny and unsubtle. It slightly marred by enjoyment of this otherwise wonderful book. ( )