MCLC: Simon Leys

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: sean macdonald (smacdon2005 at gmail.com)
Subject: Simon Leys
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Source: Asia Times (8/22/14):
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/CHIN-01-220814.html

SINOGRAPH
Simon Leys: An appreciation
By Francesco Sisci

The void left in both Western and Eastern culture by the death on
August 11 of Sinologist Pierre Rickman (aka Simon Leys), aged 78, will
be felt possibly only in the years to come. Rickman/Leys had a unique
voice on China and on literature in general, which has been very
influential for many China watchers and will possibly be more
important in the future, as China becomes even an bigger focus of
attention with its rise.

Rickman, born in Belgium in 1935, took the pseudonym of Simon Leys in
the 1970s to avoid becoming persona non grata in China. He gave some
scathing descriptions of the cultural and political destruction during
the Cultural Revolution and denounced the hypocrisy of the
revolution's Western defenders. Yet he was always careful in drawing a
distinction between the faulty leaders and the common Chinese people.

There are many ways to approach China and the study of its culture, or
Sinology as it has been called for over a century in the West. One can
concentrate on the erudition, and China offers ample room for that,
with so much to learn and such great differences from Western culture:
thousands of characters, thousands of texts to memorize and pile up in
a gigantic tower of memory. Others can concentrate on politics: again,
there is much to learn there, with the obscure machinations of modern
and ancient plotting. Others still can concentrate on the beauty of
its arts, so different and yet so fascinating, almost mesmerizing, and
so forth.

Simon Leys, unlike most and like a few others, preferred to avoid all
of that, skirting all of the above and concentrating on the truth, the
essence, as he wrote in his collection of essays "The Hall of
Uselessness".

He explained that the task of the Chinese artist was not to reproduce
objects of reality, it was not to reproduce the effects and illusions
of the vision, it was not even to create something beautiful. These
were all approaches proper to Western culture and art. The task of the
Chinese artist was to capture the essence of a spot, a situation, a
moment, and to communicate this essence in the most effective way.
This was to try to be oneself in the truest way.

In the essay "Ethics and Esthetics," he quotes calligrapher Liu Xizai
as saying, "In calligraphy, it is not pleasing that is difficult; what
is difficult is not seeking to please. The desire to please makes the
writing trite; its absence renders it ingenuous and true." And to
further clarify the point, he quotes Stendhal, writing, "I believe
that to be great at anything at all, you must be yourself," and
Wittgenstein, commenting on Tolstoy, "There is a real man who has a
right to speak."

This was the approach Leys took to Chinese culture. The effort surely
was so hard, so difficult, and so deep that it must have given Leys an
extra talent to see through all other things. This knack, refined
through decades of deep thinking, is what gave him a unique ability to
capture the essence of anything he laid eyes on, be it from the East
or the West.

Leys was in fact not simply a Sinologist but someone who deeply
understood Chinese classical artistic power to go to the essence, to
the truth, and expanded his gaze on Western culture and politics.

He wrote in an essay that Chinese artists were amateurs, and it was
demeaning for them to be paid for their work. They worked because
their conscience demanded it, searching for a deep truth within
themselves and in what they were doing. This ethical dynamic in their
work was what made their work great.

This is a lesson Leys found expounded in China, but certainly it is
true of any artist or writer, like himself. The honest effort to think
hard and thoroughly is what gives life to any real work of art or any
solid writing.

China provided Leys more than anything with an ethical instrument to
look at reality. For this reason, his essays are equally compelling
whatever he writes about. It is not his erudition that shines through
(although he was greatly erudite), not his politics (although he had a
clear stand,