The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (39 page)

In philosophical fables, however, the usual aim is to puzzle readers and catch their attention from the outset. In
Metamorphosis
, for example, Kafka entraps us at once in an inexorable nightmare:

Grown-up fairytales observe the same method. When you read the first sentence of a story by Marcel Aymé, you immediately react like a child—you
must
find out what happens next.
The Dwarf
begins:

* * *

Some writers find the initial spark in words, others in ideas, and others again in an image—an inner vision. The latter are perhaps the quintessential fiction writers. For them, very often, writing is an obsessive activity, sometimes performed as if in a trance, and generally conducted under the blind dictation of their subconscious. Writing is the safety valve that preserves their very sanity; if they did not write, they would hardly survive: Graham Greene, Georges Simenon, Julien Green—however different as individuals—are typical of this remarkable breed. Their novels—and particularly their opening scenes—linger hauntingly in the memory. Yet what we remember is not words or phrases; it is the visual impact of cinematic frames on the screen of our imagination. When Greene was still an obscure journalist and met the film producer Alexander Korda, he was abruptly asked if he had any story in mind that might be turned into a film. Greene
immediately improvised the opening scene of a thriller: “Early morning on Platform 1 at Paddington; the platform is empty—except for one man who is waiting for the last train from Wales. From below his raincoat a trickle of blood forms a pool on the platform.” “Yes, and then?” asked Korda. “It would take too long to tell you the whole plot,” Greene replied, not having a clue how he would go on: “It still needs some more working out.” But a friendship was struck that eventuated in the making of
The Third Man
. We will never know what the bleeding man on the platform was up to, but his image remains with us, as it did with Korda.

The impeccable wordsmith and original thinker Paul Valéry’s preamble for his philosophical essay “Monsieur Teste” stays etched in the mind when the essay itself is a blurry impression:

But the hyper-rationality of Valéry’s intelligence produced in him a strong prejudice against the art of fiction. To his mind, a novelist’s invention was deplorably devoid of intellectual necessity. He toyed with the idea of compiling an anthology of first lines from famous novels, to demonstrate the asinine triviality of a literary genre in which a book may begin with a statement as vacuous as: “The marchioness went out at five o’clock,” a phrase that became a shorthand indictment for a certain type of fiction. The surrealist movement appropriated Valéry’s gibe in its ferocious literary crusade against all novels and novelists—but these inquisitorial outbursts had no noticeable impact upon the general health of European and American fiction, which continued to flourish. Here are two brilliantly effective
novel openings from the 1930s (one could think of many dozens more). First, Evelyn Waugh’s
Vile Bodies
:

We sense that the book will contain resources just as surprising and diverse. Or again, George Orwell’s
Coming Up for Air
:

One could not suggest with greater economy the mood of gloom and despair that is going to pervade this prophetic indictment of a modern world poisoned by synthetic food, cretinised by commercial advertisements and ransacked by real-estate developers.

* * *

Chekhov remarked that writers would often benefit by cutting off the beginnings and the endings of their stories—for these are usually the weakest parts in their work. It would not only be inconceivable but simply impracticable to effect such surgical interventions on Chekhov’s own stories; their beginnings and endings are all the more effective for being virtually invisible—and there lies one of the secrets of his art.

Lopping off the introductory sentences of a narrative is a conceit often used to startling effect in eighteenth-century literature. We don’t really begin to read Sterne’s
Sentimental Journey
: we are casually and unexpectedly dumped into it:

This sort of abrupt opening produces the youthful and exhilarating feeling one experiences when jumping into a train already in motion. We are carried away with similar speed and whimsicality by Diderot at the beginning of
Jacques le fataliste
—and, quite significantly, here again it is travel that provides the leading metaphor:

As we just saw, Chekhov used to put the difficulty of the ending on a par with that of the beginning. Yet it is impossible to present here any exemplary selection of endings: the emotional impact, the artistic excellence of a great ending is totally dependent upon the entire book that precedes it. To my mind, the ending of Flaubert’s
Sentimental Education
is sublime; but either you have read the book, and naturally agree with me—or you have not read it, and my pronouncement will merely amount to a fatuous exercise in name-dropping. I must simply limit myself to a few marginal observations on some unusual forms of ending.

First is the delayed-release ending in which the real ending does not occur with the last sentence on the last page of the book but takes place a few seconds later, in the imagination of the reader. This technique somehow operates on the model of a very nasty type of bomb, whose truly devastating explosion is not the one that is produced on impact, but the second one that is delayed by a few minutes. Example: in Greene’s
Brighton Rock
, Rose, a naïve and kind girl, hopelessly in love with a young gangster, receives for the first time a present from her callous lover: a six-penny gramophone record on which he has recorded what she assumes to be a personal message of love. But the
reader has already been told that what the little punk recorded was a dirty flow of savage abuse aimed at the innocent girl. The young man is killed, Rose returns to her sordid lodgings in a state of utter despair, her only comfort the thought that she still has the record of his voice—her only treasure—which, now at last, she will listen to; the book ends on this sentence describing her journey home:

Alternative endings are a trick famously performed by John Fowles in
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
. He proposes two options: gloomy or happy; the reader can take his pick. It is a cheeky display of
savoir faire
by a virtuoso of story-telling, but it is precisely the sort of artifice that helped give a bad name to the art of the novel. Perhaps Valéry had a point after all when he complained that fiction writing was essentially frivolous, since one can imagine different endings to the same novel—whereas the closure of a good poem has an immutable necessity.

Weird endings are a third category. In the exceptionally rich field of modern Japanese fiction, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro occupies a towering position and
The Makioka Sisters
(1948) is generally considered to be his masterpiece. Yukiko, the third of the four sisters, is in danger of becoming an old maid, when finally a suitable fiancé is found for her. The book ends as she prepares to go to Tokyo for her marriage:

Finally, there are missing endings. Two great novels that endeavour to tackle the ultimate questions of the human condition have remained
without an ending—which, in retrospect, may be a most fitting conclusion.

Kafka, in his final masterpiece
The Castle
, tells the story of a young man who repeatedly attempts—always in vain—to overcome arcane hurdles to gain access to a mysterious castle. Will his persistence succeed? We shall never know, for Kafka died before he could complete his manuscript.

In
Bouvard et Pécuchet
, Flaubert describes how two old bachelors living in retirement, after a dreary career as menial clerks, launch themselves into an encyclopaedic survey of all human knowledge. Their naïve venture soon becomes a circumnavigation of the immense, uncharted continent of human idiocy. At the start of his mad and desperate enterprise, Flaubert’s intention had been to portray his characters as two despicable fools—but the creatures soon rebel against their creator and reclaim their individual dignity. This momentous change occurs halfway through the book, when we are told that “a pitiful ability began to develop in their minds—the ability to detect stupidity, and not to tolerate it.” From that moment, Bouvard and Pécuchet become Flaubert himself, whose task, gigantic and hopeless, turned into mental—and physical—agony. He died at work, collapsing under the strain like a donkey crushed by its burden.

In his last work, Kafka described the search for salvation; Flaubert, the quest for meaning. But these pursuits take us into mysteries no mortal can fathom. It seems strangely appropriate that death should have intervened, ensuring these heroic explorations remain open—forever.

C
HINA
is the oldest living civilisation on Earth.[
1
] Such a unique continuity naturally implies a very complex relation between a people and their past. It seems that there is a paradox at the heart of this remarkable cultural longevity: cultivation of the moral and spiritual values of the ancients appears to have most often combined with a curious neglect of, or indifference (even at times downright iconoclasm) towards, the material heritage of the past. (Whether the spiritual continuity was achieved in spite of, or
thanks to
, a partial destruction of the material expressions of tradition is itself another issue, which will only be briefly evoked later on.)

This essay attempts a preliminary exploration of the parallel phenomena of spiritual preservation and material destruction that can be observed in the history of Chinese culture. The topic being vast, I shall merely outline here some of the directions and themes which a fuller inquiry ought to pursue. At this stage, my intention is not to provide any answers, but simply to define the question.

SPIRITUAL PRESENCE AND PHYSICAL
ABSENCE OF THE PAST IN CHINA

In his autobiography, Carl Gustav Jung described how, in his old age, he wished to go to Rome, which he had never visited before. He had always postponed this project, fearing that he might not be able to withstand the emotional impact of such an encounter with the living heart of Europe’s ancient culture. Eventually, as he entered a travel agency in Zurich to buy his ticket, he fainted and remained unconscious for a short interval. After this experience, he wisely decided to abandon his plans—and he never saw Rome.[
2
] Most sinologists are not endowed with antennae as subtle as Jung’s—and yet, even without being possessed of such sensitivity, it would be difficult for whoever studied classical China to approach the China of today and not to feel constantly touched, moved, overwhelmed by the extraordinary aura that seems to emanate everywhere from a land so suffused with history.

The presence of the past is constantly felt in China. Sometimes it is found in the most unexpected places, where it hits the visitor with added intensity: movie-theatre posters, advertisements for washing machines, televisions or toothpaste displayed along the streets are expressed in a written language that has remained practically unchanged for the last 2,000 years. In kindergarten, toddlers chant Tang poems that were written some 1,200 years ago. In railway stations, the mere consultation of a train timetable can be an intoxicating experience for any cultural historian: the imagination is stirred by these long lists of city names to which are still attached the vivid glories of past dynasties. Or again, in a typical and recent occurrence, archaeologists discovered in a 2,000-year-old tomb, among the foodstuff that had been buried with the deceased,
ravioli
which were in every respect identical to those that can be bought today in any street-corner shop. Similar examples could be multiplied endlessly.