Paul Claudel
KNOWING THE EAST
Translated by James Lawler
137pp. Princeton University Press. Paperback, £11.95 (US $19.95).
978 0 691 11902 1
Victor Segalen
STÈLES
Translated, edited and annotated by Timothy
Billings and Christopher Bush
415pp. Wesleyan University Press. $80 (paperback, $34.95); distributed in the
UK by Eurospan. £51.50 (paperback, £22.50).
978 0 819 56833 5
In a characteristic moment of exasperation with the state of modern culture,
Paul Claudel observed, in an interview in 1925, that none of the current
artistic movements in Europe had anything to offer in the way of creative
innovation – “ni le dadaïsme ni le surréalisme qui ont un seul sens:
pédérastique”. He went on to boast that although some people might be
surprised that he managed to be at the same time a devout Catholic, a
practising poet and a French ambassador, he personally found nothing very
strange in this: as a matter of fact, during the late war, he had gone to
South America to buy wheat, tinned beef and lard for the French army and had
saved his country 200 million francs in the process. In their collective
“Open Letter to Paul Claudel, French Ambassador to Japan”, the slandered
Surrealists were quick to pick up the gauntlet: as far as their “pederasty”
was concerned, it was certainly all in the eye of the beholder; and what’s
more, their movement supported any revolution or colonial insurrection that
promised to annihilate Western civilization and its lackeys in the Far East
such as Claudel. How could one even imagine, they concluded with a jeer,
that the activity of poetry was ethically compatible with ambassadorship –
particularly if the latter involved the purchase of “large quantities of
lard” for a “nation of dogs and pigs”?
Claudel (1868–1955) belonged to that cluster of French writer-diplomats – all
protégés of the Quai d’Orsay’s colourful Philippe Berthelot – which at
various points included Paul Morand, Jean Giraudoux, André Salmon and Alexis
Léger (better known as Saint-John Perse). Before serving as ambassador to
Japan (1921–7), the United States (1927–33) and Belgium (1933–5), Claudel
had worked his way up the diplomatic ladder as a junior official in New York
and Boston in 1893–5, followed by a thirteen-year on-and-off stint as a
consul representing French commercial interests in the cities of Shanghai,
Hanzhou, Fuzhou and Tianjin. Although he never bothered to learn Chinese or
Japanese, Claudel turned his postings to profitable artistic account,
carving out a niche for himself as one of the leading exoticists of
twentieth-century French literature, with such works as Connaissance de
l’Est, Cent Phrases pour éventails, Idéogrammes occidentaux, L’Oiseau noir
dans le soleil levant, Le Vieillard sur le mont Omi, Petits Poèmes d’après
le chinois, and Sous le Signe du dragon – not to mention such Noh-inspired
dramatic works as La Femme et son ombre.
Of this considerable mass of Orientalia, time (as Auden might have said) will
perhaps only pardon the Claudel of Connaissance de l’Est for writing well.
James Lawler’s new translation of this collection of prose poems – the first
since Teresa Frances and William Rose Benét’s rather feeble stab at it in
1914, under the title The East I Know – offers a welcome glimpse into what
in his helpful introduction Lawler calls a “matrix work”, for the book
provides a laboratory not only for Claudel’s subsequent oeuvre but also,
given its impact on such writers as Victor Segalen, Perse, Charles Péguy and
Francis Ponge, for much of early twentieth-century French poetry as well.
First published in 1900, then expanded in 1907 and finally given its
definitive form in the 1914 deluxe rice paper edition brought out by Segalen
in Peking as part of his stylish “Bibliothèque coréenne”, Connaissance de
l’Est is very much a work that occupies the uncertain fault-line between
French Symbolism and Modernism.
When the twenty-seven year-old Claudel set off for Shanghai in 1895, he was
primarily known as a promising young playwright, author of the
anarcho-symbolist dramas Tête d’or and La Ville, much admired by the young
Gide and by Maeterlinck. He was also a fervent Catholic, his 1886 conversion
provoked (so he later claimed) by his reading of Rimbaud’s Illuminations on
their first publication in the magazine La Vogue. During this period he also
occasionally frequented Mallarmé’s Tuesdays on the rue de Rome, although his
newly found beliefs made him uneasy with the Master’s aesthetic nihilism. Of
the Orient he knew precious little: the fashionable japonaiseries of Hokusai
and Utamaro to which he had been introduced by his sister Camille, Rodin’s
mistress and disciple; a visit to the French Indochinese pavilion at the
Exposition of 1889; an enjoyable evening spent at the theatre in New York’s
Chinatown in 1893; Judith Gautier’s translations of classical Chinese poetry
in her Livre de jade; Lafcadio Hearn’s Some Chinese Ghosts. In the end, it
mattered little to him where he was headed; the important thing was to test
his spiritual vocation through self-imposed exile. Rimbaud had disappeared
from the Parisian literary scene some twenty years earlier, choosing instead
the “rugueuse réalité” of an adventurer and explorer in Abyssinia; Gauguin’s
much publicized departure for Tahiti in search of the utopian South Seas had
been celebrated by the Symbolist cénacle four years before. Claudel would
now similarly open a “fissure” between himself and the decadent secularism
of the Third Republic. To fortify his Thomist world view on his journey to
the East, he took two volumes of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.
The year 1895 also saw the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which marked the end of the
first Sino–Japanese war and forced a humiliated Qing Empire to open its
ports and rivers to Japanese trade while at the same time allowing the
Triple Intervention of Russia, France and Germany to profit from China’s
disarray. With the prospering of its colonial territories in Indochina, the
French government saw an opportunity to expand its sphere of influence from
Tonkin into southern China – hence Claudel’s various assignments to the
cities of Shanghai, Hanzhou and, for nearly five years, to the port of
Fuzhou. While in China, he dutifully submitted various reports to the Quai
d’Orsay on matters as prosaic as French joint ventures in railway and
steamship lines, investments in the local timber and metallurgy industries,
currency reform, and the competition with Britain for the tea and textile
trade. Meanwhile, he was also amassing the notes for a major “Livre sur la
Chine”, a descriptive vade mecum designed to serve as a handbook for future
French commercial enterprises in the region: portions of this manuscript (on
which he worked for some ten years) later made their way into his
patronizing survey of the history and culture of the Middle Kingdom, Sous le
Signe du dragon, published in 1948. As Gilbert Gadoffre has shown, many of
the early prose poems of Connaissance de l’Est grow out of the young
diplomat’s exercises in documentary reportage. Initially published in
various Parisian literary magazines under the title “Paysages de Chine”, his
short texts on the city of Shanghai, or on local gardens, tombs and pagodas,
often border on the postcard exoticism of a Bernardin or Chateaubriand. Or
so he feared, for when he sent these “images of China” to Mallarmé, he
abjectly apologized for having fallen into that most lowbrow of genres,
“descriptive literature”.
Although he would later refer to Connaissance de l’Est as the most Mallarméan
of all his works, its pages nonetheless show Claudel trying to break free
from the lessons of the Master. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his
desire to attend to the sensual immediacies of the concrete world of things
that offered itself to him in China – a material reality uninformed by a
single significant human encounter with the Other over the course of the
entire book. Like the post-Symbolist Rilke, who was during these very same
years practising the “eye-work” he had learned from Rodin in order to
achieve the visual precisions of the Dinggedicht, so Claudel turned to
Renard’s Histoires naturelles and Fabre’s Souvenirs entomologiques on his
arrival in China as models for his portraits of animal or vegetable life in
such poems as “The Banyan”, “The Pig” or “The Pine Tree”. This is the
Claudel who points ahead to the Parti pris des choses of Ponge (who aptly
characterized the former’s voracious – and often lumbering – descriptiveness
as that of “a great marine tortoise, at the other end of Asia, diving
towards its Chinese salad of black mushrooms”). The reality effects produced
by the Claudelian eye as it listens to the voice of things (as the title of
his later L’Oeil écoute has it) are, however, always counterbalanced by a
completely different order of “realism” – namely, that of Aquinas, for whom
the seductive particulars of the world must always be redeemed by the vision
of the universal.
But it is Rimbaud, “l’homme aux semelles de vent”, who provides the primary
impetus behind the peripatetic excursions into the Chinese landscapes evoked
in Connaissance de l’Est. As Claudel later observed in his preface to the
1912 edition of Rimbaud’s works, the “desport rhythmique” that typically
overtook the poet’s entire being in the act of walking created a kind of
“hypnose ouverte” that rendered him extraordinarily porous both to the vital
energies of nature and to the deepest vibrations of language. Whether
travelling on foot, by boat or by sedan chair, the Claudel of these early
prose poems often falls into similar trance-like states that open on to
manic moments of illumination akin to what he calls Rimbaud’s “mystique
matérialiste”: “The air is so fresh and clear I seem to walk naked . . . .
Drunk from looking, I understand all things”. Or: “I am the Inspector of
Creation, the Verifier of all things present; the world’s solidity is the
matter of my beatitude!”. Lawler’s translation nicely captures Claudel’s
Rimbaldian impulse to regress into an infantile erotic fusion with the body
of Mother Nature: “I absorb light with my eyes and ears, and my mouth and
nose, and all the pores of my skin. I soak in it like a fish, I swallow it”.
Or again: “I stand in the midst of the perfectly white air. I celebrate the
orgy of ripeness with a shadowless body . . . . I see a dazzling white bird
with a pink throat that bursts forth from this milk, this silver in which I
drown, and again is lost in a glow my eyes cannot sustain”. At moments,
Claudel can even sound like Whitman, as in this catalogue of ships in
Shanghai harbour:
"The wide-bellied junks with their lopsided sails in the wind as stiff as
shovels; those from Foochow with huge faggots of beams lashed to each side;
then tricoloured sampans, the giants of Europe, the American windjammers
full of kerosene, all the camels of Madian, the cargo boats of Hamburg and
London, the traders of the coast and the islands.
Everything is limpid; I enter a brightness so pure it seems that neither my
intimate consciousness, nor my body, offers any resistance. The weather is
deliciously cold. With my mouth shut and my nostrils given to the
exhilarating air, I breathe the sun."
These rapturous moments of plenitude and self-dissolution, however, often
issue into panicky intimations of Nothingness. For if the Far East promises
a world of theophanic presences for Claudel, it at the same time threatens
him as an abyss without ground – or as a mere Mallarméan play of signs on
the Void. Meditating on a defaced imperial stele in the ruins near Suzhou,
he observes that the teeming profusion of China is founded on a
“constitutional vacuum” or “béante lacune” filled merely with “empty
simulacra and their debris”. Incapable even of exploiting its natural
resources in a systematic fashion (one hears the voice of the vice consul
here), the tottering empire everywhere displays, like nature herself, “un
caractère antique et provisoire, délabré, hasardeux, lacunaire” – little
wonder that Claudel’s fearful vision of the castration at the heart of the
symbolic order should have later drawn the interest of Lacan. In the poem
“Here and There”, which recounts his visit to the Buddhist temple of
Rinzaiji during his brief stay in Japan, Claudel finally gives full vent to
his horror of this Asiatic void. Although he is enough of a Mallarméan to
appreciate the abstract semiotics of classical Chinese calligraphy and
painting, he is nonetheless profoundly appalled by the “pagan” worship of
3,000 identical golden idols of Kwannon – which he takes to be a “monstrous”
and “incestuous” fetishization of the signifier, all the more “Satanic”
because Buddhism disguises its desolate and solipsistic doctrine of
Nothingness behind the erotic lure of Nirvana.
