Comparative Encounters Between Artaud, Michaux and the Zhuangzi

Rationality, Cosmology and Ethics

Xiaofan Amy Li

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781909662674
• eBook ISBN: 9781351191098
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"The encounter between different minds and perspectives across time and space has always haunted the literary and philosophical imagination. Just such an encounter is staged and played out in this comparative study, which connects the twentieth-century Francophone writers Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and Henri Michaux (1899-1984) with the ancient Chinese text Zhuangzi (c. 4th-3rd century BCE). These disparate texts are bridged by questions that draw them into close dialogue: how can Artaud and Michaux, who read about and admired ancient Chinese literature and culture, be rethought through certain philosophical concerns that the Zhuangzi raises? If the points of conceptual intersection focus on rationality, cosmology and ethics, what can they tell us about these important issues? By imagining, constructing and developing this thought-encounter, Li re-envisages Artaud, Michaux and the Zhuangzi through the kaleidoscope of comparative interpretation, juxtaposing and recombining ideas and contexts to form new patterns and meanings. Xiaofan Amy Li is Junior Research Fellow in Comparative Literature and Translation at St Anne's College, Oxford University."

Chapter 1

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Variations on Perspective: Clearing the Methodological Grounds

Holding a cross-cultural dialogue between Artaud, Michaux and the Zhuangzi so far looks very promising. But a percipient reader may turn to the very basics of this interpretative enterprise and question its primary conditions: is it even possible to start such a dialogue? Can the Zhuangzi, a syncretist text dating from the fourth century BCE and fraught with uncertainties in meaning in every passage, be translated in a way that makes sense in the context of a comparison with two writers who are different in just about every aspect (language, culture, history…)? What does it take to translate different intellectual and cultural experiences into each other? And if we can, is it desirable to do so? Although the comparative method seems to offer a tempting perspective onto wider and more exotic horizons, on what grounds is it anchored? Can we simply pluck writers and texts from any context and ‘do’ comparative literature?

These doubts about translation and comparison reflect the fundamental problems in comparative criticism, but are particularly radicalized by the comparison that this book purports to construct. Though there is already no dearth of comparative studies between European literatures, or between writers and texts that share a certain cultural tradition or historical era, a comparison such as that between Artaud, Michaux and the Zhuangzi poses questions about translatability and comparability in a much starker way. And this is precisely the methodological aim and interest of this book, for it does not treat translation and comparison as simply methods that structurally support its discussions but which become obscured in the end result, submerged in the façade of interpretation. Rather, my architectural vision of the book is a clear glass building where its bolts and nuts are seen. Much as the methodological questions about comparison stem from my chosen texts and writers for comparison, this choice also stems from the questions I want to ask. To see is to see from a perspective, and the intercultural and comparative perspective is, alongside the other central themes, also one major topic of this study.

Variation one: Translation as interpretation and the comparative experience of other cultures

Translation — understood both linguistically and metaphorically — is one of the most familiar perspectives that we constantly employ in life. Nevertheless, our literary and cultural sensibility is also constantly haunted by the fear of the untranslatable. We know that the translation will never be faithful to the original, that it is always more or less an interpretation. In the case of the Zhuangzi, the interpretative element in translation is particularly significant, because there is no way to talk about the text in its own language: classical Chinese. Nor can we access its living context. Even translating the text into modern Chinese means interpreting and explaining the original textual ambiguities in a certain way, which explains why there is so much debate about which Chinese translation of the Zhuangzi is better, or whether there is a single satisfactory Chinese translation at all. In this study, all citations from the Zhuangzi are my own translations (or occasionally modified from an existing translation I like), which take classical Chinese grammar as the most important guiding principle. This means that the Zhuangzi’s words presented here are my reading of them, since not a little interpretation is required to render the text into readable English (in fact the original text itself is sometimes unreadable). This interpretational caveat about translating the Zhuangzi has to be borne in mind throughout the book, for I am only presenting one possible view of the text to explore how this particular view becomes the starting point of a dialogue with other thinkers and intellectual traditions. As mentioned above, the main novelty of this book’s engagement with the Zhuangzi is not focusing on the excavation of meaning through the textual intricacies, but on how the text can be used to inspire new thought about Artaud and Michaux. The same goes for the French writers, for I am not primarily interested in what their works mean by themselves, but what they could mean when seen from the perspectives of different Zhuangzian ideas. In this sense, my emphasis is on operation rather than meaning, centrifugal inspiration from the Zhuangzi instead of centripetal exegesis within the text.

Besides the problem of translating the Zhuangzi, there is also the difficulty of how to treat the text. We know that the present edition of the text is a patchwork of different fragments of different authors assembled into thirty-three chapters. These chapters have been divided posthumously as the Inner chapters (1–7), Outer chapters (8–22), and Miscellaneous chapters (23–33), the Inner chapters being conventionally regarded as the most authentic or ancient parts of the whole Zhuangzi.¹ Any reader of the text would naturally wonder whose voice is speaking in a specific passage, or how to make sense of the plethora of different, sometimes contradictory ideas the whole corpus presents. My approach, however, does not endorse any partiality to more ‘authentic’ chapters, nor addresses the problem of attributing authorship. The Zhuangzi functions as a text for me and I do not need to access its authors’ psychology, nor believe that a single author is always self-consistent, or that different authors cannot coincide. I treat the Zhuangzi as a textual entirety that offers a mine of different ideas scattered in different sections, but not an entirety that reflects as a whole any consistent views or theories. In other words, I say that certain views on rationality, for instance, can be found in the Zhuangzi, but not that the Zhuangzi endorses a particular stance towards rationality. This approach also works for Artaud and Michaux, who are highly inconsistent and ‘messy’ writers whose writings resist systematization and fixed intellectual positions.

But translation is always more than translation. Linguistic rendering into another sign system is only the peak of the iceberg, and especially so in the case of translating ideas into cultural dialogues that go well beyond the contextual specificities from which these ideas emerged. Comparatively reading Artaud, Michaux and the Zhuangzi is also an extended way of translating them into each other, into philosophical concepts and discourses about rationality, cosmology and ethics. Through this process, different cultural and intellectual experiences suddenly seem to be transferable; the medium of comparison as translation, at first an indirect way of experience, seems to become the interstitial space where one can experience different cultures most directly and simultaneously. Of course, there is much reason to rejoice if this is indeed the case, for this would almost be an ideal cultural eclecticism that opens up our epistemological and experiential horizons. On the other hand, do we really want this to happen? Do we not fear that too much is lost, especially cultural specificity and identity, in such a process? Isn’t the very idea that cultural experiences — in fact, any experiences — are exchangeable and available to others to re-experience both terrifying and repugnant?

What is at stake in cultural translation and comparison almost always concerns what we lose and gain from this practice, and whether the gain is worth the loss. This is why so few critics have dealt well with Artaud’s and Michaux’s fascination with the Far East, for it can be so easily slipped into the clothes of the naïve exoticist who fantasizes about an Oriental alternative to life and thought. This also explains why for a long time, and sometimes even now, sinologists have persisted in upholding some kind of incommensurability or untranslatability when Chinese culture is compared with others. For instance, possible doubts about my approach to translating and using the Zhuangzi could be: should it be translated into this comparative context? Can we properly talk about concepts laden with baggage such as ‘reason’ and ‘nature’ in such a text, and relate Western theories to it? In my view, these questions reflect the fundamental dilemma between difference and sameness. Namely, it involves the argument that different cultures and languages are incommensurable and cannot be meaningfully discussed within one (usually Eurocentric) framework, versus the view that there are universally shared commonalities between all human civilizations and that cultures are not self-enclosed cocoons but can be translated into each other. The first view has found not a little support in sinology, as debates on whether Chinese philosophy is philosophy, whether Chinese modernity is modernity, or whether Chinese feminism is feminism show.² In resistance to an all-too-easy cross-cultural communication, sinologists have typically insisted upon historical context, commentatorial tradition, and refused to gel with the free-flowing pan-nutritional fluid of Western theory for fear of Eurocentricism. I believe, however, that comparison neither means decontextualization, nor judges one culture in terms of another.³ In fact, sinology has always been inherently cross-cultural, since it denotes Chinese studies in a non-Chinese — especially Western — cultural context. There is no sinologist who is not aware of her non-Chineseness, and the vast majority of Western scholarship on China has always emphasized how different Chinese culture is from Indo-European cultures, and how inappropriate it is to use Western terms and conceptual schemata to understand China. These views can only be conceived when a comparative logic is already at work. The very possibility of studying a foreign culture is already founded upon an awareness of how this foreign culture compares with one’s own. In regard to understanding ancient Chinese culture, in particular, the real problem is not about using non-contextual language and methods, but about how impossible it is to not use non-contextual language and methods in any analysis or interpretation. Classical Chinese is not the means of expression of modern Chinese people; the context in which classical Chinese texts were written is also no longer accessible. To make sense of these ancient texts, we have to use our contemporary mindsets and non-contextual language and ideas. I remember reading in an art newsletter a few years ago about an archaeological museum displaying the catchphrase ‘All art is contemporary’. That said a lot about the conditions for the living production of culture and our reception of culture from the past.

Assertions of incommensurable differences are often essentialist pitfalls, for they require the bearers of difference or sameness to be in some way absolutely different or identical. Such absoluteness does not enrich the multiplicity of cultures but becomes just another version of totalization. As the comparatist Zhang has argued (1998: 12), nothing is really ‘identical’, yet most things have ‘widely shared’ aspects. Certainly one culture should not be judged by another culture’s standards, but should we deny that certain similarities do exist between these cultures, that one can achieve a deep understanding of another culture, simply because of the fear of appropriation? Some critics of Artaud and Michaux are so wary of colonial Orientalism that they unconsciously adopt an Occidentalist attitude, and insist on the Other’s ultimate incomprehensibility. For instance, the typical claim is that Artaud and Michaux never accessed the ‘real’ Far East but dreamed it as a spiritual therapy, remaining enclosed within their cultural tradition despite their self-exile. Susan Sontag declared that Artaud’s attitude ‘is an ultimate refinement of the colonialist outlook: an imaginative exploitation of non-white cultures […] whose wisdom it plunders and parodies’ (Sontag in Artaud 1976: xl); and Dina Hamdan argued that for Michaux, the Orient is really about the self, an ‘egotisme’ that loves an ‘Orient féminisé’ because it suits Michaux’s ‘idealist’ exoticism (Hamdan 2002: 194). But they are mistaken. We do not understand intercultural practices and intellectual exchanges well enough — not even those involving ourselves — to pass any judgments on Artaud and Michaux, who spent most of their lives battling against identity, against the monolithic and self-enclosed understanding of Western culture and the colonial insistence that non-Western cultures must be essentially different and un-understood.

By considering Artaud and Michaux together with the Zhuangzi, I challenge these reductionist views about the European avant-garde’s engagement with the sup posedly ‘Other’ and argue for a much more positive intellectual relationship between them. Although admittedly, Artaud and Michaux were introduced to Chinese culture partly via colonialist exhibitions and exoticist journalistic accounts, this by no means leads automatically to the conclusion that they were spoon-fed by the racist and appropriating ideology. As Segalen showed in his Essai sur l’exotisme (Essay on exoticism, 1911) which revolutionized the ‘exotic’ into an ethical instead of colonial (i.e. unethical) position, one can love the difference of the Other without appropriating it, and understand difference aesthetically and philosophically, leaving behind the political struggle between cultures for power domination. The Segal enian version of ‘exoticism’ affirms the Other, to the extent that the exoticist ulti mately becomes the Other, then finds that the Other is always already part of the Self as well as part of the Others of the Other, thus resulting in the evaporation of the monolithic and dichotomist conceptualizations of Self and Other. I believe that Artaud and Michaux are ‘exoticists’ in this Segalenian sense rather than naïve Orientalists. A cursory glance at their lives and intellectual tendencies is already very telling in terms of their cultural hybridity and complexity. Firstly, Artaud and Michaux were never firmly situated in one culture nor even mildly sympathetic to the idea of cultural identity — in fact, any identity tout court. Artaud’s family was from Smyrna and he grew up speaking Greek, Turkish, Italian and French.⁴ So Artaud is only problematically ‘French’, this being a cultural belonging that Artaud neither asserted nor even preferred. For example, he states that his favourite painter is Delacroix, ‘parce que le moins français dans l’essence’ (‘because he is the least French in spirit’) (II: 263). Michaux, on the other hand, seems to have an inborn abhorrence of being Belgian and European in general, embedded in an expressed hatred for his lineage and tradition (2003: 94): ‘J’ai vécu contre mon père (et contre ma mère et contre mon grand-père, ma grand-mère, mes arrière-grands-parents)’ (‘I have lived against my father (and against my mother and against my grandfather, my grandmother, my great-grandparents)’). He left his native town — or rather, escaped from it — in his youth and spent most of his life travelling or living in Paris, existing between rather than in cultures.⁵ Secondly, Artaud and Michaux most consciously embraced cultural self-exile by learning about non-European cultures, travelling to distant lands, vehemently tearing down all constructions of identity or fluctuating between fictional identities so that any notion of identity ends up liquidated. Significantly, they also wrote against their own language and culture — although as mentioned, French has always been foreign to them to a certain extent. As Casanova remarked in her La République mondiale des lettres (1999), the cult of language is a refusal to acknowledge the inherent comparison and interaction with other languages and cultures. This is why thoughtful writers have never been willing to perpetuate their linguistic heritage. Such writers’ literary career is one of expatriation, a flight from the grips of one’s mother tongue:

C’est à partir […] d’inventer leur propre liberté, c’est-à-dire de transformer, ou de refuser […] leur héritage littéraire national qu’on pourra comprendre tout le trajet des écrivains et leur projet littéraire’ (Casanova 1999: 65).

[Only by taking as the point of departure […] the invention of their own freedom, namely, transforming or refusing their national literary heritage, can the entire itinerary of these writers and their literary project be understood.]

Therefore, Artaud and Michaux cannot be seen as simply ‘European’ writers but are much more culturally hybrid. Thirdly, there is no Other strictly speaking for Artaud and Michaux, because they have no privileged position of the Self to occupy, nor see the Other as other (and for a truly non-culturally-centric mentality, the very concepts of Self and Other would evaporate). In the manner of the ultimate exoticist (à la Segalen, that is), they feel at home in foreign environments but alienated and othered in their own culture. Artaud describes how close to nature and life he felt when staying with the Tarahumaras (IX: 85); and Michaux is deeply moved by Indian strawhuts but shocked by European architecture (1977: 76): ‘Grandes surfaces de coffres-forts, coffres-forts cimentés […] coffres-forts à compartiments’ (‘Vast surfaces of strong-boxes, cemented strong-boxes, […] compartmentalized strong-boxes’). After having ‘exiled’ themselves and engaged so persistently with other cultures, Artaud and Michaux become the Other only to discover that there never was an absolute or unified Self or Other to start with. The truly non-discriminating attitude sees mutual dissolution between the Self and Other rather than attempt to overcome their opposition, since ‘overcoming’ already implicitly affirms the dichotomy. Artaud’s and Michaux’s thought does not need to be always fundamentally or distinctly different from any non-European thought, such as that of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Variations on Perspective: Clearing the Methodological Grounds
• 2 Rationality and Knowledge: Order and Chaos, the Sage and the Child
• 3 Cosmology: Spirals of Time and Space
• 4 Cosmology: Nature beyond Form
• 5 Ethical Alternations: The Gift, Indifference, and Agency
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index