MDDM encountering the Other

[Doug Millison]

...in the context of our boys' encounter with the natives, a timely NYRB
review:

The New York Review of Books
August 15, 2002

Review

Making a Fetish of Mystery

By Ian Buruma
Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity
by Victor Segalen, translated and edited by Yaël Rachel Schlick, with a
foreword by Harry Harootunian
Duke University Press, 95 pp., $45.95; $15.95 (paper)

[...]  Segalen's experiences in Tahiti made him aware of the destruction of
indigenous cultures by European colonialism. Like Gauguin, whom he admired,
Segalen sought to express what was being obliterated in his own vision of
the exotic. Back in France, in 1905, he wrote a novel, entitled Les
Immémoriaux, about the influence of French missionaries in Tahiti. Because
of this novel, one of his three published works at the time of his death,
Segalen became known as le Kipling français. He was categorized as a
colonial writer, like Pierre Loti, who wrote precious and often fanciful
travel books about the mysterious Orient. What made Segalen different from
Loti and other colonial writers, however, was his attempt to express the
point of view of the colonized. He loathed the effect of missionaries and
colonial administrators on non-Western cultures. He hated anything that
flattened diversity.

Segalen's first trip to China was in 1909. He had studied Chinese for one
year, enough to get a taste of the culture, but not much more than that.
Still, it was all he needed, for it was through his imagination, and not
his expertise, that he sought to filter his experiences. Segalen was a keen
archeologist, with a special interest in the inscribed stone slabs called
steles, which inspired his collection of poems, entitled Stèles. As in his
novel on Tahiti, he adopted the voice of "the Other," in this case a
Chinese literatus, without losing his own sensibility. China was also the
setting for his masterpiece, still regarded as a classic in France, the
novel René Leys, first published in 1922.  [...]

And recently Segalen's championship of cultural diversity has attracted the
admiring attention of postcolonial theorists in the US. It would be a pity,
however, if Segalen were to be buried in the dense and often unreadable
prose of academics whose texts are marred by too much "privileging" and
"discourses." Segalen deserves better than that. [...]

The exotic, then, as imagined by Segalen, was meant to be a bastion of
individualism in a world of mass mediocrity. In this he was a true
romantic. Assimilation, whether racial or cultural, would kill individual
difference. As a writer, traveler, scholar, and fantasist, Segalen tried
his very best to penetrate other cultures and races, and yet to "retain the
eternal pleasure of sensing Diversity" he insisted that this had to end in
failure. To retain the freedom to "conceive otherwise," others have to
remain impenetrable.  [...]

[This following bit reminds me of Pynchon's "Dixon, and his Maiden of the
day" (707) and his gals at the All-Nations...]

One of the clichés of modern literature, and indeed cinema, is the erotic
encounter of a young Western man, usually in search of himself, with a
beautiful woman of a different culture or race.  [...]  But where Segalen
gets even more interesting is when he touches upon the delicate matter
(more often seen in porno stores than in serious poetry) of turning other
cultures or races into a fetish. Segalen's longing to penetrate China and
Polynesia is overtly erotic in his writing. [...]

The novel, which begins with the sentence "I can know no more," is about
mystery, and yet is quite transparent too. Like a puppet player on a
Japanese stage, the narrator shows you all the time what he is doing: the
China of his tale is a story, and Leys is the puppet through whom the story
is told. [...]