To have an informative view of matters is often a function of perspective. Pierre Ryckmans was a man with an enviable sense of perspective, one which allowed him to be writer, essayist, translator, art historian and especially a sinologist, as well as becoming a respected professor. To have such a broad vantage point was the result of his life experiences, and they were both fascinating and complex.
Ryckmans was born in Brussels, his father a publisher, his grandfather a member of the Antwerp government, as well as anephew of the Pierre Ryckmans who was a governor general of the Belgian Congo, and of Gonzague Ryckmans, a recognized expert of Arabic epigraphy and professor at the Catholic University of Louvain. After first studying law and art history at university, his father died at an early age in 1955. That year he was a member of a delegation of ten young Belgians who spent a month in China. It was a transformative visit. He returned having decided “it would be inconceivable to live in this world, in our age, without a good knowledge of Chinese language and a direct access to Chinese culture” (explained in an interview in China Heritage Quarterly, No. 26, June 2011).
It was the beginning of a time of moves. He enrolled at the Fine Arts department of the Taiwan National University, carrying our research for what was to become his future PhD dissertation subject, the work of a Chinese painter, Shitao. In 1960, he was called up for military service in Belgium but chose to become a conscientious objector. He was able to take up a part-time student and teaching job Singapore’s Nanyang University, but under suspicion of being a communist by the Lee Kuan Yew government, he had to leave and settled in Hong Kong. During this time, and on his publisher’s advice, he decided to assume the pen name Simon Leys, to avoid being declared persona non grata in the PRC. In 1970 he moved to Australia, teaching Chinese literature at the ANU. From 1987–93, he was Professor of Chinese Studies at University of Sydney. After retiring from that position, he returned to Canberra, where he lived until he died of cancer at 78.
During his life, he was a prolific writer, publishing in English, French and Chinese. His books on China offered ‘scathing descriptions’ of the cultural and political destruction under the Auspices of Mao in mainland China. He was equally trenchant in his critiques of Mao’s western defenders. I found all his books both enlightening and persuasive. He wrote regularly for the English-language press and for the French-language press. He was a fellow of Australian. Academy of the Humanities, an Honorary Commander of the French Navy (!!), and a member of Belgian Royal Academy of Literature. He received many awards including the French Academy’s Prix Jean Walter, prix d’histoire et de sociologie, and other of their awards , as well as the Christina Stead Prize for fiction.
However, among the many books of his I have read and reread, one that was rather different was his 1966 Boyer Lectures, given on the theme ‘Aspects of Culture’. The lectures cover five themes. The first, Learning, addresses education and what he saw as its present crisis. The second, Reading, is concerned with the role of books in our lives, and the role of literary criticism. Next, in Writing, he deals with the creative experience. Lecture four, Going Abroad Staying Home, is a series of reflections on the outside world and ‘otherness’, balanced against others concerned with inner life and contemplation. Each of the chapters is humorous, insightful and memorable.
The flavour of Rickman’s approach is evident from the beginning. Having first told the reader about Rousseau’s Confessions, in which the author reveals a time on which, tongue-tied for whatever reason, he failed to respond to a series of attacks, ones he easily could have refuted on another occasion. This leads him on the reflecting on a failure of his own when, at a conference, he heard a young critic respond to a speech in such a way if prevented responses. The critic’s address was as long as the original presentation and took up all of the airtime. More to the point, in rehashing some of the slogans from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the critic was effectively denying the right of anyone to criticise another. He was arguing value judgements were a form of cultural arrogance. This was to portray the realm of scholarly activity are mere social prejudice.
For Ryckmans, this was to remind him of the Mchael Leunig cartoon presenting a trendy modern cleric. The caption we are told, read ‘Reverend so-and-So does not believe in God, but needs the job.’ It was funny, were it not for the fact that it was also a commentary on the postmodernists task of ‘deconstruction’, where anybody’s values are as legitimate as anyone else’s. If Ryckman is terrified about the thought that universities might lose their fundamental grounding in agreed vales, he imagines the consequences: “I should not be surprised if I were to learn that, right now, in the English Literature Department of [one of our] vanguard universities, (duly renamed Departments of Human Communications and Sociocultural Deconstruction) there are earnest candidates for a doctoral degree, hard at work on “deconstructing” the telephone directory.”
I smiled at the story and then stopped smiling: as he goes on to note “Truth, in other words, is not in thought, , but … it is the condition for the possibility of thinking. … The view that Truth is not a conclusion, but a premise – and the very condition for any intellectual enquiry is important and profound.” Ryckmans illustrates this idea by quoting a story about the Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhi. A couple of pages later we are pushed harder: “The trap of “seeing through” things was best exposed by C S Lewis (in a conclusion to his essay on the defence of values):
“The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent because the street of garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying “to see through’ first principles . If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To see through all things is the same as not to see.”
Skilfully, we have managed to explore some key issues in the nature of higher education and the role of universities, gently confronting issues that are as relevant today as they were nearly sixty years ago. In this first lecture, Ryckman ends by observing that the university “increasingly resembles the cardboard props that were used on the Elizabethan stage, or in the Peking opera, and on which was written in big characters “THIS IS A CASTLE’ or ‘THIS IS A FOREST’ – it amounts to little more than a symbolic signboard ‘THIS IS A UNIVERSITY’. Can such a fiction retain credibility with the public?
In many ways this lecture in The View From the Bridge is an uncomfortable introduction to Bill Readings 1996 book The University in Ruins (Harvard University Press). In his book Readings argues the university has outlived its purpose–a purpose he suggests made sense two centuries ago, when the nation-state and the modern notion of culture came together to make the university the guardian of national culture…What, Readings asks, “is the point of the University, if we realize that we are no longer to strive to realize a national identity, be it an ethnic essence or a republican will?” What happens when the culture the university was meant to preserve goes global and transnational along with everything else? This is an intriguing argument. And…it helps to explain much. From this perspective, for example, Readings is wonderfully insightful on the “culture wars” that have wracked universities and bewildered the public for two decades…
Of course, Ryckmans takes the argument as far as to lament what was happening. Readings wants to go further, suggesting who live and work in universities as well as to those on the outside need to better understand the university’s position in a changing world, ‘to come out of our professional shells, stop pining for a lost world, and actively seek to construct something different’.
In his second lecture, Ryckmans addresses reading, beginning with a nice tale from China about the importance of text, and suggests Chines script is “at the root of Chinese civilisation in a way that has no real equivalent anywhere else in the world”. Do we respect the written word as much as the Chinese di (and perhaps still do)? Ryckmans goes on to describe that scene in Peter Weir’s film wen the students are told by their charismatic teacher that their poetry anthology was compiled and had an introduction by a ‘pompous moron. The teacher tears the offending pages from the book, and, slowly at first, the students do the same, and the scene ends with a ‘joyous iconoclastic frenzy’.
Ryckmans was horrified by this scene in a film he otherwise enjoyed. Why? Because it reminds him of the many other episodes of book destruction and book burning, acts of brutality and horror, from fascist mobs right back to the first Emperor of China. Books have power. As he observes: “The point is not that a book can be considered as to have as much value as human life, but that, simply, when a man is bent on destroying books, you know he is capable of anything, since his aim is not merely to kill people, but to kill their souls”.
In case we don’t get the point, he goes on to quote from Primo Levi, who writes about quoting from the Diving Comedy in Auschwitz. In his memoir, Levi remembers a moment of sudden catastrophe when his memory begins to fail, at the end of one stanza, unable to complete the Canto: “I have forgotten at least twelve lines … I would give today’s soup to know how to connect the last fragment to the end of the Canto. I try to reconstruct it through the rhymes, I close my eyes, I bite my fingers, but it is of no use, the rest is silence’. Thirty years after writing that passage, Levi returned to it, in the last book he wrote a year before his death. He concluded “When I wrote I would give today’s soup for know how to retrieve the forgotten passage, I had neither lied nor exaggerated. I really would have given bread and soup – that is, blood – to save from nothingness those memories which today, with the support of printed paper, I can refresh gratis whenever I wish, and which therefore seems of little value”.
Ryckmans ends his comments on literature by rewriting a commentary by Thomas Merton. Merton was writing about religion. In his transposition Ryckmans takes Merton’s world but replaces religious terms with literary concepts: “Literature is not understood. Those who wish themselves cultured in order to admire themselves in this state are made stupid by literary studies. What is need is to lose ourselves completely to literature; what is needed is perfect silence. Literary theory has something revolting about it.” Yes, just allow yourself to live in the world of great books.
When he moves to writing, Ryckmans becomes rather more critical. He starts by addressing the strange desire to explain the ‘message’ of a piece of fictional writing, as if the writer was setting out some directional signs. In response Ryckmans quotes Hemmingway: “When I need to send a message, I go to the Post Office”. From here it is a short step for Ryckmans to address the importance of ‘inspiration’. With his strikingly adept use of Chinese stories, Ryckmans finds an appropriate story to illustrate his concern.
“ Prince Yuan wished to have some paintings done. Many painters came to his palace., Having bowed to the Prince, the began immediately to busy themselves with their work, licking their brushes and preparing their ink in front of him. One painter, however, arrived long after the others, quite at leisure. He made a casual bow and then immediately disappeared into a back room. Quite puzzled, the Prince despatched one servant to find out where he had gone. The servant reported back: ‘He has taken all his clothes off and sits there naked doing nothing.’ ‘Splendid’ the Prince exclaimed. ‘This one will do, he is a real painter’.
If the point might seem a little subtle, Ryckmans goes on to report how great European painters were well known for their focus on inner discipline to precede and sustain practice. He quotes from Vasari, who told the story of Leonardo da Vinci working on The Last Supper. Apparently, he would often send as much as half of the day simply looking at what he had done. When questioned, Leonardo is said to have replied ‘men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they do the least’. The View From the Bridge is full of clever anecdotes and observations like these, all of which are intended to do what Ryckmans described as the practice of great painters – encouraging the reader to stop and think.
When he turns his focus to writers, and those who face a writer’s block, he quotes Philip Larkin:
“…. Don’t ask me
Why I stopped. I didn’t stop. It stopped.
In the old days, I’d go home at six
And write all evening on a board
Across my knees. But now … I go home
And there is nothing there.
I am like a chicken
With no eggs to lay.”
(In Philip Larkin, a Tribute, by George Hartley, Marwell Press, 1988).
Should I continue? Books like A View From the Bridge are deceptive. A written version of four lectures, relatively brief and offered for general consumption. This isn’t a work of scholarship, but an easy to read and engaging overview. There’s the trap. To condense your views into four lectures, lectures aimed at an intelligent but non-specialist audience is a challenge. The lecturer has to speak to a large (and unseen) audience. The lecturer has to capture the interest of the listeners, using anecdotes, amusing stories and similar devices to create bridges into important topics to offer criticism and comment.
I think Pierre Ryckmans does it brilliantly, yet, if I want you to read the book, perhaps I could entice you by offering a few more – hopefully tantalising – snippets. He writes about the dangerous allure of exoticism, about behaving well in the face of death, and about the unlikelihood of a try insightful metaphor. He reminds us that it’s a plum pudding book, and, like little Jack Horner, that suggests you should stick your nose (and brain) into the essays, and like Jack, find yourself pulling out some plums!
