China and the West

Valéry, Paul. Le Yalou [ID D24509].
Christopher Paul Bush : When Le Yalou begins, an Occidental narrator and a Chinese guide climb a shill on the coast near the mouth of the Yalu. As the narrator is lost in reflection he is interrupted by his companion's talk of the recent Japanese attacks. The European narrator comments "Ils sont très forts, ils nous imitent", to which the Chinese guide retorts : "Vous êtes des enfants... je connais ton Europe". The Chinese here echoes one of the earliest gestures of 'East-West' dialogue in the West, an Egyptian priest's reproach of Solon in Plato's Timaeus.The Chinese guide then proceeds to lecture the narrator on the failings of Western culture, in terms very similar to those used by Solon. Valéry's Chinese accuses Europe of allowing 'reason' to consume everything : "chaque jour elle dévore ce qui existe... Vous vous épuisez à recommencer sans cesse l'oeuvre du premier jour". The European exists in a perpetually new aorld because "il confond le rapide changement de son coeur avec la variation imperceptible des formes réelles et des Etres durables". The central point of both critical monologues is that the 'oriental' culture has a more profound sense of history and a radically different relationship to memory. And as with Plato's Egyptian, writing plays an important role in Valéry's Chinese's articulation of the oriental difference : "Ici, pour pouvoir penser, il faut connaître des signes nombreuses". While for the Westerner experience disrupts continuity, for the Chinese experience itself, through the medium of language, becomes a kind of cultural tradition : "Ici, tout est historique : une certaine fleur, la douceur d'une heure qui tourne... sur ces choses se rencontrent les esprits de nos pères avec les nôtres. Elles se reproduisent et, tandis que nous répétons les sons qu'ils leur ont donnés pour noms, le souvenir nous joint à eux et nous éternise".
If everything is historical, history in the Western sense cannot exist. The Occidental contrast between the living spirit and the dead letter makes no sense here. The very omnipresence of precedence that seems to be valorized in the discussion of experience is now revealed to be a constraint to thought. The Oriental is not alienated from nature because he always dins his culture in it, but this is also an 'inability' to be alienated, to have new experiences or to develop new concepts. Chinese writing is "trop difficile", it "renferme les idées". Le Yalou draws on the thematic resources of the long and complex tradition of 'oriental' literature. As for China, "il n'y eut pas de géomètres chez les Chinois, et leurs intuitions sont demeurées intuitions d'artiestes ; elles n'ont pas servi de prétexte et de premier support aux développements logiques d'une pensée abstraite". The Orient is again characterized by the prioritization of the word at the expense of experience, "La répétition d'un mot ou d'une formule... oubliant que tout sens que nous donnons à ce que nous percevons alors 'en nous' est déduit des expériences". The West adopted "le système contraire".
In many ways, Valéry's presentation of the Orient seems to replay the basic motifs of Orientalist tradition : the West is idealist and spiritual, China is materialist and scriptural, its culture a storehouse of conceptual fossils that will not or cannot participate in the modern world.