“Ten years after his death, Simon Leys remains a master of lucidity in the face of ideologies”

Simon Leys was the first to denounce the evils of Maoism. What allowed him to see where the West was blinded?

Jérôme Michel: Simon Leys has never been a supporter of any ideology, whether right or left. He presented himself above all as a Catholic. In reality, he refused to put absolutes into politics. And when he was confronted in 1966-1967 with the reality of the Cultural Revolution, he absolutely did not approach it from a political point of view. What interests him are the facts. He speaks and reads Chinese. And it was by stripping the Chinese communist press, at the request of the Belgian consulate in Hong Kong where he held a position as researcher in Chinese literature and teacher in art history at the New Asia College, that he will simply report what he reads and sees.

He witnesses the assassination of a journalist who dies almost on his doorstep. He also sees many corpses drifting from the rivers of China to the colony’s beaches. He interviews refugees who fled the regime. He takes stock of the catastrophe in progress. And this is what led him, at the urging of sinologist René Viénet, to write a book about it, Chairman Mao’s new clothes. The book which revealed it and revealed the reality of Maoism at a time when it was obscured by the dithyramb of the left but also of the Gaullist right embodied in particular by Alain Peyreffite. A book which is both a factual chronicle and an interpretation of events: “ This revolution is revolutionary only in name and cultural only in pretext.” In reality, it hides, and this is its central thesis, a fierce struggle for power within the Communist Party. A struggle led by a despot who wants to return to the forefront after the failure of the Great Leap Forward.

There were, however, other sinologists… What made him see? What are the keys, basically, to seeing when everyone thinks differently?

J. M. : First, Leys is there. He taught in Hong Kong, and was initiated by Jesuits into the mysteries of Chinese politics and contemporary Chinese history… His first trip to China, with Belgian students, in 1955, was like a sort of love shock. , and his first concern, upon his return, was to learn the language, to immerse himself in Chinese reality, which led him to go to Singapore, then to Taiwan where he met his wife, a journalist Chinese, and Hong Kong.

Another important point: if at the time he felt a vague sympathy for the communist regime, because it brought China out of an era of misfortune and redistributed the land, he was in no way an orphan of Stalin. , like so many intellectuals elsewhere. He does not arrive in Hong Kong with a political conviction. On the other hand, he is convinced of the beauty of Chinese poetry and classical culture. He is also one of the great specialists in Chinese painting. And it is precisely because his outlook is not politicized that he will be so permeable to the reality of the facts. Nothing bothers him as such. He makes it his duty to record everything. But from these facts a truth will emerge which is not good to say, at a time when China specialists consider it as the new El Dorado of revolutionary hope after the bankruptcy of Stalin and the Soviet system.

How did Simon Leys personally experience the attacks against him?

J. M. : It was extremely painful. Overnight he became an outcast. So-called experts accused him of being a CIA agent, of spreading fake news, of having no knowledge of the country. Leys should have become an academic in France but he was the subject of a campaign of such virulence that the university authorities refused him the position of lecturer that he was seeking. This is one of the reasons why he went into exile in Australia, where he was able to continue his career.

Basically, Simon Leys is the child of Andersen’s tale which says: “The king is naked, the king is a despot, and it is not this great poet who writes the history of China on a blank page »… At the end of Andersen’s tale, everyone thanks the child for having finally opened their eyes, but George Orwell commented on this tale as follows: “Andersen has no political knowledge, because the child who does that, who tells the truth that we don’t want to see, gets beaten up. » And Simon Leys, in fact, was beaten. He didn’t expect such a backlash. It took almost fifteen years before he was recognized as one of the few to have told the truth at that time. Philippe Sollers will have the honesty to recognize that Simon Leys, from 1968, was right, and that he was right before anyone else.

Did he show courage?

J. M. : He demonstrated lucidity, intellectual probity, and the courage to speak. Simon Leys especially suffered from this permanent insult to the truth. We refused to see. It’s a very contemporary theme. We refuse to see what we see. For him, courage – as Péguy says – is to say what you see, and, even more courageous, to see what you see. “A fact, even a small one, is better than a master, even a grandiose one”he writes. All his intellectual ethics are there.

During his last stay in China in 1972, which he recounts in Chinese shadows (1974), he sees a completely lobotomized China, sad, haggard, while the discourse of an enthusiastic, red, joyful China continues… He saw the abandonment of the universities, the empty libraries, the sadness of the people. China after the Cultural Revolution.

When we look at the amount of knowledge we could have about what was happening in China, we had everything we could see. Like in the USSR during Stalin’s era. But no one could imagine, at least among the Pekinologists, this catastrophe, which he, quite simply, described. He often speaks of this defect, this lack of imagination which prevents us, in reality, from accessing the truth. Fear or ideological passion stuns the imagination.

Did his faith play a role in this lucidity in the face of reality?

J. M. : It must be remembered, however, that many Catholics have fallen into Maoism, within the magazine Esprit among others…

But yes, his faith played a role, I believe, in two ways. First, a certain conception of truth. He talks a lot about Pilate. Like Pilate, “ we had the truth in front of our eyes and no one saw it, or everyone washed their hands of it.”

And secondly, this truth is transcendent. It has nothing to do with the political order. Simon Leys refuses – and this brings him very close to Camus – to put absolutes in politics. There are only relative truths. On the other hand, politics must be judged in the name of values ​​which are not political but transcendent.

There is also in him the primacy of the person over the idea.

J. M. : Yes and, in this, he is inseparable from George Orwell, on whom he wrote a magnificent book, Orwell or the horror of politicsunderstood like all political fanaticism. One of the defects of ideologies is that they always end up making the singular person disappear. In his Homage to CataloniaOrwell refuses to shoot a Francoist, who goes to satisfy a natural need in the ruins of Toledo because, he says, you don’t shoot a man at that moment. There he is no longer a fascist, he is a man. Leys sees here the mark of Orwell’s humanism, which he shares. The refusal to make people disappear under labels. “The bad rich”, “the bourgeois”, “the intellectual”, to use Maoist phraseology…

Or today, “the dominant white male over 50”…

J. M. : Exactly. Simon Leys still helps us, with others, not to be asphyxiated by sometimes delusional speeches, which have broken with reality. He often cites Winston’s famous reflection in 1984, which opposes the general falsification of reality to the reality of the concrete world:“Always remember that water wets, that stones fall…” The truisms are true, everything else follows from them. Remember that reality is not just a social construction, that truth pre-exists its quest, that there are limits, data, anthropological invariants which escape our power. If it were otherwise, then the very idea that there is a world, a common good to share, would disappear forever.

What can also help us not to break with reality?

J. M. : There is the advice of Alphonse de Waelhens, his cousin and professor of philosophy in Louvain: “Read a lot of novels”.

What Pope Francis says anyway.

J. M. : Exactly. Literature frees us. It can open our eyes, reveal to us that deep down, nothing is simple, that everything is ambivalent, and it is the charm, in the very strong sense of the term, of literature, to precisely refuse categorizations, labels. One of the keys, I believe, is the power of literature, of poetry.

Does Leys still have anything to tell us about Xi Jinping’s China?

J. M. : From The Forest on Fire (1983)he stopped writing about Chinese politics, for a very simple reason: he thought he had said everything, and that nothing had really changed. China remained a totalitarian regime even with this pseudo-transformation into an unbridled capitalist society. On the other hand, he wrote, at the end of his life, Anatomy of a post-totalitarian dictatorshipa very beautiful reflection on the writings of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, in which he took an x-ray of a society that had become amnesiac. China has never examined its conscience. A large portrait of Mao Zedong still sits in Tian An Men Square, like a sort of absolute prohibition.

For Simon Leys, today’s China is the conjunction of the worst in capitalism and communism. The only goal assigned to Chinese society is that described in The Pig Philosophy of Xiaobo: get rich, consume, eat from his trough, and that’s it.