The greater a work’s originality and perfection, the greater its vulnerability to the risk of later ill treatment at the hands its creator. An inspired work is one which has by its very definition escaped its author; this creates the danger that the author will want to recapture it and strive maladroitly to regain control over it. No artist dwells on a par with his finest creations, and this gap can become a source of perplexity and hostility in him. It is not surprising, therefore, that in Michaux’s case it was A Barbarian in Asia—his masterpiece — that was the most cruelly manhandled by his revisions.
Michaux’s struggles with his rebellious child prodigy were initiated rather early. Discomfort was already apparent in the author’s new preface of 1945: “Twelve years now separate me from this voyage. It is there. I am here. .. It cannot be developed. Nor can it be corrected.”
In point of fact, however, Michaux was itching to correct it! His preface to the American edition (New York: New Directions, 1949) did not bode well. Although stupidity was never his strong suit, he was led to say stupid things. He bleated edifying platitudes quite beside the point: “Man needs a vast far-sighted aim, extending beyond his lifetime. A training rather than a hindrance for the coming planetary civilisation. To avoid war — construct peace.” Blah, blah, blah. (One is reminded of Chaplin, who, having had the genius to make The Great Dictator, felt the need to attach to it a long schmaltzy sermon addressed to every belle âme on the planet.) Finally, in the new edition of 1967, thirty-five years after Barbarian was written, Michaux could restrain himself no longer: this time he would take on the text itself and fix it once and for all. He began by writing a new preface in which he apologised for ever perpetrating such a work, one that “embarrassed and offended” him, that made him ashamed.
He would have liked, he went on, as a “counterweight,” to introduce elements that were “more serious, more thoughtful, more profound, more experienced, more educated.” But (thank the Lord!) the book put up a resistance. So what could be done? First of all, cut — cut more or less everywhere, removing all those disrespectful passages that Michaux now found shocking and intolerable. Later, in the wake of a last visit to Japan, Michaux edulcorated Barbarian even further for the new edition of 1989. For want of space, let me cite just a few samples of this self-censorship — instances chosen completely at random (I have signalled deleted matter by means of italics)[8]:
… Hindu religion [is] double-faced, one for the initiated, the other for fools. Humility is certainly a quality of the highest order; but not degradation.
The Hindu is often ugly, with an ugliness that is vicious and poor.
In France you tell dirty jokes and you laugh at them. Here [in India] you tell them, you absorb them without laughing. You follow them dreamily. You visualise the interplay of organs.
[The literature of] the Chinese which is almost devoid of heartbreak poetry, of complaint, has no charm whatsoever for the European, excepting a hundred or so librarians, who by dint of reading know nothing whatsoever about anything.
A Chinese general who does his business in his trousers, who begs the colonel to take his place in the battle, surprises no one. No one calls for his trousers to be displayed. Everyone thinks this quite natural. One day I saw five officers who were swearing to exterminate I don’t remember whom. They looked like rabbits.
[The Chinese: ] An old, old childish people that does not want to know what is at the bottom of anything, that has no principles, but “cases”; no law, but “cases”; no morals, but “cases.”
A Chinese prostitute is less obviously sensual than a European mother of a family. She immediately shows affection. She seeks to attach herself.
[In Japan] The men are ugly, without sparkle — they are sad, wasted and dry… The look of very little men, petty clerks without a future, of corporals, subordinates, servants of Baron X or of Mr. Z or of the papaland… little pig eyes and decayed teeth. The women… are stocky, short, for the most part solid, and all flank from leg to shoulder. The face is sometimes pleasant, but the pleasantness lacks purpose and emotion; the head is always so big, big with what? With emptiness? Why such a big head, for such a small face and still less expressiveness?… The same in character as in appearance: a great indifferent, insensitive blanket, but a trifle touchy and sentimental (like soldiers), laughing in little wild bursts like a servant girl. ..
A religion of insects, exactly the religion of ants, Shintoism with its famous cult of the anthill, an ant people.
[Japan is] a country… where a young girl who is not very rich is normally sold to a brothel keeper, to serve the multitude (as far as they have individuality!) Service, always service!
In the censored and rewritten version of 1989, Michaux felt it necessary to add a special note of apology at the beginning of the chapter on Japan, asking that he be forgiven for certain pages that he read “with embarrassment, even stupefaction in places. Half a century has elapsed, and the portrait is unrecognisable.” (In point of fact they were droll and glaringly true to life!) Michaux ends this preliminary note on a tone that is soothing and sycophantic, not to say insufferably priggish and patronising: “The Japan of that time, with its cramped, suspicious and tense feel, has been surpassed. It is clear that, at the far end of the earth, Europe has now found a neighbour.”
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Michaux’s excisions are frequently combined with rewriting. The new version of A Barbarian in Asia sets out to file down all sharp points, smooth all angles, and dull the tone overall. So much effort expended to humour everyone, to offend no sensitive ear! No indecency, no familiarity! Respect all taboos! Tread on no one’s toes! Consideration for the old and the crippled, compassion for every widow and orphan! Thus the Brahmins, originally described as “jealous as hunchbacks, but always ignorant as carp,” are now taxed soberly with being merely “jealous, often ignorant.”
Or again: “The priest is a pimp and his temple is full of women” is demurely reduced to “the temple has women.”
In the original, as compared with the natural nobility of Arabs and Hindus, “the Europeans here all look like plain workmen or errand-boys.” Revised version: “the Europeans seem fragile, secondary, transitory.”
In the original, as opposed to the exquisite modesty of Bengali women, “European women seem like whores.” The newer text, after likewise evoking the modesty of Bengali women, is content to interject a chaste “How different from European women!”
The idiom becomes academic and starchy. Where the original has “a poor blind man in Europe automatically arouses a distinct compassion. In India, if he thinks he can count on his blindness to move people, just let him try,” the revised version reads: “In India, let him not count on his blindness to move people.”