Village breton sous la neige, 1894
(Oil on canvas, 62 × 87 cm)
BY Paul Gauguin
Musée d’Orsay

It is usually said that Segalen first encountered Chinese culture in San Francisco’s Chinatown when he was forced to sojourn there to recover from illness when on his way to the South Pacific. Fascinated by the folk-opera and his encounter with Chinese writing, Segalen is thought to have bought himself paper and a calligraphy brush and started learning to write Chinese. He would arrive in Tahiti just after the death of Gauguin, that other great Orientalist, tempering the misfortune by purchasing a number of the artist’s works, among them Breton Village in the Snow. Despite all his travelling, Segalen was born in Brest, Brittany, and would die in a forest there in mysterious circumstances, all the signs pointing to suicide. By the time he arrived in Peking in June 1909, after having studied Chinese in Paris, he had learnt the language well enough to be employed as a naval interpreter as well as in his original profession of physician. Segalen’s belief in the necessity of an appreciation of Chinese civilization was not driven solely by a kind of awe, but also by a notion, not untypical of his age, that, as he wrote in one of his letters to his friend Henri Manceron, “the transfer from the Empire of China to the empire of one’s self is continuous.”

In other words, he believed that Chinese civilization could be a solution to the decadence of modern European culture. This solution was an equalization of the great civilization and the poet’s Self, the transfer being the reversal of the usual poetic act. What makes this radical is the hope it can reverse the usual assumption that the poet should give voice to and embody his civilization. Instead of the poet being, as is conventional, the face of his culture, in Segalen’s work the seen face is what is disembodied, what is focused in and by the mirror of the Other Civilization.

To enter the Chinese past, he might have written, is to pass through its mirror.

To read Segalen today is to attempt to understand a man who, despite his desire to be otherwise, was of his time — a humanist adventurer, doctor, scholar, archaeologist and poet — and it is for the reader to confront the question of what it is to feel foreign, foreign not to the Other but to oneself and one’s own culture.

Segalen’s books, most popular among them the novel René Leys and his poetic masterpiece Stèles, reveal him as someone who moves to and fro across the borderland of the Mirror. While the main character of the novel set in revolutionary Peking during the last years of the Qing Dynasty is the man after whom the book is named, the story is told by a “Victor Segalen” and this Segalen, while an observer of the times, and largely innocent in that way we must be when first immersed in a foreign world, gives the reader a good sense of the fragile and wildly fluctuating emotional states of the man than does his copious notes and letters. Stèles, a collection of prose-poems, à la Baudelaire or Rimbaud, and widely regarded as his masterwork, purports to be a collection of transcriptions from ancient inscribed Chinese stones, using the voices of many different historical personae, as if Segalen wants to try on the various masks of history.

In this, again, Segalen can remind us of Ezra Pound, of Pound’s early book Personae, although a figure with which he might also be compared is the Portuguese modernist poet and writer Fernando Pessoa whose body of work consists almost entirely of personae, or, as they are termed in his case, heteronyms.

To move through even the restructured post-Olympics Beijing while having Segalen in mind is to feel his presence as a guide to a world of illusion and history. To look at the portrait of Chairman Mao as it — or he? — famously faces Tian’anmen Square from the Gate of the same name, staring south, as the Emperor would have, as the Great Helmsman himself would on important occasions, is to realize that the entire city can be seen to have been originally built around the presence of a single man, bringing to mind Segalen’s insight early on in René Leys: “Inside, deep in the innermost centre of the Palace, a face: man-child and Emperor, Lord of the Sun and Son of Heaven…”

While this might not entirely accord with a deeper historical understanding of the city, the way Segalen presents Peking at the start of René Leys has the effect that we can feel as much inside the maze of the city as caught in the void between his two faces, between the Segalen the Writer and Segalen the Character. The latter has his own mirror-image in the dubious fictional friend who gives his name to the novel.