Rene Leys     by Victor Segalen, Translated by J.A Underwood Original title: Rene Leys Original language: French Published by Overlook Press Pub. Date: 1990 Format: Paperback, 222 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.69 x 7.99 x 5.37 ISBN: 0879513500 Edition: REPRINT List Price: $14.95 Not available for ordering Published by Quartet Pub. Date: 1990 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 222 pages Not available for ordering

In some minds the name of Segalen is linked with his contemporary, Pierre Loti. Both writers used naval service as their means of seeing the world and both wrote about their experiences in ‘exotic’ overseas locations. Of the two writers it was Loti who was the most productive, but in terms of quality Segalen is continents ahead. As time gives Loti’s work an ever increasing feel of cheap, exploitative sensationalism and petty prurience, appreciation of Segalen’s slim oeuvre grows steadily. The sensitivity and profundity of his writing gives it a feel which is completely contemporary.


Segalen is the first writer in the modern epoch to pose serious questions about what the ‘exotic’ actually implies; to ask what is it about ourselves that makes the exotic ‘other’ so compelling. His particular passion was for the sprawling immensities of China and it is here in the Imperial City of Peking that he set his novel René Leys.


Although originally published in 1923 and long before the recent wave of French structuralist critics declared ‘the death of the author’, Segalen deliberately uses the novel as a way to undermine the status of author as all-knowing guide because the text is, as its translator J.A.Underwood points out, constantly being disowned.


The book is constructed in the form of a journal of the year 1911 and documented within its pages is the author’s obsessive desire to penetrate the ‘Inside’ of the Chinese Empire, the ‘purple-walled Forbidden City’. In pursuit of this end he hires as his tutor of Chinese a young Belgian in his late teens by the name of René Leys. René is ‘the dutiful son of an excellent grocer of the Legation Quarter’ as the journal puts it in exaggerated fashion. But René, despite his age, is an accomplished linguist and already holds a post at the College of Notables. As their relationship grows René lets slip more and more authentic detail about the undercover life he leads, a life which involves precisely what it is that the author most craves, contact with the ‘Inside’.


It seems that René was in fact a confidant of the late Emperor and is now involved with the organisation of the palace secret police and is even conducting an illicit affair with the Empress. For the author he is the entrée to the Forbidden City that he seeks. As the journal unfolds, however, slight glimmers of unease begin to emerge. René narrates his own life with such authentic gusto and attention to detail and the author’s desire to believe is so strong that these doubts remain suppressed until the very end when they explode from the pages of the journal. But even than the tale is so compelling that we still have a sense of confusion and we are left, like the journal’s author, with a lingering doubt and the question ‘Who was René Leys?’. Ultimately, as the French critic Henry Bouillier wrote, ‘This is the novel of the Impossibility of Knowing’. It is also close to being the perfect novel.

‘I was astonished that a high-ranking policeman should have been caught by such a thing. Ever since tourists, missionaries, and academics first started coming here the lowest journalist had been aware of the fact that, in the Chinese theatre, as in the theatres of some other lands, the female parts are very competently filled by males, the latter being subtler, slimmer and altogether more elegant.

But he went on to explain: what was remarkable about this actor was that he was the first under the Manchu dynasty to be allowed to act in contemporary dress, namely in the costume of a Manchu woman.

«How did he get permission?» I asked.

René Leys did not answer immediately. Then he said, «By playing the same part in the Palace».

And that was the last word I could get out of him for the rest of the evening. It was almost as if he too were playing a part, and his part were over.

What an actor!’ p119