Paintings

More than eighty years after his death aged forty-one in the woods of Heulgoat in his native Brittany ('under mysterious circumstances' and reputedly with an open copy of 'Hamlet' by his side), the works of Victor Segalen, ship's doctor, explorer, art-theorist, archaeologist, linguist, literary critic, poet, novelist, essayist, librettist, (phew! already) and, with the almost equally ignored Ernest Fenollosa, the West's supreme explicator of the beauties and terrors of Chinese art and culture, remain for the most part unknown outside the relatively hermetic circles of academia. His books, most of them published posthumously, have been lovingly collected into a two-volume 'Oeuvres Completes' by Henry Bouillier (Robert Lafont, 1995) and given the benefit of copious textual commentary. English translations, however, are still relatively rare and difficult to come by (the Penguin Book of French Poetry 1820-1950 allots him ten pages, which is commendable, if somewhat less than he deserves), but anyone who seeks in literature a vision that is at once hard-edged and vigorously imaginative and a mode of comprehending the world that faces unflinchingly up to its exhilarating strangeness and luminous opacity could do much worse than to acquire and read all the Segalen that comes his way, and especially the volumes titled 'Paintings' and 'Steles'.In a literary culture obsessed with the rehabilitation of near-forgotten writers of considerably less genius and power than Segalen, wide dissemination of his works is long overdue.