"Platform" rattles my platform

SEPTEMBER 20, 2008: Don't you just love it when you find that something you've written, something you so took for granted that you wrote it almost subconsciously, is patently false?

I do, at least when i discover the bullshit before it goes on the public record. I've been writing a foreword to a 1909 book that my company is reprinting, outlining how i perceive the author to have carefully cultivated a pompous and bigoted persona in order to foist scandalously progressive/borderline hippy views concerning the West's influence on China and the superiority of the Chinese philosophy onto 'respectable' society. At the same time, i've been reading Michel Houllebecq's Platform, submitted, as i usually am, to the author's superior intellect, and the following passage rattled my cardboard shanty of a theory like an earthquake centred on Calcutta:

"I could have mentioned that Europeans had never thought of the yellow races as inferior helf-monkeys, but rather as civilised and possibly dangerous people." (paraphrased cos i already sent the book in the mail but i think it's pretty close.)

I had written that my book's author's views were deviant "at a time when the world's greatest empire hung by the thread of assumed racial superiority." The statement's got a ring to it...it's the kind of statement your eyes just glide over these days. Mine must have, several times, before Houllebecq's claim shook me awake. Actually i was more so shocked by the fact that i had written such a statement without thinking about and therefore didnt really mean it. But how well does Houellebecq's claim stand up in light of the old China books i've been reading as a job this year?

Well, i have indeed seen an attitude emerge of "yes, they're civilised, more so in some ways than us, and yes they're a threat." But the fact is that especially around the time of the Boxer Rebellion China was certainly considered 'barbarian' by many in the English-speaking world. American doctor and newspaper correspondent Robert Coltman (why so many turn-of-the-century correspondents were doctors i'm wholly unenlightened...i thought doctors were supposed to work long hours) wrote in 1901 of "barbarian, uncivilised China". And Mr John Bland, the author of the subject of my foreword, writes of "unsavoury natives", "the exegencies of racial division" and the 'Chinaman' as "a deformed half-brother" - views which, given the praise for the book at the time, were clearly widely accepted. And of course, Old China was a world populated, in English at least, by 'men' and 'Chinamen', and though it may have been used out of convention by many who had no such thoughts, the implication is of beings of two different species. Could the same be said about the terms "Frenchman" or "Scotchman"? Yes but from the depictions i've seen and read, the 'Chinaman' was often seen as a kind of pygmy. The biggest trouble is working out how often. My response is that on matters of race and culture the views of those who leave their mark in literary works have been and continue to be more progressive than society at large, i.e. "the masses" are more racist. The "yellow races", then, were generally considered inferior, only partially civilised (with Africa as a basis of comparison), and indeed, possibly dangerous.

So what then, of my dodgy claim of the empire hanging by the "thread of assumed racial superiority"? Well, I tried to cover my arse by changing "racial" to "moral", deviously narrowing the focus to the missionary justification for colonialism...and submitted the dodgy fucker anyway.

Me and my theories. God damn. Platform is a great book. I'm amazed that sardonic nihilist parody of the useless degeneracy of western people can be interwoven with romance, wonder at the beauty of the world, and an attitude towards male-female relations that's so fucking cynical it's newborn-innocent. With Michel's living life consisting of nothing but sex, he illuminates it in a purest possible light. This "light of innocence" spreads to whores, sex tourists, even the lowest-common-denominator "give the punt-uhs what they want" corporate ethos. Just like the extremes of political leftism and rightism i.e. violence bend the continuum into a circle, extreme cynicism, it seems, ends up as extreme innocence.

"In the end what all lovers of journeys of discovery seek is confirmation of what they've already read in their guide books."