A SOPHISTICATE IN MARCO POLO LAND
757
Wendell Wilkie of
One World.
A "civilization" that "the masses of men"
will make up from "their own personality" is what Michaux still wants
in 1949 while at the same time he wants the endless variety of form
typified by the Eastern civilizations in one lump. The abundance of the
Hindu imagination transfixed him as though the whole land were a
single mural. And yet with what finesse hE} distinguishes a Southern
Hindu from a Himalayan, a Hindu from an Arab. Like a schoolboy on
a holiday, the principle of his life is the experience of novelty. He
manipulates the power to reject or accept a phenomenon in terms of
emotional values as a potentate would manipulate whims for food.
There is love in passing, but implied in the most casual of manners:
the traveler notates his normal diversions. No individual experience
per se has his concern. Every phenomenon-woman, beggar, animal,
music-appears as a typical manifestation of the place of the moment.
Nothing but the typical exists, but this in a constant play of nuance and
differentiation-like his surprisingly contrasting reactions to the Chinese
and Japanese theaters; pro the former, con the latter. Obviously, only
a wide-eyed, completely self-sufficient foreigner could be at once so im–
partial and so susceptible, so faithful to the distinguishing characteristic
and so glibly generalizing. It is a
grand talent
shown here by Henri
Michaux, but it has, alas, its involuntary charlatanism.
The equation between monotony and variety, oneness and manyness,
will just not work here beyond a strictly aesthetic perspective; a fact
which Michaux-with the conscientious air of one who can say,
"It
is
impossible to think of India without being a Communist"-wishes im–
plicitly not to admit. He wants to think that "Gandhi is right to main–
tain that India is one" and that perhaps it is "only the White man who
sees a thousand Indias." Is Michaux not relying on his sweetness of
temper and ingratiating style to claim more of our indulgence than his
ideas command? He is caught in the act of apologizing for his appre–
hension not only of Hindu multiplicity of kind and number, but also for
probing into all Asia's inwardly disjunct magnitude. For, after all, if
Gandhi can claim the fact of India's unity, why could not a super–
Gandhi (given the efficient motive) claim the fact of Asia's unity? The
validity of ideas of
unification
(as distinct from those of
logical unity
which are a formal matter) depends on the organic character of the par–
ticular idea, on which in turn its practicability, or utility in action, would
depend. But of actual social and political unifications, Michaux gives
merely the vaguest of hints, and he indicates no known or unknown
program for a Western "absorption" of the Eastern civilizations or
vice versa.
