You come across some writers almost by chance; you find them concealed in a quotation, a footnote, an anecdote, in pages dedicated to authors you know and love - you believe you know everything about the latter, you deceive yourself that you know everything. When these accidental meetings gradually multiply, almost becoming a leitmotiv you recognize in many biographies, essays, novels and names familiar to you and which have given you hours of pleasure, reflection and pain, curiosity grows stronger and the desire to see what it is about resembles a sort of treasure hunt. You know the prize at the end of this quest will be new happiness, the extension of an intellectual Pantheon you only have the key to and where you can lock yourself in for hours while the outside world continues its race. Victor Segalen is one of these.

Like a meteor he whizzes through the pages of Céline, Paul Morand, Alain Gerbault, Henry de Monfreid, Mircea Eliade, Giuseppe Tucci, Chatwin and Malraux…. He moves through them following a rhythm of assonance, similes, second sight, predictions, taste, personal idiosyncrasies and decisions on life. But he threads his way through them as a presence and absence at the same time as he was a doctor, traveller and archaeologist with a passion for ancient civilizations. He was an adventurer and a poet. In short in one life he was that which others were each in theirs and this in a life that was, after all, almost as short as a breath - just forty years. They found him at the foot of an oak tree in the Breton forest of Heulgoat with Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ beside him and a handkerchief knotted under the knee to stop the bleeding caused by the cut of a sharp root. Alive, he did not publish anything, or almost – Segalen is a posthumous author by choice, a posthumous writer par excellence. Not much is known about him in Italy and if, on the one hand, the increasing number of publishers for his works proves a certain interest, it also highlights the inability and/or difficulty to make him part of a consistent project. He is a myth in France and his complete works, published by Laffont, form an opus of over two thousand pages. They contain mostly unfinished outlines, rewritings, additions and abandonment.

There is enough, in short, to try and know more. Segalen’s thought moves around two constant guiding principles: the first concerns exoticism, that is the concept of the diverse; and, the second focuses on the relations between reality and the imaginary, also called the third eye in writing. A medical officer in the navy, Segalen first found the raw material he needed for a detailed study of those themes in Polynesia and later in China, which in the early 20th century were still enveloped in the mists of those colonial empires and today risk merging with the vapours of globalized companies. One of his novels, an ambiguous but adequate definition for it, is called Les immémoriaux, that is The forgetful, those without a memory. It relates about the passing of the Maori civilization when it comes in contact with the Western one that dictates new customs and traditions, destroys its myths and beliefs and poisons body and spirit with diseases and drugs and especially when it forgets itself. Being an oral civilization, at a certain point it looses its language, hence contact with its own past. An aristocrat and an individualist, an enemy of mass democracy, a century ago Segalen understood what is today at the bottom of most ideological debates. The world’s beauty lies in diversity; there are no better or worse civilizations except in the eyes of those who establish degrees of judgement according to their own reference parameters.

Uprooting others’ visions of the world contributes to the loss of the world itself, prepares an explosive reality of dispossessed people and alters a fragile harmony that should instead be preserved. As a writer he perfectly understood that “to say is to create, to sing is to maintain” and that the heart of a population lies in its language, in that complex set of factors called tradition. Before all this, Segalen developed his aesthetics of the different - it is far different from the exoticism of his time and the reverse of that typical of times to come. In other words his theory perceives the opposite of what we are when ‘the other’ meets and clashes with what we are or exalts it in a sort of aping mimesis to the advantage instead of an attempt at full immersion, which gives an understanding of the others’ reaction towards the foreigner, of the place towards the visitor. Thus his writings are threaded by this quest for an appropriate style and the right perspective required to relate not how we see the different, but how the different sees us, stripping himself of all traces of Eurocentrism and making the effort to penetrate the soul of things. Vital and hedonist, Segalen’s vision of the world is positive, happy in a Nietschean way. We do not live in a valley of tears, we are not born to suffer and the sensual elements typical of Pan are, according to him, those that best enable us to tune in with the world, with the All we come from. Sacred aspects must not be penalized by those rules and regulations that make an institution of religious beliefs.

This sui generis author’s other element of interest comes into the picture here. His medical profession brings him in contact with neuroses, the extensive field of the unconscious, the limits of science, of mere empirics and pure rationality in explaining the mystery that surrounds us. Segalen does not consider the mystery something transcendent - it is not something beyond, another world that may be reached through asceticism or meditation. On the contrary, it concerns our imagination; it is the sum of our visions, of our knowledge, of our sensitivity placed at the service of a better understanding of ourselves and our surroundings. Poet and visionary, he explored the depths, bringing to light that which haste, habit and clichés have buried. There is in him a deep feeling of the past thanks to which the past returns to life, starts moving again and becomes contemporary. An esteemed sinologist, during his explorations in a China that was experiencing the last moment of its empire and was shaken by Western modernism, his writings succeeded in capturing the Middle Empire, now passed and yet ever present, eternal in its attitude towards nature, in its relations between men and things. It is hard to explain the depth and extent of Segalen’s thought in the limited space offered by an article for a magazine, complex as it is, being on the other hand a sort of ‘work field’, work in progress, constantly in a flutter due to new stimuli, new projects, new perceptions. We owe him, as an archaeologist, the result of the 1914 mission: the finding of Che-Houang-ti’s imperial tomb, Houo Kin-pong’s equestrian monument, the Han funerary obelisks and Buddhist iconography of Seutchouan.

We owe Seganel, the poet, the composition of Sterli - the poem is moulded on the marble of the reference funerary element to graphically match the Chinese ideogram. It produces one of the most significant visual masterpieces of our time. His masterpiece René Leys (published by Giano editore) is the product of a novelist who has absolute mastery of the traditional technique, of doing without descriptions, the narrating self and characters to create a sort of choral epic where the story flows objectively and forms while it unravels itself, thus giving a natural account typical of an oral narration around the fire. Nietsche said: “Write with blood and you will see that blood is spirit”; there is much more than mere symbolism in that haemorrhagic flow that took Segalen away. He always tried to know the unknowable and utter the unutterable. He faced reality during his journeys, constantly hoping that the confrontation with the imaginary that had fed his preparation would trigger a spark that went beyond, that was located elsewhere and would reveal the wonder of the world. In René Leys there is a dizzy interplay between reality and imagination with a final inversion of fields - what was believed to be true turns out to be probably fictitious and what had only been thought probably becomes reality. The veil of knowledge seems to lift a fraction every time but soon drops back and the search begins once again. Well, this is what we know about Victor Segalen – he believed so strongly in the value of writing that he never decided to make it public, while he lived. Death has cruelly but happily made him a cult author.

Translated by interpres sas