ABSTRACT
Segalen's work abounds in structures — embryonic or realized — for the monumentalization of subjectivity, the assumption of a point of view within the faux-sembhmt of a cultured omniscience. The principle of the aesthetic project typically emerges where the constructs of form and of subject mesh ambiguously together. Within the formally sovereign gesture of the Stèles, for example, are encountered voices in process towards an imagined sovereign position. At the same time, the fantasy of the structuring conceit is a consciously literary one — capable of evaporatingjust as suddenly as it had materialized. Quite as much as an apprehension of imaginary licence, this is a quality within the 'real' to which Segalen was alive. Nature, in his experience of the Ailleurs, anticipates civilizational archetypes:
Terre jaune. Architectures: tours et donjons, parois, murailles, créneaux, écrans et lames affilées; pics aigus, tout est inattendu, minable et miné, doux à l'œil, par exemple, velouté, honnête et fort riche . . . mais si précaire, si 'qui va s'effondrer'. Image de la Chine? 1
China offers at first sight a formal repertory of baffling diversity, shadowed by the possibility of collapse. Form itself comes to be understood as a play between these extremes — writing becomes for Segalen the site of a significantly ephemeral solidity, a fantasy of physical imposition through textual action. That each of the levels of solidity could correspond to a different kind of writing can be confirmed in a reading of his unfinished Le Fits du Ciel. 2 This is the first of Segalen's Chinese novelistic fictions, and what appears to have been the earliest literary project developed by him after arrival in China in mid-1909. Among the diverse remarks collected in a letter to his wife barely three months after this arrival is his first allusion to the work: 'Autre: J'ai cette chance, un mois après mon arrivée dans un pays, de tenir man livre: Tahiti: arrivée 23 Janvier, ier Mars: Immémoriaiix . . . Chine, 12 Juin — ier Aout: Fits du del — ou équivalent'. 3