ABSTRACT
Victor Sealed, a French poet who spent over five years in China, also understood the nature of the Orientalist enterprise. Segalen originally intended to write his thesis about such widely divergent subjects as syphilis in Jules de Goncourt's Charles Demailly, hysterical fits in Flaubert's Salammbo and deja-vu in Loti's Le Reve. Segalen removes samples from the text and transforms them into what he considered medical discourse. Segalen provides his own analysis of the difference between the two descriptions: 'C'est une veritable transmutation des valeurs. Chinese characters and stone monuments just are, just exist, as Segalen insists, until forced to 'live' in a Western context, as Segalen also insists. Like Judith Gautier's overturned and over-decorated workbox masquerading as a sarcophagus around a poupee defunte, Victor Segalen's new form, which he christened the stele, is a hollowed stone with Western notions of poetry rattling around inside.
