The Illustrated
Art of War
Sun Tzu
Samuel B. Griffith
Translator
(Oxford)

The Illustrated Art of War is an modern translation of the writings of Sun Tzu, who wrote the manual somewhere between 450 and 400 B.C. He was, at heart, a chess-player (or, more believably, a Wei-chi player). Killing is not the goal, nor even the best means to victory, he tells us.

Learn the enemy's strategy, he advises. Study the terrain. Move with speed:

When campaigning, be swift as the wind; in leisurely march, majestic as the forest; in raiding and plundering, like fire; in standing, firm as the mountains; as unfathomable as the clouds, move like a thunderbolt.

War is not necessarily for victory. It is for morale, it is for those who study it, and, ultimately, it is for spoils. "When you plunder the countryside, divide your forces. When you conquer the territory, divide the profits."

One must care for the troops "as infants." The general "treats them as his own beloved sons, and they will die with him." Prescience?

What is called 'foreknowledge' cannot be elicited from spirits, nor from gods, nor by analogy with past events, nor from calculations. It must be obtained from men who know the situation.

Seek out spies, "Native agents are those of the enemy's country people whom we employ." One must "Know the enemy and know yourself;" thus "in a hundred battles you will never be in peril." Trickery? Of course, for "to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill."

And hurry. Because, when there is an impoverishment of the country, destitution of the people, an exhausted peasantry, and a dissipation of wealth, the war can be lost. "Hence what is essential in war is victory, not prolonged expectations."

§     §     §

This has got to be one of the nicest books yet formulated on the subject of skullduggery. The illustrations --- many from ancient Chinese prints --- are gorgeous. The layout is impeccable, with tasteful double-burns of Chinese characters on almost every page. It is artful, tasteful, and, ultimately ... tasteless.

Art of Love. Of course. Art of Living, naturally. Even ... the Art of Dying. Why not? But Art of War?

§     §     §

Can you imagine having the present conflict to the East matching the Hundred Years War? Each evening newscast between now and the end of this century, you and I would be bombarded with ... well, with bombardments: tanks raising dust in the desert, jets swooping down, tiny bare villages being blasted to nothingness, soldiers loaded for bear, hustling across the arroyos.

We fans of Fox TV News would get bored and cranky, as we did with Viet-Nam: we soon enough learn to be impatient with the interruption of our favorite quiz show, our re-runs of New York Blue, preëmpted for another shoot-out in the desert.

Nonetheless, we well may be immersed in it for some time. You may recall that the war against the Rifs and their world has been going on since the 12th Century. It seems unlikely to cease tomorrow. God hope that the martial folk, those in charge of sending our charges across the sands would read The Art of War. For, as Marshall McLuhan predicted so long ago in Understanding Media our world village is rapidly shrinking. The sight of bodies, real bodies, has only been permitted in the new brave-new-world of the Living Room War. Photographers were not permitted in the trenches during WWI; the military allowed no death to be shown during WWII; but now, with video cameras everywhere, and their fare being easily available on the Web, the general hullabaloo that is modern warfare is no longer to be hidden.

The country that forbids the showing of corpses returning home for a final rest cannot shut out other channels on other satellites in other states which are showing, for those who seek it out, the true vision of this most up-to-date of Holy Wars.

§     §     §

The layout in The Illustrated Art of War can be confusing for those who do not study the Introduction: the text of what were known as Sun Tzu's "Thirteen Chapters" are interlarded with commentary in italics which are concurrences from Chinese experts --- eleven in number. Of these one at least (Mei Yao-ch'en) wrote 1300 - 1400 years after the fact.

But the whole volume has many lessons for us, and, apparently, American Captains of Industry who, it is said, are now found reading The Art of War in order to make killings in the marketplace. Let us hope that somehow this edition reaches the Washington military set, especially with such advice as,

There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.

--- Duncan Stewart

---

November
Gustave Flaubert
Andrew Brown,
Translator
(Hesperus Press)

Our narrator is eighteen years old and a regular hot-pants, filled with what the I Ching termed "Youthful Folly." Mostly of the I-can't-get-no-satisfaction department.

"If you had asked me what it was I needed, I wouldn't have been able to tell you; my desire had not specific object, and my sadness had no immediate cause; or rather, there were so many objects and so many causes that I wouldn't have been able to isolate a single one of them." In other words, he needs loving ... and he can't figure out exactly how to look for it, or exactly what it is.

Sometimes at the end of my tether, devoured by boundless passions, filled with the burning lava that flowed from my soul, filled with a furious love for nameless things, overcome by nostalgic longing for magnificent dreams, tempted by all the intense pleasures of thought, embracing all poetry and all harmony, and crushed beneath the weight of my heart and my pride, I would fall, shattered, into an abyss of pain ... I could no longer see, I could no longer feel, I was drunk, I was mad.

Fortunately, before he explodes, our unnamed blade goes to Provençe, meets Marie, and is quickly saved from dying of sheer horniness.

She's a bawd, and she too has been haunted by the itch of the ages: "Often I was seized by a kind of madness, and I would start running and running until I dropped, or else I would sing at the top of my voice, or talk to myself for ages...Strange desires possessed me."

When the two of them finally come together, it's a hoedown, as it were: "She had splendid breasts, the kind that make you long to die between them, smothered by love ... Each of her urgent caresses made me swoon; breathing the odour of her hair and the breath of her lips, I felt myself ecstatically expiring."

§     §     §

Flaubert wrote November when he was still a pup, and might have done well to burn it when he was somewhat more experienced, or when he got to the age of reason, or when he ran across some matches. Those of us who never really cared for the pokeyness of Madame Bovary will find this one a double snooze, for when Flaubert picks up the bone of young love, he is reluctant to lay it down. It might have worked for us when we were still wet behind the years, when the world's pornography binge (or bilge) was just getting cranked up so many years ago, but phrases like "the heat of her hips" and "the juddering of my excited nerves" won't make it for those of us who, in our salad years, thought Philip Wylie was a corker but who are now hearing the dying fall and can no longer count on our well-worn rounded heels to get us through the night.

--- Francine Parmentier