In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

INDIVIDUALITY VS. COLLECTIVITY 295
which individuals achieve self-affirmation by confronting death fulfills a
pragmatic function within society. Pilots, for example, master their
planes or end up yielding to them, but this struggle never offers any
concrete service to a third party. Most of the idolized and imitated stars
are incapable of sustaining even an average family life. [see Airplanes,
Stars, Silence vs. Noise, Immanence = Transcendence (Death)] Only
those public protagonists who are not only unreachable but impenetrable
seem to be protected against society'S manipulations. Stars with this
particular quality contemptuously pay society back for all the slings and
arrows that normal individuals have to endure. This is why Heinrich
Mann-among many other authors--considers Suzanne Lenglen to be
much more than just a tennis champion: "One could find Suzanne
Lenglen ugly, but her courage is so fresh that nobody ever perceives her
as plain ... Her eye is infallible, and her body has the lightness of a gaze.
It is as if she had wings that carry her everywhere, everywhere on the
tennis court and everywhere in the world. She is untroubled by the world
from which we suffer-and this is what makes her so beautiful" (Mann,
304). Like Heinrich Mann, Antonio de Alcantara Machado reveres
Suzanne Lenglen as a symbol of absolute liberty-though he doesn't even
know how to spell her name: "Victorious in every single championship,
Susanne Senglen, the queen of tennis, shares the fate of her noble sisters.
Often the newspapers write about potential husbands, and they even
announce precise wedding dates ... In reality, Susanne Sengi en remains
unmarried. But she doesn't even bother to deny those ever-circulating
rumors about a change in her civil status. And this is the right thing to
do. Instead of being married to a duke or to a prince, she maintains her
own absolute freedom" (Alcantara Machado, 138).
In Andre Malraux's La tentation de ['Occident (The Temptation of the
West), a Chinese traveler argues that in Europe the relation between art
and society is filled with tension, whereas in Asia the two spheres interact
harmoniously. The reason for this difference, according to him, lies in
the European obsession with imagining society as a sphere of action:
"With you, ... admiration results from an action. For us, it is only the
consciousness of existing in accordance with the most beautiful mode.
Through the artforms that you once called sublime, you express an
action and not a state. This state, which we know only by virtue of what
it grants to those who possess it, this purity, this disintegration of the
soul in the bosom of eternal light-Westerners have never pursued it or