VICTOR SEGALEN AND THE AESTHETICS OF DIVERSITY: Journeys Between Cultures, by Charles Forsdick. Oxford University Press, 2000, 242 pp., 40 pounds (cloth)

In 1919, 41-year-old Victor Segalen was found dead in a Breton forest, a copy of Shakespeare beside him, the pages opened to "Hamlet." Thus ended the life of a writer whom many regarded as an enigma. Some also thought him a suicide. Among these was Paul Claudel, but then the Catholic author and diplomat had reason to think so since Segalen had some time before rejected his offer of spiritual aid.

This had been in China, where Claudel was at the French Embassy and Segalen was having as little as possible to do with colonial France. His reason was that governments usually try (for their own political ends) to reduce cultural differences and Segalen was interested in the benefit of such differences -- the more extreme the better.

He had earlier traveled to Polynesia to visit the artist Paul Gauguin, and had written about Abyssinia and the poet Arthur Rimbaud. Finally, in 1909, he arrived in Beijing and stayed there for a time. In these exotic climes Segalen found what he called "an inexhaustible, boundless diversity."

Noting that Jules Boissiere wrote his finest Provencal poems while living in Hanoi and that when Gauguin died in the Marquesas Islands he was working on a snowy Breton scene, Segalen found that inspiration was produced by the play of difference -- as British critic John Sturrock has phrased it -- "between the place you are and another place where you aren't."

It was not a question of "going native" -- which Segalen, at any rate, thought impossible. Rather, it was a matter of registering and comparing the actualities of here and there, of living through that which seems utterly different. This appreciation of diversity he called exoticism, and his finest work (unpublished when he died, but now a minor classic and at present being translated into English) was his "Notes sur l'exotisme."

Now that Edward Said, in his book "Orientalism," has called our attention to the more deleterious aspects of this subject, we may turn to Segalen for something like rehabilitation. While it is quite true that turning a people into the merely exotic is one of the ways of marginalizing and hence controlling them -- Said's thesis -- it is also true that finding something promisingly strange has positive aspects, too.

Segalen himself was quite aware of the political uses to which exoticism could be put. At the same time he held the then unpopular and now blasphemous belief that "in order to benefit from experience of the exotic, people must remain as far apart as possible." Though he called 19th century French writer Pierre Loti "a pimp of the exotic," he shared some of his views -- the antidemocratic belief in the insurmountability of racial difference and an attraction to indigenous women as a way into the exotic.

Segalen was, however, strict in his definitions. "I may feel China strongly," he wrote, "but I've never felt the desire to be Chinese" -- nor would he, when the central strength of his argument was the necessity of difference itself. Ironically, the China he knew was on the verge of losing this contrasting difference. This he deplored. For him Chinese nationalist leader Sun Yet-sen was a "commercial traveler selling all that . . . Rights of Man junk," and in the process turning his country into "a kingdom of the tepid."

For a man who believed in the exotic as a positive quality, a difference that could create a sobering and serious evaluation, the threat of One World was real indeed. Segalen wrote a number of works that, seriously read, make the claims of exoticism more benign. Among these are "Steles" and "Paintings," and the novel "Rene Leys" (all now translated into English), the "Notes on Exoticism" and the collected "Letters from China," as well as the sketches for a libretto, "Siddhartha," that he was writing for composer Claude Debussy.

Though he now fits awkwardly with our current definition of "exoticism," and though he may certainly be perceived as "elitist" (another innocent word demonized), he nonetheless touches something that exists in all of us -- the need for a bonafide "other" through which we may begin to discover who we are creating in ourselves.

Though he died young, Segalen saw the future. In foreseeing the days of mass travel, he still believed that "it's possible that a balance may be established: that promiscuity will be redeemed by the small number who will still know how to feel."

In Forsdick's scholarly account of the achievements and shortcomings of Victor Segalen, we are given a balanced account of the accomplishment of a man who dared see plain an unpopular truth.