Roy Starrs on Haruo Shirane’s Inventing the Classics (2000) and the Polemics of Postmodernism

Three years ago I along with Belgian Japonophile Michael Hauspie gave my first-ever happyō in Japanese to a graduate seminar at Waseda. Our topic: Inventing the Classics: Modernity, Nationality, and Japanese Literature, edited by Haruo Shirane. Needless to say, our presentation sucked (at least my half of it). Half the class fell asleep, teacher included.

In this article for the New Zealand Journal for Asian Studies, Roy Starrs of the University of Otago does a far better job than we did in addressing both the merits and shortcomings of Shirane’s book, and in exposing the fault lines in recent criticism, namely, the split between postmodernists and “anti-postmodernists.” (I’m not quite sure what to call latter— traditionalists? modernists? humanists? torchbearers of the Enlightenment? neo-New Critics? neo-conservatives?)

While admitting that the “antifoundational” approach to the canon (defined by Shirane as “those texts that are recognized by established or powerful institutions”) has enriched our understanding of literary history and helped to sweep away old dogmas, Starrs wonders whether the trendy suppositions of postmodernism haven’t warped our understanding by reducing everything to social phenomena. Writes Starrs:

As to whether these excellent literary-historical essays convince one of the validity of the “antifoundational” canon theory Shirane propounds in his Introduction, my feelings are more ambivalent. Generally speaking, the notion of “invented tradition” was a useful one when traditions were commonly and uncritically accepted as rock-solid, age-old “givens” or as arising and evolving naturally over many centuries without conscious intervention or manipulation by elite power groups. As with all such ideas or metaphors once they become widely popularized, however, there is always the danger that this once-useful 198 Starrs notion itself becomes too much of an idee fixe and is applied too simplistically or indiscriminately to all manner of cultural phenomena, no matter how diverse, hybrid or multifaceted.

Here’s a list I’ve compiled of some of the supposed attributes of these two camps (Starrs refers to the camp on the left as the “literature-lovers”; shall we then call the others “literature-demystifiers”?):

Humanistic --- Anti-humanistic
Universalistic --- Particularistic
Belief in aesthetic standards --- Rejection of aesthetic standards
Foundationalistic --- Anti-foundationalistic
Essentialistic --- Structuralistic
Objectivistic --- Relativistic
Belief in the primacy of author --- Emphasis on social/historic factors
Belief in notion of genius --- Denial of genius
Focus on individual, inner life --- Focus on collective consciousness

Starrs, clearly aligning himself with the “literature-lovers,” speaks of the nihilism of postmodernism, warning that humanists who accept the theories of these pernicious postmodernists in fact “embrace their own death.” Starrs even names names:

Some of the still most venerated intellectuals of the 20th century, from Heidegger and Benjamin to Foucault and Derrida, were among their number, men whose nihilism led them to political folly of the highest order – nothing less than the defense of anti-intellectual, antihumanistic tyrannies in Germany, the Soviet Union and Iran. Was this the result of their straining after a reputation as “original thinkers”, or perhaps a mere delight in confounding “established opinion”? Or was it simply, and less flatteringly, the result of a rather limited power and range of thought?

I don’t pretend to have any solutions. All I can say for now is, Philosophers, if you still exist, it’s time to get to work, because until you resolve for us these more fundamental problems, literary critics aren't ever going to be able to agree on how to read anything.

A Dictionary of Marxist Thought By T. B. Bottomore

'Tis the New Year, and I'm stuck in my room reviewing Marxist terminology in preparation for an upcoming exam. If there's any one else out there in the same predicament, here's a very handy guide for brushing up on the terms. About 80% of the text is available.

日記

今日のイスラエル大使館での抗議デモに行ってきた。
日本人の、パレスチナ人の苦しみへの関心に感涙した。

"How Would You Define Japanese Modernism: An Interview with Suzuki Sadami"

Here’s Suzuki Sadami 鈴木貞美 (1947- ) in an interview with Raquel Abi-Samara, addressing the question, What is Japanese modernism? Suzuki traces its origins to the early 17th century, setting himself apart from critics like Karatani Kōjin and Nakamura Mitsuo (one might even throw Donald Keene in there) who see literary modernism as coinciding with historical “modernity,” i.e., Meiji Westernization. Suzuki holds that Japanese modernism should be limited neither to Westernization, nor to the “narrow sense of European modernism,” which is but one stage in its development. Suzuki proposes a re-periodization of the contemporary (gendai) as well, which he sees as beginning not in 1946 in the wake of Japan’s defeat but in 1920 with the advent of mass culture. Periodization of literary history, he notes, need not always coincide with that of cultural history.

In the first half of the interview, Suzuki walks us through some of terms. First, there is modanizumu モダニズム, which entered into common use around 1926. The term is derived from the word modan モダン, which

appeared for the first time in an essay on the “modern girl” movement in England in a women’s magazine 1923, and it quickly came into wide spread use circa 1926. The word was applied to many new styles of art and everyday lifestyles in urban settings, influenced from Europe and America at the time. The word “modan” was used to establish a new and different definition of the modern and to draw a distinction between it and an earlier katakana word, namely “haikara,” which also meant being fashionable in the European— namely, Victorian—style. The word haikara had come into use in Japan in late nineteenth century, its origin deriving from the word “high collar” in English. (Suzuki, 1-2)

There is also kindai, which until the Meiji period simply meant “recent,” as is the case in Fujiwara Teika’s Superior Poems of Our Times (Kindaishūka 近代秀歌, 1209). But by Meiji, the word came to refer specifically to the process of Westernization and the construction of a “capitalist nation-state.” To avoid confusion with the historical use of the term (which, like the term kinsei 近世, included the Edo period), the word was pronounced “kondai” when specifically referring to the Meiji period. The compound term kingendai 近現代 was invented later to encompass everything from Meiji to the present.

Though terms like kindaika 近代化 (“modernization”) and kindaishugi 近代主義 (“modern-ism”) didn’t appear until later (the latter was first used by Kaneko Chikusui in his 1911 essay “The Origins of Modernism”), the process itself had in fact begun much earlier. Like Ishikawa Jun, Suzuki speaks of the essential modern-ness of the Edoites, who were among the world’s most literate, and whose city was the world’s most populated by 1710. The emergence of a “national language” (kokugo), too, preceded that of the European nations. And in the arts, Suzuki points out, traces of a modernistic realism can be seen in the writings of Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), Ishida Baigan (1685-1744), Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725), Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693), and in the Edo-era shinkei 真景 landscape paintings, “in which the artist actually copied real scenes as opposed to those imagined in one’s head” (Suzuki, 5).

To be frank, however, I don’t see why Suzuki feels the need to cite examples of pre-Meiji realism in order to prove that Japan was modern before Westernization. Who ever said realism was a precondition for the modern? Is not much of European modernism in fact a reaction against the old notions of mimesis and realism? Also, the claim that Chikamatsu practiced a kind of realism is rather dubious given that Chikamatsu himself stated that realism should be avoided at all costs, as it would “permit no pleasure in the work.”

I’m late for my orthodontist appointment, and I still haven’t said a word about the second half of the interview, so I’ll just briefly mention a few of the topics discussed:

*the reciprocal relation between Japanese tradition and European modernism
*the built-in ambiguity between subject-object in Japanese grammar, writing
*the many ways of looking at Kajii Motojirō’s “Lemon” (1925)
*the war years: what really happened vs. the American triumphalist version of history scripted by the IMTFE
*Japanese universalism, militarism and the Taishō vitalism
*and some thoughts on how “the tradition” is, more often than not, creatively invented.

Aside from some clunky phrases and the occasional typo (e.g., “the poet Noguchi Yonejirô (1975-1947)”), this interview is an excellent introduction to the subject of Japanese modernism, and we should all thank Professors Tyler, Suzuki, and Abi-Samara for making it public.

Wittgenstein (1993)

It's past my bedtime, so I'm going to post this link for now and watch it in the morning. The original screenplay, according to Wikipedia, was by Terry Eagleton.

Notes on Earl Miner's On Japanese Linked Poetry

“Linked Poetry in Japanese Literature”

Haikai is an abbreviation for haikai no renga, which is now called renku. It was Masaoka Shiki who transformed haikai into haiku. “The name haiku," Miner writes," came to be widely used in the last decade or so of the nineteenth century as a result of the movement to reform haiku led by Masaoka Shiki.”

In haikai, each stanza relates only to the preceding and following stanza. There is no continuous "plot," and appropriate responsiveness is more important than dramatic consistency. The episodic structure of Genji monogatari exemplifies this, and in the "Picture Contest" chapter we see that the scroll painted by Genji has a similar sequential structure. “We may be sure that Genji's pictures made up no plot," Miner writes. "But they made a sequence.”

Miner also points out that while Western poetics are derived from ancient Greek drama, Japanese and Chinese poetics have their roots in lyric poetry, which emphasizes, above all, the response elicited in the reader. (Miner calls this "affectivism" or "expressivism.") However, aside from citing the brief preface to the Kokinshū, Miner provides little evidence to support his theory of "affectivism/expressionism.” Are we to make assumptions about the entire canon of pre-modern literature based on this preface?

Renga has its roots in poetic dialogue, which was a feature of such early works as the Kojiki, the Nihonshoki, and the Manyōshū. But the first real examples of renga are found in the fifth of the twenty-one imperial anthologies, Kin'yōshū (ca. 1125), which included some short renga. It was around this time that renga was developed by poets Minamoto no Shunrai (ca. 1057-1129) and Fujiwara Kiyosuke (1104-1177). By the Kamakura (1185-1382) and Muromachi (ca. 1392-1568) periods, “serious renga achieved true greatness.”

Miner points out that renga was the art of exile. “Among those leaving [the capital] were the priests and nobles who favored renga.” “Many masters," he continues, "were priests . . or, like Bashō later, they might have the habits of life by which priests were known.” Other examples include Nōin (998-1050), Saigyō (1118-1190), Sōgi, Sōchō, and, much later, Kaga no Chiyo (1703-1775).

Miner also discusses in some detail the organization of the Kokinshū (905), which is arranged according to subjects, natural progression of nature, or the progression of love affairs (from man’s yearnings to woman’s last miseries). After the Kokinshū, this arrangement became the norm. With later anthologies, the Zō section (miscellaneous poems) was often expanded, and "sometimes mirrored the collection at large."

As renga developed, its rules and categories grew more complex. Shinku (close) and soku (distant) relations were introduced, in addition to the new "ushin" and "mushin" styles.

Miner concludes that the history of pre-modern Japanese poetry can be divided into three major stages, according to the dominant poetic forms. First, there was waka, which, already possessing a tendency toward multiple narratives, grew into renga, which then found its final form in haikai (no renga).

“Some Canons of Haikai”

In the kasen style of haikai, there are 36 stanzas, two of which are "flower stanzas" (lines 17 and 35), and three of which are "moon stanzas" (lines 5, 14, and 29). In renga, there are typically 100 stanzas, and the rules are numerous. Yet these rules were abandoned in later renga, and elements previously regarded as vulgar became acceptable. Common artifacts from daily life found there way into poems, and aesthetic distance and fiction are introduced. “Such developments appear to signify a growing tendency to fictionalize,” Miner explains. He goes on:

Such developments are often thought to signify artifice, especially by the Japanese, and especially by Japanese today influenced by the kind of thinking encouraged by Masaoka Shiki. In truth, Japanese literature is often less fictional―or at least more autobiographical―than Western. But the deities in the ancient records were given for their speeches verse composed earlier, and in the Man'yōshū poems by sophisticated poets mask as compositions by the humble or even by animals. . . It is a mater of fine balance. The sabi style of Bashō’s great period is itself a specially fine balance―as it were―between the fictionalizing aestheticism of Buson and the more autobiographical character of Bashō’s own late and “light” style.

[Miner, Earl. Japanese Linked Poetry : An Account with Translations of Renga and Haikai Sequences. Princeton University Press. 1979.]

今日の愚痴

パパは、いわゆるアメ女と帰国子女、両方とも苦手なの。

(ちなみにここの「帰国子女」とは米国に限られているので、他の国なら許す場合もある。)

On Earl Miner’s Essay, “The Grounds of Mimetic and Nonmimetic Art: The Western Sister Arts in a Japanese Mirror”

Using Santō Kyōden’s（1761-1816) kibyōshi Edo Mumare: Uwaki no kabayaki (江戸生艶気樺焼, translated as Playboy, Roasted a la Edo) (1785) as an exemplary text, Earl Miner puts forth his thesis that the “Japanese aesthetic . . . rests not on the imitation of discrete agencies but on relation” (93). Therefore, he argues, one must avoid using Aristotelian concepts when assessing Japanese art, since Aristotle had something very different from Japanese poetry in mind when he wrote his Poetics. Miner insists that a better understanding of nonmimetic art― which, in fact, is a far more common phenomenon in the world than mimetic art― is needed for a more informed appreciation of Japanese literature.

Enjirō, the mock hero in Edo Mumare, is the spoilt son of a wealthy merchant who, after reading of the romantic exploits of several famed Heian playboys, sets out on a quixotic quest to transform himself into one such “uwaki.” But lacking both charm and looks, he must hire a slew of actors to follow him around town and bolster his image. Though the denizens immediately see through his ploys, Enjirō is oblivious to their scorn, and remains bent on being seen as the greatest lover of his day. The staged shinjū double-suicide in the end, however, does not go as planned when Enjirō is “greeted” not by his friends hired to stop the suicide, but by two robbers who leave the two hapless “lovers” with nothing but their underpants.

On one level, the work is a parody of the old tales, most notably Genji monogatari and Ise monogatari, both of which appear in the work. “The point of the parody,” Miner writes, “partly involves recollection of the old stories, whose cultural distance plays off against the modernity” (88). It is the task of each generation to make the tradition relevant again, and this is exactly what Kyōden sets out to do by retelling, or, as Walter Benjamin would say, "retranslating,” the old texts for a new age with new sensibilities. The idealized heroes are brought down to earth, and, even if they themselves are not directly ridiculed, the way in which others aspire to them is cleverly lampooned.

In Kyōden’s work, there “is no Aristotelian plot” (74), and the work is structured on a series of episodes, with both text and illustrations working together in a sort of “interpictorialism,” where the “two interplay, and no appreciation of the one is adequate without considering the other” (88). The “episodic,” you will remember, was condemned by Aristotle, who praised above all a unified and consistent plot. But in the Japanese tradition the episodic is frequently the norm, and it is therefore impractical to apply the Aristotelian standards as if they were a priori, universal principles. After all, Aristotle’s theories were intended for drama, while nearly all non-Western aesthetic traditions of the world were founded on the lyric (78).

Moreover, Aristotle’s fondness for unity, dignity of character, and logical plot structure rests on certain black and white assumptions about the world’s fundamental nature and knowability. Miner calls these assumptions a “tidying system,” and notes that it is upon these that Aristotle gives drama its moral purpose. Mimesis, Miner argues, has been the dominant mode in the West for so long simply because “it combined with the aesthetic certain philosophical, moral, and rhetorical matters―as well as because it provided useful underpinning for certain kinds of social order. It offers a realist philosophy― the world is real, knowable, imitable . . .” (84). And according to Miner, such assumptions are foreign to the Japanese.

Is this to say, then, that there were not any moral underpinnings to the Chinese and Japanese literary traditions? Certainly not. Traces of Confucian ethics, imported from China and Korea, can still be found today both in literature and life, and such traces were certainly more conspicuous during the Edo period. But Confucian teachings seemed to have had more of an influence on government officials than on artists. “The continental presumptions,” Miner writes, “did not influence writers as it did the officials of a repressive regime” (84). Kyokutei Bakin, Miner points out, was one of the rare exceptions.

However, in Japan where (if Miner is correct) phenomena are relational and dependent rather than discreet and isolated, such a clear distinction between a “self” and a “real imitable world” must not exist. This would explain why mimesis, or “exact replication” theory, made little if any headway in Japan until the Meiji period. “It should be obvious,” Miner writes, “that this [Japanese tradition] is not mimetic art. For mimesis, we require a reasonably stable sense of what is art, what is nature, who is the artist―and a definable relation between them” (76). A case in point is names. The fact that one person would use a different name for each activity reveals a very different attitude toward “self” than that held in the West, Miner claims. The birth name of the author-illustrator of Edo Mumare was Iwase Sei, but few ever referred to him as such. He is the writer, Santō Kyōden, or the illustrator, Kitao Masanobu, or, for that matter, someone else (he had a number of other names, each depending on the context). “A differing conception of the artist, indeed of selfhood, and therefore of arts and their nature,” Miner observes, “is obviously involved” (72).

If the traditional Japanese concept of art, then, is not mimetic, what it is? Miner calls the Japanese nonmimetic tradition an “affective expressive system,” which can be traced back at least to the preface to the Kokinshū (c. 920 CE), in which Ki no Tsurayuki writes that the “seed” (impetus) for all art is “kokoro” (mind, heart), which, stirred, seeks “leaves” (signs, words) to communicate this initial subjective experience (92). This original impulse to art begins as internal phenomena. The poet then finds its expression in outer things, through which it is communicated to someone else, who, in turn, is moved to continue the process. Such a concept is markedly different from what Aristotle held to be the original “seed”― that is, mimesis, or man’s natural impulse to imitate what he observes in the external world. As I have noted, this nonmimetic conception of art is the norm in non-Western traditions; and furthermore, this concept of the nonmimetic should not be confused with the anti-mimetic art of Western postmodernism, which, as Miner points out, already had a mimetic tradition against which it could react. The Japanese, “never having supposed the necessity for mimesis, never had to oppose it” (77).

One major feature of nonmimetic art is narrative flexibility, which is the ability to shift perspectives freely without having to make explicit demarcations in the text. Such flexibility, in turn, demands of the audience a certain interpretive flexibility. Miner points out an extreme example in Izumi Shikibu nikki, where four points of view are presented in one sentence. The shifts in perspective are not marked by punctuation (which, of course, did not exist in classical Japanese) or by any stage directions identifying the speaker. Rather, they are marked only by subtle shifts in tone or levels of politeness. The dialogue marker, too, is more often omitted than not, thus blurring the lines even further between narrator(s) and characters. Miner notes that which narrator or character is talking “seems to make less difference than what is being talked about” (74). He goes on:

The Japanese assumption [regarding point of view] clearly differs. Point of view and point of attention are variables, correlatives of each other; neither is the same as the other nor possible without the other―and the relationship between the two is more significant because it is also more flexible than in Western narrative. (91)

Also, the narrator can and often does intrude upon the scene to give commentary:

When the narrator intervenes to say, in effect, that Enjirō is an ass, we sense a sudden shift in the poise of ourselves as readers in relation to the narrator and Enjirō. Relation remains but is altered. (89)

Another feature of nonmimetic poetry is the synchronicity of what Miner calls the “three points,” namely, the points of view (the subject or narrator), the points of narrative attention (the object, or characters, place, etc.), and the points of understanding and affect (the reader or audience). A fourth element―“the world”― also comes into play not as the external and impregnable object of our imitation as it is in Aristotelian theory, but rather as both the “setting of what is under attention” and the “interrelation of the three correlatives” (92). In other words, aside from imparting both physical and referential location to the work, “the world” also serves as an intermediary force that links everything and everyone involved― the narrator, author, reader and audience, as well as the intertextual references, the language, and “the stuff” of the work.

As we can see, having independently functioning and distinct dramatic voices is not the most important element in Japanese poetics. Narrators frequently intervene or speak on behalf of characters, and characters often do the same, at times even breaking the “third wall” to speak as actors about the roles they are playing. (An example can be seen in Edo Mumare when Enjirō’s “friend” Shian complains about his assigned role, “Ore ga yaku mo tsurai yaku da”). Japanese audiences learn to expect such elasticity, and see no inconsistency or contradiction in the use of such involutional devices. In this sense, the Japanese narrative is more of a communicative act between characters and narrators, between present and previous texts (both literary and visual), and between the text and reader, with all parties equally capable of shifting roles.

[For the English translation of Edo Mumare: Uwaki no kabayaki, see Shirane's Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900.]