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- Convenor:
-
Jeffrey Knott
(National Institute of Japanese Literature)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Keisuke Unno
(National Institute of Japanese Literature)
- Section:
- Pre-modern Literature
- Sessions:
- Thursday 26 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
Though criticized as a modern construct, Japanese literary studies entered the modern era with the triumph of "Heian Literature" a fait accompli. Our panel sees this as a distorting premodern Heian-centrism, whose remedy lies in the excavation and rediscovery of a forgotten historical groundedness.
Long Abstract:
Much has changed in five decades of Japanese literary scholarship since the publication of Ivan Morris' The World of the Shining Prince (1964), and while his introduction to "court life in ancient Japan" remains justly acclaimed, it also seems justly the product of an era now past, when the Heian classics enjoyed an authority as unquestioned as the concept "Heian literature" itself. This shift is the work of critics in closer decades, who questioned the term's historical accuracy, objected to the ahistorical importance granted the grouping, and faulted various influences on the canonization of several constituent works. Yet if "Heian Literature" has been thus helpfully revealed as a modern construct, it has disappointingly not been recognized as equally a premodern construct, one at fault—this panel argues—for grave distortions in our understandings of literary history.
For Japanese literary studies enter the modern era with the triumph of "Heian Literature"—not in those terms—as a fait accompli. The titles anchoring the commentary output of the great scholarly popularizer Kitamura Kigin (1625-1705) bear eloquent testimony: Genji, Ise, Tosa, Makura, Hachidaishū. Universities replaced the old academies, but the core of the literary canon was not replaced, and has not been.
The distortions of this premodern construct of "Heian Literature" lie, our panel argues, in its Heian-centrism, in a historical foreshortening cyclically reproduced—and exacerbated—as ages further and further from the Heian look back to it exclusively, with disinterest in the longer and longer stretches of cultural history intervening. Given the resulting extreme elision of cultural memory, even the historical structures underlying that very interest in ancient literature risk a crippling amnesia.
It is thus in the excavation of such historical structures that we seek the remedy to these elisions. Beginning with an investigation of Pillow Book manuscripts' startling medieval diversity, we move on to explore a quiet interpretive revolution in Muromachi commentaries on the Tale of Genji. Finally we examine the use-history of the premodern analytical term tsukuri-monogatari, the inextricability of whose shifting meaning from its changing literary environment is an emblem of the self-groundedness that Heian-centrism fatally lacks.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 26 August, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper will consider in detail a number of usage examples of the term tsukuri-monogatari, from the Heian period up to the modern era. By examining the history of the word's usage, I hope to shed light on the changing literary environments in which texts of tale-literature have found themselves.
Paper long abstract:
The term tsukuri-monogatari (lit. "made-up story") seems never to have been out of use, from its first recorded usage at the end of the Heian period up to its appearance in Tsubouchi Shōyō's critical work on the novel, Shōsetsu shinzui (1885). In recent years, a thorough survey of all extant texts of early tale-literature (monogatari) was conducted by Katō Masayoshi (2009), in an attempt to determine precisely of what elements a tsukuri-monogatari can be said to consist. With the conclusions reached by Katō in that study, this paper largely concurs. However, in the famous collection of poems from early works of tale-literature known as Fūyō wakashū—an important text for any study of the word tsukuri-monogatari—the definition given for the term differs from that deduced by Katō. And again at the tail-end of the Edo period, the renowned scholar Kurokawa Harumura in his encyclopedic glossary of ancient tales, Furumonogatari ruijishō, offered yet another, differing definition.
This paper will consider in detail a number of usage examples of the term tsukuri-monogatari, ranging from the end of the Heian period up to the early 20th century. When tsukuri-monogatari as a term of analysis began to be used at the end of the Heian period, its motivation lay in contemporary attempts to collectively label those literary texts that now reach us under that name. Or to put it another way, its motivation sprang from the antecedent fact that contemporaries had begun, already, to see such texts as a separate group. What prompts use of the term is a felt need to draw distinctions, explicitly relative ones, between examples of tsukuri-monogatari and other kinds of text. As such, when we survey the history of changes in the term's usage, we reveal thereby the changing literary environments in which texts of tale-literature have found themselves. By examining, therefore, the usage of the word tsukuri-monogatari, I hope to shed light on the literary vicissitudes experienced across the ages by texts which that term has served to designate, as well as on those interested readers whose changing reception of such texts kept them in motion.
Paper short abstract:
The Pillow Book is famous for high textual variance, yet read today mostly in a single textual line. Showing how much portrayals of women differ between textual lines, this paper demonstrates the degree of variance, arguing that this diversity is the better mirror of how the work was actually read.
Paper long abstract:
Works from the Heian period have always been read in the fluid, diverse array of variants they assumed over time though copying by countless hands. When still extant, these older manuscripts and the texts they preserve are documents of great value to us in studying the bibliographic fortunes of the Pillow Book, or the details of its reception history. Indeed, even among texts from the Heian era, the Pillow Book is known as a more extreme case of textual variance. Nonetheless, today the Pillow Book is read and interpreted mostly from one textual line alone, the Sankan-bon Text. Only rarely are other extant textual lines compared with it, or made the subjects of analysis in their own right. If, however, one keeps in mind that the production and consumption of such a textual variety is itself precisely one of the most characteristic facts about the Pillow Book's reception history, it becomes clear that such issues of textual difference are something no research on the work can afford to ignore.
Drawing from all these various textual lines, this paper will consider in particular passages of feminine portrayal, demonstrating the degree of variation among images of women as painted differently by different Pillow Book texts. Such passages from the Pillow Book of discourse on women are among those most cited, assigned a significance reflective of the text's reception as the work of Sei Shōnagon, a woman herself and in court service. A careful comparison, however, of textual differences between the various textual lines reveals that the images they paint of women are by no means the same. One finds, for example, departures from the logic of the Sankan-bon Text—that most frequently interpreted in modern terms—which in their sheer contrast thoroughly relativize it, "Sankan-bon logic" becoming thus the viewpoint of one Pillow Book version among others. Considering several examples from various textual lines, I hope not only to convey the fundamental diversity of the Pillow Book's textual universe, but also to suggest that this very diversity is the best mirror of how that work was, in fact, actually read.
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to demonstrate and trace the quiet revolution that took place in interpretations of the Tale of Genji during the late medieval period, when an interest in Murasaki Shikibu's fictional characters for their own sake becomes an explicit feature of commentary and lectures on the work.
Paper long abstract:
There are many reasons to think that interpretation by character psychology, so central to modern reception of the Tale of Genji, both among specialists and among the general reading public, has a history as old as the Tale itself. There is substantial early evidence of such an interest, not only in passages of documented "reader response" such as found in Sarashina nikki, but also in early critical texts, above all in the effusive evaluations of the Mumyō zōshi. Indeed, similar passages of interpretation can be found within the Genji itself, most obviously in the famous "Rainy Night's Dialogue." Not for nothing is the daughter of Fujiwara no Tametoki known to us under a sobriquet taken from her own dramatis personae.
Yet even recognizing here a certain continuity, this paper argues that in the Tale of Genji's interpretive history, a sharp distinction can be drawn between earlier and later treatments of character. This is not the watershed usually posited, which turns on intellectual history, emphasizing incommensurate theories of mind. Far less speculatively, plentifully evident in newer Genji commentary of the 15th-16th centuries, this paper finds a growing concern that understanding its fictional characters constitutes an aspect of the Genji that must be taught, perhaps authoritatively. It is possible that the salient terminological lack of "psychology" has a reader-level significance just as salient. Surely, however, it is far less salient than the time and ink apparently spent by in-demand Genji lecturers like rengashi Sōgi or the nobleman Sanjōnishi Sanetaka to teach students, high and low, a proper nuanced appreciation of Hikaru Genji's feelings one mournful morning in the snow.
This paper seeks to demonstrate and trace the quiet revolution that took place in Genji interpretation during the medieval period, when an interest in Murasaki's fictional characters becomes an explicit feature of commentary and lectures on the work. Concentrating in particular on treatments of the relationship between Hikaru Genji and Lady Murasaki, it seeks to understand why, where earlier commentators were willing to leave readers as free to their response as Takasue's Daughter, from a certain point medieval Genji scholars were not.