Section 3b, Pre-Modern Literature | Session 8
Toshiko Yokota ( California State University)
The life and works of the renowned bunjin poet-painter, Yosa Buson (1716-1783), have long been an object of study by both academic scholars and non-academic intellectuals. Most traditional biographers view Buson, the author, as the principle source of his work without taking into consideration any other possible mediating factors of literary and artistic production. Based on their naive belief that Buson's works directly reflect the historical Buson's desires and feelings, they construct a consistent but erroneous image of Buson as bunjin from his literary works and paintings. The image presents Buson as if he resided solely in an aesthetic realm, relatively unconnected to the exigencies of his own time.
In my paper, I try to overcome some of the reductive tendencies of the traditional approach by positioning Buson and his practice as a poet-painter within the eighteenth century Japanese cultural field and analyzing socio-historical conditions that contributed to his emergence as a bunjin and to his literary and artistic production—namely the development of urban sites and the publishing industry.
My analysis of the diversified social aspects of Buson's practice as a poet-painter from a broader socio-historical perspective contributes to demystifying Buson's romanticized image as bunjin who worked only for aesthetic purposes, and helps us to understand that Buson's two-fold practice as a bunjin poet-painter was socio-historically constituted.
Herbert Jonsson (University of Stockholm)
Since the serious discussion of Yosa Buson's work started at the end of the nineteenth century, one may recognise roughly three different modes of interpretation. In the early period we have the readings of Masaoka Shiki and his group, stressing the objective and descriptive qualities of Buson's art. These were followed by critics who focused on the its subjective qualities, often by choosing a few special themes as object of study. Finally we have the interpretations that dominate contemporary scholarship, which is partly based on some evaluations made by Buson himself, and is strongly opposed to the critical writings of Shiki's group. It is interpretations which focus on allusion, on hokku as riddles or intellectual witticisms, and often search for some sort of double meaning, hidden behind the words of the poem.
In this paper I intend to give an alternative to these rather extreme and one-sided standpoints that has had a hampering influence on much research on Buson, and show how poems that are definitely unreal, and might be understood as surrealist, still need a reference to our sensual experiences, to become intelligible. By making interpretations based on the perceptual qualities that are used in these poems, and how these in turn form a strong emotional impact, we will find a way to understand these poems as organic wholes, something which will not be possible otherwise. This will also show that perceptual qualities, which are always referential, may be used to create a world, which definitely has no referent.
Laura Moretti (University of Venice)
In many genres of the Edo period literature, we observe the application of a modular structure: the theme or motif which constitutes the common basis for the single episodes is each time subjected to multiple variations which guarantee an incessant variety of contents, and among the most famous examples we can mention Saikaku shokoku monogatari. It is still unsaid, though, that this kind of episodic and hybrid prose characterizes in particular the kinsei prose before Saikaku; in other words that it characterizes that literary production in which Japanese and Western scholars still pretend to recognize strong homogeneity, bridling it in clear-cut categories.
The present paper will discuss the meaning and the forms that hybrid prose shows in the eighty-years of literature preceding Saikaku, making considerations about how hybrid prose will disappear, perpetuate or evolve in later literary genres.
The analysis will be structured on three levels. The first concerns those works which show hybrid contents: those, like Jigabachi monogatari, in which the episodic structure is reinforced by variety in narrative mode and those which, like Chikusai, come out to be hybrid in spite of their structural coherence. The second layer concerns those texts which I shall call "pluri-modal": texts in which we find a well structured plot as well as a unity of contents but in which some elements intrude to make the text bear a double or triple narrative mode. Here I will present texts unknown to the Western public as Bokusai banashi isha hyôban or Kensai monogatari. The third layer will show the extreme consequences of these narrative techniques, presenting the case of a text entitled Hyô, which could be labeled as "poly-functional".
Thus I will demonstrate that kanazôshi should not be reduced to the categories thought till now, thinking about a new way of dealing with the literary production of the early XVII century.