Monday, October 5, 2009
Friday, July 24, 2009
Introducing the Tale of Genji
It has been a thousand years or so since “Murasaki Shikibu” wrote the Tale of Genji. She wrote three centuries before Chaucer made English a respectable language for those with literary aspirations. Much of what she wrote borders on the incomprehensible today. And yet, the story of Genji consistently moves me in a way few modern authors can achieve. What the mysterious Lady Murasaki created was beautiful; an excellent work of literature. Its continued endurance is fortunate.
I will not argue that the Tale is the best work of literature ever written. Truth be told, it is not even my favorite piece of Heian-era Japanese literature. I feel a much closer spiritual kinship with the often maladroit Sei Shōnagon and her Pillow Book than with the eminently courtly and refined Murasaki. However, what Sei Shōnagon wrote was confessional nonfiction, and directly expressing oneself is easy. We are endlessly obsessed with ourselves. To be “raw” and “natural” and “authentic” is the easiest thing in the world. We love to talk about ourselves, our opinions, our circumstances. Good esteem or bad, we can barely shut up about how exceptional we are. The very cheapness and ubiquity of reality television highlights the superabundance of our narcissism. Why pay for something we can get for free? Culturally we have forgotten that “Art” is cognate with “artifice”.
The Tale is pointedly artificial, coolly embracing the dichotomy of human nature and human culture. It is not terribly difficult to extract from the Tale an idea of what Lady Murasaki was like, but that is not the point of the exercise. The obvious point is to entertain, and moreover to entertain a fabulously self-regarding and easily jaded audience. It is very clear that Murasaki Shikibu wrote for an audience, and was aware of their demands; she mentions them occasionally. One of the more distressing sections ends with an aside that amounts to, basically, “the audience made me do it”. Eight centuries later, Doyle would resurrect Holmes from his death at Reichenbach Falls for similar reasons.
The strongest evidence of the Tale’s excellence is its simple survival. The most recent English translation, and the one on my shelf, was published in 2001. This is not guarantee of literary worth, of course. The pay records of the English army during the 100 Years’ War were recently published with some fanfare. Still, no one has ever pretended to have read a book of accounts in order to gain cultural credit at a cocktail party.
To be fair, reading the Tale is not an easy task. I am quite certain there are parts of the Tale that I’ve only read in the technical sense; my eyes slid over the page as my brain disengaged and went to knock back a few brews with Morpheus, god of sleep. The thing is mammoth, and the fact that no one ever speaks anyone else’s name gets very confusing very quickly. It is much worse than the Victorian trick of replacing someone’s usual moniker with a single initial and a handful of discreet dashes.
It is probably best to view the Tale as a series of novels. Some are better than others. It helps that the Tale is broken up into a series of novella-length chapters, some of which follow along in neat close-order chronology, and some of which do not. Further evidence of the Tale’s excellence is how many of those novella-chapters reward both facile skimming and deep scrutiny. The individual stories are often interesting in and of themselves, but there is also considerable hidden meaning to be found.
There is symbolism to be uncovered, but symbolism is the literary equivalent of a parlor trick, or possibly hamburger cut with cornmeal. Symbolism usually just offers the illusion of substance. Once you actually work out the hidden meaning, you’re just drinking more Ovaltine. Finnegans Wake, by my estimation, is more a practical joke on Joyce’s part than it was a real work of any literary merit.
In the Tale symbolism is usually used by the characters themselves to allude to something they do not wish to explicitly say. Once you puzzle out who is being referred to, you’re done. Instead of building up semiotic matrices of elaborate self-reference, you instead realize in a sudden flash that a particular action or phrase carries far more emotional freight than you had noticed on first encounter. A glimpse of sleeve will have all the excitement of an unexpectedly illuminated clue in a cozy Christie-style murder mystery, with no need for a corpse to make it matter.
This excitement is the final hallmark of the Tale’s excellence. For heft and subtlety I can turn to Mann’s Magic Mountain, but despite being practically made of pure liquid irony, I never had much fun with that text. For misunderstanding and emotionally complex characters I can read pretty much anything ever written by Dostoevsky, but any shocks delivered will be cold, like winter rain falling unexpectedly on your neck. For a uniquely feminine take on biting satire I can always rely on Austen, but she didn’t write a thousand years ago. So, while I would hesitate to place Murasaki Shikibu above these literary worthies, mostly because I am a dilettante and dislike being told off by my academic superiors, I have no qualms whatever placing her among them.
And what an epic tea party that would be!
I will not argue that the Tale is the best work of literature ever written. Truth be told, it is not even my favorite piece of Heian-era Japanese literature. I feel a much closer spiritual kinship with the often maladroit Sei Shōnagon and her Pillow Book than with the eminently courtly and refined Murasaki. However, what Sei Shōnagon wrote was confessional nonfiction, and directly expressing oneself is easy. We are endlessly obsessed with ourselves. To be “raw” and “natural” and “authentic” is the easiest thing in the world. We love to talk about ourselves, our opinions, our circumstances. Good esteem or bad, we can barely shut up about how exceptional we are. The very cheapness and ubiquity of reality television highlights the superabundance of our narcissism. Why pay for something we can get for free? Culturally we have forgotten that “Art” is cognate with “artifice”.
The Tale is pointedly artificial, coolly embracing the dichotomy of human nature and human culture. It is not terribly difficult to extract from the Tale an idea of what Lady Murasaki was like, but that is not the point of the exercise. The obvious point is to entertain, and moreover to entertain a fabulously self-regarding and easily jaded audience. It is very clear that Murasaki Shikibu wrote for an audience, and was aware of their demands; she mentions them occasionally. One of the more distressing sections ends with an aside that amounts to, basically, “the audience made me do it”. Eight centuries later, Doyle would resurrect Holmes from his death at Reichenbach Falls for similar reasons.
The strongest evidence of the Tale’s excellence is its simple survival. The most recent English translation, and the one on my shelf, was published in 2001. This is not guarantee of literary worth, of course. The pay records of the English army during the 100 Years’ War were recently published with some fanfare. Still, no one has ever pretended to have read a book of accounts in order to gain cultural credit at a cocktail party.
To be fair, reading the Tale is not an easy task. I am quite certain there are parts of the Tale that I’ve only read in the technical sense; my eyes slid over the page as my brain disengaged and went to knock back a few brews with Morpheus, god of sleep. The thing is mammoth, and the fact that no one ever speaks anyone else’s name gets very confusing very quickly. It is much worse than the Victorian trick of replacing someone’s usual moniker with a single initial and a handful of discreet dashes.
It is probably best to view the Tale as a series of novels. Some are better than others. It helps that the Tale is broken up into a series of novella-length chapters, some of which follow along in neat close-order chronology, and some of which do not. Further evidence of the Tale’s excellence is how many of those novella-chapters reward both facile skimming and deep scrutiny. The individual stories are often interesting in and of themselves, but there is also considerable hidden meaning to be found.
There is symbolism to be uncovered, but symbolism is the literary equivalent of a parlor trick, or possibly hamburger cut with cornmeal. Symbolism usually just offers the illusion of substance. Once you actually work out the hidden meaning, you’re just drinking more Ovaltine. Finnegans Wake, by my estimation, is more a practical joke on Joyce’s part than it was a real work of any literary merit.
In the Tale symbolism is usually used by the characters themselves to allude to something they do not wish to explicitly say. Once you puzzle out who is being referred to, you’re done. Instead of building up semiotic matrices of elaborate self-reference, you instead realize in a sudden flash that a particular action or phrase carries far more emotional freight than you had noticed on first encounter. A glimpse of sleeve will have all the excitement of an unexpectedly illuminated clue in a cozy Christie-style murder mystery, with no need for a corpse to make it matter.
This excitement is the final hallmark of the Tale’s excellence. For heft and subtlety I can turn to Mann’s Magic Mountain, but despite being practically made of pure liquid irony, I never had much fun with that text. For misunderstanding and emotionally complex characters I can read pretty much anything ever written by Dostoevsky, but any shocks delivered will be cold, like winter rain falling unexpectedly on your neck. For a uniquely feminine take on biting satire I can always rely on Austen, but she didn’t write a thousand years ago. So, while I would hesitate to place Murasaki Shikibu above these literary worthies, mostly because I am a dilettante and dislike being told off by my academic superiors, I have no qualms whatever placing her among them.
And what an epic tea party that would be!
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