East Meets West [Unabridged] 1443853380, 9781443853385

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East Meets West

East Meets West

Edited by

Reiko Aiura, J. U. Jacobs and J. Derrick McClure

East Meets West, Edited by Reiko Aiura, J. U. Jacobs and J. Derrick McClure This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Reiko Aiura, J. U. Jacobs, J. Derrick McClure and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5338-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5338-5

PROCEEDINGS FROM THE 13TH INTERNATIONAL REGION AND NATION LITERATURE ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE

0h, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth! —From The Ballad of East and West by Rudyard Kipling

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword .................................................................................................... ix Reiko Aiura Introduction ............................................................................................... xii Part I: East Meets West—Influences and Communications The Japanese Presence in Modern Scottish Poetry ...................................... 2 J. Derrick McClure Kyoto and the Literary Legacy of Cid Corman ......................................... 28 Daniel Bratton Translation as Re-creation: An Approach to Borges’s Poetry and Prose ................................................................................................... 47 Rosa E. Penna Early Encounters with Islam and Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive .... 57 Michele Bottalico Part II: East Meets West—Comparisons Byron’s Poetical Catalogues in Don Juan ................................................. 72 Itsuyo Higashinaka Centralisation and Identity of Characters in Early Twentieth Century Writings: Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Soseki Natsume, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon ....................................................................................................... 91 Megumi Sakamoto The Kokinshnj, the Lyric and the Conventional.........................................113 Laurence Mann

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Part III: National Identities in the British Isles Underneath the Wave: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Mermaids, and the Irish Otherworld............................................................................................... 132 Donna L. Potts Emerald Noir? Contemporary Irish Crime Fiction .................................. 144 David Clark Edwin Muir’s Autobiography as a Metaphor of his Orcadian Identity and Language........................................................................................... 157 Yuko Yoneyama Part IV: National Identities in the Commonwealth J M Coetzee as Ambivalent South African: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime ...................................................................................... 174 J. U. Jacobs Regional Voices and Cultural Translation: The Example of Alice Munro ........................................................................................ 191 Marie-Anne Hansen-Pauly Contributors ..............................................................................................211

FOREWORD REIKO AIURA

It was our great pleasure to hold an RNLA conference for the first time in Asia, beside Biwako (Lake Biwa) in Shiga Prefecture in Japan, in 2010. Biwako is one of the most ancient lakes in the world, the largest in Japan, lying to the east of the ancient capital of Kyoto. It has been a place of strategic importance for transportation by water, and of strategic importance as told in historical accounts of some famous battles; hence it has often been mentioned in Japanese literature. Also in modern days, a strong sense of ecology has been nurtured among the residents around it. A few towns in Shiga used to be capitals of Japan long ago, even before Kyoto became the capital. Many places around the lake were depicted in the Tale of the Heike, an anonymously-written narrative of the rise and fall of the ruling family of Taira (Heike) during the Heian period, the story of which was spread by groups of blind priests in oral tradition and put into written form probably at the end of the twelfth century. Lady Murasaki, a lady in the imperial court in Kyoto, is believed to have written her famous novel, the Tale of Genji (11th century), one of the oldest novels in the world, at least partly while she was living in Ishiyama Temple near the lake. Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), a famous haiku poet of the Edo period (1603-1867), travelled extensively all over Japan, and he left a request in his will that he should be buried next to the grave of a samurai called Kiso Yoshinaka, depicted in the Tale of the Heike, who fought his last battle near the lake and was buried in a temple near Biwako. Basho died in Osaka while travelling, leaving his last haiku: “Fallen ill on a journey,/ Among withered fields,/ My dreams running around” [my translation]. His body was carried miles away to a place by the lakeside of Biwako. My own father was born near the lake, and when I was a child he used to tell us many inspiring folk-stories for children from that region, which he had heard from his parents and grandparents. Those historical places were my father’s childhood playground. I particularly recall some stories

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Foreword

about tanuki (raccoon-dogs) imitating humans. Such tales may have been told all over Japan, and his stories sometimes blended what he had heard with his own experiences and imagination. He told us how, on a very hot summer night, he and his brothers slept outdoors on a platform near the lake but were awoken by a tremendous, harsh and powerful noise and shaking, as from a giant underneath their platform. They looked for the source of the noise, and discovered a tanuki, snoring beneath them. They were terrified, and ran straight back home. That area must have been pitch dark at night, with only the sounds of water, the wind in the pine trees and paddy fields, and the wildlife—a typical Japanese farming area. People forget, and many of their experiences are lost to future generations if no special effort is made. We suffered a gigantic earthquake in the north-east of Japan in the year 2011, six months after the Biwako conference. It was often described as “astonishing” and “beyond imagination,” but in truth we have suffered such earthquakes and other disasters numerous times, and many were recorded in oral tradition or in literature. If we tend to assume that no such force can strike our modern society, we seem not to have learned enough from our history, much of which is to be read in our literature. Literature offers knowledge and, potentially, understanding. Many of us study literature, though sometimes I worry that despite calls for “internationalization,” Japanese literature specialists tend not to explore other heritages enough. I have experienced the importance of discovering things which had been unknown to me, or which had seemed uninteresting before. Late in the preparation of these proceedings, when choosing our cover design, I thought to make use of some of my private experience of East and West. There are two representative components—one from the East, produced by my grandfather, Sosui Nagasawa, who was a traditional Japanese textile designer in Kyoto, and another from the West, by Allan Francis Vigers, my husband’s great-grandfather who was deeply involved in the Arts and Crafts Movement led by William Morris in the Victorian era. I hope the reader will forgive my sentimental choice. It has taken a long time to bring out this book after the actual conference. There was the great earthquake, which inflicted tremendous damage physically, economically, and emotionally even on those who were not directly hit, even some years after the conference. My co-editors, Johan U. Jacobs and J. Derrick McClure are both experienced and superb editors, and excellent academics who have shown me what a good editor should be. Without their initiatives, I would not have come this far, hence I would like to express my sincere gratitude to them. I would also like to

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express my gratitude to the patient and cooperative contributors. Our gratitude extends to the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the Biwako Visitors Bureau of Shiga Prefecture, Shiga University of Medical Science, and to Carol Koulikourdi, Amanda Millar, and other staff of Cambridge Scholars Publishing, who have been patient and very helpful.

INTRODUCTION

Although this collection of papers is not a long one, it includes many topics and insights which we trust will interest the reader, and which we might never have thought about if we had not held this unique conference in Japan. J. Derrick McClure says that Scottish literature has gone through developmental/productive phases in which it has been receptive to literary influences from other languages and cultures. Still, it is amazing to see some influence of Japanese literature in the Scottish. In the Meiji period, Japan was much influenced by various European countries, leading to radical modernization. There are many influences from Scottish culture now embedded in Japan’s history. Thomas Glover for example, whose Japanese wife is said to have been the model for Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” (though this was not historically true), was a famous Scot in Japan. Daniel Bratton, who lived awhile in Kyoto, introduces an American poet, Cid Corman, who observed changes in Japan from post-war misery and poverty to today’s economically developed, if somewhat depressed society. We may read how Corman established himself in the visual arts and literary circles in Kyoto. Rosa E. Penna tells of the world famous Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges and uses his autobiographical notes to show how he was influenced by English and Japanese literature. It is also worth knowing that she was able to observe Borges closely as an acquaintance. Michele Bottalico casts light on a link between Islamism and the early American foundation days, using Royall Tyler’s “The Algerine Captive,” in which an American protagonist, captured by Muslim pirates, converses with them about shortcomings of American democracy such as the retention of slavery. Bottalico starts with some visual arts, which are a most approachable way to see the background. He believes that early America was not cut off from the rest of the world but rather “exposed to a series of cross-cultural relations, particularly with Islam . . . .”

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Itsuyo Higashinaka shows how Byron’s frequent use of cataloguing in his poems, following epic traditions from Greek to modern European, ends up “being half serious and half ludicrous.” Higashinaka then brings in an aspect of traditional Japanese literature, which, independently of European influence, has developed a rich cataloguing tradition of its own. He demonstrates that the use of cataloguing is universal, and exploited in literatures of all times and places. Megumi Sakamoto introduces Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story called “Rashomon,” originally based on an old Japanese story. He discusses whether Japan has been taking the wisest course for renovation by centralizing many fundamental standards while struggling to change people’s life-styles and ways of thinking in imitation of western cultures; and by a comparison with Grassic Gibbon’s novel Sunset Song shows that the people’s responses to enforced modernization in Japan and in Scotland had features in common. Laurence Mann argues against Helen McCullough’s idea of Kokinshu not being “lyrical,” showing that “conventionality” and “lyricism” can coexist. Mann shows that after the baptism of post-modern criticisms (e.g., Michel Foucault, et al.), a new form of lyricism became a poetic standard, “and it is by this standard that McCullough . . . judge[s] the waka poetry of Early Heian Japan.” Donna L. Potts takes up the Irish writer Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s stories about mermaids. Memories of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid may lead us to assume that mermaid stories are sad, but Ní Dhomhnaill’s mermaids are different; their identity is not split between the two realms, sea and land, natural and supernatural. Potts reminds us of the modern Irish condition underlying Ní Dhomhnaill’s stories. Her mermaids are from a different realm, and their world is remote from British culture and language. These mermaids are those who challenge patriarchal and imperialistic hegemonies as well as damage to the environment, warning us from under the waves. David Clark, a Scot living in Spain and researching Irish literature, describes a peculiar phenomenon in Ireland (once called the Celtic Tiger) when they were doing exceedingly well economically in recent years, and what that has left behind in literature—crime fiction. After the boom, people realize that they have “the most sophisticated crime networks in Europe.” The decline of the Celtic Tiger in early 2000 brought “a new series of white-collar crimes based on the flaws in the Post-Tiger.” Clark discusses these crime novels in the context of the social situation.

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Yuko Yoneyama writes about Edwin Muir, an Orcadian writer who had experienced various different living styles, jobs, and environments due to his parental home situation. He once lived in an idyllic paradise in Orkney, and then was obliged to move to a big city, which he felt was like living in Hell. Yoneyama questions why, in an essential part of Muir’s “Autobiography,” he sometimes depicts himself at some distance, which produces some strange ambivalence in “objectiveness” in an autobiography. J. U. Jacobs takes up in his paper the experiences of a Nobel Prize winner, J. M. Coetzee, who emigrated from South Africa to Australia. Jacobs illustrates, using the writer’s autobiographical works, what Coetzee must have faced in Australia, belonging loosely to both South African English/Afrikaans cultural backgrounds, and being keenly aware of his diasporic identity. Marie-Anne Hansen-Pauly has been pursuing issues of double linguistic cultural background in Canadian literature. She discusses Alice Munro’s stories (having received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013), many of which are set in a particular rural area during the Depression, and shows that Munro succeeded in letting readers detect “universality” through her local stories. According to Hansen-Pauly, “Cultural translation means being taken to surroundings where routines, interactions and institutions with their underlying beliefs and values work differently . . . . ” The topics mentioned above were originally not strongly organized, but seeing each contributor’s paper, it is surprising for me to realize how they coincide and are intertwined with each other. (R.A.)

PART I: EAST MEETS WEST —INFLUENCES AND COMMUNICATIONS—

THE JAPANESE PRESENCE IN MODERN SCOTTISH POETRY J. DERRICK MCCLURE ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY

Scottish literature in its greatest periods has always been cosmopolitan in outlook; and the revitalisation of Scotland’s literary and intellectual links with nations in Europe and beyond was integral to the great poetic revival of the twentieth century. The foreign influences to which Scottish literature since the 1920s has shown a new receptiveness are remarkably varied: Russian poetry of the post-revolutionary period suddenly became almost as productive a source for literary translations as the old favourites French and Italian; a laudable attempt to breach the ancient barrier of mutual incomprehension and hostility between the Highland and the Lowland sides of Scottish civilisation was seen in a steadily-growing corpus of translations, in both directions, between Scots and Gaelic; Old Irish and Old English as well as the classical languages, and less familiar modern European languages than the traditional staples, provided poets with productive literary stimuli. Even in view of the vast disparity between the languages and the cultures of Scotland and Japan, therefore, in this context it is not in principle surprising, though certainly noteworthy, that several recent and contemporary Scottish writers have been stimulated by an interest in Japan and its culture to produce some highly individual and often distinguished work: poems in haiku form, stories with Japanese settings, 1 and occasionally works showing a deeper level of cultural fusion are an integral feature of the modern Scottish literary scene. From another point of view this is again unremarkable: Japanese culture, however superficially appreciated or understood, has of course been a source of fascination for the Occident since the nineteenth-century vogue for Japanoiserie both celebrated and satirised in its finest artistic commemoration, The Mikado; and in the mere fact of including quasihaiku poems in its collective literary output Scotland is no different from every other country in the English-speaking world.

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In this paper I hope to demonstrate, however, that just as Japan has characteristically and throughout its history adopted cultural features from other countries and transformed them into something very much its own, so the Scottish response to Japanese literary influence has been to create a series of works of which the Scottish identity is as unmistakeable as the Japanese inspiration. The first modern Scottish poet to acknowledge a specific Japanese influence on his work is Ian Hamilton Finlay; and it is a mark not only of this artist’s adventurous method but of the paradoxical effects of the Scottish-Japanese interaction that whereas a general affinity with Japanese culture can readily be seen not only in Finlay’s writings but in the sculpture and landscaping for which he is now most widely renowned,2 the specific literary connection which he claims has operated in ways which are, at first sight, far from obvious. In a letter to Hamish Henderson 3 requesting a contribution to his avant-garde poetry magazine Poor.Old. Tired.Horse, Finlay includes Shimpei Kusano in a short list of radical poets; 4 and his collection Glasgow Beasts is dedicated “tae Shimpei Kusano / whae writ / a haill buik o poems / aboot puddocks / ‘The Hundredth Class.’” [To Shimpei Kusano /who wrote / a whole book of poems / about frogs] Yet there is no apparent suggestion of Japanese influence in the following: see me wan time ah wis a fox an wis ah sleekit! Ah gaed slinkin heh an snappin yeh the blokes aa sayed ah wis a G R E A T fox aw nae kiddin ah wis pretty good had a whole damn wood in them days hen (Finlay 2004: 223) [See me / one time / I was a fox / and was I cunning! I / went slinking / hey! / and snapping / yeah! / the lads / all said I was a GREAT fox / aw, no kidding / I was pretty good / had a whole damn wood / in those days / hen (term of address for a female)]

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The connection, however, resides first in the minimalist scale of the writing. Finlay does not adhere to any prescribed number of lines or syllables, but this and all the eleven poems in the sequence are very short: nine words, in the case of one of them. Next, the sequence appears to narrate a series of identities assumed by the persona: “an wan time / ah wis a moose /… this time / ah wis a bed-bug … anither / time / ah wis a / minnie [minnow]” and so on; making the sequence suggest a comic parody of the doctrine of successive reincarnations. And though none of the reincarnations is as a frog, a specific debt to Kusano is at least suggested by a comparison with the selection of his poems in the anthology The Poetry of Living Japan: 5 Queroque the Frog: an Autobiography, in which the amphibian narrator relates his own death; Conversation on an Autumn Night, in which (at least as far as can be gathered from the English translation) the speakers are imaginatively identified with insects and their fate; and The Frog, in which the exalted “Your back / is a trap for the heavens” is ironically undercut by the next line “(Yes, that’s right)”. Finlay’s comic exuberance in this sequence is decidedly unlike any characteristic mood of Japanese poetry (or the lowkey, ironic humour of Kusano) but in a poem such as Dalchonzie [the name of a village] the sensory vividness, imaginative force and emotional loading of the images, as well as the tiny scale of the poem, are more reminiscent of Japanese models: Hot day the pines say Wheesht! along the railway Night the mill has two wheels, a red, a black ʊ one is the sun. (ibid. 244)

ʊand the Scots exclamation Wheesht! [hush] delicately emphasises the location of the scene. It is tempting, too, to conjecture that the concrete poetry of which Finlay went on to become a leading figure was inspired at least in part by Kusano’s use of nonsense syllables representing natural sounds (of frogs and other things) and the arranging of his words and nonwords in visually-recognisable patterns on the page.6 I do not think it likely that Finlay’s pioneering use of phoneticallyspelt Glasgow basilect is an aspect of Kusano’s influence, though the presence of non-standard Japanese in the latter’s work is reflected to some extent in the English translations. Finlay’s language usage in this set of poems arose from (and exacerbated) ongoing controversies in the Scottish

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literary scene, and no foreign influence was necessary to prompt him to experiment in this particular direction. The poet who followed Finlay’s lead in writing small-scale poems in Glasgow patois with the greatest degree of enterprise, individuality, productivity and distinction, Tom Leonard, has a tiny sequence called four football haiku in his oeuvre: the first is Bovril Zen hawf time n wan hawn clappin whair the fuck um ah (Leonard 2009: 135) [half time / and one hand clapping [!] / where the f— am I]

ʊbut as this is fully of a piece with much of his other work, his styling it “haiku” is a witticism rather than a serious claim to be writing in a quasiJapanese style to a greater extent here than elsewhere; and though Leonard’s overall debt to Finlay is unmistakeable it would be special pleading to argue that any degree of Japanese influence, direct or even indirect, is recognisable in his poetry. 7 Several other Scottish poets, however, of different degrees of renown and distinction, have written poetry in haiku form. It must be noted that the very validity of attempting to transfer the haiku form to other languages is a topic which would lead us far beyond the scope of this paper. On a purely technical level, the form itself is specifically suited to Japanese, with its strongly syllable-timed rhythm and its abundance of di- and trisyllabic words, which easily form compounds, and monosyllabic particles to link them; and will of necessity have a different auditory effect in a stress-timed language and present different problems (and by the same token, offer other possibilities) in a language with a different grammatical structure. The existence of a poetic form which combines, as essentials, extreme brevity with sensory vividness, emotional force and depth of philosophical implication arose and developed in the wholly unique cultural ambience of Japan, with the mutual influencing of the Zen form of Buddhism, derived from India and China, and the indigenous Shinto;8 and though what might be called the externals of haiku poetry can perhaps be replicated, or at any rate represented by the nearest possible counterparts, in languages with phonological and grammatical structures which are not those of Japanese, there is no possibility of their arousing the same response in readers from different literary, philosophical and religious traditions.

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The Japanese Presence in Modern Scottish Poetry

By this argument, it is simply impossible to write anything in English, Scots, or indeed any other language which will arouse the same response in a speaker of that language as a haiku does for a native Japanese. That does not mean that the practice of writing quasi-haiku in other languages is pointless: it goes without saying, however, that for an activity performed with the linguistic medium of English, or Scots, to be sensibly described as writing haiku poetry, it must entail far more than producing constructions of five-plus-seven-plus-five syllables. Anybody can write a seventeen-syllable squib, and most of the things that have been produced in this form, even if they have merits of any other kind, are not haiku. To be worthy of consideration, a quasi-haiku by a Scottish poet must have something at least of the qualities listed above: sensory vividness, emotional force and depth of philosophical implication. On the other hand, a rigid syllable-count of seventeen need not be insisted upon, nor the Japanese prescription that each five- or seven-syllable line must be a grammatically self-contained unit: since the actual haiku form, as already noted, is specifically tailored to the linguistic structures of Japanese, there is no obligation on poets writing in other languages to replicate it precisely. A syllable-count of approximately seventeen (certainly not much exceeding it) and some hint of a tripartite structure may be taken as the requirements. On this showing, some Scottish poets have achieved undoubted success in the transplanted haiku form: we will proceed to examine three, from different generations and different culture-areas of Scotland. George Bruce, a poet from the fishing town of Fraserburgh in the North-East, produced a notable collection of haiku poetry. Bruce has a reputation as one of the finest of twentieth-century Scottish poets, and certainly he is one of those to whom it is easiest to respond.9 His precise and economical style, developed in his early poems in evocations of the sea and coast and of the dangers and hardships of the fishing trade to which his father belonged, are combined in his poetry with a profound empathy with, and ability to arouse strong emotional responses to, not only the joys and the tragedies of life but all aspects of human interaction with the natural world. Sparseness of expression and intensity of perception are of course integral to haiku poetry; yet it was a form to which Bruce became attracted only late in his long and productive life (he died at the age of 93, writing steadily until his last days.) According to his own account in his haiku collection Through the Letterbox (Bruce 2003), although he had found that among the students of Glasgow University, where he served for a time as Fellow in Creative Writing, “haiku was an addiction which spread like measles” (8), he himself was not tempted:

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until a stray thought took him back to a recollection of stealing a cherry in his aunt’s garden as a child. The poem which this prompted is the centre of a triad of linked haiku headed North Coast Cherries and dedicated to his wife Elizabeth: All around salt in the wind a mile from the sea salt on the tongue Against the wall that faced south, red cherries enjoyed by stealing boys When I think of you through many winters cherries ripen in the sun (14)

To appreciate the force of the central poem it must be remembered that the setting is the chilly, windswept Scottish North-East: the cherries are ripe and enticing despite their surroundings, and necessarily on a south-facing wall. The first of the “frame” poems sets the scene, evoking a sea-wind strong enough to blow the taste of salt far inland—a taste which is countered by the sweetness of the cherries, as in the last poem the cold wind is by the sun. The implications of the details mentioned form a network of ramifications, enticing the reader both to construct and to respond to an entire miniature narrative. Bruce’s previously-published work had included a small number of poems in haiku form, one being the witty Scots Haiku (though this one, by the arguments previously given, does not qualify as a haiku), written to commemorate the completion of the twelve-volume Scottish National Dictionary: Noo a’ thae words are in their tomb whan will be the resurrection? (2001: 193 and 2003: 118) [Now all those words / are in their tomb / when will be the resurrection?]

—in its original context, the last of three poems in Scots (which he used much less often than English for his poetry) commenting ironically on the undaunted survival of the language despite its receiving more of the sterilising attention (it is suggested) of academics than the potentially lifegiving attention of poets. Through the Letterbox, however, contains over a

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The Japanese Presence in Modern Scottish Poetry

hundred and fifty, grouped as “Haikus for Humanity”, “Seasonal Haikus,” “Philosophical Haikus,” “Catspeak,” a set which includes the phonaesthetically flawless She does not walk. She moves with sinuous ease. She glides, is smooth as silk (44)

and so on. The poems are matched with illustrations by Elizabeth Blackadder, each one beautifully adapted to its specific poem, in what is presumably intended as a counterpart to the Japanese haiga tradition. Technically expert, Bruce’s haikus are placed in their Scottish context by frequent cross-references to iconic Scottish poets: knowingly or not, he is thus in tune with the Japanese tradition, in which each haiku is part of an intricate network of mutual influences and allusions between poets throughout the history of the form. A haiku which appeared in Today Tomorrow becomes the first in a sequence of four dedicated to William Soutar, a lyric poet of outstanding merit who for the last years of his life was unable to rise from his bed: the second in the sequence, He who watched time from his bed for thirteen years saw green grass grow greener (19)

recalls Soutar’s poem June 1943: The simple things which do not pass Are shining here: Grass, and the light upon the grass… (Soutar 1988: 53)

Likewise, Haiku for Katie on her departure for Canada — Remember the white rose of Scotland. Water it with tears and laughter (15)

quotes a lyric by Hugh MacDiarmid: The rose of all the world is not for me. I want for my part Only the little white rose of Scotland That smells sharp and sweet—and breaks the heart. (MacDiarmid 1967: 248)

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A many-layered haiku refers to the distinguished Scottish actress Edith MacArthur’s reading of a poem by the great mediaeval poet Robert Henryson; Henryson is again evoked in a four-haiku sequence In the Garden, for which a quotation from his poem The Preiching of the Swallow forms the epigraph: Grite fule is he, that will not gladly heir Counsal in tyme while it avails him nocht. (30)10

—and Burns’s drinking song O, Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut inspires a cryptic haiku pair. In the manner of Yeats, who appears to be subliminally present in the haiku To Lucina:11 Wind-blown. I am the tatters of time, but heart is with you already (74)

the timeless quality of artistic achievement is celebrated: several of the poems are addressed to artists (including Elizabeth Blackadder); and one haiku which evokes the transcendent awareness suggested in Zen-inspired poetry: Suddenly but gently you stopped time. There was no before nor after (26)

is headed On hearing Yehudi Menuhin. 12 The poems in Bruce’s haiku collection are varied: many suggest Scottish scenes or are specifically associated with Scottish places (and a few are in Scots); some are vividly descriptive and others abstract and philosophical, many are addressed to acquaintances and are touchingly intimate: Dear Heidi, wind blew sun shines brightly I am lifted up. Thank you (35)13

but the best of them (and most of them are excellent) combine, in a fusion that is both stimulating and profoundly moving, elements from the world of nature and familiar emotions with questions that search to the limits of human understanding. Bruce, unlike other writers discussed in this paper, made no serious study of the haiku tradition; but his work in the form surely rings true to Japanese sensitivities.

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The Japanese Presence in Modern Scottish Poetry

A writer whose work is more extensively and consciously influenced by Japanese thought and literature than Bruce’s is Alan Spence. Like Finlay (in his Japanese-influenced poetry) and Leonard (throughout), Spence is strongly associated with Glasgow: his reputation was first founded on his short stories about young boys in an impoverished area of the city, and made expert use of the local patois for dialogue—a life-style and environment if possible even further removed, one might imagine, from the world of Basho and Issa than Bruce’s Fraserburgh; but whereas Bruce’s adoption of haiku as a poetic form emerged, as we have seen, late in his life and not as part of a general interest in Japanese culture, Spence developed a serious and lasting attraction to Oriental philosophy in his student days, has made several visits to Japan and has some acquaintance with the language (the door of his office in Aberdeen University is adorned with a paper reading ࢔ࣛࣥ ࢫ࣌ࣥࢫ),14 and in addition to his literary activities runs a Buddhist meditation centre in Edinburgh, named after Sri Chinmoy, the Indian teacher who was his inspiration. 15 His interest in and personal experience of Oriental, and particularly Japanese, thought and culture emerge in his work in many forms: his novel The Magic Flute, about the growth from boyhood to manhood of a group of friends and their contrasting life paths, contains fictionalised accounts of his own experiences including mistaken association in student days of LSD hallucinations with Zen enlightenment, two of his recent books are a carefully-researched novel about Thomas Blake Glover and a quasiautobiography of the eighteenth-century Zen master Hakuin (Spence 2006 and 2013), and he writes haiku-influenced poetry contrasting in some respects with that of George Bruce.16 Spence’s first Japanese-influenced poems appeared in the pamphlet Glasgow Zen. The title piece in the collection is a joke: it begins On the oneness of self and universe IT’S AW WAN TAE ME

(2002: 1)17 [It’s all one to me]

and proceeds to four more examples of the same trick, associating a maxim of Zen thought (deliberately over-simply expressed, no doubt) with a cliché of Glasgow demotic speech and thus implying a potently ironic contrast between the banality of the utterances and the profundity of the thought with which they are now linked. Here Spence applies his familiarity with Glasgow speech in a different context from the dialogue in his short stories; and the focus is not on the Zen element but on the

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reductive force of the juxtaposition. However, the pamphlet also includes his first ventures into the haiku form. The set is entitled Rain and things — 12 haiku, and the opening poem is rain falling especially on me (2000: 103)

Two recurring features of his haiku are apparent even from this opening poem. They often take the prescription of brevity to an extreme: this has nine syllables, one in the collection Seasons of the Heart has eight: the last leaves the first snow falling (ibid. 112)

and one in Clear Light seven: breathe in this moment breathe out (2005: 107)

(A set collectively called Football haiku in Glasgow Zen (2002: 53-62) consists each of three words, printed one below the other in large capitals (HERE / WE / GO); but his calling these “haiku” is of course simply for fun). Indeed, when one occurs which attains to normal haiku scale it stands out somewhat for this reason: damp leaves drift to earth the sun hangs tangled in the branches of a tree (2000: 88)

though this one also stands out for its assonance and alliteration (neither infrequent in the poems, but not always this conspicuous) and the prosodic contrast of the prevailing heavy syllables in the first two lines and the race of light ones in the last. The other feature is his frequent use of rain as a topic. (I trust that no-one would think of suggesting that this is a Scottishinspired aspect of his poetry: no-one having any acquaintance with Japanese poetry would, since it is a recurring image in the native tradition too.) The noise of falling rain appears frequently: the collection Seasons of the Heart includes several poems evoking rain drumming on roofs of different types and one consisting of the line “the sound of the rain” repeated three times (2000: 104); and in the later collection Clear Light it

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The Japanese Presence in Modern Scottish Poetry

is even more conspicuous and often associated with a darker mood: one poem in this set is just the cold just the rain just the night (2005: 122).

The haiku in Rain and things are imaginatively varied in form, subject matter and tone: some simply evoke a visual image of striking clarity: the dark field puddles reflect back the last light (2000: 69)

or an auditory one: the call and call of invisible seagulls in the fog (ibid. 122)

and leave it to make its own emotional impact on the reader; others record a memorably idiosyncratic subjective impression, whether by simply stating it: japanese landscapes in the damp patch on the ceiling (ibid. 72)

or by a nonce device such as punctuation: fourteen donkeys in a field fourteen donkeys! (ibid. 10)

Spence in these poems shows a sure understanding of the need for a short poem, in order to qualify as a haiku, to contain a charge of emotional and/or intellectual energy out of proportion to its size; and this is continued and developed in his later collections. In his first publication devoted entirely to haiku poetry, Seasons of the Heart, the 150 poems are arranged to suggest the sequential changing of the seasons; but the selection of images or thoughts on which to focus is as diverse, both in themselves and in the impressions they arouse, as in the earlier set. The first in the series:

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first warmth of spring I feel as if I have been asleep (2000: 1)

with no pictorial content, is of an elemental simplicity: the second, by contrast— first warmth of spring under the cracking ice the jawbone of a dog (2)

is much more complex, with its strongly tactile images (auditory too in the case of the ice), the contrasts between fragile ice and tough bone and between the life-giving power of spring warmth and the irreversible deadness of the jawbone, and the emotional shock of the unpleasant discovery in the context of returning spring. A similar, though less extreme, effect is obtained in one which follows shortly by a reference to a “yellow oil drum / bobbing down the river”; and the discordant juxtaposition of two things with opposed emotional connotations has a positive rather than negative overall effect in rainbows in the spray kicked up by the lorry (46)

Juxtaposition of this kind is combined with another recurring effect, that of repeated or strongly contrasting colours, in an autumn poem: red on red fall of dead leaves on rusting scrap (90)

The whiteness of clouds, swans and sails are associated in another poem, perhaps also with other features such as softness and instability of shape; and one begins “Grey earth, sea, sky…” and goes on to focus on a heron (which is also grey). Intensity of colour is the key image in such poems as the yellow gorse making the sky more blue (17) the grass is so very green the poppies are so very very red (30)

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and by implication, white of snow and brilliant yellow and purple of crocuses, in crocuses where last week the snow lay thick (3)

Other senses besides the visual are evoked: animal cries, the rustle of wind, the “sing” of a stone spun across ice. The familiar sound of rain is once associated with impressions of taste and smell: sipping tea burning incense listening to the rain (89)

and the device of making each line refer to a different sense impression recurs in sunlight through stained glass fragrance of oranges the sound of a bell (14)

The collections Clear Light and Morning Glory maintain this high level of artistry. Glasgow Zen (the later collection with the same title as the pamphlet, containing some of the poems in it and others) has much in a different vein, emphasising the Scottish aspect of Spence’s writing. A set of nine haiku are adaptations from Issa, using Scots; and the vastly different overtones of Scots as compared to English are at once evident. New Year— ma dump ae a hoose, jist the same (2002: 85) [New Year / my rubbish-dump of a house / just the same]

The insistent suggestion of a speaking voice—and not only that but even the facial expression of the speaker—which the Scots conveys in one sense counters the ideal of universal applicability to which a haiku poem might lay claim. Conversely, it could equally well be argued that the voice of Issa in the original poem may have been equally individual and distinctive to his original hearers (certainly the invaluable scholarly collection which was Spence’s source (Blyth op.cit.) expounds in full the differences in poetic persona among the various haiku poets), that the illusion of a generalised impersonality which a non-Japanese reader is liable to receive is an artefact of his having to read them in standard

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literary English translation, and that suddenly and unexpectedly hearing them in a Glasgow voice conveys something of the shock which the first hearing of Issa’s poems conveyed to their audience. This is another question too far-reaching for discussion here; but undoubtedly Spence’s Scots naturalisations ring true—painfully so, it may be, as in poor auld bugger beggin in the rain for a few bob; sorry pal, ah’m skint tae (91) [poor old bugger / begging in the rain / for a few shillings / sorry pal, I’m broke too]

Haikus by other poets are similarly treated: after Santoka, Spence produces among others this is me — nae money nae teeth nae nothin (111)

and his set of ten from Ryokan concludes with one of the most concentrated of all: it aw slips away lik a drunk dream — ach! (104)

Another witty and original section of the book is headed Joshu’s Mu, referring to the character ↓ (pronounced mu), which according to Spence’s note (13) means “nothing, no-thing, emptiness”18 and was given by the monk Joshu as the answer to “Does a dog have the Buddhanature?” In What is the square root of minus one? How many angels on the head of a pin? Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life and thou no breath at all? Mu. (16)

the obvious differences in status between the three unanswerable questions are by implication negated as the set is collectively dropped into nothingness; on another page of the same section, the momentous implications of mu are catapulted from the sublime to the ridiculous by

16

The Japanese Presence in Modern Scottish Poetry Does a cow have the Buddha-nature? Mu. (19)

followed on the next page by a tiny drawing of a cow with a speechbubble containing a mighty ↓.19 The individual use made by Spence of Japanese literature and philosophy results in work which is both highly entertaining and—in a variety of ways—thought-provoking. As Bruce’s poetic background is the fishing towns of the North-East and Spence’s the tenements of post-industrial Glasgow, the third and youngest of the Japanese-influenced Scottish writers we are discussing, Kevin MacNeil, comes from the Gaelic-speaking Isle of Lewis: his novel The Stornoway Way (2005) is a bleak, scathing, and crazily amusing picture of life in the agoraphobic-yet-claustrophobic, angst- and whiskyridden island community. Like Spence and unlike Bruce he has a longterm fascination with Zen and Oriental thought, and with Japanese haiku poetry and modern fiction; and the combination in his work of this with the island landscapes and Gaelic language produces, in his slim but fascinating book Love and Zen in the Outer Hebrides (1998), a remarkable blossoming of Japanese-inspired vision in its transplanted setting. The book contains a range of short pieces in a variety of formats: short stories (very short indeed—anecdotes or sketches rather than stories in some cases), poems ranging in length from a page to a few words, Gaelic poems with English translations in poetry or prose, translations from Basho and from miniature poems by Paul Claudel (a poet in whose work direct Japanese influence is a key factor). Original haiku poems form only a small proportion of the book’s contents; but though Love and Zen is not a haiku collection the interspersing of haiku among writings of other kinds is in fact a regular practice in Japanese literature, in which a common form from earliest times has been a continuous story with poems embedded in the prose passages. (This precise device appears on a miniature scale in the tiny story Hiort,20 in which the poem grandfather history pinned on your breast in a way the stars really do hold up the sky (10)

is said to have been written by the unidentified protagonist.) It appears that in the renderings from Basho the English as well as the Gaelic versions are MacNeil’s own (i.e. he has not simply taken an existing English version

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and put it into Gaelic). In one case at least, the interpretation of the Japanese differs from other English versions of the same poem. Basho’s Kono aki wa Nan de toshiyoru Kumo ni tori: 21

of which the literal word-by-word meaning is “this autumn-(topic) why grow-old cloud-to22 bird” becomes Am Foghar — fiù ’s na h-eòin is na sgòthan a’ coimhead aosda Autumn time — even the birds and the clouds seem aged (43)

Japanese nouns have no number and verbs neither number nor person distinctions (a notorious source of trouble for translators into European languages); and MacNeil’s decision to make the nouns plural may well have been prompted by the fact that it provides an attractive assonance on long o, not present in the singular form of the word for “bird” (eun); and the interpolated fiù “even” may likewise have been brought in for the alliteration. (In the English too, autumn and even show the ancientlyestablished convention of “zero alliteration”.) The Gaelic naturalisation of the poems is visible in other details too: Kyoto in a Basho haiku becomes Ceòs (in Lewis). MacNeil’s use of Scottish linguistic forms, as with other Scottish Zen poets, is integral to his poetic effects. Occasionally a poem written in standard literary English calls for a specifically Highland pronunciation: in the haiku Lewis rain, the strongly developed breaking as a result of which the word “moor” is pronounced “moo-ur” brings the syllable count to seventeen. 23 His Gaelic is marked by an occasional feature as being specifically that of Lewis; and once he makes poetic use of this: in the haiku headed A.M. ‘Dè mun a tha thu?’ Wet, your hair gleams. Heather dew. Gems. Dharmadhatu. (26)

the auditory echo of the Gaelic greeting (simply “how are you?”) in the Sanskrit word is dependent in part on the use of the Lewis dè mun…

The Japanese Presence in Modern Scottish Poetry

18

instead of the more general ciamar… 24 The phonaesthetic qualities of Gaelic are skilfully exploited, and in several cases where a poem is presented in both Gaelic and English the latter version is recognisably less effective in this respect: in the sub-haiku miniature pòg pòg fàileadh lag na mara a kiss a kiss faint smell of ocean (24)

the long vowels in the first two words,25 the repeated a (long then short), the consonance of pòg and lag and the preponderance of laterals and nasals comprise a delicate pattern with no counterpart whatever in the English; and in the rendering from Basho: càirdean air sgàradh gu bràth—geòidh caillt’ anns na sgòthan Friends separated for ever—geese lost in the clouds (43)

the three long a-s in the first half and two long o-s in the second, and the unifying alliteration on sg-, again impart a phonaesthetic quality which the English version lacks. Besides Gaelic and standard literary English, a few of the pieces are in an idiosyncratic phonetic representation of the heavily-accented English of a native Gaelic-speaker who acquired the language in adolescence or later: It woss last Wetinstay—or Thurshtay reeulee—I woss ceilidhing late meekseeng drams an chokes with old Dòmhnall Beag. Co-dhiù, at last it woss time for the off, I knew, since the peats had grown coldur than our kwee-ur fish minister. (8)

Superficially this has a humorous effect; but the fact that there are now very few such speakers, most middle-aged and all young Gaelic-speakers having acquired English simultaneously with Gaelic as they learned to speak, adds a note of poignancy by the implication that the persona’s days are numbered. When the form is used for a haiku:

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Summer in Lewis (after Buson) on the tshurtsh bell purtshd sleepeeng a butterfly (63)26

the implications become complex indeed: besides the overt addition of a place and a season in the interpolated title, this picture with its instantly recognisable patterns of contrast (small fragile insect and imposing metal bell; actual silence and potential loud noise) is now seen as epitomising summer in (rigidly Free Kirk) Lewis by a bodach whose language marks him as belonging to a past age. Still more intricate in its implications is the short monologue Uilleam Sona’s Song of Lewis (11-12), written in this register throughout: superficially it is simply a comic parody of the stereotypical drunken, maudlin, voluble Highlander; but the opening phrases “Eyeland of brinebitten stone, eyeland stedee and grey…” if written with normal orthography would suggest the opening of a seriouslyintended and skilfully-written poem; and later “O, and cam untshayntsheeng tshurtshyard, gardin of stone…” suddenly conveys (at least for some readers, and certainly for the author) the image of the Zen garden of the Ryoan-ji temple in Kyoto; and suggests that the speaker, who in reality would be most unlikely to know about this, has just happened to evoke it by accident and unwittingly bring the temple garden—of which the overtones are wholly unrelated to those of a western “churchyard”—into ironic juxtaposition with the rocky landscapes of the Outer Isles. The same juxtaposition appears in the poem East over West, which ends Lewis a humble brinescrubbed stone, sparse, uncomplex, itself enshrined in itself, the tiny jewelled stone of Scotland’s immense zen garden (68)

—which seems to be said with entire seriousness, but is uneasily undercut by the description of the speaker, a “Japanese Scotophile”, as “babbling, still high [after viewing Lewis from a helicopter].” Is the irony directed at this “wee professor”; or at the speaker of the framing narrative for her (she is addressed as Mairead) inability to see what the visitor sees or to respond to it with anything but patronising mockery? The sea is present throughout the book: sharply-focused images not only of salt water but of sand and gravel, and of the motion of boats, recur; and natural features such as wind, clouds, and the light of sun, moon and

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stars are evoked not only in themselves but in their visual effects on the sea. The pervasive sense thus evoked of the infinitesimal reflected in the infinite could be seen as suggesting a Zen-like awareness; as could the illogical but intelligible interplay of sense impressions and emotional responses in the unusual similes and metaphors, sometimes involving what appears to be synaesthesia, which also abound: laughter pure and melodious as a diamond bell (6), a moon made of skulls and bonedust (7), the ovenbread mist of her flesh (13), the skin of her palm snivelling the banister (19). Clearly it would be a crass over-simplification to imagine any kind of inherent natural sympathy between the modes of thought and perception invited by the landscapes and weather of the Western Isles and those achieved through Zen enlightenment; but MacNeil’s interest in the Oriental philosophy finds unusually apt expression through his poetic evocation of his native setting. Finally, as evidence of the comfortably integrated place that haikuinfluenced poetry now has in the Scottish literary scene, let us consider a collection entitled Atoms of Delight: an Anthology of Scottish Haiku and Short Poems. 27 The title is taken from The Atom of Delight, an autobiographical meditation by the novelist Neil Gunn (1956, repr. 1986), in which context it is a phrase coined to suggest the transcendental moments when one is overtaken by a joyous awareness and intuitive appreciation of the world, prompted by immediate sense experiences (or by memories of those) but reducible neither to them alone nor to a sum of them and ordinary intellectual understanding. Gunn’s novels, set for the most part in the Highlands (whether of a historical period or of his own lifetime) abound in startlingly realistic and vivid evocations not only of the landscapes—going beyond their outward appearance to their “feel”—but of the internal life of the characters: in many cases, those of young or adolescent boys. As The Atom of Delight makes overtly clear, those fictionalised experiences are based on Gunn’s own; but it was not till well on in his life that Gunn was introduced to Zen philosophy, and was surprised and delighted to find how readily it related to the experiences which he knew and had incorporated into his books. In the anthology, the “atoms of delight” are, by implication, simply the short poems which the book contains; but the weighty overtones of Gunn’s use of the phrase are present as a background to the collection. The book contains an extensive selection of haiku, both original and translated, by many poets including the three examined in this paper. It is, not assertively but easily and naturally, a Scottish collection. Many of the poems evoke distinctively Scottish landscapes or weather conditions; several refer to Scottish natural life, birds being notably frequent; the

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Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, in one of a set of four “Sea Runes”, makes a poetic line from the names of five rocks: The five black angels of Hoy That fishermen avoid — The Sneuk, The Too, The Kame, Rora, The Berry. (109)

A large proportion are in Scots, skilful practitioners here including Bruce Leeming, Stewart McGavin, David Purves and Sheena Blackhall.28 The distinctive sound-patterns of the language are frequently exploited for a poetic effect: Sheena Blackhall, the most accomplished living writer in North-East Doric,29 makes simple but effective use of an onomatope in Reeshlin, reeshlin, reeshlin The lang girse fuspers Memories o Spring (43) [Rustling, rustling, rustling / The long grass whispers / Memories of Spring]

and likewise in a rendering of one of the most famous of all haiku: Auld puil. Lowp-splyter! A puddock! (33) [Old pool. / Leap-splash! / A frog!]

A bird call appears in Leeming’s Dreich the day: the craws cannae fash thirsels croupin (53) [Dull today: / the crows can’t be bothered / cawing]

and another is contrasted with a different animal noise in Purves’ Up on the muir the whaups wheipils. Dounby the bul rowts. (32) [Up on the moor / the curlews whistle. Down here / the bull roars.]

and McGavin weaves an intricate pattern of repeated vowels and consonants in

22

The Japanese Presence in Modern Scottish Poetry twa scarts jist a fit abune the skinklan watter flee intil sundoon (48). [Two cormorants just a foot / above the sparkling water / fly into sunset]

Gaelic, too, appears in the anthology: Myles Campbell, one of the most respected of contemporary poets in the language, has five from a set collectively called Bailtean fo Fhraineach (Villages under Bracken), of which one includes four place names readily comprehensible to Gaelicspeakers but opaque in their English form. The importance of the anthology, however, is that the poems which are specifically identified as haiku keep company with short poems of many other forms which are equally Scottish but, for one reason or another, are not haiku. Norman MacCaig, another poet whose work is marked by intense and powerfully emotive evocations of sensorily-perceived detail, is quoted in one of the notes at the end of the book as saying to Alan Spence “Those aren’t haikus, Alan. Those are wee poems.” (196). MacCaig did not write haiku poetry and his conception of it may have differed from Spence’s: as we noted at the outset, given the fundamental incompatibility of the form with any other linguistic and cultural background than its own, there is certainly room for argument on where the boundaries of Scottish haiku are to be set. But by the assumptions which have prevailed in the compiling of this anthology, haiku in Scotland are now members of a larger class of “wee poems” to which poets who were in no respect concerned to meet any definition of haiku, and in some cases had never heard the term, have contributed. These “wee poems” are remarkably diverse. Chronologically, their range extends as far back as the seventeenth-century poet William Drummond of Hawthornden, represented by an epigram: Some, Ladies wed, some love, and some adore them, I like their wanton sport, then care not for them. (113)

and they include epigrams in similar format by modern poets, such as William Soutar’s mystical The Pool: Not only depth but stillness must be there, If the mind’s pool would show life’s image clear (114)

or Hugh MacDiarmid’s iconoclastic Nae man that wants tae hae ideas Aboot life efter daith sud wait til he dees (115).

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[No man who wants to have ideas / About life after death should wait till he dies.]

They include sections headed “Three-line poems,” “Two-line poems,” “One-line poems” and “One-word poems”: in the last group, the point of the “one-word poem” is its association with a title, as in Edwin Morgan’s A far cool beautiful thing, vanishing Blue

and the reductio ad absurdum of the trick of reducing poems to the smallest dimensions conceivable is Don Paterson’s On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him, in which the title is followed by a blank page. The heterogeneous mixter-maxter of cantrips of this kind with witty and satiric or beautiful and imaginationstirring miniatures amounts cumulatively to a unique anthology in which the application of Japanese techniques in a Scottish setting has resulted in a truly remarkable cultural fusion. From the period when Japan first opened its doors to Western cultural influence, that of Scotland and its literature has always held a place in the regard of our host nation. 30 We Scots, for our part, were slow to reciprocate this attention in any serious or productive manner; but since we eventually came to respond to the fascination of Japanese culture, we have, through its influence, developed in our own contemporary literature a small but distinctive, fascinating, and dynamic niche for Scottish poems in quasi-Japanese style. This friendly interaction of two highly individual literary cultures looks well set to prosper; and future developments may be awaited with interest.

Works Cited Blyth, R. H. 1949-52. Haiku (four volumes). Tokyo: Hokuseido Press. Print. Bruce, George. 2001. Today Tomorrow: the Collected Poems of George Bruce 1933-2000. Edinburgh: Polygon. Print. —. 2003. Through the Letterbox. Ed. Lucina Prestige, illus. Elizabeth Blackadder. Edinburgh: Renaissance Press. Print. Finlay, Alec, ed. 2000. Atoms of Delight: an Anthology of Scottish Haiku and Short Poems. Foreword by Kenneth White. Edinburgh: Canongate. Print.

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Finlay, Ian Hamilton. 2004. The Dancers Inherit the Party: Early Stories, Plays and Poems. Ed. Ken Cockburn. Edinburgh: Polygon. Print. Fox, Denton, ed. 1981. The Poems of Robert Henryson. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Print. Gunn, Neil. The Atom of Delight. 1986 (first published 1956). Foreword Diarmid Gunn, intro. John Pick, afterword Alan Spence. Edinburgh: Polygon. Print. The Haiga Pages. 2013 (14 September). Web. Henderson, Hamish. 1996. The Armstrong Nose: Selected Letters of Hamish Henderson. Ed. Alec Finlay. Edinburgh: Polygon. Print. Kusano, Shimpei. 1969. Frogs &. Others: Poems by Kusano Shimpei. Tr. Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu. New York: Grossman Publishers. Print. Leeming, Bruce. 1995. Scots Haiku. Terrington St John: Hub Editions. Print. —. 2000. Scots Haiku II. Edinburgh: Thistle Press. Print. Leonard, Tom. 2009. Outside the Narrative: Poems 1965-2009. Edinburgh and Exbourne: Word Power Books and Etruscan Books. Print. McClure, J. Derrick. 2002. “The Japanese translation of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle”, in Latitude 63 North, Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on the Literature of Region and Nation, Östersund (Sweden), August 2000. Ed. David Bell. Östersund: MidSweden University. 433-453. Print. —. 2005. “A new Japanese translation of Burns”, in Caledonia [organ of the Japan-Caledonia Society] 33. Tokyo. 35-44. Print. MacDiarmid, Hugh. 1967. Collected Poems by Hugh MacDiarmid. New York and London: MacMillan. Print. McKay, John. 2010. “‘All livin language is sacred’: Tom Leonard’s use of dialect”, in “What Countrey’s This? And Whither are we Gone?”: Papers presented at the Twelfth International Conference on the Literature of Region and Nation. Eds. J. Derrick McClure, Karoline Szatek-Tudor and Rosa E. Penna. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. 250-266. Print. MacNeil, Kevin. 1998. Love and Zen in the Outer Hebrides. Edinburgh: Canongate. Print. —. 2005. The Stornoway Way. London: Penguin Books. Print. Mansefield, Susan. 2003. “Who am I? Discover!”, in The Scotsman, December 1: 13. Accessible at http://news.scotsman.com/ViewArticle. aspx?articleid=2483428 Murray, Isobel, ed. 2002. Scottish Writers Talking 2. East Linton: Tuckwell Press. Print.

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Soutar, William. 1988. Poems of William Soutar: A New Selection. Ed. William Aitken. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Print. Spence, Alan. 1981. Glasgow Zen [pamphlet]. Glasgow: Print Studio Press. Print. —. 2000. Seasons of the Heart. Edinburgh: Canongate. Print. —. 2002. Glasgow Zen. Edinburgh: Canongate. Print. —. 2005. Clear Light. Edinburgh: Canongate. Print. —. 2006. The Pure Land. Edinburgh: Canongate. Print. —. 2010. Morning Glory. Illus. Elizabeth Blackadder. Edinburgh: Renaissance Press. Print. —. 2013. Night Boat. Edinburgh: Canongate. Print. Takahashi, Morio. 1938. Romanized Japanese-English Dictionary. Kobe: Taiseido Shobo Co. Ltd. Print. Ueda, Makoto, ed. 1982. The Master Haiku Poet Matsuo Basho. Tokyo, New York and San Francisco: Kodansha. Print.

Notes 1

My original intention was to include some discussion of the Japanese stories of Alan Spence and Michael Gardiner in this paper; but that must be left for another day. 2 Discussion of Finlay’s garden “Little Sparta” is beyond the scope of this paper, especially as the Japanese is far from the only or even the most important cultural influence which he has utilised there; but the almost minimalist simplicity of some of the sculptures, and the intimate association formed between the natural landscape and the works of art, bring an unmistakeably Japanese contribution to the overall effect. See http://www.littlesparta.co.uk/home.htm 3 Dated 23 February 1964: See Henderson 1996: 116. 4 The others are Neruda, e.e. cummings and Jean Arp. 5 Quoted from the online version. Finlay certainly used this book: one poem in Finlay 2004 (211) is referenced as an adaptation of Tatsuji Miyoshi’s Snow from it. 6 Even as a conjecture, this is provisional, as I have not ascertained which translation of Kusano’s poetry Finlay used (he did not read Japanese). The element of visual patterning is unmistakeable in Kusano 1969. 7 For the most recent discussion of this, see McKay 2010 and references therein. 8 The indispensable introduction is Blyth 1949-52. 9 The reaction of the audience at the launch of the 92-year-old poet’s collected works (Bruce 2001), at which he gave readings from his poems of all periods, will not readily be forgotten by those present. 10 Quoted as in the Bruce collection with partially modernised spellings; but the lines have variant textual readings and the last word should probably be mocht (may) rather than nocht (not); and if the reading nocht is assumed, Henryson’s

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quhill should be translated not as “while” but as “until”. For the original see Fox ed. 1981: 72. 11 Bruce’s editor Lucina Prestige, a long-term friend and neighbour and herself a writer. According to her, “He found haikus very easy. He just thought they were fun. He could write a haiku about anything. If you wanted one for your birthday, he would write your own personal haiku.” See Mansefield 2003. 12 No hint is given as to what he was playing: it is noteworthy that it is the performer, and neither the music nor its composer, who is credited with achieving the transcendental effect. 13 This is Heidelinde Prüger, a young Austrian scholar and poet who made Bruce’s acquaintance while in Scotland researching William Soutar (whose Bairnsangs she translated into Viennese dialect and published as Distln im Wind) and admired him greatly. 14 a-ra-n su-pe-n-su: the Japanese transliteration of his name, written in katakana, the form of the Japanese syllabary used for foreign words. 15 See the extended interviews in Murray 2002: 161-207 for Spence’s account of his learning experiences. 16 So far he has produced four collected volumes: Spence 2000, 2002, 2005 and 2010. Each of them contains some previously published poems: 2002 includes several of the poems in 1981, a pamphlet with the same title as the book. 17 References for haiku first published in the pamphlet Glasgow Zen are to their reprints in the later collections, for the practical reason that the latter are more readily accessible. 18 According to Takahashi 1938 it means “nothing; naught; nil; zero”: a fairly comprehensive set of translation equivalents. 19 The cow is a “beltie” and the white stripe round the midriff has no outline: the drawing consists of a black silhouette of the front end and a black silhouette of the rear end. ↓ in the midst of a Moo? 20 The Gaelic name for the island of St Kilda. 21 Ueda ed. 1982: 34. The translation given here is “This autumn / Why am I aging so? / Flying towards the clouds, a bird.” 22 Japanese has postpositions, not prepositions: that is, the ni (most often translatable as in, but here meaning to) is linked to kumo (cloud) and not to tori (bird). “The birds and the clouds” is certainly a mis-translation, as the two nouns are not co-ordinate. 23 I am grateful to the poet for pointing this out to me. 24 MacNeil glosses dharmadhatu in a note as “the universe as perceived in enlightenment, often imaged as a myriad of sparkling jewels.” Ciamar a tha thu like bonjour is known in isolation even by many people with no further understanding of the language: not so the dialect form. 25 Gaelic has phonemic length-distinctions, and long and short vowels are clearly differentiated. A word containing a long vowel cannot rhyme with one containing a short, even though the quality is identical; and the contrast between short and long vowels is a common feature of poetic sound-patterning: an example is the short a of caillte (lost) after the three long a-s in the Basho rendering quoted above.

J. Derrick McClure 26

27

The translation of this in the web site The Haiga Pages http://thegreenleaf.co.uk/hp/haigapages.htm is “clinging to the bell / he dozes so peacefully / this new butterfly” 27 Finlay ed. 2000. The excellent introductory essay sets out the background to the Scottish branch of haiku and Zen-influenced literature in detail. 28 Leeming has published his Scots haiku in independent collections (1995 and 2000), Purves and Blackhall among their other work, McGavin apparently not until this book. John MacDonald has also published both original and translated haiku in Scots, though his contributions to Atoms of Delight are all in English. 29 The initial f- for wh- in fusper is a characteristic of this dialect. 30 For brief discussions see McClure 2002 and 2005.

KYOTO AND THE LITERARY LEGACY OF CID CORMAN DANIEL BRATTON DOSHISHA UNIVERSITY

In discussing Kyoto and the literary legacy of Cid Corman, I am employing the critical approach known as narrative scholarship, by which an author challenges the purported objectivity of traditional academic writing by openly acknowledging, and indeed recording, personal experiences in researching a subject. As the name of this methodology suggests, the creative process of discovery is told as a story, a “tale” of research.1 My particular narrative, like so many of its kind, takes the form of a quest—in this case a quest that began around a decade ago, not long after I had first come to Japan to teach in southern Kyushu. I was immediately assigned a course titled Literature: East and West, and since I was new to Japan and could not presume to teach anything about Japanese literature, it seemed wise to teach something about which I at least possessed some knowledge: the Beats and the influence that the East had exercised upon their writing. One of the first texts I acquired to this purpose was Anne Waldman’s The Beat Book, which contained an appendix listing cities that had been vital settings for the Beat Generation. She included a paragraph on Kyoto, mentioning that Cid Corman had frequented a local coffee shop called The Muse. (357) While I had enjoyed the poetry of Allen Ginsberg as a teenager, I knew next to nothing about Corman, who for that matter was not really a Beat anyway. However, Waldman’s reference had piqued my curiosity, to the extent that I began reading Corman’s poetry and even contacted him at his house in Kyoto to arrange a meeting. Unfortunately, just before this was to happen I received a telephone call from Shizumi Corman, Cid’s wife. My excitement at hearing her voice was short-lived as Shizumi tearfully informed me that Cid had just died. This was in March 2004. Shortly after this time the chance arose for me to teach in Kyoto. Perhaps my main reason for coming to Kyoto was the opportunity to be in

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the city where Corman had resided for nearly forty years and to interview people who had known him. Maybe I’d even be able to sit in his favorite chair at The Muse on Kiyamachi Dǀri, or partake of cheesecake at CC’s, the Cormans’ cake shop on Muramachi Street. (Its logo, where the letters CC form Corman’s eyes in a sumi profile, was the work of Ohno Hidetaka, who plays a major role in my narrative.) I had no sooner arrived than a colleague in the English Department at Doshisha University stopped by to ask whether I’d be interested in meeting Kamaike Susumu—in this paper I observe the practice of giving Japanese surnames first—Cid’s old collaborator in translating works such as Bashǀ’s Oku-no Hosomichi, Noh plays, the Manyǀshu, Kusano Shimpei’s poetry, and other works of Japanese literature. Shortly thereafter Kamaikesensei, who had recently retired from Doshisha, appeared at my office door. By this time I had already met Shizumi Corman, having come up from Kyushu to see her prior to my move to Doshisha, where Corman himself taught for a couple of years back in the 1960s, and then visiting her with my wife shortly after our arrival. Thus, within our first few weeks in Kyoto, I had already met the two pivotal figures of my quest. This would seem a good time to interrupt my story with a sub-narrative containing some background information on Cid Corman. He was born Sidney Corman in Boston in 1924, one of four children in a Jewish immigrant family that tenanted several houses in working-class areas of Dorchester. Corman attended Boston Latin School, from which he graduated in 1941. As was the case with his two brothers, he graduated magna cum laude from Tufts College in 1945, where after he went on to graduate work in the creative writing program at the University of Michigan, where he received the Major Hopwood award in poetry, followed by further study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 1949-51 Corman broadcast on WMEX in Boston what he claimed to be the first radio program to air readings of modern poetry. His guests included Archibald MacLeish, John Crowe Ransome, Richard Wilbur, John Ciardi, and Theodore Roethke. His focus, however, was already upon the pioneer poetry of Pound-Williams-Stevens, the Objectivist school. Robert Creeley gave his first public reading on Corman’s program, initiating a friendship that would bring in Charles Olson. Olson and Creeley appeared respectively as the featured poets of the first two issues of Corman’s Origin magazine, which began publication in 1951 and continued for several decades, running into five series, as one of the leading little mags of avant-garde poetry. Donald

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Allen, who compiled and edited The New American Poetry, called it one of the two most important magazines of its time.

Figure 1: Corman on the Doshisha University campus in Kyoto, November 1958. Courtesy Shizumi Corman.

After two visits to Canada in the early 1950s that would lead to the appearance of several important Canadian poets—notably Irving Layton and Margaret Avison— in Origin, Corman set forth for Paris on a Fulbright grant in 1954. After a year in Paris he spent time in Provence, followed by two years in Italy, first in Bari and then in Matera, where he

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taught for eighteen months. Corman’s stay in Matera would lead to one of his best-known volumes of poetry, Sun Rock Man. His encounters with poets in France and Italy resulted in a number of translations and led to the featuring of several leading European avant-garde poets in Origin, but since our focus is upon Corman’s time in Kyoto, let’s move on to his decision in 1958, at the invitation of Gary Snyder and the American printmaker Will Petersen, to come to Japan. Within a month of his arrival in Kyoto Corman met Kamaike Susumu, with whom he studied Japanese and began expanding his knowledge of Japanese literature. His friend Will Petersen was already passionate about Noh, as was Kamaike, and Corman attended many Noh plays at this time, going on to study utai, the choral element of Noh, under Kawamura Takashi during the 1960s. As well, Kamaike, Snyder and Petersen brought Corman into the orbit of the Yamada Gallery in Kyoto’s Gion district. Yamada Tetsuo was an important exhibitor of leading artists such as Ohno Hidetaka Hayakawa Ikutada, Tanaka Ryohei, and Tsutaka Waichi, all four of whom Corman collaborated with, as well as Petersen, who exhibited at the Yamada Gallery during the 1960s. While he would go on record as saying that he could have written his poetry anywhere in the world, there is no doubt that the influence of these artists upon Corman through collaborative work was profound.2 One is here reminded of William Burroughs’ conception of a synergistic “third mind” greater in creative generation than the two minds from which it has formed. In the case of Corman’s collaborations with Ohno Hidetaka, this third mind created visual enactments of three words that, according to Kamaike Susumu, held the same meaning for Corman— silence, breath, and poetry. Kamaike pointed out to me the importance of positive and negative space in both Corman’s poems and Ohno’s art, a dynamic suggested in Ohno’s frontispieces to Cool Gong (1959) and Cool Melon (1959), and then fully demonstrated in Clocked Stone (1959) and All and All (1964). Ohno’s distinctive technique grew out of a visit to Horyuji Temple in Nara, where the famous frescoes on the inner walls of the Kondo (Main Hall) had been ravaged by fire in 1949: the melting pigment and physical damage to the frescoes inspired Ohno’s “Clocked Stone” technique.3 Incidentally, I have never seen this influence recorded anywhere: it was brought to my attention when Kamaike Susumu drove me to Nara to retrace the steps of a journey that Corman, Petersen and he made there back in November 1959. Kamaike took a photograph of Corman and Petersen, their backs to the camera, seated at a pond at Horyuji at the time. (See figure 3.)

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Figure 2: Corman in front of the Yamada Gallery, November 1962. Courtesy of Shizumi Corman.

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Figure 3: Corman (left) and Petersen at Horyuji, 1959. Photograph taken by Kamaike Susumu, courtesy of Shizumi Corman.

The negative space in Ohno’s “Clocked Stone” art represents the silence in Corman’s poetry (what’s not said is the silence = breath), while the image, the positive space, is “what is said.” Astutely, Will Petersen wrote Corman of Ohno on 18 February 1961: “What he has in common with Z [Louis Zukofsky] is the quiet—which means for me always the quietness of depth, strength, endurance, etc. The old Chinese word of praise: it is a quiet painting—is valid. So if people complain of a lack of conflict in your poems, tell them that what they are wanting to read, actually, is newspapers, billboards and broadsheets, not poetry. What art, anywhere, is not quiet?”

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Figure 4: One of Ohno Hidetaka's Clocked Stone prints. Collection of the author.

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Certainly Corman’s legacy can be discovered in this quietness. Chosen poetic texts in Clocked Stone (1959) and All in All (1964) are complemented by appropriate “clocked stone” prints, and in these pairings, Corman’s spare words, enveloped by the empty space of the rest of the page, are mirrored in the positive/negative space of Ohno’s images that appear opposite. This silence in Corman’s poetry can be seen as his awe at simply being alive, being able to breath. Kamaike once observed that because, to Corman, being alive was in itself a miracle, to ask questions from the LOGOS world—the sort of “discriminations” that Daisetz Susuki rejected as foolish—interrupts the awareness that all of creation is a miracle. Such questions never lead to the meaning of being alive. Being alive is enough. Hence, Corman writes in All in All, What can you tell me that a tree does not? If I lift a hand to the sky it is not to command rain. The sun is my throne and I the absent king. All these scepters teach me history.

And: THE COMPANION Speak to the moon if you would speak with an intelligence. Speak if you must but as truly under this influence. Or feel no need, too lost in light for dark to make much sense: here no one knows but lets heart flow into the one presence.

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Kyoto and the Literary Legacy of Cid Corman Always in Corman’s poetry there is his awareness of death in life: I make a poem, a silence. A small insect staggers onto the paper blinded by the white field and almost dances under my thumb. Its end is too obvious. Thus.4

Figure 5: Ohno Hidetaka (right) with Corman at one of his exhibitions at the Yamada Gallery during the 1960s. Courtesy Shizumi Corman.

Hayakawa Ikutada exercised a different but equally important influence upon Corman. A poet, artist, musician and scholar, Hayakawa not only encouraged Corman to translate Bashǀ’s Oku-no-Hosomichi but generally played a vital role in Corman and Kamaike’s choice of material for translation. Corman was strongly influenced by the exquisite taste of Hayakawa, recording at the time of his death: “Perhaps no one in our century better exemplifies the Japanese spirit in its deepest cultural

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manifestations that Ikutada.” 5 Hayakawa’s haiga (haiku-style) paintings graced the first publication of Corman and Kamaike’s translation of Okuno-Hosomichi, titled Back Roads to Far Towns and published in 1968.

Figure 6: One of Hayakawa Ikutada's Haiga-style renderings of Bashõ, with text of the opening from Oku-no-Hosomichi. Collection of the author; original art work with color.

Signifantly, Corman wrote in his remembrance, [I]t was his native culture that was his passion. But he drew from it at such depth and with such breadth of experience and feeling that what might

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Kyoto and the Literary Legacy of Cid Corman otherwise have seemed provincial had acquired a universal relevance. It had all become, within his life and sharing of it, a form of love. Who else could I have wished to help me illuminate the genius of the OKUNOHOSOMICHI?6

Figure 7: Hayakawa Ikutada (left) and Kamaike Susumu (right) with Corman at Hayakawa's home in Sagano, northwestern Kyoto. Courtesy Kamaike Susumu.

In his early days in Kyoto, Corman divided his time between the Yamada Gallery and The Muse, where he read, kept up on his voluminous correspondence, and edited Origin. It was at The Muse that he also socialized with many foreigners dropping into Kyoto, including Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth and Jerome Rothenberg. It was also at The Muse that Corman met Konishi Shizumi. He’d in fact seen her there over a period of a couple of years; Shizumi, who was a news editor for a television station in Osaka, would stop in at The Muse late at night upon coming back to Kyoto from work, or after an evening’s musical performance. Finally, Cid offered her two tickets for a cello performance, and after this their relationship developed quickly. They married in 1966. Photographs from their wedding day show Hayakawa Ikutada playing the biwa—Shizumi once mentioned to me that he had a beautiful singing voice, which surprised her because of his age and husky speaking voice. (Corman, who

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in his remembrance said that Hayakawa “resembled an aged bald panda bear,” also compared his “deep resonant voice” with that of a panda, “if it had command of a language.”)

Figure 8: Hayakawa Ikutada performing on his biwa at the Cormans' wedding. Courtesy Shizumi Corman.

By the time of his marriage, Corman had already published what were arguably his most important collaborations with Japanese visual artists, but such connections would continue to play a significant part in his life and writing. Corman had come into contact with the poet Kusano Shimpei, and their collaborative work both pre- and postdates this time. Corman’s friend Ian Hamilton Finlay, a long-time contributor to Origin magazine, had written to Corman about his fondness for Kusano’s work. Corman immediately sensed in Kusano an honest pleasure in poetry and verbal energy that he felt corresponded to his own and, with the help of Kamaike, he soon became personally acquainted with Kusano. Corman recorded that “[t]his opportunity brought me a lasting friendship with him as well as a warm cooperation in translating his poems.”7 On several occasions Kamaike-sensei remarked to me upon the “embryonic” nature of Ohno Hidetaka’s images, and this observation particularly applies to Ohno’s brushwork for Kusano Shimpei’s Selected Frogs (1963) and, more fully, Frogs &. Others (1968), both translations of Kusano’s poetry into English by Kamaike and Corman. The latter book, a

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handsome volume produced by Corman’s friend Eric Sackheim for Mushinsha in Tokyo, contained not only Ohno’s illustrations, still very much of his “Clocked Stone” phase, but also original artwork by Kusano, whose distinctive calligraphy was already highly valued in Japan. Although New Directions’ publication of Asking myself/answering myself in 1984, which contained some poems from Frogs &. Others, allowed Corman and Kamaike’s translations of Kusano to reach a wider audience, the exclusion of visual art in this paperback forcefully reminds us of the essential function of Ohno and Kusano’s art work in Frogs &. Others. Visual art also played an essential role in the final translation of Kusano’s work by Corman and Kamaike, eighteen of Kusano’s poems on Mt. Fuji, illustrated with woodcut prints by the renowned artist Munakata Shiko. Munakata was in fact Kusano’s old friend; Shizumi Corman told me that the two grew up in the same village.

Figure 9: Kusano Shimpei at CC's in Kyoto. Courtesy of Shizumi Corman.

At the time in the late 1960s that Corman’s translations of Bashǀ and Kusano were appearing, he had completed another collaborative project with a Japanese artist, Tanaka Ryohei, another habitué of the Yamada Gallery, who later married into the Yamada family. Most readers are unlikely to find a copy of this production, however, for Hearth, published by Corman’s Origin Press in Kyoto in 1968, was limited to only 100 copies, numbered and signed

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by the author, with three etchings in each copy signed by the illustrator—and today these sell for thousands of dollars. Their value lies not only in their scarcity and exquisite production but also in Tanaka’s reputation, for his work can be found in the Fogg Museum of Harvard University, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Cleveland Museum, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as a number of other museums and private collections. Tanaka’s etchings of Japanese landscapes—in particular thatched wara-buki houses, for which he is best known—evoke the simplicity and beauty of the Japanese hearth, a time-honored tradition of domestic life that was at this time rapidly eroding with the onslaught of industrial expansion and Westernization. In marked contrast to Tanaka’s representational art are the abstract illustrations that Cid’s close friend Tsutaka Waichi contributed to Corman’s Any How (1976). Tsutaka’s sensitivity to natural surroundings foregrounds his black-and-white abstract illustrations for Corman’s poems. As in Ohno Hidetaka’s work, Tsutaka’s positive and negative spaces enact the “silence, breath, and poetry” of Corman’s art. The images are, in Kamaike’s words, “what’s said.” The negative space can be seen as representing mu, or emptiness. However, Kamaike has pointed out that while mu is the opposite of fullness, Corman’s use of this term was paradoxical, for “mu is like two magnetic poles: each has strong power to pull the other—just like the universe; earth itself turns in that balance.” Ohno Hidetaka’s representation of space expresses this balance, as does Tsutaka Waichi’s. Corman remarked during a radio interview that mu is in fact “fullness. The empty space that you start from is the vastness, is the infinite. And you mustn’t lose it. You’re living it. . . . You’re undergoing words. Without you there’s no poem. My poems are meant to shock you back into where you are. This. Where it is. Now. This is poetry.”8 Sadly, Tsutaka Waichi died in his studio during the Great Hanshin Earthquake in January 1995, crushed by his own artistic work. According to Shizumi Corman, Cid was devastated by Tsutaka’s death—one feels this immense sorrow in listening to a BBC documentary on the Great Hanshin Earthquake that he narrated—and this event marked the closing chapter in his collaborations with Japanese visual artists. However, my story would not be complete without further mention of Will Petersen, Corman’s friend and managing editor of the second series of Origin magazine. While my focus has been upon Corman’s collaborations with Japanese artists, any discussion of Kyoto and Cid’s literary legacy should include Will Petersen: Kamaike Susumu once told me that no other foreigner of their generation had a deeper understanding of Japanese culture than did Petersen.

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Figure 10: Tsutaka Waichi's art and Corman's poetry in Any How ; permission the estate of Tsutaka Waichi

Figure 11: Petersen performing shimai in Kyoto. Photo courtesy Ami Petersen.

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There’s a beautiful little hand-bound edition of Corman’s poems, titled In No Time, that Petersen edited and produced in his studio in Yase, north of Kyoto, in 1963, after he and his family had moved into Gary Snyder’s old house up there. Each copy contains one of Will’s own “stoneprints.” The next year, each copy of Origin 2.13 (April 1964) contained one of Petersen’s prints. In 1961 Petersen wrote Corman of ma, which roughly translates into English as “empty” or “gap”—“the space between two parts”: [M]a is interval. The interval removed, missing. No sense of emptiness pause, nothingness, concentration on the form, missing the space. . . . An interesting word, eh. And useful, used in its original sense, in speaking of music, painting, poetry. . . .The ma, or ku, mu is probably what chiefly differentiates oriental thought from that of the west. . . .9

If, as Will Petersen observed, form is emptiness, then Corman’s collaborations with artists such as Ohno and Tsutaka, where the words or images are balanced by silence or negative space, are essentially enactments of the emptiness of form. It is an emptiness that, like the silence of the shite on a Noh stage, or an interval in the dialogue of Ozu’s Tokyo Story, is paradoxically a fullness. From this perspective, any thing is a suitable subject for a Corman poem—and here again I think we are at the heart of Corman’s literary legacy. In conclusion, it seems appropriate to mention my good fortune in coming to Kyoto when I did. Not only was I able to spend a good deal of time with Shizumi Corman and Kamaike Susumu, but also I was able to visit a number of places that proved painful reminders of Buddhistic impermanence. For example, I had only been in Kyoto a short while when Shizumi told me that her niece had just visited and informed her that The Muse was about to close its doors forever. I arrived there at the same time as the moving vans and carpenters but was fortunate to come away with two cups and saucers, as well as a number of digital photographs of both the interior and exterior. Similarly, anybody intent on visiting CC’s had better hurry up: it is now run by Shizumi-san’s younger sister Sachiko, who at 77 is thinking of closing up shop. Saddest of all, Shizumi Corman has now passed away. The days when Cid held poetry readings on the second floor of CC’s are already a distant memory to Kyoto old-timers, both foreign and Japanese. Gone is the time when visitors could sit down and discuss poetry over coffee, the first cheesecake in Japan, pecan pie, bagels and lox, or homemade ice cream. However, Corman’s literary legacy remains. There is nothing quite like a Cid Corman poem, and in spite of his disclaimers,

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one cannot help but to feel that his experiences in Kyoto, particularly his collaborations with Japanese visual artists, are inseparable from this legacy.

Figure 12: Corman relaxing at CC's. Photo courtesy of Shizumi Corman.

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Notes 1 Stephanie Sarver notes on the web site of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) that whereas in traditional academic writing “the storytelling is extracted from the text and submerged in a parallel narrative of footnotes and citations,” in narrative scholarship this parallel narrative of research is lifted into the text, “where we participate in the author’s process of discovery and analysis.” 2 Other exhibitors at the Yamada Gallery included Motonaga Sadamasa, Morita Shiryu, Nomura Ko, Sunohara Takehiko, Sugiura Kazutoshi, Tanaka Moritsura, Tsuji Shindo, and Yagi Kazuo, as well as Western artists S. MacDonald-Wright and Urban Couch. 3 Corman ascribed the term “clocked stone” to his friend the painter Barnet Rubenstein, with whom, along with Rubenstein’s wife, Edwina Curtis, he had stayed in Provence during the mid-1950s. Rubenstein illustrated Corman’s A Table in Provence (Origin Press, 1959), while Curtis produced the cover design for his Stances & distances. (Origin Press, 1957). 4 Cid Corman, All in All. Drawings by Ohno Hidetaka. Kyoto: Origin Press, 1964. All in All does not have numbered pagination. 5 Cid Corman, “A Note on Hayakawa Ikutada” 2. Corman’s three-page remembrance of Hayakawa is in the Corman Mss. III collection (Box 60) of the Lilly Rare Book Library of Indiana University and is quoted by permission. 6 Corman, “A Note on Hayakawa Ikutada,” 3. 7 Cid Corman, “On Translation of Shimpei Kusano’s Poems—the Power of the Sun and Atmosphere,” Mugen 28 (April 1970), n.p. 8 “Poet Cid Corman,” Poems to a Listener. By Henry Lyman. WFCR-FM. October 1980. 9 Will Petersen, personal letter to Cid Corman, 17 July 1961. Quoted by permission of The Lilly Library. It is well known in Japan that the headstone of the filmmaker Ozu Yasujirǀ contains the kanji (character) for Mu.

Works Cited Bashǀ, Matsuo. Back Roads to Far Towns: Bashǀ’s Oku-no-Hosomichi. Trans. and notes by Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu. Illustrated by Hayakawa Ikutada. New York: Grossman, 1968. Print. Corman, Cid. “A Note on Hayakawa Ikutada.” The Lilly Library, Indiana University. Manuscript. —. All in All. Drawings by Hidetaka Ohno. Kyoto: Origin Press, 1964. Print. —. Any How: Drawings by Waichi Tsutaka, with Poems by Cid Corman. Nagoya: Kisetsuha, 1976. Print. —. Clocked Stone. Drawings by Hidetaka Ohno. Ashland, MA: Origin Press, 1959. Print.

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—. Cool Gong. Frontispiece by Hidetaka Ohno. Ashland, MA Origin Press, 1959. Print. —. Cool Melon. Frontispiece by Hidetaka Ohno. Ashland, MA: Origin Press, 1959. Print. —. Hearth. Ilustrated by Tanaka Ryohei. Kyoto: Origin Press, 1968. Print. —. “On Translation of Shimpei Kusano’s Poems—the Power of the Sun and Atmosphere.” Mugen 28 (April 1970), n.p . —. “Poet Cid Corman.” Poems to a Listener. By Henry Lyman. WFCRFM. October 1980. Audiocassette. Kamaike, Susumu. Personal interviews. 30 Oct. 2008, 14 Oct. 2009 & 4 Aug. 2010. Kusano, Shimpei. Asking myself/answering myself. Trans. Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu. New York: New Directions, 1984. Print. —. frogs &. others: poems by Kusano Shimpei. Trans. Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu. New York: Grossman, 1968. Print. Petersen, Will. Personal letters to Cid Corman. 18 Feb. & 17 July 1961. Cid Corman Collection, The Lilly Library, Indiana University. Sarver, Stephanie. “Narrative Scholarship.” Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism. ASLE. Web. 9 Feb. 2010. Waldman, Anne, ed. The Beat Book: Poems & Fiction from the Beat Generation. Boston: Shambhala, 1996. Print.

TRANSLATION AS RE-CREATION: AN APPROACH TO BORGES’S POETRY AND PROSE ROSA E. PENNA PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA ARGENTINA

El error consiste en que no se tiene en cuenta que cada idioma es un modo de sentir el universo o de percibir el universo. — Jorge Luis Borges1

Borges: poetry, literatures and translations The focus of this essay is not going to be on how Borges has been translated, nor will it be on how Borges himself translated books and poems written by others, or how he gave his opinion, when he reviewed books, on the translations of others (for example on Leon Felipe’s translation of Whitman’s poetry2). The word “translation” is in the title of the essay because Borges often spoke about the act of translating, which he considered “re-creating.” A “re-creation” is not a translation. In fact, Felipe’s ‘translations’ of Whitman have become, in a way, re-creations of the American poet in Spanish, and as such they are inferior to the English original. The haiku which Borges wrote, for instance, are not translations from the Japanese, but his own re-creations of a poetic form that he had read, or heard read (one needs to remember that for most of his creative period Borges was almost completely blind and that he depended on the eyes and voices of others). Any discussion of Borges’s ideas and personal history as a writer should start with a long article published by him in English in The New Yorker in September 1970. Jorge Luis Borges was born in a house in downtown Buenos Aires in 1899, but his ancestors on his father’s side came from Northumberland and the Midlands. He used to say that this fact linked him to a Saxon and perhaps a Danish past.3 For Borges the memories of his father were connected to the English language and its literature, as he writes in the “Autobiographical Notes”:

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Translation as Re-creation His idols were Shelley, Keats and Swinburne .... It was he who revealed the power of poetry to me - the fact that words are not only a means of communication but also magic symbols and music. When I recite poetry in English now, my mother tells me, I take on his very voice. (Borges and di Giovanni 41)

Words are a means to communication, but also the way to obtain things through magic or to please the ear as music. We are reminded that when Borges recited, he unconsciously recreated the sound of his father’s voice. English and Spanish were the languages used by his father to read. Most of Borges’s own early reading was in the English language. The first novel he read was Huckleberry Finn. Don Quixote was also first read in English, and he comments: “When later I read Don Quixote in the original it sounded like a bad translation to me” (42). This mixing up of “original words” and “translated words” will reappear again and again in various ways in Borges’s work, and one needs to be on the alert for them. Borges wrote for a survey carried out by a journal in September 1975: The translation of poetry, in the case of Fitzgerald or of Omar Khayyam, for example, is possible because the work can be re-created, taking the text as pretext. I believe another way of translation is impossible, above all when one thinks that within the same language translation is impossible. Shakespeare is untranslatable to another English not his. (Borges en Sur 321; my translation)

To take the text as pretext for the writer’s own creations is an idea that Borges seems to have been playing with and realizing in a number of ‘variations on the theme’ during the 60s and 70s. In 1967 Borges was invited to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University. The fourth lecture (28 February 1968), entitled “Word-Music and Translation,” is centered on the problems of rendering words and thoughts, or in the case of poetry, sense and sound, from one language into another, and on whether this is at all possible. His lecture is filled with examples, such as the translation of a common Latin tag, “Ars longa, vita brevis” (“Art is long, life is short”). Geoffrey Chaucer, who translated this into English in the 14th century, was considered “le grand translateur” (“the great translator”) by his French contemporary Eustache Deschamps (according to the ballad he wrote in his honour). Borges comments about the first line of Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls, “The life so short, the craft so long to learn,” that: Here we get not only the statement but also the very music of wistfulness. We can see that the poet is not merely thinking of the arduous art and of the brevity of life; he is also feeling it. This is given by the apparently

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invisible, inaudible keyword – the word “so,” “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.” (This Craft 62)

Then comes a commentary on Roy Campbell’s rendering of a poem by St John of the Cross. The translator in this case cannot achieve what was expressed in the Spanish original, since this was supposed to be the communication of an unutterable mystic experience which could only be conveyed somehow in metaphors. Borges goes on to say: The difference between a translation and the original is not a difference in the texts themselves. I suppose if we did not know which was the original and which was the translation, we could judge them fairly. But, unhappily, we cannot do this. And so the translator’s work is always supposed to be inferior – or, what is worse, is felt to be inferior – even though, verbally, the rendering may be as good as the text. (65)

Borges then discusses the problem of “literal translation”: “When I speak of ‘literal’ translation, I am using a wide metaphor, since, if a translation cannot be true word for word to the original, it can still less be true letter for letter.” From the examples he provides, I will mention one which illustrates the point he wants to convey very well: how false emphases are created by this kind of translation: Matthew Arnold pointed out that if a text be translated literally, then false emphases are created. I do not know whether he came across Captain Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights; ... For Burton translates Quitab alif laila wa laila as Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, instead of Book of the Thousand and One Nights. This translation is a literal one. It is true word for word to the Arabic. Yet it is false in the sense that the words “book of the thousand nights and a night” are a common form in Arabic, while in English we have a slight shock of surprise. And this, of course, has not been intended by the original. (67) 4

Borges gives some more examples; and towards the end of his lecture he comes to a kind of conclusion, where we are again reminded that good translations were once regarded as “re-creations”: I have always wondered about the origin of literal translations. Nowadays we are fond of literal translations; in fact, many of us accept only literal translations, because we want to give every man his due. That would have seemed a crime to translators in ages past. They were thinking of something far worthier. They wanted to prove that the vernacular was as capable of a great poem as the original .... All throughout the Middle Ages, people thought of translation not in terms of a literal rendering, but in terms of something being re-created. Of a poet’s having read a work and

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Translation as Re-creation then somehow evolving that work from himself, from his own might, from the possibilities hitherto known of his own language. (71-72)5

Reading in one language causes an “evolution” in the reader whereby he comes to discover the possibilities of his own language (perhaps “unknown” instead of “known” would be clearer?) as the foreign word finds “echoes” in the native language. As the years went by, Borges remained consistent in his thoughts about “the art of the translator.” Answering a question in a public discussion at Dickinson College (the Morgan Lectures) in April 1983, he said: I think a translator should be a poet in his own right. The classic example, of course, is Edward Fitzgerald; he took several pieces from a Persian astronomer and turned them into a single poem. But I think a poem should be recreated. If not, the whole thing is merely pedantic. The poet has to recreate – things. And that happens many times, I suppose. (in Cortinez 85)

Re-creating poetry and prose: Borges’s brevity and two Japanese poetic forms As Ronald Christ has pointed out, brevity is the most outstanding quality of all Borges’s writings. He says: “His brevity is essential to his art, it is wholly intentional and is neither the result of his inability to sustain himself nor of the triviality of his themes nor of the fragmentary nature of his artistic vision” (5-6). Biographical details such as his ill-health and failing eye-sight have little to do with his brevity. Christ has also noticed that Borges’s goal was to write stories that epitomize and suggest rather than stories that detail and exhaust (7). A device used to this end is the use of few adjectives and the repeated use of the same ones. Another characteristic device is the suppression of intervening sentences to mark transitions (18). In his book Other Inquisitions, Borges writes: “I cannot walk through the outskirts of town in the solitude of night without thinking that nighttime, like memory, pleases us because it suppresses idle details” (quoted in Christ 10). Brevity, verbal concision, corresponds then to a principle of memory, a fact not surprising when one realises that most of Borges’s work was written when his eyesight was either poor or almost non-existent. He makes clear in “Profession of Literary Faith” that the writer’s task is to write at least one page that can stand for his entire literary output: I have already overcome my poverty; I have recognized, among thousands the nine or ten words that accord with my heart. I have already written

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more than one book in order to be able to write, perhaps, a single page. The justifying page, which may be an abbreviation of my destiny. (quoted in Christ 11)

Christ comments that “the goal of abbreviation justifies Borges’s own use of epigrams and his love of encyclopedias, dictionaries, maps, and atlases, all of which figure prominently in his stories as résumés of the universe” (11). But using brevity in this way does not limit Borges’s writings; it opens them to allusions – references to other times and spaces. Brevity might be, at least partly, at the heart of Borges’s relation to Japanese literature, not only when it comes to his use of two literary poetic forms, haiku and tankas, and this might be said to date as far back as 1935. That year Borges published Historia universal de la infamia (Universal History of Infamy) which includes a prose story three pages long, “El incivil maestro de ceremonias Kotsuké no Suké” (in Obras completas 320323). He gives as his source A.B. Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan (London 1912), and he declares: “I follow the telling [Spanish “relación”] by A.B. Mitford who omits the continuous distractions that work the local colour and prefers to attend to the movement of the glorious episode. That good omission of ‘orientalism’ leaves the suspicion that it is a direct version from the Japanese” (320; my translation). Mitford´s story, “The Fortyseven Rônins,” comes first in the 1910 edition of the book, but it had been published before in the Fortnightly Review according to what Mitford says in the 1871 Preface to the first edition of his book.6 Thus what is probably Borges´s first use of Japanese literature came through a ‘translation’ into English or a ‘retelling’ of the rônin story by Mitford. Daniel Balderston points out an interesting detail in an article in 1988, namely that “Mitford´s tale ends with a bloody sequel [whereas] Borges ends the story with the idea that the sequel is the retelling of the story itself” (1988: 70).7 Borges travelled twice to Japan, in 1979 at the invitation of the Japan Foundation (Kokusai Koryukikin), and again in 1983. Prior to his first trip, in 1972 he had published six tanka in his book, El oro de los tigres (The Gold of the Tigers). He concludes the Prologue to this collection of poems by saying: “As regards the influences to be noticed in this volume ... In the first place, the writers I prefer – I have already mentioned Robert Browning; then those I have read and which I repeat; then those I have never read but which are inside me. A language is a tradition, a way of feeling reality, not an arbitrary repertoire of symbols” (Obra poética 1997, 360; my translation). Borges included a short notice at the end of the book, explaining what he had in mind with these tankas: “I wanted to adapt to our prosody the Japanese stanza which consists of a first line of five syllables, one of seven, one of five and the two last ones of seven. Who

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knows how these exercises will sound to Oriental ears. The original form also does without rhymes” (410). I shall quote “Tanka 6,” and then comment on what Borges himself said about it. (Note that the poem consists of 31 syllables): No haber caído Como otros de mi sangre En la batalla. Ser en la vana noche El que cuenta las sílabas.

Not to have fallen Like others of my blood In battle. To be in the vain night The one who counts the syllables. (367)

In 1979, in his recorded conversations with Antonio Carrizo, Borges commented that implied in the poem was the fate of his military grandfather, “the Combate de la Verde, in ’74. And then myself, just the one who counts the syllables . . . . precisely the syllables of this poem, from the one who is composing the poem. And in the ‘vain night’: the night is not vain, I am the vain one.” There are two further references worth quoting in full, since they only appear here: Probably my tankas will not be tankas to a Japanese ear. I have done what I could. But maybe the differences with our language are so great that the barrier is unsurmountable.

And later on: Now I know that a Japanese read these tankas and believed that one of them was a translation from the Japanese. He looked for it in an anthology he had, this for me is the greatest praise, isn’t it? He realized that the other ones were occidental, merely that. But of one of them he thought it might be my version or one version of the original. Which means that I had caught the tone or what one expects from a tanka. (in Carrizo 303-305; my translation)

I will quote another tanka, which might be the one that was taken for a translation. Of the six it is the most impersonal: there are no personal pronouns or first- or second-person verbs, although the first person is somehow implied. 5. Triste la lluvia Que sobre el mármol cae, Triste ser tierra. Triste no ser los días Del hombre, el sueño, el alba.

Sad the rain Which on the marble falls, Sad to be earth. Sad not to be the days of man, the dream, the dawn. (367)

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Later on, in 1981, in the book La cifra (The Cypher), Borges included several poems related to Japan. The literary journal Umi published in Japanese the poem “Shinto” translated by Tadashi Tsutsumi (together with Hajime Shinoda they were the translators of Borges’s work in the 1980s). Tsutsumi pointed out then how Borges´s fantastic and metaphysical world is constituted by his deep knowledge of literature, philosophy, religions and mythologies of all times and places. A variety of elements is interwoven in his work “sometimes as translation, others as recreation” (see Gasió 140). Among the other poems related to Japan I shall briefly refer to some of the seventeen haiku and to the poem “Nihon.

Some of Borges’s haikus and “Nihon” 6.

Oscuramente libros, láminas, llaves siguen mi suerte

Darkly books, pictures, keys follow my fate.

8.

En el desierto acontece la aurora. alguien lo sabe.

In the desert dawn happens. Somebody knows it.

3.

Es o no es el sueno que olvidé antes del alba?

Is it or isn’t it the dream I forgot before dawn?

13.

Bajo la luna la sombra que se alarga es una sola.

Under the moon the lengthening shadow is only one.

14.

Es un imperio Is it an empire esa luz que se apaga, that dwindling light o una luciérnaga? or a firefly? (Obra poética 1989, 631-633; my translations)

Borges’s use in the poem of nouns and few verbal actions, and his preference for the verb “to be” are noteworthy. During a lecture given in Buenos Aires on 8 July 1985, Borges referred to the surprise he felt when he was in Japan for the first time and he realized that his books had been translated into Japanese characters (“vertidos en caracteres”): “I thought, what a strange luck they have, I wish something similar to that happened to me, to be able to enter that language, that culture, in the beautiful labyrinth which Japan is” (Gasió 152; my translation).

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The prose poem, “Nihon,” also in this late book of poems, The Cypher (in Obra poética 1989) elaborates on the subject of labyrinths which the poet has not been able to enter: the first two paragraphs refer to mathematical and philosophical languages, the fourth one to life events similar to those of his ancestors. I shall quote only the third, and longest, which refers to Japan: From mountains which prefer, like Verlaine, the hue to the colour, from writing, which exercises insinuations and ignores hyperboles, from gardens where water and stone matter no less than grass, from tigers painted by some who never saw a tiger and they give us almost the archetype, from the way of the honour, the bushido, from a nostalgia of swords, from bridges, mornings and shrines, from a music which is almost the silence, from your crowds in a low voice, I have perceived your surface, oh Japan. In that delicate labyrinth ... [it was not given me to enter]. (in Obra poética 635-636; my translation)

This last sentence is repeated at the end of each of the paragraphs, but in this one it is not completed. This essay began by mentioning circumstances relating to Borges´s family, his readings, his ways of retelling stories and pages which he had read somewhere or other, his ways of writing poetry. It then considered some of his thoughts on what “translations” mean and do to readers and writers, perhaps having as a basis the thought expressed in the epigraph about languages being ways of feeling the universe, of perceiving the universe. The important thing about any literary text is that we may be allowed to perceive beauty, no matter what words in what language are used. In the same 1968 Harvard lecture quoted at the beginning, Borges said: Now we are worried by circumstances … I think we may perhaps suppose that a time will come when men shall care very little about the accidents and circumstances of beauty; they shall care for beauty itself. Perhaps they shall not even care about the names or the biographies of poets. This is all to the good, when we think that there are whole nations who think this way. (75)

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Notes 1

In English: “The mistake consists in not taking into account that each language is a way of feeling the universe or of perceiving the universe.” 2 When considering the different possible approaches to the topic “Borges and translation”, besides the many articles available in print or on the web, one should bear in mind at least two books: Sergio Waisman’s Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 2005), and Efrain Kristal’s Invisible Work: Borges and Translation (Nashville: Vanderbilt U.P., 2002). 3 In his book of poems, El otro, el mismo, there are several poems which refer to Saxon poets or to the Anglo-Saxon world, e.g. “A un poeta sajón,” “Composición escrita en un ejemplar de la gesta de Beowulf,” “Hengist cyning,” “Al iniciar el estudio de la gramática anglosajon’”. 4 Borges had already mentioned the discussion between Matthew Arnold (18221888) and Francis W. Newman (1805-1897) about “whether a translation should be faithful to the letter or to the spirit of the original, with the assumption that it is impossible to be faithful to both” (Waisman 85, who is quoting from Borges’s Obras Completas I, 241-243). 5 Many years before this, at the beginning of his literary career, Borges wrote a note in the newspaper La Prensa (Buenos Aires), 1 August 1926. The title, “Las dos maneras de traducir” (“The two ways of translating”), referred to two practices, that of a literal translation, preferred by romantic minds and the other one, preferred by classical minds, using periphrasis. He analyzes each of them, ending with the romantic one: “Esa reverencia del yo, de la irreemplazable diferenciación humana que es cualquier yo, justifica la literalidad en las traducciones. Además, lo lejano, lo forastero, es siempre belleza. Novalis ha enunciado con claridad ese sentimiento romántico: ‘La filosofía lejana resuena como poesía. Todo se vuelve poético en la distancia: montes lejanos, hombres lejanos, acontecimientos lejanos y lo demás. De eso deriva lo esencialmente poético de nuestra naturaleza’ (Werke, III, 213)” (Textos 258). 6 See www.gutenberg.org/files/13015/13015-h/1305-h.htm#page1. Mitford´s complete name is Algernon Bertram Freeman Mitford (1837-1916). Notice the dates of the different versions of his book: 1871, 1910 (Gutenberg Internet version), and 1912 (date given by Borges). 7 Balderston comments: “Borges´s open-ended conclusion, which consists of the telling and retelling of a story of infamy, derives its power in large measure from our recognition that we share in the events told: that we too are marked by the story much as Kotsuké no Suké was” (70; my emphasis).

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Works Cited Balderston, Daniel. “The Mark of the Knife: Scars as Signs in Borges.” The Modern Language Review 83.1 (Jan 1988): 67-75. Print. Borges, Jorge L. Borges en Sur. Buenos Aires: Emecé editores, 1999. Print. —. Elogio de la sombra. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1969 Print. —. El otro, el mismo. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1969. Print. —. Obra poética. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1977. Print. —. Obra poética. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1989. Print. —. Obras completas (1923-1949) Tomo I. Buenos Aires: Emecé 1989, 287-345. Print. —. Textos recobrados 1919-1929. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1997. Print. —. This Craft of Verse. Ed. Calin-Andrei Mihailescu. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000. Print. Borges, Jorge L., and Norman Thomas di Giovanni. “Autobiographical Notes.” The New Yorker (19 September 1970): 40-99. Print. Carrizo, Antonio. Borges el memorioso: Conversaciones de Jorge L. Borges con Antonio Carrizo. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1983. Print. Christ, Ronald. The Narrow Act: Borges’ Art of Allusion. New York: Lumen Books, 1995. Print. Cortínez, Carlos, ed. Borges the Poet. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986. Print. Gasió, Guillermo. Borges en Japón, Japón en Borges. Buenos Aires: Eudeba,1988. Print. Mitford, A.B. Tales of Old Japan . London, 1912. —. Tales of Old Japan. In: www.gutenberg.org/files/13015/13015-h/1305-h.htm#page1 Web 10 July 2010. Waisman, Sergio. Borges and Translation: the Irreverence of the Periphery. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005. Print.

EARLY ENCOUNTERS WITH ISLAM AND ROYALL TYLER’S THE ALGERINE CAPTIVE MICHELE BOTTALICO UNIVERSITY OF SALERNO

Looking at one of the best known paintings by Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Youth (1841), the viewer is struck by a cloudy building hovering in the sky and probably symbolizing over-confident youthful imaginings and aspirations. Usually referred to by art historians as a ghostly “castle,” unlike the neoclassic fabrics that appear so frequently in Cole’s paintings, that building with a towering dome looks more like an Oriental temple which can be Hindu, Muslim, or Jewish, but surely not American or European. No wonder, though. An early, embryonic form of Orientalism, a veiled and contradictory interest in the East and the desire to have exotic objects to decorate houses and public buildings, started in America in the 18th century and became widespread in the following century. To mention just an example, two paintings of colonial America – John Smibert’s Dean Berkeley and His Entourage (1729-30) and Robert Feke’s Isaac Royall and Family (1741) – already showed in the foreground Anatolian carpets used as table-coverings, attesting that wealthy merchants and entrepreneurs boasted a taste for Oriental ornaments that spoke for the importance of their owners. Eastern carpets, pottery, chinaware and textiles, came mainly from Salem, Massachusetts, which at that time was a thriving seaport and trade centre, then it slowly declined in the 19th century when was eclipsed by Boston and New York, as mentioned by Hawthorne in “The Custom House.” At Salem, in 1799 the Peabody Essex Museum was founded to preserve a large collection of Japanese, Korean, Chinese and African art, among others, which deeply influenced the taste of the Americans in the newly born Republic. In the visual arts, even keener was the interest in Eastern cultures of such a cosmopolitan painter as John Singer Sargent, worth mentioning as the most outstanding of many 19th-century examples, who painted a number of

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pictures inspired from the landscapes and the everyday life of Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Persia. From a literary point of view, a great contribution to the Orientalist discourse was given by the first European version of The One Thousand and One Nights, translated into French by Antoine Galland in 1704 and later followed by many English translations that gave rise to the fashion of the Oriental “supernaturalist” tale in England and in other European countries. In the United States, these translations became largely available and popular, and in the 1790’s at least three American editions of the book were published, which encouraged the vision of Islamic lands as places of Eastern opulence and sensual enjoyment.1 A couple of decades later, a number of English Oriental and visionary tales of the Romantic era, as well as Thomas Moore’s poetical romance Lalla Rookh (1817), became bestsellers in America. They increased the curiosity about the East viewed as the embodiment of an exotic otherness rich in many promises of both fancy inspiration and material wealth. All this is part of a sort of Oriental obsession to which also the encounters with Islam belong. In a complex and contrasting pattern of uncritical fascination, repulsion and/or rejection, and partial acceptance, actually the cultural interactions with Islamic countries started even earlier than the 18th century and laid the foundations of the identity process of America. It is often disregarded, for instance, that Captain John Smith, before sailing for Virginia, fought against the Turks in Hungary, was sold into slavery to a Muslim woman, then sent to her brother in Tartary in order to be initiated to Muslim chivalry. The woman fell in love with Smith, but eventually he was able to escape and reach Virginia. Thus, as Timothy Marr rightly remarks, Smith’s experience in the Islamic orient prefigured his attitudes toward the people and places of America and foreshadowed his celebrated experiences with Pocahontas. […] His distinctive cross-cultural experiences reveal how old world patterns of disdaining “others” were imported into new world spaces as a strategy to situate the strangeness of cultural difference. His narrative also demonstrates how control over the “infidel,” often through violence, was constitutive of both Christian identity and noble masculinity. (Marr 3)

One more meaningful example of early encounter with Islam is that of the English-born Quaker preacher Mary Fisher (1623-1698). Banned from Boston in 1656, she ventured to the lands of the Ottoman empire to preach the gospel to Sultan Mehmed IV, whom she eventually visited in Adrianople (Hodgkin 339-357). Her experience was later narrated in a few letters and reshaped into a literary myth by other authors, including

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Nathaniel Hawthorne in “The Gentle Boy” (1831), 2 and it made the Americans aware of the receptivity of the Sultan as well as of the potential for evangelizing Muslim people. In the current revision of American history, Fisher’s journey testifies that the American colonies were not at all isolated from the rest of the world but, rather, they were exposed to a series of cross-cultural relations particularly with Islam, given the great power of the Ottoman empire which at that time was “the political center of the first orient to be encountered by Westerners moving East” (Marr 9). In addition to physical encounters with the Islamic world, a rather inaccurate translation of the Koran from French, done by the English Alexander Ross (1649), circulated in the American colonies from the second half of the 17th century and gave rise to lively polemics among intellectuals; the first American edition of this text was published as The Koran: Commonly Called AlCoran of Mahomet in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1806. A more reliable translation from Arabic by George Sale (1734), annotated and rich in biblical comparisons, was also widely in use. To different degrees, the long introductions to both versions helped in shaping early American misconceptions and hostility toward the Muslims which, in Fuad Sha’ban’s view, were mostly due to the influence of European thought. Nevertheless, a few critical voices against the misinterpretation of Mohammedan institutions and principles were not missing, particularly in the first half of the 19th century (Sha’ban 28-31). The Koran was not only a religious book but also a corpus of laws, thus it roused deep curiosity in many learned Americans concerned with religious and legal issues in the colonies. It is known, for instance, that Thomas Jefferson purchased a copy of Sale’s translation of the Koran in 1765, when he was still busy with legal studies at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, because of his interest in natural law and in the history of religion: “Jefferson acquired his Qur’Ɨn not long after the injustice of the Stamp Act had forced him to question seriously the heritage of English constitutional law and to seek ultimate answers in the ideas of natural law and natural rights” (Hayes 248). In his later papers and correspondence, scattered references to the Koran as an important text to make comparisons with other legal systems appeared. Although Jefferson was highly in favour of religious freedom, he found the purported infallibility of the Mohammedan body of rules quite irritating. At the same time, he was urged by the Koran itself to further his knowledge of Islam, and even to learn Arabic in order to read Muslim texts in their original language. It was the emotional and ideological climate of the post-revolutionary period, though, that gave the most significant role to the Islamic Orient because, as has been rightly stated, “Americans could not look too closely

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at the Muslim world without seeing a disturbing reflection” (Allison 94). The debate about Islamic cultures, which for several reasons had been ever-present in America, became a propulsive force that lead the new nation to a critical reappraisal of its own cultural heritage, to a closest attention to a global context and, above all, to a careful foreshadowing of the institutions that were to be established, or abolished. To many Americans, the imaginary construction of the Islamic world created by the West throughout the centuries, and reinforced by the Enlightenment, corresponded with the vision of supreme tyranny, unbounded sensuality, and profane inclinations. The supposedly repressive political system of the Ottoman Empire was often likened to the despotism of the English Kingdom, and Jefferson even accused King George III of being coresponsible for the slave trade which, in his words, was “a piratical warfare, […]the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers” (quoted in Marr 20). The negative propaganda against the Muslim countries of the Mediterranean was also the result of an early expansionist policy of the United States in that, as one critic remarks, “the founding fathers themselves were quite outspoken about the links between their newly gained independence and their desire for imperial expansion,” although “this nexus has frequently been overlooked in later historical assessments of the early republican period” (Mackenthun 4). Quite tellingly, Muslim ascendancy in many African and Eastern countries began to be considered a dangerous barrier not only against the spread of Calvinist principles but even against territorial acquisitions. In truth these two targets were combined together because, as is known, according to many American patriots the expansion of the United States was necessary in order to extend the benefits of the American experience to other areas in the world, above all to non-Christian cultures. Early republicans foreran the ideology of Manifest Destiny and, as one scholar underscores, they strongly supported the idea that [t]he intervention of Providence was at work in American efforts to “explode” old habits and establish new standards of morality and political conduct. This was to be achieved through spreading the light of the Gospel and of American Revolutionary ideas. In this sense the American Revolution was not American only; it was rather the property of mankind. (Sha’ban 23)

The founding fathers of the American Republic, because of their concern with domestic affairs, took mostly a stance from Islamism viewed as a threat to Christian religion and values. The republican project included freedom, political rights, forms of government, and public institutions,

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which had to be shaped “in contrast” to all that Islam represented. Yet, for this very reason, Islam resulted in being instrumental in inserting liberal ideas in the political thought of the early Republic. Roughly between 1785 and 1820, a fairly good number of literary works - as David Reynolds argues in his seminal book Faith in Fiction – specifically linked Islam and liberalism: [S]ome American authors […] found in Oriental religions, particularly Islam, a safe perspective from which to comment on American religion in a way that was often liberal and sometimes freethinking. Though varied in tone and emphasis, their tales were linked by a common use of correspondences between Oriental doctrine and progressive American ideas. The indirection that characterized most of these tales grew from the potentially heretical nature of the ideas they contained. (20)

Among many others, Mathew Carey published A Short Account of Algiers (1794), which denounced England for helping to plunge American citizens into slavery and vitalized the antislavery discourse in the United States. In the same year Susanna Haswell Rowson wrote a play, Slaves in Algiers, or a Struggle for Freedom, in which she described Oriental people and their customs in contrast to American people and their own culture, in order to show the advantages of republican values and the importance of freedom. Above all, Rowson focussed attention on gender roles and celebrated the power of female virtue over male despotism. Another case in point is Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive: or, The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill: Six Years a Prisoner Among the Algerines (1797), that will be discussed later. In 1801, the anonymous Humanity in Algiers, or, the Story of Azem by an American, late a slave in Algiers appeared, which made a plea for toleration. Its narrator, who had been set free thanks to the legacy of a Muslim benefactor named Azem, explicitly accused his own country of double standards when dealing with the issue of slavery. He also demonstrated that, contrary to widespread preconceptions, there were humanity and religious feelings among Mohammedans. “Despite their striking differences,” writes Schäfer, “[these] American literary renderings of the Orient typically share a common characteristic: they simultaneously move outward and inward” (XI). Actually it should be said that they look mainly “inward” because their authors, who usually had never visited any Eastern country, aim at discussing and contrasting mostly American political issues and institutions, gender roles, slavery, race theories, and religious controversies. In the wake of Edward Said, it is thus safe to comment that the afore mentioned works show how the interest in the Orient “responded more to

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the culture that produced it than to its putative object, which was also produced by the West” (Said 22). In the early 19th century, even the publication of a number of real or fictional accounts regarding the so called “white slavery” contributed to excite attention towards the Muslim world. The most popular was the account by Captain James Riley, An Authentic Narrative of the loss of the American Brig Commerce (1817), which sold about one million copies. Fragments of Joshua Gee’s Narrative of Joshua Gee of Boston, Mass., While he was captive in Algeria of the Barbary pirates, 1680-1687 (1687), reputed to be the first Barbary captivity narrative from America, were widely circulating (Baepler 1-58). These writings won favour with a large audience and even revived the popularity of Indian captivity narratives, which were usually heavily romanticized although they were grounded on factual events. The historical reason for the flourishing of the Oriental captivity tales is that, as is well known, since the 17th century all the countries of northern Africa from Morocco to Libya, then known as Barbary States, had been haven for pirates who raided ships and imprisoned American travellers for ransom. After its independence, the United States could no more count on the powerful fleet of England which, on the contrary, secretly encouraged the hostility of the pirates against its former colonies. Furthermore, the American government refused to pay tribute-protection money to the countries of the Barbary Coast, as England would do in the past. So it was that from 1785 to 1797 an undeclared American Algerian war reached its climax. Tyler’s novel, as well as Rowson’s play, is based on this conflict, although historical events are sometimes distorted and mixed with fiction in their works. Later two Barbary Wars (1801-1805, and 1815), in which Lieutenant Stephen Decatur became one of the most popular heroes, put an end to the raids of pirates and to the American practice of paying tribute for return of the prisoners.3 Tyler’s The Algerine Captive, which in the latest decades has become an icon of American literary encounters with Islamic countries, was long neglected and then was revived in the United States after the September 11 tragedy, because it dramatizes the ideological conflict with Islam only to imagine a possible way to resolve it: namely, cross-cultural understanding. This eclectic and rhapsodic picaresque novel – an early specimen of that odeporic narrative which was to become a constant presence in American literature - was originally published in two volumes, each of them divided into several short chapters. Its protagonist-narrator Updike Underhill, a character that is reminiscent of Voltaire’s Candide, seeks a full understanding of his own country by removing the beloved object of his analysis from himself; in other words, by using an upside down spyglass.

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Through a long journey that takes him to several regions of the world, Underhill grasps the rich complexity of reality and finally comes to accept the totality of his homeland in its positive and negative aspects. A fictional mask of Royall Tyler, Dr. Underhill actually uses Socratic irony as a narrative and rhetorical strategy, because he feigns more ignorance about his own country than he really possesses. The narrator presents himself as ignorant, and consequently in need of expatriation in order to acquire knowledge, but he is in fact cautious and tentative. When his intellectual adventure is over, and he sets out to write his account, Underhill does know that the United States will turn out to be the best place in the world to live in, “the freest country in the universe” (AC 224). Thus, throughout the text he wavers between criticizing and praising his homeland but lets its objective value emerge through evidence and mere experience, and through the encounter with the otherness. Subtly enough, in The Algerine Captive Tyler/Underhill fight any kind of tenets, and particularly the dogma of American democracy sanctioned by the Revolution but not entirely put into practice. They challenge a too self-confident America that acknowledges no alternative to it, thus considering itself free from self-analysis. In Volume I, Updike Underhill starts by perceiving features of his native New England that are just the opposite of what they should be according to the principles of the New Republic. He comically describes the excessive moral zeal of the past, the bigotry of 17th-century Puritan society. He is disappointed by both the theoretical and practical knowledge of New England and is later given a chance to verify the ignorance and the roughness of his fellow citizens by working as a schoolmaster. Underhill is finally allowed to study medicine and, seeking practical experience with other doctors, he meets all kinds of quacks. Enough is enough, and Underhill goes South in search of the mythical America he had always dreamt of. Even more disappointed by the local bigotry and way of living, he accepts a berth as a surgeon on a ship bound for Africa, meaningfully named Freedom. The ship stops in London, and the protagonist manages to express quite a few bitter comments on English society. Later he sails for Africa aboard a slave ship ironically named Sympathy – where black slaves suffer a brutal treatment  and is eventually captured by Algerian pirates and sold into slavery. Volume II of The Algerine Captive thus includes descriptions of historical, social, anthropological, economic and religious aspects of what today is Maghreb. Dr. Underhill discovers, at his apparent surprise, that the Barbary countries have class hierarchies, superstition, quackery, unequal condition of women, and social abuses, not unlike those of the

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United States. So, in the words of Cathy Davidson, Algeria becomes “a distorted mirror version of America. Or, more accurately, it becomes the mirror version that especially shows up American distortions” (209). Tyler, like the expatriate writers of the 1920’s and 1930’s, explicitly or implicitly speaks of America even when he describes a foreign reality, be it English or Algerian. In Chapter 1 as elsewhere Royall Tyler, in compliance with his not too hidden intention to write a diverting book “of amusement,” 4 narrates Underhill’s first meeting with the Dey of Algiers using those captivating elements of the Oriental tale that most attracted the attention of readers, and which rendered ideas satirizing the New England orthodoxy palatable. The Dey is described seated “upon an eminence covered with the richest carpeting fringed with gold,” under a canopy “of Persian silk […] from which were suspended curtains of the richest embroidery, drawn into festoons by silk cords and tassels enriched with pearls” (AC 122); his attire is full of diamond buttons, loops of pearls, gems, velvet, shining gold, all kinds of jewels. Then, in Chapter 4, the narrator soon starts to give up many prejudices he had been taught, for instance about all the Algerians being blasphemous infidels or having more than a wife  notions that turn out to be not exactly true and that should be evaluated from a proper angle. Even in the Bible, he comments quoting Rachel, there are a few examples of concubinage that depend upon circumstances and are considered legitimate in different cultural contexts: My master had a wife, […] and, to my surprise, had only one. I found it to be a vulgar error, that the Algerines had generally more. […] they generally find, as in our country, one lady sufficient for all the comforts of connubial life; they never take another, except when family alliance or barrenness renders it eligible or necessary. The more I became acquainted with their customs, the more was I struck by their resemblance to the patriarchal manners described in the Holy Writ. Concubinage is allowed, but few respectable people practice it except for the sake of heirs. With the Algerines, the barrenness of a RACHEL is sometimes compensated to the husband by the fertility of a BILHAH. (129-130)

Dr. Underhill describes the slave market where he is sold, the poor living conditions of the slaves, the violence of their guardians, the disgrace of losing freedom, with obvious critical allusions to slavery in the United States, which was one of the most shameful dark spots of American democracy. 5 A slave himself, he sympathizes with the helplessness of slaves and once ironically comments:

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Perhaps the free citizen of the United States may, in the warmth of his patriotism, accuse me of tameness of spirit, in submitting to such gross disgrace. I will not justify myself. […] I have only to wish him in my situation in Algiers, that he may avail himself of a noble opportunity of suffering gloriously for his country. (125)

As to the protagonist’s exposure to Muslim religion, there are sections of the novel in which Tyler has Underhill feel his faith wavering (“for the first time I trembled for my faith and burst into tears”[138]), for example when an Englishman first, then the mullah himself, try to convert him to Islam. In this regard, the five-day dialogue between the Mohammedan minister and Dr. Underhill, in Chapter 7, is most revealing. The former admonishes the narrator against accepting conventional religion passively and tells him that the choice of a specific creed must be a rational act, thus leading Updike to question his own faith for a moment in a stammering voice: Mollah. “Born in New England, my friend, you are a Christian purified by Calvin. Born in the Campania of Rome, you had been a papist. Nursed by the Hindoos, you would have entered the pagoda with reverence and worshipped the soul of your ancestor in a duck. […] A wise man adheres not to his religion merely because it was that of his ancestors. He will examine the creeds of other nations, compare them with his own, and hold fast that which is right.” Author. “You speak well. I will bring my religion to the test. Compare it with the---the---“ (139)

Each of the two characters highlights the leading principles of his own religion, and the words of the mullah, a convert from Greek Christianity, tend to erase many distortions and preconceptions about Islam. Objective allusions to the sternness of Calvinism, to the irrationality of some ethical rules of Puritanism and of the purported non-perfectibility of humankind, as well as to social injustice in the United States, are not missing in these pages of Tyler’s novel. So that Underhill, albeit deploring the blasphemy of the Mohammedan priest, is utterly “confounded by his sophistry” (143) and sometimes is left speechless, as in the following dispute: Author. “Our religion was disseminated in peace; yours was promulgated by the sword.” Mollah. “My friend, you surely have not read the writings of your own historians. The history of the Christian church is a detail of bloody massacre: from the institution of the Christian thundering legion, under Constantine the Great, to the expulsion of the Moors out of Spain by the ferocious inquisition, or the dragooning of the Huguenots from France,

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Early Encounters with Islam and Tyler’s The Algerine Captive under Louis the Great. The Mussulmen never yet forced a man to adopt their faith. […] We leave it to the Christians of the West Indies, and Christians of your southern plantations, to baptize the unfortunate African into your faith, and then use your brother Christians as brutes of the desert.” Here I was so abashed for my country I could not answer him. (142)

Although charmed by the rationality and the amiability of the mullah, the narrator chooses to go back to harsh menial work in a stone quarry rather than to convert to the faith of the “ferocious race,” of the “impostor” Mohammed. He makes a plan to escape but gives up after he is taken to witness the horrific impalement of a slave who has attempted to escape from bondage. As a result, Underhill goes through a state of deep moral and physical crisis, and later he is surprised by the humanitarianism of the mullah who treats him sympathetically and does not take advantage of his weakness by insisting to convert him. So much so that the narrator admits, “If any man could have effected a change of my religion, it was this priest. I was charmed with the man, though I abominated his faith. His very smile exhilarated my spirits and infused health” (153). He even declares that, could he be assured of going back safely to the United States in a few years, he would have stayed in Algeria longer because “to observe the customs, habits, and manners of a people of whom so much is said and so little known at home […] was highly interesting” (154). Thanks to the mullah, Underhill is purchased by the director of a hospital where he discovers the backwardness of the Algerian surgical practice if compared to that of most American surgeons. He is allowed to show his medical skill and is gratified by a great deal of success that makes his reputation widely known. On several occasions, though, his professional task is hampered by all kinds of religious beliefs; which leads the narrator to comment on both the upsetting fanaticism of the Muslims and their praiseworthy unfaltering and somewhat tolerant creed: Religious prejudice was a constant impediment to my success. The bigotry of the Mahometan differs essentially from that of the Roman Catholic. The former is a passive, the latter an active principle. The papist would burn infidels and heretics; the Mussulman never torments the unbeliever, but is more tenaciously attached to his own creed, makes his faith a principle in life, and never suffers doubt to disturb, or reason to overthrow it. (155)

Indirectly criticizing the Trinitarian theology of Christianity, Underhill underscores that “the fundamental doctrine of the Alcoran is the unity of God” (186) and praises the Koran also because it “forbids games of chance, and the use of strong liquors; it inculcates a tenderness for idiots,

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and a respect for age” (187). Quite tellingly, he shows himself bewildered and amazed at the conflicting relationship between Islam and his native religion, thus launching an appeal for responsiveness and cohesion that sounds daring and premonitory for his own time: I would not bring the sacred volume of our faith in any comparative view with the Alcoran of Mahomet; but I cannot help noticing it as extraordinary that the Mahometan should abominate the Christian on account of his faith, and the Christian detest the Mussulman for his creed when the Koran of the former acknowledges the divinity of the Christian Messiah, and the Bible of the latter commands us to love our enemies. If each would follow the obvious dictates of his own scripture, he would cease to hate, abominate, and destroy the other. (187)

The narrator rounds off his exploration of Islam by visiting Medina and Mecca, assisting at marriages and funerals, and by reviewing the history and the main institutions of the Algerians. As happens to the protagonist of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, who emigrates from the home country of his body only to come back to it after he has wandered from land to land observing the preposterous and cruel foibles of humankind, Updike Underhill is finally ready to return to the United States. In a metaphoric coming-of-age ritual, this new American has experienced discordant and objectionable features in both Christian and Islamic cultures, and especially towards the latter he has strived to show a disposition to balanced comprehension. Underhill’s forced exile has partly redeemed also his native country, which now becomes the yearned for Ithaca of a Ulysses that has been a prisoner of the Cyclops, of the Lotus Eaters, of Calypso. His search for a national identity, and for a personal knowledge and a cosmopolitan attitude toward the Other that “must” be different and more responsible in post-revolutionary America, has come to an end. Even though at the cost of a political compromise, because Updike ends up by implicitly accepting – in a sort of amnesia - a democracy marked by racial inequality in favour of national unity. As the young nation is struggling to define a new set of values, Royall Tyler, following the fashion of the Orientalist discourse, thus makes a plea for flexibility and for a critical transnational consciousness. At the same time, in the wake of European rationalism and Deism he shows himself skeptical about a number of established beliefs. A convinced deist himself, like many founding fathers such as Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, and others, Tyler formally bolsters Christian orthodoxy because doing the contrary can be too dangerous at his time. Of course he does not adhere to Islam but, rather, uses it in order to simplistically attack revelation and to

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show his aversion to Calvinism; his liberalism lies essentially in “tolerance.” In so doing, Royall Tyler points out to the Americans the road that should be taken in order to emerge from the provincial, circumscribed, self-centered, and bigot culture of a former colony and to become part of a modern global context. He absolves and accepts the United States as part of a larger and much more complex world; not as the mythic Eden-like island of the past, the City upon a Hill, a kind of Utopia, but as a political reality in the making, with objective virtues and shortcomings, tensions and ambiguities. A reality that for the future is expected to be grounded in the soundest democratic and libertarian principles and that, in Tyler’s view, needs Federalism “to enforce a due respect among other nations” (224), and to survive in a multi-faceted and competitive universe. Consequently, the last sentences of The Algerine Captive read: “ Our first object is union among ourselves. For to no nation besides the United States can that ancient saying be more emphatically applied; BY UNITING WE STAND, BY DIVIDING WE FALL” (224). Which sounds as a warning to the newly-established Federal Union, in which so many differences among the former colonies are viewed as a threat to the nation and give rise to much debate. So that it is safe to conclude that Tyler, by means of his comparison between the United States and Islam, indirectly makes a plea for integration on a national scale of all the states of the Union. And as one critic argues: The Algerine Captive presents differences (social, political, religious, racial, and aesthetic) as features that cannot and should not be resolved or diminished in the early republic. In doing so, the novel actively replaces one conception of the nation – as a union of citizens bonded by common interests – with another, whose unity is founded on the representation of variety. (Holt 483)

Notes 1

The first American edition, entitled The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, was published in 1794 (Philadelphia, PA: H. & P. Rice; and Baltimore, MD: J. Rice & Co.). Other popular early editions were: Arabian Nights Entertainments. Norwich, CT: Thomas Hubbard, 1796; The Oriental Moralist, or The Beauties of The Arabian Nights Entertainments. Dover, NH: Samuel Bragg, 1797. 2 It is widely accepted that Hawthorne loosely shaped Catharine, Ilbrahim’s mother, after Mary Fisher whose story he learnt from Willem Sewel’s History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress, of the Christian People Called Quakers (for more details see, among others, Luedtke 95-100). Thus Hawthorne describes Catharine’s mission and, in contrast to Puritan bigotry, the Sultan’s benevolence:

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“Her mission had extended also to the followers of the Prophet, and from them she had received the courtesy and kindness which all the contending sects of our purer religion united to deny her. Her husband and herself had resided many months in Turkey, where even the Sultan’s countenance was gracious to them; in that pagan land, too, was Ilbrahim’s birthplace, and his oriental name was a mark of gratitude for the good deeds of an unbeliever” (61). 3 Among the most recent and insightful analyses of these post-revolutionary conflicts, which stimulated the drive to create the U. S. navy and from which the new Republic first gained status as an international power, see Lambert’s and London’s books. 4 In the Preface to The Algerine Captive, the narrator insists on declaring that he was astonished at “the extreme avidity with which books of mere amusement were purchased and perused […]. [S]ocial libraries had been instituted, composed of books designed to amuse rather than instruct; […] no sooner was a taste for amusing literature diffused than all orders of country life […] forsook the sober sermons and practical pieties of their fathers, for the gay stories and splendid impieties of the traveller and the novelist.” Meaningfully, he concludes by saying that what is wanted in America is “that we write our own books of amusement.” (AC 27-28) 5 It should not be forgotten that this is the time in which a certain discontent about slavery, and criticism towards this institution, took shape. To quote just an example of the period colour, in a letter of 1774 Abigail Adams – whose firstborn daughter Tyler almost married  wrote to her husband John, who was then a delegate to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia: “I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in the province. It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me – to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.” (Letters 39)

Works Cited Allison, Robert J. The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815 (1995). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. Print. Baepler, Paul. “Introduction”. White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives. Ed. Paul Baepler. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Print. Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Print. Hayes, Kevin J. “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’Ɨn.” Early American Literature, 39, 2 (2004): 247-261. Print. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Gentle Boy.” Twice-Told Tales. London: Dent, 1967. Print. Hodgkin, Lucy V. A Book of Quaker Saints (1917). Charleston, SC: BookBazaar, 2007. Print.

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Holt, Keri. “ ‘All Parts of the Union I Considered My Home’: The Federal Imagination of The Algerine Captive.” Early American Literature, 16, 3 (2011): 481-515. Print. Lambert, Frank. The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World. New York, NY: Hill & Wang, 2005. Print. Letters of John and Abigail Adams. Ed. Frank Shuffelton. New York, NY: Penguin, 2004. Print. London, Joshua E. Victory in Tripoli: How America’s War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. Print. Luedtke, Luther S. Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Romance of the Orient. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989. Print. Mackenthun, Gesa. “ ‘Between Worlds’: Edward Said and the Rediscovery of Empire in American Studies.” America and the Orient. Ed. Eike Schäfer. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006. Print. Marr, Timothy. The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Print. Reynolds, David S. Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Print. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. Print. Schäfer, Eike. “Preface.” America and the Orient. Ed. Eike Schäfer. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006. Print. Sha’ban, Fuan. Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought: The Roots of Orientalism in America. Durham, NC: The Acorn Press, 1991. Print. Tyler, Royall. The Algerine Captive. Ed. Don L. Cook. New Haven, CT: College & University Press, 1970 (quoted as AC). Print.

PART II: EAST MEETS WEST —COMPARISONS—

BYRON’S POETICAL CATALOGUES IN DON JUAN1 ITSUYO HIGASHINAKA RYUKOKU UNIVERSITY

Catalogues in literature As is well-known, the narrator of Don Juan declares in Canto I that his poem is going to be epic and that each of the twelve books will contain “love, and war, a heavy gale at sea, / A list of ships, and captains, and kings reigning” (Complete Poetical Works I, 200). Here Byron uses the word ‘list.’ In Canto XIII he takes his readers on a tour of Norman Abbey in order to show them some of the paintings in its possession. When the tour is over, the narrator feels he might have been acting like an auctioneer, so he says apologetically: “That Poets were so [auctioneers] from their earliest date, / By Homer’s ‘Catalogue of Ships,’ is clear” (74), indicating that he is following in Homer’s footsteps in detailing the paintings one after another. Byron is of course referring to a long passage in Book II of the Iliad, in which Homer makes a list of the contingents of the Achaean army (II, ll. 484-923). Homer’s proposed creation of a catalogue is rendered into English by Alexander Pope in his translation of the Iliad: “What crowded Armies, from what climes they bring, / Their Names, their Numbers, and their Chiefs I sing” (VII, ll. 584-5). Each of Homer’s contingents is typically composed of the name of its leader, his home country and a short biographical sketch including his genealogy, the number of ships and men, and so forth. For instance, this is how Odysseus and his contingent are depicted in the Iliad, again in Pope’s translation: Ulysses follow’d thro’ the watry Road, A Chief, in Wisdom equal to a God. With those whom Cephalenia’s Isle inclos’d, Or till’d their Fields along the Coast oppos’d; Or where fair Ithaca o’erlooks the Floods, Where high Neritos shakes his waving Woods,

Itsuyo Higashinaka Where AEgilipa’s rugged Sides are seen, Crocylia rocky, and Zacynthus green. These in twelve Gallerys with Vermillion Prores, Beneath his Conduct sought the Phrygian Shores.

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(II, 765-74)

Around the time of Homer, Hesiod produced his Theogony, the genealogy of the deities of pagan mythology. The work comprises a catalogue of basic facts about the lives of the gods. Aeschylus, in one of his three catalogues in The Persians, provides a list of the Persian leaders who have gone to conquer Greece, and supplies their respective backgrounds. Shortly after the performance of The Persians, Herodotus, a historian, gave a detailed record of the different races and tribes that constituted the Persian army that was about to attack Greece. Virgil also has his own catalogue in Book VII of the Aeneid where he invokes the Muses to sing (in Dryden’s translation) about “the Chiefs that sway’d th’Ausonian Land, / Their Arms, and Armies under their Command: / What Warriours in our ancient Clime were bred, / What Souldiers follow’d, and what Heroes led”. (Dryden VII, 887-92). These writers are all included in Byron’s “Reading List of 1807” (1-7), and it is quite likely that he had read them and the various catalogues included in their works. Furthermore, there is no question that Byron was familiar with the genealogy of Adam down to Noah in Genesis. The fact that he used the Spenserian stanza in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage suggests that he had read that section in The Faerie Queene where Spenser sings gloriously and sonorously about the catalogue of the rivers in attendance at the marriage ceremony of the Thames and the Medway. Spenser begins his catalogue thus: Helpe therefore, O thou sacred imp of Ioue, The noursling of Dame Memorie his deare, To whom those rolles, layd vp in heauen aboue, And records of antiquitie appeare, To which no whit of man may comen neare; Helpe me to tell the names of all those floods, And all those Nymphes, which then assembled were To that great banquet of the watry Gods, And all their sundry kinds, and all their hid abodes. (IV, xi, 10)

Naturally Byron knew his Milton well, and therefore also the catalogue of the fallen angels in Paradise Lost, which begins:

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Byron’s Poetical Catalogues in Don Juan Say, Muse, thir Names then known, who first, who last, Rous’d from the slumber on that fiery Couch, At thir great Emperor’s call, as next in worth Came singly where he stood on the bare strand, While the promiscuous crowd stood yet aloof? The chief were those who from the Pit of Hell Roaming to seek thir prey on earth, durst fix Thir Seats long after next the Seat of God. (I, 376-83)

Byron also loved Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which he calls “the most amusing & instructive medley, of quotations & Classical anecdotes I ever perused” (“Reading List” 7). Needless to say, Burton is a master of cataloguing. In addition to these writers, one should not forget the name of Rabelais, an expert on cataloguing of various kinds. Rabelais goes into detail about the genealogy of Pantagruel, starting with a giant by the name of “Chalbroth / Who begat Sarabroth / Who begat Faribroth / Who begat Hurati, that was a brave eater of pottage, and reigned in the time of / The flood, / Who begat Membroth / Who begat Atlas, that with his shoulders kept the sky from falling” (171), and going on and on until, some 60 generations later, Gargantua is said to beget “the noble Pantagruel” (173). Again in his “Reading List of 1807”, Byron writes: “I have also read … about four thousand novels including the works of Cervantes, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Mackenzie, Sterne, Rabelais & Rousseau, etc etc” (6). Among the authors mentioned so far, Rabelais is the only one whose catalogues could raise “serious laughter” (Don Juan, XIII: 86), which, I believe, links Byron to this French giant of cataloguing. Byron, who lived in Italy for a lengthy period, also knew Italian literature well. Along with Dante, Petrarch, Tasso and others, he admired Ariosto, whom he called, “The southern Scott, the minstrel who call’d forth / A new creation with his magic line, / And like the Ariosto of the North, / Sang ladye-love and war, romance and knightly worth” (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV, 40). (We know how much Byron loved Walter Scott’s novels, and that he had John Murray, his publisher, send him his novels whenever they appeared.) It is Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso that Byron had in mind in the above quotation. One example of a catalogue from this work is the account of the many captains with their troops gathered to cross the Channel to give assistance to the French beleaguered by Moslems. The narrator of the poem begins his catalogue by saying: “That all these armies you may fully know, / I’ll point you out the captains

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as they go” (X, 76). The following stanza forms part of the catalogue consisting of “the Scottish, Irish, English host, / Or from the islands round about the coast” (75): The Duke of Buckingham parades ahead, And Henry is the Earl of Salisbury. Of Abergavenny Herman is the head, And Edward is the Earl of Shrewsbury. These are the Welsh and English, as I’ve said, But to the west, all Scottish troops you’ll see. They number thirty thousand to a man. Zerbino, Prince of Scotland, leads the van. (X, 83)

Thus, Byron must have been fully aware of the long tradition of cataloguing when he was writing Don Juan, because the poem is full of different kinds of catalogues throughout.

Catalogues in Japanese literature Western literature has no monopoly on cataloguing. Japanese literature, for instance, is rich in various sorts of catalogues. One is immediately reminded of The Pillow Book (Makura no Sǀshi) written by Sei Shǀnagon, a witty lady of the court, who flourished about a thousand years ago. This book of essays of various lengths contains many lists of diverse kinds. I select three short ones, which are entitled “Rivers”, “Villages” and “Rare things”. Here is a catalogue of rivers in section 59: Rivers—Asuka River. It’s moving to wonder how its deeps and shallows can shift as the poem says. ƿi River, Otonashi River, Nanase River. Mimito River—I enjoy wondering just what sound its quick ear caught. Tamahoshi River, Hosotani River. Itsunuki River and Sawada River are reminiscent of old saibara songs. Natori River—I’d like to know just what sort of ‘name’ it had. Yoshino River. The Plain of Amano River—I love that poem of Narihira’s where he ‘begs shelter from the Heavenly Weaving Maid’.

The note to Asuka River identifies “the poem” collected in Kokinshnj (Collection of Japanese Poems of Ancinet and Modern Times): “What in this world of ours / is sure and unchanging? / In Asuka river / the deeps of yesterday today / shift to running shallows” (313). Asuka river is often

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sung in waka poems and hence is “a poetical place; and classical,”2 expressing mutability. The same note explains that “Mimito literally means ‘sharp-eared’” and refers the reader to a poem about the Mimito River: “Mimito River / that flows by the great stone walls / of towering ƿmiya, / has caught with its quick ears / the echo of your voice, my love” (313). Natori River means a river of name-taking or good reputation, hence the author’s comment. Sei Shǀnagon chooses those rivers which sound pleasant and suggestive, and that are often mentioned in waka poems. This allusive quality applies also to her other catalogues as well, such as the list of villages in section 62: Villages—ƿsaka. Nagame. Izame. Hitozuma. Tanome. Ynjhi. Tsumatori—it’s fun to wonder whether he’s had his wife stolen or he’s stolen someone else’s. —Fushimi. Asagao

According to the note, “[T]hese village names are almost all chosen for their unusual literal meanings, most of which are associated with the image of a love affair” (313) – for instance, ‘ƿsaka’ means ‘slope for meeting,’ ‘Nagame’ meaning ‘to become pensive’, and ‘Hitozuma,’ ‘a married woman.’ Asagao means ‘the face of one just awake as well as morning glory.’ As for ‘Tsumatori,’ Sei Shǀnagon herself wonders about it and elucidates its meaning with a touch of humour. The word literally means ‘to get a wife.’ She can also be satirical, as the list of “Rare things” testifies. I select a few out of the eight that she enumerates in section 71: Rare things— A son-in-law who’s praised by his wife’s father. Likewise, a wife who’s loved by her mother-in-law. A pair of silver tweezers that can actually pull out hairs properly. A retainer who doesn’t speak ill of his master . . . Two women, let alone a man and a woman, who vow themselves to each other forever, and actually manage to remain on good terms to the end.

Sei Shǀnagon has a sharp eye as well as a sharp tongue. In this respect her way of cataloguing is similar to that of Byron (and would be well worth pursuing), though she can be serious, comic, or neutral, and is often elegant and refined. These three quotations represent just a very small portion of the large number of catalogues she employs. Cataloguing in Japanese literature is not restricted to The Pillow Book

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only. For instance, one finds in The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari), such lists as the list of courtiers, the list of the Genji warriors, the list of the Monks, and the list of the Emperor’s Enemies. This epic work, written in the early thirteenth century, uses a poetic prose to depict the battles between the Heike and Genji clans, and the consequent downfall of the Heike family. In the following part of the list of the Genji warriors, which reminds one of the Homeric catalogue of the contingents in the Iliad, each warrior is given his name, birth place, rank, genealogy, relatives and so on: First, in Kyoto there are the sons of Mitsunobu, the ex-governor of Dewa Province. They are the governor of Iga Province, Mitsumoto, the captain of the Imperial Guard from Dewa Province, Mitsunaga, the archivist from Dewa Province, Mitsushige, and the Kanja from Dewa Province, Mitsuyoshi. Then, Juro Yoshimoro, the youngest son of the late Captain Tameyoshi, is in hiding in Kumano. Though there is the archivist Tada no Yukitsuna in Tsu Province, he need not be included here, for he is the man who first joined in the new councilor Narichika’s plot against the Heike and later betrayed his comrades. There are, however, his younger brothers, Tada no Jiro Tomozane, the Teshima-no-Kanja Takayori, and Ota no Taro Yorimoto ... In the province of Shinano there are Ouchi no Taro Koreyoshi, Okada-no-Kanja Chikayoshi, Hiraga-no-Kanja Moriyoshi and his son Shiro Yoshinobu, Tatewaki-no-Senjo Yoshikata and his second son, Kiso-no-Kanja Yoshinaka. In exile in the province of Izu there is the former major of the Imperial Guard of the Right, Yoritomo ... (Tale of the Heike Book IV, Ch. 3)

Another good example of cataloguing comes from The Love Suicides at Amijima (Shinju Ten no Amijima), a play for the puppet theatre by Chikamatsu Monzaemon and first performed in 1720. The protagonists, Koharu and her lover Jihei, are on their way to the place where they commit suicide. They cross many famous bridges of Osaka, milestones as it were, which form a catalogue, to lead them finally to their place of death. (Osaka used to be called a capital of water, famous for its 808 bridges.) Here is part of the list of the bridges the lovers cross before they reach the place of their double suicide: This bridge, Tenjin Bridge, he [Jihei] has crossed every day, morning and night, gazing at Shijimi River to the west. Long ago, when Tenjin, then called Michizane, was exiled to Tsukushi, his plum tree, following its master, flew in one bound to Dazaifu, and here is Plum-field Bridge. Green Bridge recalls the aged pine that followed later, and Cherry Bridge the tree that withered away in grief over parting. Such are the tales still

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Byron’s Poetical Catalogues in Don Juan told, bespeaking the power of a single poem. (Love Suicides 202)

A comparative study of Japanese and Western literary cataloguing might be interesting, but lies beyond the scope of this essay.

Byron’s catalogues Byron has various ways of cataloguing. First, he often makes a catalogue of proper names. Secondly, he focuses on one mental attitude and makes a list of its instances; for example, he makes a list of things he considers sweet. I call this a catalogue of mental response. Thirdly, he gives detailed descriptions of shipwrecks, wars, dinners, and so forth. In the stanza mentioned earlier where Byron refers in Don Juan to “Homer’s ‘Catalogue of Ships,’” he says to the reader, “I spare you the furniture and plate” (XIII, 74), thus revealing that he considers describing the “furniture and plate” as a kind of catalogue too. I call this kind a catalogue of description. Besides these fairly long catalogues, he often uses much shorter lists, of a line or two. For instance, he succinctly sums up the lot of a married woman: “A thankless husband, next a faithless lover, / Then dressing, nursing, praying, and all’s over” (II, 200). Drummond Bone discusses these shorter lists as well as longer ones in his interesting article, “Beppo: the Liberation of Fiction.” In this essay, I should like to concentrate mainly on Byron’s way of cataloguing proper names and treat the other kinds of catalogues more briefly. Interestingly enough, Don Juan begins with a list of names. We know that, before the narrator settles on “our ancient friend Don Juan” (I, 1) as the hero of his poem, he provides a list of the names of military heroes, mostly French and British, as possible candidates for this role. The list has thirty names in all, some lines consisting of nothing but names: Vernon, the butcher Cumberland, Wolfe, Hawke, Prince Ferdinand, Granby, Burgoyne, Keppel, Howe, Evil and good, have had their tithe of talk … …. Barnave, Brisssot, Condorcet, Mirabeau Petion, Clootz, Danton, Marat, La Fayette, Were French, and famous people, as we know … (I, 2-3)

The narrator seems to give credit to some (Nelson for one), and considers others not evil, but on the whole he pokes fun at these military men,

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calling them “Followers of fame, ‘nine farrow’ of that sow” (I, 2), quoting from Macbeth,3 lumping them all together and abandoning them when he decides on Juan as the hero of his poem. The names of “the military set” (I, 3) are pronounced in rapid succession so that the so-called heroes almost lose their respective identities. Byron succeeds in belittling these famous heroes by cataloguing them, and thus reveals the irony or cynicism that is a typical characteristic of his cataloguing. One main feature of Byron’s cataloguing is to make a list of ludicrous names. In Canto I Julia, in defending her honour when Alfonso, her husband, rushes into her bedroom, shouts the names of her worshippers whom she says she has rejected. The list is headed by General Count O’Reilly (rhyming with “vilely”) (148), the Italian Musico Cazzani and the Count Corniani (149), the last two rhyming names having obscene connotations. There are also the Count Strongstroganoff, reminding us of the beef dish (although it came into existence after Byron’s time), and the absurdly named Irish peer, Lord Mount Coffeehouse. The variorum edition of Don Juan annotates that Mount Coffeehouse comes from ‘The Mount’ which “was a celebrated coffeehouse near Grosvenor Square” (Variorum 41-2). Julia is a character of quite remarkable linguistic resourcefulness. On the whole, Byron’s naming is mischievous, topical and belittling. Although Julia’s list sounds comical, we know that her ruin is imminent.㻃 Byron’s cataloguing reminds one again of his own phrase, “serious laughter” (XIII, 86). Byron again plays with ludicrous names in Canto XV where Adeline, a society lady “determined Juan’s wedding / In her own mind” (XV, 40). The list of the candidates reads: “the sage Miss Reading, Miss Raw, Miss Flaw, Miss Showman, and Miss Knowman, the two fair co-heiresses Giltbedding.” Miss Reading is probably a blue stocking, while Miss Raw, Miss Flaw and Miss Showman seem to lack some quality to make them good spouses. Miss Knowman may be clever, but may already know men in the Biblical sense. The Giltbedding sisters will probably bring a rich dowry, but may be too forward in a certain respect. Adeline has also in mind a lady by the name of Miss Millpond, modelled unmistakably on Miss Anabella Milbanke, the maiden name of Lady Byron, and Miss Audacia Shoestring. Referring explicitly to a catalogue, the narrator says: “Now it so happen’d, in the catalogue / Of Adeline, Aurora was omitted” (48). Again his naming is suggestive, ludicrous and satirical, although there is a note of bitterness in his inclusion of Miss Millpond. Byron’s cataloguing at this stage reminds one of Rabelais in that names tell about their bearers. In his Pantagruel Rabelais compiles a long list of

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“the Names of the Noble and Valiant Cooks who went into the sow, as the Greeks did into the Trojan Horse” (615). To quote only a few names from this catalogue of 170 names: “Rot Rost, Dishclout, Save Sewet, Fire Fumbler, Pillicock, Long Tool, Prick Pride, Prick-Madam, Pricket, Hogs Gullet” (616) and so on. (Incidentally, Rabelais has a catalogue composed of over 160 different words meaning ‘bollocks,’ and his translator, Thomas Urquhart, a Scot, adds some three hundred more to his master’s catalogue, thus out-Rabelaising Rabelais (407-10). (For better or worse, Byron did not inherit this side of Rabelais or Urquhart.) Byron makes yet another notable catalogue of names in Canto XIII, where noble guests assemble at Norman Abbey, “The Brahmins of the ton,” whose “party might consist of thirty-three” (XIII, 83). The catalogue begins with the women guests: The noble guests, assembled at the Abbey, Consisted of—we give the sex the pas— The Duchess of Fitz-Fulke; the Countess Crabbey; The ladies Scilly, Busey; —Miss Eclat, Miss Bombazeen, Miss Mackstay, Miss O’Tabbey, And Mrs. Rabbi, the rich banker’s squaw; Also the Honourable Mrs. Sleep, Who look’d a white lamb, yet was a black sheep; (79)

Again the names speak for themselves. In his note to the stanza, McGann says about these ladies: “Although these are imaginary, largely linguistic characters, like so many others in the poem, a few have been traced to dominant models” (Byron, Collected Poetical Works 757). The name Fitz-Fulke, carelessly pronounced, sounds rude. The Countess Crabbey may be a disagreeable person, and Miss O’Tabbey is perhaps an ill-natured gossip. Through Byron’s linguistic play we get to know that they are not quite like the ladies praised in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. Odysseus also makes a list of women during his descent to the underworld. He questions his mother and “Daughters and wives of excellent men” (Odyssey XI, l. 226) one by one. Like Odysseus, who says that he “cannot tell or mention all of the women I saw in numbers there, wives and daughters of heroes” (ll. 328-9), so Byron says, “I have seen more than I’ll say” (XIII, 83). Odysseus’s women are fifteen in number, and Byron names ten women, although there are “other Countesses of Blank—but rank” (80). While Odysseus’s sketch of the women he meets is sad and serious in tone, Byron’s tone is generally facetious.

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The names of the more notable male figures whose souls Odysseus sees in Book XII are Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax, Minos, Orion, Sisyphos, and Heracles. They tell Odysseus their stories and ask him what has happened since their deaths. For instance, Agamemnon tells about the death inflicted upon him by Clytemnestra, and also cheers Odysseus by talking about his faithful Penelope (ll. 387-466). The passage often shows how the dead are still possessed by the passions that used to sway them when alive. (One could almost create a Noh play out of their situations, because a typical protagonist in a Noh play is still shaken after death by strong passions and is unable to become a Buddha.) The male dinner guests whom Byron enumerates in his catalogue have none of these profound human emotions. Their traits are again roughly implied by their last names: Parolles, Rackrhyme, Lord Pyrrho, Sir John Pottledeep, the Duke of Dash, the preux Chevalier de la Ruse, Dick Dubious, Angle, Sir Henry Silvercup, the Reverend Rodomont Precisian, and Lord Augustus Fits-Plantagenet, Jack Jargon, General Fireface, and Jefferies Hardsman (84-88). Byron’s sketches of these guests are shorter than those of Odysseus. For instance, Dick Dubious is called “the metaphysician, who loved philosophy and a good dinner” (87). Dick Dubious is probably a sceptic for whom philosophy and a good dinner are not incompatible, with Byron as always enjoying the wordplay and most of the guests becoming the butt of the narrator’s satire. Byron has another kind of catalogue in Canto VII, the war canto, where he does not miss the chance to have fun with Russian names, as he states his aim with this catalogue: it is “to increase / Our euphony” (15). This is part of the list: Strongenoff, Stroknoff / Meknop, Serge Lwow, Arseniew of modern Greece, / And Tschitsshakoff, Roguenoff, Chokenoff, / And others of twelve consonants a-piece”. He adds more names, which, as he says, end with “‘ischskin’, ‘ousckin’, ‘iffskchy’, ‘ouski,’/ Of whom we can insert but Rousamouski” (16). This is followed by even more Russian names: “Scherematoff, Chrematoff, Koklophti, / Koclobski, Kourakin, and Mouskin Pouskin, / All proper men of weapons” (17). Thus Byron savours the mere sounding of the names (‘euphony’), especially their ending, while simultaneously making use of the preceding parts of the names for comic effect. It is interesting to note that Byron’s archenemy, Robert Southey, wrote a short poem called “March to Moscow”.4 It is a clever satirical poem, which begins with “The Emperor Nap he would set off / On a summer excursion to Moscow” (Section 1, 217-22; 73-77). Southey, who like Byron was also interested in wordplay, is ingenious with his play on

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Russian names in this poem: There was Tormanzow and Jemalow And all the others that end with ow Milarodovitch and Jaladovitch And Karatschkowitch, And all the others that end with itch; Schanscheff, Souchousaneff, And Schepaleff, And all the other that end in eff; Wasiltschikoff, Kostomaroff, And Tchoglokoff, And all the others that end in off; Rajeffsky and Novereffsky And Rieffsky, And all the other that end in effsky; Oscharoffsky and Rostoffsky, And all the others that end in offsky ... (Section 8)

And then Southey piles up the names that end in ‘off’ using eleven lines, with some clever alliterations: “And Platoff he play’d them off, / And Shouvaloff he shovell’d them off, / And Markoff he mar’k’d them off / And Krosnoff he cross’d them off,” and so forth. This is a linguistic tour de force, for all that Byron says against Southey. In his “The Cataract of Lodore” Southey uses an enormous number of present participles of verbs to show how the cataract falls. Here is just a portion of his catalogue: And glittering and frittering, And gathering and feathering, And whitening and brightening, And quivering and shivering, And hurrying and scurrying, And thundering and floundering; Dividing and gliding and sliding, And falling and brawling and sprawling, And driving and riving and striving, And sprinkling and twinkling and wrinkling And sounding and bounding and rounding, And bubbling and troubling and doubling, And grumbling and rumbling and tumbling, And clattering and battering and shattering … (II, 73-77)

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It is quite conceivable that Byron had read Southey’s poem and got some tips. Byron himself comments on many names of “twelve consonants a-piece” (15), and the difficulty of rhyming with “those discords of narration” (16). Despite this linguistic feat, however, there is a grim side to this section when Byron ironically says: “Achilles’ self was not more grim and gory / Than thousands of this new and polished nation, / Whose names want nothing but—pronunciation” (14). Nor is Byron forgetful of good old Anglo-Saxon names. In the war canto appear many English soldiers whose ambition is to become a brigadier or to sack a town. Byron’s catalogue of Englishmen is much shorter, with sixteen Thomsons and nineteen Smiths among them. He mentions only two Thomsons by their first names: Jack Thomson and Bill Thomson, and says, “all the rest / Had been called ‘Jemmy’ after the great bard” (19), referring to James Thomson, author of The Seasons. He says, “Three of the Smiths were Peters”, and simplifies the rest, noting them as “Jacks and Gills and Wills and Bills” (20), anonymous figures in the war. Byron ends this section of English names by mentioning the elder Jack Smith from Cumberland, the son of an honest blacksmith, who “fills / Three lines of the dispatch in taking “‘Schmacksmith’, / A village of Moldavia’s waste” (20). Again, beneath the amusement of enumerating names there lies the serious side of Byron: “I wonder if a man’s name in a bulletin / May make up for a bullet in his body” (21) – the implication of the italicized wordplay is bitter and grim. Aside from fictitious names, Byron also makes a catalogue of real people. As he makes Juan float “Amongst live poets and blue ladies” (XI, 64) and other society people in Canto XI, he cannot help but recall the years of his fame. He realizes that the world he knew so well has changed so much and that “Statesman, chiefs, orators, queens, patriots, kings, / And dandies, all are gone on the wind’s wings” (XI, 76). Beginning with this stanza, this catalogue section ends at stanza 86 where Juan is wistfully told by the narrator to seize the day, “Carpe diem … carpe, carpe!” Anne Barton calls this section “the so-called ubi-sunt stanzas”: “The so-called ubi sunt (‘where are they?’) passage (XI 76-85) is one of the most stunning in the poem, not least because it contrives to be at the same time wonderfully specific in its wry lament for a particular modern society as timeless as Villon’s ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan?’ in his ‘Ballade des dames du temps jadis’” (75). The list of names and what happens to them individually constitutes the catalogue. The list enumerates such figures as Napoleon, a Duke (Wellington), Castlereagh, Grattan, Curran, Sheridan, the unhappy Queen, her daughter, Brummel, Long Pole Wellesley,

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Whitbread, Romilly, George the Third, and ‘Fum’ the Fourth. The list also includes the Grenvilles, Lady Caroline, and Lady Frances, Johanna Southcote, and unnamed figures such as Lord This and Lady That, The Honourable Mistresses and Misses, and so forth. This is a catalogue, not merely of names, but mainly of people who once flourished, but have now succumbed to the law of mutability. The theme is clearly set forth: “In short, the list of alterations bothers: / There’s little strange in this, but something strange is / The unusual quickness of these common changes” (XI, 81). Byron also refers to “Ye annals / So brilliant where the list of routs and dances is” (80), again using the word “list.” This catalogue is highly topical and political, besides being literary, social and personal. Byron makes very brief evaluations of some of the people in the list: “Where is Napoleon the Grand? God knows” (11-77), or “Where’s Brummell? Dished.” Or, “Where are the Lady Carolines and Franceses? / Divorced or doing thereanent,” and so forth. His main target is George IV, who had recently gone to Edinburgh and Dublin, where he had been well received. Byron says that George IV went to Edinburgh “to be fiddled by Sawney’s violin,” and the city was the scene of “royal itch and loyal scratching,” exquisitely rendered by the expression, “Caw me, caw thee” (78). And of course George IV seems to have been more popular in Dublin, as “Dublin shouts” indicates, and less so in London, which is expressed by “London hisses.” Queen Caroline died in August 1821 and her daughter in 1817. The Whigs remained out of office for a good many years while Byron was away from England. In fact, this catalogue is so constructed as to present his political stance. He rounds off the section by returning to “Napoleon shrinking to a Saturn” (82), the late Queen (83), and “the Whigs not getting into place” (84). Byron assesses the political situation from his years of fame to 1822 when he was writing this part of Don Juan. The overall treatment is satirical and comic as well as serious, because of the suppression of human freedom by those in power. Byron’s catalogue here is again double-edged: he is troubled by the quickness of change, the mutability of things human. Norman Abbey gives Byron yet another opportunity to make catalogues. Visitors are ushered inside the Abbey and given a chance to see the paintings which decorate its walls. The catalogue consists of two sections. The first section (68-70) deals with the portraits of Lord Henry’s ancestors, who, although they are not given specific proper names, deserve to be commented on here. It includes “Steel Barons,” “gay and garter’d Earls,” “Lady Marys,” “Countesses,” and “some beauties of Sir Peter Lely” (68). Then the narrator’s attention shifts to the portraits of some of Lord

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Henry’s male ancestors: Judges in very formidable ermine, Were there, with brows that did not much invite The accused to think their Lordships would determine His cause by leaning much from might to right: Bishops, who had not left a single sermon; Attorneys-general awful to the sight, As hinting more (unless our judgments warp us) Of the ‘Star Chamber’ than of ‘Habeas Corpus.’ (XIII, 69)

Byron always manages to explain succinctly in a line or two the attribute of each personage. His perspective tends to be ironic, and some seemingly great personages are treated satirically. The stanza quoted above shows clearly that the judges and attorneys-general were more on the side of repression than protection of human rights, and the bishops were perhaps neither very learned nor good pastors. Byron’s satirical intention becomes clearer when this catalogue shifts to another catalogue of the paintings done by great masters: “But ever and anon, to soothe your vision, / Fatigued with these hereditary glories, / There rose a Carlo Dolce or a Titian” (71). Since visitors are said to become tired with looking at the portraits of Lord Henry’s ancestors, he now offers instead a catalogue of paintings of a more general nature. The list of the great Italian, French, Dutch and Flemish masters includes Carlo Dolce, Titian, Salvatore, Albano, Vernet, Spagnoletto, Lorraine, Rembrandt, Caravaggio and Tenniers, and, for a change, the narrator has no ironic words for any of them. For instance, he has this to say about Lorraine and Rembrandt: “Here sweetly spread a landscape of Lorraine; / There Rembrandt made his darkness equal light” (72). The only change in tone comes at the end of the section, but it is only humorous, and not satirical. The narrator sees in a Teniers a “bell-mouthed goblet,” which “makes me feel quite Danish / Or Dutch with thirst—What ho! A flask of Rhenish.” Byron has a note to these lines: “If I err not, ‘Your Dane’ is one of Iago’s Catalogue of Nations ‘exquisite in their drinking’” (V, 757). Significantly, he uses the word “catalogue” here too. Iago is talking about a song, which he “learned in England, where, indeed, they are most potent in potting: your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander—Drink, ho!—are nothing to your English” (Othello, II, iii, 66-8). Iago enumerates only four nationals, but Byron considers the lines as a catalogue and says: “But a mere modern must be

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moderate—/ I spare you then the furniture and plate” (XIII, 74). Byron’s mentioning of “the furniture and plate” leads us to the second type of catalogue: what I would call a catalogue of description, such as the catalogue of dishes offered at Norman Abbey. Byron begins mock-heroically, reminding us of The Rape of the Lock: Great things were now to be achieved at table With massy plate for armour, knives and forks For weapons; but what Muse since Homer’s able (His feasts are not the worst part of his works) To draw up in array a single day-bill Of modern dinners? where more mystery lurks In soups or sauces, or a sole ragoût, Than witches, b—ches, or physicians brew. (XV, 62)

The word “day-bill” can be taken as ‘catalogue’. Earlier in the poem, when the famished Juan is first fed by Haidee and Zoe after the shipwreck, Byron recalls Homer’s Iliad, and says that the mess of broth they prepared for Juan was “the best dish that e’er was cook’d since Homer’s / Achilles order’d dinner for new comers” (II, 123). He here refers to the visit by Odysseus and Ajax to Achilles, who, again in Pope’s words, “at the genial Feast presides, / The Parts transfixes, and with Skill divides” (IX, 275-6). Homer does not spend much time or lines on the actual ‘dinner.’ Byron, however, devotes thirteen stanzas to the ‘modern dinner’ (X, 62-74). The cuisine offered at Norman Abbey is mainly French, but there are dishes “a l’Allemande” and “A l’Espagnole” as well. He is now ready “to crowd all into one grand mess / Or mass” (64). In other words he is making a catalogue, which includes soupe à la bonne femme, a turbot, dindon a la Périgueux, soupe à la Beauveau, Dory, pork, fowls à la Condé, slices of salmon with sauces Genevoises, and haunch of venison (63-65). Talking about “Petits puits d’Amour,” Byron says, “one may dress it to his wish, / According to the best of dictionaries, / Which encyclopedize both flesh and fish” (68). His use of the word “encyclopedize” –to catalogue, systematize and exhaust–is worth noticing. To the chagrin of lovers of English cuisine, the narrator says he would rather use such words as “the gibier, / The salami, the consommé, the purée” than “roast beef” or “Bubble and squeak,” since those French dishes “make my rhymes run glibber,” and do not “spoil my liquid lay,” as the English dishes might do (71). This culinary catalogue is a tour de force. Gone are the days of “Adam’s simple ration” (69) or Achilles’ simple fare.

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The great variety of modern dishes demands naming, and hence a need for a nomenclature, a catalogue. The rhyming is amusing in these stanzas, as elsewhere. The lines, “there is more mystery in soups or sauces or a sole ragout / Than witches, b—ches, or physicians brew” (62), in themselves constitute a short list. Elsewhere, Dory is rhymed with glory, and Ammon with “A glazed Westphalian ham on” (65). He could be being wicked when he says, “There’s pretty picking in those ‘petits puits.’” (68). The section begins mock-heroically – in fact, Byron is never far away from the military image. He has this couplet to emphasise his modern age: “But oh! Ye modern heroes with your cartridges, / When will your names lend luster even to partridges?” (67). There is no space here to quote Gargantua’s spectacular dinner in full, consisting of “roasted sixteen oxen three heifers two and thirty calves, threescore and three fat kids, fourscore and fifteen wethers … elevenscore partridges …” (112-3), the list going on for 17 more lines. There is a kind of hilarious wildness in Rabelais’s catalogue; Byron’s, in comparison, is almost tame. Byron’s third type of cataloguing is the grouping together of many instances of a certain mental response on the part of the narrator. One such is found in a section in Canto I where he enumerates things he considers sweet, employing six stanzas (122-7). His ultimate purpose is to emphasize the sweetest thing of all, “first and passionate love” (127), to which the narration is eventually heading. The narrator is in no hurry to relate the sad outcome of the love of Juan and Julia. He enjoys his cataloguing. Byron uses the word “sweet” nineteen times and “sweeter” once in these six stanzas besides “the sweetest.” The word “dear” is also used twice with almost the same meaning as “sweet.” The clause, “‘Tis sweet,” is used eight times. For example, he considers it sweet to hear “the song and oar of Adria’s gondolier,” or “the nightwinds creep / From leaf to leaf,” and to see “the evening star” or “the rainbow, based on ocean, span the sky” (122). This tone, both serious and innocent, continues in the list composed of such sweet things as “the watchdog’s honest bark,” “the lark,” “falling waters,” “the hum / Of bees, the voice of girls, the song of birds, / The lisp of children and their earliest words” (123). Then, as is often the case with Byron, he starts including unexpected things like “revenge—especially to women, / Pillage to soldiers, prize-money to seamen” (124), and “legacy,” and “The unexpected death of some old lady / Or gentleman of seventy years complete” (125). Towards the end of the catalogue the tone changes again and returns to the initial lyrical stance: “Sweet is old wine in bottles, ale in barrels; / Dear is the helpless creature we defend / Against the world;

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and dear the schoolboy spot / We ne’er forget” (126). Thus the catalogue of “things sweet” begins quietly and innocently, becomes satirical, and then sentimental and nostalgic, and finally ends in praise of “first and passionate love” (127). Towards the end of Canto I the narrator makes a catalogue of things that are gone and past, and cannot be retrieved, using the phrase, “never more.” He says he is thirty years of age now and that he feels he is not the same man as he was “in my hot youth when George the Third was King” (212). In the four stanzas that ensue, he uses the phrase “never more” or “no more” eight times. The main appeal is expressed in these lines: “No more—no more—Oh! Never more on me / The freshness of the heart can fall like dew” (214). In short, “My days of love are over, me no more / The charms of maid, wife, and still less of widow / Can make the fool of which they made before” (216). One cannot suppress a smile at the juxtaposition of maid, wife and widow. He says in a rather self-deprecating and comic manner that, if his heart is no more “my sole world, my universe,” “I’ve got a deal of judgment, / Though heaven knows how it ever found a lodgement” (215). To make the section completely bathetic, he says: “I think I must take up with avarice” (216). Byron is fond of repeating words or phrases to express his states of mind, and is almost always both serious and comic. This essay has shown Byron’s love of cataloguing from three different perspectives: cataloguing of proper names, descriptions, and mental responses. His habit of making short catalogues would have to be the subject of another study. Byron loved making catalogues throughout Don Juan, enjoying the euphony and linguistic play in them. True to the Homeric tradition, his cataloguing is often military-oriented, and is therefore serious as well, although he generally rejects epic prowess. This essay has tried to demonstrate how his cataloguing is characterized by “serious laughter.” In May 2008 I had the pleasure of inviting Mr Andrew Motion, the then poet laureate, to Ryukoku University in Kyoto for a poetry reading. One of the poems he read was entitled “The Wish List,” which had been occasioned by his father’s death. The poem is about the things he wished to place in his father’s coffin. One item leads to another, and what we read in the end is a catalogue of things Motion’s father loved, and also his short biography, which is both selective and yet strangely exhaustive. Even in twenty-first century English poetry, the tradition of cataloguing is flourishing.

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Notes 1

This essay is a revised version of the article published in The Newstead Byron Society Review (January 2010). I am grateful to Dr Peter Cochran of Cambridge who kindly read the essay and made useful comments and suggestions. 2 See Byron’s letter to Thomas Moore, 17 November 1816, in Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand (London: Jon Murray, 1973-82), 12 vols, V, 131. 3 “Pour in sow’s blood, that hath eaten / Her nine farrow” (IV, i, 63-64). See Macbeth, ed. A. R. Braunmuller (Cambridge, University Press, 1997). 4 E. H. Coleridge quotes a few lines from Southey’s “March to Moscow”, beginning with “Oscharoffsky and Rostoffsky, / And all the others that end in –offsky”. See his note to Canto VII, stanza 16 in The Works of Lord Byron, Poetry, 7 vols, VI, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: John Murray, 1903).

Works Cited Aeschylus. Persians and Other Plays. Trans. Alan H. Sommerstein. London: Penguin Books, 2009. Print. Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando). Trans. Barbara Reynolds. 2 vols. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin books, 1975. Print. Barton, Anne. Byron: Don Juan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Print. Bone, Drummond. “Beppo: the Liberation of Ficton.” Byron and the Limits of Fiction. Ed. Bernard Beatty, and Vincent Newey. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988. Print. Byron, Lord. Byron’s Don Juan: A Variorum Edition. Ed. Truman Guy Steffan, and Willis W. Pratt. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1957. Print. —. Byron’s Letters and Journals. Ed. Leslie Marchand. 12 vols. London: John Murray, 1973-82. Print. —. Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. 7 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980-93. Print. —. “Reading List (1807).”Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose. Ed. Andrew Nicholson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. 1-7. Print. —. The Works of Lord Byron. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 7 vols. London: John Murray, 1903. Print. Chikamatsu, Monzaemon. The Love Suicides at Amijima. Four Major Plays of Chikamatsu. Trans. Donald Keene. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Print.

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Dryden, John. Virgil’s Aeneis. The Poems of John Dryden. Ed. James Kinsley. Vol. 3. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958. Print. Hesiod. Theogony and Theognis. Trans. Dorothea Wender. London: Penguin Books, 1973. Print. Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Aubery de Selincourt. London: Penguin Books, 1954, revised edition 2006. Print. Homer. The Iliad of Homer. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1951. Print. —. The Odyssey. Trans. Albert Cook. New York: W.W. Norton, 1974. Print. Milton, John. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957. Print. Motion, Andrew. “The Wish List.” Cinder Path. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Print. Pope, Alexander. Alexander Pope: The Iliad of Homer. Ed. Maynard Mack, and others. 11 vols. Vol. 7. London: Methuen; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. Print. Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart, and Pierre le Motteux. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Print. Sei Shǀnagon. The Pillow Book. Trans. Meredith McKinney. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Print. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Ed. A.R. Braunmuller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Print. —. Othello. Ed. Norman Sanders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Print. Southey, Robert. The Poetical Works of Robert Southey. London: Longman, Brown Green, and Lonmans, 1848. X vols. Reprinted in Anglistica & Americana. Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1977. Print. Spenser, Edmund. The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser. Ed. J. C. Smith, and E. De Selincourt. London: Oxford University Press, 1960 (1912). Print. The Tale of the Heike. Trans. Hiroshi Kitagawa and Bruce T. Tsuchida. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1975. Print.

CENTRALISATION AND IDENTITY OF CHARACTERS IN EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY WRITINGS: RYUNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA, SOSEKI NATSUME, AND LEWIS GRASSIC GIBBON MEGUMI SAKAMOTO FUKUSHIMA UNIVERSITY

Introduction The early twentieth century was a historical turning point for Japan and European countries. Radical societal and traditional movements led to drastic changes in people’s ways of life. To operate the First World War effectively, governments started to centralise their political administration and centre-oriented education systems, and modernise their military forces. This forced citizens to become members of what was intended to be a united nation. Earlier, people born and raised in different regions had used their own dialects and local languages and were accustomed to the local situation; however, after the onset of the War, the concept of the nation state took over, and governments forced people to adopt the ‘national standard’ to become citizens of the state and function to preserve the strength of the modern nation state. This situation led to both societal and mental conflict for the people. Japan was a notable example of this. The new Meiji government began with the Meiji Restoration in 1867; this government planned to build strong armed forces for the country, and introduced a centre-oriented compulsory education system in 1872. The new education system enforced the use of common classroom materials that adhered to the national standard. Classroom textbooks started to be printed using the Tokyo dialect, and emphasis was placed on the children’s awareness of their identity as members of the state, and concomitant responsibilities. A single

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standardised language and an official view of the national history quickly spread to every region in Japan, including Kyusyu, Okinawa, Hokkaido, and the North-East, where strong indigenous cultures and languages had once flourished. People were faced with the serious danger of losing their regional awareness and identities. Britain and Japan strengthened their positions against Russia with the Anglo–Japanese Alliance of 1902, which accelerated those modernizing processes. In this new situation, people in Asian countries were forced to contend with the question of how to deal with Western cultures and emerge as winners in view of colonial supremacy in this region. These successive modernisations by the Japanese government led to Japan’s triumphs in the First Sino–Japanese War of 1895 and the Russo–Japanese War of 1905, as a result of which Japan gained a place as one of the strongest competitive powers in Asia. According to Dennis C. Washburn, ‘There are several reasons why the need for a common understanding of the meaning of modern seemed so urgent in Meiji Japan. The threat posed by Western imperialism and the danger of extreme economic and cultural marginalization forced a reevaluation of social norms. This led to the belief that the only way to protect Japan from the West was to sweep aside the traditions of the immediate past and forge a new cultural identity in order to compete with Western powers’ (Washburn 4). On the other hand, this kind of strong centralisation and rapid establishment of the nation state led to societal and mental upheaval for the people. Fast-paced changes undoubtedly aroused strong awareness of concepts like individualism and nationalism. As a natural result, Japan, the UK, and other European countries witnessed a surge in modernist literature in the early twentieth century. One of the main roots of literary productivity is people’s a strong awareness among writers of being in a new age. It was a long forty years after the Meiji Restoration that Japan re-opened its doors to the West, which was the starting point for Japan as a modern nation state. Although in the beginning, people continued to maintain their traditional ways of life, Western cultures gradually had their impacts on the daily lives of the people; for instance, German influence was seen in the first constitution and political system of Meiji Japan, and influences from the UK, Scotland in particular, were seen in industrialisation and centralisation, backed by the nation-wide railway and education systems which were also influenced by the British institutions.

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Modern Historical Events and Literary Works 1867-1910 in Japan 1867 Meiji Restoration (End of Edo period) 1872 Law for the National School system 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance Treaty 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War 1906 Law for the Foundation of the National Railway 1908 Soseki Natsume, Sanshiro 1910 Japanese Military Occupation of Korean Peninsula 1915 Ryunosuke Akutagawa, ‘Rashǀmon’ Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) played a leading role in modern Japanese literary developments along with Ogai Mori, Takuboku Ishikawa, and Kan Kikuchi. Although Akutagawa died at the young age of 35, he was a prolific writer and the author of more than 300 short stories. He is also an internationally renowned author, joining the ranks of Soseki Natsume, Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata (the first Japanese Nobel Prize Winner), Haruki Murakami and the internationally-known female writer, Banana Yoshimoto. In fact, one of Japan’s most honoured literary prizes— the ‘Akutagawa Prize’—is named after him. His works still appear in more than twenty school textbooks in Japan (Sekiguchi 73) His works—including ‘Rashǀmon,’ ‘In a Bamboo Grove,’ ‘The Nose,’ and ‘The Spider Thread’—have been translated into over twenty languages, including English versions of his thirty-six stories. Akutagawa also owed part of his reputation to Akira Kurosawa, the critically acclaimed director who made ‘Rashǀmon’ in 1950, winning the Leone d’Oro at the 1951 Venice International Film Festival. Although Kurosawa’s movie was called ‘Rashǀmon’, the film is not based on this story, but on another of Akutagawa’s short stories: ‘In a Bamboo Grove.’ Akutagawa’s use of Japanese classics such as Konzyaku Monogatari Shu (an early twelfthcentury collection of short stories by anonymous authors) lends a remarkable flavour to his historical works, including ‘Rashǀmon’ in which Akutagawa tries to find a solution for the modern common people. Soseki Natsume (1867–1916) was undoubtedly the master of the new literary trend in Japan at that historical turning point. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo), where he began his study of English. “Born before the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Soseki belonged to the last generation of Japanese who could remember the old Edo culture that existed prior to the radical changes that were carried out

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as Japan transferred itself into a modern imperial power in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s” (Bourdaghs 3). After his career as a high school teacher, the Japanese government, in 1900, sent him to Britain for two years on a government scholarship (funded from the compensation paid by China to Japan after the Sino-Japanese War) to study as a literary scholar; his scholarship was originally part of China’s war compensation to Japan after the Sino–Japanese War. During his stay, he mostly lived in London but also visited Scotland. Natsume was also a student of European philosophy, including eugenics and the works of Friedrich W. Nietzsche. His major work, Sanshiro, was written in 1908 just after the Anglo–Japanese Alliance (1902) and the Russo–Japanese War (1904–05). Sanshiro is a bildungsroman tracing the development of the eponymous twenty-threeyear-old protagonist. The story is remarkable in that it investigates the life of the young modern generation who are faced with difficulties, trying to find their own path by treading between traditional Japanese culture and the strong Western influences which were affecting it. Centralisation and the formation of modern nation states had a similar impact on authors in Britain. The common problems remained of how to deal with rapid modernisation or industrialisation and how to find a reason for existence. Through a comparison between the above two Japanese works and those of the Scottish novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1901–35), this study will highlight the common literary themes in the early twentieth century.

1. Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s ‘Rashǀmon’ Till today, Akutagawa has been revered as a writer of national stature in modern Japanese literature. He had a keen awareness of the historical background of his time, and seemed to be able to show people how to cope with the fast-paced changes of the period. In his introduction to Rashǀmon and Seventeen Other Stories (published by the Penguin Group), Haruki Murakami says the following: In Japan, Akutagawa Ryunosuke is a writer of genuinely national stature. If a poll were taken to choose the ten most important ‘Japanese national writers’ since the advent of the modern period in 1868, Akutagawa would undoubtedly be one of them. He might even squeeze in among the top five. . . . But what is . . . a ‘writer of national stature’ in Japan? Such a writer would necessarily have left us works of the first rank that vividly reflect

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the mentality of the Japanese people of his or her age. . . . Of course the works themselves . . . must not only be exceptional, they must have the depth and power to survive at least a quarter century after the writer’s death. . . . The important thing is whether each of them as an individual human being embraced an awareness of the great questions of the age, accepted his or her social responsibility as an artist on the front line, and made an honest effort to shape his or her life accordingly. (‘Introduction,’ Rashǀmon and Seventeen Other Stories, xix)

Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s masterpiece, ‘Rashǀmon,’ was written in 1915. One of his important inspirations for ‘Rashǀmon’ was the Japanese classic, Konzyaku Monogatari Shu, written in the early twelfth century. This is a collection of short stories by anonymous authors. The series depicts the daily lives of ordinary people towards the end of the Heian Period in the twelfth-century Japan. When using Konzyaku as a source for ‘Rashǀmon,’ Akutagawa replaces the background of the book with one resembling his life in the early twentieth century. Therefore, a comparison between the story in ‘Rashǀmon’ and those in Konzyaku will highlight Akutagawa’s alterations of the original story and his literary intentions. Another important influence that can be seen in Akutagawa’s literary works is that of the German philosopher, Friedrich W. Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s philosophy was already starting to have a big impact on Japanese society in the early twentieth century, particularly Japan’s literary society, including not only Akutagawa but other major novelists like Ogai Mori and Chogyuu Takayama. The first examination in this study will deal with a comparison between ‘Rashǀmon’ and one of the stories in Konzyaku. The first story in Konzyaku is called ‘Razyomon no Uwakosi ni Noborite Sibito wo Mitaru Nusubito no Korowai’ in Japanese (‘The Story of the Thief Who Comes up Razyo Wall and Watches the Dead’). There are many apparent differences between Akutagawa’s ‘Rashǀmon’ and ‘Razyomon’. It is clear that Akutagawa only uses this Konzyaku story as a source; he adds several important facets that the original story does not have. These differences will highlight Akutagawa’s literary concerns and intentions. The original story in Konzyaku is called Razyomon, whereas Akutagawa’s story was titled Rashǀmon; therefore, the sounds of the two titles are different. In Japanese, ‘Razyomon’ originally referred to the main gate of the capital—Kyoto—during the Heian period. ‘Razyo’ is a proper noun, and ‘mon’ means ‘gate.’ Therefore, ‘Razyomon’ means ‘Razyo Gate.’

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The outline of both stories is necessary for a more detailed examination of the differences. Akutagawa’s ‘Rashǀmon’ is set at the end of the Heian Period in twelfth- century Japan. One evening, a young servant who has just been dismissed sits on the steps of Rashǀmon Gate to wait out the rain. Social security is very bad, and there is almost no law and order in the city, even in the capital town of Rashǀmon, which has almost fallen out of use. At Rashǀmon Gate, people even discard abandoned corpses. Therefore, this story has a pervasive Gothic flavour. He aimlessly ascends the ladder at the Gate, where he comes upon a room in which there are a number of carelessly discarded dead bodies. In the dim room, he encounters an old woman pulling the hair off a corpse. He plucks up the courage to ask her, ‘What are you doing there?’ The old woman replies, ‘I㸫I was pulling㸫I was pulling out hair to make a wig.’ She proceeds to pull the hair off the body of a lady, justifying her actions by saying that she uses the hair to make wigs, which she then sells for money so that she can survive in hard times. She says, ‘I know, I know, it may be wrong to pull out dead people’s hair. But these people here deserve what they get. Take this woman . . . she used to cut snakes into four-inch pieces and dry them and sell them as dried fish.’ Listening to her excuse, the young man disregards his conscience and forgets his anxiety. Like the old woman, he believes that any action is allowed in the name of survival. The man then brutally strips the old woman of her robe and disappears into the town to sell it. This story ends with the sentence, ‘What happened to the lowly servant, no one knows.’ Critics highlight the outstanding egoism of the young servant. However, before concluding that he is merely egoistic, it is necessary to quote an excerpt from the first scene of the story for closer examination. The story begins on a rainy evening in the ruined city of Kyoto. Evening and a lowly servant sat beneath the Rashǀmon, waiting [for] the rain to end. Under the broad gate there was no one else, just a single cricket clinging to a huge red pillar from which the lacquer was peeling here and there. Situated on a thoroughfare as important as Suzaku Avenue, the Rashǀmon could have been sheltering at least a few others from the rainʊperhaps a woman in a lacquered reed hat, or a courtier with a soft black cap. Yet there was no one besides the man. (Akutagawa 3)

The following excerpt is the first scene from the Konzyaku story ‘Razyomon.’

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A man coming from Settsu region to Kyoto, who wants to steal, now stands behind the Razyomon to hide because it is still in the daylight. Suzaku Avenue is in the crowd, and even from Yamashiro district many people seem to approach, so the man feels he have to hide for a while and climbs up the upstairs of the Razyomon furtively. (‘Razyomon no Uwakosi ni Noborite Sibito wo Mitaru Genin no Kotowari, ’Konzyaku Monogatari Shu, vol.29, No.18) Akutagawa, Rashomon ᬅ Evening, and ᬆa lowly servant sat beneath the Rashomon, waiting the rain to end. Under the broad gateᬇ there was no one else, just ᬈa single cricket clinging to ᬉa huge red pillar from which the lacquer was peeling here and there. Situated on a thoroughfare as important as Suzaku Avenue, the Rashomon could have been sheltering at least a few others from the rainʊperhaps ᬊa woman in a lacquered reed hat, or a courtier with a soft black cap. Yet there was no one besides the man. Konzyaku Story, ‘Razyomon’ Now, it is old story, A man coming from Settsu region to Kyoto, who wants to do theft, now stands behind the Razyo-mon to hide because it is still in the daylight. Suzaku Avenue is in the crowd, and even from Yamashiro district many people seem to approach, so the man feels he have to hide for a while and climbs up the upstairs of the Razyo-mon furtively.

The differences between those two excerpts have been numbered as follows: Firstly, ‘Razyomon’ is set in the daytime, but Akutagawa’s ‘Rashǀmon’ is set in the evening. Secondly, the male character in Razyomon already intended to commit a robbery, which was not the motivation of the lowly servant in ‘Rashǀmon,’ at least not in the first scene. Thirdly, in ‘Razyomon’, the gate and Suzaku Avenue are crowded with people; but in ‘Rashǀmon,’ Akutagawa states that ‘There was no one else.’ Further, ‘Razyomon’ does not contain descriptions of ‘a single cricket,’ ‘a huge red pillar from which the lacquer was peeling here and there’ or references to the hat and cap. These differences are the conscious creation of Akutagawa. However, the following questions remain to be answered: What is the meaning of these changes and creations? What was the intention of this modern author? Of importance, first, is the time at which the story is set. In a sense, evening forms a border between the bright daytime and the dark night, a fine line between order and disorder. Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi in his Reading

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Rashǀmon, [Sekiguchi 22] and Toshio Hiraoka [Hiraoka 28] both pay attention to the important use of a specific time. The evening setting also influences the mindset of the young servant, who is moving from an ordered bright world into the chaotic night. He is a helpless, fragile creature, like the cricket clinging to the red pillar. The red pillar and the phrase ‘the lacquer was peeling here and there’ also have special meaning. All the pillars and beams are coated in vermilion because that colour had special religious significance in Japanese history, especially during the Heian period. The people held the belief that the colour vermilion protects against misfortune. Therefore, many Shinto shrines are painted with this colour. Further, the political authority of the Heian emperors was based on Buddhism and Shintoism. Though critics do not mention the religious meaning of the colour (Yamazaki 56-57), vermilion, therefore, symbolises Shintoism. The word ‘Heian’ itself means ‘peace of mind.’ Historical facts show that although the political authority of the Heian emperors was based on their authority within the Shinto religion, this religion started to decline drastically towards the end of the Heian era. Therefore, Akutagawa’s phrase ‘the lacquer was peeling here and there’ is undoubtedly intentional. The author draws a comparison between the decline of religious authority in the Heian period and the similar decline in the Taisho era, during which the author lived. Therefore, metaphorically, people were clinging on to the old and weakened religious authority during the Heian and Taisho eras, much like the small cricket clinging to the pillar.

⨶ńᅄ㸦square㸧+⣒㸦strings㸧 +⥔(grid)㻃 ᇛń Walls  㛛 ń Gate㻃   ⨶ᇛ㛛㸸Gate of the surrounding walls of a Capital㻃

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While it is true that the cricket is a metaphor for helplessness and frailty, the question now is: who are the people who fall into this category? The answer lies in Akutagawa’s description in this first passage of the book. . . . The key terms here are the ‘hat’ and ‘cap.’ The original Japanese expressions for ‘a lacquered reed hat’ and ‘a soft black cap’ are ‘ichimegasa’ and ‘momi-ebosi’ respectively. ‘Ichime’ means a woman who sells goods in a daily market; further, in the Heian period, low ranking public servants and minor officials wore the momi-ebosi. It can therefore be said that Akutagawa’s descriptions of the hat and cap are intentional and have symbolic meaning. It is obvious that Akutagawa was describing the middle or upper middle class people, the class to which he himself belonged, and trying to show what their ordinary everyday lives were like in the twelfth century. Another parallel to this is Akutagawa himself belonged to this class. The final difference between ‘Rashǀmon’ and ‘Razyomon’ lies in the names themselves. As already pointed out, the title in the original Konzyaku stories is ‘Razyomon’, but Akutagawa changes it to ‘Rashǀmon.’ This is also associated with the difficulty of translation of Japanese Kanji characters. First, we discuss Razyomon from Konzyaku. As seen in the first figure, the three Chinese characters are read from top to bottom—‘ra,’ ‘zyo,’ and ‘mon.’ These three characters have their own meanings. The first, ‘ra,’ is a combination of three parts depicting ‘square,’ ‘string,’ and ‘grid.’ ‘jyo’ means ‘walls’ and ‘mon’ means ‘gate.’ Therefore, Razyomon means ‘the gate of the walls surrounding the capital.’ However, Akutagawa changes one character to make up his title: ‘Rashǀmon’. (next figure )

⨶ńᅄ㸦square㸧+⣒㸦strings㸧+⥔ (grid)㻃 ⏕ ń Life, Lives㻃 㛛 ń Gate ⨶⏕㛛㸸Intersection or Crossing of the lives of the people㻃

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Although ‘ra’ and ‘mon’ have the same meaning, the second character on the top, ‘shǀ’, has a completely different meaning compared to the original ‘zyo’. Here, ‘shǀ’ means ‘life’ or ‘lives’ (of the people). Therefore, Rashǀmon means ‘the intersection or crossing of the lives of people.’ Here also, Akutagawa’s revision of the name is intentional and symbolic. He attempts to depict the Rashǀmon Gate as the location or the crossroad at which his protagonists meet, impacting on each other, and figuring out ways in which to survive in harsh times [Sekiguchi 32-33]. The lowly servant resolves to be a thief and steals away the old woman’s robe. Although this action is morally wrong, Akutagawa himself seems to find it admirable, considering it a reasonable action in the name of survival. In this way, through the critical situation faced by the servant, Akutagawa tries to overcome traditional morals and values. This is an unscrupulous act, but Akutagawa is confident that he will overcome traditional notions of Good and Evil. Through this, ‘Rashǀmon’ brings out Akutagawa’s individualism. By way of a final analysis of Akutagawa’s ‘Rashǀmon,’ it is necessary to mention the impact of Nietzsche. By the time Akutagawa wrote ‘Rashǀmon’ in 1915, he had already bought and read Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Anti Christ, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche’s stress on overcoming notions of Good and Evil are recalled in Akutagawa’s description of the peeling lacquer from the red pillar, which shows the people’s distress at the lack of religion or beliefs that they can rely upon. This is also seen in Akutagawa’s changing of the original ‘walls’ into ‘lives.’ Akutagawa was on the frontlines of his age, and his aim was to highlight the value of the individual middle class person. Although over a hundred years have passed since ‘Rashǀmon’ was first published, it still has a strong impact. Akutagawa’s unique individualism still has its special meaning, presenting the following question: How can individuals protect their own personal values and hold these above the ‘Good versus Bad’ ethics imposed by the nation state? This was the main problem for Akutagawa in the early twentieth century, and remains a problem for us in the twenty-first.

2. Soseki Natsume’s Sanshiro Soseki Natsume was the first critic to recognise the literary talent of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, on whom he was a significant literary influence.

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Natsume was a recognised master in the Japanese literary scene of his time, and remains one of Japan’s most popular authors. He had already an established status as an authority when he wrote Sanshiro, and he also depicted the ambivalent situation of the people. As Van C.Gessel points out; The clash between the group-oriented behavior of Japanese tradition and the individual action of the West is one of the most evident of the conflicts, though by no means the only one, waged in Soseki’s stories. Soseki perceived these clashes in terms of their impact on the individual life, but he is forever ambivalent as to appropriate solutions. He is unwilling to abandon completely the core and substance of traditional Japanese behavior, but is intelligent enough to see the benefits of individual freedom. Many of his fictional characters wander the uncharted land lying between social responsibility and personal freedom. (Gessel13)

In the first scene of Sanshiro, the young protagonist leaves his hometown of Kyusyu to study at Tokyo Imperial University. His train passes through Japan’s major towns of Hiroshima, Osaka, and Kyoto; and as the train approaches Tokyo, the homesick Sanshiro starts to feel very lonely and begins to carefully observe a local woman sitting beside him: The woman had caught Sanshiro’s eye when she boarded in Kyoto. She was very dark, almost black. The ferry had brought him from Kyusyu, and as the train drew closer to Hiroshima, then Osaka and Kyoto, he had watched the complexions of the local women turning lighter and lighter, and before he knew it he was homesick. Then she had entered the car, and he felt he had gained an ally of the opposite sex. She was a Kyusyu-color woman. (3)

In the paragraph above, the contrast between white and black is remarkable. The colour of this ‘local’ woman seems ‘dark, almost black,’ but upon approaching Tokyo, the women turn ‘lighter and lighter.’ This symbolical contrast is prevalent throughout the story. When approaching Hamamatsu station, Sanshiro glances at ‘four or five Westerners,’ including a Western lady. One pair was probably a married couple; they were holding hands in spite of the hot weather. Dressed entirely in white, the woman was very beautiful.… Foreigners as colorful and attractive as these were not only something quite new for Sanshiro, they seemed to be of a higher class. (15)

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The white colour of the Westerners is symbolic. This is also true of Mineko Satomi, the sophisticated lady from Tokyo. Sanshiro befriends Mineko at Tokyo Imperial University, and gradually falls in love with her. His love is a combination of his adoration of her sophisticated Tokyo image and his sympathy for her anxiety about this new age. What about Sanshiro himself—is he black, or white? Yojiro, one of Sanshiro’s friends, answers this question with his satirical remark, ‘You are the Kyushu black man’; comparing Sanshiro with the African hero in Aphra Behn’s novel, Oroonoko. Aphra Behn (baptised 1640 – 1689) is a prolific dramatist of the English Restoration period, and the first English professional female literary writer. Natsume’s reference to Aphra Behn and her masterpiece Oroonoko (1688) shows his wide knowledge of English literature. Yoichi Komori, a leading critic of modern Japanese literature, appropriately points out that Natsume’s frequent comparison of black and white shows his sound knowledge of social Darwinism and eugenics. The colour black is associated with the undeveloped and wild image of Kyusyu, Japan, and Sanshiro himself; the colour white with sophistication and the developed image of Tokyo, Westerners, and Mineko. The study of eugenics had a large impact on Japanese academic society; for his part, Natsume learned about eugenics from his stay in Britain from 1901 to 1902. Through colour contrasts, Natsume satirically dramatises the impacts of European philosophies and people’s awareness. According to Komori, Japanese modernisation and centralisation were enhanced by the foundation of the National Railway System. The railways mobilised the masses and easily widened the gap between the developed, industrialised major cities and the undeveloped, barbarous countryside. In fact, these gaps were already quite wide owing to the rapid development and centralisation of Japan. In the feudal Edo age, people were prohibited from leaving their hometowns; however, towards the end of this period, people started using the railways to leave their homes and move around the country, much like Sanshiro. Natsume depicts Sanshiro as a typical country boy travelling to the big city, faced with social mobilisation and the serious mental instability caused by moving away from his birthplace. Centralisation in Japan was accelerated by the introduction of the new centralised education system introduced in 1872. Natsume criticised this centralisation and discrimination against varying local cultures; this is accurately depicted by Sanshiro, a typical country boy. After spending several weeks of his new life in Tokyo, Sanshiro receives a letter from his mother in Kyusyu. In this scene, he feels as though three worlds appear in front of him. The first is associated with his

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former life and his mother, and he does not want to return to that life. The second is his present life in Tokyo, surrounded by books, people, and the sounds of streetcars that he has come to enjoy and does not want to give up. The final, and most tempting, world appears ‘as radiant and fluid as spring, a world of electric lights, of silver spoons, of cheers and laughter, of glasses bubbling over with champagne.’ This world is associated with his future, with his life in Tokyo with Mineko. Although this world lies just in front of him, he feels it is ‘unapproachable.’ Sanshiro feels, for some reason, that this world is unattainable and closed to him. The three worlds signify Sanshiro’s feeling of being suspended in limbo. In his new life in Tokyo, Sanshiro cannot find his way to a world with which he can identify.

3. The Historical Meaning of Individualism in Modern Nation States The next question to be answered is: what is the historical meaning of Natsume’s Sanshiro? Why does Natsume try to highlight the agony of Sanshiro using his knowledge of eugenics, and what or who is the target of his harsh criticism? To attempt an answer to these questions, it is necessary to pay close attention to the then historical background of Japan. More particularly, it is important to understand the views of Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835–1901), a contemporary of Natsume. Fukuzawa was the most influential political theorist at the end of the nineteenth century. In the early 1860s, during the Tokugawa period (the last in which the feudal system prevailed), Fukuzawa visited various European countries including France, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Britain as a member of a political mission. Upon his return, he began to insist on the importance of quick modernisation for Japan, including the development of industries and the formation of a strong military force. He believed that only modernisation would allow this small Asian country to compete with strong Western forces; he was also a strong supporter of the Sino–Japanese War of 1894 and basked in Japan’s victory. Fukuzawa’s logic is sound. Western countries were making advances on Asia—exemplified by the First Anglo-Chinese War in 1840—and China and Korea were ‘undeveloped’ countries, too weak to protect themselves; therefore, Fukuzawa’s view was that Japan must ‘protect’ these countries from the advancing European powers , making Japan the supreme power in this region. According to Fukuzawa, this was the reason

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for Japan to introduce Westernisation and modernisation, in order to compete with the strong European countries. In his famous essay entitled Datsu-A Ron [Farewell to Asia], Fukuzawa urges Japan to shed its image of an undeveloped Asian country and adopt the garb of a developed Western nation. Therefore, inculcating people’s awareness and responsibilities as members of the nation was of the utmost importance to Fukuzawa. For his part, Natsume was keenly aware of this historical environment. Sanshiro can be considered as Natsume’s response or resistance to these historical movements. This is exemplified in one of the scenes in Sanshiro, where the students at Tokyo Imperial University speak out at a drinking party: “We, the youth, can no longer endure the oppression of the old Japan. Simultaneously, we live in circumstances that compel us to announce to the world that we, the youth, can no longer endure the new oppression from the West [which] is just as painful to us, the young men of the new age, as is the oppression of the old Japan. . . . We do not study Western literature in order to surrender ourselves to it, but to emancipate minds that have already surrendered to it.” (Sanshiro 109)

‘When the speech ended, the assembled students all cheered enthusiastically. Sanshiro was among the most enthusiastic.’ However, of greater importance is Sanshiro’s response the day after the party: ‘The awareness that he was a youth of the new age had been strengthened suddenly the night before, but nothing else had been strengthened; physically, he was still the same’. Immediately following this sentence, Natsume proceeds to discuss an athletic track meet. Sanshiro went out after lunch. The entrance to the meet was at the south end of the playing field. There the Rising Sun and the English flag were displayed crosswise. He understood what the Rising Sun was doing there, but why the British flag? Maybe it was for the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. But he could not see any connection between the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the University track meet. (Sanshiro 110-112)

There is no need to go into the impact that the Second Boer War (South African War) of 1899 had on Britain’s position; Britain and Japan, which collaborated in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, both needed numbers of trained troops with immense physical strength to conduct the wars; therefore, the athletic meets of the university students were closely connected to the social conditions of the time. Although the character of

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Sanshiro finds the presence of the British flag strange, the author, himself, is well aware of the Russo–Japanese War and the implications of the alliance; therefore, Natsume’s mention of the flags here is intentional. What is important, here, is Sanshiro’s attitude: ‘Sanshiro had never been fond of sports’ (110), and after watching some games, ‘[t]here was another running event, then the broad jump, and next the hammer throws. It was with the beginning of the hammer throws that Sanshiro’s patience gave out. People should go ahead and hold all the athletic meets they liked. They simply shouldn’t expect other people to watch them. . . . Sanshiro slipped away from the playing field and came out to the artificial hill behind the seats’ (112). What does this scene mean? Keiko Akai points out the importance of reading Soseki’s works in the historical context (Akai 180). Although Sanshiro himself was filled with nationalistic enthusiasm when he heard the speech of the student at the party, he still feels as though ‘nothing else had been strengthened; physically, he was still the same’. Therefore, Sanshiro cannot muster up any enthusiasm for watching the games, which might serve as good training for the military. What is the meaning of Sanshiro’s avoidance or hate of the official enthusiasm for the War? A contemporary author in Scotland, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, also depicts people’s hesitation and resistance to the War, and thus a detailed examination of his novel Sunset Song will give a possible answer.

4. Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song: Modernisation and Beginning of Unstable Identity Lewis Grassic Gibbon was born in Segget in Aberdeenshire, Scotland in 1901. In his thirty-five years of life, Gibbon published thirty-five literary works including his masterpiece Sunset Song published in 1932. Along with other important Scottish writers, notably Hugh MacDiarmid, Neil M. Gunn and Edwin Muir, Lewis Grassic Gibbon contributed to the creation of the literary revival, ‘the Scottish Renaissance.’ The movement raised the people’s consciousness about the indigenous language of the nonGaelic-speaking parts of the country, Scots, along with the local life in Scotland. The local farming communities of Scotland, in decline for much of the nineteenth century, received their death-blow from the rapid industrial developments and growth of the international market economy which followed the First World War. And in the ten years leading up to the Second World War, the London-oriented centralisation of social systems

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including education, industry, and military forces gathered strength. On the other hand, this kind of centralisation also stimulated people’s awareness of their local language and traditional life. The Scottish Literary Renaissance led directly to the awakening of Scottish national identity, as the Irish literary revival, “Celtic Twilight,” led by William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, “AE” Russell and Edward Martyn had done for Ireland. Having analysed Sanshiro, it will not be very difficult to discern parallels with Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song. Just before the First World War, Scotland, too, underwent rapid social changes and centralisation. Many Scottish people were faced with the serious choice between keeping their traditional way of life in their local towns or moving into the industrialised way of life, as the protagonist in Sanshiro did in Japan in the early twentieth century. Several reminiscences of this age can be found in the experiences of the young female protagonist of Sunset Song, Chris Guthrie. When faced with radical social changes, Chris is forced to make a choice. She goes away to school in Aberdeen and starts to learn French. One day she is made to display her French pronunciation in front of a school inspector from London. Chris tries to pronounce the French phrases, but in vain. She is not familiar with English or French; the language that she is most familiar with is that of her farming life in her village near Stonehaven, the North Eastern Scottish dialect called Doric. So that was Chris and her reading and schooling, two Chrisses there were fought for her heart and tormented her. You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you’d waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you…and the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies. (Gibbon 37)

Chris feels as though she is divided into two selves. The first is her former self that enjoys listening to the peewits crying and feels great love for the Scottish land and skies. However, the second self, the new Chris, feels ashamed of her Scottish land and the coarse language of its inhabitants. She has to make a choice between leaving her beloved home to become a teacher and staying on her familiar land. Placed in the historical background, especially the reformation of the education system in Scotland by the UK government, this episode shows a special meaning. During the eighteenth century, education in Scotland was mainly operated by the national church or the autonomous burghs. The Education Act of 1872 abolished this kind of parish education in Scotland

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and introduced a centralised education system, compulsory for all children aged between five and thirteen. Inspectors played an important part in spreading of this London-oriented education system. They checked the pupil’s achievement in speaking and writing English and their understanding of British history along with their knowledge of French. But, why did the British government try to change the Scottish education system in this time? T.M.Devine replies to this question: The growth of state intervention in education after 1872 also had an impact in the field of social welfare. The Boer War of 1899-1902 had shocked government by revealing the very poor physical condition of recruits from the urban working classes. Concern was deepened because this was the era of ‘national efficiency’…. Compulsory schooling under state authority since 1872 offered a means for tackling these problems. In effect, the schools were now to become agents of state welfare and social policy and through the school the next generation of citizens could be ‘improved.’ (Devine 399)

The pupil who speaks Scots in the classroom was punished even in the mid-twentieth century. Lewis Grassic Gibbon criticises the enforcement of English and upholds Scots in this novel through the words of the character Long Rob. Rob speaks to Mr. Gordon at a party and insists on the value of Scots as compared with English: Up at Rob’s table an argument rose . . . Rob was just saying what a shame it was that folk should be shamed nowadays to speak Scotch㸫or they called it Scots if they did, the split-tongued sourocks! Every damned little narrow-dowped rat that you met put on the English if he thought he’d impress you㸫as though Scotch wasn’t good enough now, it had words in it that the thin bit scraichs of the English could never come at. And Rob said You can tell me, man, what the English for sotter, or greip, or smore, or pleiter, gloaming or glunching or well-kenspeckled? And if you said gloaming was sunset you’d fair be a liar; and you’re hardly that, Mr. Gordon. (Gibbon 156)

Rob’s choice of Scots words reflects the farming life of the people. ‘Sotter,’ (a mess, or dirty work), ‘greip’ (gutter in a byre), ‘smore’ (thick oppressive atmosphere, as in fog or humid heat), and ‘pleiter’ (messy, unproductive work) suggest the condition of soil of the field and road. ‘Gloaming’ suggests the long twilight of summer evenings in Scotland. Rob knows well about the farming life and the weather in Scotland, so he

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can say confidently, ‘if you said gloaming was sunset you’d fair be a liar.’ Chris feels sympathy with Rob’s words. At the end of the story, Chris throws away her dream of becoming a teacher in a city and decides to stay with the folks in the country in Scotland. Chris feels as if her identity is divided in half. This is closely similar to Sanshiro’s perplexity in Tokyo, when he envisions three worlds in front of him. Both these characters get to know their new worlds. Chris learns English and French and starts her school life, as Sanshiro leaves his hometown and becomes accustomed to Western tastes in Tokyo. Both characters’ identities are unstable. Further, their unique experiences have a universal character for people faced with the rapid formation of nation states in the early twentieth century.

5. Conclusion Chris in Sunset Song was torn between the two worlds, but finally decided to stay with her family and familiar land, in spite of their frailty and corruption facing with the First World War. However, Sanshiro lost his way and was unable to identify with either the new or the old world. The lady from Tokyo, Mineko, calls Sanshiro a ‘stray sheep,’ and sends him a small postcard: He [Sanshiro] took a bath and went up to his room feeling refreshed. There was a postcard on his desk. The sender had drawn a picture on one side of the card. It showed a little stream with shaggy grass on its banks and two sheep lying at the edge of the grass. Across the stream, stood a large man with a walking stick. He had a ferocious looking face modeled closely on the devil in Western paintings, and he had carefully labeled, ‘Devil’, so as to preclude any error. The card’s only return address was ‘Lost Child.’ Sanshiro knew immediately who that was. And he was gradually pleased that she had put two stray sheep in the picture, suggesting that he was the other one. Mineko had included him from the begging, it seemed. Now at last he understood what she had meant by ‘Stray sheep.’ (Sanshiro 99100)

The above passage calls to mind the Gospel according to St. Matthew. In the excerpt, ‘shepherd’ refers to God and His love as shown in his search for one ‘stray sheep’. According to the Gospels of Matthew (18:12–14) and Luke (15:3–7), a shepherd leaves his flock of 99 sheep in order to find the one sheep who is lost. This shepherd’s deed shows the deep love of God. However, the confusing part is why the Devil, and not God, stands

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by the stray sheep? This mysterious passage involving a small postcard seems to resonate till today, asking the readers of this story to clear up this confusion even in the early twenty-first century. One possible interpretation is that this excerpt is Mineko’s confession, revealing her temptation. She says, ‘I am also a lost child like you, Sanshiro’. Mineko was forced into an unwilling marriage. Her situation closely reflects the inferior position of women at the time (Komori 119). Thus, the Devil stands beside two sheep. Further, Sanshiro and Mineko lose their way only because they both questioned their lives and the historical atmosphere of the time. As for Sanshiro, if he were able to completely immerse himself in the nationalistic enthusiasm for the First World War, he would not be in such a state of agony. If Mineko were able to adhere to the traditional Japanese ideas of marriage—meaning almost no individual freedom to choose a partner—she would not be lost either because she would blindly obey tradition. This small postcard seems to tie together history with totalitarianism and individualism at this historical turning point. The Devil symbolises the breakdown of spiritual ethics and morals and people’s lust and desire for the opposite sex. In early twentieth century Japan, the totalitarian government also started to insist that it was in the interest of the state to become an Asian superpower and forced upon its people ethics and morals to adhere to as members of the state, an idea strongly supported by Yukichi Fukuzawa as well. However, these trends oppress individual freedom and personal desires. By depicting Sanshiro and Mineko as stray sheep, Natsume is trying to declare his own doubts about the historical trend of the time, showing people’s resistance to nationalistic totalitarianism, which goes against individualism. In his lecture at Gakushuin University in 1914, Natsume discussed his concept of Individualism versus Nationalism. Some people spread the rumor that modern Japan will not survive if it does not embrace the theories of nationalism and firmly believe in those ideas. In addition, there are many who support the view that nationalism will perish if we do not attack individualism. These arguments are completely unfounded. In fact, we are at the same time nationalist, cosmopolitan and individualist. Individual freedom is, without a doubt, at the heart of individualism, which serves as a foundation for the happiness of human beings. (‘My Individualism’ 53-54)

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Japanese critics remark on this phrase and offer analyses of it. Koichi Senbokuya points out that Soseki’s ‘My Individualism’ is his crying for reason and sense in the drastic social change which brings loneliness (Senbokuya 283). Komori, in Prophet in the End of the Century, points out that Natsume places more stress on the importance of individual freedom as compared with nationalism (Komori 274-77). And Kameyama Yoshiaki analyses this phrase as showing the deep anger of Soseki against the state which oppresses human freedom. (Kameyama 9) As Natsume tries to stress Individualism, Grassic Gibbon likewise depicts the folks in Scotland who face up to oppression by the state in Sunset Song. Long Rob tries to refuse to be conscripted for the First World War. Chris is a follower of his thought. Her husband, Ewan Tavendale, also tries to seek his own freedom to go back to his own farm, Blawearie, even from the battlefield in France. Ewan is executed by shooting for illegally escaping from the battlefield without permission. The night before Ewan’s execution by the military police, his friend Chae Strachan asks him why he tried to escape. Ewan replies; But why did you do it, Ewan? You might well have known you’d never get free. And Ewan looked at him and shook his head, It was that wind came with the sun, I minded Blawearie, I seemed to waken up smelling that smell. And I couldn’t believe it was me that stood in the trench, it was just daft to be there. So I turned and got out of it. (Gibbon 237-38)

His memory of the old smell of his own fields at Blawearie, ‘awoke’ him and made him feel foolish standing in the battlefield in France. But Ewan was shot by the military police the next morning. The main characters in Sunset Song, Long Rob, Chris and Ewan Tavendale, resist the War and the totalitarianism operated by the British government and seek their freedom like Sanshiro and Mineko in Sanshiro. Relationships and individual personalities in Sanshiro and Sunset Song may be quite fragile when set against the massive historical trends of the early twentieth century, but we must also remember the literary movements which faced, head on, these nationalistic trends by creating unique and lovable characters. For example, the gamekeeper and the Lady in Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the mysterious young Aaron Sisson, searching for his way, in Aaron’ s Rod, both by D.H. Lawrence, all call to mind Chris, Chae, and Long Rob in Sunset Song. In the last phrase of his Aaron ’s rod, Lawrence urges the reader to believe in his own mind. Along with Natsume, Grassic Gibbon and D.H. Lawrence, Akutagawa, in his

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short story Mujina, also emphasises the importance of believing in your individual self, referring to “The Celtic Twilight” by W.B. Yeats and concluding: ‘We, as our ancestors have done, had better believe in our individual selves, and how to live our own lives following our inside voices.’ Akutagawa’s belief in individual existence has also been shown in his adaptation of Konzyaku’s ‘Razyomon’ into ‘Rashǀmon.’ The early twentieth century was a historical turning point with the First World War. Literary movements and authors in Japan as well in the UK were forced to confront this crossroad and crisis. They were forced to react to the massive historical trends, especially centralisation and totalitarianism. Soseki Natsume and Ryunosuke Akutagawa both react to the nationalistic trends shown typically by Yukichi Fukuzawa, by laying stress on individualism. They could face these challenges because both authors had an extensive knowledge of British individualism and of writers of the Irish national revival such as W.B Yeats. In spite of the distance between the UK and Japan, the works of those writers and the attitudes which they proclaim resonate strongly together, and demonstrate how a mutual interest and common cause is made by writers on opposite sides of the world.

Works Cited Akai, Keiko. Power of Thought of Sosek, [Soseki toiu Sisou no Chikara]. Tokyo: Chobun-sya, 1998. Print. Akutagawa, Ryunosuke. Rashǀmon and Seventeen Other Stories. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Print. Bourdaghs, Michael K. “Introduction, Natsume Soseki and the Ten-Year Projects,” Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings. Eds. Michael K. Bourdaghs, Joseph A, Murphy, and Atsuko Ueda. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. Print. Devine, Tom. The Scottish Nation 1700-2000, Penguin Books,1999. Print. Gessel,Van C. Three Modern Novelists: Soseki, Tanizaki, Kawabata. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1993. Print. Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. Sunset Son., Edinburgh: Cannon Gate Classics, 1993. Print. Hiraoka,Toshio. Literary Tradition of Sunset, [Yugure no Bungaku Shi]. Tokyo: Oufu, 2004. Print. Kameyama, Yoshiaki. Natsume Soseki and Individualism, [Natsume Soseki to Kojin Syugi]. Tokyo: Shinyo Sha, 2008. Print.

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Komori, Yoichi. Image of Women in Soseki’s Novels [Soseki no Zyosei Zo]. Eds. Karatani Kojin, Yasuharu Koike, Komori Yoichi, Haga Toru, Kamei Shunsuke, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994. Print. —. Prophet in the End of the Century [Seiki Matsu no Yogensya, Natsume Soseki], Tokyo: Kodansya, 1999. Print. —. Re-reading Soseki, [Soseki wo Yominaosu], Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1995. Print. Natsume, Soseki. ‘My Individualism and the Philosophical Foundation of Literature,’ translated by Sammy I. Tsunematsu. Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2004. Print. —. Sanshiro, Penguin Classics. 2009. Print. Sekiguchi,Yasuyoshi. Historical Awareness of Akutagawa Ryunosuke [Akutagawa Ryunosuke no Rekishi Ninshiki]. Tokyo: Shin-Nihon Shuppan Sha, 2004. Print. —. Reading Rashǀmon[Rashǀmon wo Yomu], Tokkyo: Ozawa Shuppan, 1999. Print. Sekiguchi, Osamu. Reading Akutagawa’s Novels. Tokyo: Choei Sha, 2003. Print. Senbokuya, Koichi. “Soseki and His Individualism” [“Soseki to Kojinsyugi”] Inteligent Space of Soseki [Soseki no Chiteki Kukan], Eds. Miyoshi Yukio, Toshio Hiraoka, Sukehiro Hirakawa, and Jun Eto. Koza Nastume Soseki, Tokyo: Yuhikaku,1982. Print. Suzuki, Tomi. Narrating the Self, Fictions of Japanese Modernity. California: Stanford UP, 1996. Print. Tsukamoto, Toshiaki. Soseki and Britain[Soseki to Eikoku]. Tokyo: Sairyu-sya, 1999. Print. Washburn, Dennis C. The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fictio.,New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Print. Yamazaki, Koichi. Linguistic Space of Akutagawa Ryunosuke [Akutagawa Ryunosuke no Gengo Kukan]. Tokyo: Kasama Shoin, 1999. Print.

THE KOKINSHNj, THE LYRIC AND THE CONVENTIONAL LAURENCE MANN OXFORD UNIVERSITY

Of the extent corpus of Early Heian Japanese waka (for our purposes, we can think of this as a short, 31-syllable poem, sometimes referred to as tanka, “short poem”), a considerable portion is contained in the “Anthology of Poems Past and Present” (hereafter, Kokinshnj),1 completed around 905 CE (Itasaka 254). As the first poetry collection to be commissioned by the Emperor himself, the Kokinshnj holds an inviolable tenure in the history of imperial patronage of the arts in Japan and is largely responsible for the establishment of the thematic and rhetorical framework within which, almost exclusively, the composition of waka was to take place until the modern period. It acted also as a handbook for the critical analysis and interpretation of later works; many private (lyrical?) poems have almost certainly been lost to posterity because they did not confirm closely enough to the ideals of the Kokinshnj and thus did not make it as far as any of the multimedia environments in which waka could be 'published' – utaawase, the byǀbu-e, the hyakushu-uta, etc. (Shirane passim). Perhaps it is because of the ubiquity of its stylistic and hermeneutic legacy that the Kokinshnj, once esteemed so highly, attracted a good deal of criticism from commentators schooled in “modern” Western European literary theory, which arrived in Japan, along with no insignificant amount of ideological baggage, in the late nineteenth century. All of a sudden, its artifice, word play and stylistic conventionality are found to be stifling to lyrical expression – and this cannot be a good thing. Amongst the various attacks to which the Kokinshnj has been subject over the course of the last century and a half, some of the most vitriolic are to be found in a series of newspaper articles by Meiji critic and poet Shiki Masaoka that began with Letters to a Tanka Poet, in 1898. Overturning a millennium of tradition, Shiki writes off the collection as “trashy” (Tsubouchi 140), mocking those who had held it up as a model to be venerated and emulated. His views were shared by much of the early

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twentieth century Japanese intelligentsia, including exponent of free verse and critic Sakutarǀ Hagiwara, who criticized the collection severely for the mediocrity of its poetry, in his essay On the Kokinshnj (passim). Criticised for the monotony of its content and for its overdependence on conventional motifs, the Kokinshnj was held to be inferior to other poetry collections by modernist2 Japanese scholarship until the Second World War and – while essays in praise of the it are to be found among the work of Japanese scholars of a more traditional waka-compositional bent – it has received a generally frigid reception in post-war scholarship too, both inside and outside Japan. Of the many criticisms levelled at the Kokinshnj, that with which we are concerned here was made by American scholar, Helen McCullough, in her study of the text, Brocade by Night: Kokinwakashnj and the Court Style in Japanese Classical Poetry, first published in the early 1960s. McCullough suggests that the poetry of the Kokinshnj is too heavily reliant on established conventions and, therefore, in contrast with that of its thirteenth century descendant, the Shinkokinshnj, or “New Anthology of Poems Past and Present,” it lacks the credentials necessary to qualify as “lyric poetry” (8). So, what reason should we have to question this? McCullough’s argument, I would suggest, is based on two overarching assumptions; firstly, that the waka found in the Kokinshnj are “trammelled” (Bownas and Thwaite lxi) within the confines of socio-rhetorical and prosodic convention and, secondly, that the lyric poem is not. As we shall demonstrate later, the first of these assumptions can be effectively countered using evidence from the text itself. As for how to deal with the second, we might look to another Western “ism,” postmodernism, for inspiration. Postmodernism is, of course, an appellation we like to give to a variety of schools of thought that emerged as a reaction to the dominance of modernism and which burgeoned in influence, throughout the Humanities, during the late twentieth century. Postmodernist, post-colonialist and poststructuralists attempted to reformulate the parameters within which literary analysis took place, avoiding what they perceived as interstitial lacunae arising from the inflexibility of modern science/non-science nomenclature, instead turning towards narratology, reader response, deconstruction and a miscellany of other recipient-centric approaches. Texts now need to be stripped to reveal their underlying ideologies in order that, ostensibly at least, they could be considered on their own terms. This is why McCullough's preoccupation with “individuality and originality (or their absence)” (Okada 36) has been criticized by other scholars, notably Richard Okada, who notes, in his review of Brocade by Night: “The search

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for originality . . . goes against modern-day critical practice in the west. Such notions as ‘originality’ and . . . ‘authorship’ have been vigorously put into question. There has been a shift in emphasis from author to ‘reader’ and ‘text,’ both terms having undergone considerable refinement in the past two decades” (37). In this paper, I hope to contribute to the debate over McCullough's treatment of the Kokin poetry, focussing particularly on the problematic concepts of lyric and conventionality – to which adequate attention has not be dedicated, by Okada and other reviewers so far. The lyric, for modernists (and their later followers), was essentially a short poem composed of the original and personal sentiments of an “I,” an individual poetic persona usually identifiable with the poet himself but always with the individual. Even where that individual was interpreted as a reader-construct, as in some models, the lyric was seen nevertheless as executing “the unifying role of the individual subject” (Culler 170). Conventional elements – the dictates of taste and society – impede the expression of this subject and, therefore, should be avoided. Ideally, a lyric poem would exist only as a stream flowing in the mind of the individual, channelled by its emotions and, with its occult, fluid power shape the actions and characters of its protagonists. As Morris notes, with more than a touch of cynicism, “the lyric method almost demands that a high degree of energy and ingenuity be diverted into the elaboration of romantic characters with complex emotional sensibilities” (563). While post- and anti-modern critiques are hesitant to abandon once and for all this lyric schema (I shall avoid the word archetype) – as we come to realize when we encounter comments such Okada's footnote “one of the most obviously contrived in the whole collection, [Ariwara no Narihira's poem] KKS 411 [i.e. Kokinshnj 411] is perhaps one of the least lyrical poems one can imagine” (36) – they do provide us with some tools to examine our understandings of lyric, afresh. Michel Foucault, associated with postmodernism and poststructuralism (although he appears to have disliked both terms), has claimed, from the time of “Les Mots et les Choses” onwards, that all knowledge – and systems pertaining to the classification of knowledge – that have existed in the West since the late eighteenth century form part of the same overarching epistemological framework or, in his words, the “episteme.” In “Les Mots et les choses,” he famously concludes: “. . . the entire modern episteme . . . was formed towards the end of the eighteenth century and still serves as the positive ground of our knowledge . . . [It concerns] man’s particular mode of being and the possibility of knowing him empirically” (385).

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According to Foucault, then, the late eighteenth century saw an intellectual sea change take place in Europe and North America. It was during this time that the Discourse was displaced by empirical objectivity and it was also then that the Arts – distinct from but adjunct to this new brand of knowledge – were forced to fashion for themselves a fresh mould in the self-justifying otherness of subjectivity. The lyric was to emerge from this mould altered and invigorated, to the point that, for the first time since Callimachus, critics were ready to “assert its superiority over epic and drama” (Johnson 82). The unadulterated and succinct expression of emotion that characterized this new form of lyricism became “not only beautiful but also the only beautiful” (82). In other words, the lyric became a poetic standard in its own right – and it is by this standard that McCullough and scholars like her judge the waka poetry of Early Heian Japan. Thus, Foucault (who I have quoted here only as an example one of the post-Saussurian thinkers that have shaped the course of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century criticism) has provided us with a justification for re-evaluating the criteria by which poetry is included in and excluded from the lyric bracket and, more generally, for questioning any superimposition of analytical conditions defined within our episteme on the literature of its antecedents or concurrent but unrelated epistemes. This paper aims to form part of such a re-evaluation. Having established the raison d’être of our discussion, we are now in a position to put aside our “isms,” at least for the time being. It must be stressed that this is not a postcolonial or a poststructuralist reading. It is not intended as a post-anything reading. No “deconstruction” will be attempted here. Nor will we jump headfirst into the discussion of immanent power-relations present in Kokin poetry (although, no doubt, they do exist and would make interesting subject matter). Instead, and in response to McCullough’s remarks, we shall restrain ourselves to thinking about the extent to which the environment in which the Kokin poems were created might have has rendered them conventional and the implications this could have for their status as lyric poetry – in the context of our new understanding of both as contested concepts. Implicit in such a discussion is a corollary, and more general, question – whether the concepts of conventionality and lyricism are polarized, as the modern axiom dictates, or whether elements of both can be juxtaposed, and coexist, within a single poetic entity. And, since all our terminology is alien to the premodern Japanese critical lexicon – and, as we have shown, eludes succinct definition even in English – it will behove us to look to examples from the

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so-called “lyric traditions” of other regions for the purposes of comparison. Therefore, the remainder of this paper will be structured in a bipartite manner, beginning with a discussion of prosodic conventions and thematic precedents observable in Kokinshnj waka, before moving on to look more generally at how elements such as these affect our consideration of poetry and the generic classification to which we assign it. During the course of our discussion we will, hopefully, come closer to a working definition of “lyric” but we must nonetheless remain mindful of imprecision of the nomenclature at our disposal throughout. The poetic material of which the Kokinshnj is comprised was, for the most part, composed at a time when the judicative, administrative and fiscal infrastructures that maintained the Early Heian oligarchy were already firmly established – allowing courtiers a life relatively free of mundane concerns, in which they were able to develop and cultivate highly sophisticated aesthetic tastes, drawing on Chinese example for inspiration (Rodd and Henkenius 4). That the Kokinshnj emerged from this courtly aesthetic tradition, there can be little doubt, since not only was the collection commissioned by the Emperor himself, but the poet most heavily involved in its compilation, Ki no Tsurayuki, was considered by his contemporaries at court to be a chef de file of fashionable waka composition. Early Heian waka can be sub-classified into two groups according to time of composition. The first dates from the time of the Rokkasen (midninth century) which, together with older Manyǀ period verses, comprise the “ko,” or “Ancient” element in the Kokinshnj’s title. The “kin” or “new” part refers to the poetry of Tsurayuki and his contemporaries, roughly a generation after the Rokkasen. During the ninth century a vogue for all things Chinese gripped the Japanese court. Chinese culture and literature had played such a fundamental role in the public and aesthetic lives of the courtiers, in the period leading up to the compilation of the Kokinshnj, that it has been described, by Japanese literature specialists (seemingly with a nationalist agenda) as a Kokufnj ankokujidai (“Dark Age of National Style”). The Japanese literati of the ninth and tenth centuries were thus undoubtedly familiar, to a greater or lesser extent, with a considerable array of Chinese literary sources. However, perhaps because of sociocultural parallels between the early Heian court and the Six Dynasties salons in China, it seems to have been poetry composed during the Six Dynasties period that most impressed poets of the two eras mentioned above and, therefore, exerted most influence on the formative

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development of the Kokinshnj (McCullough 327). Its impact is most visible in two areas – firstly, the direct borrowing of subject matter, thematic material and motific elements from Chinese verse and, secondly, an increasing tendency within Japanese poetry toward epideictic display and the use of linguistic devices akin to the conceits found in the poetry of the European Renaissance. With regard to subject matter, there can be little doubt that the Japanese poetry found in the Kokinshnj was heavily influenced by Chinese precedent. It is well documented that situations or stimuli perceived as possessing insipient poetic worth within Six Dynasties verse (particularly the so-called yong wu or ‘poems about things’) were transferred directly into the Kokin waka (Brower and Miner 6) – “migrating geese, scattering leaves. . .gentle breezes, new willow growth, and lingering snow,” to name but a few (McCullough 72). Although the tone of the two poems is quite different, a comparison of the following short verse penned by Southern Qi Poet, Fan Yun (McCullough 66) with an example taken from the first book of the Kokinshnj illustrates for us the borrowing of “conventional” poetic material, as well as the Japanese adoption of the concept of “elegant confusion” from China (Rodd and Henkenius 51): Fan Yun (451-503) “A Song of Parting” Then, when I left, the snow was like flowers; Now, when I return, the flowers are like snow. Topic Unknown

Anonymous

kokorozashi

so longingly have I

fukaku someteshi

awaited the fresh flowers

Orikereba

of spring

kieaenu yuki no

dyed my soul

hana to miyuran

as clustered blooms on branches

that they have and I see snow

During the Six Dynasties period, court poetry (mostly shi) was, by and large, conceived as an elevated means of social interaction, or “polite discourse”, in much the same way as the prose-poem fu had been during the Han Period (McCullough 48). In order to demonstrate his linguistic virtuosity and copious literary knowledge, in the context of a banquet or court function, the Six Dynasties poet could be said to have striven toward familiarity, rather than originality, by reworking phrases and concepts

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from older poems and alluding to historical, geographical and sociocultural points of reference, which were recognizable to his (educated) audience. For example, when court poet Su Ting was required to compose a verse on an “Imperial Visit in Early Spring to Princess Taiping’s Southern Villa”, he describes the Imperial family as having “spread gold”, and “supported a loom” – allusive references to the Buddha’s retreat and Qi Xi,3 an astrological phenomenon associated with meeting, respectively (50). The same myth serves as the theme of poems 173 to 183 of the Kokinshnj. In almost every case, the story is referred to obliquely, acting as a vehicle for the expression of pain caused by the transitory meeting, and subsequent separation, of lovers or friends. Poem 174 provides a clear example of this: Topic Unknown

Anonymous

hisakata no

over the vastness of

ama no kawara no

Heaven’s River –

watashimori

oh ferryman there on the bank –

kimi watarinaba

should my love cross to me,

kaji kakushite yo

would that you hide away your oars!

As elaborate word play, orthographic and semantic rebus came to be perceived as fundamental to courtly expression within the Six Dynasties salons,4 so were elegant witticisms, contrived syntactic constructions and double-entendre incorporated within the courtly poetry of the Kokinshnj. Similar social functions fulfilled by poetry in both courtly societies – polite communication and a means of entertainment at social functions. In Japan, this extended to the formalized presentation of verses at competitions sponsored by the Empress – the so-called uta-awase, poetry from which features prominently within the Kokinshnj (Rodd and Henkenius 5). The various epideictic devices that flourished within these social contexts are expressed by a number of Japanese technical terms, the most commonly discussed being the jokotoba (‘prefatory phrase’), the kakekotoba (‘pun’ or ‘extended epithet’) and the engo (‘related word’). The latter two will feature later in our discussion. It should be noted that jokotoba occur several hundred times in the Man’yǀshnj, so they were not a new phenomenon. However, there does seem to have been achange in the frequency and complexity of such expressions by the mature Kokin period, which could plausibly be attributed to continental influence.

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Before moving on, it is worth noting that, thus far, we have attempted to demonstrate that the aesthetic norms which governed the composition of many Kokinshnj waka drew heavily on Chinese example and often led to poetry being ornamented with arcane, and formulaic, rhetorical devices. However, this should not be taken as evidence of their conventionality. Informed as they are by East Asian, as well as English and European poetic traditions, Brower and Miner suggest that conventionality in poetry arises out of an imbalance between the impersonal and the personal (21) – that is to say, an over-eagerness on the part of the poet to either fulfil preconceived social functions within the context of given aesthetic parameters or to enunciate his response to emotional stimuli. Too much of either, according to these critics, can result in insincerity and artifice. If this is the case, then even verse replete with shows of linguistic ostentation and courtly wit can remain free of conventionality, provided it maintains equilibrium by also giving voice to the poet’s concerns – be they particularistic or universal. English literature abounds with examples of such poetry. Many commentators claim, for instance, that it was by means of “conceit” – contrived phrases and allusive language– that Donne and other metaphysical poets were able to discover “occult resemblances in things apparently unlike” (Wellek 100). Indeed, a brief examination of the first stanza of “A Nocturnal upon S. Lucy’s Day, being the shortest day” reveals Donne’s expertise at manipulating language in an elegantly witty fashion: ‘A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucys Day, Being The Shortest Day’ (Extract), John Donne 'TIS the year's midnight, and it is the day's, Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ; The sun is spent, and now his flasks Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ; The world's whole sap is sunk ; The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk, Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk, Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh, Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

In “A Nocturnal,” Donne talks of the Sun sending forth “squibs,” which could refer both to “beams of light” or “altercations” and “sap,” which could be interpreted as “vital fluids” or, in other contexts, “to undermine foundations.” His use of the interrogative “whither” might have called to mind the verb “to wither,” tied semantically to the earlier “sap” (Donne

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72). Thus it can be seen that Donne employed techniques closely resembling the kakekotoba and engo, in an attempt to juxtapose – and relate – ideas, for the consideration of his reader. There are also elements within the Kokinshnj that seem to suggest poets’ purposeful manipulation of semantically pregnant language, to create a meditative atmosphere, or to raise questions regarding the nature of animate and inanimate states. Perhaps some of the best examples of this are to be found within the work of Ariwara no Narihira, whose poetry has been described as exuding a “deep emotionality, touched directly by human existence” (Aoki 16). The following waka, for example, makes use of the kakekotoba, “nagame”, meaning both “Spring rains,” and “Staring, lost in thought” (Ozawa 254) to associate the restless emotions of the poetic speaker with the meteorological characteristics of Spring (Cranston, 66). Having set the tone of the poem as a response to a highly personal issue in the kotobagaki (prose introduction), Narihira evokes a hazy, synaesthetic image which precipitates contemplation of the relationship between emotional and environmental stimuli (i.e. sexual frustration and incessant, hazy drizzle). Composed towards the beginning of the Third Month on watching the haze of drizzle – and sent to a girl to whom he had previously spoken fond words in secret.

Ariwara no Narihira

oki mo sezu

not sleeping, not waking

ne mo sede yoru o

I lay ‘til dawn came ,

akashite wa

and today I while away

haru no mono tote

– an object of spring? –

nagame kurashitsu

my stare long, long like the rain

Therefore, although much of the poetry of the Kokinshnj is ornamented with contrived witticisms and, indeed, derives inspiration from Chinese example, it is precisely through the skilful manipulation of allusive and polysemantic turns of phrase (which modernist like Shiki found artificial), commonly understood by the poet and his/ her audience, that it transcends superficiality and attains ushin (“meaningfulness”). Furthermore, while Kokin poetry undoubtedly contains conventional elements – a facet it arguably shares with all poetry – according to Brower and Miner’s definition, it should not be termed conventional in itself, because it maintains a balance between the personal and the impersonal.

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Having considered this, we are now well placed to progress to the next stage of our discussion – and think about the extent to which the early Heian waka contained in the Kokinshnj may be described as lyrical and how, if at all, this relates to elements of socio-poetic convention that can be perceived within them. Lyricism is, in the words of Lindley, “elusive of definition” (1). As it has already been pointed out, it was usual for modernists to view the lyric as a primarily individualist and unconventional genre, centred on an individual-specific, rather than society-based poetic persona. In doing so, they exclude from the lyric bracket all poetry that is impersonal or has been created to fulfil a specific social – and by extension, conventional – function. As noted earlier, there is considerable evidence to question this but, for the purposes of argument, we shall maintain the assumption at present and examine the nature of Kokin poetic composition accordingly. We have already seen that much of the poetry contained in the Kokinshnj was created as a means of social discourse and, primarily, functioned within the parameters of courtly aesthetic norms. However, this does not necessarily indicate that the poets’ creative objectives were obscured, nor that the flow of his emotions was in any way constricted. Many of the Kokin waka¸ particularly those from the several books of love poetry, can be appreciated as terse evocations of individual emotional experiences. In this period at least, dialogue through the poetic language of waka removed need for humble and honorific inflections of everyday court speech and so, it could be argued, facilitated a more genuine expression of the poet’s emotions than would have been possible otherwise (Brower and Miner 7). At the very least, it offered the impassioned courtier or jilted lover a more emotionally expressive medium than Chinese, in which most official business was conducted, by virtue of being composed in their first language. The following love poem, particularly interesting for its entirely imagistic approach, demonstrates the depth of emotion present in some of the Kokin waka: Topic Unkown

Fujiwara no Kachion

shiranami no

the vessel traversing

ato naki kata ni

where not a trace of wake is left –

yuku fune mo

even she may rely

kaze zo tayori no

upon the winds

shirube narikeru

to mark for her a passage!

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This waka incorporates highly intense metaphorical language to describe the emotional tumult associated with romantic frustration – language that is akin to the natural similes of Thomas Wyatt’s lyrical sonnets. It might even point towards the poet’s dissatisfaction with the abstracted notion of fate, as he muses on why “the winds” have failed to guide him safely through his amorous encounter. Ariwara no Narihira’s work, as we have already noted, is particularly contemplative. It often evokes an apostrophic state of heightened emotional or philosophical perception, triggered by a particular external stimulus – reminiscent of Dostoyevsky’s ‘lyrical prose’ style, such as is to be found, for example, in his novelette, “The Gentle Spirit.” Narihira’s considerable talent and mastery of poetic diction notwithstanding, such is the intensity of emotion expressed in his work, (at the risk of sounding Poundian), it is even tempting to suggest that the natural parataxis of the Japanese language also played a role in the compositional process – in that can channel complex strings of utterance into a single syntactic stream in ways that other languages cannot. In the following poem composed for an official’s birthday party by Narihira in 875, the falling of the cherry blossom seems to initiate an individual response from the poetic persona, causing him to muse on the transience of human life and, perhaps more interestingly, on the prospect that emotional intensity stimulated by one natural process might be able to alter the course of another: Composed when the fortieth birthday celebrations of the “Horikawa” Minister were held at his villa on the Ninth Avenue . sakurabana

Ariwara no Narihira

O, cherry flowers!

chirikai kumore

dance down to cloud

oiraku no

the path whence they say

komu to iu naru

comes age – that he may

michi magau gani

never find his way there

Having now suggested that the Early Heian waka is both conventional and demonstrably lyrical by modernist standards, let us return finally to the original premise of our discussion – that the modernist hypothesis is a product of its time and place of origin and that it is, therefore, inappropriate to apply it in other contexts. As we shall now see, there is much evidence in pre-modern European sources to indicate that poetic

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individualism has never been synonymous with lyricism and that, in any case, the adoption of a conventional poetic idiom should not necessarily detract from either. Without wishing to bore the reader with stories he or she will have heard time and time again, I feel it is necessary here to return to the source of our understanding of lyric (and many other generic categories) in the, West – which is, of course, Ancient Greece. In the introductory section of “Poetics” Aristotle as follows refers to what has generally been understood as “Greek lyric poetry” simply as “țȚșĮȡȚıIJȚț߱Ȣ”, verses composed to be sung to accompaniment of the harp-like cithara (Aristotle 3). His choice of terminology is relevant to our discussion since the cithara – unlike the closely-related ȜȪȡĮ (lyre), from which, of course, the English word “lyric” is derived (Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry 3) – seems to have been performed primarily by troupes of professional musicians, in places and on occasions of special social significance. Hellenic understandings of lyric were, thus, not confined to issues of individual poetic personae, or to streams of consciousness. A discussion of characterizations of the genre in Greek discourse is not required here – but, since it is irrefutably the case that Greek lyrics often fulfilled specific socio-political, religious and collectivist functions and employed complex epideictic language, it is worth us mentioning briefly one concrete example of such poetry: Pindar’s Nemean Odes. We know the Odes were commissioned by influential patrons and were occasional – created to fulfil specific social demands and not just to satisfy the poet’s individual creative impulse. Pindar throughout makes use of standard “lyrical and elegiac” imagery, punctuating his verse with witticisms. (Bowra, Pindar 241). This is evident, for example, in lines 4853 of the Fifth Ode, in which Pindar plays around with phonological resemblances, such as athletai and Athanai (Race 53). It is worth quoting here: ੅ıșȚ, ȖȜȣțİ૙ȐȞ IJȠȚ ȂİȞȐȞįȡȠȣ ıઃȞ IJȪȤ઺ ȝȩȤșȦȞ ਕȝȠȚȕ੹Ȟ ਥʌĮȪȡİȠ: Ȥȡ੽ įૃ ਕʌૃ ਝșĮȞ઼Ȟ IJȑțIJȠȞૃ ਕșȜȘIJĮ૙ıȚȞ ਩ȝȝİȞ. İੁ į੻ ĬİȝȓıIJȚȠȞ ੆țİȚȢ, ੮ıIJૃ ਕİȓįİȚȞ, ȝȘțȑIJȚ ૧ȓȖİȚ: įȓįȠȚ ijȦȞȐȞ, ਕȞ੹ įૃ ੂıIJȓĮ IJİ૙ȞȠȞ ʌȡઁȢ ȗȣȖઁȞ țĮȡȤĮıȓȠȣ, ʌȪțIJĮȞ IJȑ ȞȚȞ țĮ੿ ʌĮȖțȡĮIJȓ૳ ijșȑȖȟĮȚ ਦȜİ૙Ȟ ਫʌȚįĮȪȡ૳ įȚʌȜȩĮȞ ȞȚț૵ȞIJૃ ਕȡİIJȐȞ, ʌȡȠșȪȡȠȚıȚȞ įૃ ǹੁĮțȠ૨

Moving on (very quickly!), let us think about the European Middle Ages – where songs called lyrics were sung by troubadours around Provence and elsewhere. These troubadour-lyricists, I would argue, remained true to the Pindaric tradition. Being professional poets, they sought primarily to

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impress their wealthy clientele and, in order to do so, aspired to the witty “manipulation of standard ideas” and the “artful deployment of conventional motifs” (Lindley 53). Although, superficially, their work may appear to evoke the emotions of a one individual (romantic love for a partner, loss and sadness after the end of a relationship, etc.), the reality is that it was generally occasional, intended to be performed in public – just as Heian uta-awase poetry had been – and made extensive use of conventional thematic motifs and prosodic devices. Thus, we see that modern understandings of generic categories like lyric – to which McCullough and others cling with such tenacity – are “inapplicable to the poetry of the [European] Middle Ages” (Burrow 67-8). A few hundred years later, again, in England, court poets such as Wyatt would seek to embellish simple “lyrical” song with elegant cadence, taking it “in the direction of wit and logical development,” to which their elite audience were able to relate (Lindley 9). Wyatt, for example, was able to objectify even the most intensely personal of themes – such as the discovery of a lover’s unfaithfulness – by looking to neo-Platonic concepts such as “goodness” and “truth” to provide an “evaluative commentary of . . . [his] subjects” (Ricks and Michaels 363). Such philosophical quips are common throughout his oeuvre but a particularly good – and oft-quoted – example is to found in the first few lines of his well-known ode, “A Revocation,” given below (Quiller-Couch 62): What should I say? ʊSince Faith is dead, And Truth away From you is fled? Should I be led With doubleness? Nay! Nay! mistress.

As for the neo-classicist lyrical poets, we need say little here except that, naturally, they sought, as far as is possible in the vernacular, to emulate the work of the Ancients (Crane et al. 412) – and, just as much of that was highly conventional and far removed from the modernist conception of a personal, emotionally-charged lyric, so indeed was the product of its imitation. Indeed, the modernist definition, when applied to any or all of the pre-modern European lyric poetry we have surveyed, simply does not ring true. So, why then should we apply it to the poetry of Early Classical Japan, yet further removed from the intellectual conditions in which it was forged?

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It is well known that Wordsworth and his early-Romantic contemporaries sought specifically to liberate English poetry from the yoke of superfluous artifice and, thereby, to create a sincere idiom for the exposition of the poet’s emotion (411) but even they must necessarily have drawn on images familiar to the reader, in order to stir within him “a kindred feeling concerning them” (Shawcross 50). Thus, while the Wordsworthian lyric, as typified by the Lucy poems, captured beautifully the dreamlike flow of the individual poetic speaker’s contemplations, by virtue of being poetry – and therefore being heard by others – it could not transcend the framework of shared cultural experiences that tie a poet to his audience. And why? Postmodern critics, at least, would tell us that, in the Romantic lyric – as in any other – the “concept and status of an a priori ‘individual’ are always in question” since the language through which such an “I” is delineated is necessarily contiguous with, and subject to, “a pre-existing system that at once socializes and individuates it” (Blasing 5). We can therefore conclude that, although a lyric standard was undoubtedly created in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – a standard to which critics have inappropriately compared a great deal of poetry from other periods and regions – Romantic lyrics themselves scarcely live up to it. Or rather the lyrics that have been best received in the literature do not. Romantic poets with an overzealous commitment to the “Art for Art’s Sake” cause, or else a predilection for intense, introverted personalism – like a few of the contributors to the Kokinshnj – run the risk of seeing their work indicted as affected and conventional in its own right, according to Brower and Miner’s definition at least. It is most likely to poems such as these that Blasing is referring to when she talks of “cultivated, induced, pathological, or “deviant” irrationality . . . which certain poetic practices may invoke” (2). Definitions of conventionality and lyricism within poetry are multifarious – to the point that their application to any specific works is very difficult. However, as we have observed, the two concepts are not contradictory as the post-late-eighteenth-century paradigm suggests and, indeed in many instances, seem to enjoy a symbiotic relationship. While Early Heian waka undoubtedly exhibits many conventional elements and considerable borrowing from older Chinese poetic forms, this, as we have seen, is by no means a bar to lyrical expression. So how are we to understand our understanding of the lyric? Having put modernist assumptions aside, we are left, essentially, with the Classical definition – that is to say a poem which is not epic or dramatic and which, in antiquity, was sung to the accompaniment of a plucked stringed instrument. However, that gives us very little to go on. It is the

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opinion of the author that mainstream criticism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been heading in the right general direction when it has sought to prove that, firstly, the “individual” associated with lyric is a recipient construct (and only real when contextualized as such) and, secondly, that the lyric is not merely written in poetic language but that it actually is poetic language – language which “. . . keeps in view the linguistic code and the otherness of the material medium of language to all that humans do with it” (2). Through our present discussion we have shown that we might be justified in taking this line of thinking one step further and eliminating the “individual” altogether. In so doing, we reduce the lyric to a kind of “poetic vernacular,” system of linguistic signification which can be simple or, in some instances, more arcane, but one which is necessarily comprehensible to the poet and audience in such a way as to bring about the metagenesis of additional referents, which might be entertaining, thought provoking, emotionally charged, socially critical, or any combination of the above. If such a vernacular exists, there can be little doubt that the Kokin poets were anything less than highly conversant in it.

Notes 1

The collection’s full title is Kokinwakashnj but I have abbreviated it throughout to Kokinshnj, according to Japanese convention. 2 Taking inspiration from Romanticism, Marxism, Imagism, Impressionism etc. 3 Japanese: Tanabata – lighting conditions cause the Milky Way to appear dimmer than usual, hence creating the impression that two lovers on either side of it (the stars Altair and Vega) are able to meet and consummate their affection. 4 Perhaps the best known examples of Chinese poetry which employ such word play are the palindromic epigrams of Xiao, dismissed by many critics as little more than prandial frivolity. See: (McCullough 61).

Works Cited Aoki, Takako. Chnjko no Kajin [Waka poets of the Classical Period]. Tokyo: Nihon Koten Bungaku Kǀza, 1960. Print. Aristotle, and Donald William Lucas. Poetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Print. Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. Print. Bownas, Geoffrey, and Anthony Thwaite. The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964. Print.

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Bowra, Cecil. Greek Lyric Poetry: From Alcman to Simonides. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961. Print. —. Pindar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Print. Brower, Robert, and Earl Miner. Japanese Court Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961. Print. Burrow, John Anthony. Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature and Its Background 1100-1500. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Print. Crane, Ronald Salmon, et al. Critics and Criticism : ancient and modern. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1952. Print. Cranston, Edwin. A Waka Anthology, Vol.2: Grasses of Remembrance. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2006. Print. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge, 1975. Print. Donne, John. The Complete English Poems. Harmsworth: Penguin Books, 1997. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock Publications, 1970. Print. Hagiwara, Sakutarǀ. Hagiwara Sakutarǀ Zenshnj [Collected Works of Sakutarǀ Hagiwara]. Vol 7. Rev. ed. Tokyo: Chikuma shobǀ, 1987. Print. Itasaka, Gen, ed. Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. Vol. 4. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1983. Print. Johnson, Walter Ralph. The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry. Berkeley ; London: University of California Press, 1982. Print. Lindley, David. Lyric. London and New York: Methuen, 1985. Print. Tsubouchi, Toshinori. Masaoka Shiki: Kotoba to ikiru [Shiki Masaoka: Living with words]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2010. Print. McCullough, Helen. Brocade by Night: Kokinwakashnj and the Court Style in Japanese Classical Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961. Print. Morris, Mark. "Waka and Form, Waka and History" Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46.2 (1986): 551-610. Print. Okada, Richard. "Translation and Difference – A Review Article" The Journal of Asian Studies 47.1 (1988): 29-40. Print. Ozawa, Masao, ed. Kokinwakashnj [Anthology of Poems Ancient and Modern]. Tokyo: Shǀgakkan, 1971. Print. Quiller-Couch, Arthur Thomas, ed. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250-1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939. Print.

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Race, William, trans. Pindar II: The Nemean Odes, Isthmian Odes, Fragment. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print. Ricks, Christopher B., and Leonard Michaels. The State of the Language. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Print. Rodd, Laurel, and Henkenius, Mary, trans. Kokinshnj: Collection of Poetry Ancient and Modern. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Print. Shawcross, John, ed. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Vol 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1904. Print. Shirane, Haruo. Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Print. Wellek, René. Concepts of Criticism. New York & London: Yale University Press, 1963. Print. Unless otherwise stated, all translations from Japanese are the author’s own. Translations of the Kokinshnj follow the Nihon-kotenbungaku Zenshnj edition of the text.

PART III: NATIONAL IDENTITIES IN THE BRITISH ISLES

UNDERNEATH THE WAVE: NUALA NÍ DHOMHNAILL, MERMAIDS, AND THE IRISH OTHERWORLD DONNA L. POTTS WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s recent collection, The Fifty Minute Mermaid (2007), is the culmination of her long fascination with and exploration of the lore of mermaids. Mermaid folklore is of course most prevalent in fishing communities on islands—and in Ireland, it is also associated with the Irish-speaking regions known as the Gaeltacht, which, because of their remoteness from Dublin, the center of British administrative rule, were more likely to retain the Irish language as well as its traditional culture. Ní Dhomhnaill's poems about mermaids—creatures caught between two realms—sea and land—and between two ways of being—natural and supernatural—are emblematic of the Irish modern condition, and particularly that of Irish women, given that merfolk are virtually always depicted as female, and their fates in folklore are emblematic of those of women under patriarchal control. In folklore, mermaids were tricked by mortal men into leaving behind their sea lives; the men would hide some article of the mermaid’s clothing —usually a cap or a cloak—in order to prevent their return to the sea. Ní Dhomhnaill specifies that her mermaid’s hood, hidden from her ages ago in the back loft, is made of seal skin, perhaps recalling the stories of selkies, or sea people, who in Irish, Scottish, Faroese, and Icelandic folklore, shed their skins to become human (Selkie-Folk). Ní Dhomhnaill’s mermaids, because they come from a different realm than humans, operate under totally different sets of principles and have strikingly different concepts of reality that represent challenges to patriarchal and imperialist hegemonies. Their dual nature—half animal, half human—also presents a challenge to the anthropocentric world view historically used to justify conquest; indeed, the British depicted the Irish as animals—usually apes or pigs—in order to establish their superior claim to rule in Ireland. Ní Dhomhnaill’s mermaid poems ultimately offer

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an ecofeminist critique of a contemporary Ireland in thrall to modern “progress” at the expense of the environment. The poems in Fifty Minute Mermaid are from her prior Irish language volume, Cead Aighnis [Permission to Speak] (An Sagart 1998), and the dual language edition is the result of yet another of Ní Dhomhnaill’s fruitful collaborations with Paul Muldoon, whose great sensitivity to the nuances of Irish is as evident here as it was in earlier translations such as “As for the Quince” and “The Language Issue” (Pharaoh’s Daughter 1991). In fact, the latter poem beautifully addresses Ní Dhomhnaill’s preoccupation with the language issue, her decision to write in Irish, and likewise her willingness to entrust her poetry to translation by fine poets like Muldoon: I place my hope on the water in this little boat of the language, the way a body might put an infant in a basket of intertwined iris leaves, its underside proofed with bitumen and pitch, then set the whole thing down amidst the sedge and bulrushes by the edge of a river only to have it borne hither and thither, not knowing where it might end up; in the lap, perhaps, of some Pharaoh’s daughter.

The very placement of the poems on the page—with Ní Dhomhnaill’s Irish originals on the left, and their translations on the right, is a reminder of the hope she has placed in the Irish language, contingent on her willingness to “set the whole thing down” in English—a risky venture which she suggests has the potential for great reward: Moses, saviour of the Israelites, was once the baby in the basket that ventured precariously into the midst of the historic enemies of the Israelites and landed in the lap of the Pharaoh’s daughter. Early in the collection, Ní Dhomhnaill indicates that the process of assimilation that the merfolk must undergo has had a devastating impact on their language. In “The Assimilated Merfolk,” Ní Dhomhnaill suggests

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that being removed from their element leads them to forget entirely the whale song that once surrounded them, and the uvula, essential to speech production in some languages, including the mermaids,’ “is displaced in the vast majority of them” (Fifty 31). In “A Recovered Memory of Water,” the mermaid’s daughter struggles to regain the vocabulary for the world she left behind: “She doesn’t have the terminology / or any of the points of reference / or any word at all that would give the slightest suggestion / as to what water might be.” The loss of language is equated with the loss of a whole sensibility. She observes that the once familiar song, “Port na Púcai” (Tune of the Pookas), is now all but lost to them. Incidentally, “Port na bPúcaí” (properly translated as “Tune of the Pookas,” because it originally had no words) is an actual Irish slow air, which reputedly was first heard by Blasket Islanders rowing back to Inishvickillane, and presumed to be sounds made by whales, or perhaps by fairies imitating whale song (“The Given Note”). In Irish folklore, the Púcaí are nature spirits and shapeshifters who love music, and especially enjoy playing wind instruments (“Na Púcaí).” The realm that Ní Dhomhnaill creates, inhabited by beings like mermaids, selkies, and púcai, is reminiscent of that of the Celts, displaced and marginalized in the course of Anglo-Saxon conquest. Through the process of colonization, the Irish language was nearly lost as well: through the imposition of English language, law and customs, as well as through acts such as the 14th century statutes of Kilkenny, which among other things, outlawed the Irish language, pushing it into remote pockets of western Ireland that were beyond English jurisdiction. Ní Dhomhnaill often refers to the fracture created by the linguistic break as representative to the brokenness of colonization. She relies on Irish language and Irish folklore in an effort to retrieve something essential to both: a vision of reality that has been lost. Stephen Slemon, discussing the double vision or “metaphysical clash” produced when colonization imposes a foreign language on an indigenous population, writes that the postcolonial text “recapitulates a dialectical struggle within language, a dialectic between ‘codes of recognition’ inherent within the inherited language and those imagined, utopian, and future-oriented codes that aspire toward a language of expressive, local realism, and a set of ‘original relations’ with the world” (408). Ní Dhomhnaill’s decision to write and publish in Irish, which grows out of the need to acknowledge the simultaneous existence of the otherworldly and the worldly, likewise permits her to convey a worldview that implicitly challenges the English worldview. Ní Dhomhnaill contends

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that the difference between the Irish language and the English language underscores this distinction between pre-scientific and post-scientific cultures. She writes, Irish deals with the world in a narrative, non-conceptual way, which is not the same at all as a non-intellectual way, it just means that whereas conceptual thought exercised only the intelligence, narrative forms of thought exercise the heart and the imagination, and other parts of the human organism beside the purely intellectual. For instance, Irish has a whole attitude to “an saol eile,” the preternatural or “the Other World” which is totally impossible to translate into English, where the postEnlightenment language has a built-in prejudice against it. (“Why I Choose” 28)

Deborah McWilliams writes that Ní Dhomhnaill “is ardent in her conviction that ‘one of the few, genuinely alternative cultural strands now [is] the Irish language tradition,” because, as she observes, “the Irish language didn’t go through the Renaissance . . . [or] the Reformation . . . [or] the Enlightenment . . . [or] the Victorian era. [Rather] it fell out of history” (Consalvo 158). At least officially it fell out of history during the period in which it was outlawed in Ireland; it continues to be spoken in the isolated regions of the Gaeltacht, but these regions, she would argue, remained relatively untouched by the intellectual movements of mainstream culture. Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem “An Mhuruch Agus Focail Airithe” (“The Mermaid and Certain Words”) relies on the image of the mermaid to depict an inversion of contemporary power relations in Ireland. The poem features a menacing Irish schoolmaster who makes the learning of Irish a kind of punishment, but who is ultimately revealed to be “the fictitious creation of a deceptive mermaid, ... used to camouflage a deeper knowledge of Irish folklore than any taught in schools.” Although Ní Dhomhnaill’s mermaid denies any knowledge of the sea, “life under the wave,” or “those superstitions,” her deceptions are ultimately exposed (McDiarmid 119): In the Department of Irish Folklore there is a full manuscript, from the Schools Compilation, written in her hand, written in water with a quill pen, on a tassel of seaweed as parchment.

Whereas mermaids have traditionally been portrayed as victims of mortal men, and students portrayed as victims of bullying schoolmasters, this mermaid student ultimately prevails. Furthermore, she does so with lines “written in water,” an allusion to Keats, whose name was “writ in water,”

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recalling Milton’s “Lycidas,” his elegy to Edward King, who drowned on his way home to Ireland—but also a particularly apt description of the oral tradition, which, though presumably faced with extinction, remains fluid enough to accommodate a variety of tellers and perspectives. Significantly, Ní Dhomhnaill suggests the oral tradition, and indeed, the lore of women, whose work was too often attributed to “anonymous,” ultimately prevails against the seemingly stronger and more permanent written tradition. Yet the final irony is that the oral tradition may only be revived when a poet like Ní Dhomhnaill sets herself to the task of writing about it, of publishing poems about it based on documents transcribed by folklorists. In “The Merfolk and the Written Word,” Ní Dhomhnaill again associates mermaids with the oral tradition, describing the merfolk “literate in their own fish tongue,” whose “Island School” is “closed down by the Department of Dried-Out Islands back in the ‘50s.” Their plight alludes to that of Irish-speaking island dwellers (recalling, in particular, the 1950s evacuation of the Blaskets), and indeed of the plight of all Irish speakers after British colonization. She writes, “They never took to the pen/or cultivated the native prose text”—suggesting that Ní Dhomhnaill’s own use of the Irish oral tradition in her poetry is an act of defiance that enables her and her readers to imaginatively inhabit this folkloric realm (“Merfolk” 441-42). The loss of the Irish language, and of the oral tradition on which it relied, entailed the loss of a whole folk tradition—of myths, stories, superstitions, traditions, and folk remedies—in favour of a western world view shaped by Christianity, the scientific revolution and the enlightenment. Ní Dhomhnaill’s mermaids, the reader is told, were once pagan, they were giants, and they once dwelt in “marble halls”—all of which is reminiscent of the stories of inhabitants of Ireland prior to colonization. Ní Dhomhnaill’s mermaid prefers to smoor the fire “not as Christ covers every spark, / with our Lady at the head of the house, / Saint Brigid at the heart…” but rather, she smoors the fire “in the name of the great Crom and his race”—the pre-Christian Irish deity whose worship was reputedly ended by St. Patrick, when he destroyed the golden cult image of Crom with a sledge hammer (“Metrical Dindshenchas”). Ní Dhomhnaill contends that mermaids in ancient times were enormous, and responsible for great stone works; likewise, the Fomorians, ancient inhabitants of Ireland, were once believed to be a race of semidivine giants responsible for stone wonders such as the Giants’ Causeway in County Antrim. The Irish name for “Giants’ Causeway” is Clochán na bhFomhóraigh or Clochán na bhFomhórach, which means "stepping stones of the Fomhóraigh." Early scholars held that the original name,

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Fomorian, in Irish contains the elements fo, "under/below," and muire, "sea," suggesting that their original habitat was under the sea (MacKillop 211). Recent research by Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh provides an exhaustive list of possible etymologies of “Formorian” and its variants: it may mean everything from “giants” to “sea pirates” to “giants who live in caves and underground structures”(172-243). The mermaids’ own original habitat in Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry is “Under the Sea.” The mermaids’ memory of “marble halls” alludes to the famous song by the Irish Michael William Balfe, “I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls,” included in his opera, The Bohemian Girl. The singer’s dream of a time when she could “boast of a high ancestral name” is used by many Irish writers, including Joyce, in his short story, “Clay,” to refer to the precolonial greatness of the Irish, lost through the process of colonization, which ultimately forced the Gaelic aristocracy into exile in an event known as “Imeacht na nIarlai,” the Flight of the Earls (“Flight”). Not coincidentally, the mermaids’ exile from their homeland “underneath the wave” results in an increase in infectious diseases to which the mermaids have no immunity. As with the Irish, or any colonized people, the mermaids “were particularly susceptible to severe illnesses / and any infectious disease that was doing the rounds” (Fifty-Minute 61). Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies examines how Eurasia's dense populations and high levels of trade resulted in immunity to a wide range of pathogens, which allowed them to more easily conquer indigenous populations who had no immunity to the diseases they carried (195). Ní Dhomhnaill suggests that their sudden susceptibility to illness may be equally attributed to the loss of tradition and community that their exile entails. David Lloyd’s recent Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity 18002000: The Transformation of Oral Space (2011) examines how the performance of Irish identity through the oral tradition became increasingly marginalized, as well as increasingly the province of Irish women, whose double colonization made participation in the mainstream English language literary tradition all the more difficult. In “Lack of Sympathy,” Ní Dhomhnaill tellingly places Irish speaker Peig Sayers, the most Blasket Islands’ most famous and highly regarded folktale teller, among the merfolk, and throughout her mermaid poems, Ní Dhomhnaill uses the mermaid’s uniquely feminine plight to addresses the plight of women, particularly in Irish culture. In “The Mermaid in the Labour Ward,” the human realm is equated with mortality and pain (the “curse of Eve” was to suffer labor pains), the mermaid’s realm with prelapsarian tranquility. After the mermaid is forced to join the mortal realm, which

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represents the simultaneous entry into female domestic life, Ní Dhomhnaill writes that, It’s little wonder in the long months that followed, as her instep flattened and her arches dropped, if her mind went with them. (“Merfolk” 442)

In “The Mermaid,” Ní Dhomhnaill writes from the mermaid’s perspective, refreshingly distinct from that of the colorless lives of “landlocked” women bound by all the social strictures imposed by patriarchy: Though I’ve got a fish’s tale I’m not unbeautiful; my hair is long and yellow and there’s a shine from my scales you won’t see on landlocked women. Their eyes are like the stones but look into these eyes of mine and you will see the sturgeon and you will see fine seals gambolling in my pupils. Not without pain have I landed; I broke the natural law. (Rogha Danta 53)

Whereas the mermaid forgoes immortality by breaking the natural law— relinquishing her natural form for a mortal form—she maintains a kind of perception which mere mortals lack, but which she is confident she can provide for them. Ní Dhomhnaill thereby expresses her intention to offer the same kind of vision to her readers. The mermaids’ displacement leads them to fling away the tune, “Port na bPucai,” which simultaneously leads them to deplore their place of origin and reject all that identifies them as female: The air of that tune is forever breaking down along with the menstrual rags, the menstrual blood they shy away from, reminiscent as it is of the ooze and muck from which they sprang.

In “The Merfolk on Breastfeeding,” “they refuse point-blank to breastfeed their newborn / but wean them much too early,” which results in a high

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rate of infant mortality: “It’s their dietary regimen / that’s eating away at their children.” The mermaids’ newfound antipathy to breastfeeding is a product of their displacement and their desire to assimilate into the dominant culture; it recalls the process by which formula companies in industrialized countries succeeded in getting women in less-developed countries to give up breastfeeding in favour of formula feeding. Formula company representatives posing as nurses persuaded the women that their breast milk was inferior to that of the manmade formula, but when their relinquishment of breastfeeding led to a sharp rise in infant mortality. Although scientific research supports the fact that breastfed babies are healthier, have lower infant mortality rates and fewer chronic illnesses throughout their lives than formula-fed babies, formula companies made enormous profits of convincing women otherwise (Baumslag 113-17). “Mermaid with the Parish Priest” is the story of a clever mermaid who wrote a brilliant essay, prompting the parish priest to invite her to his house, presumably to reward her. He instead sexually assaults her: She would never forget the smell of his study. The long lines of books and the musky smell in the air. He spoke to her in Irish. He showed her Bedell’s Bible. Then he put her sitting on his lap with her legs astride him on either side….

The poem concludes, “Little wonder that shortly afterwards she renounced the Irish language. / Never again did she set eyes on Bedell’s Bible.” Her mother dismisses her story, while continuing to attend mass and listen to the sermons of the priests, and thus the mermaid resolves never to tell her mother another thing. The mermaid’s story re-enacts that of thousands of Irish women and children abused by clergy, whose stories were ignored for decades, and only in the last few years given any official credence. The Ryan Report (2005), which details the investigation of child abuse in Ireland’s industrial school system, as well as pressure from advocacy groups like “Justice for Magdalenes,” an advocacy group for women incarcerated in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, prompted the United Nations Committee Against Torture to investigate the Magdalene Laundries. In 2011, the Committee issued a report condemning the Irish government for failure to acknowledge the pain and suffering of the victims and calling for a thorough investigation into the abuses that occurred. In March 2010, Pope Benedict XVI wrote a pastoral letter of apology to address all of the abuse that was carried out by Catholic clergy. In 2010, Pope Benedict established a formal panel to investigate the sex abuse scandal, and in

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2011, the panel reported widespread sexual abuse in every diocese in Ireland it investigated (“Irish Panel”). The mermaid’s loss of faith in the Irish language, in language in general, and in the church, has its counterpart in that of Irish women, whose stories were ignored by the male-dominated church and state in favour of the “official” narrative of Irish nationhood and the Irish Church, produced and controlled by men. Ní Dhomhnaill contrasts the mermaids’ new lives, characterized by pain and patriarchal control, with the underwater realm they were forced to relinquish: From what we can determine about their underwater existence it’s obvious that the females had a wide range of powers and that they were pretty much free of all oversight, quite unlike their circumstances on dry land.

Ní Dhomhnaill’s mermaids’ arrival on dry land also required shapeshifting—ridding themselves of their fishes’ tails in favour of human legs. Her frequent use of folktales involving transformation, or shape-shifting, from human to animal form, serve to remind the reader of the inseparable relation between the human and the animal world, and of the value of integrating precolonial folk vision with a contemporary worldview. Shapeshifting, is a common motif in Celtic mythology, which is often the source for Ní Dhomhnaill’s many shape-shifters: ravens, hare, deer, water horses, hounds, hags, hawks, and mermaids. James MacKillop observes that “transmigration of souls gives way to the widespread motif of shape-shifting, and the happy afterlife becomes concurrent with mortal life” (317). Anne Ross notes the way in which shape-shifting brings animals and humans “into a continual juxtaposition, their shapes and characteristics continuously merging and separating in the mythological legends” (50). Through the motif of transformation, Ní Dhomhnaill problematizes the western dichotomy of subject and object, nature and self, and instead asserts their interrelationship, even their inseparability. Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry relies on transformations to convey that “the whole of Western discourse is ripe for transformation and is transformable.” Shape-shifting legends, born out of dire need to cope with terrible situations, imply that the only hope for salvation is radical transformation. Bo Almqvist writes, The once all but universal belief in transformation and enchantment forms the core of innumerable popular narratives. In a wide range of these we

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also meet with skins, hides, cloaks, feathercoats, etc., which are donned by magicians as they transform themselves into animals or cast over antagonists they want to turn into wild beasts or birds. Equally common is the motif that certain zoomorphic or semi-zoomorphic beings—whether expressly stated to be enchanted humans or not—are able to remove their animal coats and take on human shape. (1)

In “The Fairy Boat,” Ní Dhomhnaill alludes to the legend that is closely akin to mermaid tales, and forms the basis for the 1994 film, The Secret of Roan Inish: fairies who can transform themselves into seals. While picking dulse, three women see the fairies “go through a place so narrow only a seal might pass.” The elders advise them to head home and say the Rosary, “for this same vision had often come/ to people out on the sea.” Ní Dhomhnaill thus encapsulates Christianity’s traditional response to Celtic religion: imposing its own rituals and myths in an effort to eradicate all traces of Celtic ones. Ní Dhomhnaill concludes the poem by noting that there were “three who’d seen and three who hadn’t/ the men rowing for dear life/ with their blue jerkins and red bonnets/ putting in at the Women’s Cliff,” implying that the encounter with the fairies is just as likely to have really happened as not, and that the world view reflected in the encounter is just as likely to be valid as that of the Christian world view imposed on it. As in other poems, the red bonnets signify the men’s association with the Celtic otherworld. Thus, Ní Dhomhnaill’s most recent poems serve as environmental critique, challenging the dichotomy between nature and humanity established by the scientific revolution and unfortunately used as justification for environmental exploitation and degradation. One common explanation for mermaid lore around the globe is that it reflects the human awareness that we are one with the animal world, yet also distinct from it—a part of nature, though often perceiving ourselves to be, through culture, apart from nature. Carolyn Merchant describes the way in which “the removal of animistic, organic assumptions about the cosmos constituted the death of nature—the most far-reaching effect of the Scientific Revolution. Because nature was now viewed as a system of dead, inert particulars moved by external, rather than inherent forces, the mechanical framework itself could legitimate the manipulation of nature.” Ní Dhomnaill’s mermaids, suffering the impact of a variety of forms of environmental degradation well-known to a twenty-first century audience, eventually must retreat to Tir fo Thuinn, the land under the waves, from which they had once emerged—a cautionary tale for a contemporary audience. She writes “if the prophecy is to be believed / and it won’t be long until the sea returns to cover Slieve Mish / because of pollution and

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greenhouse gases, / I wonder, at that point, what stuff they’ll be made of” (Fifty 71). The 1995 Southern Review interview with Mebh McGuckian and Ní Dhomhnaill explores the common assumption that Ní Dhomhnaill is overly preoccupied with earth, sexuality, and the non-rational, rather than the rational. Ní Dhomhnaill responds that “I am for a marrying of the logical with the non-rational” for combining ‘male’ energy with ‘female’ energy ...” (Consalvo “Adaptations” 319). Ní Dhomhnaill’s many poems about transformation are the means by which she implores readers to consider the import of more comprehensive transformations in their views of themselves and the world.

Works Cited Almqvist, Bo. “Of Mermaids and Marriages: Seamus Heaney’s ‘Maighdean Mara’ and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s ‘An Mhaighdean Mhara.’” Béaloideas (1990), 1-74. Print. Baumslag, Naomi. Milk, Money, and Madness: The Culture and Politics of Breastfeeding. Praeger, 1995. Print. Consalvo, Deborah McWilliams. “Adaptations and Transformations: An Interview with Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 83, no. 331 (Autumn 1994): 313-20. —. "The Lingual Ideal in the Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.” EireIreland 30, no. 2 (1995): 148-61. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Norton, 1997. Print. “Flight of the Earls.” Web. 22 September 2013. http://www.flightoftheearls.ie/. “The Given Note.” Web. 22 September 2013. http://www.rte.ie/heaneyat70/music_givennote.html. “Irish Panel on Abuse Cites Failure by Church.” Web. 22 September 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/world/europe/in-ireland-catholicdioceses-are-faulted-on-abuse.html?_r=0 Keightley, Thomas. The Fairy Mythology. H. Ainsworth, 1828. Print. MacKillop, James. Dictionary of Celtic Mythology. Oxford, 1998. Print. McDiarmid, Lucy. “Heaney and the Politics of the Classroom.” Ed., Robert F. Garratt. Critical Essays on Seamus Heaney. New York: G.K. Hall, 1995. Print. The Metrical Dindshenchas. Web. 22 September 2013. Ed. Lisa Boucher, Alf Siewers, Saorla Ó Corráin. CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts. University College, Cork College Road, Cork, Ireland.

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http://www.ucc.ie/celt 2005. Vol 4, Poem 7. “Na Púcaí.” An Sionnach Fionn. Web. 22 September 2013. . Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala. The Fifty Minute Mermaid. Gallery Press, 2007. Print. —. “The Merfolk and the Written Word” The Southern Review 31:3 (Summer 1995) 441-442. Print. —. Rogha Dánta: Selected Poems. New Arts Books, 1993. Print. Ó Maolalaigh, Roibeard. “Fomóir, fomhair, famhair, fuamhair(e) (‘giant’) and Related Forms in Scottish Gaelic,” Scottish Gaelic Studies, 2013. Print. Ross, Anne. Pagan Celtic Britain: Studies in Iconography and Tradition. London: Routledge and K. Paul; New York: Columbia University Press, 1967. “The Selkie-Folk.” Web. 22 September 2013.

Slemon, Stephen. “Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Ed. Zamora, Louis Parkinson and Wendy B. Faris. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1995. Print. Wilde, Lady Jane Francesca. Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland. Boston: Ticknor, 1887. Print.

EMERALD NOIR? CONTEMPORARY IRISH CRIME FICTION DAVID CLARK THE UNIVERSITY OF A CORUÑA

The name “Emerald Noir” has been used to describe the new crime writing coming from the island of Ireland in the last decade of the twentieth and first decade of the twenty-first centuries. The Armagh novelist Stuart Neville believes the term was coined by the Scottish writer Val McDermid as “perhaps to express kinship with the Tartan Noir movement of which she, Ian Rankin and Stuart MacBride are just three of Scotland's leading exponents.” The usage is now widely accepted, but as Neville himself suggests, it has perhaps been misused by some critics who see the phenomenon of crime writing as being a recent one in Ireland. Irish crime writing has existed for almost as long as has the genre itself, and indeed has provided the English language with many of the great specialists in the field. Until recently, however, Irish exponents of the genre have generally been included within an English or British tradition of crime writing, and this status has not been repudiated by the large number of Irish writers who have set their fiction within a markedly English context, translating their crime narratives to English geographical and social settings. Thus writers such as Eilís Dillon and Nigel Fitzgerald, both working in the middle of the twentieth century and both of whom purposely set their novels in Ireland, are in a minority when compared with all the writers who made use of an English environment for their setting. This article will briefly examine the historical status of crime fiction before looking at the rise of the genre over the last decade or so, and will conclude with an analysis of the relationship between contemporary crime writing and the recent economic boom and decline in the Republic of Ireland and to a somewhat lesser extent in Northern Ireland, highlighting the importance of criminal activity centred around the property market in many recent Irish crime narratives. When talking of “Irish” crime fiction it is, perhaps, worth noting the difficult and often contradictory relationship that exists between crime

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fiction and the concept of “nation” or “state”. Since Ernest Mandel’s ground-breaking Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story (1984), many critics have highlighted the close relationship between this popular genre and a wide variety of contemporary social issues. As Haut states, “to examine a culture one need only examine its crimes” (3). The essentially “realist” infrastructure of most crime fiction gives it a particularly clear mandate to fulfil the early Marxist criteria for social fiction, providing, as it were, an accurate picture of society and its inherent contradictions. This Balzacian role has been exploited by crime writers as a means of revealing both explicitly and implicitly the tensions inherent in issues such as social class, gender, race and the relationship between the individual and society or the authority which represents said society. It is for this reason that, while many studies have been written on class, gender and crime, for example, until relatively recently the “national” status of crime fiction has been largely ignored. The hegemony of crime fiction from major nation states with linguistic, economic and political dominance was a truism throughout the early years of the genre right up until the second half of the twentieth century. Thus American, English and French models provided the dominant examples of the genre throughout its formative and evolutionary periods. The importance and relative stability of the State as institution within these countries helped to create the different sub-divisions of the genre, with France, the United Kingdom and the United States providing the clearest examples of early Detective, Golden Age, Hard Boiled and Police Procedural fiction, to use the subdivisions used by critics such as Martin Priestman (2003) and John Scaggs (2005), to mention just two recent critics. As Mandel notes, during the nineteenth century and coinciding with the bourgeois revolution, “a stronger state and more powerful police force were needed to keep a watchful eye on the lower orders, on the classes that were ever restive, periodically rebellious, and therefore criminal in bourgeois eyes” (13). With the reification of the concepts of law and order, of crime and punishment, the bourgeoisie became steadily more implicated in the maintenance of the status quo. Such a status quo assumed the “stability of bourgeois society and the self-confidence of the ruling class” which “assumed that this stability was a fact of life” (44), and, as such, any revolt against social order was immediately assimilated into criminal activity, and the proletariat became identified with the criminal classes. Crime fiction, for Mandel, only takes roots in a society only “when bourgeois ideology in its purest sense becomes all-pervasive” (45). From the early nineteenth century up until the middle of the twentieth, the large,

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industrially advanced nation states were therefore, not surprisingly, the prime producers of crime fiction. The second half of the twentieth century, however, saw a variety of fictions which dramatically challenged the underlying ideologies of the genre, and these fictions often came from writers from smaller countries which were only just defining their Statehood or nationhood within this period. Clear examples are the many South American crime-writers who bloomed under the shade of Borges and his magnificent deconstruction of the traditional detective ethos, writers from former British and French colonies, and importantly, perhaps, others from small stateless nations like Scotland or Catalonia. Catalonian crime fiction, both in Catalan and in Castilian Spanish, is much more challenging, dynamic and assertive, for example than that from other regions of Spain where the question of national tension is less apparent. It is not difficult to see, therefore, why Ireland, peripheral to the hegemonic nature of British capitalism, was peripheral to the rise of crime fiction, at least when such fiction was coded in geographical and social terms. Irish crime writers more often than not used British, European or American settings for their works. The few exceptions are important. For example Gerald Griffin’s novel The Collegians (1819), set in Ireland, a country “of little agreeable association to recommend it” (4), is arguably one of the finest early examples of the genre in English. The great Irish detective writers of the “Golden Age” such as Freeman Wills Crofts and Cecil Day Lewis (writing as “Nicholas Blake”) tended to avoid Ireland both in terms of setting and in terms of content, and their example was followed widely by most Irish writers. Despite this, however, in a country possessing and combining some of the traits of an emerging nation, of an ex-colony and, in terms of the initial Free State dependence on Britain and the situation in Northern Ireland, with certain features of the stateless nation, Irish crime fiction presents a fascinating crucible through which a number of imagined Irelands can be constructed. It is not, therefore, surprising to observe a significant rise both in terms of quantity and quality of Irish crime fiction over the last twenty years. The most important development in Irish crime narrative over this period is undoubtedly the movement towards fiction set in a contemporary Irish context, reflecting recognisably Irish protagonists within a recognisably Irish framework. The reasons why so many Irish writers had set their works in non-Irish settings, such as England or the United States are various, but many of these are directly related to the uncertain status of Ireland as a nation and the consequent ambiguity which enshrouded the law and the instruments designed to uphold it. Hence in the early twentieth

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century the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), the police force pertaining to the British state, was perceived by a large number of inhabitants of Ireland as being part of the power of the oppressor. As such a “sympathetic” police officer in a work of fiction set in pre-Independence Ireland would be unacceptable to a significant percentage of Irish people. While the formation of An Garda Síochána in the nineteen-twenties represented a formal change in police authority in the new Republic, the historic mistrust of the police still largely remained, with the Guard being regarded often as a “fucking culchie” (Glyn: 20) from the country and, again, unsympathetic characters to engage the reader’s interest in fictional circumstances. The situation in Northern Ireland was no easier, and the role of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) up until its substitution by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) in 2001, was generally considered to be far from neutral. Such a situation would continue, of course, in this area, with the political role of the RUC being far from neutral. Given the circumstances, therefore, it is hardly surprising that crime fiction with Irish police officers as protagonists was scarce throughout most of the twentieth century, with Sheila Pim, Eilis Dillon and Nigel Fitzgerald providing the first credible Guards to appear in Irish crime narrative. If credible Irish police officers are hard to find in Irish crime fiction before the end of the twentieth century, private detectives are no easier to encounter. With a few exceptions, such as the Northern Irish writer Mike Shelley, who introduced his private detective Bernard Holland in The Last Private Eye in Belfast (1984), most Irish crime writers either avoided the use of private eyes or else placed their private investigators within nonIrish settings, normally the UK or the USA. As Ken Bruen states in his The Guards (2001): “There are no private eyes in Ireland. The Irish wouldn’t wear it. The concept brushes perilously close to the hated ‘informer’. You can get away with almost anything except ‘telling’” (5). The status of the informer, of course, harks back to pre-Independence Ireland and, like the distrust of the police forces, is significantly redolent in a country still at odds with its own status and condition. The nineteen-seventies saw a sharp increase in armed crime in the Republic of Ireland. The “Troubles” in Northern Ireland made firearms readily available in the Republic, and one crime reporter reflects how armed robberies in Dublin rose from a mere from five in nineteen sixtynine to over one hundred and fifty a year at the beginning of the next decade (Williams 28). Throughout the nineteen seventies and eighties these arms were used by newly constituted gangs which set about constructing a vast drug-dealing network. Many of the leaders of these gangs became nationally famous as their exploits were highlighted in

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newspaper articles feeding a public avid for information regarding the Irish “mafias” and the personalities behind their operation. The growth in “home grown” crime, and the constant media presence of larger than life criminal figures such as Martin “The General” Cahill, George “The Penguin” Mitchell, Gerry “The Monk” Hutch or John Gilligan saw many investigative reporters publishing book-length volumes of “True Crime” stories, which reached a voracious market eager for longer and more detailed accounts of the heists, murders and kidnappings they had grown accustomed to in their newspapers. Thus in the early to mi- nineteen nineties the market for crime literature in Ireland grew, and this growth would soon be reflected not only in the “True Crime” genre but also in a new, incipient Irish crime fiction, which would start to deal with Irish crime in an Irish setting on a scale hitherto unknown in the country. Not surprisingly, perhaps, some of the crime reporters of this period, most notably Gene Kerrigan and Liz Allen were to become crime novelists at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as were ex- Garda officers such as Gerry O’Carroll or Jim Galvin. A long list of competent writers with a steadily enhanced popularity would produce copious amounts of crime fiction set in Ireland, and the best works by writers such as Vincent Banville, Jim Lusby, John Brady, Rory McCormac, Paul Carson and TS O’Rourke, to name but a few, provide fascinating insights into criminal activity in Ireland in the pre-Celtic Tiger years and the early days of the Tiger economy. The crime literature boom of the nineteen nineties reflected the dominant criminal behaviour of the times in that it was gang based and drug centred. The defining moment of the decade in terms of penal legislation and public attitudes towards criminal activity, however, would change not only the scale and magnitude of delinquent behaviour in the Republic of Ireland. The murder of Veronica Guerin in nineteen ninetysix brought about a huge public outcry at precisely the moment when Ireland, recently entered into the dynamics of the Tiger economy, was at its highest level of self-esteem. Guerin, whose newspaper articles had resolutely condemned the drugs gangs which operated with apparent indemnity throughout the country, was a popular public figure whose murder caused the country to call into question its own status as an advanced nation. The result was the passing of a package of anti-crime legislation which led to the creation of the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB), a multidisciplinary agency with powers to seize any assets ordained to have proceeded from illegal activity and which has since been termed “one of the most successful innovations ever in Irish law enforcement”

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(Williams xiv), the design of which has since been adopted by many other countries including the UK. The creation of the CAB and the growth of the Celtic Tiger economy saw a change in the habits of crime in Ireland. The new economic selfconfidence was enshrined in effective new legislation which ensured that the gangsters of the nineteen eighties and early to mid-nineties found life and criminal activity in the new Tiger Ireland much more difficult. The focus of crime in the late nineties and in the first decade of the twenty-first century moved away from the old gang-based robbery and kidnappings towards the more lucrative and initially less perilous area of white-collar crime. The Celtic Tiger period was characterised by an enormous growth in the property market, and the quick profits that could be gained from this prompted a whole new level of criminal activity. This activity would be documented by many of the crime writers who had first made their names in the decade before, but their numbers were augmented by a whole new generation of writers. Thus the “emerald noir” which would proliferate in the years 2000-2010 was represented by novelists such as Liz Allen, Ingrid Black, Tana French, Alan Glynn, Declan Hughes, Arlene Hunt, Gene Kerrigan, Rob Kitchin, Cormack Millar and Niamh O’Connor. These writers would concentrate largely on the new property-related crime which had grown so rapidly and which had filled the criminal ranks with seemingly endless ranks of lawyers, bankers, businessmen and politicians. In his critique of the corruption rife during the Celtic Tiger period, Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger, the journalist Fintan O’Toole scathingly reveals the folly which led to the Irish landscape being drastically reformed over the first decade of the twentyfirst century. In a country, said O’Toole, which was losing its religion, “the indestructibility of the property market was the remaining one true faith” (124). The cover of O’Toole’s book shows a crumpled “euro” symbol drowning in the troubled waters of the Liffey. Between the river and the cloudy, windswept skies, the skyline of Dublin is clearly recognisable with the silhouette of the Customs House, but dominating the picture are towering cranes and new buildings in construction. Dublin, and the rest of Celtic Tiger Ireland, had been undergoing a property boom unlike any other known hitherto in the country and without precedent in Western Europe. During the last few years of the twentieth century into the first decade of the twenty-first Ireland made known her apparent prosperity through the sheer scale of property development and the resultant increase in the price of housing. In the twelve years between nineteen ninety-four and two thousand and six there was a rise in over five

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hundred percent in the price of rented accommodation in the city of Dublin (101) and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was giving talks around the globe on the “miracle” of the Celtic Tiger. To all intents and purposes, Ireland was the front-runner in a new world order, and her construction industry the flagship which heralded her apparent prosperity. The events of the last few years, with the endemic political scandals which engulfed the last years of the first decade of the new millennium, raised the question of the extent to which Ireland’s economic miracle had been a myth. The collapse of the Anglo-Irish Bank, the revelations regarding bank regulation scandals and the final acknowledgment that high-level politicians from all of the major parties had connived with bankers and property speculators to create a financial bubble which led to the total collapse of the Irish banking system and the death of the myth of the Celtic Tiger. The writing, for O’Toole, had been on the wall. The Irish state had subsidised, he claims, to the amount of €2 billion the building of houses “whose purpose was to provide shelter, not for real people, but for the taxes of their builders” and so, instead of “providing real houses for people who desperately needed them, €2 billion of public money was squandered on putting up empty shells in places where no one wanted to live” (117). By two thousand and nine Dublin had “the highest vacancy rate of any European capital and was rated as having the worst development and investment potential of twenty-seven European cities” (9), with more than one fifth of available office space totally unoccupied. The incredible rise in Irish crime writing between 2004 and 2010 is intrinsically related to the popular conception that there was something occult behind the veneer of the Tiger, and that that “something” very likely held criminal connotations. Just as the Derry of Sean O’Reilly’s early fiction seems to be infested by the menacing drone of British army helicopters hovering outside the windows, so the Dublin of the novels of Gene Kerrigan and Declan Burke is haunted by the presence of massive cranes, raising their heads above the urban milieu. In Hughes’ first novel The Wrong Kind of Blood (2006), his lead character, the private detective Ed Loy, returns to his home city after a number of years working in the USA, and from the aircraft notes that his “first view coming in on the plane wasn’t of the coast or the green fields of North Dublin; it was of the four great Dawson cranes suspended above a vast oval construction site. It looked as if they had just dug up the Parthenon, and were laying the foundations for another shopping mall” (11). Similarly, in Gene Kerrigan’s debut, Little Criminals (2005), one character, Justin Kennedy,is first encountered seated in his office where

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from his window he sees “a familiar sprouting of cranes” which decorated the city (41). The confidence in construction is such that “the chattering classes were never done boasting about how many cranes there were on the Dublin horizon” (Dark Times in the City 2) and the cranes were seen as “badges of national pride” (2). Despite such pride, however, there is always a dark side to the construction industry. Building speculators are either in liege with corrupt politicians and bankers, or are criminals who have evolved from other illicit activities to the more lucrative and apparently respectable world of the property market. The Dublin to which Ed Loy returns has changed greatly from that which he left behind two decades before. He is shocked to see that the houses “have doubled in value in the five years since they were built” (Little Criminals 11). In the city centre, Grafton Street “had a sleek sheen to it now, a brash unapologetic confidence about itself that had been thin on the ground in Ireland twenty years before” (29). Loy quickly discovers, however, the raw underbelly of the Tiger. Off the sides of Grafton Street are droves of homeless people, a “derelict on every doorway” (29). The building industry relies on shady deals with unscrupulous politicians and the reclassification of land for financial gain, The Halligan family, a criminal grouping which launders criminal gains through the property market, appears in all the novels of the series. They are protected by the moneyed classes, to whom they in turn offer their own type of protection. For Hughes, the new property-rich Irish are taking over the role of the old colonial absentee landlord who had exploited his tenants and become such a hated figure in Irish history. Gene Kerrigan also sees the hunger for quick money on the property market as being one of the great anathemas of modern Ireland. Even guards in patrol cars discuss property prices in a country that “had been a decade in love with its own prosperity” (Midnight Choir 11). The small-time criminals of pre-Tiger Ireland have been replaced by corporate crooks that are as willing to use the courts and Government agencies as they are to use more overtly criminal tactics. Just as Hughes has the Halligans and Kerrigan the Mackendricks, many of the Irish crime novels of the first decade of the new century have property developers as their villains. In Liz Allen’s Last to Know (2004), the gangster Mooney is a “property developer extraordinaire” (5), while in Arlene Hunt’s False Intentions (2005) Edward Naughton is a property developer, the owner of the crooked business Zara Construction. Cormack Millar sees Celtic Tiger Ireland as “an old familiar drain” in which “a selfrighteous native kleptocracy had swollen on the proceeds of small favours done, modest sums diverted, decisions revered, grants obtained, investments

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announced, land deals sweetened, planning laws flouted, political donations siphoned into private fobs” (43-4). The effects of this sustained growth in construction for purely speculative purposes were to have an enormous impact on the environment. Within the cities the skylines would be permanently altered, but more importantly any type of social cohesion which had previously existed was lost. The working-class areas of the central urban areas are being destroyed to create new spaces on which office blocks or high-scale housing developments can be built. The sharp and uncontrolled increase in the price of housing also forced many people to seek dwellings outside the traditional urban areas. O’Toole comments that such practice was responsible for “a vast expansion of the effective area” of the city of Dublin as “large swathes of Wicklow, Wexford, Meath, Louth, Westmeath, Carlow, Offaly, even Cavan and Monaghan, became parts of outer Dublin” (173). He also states that even within the city centre new apartment complexes often lacked any real sense of connection to the old working-class areas “in which they merely happened to have been built” (174). Such a sense of displacement is apparent in many of the crime novels from the period. In Declan Hughes’ The Dying Breed (2008), social tension is created as working-class and middle-class families are brought into contact in one of the newly-constructed Dublin suburbs. The middleclass prejudices against the “skangers, scabies, scumbags” (29) with who they were forced to share a social space are further exacerbated by the families from the council houses dumping their rubbish outside the privately-owned accommodations. Hughes ironically notes that “young couples on good salaries were now living cheek by jowl with people they used to cross the city to avoid, and they were getting a crash course in the social policies that had left many people disaffected and alienated, confined to bleak estates decimated by drug abuse and criminality” (31). Meanwhile, the inner-city areas which have not yet been developed are in a state of dilapidation. In the Galway of Ken Bruen’s Cross (2007), the developers hover like vultures waiting for the death, bankruptcy or definitive resignation of the residents of the “last barrier in a town with modern construction run riot” in order to purchase the property before they “rip the guts out of it or raze it to the ground, and presto, a new set of luxurious apartments, uglier with each successive purchase” (98). Many of the final owners of these condemned houses in Bruen’s Galway are newlyarrived immigrants. Similarly, in Andrew Nugent’s Second Burial (2007), African immigrants inhabit the area around Parnell Square which has now become known, like part of Galway town, “Little Africa”, inhabited by

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those who had “come to hitch a ride on the Celtic Tiger” (16). In Arlene Hunt’s Black Sheep (2006), the young drug user who witnesses the murder at the beginning of the novel and who steals from the dead man’s pockets lives in a desolate apartment complex which although only twenty years old was already in ruin: At one point, it had housed a wide variety of professional people and families; but over the years, as the Celtic Tiger roared, spluttered and meowed, the original people had made money and moved to houses with gardens in the suburbs. And with them had gone their sense of pride. Now the paintwork was peeling; the gardens went months without anyone bothering to mow the lawns. The collection of year-tenants, welfare recipients and immigrants living in the Kilmainham Heights didn’t give a shit if the place fell down about their ears (16).

Many recent crime novels also reflect the neglect to which the social services in Ireland have been allowed to degrade. The money “saved” from cuts in health, education and housing are also reflected in the landscape. Hospitals are inevitably understaffed and rundown, council housing represents a type of no-go area for the police services, and state schools and colleges are under-resourced and dilapidated. In Kerrigan’s Little Criminals, the buoyancy of new construction for office and empty rental spaces is contrasted with the “shanty schoolroom” where “despite the voluntary donations and the kids’ sponsored walks, there wasn’t money for plaster on the breeze-block walls, and some of the classrooms had no ceilings, just steel girders beneath a corrugated roof” (43). Although Dublin, as capital and largest city, was the centre of the property boom during the Tiger period, it was by no means the only area of mass growth in the property industry with its resulting effects on the landscape. As we have seen, Ken Bruen’s Galway is being constantly reshaped in the wake of new construction. Not even Donegal is spared the impact of the bulldozer and the concrete. In Paul Charles’ The Dust of Death (2008), Letterkenny is known to the inhabitants as a “Boomtown”, and we read that “the Klondyke had nothing on the Letterkenny boyos; but instead of prospectors, Letterkenny is infested with developers” (29). One of these Letterkenny developers is Owen Bonner, who hails from one of the old traditional criminal families of the area. Bonner, however, has taken advantage of the Tiger economy, has studied at university and is confident in the fact that there is still a large amount of money to be made in the property, even despite the downturn in the economic boom. Bonner tells the Guard Starrett that “The old Celtic Tiger may have been winded, but its generation still wants to party, and I can tell you, they want to party in clean, modern buildings with proper plumbing and all the health and

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safety issues that go with them” (151). Across the border, the prosperity has been less apparent, but Northern Ireland has seen an increase in the property market, partly as a knock-on effect from the Republic but also because of the positive effects of the Peace Process, much of which was concurrent with the Tiger years. In Adrian McKinty’s The Bloomsday Dead (2007), the protagonist Michael Forsythe returns to his native Belfast after many years’ absence. Like Ed Loy in Dublin, he sees many changes, but here these changes are perceived as positive in that they might eventually lead to Belfast becoming “any other dull, wet northern European city” (135) as “tenements had been demolished and were being replaced by neat semidetached houses” (174). Land has always been a primary issue in Irish politics. In her 2007 novel In the Woods, Tana French relates this to the historical importance of land to the Irish people. In a society where corruption is taken for granted or, as she claims, “even grudgingly admired”, she argues: (…) a huge amount of the corruption centres on that primal, clichéd Irish passion, land. Property developers and politicians are traditionally bosom buddies, and just about every major local land deal involves brown envelopes and inexplicable re-zoning and complicated transactions through offshore accounts” (113).

The incipient growth of Irish crime fiction in the nineteen nineties reached a new maturity in the first decade of the new century. While the first generation of writers to attempt the fictional narration of Irish crime within an Irish setting had relied mainly on formulaic writing which often relied on American and British models being transported into an Irish context, the new writers were able to transcend the boundaries of genre fiction, creating a popular literature of some quality which accurately reflected the changing face of Irish society over the decade. This is not to say, of course, that irish crime writers immediately and unanimously transferred the scene of their narratives to the island of Ireland. Indeed, many recent writers have continued to use non-Irish settings with great success. Thus while novelists such as John Connolly and Alex Barclay have made innovative use of an American setting, while William Ryan and Conor Fitzgerald have, respectively, locate their narratives in the Stalinist Soviet Union and post-Berlusconi Italy respectively. While it is true, however, that many Irish crime writers still tend to situate their fictions outside Ireland, it is also worthwhile noting that certain Irish writers who had hitherto embraced foreign traditions such as Ken Bruen or Paul Charles started to write fictional crime set in Ireland for the first time. A large number of women writers started to produce crime fiction of quality,

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helping to widen the scope of a literature which was fast becoming synonymous with social criticism. John Banville’s “Benjamin Black” novels may provide the most ostensibly “literary” credentials for “emerald noir”, but the overall quality of much contemporary Irish crime writing is high. The most important aspect of this new fiction, however, lies in its assertion of independence from the restrictions which had previously hindered the genre within an Irish context, namely its perceived inability to tackle crime as an essentially Irish issue within an essentially Irish context. The self-confidence and originality of recent Irish crime fiction has provided an invaluable prism through which the complicated milieu of post-Tiger Ireland can be gauged.

Works Cited Allen, Liz. Last to Know. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004. Print. Bruen, Ken. Cross. London and New York: Bantam Press, 2007. Print. —. The Guards. Dublin: Brandon, 2001. Print. Charles, Paul. The Dust of Death. Dingle: Brandon, 2008. Print. Cunningham, Peter. Capital Sins. Dublin: New Island, 2010. Print. French, Tana. In the Woods London: Hodder, 2007. Print. Glynn, Alan. Winterland. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. Print. Griffin, Gerald. The Collegians. Ed. John Cronin. Belfast: Appletree Press, 1992. Print. Haut, W. Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999. Print. Hughes, Declan. The Dying Breed. London: John Murray, 2008. Print. —. The Wrong Kind of Blood. London: John Murray, 2006. Print. Hunt, Arlene. Black Sheep. Dublin: Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006. Print. Kerrigan, Gene. Dark Times in the City. London: Harvill Secker, 2009. Print. —. Little Criminals. London: Vintage, 2005. Print. —. The Midnight Choir London: Harvill Secker. Print. McKinty, Adrian. The Bloomsday Dead. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2007. Print. Mandel, Ernest. Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story Minnesota: Minnesota UP, 1984. Print. Millar, Cormack. An Irish Solution. Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2004. Print. Neville, Stuart. “Dangerous Arts.” Tribune. Tribune.ie. 19 Sept. 2010. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. Nugent, Andrew. Second Burial. London: Headline, 2007. Print.

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O’Toole, Fintan. Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Print. Williams, Paul. The Untouchables: Ireland’s Criminal As sets Bureau and its War on Organised Crime. Dublin: Merlin, 2006. Print.

EDWIN MUIR’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS A METAPHOR OF HIS ORCADIAN IDENTITY AND LANGUAGE YUKO YONEYAMA UNIVERSITY OF SHIZUOKA

I. Introduction When reading an autobiography, we trace a process of identifying the author as analyst with himself/ herself as the object of the analysis. An autobiography is a metaphor of narrating and narrated author: the author is divided into subject (as narrating self) and object (as narrated self), but as the two are recreated in the reader’s mind the boundary disappears. As James Olney suggests, it is “like a magnifying lens, focusing and intensifying that same peculiar creative vitality that informs all the volumes of collected works” (Olney 3-4). It also correlates the author’s consciousness and unconsciousness, enabling readers to approach the author’s inner self closely: we assume that the clearest representation of an author’s identity is the one given by the story he/she tells of his/ her own life. The Orkney poet Edwin Muir (1887-1959), however, said in his Autobiography, “The problem that confronts an autobiographer even more urgently than other men is, How can he know himself? I am writing about myself in this book, yet I do not know what I am” (Muir, Autobiography 40). Of course he knew the facts about his personal history, but the knowledge was only “in an external and deceptive way, as it were a dry legend which he made up in collusion with mankind” (Muir, Autobiography 40). Muir was the youngest son of six children of a farmer in the Mainland of the Orkney Islands. The Muirs settled in the small island of Wyre, where a strong sense of agricultural community had been preserved. It is here that the happiest days in his life were experienced, and the period remained in his mind as a remembered Eden. When he was fourteen years old, however, the family had to move to the Mainland because of their

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landlord’s exploitation; and later to Glasgow, where his elder brothers worked. This was an enormous and daunting change for them, from a preindustrial village closely tied to animals and nature, to a modern city with appalling social problems. The hardships of life in Glasgow were so severe that it may have contributed to the deaths of his parents and two of his brothers. The family divided up, and young Edwin was obliged to work at various places: a law office, a publishing company, a beer-bottling firm, a bone factory, and a ship-building company. During these years he was influenced by socialism and by the doctrines of Nietzsche, and contributed to the critical magazine New Age edited by Alfred Orage. In 1919 he married Willa Anderson from Shetland, an instructor at a teacher training school, and they moved to London, where he became an assistant to Orage. Willa and Edwin then went to Prague, Dresden, Forte dei Marmi, Salzburg and Vienna; and began the project of translating the novels of Franz Kafka, with whom Edwin felt much sympathy, into English. In 1924 they went back to England, and returned there after a visit to the Côte d’Azur. Their only son, Gavin, was born in Surrey. It was around that time when he began to write poems. His travels in Europe had planted the seeds of his poetic development by giving him many experiences for which prose would have been inadequate as a means of expressing his thoughts. In 1935 the family moved to St Andrews, where Willa had studied. Shortly afterwards Edwin began working for the British Council in Edinburgh; a career move which soon led to his first going to Prague as a director of the British Institute and then becoming a director of the Rome Institute of the British Council. After that he returned to Scotland to become a warden of Newbattle Abbey, a kind of open college for further education. He published The Story and the Fable, the early version of his Autobiography, in 1940, and in 1954, when he was 67, completed it by adding the description of his later life. To give a series of lectures as the Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Professor at Harvard, he travelled to the States. Two years later, he died in Swaffham Prior, near Cambridge. An Autobiography is both a narrative of Muir’s life events and a series of reflections on many issues which those events prompted: as an example, place names, a factual detail, lead into meditations on their meanings and overtones. The writer of an autobiography can present an idealised or wholly illusory portrait. The nature of Muir’s self-portrayal, and his possible intention in presenting it to his readers, will be examined in this essay.

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II. Poetry as a Road Back to Orkney An Autobiography begins with Muir’s recollections of his childhood in Wyre. The family lived with their animals in close contact with untamed nature, and their appreciation of life and of the bounty of the earth was something he never forgot. It was a pleasure for them after their daily labour to sing, accompanying themselves on the fiddle or melodeon, or simply to chat. Children were excited by their parents’ stories of witches and fairies; and Muir’s imagination, in his early years, was nourished by the legends and folk tales which were so familiar to the islanders. After leaving Orkney, Muir looked at his native land mainly from the outside, living in several cities in Europe. No matter where he was, however, the Orkney landscapes always remained in his memory as an inexhaustible stimulus to his imagination. Legend or myth is one of the most important factors to consider in assessing Muir’s poetry and vision. Orkney has a wealth of folk tales and legends, and according to Muir “there was no clear boundary in the islands between the ordinary and the legend” (Muir, Autobiography 4). Through all his journeys around Europe, Muir appears to have been in search of an imaginary “nevernever-land” (as he called it) with reference to which he could ascertain his own identity as an Orcadian. On arriving in Glasgow, he was profoundly shocked to find that “a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two days’ journey” (Muir, Autobiography 289). With the move from an isolated rural village to the centre of Scotland’s largest industrial city, his life changed completely. He recoiled from the fact that the entire system of values was different from that of Orkney, where the traditional life styles from the middle of the eighteenth century were still going on. “In the islands it was considered contemptible to steal a march on your neighbour and tasteless to push yourself forward”; but in Glasgow “these things were thought not only permissible but a mark of virtue” (Muir, Scottish Journey 112, hereafter SJ). Now that the pastoral landscapes of his childhood had been swept away from his field of vision, he was brought face to face with the appalling gap between rich and poor which had come to prevail in the new competitive society, and was forced to confront the concepts of “rationality” and “efficiency” at the centre of the standards which applied in the industrial city. Even in the Victorian age, while some people were eager to succeed, others could not manage to follow their dreams and failed to advance in the merciless world; and this mode of life had been advancing steadily in Glasgow while Orkney had remained in the preindustrial age. “All my life since I have been trying to overhaul that

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invisible leeway. No wonder I am obsessed with Time” (Muir, SJ 112). Muir had grown up without noticing “that invisible leeway”; but now his realisation of the full extent of it filled him with horror. Once he recognised “that invisible leeway,” Muir set Orkney as his ideal, and his creative imagination came to be inspired by his nostalgic recollections. He never saw the “leeway” as suggesting an inferiority in Orkney life when measured against urban civilisation: on the contrary, the rich humanity which had been put out of the minds of people in the city was still developing in his native land. The islanders who helped each other and did not lock their houses even at night had nothing to do with either ambition or competition. A “culture made up of legend, folk-song, and the poetry and prose of the Bible” was dear to them; and their observation of “customs which sanctioned their instinctive feelings for the earth” (Muir, Autobiography 54) was a positive virtue. Later, in Rome, Muir was impressed by “people who spoke from the heart” (Muir, Autobiography 271) as Orcadians did. They devoted themselves to expressing their feelings. Their simple and natural way of talking, full of spirit, reminded him of farmers in Orkney living close to animals and the earth. It was in his late thirties that Muir began to write poems, simply because what he “wanted to say could not have gone properly into prose” (Muir, Autobiography 201). An additional factor may have been that his period in Germany during the menacing rise of the Nazis had made him aware of the limit of the individual’s strength. “I had acquired in Scotland a deference towards ideas which made my entrance into poetry difficult” (Muir, Autobiography 200-1). He hesitated to venture into the world of poetry, recognising that he had no training and was too old to submit himself to contemporary influences. On the other hand, it was impossible for him to restrain the overwhelming instinctive feelings prompted by the turbulent times in which he was living. Though unable, as he believed, to express himself fully in poetry, he could at least force the rhythms of English poetry, “creaking and complaining” (Muir, Autobiography 200-1), into the mould of his mind. His Orkney roots had enabled him to store up infinite imaginative resources. However far away he was from his native islands, Orkney was always his essential mental landscape, and it was from an Orcadian viewpoint that he criticised the world around him. Brought up in the islands where myths and legends, recounted for generation after generation, were an integral part of daily life, Muir increasingly concentrated on confirming his own identity through poems which drew on his recollections of both the external and the imaginative aspects of Orkney life. As he said at the beginning of his Autobiography,

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“The Orkney I was born into was a place where there was no clear boundary in the islands between the ordinary and the fabulous; the lives of living men turned into legend”(Muir, Autobiography 4). The “invisible leeway” unites reality with fantasy, enriching the human spirit. Even after leaving Orkney, conscious of this “invisible leeway,” his relationship with the islands became much stronger. It is clear that Muir was proud of the “invisible leeway” by which he set his viewpoint. However, his argument seems intriguing and ambiguous when he comes to examine the whole of Scotland. Before The Story and the Fable, he published Scottish Journey (1935), in which he described his driving trip around Scotland. From Edinburgh, he went south to the Borders, then to the Highlands via Glasgow, and finally back to Orkney. The book resembles a travel essay, describing his journey and the observations he made in each place on the rural and urban scenery and the local people’s lives. It also could be read, however, as Muir’s criticism of Scottish society. His sensitive descriptions based on his experience contain many clues to his opinion of his native land.

III. Orkney as an Eden Even at the beginning of his journey, Muir was looking at Scotland in elaborate detail, and was severe in his criticism of Scottish society. Unemployed people whose faces showed no animation, towns which were superficially brilliant but always had some shameful parts, differences in regional characteristics between Edinburgh and Glasgow or between the Lowlands and the Highlands, distinctiveness among people living in various places, and ubiquitous class distinctions: these are all objects of his criticism. Scotland contains many such binary confrontations, which Muir regarded as one of the crucial factors that had robbed the country of its nationhood. The current situation in Scotland seemed to Muir “the inevitable result, the logical last phase, of the intestine dissentions which had all through its history continued to rend it” (Muir, SJ 227). Readers can hardly avoid being discouraged by the pessimistic line in the very first part of the essay: “Scotland is gradually being emptied of its population, its spirit, its wealth, industry, art, intellect, and innate character” (Muir, SJ 3). Muir always emphasised contrasts — between past and present, country and city, reality and imagination — in order to underline the contrast between Scotland as it was and as it had once been, or ought to be. For Muir, Orkney represented “the only desirable form of life” (Muir, SJ 240); since Orcadians could make the best of “a happy series of drawbacks, or what seem at first sight to be drawbacks” (Muir, SJ 241,

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italics mine). Muir saw the principle of industrialism, which valued rationality and efficiency above everything else, as the key source of social evils; as an economic disorder with bad effects on the maintenance of Scottish nationhood. While he accepted that industrialism had brought some benefits and social progress, he claimed that these were outweighed in Scotland by its bad effects. For one thing, in Glasgow there was a clear gap between the poor who despaired of ever escaping from their slums and the rich who had attained their success without considering its effect on others. The urban poor, deprived of all opportunities even to make efforts to improve their situation, were visible in all their misery and squalor; but though their plight was so clearly visible it did not prompt their more fortunate fellow-citizens to take any action. Muir contrasted this “dark picture of Industrialism” with the “normal traditional mode of existence” (Muir, SJ 105) in Orkney. The Orkney Islands are such an interesting little community that they deserve a longer description than I have given to the places I stopped at in the Highlands; also I know them much better, having been brought up in them, and can speak of them with more confidence (Muir, SJ 236).

After driving through the Highlands, he was to leave for Orkney the next morning, and with the islands before him he felt comfortably tired and safe. In the twilight, the silent outline of the hills was veiled in the distinctive quality of the light indigenous to the islands. For a while, he “wandered about the shore for some time in this strangely distinct and yet dream-like clarity.” “The shadows of the cliffs motionlessly reflected in the sea, the Orkney hills blown like bubbles against the colourless sky, the horse and cattle near-by cropping the grassʊtearing of their teeth and the pounding of their hooves sounding strangely loud in that stillness and at that hourʊ” (Muir, SJ 223): as he contemplated this scene and absorbed its influence, the fusion of myth and realty integral to his vision of Orkney was reinforced. Next day he stepped into the islands and found that the farming life, which had been hard and painful in his childhood, had now become less laborious and more prosperous. He was amazed that the farmers had been willing to introduce “the most scientific modern lines,” proving themselves “unusually intelligent and adaptable” (Muir, SJ 240), while maintaining the simplicity and dignity of the old way of life. Every traveller in Orkney would be impressed by the sight of “a population of small farmers and crofters, naturally gentle and courteous in manners, but independent too, and almost all of them moderately prosperous” (Muir, SJ 237). “The great majority of its farms are small and of a size that can be

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easily cultivated by the farmer and his family, without hiring outside labour.” Walking among the islands, he realised that the good old traditions had proved capable of surviving the changes which had led to an improvement in the standard of living. It was in “a country community where it was a tradition among the small farmers to help one another when help was needed, either with labour or their own goods” (Muir, SJ 111) that he had led a happy life when he was young; and this healthy climate, though it had vanished in Glasgow, was still in being many years later in Orkney when he returned as a tourist. While the distribution of wealth was managed both efficiently and ethically in the islands, this was not true of the industrial cities; and Muir’s conviction was that this was because of “the corrupting influence of Industrialism” (Muir, SJ 111) on the moral standards that prevailed there. In Orkney, no-one was extremely rich, and there was not the desperate poverty that prevailed in the big cities of Central and Southern Scotland (Muir, SJ 240). He was convinced that life there was “far more harmonious and satisfying, it is true, than in any other place” he found in his journey through Scotland (Muir, SJ 105). …by its isolation for centuries from the rest of Scotland and Great Britain, an isolation which has enabled it to preserve its traditional ways of life, so that until to-day it has scarcely been touched by the competitive spirit of Industrialism, and has remained largely co-operative; and by the fact that it has at the same time been able to take advantage of scientific discoveries which are a specific product of Industrialism. It has managed, as far as that is humanly possible, to have its cake and eat it. It has been saved by being just outside the circumstance of the industrial world, near enough to know about it, but too far off to be drawn into it (Muir, SJ 240-1).

Orkney was “an erratic fruition,” for it was a community which had fortunately maintained “a life quite eccentric to the economic life of modern civilization” (Muir, SJ 240-1). Muir’s imaginative response to Orkney struck an empathetic chord with another Orkney poet, George Mackay Brown (1921-96). Brown had studied under Muir at Newbattle Abbey, and it was largely due to Muir’s help and encouragement that he became a writer; but in contrast to Muir Brown spent most of his life in Orkney. They had some characteristics in common, as Butter suggested, since as they were brought up in contact with an older culture and then confronted the modern world, both of them were naturally preoccupied with time and the past. Such “imaginative people” as Muir and Brown, “need the past in order to find a pattern in the shifting present” (Butter 16-17). As Brown recognised, the sense of “invisible leeway” which Muir acquired later through his “dreadful

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experiences he set against his childhood in Orkney,” was nurtured and based on his early life in the islands. “Without that contrast,” Brown said, Muir “would have been a different kind of poet, and a lesser one (Brown 153) […] Muir adventures deep and far into the racial memory, and the treasures of image and symbol he brings back are steeped in the purity and light and tranquillity of the beginning” (Brown 154).

IV. Skepticism on Scots Language and Scottish Identity Muir’s assertion that a recognition of the distinctiveness of Orkney within Scotland was crucial to realising “the only desirable form of life” was one aspect of the ambiguity of his Scottish identity. At the end of his Scottish Journey, Muir wrote that “the fundamental cause of its [Scotland’s] many ills, including even the de-nationalisation of its people, was economic and not national” (SJ, 248). The economic dependence of the national life on England discouraged Scottish self-respect, he said, and disgraced Scotland’s own traditional culture. “The upper middle classes of Scotland, again, are being Anglicised not because they prefer England to their own country, but because an English accent and English manners are of more economic and social value in present-day society than a Scottish accent and Scottish manners” (Muir, SJ 240-1). In the book Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer (1936), Muir examined this view in depth, extending it to include a criticism of Scottish literature as well as a comprehensive social argument. In this book Muir discusses the indigenous Scots language, which is one of the integral features of Scottish culture, and argues that its presentday state is related to the decline of Scottish national identity and lack of a positive attitude to Scottishness. His opinion on Scotland and its languages provide important evidence regarding his personal sense of Scottish identity. He argued that the only true national language in Scotland, in the sense of a language in which the entire population could express itself, was English. Muir did not accept either Scottish Gaelic or Scots as homogeneous languages because they did not meet the conditions required to generate a national literature. The state of Scots, he believed, was crucial: he insisted that the modern Scots language, existing from roughly 1700 onward, could not be a homogeneous language which enabled Scotsmen to both feel and think to create “an autonomous literature.” Older Scots in the Mediaeval period, by contrast, was “a homogeneous literary language㸫when thought and feeling, in other words, could come to equal collision in the poet’s mind” (Muir, Scott and Scotland 11, hereafter SS). On the other hand, since the

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period of Modern Scots, Scottish people have had “a literature without a language” (Muir, SS 6). …when we insist on using dialect for restricted literary purposes we are being true not to the idea of Scotland but to provincialism, which is one of the things that have helped to destroy Scotland. If we are to have a complete and homogeneous Scottish literature it is necessary that we should have a complete and homogeneous language (Muir, SS 111).

Muir argued that a homogeneous literary language should be “an achievement continuously created and preserved by the highest spiritual energy of a people” (Muir, SS 7) as well as “a means of expression capable of dealing with everything the mind can think or the imagination conceive” (Muir, SS 8). He regarded the Scots language as an inappropriate means for a wide range of modern literature because it could not express intellectual ideas. It is difficult to draw a rigid line between Scots and English linguistically, for both are derived from Old English and they did not become clearly differentiated until well into the Middle Ages. This makes the condition of Scots more complicated than that of Scottish Gaelic, which is one of the Celtic languages. In Mediaeval Scotland, Scots was the national language for all purposes including law, administration, and court life, and the poetry in Early and Middle Scots forms a national literary corpus of outstanding merit. In the eighteenth century, Lowland Scotland came to be admired all over Europe for its magnificent contribution to all areas of science. But although Scotland’s intellectual achievement in this period far surpassed that of England, it became fashionable for the Scottish literati to try speaking and writing in standard literary English, though not with the accent of England. During the Scottish Enlightenment, those who spoke and wrote in Scots came to be regarded as vulgar or not sophisticated. English influences on Scottish politics, church and culture led to an increasingly limited range of uses for Modern Scots, although it has certainly not disappeared entirely. Muir proposed that it was only in a mature language that people could appropriately express their thoughts and feelings. If a homogeneous language is spoken by the whole nation, he argued, a dialect to this homogeneous language is “what a babbling of children is to the speech of grown men and women” (Muir, SS 42). A national language in the contemporary world must be able to cover all spheres of science. Muir associated Scots with feeling as contrasted with thought and English with fully-developed thought, because Scots, in his view, could not move beyond “the restricted and local province of dialect” (Muir, SS 42).

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It is well known that Muir disagreed with a radical patriotic poet from the Borders, Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978), whose call was for full Scottish independence in both the cultural and the political fields. Muir had noted, while visiting the Borders, that their well-established local industry of weaving had enabled them to survive “the intensifying onset of Industrialism that has eaten into the core of other communities” (Muir, SJ 44) and to preserve their distinctive local identity. As he perceptively remarked in Scottish Journey, Perhaps, too, their [the border towns] geographical position, the fact that for centuries they existed almost on the frontier of a hostile foreign nation, strengthened their individuality as units, and impressed upon them so strongly the need for united effort, yet it has not disappeared. The essential virtues of a nation generally gather at their greatest strength not at its centre but at the places where it is most powerfully and persistently threatened: its frontiers (Muir, SJ 44-5).

A central feature of this local identity was the dialect: the Border dialects were (and still are) among the best-preserved in Scotland; and MacDiarmid’s native-speaker familiarity with Langholm speech provided the foundation for the literary Scots in which he produced some of the greatest poems written in Scotland in the twentieth century. Muir, however, in stark contrast to MacDiarmid, was neither an advocate of Scottish nationalism nor a believer in the ability of Scots to express every sort of thought and feeling. His wife Willa, who encouraged Edwin not only to create his unique imaginary world but to look at the contemporary society and literature with a critical view, suggested that his interest in the Scottish Renaissance was tepid. However, though it is true that most of Muir’s creative writings are in English, this does not mean that he underestimated the Scots literary tradition. Muir and MacDiarmid respected each other as leading poets and critics, and shared the view that Burns and Scott were flawed as iconic figures of Scottish identity. Muir and MacDiarmid agreed that the unthinking admiration of those great Scottish writers expressed by people who knew little or nothing about either them or their literary context was a hindrance to a true understanding of Scotland and its present condition. Despite their common search for a new perspective on Scottish literature, however, Muir and MacDiarmid parted company on the question of whether the Scots language had any possible place in the search. One of the keys to understanding Muir’s remarks on Scottish literature lies in his writing on Burns, whose monumental achievement, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), attracted popular attention to Scots and earned for him the status of Scotland’s national poet. As Muir wrote,

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No other writer has said so fully and expressly what every man of his race wanted him to say; no other writer, consequently, has been taken so completely into the life of a people (Muir, Essays 58).

Muir, however, saw Burns’s linguistic practice as proving the limitations of Scots: …when Burns applied thought to his theme he turned into English…. And it is clear that Burns felt he could not express it in Scots, which was to him a language for sentiment but not for thought. He had no language which could serve him equally for both (Muir, SS 13).

This seems narrow and unjust. Burns, by choosing his language according to the themes of his poems and drawing on the characteristics of Scots or English to express his meaning, made the practice of language switching, not unusual in his time in Lowland Scotland any more than today, into a poetic asset, enabling him to unify Scots and English as a literary medium capable of expressing a full range of thoughts and emotions. There is thus no contradiction in the fact that the national poet of Scotland did not write only in Scots but became a true poet for the Scottish people through his use of the two languages. Burns’s practice in fact shows the fallacy in Muir’s decision to reject the Scots language as being of no use for “a synthesis between thought and feeling” (Muir, SJ 72), and his belief that Scots “exists, in forms of varying debasement, in our numerous Scottish dialects; but these cannot utter the full mind of a people on all the levels of discourse” (Muir, SJ 111). We must pay special attention to the point that Muir’s evaluation of language and culture in Scotland was not always consistent. Like MacDiarmid whose ideal literary language was Older Scots, he had a high esteem for the court poets of the Middle Ages and ballads of popular poets in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On the other hand, wishing to avoid the provincialism which he saw in “using dialect for restricted literary purposes,” he denied a future to Scots, believing that it was inappropriate for use in modern society. This will be examined carefully in order to understand Muir’s complicated literary philosophy.

V. The Search for Self and the Ambiguity of Scottish Identity Driving around Scotland gave Muir an impression of “a confusing conglomeration,” and he confessed at the end of his journey that “what Scotland is I am still unable to say” (Muir, SJ 2). He had already begun

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to write poems by that time; and several of the pieces inserted into the essay, such as “Scotland’s Winter,” expressed his bitterness at the present state of Scottish society. Since everything that he saw from his car forcibly revealed to him the contrasts in the people and their surroundings, it seemed to him that “contrast can be more briefly expressed in verse than in prose, and can thus form a synopsis of a complex scene, otherwise difficult to put into words”(Muir, SJ 152). Writing poems thus became his primary means not only to express his thought and feeling but also to know himself in depth, acknowledging the “invisible leeway” in the fastpaced world. I took a chance cut through it [Scotland], stopping here and there, picking up this or that object, gathering shells whose meaning was often obscure or illegible to me. I did not find anything which I could call Scotland; anything, that is to say, beyond the vague and wandering image already impressed upon me by memory: the net result of my having been brought up in it, and of living in it until I was nearly thirty, and lastly of belonging to it (Muir, SJ 243).

This conclusion is the reappearance of the beginning of Scottish Journey referred to above. All he could do during the journey was to make sure of what he already knew and experienced again and try not to miss something new and unusual to him in vain. He could not find any fresh images of Scotland until he finally arrived in Orkney. The belief expressed in Scottish Journey that Scotland, lacking any common characteristics shared by the whole nation, would be “a mere collection of districts”(Muir, SJ 112) can also be seen in Scott and Scotland. Scotland, with its range of widely different local cultures, leaves tourists with a variety of miscellaneous impressions. Yet this in itself unites all the regional identities, and could be the representation of the nation for which Muir longed all his life. Orkney, which he remembered as “probably the most prosperous, well-run, and happy community in Britain” (Muir, Autobiography 71), also represents a microcosm of Scotland in all its polyhedral variety. …he [the tourist] will not come to know much about the place unless he lives there for quite a long time, habituating himself to the rhythm of the life, and training himself to be pleased with bareness and simplicity in all things. Orkney is full of fine scenery, but that has to be looked for, and of historical interest, but that requires acquaintance with a kind of history on which even experts are uncertain: the kind of history which is popularly called prehistory (Muir, SJ 237).

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In Orkney “the spectacle of the quickly changing skies and the clearness and brightness of all the colours,” “the bareness of the landscape with its strong colours, the vivid evidences of a past but strange life, the endlessly seductive contours of all these islands spread out in the sea” (Muir, SJ 238), and the innumerable archaeological heritage sites attract us, but we cannot know them if we merely experience them passively instead of actively trying to appreciate and respond to them. Orkney is filled with spectacular things that we can find or experience only by ourselves. Muir’s attitude to the traditional Orcadian way of life also included respect for the native speech. He praised the Orkney dialect, paying homage to “simple, uneducated people here and there [who] still speak a beautiful language and know where to set a word in a sentence” (Muir, Autobiography 53-54), and expressing admiration for the “very fine” local poets who did not write in the English which they had learned laboriously from the grammar books. It is very interesting to find that the language spoken in Orkney, “a mixture of Norse, Scots, and Irish,” was precisely and affectionately depicted by Muir: The men spoke for the most part in a slow, deliberate voice, but some of the women could rattle on at a great rate in the soft sing-song thousand years. . . . It is a soft and musical inflection, slightly melancholy, but companionable, the voice of people who are accustomed to hours of talking in the long winter evenings and do not feel they need to hurry: a splendid voice for telling stories in (Muir, Autobiography 53).

A certain confusion of attitudes is unmistakeable, however, in his respect for Orkney speech and simultaneous rejection of Scots as a language for poetry. While respecting the native dialect of Orkney for preserving something of the childlike, Edenic innocence which he saw as represented by the island life, he nonetheless argued that since to most people who were born and brought up in Scotland “dialect Scots is associated with childhood, and English with maturity” (Muir, SS 42), Scots was not available for the full range of information needed in the modern world. However, it is not fair to compare a relationship between socially dominant and subordinate languages with another one between an adult and a child. Of course the value of languages should not be judged from how people use them in society. Muir himself considered that Orkney should not be underestimated, still less seen as unimportant in comparison with England. There is no suggestion in his praise of Orkney speech of the fighting spirit he assumed when arguing for “a complete and homogeneous Scottish literature” (Muir, SJ 111) or for the need of a

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national language to avoid biased localism. He just described “people who spoke from the heart”. Willa’s memoir, Belonging: A Memoir (1968), which was written after Edwin’s death, could be read as a supplementary explanation or comment on his life and works. She was proud that they inherited “a primitive simplicity from our Orkney and Shetland forebears.” It was “a greater proportion of simplicity than is usual in Britain,” and they inherited it from “islanders who practiced co-operative not competitive ways of living” (W. Muir 12). She also shared the same idea of Scots language with him: The Lowland Scottish vernacular was not his [Edwin’s] vernacular. It was Orkney he [Edwin] spoke, not Lowland Scots or Lallans. In any case, he had already adopted English as his language and preferred to graft his poetry on to the great tree of English literature (W. Muir 45). It is true that for Muir, proud as he was of being an Orcadian, the Scots language could not serve as a homogeneous language symbolising Scotland as a whole, and for that reason, he selected English and depended on it for literature. However, we have to accept that the Muirs were wrong as far as the language was concerned. The Orkney dialect, though not spoken in the Lowlands, is linguistically one of the dialects of “Lowland Scots,” closely associated with the culture and traditional life of its community just as the other dialects are. The Muirs seemed to make the mistake of taking their language and culture as being fundamentally different from those of the Lowlands, instead of a specific regional development of the language and culture found, in other distinctive forms, in the various localities of non-Gaelic Scotland. In addition, Muir’s view of the national poet and the Scots language are intertwined with each other: …between Burns and this writer, though both are Scotsmen, there is a barrier of Speech. The critic cannot use Burns’ language; he has no working standard, therefore, for measuring the excellence which Burns attained in it; but most important of all, he is not in the least involved in the preservation of a living speech (Muir Essays 16).

Muir’s attitude to Scots seems not always consistent with his attitude to Scotland and the Scottish people as discussed above. While he was culturally patriotic and therefore should have wished to preserve and develop the things that make Scotland distinctive, he denied the viability of the language in which some of the greatest of writers had expressed themselves. Muir felt that there was a barrier of speech between himself and Burns, but they nonetheless had common feelings about their native land and language.  When Willa asked Edwin a question of “belonging,”

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“he hesitated and then said that if he belonged anywhere it must be to Orkney” (W. Muir 9). We referred to Olney’s idea of autobiography at the beginning of this essay. Olney approaches Jung’s experiment in autobiographic metaphor and discusses how the archetypes which are shaped out of past experience shape our future experience (Olney 135). Jung used a complex metaphor for psychic experience. It is “the process of bringing unconscious contents into the area of consciousness and under the control of awareness and will.” We cannot analyse or explain the highest peaks of self, but they could be “re-experienced in metaphors and symbols: in autobiography and poetry” (Olney 25). According to Olney, not only the past but the present also varies in presenting earlier selves to us, as Muir understood before his Autobiography was published. …the present is a question perpetually running back to find its answer at a place where all is over….We can feel but we cannot see life whole until it has been placed in some kind of past where it discovers its true shape (Muir, Essays 225).

In the psychological basis of the use of metaphor to grasp the unknown through the known, Muir uses a metaphor as “essentially a way of knowing”. It “allows us to connect the known of ourselves to the unknown of the world” (Olney 31), as Olney states, but what is essential to the full autobiographic art is awareness of the nature of self-being (Olney 43). Muir, a poet of keen perception, struggled to know on what his countrymen should rely in their search for their identity. Scots poetry can only be revived, that is to say, when Scotsmen begin to think naturally in Scots. The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind (W. Muir 9).

It could be amplified as follows: if the Scottish people can have pride in their regional language and its tradition, even though it may not cover the whole of Scotland but is strong enough within their own community to give them confidence in their communal identity, then it could enlarge its function as a symbol of Scotland. While he was a Scot and an Orcadian, he was at the same time a European citizen. Readers with perception would experience both his conscious and unconscious worlds to solve the mystery of his identity. His resolution is presented at the end of An Autobiography.

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Edwin Muir’s Autobiography as a Metaphor of his Orcadian Identity As I looked back on the part of the mystery which is my own life, my own fable, what I am most aware of is that we receive more than we can ever give; we receive it from the past, on which we draw with every breath, but alsoʊand this is a point of faithʊfrom the Source of the mystery itself, by the means which religious people call Grace (Muir, Autobiography 277).

Olney argues that if an individual’s life is symbolic, it will continue to live in his autobiography which is the image of his life (Olney 50). Muir is still living and radiating in his Autobiography and poetry.

Works Cited Brown, George Mackay. For the Islands I Sing. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2008. First published by London: John Murray, 1997. Print. Butter, Peter. “George Mackay Brown and Edwin Muir.” The Yearbook of English Studies 17 (1987): 16-30. Print. Muir, Edwin. An Autobiography. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2000. First published by London: the Hogarth Press, 1954. Print. —. “Burns and Popular Poetry.” Essays on Literature and Society. London: The Hogarth Press, 1949. Print. —. “The Poetic Imagination.” Essays on Literature and Society. London: The Hogarth Press, 1949. Print. —. Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer. Edinburgh: Polygon Books, 1982. First published by George Routledge & Sons Ltd., 1936. Print. —. Scottish Journey. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1979. First published in 1935. Print. Muir, Willa. Belonging: A Memoir. Glasgow: Kennedy & Boyd, 2008. First published by London: The Hogarth Press, 1968. Print. Olney, James. Metaphors of Self: the Meaning of Autobiography. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1972. Print.

PART IV: NATIONAL IDENTITIES IN THE COMMONWEALTH

J M COETZEE AS AMBIVALENT SOUTH AFRICAN: BOYHOOD, YOUTH, AND SUMMERTIME1 J. U. JACOBS UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL

Cultural cross-over J M Coetzee’s three autobiographical novels (or fictional autobiographies), Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002) and Summertime (2009), which have since been published together as a trilogy under the title Scenes from Provincial Life (2011), deal with formative stages in the life of their common protagonist John Coetzee. In an interview in Summertime, a former colleague and friend responds to the question of why, in his notebooks, Coetzee raises, but then drops, the subject of his “white South Africanness” (209) by suggesting that “it might have seemed too complex a topic to be explored in a memoir or diary – too complex or too close to the bone”. The subject of Coetzee’s white South African identity, I suggest, is perhaps better suited to fictional than to biographical treatment, and this essay will attempt to show how in these three works Coetzee, who in 2002 emigrated to Australia where he became a citizen in 2006, both avows and disavows his Afrikaner as well as his English cultural roots in South Africa. Any attempt to define a ‘South African’ national identity must acknowledge the deep racial, cultural and linguistic divisions between, and also within, groups as a result of the country’s colonial and apartheid history – divisions too complex to be contained in any simplistic notion of a ‘rainbow nation’. As Leon de Kock expresses it: “even today it is highly problematic to shift from the first-person singular to the first-person plural when talking South African – to move from ‘I’ to ‘we’ or ‘us’” (272). South African critics have proposed various tropes for interpreting a South African identity. To get beyond the binary lenses of colonialism and apartheid, to respond to the challenge of the postapartheid present, and to understand how (to use de Kock’s formulation) the South African firstperson singular might be seen in conjunction with with a first-person

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plural, Sarah Nuttall proposes the notion of entanglement – which echoes Edward Said’s thesis about postimperial cultures being “hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic” (xxix). According to Nuttall: Entanglement is a condition of being twisted together or entwined, involved with; it speaks of an intimacy gained, even if it was resisted, or ignored or uninvited. It is a term which may gesture towards a relationship or set of social relationships that is complicated, ensnaring, in a tangle, but which also implies human foldedness. It works with difference and sameness but also with their limits, their predicaments, their moments of complication. (1)

She suggests that entanglement “is a means by which to draw into our analyses those sites in which what was once thought of as separate – identities, spaces, histories – come together or find points of intersection in unexpected ways. It is an idea which signals largely unexplored terrains of mutuality, wrought from a common, though often coercive and confrontational experience” (11). Leon de Kock turns to the metaphor of the seam to understand the ways in which identities formed in South Africa across “schisms, barriers, and misperceptions” (272) have been represented in writing. The seam, de Kock says, is a “site of a joining together that also bears the mark of the suture” (276). The seam, he suggests, is “not only the site of difference … but it necessarily foregrounds the representational suture, the attempt to close the gap and to bring the incommensurate into alignment by the substitution, in the place of difference, of a myth, a motif, a figure, or a trope”. The seam, he argues, is therefore the site of both difference and convergence; it is the place where “the representational ‘translation’ of difference” happens, the place “where difference and sameness are hitched together – where they are brought into self-awareness, denied, or displaced into third terms” (277). Because South Africa has so overwhelmingly been a place of dualisms – “the civilized and the savage, settler and indigene, White and Black, oppressed and privileged, rich and poor” (285) – he proposes that “[p]erhaps to be a ‘South African’ writer in the full sense requires imaginative inhabitation of the seam as a deep symbolic structure” (284). De Kock’s notion of the cultural seam in turn corresponds to Stuart Hall’s theory of cultural suture, and his argument that cultural identity is based on differences and discontinuities rather than on fixed essences, that it undergoes constant transformation, and that it is “a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’” (225). Cultural identities, Hall says, “are the points of identification, the unstable points of

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identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence, but a positioning …” (226). To underpin his definition of transnational fiction, Stephen Clingman suggests a definition of identity which is based on Chomsky’s theory of grammar as generative. Within such a generative grammar of identity, Clingman argues, “the syntax of the self – its combinatory, unfolding possibilities – is a transitive syntax” (16, emphasis added): on the basis of recursion and combination, it navigates across boundaries, linking “syntax within the self to syntax beyond the self” (21). Such an identity recognises boundaries that demarcate differences, but is also transitive in its engagement with and crossing of those boundaries. The transitive imagination, Clingman says, is premised on the paradoxical interdependence of navigation, “whether internal, external, or linking the two”, and the boundary – as he expresses it: “navigation occurs not despite but because of the boundary” (21). A transitive syntax of the self “does not override or negate difference within the self or in relation to others – indeed … it depends on it. But it does hold out the possibility of connection” (15). According to Clingman, it is precisely this capacity for navigation across boundaries that provides the self with its transitive form: “Differences within the self or between the self and other selves are not overridden or transcended …. Rather, they become the foundation of identity as a kind of meaning – but meaning considered always as navigation, exploration, transition” (22). Drawing together Nuttall’s notion of entanglement, de Kock’s metaphor of the seam, and Clingman’s theory of a transitive syntax of the self, I would suggest that Coetzee’s particular poetics of the seam provides a way of understanding his “white South Africanness” as an entangled identity in his writings, with transitivity is its most distinguishing feature. In an essay written in 1980, Coetzee explains a familiar observation in the field of stylistics, one which provides an important point of access to his own fictional writing and the transitive thinking that informs it: When a writer uses the same syntactic operation again and again, he is signaling a particular habit of making sense of his material. The kind of linkage that he makes between items, the kind of logical relation that he creates between propositions, the emphasis he gives to one verbal category over another – all of these being logical or epistemological acts with more or less clear syntactic correlates – can be read as clues to the logical or epistemological matrices within which his thinking moves. (Doubling 147)

I have argued elsewhere (Jacobs, “Writing Reconciliation”; “Cruciform Logic”) that Coetzee’s writing is characterised by a stylistic ‘tic’: his predilection for the rhetorical figure of chiasmus. In his novel Age of Iron (1990), for example, this syntactic operation of reflection and reversal

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permeates Elizabeth Curren’s account to her daughter of her life in South Africa in the dying days of apartheid in the late 1980s. Elizabeth Curren cannot be indifferent to the low-grade civil war around her – as she expresses it: “How can I be? …. It lives inside me and I live inside it” (102). The crime of apartheid, she says, is part of her South African inheritance – she was born into it: “It is part of me. I am part of it” (164). Coetzee’s fictional works reveal in varying degrees what Sanford Budick, following Nietzsche, calls “a manifold of mind” (225) whose elements are best expressed in the interactive binarisms of chiasmus. Budick argues that chiasmus, which is generally defined as the reversal of syntactic elements, or signs, together forming a chi in the pattern AB:BA, “is necessarily the figure of a mind that cannot make up any kind of mind except being beside itself” (227). While it generally is true “to think of chiasmus in terms of antithesis or negation”, he says, it is more accurate to say that a chiasmus is a movement of two sets of opposed signs (two binarisms) in which the pattern AB:BA is only one interim possibility. Because of the multiple meanings of all signs, any one reading (at a given junction of possible combinations) of any sign – or syntactic element or binarism – is always to some extent an arbitrary decision. Within the fourfold network of signs, each binary term is always poised for a change of its sign (A into B, B into A). (227)

Henri Suhamy has pointed out that in chiasmus, “in their mirror arrangement, the binary terms, passing from one syntactic element to the next, as much reflect as oppose each other” (quoted in Budick 227). Budick further suggests that: more than any other figure of language, chiasmus inevitably embodies the problem of other minds. In fact, what we picture in the AB:BA of chiasmus may only be the experience of the limit of (our) being within thought itself: that is, we think our being [A] only at the limit of what is not our being [or death] [B]. Yet no sooner are we lost in this movement of thought, than we de facto reverse direction, now thinking from what is not our being [B] toward the limit of our being [A], and so on. (227-28)

Budick goes on to argue the usefulness of chiasmus for any discussion of “a shared thinking or a mutual fit of cultures” (229) and he proposes the matching chiasma of different individuals as presenting “a picture of shared (divided) thinking – and of mutuality of culture” (230). Chiastic configurations are both oppositional and reciprocal, and in their continual creation of potentialities of relation, are premised on co-subjectivity, which is a condition for cross-cultural discourse.

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Coetzee’s chiastic habit of mind, which finds resonance in both Samuel Beckett’s self-reflexive and self-cancelling sentences as well as Dostoevsky’s “double thought” (Doubling 282), underlies what David Attwell has called Coetzee’s “poetics of reciprocity” (in Coetzee, Doubling 58). His predilection for the opposition and reciprocity of chiasmus is evident from his view of writing as relying on a feedback loop of some kind” (18), whereby the writer is written through the act of writing. Coetzee’s cruciform cast of mind informs his view of the relationship between fiction and history as contrasted yet comparable modes of storytelling. Chiasmus also underpins his fictional use of intertextuality, whereby hypotexts and hypertexts are reciprocally doubled, as in Foe, The Master of Petersburg and Age of Iron. The chiastic figure of opposition and cross-over allows for his narrative cross-gendering in the use of female narrators or protagonists, as in Age of Iron and In the Heart of the Country. Chiasmus enables one to understand more fully the selfreflexive doubling and cancelling of realism inherent in metafictional writing. Reversal and reciprocity, according to Coetzee’s novelistspokesperson, Elizabeth Costello, are what makes possible the “sympathetic imagination” which enables a person to enter imaginatively into the lives of animals and other non-human beings (Coetzee, Lives 35; Elizabeth Costello 80). And finally, chiasmus, I propose, provides a rhetorical and conceptual vehicle for Coetzee’s recursive avowal and disavowal of his tangled South African cultural roots.

Coetzee’s cross-cultural autrebiographies At the level of genre, chiasmus provides a structure for Coetzee’s combination of life writing and creative fiction in his three fictional autobiographies/autobiographical memoirs, Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime. In representing himself in these works as a fictional persona whom he employs as a figural narrator, Coetzee achieves a continuous generic cross-over between what Philippe Lejeune calls an “autobiographical pact” (see 3-30) with the reader, based on a relationship of identicalness between actual author, narrator and protagonist, and the opposite of this, which is a “fictional pact” based on a relationship of only resemblance between them. These three works, with their counterimpulses of biographical factuality and self-creation, exemplify Paul John Eakin’s argument that “autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content, what we call fact and fiction being rather slippery variables in an intricate process of self-discovery” (17). This “process of self-discovery”, Eakin suggests, is finally inseparable from the art of self-invention” (55).

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By means of Coetzee’s cross-over genre, which he has called “autrebiography” (Doubling 394; see also Flanery, Lenta), his narratives combine the omniscience and objectivity of an extradiegetic, heterodiegetic narrator with the subjectivity of an intradiegetic, homodiegetic narrator, resulting in a narrative domain in which, as Coetzee himself puts it: “he … begins to feel closer to I” and “autrebiography shades back into autobiography” (Doubling 394). Or, as he formulates this chiastic relationship between fact and fiction, appropriately, as a chiasmus: “All autobiography is storytelling, all writing is autobiography” (Doubling 391). In Boyhood, Coetzee’s fictional memoir – or autrebiography – of his early life in Worcester in the Western Cape, chiasmus provides a figure for understanding the cultural conundrum that lies at the heart of his youthful protagonist’s complex filiation. The young John Coetzee casts his relationship with his parents, individually and together, in terms of conflicting sentiments that compel him back and forth emotionally during his early formative years. Every feeling is countered by its negative as he tries both to discover and to invent a South African sense of self. The whole question of his family’s South African identity is problematic to him, a series of unravelling contradictions in the context of a culturally and racially conflicted society. Their family, he feels, “‘is’ nothing” in a country in which identity cannot be taken for granted: “They are of course South Africans, but even South Africanness is faintly embarrassing, and therefore not talked about, since not everyone who lives in South Africa is a South African, or not a proper South African” (Boyhood 18). This cruciform dynamic of attachment and denial is manifested most immediately in the young John’s relationship with his father with whom he shares a love of cricket and rugby, and also with his mother, whose influence sets him apart from other school children. In relation to both parents, he constantly moves between identification and rejection: “His mother is the only one who stands between him and an existence he could not endure. So at the same time that he is irritated with her for her slowness and dullness, he clings to her as his only protector. He is her son, not his father’s son. He denies and detests his father” (79). The mental pattern of doubling and reversal extends also via his parents to his cultural filiation: Because they speak English at home, because he always comes first in English at school, he thinks of himself as English. Though his surname is Afrikaans, though his father is more Afrikaans than English, though he himself speaks Afrikaans without any English accent, he could not pass for a moment as an Afrikaner. The range of Afrikaans he commands is thin

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On the one hand, the young John has a horror of being turned into an Afrikaner by Nationalist education policy, and his contempt for Afrikaners is far-ranging: he distances himself from their national anthem and despises the Afrikaans songs that they are made to sing at school; he mocks the circumlocutions that Afrikaners are driven to because of their cultural inability to use the second person when speaking to anyone older than themselves, and also their speech formulas of politeness; he is disgusted by the obscene language of the menacing Afrikaans-speaking boys at school; and he hates the rage and resentment that he detects in them, as in all Afrikaners. On the other hand, the Englishness that he affects – the English language, England and all that it stands for – is also a cultural identity for which he knows he fails fully to qualify. Both of these cultural positions are negatived and reversed, however, by his natural affinity for the Afrikaans language: “When he speaks Afrikaans all the complications of life seem suddenly to fall away. Afrikaans is like a ghostly envelope that accompanies him everywhere, that he is free to slip into, becoming at once another person, simpler, gayer, lighter in his tread.” (125). He is unwilling to yield up this language to the Afrikaners, and is disappointed in the English because of the contempt that they have for Afrikaans, and their supercilious mispronunciation of its words. All John’s contradictory cultural affiliations are contained in his love for his father’s family farm, Voëlfontein, where, paradoxically, “[e]verything that is complicated in his love for his mother is uncomplicated in his love for the farm” (79). It is here that he “drinks in the happy, slapdash mixture of English and Afrikaans that is their common tongue” (81) when the extended family get together, but it is also here where he knows that “he will never be more than a guest, an uneasy guest” (79), and senses that he is already grieving at the loss of the farm. On the one hand, he feels a sacred belonging to the farm, which he formulates chiastically to himself in a secret belief: “I belong to the farm” (96); on the other, “he knows what the farm in its way knows too: that Voëlfontein belongs to no one” (96), that the farm is greater than, and will outlast, all of them. Youth, Coetzee’s second fictional memoir – or autrebiography – has as its subject the youth, John Coetzee, a student of mathematics and English at the University of Cape Town around the time of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, and his decision afterwards to leave South Africa for England. In Youth Coetzee’s ambivalence towards his English and Afrikaner cultural roots is subsumed into a larger ambivalence about his

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South Africanness itself. In Youth, too, chiasmus provides a paradigm for understanding the recursive dynamic of his alternating identification with and rejection of not only his South African cultural filiation but also his adoptive British cultural affiliation. As a student with aspirations to become a poet he moves with a set of young artists and intellectuals whose hatred for the Nationalists and dismissal of South Africa as a “benighted” (5) country reinforce his own growing unease about his position as a white in the apartheid state. He realises that its segregationist laws have created an unbridgeable divide: “Between black and white there is a gulf fixed. Deeper than pity, deeper than honourable dealings, deeper even than goodwill, lies an awareness on both sides that people like [his friend] Paul and himself, with their pianos and violins, are here on this earth, the earth of South Africa, on the shakiest of pretexts” (17). Recalling how as a schoolboy in Cape Town in 1952 he had watched the Van Riebeeck Festival parade in celebration of three centuries of colonial settlement and Christian civilisation in South Africa, he now concludes, when witnessing the protest marches after Sharpeville, less than a decade later, that “he is watching history being unmade” (39). His own personal concerns are overtaken by the turmoil in the country, the further tightening of the pass laws to which Africans are subjected, and the brutal shooting by the police into crowds of fleeing protesters, men, women and children: “From beginning to end the business sickens him: the laws themselves; the bully-boy police; the government, stridently defending the murderers and denouncing the dead; and the press, too frightened to come out and say what anyone with eyes in his head can see” (37). His resolve to leave South Africa for good is motivated by, on the one hand, a despairing sense that – as he later explains in a job interview with IBM in England – “the country is headed for revolution” (45), and, on the other, the fear that he will be conscripted into the Defence Force, and find himself doing his military training “behind barbed wire in Voortrekker Hoogte, sharing a tent with thuggish Afrikaners” (40). Coetzee’s ambivalent cultural filiation in South Africa leads to his equally ambivalent cultural affiliation in England. Having secured a job in the computer industry in London, his immediate feeling is one of relief that he has “escaped from the Afrikaners who want to press-gang him into their army and the blacks who want to drive him into the sea” (85), while he paradoxically becomes even more conscious of his own South Africanness. In London he discovers The African Communist, with articles on conditions in South Africa that were written by his former fellow Cape Town students. He is disquieted by the realisation that South Africa is still the setting for the first prose story that he writes in London: “He would

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prefer to leave his South African self behind as he has left South Africa itself behind. South Africa was a bad start, a handicap. An undistinguished, rural family, bad schooling, the Afrikaans language: from each of these component handicaps he has, more or less, escaped” (62). He is determined to purge South Africa from his memory: “If a tidal wave were to sweep in from the Atlantic tomorrow and wash away the southern tip of the African continent, he will not shed a tear. He will be among the saved”. He is cringingly aware of the stigma of being a South African in England; the British, he says, have had enough of their former colony and of what the Boers have done to it: “They would be content if South Africa would quietly vanish over the horizon. They certainly do not want forlorn South African whites cluttering their doorsteps like orphans in search of parents” (87). And when he reads in the Guardian about apartheid violence and atrocities, his feelings of horror are assuaged only by the smug conclusion: “As far back as he can remember, Afrikaners have trampled on people because, they claim, they were once trampled upon. Well, let the wheel turn again, let force be replied to with greater force. He is glad to be out of it” (100). The obverse of Coetzee’s callowness is the assiduousness with which he strives to perfect his poetic skills in London, where exposure to literature and the arts enables him to become a world citizen. From his early passion for Pound’s Pisan Cantos, and his preference of Pope to Shakespeare, and of Swift to Pope, he graduates to Flaubert and Henry James, who, he says, “shows one how to rise above mere nationality” (64). Although he finds French difficult, he does know Latin and picks up Spanish without difficulty, while he has a real feeling for German and is therefore able to read Ingeborg Bachmann, Bertolt Brecht and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Through Afrikaans he has an insider’s knowledge of Dutch, but, he says condescendingly, “of all nations the Dutch are the dullest, the most antipoetic” (77). He discovers the poetry of Joseph Brodsky, Zbigniew Herbert and Pablo Neruda, the music of Anton von Webern, the paintings of Robert Motherwell, and the films of Satyajit Ray. His European cultural sensibility develops to the extent that “he can at least, when he switches on the radio, tell the difference between Bach and Telemann, Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven and Spohr, Bruckner and Mahler” (135). For all the European refinement that he has acquired, however, his South African identity continues to be problematic, and he remains entangled with the country of his birth in a typically cruciform dynamic of denial and attachment. South Africa, he says, “is like an albatross around his neck. He wants it removed, he does not care how, so that he can begin

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to breathe” (101). The country that he has tried so hard to put behind him, remains “a wound within him” (116), and he asks himself: “How much longer before the wound stops bleeding? How much longer will he have to grit his teeth and endure before he is able to say, ‘Once upon a time I used to live in South Africa but now I live in England’?” He may caricature Afrikaners as “big-bellied, red-nosed men in short pants and hats, [and] roly-poly women in shapeless dresses (121), and their language as having the effect of spoken “Nazi” (127) in England, but when his cousin Ilse and her friend Marianne visit London, he reverts, for the first time in years, “to the language of the family, to Afrikaans”, and “can feel himself relax at once as though sliding into a warm bath” (127). And when in the British Museum he reads accounts of early ventures by ox-wagon into the interior of South Africa, he is transported by the Afrikaans place names back to his home country: “Zwartberg, Leeuwrivier, Dwyka: it is his country, the country of his heart, that he is reading about” (137). Finally, the existential ambivalence that Coetzee experiences may best be understood in terms of the dislocations of exile. He regards London as one of the few cities “where life can be lived at its fullest intensity” (41), but the life that he is leading here “is without plan or meaning” (59). Coetzee resorts to his characteristic mental pattern of doubling and reversal to explain the cultural conundrum of the exiled writer: “He has not mastered London. If there is any mastering going on, it is London mastering him” (63). He knows that, despite everything he might share with other Londoners, “[n]ot in a month of Sundays would Londoners take him for the real thing” (102); on the contrary, to them he will always remain a foreigner, someone who does not belong. Although the people with whom he works are polite towards him, from certain of their silences he nevertheless “knows he is not wanted in their country, not positively wanted” (104). He asks: “How long will he have to live in England before it is allowed that he has become the real thing, become English? …. And ‘becoming English’ – what does that mean, anyhow?” (103). His position in England is neither that of temporary resident like other young South Africans, Australians and Canadians, nor that of refugee; this, coupled with his sense of his own essential “meanness [and] poverty of spirit” (95) in his personal relationships, and of himself as being someone whose “sole talent is for misery, dull honest misery” (97), leaves him with an even more precarious sense of his identity. The Englishness that he aspires to is as tenuous an identity as the South Africanness that he has abjured: “He belongs to two worlds tightly sealed from each other. In the world of South Africa he is no more than a ghost, a wisp of smoke fast dwindling away, soon to have vanished for good. As for London, he is as good as

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unknown here” (130-1). Having achieved no more than a toehold in Britain and having deliberately cut himself off from his South African roots, he finds himself “locked into an attenuating endgame, playing himself, with each move, further into a corner and into defeat” (169). So much for the fictional young John Coetzee. What of the actual author, J. M. Coetzee and his “rather complicated and fraught linguistic background” as Rita Barnard (2) has called it? First, Coetzee has conceded in an interview that he would never be accepted amongst Afrikaners as an Afrikaner. English, he says, has been his first language since childhood, and not Afrikaans; nor is he “embedded in the culture of the Afrikaner” (Doubling 342). Besides, “Afrikaner” is more than just “a linguistic/cultural label”; it is also an ideological term after having been hijacked by an exclusionary Afrikaner Nationalism. What then, he asks, is he “in this ethnic-linguistic sense”? He explains: I am one of many people in this country who have become detached from their ethnic roots, whether those roots were in Dutch South Africa or Indonesia or Britain or Greece or wherever, and have joined a pool of no recognizable ethnos whose language of exchange is English. These people are not, strictly speaking, “English South Africans,” since a large proportion of them – myself included – are not of British ancestry. They are merely South Africans (itself a mere name of convenience) whose native tongue, the tongue they have been born into, is English. (342)

The first two volumes in Coetzee’s trilogy of fictionalised memoirs employ a third-person narrative voice to distance the author from his fictional autobiographical subject; in the third volume, Summertime, Coetzee has set up a more elaborate narrative dialogue which is structured in terms of the countermotions and countervoices of chiasmus. The metafictional treatment of the cultural counterclaims of English and Afrikaans in Summertime is based on the conceit that the émigré, Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist J. M. Coetzee has since died in his adopted country Australia. An English biographer, known only as Vincent, wishes to write a book about the crucial years in John Coetzee’s life from 1971/2 to 1975 after he had returned to South Africa under a cloud from the United States to live with his widowed father in a ramshackle house in suburban Cape Town. As the informant Martin J. sums up the migrant author’s career: “John left South Africa in the 1960s, came back in the 1970s, for decades hovered between South Africa and the United States, then finally decamped to Australia and died there” (209). Vincent uses dated and undated extracts from Coetzee’s notebooks to frame transcripts of his own interviews with five people who had known John Coetzee during this period. The life of each of these informants has

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mirrored and reversed in different ways Coetzee’s in- and out-migrations. Martin J. himself emigrated from South Africa in the 1970s for England. The psychologist Dr Julia Frankl, with whom Coetzee had an affair in Cape Town, is the South African-born daughter of a Hungarian Jewish refugee from the Nazis. She settled in Canada, in Kingston, Ontario after her eventual divorce from her South African husband. The Brazilian dance instructor, Adriana Nascimento, who rejected the infatuated Coetzee’s overtures to her while he was coaching her daughter in English, had come to South African from Angola together with her husband and two daughters after the emergency of 1973, but returned to her native São Paulo after the death of her husband in South Africa. Sophie Denoël, the young, married French lecturer with whom John Coetzee shared a course at the University of Cape Town and with whom he also had an affair, had come to Cape Town, via Madagascar, together with her husband as part of the French postcolonial drive to promote Francophonie throughout the world. She is interviewed in Paris where she currently lives. And finally, John Coetzee’s favourite Afrikaner cousin, Margot Jonker, who is interviewed in Somerset West, South Africa, is similarly presented as being uprooted: she and her farmer husband were both obliged through economic circumstances to work away from their farm in the Roggeveld during the week, returning home to it only at weekends. The autrebiography – or novel? – opens with Coetzee’s account in his notebooks, on the one hand, of his outrage at reading a newspaper report on 21 August 1972 of a cross-border raid by a South African Defence Force squad on a house in Francistown, Botswana, and their killing of seven people, among whom three women and two children: “He reads the reports and feels soiled. So this is what he has come back to!” (3). His contempt for the ruling Afrikaner National Party and their self-serving interpretation of history is then followed by a description of his encounter with a Cape Town widow who has sought his advice as a language expert to interpret a term in her late husband’s will. She refuses to accept his opinion, however, despite his having a [PhD] “degree certificate that makes him an expert commentator on the meaning of English words” (11). This chiastic opening dynamic between Coetzee’s rejection of the prevailing official Afrikaner culture and the rejection in turn of his authority in English, informs all the cruciform interviews that follow. Julia Frankl reminds Vincent: “I am perfectly aware it is John you want to hear about, not me. But the only story involving John that I can tell, or the only one I am prepared to tell, is this one, namely the story of my life and his part in it, which is quite different, quite another matter, from the story of his life and my part in it” (43). The repeated and reversed motif of cultural

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attachment and detachment is highlighted by, on the one hand, Julia registering the way Coetzee’s father’s Afrikaans-accented English reveals the closeness of his Afrikaner background, and, on the other, her telling of the publication of Coetzee’s first novel, Dusklands, in English, about his distant Afrikaner ancestor Jacobus Coetzee. The interview with Margot Jonker has been recast by Vincent as an uninterrupted narrative with Margot as third-person, figural narrator, and presented to her for final approval, after its Afrikaans words had been checked by an Afrikaans-speaking South African colleague of Vincent’s. Margot asks: “if it is a book about John why are you including so much about me?” – to which Vincent answers, typically, chiastically: “You were part of your cousin. He was part of you” (152). Coetzee’s cultural ambivalence emerges in Margot’s account of her sister Carol’s hostility towards John because of what she regards as his affected and supercilious Englishness vis-à-vis the Afrikaner Coetzees, and also from Margot’s reaction to John’s description of the enthusiasm that he and his father share for cricket: “two Afrikaners devoted to an English game” (95): “Two Afrikaners. Does he really think of himself as an Afrikaner? She doesn’t know many real [egte] Afrikaners who would accept him as one of the tribe” (95). The Afrikaans language context of Margot’s recollection of a Christmas-time gathering at the Coetzee family farm, Voëlfontein in the Karoo, is emphasised throughout by translations in the text of Afrikaans words and concepts, colloquial expressions, idioms, forms of address and terms of endearment, as well as by glosses inserted in square brackets. In the midst of this Afrikaans linguistic saturation of the narrative, John’s Afrikaans solecisms serve as signs of his deracination – for example, when he addresses coloured children in Merweville with the archaic “jongens” (105), or incorrectly uses the Afrikaans word “jok” (fib) (122) when he means “grap” (joke) in speaking to the coloured farmworker, Hendrik, or when his Afrikaans idiom falters as he tries to explain his vegetarianism to members of the Coetzee clan around the supper table. Adriana Nascimento’s recollections present a complex exercise in cross-cultural translation: not only does Vincent interview her via a Portuguese interpreter, but she tells of her misgivings about the competence of her daughter’s English coach to teach the language, her skepticism fuelled by her suspicions that Coetzee had designs on the girl. In this section of the novel, Coetzee’s rootedness in English culture is brought under scrutiny just as his Afrikaner filiation was questioned in the previous section. Coetzee “sound[ed] like an Afrikaner” (157) to Adriana, who wanted her daughter “to learn proper English, from an English person”. Adriana complained to the school principal that Coetzee “‘is not

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even English, he is a Boer’” (187). Defending himself, Coetzee says to Adriana: “‘I agree I am not of English descent …. Nevertheless I have spoken English from an early age and have passed university examinations in English, therefore I believe I can teach English. There is nothing special about English. It is just one language among many’” (161). In this text in which fact inclines towards fiction and vice versa, and in which we are reminded that in our letters and diaries “we are all fictioneers” (226), it is given to Sophie Denoël to sum up the debate about cultural counterclaims. She tells Vincent that although Coetzee “wrote in English, very good English, and had written English all his life” (237), he was nevertheless ready to embrace an Afrikaner identity because “under the gaze of history he felt there was no way in which he could separate himself off from the Afrikaners while retaining his self-respect, even if that meant being associated with all that the Afrikaners were responsible for, politically” (238). To this she adds an important qualification about his family background: “they were cultural Afrikaners”, she says, “but not political Afrikaners” (239). In his novel Diary of a Bad Year (2007), J M Coetzee has Señor C., another one of his authorial personae, speak for the possibility that he has no mother tongue: “Until recently”, he says, “I accepted without question that, since English is the language I command best, English must count as my mother tongue. But perhaps it is not so. Perhaps – is this possible? – I have no mother tongue” (195). Señor C. goes on to distinguish between the spoken tongue and the written tongue. At times, he says: “as I listen to the words of English that emerge from my mouth, I have a disquieting sense that the one I hear is not the one I call myself. Rather, it is as though some other person (but who?) were being imitated, followed, even mimicked”. Writing, on the other hand, “is a less unsettling experience”, he says: “Sitting in silence here, moving my hand, calling up these English words, shifting them around, substituting one for another, weaving them into phrases, I feel at ease, in control”. In Summertime, each of Vincent’s informants distinguishes between the celebrated writer J. M. Coetzee and the person John Coetzee that they knew. According to Martin J., as white colonials he and Coetzee shared “a certain provisionality” (211) in their feelings toward South Africa, based on a “reluctance to invest too deeply in the country, since sooner or later [their] ties to it would have to be cut, [their] investment in it annulled” (211). Julia Frankl describes Coetzee’s failure to connect, or at best ability to connect “only briefly, intermittently” (82), as verging on autism. In her opinion, his profession as novelist was at odds with the fact that “he was not human, not fully human” (83). For Adriana Nascimento, he was

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“disembodied …. divorced from his body” (198) in a puppet-like way. Despite his “big reputation” (195), she says, “he was not a great man. He was a little man, an unimportant little man”. Sophie Denoël remembers him as “not an at-ease person …. never relaxed …. not at ease among people who were at ease” (231), personally or culturally, but “happiest in the role of outsider” (239). All the time she was with him, she says, she never had the feeling that she was “with an exceptional person, a truly exceptional human being” (242). And to his cousin Margot he remained “the failed emigrant, the poet of melancholy” (141), whose complex relationship with his native Afrikaner culture remained unresolved.

Conclusion To return finally to the question of a mother tongue and cultural identity, and to the cross-over dynamic between a writer’s native and adoptive languages. It is, after all, as a writer in English and not in the language of his Afrikaner forebears that J.M. Coetzee has become internationally celebrated. In Diary of a Bad Year Señor C. speaks for his author, J. M. Coetzee, when he suggests: “Perhaps it is so that all languages are, finally, foreign languages, alien to our animal being. But in a way that is, precisely, inarticulate, inarticulable, English does not feel to me like a resting place, a home. It just happens to be a language over whose resources I have achieved some mastery” (197). Coetzee’s South African identity, as revealed in his writings, is similarly not “a resting place, a home”, but a seam where different cultures are hitched together and a cross-cultural discourse can take place. All South African identities, I would suggest, are similar sites of convergence and negotiation of different, often conflicting, cultures.

Notes 1 This essay is part of ongoing work on J.M. Coetzee, and is a revised and extended version of the article “(N)either Afrikaner (n)or English: Cultural cross-over in J. M. Coetzee's Summertime”, published in English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies 28.1(2011): 39-52.

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Works Cited Barnard, Rita. “Coetzee in/and Afrikaans.” Journal of Literary Studies 25.4 (December 2009): 84-105. Print. Budick, Sanford. “Cross-culture, Chiasmus and the Manifold of Mind.” The Translatability of Cultures:Figurations of the Space Between. Ed. Sanford Budick, and Wolfgang Iser. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. 224-44; 338-40. Print. Clingman, Stephen. The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print. Coetzee, J M. Age of Iron. New York: Random House, 1990. Print. —. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. London: Secker & Warburg, 1997. Print. —. Diary of a Bad Year. London: Harvill Secker, 2007. Print. —. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1992. Print. —. Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. London: Secker & Warburg, 2003. Print. —. Foe. Johannesburg; Ravan Press, 1986. Print. —. In the Heart of the Country. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1978. Print. —. Scenes from Provincial Life. London: Harville Secker, 2011. Print. —. Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life. London: Harvill Secker, 2009. Print. —. The Master of Petersburg. London: Secker & Warburg, 1994. Print. —. Youth. London: Secker and Warburg, 2002. Print. De Kock, Leon. “South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction.” Poetics Today 22.2 (Summer 2001): 263-298. Print. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of SelfInvention. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Print. Flanery, Patrick Denman. “One of a Tribe? J. M. Coetzee’s Autrebiography.” Times Literary Supplement 5554 (11 September 2009): 19-20. Print. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity, Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. 222-37. Print. Jacobs, J. U. “Writing Reconciliation: South African Fiction after Apartheid.” Resisting Alterities: Wilson Harris and Other Avatars of Otherness. Ed. Marco Fazzini. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004. 177-195. Print.

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—. “J. M. Coetzee and Cruciform Logic.” J M Coetzee: Percorsi di Lettura tra Storia e Narrazione. Ed. Giuliana Ferreccio, and Carmen Concilio. Iesa (SI), Italy: Edizioni Gorée, 2009. 13-61. Print. —. “(N)either Afrikaner (n)or English: Cultural Cross-over in J. M. Coetzee's Summertime.” English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies 28.1 (2011): 39-52. Print. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Print. Lenta, Margaret. “Autrebiography: J M Coetzee’s Autobiographical Writing.” English in Africa 30.1 (2003): 161-174. Print. Nuttall, Sarah. Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Postapartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009. Print. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994. Print.

REGIONAL VOICES AND CULTURAL TRANSLATION: THE EXAMPLE OF ALICE MUNRO MARIE-ANNE HANSEN-PAULY THE UNIVERSITY OF LUXEMBOURG

The analysis of a few selected stories by Alice Munro was prompted by concerns about the motivation of non-native students when faced with works that are either too remote from their own experiences or do not correspond to their expectations and representations of Anglo-Saxon culture. The former nation oriented focus of contents with an emphasis on British literature (and additionally American, i.e. US literature) has long lost its primacy. The term “literatures in English,” has been generally accepted and with it has grown an awareness of the relevance of postcolonial writers (with a focus on politics and empowerment) but also of regional and personal voices from all over the world, Numerous papers presented at RNLA conferences have addressed these issues. The essentially positive connotations of “regional” and “regionalism” have been opposed to the rather pejorative meaning attached to “provincial” and “provincialism” : “regional” and “regionalism” … are at the least neutral, and more usually positive terms, suggesting valid and vigorous differences from metropolitan norms - attractive alternative modes of speech, custom, landscape, culture. Good regional art, we acknowledge, is in touch with universals, with the paradigms of myth or tragedy, with the forces of history, … Gilmour (1989, 51)

In Canadian writings cultural echoes often resonate with the specificities of those regions to which writers are attached. What relevance can they claim in a globalized world where the recognition of differences implies the need of intercultural approaches? This paper aims to show that the need for a constant readjustment of our understanding of cultural spaces is an argument in favour of centrifugal voices (Bakhtin). Resorting to cultural translation and other related

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concepts should foster insights into textual specificities, which express tensions between characters and beliefs, but also point to revised perspectives in individual lives marked by ever changing environments.

Cultural translation Ways to define cultural translation have significantly evolved in the course of the past decades (Asad 1986; Trivedi 2007). In a very simplified view of this development one may distinguish (three) stages and approaches. If all contain the idea of distance or separation and are based on an awareness of possible miscomprehension and the need to negotiate between different views and communities, it is the focus on language and on the role of relations that changes. The term “cultural translation” was first mostly used by anthropologists taking an ethnographic stance and trying to communicate observations and knowledge about the lives and beliefs of little-known remote communities through a language that members of their own culture would understand. Cultural translation aims at meaning making for an audience used to a very different context embedded in another language with related thinking processes; it implies an interpretation of situations and often stands in opposition to literal translation. Soon linguists, in particular professional translators, have also come to realise that a cultural rather than a literal translation of texts is often necessary to render the meaning and connotations of the original language. In the wake of reception theories, the role of the reader is stressed by literary translators (Bassnett 1998). Translating is seen as a dialogic process, requiring the recognition of two or more cultures meeting in the attempt to transpose a text into another language. With postcolonial theory, the interest in cultural translation shifts away from a linguistic transposition to an interest in the mobility and emancipation of cultural communities. Postcolonial societies may use the same language across the globe but according to location, discourse will not carry the same meaning. New spaces and hybrid identities are created in the interstices of cultures that meet (Bhabha 1994). This is a universal process: different cultures meet anywhere and concern individuals as much as societies. An analysis of some selected stories by Munro will show that the concept of cultural translation is applicable for all contexts and offers an approach to deal with recurring themes and motives of her work, such as erroneous beliefs, illusions, lack of understanding. The tension underlying most of her stories is due to various forms of cultural distance, to spatial

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separation, to a confrontation of past and present, to age and gender differences. Travelling, remembering and reflecting - protagonists/ narrators have to “translate” lives and experiences into new environments. Writing is a way of rendering this changing contexture visible. Moreover, cultural translation is an attitude that readers will develop to make sense of unfamiliar settings. It requires a confrontation with one’s own earlier representations and a readiness to conceive new cultural contexts and perspectives. This is an important condition for intercultural understanding. It may be useful to recall the parallels with what is understood as metaphorical reading. Indeed “metaphor” and “translation” have a similar etymology, both words referring to the act of carrying across or behind and beyond (Macadam 1975). Rides on buses and trains, car trips or sea crossings are recurring elements in Munro’s stories, especially the more recent ones. They seem to be discretely underlying action and plot, providing a solid structural framework along which the protagonists’ passages from one sphere or period of their lives to another can be watched. Transitions are usually smooth because they follow trains of thought, the protagonists’ or the narrator’s, rather than spatial or chronological movement. New viewpoints subtly signal changing cultural outlooks. Practically all the stories in Too Much Happiness give evidence of Munro’s great gift to take her characters across time and space within the short format of her stories, which often convey a narrative as complex as that of a complete novel. Trips, journeys or passages are in their own way means to signal cultural translation. Literally, etymologically, translation means the fact of being transported or carried across or beyond, from one place to another, thus suggesting a process as well as a space to be crossed. Linguistic translations take us to a world with a different language, different words, sounds and syntax. Cultural translation means being taken to surroundings where routines, interactions and institutions with their underlying beliefs and values work differently, where material representations and symbolic productions, such as works of art or literature and artifacts of daily life take other shapes. It can be argued that in Munro’s stories cultural translation, or this transfer from one context to another, works on several levels. The protagonists move between cultural environments often standing for changes in the course of their lives. The author, moreover, rooted in her own context, negotiates the passage from cultural reality to fiction, constructing coherent stories with authentic backgrounds. On another level, in agreement with reception theory (Jauss 1967, 1982), cultural translation also occurs with readers, who are apt to link Munro’s fictional

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world with their own cultural experiences. This contingent view of culture denying a direct mirror representation of reality in fiction reflects Bhabha’s distinction between cultural text and the act of cultural enunciation (cf. “the différance of writing”) and the ensuing necessity to conceive a Third Space, however elusive it will remain (36-37). It also echoes Bakhtin’s view of dialogism (1981), as further elaborated by Holquist (1990, 2002) and taken up by Kramsch (2009). In her address given on the occasion of the award of the first Man Booker International Prize to Alice Munro, the chair of the judges insists on Munro’s capacity to render insights into the inner lives and aspirations of characters, which is an essential way to recognize the individual perspective on culture and lives: Munro is often alleged to be an unpolitical writer, but expanding the realm of what the culture takes seriously is always a political act. There is no universal point of view, no unbiased art. As one larger goal of our prize is to broaden our knowledge of the world geographically and politically, so another goal is to deepen our knowledge of the lives around us, to teach us not to slight or overlook what we see everyday. (Smiley 2009)

To draw complex and convincing characters, Munro sets most of them against a cultural and historical background which is multi-layered and true to life, usually thanks to material details or comments and actions. In an article pointedly called “Close to home,” Atwood has reflected on the role of the Canadian regional background, Huron County in south-western Ontario, on Munro’s work. This is the world in which she grew up and has lived; much of her work scrutinizes what Atwood calls the “unfathomable” lives of its people revealing often surprising multi-layered complexities of human nature. The stories this article focuses on come from recent work. Cultural contexts vary and are not always “close to home.” They all provide clues about how fictional characters, situations and plot are created through subtle details and delicately reflective comments. In Munro’s stories, contexts, thoughts and viewpoints often emerge between the lines. For some readers–of a different age or with different perspectives--the identification process with protagonists may not always be similar to the direct empathy described by some critics, like Cohen. In short fiction, the very constraints of the genre impose a high degree of implicitness. One needs a keen eye for implied meaning, the use of details and connotations, often linked to a place and a time, to touch on the core of characters’ moods or the narrator’s subtle comments. This may be a particular challenge for readers from other cultural contexts or belonging to an age group that does not share Munro’s views on life and cultural

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roots. And yet many non-native English readers would like to participate in the literary experiences which remain significant elements for the appropriation of a language embedded in living cultures. How can this awareness of details and meaning construction be nurtured, especially in educational settings? Following many of Kramsch’s key ideas on a “third culture” (2009), this article will argue that especially in the present context of foreign language departments (in universities and in the upper classes of secondary education) critical models become relevant for an understanding of the processes of cultural translation.

“Third Culture” and recent developments in literature studies Munro is known all over the world. There was some agreement that she did not even need the publicity of the Booker Prize International to introduce her to new readers. Her work is likely to be studied in the context of Canadian or Commonwealth literature, or as part of a course on women’s writing. Yet what justifies her place in the curriculum of literature in universities, especially in non-English speaking countries? In many schools and universities significant efforts are being made to adapt literature studies to new insights and current requirements. The Bologna process asks for more globalized approaches, which also means support for courses opening up to literatures across the world. Thanks to the growing mobility of students and teaching staff, the development of multicultural competences and an awareness of “difference” are emphasized. On an organisational level and in research projects, literature is sometimes associated with cultural studies, a cooperation which has brought about a change in methodology and theoretical references. Moreover, language and literature classrooms are seen as hybrid spaces where local and mainstream texts meet, but also where the diversity of cultures should include students’ own cultural spaces (Kramsch 1993; Hallet 2011). After decades of prioritising the transmission of knowledge about a well-established canon focussed on English and American literature, literature courses now often focus on how students can integrate this knowledge about texts and authors in their general outlook on the world and actions (Showalter 2003). As mentioned in the introduction, “literatures in English” has become the generally accepted term for educational contexts too (Carter and McRae 1996; Pope 1998, 2012). As the aim of studies is no longer exclusively focussed on the texts but also includes readers’ response and ability to construct their own meaning, it is

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much easier to argue that so-called regional literature, also from outside England and the United States, has its place in the curriculum. Literature and culture have become closely associated with issues of intertextuality, multiliteracies, intercultural understanding and multicultural competences (Hallet 2002; Pope 1998, 2012). For an intercultural, reader-integrated approach to literary texts, some critical models prove particularly rewarding. They have guided the analysis of Munro’s stories which follows. Underlying them all is Bakhtin’s idea of the relationality between Self and Others (1981, 2004), as explained and further developed by Holquist (1990, 2002) and Kramsch (2009). A term that may require further elucidation is that of “regional voice.” In the present paper “regional voice” means that the narrator’s or author’s voice is rooted in a local cultural setting but it is not limited or constrained by these circumstances. The regional voice is the viewpoint, possibly only a momentary, fixed standpoint which explains the perspective through which the story is presented. It could be compared to the fixed leg of a pair of compasses, which does not prevent the other leg from roaming far--to echo John Donne’s use of the image (“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”). A speaker may belong to one context or region and yet visit, observe and scrutinise others. This regional voice can thus be the narrator’s voice or the voice of a character. Every fictional text has many voices with centripetal and centrifugal forces competing. As Bakhtin puts it in his essay “Discourse in the Novel,” narratives offer rich examples of “heteroglossia” which reveal a multitude of views and underlying diversity: The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types >raznoreþie@ and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions. Authorial speech, the speeches of the narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia >raznoreþie@ can enter the novel. (263)

For stories to acquire meaning they need to be received and interpreted: the reader’s response is another voice, again rooted and defined by a certain setting. The study of literature takes a crucial position in Bakhtin’s general interest in the workings of discourse and in his conception of dialogic relations. As Holquist explains, literature is conceived as dialogue, as utterances made in specific situations: Literary texts, like other kinds of utterance, depend not only on the activity of the author, but also on the place they hold in the social and historical

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forces at work when the text is produced and when it is consumed. Words in literary texts are active elements in a dialogic exchange taking place on several levels at the same time. (68-69)

Holquist describes the different levels of simultaneity that dialogism implies. For readers of fiction, an awareness of the cultural associations that cling to words in particular times and places is essential; their own associations and contextualised experience of a text are just as important as linguistic considerations or historically founded viewpoints so that ultimately, “simultaneity is found in the dialogue between an author, his characters, and his audience, as well as in the dialogue of readers with the characters and their author” (69). Kramsch (2009), in relation to readers of other cultures, speaks of the “thirdness of dialogue.” All these voices connected to a text are impregnated with the cultural contexts to which they belong. Linked to this is the other essential idea that culture is text, and text is culture, the much used, though sometimes quite elusive metaphor going back to cultural anthropology. Geertz, who coined the expression (1973), has always insisted on the importance of meaning making, of using all the “available light” to understand the complexities of other people’s cultures, to discover “who they think they are, what they think they are doing, and to what end they think they are doing it. . . . Moreover, it is necessary to gain a working familiarity with the frames of meaning within which they enact their lives” (16). If writers’ focus is on the “Other,” though they use different tools than ethnographers, their approach and working methods reflect the idea of culture as text that can be decoded-- and of text as a reflection of culture. It is the very intangible and lastly indefinable nature of what culture is, what it means for the observed–real or fictive–persons, which motivates the writing and on-going process of analysis. A dialogic view of literature includes reader-response and furthermore embraces the receiver’s cultural context. The Latin etymology of the word “text” suggests material that has been woven. It is the manner of weaving the sometimes disparate elements of culture together that may vary. Fiamengo takes up this view of Munro in a subchapter called “Experimental regionalism”: Alice Munro is … fascinated by the texture >my emphasis@ of lived experience and the impossibility of accurate representation. In stories and story cycles rich with detail about the rundown houses, ramshackle yards, piles of junk, and ill-maintained fields of poor districts in southwestern Ontario, Munro’s catalog and her unusual combinations of adjectives indicate her interest in a form of photographic realism and in the way that language derails representation to become its own subject. (251)

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For the understanding of Munro’s succinct evocations of plot and characters evolving in specific place and time settings, Bakhtin’s concept of the literary artistic chronotope proves very useful: “Spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (84). These moments where time and space “meet” give special meaning to events; they are like the concealed backbone of the story, “organizing centers for the fundamental narrative events” (250). Bakhtin has identified several types of chronotope, such as the chronotope of encounter, the chronotope of the road, often associated with encounter, the chronotope of threshold related to crisis or break. For him, many key motifs of literature are essentially chronotopic, in particular, “meeting/ parting (separation), loss/acquisition, search/discovery, recognition/ nonrecognition” (97). He also insists that if time and space are abstract concepts, artistic unity is achieved through the emotions and values that the writer attaches to the work as a whole. A last important, though unusual idea that helps understanding and representing dynamic elements and processes in literature, such as cultural translation, is provided by Moretti. In Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, he has developed new metaphors as tools to read literature: it is through maps, graphs and timelines or pictures of organic elements such as trees that he proposes to represent the evolution of genres and literary outputs. His interest is in aspects of time and space; in his eyes it is quite surprising that Bakhtin should not have included a single map in his essay on the chronotope (35). One could indeed easily imagine diagrams showing the net of characters’ relations, various types of timelines as well as maps, fictive and real, of Munro’s settings and her characters’ local movements or travelling. Like Atwood, Howells points out that Alice Munro’s early fictions “are set mainly in her home territory, the rural communities and small towns of southwestern Ontario.” In her more recent work, she has kept this fascination for the details of everyday life; but in several stories, she clearly moves beyond the sometimes restrictive constraints of provincial life to explore other contexts, especially situations belonging to the past, stories of people who have travelled and can convey a different perspective on life. Nonetheless, Howells’ description of her earlier work remains pertinent: the text appears as “a surface layer covering over a darker secret world of scandal, violence, child abuse and sudden startling deaths” (200).

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Intercultural readings of selected recent stories by Munro The focus is on cultural translation and the ways in which Munro constructs her representations of life. Two stories are taken from the most recent collection called Too Much Happiness, published in 2009: The first is called “Fiction,” whose title already hints at the underlying concern with the creation of stories the title story; the second is the title story of the collection, a condensed fictional biography of a Russian mathematician of the late 19th century. The last example comes from the The View from Castle Rock (2006): this is a fictional memoir Munro has written about her family’s past.

“Fiction” If (culture is text and) text is culture, what is the underlying cultural text here? Bakhtin’s idea of chronotopes as meaning making devices has determined the selection of passages where space, time and movement are felt to take on special significance. The opening of the story is a very effectively constructed chronotope of passage and threshold, working on various levels: dusk, passage from the bustle of the city to the quiet life beyond its limits, from rain to snow. It is the return to a home which is on the threshold to the dark forest, an archetypal theme of Canadian literature, an old farmhouse in a state of transition as it is being renovated. The passage also tells us about the social position of the inhabitants, suggesting a certain life style, on the edge of society. Some artefacts help draw the social and cultural context of this life: implicitly there is Joyce’s car allowing her to move from an urban to a rural or rather fringe type of surroundings at the edge of the forest and society. Other objects are mentioned, there is an allusion to the furniture that Jon restores, and perhaps most suggestively there are these patio windows, significant because fashionable but even more so as part of the overall metaphor of opening up and closing in. In Munro’s stories there are not only material windows: looking outside, like travelling, is usually associated with thinking and dreaming, with windows of the mind opening up to the past and other places. It should be noticed that this opening of the story is told in the past tense, it is part of the memory that is revived in part II, which takes place much later and is narrated in the present. In the second part we have a different type of chronotopes, chronotopes of meeting, of non-recognition and later of recognition. Joyce and Matt are giving a party in their house in North Vancouver to celebrate Matt’s sixtyfifth birthday. He is a neuropsychologist who is also a good amateur

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violinist. That is how he met Joyce, now a professional cellist and his third wife. The great variety of people, all guests and relatives linked to the extended family, and their party talk provide good examples of heteroglossia. There are succinct descriptions and the cultural frame is very adroitly suggested through foods and drinks, clothes, bits and pieces of conversation as well as Joyce’s comments. The omniscient narrator seems to fuse with Joyce’s thoughts (46). Joyce is aware of the changes over the past decades which have quite pleasantly affected her own life. Society has evolved, mentalities, family relations and values, too. Many cultural hints are given, all reinforcing the idea of a middle class, educated society. But trying to stay somewhat detached and critical, she wonders a little self-mockingly, possibly with a hint of despise, if her own words are still shared by those around her. But Joyce’s apparent distance and aloofness will soon be upset. To her great dismay, she discovers that a young girl to whom she has taken an “instant dislike” because of her attitude, her smoking and her clothes (“a short frilly black dress that makes you think of a piece of lingerie or a nightie, and a severe but low-necked little black jacket”) is not so young (“over 30”), married and on top of it, a writer, like herself. The following scenes are related to a bookshop, which can also be seen as a significant place of encounter. Joyce sees the girl’s face in a poster advertising a book called How Are We to Live (no question mark added). She buys the book, starts reading and the chapter that immediately catches her attention is entitled Kindertotenlieder, an allusion to Mahler but also, Joyce thinks, the expression of the young author’s sense of selfdramatization. Joyce reads on and the book is the unmistakable revelation that its author is a child she knew not only as one of her former pupils, but also as the daughter of her former husband’s apprentice and lover, through whom their relation was broken up. During her reading she has to correct her views of its author, Christie Dell, again and again. It is in the details of this progressive reversal that the story not only reveals a fine parallel between the young Joyce and Christie but also, it seems, some selfmockery on Munro’s part. Munro’s sense of a subtle irony is confirmed–an irony which is never destructive, aggressive or spiteful. It rings with the laughter of human comedy, the knowledge that human beings make fools of themselves but are always capable of adapting and accepting new views. The final message, quite in agreement with Munro’s essential approach to writing is that the protagonist will not let herself be disheartened by the startling mirror image held up to her: she decides that the unpleasant self-discovery might best be used as inspiration for another story: “Walking up Lonsdale

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Avenue, walking uphill, she gradually regains her composure. This might even turn into a funny story that she will tell some day. She wouldn’t be surprised.” (p. 61) The end of the story becomes a kind of mise en abîme, a reflection of the narrator on how life stories are constructed and how events experienced by different people will be remembered differently.

“Too Much Happiness” This is the title story of Munro’s latest collection. Here she further explores the relation between reality and fiction in a totally new way for her. It is the fictional biography of Sophia Kovalevsky, a 19th century Russian mathematician. Her interest in this genre may have been inspired by similar works of biography by other Canadian writers, with a historical and fictional bias, such as, among others, Small Ceremonies and Swann by Carol Shields or Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. It is as if these novelists, in agreement with postmodern tendencies, wished to uncover the close link between fiction and reality, to show the reader how fictional creation is generated and inspired by facts, yet developed along its own momentum of imagination and craftsmanship. In a note of acknowledgment, Munro explains how this work was produced: I discovered Sophia Kovalevsky while searching for something else in the Britannica one day. The combination of novelist and mathematician immediately caught my interest, and I began to read everything about her I could find. One book enthralled me beyond all others, and so I must record my indebtedness, my immense gratitude, to the author of Little Sparrow. A Portrait of Sophia Kovalevsky (Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1983), Don H. Kennedy, and his wife, Nina, a collateral descendant of Sophia’s, who provided quantities of texts translated from the Russian, including portions of Sophia’s diaries, letters, and numerous other writings. (305)

So quite clearly Munro relies on non-literary texts that provide the cultural and historically situated background for her story. They are the references to the material cultural dimension of the story, for instance to scientific work, like the studies by Poincaré and Weierstrass, and Kovalevsky’s own mathematical and novelistic writings (Theory of Partial Differential Equations; The Nihilist Girl; The Raevsky Sisters). However, in Munro’s story the social, institutional and personal aspects of Kovalevsky’s life are more significant to understand mentalities and the protagonist’s evolving thoughts and emotions, worries and joyful expectations. “Too Much Happiness” is the fictionalised biography of a woman confronted with organisations and people that partly oppose and yet also support some of

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her strong scientific and personal ambitions. But it is also the story of her own contradictions as she is torn between her wish to pursue her scientific work and to be happily married. There are references to institutions of the time, to university rules concerning the recruitment of female academic staff, to the award of prizes for academic achievement; there are also very varying views on marriage and personal relations. Political events, like the Commune in Paris, appear to have played a role in her life; fashions are mentioned as well medical practice. These perfectly integrated cultural and historical elements underline different social practices and attitudes in the Europe of the late 19th century but also the protagonist’s changing feelings towards science and leisure, marriage and love, independence and security. In France she has received a prestigious award (the Bordin Prize), but is still not allowed to work in a university. Therefore she lives in Stockholm where she has been offered a post – but would she not prefer to be happily married to Maksim and follow him wherever that is? What is most remarkable about Munro’s presentation of Kovalevsky’ life story is that she focuses only on the last days of her life and is nonetheless able to provide a totally satisfying biography (in approximately 56 pages). How does she do it? This is not a chronological account, but a sequence - or series - of chronotopes, appearing like knots on a string. They are chronotopes of the “road,” all linked by a long railway journey from Genova in Italy to Sweden, with stops in the south of France, Paris and Berlin, continuing via Denmark and various ferries, to Stockholm. What counts as much as the meetings on the “road” is the time on the train, giving the usually solitary traveller an opportunity to reminisce and reflect. Thanks to flashbacks and anticipations a patchwork of Kovalevsky’s life gradually takes shape and provides meaning for the reader who comes to understand her present–ultimate--goal: the planned– rather vaguely, it is true–wedding to Maksim in the coming spring. To some extent, the organization of this life story reminds us of the way modern media allow structuring complex information: the stages of the journey are comparable to a basic text with many hyperlinks inbetween. New details and stories and pictures are evoked so that gradually a seemingly complete text of Sophia’s life appears, similar to a piece of cloth: the text literally becomes visible as woven material with various patterns and designs. To draw these separate scenes Munro is likely to have resorted to many of the various documents about Kovalevsky’s life that she found. Through the device of this final journey she has stitched them together–like a dying person’s review of life.

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To convey the heroine’s fictionalised state of mind Munro creates a character that is historically true as well as capable of arousing the reader’s empathy. It is a universally relevant story yet the cultural context suggested in the various scenes is important to guarantee the plausibility of events and actions and to mark the difference with the narrator’s --and the reader’s--own time. The title is intriguing: it refers to the last words that Sophia is reported to have whispered to her young daughter, just before dying: “Too much happiness” (302). No direct explanation is given but it appears that a doctor she met on the train from northern Germany to Denmark recognized, though she herself did not, how mortally ill she was and offered her a tablet–of morphine? --with the simple words: “This will give you a little rest if you find the journey tedious” (289). Too much happiness, indeed, because Sophia died, but she died after a couple of days of great elation and mental activity--totally unaware that this was the end. In a study on the theme of happiness in Munro’s earlier writings, Beran notes that “happiness, …, to the extent that it reflects tawdry ideals of popular culture or the conventionality of the happy ending, is frequently treated ironically in Munro’s writings. . . . Munro’s stories provoke readers to think about happiness in a context that goes beyond the stories of individual characters” (340). The questions left at the end of “Too Much Happiness” also make evident what Hunter has called “the nature of Munro’s short story art, with its characteristic aversion to determinate structures and final meanings” (236). Munro herself, in another context, has spoken of happiness and her words shed further light on the meaning of happiness for her as a writer. Indeed, on the occasion of her reception of the Booker International Prize in 2009, she said in her Acceptance speech at Trinity College Dublin: Writing is a really strange thing. Say you begin when you’re seven years old, walking round and round in the yard outside your house–you would call it a garden– trying to think up a new ending, a salvation for The Little Mermaid. As it happens, Andersen already had a wonderful ending in place, but it’s too unbearable, you have to keep her from being changed to foam on the sea. The pursuit of the happy ending. You can’t live until you’ve got it in place. Then seventy years later, you’ve still got life up for translation. The happy ending has been discarded, but you’re still at work–meaning is what you’re after, resonance, some strange beauty on the shimmer of the sea that was the Little Mermaid and her deathless lover. >My emphasis@

The title may also be an allusion to Margaret Atwood’s short story “Happy Endings” (1984), where in an essay-like text she offers six alternatives of

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plot to the “John and Mary meet” type of story: She concludes that “the only authentic ending is … John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die. So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favour the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with” (384). Munro is the “true connoisseur”: she provides a coherent view of what Atwood calls “one thing after another” with suggestions of “how and why” things have happened.

“The View from Castle Rock” This story offers the most literal rendering of cultural translation and is taken from a book with the same title. The View from Castle Rock is different in genre from Munro’s other works as it is a collection of tales about her real and imagined ancestors. It may also be considered the most “regional” of the pieces selected for this paper. The background setting is Scottish, as already suggested by the reference to Castle Rock, or the Castle of Edinburgh, in the title. Here another perspective on cultural translation is offered. However, this awareness of Scottish elements in Canadian life, triggered by her interest in her father’s family history, is not new in Munro’s work. Looking at Scottish-Canadian elements in Munro’s fiction, Gittings uses the term of “cultural translation.” He refers to Benjamin’s views in “The Task of the Translator” and explains the nature of this interaction: Scottish immigrants did not simply transpose their culture from one surface to another; they had to reshape or translate the New World and the one in which they found themselves. Through this process they could begin to recognize the familiar in an alien space. The Old World signifying systems used to enact this transformation, however, are transformed themselves in a marrying of their cultural referents to new signifieds. The act of bridging a gap between two seemingly incommensurable systems, whether linguistic, temporal or cultural, necessarily creates a new entity. (27)

In The View from Castle Rock, published in 2006, Munro tries to recapture the perspective of her ancestors, 19th century emigrants to Canada, and so provides another journey between cultures and between past and present, reality and fiction. She insists on the fictional approach she has taken to As she explains in the Foreword : I put all this material together over the years, and almost without my noticing what was happening, it began to shape itself, here and there, into

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something like stories. Some of the characters gave themselves to me in their own words, others rose out of their own situations. Their words and my words, a curious re-creation of lives, in a given setting that was as truthful as our notion of the past can ever be. (ix-x)

The title of the book is a reference to a chapter with the same heading. It shows how in the early 19th century the inhabitants of a remote Scottish valley gradually enlarged their view of the world, visited Edinburgh and became ready to leave the country. In a well-remembered scene, a truly chronotopic event for the young Andrew in particular, one cannot help noticing a mildly ironic undertone with the narrator gently mocking the credulity and representations of those climbing to the top of the castle of Edinburgh and imagining they can make out the other side of the Atlantic. The sun was out now, shining on the stone heap of houses and streets below them, and the churches, whose spires did not reach to this height, and some little trees and fields, then a wide silvery stretch of water. And beyond that a pale green and grayish blue land, part in sunlight and part in shadow, a land as light as mist, sucked into the sky. “So did I not tell you?” Andrew’s father said. “America. It is only a little bit of it, though, only the shore. There is where every man is sitting in the midst of his own properties, and even the beggars is riding around in carriages.” … He turned and addressed Andrew. “So there you are my lad and you have looked at America,” he said. “God grant you one day you will see it closer up and for yourself.” ( 30)

It was much later that Andrew found out he had been looking at the peninsula of Fife. However much readers are likely to smile at this conversation, it sums up an important event in this spatial-temporal world of emigrants. The discovery has traits of folkloric Rabelaisian laughter and has shaped the narrative of the family. She also continues the exploration of irony that has been–discretely, but unmistakably – present in all her best work. There is above all a recurring focus on how stories develop with underlying links to reality, which is being transformed through the writing process. She knows that many people interested in the history of their family or community look at writing as source of truth and a recording of facts, which means they have little understanding for views like hers, which underline the fictionalised character of any account. In the book she reports an interesting exchange between a story teller and a journal writer, the first trying to make sense of what he sees and hears, the second recording what happens:

206 Regional Voices and Cultural Translation: The Example of Alice Munro “I am writing a journal of this voyage,” Walt says, wanting to make clear that this is a job for him, not an idle pleasure. Still he feels that some further justification is called for. “I am writing to keep track of every day so that at the end of the voyage I can send a letter home”. (60)

This dichotomy between fact and fiction is taken up in other parts of the book. So, for example, in an old letter, quoted as an apparently authentic document, James Hogg, the poet (and a relative of Munro’s father’s family) is called a liar: “Hogg poor man has spent most of his life conning Lies and if I read the Bible right I think it says all Liares is to have their part in the Lake that Burns with Fire and Brimstone” (84). Munro then draws a parallel with her own writing and with tongue in cheek she adds, “I am surely one of the liars the old man talks about, in what I have written about the voyage. Except for Walter’s journal, and the letters, the story is full of my invention. The sighting of Fife from Castle Rock is related by Hogg, so it must be true” (84). This comment confirms that Munro loves to integrate the issues of fiction versus reality into her stories, thus opening up aspects of her writing process to the reader. It is also Munro, the storyteller, who depicts her ancestors’ crossing of the Atlantic with such vivid details and empathy as only fiction can do it. In the memorable description of birth giving - a significantly chronotopic event--we do not find the plausible point of view of a 19th century commentator: it is the sympathetic account of a late 20th century female writer. The book did not meet with everybody’s approval. Brad Hooper devotes the last chapter of his book on Munro to The View from Castle Rock and calls it “A Slip Backward”. What he objects to is Munro’s stepping in not as a narrator but as an actual author, intrusions which in his eyes “prove distracting and erode the veil of suspension of disbelief” (151). This, I would argue, is an inability to recognize that Munro has deliberately chosen to mix genres creating new forms that may not be too easy to label: fictional biography, historical fiction, some parts coming across as fictionalized family memoir, others as fictional autobiography. Behind Munro’s stories, there is not only a woman, as Sheila Munro, her daughter has shown, there is also a family and a (hi)story illustrating the emergence of a third culture in changing times and surroundings.

Conclusion The analysis of these selected works shows that cultural translation takes many forms in Munro’s writing: It may mean crossing spaces, or moving across time and generations. The apparent isolation of characters is contradicted by the awareness of cultural roots and often imperceptible

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links to other people. These stories provide refined examples of the inevitable development of third cultures and it is the dynamic and inclusive view of individual lives and communities which accounts for their universal appeal. Bakhtin’s theories, with their emphasis on voices and heteroglossia, but also on space and time, seem quite appropriate especially for a systematic literary analysis. For readers ideas such as the thirdness of culture or Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and the chronotope facilitate active reception. Munro’s own references to her writing process show how the aesthetic reconstruction of lives, especially with their embedded reflections, allow reconsidering views on identity, personal values and social relations. She suggests a mental processing where cultural elements with their significant temporal and spatial dimensions are distilled into chronotopes to which author/narrator, protagonist and reader, in a kind of triangulation, give meaning. Munro’s stories reflect individuals’ perception of social and cultural reality; conversely they contribute to shaping her readers’ awareness of contexts. They are a perfect illustration of what Bakhtin writes in his concluding remarks to the essay on time and chronotopes : However forcefully the real and the represented world resist fusion, however immutable the presence of that categorical boundary line between them, they are nevertheless indissolubly tied up with each other and find themselves in continual mutual interaction; uninterrupted exchange goes on between them . . . . The work and the world represented in it enter the real world and enrich it, and the real world enters the work and its world as part of the process of its creation, as well as part of its subsequent life, in a continuing renewal of the work through the creative perception of listeners and readers. (254)

Munro’s work is full of voices, of true heteroglossia. What she achieves is a fictional translation of participation in cultural situations that have been watched, remembered or imagined. It is Munro’s own voice and her amazing craftsmanship that turn these stories into experiences of intercultural understanding. Context and cultural background, as well as a subtle handling of temporal references, contribute to the extraordinary creation of convincing characters, people she seems to have met and accompanied and whom the readers, too, will recognize as if they had been part of their lives. It is human comedy at its best, a microcosm of human beings who struggle hard to overcome adversity and to reach for an ever elusive happiness.

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Works Cited Asad, Talal. “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology.” Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. New edition. Eds. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Santa Fe, N.M., School of American Research: 2010. 141- 164. Print. Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. Toronto: McClelland &Stewart, 1996. Print. —. “Happy Endings.” 1984. The Secret Self 1: Short Stories by Women. Ed. Hermione Lee. London: Phoenix 1991. 381-384. Print. —. “Close to Home.” The Guardian. Culture. Books. Alice Munro. 11 Oct. 2008. Web. 09 Sept. 2013. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. 84-258. Print. —. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. 259-422. Print. Bassnett, Susan. “The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies.” Constructing Cultures: Essays in Literary Translation. Eds. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere. Clevedon/ Bristol: 1998. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” 1923. Translated by Harry Zohn, 1968. The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. London: Routledge, 2000. 15-23. Print. Beran, Carol L. “The Pursuit of Happiness: A Study of Alice Munro’s Fiction.” The Social Science Journal, Vol. 37, Nr 3 (2000). 329-345. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print. Carter, Ronald, and John McRae, eds. Language, Literature and the Learner. London: Longman, 1996. Print. Cohen, Leah Hager. “ Alice Munro’s Object Lessons.” The New York Times. Sunday Book Reviews. 27 Nov. 2009. Web. 2009. Web. 09 Sept. 2013. Donne, John. “ A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”1611. Ed. Herbert J.C. Grierson. Web. O9 Sept.2013. Fiamengo, Janice. “Regionalism and Urbanism.” The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature. Ed. Eva-Marie Kröller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 241-262. Print.

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Geertz, Clifford. Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Print. Gilmour, Robin. “Regional and Provincial in Victorian Literature.” The Literature of Region and Nation. Ed. R.P. Draper. London: Macmillan, 1989. 51-60. Print. Gittings, Christopher E. “Constructing a Scots-Canadian Ground: Family History and Cultural Translation in Alice Munro.” Studies in Short Fiction 34, Newberry College (1997). 27-37. Print. Hallet, Wolfgang. Fremdsprachenunterricht als Spiel der Texte und Kulturen - Intertextualität als Paradigma einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Didaktik. Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002. Print. —. “Transcultural Fictions and Identities in the EFL Classroom. Beyond “Other” Cultures: Transcultural Perspectives on Teaching the New Literatures in English. Eds. Sabine Doff, and Frank Schulze-Engler. Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier , 2011. Print. Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 1990, 2002. Print. Hooper, Brad. The Fiction of Alice Munro: An Appreciation. Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2008. Print. Howells, Carol Ann. “Writing by Women.” The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature. Ed. Eva-Marie Kröller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 194-215. Print. Hunter, Adrian. “Story into History: Alice Munro’s Minor Literature.” Journal of the English Association, Vol. 53 (2004). 219-238. Print. Jauss, Hans Robert. “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory.” 1967. Critical Theory since 1965. Ed. Hazard Adams & Leroy Searle. Transl. Timothy Bahti. Tallahassee, Florida: University Presses of Florida, 1982. Chapters V to XII, 164-183. Print. Kramsch, Claire. Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. —. “The Cultural Component of Language Teaching.” Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht. 1996, 13 pages. Web. 09 Sept. 2013. —. “Third culture and language education.” Contemporary Applied Linguistics. Vol.1 Language Teaching and Learning. Eds. Vivian Cook & Li Wei. London: Continuum, 2009. 233-254. Macadam, Alfred J. "Translation as Metaphor: Three Versions of Borges." MLN. Vol. 90, No. 6, Comparative Literature: Translation: Theory and

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Practice (Dec., 1975), pp. 747-754. Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Web. 09 Sept. 2013. Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. New York: Verso, 2005. Print. Munro, Alice. The View from Castle Rock: Stories. 2006. London: Vintage Books, 2007. Print. —. Too Much Happiness. London: Chatto & Windus, 2009. Print. —. Acceptance speech at Trinity College Dublin. The Man Booker Prize. 2009. Archive. Web. 01 May 2012. Munro, Sheila. Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2002. Print. Pope, Rob. The English Studies Book. London: Routledge, 1998. Print. —. Studying English Literature and Language. London: Routledge, 2012. Print. Shields, Carol. Small Ceremonies. Nepean, Ontario : Borealis Press, 1976. Print. —. Swann. Toronto: Stoddart Publishing, 1987. Print. Showalter, Elaine. Teaching Literature. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Print. Smiley, Jane. “Chair’s Speech.” Man Booker International Prize to Alice Munro. 2009. Archive. Web. 30 March 2011. Trivedi, Harish 2007. “Translating culture vs. cultural translation.” In Translation – Reflections, Refractions, Transformations. Eds. Paul StPierre and Prafulla C. Kar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007. 277–287. Print.

CONTRIBUTORS

Reiko Aiura (Vigers) is a professor in the Culture and Medicine Department in Shiga University of Medical Science in Japan. She was educated at Doshisha University in Kyoto (B.A., M.A.) and Aberdeen University, Scotland (M. Litt.) Her research interests have been in Scottish and English literature, particularly George MacDonald. She is currently interested in origin of literature and translation of cultures. Michele Bottalico is Professor of American Literature at the University of Salerno, Italy. His scientific interests focus on the development of American literary identity and on interethnic studies. His publications include Tra cielo e terra: La poesia di Anne Bradstreet (1966), Milestones. I classici della creatività chicana (2008), and numerous articles and translations. He has edited several collections of essays, among which are Literature and the Visual Arts in 20th-Century America and Borderline Identities in Chicano Culture. Daniel Bratton is the author of two books. His articles have been published in South Korea, Japan, India, England, Belgium, the United States, and Canada. Bratton received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, teaching at University of Toronto in Mississauga prior to moving to the Far East in 1994. From 2005-2010 he was Professor of English at Doshisha University in Kyoto (where Cid Corman once taught) and also lectured in the School of Graduate School at Kyoto University. Upon retiring to Canada, he founded the Elora Poetry Centre. David Clark was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of A Coruña. He has held executive positions in both national and international Associations for Irish Studies and has published widely on contemporary Irish and Scottish writing. He co-edited the volume of essays As Nove Ondas and is co-author, with Antonio de Toro, of the book British and Irish Writers in the Spanish Periodical Press. His most recent publications are In the Wake of the Tiger: Irish Studies in the Twenty-First Century and To Banish Ghost and Goblin: New Essays on Irish Culture.

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Marie-Anne Hansen-Pauly is a Senior Lecturer and researcher at the University of Luxembourg. Her main interests are in multilingualism in educational contexts as well as in transcultural literature and identity. She is the president of the Luxembourg Comparative Literature Association. Itsuyo Higashinaka was educated at Osaka University and the University of Alberta. He was President of the Japanese Byron Society and is Professor emeritus at Ryukoku University in Kyoto. He has published many books and articles on Byron. His most recent book is Byron the Protean Poet (2010). His essay, “Byron’s Indebtedness to Martial and Catullus” was published in The Byron Journal (Vol. 39, No. 1, 2011). He also translated Byron’s poems such as Beppo, The Vision of Judgment, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and other texts into Japanese. J. U. Jacobs (Johan Jacobs) is Professor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He earned MPhil and PhD degrees at the University of Pretoria, UNISA, and at Columbia University, New York, specializing in American literature. His research focuses on South African fiction, autobiography and prison writing, and postcolonial writing (the novel and travel writing), especially from Australia, India, Canada, and Africa. He is one of the editors of the journal Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa. He has edited a book of critical essays on the prose, poetry and paintings of Breyten Breytenbach, and has been working on a study of Zakes Mda’s novels. Laurence Mann is reading for a DPhil in Japanese Literature at Oxford University, supported by the Wolfson Foundation. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he was the recipient of numerous scholarships and awards, as well as a Gibbs Prize, for outstanding performance in examinations. His doctoral research focuses on the poetics of Shinto liturgies and he is currently preparing a paper for publication entitled Orality in the Engishiki Norito. He is also a project member of the Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese. J. Derrick McClure, educated at Ayr Academy, Glasgow University and Edinburgh University, has recently retired after nearly forty years of lecturing in the English Department at the University of Aberdeen. He has published four monographs and over a hundred articles on Scottish literary and linguistic topics, as well as numerous Scots poetic translations from Gaelic, Italian and other languages. In 2002 he was awarded an MBE for services to Scottish culture.

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Rosa E. Penna holds a Ph.D in Literature from the Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina (Buenos Aires, Argentina), where she is Professor of English Literature. Since 1996 she has edited Cuadernos de Literatura Inglesa y Norteamericana. As from 1982 she has been collaborating for the compilation of the MLA International Bibliography (New York, USA). (She is now a Distinguished Senior Field Bibliographer and Bibliography Fellow.) She has published articles and chapters of books on English Language Literatures and Comparative Literature in Argentina and abroad. She is a member of the International Advisory Board for the journal European Romantic Review. She is a founding member of the Region and Nation Literature Association, and co-editor of the Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference of the RNLA, held at Aberdeen University in 2008. Her current research interests focus on the use of space and place in 19th and 20th Century English literature. Donna L. Potts is a professor at Washington State University, after having taught at Kansas State University for twenty-two years. She held a Fulbright lecturing award at the National University of Ireland in Galway from 1997 to 1998; returned there on sabbatical 2004-05, and again in 2011 for a fellowship in the Centre for Irish Studies. She recently edited a collection of essays, poems, and illustrations in honor of the poet Francis Harvey, for Cambridge Scholars Publishing (forthcoming). In addition to many articles on Irish poetry, she has written books on poetry, including Howard Nemerov and Objective Idealism: The Influence of Owen Barfield (Missouri 1992) and Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition (Missouri 2011) as well as a book of poetry, Waking Dreams (Salmon 2012). Megumi Sakamoto is a Professor at the University of Fukushima (Faculty of Administration and Social Sciences). Educated at the University of Chuo, Tokyo, 1990 (M.Litt.), he concentrates on Comparative Cultural Studies and Scottish Literature. The title of his dissertation is “A Study of the Novels of George Eliot.” Published papers include “Literary Tradition in Scottish Renaissance and Regional Nationalism,” Reading English and American Literature in Succession, 579-598, 2012, Kaibunsha Publisher, Tokyo. Yuko Yoneyama published her Ph. D thesis, The Lexicography of a European Regional Language, Scots: the History and Philosophy of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue in February, 2013, and is currently conducting research on Scots and Scottish Gaelic from sociolinguistic

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perspectives. She has also written on Scottish literary figures, including Robert Burns, Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir. She is a Lecturer at the University of Shizuoka, Japan.