Organizer: John R. Wallace, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair: Royall Tyler, Australian National University
Discussant: David Pollack, University of Rochester
Each scholar on this panel offers a new approach to the nature of the erotic relationship in Genji monogatari, the masterpiece of classical Japanese prose. While variety of romantic liaison is agreed to be at the heart of the Genji narrative, the erotic aspects of the work have been insufficiently studied. A greater willingness to openly discuss sexuality in Japanese classics and the sophistication of gender-oriented criticism provide now the context for venturing new, disciplined considerations on this most central aspect of the work.
This panel offers a thought-provoking array of topics. Royall Tyler argues that the entertainment value of Genji, too often set aside in Genji studies, lies precisely and intentionally in erotic relationships. Paul Schalow explores male to male bonding in the tale, viewing women, who have typically been the primary object of literary analysis of Genji as mediators for these male relationships. Doris Bargen reverses the usual study of kaimami, the common erotic motif of Heian prose, in which a man peers at a woman through a gap in a wall or fence. Bargen analyses the extent to which women are victims in this situation and that to which they are complicit participants. John Wallace interprets the courtly elegance of Genji not simply as a reflection of Heian culture but a conscious literary strategy of the author, intended to cope with the anxiety of erotic longing.
Lady Murasaki's Erotic Entertainment: The Early Chapters of the Genji
Royall Tyler, The National Australian University
As a revered masterpiece and as a featured item on many a syllabus, Genji monogatari is difficult not to take solemnly. One reader finds everywhere in the Genji "the social history of elites," another gathers from it that "the extreme physical and psychological vulnerability of the Heian women augured ill for her happiness," a third talks of "self-legitimating maneuvers" and a "powerfully didactic cast," and most ponder Genji's "character."
Let us say that it is true: Murasaki Shikibu began writing her tale because Princess Senshi wanted a new story. What might Senshi have had in mind? Not social history and so on. Something entertaining, surely, however high her standards.
The early chapters of the Genji are to my eye an intentionally erotic entertainment and an exhibition of surprisingly explicit erotic situations. Each evokes the tension between Genji and a woman, and this tension, with its peculiar color and tone, is the "point" of the entertainment: a "point" that lies not in character but in relationship. Such a view explains at once Genji's variability and his constantly reaffirmed perfection. He is less a character than a foil. Moreover, by flirting with naughtiness in her account of his adventures, Murasaki Shikibu showed how decorous her allegedly decadent society really was.
Kaimami Through a Woman's Eyes
Doris G. Bargen, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
The Heian courtier sometimes engaged in a peculiar form of courtship that involved approaching a woman furtively. The topos of kaimami (lit. peeping through a gap in the fence) has been examined largely from the male perspective. Since there are various motivations for male kaimami, an act that serves as an inspiration to poetic creativity and as a prelude to the actual possession of a woman, the task of analyzing patterns of kaimami is formidable enough. Yet kaimami is by no means an exclusively male phenomenon. Without the woman on the other side of the fence, permanently fearful of being seen and never sure that she has not been, the spying man can find no more gratification than in having spotted a piece of furniture.
Norma Field has stimulated reflection on kaimami by calling it "visual rape" and by suggesting that the voyeur inflicts violence on women who are "pinned like butterflies beneath his cool gaze" (The Splendor of Longing in the Tale of Genji, p. 123-24). I wish to examine the extent of women's victimization and complicity in kaimami. What do women feel when they discover that the erotic gap in the fence has been penetrated by the male gaze? Where was their own gaze? I will focus on a famous pair of kaimami scenes targeting one female character: the child Murasaki seen by Genji and the mature Murasaki seen by Genji's son Yugiri. Finally, what is the impact of distractions-the bird and the typhoon-on these particular kaimami?
Anxiety of Erotic Longing and Murasaki's Miyabi
John R. Wallace, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Henry Staten, in Eros in Mourning (Johns Hopkins, 1995), traces the function within philosophical, religious and literary discourse, of the ideology of transcendence as a way to confront the psychological anxiety of eros where to love immediately implies the discomfort of possible (indeed likely) loss of that which one loves. Staten suggests that the idealization of the love object in Platonic thought, Christian orthodoxy and troubadour song is an attempt to overcome the known mortality of real love objects.
In Staten's reading of literature, Heian period prose and poetry, it seems to me, can be regarded as mixing two positions. On the one hand, glorification of the court's grandeur and invocations for its longevity are common (political) notes struck, not just in public waka, but in the time's diaries and histories. On the other hand, we find lamentation for the transience of the human bond. I suggest that it is specifically Murasaki who deeply explores the social ethic and aesthetic of miyabi as a place where transcendence and imminence, the eternal and the pathos of the temporary converge.
Does Murasaki's Genji engage in the type of response to erotic anxiety that Staten discusses? I will suggest that the beautification of (erotic) pain through extenuation of the aesthetic of miyabi was brilliantly advanced by Murasaki, and became the preferred response to this anxiety rather than Western idealization as outlined by Staten, or Buddhist detachment. Indeed, the beautification of Staten's "mourning" as a response to the anxiety of loss and separation remains an important thread in Japanese literature.