Organizer and Chair: Paul Gordon Schalow, Rutgers University
Discussant: Norman Bryson, Harvard University
The entire cultural production of Edo can arguably be characterized as dominated by the activities of re-reading and re-writing, discursive practices that also define the "postmodern" in this century. In lieu of old terms such as "parody" (Linda Hutcheon) and "pastiche" (Ingeborg Hoesterey) that have been resurrected to describe the linguistic structure of the postmodern, this panel will develop the idea of "overtext" (Sumie Jones) to explore the activity of re-reading and re-writing at work in the creation of Edo texts and images.
The concept of overtext is derived from "mitate," the chief rhetorical device in Edo arts which provided the means to cross boundaries not only between the classical and the modern, the high and the low, but also between media. Not merely allusion nor necessarily parody, mitate overlays one text (be it a specific work, image, or word, or even a set of conventions of a genre) over another to instigate an entirely new reading, as the result of which a new and sometimes delightfully unexpected text or image emerges.
The artist's employment of the multi-layered overtext led to a proliferation of fetishistic and often erotic repetitions of themes, stories, and expressions in the Edo arts. The three proposed papers describe various examples of the overtext and the process of multi-layered reading that characterizes it: Midori McKeon's paper is on the erotic treatment by Ryutei Tanehiko (1783-1842) of the Urashima Taro legend; Tan'o Yasunori's paper explores the homoerotic in paintings of Ogata Korin (1658-1716); and Sumie Jones's paper addresses the crisis of language in Sawada Natari's (1778-1845) Ana okashi.
Forbidden Play: Erotic Overtext in a Late-Edo Didactic Tale for Children
Midori Y. McKeon, San Francisco State University
Ryutei Tanehiko, a late-Edo master gesaku writer, published a picture-book tale for children entitled "Mukashibanashi Urashima jijii" (The Legend of Old Urashima), derived from Japan's popular Urashima legend. Tanehiko claims in his preface that the tale, except for the denouement, is a faithful reproduction of one narrated to him by a little girl. He obscures the tale's origin, however, by saying that the girl heard the story from someone from Echigo province.
The Urashima legend, whose earliest extant text dates from the eighth century, had evolved by the Edo period from its early narrative of spontaneous love and marriage between a young fisherman and a divine woman to a didactic tale in which a turtle-woman (or a daughter of the sea god) marries a fisherman to repay his kindness for sparing her life.
"Mukashibanashi Urashima jijii" gives a new twist to the didactic tale by encoding in it a story of illicit intercourse between the sea god's daughter and a married old fisherman. The eroticism is concealed visually and discursively from the young audience and the scrutiny of the authorities by protective codes that can be deciphered only with proper lexical, cultural, and intertextual knowledge. Tanehiko's overtext of Urashima is a product of the intricate interplay between the erotic and didactic stories coupled with the deconstructive denouement, and represents a quintessential example of the playful/subversive use of the overtext device in gesaku literature.
Flowers as Homoerotic Overtext in Edo Art
Tan'o Yasunori, Waseda University
Eroticism is still a taboo subject in Japanese academic circles, at least in the field of art history. This situation prevents discussion about the erotic contexts surrounding individual works of art, and makes it difficult to conceptualize the element of the erotic and its role in the production of the overtext in Edo art.
In his book Korin to Kenzan (1962), the art historian Kobayashi Taichiro made a rare attempt to interpret the erotic significance in the works of Ogata Korin (1658-1716). For example, Kobayashi sees evidence of the homosexual relationship between the painter and his subject in Korin's portrait of Nakamura Kuranosuke, but this view has never been supported by other scholars, for it is based on Kobayashi's direct response to the work, not on any objective evidence. But if we accept that the plum blossoms painted on the fan placed directly in front of the subject of the portrait are a symbol of male love, the appropriateness of Kobayashi's view can be appreciated. In other words, the plum blossom leads us into a reading of the homoerotic overtext of the portrait.
In this paper, I will reinterpret Kobayashi's study of the erotic context of Korin's work through the theme of homoerotic flowers (nanshoku no hana), and present a new interpretation of Korin's most famous standing-screen, "Irises," suggesting that references to both Ise monogatari and male love in it make the irises part of a homoerotic overtext. My reading of Korin might be dismissed as "over interpretation," just as Kobayashi's was, but my hope is that it will resurrect some of the sensuality in Korin's work that standard academic readings have covered up.
Overtext and the Anxiety of Writing: Sawada Natari's Ana okashi
Sumie Jones, Indiana University
The spoken style that began to affect the written style in 17th-century bourgeois literature came to dominate the writings of Edo in the form of "Edo dialect." The crisis of language in the mid-18th century resulted from the intellectuals' promotion of this dialect in opposition to the authority of Kamigata culture. Dialogue as a narrative form, as seen in such Edo genres as sharebon (books of manners), kokkeibon (humorous books), and ninjobon (sentimental books), privileged the spoken tongue as a style for writing. The author came to willingly abandon his authority by assuming the position of copyist of actual conversations. In short, the efforts of the promoters of "Edo dialect" back-fired, to endanger the power of writing itself. Erotic writings in kanbun and wabun were the responses of the intellectuals to the crisis of written language.
Sawada Natari (1778-1845) was one writer whose dismay with the state of late-Edo gesaku is clear: the language had become so comfortably close to contemporary reality that writing could no longer say anything special. Insofar as the spoken Edo idiom was as illogical and chaotic as the rule of the samurai in his view, any writing that imitated spokenness necessarily submitted to the shogunate's fraudulent rhetoric. The ambivalence of his feelings about the efficacy of writing emerges through the presence of multiple layers in his works. This paper will examine the wabun style of Sawada's pornographic work, Ana okashi (The layered meaning of the title makes it impossible to put into English), completed around 1822, in order to show how the reader is engaged in the process of layering.