Organizer: Gustav Heldt, Columbia University
Chair: Haruo Shirane, Columbia University
Discussant: Joshua Mostow, University of British Columbia
This panel proposes to examine two interrelated moments in premodern Japanese cultural history—the Heian and Kamakura periods—by focusing on the issue of visuality. The structuration of visual space plays a critical role in the construction of social identities in any culture, informing a wide range of signifying practices that produce it. In this panel, the issue of visuality is used to articulate the complex relations among different modes of representation such as writing and painting and the formation of social subjects and spaces through these media. Each paper demonstrates how insights afforded by materials usually divided by discipline: such as poetry and prose in literature, painting in art history, or legal documents in institutional history, may be creatively combined and reexamined through attention to their grounding in larger visual economies.
Tomiko Yoda argues for a narrative economy in Heian prose whose relation to the visual structures of picture scrolls calls into question the necessity for consistent registers of person in representing subjects. Thomas LaMarre links the formal strategies of representation in these same scrolls to the differently gendered and classed subjects who viewed them. Gustav Heldt suggests how one such subject deploys the visual performativity of poetry to claim a place in the ritualized space of the Heian imperial court. Thomas Keirstead examines instances of visual display in Kamakura government legal documents which suggest that institution’s reliance on the performance of spectacle, thereby revealing a previously unnoticed affinity between it and the imperial court.
Narrative Space in Heian Painting and Writing
Tomiko Yoda, Duke University
Modern commentaries on Heian prose literature often note an inconsistency of narrative voice, shifting between first- and third-person registers. The paper questions such use of person as a universal, arguing instead for its grounding in a particular representational regime of modernity. This order, which has had a formative influence on a variety of media including painting, photography, and cinema, as well as written narratives, is chiefly informed by the rectilinear perspectivism of post-Renaissance painting. Through reference to this visual model, the paper draws on works in art history and film studies to challenge the normative status of modern perspectivism, exploring the efficacy of different systems of representation. Taking the visual analogy further, the paper will compare the representational field evoked in Heian narrative with the structure of late-Heian narrative handscroll paintings (emaki), focusing on those aspects of the latter’s visual vocabulary that refract the regulatory principle of perspectivism such as the coexistence of multiple spatio-temporal zones within a single pictorial plane, decentered distribution of figures salient to the narrative, and an inverted perspective which pivots the direction of the viewer’s gaze. By identifying the parallels between the verbal and pictorial narratives of the period, I will propose some general logics of Heian narrative which suggest that what modern commentators have perceived as the discrepancy of person in Heian writing may rather be understood as being perfectly consistent with a larger narrative economy.
Regimes of Seeing and the Problem of Gender in Reading Heian Emaki
Thomas LaMarre, McGill University
Central to this paper is the notion that Heian picture scrolls (emaki) combine diverse regimes of reading. It begins with an overview of various theories about how emaki are to be read, with particular attention to the conventions for the orientation of the reader/viewer, for the interaction between images and texts, and for identification with characters in them. The visual codes of emaki seem to enable readers to conjoin different modes of seeing and speaking. Yet, because discussions of emaki tend to ground their interpretation in linguistic or textual terms, it is difficult to talk about multiple regimes of seeing and reading, or about power relations. Recent research on gender and emaki raises questions about power relations implicit in the organization of the visual field. Such research often reaches an impasse in that it tends to mistake the signification of masculine and feminine for identification (in the psychoanalytic sense). Nevertheless, it provides a way to think about spectatorship and diverse ways of reading. Following the lead of feminist accounts of cinema, this paper proposes to redefine formal knowledge about emaki with an eye to court ranks and hierarchies as well as gender.
Envisaging the Court Poet in the Kana Preface to the Kokinshû
Gustav Heldt, Columbia University
This paper will discuss the kana preface to the Kokinshû, typically read as an official account of waka poetry, in relation to the self-fashioning strategies of its lower-ranking male author. In narrating the history of waka poetry, its formal qualities, and its role at court, the kana preface foregrounds visual and spatial terms in such a way as to figure written poetry as a site for the visual re-enactment of cosmological genesis. This privileging of the visual in Tsurayuki’s account of poetry’s significance ensures a place at court for the waka poet as writer. Poetic envisagings of the world as a series of cosmological correspondences amplify and reproduce the gaze of the emperor which enacts this envisaging of the world in court ceremonies. As an extension of the imperial gaze, Tsurayuki can claim a place in the visual economy of those court rituals from which he was excluded. This claim to a shared vision is gendered as male through the placing of women poets outside the court or hidden from view, thereby highlighting an anxious claim to a masculinity defined as a visual sensibility shared with the emperor. Placed in the context of a court where visual and bodily proximity to the emperor were privileged terms for envisaging oneself, Tsurayuki’s insistent claim to the visual performativity of poetry in the kana preface suggests the import the practice of its writing held for his vision of himself as a member of the court.
The Spectacle of Justice in Late Heian and Kamakura Japan
Thomas E. Keirstead, State University of New York, Buffalo
The proposed paper will look at the performance of Kamakura justice in light of the openings made by a new historiography of the middle ages which emphasizes the spectacular and visual over the rational and subdued. Dispensing justice has been identified as perhaps the key activity of the Kamakura warrior government, but the process has been described as if it involved only the dispassionate and disembodied examination of documents. However, records of supplicants to the Kamakura court, with their reference to the daily round of activities, and account books detailing expenses for entertaining officials, gifts to temples, and the like indicate that obtaining justice in Kamakura involved a certain kind of spectacle as well as documentary evidence. That the court was also called a "garden" (niwa) suggests that Kamakura can be connected to a range of liminal sites possessing the aura of powerful places where other worlds impinged upon the present. As another of these "gardens," the Kamakura court, too, may be seen as participating in an economy in which the manipulation and maintenance of aura was as important as the weighing of evidence. The arrangement of the city and its temples, and the ceremonies performed there, suggest as much. Kamakura’s authority thus appears much more like that of the imperial court than is typically acknowledged. Behind both lay appeals to a realm of practices, including the performance of justice, that involved spectacle as much as the rational functioning of legal texts.