Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji (Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Lit) by James McMullen

Author:James McMullen [McMullen, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-04-30T05:00:00+00:00

Any reader will pick up on the erotic vibes here; “insider” readers may do so in part through recognition of the figure of “smoldering desire” transferred to a burning flame of one kind or another as a time-tested waka trope (many editions, including Washburn’s, cite a particular poem in the Kokinshū as a touchstone). But the whole vignette is itself a replay of such dialogues-in-verse between wooing males and resisting (often dismissive, or at least very guarded) women, which are ubiquitous in monogatari, in diaries that also work in and with poems, and in “love” (koi)-themed sections of topically categorized and sequenced anthologies. Furthermore, Genji’s “eternal flame of love” is also a doubling, two-layered affair: he refers both to his unquenched passion for Tamakazura and for her long-dead mother, Yūgao, and summons into this flame-lit garden the remembered traces of her smoldering funeral pyre (which he did not see with his own eyes, but heard tell of in Koremitsu’s eyewitness report). Tamakazura fires back with a prediction (and a wish) that his fickle passions may soon disperse into thin air. In short, this vignette is already overloaded and overdetermined by its intertext, which reaches back into as well as far outside the Tale’s text itself—all with one move, one sleight of hand, abracadabra, multivalent conjuring act—but it thereby gains in its poetic and (melo)dramatic vigor, bite, and gently parodic (or parasitic?) seriocomic stop-action momentousness—all of which quickly passes, like the chapter itself, leaving an ash-like or vaporous, bittersweet resonance and acrid odor in its wake.

I have suggested that one might read the Tale as a housing for poems, or for poetry itself. Within that construct, furthermore, there are certain poems, and particularly fragments, or “smoky, vaporous traces,” or ghosts of poems that are brought into its space and the reader’s sphere of attention, which then seem to refuse to leave, to resist exorcism, but rather insist upon reasserting themselves, thereby complicating and enriching the texture of the text in their particular ways, with their own lingering flavors—sweet, bitter, acrid, always fragrant. This is especially true of certain poetic traces that are introduced into the text’s extended (fifty-four-chapter-long) orchestration through fragmentary quotation (in’yō). One might cite many examples: there are the recurring references to Bai Juyi’s “Song of Unending Sorrow,” beginning in the very first chapter (“Kiritsubo”) in the account of Genji’s father’s grief over the boy’s mother’s devastating death, which mirrors—as does their whole love story—that of the Tang Chinese emperor and his consort who are the song’s protagonists. There is also the morphed revivification, through poetic quotation and adroit rearrangement, of the theme and attendant figures of nostalgic longing associated with the scent of orange blossoms, which thoroughly imbues and around which the short but evocative Chapter 11 “Hanachirusato” is built and that gives the woman with whom Genji falls in love in it her lasting “name,” “the lady of the house of scattering [orange] blossoms.” But here I will dwell on what may be the most frequently recurrent

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.