Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

Shishosetsu and the myth of sincerity

Jill Walker had heard about but not read Vigdis Hjorth’s novel, Om bar, which “the literary crowd at the university and Café Opera agreed was a malicious act of vengeance against Hjorth’s ex-partner, who happens to be a professor of literature [at the University of] Bergen. The novel was unanimously decried as terrible, awful, embarrassingly bad, as well as morally despicable.”

When she read the book, Jill was surprised and impressed:

It’s amazing. Relentlessly honest, but not at all in the simplistic sense of gossip and scandals. Yes, it can be read as a very thinly disguised account of the author’s relationship to the professor, but its factual accuracy (or lack of such) is irrelevant because the honesty here is of an altogether different nature. It is in the emotions portrayed: merciless love that shoves aside all normality, all sense, all expectations as to how we (women? mothers? people?) are supposed to behave. The extremity of it is terrifying and recognisable. I see it in myself and in my friends (calm, married women turn thirty and explode), though we pull back before we lose ourselves, only glimpsing the destructive potential of such obsession.

The debate about this book has been symmetrically opposite to some of the recent complaints about truthfulness and blogs. The novel that is too close to reality is ridiculed and condemned. The blogger, on the other hand, is expected to adhere strictly to what actually happened.

How strange.

“The novel that is too close to reality is ridiculed and condemned.” Not universally. In the shishōsetsu—one of the most influential genres in the Japanese novelistic tradition—the praise and admiration bestowed on a book depended almost entirely on how closely it adhered to the reality of the author’s life.

The titles of the three main studies in English of the shishōsetsu—Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit’s Rituals of Self-Revelation, Edward Fowler’s The Rhetoric of Confession, and Tomi Suzuki’s Narrating the Self—neatly illustrate how strongly the shishōsetsu narrative is grounded in the writer’s lived experience.

In the introduction to his study, Edward Fowler provides a useful overview of the genre’s main characteristics:

the shishōsetsu (more formally watakushi shōsetsu; commonly translated as “I-novel”), [is] an autobiographical form that flourished in Taishō Japan (1912-26). The shishōsetsu, narrated in the first or third person in such a way as to represent with utter conviction the author’s personal experience, is riddled with paradoxes. Supposedly a fictional narrative, it often reads more like a private journal. It has a reputation of being true, to a fault, to “real life”; yet it frequently strays from the author’s experience it allegedly portrays so faithfully. Its personal orientation makes it a thoroughly modern form; yet it is the product of an indigenous intellectual tradition quite disparate from western individualism. Progressive critics have ridiculed it over the decades as a failed adaptation of the western novel, while traditionalists have reveled in its difference. The difference lies not so much in its autobiographical “purity” (as the Japanese literary establishment, or bundan, would have us believe), however, as in its ultimate distrust of western-style realistic representation from which it has presumably borrowed so heavily. Its critically mixed reception notwithstanding, the shishōsetsu has been championed by many important writers and occupies a central position in modern Japanese letters. Coming to terms with it means coming to terms in many ways with the entire literature.

The Rhetoric of Confession contains—nested between a lengthy introduction outlining the difference between Japanese and Western narrative method and a brief epilogue dealing with contemporary shishōsetsu—three main sections: an examination of the social, linguistic, and literary foundations of the shishōsetsu; an explanation of how the form developed and its reception by readers and critics; and, finally, detailed studies of three shishōsetsu authors.

The title of Part 1—The “Transparent” Text—as well as the titles of its three chapters—Fictions and Fabrications, Language and the Illusion of Presence, and Shishōsetsu Criticism and the Myth of Sincerity—should offer some clues as to how reading and thinking about both shishōsetsu and shishōsetsu criticism over an extended period (albeit in English, rather than the original Japanese) has shaped my thinking about the inherent contradictions in writing for what is widely regarded as a self-revelatory medium, the weblog.

Why does the shishōsetsu fascinate me? Because it uses, in Edward Fowler’s words, “the techniques of essay, diary, confession, and other non-fictional forms to present the fiction of a faithfully recorded experience.” In other words, it collapses genres that are commonly regarded in the Western tradition as quite separate and exploits the tension between fictional and non-fictional modes of representation.

Why does the shishōsetsu fascinate me in relation to blogging? Partly because of similiarities between issues that have arisen since I acknowledged that some elements of my weblog entries were fabricated and how those same issues were regarded and articulated in Taishō Japan. Mainly because I suspect that both the way the problems were resolved over time and the differing Japanese and Western perceptions of the shishōsetsu might offer clues about writing for a self-revelatory medium.

Fowler explains that while the shishōsetsu’s name suggests it should be read as fiction, most Japanese critics (and readers) treat it as non-fiction:

By far the most common approach to the shishōsetsu has been the nonfictional one, for the general critical perception has been that it is resistant by definition to analysis as an autonomous text. Unlike “pure literature” in the west, which calls to mind an author aloof from his writing after the manner of Flaubert or Joyce, “pure literature” in Japan (a category to which the shishōsetsu belongs) is considered inherently referential in nature: its meaning derives from an extraliterary source, namely, the author’s life. The Japanese as readers of shishōsetsu have tended to regard the author’s life, and not the written work, as the definitive “text” on which critical judgment ultimately rests and to see the work as meaningful only insofar as it illuminates the life. The Japanese reader constructs a “sign” out of the signifying text and the signified extraliterary life, with no misgivings about this apparent blending of “intrinsic” literary and “extrinsic” biographical data. Literature which is not “pure” (i.e. literature that does not serve as a window on the author’s life) is relegated to the realm of “popular” reading and considered less worthy of critical attention.

In his introduction, Fowler also explains how the shishōsetsu author was highly conscious of one particular aspect of classical Japanese literature, “what might best be described as the actor-audience relationship”:

Classical poetry and drama, for example, especially in the centuries immediately preceding the modern period, are noted for their strong tradition of audience participation in the reading—one almost wants to say mutual production—of a text. Haiku artists like Bashō and Issa filled their poetic stages with their presence in a way that made every observation, however grounded in experience or in nature, a virtuoso linguistic performance. Readers were attracted to the persona as much as to the poem and read each verse or sketch against the larger image of the poet they had constructed from the corpus.

In a similar way, the shishōsetsu “thrived on an intimate actor-audience rapport made possible by the audience’s homogeneity and limited size”:

Readers of the shishōsetsu in its heyday (the second and third decades of this century) numbered only in the thousands. They would recognize the authorial persona in any story regardless of the main character’s (or narrator’s) name or situation. The convention of the author as an actor who played himself had the effect of drawing the reader closer to the narrator-hero and creating a bond that was often stronger than the reader’s affection for any single text. Out of this relationship emerged the institution of the bundan, which means, simply, literary circle(s) but which in the Taishō period referred specifically to that close alliance of writers, critics, and interested readers who had an emotional or intellectual stake in the equation between art and private life. Neither author nor reader took seriously the realistic convention of an anonymous, omnescient narrator who remained hidden behind the characters he created. For both, reality in literature stemmed largely from the narrator’s ability to speak in literally the same voice as his hero and thereby invite reader identification.

It’s impossible not to draw a comparison between the Taishō period bundan—the rhetorical triangle (as Jeff Ward might describe it) of writers, critics, and readers—and what one might call a Blogarian bundan, also made up of writers (of original posts), critics (other bloggers who respond on their own blogs and readers who leave comments), and interested readers (who feel compelled neither to blog nor to comment but are sufficiently engaged to read a weblog over time).

In the light of the debate that’s occurred over the past week or so, this passage from Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit’s Rituals of Self-Revelation resonates:

…the specific interpretation of the naturalist demand for truth in the sense of unsparing personal revelation and its adoption in literary practice by Katai, Tōson, Hōmei, and others gave the bundan the character of a controlling body, which could attest to whether the work involved corresponded to the facts and could so certify or deny the degree of sincerity, that is, the artistic value of a work. Reviews were essentially an examination of the relationship between fact in the work and in reality, which the general reader could follow upon their publication.

The only problem is, as Jeff Ward pointed out:

Facts only mean something when they are directly experienced. When they are written down, they are subject to distortions and lies that have little to do with the original event. It depends a lot on who says them.

It’s for exactly this reason that I’ve suggested that “honesty” and “sincerity” in self-revelatory weblog posts are, at best, problematic; or, at worst, illusory. Again, Jeff Ward:

We weasel our way around it by summoning motive to justify our bending of the truth. Often these motives are rhetorical and transparent—but just as often these motives are opaque, hidden, personal, and not apparent even to ourselves. We construct our image of self by creating consistent fictions. There are seldom easy points of reference to measure truth, especially regarding our selves.

Similarly, Fowler, Hijiya-Kirschnereit, and Suzuki—using different arguments and analytical methods—all call into question the transparency and sincerity of the shishōsetsu. About Shiga Naoya, the acknowledged master of the form, whose nickname was shōsetsu no kamisama (the god of the shōsetsu), Fowler says:

That a writer like Shiga really does sound more sincere than others, then, is a tribute not to his honesty but to his mastery of the rhetoric (the intimate voice, ellipses, allusions, etc.) of authenticity.

(A master of the rhetoric of authenticity. Sounds rather like George Segal.)

It should come as no surprise, then, that Shiga Naoya (and Nagai Kafū, whose best work subverts shishōsetsu conventions) are my favorite authors nor that a few years ago, when asked why I’ve put so much time and energy into studying Japanese, I replied: “So that one day I can read [Shiga’s] An’ya kōro (A Dark Night’s Passing) and [Kafū’s] Bokutō kidan (A Strange Tale from East of the River) in Japanese, rather than English.” I really want to experience the myth of sincerity—without the layer of mediation imposed by a translation.

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