The "Debate over Pure Literature"
New (to me) intel on novels, from Japan
Happy new year, dear readers! I’m writing to you on the plane back to New York from Tokyo, where I’ve been working on a literature-related magazine story that has been taking up all my bandwidth for weeks and weeks. I’m really excited to share more about that soon, but for now I’ll just say that it involved some interviews with Japanese publishing people, during the course of which I was impressed by the number of mentions of a “debate over pure literature” that took place between Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Junichiro Tanizaki in 1927. So I decided to do some background reading about the history of the “modern novel” in Japan, and OMG you guys! So much useful intel I had never encountered elsewhere (e.g. in comp lit/ theory of the novel classes in the US). Truly, specialization is the bane of human, and probably non-human, progress! So that’s what I’m going to write about today, for as long as I can stay awake.
Quick caveat: this is basically based on what I managed to retain from sitting in various Renoir Ginza locations, speed-reading the Japan chapters of the Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, so it’s not a highly researched or expert opinion, and will not be news for anyone who has taken a Japanese literature 101. But it was news for me! Lots of new thoughts about language, objectivity, and fictionality in the novel!
Quick acknowledgment of “pre-modern” novels in Japan: as you probably know, The Tale of Genji was composed in the eleventh century, by an imperial lady-in-waiting, Murasaki Shikibu—whose authorship doesn’t seem to have struck anyone (e.g. literary men) as strange, or caused them to minimize her work, which I must say I already find remarkable… and check out these beautiful and dignified illustrations of Lady Murasaki working on her book:
Anyway, the “modern Japanese novel” is a form that emerges through dialogue with the Western novel, during the Meiji Restoration (1868-89): a period of modernization and self-imposed Westernization, designed to avoid invasion by the actual West—so, not totally unlike the Petrine reforms in Russia, or the Kemalist reforms in Turkey. (It is so interesting to think about how these resonances figure into Russian, Japanese, and Turkish novels—but that is a way longer story, even longer than this flight.)
In 1886, Tsubouchi Shōyō—a critic and translator of Shakespeare (and also of Edward Bulwer-Lytton,1 whose novels were somehow hugely influential in Japanese—publishes a famous book called The Essence of the Novel (Shōsetsu shinzui), explaining that novels are a vehicle for profound human truth, calling for the production of Japanese psychological realism, and establishing shōsetsu as an equivalent of “novel.” The following year, Shōyō’s protegé, Futabatei Shimei, starts publishing Drifting Clouds, widely considered Japan’s “first modern novel.”
Drifting Clouds tells the story of Bunzō, an ineffectual public servant who is in love with his cousin; the cousin is into Bunzō’s rival, Noboru (Ascent) (same name as the villain in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) who embodies the achievement-oriented values of Meiji culture. Echoes of Oblomov, you say? OK, get this: as Futabatei was forging the new register of Japanese necessary for writing novels, he periodically switched to writing in Russian (he was also a Russian translator), and then translated back to Japanese. This wasn’t the speediest process, and there were gaps in serialization. The biggest gap was in 1888-89, during which Futabatei published two translations of Turgenev (two stories from A Sportsman’s Sketches), so he could emulate Turgenev’s narrating subject!
This brings me to something else that blew my mind about Japanese Westernization. I mean OK, thanks to Benedict Anderson, I was expecting that they were going to standardize the systems of time and writing, and disseminate those standards through novels, newspapers, etc.; and, on the language end, I wasn’t surprised to learn that it was complicated to choose what regional dialect would be standard, or to forge a synthesis of vernacular and classical/ literary language (genbunitchi) that ordinary people could use. But then there was some stuff I had never heard of. E.g. that one of the questions, because of Japanese grammar, was how to express the kind of “individual, autonomous, apparently objective and neutral subjectivity featured in Anglo-European novels, newspapers, [and] legal systems”—which was apparently not expressible up to then, and was probably part of what Futabatei was wrestling with. To quote the Columbia Companion: “every Japanese speech act (even today) encodes markers of hierarchical and personal relationship between speaker and hearer,” so there was no obvious way to write a sentence that was “independent of its context, and independent of a specific pair of interlocutors.”
[Even at a beginning level of Japanese, I can sort of see this—e.g. you use different verb forms, pronouns, etc., depending on who you’re talking to, and there are many words for “I,” with different degrees of distance, intimacy, femininity, brashness, cuteness, etc.; the original title of Natsume Sōseki’s I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru) is a joke, because “wagahai” is a particularly lofty form of “I,” for use with less lofty beings (cat dialogism).]
One big question thus involved omniscient narration:
In Japanese it is, strictly speaking, not possible to make a declarative statement about someone else’s state of mind, along the lines of “Mary is happy,” for example. One can only say that Mary “looks” happy, or “seems” happy, or “is reported to be” happy. In a language so tied to the phenomenology of personal experience and interpersonal relationships, so evidently mistrustful of “omniscience,” how could a linguistic stance of “objectivity” be framed?
And what’s really fascinating to me is that some critics draw a line between the Japanese grammatical bias against omniscience, and the prominent role played by autobiographical material in the history of the Japanese novel.
This seems to start (is reported to start?) in the movement called “Japanese naturalism” (shizenshugi), which begins in the 1900s with translations of Zola and Flaubert. Japanese naturalism doesn’t seem that similar to Zola-style naturalism—it isn’t about the fate-like operation of scientific or social-scientific forces—but is more about “small-scale perversions, always with a personal connection to the author’s life,” with a focus on “unpleasant, embarrassing, even shameful aspects.”
A famous example, Katai Tayama’s The Quilt (Futon, 1907), tells the story of a married, middle-aged, Tayama-like writer who falls in love with a young woman boarding in his house; he “is devastated when she takes his advice about individualism and romantic love seriously” and runs away with a younger guy. (Rookie mistake.) The title comes from the last scene, when the writer “buries his face in her used bedding to recapture her scent.” (Damn!) It was known in literary circles that Tayama had had a similar relationship with a protegée who had “left his tutelage” to be with someone her age. The Quilt was received as a revolutionary, shocking confession of shameful emotions.
According to the Columbia Companion, the (apparently otherwise inexplicable) popularity of such “squalid” narratives, and of Japanese naturalism in general, is rooted in a linguistic “prejudice against fictionality”:
Because in normal (nonliterary) contexts the Japanese language has no way of directly expressing the feelings of another person, the creation of an omniscient narrator, able to narrate the innermost feelings and thoughts of a fictional character, seems unnatural, epistemologically invalid, to many readers and critics… The veracity, accuracy and sincerity—the truth value—of a narrative based on the author’s own life experiences could be trusted. The truth value of an obviously fictional narrative could not.
I almost cried when I read this. Given that many people in the US still think of a “novel” as a book with no relationship to referential truth (otherwise it would be “nonfiction”), and given the many hours of my life that I’ve spent explaining why I don’t find this framework useful, I was so moved to learn that some significant percentage of Japanese novelists, and novel readers, were resistant to the idea of any one person claiming to know other people’s mental states—or were resistant to the idea of writers leaving out their subjective access to information about other people’s mental states.
In interviews, I have often been asked about “autofiction,” “turning my life into fiction,” etc.—and the thing is, I don’t see it as “turning my life into fiction.” I see it as a reluctance or inability to make claims about other people’s mental states. Not that I couldn’t do it; but WHY should I do it—why should I HAVE to do it—when I might well be (and surely would be) mistaken? Why not describe mental states that I’ve actually experienced, in contexts similar to the ones that actually evoked those mental states—rather than trying to abstract away to some other situation that I don’t know about? If my goal is to understand more about the mystery of interpersonal relations, and/ or to convey a representation of that mystery for others to work from… why would I risk using mistaken mental states?
I will add also that the part about Japanese grammar and “Mary is reported to be happy” resonated for me with the -miş suffix in Turkish, which I wrote about in The Idiot. Turkish distinguishes grammatically between what the speaker knows firsthand, versus what they know only by hearsay. Folktales start out with the hearsay suffix (“once upon a time there was apparently a woodcutter”); but novels and newspapers are usually presented like firsthand knowledge. I’m a native English speaker, but on some level I often think in terms of -miş, especially with novels. (This is actually what my dissertation was about: how some novels implicitly raise the question of the novelist’s epistemological access to the characters and events of the plot.) I don’t think it’s possible to read The Magic Mountain without wondering how much time Mann spent in Swiss sanatoria (three weeks in 1912); and I don’t think this question arises primarily from extraliterary knowledge about Mann, so much as from internal features in the text. (I suspect this might be the case even with books like The Quilt, but that is another story.)
In Japan, “naturalism” eventually gives rise to the form known as shishōsetsu (or watakushi-shōsetsu—both possible ways to pronounce “私小説”), often translated as “the I-novel,” and “considered by many the most ‘Japanese’ of literary forms.” The I-novel can be in the first or the third person, but it has a single narrative focal point: a protagonist whose life circumstances resemble those of the author. One example, Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human, is now Tiktok famous because Osamu Dazai appears as a character in a popular manga/ anime called Bungo Stray Dogs, where he has a superpower called “No longer human,” which I believe involves shouting “No longer human!” and then he shoots lightning and “nullifies” other people.
[I am guessing that Bungo Stray Dogs is named after the Stray Dog Cafe in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg? characters include both Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol; Gogol’s secret power is called “The Overcoat” and is “quite useful for shoplifting.”]
Other well-known I-novelists include Shiga Naoya and Shimazaki Tōson, both also characters in Bungo Stray Dogs.
OK, this brings us to the debate between Tanizaki and Akutagawa. You probably already know Tanizaki, author of The Makioka Sisters, Devils in Daylight, and many other wonderful books available in English; Akutagawa is less translated, but very famous in Japan (the major Japanese literary prize is named after him, and Kurosawa’s “Rashōmon” is based on one of his stories).
During his short career, Akutagawa published books in a range of styles, including nostalgic sparkly tales of early Meiji, dark Russian-sounding narratives about life-ruining doppelgängers, and, in later years, autobiographical fiction, “a genre he had long resisted.” The autobiographical fiction was fragmented and somewhat troubling, and in 1927, at age thirty-five, Akutagawa committed suicide.
The debate started earlier that same year, when Akutagawa said in a magazine interview that he thought that “truth” was more important than “imagination,” and that novels didn’t need contrived or sensational plots.
Tanizaki wrote a rebuttal, professing his own addiction “to what Stendhal had called ‘beautiful lies.’” (Pause to imagine what it would be like if you did an interview in a magazine and then it was rebutted by Tanizaki.) Praising the “swashbuckling historical fiction” known as chanbara, he went so far as to say that anything that wasn’t fictional was boring to him.
Akutagawa replied that chanbara reflected the worst excesses of the Edo period; hadn’t Shōyō demonstrated that novels weren’t just for entertainment, but for expressing profound truths? Tanizaki countered that the novel was “uniquely effective for making maximum use of plot,” and that it would be wasteful not to use this capacity.
By then, Akutagawa, who had started out saying that truth was more important than plot, was stuck defending the more extreme position that novels shouldn’t use plot. I will just quote the Columbia Companion here:
Akutagawa’s reply seemed to demonstrate his discomfort with the position he was now forced to defend. In it he repeatedly emphasized that there are many good kinds of fiction—he did not mean to exclude the possibility of architectural beauty. But just as there are good paintings with clear, representational pictures and also good paintings that are more abstract, it should also be possible to see value in various kinds of novels.
He added that a novel following the main character’s life “could be very ‘pure.’” When he took an overdose of barbital on July 27 of that year, “contemporaries attributed it partly to his despondence over having ‘lost’ the debate.”
OK, so I love Tanizaki… but I’m obviously very sympathetic to Akutagawa. And even though I’m hugely grateful to the Columbia Companion (especially the chapters by Sharalyn Orbaugh), the portrayal of the Akutagawa/ I-novelist side of the debate sounds a little bit off to me. E.g. at some point it says that, whereas Tanizaki thought that “the writer’s own personality should be obliterated in his work,” the I-novelists thought that “the most important task of literature was to present the unvarnished, unmediated experiences of the author himself.” I just can’t imagine an actual novelist saying, or thinking, “The most important task of literature is for me to present my unvarnished, unmediated experiences.” If you thought that, why would you write novels?
I also wasn’t sure about the following comparison between autobiographical writers, and writers who “defend the place of imagination in fiction”:
The [non-autobiographical] writer is somewhat godlike in his or her ability to create an entirely fictional world. But the [autobiographical] author is also godlike, in that the image of his persona, built up over many “personal” works, is the sole focus of attention and value. The “world” the reader sees in such works is the limited, solipsistic world of the author. Nonetheless, it was believed by many writers and critics that even such a narrow viewpoint was valuable in its ability to reveal human “truth.”
I have a couple of responses. One response: “Why does it matter who is more godlike?” Another response... OK, I haven’t read enough Japanese I-novels to challenge this evaluation; maybe they really are terrible. (I will say that I greatly enjoyed No Longer Human, and am also digging The Beggar Student (“A fictional writer in his thirties named Osamu Dazai has just mailed his publisher an awful manuscript, filling him with dread and shame”), translated by Sam Bett, which I started reading after attending a fantastic conversation between Bett and Yuki Tejima about translating Dazai’s humor.) But at least in theory, I don’t think the autobiographical novelist is necessarily the “sole focus of attention and value.” Surely no sane person would say that Proust’s narrator is “the sole focus of attention and value” in In Search of Lost Time, a work that is so concerned with the lives of others—albeit with the acknowledgment that our only access to those lives is mediated by our own subjectivity and the story of our personal relationships. Anything we describe outside of that is a fictional hypothesis, an act of presumption.
There can be a lot of value in such an act of presumption. It can feel true and soaring and exciting and transcendent, like when Tolstoy or Eliot swoops into someone’s POV and you feel, “that’s exactly what that person would think”—and then they swoop into someone else’s perspective, and it’s like the Matrix, and for a second you, the reader, become the single point of comprehension and resolution of all human disagreements.
But there’s also value in the act of presumption that consists of believing that (some) readers can tolerate reading about an actual person, from that own person’s perspective, without dismissing it as solipsism, or self-promotion, or whatever else the “self-hatred” voice says when it’s telling people to stfu. There’s value in the idea that you don’t HAVE to disguise lived experience as a symmetrical story that fits a form described by Aristotle, in order for others to not find it repellent. There is value in how real Proust is about his childhood suffering when his parents had dinner guests—and in how that suffering comes back in some incredibly twisted way after six volumes, and he’s standing in a driveway and transcends time—and if he was a manga character, that would be his superpower, and lightning would shoot out of his head and he would shout: “TIME REGAINED!”
What I’m saying is, there are a lot of ways for a novel to be great.
This made me think about the roles assumed in the debate by Akutagawa and Tanizaki. In normal life, the two were friends. Both had written well-regarded I-novels, AND books with fictional plots. Nonetheless, they got in a heated argument that continues to this day, and makes other people heated when they talk or write about it.
I find myself remembering an encounter I had with a novelist some years ago on a books panel. I had just published Either/Or, and she had published a sweeping multi-perspective novel with a constructed plot. The panel got a question about using autobiographical material. The non-autobiographical novelist—a brilliant and delightful person; I probably share 95% of her views on literature—said something like: I could never violate the women in my family by doing that.
Well, there I was, stuck defending the women-violators. I launched into some version of my standard response, viz.: I stand against the honor/ shame culture; one way that culture is sustained is through the idea that “we don’t air our dirty laundry”—i.e., it’s shameful, a betrayal of honor, to narrate one’s own subjective reality (which invariably implicates others). Novelists, feeling the shame they’re supposed to, distort their experiences. As a result, we all grew up reading accounts that don’t reflect reality, making us feel more alone with our own shame. Therefore, even though I put a value on not exploiting my personal relationships, and not causing pain to people I care about, I ALSO put a value on not censoring my subjective reality, and not perpetuating the sanitized version of personal life that benefits various power structures; for me, writing often involves a painful struggle between those considerations.
This is an emotional issue for me, so I wasn’t cool and collected in my answer, and I definitely managed to say something that annoyed the more fictional novelist. Probably I sounded like I was implying that she was perpetuating shame culture and existing power structures—which admittedly would have been pretty rude, and wasn’t my intention—but I remember backstage she said something about how at least she wasn’t betraying everyone in her life. Even at that time I remember thinking: this isn’t actually about her or me; this is about some powerful force that’s talking through us. So I was greatly struck to feel this force talking through Tanizaki and Akutagawa (and then talking to me, again, through publishing people in Tokyo).
To an extent, I think this “debate” is a fake one. My favorite novels include both omniscient sprawling POV swoop-fests (like The Makioka Sisters), AND novels where the protagonist’s life circumstances mirror those of the author. And yet… I do think there may actually be a breakdown in disposition between writers who feel more oppressed by the thought of having to make things up, versus writers who feel more oppressed by the thought of being confined to their paltry existence. Not that there isn’t fluidity between the categories, or that people can’t move between them—but it’s a divide I have definitely come up against in conversations with other novelists.
Perspicacious readers! As you may have guessed, not even a 14-hour flight was long enough to write this very long post; days have gone by since I landed in New York, and here I must leave you.
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