Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Been reading WUBC for about a year and a half; finally finished. As usual with Murakami, one is left feeling that this is a roman a clef, sans clef. One gets the big picture, if not the details, through the grand hotel-room speech at the end justifying the allegory: the legacy of Showa history is that thing, not quite like a to-be-aborted-baby, which can be drawn forth either for psychic healing or for a power grab. The details would probably require a knowledge of Japanese pop historiography and LDP machinations, circa mid-80's.

Without access to the specialist's knowledge, though, I am a little befuddled in trying to assess the jacket-blurbs that, quite naturally, call this epic. One does not need to endorse the idea that there can be a transhistorical genre called "epic" to wonder what motivates the NY literary-industrial complex to invoke the term. Is it reducible to length + history? One is tempted to speak of the "sweep" of a text in preparing the way for "epic" designation, but this is of course merely a substitution of one metaphor for another. I am reluctant to turn this into yet one more iteration of the poststructuralist game, though--it would be nice to come up with a provisional description of what is left to the term "epic" now, after the death of literary historiography.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland

• Remarkable how a book dedicated to gender and reproduction, and which anticipates third-wave feminism in its refusal to accept essentialisms, manages to avoid any mention of sexuality. Strategic feminism for Edwardian times?
• Also, the author shows amazing restraint in writing from the male first-person point of view; this could have been bitter satire, but the narrator is treated with such sympathy, one suspects CPG is trying to sway male readers to support political reform.
  

H.M. Posnett, Comparative Literature 1.1, "What is Literature?"

When an author begins an initial chapter with the self-declared purpose of offering a definition of the object of study, and then hedges this definition round, before and after, with qualification after qualification which, in final analysis, do in fact qualify the definition out of all usefulness; and when the author then declares the discovery of uselessness to be the prime benefit of the exercise, one would at least expect him to be deliberately tweaking authoritative expectations. But who is the authority whom Posnett addresses, and why would he feel the need to act like a satirist (albeit without much humor in the irony)? If CL were a doctoral dissertation, then I would recognize the passive-aggressive tone--but I believe that it was written after HMP had his position. Perhaps this chapter was provided at the request of the editors of the International Scientific Series, in their need to justify and explain the presence of the book?

戴天, “岣嵝山论辩”

Dai Tian is encroaching on old territory here. Once the Daoism starts to come through, in lines like:

问题是什么

是山

你说到底

存在还是不存在

道理是什么

是有还是没有

是名词还是

实质

Then it isn't so very hard to jump immediately to Messrs. Ouyang and Su, respectively:

平山阑槛倚晴空。山色有无中。手种堂前垂柳，别来几度春风。文章太守，挥毫万字，一饮千钟。行乐直须年少，尊前看取衰翁。

落日绣帘卷，亭下水连空。知君为我，新作窗户湿青红。长记平山堂上，敧枕江南烟雨，渺渺没孤鸿。认得醉翁语，山色有无中。一千顷，都镜净，倒碧峰。忽然浪起，掀舞一叶白头翁。堪笑兰台公子，未解庄生天籁，刚道有雌雄。一点浩然气，千里快哉风。

Does writing in the vernacular really mean that one has to substitute the prolix "存在还是不存在" for the concise "有无中"? The latter is hardly out of bounds, linguistically, for any competent contemporary speaker of Chinese. But, of course, this is a problem compounded by the subject of the poem. Not only, apparently, "Which is the real Mt. Goulou if they both look the same?" but also, "Is the substance of my Daoist-experience-of-the-mountain functionally equivalent to those of the Song lyricists, when I no longer can (or at least choose to) express it in the same words?" Perhaps this is part of the point here: what is the complaint against prolixity anyway, that it is non-signifying? Hmmm…"Neo-Song Postmodern"?