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Modern Japanese Fiction Oe Kenzaburo "Prize Stock" General
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| Criticism | Pictures | Links "Pan." The Oxford Companion to World mythology. Ed. David Leeming. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Web. 6 December 2010. Pan Europe The
Greek worshippers of this goat-horned, goat-legged god were none too
certain whether he was a single deity or a group of deities. Legend
makes Pan the son of Hermes, and the favourite of Dionysus, the
fertility god. His birthplace was Arcadia, the pastoral state in the
centre of the Peloponnese. Pan played on the syrinx and haunted caves
and lonely rural places. He was playful and energetic, but irritable,
especially if disturbed during his siesta. He could inspire fear, a
sudden groundless fright, in both men and animals. By blowing on a
conch shell he created panic when Zeus led the gods against Kronos and
the Titans. Like other Olympians, he enjoyed chasing nymphs, and
especially Echo. "Pan" A Dictionary of World Mythology. Ed. Arthur Cotterell. Oxford University Press, 1997. Oxford Reference Online. Web. 6 December 2010. pastoral a form of escape literature concerned with country pleasures, which is found in poetry, drama, and prose fiction. Its earliest examples appear in the Idylls of Theocritus in which shepherds lead a sunlit, idealized existence of love and song. The eclogues of Virgil and Longus' romance Daphnis and Chloe blended the idealization with a more authentic picture of country life, and Virgil added an important new feature to the tradition in making his poems a vehicle for social comment. Neglected during the Middle Ages, the pastoral reappeared during the Renaissance when Petrarch and his imitators composed eclogues in Latin and in the vernaculars. It was with the prose romance ( Sannazar, Cervantes, Sidney, D'Urfé), and the drama that pastoral attained its peak of popularity: Tasso's Aminto (1581), Guarini's Il Pastor Fido (1590, which served as a model for Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess ), Lodge's Rosalynde (the chief source of As You Like It ), Jonson's The Sad Shepherd , and Milton's Comus . In the 17th cent. the Theocritean vision gave place to a more realistic dream of enjoying a rural retreat. Poets like James Thomson extolled country pleasures and represented rural trades as enjoyable, until Crabbe showed that their descriptions were divorced from reality, and Wordsworth taught men to seek comfort in a Nature endowed with visionary power. The pastoral in its traditional form died with the rise of Romanticism. "pastoral." The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Ed. Margaret Drabble and Jenny Stringer. Oxford university Press, 2007. Oxford Reference Online. Web. 4 December 2009 pastoral A highly conventional mode of writing that celebrates the innocent life of shepherds and shepherdesses in poems, plays, and prose romances . Pastoral literature describes the loves and sorrows of musical shepherds, usually in an idealized Golden Age of rustic innocence and idleness; paradoxically, it is an elaborately artificial cult of simplicity and virtuous frugality. The pastoral tradition in Western literature originated with the Greek idylls of Theocritus (3rd century BCE), who wrote for an urban readership in Alexandria about shepherds in his native Sicily. His most influential follower, the Roman poet Virgil, wrote eclogues ( 42 -- 37 BCE ) set in the imagined tranquillity of Arcadia . In the 3rd century CE, the prose romance Daphnis and Chloe by Longus continued the tradition. An important revival of pastoral writing in the 16th century was led by Italian dramatists including Torquato Tasso and Battista Guarini , while long prose romances also appeared in other languages, notably Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia ( 1590 ) and Honoré d'Urfé's L'Astrée ( 1607 -- 27 ). English pastorals were written in several forms, from
the eclogues of Edmund Spenser's The Shephearde's Calender ( 1579 ) and
the comedy of Shakespeare's As You Like It ( c.1599 ) to lyrics like
Marlowe's ‘The Passionate Sheepeard to his Love’ ( 1600 ). A
significant form within this tradition is the pastoral elegy , in which
the mourner and the mourned are represented as shepherds in
decoratively mythological surroundings: the outstanding English example
is John Milton's ‘Lycidas’ ( 1637 ). While most forms of pastoral
literature died out during the 18th century, Milton's influence secured
for the pastoral elegy a longer life: P. B. Shelley's ‘Adonais’ ( 1821
) and Matthew Arnold's ‘Thyrsis’ ( 1867 ) are both elegiac imitations
of ‘Lycidas’. By the late 18th century, pastoral poetry had been
overshadowed by the related but distinct fashions for georgics and
topographical poetry , and it came to be superseded by the more
realistic poetry of country life written by George Crabbe , William
Wordsworth , and John Clare . For a fuller account, consult Terry
Gifford , Pastoral ( 1999 ). Other. Primarily understood as the other human being in his or her differences. The problem of other minds was first formulated clearly by John Stuart Mill in An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, although there are clear antecedents in Descartes . It was taken up by Husserl in the Fifth of his Cartesian Meditations where the other is constituted as an alter ego. However, it is only with Levinas that the philosophy of the Other was freed from the epistemological problematic. In Totality and Infinity Levinas charged previous philosophy, including that of Husserl , with reducing the Other to an object of consciousness and thereby failing to maintain its absolute alterity: the radically Other transcends me and the totality into whose network I seek to place it. According to Levinas, by challenging my self-assurance the Other opens the question of ethics. The priority of the Other becomes equivalent to the primacy of ethics over ontology. Questions have been raised about this conception of the Other. Derrida asked whether the absolute alterity of the Other is not inevitably compromised by the fact that the Other is other than what is given initially. The logical problem has especially devastating consequences in the political realm, particularly if the Other is not accorded the ethical priority Levinas gives it. In this way the now widespread use of the language of otherness in anthropological discourse to describe the West's encounter with non-Western cultures tends to keep the dominant discourse intact, just as the reference to the feminine as Other reasserts male privilege. The notion of the Other is also used by other European thinkers in a broader sense. Death, madness, the unconscious are all said to be Other. In each case the challenge of the Other is the same: that in some way the Other cannot be encapsulated within the thought-forms of Western philosophy without reducing the alterity of the Other. Bibliography Apollonian/Dionysian
Contrast introduced by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy
(1872) between the spirit of order, rationality, and intellectual
harmony, represented by Apollo, and the spirit of ecstatic, spontaneous
will to life, represented by Dionysius. In later writings Apollo
became, confusingly, more identified with Christian virtues, leaving a
calm classicist such as Goethe oddly classified as a Dionysian figure. Questions to mull over as you interpret the story "Prize Stock"
"Oe himself has referred to his 1950s stories with the Japanese term bokkateki, which means "pastoral." (Napier) "in the case of the black soldier in Oe's "Prize Stock," the man's characterization is so removed from quotidian reality as to be a deliberate icon of the Other, a surreal being whom the protagonist both admires and fears." (Napier) "these alternative pastoral communities, isolated in the mountains from the rest of Japan , became the staple environment of many of Oe's fictional products. They are consistent, spiritual reference points, yearned-for "non-places," where his characters retreat in times of crisis in order to escape the alienation of modern Japan, by drowning themselves in the all-encompassing sense of kyodotai (communality), a word and a feeling that are usually associated in Oe's works with primitivism, violence, and nature. "Shiiku," which was translated into two English versions-- "Prize Stock" and "The Catch," won Oe his second Akutagawa prize in 1958." (Napier) "The soldier and the village children form a positive kind of primitive community, while the supposed adults, in their war-engendered violence and slyness, come across as barbarians of a particularly vicious kind." (Napier) "The image of the pit recurs in Oe's later writings (once in "Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness," twice in The Silent Cry ), and acts as an obvious metaphor for a mythic "threshold," the place the hero must enter before he begins his journey. Structurally, the pit suggests a narrative movement upward and out, a kind of rebirth reinforced by the womblike aspects of the pit. As it turns out, however, the rebirth is a degraded one, an emergence into the unwanted agonies of adult perception, the realm of the Symbolic: rather than an outward movement, the story ends in yet another pit of death." (Napier) "The three most important elements that create this effect [romantic pastoralism] are, first, the isolation and anonymity of the setting (as Shinohara Shigeru points out, since none of the characters have proper names and are identified only by nickname or family relationship, the village could occupy any country, any time, or even an alternate mythic world; 24 in other words, it is a "non-place"); second, the use of the child's perspective; and, third, the exalted language surrounding the black soldier." (Napier) "As a child, Oe later explained, he had been taught that people from outside his little village were what Alfred Kurella calls "aliene" (crazy or mad). (4) Indeed, there had been few such strangers among the village populace." (Tachibana) "the focus of the story is a study of power and the paths through which it circulates, and that its handling of the issue of race can be understood in this context." (Tachibana) "Despite its fantastic and symbolic elements, Oe's story is basically a realistic depiction of the dispersion of power in a Japanese village community. Its inherent relationships of hierarchy are exacerbated by the presence of the black soldier, who, as a prisoner of war, puts nearly all of the villagers' power differentials into play." (Tachibana) "For a Japanese reader, the blackness of the soldier helps to create the effect of ika or defamiliarization, according to the theories of the Russian Formalists, which Oe knew. In a passage that Oe elsewhere quotes from Shklovsky, art is said to defamiliarize things that have become habitual or automatic: "The technique of art is to make objects `unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an esthetic end in itself" (12). (13) Oe's selection of the racial element to highlight in the tale prolongs the audience's perception by resisting or contravening the image of America (the West) held by the Japanese at the time, which was that it was a country where power, including military power, was held only by members of the white race." (Tachibana) "the Imperial Japanese Army declared war against the U.S. and England on 8 December 1941 under the slogan "Down with White Imperialism" in Asia . (14) During the war, Japanese radio propaganda repeatedly emphasized the cruel treatment by the Allied forces of black members of the American army, and, implying a natural alliance among people of color, called upon blacks to help drive out the white devils from Asia. (15)" (Tachibana) "But the villagers' merciless treatment of the black soldier defamiliarizes the propaganda of the Imperial Army as well as the wartime stereotype of the enemy as white. Though the Japanese term for black people is kokujin, in the story 0e also uses, deliberately, the derogatory term kuronbo to demonstrate the villagers' power over the soldier and their contempt for him. (16)" (Tachibana) "Hearing about the harsh discrimination against blacks in the U.S., the majority of Japanese people sympathized with them, despite the fact that racially mixed children in Japan (many of them orphans), especially children with dark skins born of Japanese mothers and African American fathers during the Occupation, were similarly discriminated against. Oe concludes that the Japanese could point out the need for "justice" for blacks in the U.S. since it was not their problem, but someone else's (Oe Kenzaburo dojidai ronshu 1, 15-17). In "Shiiku" he makes it evident that fear and hostility toward racial difference are indeed a Japanese problem too." (Tachibana) "Within Japan , the prefecture/town/village status differential implies the historical situation of the burakumin--the "descendants of the untouchables' of the pre-Meiji era [before 1868]," who were "by and large excluded from the mainstream of Japanese life and discriminated against" (Passin, 124). The members of this group were regarded as unclean, since they dealt with despised but necessary processes such as preparing animal skins [ . . . ], disposing of waste, and burying the dead." (Tachibana) "Beyond Japan , the prefecture/town/village relationship parallels that between Japan and the U.S. after the Japanese surrender of 1945, as well as the more "universal" relationship between colonized counties and colonizers or the so-called Third World and the industrialized nations. The control of Japan by Occupation forces constituted a situation in which people lived with constant feelings of shame and the humiliating need to defer to others to make decisions or authorize actions." (Tachibana) "In his 1995 essay "The Day the Emperor Spoke in a Human Voice" [. . .], Oe states that during the war, he, like other children, had thought of Japan's rulers as "filling the sky, their Imperial Majesties the Emperor and Empress, mounted on a cloud" (103), with a belief in a glorious and honorable death for the emperor, and that at the end of the war, "the Emperor speaking to us in a human voice was beyond imagining in any reverie" (103). (23) To Oe's further surprise, the emperor soon transformed "completely" from a god into a human being through his human proclamation (ningen sengen) of January 1946" (Tachibana). "As in Dionysian mythology, the black airman in the story gradually becomes an object of faith among the villagers, especially among the young boys, who savor the excitement of a festival. [. . . . ]. In the story, my imagination unfolds in a manner found more in the realm of myth than in folklore, although, of course, folklore of similar content is recounted synchronically in many parts of the world." (Kenzaburo) And finally, consider the following email from a Japanese student Dr. Bordelon, I was going over the lesson plan for Prize Stork and found the word "buraku-min---the descendants of the untouchables." (Tachibana) Now I see the story in a new set of lights. If you see the village as buraku, an area where those buraku-mins live, the term "frog" makes sense to me. There is a Japanese saying that goes "Kaeru no kowa Kaeru (A frog's child is a frog)." English equivalents are "Like father, like son." or "Blood will tell." I see a barn burning like crazy… I suppose this saying makes a negative reference to buraku system (Japanese equivalent of the caste system). The label of braku-min is hereditary and unavoidable. To this date, it is said that you can tell from a person's family name if he/she is a braku-min. Also, a quick internet search on keywords "braku" + "kaeru (frog)" showed me that this saying -- A frog's child is a frog -- appears on some lists of words that are not allowed to be used on air. And also (don't be shocked!), those lists included words such as "one-legged", "one-armed", "kuronbo" and "harelip" Now I see clearly that the village is a buraku. For buraku-mins made their living by businesses other people avoided, such as slaughtering, skinning animals, cremations. I remember you mentioned last week in the class, that those village people look like they are not being involved in agriculture or farming. I should have noticed the oddness of it right there, for it is a clear hint of the village being "braku." This is a possible reason why Oe has not been treated as the other [Japanese] Novel Prize winner. Buraku issue is such a dark and stigmatic concept; it looks like Japan's education system, to this date, doesn't know what to do with it or with Oe.
Links Lehmann, Chris. "Admiring Oe's Talent for Discomfort." National Public Radio, August 3, 2006,
© 2010 David Bordelon
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