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CHAPTER II. THE CLASSIC NOVEL

THE BEGINNING OF THE NOVEL IN JAPAN

Japan produced the first great novel of world literature, Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji). The author, Murasaki Shikibu, was a court lady who lived in the tenth century.

The Tale of Genji was the culmination of a literary current which had produced other tales (monogatari) previously: Taketori Monogatari and Utsubo Monogatari, possibly from the same unknown writer; Ise Monogatari and its poor imitations; Yamato Monogatari; and Hamamatsu Chunagon Monogatari. Nearly all of these and the other tales or narratives which came afterwards told stories that were too complicated or fantastic, though brushed in most delicate tones.

Ochikubo Monogatari (The Tale of Lady Ochikubo) is nearer the idea of a novel than any of the others. In it there is a naïvely woven plot, some characterization, and a few poems sprinkled with images as subtle as: "Your love, as fleeting as a shade on a mirror."

The liveliest and largest collection of tales (one of the largest in the world) is the Konjaku Monogatari (Tales of Ages Ago). It includes more than one thousand tales collected from China, India, and Japan during the eleventh century. Its amazing variety, rich folklore, Oriental custom, legend, and Buddhist moral examples make it most enticing reading even today.

The monogatari were in such profusion that a critic of the time compared them with the grains of sand on Arisomi beach. The novel originated within the cultured circle of society that surrounded the emperor. Though written in a language which was not much regarded by scholars of the time (novels were written in Japanese, while the language used by Japanese scholars was Chinese), prose fiction was widely read by the court people. Through the diaries of the time we can see that the personalities in high positions read novels and even confessed their appreciation for them. The author of Sarashina Nikki, a court lady from the ruling Fujiwara family, tells us in her diary how much, she used to dream of the hero of Murasaki's novel: "The only thing that I could think of was the Shining Prince who would some day come to me, as noble and beautiful as in the romance."¹

In China, on the contrary, all novels when they first appeared were considered frivolous and even subversive. The authors did not dare reveal their names. Confucian scholars and all learned people despised novels on account of their popular language and fictitious character. It was only after the Republic was formed that the Chinese recognized the novel as literature at all. In China, the novel appeared five centuries later than in Japan, and it took three centuries more to produce a masterpiece.

The first Chinese novel, San Kuo Chih Yen-i (History of Three Kingdoms), was written by Lo Kuan-chung during the early years of the Ming dynasty in the spoken language of the day. Shui Hu Chuan. (The Story of the Fringes of the Marsh), also written in the fifteenth century, centred around bung Chiang, a bandit famous for his ravages in the provinces of Honan and Shantung. The novel that in part is a continuation of Shui Hu Chuan is Chin Ping Met (Gold Vase Plum), written at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It represents a great advance because for the first time two of the central characters are feminine. Though the greatest part of this novel is pornographic, it has been considered the best novel on social manners of China. The next great Chinese novel is the Hung Lou Mêng (Dream of the Red Chamber); it was written in the eighteenth century during the Manchu dynasty, and is considered not only the greatest novel of Chinese literature but also one of the world's master-pieces, It influenced another Chinese erotic novel which appeared about twenty years later, Jou Pu Tuan (The Prayer Mat of Flesh). It is attributed to Lu Hsün, one of the most outstanding Chinese novelists and historians of that time.²

Unlike art, philosophy, and religion, where Chinese influence was paramount, Japan never received influence of value from the Chinese novel. In Japan and China the novel has developed along completely different lines. The Chinese novel is long, employs very realistic technique, revels in details, and is content with "telling the story without the subjectivity characteristic of the novels of Western Europe, writes Lin Yutang. "Fine psychological portrayal there is, but there is very little room for the author to expand over his psychological knowledge."³

We will see later that the Japanese novel also revels in details and has a slow tempo; but on the other hand it is generally short, subjective, and rich in poetic feeling. At the same time it is poor in constructive imagination and psychological depth. The Japanese began to look down upon the novel later when it left the subjects of aristocratic life and began to choose its characters and atmosphere from among the merchants and the poor, Before and after the Meiji Restoration, fiction and literary art in general were despised; novelists were considered more as entertainers of the common people. An inferior form of the novel somewhat influenced by its Chinese prototype was then regarded as a means for promoting morals with punishment of vice and reward of virtue according to the Confucian feudal morality.

Novelists and translators of Western novels tried to introduce to Japan "the manners and feelings" of the West, and to help the Japanese "to gain their individual liberty in the manner of those courageous foreigners." But intelligent men like Yukichi Fukuzawa showed little appreciation for literature. In his time, empiricism and utilitarianism in the promotion of a material civilization had a definite priority over the arts.⁴

THE TALE OF GENJI

The Tale of Genji is a vast fresco extending through three generations with a huge cast of over four hundred characters. More than thirty of them are of first importance, and are characterized with psychological vividness and realism.

This novel, one of the longest ever written, is about the love adventures of Shining Prince Genji, son of the emperor and a concubine. The story continues with Genji's children and grandchildren. Though the image of Genji is romantically idealized, the social background and life of the aristocracy are portrayed with great realism. This combination of idealism and truth gives great enchantment to the novel. The tale is indeed remarkable for its vivid descriptions of the social milieu, for the psychological character studies drawn with subtlety and deep insight.

Murasaki Shikibu (975-1024) wrote most of The Tale of Genji during the three or four years after the death of her husband and before she returned to the court. Her husband had been a lieutenant in the Imperial Guard and left her a widow when she was twenty-three years old.

The Tale of Genji is the highest exponent of the aristocratic literature of the time, and announces the transition from the government of the aristocracy to the government of the military class. It displays a modern self-awareness of the society it portrays, as Nyozekan Hasegawa has pointed out. A review of The Times of London noted that its translation by Arthur Waley reads surprisingly like a modern novel.

The opinions of the first Western writers who read The Tale of Genji were not enthusiastic. Georges Bosquet called Murasaki that boring Japanese Scudéry," and Ernest Satow found the plot "devoid of interest" and "only of value as marking a stage in the development of the language."

That it was written by a woman is not exceptional in Japan. We find in the same epoch some remarkable diaries whose authors were women. Women were the only notable writers for a period of about one hundred years. To Ono no Komachi is due a reputation of ardent love and passion which is continued by Lady Ise, Izumi Shikibu, Sei Shonagon, and Akiko Yosano, all of whom have shown their superiority over men in a country where men have at times enjoyed a social superiority as probably in no other civilized country. In China notable women poets have appeared, among them Li Ching-Chao, known for her tz'u, who lived some years after Murasaki.

In an attempt to explain this upsurge of literary genius in the women of the Heian period, Nyozekan Hasegawa emphasizes the fact that the aristocracy had lost its role as intelligentsia, this role having passed into the hands of women. It is also true that the traditional position of woman in Japanese society was quite strong.⁵

THE CONCEPT OF THE NOVEL IN "THE TALE OF GENJI" AND THE WESTERN CONCEPT OF THE NOVEL

Murasaki expresses in Genji her concept of the novel:

I have a theory of my own about what this art of the novel is, and how it came into being. To begin with, it does not simply consist of the author's telling a story about the adventures of some other person. On the contrary, it happens because the storyteller's own experience of men and tilings, whether for good or ill—not only what he has passed through himself, but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of—has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart. Again and again something in his own life or in that around him will seem so important that he cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion. There must never come a time, he feels, when men do not know about it. That is my view of how this art arose.⁶

Though the novel is mere invention, we accept this invention, even in its crudest absurdities, as an account of something that has really and actually happened.

In the third part of her novel ("A Wreath of Cloud") Murasaki thought that the novel contained the higher, everlasting truth of reality; that fiction moulded in the eternal beauty of the language the important moments of life before they vanish. In the first part, Murasaki finishes chapter fourteen saying that she narrated all the detailed matter which Genji wanted to conceal, because she feared that her novel might be accused of being "no history but a mere made-up tale designed to influence the judgement of posterity."⁷

Therefore, while telling the story Murasaki tries to give it the firmness and density of reality, pretending that the story has really happened. By this stratagem she elicits credibility and evokes the reader's imagination and sensibility. This texture of reality grows from the author's knowledge of men and things. Books of history narrate only facts and supply information on social events, without entering into the personal life of the individual; the novel, says Genji, penetrates into men's souls, discovers the universal and inner nature of man.

The Tale of Genji is built around a few main ideas: the idea of love, illustrated by a certain number of amorous characters, Prince Genji being the centre of them; the idea of power, which determines the behaviour and fixes the destiny of several of the characters; the idea of time, which imbues the whole action of the novel.

The secret of masterpieces, writes Robert Lidell in A Treatise on the Novel, lies in the concordance between the subject and the temperament of the author. It is obvious that the personality of Murasaki, as we know it from her novel and from her diary, is very sympathetic to her social environment. Maybe she was not completely identified with it, and that was why she kept the necessary distance to observe and describe it with such deep, realistic analysis. But she loved the elegance and grace of court life. She probably dreamed of some charming young prince of her own, and that is why she over-idealized Genji.

For tightening the structure of her novel, Murasaki used certain patterns of action which, as Ivan Morris has observed, occur with variations at widely separated points in the narrative, like the motifs of a musical composition. This deliberate repetition of situations, settings, and relationships between characters appeals to the aesthetic sense of the reader and gives unity to the novel. This is a device used also by Proust, as noted by Edmund Wilson when he labeled A La Recherche du Temps Perdu a symphonic structure rather than a narrative in the ordinary sense. Pattern, according to E. M. Forster, is something which springs mainly out of the plot, and to which the characters and any other element present also contribute."⁸ Both Murasaki and Proust used pattern and rhythm to give cohesion and harmony to their long novels.

Another device for which Murasaki has been compared to Proust is the use of the introduction of a character not yet mentioned as if the reader knew him before and were already familiar with him. Thus Princess Asagao is introduced in the second chapter of The Tale of Genji. This process, as critics have noted for both writers, can produce a suggestive realistic effect. Still another device frequently used by both authors consists of hinting at the existence of a character before he or she enters into the action, or of making a vague allusion to events which will happen many years later, Ivan Morris quotes examples of all these devices in his interesting book The World of the Shining Prince,⁹ and his points are easy to see when reading Murasaki's novel. But if it is true that some literary devices are similar in Murasaki and in Proust, there is no similarity whatsoever between the recurring leitmotif patterns employed by each.

Edward Seidensticker in a recent article points out a peculiar Japanese characteristic of Murasaki's pattern which consists of associating the full moon with tragedy. Three of the women important in Genji's life die on or very near the night of the full moon. In each case the circumstances are horrifying: the three are possessed by the spirit of a fourth woman who is insane with jealousy. In each case, again, the most beautiful moon of the year, the full moon of the lunar month, is associated with disaster. Each time the image recurs, Seidensticker concludes, it brings a mixture of grief and terror.¹⁰

By building the character through a succession of multiple states, and conceiving human relations as a series of failures by one person to meet and to understand another, both Murasaki and Proust achieve rich and surprising effects,¹¹ A complete comparative study between the two masterpieces should reveal many more common points, since they are two extraordinarily rich and extensive works. Murasaki had not only the genius to discover by herself the technique necessary to give life to a very long narration, but also the power to capture the interest and imagination of the reader through her highly artistic skill.

All this shows the surprisingly modern aspects of this first novel of love in world literature. Later we deal with another point in which Murasaki has been compared to Proust—the use of the element of Time.

The Tale of Genji, in its large panorama of the passing of human lives, reminds one of Tolstoi's War and Peace: the master-motif that underlies the former is the same one that Percy Lubbock observed in the latter—the story of youth. Man is at the mercy of time: Genji, still young and handsome, talks with his young friends a whole rainy night about different types of women. Genji, already old, holds in his arms the little child of his young wife, Princess Nyosan, with dark thoughts that the father of the child must be his own son. That son, Kashiwagi, did to Genji what Genji himself had done to his father the emperor when he seduced his new wife, Lady Fujitsubo. Time sees repetition of life with its eternal patterns; man fulfils his destiny and vanishes.

But what gives The Tale of Genji an air of modernity is really its theme: love. It is only after Honoré d'Urfé, who lived about three hundred fifty years ago, that European fiction began to occupy itself with the sentimental story, built up coherently around a certain number of episodes. Before d'Urfé, duty, family, city-policy, or adventure were the themes of poems, plays, and stones in Greece and in Rome. When love inspired a writer, it was rather to create songs exalting the beauty of its physical aspects, as with Ovid.

The Tate of Genji is the first novel to deal with the sentimental aspects of love and to analyse the intimate feelings of the heart. For this also it has a particular place and meaning in world literature.

THE CONCEPT OF LIFE

Perhaps the most striking feature of aristocratic Heian life, writes Edward Seidensticker, is its emphasis on good taste. In action it gave rise to vast and minute cultivation of taste and form. Infinite care was dedicated to the selection of an ensemble, to the composition of a letter, to the concocting of a perfume. The days were spent in ceremonies, in elegant pastimes viewing the cherry blossoms, burning incense, or seeing the moon in the melancholy of night; the main occupation was to read and write poems, to court, and to embark on gallant adventures. As has been written, the real religion of Heian was the cult of calligraphy. Religion became an art and art a religion.

Buddhist rites were a spectacle; Chinese poetry was an intellectual game. George Sansom writes:

Heian courtiers were great connoisseurs in emotion and judges of ceremonies and etiquette; sentimentally aware of the sadness of this dew-like fleeting world, but intellectually unconcerned with all its problems; prone to a gentle melancholy but apt to enjoy each transitory moment, and quite without interest in any outlook but their own.¹²

Japanese Heian writers were not much troubled by the problem of evil. We see, though, Genji preoccupied with sin, and even preoccupied with the fate of his father's soul after he sees him in a dream burdened "by a load of earthly sin." The Japanese, notes Sansom, have cared little for abstract ideas of good and evil, but have always been concerned with problems of behaviour towards society. They were very superstitious; natural disasters and disease, for which they had no explanations, made them resort to religion and magic practices.

There is in the Japanese soul a light and pleasurable side lit by the sunshine of Shintoism, which rejoices at the pleasures and virginal forces of the earth. There is also the sombre side in which Buddhism brings its deep concern of the suffering of life. The nucleus of Murasaki's art lies in the combination of the two.

The Buddhist concept of life deeply imbued Murasaki's novel. "The purpose of The Tale of Genji may be likened to the man who, loving the lotus flower, must collect and store muddy and foul water in order to plant and cultivate the flower, writes Norinaga Motoori, one of the greatest Japanese literary theorists and Murasaki's fervent admirer,"The impure mud of illicit love affairs described in the Tale is there not for the purpose of being admired but for the purpose of nurturing the flower of the awareness of the sorrow of human existence. Prince Genji's conduct is like the lotus flower which is happy and fragrant but which has its roots in filthy muddy water. But the Tale does not dwell on the impurity of the water; it dwells only on those who are sympathetically kind and who are aware of the sorrow of human existence."¹³

From Buddhist thought comes the feeling of sorrow, pity, and sympathy for things, mono no aware. It is a connection between beauty and the sadness of the world, because the greatest beauty is the one that lasts the shortest time. Life flows away with its pleasures, all things are evanescent. The aspects and changes of nature respond to changing human emotions and passions. And both men and tilings suffer from this poignant feeling of irreparable loss. As Ivan Morris pointed out, in scene after scene The Tale of Genji reaches its emotional climax in the union of aesthetic enjoyment and sorrow.

THE CONCEPT OF LOVE: A CULT OF BEAUTY

Love in Heian aristocracy consisted of an elaborate code of courtship which was very strict in its rules of composing and answering poems, but lenient in allowing a suitor to enjoy his belle's full charms. We see in the novels of the time that it was difficult for a lady (and probably not very polite) to refuse a gentleman of good birth when approached according to the rules of poetical courtship. A man would easily fall in love at the mere glimpse of long, bewitching tresses of hair or a beautiful kimono sleeve. Love was an irresponsible adventure without future, compromise, or any sense of sin.

Ivan Morris writes:

The love life of the Heian aristocracy is marked by a curious mixture of depravity and decorum. The absence of any ideal of courtly love involving fealty, protection, romantic anguishing, and the acceptance of a high degree of promiscuity frequently gives a flippant, rather heartless air to the relations between the men and women of Murasaki's world. One has the impression that, for all the elegant sentiments expressed in the poems, the love affairs of the time, especially at court, were rarely imbued with any ideal feeling, and that often they were mere exercises in seduction.¹⁴

The cult of beauty and the pursuit of pleasure were predominant in Heian court life. The moral customs were such that any girl who remained virgin for long was considered to be possessed by an evil spirit, and no self-respecting family would welcome such a reputation. The ancient Chinese also believed that the abstention from sexual intercourse broke the equilibrium of yin and yang and put the person to the risk of succumbing to incubi and other evil forces.¹⁵

There is a poem by Princess Uchiko Naishinno, second daughter of Emperor Saga, in which the concept of love is as natural and as liberal as we can imagine by these lines:

I cannot bear to sleep alone.

I cannot tear from my heart

The sweet thoughts of love.

The Manyoshu contains a poem by Princess Tajima "composed," it says, "when her clandestine relations with Prince Hozumi during her residence in the Palace of Prince Takechi became known."

A vestal virgin of the great Ise Shrine was said to have sent this poem to Narihira (who lived around one century before Murasaki) after having paid a visit to his sleeping quarters:

Did you come here?

Did I go to visit you,

Or is it only my thought?

Was our night a dream or reality?

Was I sleeping or awake?

In The Tale of Lady Ochikubo, one of the first of the monogatari mentioned previously, we find a curious scene of a gallant who visits a noble lady. She is the daughter of an Imperial Princess, but her stepmother treats her cruelly, giving her only shabby clothes worn already by her half-sisters. Though it was the first time they had seen each other, the young man stayed for the night; he took her in his arms and the inexperienced young lady "wept and trembled in fear and misery." The next day, he inquired from her chambermaid if she found him disagreeable. By no means, she replied, "it is merely the painful memory of the shame she felt that night at the shabbiness of her clothes that now distresses her."

In spite of a certain flippancy and promiscuity in refined court society, we cannot conclude that amorous adventures were only casual and superficial. This is proven by the concentrated analysis made of jealousy in several books of the time. In The Tale of Genji jealousy is the reverse of amorous pleasure in every relationship between a man and a woman, and the full analysis of jealousy is made with insight and careful detail. The diary of a jealous lady, the Kagero Nikki (The Gossamer Years), we will see, is dedicated to expressing the bitterness, the solitary pain and humiliation of a jealous woman abandoned by her husband. Everywhere jealousy is the sombre side of love, inseparably linked with passion. The ardent yearning for the absolute and the eternal which burns in love comes together with the instinctive certitude that love cannot last, cannot escape the laws of change and death engraved in human nature.

It is not surprising that women express their jealousy bitterly, because Heian society was a world of men, where a man could have many wives and concubines; the initiative for an adventure was always his. The men of aristocracy had a life of leisure and gallantry. We can read how the boss of a noble functionary of the palace used to send his subordinate poems to invite him to come to his job, but even with the courteous poems he did not succeed in wakening the subordinate's sense of duty. Marriage took place very early, the match being made by the families; and this, too, explains the liberty of morals and why multiple adventures increased a man's prestige.

This concept in which physical love was accompanied by a ritual of elegance and grace and a refined cult of beauty is very far from the concept that arose in Europe about two centuries later. The ideal of European courteous love was purely spiritual, for the knight was content with receiving from his lady as little as a coloured ribbon: with it over his heart, he would fight anyone who would deny that she was the fairest in the world. By contrast, in mediaeval times a European lived a primitive life, crude and without art—except for the troubadour, who would send poems to his lady, without hope for an answer. His lady, unlike her Japanese sister, would seldom be able to poetize. In sum, the ideals of elegance and refinement were unknown in. Europe, just as the ideals of chivalry were ignored in Japan.

The contemporary ideal of man's beauty, in the time of Genji," writes Ivan Morris, was a plump white face with a minute mouth, the narrowest slits for eyes and a little tuft of beard on the point of the chin. This—apart from the beard—was the same as the ideal of feminine beauty, and often in Murasaki's novel we are told that a handsome gentleman like Kaoru is as beautiful as a woman."¹⁶ Murasaki's men have "the gentleness and grace of her girl friend Saisho," writes Waley. Men powdered their faces and perfumed themselves heavily; they had soft manners and were far from displaying the impassible courage of their samurai descendants. Women were always enveloped in beautiful silk robes—the average number was twelve—in exquisite colours combined with the most refined taste under strict rules prescribed by etiquette. These are the images that we find in the literature and in the painting of this epoch.

THE CONCEPT OF TIME

We referred before to the striking similarities of technique between The Tale of Genji and Prousts's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Another point in which they have been compared is the importance both attribute to the idea of time. The purpose of exploring the arcana of time is expressed in the title of Proust's novel. Donald Keene has pointed out that Murasaki's novel betrays an obsession with the idea of time.

But although in both novels time is so poignantly dominant, there is an enormous difference in the development of the concept. In these different ways of developing the same idea, we encounter one of those areas in which East and West evolved along completely different lines.

In the Western concept, time is divided and fragmented, and the content of each fragment is explored till it is exhausted: the individual existence has therefore a concrete value. In the Oriental concept, time is undivided, is part of die immutable rhythm of the cosmos, and belongs to an absolute sequence which embraces man and the universe in its cyclical repetition. The seasons of the year are an aspect of this principle of eternal cyclical renovation, and the renewing of the generations is only a part of the cyclical renovation of the universe: the individual here has no concrete value, passes unnoticed in the great cosmic process.

Thus, it is easy to understand why Oriental novelists did not experiment in the field of time. On the other hand, in the complex time perspectives of some modern Western novels, we can see the critical spirit, the intense analytical attitude which is a unique characteristic of the West.

It is fair to say that the concept of time, as it is expressed in the Tale, has not been modified in the Japanese novel and is still essentially the same in most novels of today. In fact, there has been no evolution. It seems that Japanese writers, under the influence of the idea of time which has obsessed their literary and religious heritage, have not yet completely realized the revolution in this field which appeared in the Western novel after Proust.

Both Murasaki and Proust show time linked to the form of the novel; the action of the novel is a struggle against time. In both, time is the "unifying principle of homogeneity which polishes all the heterogeneous fragments and links them by an irrational and inexpressible relation," to use a phrase of Gerögy Lukacs; in both, it is time that "puts order into the imbroglio of the characters and gives them the appearance of an organic reality evolving by its own forces: without a visible meaning, the characters come and go, meet each other, break the ties that they had just established."¹⁷ Thus, the concept of time and its unifying principle in the fictional texture of reminiscence is common to both Murasaki and Proust Perhaps this extremely subjective idea of time can be seen as a sign of an epoch of decline. Both Murasaki and Proust have portrayed a decadent society at a time when it was losing its self-confidence and its sense of permanent values. But this is about all they show in common, general traits and features which can be found in many novels of similar length. If we carry our analysis further, we shall find that Murasaki and Proust followed completely different paths.

Murasaki's concept of time was essentially poetic. In Japanese poetry, time is a part of the movement of the universe and also a link between all living beings. This link is stronger than with Proust, became for Murasaki, a Buddhist, there are no breaks in time; death is not a stop but an interruption in a life which is extended in an infinite number of reincarnations. Thus the passing of time is life itself, and this is the substance of the novel: the transience of passions, joys, sorrows, social position, and power; the brevity of youth, with love and its glory; and decay, with suffering and death. The eternal renewal brought by the wheel of time. In the Tale time is cyclical and unilinear; the novel occupies only a section of the infinite line of cosmic time.

Proust meditated on the problem or time in the novel, and brought about a total revolution. He found a process of using several planes of time. Time does not flow, it is broken into fragments which slide on top of each other. That is why it is difficult to find a chronological order in his novel. Proust found a new time relation between characters; he used the fragments into which he broke time at his will, giving them elasticity, obliging them to expand or to dwindle. He isolated time, and in this process the fictional world broke into a multiplicity of partial worlds. As R. M. Albérèes has noted, Proust's work initiates the "polyphonic, musical, stereophonic forms of novelistic enchantment. Proust explored the idea of time to limits never known before him. He himself considered Gustave Flaubert one of the forerunners in this field, and wrote that Flaubert was the first novelist who put into music the mutations of time.

Proust explained that he saw the characters of his novel as puppets in a show bathing in the immaterial colours of the years, puppets exteriorizing Time, Time that usually is not visible, which, to become visible, searches for bodies and wherever it finds them takes hold of them in order to show on them its magic lamp."¹⁸ Poetized time is one of the fundamental themes of Proust, together with that of involuntary memory.

Georges Poulet, in a very interesting study on time, from Montaigne to Sartre, Etudes sur le Temps Humain, explains the idea of time in Proust's work:

The characters in Proust never develop, so to speak. As in Gide, we don't see them progressing along a story. Anachronic, intermittent, through the multiplicity of their appearances, or of their experiences, they can well give an "impression of continuity, an illusion of unity, but their lives are but a collection of moments. Every particular experience is immediately grasped in each of the thousand sealed vases, everyone of which would be filled with a colour, with an odour, with a temperature absolutely different. In Proust, not only the moments are isolated from each other, but their isolation is eternal, so to speak. From the moment in which such fugitive experience developed in the actuality of its short particular duration, this life, infinitely preserved, in an hermetically sealed cellule of the memory, pursues there an occult and always momentaneous existence, until the day when a chance will bring up that moment to a new and fugitive actuality.¹⁹

These brief indications are enough to show the fundamental differences between Proust and Murasaki: Proust was lucidly aware of the parcelling of time, and he aimed at giving each moment such an importance that it comes out as if it were independent, a moment without precedent: "From the first line of the work of Proust a consciousness arises from the naught where it was sunk and, thus arising, founds a moment which does not depend on that that precedes it."²⁰

Murasaki never shows this minute consciousness of the value of time. She individualizes some particular, privileged moments with a skill as subtle as Proust's, but she does not do it following a clear and established programme, nor according to a special technique. That is why her concept of time is not as rich and as round as Proust's. Time is not projected on the characters in a multiplicity of reflections in order to light a net of complex relations or of multiple destinies. As Murasaki follows a linear treatment of her characters, the idea of time does not unfold in such diverse planes. For Murasaki time is a line; for Proust time is a multiplicity of broken lines, a labyrinth, a perennial complex structure giving consistence to the present. The Tale of Genji passively follows the process of time, its action flows with the flowing of time, whereas the action of Proust's novel is a combat against the powers of time.

In the Tale time does not exist incorporated into the characters; it is an irresistible force, changeable and flowing, visible in the mutable face of beings and things. That is why the idea of time is connected with the feeling of sorrow and loss. Buddhism teaches that suffering originates in the impermanence of the world. The Tale of Genji begins: "At the Court of the Emperor (he lived it matters not when)…" It is of no avail to fix a precise moment in time, because the world of time is a delusion. Man dissolves in time.

In Proust's novel, man, instead of dissolving in time, seizes and reconstructs himself through time. Time is reality. Through Proustian time man finds himself again, picking up from memory those fragments of himself which he let fall into naught. Proust's novel begins with a moment emptied of all contenu and ends with a series of moments as different as possible from the first, since they have for contenu, as Proust says, "truly full impressions, those which are out of time. Proust has not recaptured time, but he has found a liberation from it: "A profound idea which has enclosed in it space and time is no longer subject to their tyranny and has no end."²¹

Georges Poulet contends that on one hand Proust's novel appears as a novel without duration; on the other hand, it embraces the duration of a life, but with a retrospective existence of a life which does not advance but is, in Proust's words, an "ulterior existence discovered among pieces which only need to be joined together." In Proust's novel, concludes Poulet, can be found not only the time of an individual experience and the intemporal traits of a particular genius, but also—in a retrospective way—all the time of French thought back to its origins. Man there reaches that total structure of himself which human existence had lost since the Middle Ages.²²

In that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation, in time creative and destructive, Proust discovered himself as an artist. Through time he "understood the meaning of love, of vocation, of the joys of the spirit and the utility of pain."²³

The exploration of the idea of time in the novel is not a unique Proustian preoccupation. We can say that it translates one of the most revolutionary, exciting new experiments in the Western novel In the days of Proust, Thomas Mann showed very clear ideas about this problem in the Magic Mountain, which is also a novel about time (published in the same year as La Prisonnière, 1924);

For time is the medium of narration, as it is the medium of life. Both are inextricably bound up with it, as inextricably as are bodies in space. Similarly, time is the medium of music; music divides, measures, articulates time, and can shorten it, yet enhance its value, both at once. Thus music and narration are alike, in that they can only present themselves as a flowing, as a succession in time.

Modern writers, through further exploration of the planes of time, have created more richness and complexity in the fictional world and have changed the temporal perspectives, inserting the past into the present in order to grasp unrevealed facets of the personality.

It was through such new developments—the Proustian concept of multiplicity of experiences running in parallel in the same instant—that Lawrence Durrell found the original seed of his Alexandria Quartet. Durrell explores time through the multiple faces of reality, as it is reflected in one protagonist of the Quartet in regard to each of the other three. The author's aim is "to inhabit those deserted spaces which time misses—beginning to live between the ticks of the clock, so to speak."

The nouveau roman accelerates the idea of time and gives it a much greater intensity. For Claude Simon, for example, time assumes a fearful force of corruption with an increasing, destructive potency. For other authors, like Samuel Beckett, the development of time is so intense that it permeates the action: dominating, absorbing, omnipresent.

About time in the modern Western novel, R. M. Albérès writes;

By giving a relief to the time of the novel and by introducing in it stereophonic effects, and by putting into it a new dimension, the action ceases to be expressed by a straight line on an even surface (the destiny of the hero on the background of a decor). It becomes a net of multiple lines, superposed, alternate, zigzagging and crossing each other and sometimes uniting into polygons in Durrell, or into labyrinths in Robbe-Grillet. It is no longer possible to represent the plot by the simple graphic of a continuous and unique narrative, like in Le Rouge et le Noir or in Germinal; we will need to use more complete graphic representations, some with three dimensions, as it was suggested by a scheme of the work of Proust. The reader of a novel enters no longer into a story by one end to go out by the other, following a continuous path; he must penetrate into a universe in which he wanders, in which he does not know where he goes.²⁴

In contrast to this restless experimenting by Western novelists, in Japan writers have been content with the traditional unilinear treatment of time. Some of the younger Japanese novelists have tried to further the development of time, but always along a single plane.

Sei Ito noticed that in The Tale of Genji) as in other major Japanese tales, such as The Tate of the Bamboo Cutter, Saikaku's The Life of an Amorous Woman and The Life of a Man who Lived for Love, and even in Tanizaki's Makioka Sisters, the passage of time provokes changes and developments through a linear treatment. There are no countercurrents. These novels do not develop a complex interwoven antagonism among the characters in order to create a symphonic treatment, a multiple relationship, or a change in rhythm and in time.

Sometimes we find in the works of Japanese writers of today a first awakening to the complex possibilities of time in fiction, but they never go beyond a thought, a brief reflexion on the subject. We see it, for instance, with Yukio Mishima: "At the thought that he would hear it no more he listened with deep concentration, striving for every corner of every moment of this precious time to be filled. . . . The moments seemed transformed to jewels, sparkling with inner light." Time is thus manifested in a simplified expression of Kobo Abe: "There was only a timeless, artificial illumination. Time measured in units of tens of thousands of years flowed along right outside the wall in subterranean water streams and through the layers of earth, slicing vertically straight down."

It must be said that experiment on the time theme in Western fiction has been the particular enterprise of a few great writers. The transformation of the novel into a bold polyphony was the work of isolated geniuses. Few indeed are "those who have dared to play on the organs of time."²⁵

Even in the ordinary novel which follows the conventional linear treatment of time, the traditional concept of time has evolved in consequence of the great social transformations. While the traditional novel was a story of time against a permanent pattern, writes Edwin Muir, the contemporary novel is a story of time against a background of time.²⁶

The classic Western writers lived in a world based on the law of permanence: transient human life briefly appeared and disappeared against a constant background, an immutable order of Christian verities. With the weakening of religious feeling today, not only individual life but the world itself begins to look transient; nothing is firm and man doubts all values. This has altered the current idea of time in the modern novel. The sense of eternity against which a human life took a particular meaning is lost. This Western concept, in which change is a universal motor, in which nothing in the world is certain or lasting, comes very near to the fundamental Buddhist idea of impermanence. Buddhism gave religious expression to the feeling of constant change which dominated a continent where great invasions and frequent national calamities uprooted human ties and threatened institutions in nearly every generation. In the West, after the collapse of the firm beliefs and unaltered traditions described by the great nineteenth-century novelists, and after two world wars and the advent of nuclear weapons, we have come to the same conclusion, that in the present looms an uncertain future, tinged with fear and calamity. This uncertainty has determined the fundamental concept of time predominant today in the Western novel.

The concept of time adopted in The Tale of Genji—which is fundamentally the same as in the modern Japanese novel—shows similarities to this last Western concept. Based as it is on Buddhist thought and Chinese traditional philosophy, which always emphasized the transient character of all things, The Tale of Genji gives a primordial importance to the time element.

We can say, to conclude, that by abundantly using the traditional Japanese concept of time in its religious and philosophical aspects of alternate importance and evanescence, Murasaki has come surprisingly close in many points to the latest Western novel. Nevertheless, Murasaki never thought of trying to explore complex implications of time such as those elaborated by Proust and his modern successors.

TWO GREAT SYMBOLS: GENJI AND DON JUAN

Only a cultured, and refined society like that of Kyoto in the tenth century could produce a romantic character like Prince Genji. In the psychological portrait of Genji there are the features of a society in which the position of women is inferior. The woman, merely reflects the shining glamour of the prince, obeying his every wish. It is certainly a most inviting study for exploring the provoking and treacherous new realms of comparative literature—by comparing the figure of Genji, the Japanese Don Juan, with the Western Don Juan of the Middle Ages. The Don Juan born under the sun of Spain was of equally noble birth, rich, courageous, proud, courteous towards women, but also unreliable, egotistical, unfaithful, and always searching for a new adventure.

The Japanese type of Don Juan is personified in a prince, son of an emperor (and. one of his concubines), a man at the very top of Japanese society. This evinces already the idea or hero-worship: Murasaki's intention was to idealize a man to the supreme, giving him all the attributes of power, seduction, prestige, and beauty. The women he possesses provide the titles to several books of the novel. He is successful. He has no reason to repent from his adventures, nor does he suffer from a sense of sin; he feels no painful guilt. He is not under the menace of damnation, and he is not condemned. This means that his amorous adventures are not reproved by the society, his pleasures are not illicit, and though not being strictly according to morals, the punishment for them is neither hell nor eternal damnation. The moral sanction reserved for this sort of deed by Buddhism and by Christianism is completely different. Here begins the real separation.

We might note that this difference in religious outlook has a parallel in the literary criticism in Europe and in Japan, for Don Juan and Genji, respectively.

The Chinese Don Juan, Hsi Men, the hero of Chin Ping Mei, evinces the practical, down-to-earth character of the Chinese people; he is the son of an apothecary and himself a trader.

In an article entitled "Contemporary Studies of Genji Monogatari," Prof. Akio Abe referred to a socio-historical school of criticism which tried to clarify the historical position of the aristocratic society or the Heian period within which The Tale of Genji was born. According to this school, Murasaki typifies the contradictions of the society she describes, contradictions which brought about the collapse of the ancient aristocracy. Genji is himself the very symbol of these social contradictions and decadence, this school of criticism contends.²⁷

A more conservative critic, Norinaga Motoori, without considering the character or social meaning of Genji, considers Genji's destiny and morality as symbols of human experience, and tries to find the explanation and moral justification in Buddhism.

Consider the European Don Juan. In Spain he is a nobleman, not of high rank, great fortune, or personal prestige, but with all the virile characteristics of a knight: courage, strength, manly appearance. He is an average gentleman, possessing the average qualities, defects, and ideals of the gentleman of his time, but because he is a hero, he possesses them in high degree. He has an indomitable pride, inexhaustible energy, the dominating will of a fanatic, He suffers from a painful thirst for love which he erroneously deviates to mere physical love. This thirst for love of women is so great that it is prolonged in a stronger and more significant need, a mystical anguish increased by the shadow of death. Love, religion, and death are the protagonists of his adventure. He goes from one woman to another; he never stays in the same place. He goes along the narrow streets of Seville under the dark of night, or jumps over the wail of a convent, risking his life for only the sweet pleasure of a brief encounter. He defies society, the church, and God. The spur of his love is not only that he wants to possess beauty and to pursue pleasure through successive deceptions, but mainly it is an irresistible attraction to sin, with the vague certainty of final expiation.

Mysticism with such strong erotic tones has been explained by the atmosphere of physical exaltation which existed at the time in some religious movements in Spain, One example is the Alumbrados, who went to the point of advising nuns and simple women believers to have sexual relations with Alumbrado priests and monks for the purpose of begetting prophets.

In his study of Don Juan, Gregorio Marañon defends the thesis that Don Juan is not the archetype of virility, because the perfect varon is the strictly monogamic man, one who fixes his preference on a certain woman and does not look for sex like an adolescent. Marañon goes as far as affirming that Don Juan is not a typically Spanish character; he is an exotic importation without national roots. For Marañon the virile type of Spanish lover is el medico de su honra—the caretaker of his honour; monogamic, austere, living only for his home; with many children and with one cult; with honour upheld by violence, sacrifice, vengeance, and crime if necessary, Marañon, who was probably a type of el médico de su honra himself, was carried away by his moralist bent, and did not stick to the literary field and the Don Juan created by Tirso de Molina. The type illustrated by Marañon strongly suggests Sancho Panza, in contrast with Don Quixote. The latter, perhaps less manly than Sancho Panza, is more courageous and loves risk and adventure. He is as interested in the stern pursuit of his visions and ideals as is Don Juan in his dream of reaching the absolute in love. The main difference is that el médico de su honra is a contented man who enjoys his tranquil, limited love; Don Juan, as Don Quixote, is under a curse that never allows him to stop his quest for the absolute.

The Spanish type of Don Juan was adopted by Molière in his much criticized play Don Juan. Louis Jouvet has attempted to give it a depth that the play did not contain, adding strong Spanish traits to it. But Jouvet's efforts could not redeem the sceptic, rationalist French Don Juan, who lacks the two strongest traits of the true Don Juan—a wild freedom in love (in Molière's play he is married) and a deep religious feeling against which he constantly strives (Molière makes him an atheist). Still further away from the purity and strength of the Spanish myth is Montherlant with his decadent Don Juan, sixty-six years old, weathered by impotence and libertinism. Nearer the original is the eloquent dialectician created by Bernard Shaw, with his brilliant arrogance and devilish cunning.

Mozart, with his romantic Don Juan, added some traits of courage and gallantry belonging to a type of seducer, but he did not grasp the essential quality of the original, the thirst for absolute love. Though there are also Don Juans in northern European countries, as Ramiro Maetzu noted, the true type of Don Juan is the one which originated in Spain.²⁸

Comparing the positions of Japanese and Western Don Juans, we see that Genji is an approved social symbol, he is a positive hero, grand minister, showered with honours, and adored by all women; his pursuit of pleasure is not antisocial, he is not an outcast. In the end he suffers what time and decadence reserve for every man, and even if he is a hero, he finishes as a conformist. On the other hand, Don Juan, until the very end, is a reprobate, condemned by society.

While the Japanese Don Juan finds the thrilling paths of adventure easy and smooth—as it should be for a charming prince of royal blood in a society where strict hierarchy assured all privileges and women could not resist masculine daring—the Spanish Don Juan has to fight for the possession of his belles, and has to risk his life in dozens of duels. In the end he has to face death in the form of the stone statue of the father of one of the women he seduced and betrayed, the statue of the Commander who comes to the ultimate meeting.

Don Juan is a great rebel—he rebels against society and against God. He is not an atheist because he challenges God, and his greatest temptation is to deny the greatness of God. His main offenses are not against women, but against God himself.

Here we reach the essence of what so well characterizes the fundamental differences between the two cultures: Oriental culture is aesthetic, conservative, and unstirred by the curse of a ceaseless quest for the absolute; Western culture always tries to go beyond itself, is never satisfied, is essentially Promethean in its quest for a higher freedom and never gives up in its attempt to ravish the creative fire of the gods.