Guy Amirthanayagam (Eds.) - Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue - New Cultural Identities-Palgrave Macmillan UK (1982) PDF

ASIAN AND WESTERN WRITERS IN DIALOGUE
Also edited by G'9' Amirthanqyagam
WRITERS IN EAST-WEST ENCOUNTER

New Cultural Bearings
ASIAN AND WESTERN
WRITERS
IN DIALOGUE
New Cultural Identities
Edited by
Guy Amirthanayagam
M
©Guy Amirthanayagam 1982
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1982
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
First published 1982 by

THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
ISBN 978-1-349-04942-4 ISBN 978-1-349-04940-0 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-04940-0
Contents
Notes on the Contributors Vll

Preface and Acknowledgements X
PART I LITERARY AND CULTURAL ROLES
I Literature and Cultural Knowledge

GUY AMIRTHANAYAGAM 3
2 Notes Towards a Definition of International Culture
MALCOLM BRADBURY I3
3 Realisms, Occidental Style
KENNETH BURKE 26
4 The Question of Exile
LEON EDEL 48
5 Cultura:I Mis-readings by American Reviewers
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON 55
6 The Search for Identity: A Kannada Writer's
Viewpoint
U. R. ANANTHA MURTHY 66
7 Literature in the Global Village: An Inquiry into
Problems of Response
C. D. NARASIMHAIAH 79
PART II LITERARY AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES
8 New Epics of Cultural Convergence

IKUKO ATSUMI IOI
9 The Portable Pagoda: Asia and America in the Work

of Gary Snyder
REUEL DENNEY I I 5
v
VI Contents
IO Two Readers and Their Texts

NISSIM EZEKIEL I37
II Western Ideology and Eastern Forms ofFiction: The
Case of Mulk Raj Anand
S.C. HARREX I42
I2 Culture as History: The Filipino Soul
NICK JOAQUIN 159
I3 The Quest for Self in Modern Korean Poetry
PETER HACKSOO LEE I9I
14 Tradition Overturned: A Modern Literature in

Sri Lanka
EDIRIWIRA R. SARACHCHANDRA 209
Index 22I
Notes on the Contributors
GuY AMIRTHANAYAGAM, poet and essayist, heads the research

project in literature and culture at the East-West Center,
Honolulu, Hawaii. He has published a collection entitled Poems,
several critical essays, and has edited the recently published Writers
in East-West Encounter: New Cultural Bearings. He has also co-edited,
with S.C. Harrex, Onry Connect: Literary Perspectives East and West.
MALCOLM BRADBURY, novelist and critic, is Professor of American

Studies at the University of East Anglia, England. Among his novels
are Eating People is Wrong and The History Man. His critical works
include The Social Context of Modern Literature and Possibilities: Essays
on the State of the Novel.
KENNETH BuRKE, writer and philosopher, is also one of the most

influential critics in the United States. Among his publications are
Collected Poems 1915-1¢7, The Complete White Oxen: Collected Short
Fiction, A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, Language as
Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method, The Philosophy of
Literary Form and The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology.
LEON EDEL is a critic and well-known scholar, biographer of Henry

James and editor of the Edmund Wilson papers. Other publications
include Modern Psychological Novel, Henry James: A Collection ofCritical
Essays, James Joyce: The Last Journey, Henry David Thoreau and
Bloomsbury: A House of Lions.
MAXINE HoNG KINGSTON is visiting Professor of English at the

University ofHawaii. Her first book, The Woman Warrior: Memories
of a Girlhood among Ghosts (I976), won her the National Critics'
Circle Book Award in I977· She has also published China Men
(I98I).
U. R. ANANTHA MuRTHY, who writes in the Kannada language, is

one oflndia's leading contemporary novelists. He teaches English
vii
Vlll Notes on the Contributors
at the University of Mysore, India, and was Secretary of the

Association for Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies.
His novel Samskara is available in English translation.
C. D. NARASIMHAIAH, Professor of English, University of Mysore,

edits The Literary Criterion, and has published studies ofF. R. Lea vis,
and the novelist Raja Rao. He was Chairman of the Association for
Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies.
IKUKO ATSUMI, poet and scholar of American and English literature,

is Associate Professor of English Literature at Aoyama Gakuin
University, Tokyo. She has published two anthologies, Soaring and
The Ninth Electron.
REVEL DENNEY, Emeritus Professor of American Studies, Univer-

sity ofHawaii, is co-author of The Lonely Crowd with David Riesman
and Nathan Glazer. Among his other publications are The
Astonished Muse and In Praise rif Adam, a prize-winning collection of
poems.
N1ss1M EzEKIEL is a leading English-language poet in India. His

works include A Time to Change, Sixry Poems, The Third, The
Unfinished Man, The Exact Name, Three Plays, Snakeskin and Other
Poems, translations from the Marathi of Indira Sant, and Hymns in
Darkness.
S.C. HARREx, critic and poet, is Director of the Centre for Research
in the New Literatures in English at Flinders University of South
Australia. Publications include The Fire and the Offering: The English-
Language Novel rif India 1935-1970 and Companions rif Pilgrimage:
Collected Essays.
NicK jOAQUIN, leading Filipino novelist and dramatist, is recipient

of the National Artist Award. His publications include the novels
Tropical Gothic and The Woman who Had two Navels, Stories and Poems
and the drama The Portrait rif an Artist as a Young Filipino.
PETER HAcKsoo LEE, linguist and specialist in Korean literature, is

Professor of East Asian Literature at the University of Hawaii. He
has won awards for his work in Korean and Japanese literature,
which include Studies in Saenaennorae: Old Korean Poetry and Flowers rif
Notes on the Contributors lX
Fire: Twentieth-Century Korean Stories. Other titles include Celebration

of Continuity and Songs of Flying Dragons.
E. R. SARACHCHANDRA is Sri Lanka's best-known playwright.

Among his well-known plays are Maname and Sinhabahu. He has
also published several novels, including Curfew and a Full Moon,
which is available in English.
Preface and Acknowledgemen ts
One of the greatest adventures of the twentieth century is the

growing contact of cultures. In its classical configuration, the
meeting of cultures is that of the East and the West, meaning at one
time the 'Orient' and Europe, but now enlarged to include
America: in fact, because of its position as a dominant superpower,
many think of America as typifying the West. The interaction of
cultures may be seen either from a broad international perspective,
or at a more intimate level as an interplay of subcultures within
national or regional spheres- for example, the Black, Jewish or the
American-Indian minorities within the United States.
A rich fruit of this multiple meeting of cultures, both within and
among nations, is a type of modern literature which has great
artistic merit and social significance. This modern literature consists
of writings that are directly generated by the meetings of cultures,
namely those works in which the central experience is cross-
cultural, and where the nature and the destiny of character is
shaped in some fashion by the cross-cultural encounter.
To validate the timeliness and topicality of a study of this
liter.ature one has only to point to the degree of inter-cultural
misunderstanding that persists in the modern world, even though
cross-cultural contact has greatly increased and the opportunities
for interaction between cultures are constantly growing in both
frequency and range. The 'literature of cross-cultural contact'
mirrors this situation well, since it embodies the actual processes of
interaction, and demonstrates in complex, multifaceted ways the
harmonies and disruptions which are their consequence. This kind
of demonstration has an intimacy, immediacy, inwardness and
subtiety unavailable from any other source.
Part I of this book, 'Literary and Cultural Roles', is largt>ly occupied

by the critic, or the writer in his role as critic, the critical emphasis
being on appreciation and general strategies of approach to the
social and cultural implications of literature. The editor reviews
some recent re-orientations of the often-discussed relationship
X
Preface and Acknowledgements XI
between literature and the cultural knowledge to be derived from it.

Leon Edel explores the 'alienation' of the literary artist in the
modern Occident. Malcolm Bradbury directs his attention to the
largely unresolved question of methodology, and to the difficulties
set for the investigator by the existence of strongly persisting cultural
boundaries. Kenneth Burke addresses an issue central to the reading
ofliterature for social evidence: the relationship between realism and
reality. Burke's characteristically probing analysis leads to the
formulation of a set of considerations which have to be borne in
mind by those who study literature for the evidence it can give
about society. In Murthy and Kingston we find illuminating
discussions of the author-audience relationship. C. D.
Narasimhaiah's essay reviews distinct experiences in cross-cultural
and cross-national exploration.
'Literary and National Identities', Part II, has its strongest
emphasis on Asia, and the cultural impact of the West, particularly
the modern West. Themes and questions that have already been
adumbrated, even enunciated by, for example, Murthy and
Narasimhaiah, are reintroduced. Atsumi, Joaquin and Lee discuss
in detail the national-cultural sources of new concepts of the writer's
role in Japan, the Philippines and Korea. Atsumi considers the
development of modern Japanese poetry in the direction of a new
unity and a new universality forged out of disparate elements. Nick
Joaquin sees the impact of the West on his native Philippines in
positive terms, a cultural encounter, which according to him
created the Filipino identity. Peter Lee's discussion of Korean
poetry is a study of literary sensibility under conditions that
promote the growing manifestation of the individual self, which is
abandoning its high-culture feudalism while being battered by
foreign victimisation and conquest. Denney's commentary suggests
how a crisis in American cultural and literary identity stimulated
the grafting of American intuitionist notions of poetry on roots
imported from Hinduism and North-east Asian Buddhism. Nissim
Ezekiel's paper is an imaginary dialectic of two readers from
separate cultures reading the same text. S. C. Harrex studies the
Indian writer, Mulk Raj Anand, with respect to his attachment to
Western materialist radicalism, and the aesthetics he deduced from
it. Sarachchandra looks at the way traditional literature has been
overturned by Western values in a post-colonial setting.
The candid, well-informed and imaginative comments by the
guest writers and critics printed here suggest new stages and
xu Preface and Acknowledgements
openings in the international literary dialogue. At the same time

they suggest how deeply the modern world needs the artistic
devotion and vigilance for the human spirit that these contributors
represent.
I must begin by thanking the contributors who gave me complete
freedom to edit their manuscripts to suit the requirements of the
book.
It is more than an act of duty when I acknowledge my debt to the
East-West Center, and particularly to Verner Bickley, Director of
the Culture Learning Institute, for his encouragement and keen
interest in this publication.
Reuel Denney and Karen Smith shared the editorial task so
completely that any expression of thanks would be inadequate.
Ediriwira Sarachchandra, Margaret King and Elmer Luke read
the manuscripts with great care and made several useful
suggestions. I would like to specially thank Tina Shettigara for her
proof-reading and the care with which she prepared the index.
Mrs Hazel Tatsuno and the secretarial staff of the Institute were
very helpful in the organisation of conferences relating to this
project. The typing responsibilities were ably shared by Jan
Yamane, Betty Wolfram, Lyn Moy, Louise Endo and Mary Fatora-
Tumbaga.
My wife, needless to say, was my constant coach.
Part I
Literary and Cultural Roles

1 Literature and Cultural Knowledge
Guy ADlirthanayagaDl
There are many ways ofknowing a culture different from one's own.
Perhaps the best, most complete and comprehensive is to take the
step, sometimes irretraceable, of living in another culture and
learning in a direct way the language or languages of the people-
becoming familiar consciously and subconsciously with the
customs, social habits, mores, thoughts, religions, literature and art,
the 'popular' culture and other aspects of the culture's way of life.
But for most-indeed all-ofus, this way oflearning cultures is not
practicable. To begin with, it is not at all clear that one has learned
another culture merely because one has lived several years in it.
Apart from degrees of percipience and discernment, which vary
among individuals, too close an identification with the culture one
studies leads to a loss of the objectivity which is essential for any kind
of balanced study. Again, there is such an overwhelming number
and variety of cultures in the world that one has to consider
economies not only of time, money and place, but also of spirit. The
student of culture has therefore to limit his area, choose his focus,
and achieve what is possible given the inevitable brevity of the time
he has at his disposal. He has to know the separate ways- not really
separable except as mental conveniences -of the anthropologist, the
sociologist, the philosopher, the historian, the creative writer, the
litterateur, and the intelligent or merely curious traveller.
However, the study of its literature is a unique, and perhaps the
best, way of apprehending a culture in its complex particularities,
its nuances and its own characteristic tone. Literature is an
invaluable cultural expression because it springs from its cultural
nexus, if it may be so called, with an immediacy, a freshness, a
concreteness, an authenticity and a power of meaning which are not
easily found in other emanations or through other channels. When,
for example, one reads of the tea ceremony in japan, as presented by
Kawabata, one proceeds from the intricacies of the ceremony to the
3
4 Literary and Cultural Roles
complexities of Japanese social life; in R. K. Narayan's The

Financial Expert one is plunged into the actualities of a small town in
southern India, and immersed in the vivid realities of a small town's
business life.
Obviously, if the writer is great, the importance ofhis work is not
contained by a regional, national or even time-bound frame; but the
vividness of the cultural nexus, however mixed the brew may be, is
often a necessary condition ofhis art. One may illustrate this further
by citing some established American examples, such as Mark
Twain's The Adventures qf Huckleberry Finn, Henry James' The
American or Portrait qf a Lady, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great
Gats by.
Huckleberry Finn is a novel set in the specific context of post-Civil
War America. It opposes nature and the machine, the pre-
industrial and the industrial ways of life. The novel's morality,
however, does not depend on a simple repetition of ethical
principles found in currently-accepted codes of conduct, nor is it
merely illustrative; a kind of gloss on prevalent ethical attitudes. On
the contrary, the novel shows a complex, evolving moral imagin-
ation and sensibility, far removed from th-e conventional Christian
ethics of Twain's day. The current worship of the machine, of
money, of what Ruskin called 'the Goddess of getting on' is what
Mark Twain inveighs against. Elsewhere he describes the offensive
credo as follows: 'Get money. Get it quickly. Get it in abundance.
Get it in prodigious abundance. Get it dishonestly if you can,
honestly if you must.' Against this he places his sense of the old
America, simpler, with its own mix of good and evil, but somehow
to be preferred. The novel has a moral aura, and is symbolic of
moral realities. The concrete setting of the story in a particular time
and place is the source of its value as cultural knowledge, and also
one of the sources of its artistic excellence.
Henry James' The American also belongs to a specific time and
place, even though it is engaged with the international theme: with
America's relationship to its past, and to the old Europe, the land of
ancestral memory. The protagonist, Christopher Newman, em-
bodies a particular aspect of the American dream of that time. As he
tells his expatriate friend Tristram:
I want the biggest kind of entertainment a man can get. People,

places, art, nature, everything! I want to see the tallest
mountains, and the bluest lakes, and the finest pictures, and the
Literature and Cultural Knowledge 5
handsomest churches, and the most celebrated men, and the most
beautiful women.
He uses a metaphor from his business past when he says that he

wants a woman who would be the 'best article in the market'. Even
his business mentality is idealised as having 'undefined and
mysterious boundaries, which invite the imagination to bestir itself
on his behalf'.
Even though he is 'crude' compared to the Europeans- he has
often admired the 'copy' more than the 'original'- he has a strong
streak of decency; he refuses to exploit his knowledge of the skeleton
in their cupboard in order to get even with his European associates.
The novel however is too simplified, as it opposes not just American
innocence to European sophistication, but American nobility of
mind to European villainy. But it does look forward to the later
novels, where James was to treat the 'international' theme with
greater psychological depth and maturity, where the American-
European exchange was more subtle and more a two-way business,
where James' main preoccupation was the theme of freedom and
the circumstances in which freedom had to operate, where he was
able to project his opposition between American and European
cultures in terms of an ideal civilisation which, though nowhere to
be found, could nevertheless be posited as a humanly-satisfying
scale of reference. It looks forward to Portrait rif a Lady, which
examines more seriously the possibilities offreedom in the real world
of circumstance, and uncovers a tragic reality which endures.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, though admittedly a
slighter novel, has a complex cultural meaning: it is a later variant of
the American dream, and reflects a changed society. I wish to draw
attention only to the quality of Gats by's corrupt greatness, which
can still cling to an incorruptible hope. The earlier widespread
respect for 'getting-rich-quickism' has already turned somewhat
sour in American culture, though Gats by's love for Daisy redeems to
some extent his unscrupulously acquired wealth and other major
faults of character. The description ofGatsby at the graveside as the
'poor son of a bitch' is derogatory as well as pathetic. Gats by differs
from the typical American self-made man by his greater imagin-
ative style for self-renewal, for wanting to be reborn, to spring from
his own platonic conception of himself. This feeling, though
somewhat individualised in Gatsby, has its links with the original
American desire to begin all over again in a new country, with
frontiers that had an apparent capacity for expansion without end.

One could chart the further disintegration of the American dream
in later times, as for example in Arthur Miller's Death ofa Salesman,
where the pressures exercised by the still sufficiently pervasive belief
that only 'making it' matters, can only lead to disintegration and
disaster.
The use of literature for learning about cultures is one of the
important new directions taken by literary studies in recent times.
Though it has been known for a long time that one of the ways in
which culture reveals itself most fully is in the thinking which guides
it, shapes its values, and gives rise to its various creative expressions,
and that the literary or artistic achievements of a culture are among
its deepest and most authentic manifestations, there have been in
the past relatively few systematic or sustained attempts to study
cultures in this way; to 'possess' them intellectually as it were, and to
relate the humanistic achievements to the 'totality' or 'wholeness' of
cultures. Traditionally, the teaching of literature has been con-
cerned with the literary text as being worthy of study because of its
artistic merit or moral value. The most common way in which the
literary text has been extended has been in the direction of relating
it to, and seeing it as a part of, the history of literary tradition in a
particular language. While the major literary works of past
historical periods have been regularly used as source material for the
study of the social life of the period in question, little contemporary
work has been examined in this way. In recent years, though, there
has been growing momentum and development in the belief that
the social context of literature is essential to its understanding.
Though the literary critic in particular has resisted any attempt
to 'sociologise' the work of art, he now seems more willing to
approach it through concepts of medium, channel, genre or
ambience. The conviction has gained ground that the study of
society is a necessary dimension of the study ofliterature itself; that
the sensitive literary critic or the sensitive social "Scientist will not do
any disservice either to literary or to social studies. In fact without
sensitiveness, moral sensitivity and imagination, neither the literary
critic nor the social scientist is likely to be a good practitioner of his
own chosen specialty.
Characteristically modern phenomena, such as the loss of a sense
of personal identity in a mass society, the concern with aberration,
the ecological dangers posed by twentieth-century growth, the
intensive bureaucratisation of modern life, and the threat to the
very survival of the human species in the nuclear age, are reflected
in fiction, poetry and drama, and the sociological studies of these
matters provide useful background for literary study. On the other
hand, the literature is itself important documentation for social
studies, and the social scientist cannot ignore it. Particularly since
the 1 950s there has been a renaissance in the study of the relations of
literature and society, the position of the writer in society, and in
social problems as material for the creative artist. Anthropologists
have been especially imaginative and adventurous in the uses of
literary materials to support their research and enforce, if not
actually discover, their findings.
However, it must be emphasised that even though literature
introduces the reader to the culture with an immediacy and a
concreteness which cannot otherwise be duplicated, there are
several pitfalls which have to be borne in mind. Most critics and
lovers of literature claim that literature is its own end and
justification, that one must first learn to read and appreciate
literature before moving from it to cultural studies of any kind. In
fact they would reverse the process, and say that one must study the
culture in order to appreciate the literature- and not vice versa-
because literature represents the greater value, and should there-
fore be the prime concern. More people are interested in Homer
than in the specifics of Homeric times.
The work ofliterature is surrounded by concentric circles. There
is the author's character, his life story, his health or illness, his place
within his family and immediate social circumstances, his recep-
tivity to the ideas and ideologies current in his time, and-
remembering T. S. Eliot's remark that a major Western poet should
write with a sense of the tradition from Homer onwards in his
bones- his place in the literary tradition, which may extend
backward for thousands of years. There is also, and importantly, the
writer's relation to his own times. In addition to all these there is the
quirk of his own creativity, that special gift which is unique to him
and which interacts with all the other factors, somewhat in the
nature of a catalytic agent, to produce the special and irreplaceable
work of art. To be able to read literature well one must be
perceptive and sensitive to all these factors: to read it perfectly
would therefore be nearly impossible.
It may be that a culture is more accurately studied in some
respects by reading its newspapers than its works of serious art. It
may also be true that best-sellers are more representative of some
aspects of the time than its works of major literature. It is undeniable

that popular books such as Uncle Tom's Cabin or even Gone With the
Wind, which have defensible claims to authenticity, are better
source-material for the study of the age than the more recondite
masterpieces. In our own time, soap operas on television may tell us
more about what that indefinable character known as the common
man really feels and thinks. The point, however, is that literature is
the fruit ofthe most creative, and often the most interesting, minds
in a society. And therefore what is found in them is significant in a
different way, and at a different level. Great literature may capture
what is happening in the depths of the individual and social mind; it
may engage the deeper preoccupations, which in future times may
surface and become prominent, so that students oflater periods are
ready to identify these interests as the most important realities of the
times in question. But one has to have the required critical sense to
recognise that some works may be merely idealistically nostalgic, or
even utopian or future-oriented. The novel may deal with the
emergent aspects of the future as, for example, George Orwell's
1984. The 'feel' or reality may be deceptive: if you read Tolstoy's
short story Master and Man, you cannot conclude that the aristocrat
who gave his life to prevent his servant from dying of cold is in any
way typical of relations between master and man in nineteenth
century Russia. Tolstoy is more concerned with communicating a
human sympathy which transcends time and place. It is in this sense
that one has to reckon with literature's engagement in the universal
arena of experience. The writer's enduring value may subsist in
what he gives to his time, and not so much in what he derives from it.
One has therefore to take into account in an interrelated way all
these possible facets of a work of art before determining their
relevance for cultural knowledge.
Great literature is concerned with truth, while soap operas may
merely reflect the fantasies, dreams and pathologies of the producer
and the audience. In so far as man is a social animal, even the most
private experiences treated in literature have a social context, and
therefore they help to determine and complete our knowledge of the
human and cultural condition. The Chinese poet's attitude to
nature and the passage of time, and Wordsworth's sense of the non-
human in nature, tell us not only of the individual sensibilities of the
poets concerned, but also of their respective societies and the
different periods in which they wrote. As even the most intimate
experiences of, say, love, nature or death have a social context, their
recreation by artists has profound social meanings. There is

therefore no substitute for the cognitive value of great literature: it is
an invaluable source of the on-going movements of communion
between individuals and cultures.
There are other tendencies, not yet dominant, but becoming
more and more vocal in our culture, which have given the study of
literature additional new dimensions. Literature has acquired a
special value in the so-called age of science, to the extent to which
purely scientific education has been seen to be incomplete. Natural
science is not expected to yield values or guide conduct, but the
'scientific' approach seen as a total attitude is now largely
discredited, if not finally laid to rest. Every partial approach, such as
the scientific, however ethically or morally neutral it may appear,
creates its own mythologies; and the grey mythologies of science
have prov,rd themselves life-defeating.
The social sciences enjoyed until recently a period of fitful bloom,
but they too seem to have lost their confidence. More and more
people are turning to literature to seek the values whose life-support
was once provided by religion and philosophy. Critics and scholars
nowadays increasingly tend to busy themselves with the cultural
situation in which literature finds itself, and with the insistent
demands being made upon literature to provide an education in
moral sensibility and critical intelligence. They tend to approach
literature with the expectation that the principle which should
direct and inform educational effort is to be found primarily in
literary study. Since literature expresses the lived actualities of the
time, it is seen as an authentic source not only of the realities of
society as experienced by its most intelligent and sensitive members,
but of life-giving values and value-judgements. Literary study is
seen to lead not only to enlargement or refinement of sensibility, but
to training in discrimination, aesthetic and moral; the moral
judgement is not separate from the aesthetic in the sense that it is
subsequently superimposed on it; they are composite, and form a
unity.
Unlike in the past, when the experience ofliterature was sought
to clarify or extend moral insights, as, for example, one's reading of
Blake would modify one's traditional interpretations of Christian
world-views, today one goes to literature for the very creation of
values. Literature no longer offers the mere alteration of, or escape
from, traditional belief systems; it is called upon to provide
substitutes for what is no longer believed in.
It is in this context that extreme, and exaggerated, demands are

made upon poetry, and nearly impossible claims made on its behalf.
For a poet like Wallace Stevens, poetry belongs to the highest rung
in the caste-system ofhuman knowledge. He says in one ofhis essays,
'After one has abandoned the belief in God, poetry is that essence
which takes its place as life's redemption.' This is indeed the
supreme claim; it goes far beyond even the Shelleyan position of the
poet as the unacknowledged legislator. Stevens may not be
representative. There are other views, notably that ofT. S. Eliot, a
poet equally dedicated to his calling, but for whom the poetic
discipline was not self-sufficient, and needed completion by a moral
or even theological discipline. But Eliot's view is even less accepted
today. For Stevens' poetry makes life 'complete in itself'; that his
assertion is not as fantastic as it appears is seen in his long poem
'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction'. The subject is the relation
between Imagination and Reality; the imagination which is the
golden solvent brings the vivid transparence which in turn
renovates experience. Reality is not realism, which is a corruption;
it is the 'ultimate value', the spirit's 'true centre'. Imagination,
'man's power over nature', confronts reality in all its fullness: what
ensues is a fruitful interchange, a supreme fiction, a poetry which is
life's sustaining aliment:
Is it he or is it I that experience this?

Is it I then that keep saying there is an hour
Filled with inexpressible bliss, in which I have
No need, am happy, forget need's golden hand

Am satisfied without solacing majesty,
And if there is an hour there is a day,
There is a month, a year, there is a time

In which majesty is a mirror of the self:
I have not but I am and as I am, I am
That in a secular age a poet should fabricate an experience which

may be described as a 'pagan' equivalent of the beatific vision, is in
itself an achievement: that he should make it appear so nearly
credible is a poetic triumph. In another poem, 'The World as
Meditation', Stevens expressed the sense in which, even though
there is no longer any fury in transcendent forms, his actual candle
Literature and Cultural Knowledge I I
blazes with artifice. Though God is dead, the imagination takes his
place as the mirror and the lamp, the source and giver of life:
We say God and the imagination are one

How high that highest candle lights the dark
Out of this same light, out of the central mind

We make a dwelling in the evening air
In which being there together is enough
Despite the fact that high claims are made for literature, and that
it has been pressed into service for a variety of scholastic purposes,
the most notably recent of which is its use for cultural studies, I
would like to conclude by stressing that there is no substitute for the
close, unremitting, disinterested reading of the literary text with a
view to extracting the total meaning. There is no surrogate for
literary analysis and comparison. All cultural study of literature
must begin from there, before proceeding to aesthetic, moral or
cultural extensions and judgements. This is not to minimise the
information and the knowledge that is afforded by the study of
history, sociology and other relevant disciplines, but merely to stress
that the realities or portions of reality discovered by the creative
personality belong organically to the history and the mythology of
the human imagination.
Since the medium is words, with all the weight of denotation,
connotation, rhythm and the accumulated inheritances ofhistorical
usage, modified by the specificity of the immediate situation,
cultural knowledge is most accessible, complete and distinctive in
literature. It is not incidental that Aristotle gave poetry a higher
place than history. To understand the individual creative
personality, one must read the text as carefully as possible, and grow
into the reality it embodies, just as the artist grows into his
experience in the process of creation. It is only then that the reader
can encompass the total experience, and demonstrate how complete
or partial, how effective or ineffective, the particular work is. Only
after fully saturating oneself in the work, penetrating and evalu-
ating its significance, can one move into cultural studies. The
'movement' into cultural studies must also be informed by an
equally intense and sophisticated concern for the dynamics of
civilisation, which in itself has close relationships to the original
creative pressure.
The principle underlying this approach to literary-cultural

studies is that literature is an integral part of culture, and culture an
integral part ofliterature. The cultural setting of a literary work can
be no more meaningfully separated from the work itself than form
can be separated from content within a work of art. In these terms
culture is an essential aspect of the being of literature. This is an
aesthetic principle and not a social-scientific statement. Culture
should not be seen merely as a setting or an aura surrounding the
work, but as much of an integrated element as the thought, the
characters, the action or the language. In fact, if the cultural setting
can be thus isolated, it has to be seen as a defect of artistic
realisation; the degree of cultural penetration is an index of the
success or failure of the work of art and a factor of its significance.
Examples abound ofliterary works where the exotic, impressionistic
or inadequately grasped setting is a substitute for creative
inspiration; happily, there are examples of the opposite. Culture is
conterminous with the human, artistic and moral world of the work
of literary creation.
2 Notes Towards a Definition of
International Culture
Malcobn Bradbury
Over the last thirty years or so, in the period of reconstruction, social
reorganisation, and the post-imperial realignment of nations that
followed the Second World War, we have seen a great deal of
interest, on a global scale, and in a very wide variety of quarters,
with the id~a, or the issue, of 'culture'. Now the term 'culture' has
long been a repository for many anxieties. It is a term that warms
the spirit, with the sense that it speaks to some central humane desire
for mental and emotional refinement and enrichment, the desire
that makes the arts and ideas a fundamental resource of the human
mind; it is a term that also chills the spirit with the sense that culture
is a privatised and limited preserve, the possession of certain nations,
classes or elites, and so requires membership either of specialist
cadres or else a certain level of social and educational achievement
for its enjoyment. We may be talking about one of the richest
resources of the human mind, resources that break the barriers of
nationality and link the community of man; we may be talking
about those tighter linkages that cohere a village, bond together a
linguistic group, or cement a nation. The word means one thing to
an artist or a critic of the arts, and quite another to an anthropol-
ogist or a sociologist; while to a politician or a head of state it may
mean something else again. The debate is rich, but it is also
threatening. And among those who might feel most entitled to be
threatened by it are those who are responsible for cultural
production, and so become the focus of these pressures and
contentions: I mean, of course, contemporary artists themselves.
The contemporary concern with 'culture' has been fed from a
very wide variety of sources, and there can be no doubt that behind
I3
it there has been a breaking up, or a collapsing, of old cultural

hegemonies, within nations, and between nations. It is inevitable
that, in these comments, I make my points from a Western point of
view, but that is a condition of any debate about culture: all
discussion of the matter is itself culture-bound. The West has had a
strong tradition of cultural confidence and assertion; at the same
time, much of the history of Western culture throughout the
twentieth century has been a history of turbulence, self-scepticism,
irony-so that if we take the modernist movement as a fundamental
expression of the tendency and spirit of the modern Western arts, we
will find in it, as the critics say, as much decreation as creation. The
modernist arts have been centred, that is, on a large-scale and
anxious questioning of cultural lore. Some of the greatest texts (The
Waste Land, Ulysses, The Trial, the poems ofRilke, Yeats, Valery,
George, Stevens, for example) have been pained culture-readings
proposing an ultimate dislocation of the cultural sequence of the
past; others of its works, such as those of Dada and Surrealism
('Dada', said Louis Arp, 'has launched an attack on the fine arts, an
enema to the Venus de Milo ... '), have been systematic acts of
dislocation, challenging the whole idea of cultural solemnity and
stability, and its base in Western bourgeois taste. We still,
nonetheless, take Dada or Surrealism as 'high' art, though in fact we
have also seen the collapse of the fundamental models of cultural
hierarchy or stratification. We have, moreover, acquired many arts
and sub-arts: high culture and popular culture, op art and pop art,
the massive growth of the technological or the media arts, and so on.
Beyond the technological process, and often questioning it, we have
also seen the emergence of many new cultural sectors demanding
recognition. In the West, there have been the demands of sectors
who have felt excluded from culture, from the working class to
blacks to women. On the global scale, there have been the pressing
demands of nations and races who have felt excluded from the
cultural record. It is hardly surprising that the term 'culture' has
been surrounded by a contentious debate.
At the same time, in the process of cultural redefinition and
reorganisation, we have seen, in the post-war world, massive
endeavours in the direction of institutionalising culture. When,
during the Revolutionary War against Britain, the Americans
issued a Declaration of Independence, writers and artists followed
this by seeking to make a declaration of cultural, ar literary, or
linguistic independence. We know the problems surrounding this; it
A Definition of International Culture
is one thing to sever political ties, but quite another to sever cultural
ones. They adhere in speech, in social practices, in mental sets and
models; they propose, in short, that you cannot 'create' culture by
fiat. Yet one of the most familiar and fundamental of political aims,
when new states -like the many that have formed since the Second
World War- find nationhood, or when new communities assert
their claim to attention, is the constitution, or institutionalisation, of
a national expressive culture. Artistic cadres are formed; art is
described as a weapon, or seen as a means for the articulation of new
consciousness. It may be a way oflinking the past to the present, or
of finding a voice for the future. Nationalist or regionalist desire is
often expressed through it, and of these forces the artist becomes the
agent. The politics of culture has always been with us, but that too
has become a special power in our times. Ministries of Culture
abound; culture is internationally promoted; there are inter-
national agencies like UNESCO, whose ambiguous role it is both to
speak for the contending universe of national cultural claims and for
the internationalisation of culture. The paradox is demanding, and
it touches artists deeply.
One effect is to intensify an old conflict of allegiances- between
the nationalist version of the artist's role, and the internationalist
one. The expected or structured role of the artist varies enormously,
as it always has, from society to society, nation to nation, language-
block to language-block. Literature especially, being a language-
art, secretes many of these tensions and ambiguities: they are
manifest in literature's way of being both translatable and
untranslatable. Yet writers have long learned to think of themselves
as participants in a multi-lingual enterprise, and to regard them-
selves as members of an 'international community of letters'.
However, they also articulate their native language, and the
resources and perceptual patterns of their own culture; they need
their localism, and often their localism asserts that it needs them.
This, too, is a tension expressed in much modern writing-James
Joyce famously explores it in A Portrait rif the Artist as a roung Man,
where Stephen Dedalus leaves behind family, nation and religion-
his 'culture' in one sense- to expatriate himself to art's capital,
Paris- 'culture' in another sense- there, however, to 'forge the
uncreated conscience of my race'- 'culture' in a third sense- and
indeed one may see it as a fundamental source of much of our best
modern art.
We have seen, as I say, a marked reactivation of these issues in
recent years, but of course in a transformed global situation. The

tension between local and international has become an aspect of all
societies in our global-village world. Not only have we seen new
calls on the nationalist aspect of writing, on the role of art as
weapon or cultural claim: we have at the same time seen a massive
transformation in the nature of cultural formation in all societies,
coming, quite simply, from the processes ofinternationalisation that
arise from the modern economy, modern technology, modern mass-
communications. Kojak has been globalised; the western is made in
Japan. We now have something that has been called 'super-
culture', which is perhaps no culture at all, but the expression of
cultural fragments, a mechanical communication of interchan-
geable parts of stories, myths, images, through a great new
technology of transmission. Behind the technology is an economics,
and behind the economics a politics. Yet perhaps what presses most
on us is the internationally-funded imagery of the popular arts-
which, however differently the elements may be received in
different societies, seems to work toward a unification of awareness,
just as modern economics works toward the unification of a life-
style. A modern cultural melting-pot exists, which shapes living and
expectation on an extraordinary scale.
Culture thus becomes about the stabilisation of the past, and the
destruction of the past; about the wholeness of communities, and the
ending of those communities as other new ones are made. This is not
all new. If, from culture to culture, period to period, the arts have
functioned very variously- arising from different sociological
milieux within communities, manifesting fundamentally different
ideologies, perceptions and mythic needs- they have also always
had something to do with the breaking up of the communities from
which they have come. They have been a form of consciousness in
historical action, while also moving beyond history. Much art, in the
past, in the present, has not of course been individualised, and
comes from the subjective achievement of a signed performer; it has
come from the collectivity as such. Yet art's paradox is that it
transforms, transacts, becomes multi-semantic, moves out of its
formative circumstances into a level of 'timelessness'. It reaches
across national and temporal barriers; it even comes to acquire its
own international institutions, and grows into its own polyglot
community. For this reason, nationalist accounts of artistic achieve-
ment are rarely sufficient. Writers and artists move, across their own
distinctive landscape; so do writings and works of art.
A Definition of International Culture 17
II
In 1948, T. S. Eliot published a book called Notes Toward a Definition

if Culture, a recognisably conservative book. But the anxiety of the
title reflected a general disturbance in social discussion, and from
about that date forward we may see, in the Western thinking on
which I want to concentrate, an intensification of the cultural
debate. Eliot wrote from a literary standpoint, and the standpoint of
high culture; he assumed that culture was essentially bound up with
certain phenomena of especial interest- the creative, signed, serious
arts, especially the literary ones, and their performance in society-
though he went on to root this more deeply, above all in the religious
practices of nations. The method was, so to speak, to start from the
great achievements of the arts, and then reach toward the
anthropological dimension; and that is one essential way of
balancing the forces in the cultural equation. But of course this is
open to much dispute; and the dispute came. For modern thought
has been deeply marked by the attempt to move towards an
anthropological definition of culture, which recognises artistic
achievements as one structural derivative from much more funda-
mental processes- processes that may be examined comparatively,
so that a working model of culture may be reached. One modern
flowering of this enterprise, which has attempted to unite many
different kinds of thinking, many different disciplines of thought,
has of course been Structuralism, a tendency that has, I suggest,
much to do with the post-war movement toward the redefinition of
culture. I cite these examples because I think they represent two
fundamental aspects of the kind of thinking we might today bring to
bear on the definition of the cultural equation, which is properly a
matter of great concern. And I want to extend them to suggest a
central ground for debate.
One of the great derivatives that arises from the tradition of
Western thought is the possibility of the definition of culture as
eminently a humanistic achievement. It arises because of the
rootedness of certain fundamental ideas of individualism, of the
importance of subjective creativity; and it has been intensified,
especially from the Romantic period onward, because of the way
these ideas have come systematically into contention with certain
other aspects of the same tradition- those features of science and
technology, of industrial development, of urbanisation, secularis-
ation, modernisation, that have formed the nature of mankind's
experience and consciousness not just in the Western nations but

more broadly throughout the world. It was possible, therefore, to
use the standpoint of the arts and of subjective creativity as the
source of a social critique of the world that, so to speak, permitted
that subjectivism in the first place. One could therefore propose, on
the one hand, that literature and the other expressive arts were
historically sanctioned aspects of society, which, however much
they were derivatives of social phenomena, existed autonomously.
They had their own institutionalisation and their own rights to
existence. On the other hand, one could also propose that society
itself was a systematic process moving through clearcut patterns of
historical evolution and change. It was thus possible for artists, or
anybody who took their achievements as central and valid, to
identify an autonomous realm of the arts, and to step from that into
an attitude toward, or an assessment of, culture. Equally, it was
possible for those engaged in science, or, increasingly, in the
scientific study of society, to study that modernising, technologising
process which has dominated Western life since the seventeenth
century, and to come to systematic conclusions about that. Hence it
was possible to postulate what C. P. Snow came to call 'the two
cultures'. And if it became a matter of importance to study the
cultural question, as came increasingly to happen after the Second
World War, when it seemed cultural relations were being reformed,
then the problems that would need formulation would be problems
about each of these two cultures, about their inter-relation and their
hostility; and representatives of each party would be likely to want
to make their voices heard.
This is a perhaps elaborate fashion of saying that one essential
way in which the debate about culture has formed itself in Western
terms has been through the attempt to set side by side, and perhaps
reconcile, the methods of literary study and those of history or
sociology. Thus, when the desire to formulate a systematic cultural
study, and find a culturalist theory, developed, it was literary study
and sociology in particular that felt themselves essential parties to
the bargain. I have written about the problems surrounding this
enterprise elsewhere; 1 what I now want to remark on is the reasons
for the development of the enterprise. One fundamental aspect of it
was a growing awareness that the old and familiar models of
cultural hierarchy and stratification seemed to be breaking down,
largely as a result of fundamental social change and the new
workings of the market. Also important was a growing interest
among sociologists in literature as an expressive centre of ideology.

There was· growing concern too about the 'balkanisation' of
different types of knowledge, and a desire to find in cultural studies
an educational tool that raised essential questions about our social
experience, and the way in which the human mind articulates it.
The term 'culture' seemed to open many doors, and pave the way
toward the possibility of inter-disciplinary contact among
specialists, while reflecting a fundamental change in the expressive
life of society. What I want to do next is to examine, quite briefly,
some of the intellectual developments that have taken place in
certain central areas of Western thought as two traditions of
thinking- those located in literary study and literary consciousness,
and those in social study and the sociological imagination- have
struggled or combined around the term 'culture'.
m
I have, in my own case, a double angle of vision. I am, as a writer,
intensely conscious of the way in which ideas of culture press
articulately, as of course they also press unconsciously, against the
art one tries to produce, the social role one attempts to perform. But
I am also an academic, and I have been involved in several different
enterprises which have attempted to secure a method or a group of
methods for cultural analysis. The three are English studies,
American studies and cultural studies; and you will see at once that
they are not all enterprises of the same type. Two are area studies,
essentially defined, in the first instance, by a geography; the third is
a thematic study, defined by a subject-matter, either selected from
social experience, or attempting to incorporate an idea of the
wholeness rif social experience. But of course a geographically
defined subject matter is never enough, and in practice there has to
be a method or a group of methods for studying the subject. In
practice, the matters of concern tended to be those that clustered
around the word 'culture' or (less familiarly, now) 'civilisation'-
language, custom, myth, tradition; geography and economic
resources; peoples and their ethnic characteristics; political insti-
tutions and social organisation; the history of ideas and ideology; the
run of conflict, debate and coherence in the society; the kinds of
process that generate development and change; the creative arts
and their forms. So the disciplines called in tend to be history,
literature and sociology or social studies; and it is among the

alliances that these can make that a working area, and hence a
model of culture, tends to get forged. (Of course this is not the only
axis for the study of a society, and one only has to look at other area
studies- Russian studies, African and Oriental studies- to see a
very different mix, and therefore a very different model of what
constitutes culture, being developed.)
Now it seems to me significant that it was in the 1 950s, in the wake
of those feelings about cultural redefinition, and the changing
pattern of cultural hegemony, even about the world balance of
cultural power, that all these areas of study developed strongly. It
was in 195 7 that Henry Nash Smith asked a key question, in the title
ofhis essay 'Can "American Studies" Develop a Method?', and he
suggested that one would evolve through a 'principled opportun-
ism', by which scholars in different areas would come together on
common ground. Still, the key to the enterprise would be a type of
cultural anthropology, and he commented: 'Why may we not say
quite simply that the problem of method in American Studies can
be solved by presupposing a value implicit in culture which includes
and reconciles the apparently disparate values assumed in the
disciplines of, say, literature and sociology?' It was a suggestion that
appealed to the potential of intellectual curiosity at the time. A
similar movement, based largely on the inheritance from
F. R. Lea vis's magazine Scrutiny, and on the social inquiries of the
literary critics on the New Left, was starting in England; there was a
revival of the tradition of culture study on the continent of Europe.
In each case, the new curiosity was focused in the fields ofliterature,
sociology and history. It was driven partly by an attempt on the part
of literary critics to escape from formalism, the contemporary
variant of the New Criticism; partly by a desire among sociologists
to consider the expressive arts, the sociology of knowledge, the
sociology of the intellectual; partly by a wish among historians to
move more deeply into the study of social myths. It reflected in
general the search for a new intellectual language that passed
beyond the inherited lore of the disciplines; and the idea of culture
became focal.
However we might note here the presence of certain ideas that
have since become harder to hold. One is that literary arts, and the
methods established for studying them, remained always central.
There was, it was assumed, a major body of literature of a serious
kind which would remain a central object of study; there was, it was
A Definition of International Culture 21
also assumed, an empirical aspect to sociology which would let it

consort with literary study on equal but not superior terms; it was
hence assumed that literature would not be treated simply as a
social phenomenon, an expressive outcrop of the social process, but
would be valued formally and artistically. It could hence be
supposed that the literary arts on the one hand, and the determining
social processes and energies of social change on the other, could
provide two key aspects of a definition of culture. This depended
heavily on fairly confident assumptions about the powerful way in
which individual acts of creation and the creative tradition existed
within, but also transcended, their social context. Society was a
process of self-generating evolution, which changed the environ-
ment in which literature occurred, changed human consciousness
and literary form, but did not utterly define it. Smith emphasised the
idea of a plural companionship among different disciplines: inter-
disciplinary·approaches, not a super-discipline. The hope was that
cultural studies would provide an overview, beyond the standpoint
of particular national boundaries, which might lead to a compara-
tive theory of culture. But the problems were apparent. 'Culture' was
not an easy extrapolation to form from the elements that were being
drawn in. It seemed to provide a basis for a modern, international,
inter-disciplinary enterprise; but it was not, of course, secure neutral
ground. There is nothing abstract about the idea of culture, when it
comes into discussion. It is a vital centre of politics, of dispute about
value. The problems are apparent enough when the enterprise is
academic study; the word 'culture' does not mean the same thing to
a literary critic and an anthropologist. The problems are that much
greater when we move to consider the sense of culture as it exists in
individuals and groups in society. It involves matters of hierarchy,
social precedence, cultural power, the entire question of value-
making and value-orientation in society, the way peoples possess or
feel they do not possess a communal reality. It is not a matter of fact;
it is a matter of social conflict and contending social claims.
Moreover, the concern with culture itself arises from an on-going
cultural debate that has been differently formed within every
different society. The way in which poets, dramatists, novelists,
painters, sculptors, musicians, thinkers, critics and intellectuals, the
cadre of those who embody some inherently significant cultural
commitment, have shaped the idea of culture is a central facet of
culture itself. And this has happened differently in different nations,
so that these views must shape the way in which culture is studied.
One notable feature of the United States and the European

countries, then, is that there is in all of them a well-developed
cultural debate. The debates have certain things in common, and
certain fundamental divergences; and a good deal of recent
intellectual activity has been an enterprise in the direction of their
reconciliation. I am arguing that the new interest in cultural studies
that grew up in the 1950s arose not just to deal with culture, but also,
in an involved sense, out of its culture. Thus in England it was an
attempt to take further the cultural critique of English society that
had been alive from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century,
following on from the breakdown of patronage, the rise of the
literary market, the onset of the industrial revolution and a
mechanistic form of society, the assault on this mechanism from the
standpoint of the imagination and of organic values, the rise of a
romanticism in which the poet, socially uncertain, now, and
ambiguously positioned in relation to the classes, acted as, in
Shelley's phrase, an 'unacknowledged legislator'. The key figures in
the ensuing culture debate- examined by Raymond Williams in
Gulture and Society and The Long Revolution- were the poets, writers
and Victorian sages (Coleridge, Mill, Arnold, Carlyle, Morris, etc.)
who saw the imagination as a mode for the accurate perception of
what was wrong in society. Assuming the centrality of the literary
imagination, and the need to make 'culture' prevail, they took as
their possibility not a situation where the artist seemed romantic-
ally alienated but where he was an intervener in social affairs. Thus
a politics of culture was possible, as it was not, it seemed, to the same
degree in America and France. And to this situation we may trace
something of that centralising liberal humanism that seems part of
the British concept of culture. These issues passed through into the
debate of the 1950s, into the work of, say, Richard Haggart and
Raymond Williams. Both assaulted a class-centred or hierarchical
model of culture, and sought its 'democratisation'. But both
assumed that cultural concern, empiricism, detailed realism,
liberalism were essential constituents of a definition of culture.
We can see great differences between such views and those of
American or European cultural critics. In America, the post-
revolutionary problem had been largely the problem of culture's
'absence', a feeling of lack of warrant, and even of material, for
artistic activity. The tendency was to divorce actual from potential
culture, history from space. Cooper was a classically divided figure,
turning to Europe for culture as substance, but inventing the myth
A Definition of lnteTTlfltional Culture 23
of the free-standing frontier individual, resisting the encroaching
pressure of 'civilisation'. The problem was to generate not a
hierarchical but a democratic model for culture; as de Tocqueville
noted, this left massive problems of cultural generation. Thus the
tone and texture of the resulting debate were quite different, and it is
hard to imagine a book that could do for the American cultural
debate what Williams's book did for the British; though other
studies, like Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land, or Leo Marx's The
Machine in the Garden, show the attempt of American writers to distil
not the social fabric of culture, but its mythological fabric. One
result is that American culture seems to us not to grow out of
traditions and old orders, but in a naked situation in which the
whole issue of the nature of artistic existence and the making of
artistic consciousness has a peculiarly exposed form. There is in fact
a self-conscious coherence about American culture which comes in
part from the fact that the hierarchical sub-divisions of European
cultures were apparently absent. Yet this situation has changed very
greatly, as the nationalist portrait of culture has seemed to come into
question through the rise of ethnic and regional literatures: black
culture, Indian culture, even women's culture have become matters
of dominant concern.
In Europe, too, models of culture have evidently been different
again. The cultural debate that runs through European thought-
we might trace important roots in Mme de Stad and Taine- has in
many ways been vastly less concerned than the English with the way
in which literature functions as an active force in society, and much
more with its existence either as a social or an ideological
manifestation. We have, of course, in Marx and Marxism probably
the most systematic, though in some ways also the most limiting,
formulation of the relationship of individual creative thought to
social structure. Of this matter there have of course been modern
sophisticated variants: the Frankfurt school of Adorno,
Horkheimer, Lowenthal; Goldman's sociology of literature; and
that French model of linguistic and anthropological analysis that
was already well developed before it thrust its banner into the air
with the word 'structuralism' emblazoned on it. Here the tendency
has been to see literature very much more phenomenologically as a
cultural event, a written or a performed text that emerges from a
socio-mental structure, a temporal and cultural coherence of
relations, and acts within that structure. In many respects it has
been models of this last type that seem to have come closest to
prevailing in the formation of a contemporary idea of culture. Yet

we may note in many of them the development of an inner
resistence, a growing commitment to subjectivism, a desire to
reformulate the humane component. In many respects, the holism,
or theoretical completeness, of modern intellectual formulations
about culture seems greatly to have intensified; and certainly
Hegelian and revisionist Marxist factors have grown more and more
important. Yet as our cultural schemata grow even more vast, more
explanatory, more theoretical, we have come to find them less and
less useful in accounting for the specific achievements of culture in
the realm of artefact or creation, and they run the risk ofbecoming
one of those structures of alienation by which in so many forms the
modern artist has felt himself oppressed. Today the debate seems in
a peculiarly uncertain stage; finalised in some respects, newly
reopened in others. We are no longer sure of the tools we need, and
no longer sure of the proper objects for study. But one dimension,
certainly, is beyond the national perspective, into a genuinely
comparative perception of the conditions of modern artistic and
cultural formation. It has grown less and less possible to think of the
founding sources of culture in terms of the nation states, or even of
the distinct language blocks. Artistic expression is globally inter-
fused now, and no longer co-equal with nationhood; it is, like the
changing states that make up our world, both larger and smaller.
Yet ther-e is one residue from theW estern cultural debate which we
all, I think, should want to defend: this is the potential alignment
between the cultural debate and humanism.
IV
I began by talking about the countervailing claims that definitions of
culture, as well as the more fundamental workings of cultural
process, impose on the artist -whom I take to be the centre of all the
pressures about which I have been reflecting. As artists know, art is
both an individual and a strikingly unindividual enterprise. Art is a
social event that changes with the world; and what is in change is
not only contemporary art, but the art of the past as an institution or
a cultural inheritance. Art's production depends on the prevailing
nature of many aspects ofthe contemporary artistic institution: the
nature of the market, the available technologies of transmission, the
substantive materials of cultural reference that are available for
transmutation or re-articulation. All art is an allusion to art's past

and art's future, but we may define that past and that future very
differently. Today the written Western culture of the past has itself
acquired ambiguous status; it contends for eultural dominance with
a whole variety of other cultural phenomena. We may see this in the
spirit of much of modern art, inhabited as it is by recurrent feelings
of parodic scepticism about what lies behind it. The modern artist is
pressed from many sources: from the past and the present, from the
local and the international, from a personal hunger for individual
expression and a corporate desire for articulation. Behind him there
is a massive, shifting sociology, geography and economics of cultural
formation. We need to acquire a cultural study that understands
this, which is indeed internationally conceived, but recognises that
the structures of form and feeling that are available to us now are
infinitely varied. But the ultimate definition of culture is that it is an
international humane enterprise. Certainly one of the places that
we must look to most carefully is the modern page, the modern
canvas, the modern performance of being an artist, as it is shown to
us in many countries in many forms; it is here that we will see the
anxieties of modern man in the modern culture of our global world
most clearly focused.
Note
1. In the introduction to my The Social Context of Modern English Literature (Oxford:

Basil Blackwell, 1971).
3 Realisms, Occidental Style
Kenneth Burke
Introduction
I should begin with the problem of beginnings, and say why.

The main problem in discussing what literature has to tell us as
documentary evidence about the general conditions of its origin
involves what we might call the choice of terms for describing what
a given work's background really is. For instance, unless I
remember incorrectly, in neo-classic French tragedy, though there
is much talk of death, there is no mention of pistols. However, this
omission is not documentary evidence that there were no pistols, in
the way that the featuring of gunplay on our contemporary TV
shows clearly reflects the fact that the aristocratic sword has gone
out offashion and that we are in a time when all who are concerned
with law and order- except those of our politicians who stress 'law
and order' as one of their favourite selling points-worry, about
such chummy pieces as 'Saturday night specials'.
In discussing the use ofliterature as documentary evidence, this is
a prime consideration with which we have to deal. French neo-
classic tragedy was in many obvious respects documentary evidence
of the circumstances during which the dramas of Comeille and
Racine were written and first produced. There is even an histori-
cally authenticated case where Comeille's Cinna was given a totally
pragmatic application. A figure whose name escapes me was
accused of plotting against the king. The sub-title of Cinna is 'the
clemency of Augustus', since the play ingeniously involves a chain of
events, with a correspondingly fitting set of relationships among the
characters, whereby the king is moved to respond with the grandeur
of the fictive Emperor and pardon the conspirator. His ministers
worked hard to undo the effects that the fiction had upon him. In
the end their efforts, and not Comeille's drama, won, and the
conspirator was duly executed.
Realisms, Occidental Style 27
My point is this: surely there was never an art that more clearly
reflected the courtly influences contemporary with its ceremonious
postures- and that influence is documentary indication of the
conditions characterising the theatre of the times, as reflected in the
neo-classic dramaturgy. However, the fact that there was no
mention of pistols is documentary evidence not that there were no
pistols then about, but that the mention of so low-grade a weapon
would violate the stylistic proprieties of the medium. (If you find a
mention of pistols in Corneille or Racine, please don't tell me. And
in any case, even if you did find such a passage, surely I have made
my point in principle.)
In any case, I have now decided on my beginning, which
illustrates a major problem besetting our attempts to use works of
literature as documentary evidence about their 'contexts of
situation'. A book such as Kerouac's On the Road, for example, that
refers to driving about America 'like crazy', is at least a fairly
reliable indication that it was a civilisation, not of stage-coaches,
canals and riverboats (though many canals and riverboats are still
with us), but of motor cars 'run rampant'. (I say that American
civilisation was such. Just what important changes, if any, result
from the 'energy crisis' still remains to be seen. Up to now, the cars
still race by our place in the country, just about as roaringly and
empty-beer-can droppingly as ever.)
My first introductory example will deal with a few pages from
Levi-Strauss's The Story £if Asdiwal. It will be but a brief summary of
some pages that were themselves a summary, so I cannot do justice
to the full statement. I use only as much as applies to this particular
problem.
On the basis of what Levi-Strauss can adduce from other sources,
he notes that certain important aspects of the myth (my equivalent
ofwhat I shall call 'context' or 'realism' in a quite loose use of the
term) do not have 'anything to do with the reality of the structure of
Tsimshian society, but rather with its inherent possibilities and its
latent potentialities'. Thus he proceeds: 'Such speculations [the
myth's speculations about types of residence to do with distinctions
between patrilocality and matrilocality] in the last analysis do not
seek to depict what is real, but to justify the shortcomings of reality,
since the extreme positions are only imagined in order to show that
they are untenable.' This step, which is fitting for mythical thought,
implies an admission (but in the veiled language of the myth) that
the social facts when thus examined are marred by an in-
surmountable contradiction- a contradiction which, like the hero

of the myth, Tsimshian society cannot understand and prefers to
forget.
From this aspect of the myth as he interprets it, Levi-Strauss
concluded:
This conception of the relation of the myth to reality no doubt

limits our use of the former as a documentary source. But it opens
the way for other possibilities; for in abandoning the search for a
constantly accurate picture of ethnographic reality in the myth,
we gain, on occasions, a means of reaching unconscious
categories.
0 bviously, in so far as these are such 'unconscious categories', the

myth would be documentary evidence of them. But it is not the kind
of evidence we generally associate with the specifically social
conditions which sociologists, anthropologists or historians would
interpret the myth as reflecting. And when he concludes 'that for
these natives the only positive form of existence is a negation rif non-
existence', it is not our problem now to decide whether or not we
agree with this statement of the case (if only because my greatly-
truncated report of Levi-Strauss's characteristically ingenious
speculations does not provide even remotely enough information for
us to take a stand on the issue). My purpose here is simply to indicate
that, to sum up the ultimate nature of the myth along Levi-Strauss's
line, the kind of terms we should need would be not
anthropological, sociological or historical, but in terms of nco-
Hegelian dialectic- a formalistic description in itself as non-
temporal as the multiplication table.
My other introductory example, a favourite with me, is
Euripides' tragedy, or tragic lamentation, perhaps what Aristotle
would have called apatli£tiki (Poetics, xvm): The Trojan Women. To
quote from the edition of The Complete Greek Drama (edited by
Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O'Neill, Jr):
The play, produced in the spring of 415 BC, followed closely upon
the siege and capture of the island ofMelos by the Athenians. In a
spirit of cold-blooded and brutal imperialism, Athens had taken
the island, massacred the adult male population, and sold the
women and children as slaves. Melos' only crime had been that
she wished to remain neutral. The whole episode is treated
brilliantly by Thucydides, who is unmitigated in his condem-

nation of the crime. It is not surprising, therefore, that Euripides'
illusion of a great and just democratic Athens crumbled into
nothing. Even at the very moment when the play appeared, the
same military faction which had determined the action against
Melos was still in power and was gathering its forces to embark
upon the ill-fated expedition against Sicily.
In one notable respect, this statement of the editors is quite

misleading. The play by Euripides is ostensibly concerned not with
policies and incidents for which the war party of Athens at the time
of Euripides was responsible, but with brutalities suffered by women
victimised in the Trojan War that was the subject of The Iliad. Here
the pathos attains its height in episodes relating to the Greeks'
hurling of the princely child Astyanax to his death lest, if he
survived, he might someday avenge the sacking of the city.
This is quite an important point. Had Euripides written a tragedy
called 'The Sack ofMelos', there would have been a riot. It would
have polarised the audience. But, as the story got told in his terms,
members of the peace party and members of the war party could
weep in unison, at the fiction of an analogous situation ascribed to
the epic (hence, mystically idealised) past. In fact, another
playwright, whose work is lost, did write a tragedy that dealt
explicitly with the subject of Melos, and he fell into considerable
trouble for his pains.
Here we might cite an amusing contrast with Euripides' play
(which, while using mythic lore, was professionally far from the kind
of rambling tribal myth discussed by Levi-Strauss). It is worth
noticing how at the time of the First World War, one Broadway
hack job dealt with the susceptibilities of audiences. It was a war
play designed for popular consumption in wartime. It therefore
used the most obvious kind of dramatis personae- all the good guys
being on the side of the Allies, all the bad guys on the side of the
Central Powers. However, the play was supposedly written by a
'neutral' observer of the situation, namely a Dane. But the drama
critic George jean Nathan discovered otherwise. Actually, the play
was also running in the theatres of the 'enemy', the one major
difference being that theN ew York version had reversed the roles of
good guys and bad guys. Since at that time a favourite sentimental
song was Carrie Chapman Bond's 'The End of a Perfect Day',
Nathan entitled his article springing the news about this delicate
tribute to American wartime sensibilities 'The End of a Perfect

Dane'.
All told, as viewed from the standpoint of our problem, what
considerations do we confront when comparing and contrasting
these two cases?
The Broadway play, like its original inverted counterpart, was
factional in the simplest sense. The conditions of nationalistic war
readily provide a market for works that embody a crude antithesis
between attitudes toward friends and enemies, an antithesis equally
exemplified in both versions of the play, despite the cynically
disingenuous feat of 'translation'.
But the play by Euripides was designed to meet a much more
complex challenge. As I would size up the dramaturgic tactfulness
of what the editors call his 'tragic pageant', it was concerned with
subtleties of this sort:
1. Classical Greek tragedy being a civic ceremony, it would
attain maximum cathartic effect to the extent that, whatever the
disputes that plagued the city, the audience (which was composed
of all conflicting classes among the citizenry) could be infused with a
unified attitude. This would be the case if all members of the
audience, despite the conflicting interests in their daily relationships
with one another, could be brought to weep in unison at the pathos
of an intensely dramatic fiction.
2. In his personal role as a member of the peace party, Euripides
had deeply felt the pathos of the indignities done to the small island
of Melos by the champions of Athenian democratic imperialism.
3· It was indeed a 'timely topic', vibrant with opportunities for
the purgative function of pity. As I have explained elsewhere, I take
it that the most cathartic public relationship would be one of
universal love. To love everyone would be identical with being
totally 'cleansed'. However, such love would have to possess an
intensity far greater than what characterises a merely philanthropic
attitude of goodwill. I interpret an audience's sense of pity as being
on the slope of love, and thus the dramatic response that comes
nearest to the intensity needed for catharsis. (Incidentally, I also
interpret it as a civic surrogate for the primitive Dionysian orgy out
of which the political nature ofGreek drama developed. A weeping
in unison would be the analogue of any sexual promiscuity that
might have been ritually associated with such rites. Here, adapting
patterns of Freudian psychology, I would interpret sympathetic
weeping as a communal surrogate for sexual orgasm.)
Realisms, Occidental Style
4· But such a 'timely topic' had to be treated via the 'pathos of

distance'. For as thus treated in 'mythic' terms of the Trojan War
(the Greeks' 'essential' war, as established by the traditional
Homeric epic), the subject could be presented in ways whereby
members of both the peace party and the war party could weep
together, regardless of their views about the disgraceful bullying
done by Athens upon little Melos, thanks to the Athenian
democratic imperialists of the war party. (One should read
Thucydides on the ensuing campaigns in Sicily, to see what,
because of the powers of the war party, was to happen next in the
history of Athenian democratic imperialism.)
5· The most telling touch (and I believe that thoughts about it
bring us close to a generating principle in the greatness of Greek
tragedy) is the dramaturgic device whereby the Greek, who brings
to the young prince's mother the news that her child is to be hurled
to death from atop Troy's battlements, is himself unhappy about the
decision of which he is the herald. Essentially the distinction I would
bring out is of this sort: in the hack pattern, the drama was simply a
matter of Us against Them. In the Grand Tragic Pattern of
Euripides,the partisan issue was both expressed and transcended.
Incidentally, I would analyse the appeal ofSophocles' Antigone from
the same point of view. Since Creon had relented, and retracted his
harsh decrees, before the bad news began coming in, and since his
decrees in the first place represented the judgements of an un-
fortunately mistaken, but conscientious, administrator, we feel sorry
not only for Antigone, but also for him. He too has suffered grievously
for having started a sequence of events that he could not stop.
To be sure, a timely topic lurks poignantly in the background
with regard to circumstances that we learn from Thucydides (who
provides the documents nowhere to be found in Euripides' play,
ostensibly about 'Troy'). Yet the ultimate motivation involving the
play's appeal is grounded not in local conditions but in ingeniously
diplomatic dramaturgy. It is in its own way 'timeless', in the sense
that such modes of appeal will have their force so long as our ways
with symbol-systems persist- and I assume that they will persist as
long as we are physiologically, hence 'mentally', the kind of animal
we have been ever since we became our kind of animal.
However, I am not trying to make a special plea for Greek
tragedy as 'eternal'. I am only trying to bring out this admonitory
proposition: the study ofliterature as social document can lead to an
over-emphasis upon motives that are merely local in some given
historical period; whereas a literary work's appeal does not depend

upon motivational ingredients that appear and disappear with the
duration of that particular period. For instance, a work may possess,
among other things, the appeal of unity, or internal consistency may
be more exacting than in others; its formal appeal is not local in the
sense that some particular doctrine or assumption might appeal in
an era marked by the hegemony of such a doctrine or assumption,
itselfhaving in effect the appeal local to some 'timely topic' at a time
when it was timely.
On the other hand, we should devoutly subscribe to Croce's
concept of what he calls a 'palimpsest' (namely, places in a work
that are misread simply because readers who only know the text
may lack the historical knowledge needed to grasp the full
implication of some particular passage or style). That consideration
could in itself merit many pages of discussion. But for our purposes it
is enough to think of places where a critic assumes that some
particular word in an earlier work meant what it means now
whereas, had the critic but consulted the history of the word as
recorded in the OED, he would know that a usage current in an
earlier century was involved. Yet, alas! even scholarly caution may
not solve the case beyond all doubt-for the author may have been
recollecting a still earlier usage, or anticipating a later one.
Realism. and Reality
Our nature as the typically word-using animal makes for a kind of

doubling, whereby things and situations do not seem wholly to exist
for us until or unless we have words for them. The cycle of the
seasons must be matched by a lore of the seasons, ranging from
ancient myths of sky-gods to strictly scientific descriptions and
measurements of cosmic processes. Spring calls for a spring-song;
mating attains symbolic fulfilment in a love-song; marriage gets its
ceremony. For our physical or mental discomforts we aim to list a
syndrome of symptoms. And even death is not as complete as it
could be unless it attains a culminative counterpart in some formal
leave-taking, for which one sociologist (Thomas D. Elliott) has
proposed the somewhat unfeeling, but resonant, title 'Ritual of
Riddance'.
Though many contemporary writers may quarrel with attempts
merely to repeat such traditional duplications, they are by no means
rejecting the principle. Indeed, they are but striving to carry on the
same process, except under new conditions. Indeed, their quarrels
with words centre in their efforts to make words serve better than the
traditional doublings could as counterparts for experience as they
know it now.
We thus confront the concept of 'context' in two senses. There is
the strictly literary context, as when an aggrieved author complains
that an opponent has misrepresented him by quoting a contested
passage 'out of context'. There is also what the anthropologist
Malinowski called 'context of situation', the largely non-verbal
cluster of circumstances out of which any strictly verbal context
arises, and to which it is necessarily related in some way or other.
Somehow, directly or indirectly, it 'reflects' the historical conditions
that prevailed at the time of its creation. (In this regard I would feel
justified in examining an historical novel, among other things, for
traces of the circumstances under which it was written.)
As for the title of this paper, I am using the term 'Realism' in a
·quite loose sense, referring simply to the literary work considered as
itself a context. My use of the term 'Reality' would, on the other
hand, correspond to the 'context of situation' out of which that
purely literary context comes to be. In my sense of the term
'Realism' (as distinguished from its application to a particular
literary school, be it Flaubert's kind of realism or the kind that some
authoritative office-holders would demand of 'socialist realism'),
even an out-and-out fantasy could be examined for its traces of
realism, insofar as its context bears upon 'Reality' (its correspond-
ing 'context of situation') in some way. Thereby, insofar as it
succeeds, it possesses a 'verisimilitude' of some sort or other, even if
the author, whatever his intentions, is in effect 'realistically' saying:
'In my depictions of "Reality" I'm crazy.' Obviously, our specifi-
cations as to what is required to meet the tests of 'Realism' are not
over exacting as viewed in terms of the 'doubling' I spoke of (the
need of the symbol-using animal to round things out by translating
its 'context of situation' into sheer context). By 'Realism' is meant
whatever sheerly symbolic reality is designed somehow or other to
reflect, or refract, or duplicate the non-symbolic 'Reality' out of
which it somehow emerged, whether such context of situation is
represented 'objectively' or 'subjectively'.
Here would be a test case: the imitation of victimisation in a
classical Greek tragedy would obviously be classified as 'Realism',
though its highly ritualistic nature radically differentiates it from
the realistic imitation of suffering in a play such as Arthur Miller's

Death rif a Salesman. But victimisation in a Roman gladiatorial arena
would not be 'Realism'. Such a happening was a direct brutal fact of
'Reality' itself. To understand the purely symbolic ingredient in
that motivational recipe, we would have to concern ourselves with
the nature of vicarious sacrifice in general. For even those poor
devils who were not just 'realistically' but really killed were also
symbolic victims; the Roman public needed them; the cry for bread
and circuses (panem et circenses) was not just local to the times. In
principle (if in such matters we may speak of 'principle') it is a
universal cry- for tragically high among the resources of symbol
systems is the principle of substitution.
Owing to my fixations about the problems of what I would call
either 'Technologism' or the 'Technological Psychosis', I gave
much thought in thinking of this subject to the fantasies of Science
Fiction and what, as social documents, they might tell future
generations about conditions now.
However, having in mind that our immediate concern is with the
understanding of culture as perceived via literary texts, I may
tentatively list the following:
1. There is technology as the mad scientist.
2. There is technology as the beneficent magician.
I have also been tinkering around the edges of a third possibility,
namely, the use of Science Fiction as an opportunity for satire.
Hence, above all, with regard to the subject of my attempt to build a
criticism of our contemporary Reality around a lowly kind of
Science Fiction, a project for imagining a Culture Bubble on the
Moon, an ingenious technological reduplication of what we have
here on Earth already, except for technology's side-effects,
pollution ... but why try finishing that sentence?
Basically, I have in mind the thought that, when man now looks
in the mirror, he confronts as his counterpart the technological
duplication of himself. He is by sheer definition the 'rational
animal'. There can be nothing more rational than a rationally-
designed contrivance by which, if you put in the proper things, you
get out exactly what the machine- as built, in keeping with the
rationality with which you built it- will deliver according to what
you asked for.
Only humans are 'rational' enough to construct such perfectly
rational replicas of implemented rationality as our mechanisms are.
If the accumulated clutter of them and their unwanted by-products
(or 'side-effects') add up to a clutter of problems that is not rational
at all, that is just too bad. But in any case, with regard to literature as
social document, in our day at least we know for sure that all such
fantasies testify to the contemporary hegemony of technological
implements, with their corresponding clutter and problems.
In sum, I personally take it all to be saying: once human
rationality attains its ideal perfection in the accumulation of
fantastically numerous machines (each one of which is rationally
designed) by such sheer implementations of rationality-in their
multitude and the vexing problems due to the corruption caused by
their unwanted by-products or side-effects- the ideals of rationality,
as embodied in the products of applied science, are transformed into
a veritable traffic jam of problems. Mankind is in trouble indeed
when its best principle of guidance, reason, becomes so major a
source of social disturbance. But whatever the Realism of science
fiction might tell the future about the nature of Reality as we
experience it, I am puzzled because I cannot imagine our agreeing
on what the nature ofReality now actually is. The only thing we can
know for sure is that there are all kinds of Reality now. I wonder
whether that is not always the case. The ultimate question would
presumably be: 'whose kind of Reality now is the type truly
representative of our times?'
But let us turn to our main problem: namely, a listing, in one-two-
three order, of some of the major problems we confront in the
attempt to use the Realisms of literary contexts as documentary
insight into the Realities to be found in contexts of situation.
First, there is the deceptive tendency to overstress the sheer
context ofliterary work, any formal considerations being dismissed
as mere 'formalism', as a purely literary matter. The tragedy by
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, provides an interesting instance of this
sort. Shelley was an enthusiastic admirer of this play, which he took
at face value, as the heroicising of Prometheus, challenge to Zeus.
But it was the first of a trilogy, and only a few scattered fragments of
the second and third plays survive. However, in his book, Aeschylus
and Athens, the British scholar and critic George Thomson offers
good grounds to interpret the surviving play not on its face value but
in the light ofits place in the trilogy. When it is approached thus
formally, he interprets this first play as the portrayal of excesses on the
part of both Prometheus and Zeus, excesses that, by the end of the
third play, had mellowed into moderation. In keeping with this
interpretation (which fits perfectly with the dramaturgic tactics of
the Oresteia, the one Aeschylus trilogy that does survive) the
furiously challenging heroics of the first play were, one might say,
being put up to get knocked down; but Shelley idealistically took it
all at face value.
There is thus a sense in which formalist considerations might
properly figure, even when one's interests are wholly concerned
with the interpretation of texts as social documents. It is a point that
will turn up whenever the demands of artistic effectiveness do not
coincide with the demands of strictly literal factuality. In
particular, this is the case with regard to the question ofproportion. It
is much easier to show, by the examination ofliterary texts, that a
certain motive or situation was present at a given time than it is to
specify the exact proportion of that element in the cultural context
of situation as a whole. For, owing to the entertainment value of
saliency, literary works are designed to spotlight their themes.
Whereas the needs of drama favour the choice and featuring of
characters that are in some notable respects excessive, the dramatist
changes this technical advantage into a kind of cautionary tale. He
does so since the outcome of the characters' excesses can be
interpreted as a moral admonition against precisely those same
excesses which, like the villain in melodrama (or a great example,
I ago in Shakespeare's Othello), keep providing the motives that in
turn generate the turns in the plot.
Ironically enough, the entertainment value of news (supposedly
on the Reality side of our pair) leads to a variant of this same
difficulty, with regard to the proportions of the ingredients in an
age's motivational recipe. For the headline is the newsman's ideal. I
made up this analogy, though I will not vouch for its authenticity as
natural history: just as a woodpecker, ifhe does not bang his head
several hours a day, gets a headache, so newsmen are only happy
when reporting disasters of one sort or another. Since our ideas of
the world we live in are formed to an overwhelming degree not by our
immediate experience but by the greater clutter of information and
misinformation which we receive second-hand, what we know
directly- through our immediate experience- is comparatively
minute.
Thus, all told, when using the fictions of Realism as evidence for
the study of Reality, we are liable to get caught in a kind of
circularity. It is somewhat similar to intelligence tests. One may
argue as to whether intelligence tests do adquately score human
intelligence. But at least there is no denying that, by and large, they
adequately score people's relative ability to pass intelligence tests.
In the same sense, though one may argue whether stories that
feature crime and violence do attest to a corresponding prevalence
of crime and violence in human relations, or whether such fictions
serve to stimulate more crime and violence, in any case, their sheer
popularity is on its face evidence that there is a big market for stories
of crime and violence.
The entertainment value of news is like the entertainment value
of gossip- and the kinds of topics which the news features are likely
to coincide somewhat with the kinds of gossip which literature
features, except that literature can develop in detail a range of
pornography that the news can but hint at. On the other hand, the
news has one advantage with regard to the curative value of
victimisation. For in literary Realism, the scapegoats who suffer on
behalf of our entertainment are but fictive, whereas the news, like
the ancient Roman gladiatorial contests and the Spanish bullfight,
gives us real victims. Television broadcasts of gruelling athletic
events, particularly prize-fights, round things out by having the
Reality of the occasion presented dramatically as news in the
making.
At this point an issue arises which I can but mention in passing.
Coleridge laid much stress upon a distinction between an 'imitation'
and a 'copy'. Only an 'imitation' would meet his requirements for
an act of the poetic 'imagination'. A 'copy' would be as dead as the
mere waxwork realistic representation of some historic figure,
clothed in a costume exactly proper to the times. The more I ponder
over that distinction, the more convinced I become that the
developments of photography since Coleridge's time introduce the
need for some such intermediate term as 'record', as with modern
'documentaries'.
For instance, suppose I happened to have my camera trained in
exactly the position to record a murder that suddenly took place
exactly there. Ifl showed it to you, you would be witnessing a literal
record of the occasion. On the other hand, if I did not have such a
record, but a realistic picturising of that event were called for in a
fiction, to the best of my ability I would try to simulate the
conditions in so lifelike a way that there would be no notable
difference between the documentary record and the artificially
lifelike re-enactment. As a matter offact, ifl knew exactly where the
event had taken place, and if the surrounding scene were still in the
same condition as when the event did take place, I could combine
an exact documentary record of the scene with a simulated act that

would look exactly as it would have, had I actually photographed
the real thing.
When I was young, if I had been a good boy for the week, I was
given money on Saturday to attend a blood-and-thunder melo-
drama in a local run-down theatre. What gore! I still remember to
this day the lawless Biddle Boys' escape from prison, how they shot
down a guard, and how it took him at least five minutes of agonised
orating before he died. When the curtain for that act came down,
everybody was so enthusiastic because he had died so well that we
demanded that he take several curtain-calls. And I still remember
how in The Count of Monte Cristo the enormous rocks of the dungeon
swayed, to an off-stage breeze that was not called for in the script.
Realism, you say? Yes, but realism with a difference. Not the realism
of the record-so documentarily exact that you are witnessing
something no different as a simulation from what it would be as the
real thing.
People justify our filmed representation of violence on the
grounds that so many of Shakespeare's plays are rife with violence.
No mention is made of the difference that the violence there is
embedded in great poetry, whereas the modern filmed versions of
such violence are given in lifelike versions wholly devoid of poetry,
and without its stylistic artifices. Now, everything is done by
machinery. I am not sure just how to gauge such things. But is it not
possible that there is a fundamental difference of some sort between
realism of poetic imitation and realism of the record?
In any case, when trying to discern the reality that is explicitly or
implicitly represented by literature's various brands of Realism, we
have one major, purely literary, concern to deal with: namely,
literary works are not designed for purely documentary purposes.
Their primary source of appeal is not truth but verisimilitude. The
mere fact that something actually happened is no assurance that the
reader will go along with your use of it in a fiction, however accurate
the details. Yet sheer fantasies can somehow 'ring true', though the
story never actually happened, and never will happen.
Thus, before we even begin, we can know that our enterprise is to
be complicated by a terministic situation of this sort: something may
be there because it is 'true' of the situation. It may be there because,
although not true, it seems true.lt may be there primarily because it
belongs to the particular literary tradition of which it is a part, and
that is the sort of thing its public expects. Even if something is not
obviously there, it may be implicitly there, given the particular

terministic screen, or perspective, you would employ when trying to
see what it is doing.
A related thought is that a given work may be representative not
of things as they prevalently were at the time, but of an emergent
development. Hence, at the time it could have been at most
representative of a minority consciousness or situation.
Also, for finding the nature of our times variously anticipated in
earlier times, the resources of analogy are ever present. The
tremendous amount of organisation in a Wagnerian opera, for
instance, when at fortissimo moments it blares and blasts and
pounds as on a battlefield in obedience to the commands of an
authoritarian 'leader', is enough in itself to give me the feel at times
that the Hitlerite Blitzkrieg was but the transference of the same
powers from one set of terms to another (a feeling which Hitler
himself seems to have shared).
Another difficulty with regard to literature as document involves
the nostalgic element in art's appeal. Thus, there is still quite a
public for Westerns in the United States. But no matter how
accurate the scenic details of the fictive scenes may be (and in the
movies the scenes shot 'on location' can have the factual accuracy of
photographic records), the true cultural Reality to which they bear
witness is their temperamental appeal to readers whose actual way
of life is wholly different. That is the idealised nostalgic motive now
they implicitly represent, while on their face value they tell us of a
fictive past, the dream of which is in some way or other medicinal for
their public now.
In brief, the 'Realism' of nostalgic literature, in its nature as
document, may be explicitly referring to a 'Reality' which is now a
lie. But if we could dig deeply enough, being always on the look-out
to 'discount' any sheer surface (and particularly if we had
extraneous historical material to aid us in the task) we might be able
to crack the code that reveals the documentary aspect of this
literature. I pause, in passing, to stress the thought of the aid that
historical information might contribute to the documentary use of
specifically literary works- for when both literary and non-literary
kinds of materials are available, the ideal practice would be to work
with both.
But I expect that I shall always keep running across variants of
the same problem if our speculations are confined to literary
contexts alone, and if we try to derive from them alone our
documents attesting to contexts ofsituation. The work, viewed on its

face value, may be but documentary evidence that such work was
produced (or that a body ofsuch work was produced at that time- if
we might consider the Homeric poems, for instance, as a body of
work, for presumably they portrayed not their times, but the
mythically idealised version of a prior time).
For where nostalgic literature is concerned, the work may be, not
a portrait of the times in which it was produced, but compensatory
or antithetic to its actual context of situation. Or there arises a
related consideration: the work may be a portrait of its author, but
the author himself may not have been representative of his period.
The vexing consideration in this case is that, without adequate
biographical data, we might not be able to judge whether the work
should be taken as consistent with the author's temperament or as
antithetical to it.
The philosopher George Santayana made an ironic observation
about Walt Whitman with regard to what we might call the
ambiguities of dating a motive. Whitman's promissory idealising of
the future was constructed around a simple scheme whereby his
America was at the turning-point between the dying of feudalism
(with all its faults) and the growing promissory triumph of
democracy. But seizing on the fact that Whitman saw in the ways of
the pioneer the very essence of the new era, Santayana pointed out
that the very settling of the nation would mark the end of
pioneering- and it would follow that Whitman's own promise of
the future was itself in effect a kind of idealised nostalgia. There is
also the fact that Whitman's ideas of democratic brotherhood
contained personal 'non-political' connotations of mao-love, a
source of embarrassment to some, including himself, and a cause of
great encouragement among others of his followers. (As a matter of
fact, in order to ease his embarrassment, he invented the fiction of
six illegitimate children.)
The political aspects of his democratic gospel, it seems to me,
amounted to the celebrating of such a life-style as was made possible
by the kind of manufactured commodities that one would find listed
in a mail-order catalogue for small farms and on sale in the general
stores of towns on the make. The element of\::xpansionist hopeful-
ness derived from the effects of the frontier. White immigrants from
Europe and their descendants already in America could introduce a
way of life that would gradually take from the natives their
traditional means oflivelihood, resettling the land in keeping with
Realisms, Occidental S!Jle
the new technology and its corresponding small-scale capitalism

(small-scale certainly as compared with the kinds of organisations
we confront now, such as multination al corporation s and national
conglomerates, or a mixture of the two). It is obvious that such an
interpretati on of Whitman's literary work, considered as social
document, would owe much to sheerly historical data and theory.
Yet poems such as 'Song of the Broad-Axe', 'Song of the Exposition',
'Song of the Redwood-T ree', 'A Song for Occupation s', and
'Pioneers! 0 Pioneers!' clearly bear witness not only to such a
situation, but also, as the historical documents themselves could not,
build up the feel of such times. In a sense they 'spiritualise' the
material conditions of their time, with such accents of celebration
and Utopian promise as could readily go with thoughts of a
continent rich in resources to be exploited.
Whitman's great stress upon invitation to foreign freedom-
seeking immigrants almost automatical ly deflected him from
thinking of such movements as an invasion (the view necessarily
forced upon the natives by the fact that the settlers not only brought
a new way oflife, but by the same token, as I have said, took from
the Indian aborigines their traditional means of livelihood).
Surely the most troublesome problem in trying to use literature as
social document concerns the problem of'proporti on'. Whenever I
think of this issue I recall a remark by a deceased friend and poet, an
odd fellow, John Brooks Wheelwrigh t, concerning the nature of
ideas. He said that with people who do not have many ideas, an idea
can be like the introduction of rabbits into Australia. Since it has no
natural enemies, soon it is nearly everywhere. In evaluating traces
of a motive, we must also ask of what cluster it is a part, since its
effect is reinforced or constrained by the presence or absence and
comparativ e intensity of other motives. That is to say, a motive is
but one ingredient of a motivational recipe. The other ingredients
may modify its implications.
Consider, for example, a work such as Dante's Divine Comet[y.
Would it not represent a notably different cultural complex if there
were but the Inferno, the appeal to fear and vengeance by accounts of
eternal suffering without hope, as contrasted with the pity theme in
the Purgatorio, and the theme of blessedness in the Paradiso?
One problem of proportion with regard to the nature of our
society has to do with the disparity between our powers as physical
organisms and our powers as magnified by the resources, both
technical and organisational, of applied science. The horrors of an
Auschwitz derive from a few instructions given by authorities who

never went near the place. An overwhelming amount of the damage
done by our ingenious, spendthrift, modern weaponry in Vietnam
was made possible by humble, orderly, obedient, peacefully-
behaving job-holders, who raise their families in the quiet suburbs,
and perhaps do not even spank their children. One bomb dropped,
by the merest twitch of a finger, upon a target so far below as to be
unseen, can, without the slightest physical effort, do more damage
than could have been done by a whole raging hoard of Genghis
Khan's invaders exerting themselves like crazy. In such dissociation
which, given the current state of technological development, is all
about us, there is a kind ofbuilt-in schizophrenia. Its disorders also
foment guerrilla movements, and I suspect sheer aimless vandalism
among puzzled, spirited youths whose energies would otherwise be
unemployed.
If ther.e survive in later times a people who care about such a
matter or have the material to inquire into it even if they would,
let us hope that they can interpret the literature as documents with
more assurance than I can now. All I can see, all about me, are the
ever-mounting problems of technology and the corresponding need
for some kind of 'global' order, the nearest approaches to which at
present are made by the highly problematic multi-national
corporations. Our history tells us quite a bit about such situations. I
am not wholly sure to what extent, and by what explicit or implicit
routes, our literature is telling us the same, or something else.
The problems of proportion, as complicated by the resources of
analogy, are to be seen from another angle in the case of
psychologists who discern the lineaments of cruelty (or verbal
sadism) underlying the ingenious distortions in such fantasies as
Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Yet the
nearest we come to anything even remotely violent in the author's
actual life was in the occasional use ofhis devices as a way of teasing,
even to the extent of vexation, the little girl whom he tried to charm,
in as remote and recondite and retiring a kind of courtship as is
conceivable. Possibly the implicit motivational tangle manifests
itself by another route in his tendencies to stammer- and also
glancingly in the fact that, although the pseudonymous authorship
of this mathematician's 'Alice' books was well known, 'Lewis
Carroll' invariably insisted that 'Mr Dodgson neither claimed nor
acknowledged any connection with the books not published under
his name.' (I quote from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.)
At this point I am going to risk some paragraphs which are, I fear,

not a little unwieldy. I offer them as but a first rough
approximation. The sacrificial motive can attain dramatic com-
pletion in ideas and images of the kill. Hemingway exploited the kill
end of that spectrum. Orthodox religion stresses the sacrificial.
Nietzsche's criticism of morals brought out the deviousness whereby
vengeance can be manifested in the name ofjustice, an accountancy
that Dante's rationale of the Inferno employs in its way. It is in
keeping with the thought that, since God is just, he will sentence to
the eternal tortures of damnation only those who deserve such
punishment; since they are receiving the punishment they deserve,
they deserve no pity. Thus, Nietzsche quotes from the Thomist
Summa Theologica: 'And the blessed in Heaven shall look upon the
sufferings of the damned, that they may love their blessedness the
more.' In The Merchant if Venice, Shakespeare works poignantly with
the ambiguities ofjustice and revenge, when Portia abides so strictly
by the letter of Shylock's bond that his cry for justice is turned
against him.
Construction involves destruction. In the sense that the building
of any order involves the undoing of some previous order, and even
a marble used for sculpture must be deprived of the form it had in
nature, dialectically these two opposing terms 'construction' and
'destruction' are so interrelated that we might explicitly feature but
one, and leave the other to be only implied. Freud would say in
effect that the stress upon the constructive member of the pair
involves a 'sublimation' of the 'aggressively' destructive.
In the March 1975 issue of Polish Perspectives, a monthly magazine
that I follow with great interest, there is an essay on a contemporary
Polish author, director and designer, JozefSzajna, whose concerns
seem to bear quite radically upon these motivational puzzles. We
are told:
The whole of his work is very much of a piece in style, the same
themes and obsessions recurring compulsively. The most power-
ful of these obsessions is the horror of the concentration camp
which Szajna experienced at first hand. As a 17-year-old he
passed through the inferno of Auschwitz, being saved only by
chance from a group of prisoners being taken to their death.
Auschwitz has left its imprint on his whole life and work. In his
productions it has grown into a parable of modern times: the
apocalypse of civilization, chaos, cleavage and terror. In it he

searches for truth, hope and faith in man.
In the article there are two places that particularly engross me

with regard to the tangle I am now confronting. With reference to
his grim drama, Replika, built around the theme of the Auschwitz
horrors, it is said of the title that it has two meanings:' "rejoinder"-
the answer of an artist who suffered this hell himself- and
"duplicate"- a reproduction of that world of extermination, art's
rendering ofjustice to the victims and executioners. It is a requiem-
of apotheosis for the one and rage for the other.' The second passage
I would cite is:
Szajna's supreme accomplishment so fu.r is Dante. Here he set out

to quarry from The Divine Comedy all that is of contemporary
relevance, to build a bridge- as regards style as well as content-
between a medieval masterpiece and the present day. In a
dramatic pictorial vision, in a frenzy of images of veritably
infernal expression, he shows us a true theatre of cruelty, a world
which has been turned into a hell, a man who has descended into
the pit, who is torn between crime and sanctity, between agony
and joy, between the will to create and to destory.
The playwright's testimony in Replika seems to involve the

author's compulsive need to find a symbolic duplication of his
intensely traumatic experience as a youth along with a symbolic
righting of the balance-sheet in terms ofjustice, some compensatory,
some retaliatory. In the Dante, the state of being 'torn' between
creative and destructive motives seems to derive its generating
tension from ways of dramatising in this way the interrelationship
between these contrasting motivational slopes. The moment of
confusion between the two, therefore, is itself made the explicit
personalised centre of what might be otherwise but an impersonally
conceived intermediate moment in a dialectical design.
What I was trying to suggest, in those unwieldy paragraphs. was
the sheerly terministic problem involved in the thought that the
implications of a motive (and thus one might even say the nature of a
motive) will vary with the wider motivational complex of which it is
a part. Thinking along these lines, I have noted that there is no
violence in Faulkner, there are no bull-fights in Hemingway. Or an
equally available mode of expression would be to say, for instance,
that the same intensity of'aggression' is needed to concentrate on a
poem in praise of peace as on a poem in praise of war, or in actual
pacific and militaristic enterprises ('Reality' itself).
There is also the troublesome fact that a perspective dealing with
the motivational implications of a literary work necessarily involves
the implicit or explicit choice of a terministic screen. That in turn
involves its own peculiar assumptions about the extra-literary
motivational 'Reality' that is the work's 'context of situation'-
either in terms of broad historical trends or in biographical,
psychological, personalistic terms for the characterising of author-
ship as major causal factor.
We can avoid these problems somewhat by building methodi-
cally around the fact that every literary work has its own set of
'equations', its explicit and/or implicit ways of saying what equals
what. One can establish these by direct reference to the work itself.
But even so there is quite a range to choose from. For instance,
Marxists could delight in Balzac's novelistically Realistic depictions
of capitalist 'Reality', despite his Royalist leanings. And we often
hear tell ofhow heroic the Satan of Paradise Lost became. Or the text
itself shows us how a work that started out to satirise Don Quixote
could end as an idealisation of the motivational principles implied
in his nature as a person.
But by and large, there is an ultimate problem: is it not true that a
work tries to be as thoroughly or 'efficiently' itself as possible? For
over half a century, having in mind Matthew Arnold's plea for
literature that would 'see life steadily and see it whole', I have been
wondering whether, given the conditions of competition as we know
it, a work ofliterature can possibly gain the attention of the market
unless it can somehow see life unsteadily and in a partial way
saliently its own, though fads may be such that whole herds of artists
may swerve in that direction for a time. Modern conditions of
production are necessarily unstable in response to the instability due
to the still highly partitive and innovative nature of modern
technological expansion and inventiveness. Under these
circumstances, perhaps the nearest we can come to stability and
wholeness is in historical, biographical and critical 'surveys' of the
literary field.
Yet beyond all question, within that considerable clutter, our
literature is already telling us more than the fact that we are in such
a clutter. Already the future is being incipiently symbolised-ifwe
but knew for sure how to interpret it as social document, regarding
conditions now, the nostalgically idealised past, the willingly

superseded past, and the feared or hoped-for future. But above all
(and here is how literature now may come closest to 'seeing life
steadily and seeing it whole'), implicit in all literature are the traces
of what it always has been and always will be to be the kind of
animal we shall always be prone to being, so long as our physiology
and corresponding ways with symbol-systems remain a constant.
In the enterprises that have to do with trying to spy upon
ourselves through the medium of our literature, each of us must be
at least two people; one a tentative believer in our speculations, the
other an almost total sceptic. So we go on. At least we can know for
sure that literature is vatic, that it is, however roundabout, always in
fictive ways telling us the truth about ourselves, if we but knew all it
is saying about the relation between Realism and Reality. Given the
opportunity, unless we obliterate ourselves, we shall continue to
ponder on such matters. We shall do so not only with fear and
trembling at the thought of our many errors (the liability to which
the great resources of modern technology drastically intensify), but
also with pious admiration for the lore of man's collective greatness,
as made possible by his aptitude for symbol-systems. What more
humane an evidence can we have of such an aptitude than the
works, even the lowliest, of our literature?
That would be an advisable place to end, but perhaps it would be
best, for purposes of clarity, to sum up by reviewing my main points,
with regard to the use of literature as social document:
1. A given work may be consistent with the author's character

or antithetical to it. For instance, I know an author who
specialises in gore, yet personally winces at the thought that
any person, or any animal, should suffer.
2. Even if a work does give a fairly consistent portrait of an
author, the author may not be representative of his times.
3· Works may represent not their times, but the idealistically
nostalgic.
4· Works may represent not the typical conditions of their times
but the emergent aspect of later times.
5· There are risks of too temporal an interpretation, since works
draw on universal motives too.
6. The latitudinal nature of analogy makes it possible to make
quite different times seem alike, since analogy can feature
some one element they have in common.
7. A work changes its appearance in response to the particular

perspective, or frame of reference, in terms of which one
views it.
8. The neglect of formal considerations can lead to false
interpretations.
g. Though the Realism of literature does give us the feel of
Reality, as non-literary documents cannot, it can provide no
assurance that the verisimilitude of a fiction is the same as the
truth.
1 o. This last point leads into the most important and most elusive
problems of all: the extent to which a given work adequately
represents the proportion of a given motive, as modified by the
proportions of other reinforcing or corrective motives in the
context f!! situation behind the work's literary context. Not only is
this the most important problem in our attempt to go from
the work's Realism to its corresponding Reality, but the very
nature ofliterature as a bid for the readers' attention invites
kinds of emphasis that are analogous to the function of
headlines in the news.
Thus, even a work that managed to meet Matthew Arnold's

specification completely, to 'see life steadily and see it whole', would
but be one more fiction, more representative of itself as a literary
triumph than of the overall situation out of which it arose.
4 The Question of Exile
Leon Edel
In its strict meaning, as we know, the word exile should be applied

to those who are forced to leave their homeland, as Dante left
Florence. He had no choice. There is of course the older and larger
sense of exile which need not concern us here: that sense in which
Christ, belonging to the Kingdom of God, was not of this world. The
Prodigal Son, we remember, exiled himself; and having wasted his
inheritance on whores and high living, returned to feast on his
father's fatted calf, so greatly did his father rejoice to have his son
restored; his other son, who had remained at home, could only
complain that no fatted calf had ever been killed for him. The moral
of the parable is that it is important to save the wasteful from waste:
the strayed sheep must be found and restored to the flock. As you
see, we can hardly apply such a parable to our modern literary
exiles.
The OED is not altogether helpful. It defines political or coerced
exile quite adequately. It describes the other state, the one we are
considering as 'expatriation, prolonged absence from one's native
land, endured by compulsion of circumstance or voluntarily
undergone for any purpose'. Yet its examples are the reverse of
illuminating. It quotes Gower ( 1 393) who said 'to do profit to the
commune ... he take of exile the fortune'. And Macaulay in the
nineteenth century, 'after an exile of many years, Dudley North
returned to England with a large fortune'. Like the parable of the
Prodigal Son, it pays to spend one's inheritance abroad; home
rejoices, it seems, at the exile's return.
Neither our dictionaries, nor in general other writings, throw full
light on literary exile. One has always to study the individual case.
But in doing so we must not overlook the literary exiles of our
century- and of the past- so numerous and so dedicated, who left
their work-tables and tore up their roots to start their lives all over
again in an alien country. The terms were cruel- they always are;
48
The Question of Exile 49
the coercion great; the mental anguish beyond description. A writer
takes into exile his bare hands, a few books, perhaps a suitcase of
worldly goods; though often the writer goes denuded of all
possessions. He retains one asset- it is however his entire capital-
an asset not shared by other exiles. This is his language, his
imagination. To this extent he is fortunate. With favourable
circumstances he will be able to go on writing, be able to speak out
freely as always. Still he faces difficult barriers. The exile is made a
foreigner'; and he is faced with audiences that must have him -if
they -are to have him at all- in translation. Learning to write in a
new language is a feat few have been able to perform. Those who left
Spain in our century to defend their Republicanism offer us vivid
testimony of a long and arduous exile in which all their horizons and
often their language had to be changed. One thinks too of the
Russian emigres in England long ago, led by Herzen, who have
been called 'romantic exiles'. Only a few in the history of exile come
to new homes to discover accumulated royalties. And even when
they are so cushioned, the psychological displacement is still
incalculable. I mention these general cases at the start. We are
familiar with them; those who live by the pen can empathise with
them most. Their predicament, their alternatives, are nearly always
similar, and similar in the accompanying distress and anxiety.
What requires deeper discussion are the ambiguous exiles, the
many who have not told their own eloquent stories, and who, in
these coerced cultural encounters, work out their salvation in
special ways. I said one has to consider the individual case. The
supreme exiles of our time, such as Einstein or Freud, were highly
individual, and moved into comfort and even sinecure. Nabokov's
exile was hardly voluntary, as we know; and he defined again and
again his forced state of separation. He moved thrice, from Russia to
Germany, from Germany to France, from France to America. As to
how those who leave their homeland serve the new cultures in which
they find themselves, this again defies general rules. In Russia,
certainly, Nabokov would have been less inclined to write in
English. Solzhenitsyn, living behind his extensive privacy on his
splendid acres in Vermont, seems hardly likely to do anything
important for American culture at present; no more than Thomas
Mann, who came into our midst, and took out citizenship. This was
late in life; and in the end he moved to Switzerland, and illustrated
his true cosmopolitan rather than his artificial American condition.
The conferring of citizenship has no relation to our question. Henry
James acquired British citizenship during the First World War, a

year before his death. This means that he retained his American
citizenship for forty years, while living in England. His countrymen,
however, looked only at the final change, and called him disloyal
and a traitor. But they asked of Charlie Chaplin, who stayed for
many years in the United States and clung to his British citizenship,
why he did not become American. Charlie Chaplin's American
residence, and his British adherence, had nothing to do with his
profound influence on modern mimetic art, and the use of the screen
for portrayal of a universal comic spirit. T. S. Eliot became a British
subject long before his death; he is claimed nonetheless (rightly I
think) by America, quite as much as by London and the Church of
England. One's citizenship in literary discourse is determined after
all by the landscape of the imagination. There is much of New
England in Eliot's late Four Qy.artets- as there is of the city of St
Louis in Prufrock. In any event Henry James and T. S. Eliot are not
really cross-cultural cases. They share the language ofboth America
and England; they are, like novelists in India who write in English,
or the writers of the Antipodes, participants in a common literary
language and tradition in which different voices, often thousands of
miles away, can be heard. We might say as much of the French
Canadians who write in French, yet see no connection- save
language-with their erstwhile compatriots, and indeed consider
the French of France a godless people.
It is when a writer of one culture and language chooses another
that we get fascinating situations.Joseph Conrad was an exile on the
waters of the earth long before he settled in England; and when he
was in England, he felt himself in exile from the sea and the ship,
which is always shipshape, unlike the organisms and cities on land.
Or to take another name out of my youth, that ofPanait !strati, the
Romanian, who chose to write in French, finding his audiences in
France; or that curious American, Julien Green, who has never
been called disloyal, although he chose to write all of his work in
French, and was ultimately elected to the French Academy.
The archetypal exile in American literature has always been, I
suppose, Henry James. He spent much of his childhood abroad.
That made him a natural sort of exile. But he also lived many of his
younger years in his native New York and his adopted Boston. I
have already referred to his clinging to his American citizenship
most of his life. He went to live abroad because Boston and New
York were in his youth too parochial for his cosmopolitan
The Question of Exile
upbringing. Chickens and pigs still wandered in Washington

Square; there were still cows on the Common near Harvard. He
preferred dense London and lively Paris to such ruralism. His
preferences ran deeper still.
To be a cosinopolite is not, I think, an ideal; the ideal should be to

be a concentrated patriot. Being a cosmopolite is an accident, but
one must make the best ofit. If you have lived about, as the phrase
is, you have lost that sense of the absoluteness and the sanctity of
the habits of your fellow-patriots which once made you happy in
the midst of them. You have seen that there are a great many
'patriae' in the world, and that each of these is filled with
excellent people for whom the local idiosyncrasies are the only
thing that is not rather barbarous. There comes a time when one
set of customs, wherever it may be found, grows to seem to you
about as provincial as another; and then I suppose it may be said
of you that you have become a cosmopolite. You have formed the
habit of comparing, of looking for points of difference and of
resemblance, for present and absent advantages, for the virtues
that go with certain defects, and the defects that go with certain
virtues. If this is poor work compared with the active practice, in
the sphere of which a discriminating Providence has assigned
you, of the duties of a tax-payer, an elector, a juryman or a diner-
out, there is nevertheless something to be said for it. It is good to
think well of mankind, and this, on the whole, a cosmopolite
does ... The consequence of the cosmopolite spirit is to initiate
you into the merits of all peoples; to convince you that national
virtues are numerous, though they may be very different, and to
make downright preference really very hard.
VanWyck Brooks, in his Pilgrimage ofHenry James, argued that by

living abroad James uprooted his art and wrote bad novels. The
world has judged otherwise. He was never more American than
when he portrayed the nice and ugly Americans abroad. Quite
rightly, we can raise the question: what kind of novels did those who
stayed at home write? It is in the nature of America's art, like
Canada's or Australia's, to be related to exile; as the Romantic
movement in England counted its exiles in Italy. And those modern
poets who have chosen to remain at home (so much more
successfully than most of our novelists) had to create a kind of
original American world. I speak ofWhitman, Williams, Stevens,

Marianne Moore; those who built what Hugh Kenner has called 'a
home-made world'. And we remember that Melville, after his great
voyages, lived in exile-in New York. This brings us to the ironic
centre of our matter: there are more exiles in their own countries
than there are abroad. Richard Wright and James Baldwin offer
proof of this in many ways, not least by their ultimate choice of
Europe: they illustrate facets of national confinement and
liberation.
lfHenry James is the archetypal American case, what are we to
say of the exile of the Irish writer, James Joyce? He announced
himself'exile at every turn'. In his Swiftian Hudibrastic 'Gas from a
Burner' he wrote of
This lovely land that always sent

Her writers and artists to banishment.
Maker of a legend of himself, he of course meant simply himself as

the banished. I am not aware of the banishment ofY eats, or AE, or
Synge, or Lady Gregory, or O'Casey, or so many other Irish writers
both native and cosmopolitan, although this was what Joyce
implied. To be sure they liked to go to Paris; but what writer has not
sought the French experience? Or they went to London, like
Bernard Shaw, in quest of a career. George Moore ambled between
Ireland and England and France with his Aubusson carpet and his
cat; the French impressionists painted his sad face and his droopy
moustaches; and in his old age he made himself a kind of
scatterbrain sage in Ebury Street, London.Joyce however offers us a
truly vivid case of the writer self-banished, who as Yeats put it with
characteristic accuracy was 'an exile in flight from the objects of his
hatred'.
That is, I suspect, a true description of many of the modern
literary exiles. Artists are seldom happy in their earliest
enviroq.ments; the immediate world seeks to mediocratise the artist;
and usually it is family, homeland, Establishment, which works to
that end- those nets Joyce sought to escape. The flight is away from
exile in one's own land. Abroad, such artists often discover
themselves less exiled; they find a fraternity of exiles who have also
fled mediocratisation; 'I am going alone and friendless into another
country', James Joyce wrote with a touch of self-pity to Lady
Gregory, asking her for money as he left for his brief early sojourn in
The Question of Exile 53
Paris to study medicine. Joyce's biographer tells us that his hero

'needed exile as a reproach to others and a justification of himself'.
He adds, 'he was neither bidden to leave nor forbidden to return'.
Joyce wrote a play which he called Exiles. In it we find a much
truer statement of what he really meant by 'exile', for his exiles all
live in Dublin, after having lived abroad. Political exile, as I have
said, is not in question. There is also sometimes an economic exile,
when one seeks one's fortune abroad, like Dudley North, rather
than at home. Above all there is a spiritual exile, as Joyce said in his
play, 'that food of the spirit by which a nation of human beings is
sustained in life'.
Joyce's exile was described by him in more naked terms to
his brother, Stanislaus. 'I have come to accept my present situ-
ation as a voluntary exile- is it not so? This seems to me
important ... because I am likely to generate out of it a sufficiently
personal future.' And he added that exile also supplied him with the
note on which 'I propose to bring my novel to a close'. The novel
was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. His exile it seems was
practical, even opportunistic, quite as much as spiritual.
I believe, in the light of our data, that the question of a modern
writer's 'exile' outside that of the coerced political exiles is largely a
factitious question. Hemingway's was the exile of an adventurer
who could not face his latent fear of a lack of manhood. Joyce's had
the reality of volition. The other exile, the exile of the spirit, is the
most general kind of exile- whether in the children of the Antipodes
who feel the 'tyranny of distance' from older centres of culture, or
the Canadians or East Indians who in their various provinces look to
older cultures in seeking to fashion a native world; or those who,
alienated from their own still primitive cultures, seek to heal the
wounds of alienation by literal absence in more advanced
civilisation. Sometimes those who remain to face the loneliness of a
national imprisonment among the philistines are enabled, like
Whitman or Mark Twain, to create large national myths. Even
Whitman played with foreign languages, and Mark Twain went
abroad to proclaim American innocence. Everywhere we turn we
find exceptions and differences, and contrasts between world
regionalism and cosmopolitanism. One can carry such thoughts
very far- and we can remind ourselves too that Thoreau, sitting in
his hut by Walden Pond, read the Vedas and Confucius; and Yeats
found inspiration in the Noh plays; and Pope's Essay on Man
travelled very quickly to Moscow. Exile is most of all- when it is not
an enforced and horrible reality- a state of mind, or as Henry James

said, it can become 'the real cosmopolitan spirit, the easy imagi-
nation of differences and hindrances surmounted'. This could be a
useful epigraph for cross-cultural encounters.
5 Cultural Mis-readings by American
Reviewers
Maxine Hong Kingston
When reading most of the reviews and critical analyses of The

Woman Warrior, I have two reactions: I want to pat those critics on
their backs, and I also giggle helplessly, shaking my head. (Helpless
giggles turn less frequently into sobs as one gets older.) The critics
did give my book the National Book Critics Circle Award; and they
reviewed it in most of the major magazines and newspapers, thus
publicising it enough to sell. Furthermore, they rarely gave it an
unfavourable review. I pat them on the back for recognising good
writing- but, unfortunately, I suspect most of them of perceiving its
quality in an unconscious sort of way; they praise the wrong things.
Now, of course, I expected The Woman Warrior to be read from
the women's lib angle and the Third World angle, the Roots angle;
but it is up to the writer to transcend trendy categories. What I did
not foresee was the critics measuring the book and me against the
stereotype of the exotic, inscrutable, mysterious oriental. About
two-thirds of the reviews did this. In some cases, I must admit, it was
only a line or a marring word that made my stomach turn, the rest of
the review being fairly sensible. You might say I am being too thin-
skinned; but a year ago I had really believed that the days of gross
stereotyping were over, that the 1g6os, the Civil Rights movement,
and the end of the war in Vietnam had enlightened America, if not
in deeds at least in manners. Pridefully enough, I believed that I
had written with such power that the reality and humanity of my
characters would bust through any stereotypes of them. Simple-
mindedly, I wore a sweat-shirt for the dust-jacket photo, to deny the
exotic. I had not calculated how blinding stereotyping is, how
stupefying. The critics who said how the book was good because it
was, or was not, like the oriental fantasy in their heads might as well
have said how weak it was, since it in fact did not break through that
fantasy.
55
Here are some examples of exotic-inscrutable-mysterious-

oriental reviewing:
Margaret Manning in The Boston Globe: 'Mythic forces flood the
book. Echoes of the Old Testament, fairy tales, the Golden Bough are
here, but they have their own strange and brooding atmosphere
inscrutably foreign, oriental.'
Barbara Burdick in the Peninsula Herald: 'No other people have
remained so mysterious to Westerners as the inscrutable Chinese.
Even the word China brings to mind ancient rituals, exotic teas,
superstitions, silks and fire-breathing dragons.'
Helen Davenport of the Chattanooga News-Free Press: 'At her
most obscure, though, as when telling about her dream of becoming
a fabled "woman warrior" the author becomes as inscrutable as the
East always seems to the West. In fact, this book seems to reinforce
the feeling that "East is East and West is West and never the twain
shall meet," or at any rate it will probably take more than one
generation away from China.'
Alan McMahan in the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette: 'The term
"inscrutable" still applies to the rank and file of Chinese living in
their native land.' (I do not understand. Does he mean Chinese
Americans? What native land? Does he mean America? My native
land is America.)
Joan Henriksen in a clipping without the newspaper's name:
'Chinese-Americans always "looked"- at least to this WASP
observer- as if they exactly fit the stereotypes I heard as I was
growing up. They were "inscrutable.'' They were serene,
withdrawn, neat, clean and hard-workers. The Woman Warrior,
because of this stereotyping, is a double delight to read.' She goes on
to say how nicely the book diverges from the stereotype.
How dare they call their ignorance our inscrutability!
The most upsetting example of this school of reviewing is Michael
T. Malloy's unfavourable review in The National Observer: 'The
background is exotic, but the book is in the mainstream of American
feminist literature.' He disliked the book because it is part of the
mainstream. He is saying, then, that I am not to step out of the
'exotic' role, not to enter the mainstream. One of the most deadly
weapons of stereotyping is the double bind, damned-if-you-do-and-
damned-if-you-don't.
I have a horrible feeling that it is not self-evident to many
Caucasian Americans why these reviews are offensive. I find it sad
Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers 57
and slow that I have to explain. Again. Ifl use my limited time and
words to explain, I will never get off the ground. I will never get to
fly.
To say we are inscrutable, mysterious, exotic denies us our
common humanness, because it says that we are so different from a
regular human being that we are by our nature intrinsically
unknowable. Thus the stereotyper aggressively defends ignorance.
Nor do we want to be called not inscrutable, exotic, mysterious.
These are false ways oflooking at us. We do not want to be measured
by a false standard at all.
To call a people exotic freezes us into the position of being always
alien- politically a most sensitive point with us because of the long
history in America of the Chinese Exclusion Acts, the deportations,
the law denying us citizenship when we have been part of America
since its beginning. By giving the 'oriental' (always Eastern, never
here) inhuman, unexplainable qualities, the racist abrogates human
qualities, and, carrying all this to extremes, finds it easier to lynch
the Chinaman, bomb Japan, napalm Vietnam. 'How amazing',
they may as well be saying, 'that she writes like a human being. How
un-oriental.' 'I cannot understand her. It has to be her innate
mystery.' Blacks and women are making much better progress. I did
not read any reviews of Roots that judged whether or not Alex
Haley's characters ate watermelon or had rhythm. And there were
only two cases I encountered of sexist stereotyping: one from my
home-town paper, The Stockton. Record: 'Mrs. Kingston is a 36-year-
old housewife and mother who teaches creative writing and
English.' The above was a news story on The Woman Warrior
winning theN ational Book Critics Circle Award, so the paper might
have described me as a writer. The other was Bookshelf, a journal of
Asian Studies: 'The highly acclaimed first book by a Chinese-
American school-teacher.'
How stubbornly Americans hang on to the oriental fantasy can
be seen in their picking 'The White Tigers' chapter as their
favourite. Readers tell me it ought to have been the climax. But I
put it at the beginning to show that the childish myth is past, not the
climax we reach for. Also, 'The White Tigers' is not a Chinese myth
but one transformed by America, a sort of kung fu movie parody.
Another bothersome characteristic of the reviews is the ignorance
of the fact that I am an American. I am an American writer, who,
like other American writers, wants to write the great American
novel. The Woman Warrior is an American book. Yet many

reviewers do not see the American-ness of it, nor the fact of my own
American-ness.
Bernice Williams Foley in the Columbus Dispatch:
Her autobiographical story (in my opinion) is atypical of the

relationship between Chinese parents and their American
Chinese children whom I have known in New York City and
Cincinnati. Moreover as a "foreign barbarian of low culture"
living in China, I always sensed in the Chinese, whether they
were our business friends or our servants, a feeling that the
ancient cultural heritage of their Middle Kingdom- the Center
of the Universe-was superior to ours ... She rebels against the
strict pattern of life inherited from old China and based on
Confucius' moral teachings, which preserves the strength of the
family's heritage, and which are the basis of Chinese ethics and
virtues.
The headline for this article was 'Rebellious Chinese Girl Rejects
Ancient Heritage'. Foley goes on to say that she does not find the
book 'likeable'. Of course not. What she would like is the stereotype,
the obedient-Confucian-Chinese-servant-businessman. (What is a
'business friend' anyway?)
Kate Herriges in an ecstatically complimentary review in The
Boston Phoenix: 'Subtle, delicate yet sturdy, it [The Woman Warrior] is
ineffably Chinese.' No. No. No. Don't you hear the American slang?
Don't you see the American settings? Don't you see the way the
Chinese myths have been transmuted by America? No wonder the
young Asian American writers are so relentlessly hip and slangy.
(How I do like Jane Howard's phrase in her Mademoiselle review:
'Irrevocably Californian.' I hope the thirty per cent of reviewers
who wrote sensible pieces accept my apologies for not praising them
sufficiently here.)
The Saturday News and Leader of Springfield, Missouri: 'Maxine
Ting Ting Hong Kingston is a Chinese woman, even though the
place of her birth was Stockton, California.' This does not make
sense. Because I was born in Stockton, California, I am an American
woman. I am also a Chinese American woman, but I am not a
Chinese woman, never having travelled east of Hawaii, unless she
means an 'ethnic Chinese woman', in which case she should say so.
Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers 59
Rose Levine Isaacson, in the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson,
Mississippi: ' ... the revelation of what it was like for a Chinese girl
growing up.' She tells of Chinese laundries she has seen as a child.
Though I enjoy her childhood recollections, I cringe with embar-
rassment when she says, 'We knew they lived in back of the
laundry ... '. That was one thing I always hated- that they knew
we lived there when we owned a house.
Margaret E. Wiggs in the Fort Wayne News Sentinel: 'The timid
little Chinese girl in San Francisco ... Clever girl, this little
Chinese warrior.' Ms Wiggs does not know that as a kid I read
'Blackhawk' comics, and was puzzled, then disgusted, that Chop
Chop was the only Blackhawk who did not get to wear a uniform,
was not handsome, not six feet tall, had buck teeth and a pigtail
during World War II, wore a cleaver instead of a pistol in his belt,
and never got to kiss the beautiful ladies. Blackhawk was always
saying, 'Very clever, these little Chinese.'
I know headline writers are under time and space deadlines, but
many of them did manage to leave the 'American' in 'Chinese
American'. Here are some exceptions: Malloy's article in The
National Observer: 'On Growing Up Chinese, Female and Bitter'.
The Sunday Peninsula Herald: 'Memoir Penetrates Myths Around
Chinese Culture'. The Baltimore Sun: 'Growing Up Female and
Chinese'. The Cleveland Plain Dealer: 'A California-Chinese
Girlhood'. (I wouldn't mind 'Chinese-Californian'.) Harold
C. Hill's article in a clipping without the newspaper's name:
'Growing Up Chinese in America'.
That we be called by our correct name is as important to Chinese
Americans as it is to native Americans, Blacks and any American
minority that needs to define itself on its own terms. We should have
been smart like the Americans of Japanese Ancestry, whose name
explicitly spells out their American citizenship. (Semantics,
however, did not save the AJAs from the camps.) Chinese-
American history has been a battle for recognition as Americans; we
have fought hard for the the right to legal American citizenship.
Chinese are those people who look like us in Hong Kong, the
People's Republic and Taiwan. Apparently many Caucasians in
America do not know that a person born in the USA is automati-
cally American, no matter how he or she may look. Now we do call
ourselves Chinese, and we call ourselves Chinamen, but when we
say, 'I'm Chinese', it is in the context of differentiating ourselves
fromjapanese, for example. When we say we are Chinese, it is short
6o Literary and Cultural Roles
for Chinese-American or ethnic Chinese; the 'American' is implicit.

I had hoped that this was the usage of the reviews, but instead there
is a carelessness, an unawareness.
As for 'Chinaman', I think we had better keep that word for use
amongst ourselves, though people here in Hawaii do use it with no
denigrating overtones as in the popular name for Mokolii,
'Chinaman's Hat'. And lately, I have been thinking that we ought
to leave out the hyphen in 'Chinese-American', because the hyphen
gives the word on either side equal weight, as iflinking two nouns. It
looks as if a Chinese-American has double citizenship, which is
impossible in today's world. Without the hyphen, 'Chinese' is an
adjective and 'American' a noun; a Chinese American is a type of
American. (This idea about the hyphen is my own, and I have not
talked to anyone else who has thought of it; therefore, it is a fine
point, 'typical' of no one but myself.)
I hope that the above explanation makes clear why I and other
Chinese Americans felt a clunk of imperfection when reading Peter
S. Beagle's and Jane Kramer's otherwise fine pieces in Harpers
Bookletter and The New Tork Times Book Review respectively. Both
gathered from the dust-jacket, and perhaps from my name, that I
had 'married an American'. Chinese Americans read that and
groaned, 'Oh, no!' immediately offended. I guess Caucasian
Americans need to be told why. After all, I am married to an
American. But to say so in summing up my life implies these kinds of
things: that I married someone different from myself, that I
somehow became more American through marriage, and that
marriage is the way to assimilation. The phrase is also too general.
We suspect that they might mean, 'She married a Caucasian.' Too
many people use those two words interchangably, 'American' and
'Caucasian'. In some ways, it is all right to say that I am 'Chinese' or
my husband is 'American' if they did not stop there but go on to
show what has been left out.
Another problem in the reviews is New York provincialism,
which The New Torker teased in one of their covers, which showed
nothing west of the Rockies except Los Angeles and San Francisco.
New Yorkers seem to think that all Chinese Americans in California
live in San Francisco. Even my publisher did not manage to correct
the dust-jacket copy completely, and part of it says I am writing
about Stockton, and part says San Francisco. The book itself says
that the Chinese Americans in the Sanjoaquin Valley town, which
is its setting, are probably very different from the city slickers in San
Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers
Francisco. I describe a long drive away from San Francisco to the

smaller valley town, which I do not name; I describe Steinbeck
country. Yet, New West, which published an excerpt, prefaced it by
twice calling it a San Francisco story-ironically, it was the very
chapter about the San Joaquin valley. How geographically con-
fused their readers must have been. New West is a California
magazine; so the theory about New York provincialism applies to
more places than New York.
The New Yorker: 'A Picture of nineteen-forties and fifties Chinese-
American life in San Francisco . . . '.
The Fort Wayne News Sentinel: 'The timid little Chinese girl in San
Francisco .. .'.
The Boston Globe: '. . . the "foreigner-ghosts" of San
Francisco .. .'.
Newsweek: 'The most interesting story in The Woman Warrior tells
how Brave Orchid brought her sister, Moon Orchid, from China to
San Francisco.'
Sometimes you just have to laugh because there really is no
malice, and they are trying their best. Viva magazine published the
'No Name Woman' chapter with a full-page colour illustration of
Japanese maidens at the window; they wear kimonos, lacquered
hair-dos, and through the window is lovely, snow-capped Mt Fuji.
Surprise, Asian brothers and sisters! We may as well think of
ourselves as Asian Americans because we are all alike anyway. I did
not feel angry until I pointed out the Japanese picture to some
Caucasians who said, 'It doesn't matter.' (And yet, if an Asian
American movement that includes Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos is
possible, then solidarity with Caucasian Americans is possible. I for
one was raised with vivid stories about Japanese killing ten million
Chinese, including my relatives, and was terrified of Japanese,
especially AJ As, the only ones I had met.)
It appears that when the critics looked at my book, they heard a
jingle in their heads, 'East is east and west is west .. .'. Yes, there
were lazy literary critics who actually used that stupid Kipling
British-colonial cliche to get a handle on my writing:
'East Meets West', said Newsweek's headline. (Time was more
subtle with 'A Book of Changes.')
The Philadelphia Bulletin: 'The Twain Did Meet Among the
Ghosts.'
The Sacramento Bee: 'East and West Collide Inside a Human
Mind.'
The San Francisco Examiner: 'East Meets West in a Large New

Talent.'
The Chattanooga News-Free Press: 'In fact, this book seems to
reinforce the feeling that "East is East and West is West and never
the twain shall meet," or at any rate, it will probably take more than
one generation away from China.'
I do not want the critics to decide whether the twain shall or shall
not meet. I want them to be sensitive enough to know that they are
not to judge Chinese American writing through the viewpoint of
nineteenth-century British-colonial writing.
Interviewers, including those from Taiwan and Hong Kong, as
well as reviewers have been concerned about how 'typical' of other
Chinese Americans I am. Michael T. Malloy in the National
Observer says, 'I'd like to report that The Woman Warrior seemed as
singular to my Chinese Canadian wife as it did Irish American me.'
(Malloy is the critic who attacked the book for being 'mainstream
feminist'.) And I have already quoted Bernice Williams Foley of
The Columbus Dispatch: 'Her autobiographical story (in my opinion)
is atypical of the relationship between Chinese parents and their
American-Chinese children whom I have known in New York City
and Cincinnati.' Here is a paragraph from a review in the San
Francisco Association of Chinese Teachers newsletter (I think they
mean Chinese American teachers):
It must be pointed out that this book is a very personal statement,

and is a subjective exposition of one person's reactions to her
family background. It would be dangerous to infer that this
'unfamiliar world' represents or typifies that of most Chinese
Americans. The Woman Warrior is not an easy book to grasp, both
in terms of style or content. Especially for students unfamiliar
with the Chinese background, it could give an overly negative
impression of the Chinese American experience.
(This review gave the book a seventh grade reading level by using a
mathematical formula of counting syllables and sentences per one
hundred-word passage.) These critics are asking the wrong
question. Instead of asking, 'Is this work typical of Chinese
Americans?' why not ask, 'Is this work typical of human beings?'
Then see whether the question makes sense, what kinds of answers
they come up with.
I have never before read a critic who took a look at a Jewish
American spouse and said, 'There's something wrong with that Saul
Bellow and Norman Mailer. They aren't at all like the one I'm
married to.' Critics do not ask whether Vonnegut is typical of
German Americans; they do not ask whether J.P. Donleavy is
typical of Irish Americans. You would never know by reading the
reviews of Francine du Plessix Gray's Lovers and Tyrants that it is by
and about an immigrant from France. Books written by Americans
of European ancestry are reviewed as American novels.
Now I agree with these critics-the book is 'personal' and
'subjective' and 'singular'. It may even be one-of-a-kind, unique,
exceptional. I am not a sociologist who measures truth by the
percentage of times behaviour takes place. Those critics who do not
explore why and how this book is different but merely point out its
difference as a flaw have a very disturbing idea about the role of the
writer. Why must I 'represent' anyone besides myself? Why should
I be denied an individual artistic vision? And I do not think I wrote
a 'negative' book, as the Chinese American reviewer said; but
suppose I had? Suppose I had been so wonderfully talented that I
wrote a tragedy? Are we Chinese Americans to deny ourselves
tragedy? If we give up tragedy in order to make a good impression
on Caucasians, we have lost a battle. Oh, well, I'm certain that
some day when a great body of Chinese American writing becomes
published and known, then readers will no longer have to put such a
burden on each book that comes out. Readers can see the variety of
ways for Chinese Americans to be.
(For the record, most of my mail is from Chinese American
women, who tell me how similar their childhoods were to the one in
the book, or they say their lives are not like that at all, but they
understand the feelings; then they tell me some stories about
themselves. Also, I was invited to Canada to speak on the role of the
Chinese Canadian woman, and there was a half-page ad for the
lecture in the Chinese language newspaper.)
The artistically interesting problem which the reviewers are
really posing is: How much exposition is needed? There are so many
levels ofknowledge and ignorance in the audience. 'It's especially
hard for a non-Chinese', says Malloy, 'and that's a troubling aspect
of this book.' A Chinese Canadian man writes in a letter, 'How .dare
you make us sound like savages with that disgusting monkey feast
story!' (Since publishing the book, I have heard from many monkey
feast witnesses and participants.) Diane Johnson in The New York
Review of Books says that there are fourth and fifth generation
Chinese Americans who can't speak English. (It is more often the
case that they can't speak Chinese. A fourth or fifth generation
Chinese American and Caucasian American are not too different
except in looks and history.) There is a reviewer who says that it is
amazing what I could do with my IQofzero. (How clumsy the joke
would be if I explained how IQ tests aren't valid because they are
culturally biased against a non-English-speaking child.) There are
Chinese American readers who feel slighted because I did not
include enough history. (In my own review of Laurence Yep's Child
of the Owl in the Washington Post, I praised him for his bravery in
letting images stand with no exposition.) My own sister says, 'You
wrote the book for us-our family. It's how we are in our everyday
life. I have no idea what white people would make of it.' Both my
sisters say they laughed aloud. Harper's says the book is marred by
'gratuitous ethnic humor', and Publisher's Week(>' says the humour is
'quirky'. So who is the book for?
When I write most deeply, fly the highest, reach the furthest, I
write like a diarist- that is, my audience is myself. I dare to write
anything because I can burn my papers at any moment. I do not
begin with the thought of an audience peering over my shoulder,
nor do I find my being understood a common occurrence anyway-
a miracle when it happens. My fantasy is that this self-indulgence
will be good enough for the great American novel. Pragmatically,
though, since my audience would have to be all America, I work on
intelligibility and accessibility in a second draft. However, I do not
slow down to give boring exposition, which is information that is
available in encyclopedias, history books, sociology, anthropology,
mythology. (After all, I am not writing history or sociology but a
'memoir' like Proust, as Christine Cook in the Hawaii Observer and
Diane Johnson in The New rork Review of Books are clever enough to
see. I am, as Diane Johnson says, 'slyly writing a memoir, a form
which ... can neither [be] dismiss[ed] as fiction nor quarrel[ed]
with as fact'. 'But the structure is a grouping of memoirs', says
Christine Cook. 'It is by definition a series of stories or anecdotes to
illuminate the times rather than be autobiographical.') I rarely
repeat anything that can be found in other books. Some readers will
just have to do some background reading. Maybe my writing can
provide work for English majors. Readers ought not to expect
reading always to be as effortless as watching television.
I want my audience to include everyone. I had planned that if I
could not find an American publisher, I would send the manuscript
to Britain, Hong Kong, Canada, Taiwan-anywhere-and ifit did

not then find a publisher, I would keep it safe for posthumous
publication. So I do believe in the timelessness and universality of
individual vision. It would not just be a family book or an American
book or a woman's book but a world book, and, at the same
moment, my book.
The audience of The Woman Warrior is also very specific. For
example, I address Chinese Americans twice, once at the beginning
of the book and once at the end. I ask some questions about what life
is like for you, and, happily, you answer. Chinese Americans have
written that I explain customs they had not understood. I even write
for my old English professors of the new criticism school in Berkeley,
by incorporating what they taught about the structure of the novel.
I refer to Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Shakespeare;
but those who are not English majors and don't play literary games
will still find in those same sentences the other, main, important
meanings. There are puns for Chinese speakers only, and I do not
point them out for non-Chinese speakers. There are some visual
puns best appreciated by those who write Chinese. I've written
jokes in that book so private, only I can get them; I hope I sneaked
them in unobtrusively so nobody feels left out. I hope my writing has
many layers, as human beings have layers.
6 The Search for an Identity:
A Kannada Writer's Viewpoint
U. R. Anantha Murthy
Some days past I have found a curious confirmation of the fact

that what is truly native can and often does dispense with local
color; I found this confirmation in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par
excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels: I believe if there were
any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of
camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was
written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no
reason to know that camels were especially Arabian. For him
they were a part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them;
on the other hand, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab
nationalist would do is to have a surfeit of camels, caravans of
camels, on every page: but Mohammed, as an Arab, was
unconcerned; he knew he could be an Arab without
camels. Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Argentine Writer and
Tradition', Labyrinths (New Directions, 1962) p. 181.
At a seminar held recently in India to celebrate the centenary of the

birth of Sri Aurobindo, we might have expected a series oflaudatory
speeches, as is customary when centenaries of well-known Indian
and international figures are celebrated. But the secretary of the
Ministry of Education, which hosted the seminar to celebrate the
Aurobindo centenary, was a sensitive Hindi poet, who made the
occasion an excuse to discuss problems of contemporary writing in
the Indian languages. After the Minister paid the expected tributes
to Aurobindo and called upon the writers to uphold Indian culture,
work for national integration, world peace and so forth, we settled
66
The Search for an Identiry
down to business. We had met in one of the dingy provincial capitals

of North India, and among us we had writers in Hindi, Bengali,
Marathi and Kannada, and an internationally-famous Indian
painter.
The discussion inevitably turned to questions that obsess Indian
writers these days: Why is the Western mode of thought and writing
the model for us? Why are we unoriginal in our treatment of form
and content in the novel, drama and poetry? While Indian dance
and music are uniquely Indian, why does contemporary Indian
literature take its bearings from the literature of the West? Are we
really a nation of mimics, victims of English education, which has
conditioned the faculties of our perception so much that we fail to
respond freshly to the immediate situation in India? Should we read
Brecht in order to discover that our folk theatre can be used? Why
do we import even our radicalism via Ginsberg, Osborne or Sartre?
And our reaction against the West- is it not often emotional, while
intellectually we remain bound to Western modes of thought?
But the language that we used to discuss these questions was
English, as it had to be. And the names and examples that
dominated our discussion were different from those fashionable ten
years ago. In the place of Eliot and Yeats, dear to us for the impact
of Indian philosophy on them, we now used the ideas of Camus,
Kafka, Sartre and Luka~s. We admired the achievement ofRussian
masters, who seemed better influences for us than the Anglo-Saxon
writers, who are anti-metaphysical and pragmatic in their outlook.
Was not the Russian literary scene before the Revolution very
similar to ours, in its struggle between the Westernisers and the
Slavophiles? Dostoevsky, with his metaphysical brooding, was
closer to the Indian temperament than the writers of the novels of
manners. Still it was Shaw and Galsworthy, rather than the more
poetic Synge and Chekhov, who influenced the previous generation
of writers in India.
As we were discussing these questions, ironically with examples
from the West rather than from our own literatures (some of which
have a history of a thousand years, and quite a few writers radical
and disturbing in their vision), the painter narrated to us an
incident which deeply moved me. Before I relate what he said, let
me describe how we dressed, which is important for the point I want
to make.
The Bengali writer and a Hindi writer wore white dhoti and kurta,
which nearly all nationalist Indians wore during our struggle for
freedom. The Bengali writer had a Marxist background (he spoke in

Bengali, which was translated for us), and the Hindi writer was a
Gandhian socialist of the Lohia school. Two Hindi writers and a
Marathi writer, who were in their thirties, and modernists in their
writing, wore pants andjubba and had long hair- now the accepted
attire of bohemian and artistic Indian intellectuals. (Even in this
dress, one looks middle class in India. The film stars have
popularised it among the young of the rich and middle classes.)
Only the painter looked authentically unmiddle class- with his
flowing hair and beard, kurta and dhoti not elegantly gathered and
worn in the Bengali fashion, but tucked carelessly around the waist
in the South Indian style. He could have been genuinely taken for
a wandering Indian sadhu, except for his powerful and well-
articulated English. Perhaps a remark made by me in the course of
the discussion on the search for Indian identity had prompted him
to speak, or perhaps I am mistaken. Anyhow, this is what I had said.
Speaking ofKannada literature, I had observed that there were
distinctly two generations of writers- those who belonged to the
Gandhian era, and us. In order to clarify certain issues, I had
ventured to generalise recklessly (which most of us were doing
anyhow), and described the earlier of these generations as being
'insiders' and the later, my own generation, as being 'outsiders'.
Some 'insiders' even grew a tuft, wore caste marks, chewed betel
and, more often than not, came from a rural background. Along
with their Gandhian idealism, their sensibilities bore the distinctive
features of their castes and regions, and they wrote as if the English
education they received was inconsequential. I had in my mind
some great Kannada writers like Bendre, Putina and Masti and I
was of course rashly generalising, for it was not unusual in the past to
describe each of these writers as the Wordsworth or Shelley or
Hardy or Shaw ofKannada. Yet I was not wholly wrong in thinking
of them as 'insiders' in comparison with my generation of writers.
There is no doubt we look and think differently from them. We
admire their 'insider's' knowledge of Indian tradition, but reject
their celebratory attitude toward Indian traditionalism. They
made it possible for us to write, but we had to rebel against their
conservative clinging to certain aesthetic modes. Some modern
writers are, as a result, more inventive in their writing, but have we
not also moved closer to the West in our experimentation, thus
risking rootlessness in our own tradition? I raised the question, but
as a practising modernist writer myself I also tried to argue that
The Search for an Identity 6g
there was no need to be unnecessarily anxious about it. We all write

in the Indian languages, and this fact has a profound consequence
on what we actually do in our languages, however much we expose
ourselves to the West in search of ideas and forms. The 'insiders' and
'outsiders' cannot remain mutually exclusive. The fact that we write
in an Indian language like Kannada, kept alive by the oral
traditions of the illiterate rural people as well as a thousand-year-
long native literary tradition (which has behind it an even longer
pan-Indian Sanskrit tradition), has its own compulsion on what its
recent writers do with their exposure to the West. Moreover, it can
be said that many of our regional languages, despite their rich
literary traditions, were actually preserved by illiteracy; for the
literate of our country have always acquired the language of the
ruling elites, whether it was Sanskrit, Persian or English, and have
tended to use the mother tongue as a dialect, and the acquired
language as the medium of intellectual discourse. The medium
shapes the writer, even when he is shaping it. The writer influenced
by the West may think and feel like an 'outsider', and yet he has to
be an 'insider' to the language created by the peculiar congruence of
indigenous and Sanskrit classical traditions, folk tradition, and now
the impact of spreading Western education. If one borrows Western
technology and science, its culture too is bound to influence one,
and where else can the integration of conflicting strains in one's life
be achieved except in one's language?
I was at pains not to appear eclectic in my approach. I wanted my
friends to see the emergence of a new Indian identity in our
literature as the result of a dialectic, not a mixture, of the living old
and new, which would be germane to the genius of our languages.
Kannada writers had such a relationship with Sanskrit literature
once, and our achievement in the past was not a copy of Sanskrit
composition. In some writers at least it was unique, although within
the context ofSanskritic tradition. In my argument I had assumed
that a language rejects what is wilfully and artificially imported into
it, and discerning literary criticism can distinguish between what is
genuine and what is faked without going into the abstract and un-
solvable question of how much ofWestern influence is good for us.
Moreover, I argued, the Kannada language may have a literacy
tradition of a thousand years; still the contemporary writer can only
use the current language that has become a part of his experience in
his own lifetime. The search for the language adequate to one's
creation is also a continuous one; it varies from one work to another.
When the writer influenced by Western literatures chooses to

write in a language like Kannada, he has made a moral choice. If
the ideas that are still not of my language are embodied in my
language creatively, then it becomes a part of the living tradition of
my language.
I said that one uses only the current language of one's lifetime;
but perhaps it is even narrower than this. As a writer I have felt often
that my essential language is what I acquired during my childhood
in a village and what I have been able to add to it- not superficially
but experimentally-in the process of growing up. In the actual
business of writing we all know how much of our knowledge and our
acquired language is really superfluous and useless. The magic of
literary creation lies in actualising new facets of experience;
suggesting the inarticulate while articulating the particular and the
given; conquering new domains of experience which are not yet the
property of one's language. If I should do all these in a language
that has become my own only from the days of my childhood, then
that language which has roots in me must have roots outside me as
well- in its tradition of a thousand years, and what is affecting the
lives of the people who speak that language today. If the Western
impact on us is a reality, how can we wish it away? I will have to
relate myself to it with my language, which if it has to have
evocative power, should have its roots in the language of the ancient
poets, and its current life in the idiomatic vigour of the illiterate
peasant's speech.
As a creative writer I work on this assumption, but I cannot
wholly silence my literary conscience with that argument. Hence
what the painter said, his extraordinary appearance and ability as
an artist adding to the power of his argument, deeply disturbed me.
In retrospect, what he said may seem simple to me now, but the fact
that I was disturbed by his argument (and a few other writers were
also impressed like me), is an indication of a profound disquiet
among the Indian writers today in their search for identity.
The painter was travelling through villages in North India
studying folk art. A lonely cottage at the foot of a hill attracted his
eye. As he approached the cottage, he was puzzled by a piece of
stone which he saw inside the cottage through the window; it was
decorated with kumkum- the red powder that our women wear on
their foreheads as an auspicious sign- and flowers. He wanted to
photograph the stone that the peasant worshipped, and he asked the
peasant (who was weaving a basket outside the cottage) if he could
The Search for an Identity
bring the stone outside the cottage into the sun so that he could take
a picture. After taking the photograph, the painter apologised to the
peasant in case the stone he worshipped was polluted by moving it
outside. He had not expected the peasant's reply. 'It doesn't
matter', the peasant said, 'I will have to bring another stone and
anoint kumkum on it.' Any piece of stone on which he put kumkum
became God for the peasant. What mattered was his faith, not the
stone. Do we understand the manner in which the peasant's mind
worked?- the painter asked us. Can we understand his essentially
mythical and metaphorical imagination which directed his inner
life? Will Lukac;s and Russell, who influence the structure of our
thinking now, help us see instinctively the way this peasant's mind
worked? That is why we do not understand the complex pattern of
ancient Indian thought, its daring subjectivity, caught as we are in
the narrow confines of Western scientific rationality. In his
simplicity, the peasant still keeps alive the mode of thinking and
perception which, at the dawn ofhuman civilisation, revealed to the
sages of the Upanishads the vision that Atman is Brahman. Should
we not prefer the so-called superstition of the peasant, which helps
him see organic connections between the animal world, the human
world, and the nature surrounding him, to the scientific rationality
of Western science, which has driven the world into a mess of
pollution and ecological imbalance?
The painter continued: 'Western education has alienated us
utterly from this peasant, who belongs to the category of the seventy
per cent, the illiterate Indian mass. There is no gap for him between
what he perceives subjectively and objectively. As his senses were
actively engaged with the world outside him, he had no time to
reflect on the luxury of the existentialist problem of whether life was
meaningful. If we don't understand the structure and mode of this
peasant's thinking, we can't become true Indian writers. Therefore
we should free ourselves from the enslaving rationalist modes of
Western scientific thinking, from which even their great writers are
not totally liberated. Only then we will be able to see what connects
this peasant vitally to his world that surrounds him, and to his
ancestor who perhaps ploughed the same patch of land some three
thousand years ago. Western modes of perception will not help us
understand what sustains this peasant- whether it is liberalism,
scientific positivism, or even Marxism. These European-born
theories', the painter concluded, 'only serve to make us feel inferior,
and thus turn our country into an imitative copy of the West.'
As I said, we were moved by the painter's argument. In the midst

of Camus, Sartre, Kafka and Lukac;s, he stood before us as an
authentic Indian, who was untouched by the ideas of any of these
writers, whom we were using as points of reference to define our
positions.
In retrospect a doubt nagged me. Isn't the authentic Indian
peasant, whose imagination is mythical and who relates to nature
organically, also an. imported cult figure of the Western radicals,
who are reacting against their materialist civilisation? What if these
spiritual reactions in the West are their way of keeping fit, and the
'decline of the West' theory is a glibly-repeated humbug?
In India, Mahatma Gandhi, who himself approximated the
Indian peasant in his appearance, in his mode of thinking and in his
political imagery, still chose Pandit Nehru, the Westernised Indian,
as his successor. I do not think that the children of that peasant will
believe in the magic of transferring the stone into God, nor did the
painter work on his canvas that way- he sought an objective form,
there, on the canvas, for his perceptions and ideas, and he couldn't
ignore the experimentations in Western painting.
Still, why did the painter move me with his argument? Why do
we, the educated Indian writers of my generation- most of whom
now belong to the middle-class intelligentsia- suffer from a nagging
self-doubt? Why are we all soliloquists and monologists- the
'stream of consciousness' technique is very popular with our
novelists -whereas the older generation of writers (who were also
educated in English and belonged to the upper classes and castes in
India) did not think that their perceptions were limited to
themselves? Perhaps, since they belonged to a generation that was
involved in the struggle to free India, they felt a common destiny
with the masses oflndia, which in the post-independence India we
don't feel. They did think that they wrote and spoke for the whole
country- whatever be the quality of their writing (a good deal of
which was sloppy, sentimental and revivalist). I even envy the
homespun, plain khaki clothes they wore, which were egalitarian
symbols in the post-independent India of Gandhi, but which no
longer are, because they are the clothes of our corrupt politicians
and ministers. Today we do not think that we can be intensely
personal and universal at the same time- a confidence which is
important for the creation of great art. As a result we keep reacting
rather than creating; we advocate the absurd, or in reaction to it
admire the authentic Indian peasant- all of them masks to hide our
The Search for an Identity 73
own uncertainties. In the morass of poverty, disease and ugliness of
India, isn't the Westernised Indian inauthentic and inconsequen-
tial, and the traditional peasant an incongruous and helpless victim
of centuries of stagnation?
Why did it seem to us that to be authentically Indian we should
idealise the simple peasant? We had great Indian writers in the past
who had a quarrel with the belief patterns of traditional India. In
their search for an authentic mode of existence, the twelfth-century
mystical poets in my language (Basavanna, Allama and the woman
poet Akka) were very impatient with the naive acquiescence and
resignation of the traditional Indian mind. They didn't emulate the
peasant, but tried to rouse him into an awareness of his inner
potential. The great Indian tradition was not merely spiritual and
devotional: we had the materialist Lokayata School, the Sankhya
System, and Jainism and Buddhism, which were atheistic. It is a
tradition of an intense conflict of world-views, yet our revivalists
prefer to select only one aspect of it. Isn't this debilitating romantic
strain in us also due to our obsession with the West?
I shall summarily try to pose the question like this: the continuity
of tradition of rural India, and the gymnastics of the Indian
intellectual (which begin and end with him) have remained apart,
unrelated. Why is there still no reaching out to each other? Why are
we not fully possessed of the vital problems oflndia? And why don't
we have the confidence and desire to affect the thinking of the
peasant who, in turn, should become creative as some of them did in
the twelfth century in my language? If and when the writers of our
country give such immediate responsive attention to our situation,
wouldn't we then be less obsessed with the West, and wouldn't
much that is happening in the West today seem irrelevant to us? The
noble Nehru ran the affairs of the country with his face always
turned to the West. What will the post-Nehru generation of writers
do? Would Gandhism and Maoism, which have many similarities,
create in our countries the situation that necessitates the kind of
attention I spoke of? But, then, wouldn't our literature become
monotonous, burdened with one theme, one purpose, one attitude?
As Yeats said:
Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
II
I should take a more professional look at the problem and clarify

issues as they are, rather than lose myself in wild speculation as I did
just now. Yet I do not regret revealing to you the tenor and trend of
our minds in India today. I don't want to pretend that I have yet
overcome the painter's argument; the peasant does bother me, like
Anna Karenina's dream in Tolstoy's novel, and I am worried that
the underlying assumption of the literary culture in which I write is
potentially capable of making the peasant's mode of existence and
thinking irrelevant to me. And a large part of the reality of my
country is still him, and he is there in my language, whose vigour of
expression has been preserved by him.
Between any two literatures there can be roughly three kinds of
relations: first, the relation of the master and the slave; second, the
relation of equals; third, the relation between a developed country
like Europe or America and a developing nation like ours. The
example for the first is the way the white men imposed their culture
on the blacks in America. Yet no imposition can be completely
successful- as in music, in literature too the minority culture of the
blacks may contain the creative nucleus that will influence the
literature of the whole country. The interaction between the
English and the French literatures illustrates the second kind of
relationship. When a French historian writes the history of English
literature, it is possible that he sees a French writer at the back of all
the important English writers.
The third kind of relationship is more complex than the first two.
I use economic categories to describe this relationship, rather than
terms like East and West, for the thought patterns arising from the
division of mankind into East and West are often simplistic. In my
own country, as it must be evident from my talk, it results in either
imitation or frigid conservatism. Only because I am born an Indian
I refuse to think that it is a crime to respond more to Tolstoy or to
Shakespeare than, say, Pampa's epic in my language. I must also be
aware when I say this that the novels of Karanth in my language,
although they fall short of the world masterpieces I admire, are
much more relevant to me in forming my sensibility.
We are a very poor, humiliatednation now, but with a rich and
highly sophisticated culture in the past. This creates many psycho-
logical complications in our relation to the West. The influence of
Western literatures may either sharpen our attention to our own
reality, or it may take our minds away from what is most relevant to
our situation. This is the heart of the problem- how can we have a
mature relationship? Will it ever be possible to evolve a mature
relationship of equals, from a relationship that has been one-sided?
America wants our gurus, but will she ever need our poets and
novelists, and respond to them as we respond to American writers?
And even this response is often out of proportion to the real merit of
the writers- which is still another problem of uncritical acceptance
of received opinions from the West.
One of the Hindu writers brought into the discussion was Dr
Lohia, a Gandhian Socialist thinker who once described Indian
intellectuals as either backward-looking, sideways-looking or
forward-looking. The backward-lookers entertain the illusion that
the solution to our problem lies in the revival of our past. (Which
aspect of our past? The revivalists are highly selective; they ignore
the sceptical and rationalist aspects of our past.) If this is the typical
thinking of the conservative upper castes in India, the cosmopolites
in India always look sideways. Shall we be like America? Or Russia?
Or France? Or Britain? They also speak very emotionally about the
ancient glory of India, yet they seek their intellectual motivations
from the West. They can get very upset about the American
atrocities in Vietnam, but they don't raise a finger against the
burning of the huts of the untouchable castes by the landlords of
Andhra Pradesh in India. They admire Ginsberg's protest and
ungentlemanly ways, yet when one of our earnestly radical
legislators removed his chappal to beat the corrupt ministers in the
Assembly, they were utterly shocked by his lack of manners.
They wear the hippie costume, but the material is imported
terylene.
But if one thinks that the great scientific and cultural progress of
the West, with its exploration of space and its undoubted creative
energy, is related to the famine and hunger among the illiterate
peasants of the rural areas ofGulbarga and Bijapur in my state, and
that these two interrelated phenomena are bound to react mutually
as our people are roused to consciousness, then one has to become
forward-looking; not only the people of the East but those of the
West, too. The forward-looking Indian will then have to work for
approximation among mankind -which is possible only through a
new technology, and a new political and economic order-which
are again related. For the writer in India who has such a vision, the
famine in an Indian village, a new literary experiment in French
literature, the science that has caused enormous wealth in one part
of the globe and poverty in another, the ancient mystical poetry of
Kabir and Basavanna-which he may read wearing Western dress,
but which still moves him to the depths- all these coalesce in to an
immediate contemporary reality. He has to make connections much
more than he does now, or more than much of contemporary
Western literature which he reads does. As a writer, then, he will
have to struggle to embody his vision in a language in which you can
write like Blake, and not analytically like Russell, and which, unlike
European languages, is still rural.
I am sorry to have slipped into such a high note again. I spoke of
the cliche-posture of backward-looking Orientalism, and imitative
Westernisation- they are really the same. The great sage of the
Upanishads, Yajnavalkya, was not an Orientalist; he was not
bothered about his Indian identity. Imitation either of our own past
or of Europe leads to sterility; and attention to the immediate reality
is warped. Also, as I have indicated earlier, the Indian Orientalist
chooses to uphold a highly-simplified version oflndia, the image of
India created during our freedom-fighting renaissance, an image
again moulded in the narrow Victorian sensibility. Even Mahatma
Gandhi was essentially a puritan, and lacked the richness and
complexity of ancient Indian thought.
In reaction against the Orientalists and the Westernisers, some of
our really intelligent and sophisticated writers have created a new
kind of work of art which, apparently, looks Indian and original.
Yet in a very subtle manner these works are also Indian equivalents
of Western models. The conceptual framework into which the
material is organised is Western. The material is Indian- the details
oflife, the myths, the folklore, the legends are all there, but you feel,
'Why should I read this after reading Kafka or Camus?' You can't
borrow the style or form of these writers without their philosophy,
their concept of man; it is not neutral like classical realism, I would
say there are some 'mental-frames' today in Western literature,
born out of certain definitions and concepts of man, which
dominate the literature of the world, and certainly oflndia, and this
has resulted in monotony. Therefore the Indian writer looking for a
new mode of perception is certainly attracted by the simple peasant
who has remained through the centuries impenetrable to the
cultures of the conquerors.lt is important to know that he exists; our
hypersensitive, highly-personal nightmares will at least be tem-
pered with the irony of such knowledge.
The question then could be put this way: in India, what should
happen to the whole country so that we will be forced out of the
grooves that I have been speaking of?
III
I will not attempt an answer to this big question, but will try to take
another look at what makes these grooves in our cultural situation.
Is there a relatio'nship between what the writer creates and the
expectations of an ideal reader? What I wish to say now is based on
the assumption that the implicit awareness of his potential ideal
reader is one of the important factors entering into the writer's
creative process- the embodying process of bringing a work into
existence in a particular cultural context. Let me see then what has
been happening in my language. In the classical period ofKannada
literature nearly a thousand years ago the ideal reader, who
belonged to the elite class forming a very small fraction of the society
which could read and write, could presumably read Sanskrit also.
Therefore he brought to his reading of Kannada aesthetic expec-
tations formed from his study of Sanskrit. The best of Kannada
literature in the past is original within the context of Sanskrit
literature.lts departures are important, yet they are departures. No
good writer limits himself to the expectations of the reader; he
extends them, but within a given context. Even now the literates in
my language constitute hardly 30 per cent of the population, and
the ideal discerning reader of our literary works is one whose
sensibility is formed by a study of English literature. This is the
cultural situation in which we are writing; the peasant at the foot of
the hill can't read me. His consciousness may enter my work as an
'object' for others like me to read, which will be very different from
what would have been ifl were aware in my creative process that he
was also my potential reader. The socio-economic process that will
make him a potential reader may also make him a man of the
sideways-looking middle class, like us. Is it possible then to have a
different context for writing in a country like India?
Yet there is literature in India which cuts across this framework.
There were revolutionary periods in our history which saw
important socio-cultural changes brought about by great religious
movements. These religious poets worked in the oral tradition and
therefore, in the creative process itself, they had before them both
literate and illiterate people. Thus when the illiterate masses were
not mere objects and themes ofliterary creation but participants in
the act of communication, our regional literature underwent a
change not only in theme, but in its aesthetic structure. In an
important way this literature, created in the oral tradition, since it
was not conditioned by the expectation of the Sanskrit educated
literati, becomes most daring and original in its imagery, metaphor
and rhythmic structures. There is a big gap between the language
and rhythm of classical literature in Kannada of the twelfth century
and the language I use today. But the language and rhythm of the
mystical poetry ofBasavanna, Akka and Allama, who are also of the
twelfth century, is like the language in which I write today. And
these poets were radical in their attitudes too. I must make an
important point here; their audience, which cut across social
barriers, was an immediate one for them. It was not a mass audience
to whose taste they catered. The difference is significant.
I don't foresee such a socio-cultural and religious turmoil
challenging us to create outside the defined frameworks of the
cultural and literary expectations of our highly limited reading
public. The oral tradition is still there in India, but the urge to work
in it is not found among our English-educated middle-class writers.
The expansion of the reading public, whether it is brought about by
the present system in India, or by the kind of Indian Marxists we
have now, will again be through a process of modernisation and
industrialisation- and therefore such a literate mass may not create
for the writers a qualitatively different writing situation. What we
see of the Marxist progressive writing situation in India is
propagandist, its relation with its audience is hackneyed and
unproductive; it is not truly a 'dialogue', in the sense that Paulo
Freire uses this word in Pedagogy cif the Oppressed.
I hope you will appreciate why I cannot end this paper neatly.
What is the best that a writer with this awareness can do? Perhaps
write for himself. But that is not even ideally possible- I would like
to add -and yet . . .
7 Literature in the Global Village: An
Inquiry into Problems of Response
C. D. Narasilnhaiah
In India, it is almost axiomatic that literature is primarily a cultural

pursuit; indeed, literature and culture have been interchangeable
terms, because it has been traditionally recognised that literature
alone, thanks to its unique inherent resources, can offer the most
complete and the most authentic experience of a people. What is
also recognised is its twin-values of prayojana and purushartha, 'social
utility' and 'ultimate value', or that by which all else is known.
Indians have been accused of a notorious lack of historical sense,
that is, as the West understands history; one presumes a linear
rather than a cyclical view has generally characterised the Western
approach to history. On the other hand, myth and legend have
greater hold on the Indian imagination- and, as I understand,
African imagination as well- than recorded events. I would go so
far as to think that history itself has to be mythicised in India if it
must have a claim on our attention. This fortunately eliminates for
us much rubbish which often goes by the name ofhistory, but has no
human significance. As for sociology, it is a latecomer on the Indian
scene, and one is not sure that it has made any dent on the
consciousness of even highly-educated people outside the university
departments where it is taught- it is so professionalised, a euphem-
ism for unmitigated dullness.
I hope I can speak with some detachment when I claim that
English has, for a century and a half, been a popular subject of study
in school and college mainly for its cultural value, though some
tactful professors have had to tell their obtuse administrators and
politicians that we need English because it is the language of
science, technology, commerce, diplomacy and international
79
8o Literary and Cultural Roles
communication. Whatever teachers of English may think or their

employers believe, the students are sure to reject English, or at best
suffer it, once it is shorn of its literary value. The state of English in
Asian countries like Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Thailand and
Burma, where it is studied as a '(foreign) language' should be a
warning to others who propose to gain mastery over it through a
'linguistic approach'. It should be interesting to know that English-
which not long ago made its way into institutes of engineering and
technology across the country with a view to strengthening the
student's powers of comprehending engineering and technology- is
slowly becoming entrenched as a literary discipline: sheer survival
has dictated the shift of emphasis. But it is now receiving
justification because of our increased interest in American
literature, European literature in translation and Commonwealth
literature; including what is written by Indians in the English
language.
Which brings me to my present concern. It is argued by some,
with a certain plausibility which takes one in, that many modern
novels from both Asia and the West reflect a common modern
environment, which is so overwhelming that it may be more
important than the forces of traditional cultures. The novelist,
whether in Tokyo, Bangkok, New York or Rio, lives as a member of
a nuclear family in a metropolis, with its problems of overcrowding,
crime, pollution and modern technology. In fact, he is closer in
spirit to his colleagues half a world away than he is to his own
grandparents.
However, not being an avid reader of fiction, I find my resources
woefully limited in dealing with such an argument, so I salvage
from the debris three contemporary books which happen to be
fictional, and with one of which at least I am familiar since it was
lately thrust on my attention. I give below some random representa-
tive extracts from them:
The moon, now high in the sky, poured white light over the
desert. Soon he heard a motor and, looking, saw the touring car
returning, the far, dim headlamps throwing a faint light before it.
Capon stood on the runningboard, kicking one leg out and
waving his hat. Suddenly the car swerved to the left and started
going around and around in wide circles, Hook turning the wheel
sharp first one way and then the other, making the car zigzag and
kick up mounds of dust.
Literature in the Global Village 81
Hook cut the wheel hard and the car tipped to one side on two
wheels, balanced there an instant, then thudded down with a
loud groan on its springs. He put it in reverse and it shot
backward. Then, the gears grinding, he steered the car toward
the hut, the engine sputtering and missing.
Max stepped from the fire to meet them but the car kept on
coming and he jumped out of its path as it bore down on
him. (Michael Rumaker, from Evergreen Review.)
Each time Brij entered his father's office, something delicious

happened to him. Everything about the office was controlled and
immaculate. The temperature for one thing. Whatever it was like
outside, here the air was exactly right. The sounds were subdued
office sounds. In the main room where the secretaries and steno-
graphers sat with frosted glass partitions between them, type-
writers discreetly punctuated the silence. There were brand new
journals on technology and engineering symmetrically placed on
a round table in the visitors' section of the room. Not a scratch or
a smudge on any glossy wood or glass surface. The chairs were
upholstered in moss green leather framed in dark teak. There was
a coffee-coloured pile carpet. Brij breathed deeply. It was
beautiful. (Nayantara Sahgal, from The Day in Shadow.)
The room rocked gently back and forth, gradually swaying to a

stop. Blue and gold curtains, blue and gold coverlets neatly folded
on the carved teak chest against one wall, floated into focus. He
could have been in any half-dark, drowsily warm, sumptuously
furnished interior in time or space. He was, however, in Room
930 of the Intercontinental Hotel in what, for want of a better
name, was known as the Blue and Gold Suite. It was the corner
suite kept for special friends of the management, no questions
asked. And it was morning. The morning furthermore of
November the fifteenth, of the conference in the Ministry to
choose between the three oil exploration offers that had been with
the Ministry for five months. With the discovery of oil in the
Jammu region, the decision could no longer be delayed. What had
possessed him to stay here all night? (Ibid.)
It was painful how the connection continued, like a detached

heartbeat. The tissue of a marriage could be dissolved by human
acts, but its anatomy went on and on. And skeletons could endure
for a million years. Just living together, daily routine produced

that uncanny durability .... She wondered how he destroyed
his memories. Did he nail them down in coffins and let them
pulsate there till they rotted? (Ibid.)
In its extreme form, this horror is the horror of madness: and most
of us know its shadow, for moments anyway, when we are in the
grip of an overmastering emotion. The emotion may give us
pleasure or not, for most of its duration we can feel ourselves in
full control; but there are moments, particularly in love,
particularly in such a love as mine for Sheila, when the illusion is
shattered and we see ourselves in the hands of ineluctable fate,
our voices, our protests, our reasons as irrelevant to what we do as
the sea sounding in the night was to my wretchedness, while I lay
awake.
It was in such moments that I faced the idea of suicide. Not
altogether in despair- but with the glint of a last triumph. And I
believed the idea had come in that identical fashion to other men
like me, and for the same reason. Not only as a relief from
unhappiness, but also a sign, the only one possible, that the horror
is not there, and that one's life is, in the last resort, answerable to
will. At any rate, it was so with me. (C. P. Snow, from Time of
Hope.)
The passages cited here should leave one in no doubt as to the

conclusion: that one readily endorses the argument that 'In fact he
(the novelist) is closer in spirit to his colleagues half a world away
than he is to his own grandparents.'
I have drawn my excerpts from three fictional works: American,
Indian, British. And I should like to think it is not worth one's while
to inform ourselves which is which; they could have been written
anywhere in the world. The foregoing passages are obviously not
literature, unless we stretch the term to include all printed words.
They are not, in fact, anything deserving of an intelligent adult's
attention, whether one looks at them simply as 'the best that has
been thought and said in the world', or 'life seen through a
temperament', or simply 'words charged with meaning', because
they are all so utterly trivial.
And thus our preoccupation boils down to a critical question, so
that we make sure we are dealing with literature and not something
else. And the critic ofliterature has little to lose by not 'using' such
Literature in the Global Village
writing as 'source material' for the social life of our times, as it has
often been in the past, because it has been the happy hunting-
ground for scholars with social preoccupations.
Besides, why does, why should, I humbly ask, the 'social' get any
more attention than, say, the intellectual, moral and spiritual life of
a period, if our object is to learn culture? And I presume that
'culture' is larger than what is suggested by the term 'social'- the
reason why a literary critic who is concerned with the totality of
experience, the 'history and destiny of man', ought to be considered
incomparably better qualified than a 'social' historian who has
taught himself to 'use' literature as 'source material' to study 'the
social life of the period'. The ominous terms so constantly in use in
sociological studies- 'use', 'source material', 'social life of the
period'- belong, one knows, to the discipline of sociology, which
seeks to abstract from the work of art what it is looking for, rather
than letting it affect the many sides of the reader's personality,
including the social, by a full exposure to the work of art. I say so at
the cost of sounding dogmatic, in my anxiety to put forward
literature's superior credentials over sociology for the business on
hand, namely to know the culture of a people through their
literature.
It is good to warn ourselves at the outset that the culture of a
period in any country is not a monolithic mass- this cannot be so
even in the so-called monolithic societies. There must be numerous
counter-cultures and subcultures in any society; more so in a liberal
society, for culture in its very nature is not a smoothly flowing
stream but a struggling complex of currents. And this is a sign of its
vitality.
II
Consider, for instance, the literature of the eighteenth century in

England, covering at least two important monarchs, Queen Anne
and King George III, and two literary periods, though not clearly
demarcated: The Age of Addison, Steele, Swift and Dryden; and
the Age ofPope and johnson. In both one notices a preoccupation
with satire of a wide-ranging kind. But does Addison's satire ofthe
follies and fashions of women, with all its urbanity, succeed in
coming to grips with what it satirises, or does it simply skim the
surface? If so, what are the limitations of the 'Good Form' which the
eighteenth century prized so much? Or did the century mean by it

more than what the term means to us today? Then, how does
Addison compare with Dryden, who, it is good to remember, wrote
not only 'Mac Flecknoe' and 'Absalom and Achitophel' but also the
celebrated odes? Again there is Swift, that master of destructive
satire, with his deep disgust of human nature. Add to these a less
appreciated fact, namely that this Age of Satire and sophisticated
urban culture gave England a Puritan in Bunyan, a 'mechanick,'
who nevertheless shared in the rich traditional culture of England
which alone could have made possible a masterpiece of the order of
The Pilgrim's Progress.
Proceed from these to the Age of Pope and Johnson, the former
the author of'The Rape of the Lock', but also of'The Dunciad'. In
the Augustan Age, especially represented by Dryden and Pope, how
well do we today respond to the play of'wit', which Leavis calls 'the
focusing sharpness of illuminated intelligence'? Next to Pope, the
incomparable Dr Johnson with his terrific moral earnestness and
compassion was also a great club man. About the last trait,
Dr Leavis has remarked, 'For the consideration of Johnson's
strength as a talker cannot properly be separated from that of his
strength as a writer' (The Common Pursuit, London, p. 101). Did the
eighteenth century have- the nineteenth century surely did-
separate canons ofjudgement for the assessment of these two forms:
writing and talking? In any case, Johnson's deficiency in criticism
required everything to be stated; it was not enough for him that a
thing was enacted- which made the great Doctor give high praise to
Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard'. His claim that the
sentiments of the 'Elegy' find an echo in every bosom has been
strongly refuted by T. S. Eliot, who says that while Gray's language
is refined, the sentiments are crude, resulting in a dissociation of
sensibility. Last of all, Johnson's habit of mind- which thought in
classical categories of 'delight' and 'instruction', as when he
maintained Shakespeare's comedy 'pleases', his tragedy 'instructs'-
thus lost sight of whatever eluded these categories.
Now the Age ofJohnson, the Augustan heyday, Leavis incisively
writes, is a period 'very confident of its flourishing cultural health'.
Its insistence on the 'social', Leavis adds, was bound to have a
'discouraging effect on the deeper sources of originality, the creative
springs in the individually experiencing mind' (ibid., p.186). Such
a creative mind is of course that of Blake, who cannot have failed to
feel that 'conventional expression, however natural and inevitable
Literature in the Global Village Bs
to the age, imposes a conventional experience' -which is at the
other extreme of a mind with 'a full consciousness', a sure sign of
'genius'. In such an age, a genius like Blake's, even as Hopkins' in
Victorian England, may manifest itself in technical innovation as
well as in a profound triumph of the spirit. Strangely, however, close
friends of Hopkins who, one would have thought, were qualified to
react intelligently, found Hopkins' poetry odd, obscure and
difficult. Both Blake and Hopkins, like that other isolated genius on
the other side of the Atlantic, Emily Dickinson, had no audience to
share the results of their creativity. Now if we admit that art is a
collaborative endeavour, we cannot know how much the absence of
effective collaboration affected their creative achievement.
In each of these cases the experience is the poet's own, but the
language was a shared inheritance, although the poets fashioned it
as an effective medium for a thought and sensibility very different
from others of the age in which they lived. Now, how do we
apportion the gains between a uniquely individual experience and
language, which is a social instrument?
To conclude this brief discussion of the eighteenth century: How
do we get to know the culture of the age lying behind a whole
complex of contrary achievements? What is the nature of the
equipment we bring to the task? And how does it differ from that of
the social scientist? Do we rely more on Addison and Dryden than
on Bunyan, Pope and Johnson rather than Blake, in determining
the culture? Does our estimate depend upon the prestige and
standing of the author concerned, or do we make a first-hand
response to the work of art as an autonomous object? Is it possible to
divorce the work from the society in which it grew? What do we do
when the two approaches clash and confuse the scene? In other
words, how do we sort them out?
Against this awareness, how do we judge contemporary
literature, the literature of the nuclear age? How does the age affect
different members of the nuclear family? Are they all at the same
stage of evolution? How do geography and history shape them?
What of those tremendous reservoirs of culture- namely race,
religion, and that mysterious amalgam called sensibility? What
other forces operate on the writer's creative impulse? What ofthe
peculiar unique equipment of the individual writer? It may be good
to examine these ramifications which are outside the orbit of the
sociologist. But before we proceed to a consideration ofliterature in
the nuclear age, cast a brief glance at the nineteenth century: a poet
like Tennyson felt unhinged at the impact of Darwin's theory of

Evolution, and sought refuge now in the Lotos Island, now in The
Palace of Art. And yet ironically he was claimed by literary
historians to be the foremost representative of his age. IfTennyson
sought escape from life, Matthew Arnold was whining and
moaning, whither are we? whence are we? and so forth. If Tennyson
and Arnold were 'ruminating', Browning was proclaiming, 'God's
in His heaven/All's right with the world' -miscalled robust
optimism, which brought forth the ejaculation 'Oh, had he been less
robust!'
How do we get at the culture of the age, in the face of this
confused medley of utterances? What truth is there in the oft-quoted
claim, 'spacious times of Queen Victoria'?
Again, even before the nuclear age set in, a poet like Wallace
Stevens noticed in America that the 'theatre' of poetry had
changed, calling forth radical readjustments. In a poem which is
virtually his poetic manifesto he described the 'Modern Poem' as of
the mind in the act of finding what will suffice. It must face the men
of the time, meet the women of the time. And know the speech of the
place. Of a man skating, a woman dancing and combing. The poem
of the mind. Though Stevens speaks for poetry, it may be taken to be
no less true of fiction and drama as well, for the period marks a shift
of sensibility. Was the shift of sensibility accompanied by a change
of expression? Or did it have to wait for a man of genius? If so, how
do we judge the period? Going back to Stevens, the question is this:
can we identify his men and women? Were they all skating and
dancing? Are they there or do we take the poet's word for it? Is it a
symbolic mode ofsuggesting their occupations or preoccupations? If
not, does the poet leave out vast masses of people who did, all the
same, make culture? As for the men skating and women dancing, do
they all receive the same treatment at the hands of other poets, that
is, do all poets see alike and react alike? How do we compare their
efforts? Does the comparison help to reach the truth? If so, what
criteria can be more reliable than others? A volley of questions
which must remain unanswered in the present paper!
Consider now the contemporary situation, which ties up the
entire world into what is now a near-cliche, the 'global village'. It is
claimed in some quarters that writers, regardless of where they live,
share the same common heritage, though the word 'common' more
often than not ignores very common countries and cultures outside
the Anglo-American orbit. But ironically the latter participate in
the mainstream ofWestern culture more insistently than those born

to it. Not quite, I hasten to qualify, because their newly-won
political freedom has made them hypersensitive to their destiny,
and this they cannot fulfil without a self-discovery which in its turn
has necessitated a discovery of the group, the nation, the race, its
pressures and aspirations. These alone can give them an identity in
an age where everything else is calculated to destory it.
ID
Let me turn to iny Indian experience to elucidate this position. I

shall take up for consideration the work of two novelists who are or
ought to be, well known everywhere- I mean R. K. Narayan and
Raja Rao- and I shall focus attention on novels which have an
international theme, namely The Vendor ofSweets and The Serpent and
the Rope.
Narayan is very much a Malgudi man. It must now be familiar to
readers of Narayan that Malgudi is an imaginary small town in
South India, difficult to locate but one will not be far wrong in
saying it must be somewhere between Madras and Mysore. This
Indian book was first published in the United States, dedicated
(please note) to 'My great friend Lyle Blair (of Michigan University
Press)', 'a remarkable Australian' 'who resides in the heart of
Malgudi'. The circle is complete and the line has met at the point it
started from, namely Malgudi. Not merely the dedication but the
theme of the novel is, in a sense, international; and the motivating
force in the life of the vendor's son is a typical, ifludicrous, product
of our Nuclear Age. A small-town vendor, who makes his living by
selling sweets, nevertheless makes enough money to send his son to
the United States. The son has neither the patience nor the
inclination to follow in the footsteps of his father. His ambitions are
sky-rocketing; indeed, he thinks in a very big way to combine in
himself the roles of a creative writer of fiction, printer, publisher and
international distributor. While returning from America, he meets
a Korean girl and comes to live with her in Malgudi. The father
who, we are told, had a 'maternal obsession about the boy's
feeding', feels increasingly neglected, is heartbroken, winds up his
business, and withdraws into the forest to seek 'complete
enlightenment'.
A very modern theme, but suffused throughout with traditional

values while the medium retains a conscious naivete so as to match
the simple life of a small town vendor. Consider the very opening
page:
'Conquer taste, and you will have conquered the self,' saidjagan
to his listener, who asked, 'Why conquer the self?' Jagan said, 'I
do not know, but all our sages advise us so.'
The listener lost interest in the question; his aim was only to
stimulate conversation, while he occupied a low wooden stool
next tojagan's chair.Jagan sat under the framed picture of the
goddess Lakshmi hanging on the wall, and offered prayers first
thing in the day by reverently placing a string ofjasmine on top of
the frame; he also lit an incense stick and stuck it in a crevice in
the wall. The air was charged with the scent of jasmine and
incense, which imperceptibly blended with the fragrance of
sweetmeats frying in ghee in the kitchen across the hall.
The listener was a cousin, though how he came to be called so
could not be explained, since he claimed cousinhood with many
others in the town (total incompatibles, at times), but if
challenged he could always overwhelm the sceptic with
genealogy. He was a man-about-town and visited many places
and houses from morning till night, and invariably every day at
about four-thirty he arrived, threw a brief glance and a nod at
Jagan, passed straight into the kitchen, and came out ten minutes
later wiping his mouth with the end of a towel on his shoulder,
commenting, 'The sugar situation may need watching. I hear
that the government are going to raise the price. Wheat flour is all
right today. I gave that supplier a bit of my mind yesterday when
I passed Godown Street. Don't ask me what took me there. I have
friends and relations all over this city and everyone wants me to
attend to this or that. I do not grudge serving others. What is life
worth unless we serve and help each other?'
It is possiblejagan is mechanically mouthing a wise saying when

he pontificates, 'Conquer taste, and you will have conquered the
self.' And Narayan's irony becomes apparent injagan's reply to the
question 'Why conquer the self?': 'I do not know, but all our sages
advise us so.' The old man is a product of an earlier generation, he is
fifty-five and widowed; and the son is the veritable 'third' ofhis life.
One is not sure that Narayan, for all his awareness of the fantastic
Literature in the Global Village 8g
'progress' made in life and literature in the West, from where his
native Tamil wit derives its reinforcement, does not himself
subscribe, in however subdued a way, to the traditional values
which have nurtured both the sweet vendor and himself. Hence the
'yes' and 'no' of his treatment in the novel. The sweet vendor must
have a picture of a god in his commercial establishment as much to
answer to an inner need as to impress his clientele with his
righteousness in his transactions. The picture in this case is that of
Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, which is not without its ironic
implications.
Again, we notice the operative irony in the character of the
cousin, a 'man-about-town', who may well be making his living by
his wits, but finds a rationale for his do-gooder's occupation from the
force of the time-honoured injunction of the individual fulfilling
himself in the service of his fellow men. 'I do not grudge serving
others. What is life worth unless we serve and help each other?'
As the action progresses, the vendor's son gets into his head new-
fangled notions of wanting to learn to be a writer, for which he
decides to go to America-N arayan might well be poking fun at the
creative writing courses in American academic life! The father
naturally demands: 'Did Valmiki go to America or Germany in
order to learn to write his Ramayana? ... Strange notions these boys
get nowadays.' Finally he yields to his son's persistence. But does he
have the 'cash' to meet the son's expenses? The old man's reply has a
touching spontaneity, touching, that is, considering his Silas
Marner-like miserliness: 'Naturally. What is the cash worth to me?
It's all for him. He can have everything he wants!' We realise that
the frequent mention of Upanishads, Gita, Panchatantra and Gandhi
in the novel is not mere lip-service to the wisdom oflndia's past, for
later it is the old man who resents his son bringing a Korean girl
home with him when he should have married someone from his own
caste. He disapproves of his son's living with a woman without
sanctifying the union, and hence persuades him to go to a temple
quietly, and become man and wife in the presence of the god. As for
himself, he is not averse to the idea of his gradually withdrawing
from life:
'Yes, yes, God knows I need a retreat. You know, my friend, at

some stage in one's life one must uproot oneself from the
accustomed surroundings and disappear so that others may
continue in peace.'
go Literary and Cultural Roles
'It would be the most accredited procedure according to our

scriptures- husband and wife must vanish into the forest at some
stage in their lives, leaving the affairs of the world to younger
people.'
The author's comment soon follows:
Jagan felt so heartily in agreement that he wanted to explain why

he needed an escape-his wife's death, son's growth and strange
later development, and how his ancient home behind the Lawley
Statue was beginning to resemble hell on earth- but he held his
tongue.
The father, for all his orthodoxy and want of formal education,
shows a magnificent catholicity as the initial resentment wears off; it
is now not the father but the son who, after having spent the Korean
girl's hard-earned two thousand dollars, will ask her to go back to
America.
She merely said, 'Mo has no more use for me.'

'Use or no use, my wife- well, you know, I looked after her all
her life.'
He found some portions of her talk obscure but could not ask
explicitly for explanations. He said, 'If you read our puranas
(legends) you will find that the wife's place is beside her husband
whatever may happen.'
The novel concludes with the conviction of his son for a traffic
offence, resulting in imprisonment about which] agan, whose 'mind
had attained extraordinary clarity now', comments:
'A dose ofprison life is not a bad thing. It may be just what he
needs now.'
But this does not deter him from discharging his parental
obligations: he writes out a cheque for his son's legal expenses.
'If there are further charges?' asked the cousin.

'We'll pay them, that is all. You can ask me wherever I live. I
am not flying away to another planet.'
Before the old man leaves home with a little bag which contains
all he needs he makes a similar gesture in respect of his Korean
daughter-in-law:
'If you meet her, tell her that if she ever wants to go back to her
country I will buy her a ticket. It's a duty we owe her. She was a
good girl.'
The old man's behaviour-in saying what he does about his son's
imprisonment, and offering to buy a ticket for the Korean girl from
the money on which he continues to keep a hold, while withdrawing
into the forest to live a life of fasting and prayer- has amused not
merely many Western critics but Indians as well. Enticed by the
still-fashionable ironic mode as a critical concept, they fail to discern
where irony stops and affirmation begins- a difficult thing to
unravel when the novelist has intricately woven both into the
labyrinth of his creative being. And yet one has no doubt the author
sees no essential contradiction in what the old man says and does.
For they are all born of his assiduously acquired disinterestedness, a
virtue most prized in the Indian tradition. From his standpoint,
anything else in the circumstances would be disapproved of as being
either brutishly selfish and callous, or sentimental. The novel thus
ends as it should. Any other ending in the attempt to be concessive
to his Western readers would look forced; by the realities oflndian
life and character it would not be warranted.
Against this, consider the better known but not, I should like to
think, superior work of art, Death d a Salesman by ArthurMiller.
Willy Loman's predicament is the predicament of most of us reared
in societies (India, some fear, will soon be the same) dominated by
commercial values of success and failure. Furthermore, failure- if
not fear offailure, ending in suicide- for someone likeN arayan who
was brought up on traditional values must be in the nature of a
corroboration of his American counterpart's egocentric
predicament. Arthur Miller is reported to have reprimanded the
professor of economics whose classroom lecture he audited as a
student. The professor, he said, knew how to measure the giant's
foot but not how to look you in the eye. Apparently Economics,
since the time of Adam Smith, who was a Professor of Moral
Sciences in the University of Edinburgh, has moved a long way,
until at last it has lost all connection with ethics, and become
econometrics.
And yet can one generalise? Did the American public go to see the
play to confirm their own predicament or to transcend it? What
values does Miller commend to heal the tissues of the spirit? Are they
there in contemporary American society? What is its climate of
culture? Can it be all No without a modicum of Yes? If not, how
does the play help to understand the culture of the period?
One is anxious not to adopt a superior stance in offering these
remarks; it is merely to compare two kinds of attitudes to life which,
in the present case, are represented by an Indian and an American
work; and one is aware the roles could very well alternate. In any
case, one gratefully looks for correctives in responding to so complex
a problem, and it is tempting indeed to seek comfort in simplistic
solutions.
The novel I wish to consider now is The Serpent and the Rope, by
Raja Rao; an international novel in a major way, because it is a
product of our enlarged and heightened consciousness. Narayan's
Vendor rif Sweets, on the other hand, is international only
tangentially; it is not meant to be anything else. A young Brahmin,
Ramaswami, educated in the traditional way-well-read in the
Upanishads and the Sutras- goes to France to do research on the
Albigensian heresy, which must sound obscure to many an educated
European ear. He marries Madeleine, who is six years older than he,
and a Catholic teacher of history. He visits England at the time of
the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and partakes of the
celebration with a genuine feeling of involvement. While in France,
he is thrown into the company of intellectuals like himself-
Georges, a Russian, and Lezo, a Spaniard-and he also visits
Cambridge where he has interminable conversations with iconoc-
lastic undergraduates. Madeleine marries Ramaswami because he
is an Indian, and India represents a cause; but she gradually grows
alienated from Ramaswami, gets interested in Tibetan Buddhism,
while continuing to fast on Fridays, fascinated as she is by Georges'
discourses on Catholicism. When the crisis comes, Madeleine, for all
her elaborate observance of Buddhist rituals, behaves very much
like a bourgeois (she is a notary's niece) when she causes Ramas-
wami to apply for a divorce, a situation to which he is very much a
stranger. And this is forced on him by one who practises the
teachings of the Buddha, the Compassionate.
In consonance with such a milieu is a young Rajput Princess
engaged to an official in the Indian Diplomatic Service. She goes to
Cambridge to read for the History Tripos, moves around with a
young Muslim from Pakistan, wears high-heeled shoes, sings jazz,

dances the boogie-woogie and smokes like a chimney. The novelist
meets the challenge squarely when he decides to name her Savithri-
a name which goes back to the Rig Veda, meaning Light,
Knowledge, and later a name in the Mahabharatha of a wife who
brings her dead husband back to life. In our own age she becomes,
in Aurobindo's epic of that name, a symbol of a new knowledge of
which man is in most need. All this complexity is implicit in
Madeleine's observation to Ramaswami that Savithri is three
thousand years old, and one cannot visualise her travelling on a bus
in Paris.
To continue the complex pattern, we are informed that Savithri
knows Sanskrit and sings Mira bhajans (devotional songs) with
feeling. She loses her heart to Ramaswami, but is content to be
'married' to him only symbolically, while deciding to go back to
India and get married to 'stump Pratap'. If she must marry
someone, she might as well marry Pratap, because he is so very
'clean', 'gentle' and 'nice'. Besides, this is, in accordance with her
dharma, 'the radar that lands the plane to safety', a very twentieth-
century image meant to evoke the meaning of a difficult traditional
Hindu concept.
Such are the compulsions of tradition- or is it traditions? For the
novel alternates between at least two traditions- the Indian and the
European. Yajnavalkya and Sankara jostle with StJohn of the
Cross and Paul Valery; Benares and Paris both become surreal
cities. Ganga joins the Rhone somewhere; Indian Nyaya and
Aristotle's logic, like Buddha's Bowl and the Holy Grail, are
connected with each other; French and Sanskrit quotations
alternate. One cannot think of a novel more truly international.
Ramaswami and Madeleine have gone as far as two human beings
of opposed backgrounds can possibly go. Raja Rao takes off where
E. M. Forster despairs in A Passage To India: 'Not there, not now,
because the earth didn't want it, the sky didn't want it and the
horses said no.'
When I said Raja Rao goes 'very far', the 'far' includes farther in
time, space and thought, forward to the nuclear age and 'forward to
the past', the past ofimmemorial India and ofEurope. Raja Rao is
by no means the first to do this: James Joyce turned to Greek
legends, Henry James journeyed to Europe in search of an ideal
civilisation, and T. S. Eliot sought both Dante and the Upanishads.
The matrix of all this is the epoch-making anthropological work,
The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer. The mark of an educated

mind, Whitehead has somewhere said, is the ability to see the
connections of things which do not seem to have any connection, the
kind of connection Frazer sought to see between the piiest at Nemi
in Italy and his counterpart in South India.
The three following excerpts from The Serpent and the Rope show
how Europe and India interpenetrate, thus placing both in
perspective:
The same afternoon Dr. Pai came to examine me. He was not too
alarming, but there was no question of an air journey for the
moment-nor the cold air of Europe. No, not even the South of
France, he persisted; he knew that part of the world very well.
'Later in the summer, perhaps,' he said.
'But I have a wife, and she's going to have a baby,' I argued.
'Your wife would no doubt prefer you alive here than dead
there,' he laughed.
Little Mother was shocked at his crude remark. She beat her
knuckles on her temples: what an inauspicious thing to say!
'Today medical science is so well advanced that there is no
danger for a patient like you; I don't think you're such a serious
case. The X-rays will tell me, once I have them. For the moment
take rest. And don't you let people come and worry him,' he said,
turning to Little Mother. 'In Europe, people are so understand-
ing about patients and diseases. Here we treat disease as though it
were a terminal examination-whether you pass or fail it makes
no difference. Look after yourself, old boy. After all, now that
your father is no more you are the pillar of the family. You must
get better.'
Saroja's joy was golden, you would have thought, if you had
known her. But she used to sit by me, as I lay in my room, and I
spoke to her of Madeleine and myself, or of Georges and his
forthcoming marriage with Catherine, for I talked a great deal.
She wished she had been a European woman; it would have given
her so much freedom, so much brightness.
'What freedom?' I exclaimed. 'The freedom offoolishness. In
what way, Saroja, do you think Catherine or Madeleine is better
off than you?'
'They know how to love.'
'And you?'
'And we know how to bear children. We are just like a

motorcar or a bank account. Or, better still, we are like a
comfortable salary paid by a benign and eternal British
Government. Our joy is a treasury receipt.'
'Oh, it'll be all right, Saroja. Time and experience soften all
things.'
The bridegroom came and sat by me. He was full of respect and
affection for his new brother-in-law. He felt proud ofSaroja, and
showed how honoured he felt to be a member of our family. 'I
have a boss who knows France very well,' he explained. 'He
knows Monte-Carlo, Paris, and the South of France. You will
meet him when you come to Delhi.' His brother, younger than
him, dropped in to say he had taken French for his degree. He was
reading 'Lettres de Mon Moulin' and Moliere's 'Malade
Imaginaire.' He was going to be a diplomat, he had decided.
Cousin Vishweshwara's son Lakshmana came to say how
delighted he was to see me. He had just returned from Cornell.
He had a degree in radio engineering. The world was large and
prosperous. There was no reason why I should be suffocating in
this room.
The placing is an aid to heighten consciousness of expanding

horizons, consciousness of each people separately, and consciousness
ofhow they can further understand and make for an appreciation of
the differences between peoples. We have talked enough for
decades, glibly though, of the common things which unite mankind-
which will suffice those loud-voiced quantifiers from international
forums. After all, political language, Chomsky tells us, 'narrows the
range of the thinkable'. The time has arrived when we should take
courage in both our hands, and speak of the differences rather than
points of agreement only, and teach ourselves to appreciate this fact.
Which is more likely to preserve our identities- one of man's
deepest urges. Thus, we cultivate respect for the otherness, and
paradoxically keep our identities intact, which seems to be the truest
way of learning from each other's cultures.
Reverting to the novel, one can easily make the mistake of
thinking, such are our predispositions, that Madeleine and Ramas-
wami were estranged because of the divergence ofbackground; but
the novelist helps us to see that it is largely a question of their
g6 Literary and Cultural Roles
inability to subdue the ego. As Raja Rao puts it: Ramaswami and
Madeleine are two solitudes, not one silence. That point of silence is
suggested in the symbolic marriage between Ramaswami and
Savithri. Here now is a propitious moment for the two of them to
translate the symbol into actuality. In a typical novel they would
either marry or continue to pine for each other in the manner of
Abelard and Heloise, Tristan and Iseult, or Romeo and juliet, the
archetypes of unfulfilled love. Raja Rao, whom Denis de
Rougemont in Love in the Western World quotes with approval, seems
to think that this is not love but passion, and worse, narcissism- for
love at its profoundest must find its expression in sacrifice. Which, in
this novel, means Savithri must go back to Pratap, and
Ramaswami, such is his destiny, must go to a guru: here is some kind
of variation on the theme of Eliot's The Cocktail Party, in which
Edward and Lavinia return to each other, while Celia goes to a
plague-stricken colony in the endeavour to work out her salvation
'with diligence'. The Brahminic emphasis on vertical obligation,
the need finally to leave behind 'the fury and mire of human veins',
sends Ramaswami to a guru, while what I am inclined to call
horizontal or social obligation impels Celia to turn to the distressed
section of mankind, bringing Christianity and Buddhism closer to
each other in their profound compassion.
How different is such an attitude from the much publicised, much
canvassed, view of the world as 'absurd' held by Camus! Camus
writes in The Myth qf Sisyphus: 'The absurd, however, is the
confrontation of this non-rational world by that desperate desire for
clarity which is one of man's deepest needs!'
In the myth, Sisyphus found his freedom, which Camus calls his
victory, because of the knowledge that the labour of rolling a stone
upwards only to have it roll down again is futile. But what does one
do with such knowledge? Treat everything with scorn? -for there is
no fate, according to Camus, which cannot be surmounted by scorn.
Raja Rao seems to think there is yet another way oflooking at the
world- the way of Shakespeare in the final scenes of King Lear, and
in The Cat and Shakespeare, Rao's own novel, in which the world is
rampant with corruption. In the novel, a mere office clerk called
Govindan Nair asks us, in the wisdom which is the gift of a finer
awareness of the inner life: 'Have you ever seen a kitten fall? Trust to
the Mother cat, then.' Marjaranyaya, the logic of the cat-kitten
relationship, is a celebrated philosophical concept in India, by
which man must surrender (because does man know anything?) to
the mystery of the universe, like the kitten which the Mother cat
holds by the scruff of its neck and carries to a place of safety.
Now both 'scorn' and 'surrender' make their own demands on
their votaries. Strangely, those writers of our age, who by and large
affirm the primacy of the spirit, whether it be Narayan, Raja Rao,
Patrick White or Wilson Harris, seem to be at the other end of
Camus, though both help to cross-fertilise the literary imagination.
But how does one judge the culture of the age through the 'distorted'
vision of a Camus, a Beckett or an Ionesco? In Patrick White's Voss,
Laura Trevelyan, who survives Voss, the German explorer lost in
the Australian desert, affirms: 'When man is truly humbled, when
he has learnt that he is not God, then he is nearest to being so.'
And Wilson Harris, the Guyanan writer, makes a frontal attack
on Camus and Ionesco in a paper on 'The Interior of the Novel'
(collected in National Identity, by K. L. Goodwin, Heinemann
Educational Books, London, Melbourne, r 970):
The cult of Camus- the uniform concentration camp, ghetto-

the uniform consolidation of the absurd gives him (the 'middle-
of-the-road-hero') nihilistic and vicarious shelter within the
egocentric logic of the straight-jacket or torture chamber ... I
mention Camus and Ionesco because their kind of despair is very
much in vogue among young writers.
It will have been seen by now that almost every writer, past the
age of posturing, a deadline difficult to fix, has revealed his peculiar
identity- both as an individual and as member of a group- in his
response to the material provided by the Nuclear Age. Far from
obliterating his uniqueness the Age may even have helped to bolster
it- which is art's benefaction as against the deadening effects of
technology. One cannot do better than to conclude this paper with
a quotation from the Indian poet Aurobindo's Last Poems, which
makes further explanation superfluous:
One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink

At the Mermaid, capture immortality;
A committee of hormones on the Aegean's brink
Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey.
A thyroid, meditating almost nude

Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light
g8 Literary and Cultural Roles
And, rising from its mighty solitude,

Spoke of the Wheel and eightfold Path all right.
A brain by a disordered stomach driven

Thundered through Europe, conquered, ruled and fell.
From St. Helena went, perhaps to Heaven.
Thus wagged on the surreal world, until
A scientist played with atoms and blew out

The universe before God had time to shout.
A tribute to the traditional wisdom of India, not always in

evidence in contemporary Indian actuality. Which makes 'culture
learning' from literature a delicate and difficult task. But then there
is no more reliable alternative if one wants to understand the
essential culture of a people.
Part II
Literary and National Identities

8 New Epics of Cultural Convergence
Ikuko AtsuDli
Many still think ofjapanese poetry in the limited realm of haiku, yet
in the last thirty years this traditional form has taken second place to
a new form of poetry emerging to maturity especially after the
Second World War. I feel that gendaishi (literally, contemporary
poetry, especially the free-style poetry that evolved after the Second
World War) acts as a kind of radar, registering the sensibilities and
mentality of a world dominated by technology. In fact, its intricate
precision and sophisticated compactness can be compared to
certain aspects of present-day technology.
Gendaishi are completely unhampered by the restrictions of line
and language that have traditionally been the backbone of
Japanese prosody. Rather, they are characterised by great diversity
in style and content, and their special qualities include emphasis on
expressive intensity, as against exposition of 'ideas' (in the Westem
sense) and a complex and elaborate aesthetic sensibility which
aspires to a form of total art, the impact of which lies not only in
reading but in viewing them. The latter feature shows in 'concrete
poetry', whose verses, stanzas or lines are arranged in the shape of a
character, a picture or an abstract design. Along with experimen-
tation in the appearance of poetry are drastic changes in the very
nature of poetic japanese, such as manipulation of standard syntax
and semantics in order to enhance linguistic expression.
While the nature of poetry has changed, so have the concems of
the poet. Through the work of three who represent the reactions of
post-war poets to their changing world- Tamura Ryuichi ( I923-
), Irisawa Yasuo (I 93 I- ) , and Yoshimasu Gozo (I 93g-- ) - I
would like to present an analysis of the evolution of poetry since the
Meiji Restoration.
In the thirty years since the Second World War, a pattem of
cultural borrowing and adaptation, creative incorporation, then
repudiation and maturation, is observable in japan; it shares much
101
102 Literary and National Identities
with the first thirty years of the Meiji period. The first decade of
Meiji was marked by 'civilisation and enlightenment', inspired
largely by the United States. Turning away from the American
model, the second decade saw a growing preference for European
institutions, and an enthusiasm for democratic ideals. The third
decade, ending with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in
18g4, saw a resurgence of nationalism and appreciation for the
traditional.
The post-war period likewise evidences this pendulum-like
swing, begining with a renewed enthusiasm for European and
American models. In the 1g6os these concepts and movements from
abroad were internalised and cultivated as truly original trends
emerged. With the violent protest movements opposing the japan-
US security treaty still simmering in the late 1g6os, the 1970s
ushered in a period of introverted rediscovery and renewed
appreciation of traditional values.
The swing of this cultural pendulum is no less evident in the
writing of the post-war poets. Tamura Ryuichi, who may be called
the founder of post-war poetry, recently commented on trends in
Japanese culture as follows:
With the process of modernization beginning in the Meiji era,

Japanese culture lost sight of, even deliberately banished, the
organic relationship between the individual and society. Litera-
ture and art remained the preoccupation of individuals, but
individualism failed to develop real strength. The society that
aimed at being a modern nation chose to standardize the whole.
Therefore the game of words, which is the essential pleasure of
poetry and which naturally emerges from the dynamic inter-
relationship between individuals and society, was lost.
Here we can detect the echo ofW. H. Auden, whose work, along
with the other English poets of the 1930s, had so deeply affected
Tamura, with their portrayals of a time of crisis and anxiety. The
problem of the 'individual' and the 'whole' seems to be a key to
explaining why the ardent and rapid westernisation in which] a pan
indulged brought it both sickness and prosperity. It is also among
the major distinguishing qualities of post-war poetry.
As Percival Lowell, an American mathematician who visited
Japan, wrote in 1888 in The Soul of the Far East,
New Epics qf Cultural Convergence 103
the sense ofselfgrows more intense as we follow in the wake of

the setting sun, and fades steadily as we advance into the dawn.
America, Europe, the Levant, India, Japan, each is less personal
than the one before. We stand at the nearer end of the scale, the
Far Orientals at the other. If with us the I seems to be the very
essence of the soul, then the soul of the Far East may be said to be
Impersonality.
The main concern of Japanese writers before the modern age was
not the ego, but its submergence in impersonality. Post-Meiji
writers took Western thought and literature as their model and, in
the process, acquired Western ideas on individualism and respect
for the importance of the ego. They attempted to nurture a 'modern
ego' in traditional soil, oblivious of the fact that their hierarchical
society, dominated by control imposed from above, was still in
essence a pre-modern society. The more they devoted themselves to
individualism, in defiance of the spirit of their society- their
'whole'- the greater was their need for a secure ego, one confident
enough to withstand the 'whole'. When it failed to come to their aid,
they were crushed by the overwhelming and monolithic strength of
their own society. It is possible that the great number of major
writers who committed suicide reflects the lack of an organic and
mutually sustaining relationship between the individual and the
'whole'.
In the wake of utter ruin in the Second World War, however, a
new trend appeared in Japan. It expressed less concern with the
preoccupations of individuals than a desire to capture 'wholeness'-
in relationships, in society, in the world -wherever it could be
found. The shift occurred not only in Japan, but everywhere, for
several reasons. Technology had made possible genocide and
pollution on a global scale, even the very destruction of mankind.
The Japanese realised that Western 'rationality', which they had so
naively taken as their model, could not provide all the answers.
Tamura saw modern civilisation as a 'cliff' and man, in his rush for
progress, fast approaching the brink. The fall of scientism was
accompanied by the atrophy of humanism. Clearly it was over-
optimistic to believe that the pursuit of individualism would lead to
universal truth.
Concurrent with this post-war pessimism was a change in the
world-view ofJapanese poets. A convergence of world cultures had
occurred, and the Japanese now saw themselves as part of a larger
entity. It grew more important to combine appreciation ofJapan's

uniqueness with respect for, and communication with, the rest of the
world. Poets searched for universals both in their national identity
and in other cultures.
The three poets I have selected belong to slightly different age-
groups and wrote in very different poetic styles; but it is obvious that
they are all aiming, perhaps unconsciously, in the same direction.
They were all influenced by Western poetry in their formative
periods- Tamura by English poetry of the 1930s, Irisawa by
modern French poetry, and Yoshimasu by recent American poetry.
The influences ofWestern literature and thought they had absorbed
began to emerge in their poetry, revealing strong elements of cross-
cultural experience, and a sense of the universal.
A brief outline of the antecedents of post-war poetry will clarify
the tradition which these poets inherited. Western forms of poetry,
called shintai-shi or new-style poetry, were introduced to Japan in
the 188os. Early attempts to emulate this form attained full
maturity in the Taisho era, in the aftermath of the colloquial poetry
movements of the later Meiji era. Then a revolution of poetic
language and sensibility occurred, stimulated by the European
avant-garde movements (futurism, cubism, dadaism, expressionism).
Gendaishi grew out of this revolution, and the heterogeneity of
expression in contemporary poetry may be attributed to the
mingling of those influences. Likewise, under the impact ofWestern
linguistic forms, poets proceeded to strip away the hoary rhythms of
the Japanese language, and try to modernise their linguistic
sensibilities.
\Vestern influence alone, however, is not responsible for the
differences between pre-war poetry and post-war gendaishi. Avant-
garde movements reached Japan before the War, but, as Tamura
and other poets have argued, the traditionalJapanese aesthetic still
ruled the minds of the pre-war poets. This aesthetic emphasised the
unity of man and nature to the point of a kind of passivity which
precluded objective criticism. This was why Tamura and the others
felt that poets had supported totalitarianism rather than serving as a
force against it. Tamura's Arechi (Waste Land) group, which drew
inspiration from Auden, Eliot and Day Lewis, sought to establish an
objective interrelationship between the self and the outer world as a
firm foundation for criticism.
In a sense, post-war poetry emerged in the wake of the dissolution
of this sense of unity between nature and man occurring in the shock
New Epics of Cultural Convergence ros
of the war's devastation. When Tamura wrote in an early poem,

'the earth is harsh', he was searching for poetry in things hitherto
considered unfit for poetry. Like Irisawa and Y oshimasu, he
invented new techniques to meet the exigencies of a drastically
changed poetic consciousness.
One of his innovations is counterpart structure, a technique in
which concepts seem to parallel each other, but actually present a
paradox, creating the effect of fluidity in time and space, where
objective outer and personal inner worlds are in constant flux. A
good example of this is 'A Visionary: Four Poems' from Four
Thousand Days and Nights. The first poem goes:
From the sky a bird falls

For a bird shot dead where nobody is
A field is waiting
A cry comes from a window

For a cry shot dead in a room where nobody is
The world exists
The sky is there for a bird

A bird falls only from the sky
The window is there for a cry
A cry comes only from the window
I don't understand why it is

I merely feel why it is
Since a bird falls

There must be height
Since a cry is heard
Something must be shut in
Just as there is a dead bird in the field

My head is full of death
Just as there is death in my head
There is nobody at any of the world's windows
The second poem testifies to the death of the age by a regression in

the flow of time.
In the beginning
I looked out of a small window
At four-thirty
A dog ran past
Cold passion went chasing after it
From where did the dog come?

Where did that skinny
Modern dog run to?
What darkness chases you?
What kind of desire makes you run?
At two
A pear tree split
An ant dragged his friend's body along
So far
Everything we have witnessed
With our eyes
Started from the end
By the time we were born
We had already died
Before we hear crying
There already lingers only the silence
At one-thirty
A black bird fell
From a very high place
Whose is this garden

Whose is this lonely garden
Devastated
In the autumn light?
Like a bird searching for prey
Someone lurks in a high place!
Whose is this garden?
At twelve
I saw a garden
With the eyes of a man gazing into the distance.
New Epics f!! Cultural Convergence 107
The poem ends with, 'At the centre of noon my thirst remains'.
'Noon' is 15 August 1945, the day of Japan's surrender, when the
author felt time stopped and the world became a 'midday globe'-
the earth's rotation frozen at an eternal noon. Tamura portrays the
irony experienced by many on that sunny, mild summer day, when
Japan and the Japanese endured overwhelming destruction.
Another ofTamura's techniques was that of a kind of'bird's-eye
view', an objectified, overall perspective, exemplified by his prose
poem, 'Etching'. This short piece marks the point of departure for
all his poems and perhaps, of all post-war Japanese poetry:
A certain landscape he once saw in a German etching now lies

before his eyes. It seems to be either a bird's-eye view of an
ancient city gradually turning from dusk into night, or a realistic
drawing of a modern-day cliff being carried from midnight to
dawn. He, that is, this man who I started talking of, had killed his
father when young. That autumn his mother went beautifully
msane.
In the temporal contrast between 'gradually turning from dusk into

night' and 'from midnight to dawn', the poet conceives ancient and
modern times as existing simultaneously, as if in two coexisting
hemispheres. Japan, having rid itself of its nationalistic near-
sightedness during the War, now had an eye for the whole West, not
only its contemporary culture, but its ancient traditions as well.
Modern times, however, are seen as an inescapable 'Cliff'. 'This
man' is the author's objectified personality, the ordinary Japanese
upon whose shoulders rests the destiny ofJ a pan. The father he killed
when young possibly refers to the emperor system in Japan, and the
mother he made beautifully insane to Japan's aesthetic
conscwusness.
Through his use of objective, overall perspective and counterpart
structure, Tamura visualises the totality of Japan and the West,
both the ancient and the modern, and tries to express a unity within
these elements. The unity is often paradoxical and difficult to grasp
logically, but there can be no doubt that his work aims at a universal
VlSlOn.
Tamura, in the late 1940s a champion of the avant-garde, became
in the late 1950s a formalist in his own right. His poetry became
increasingly predictable and static, adhering rigidly to the same
formulae he advanced at the beginning of his career. At the end of
the 1g6os, however, fresh approaches appeared in his work, growing

out of an extended trip abroad. It is concerned less with Japan's
situation in the world than with world-wide phenomena. His later
poetry evokes the totality and roundness of the earth, going beyond
one-dimensional, parochial perspectives.
Irisawa Yasuo in his turn sought what he called 'pseudo-
narrative' poetry, pseudo-narrating 'unrealistic matters'. His poems
attempt to trap a deeper reality beneath the surface, in an attempt
to manifest what Maurice Blanchot called 'something which never
stops narrating by itself and something that had no beginning, no
end'. His goal was to create a receptacle which could contain total
reality, that is, a language of analogy equivalent to the totality of
realistic relationships. He tries to people his pseudo-narrative
poetry with archetypical characters embodying the complex re-
lationships he seeks to express, and their pseudo-narrative is
propelled by rich imagery which develops in a continuous and
coherent pattern. The following is one of ten stanzas of a poem
entitled 'The Dead Man', noteworthy for its subtle variation and
elaborately structured patterns:
She waits for him in vain at the graveyard

Three flat men sitting on her dally with each other
Her other body without knowing when
Takes the shape of a man's desire who ought to have been dead
She spreads the hairs in her armpit like fins
The most colloid part of her dimly smells
Her flat-bottomed boat streams away to the west
The city is above her blazing deeply like lava
The wind forces her away
And she kills time her skin getting goose-flesh
Soon a huge crane carries her to another country
The characters in lrisawa's poetry are often dead men whom he

calls 'inhabitants of the impossible country beyond the sea of time'.
In most cases they are not aware that they are dead and still retain
potential human qualities. There are always two complementing
characters (for example, two egos, a man and a woman on a suicide
trip) and Irisawa's 'she', like the 'he' in Tamura's writings,
represents the anima, the secret base of the author's consciousness.
Irisawa's images point out the existence of archetypes, each
New Epics of Cultural Convergence 109
character having indeterminate nationality. In his books, Happy or

Unhappy, Fire of the Summer Solstice, Old Land, Mr Langerhans' Island
and Preliminary Essay on the Seasons, an elaborately structured 'anti-
world' emerges, a world seemingly unreal, the surface of which
reflects the tumult of the 1g6os, the depths resounding with the cries
and voices of human beings everywhere. From the exploration of
this anti-world, which is Irisawa's internal world, comes an
illumination of total reality in the phenomenal world.
lrisawa studied French literature at Tokyo University, and
grew to believe that the concepts of the collective unconscious
and mythological archetypes, as defined by C. J. Jung and
G. Bachelard, are together the source of artistic expression and
inspiration. He saw the importance of these concepts for the great
European writers whose work so nourished Japanese poetry-
French symbolists and surrealists, English writers like Yeats, Joyce,
Lawrence and Eliot. Modern Japanese writers undoubtedly felt the
impact ofWestern literature in a somewhat distorted form, but they
remained passionately devoted to it, sometimes to the point of
absurdity. The intellectual and scholarly Irisawa, however, was
able to introduce European writing with a minimum of distortion.
He pointed out that the various European literary movements-
symbolism, dadaism, surrealism, neo-realism- all combined an
intense political consciousness with a manifest world-view, but by
the time they penetrated the Japanese literary world they represen-
ted little more than poetic technique. Eventually Irisawa rep-
udiated all poetic concepts and definitions formulated since the
Meiji period, in particular any claim that poetry is a means of
expressing individual personal feelings. While Tamura was more
selective in his approach to writing poetry, lrisawa broadened its
scope to include a wider variety of poetic criticism. He accused
Tamura and the other Waste Land poets of not being aware of how
much their poetry grew out of the convergence of Western
languages and Japanese. He felt that an inquiry into the origins of
their poetic voice should have been the natural outcome of the
introduction and wide acceptance of surrealism. Deliberate use of
the idea of the collective unconscious was not achieved by Irisawa
alone, but through his advocacy of such concepts, mod,ern poetry
attained autonomy from the bonds imposed by individualism.
Poetry thereby acquired the means to exercise a lively criticism of
modern civilisation while incorporating a quality of unceasing re-
examination of the state of poetry itself.
I 10 Literary and National Identities
In exploring his 'anti-world', Irisawa continued to delve deeper

into absolute reality and the vastness of the collective unconscious.
What finally emerged from this orientation was My ]zumo, My
Repose ofthe Soul ( 1968), based on a rediscovery ofhis identity during
a visit to his birthplace in lzumo. As it happens, lzumo is also the
area where japan's oldest tribe originated, and is identified with the
oldest Shinto shrine in japan. His quest went beyond the personal to
the very roots of the Japanese themselves. The book acquires still
another dimension by outlining the way poetry works in creating a
parody of a parody. He uses themes such as 'a country of root and
bottom', 'treason', 'perfidious attack', 'subjugation', 'repose ofsoul
or repression of magical power' -motifs derived from the Kojiki, the
Nihon shoki and Fudoki, some of]a pan's oldest documents, all written
in the eighth century. These themes add deeper significance to the
pilgrimage to his birthplace. He also parodies ceremonies evoking
spirits, and poetry itself, by attaching to the poems notes longer and
more elaborate than the text itself. The soul and spirit he seeks
emerges at the end of his book in the form of words which must be
read with a mirror. lrisawa's descent into the inferno underlying
modernjapan lays bare the root causes of the modern malaise. Like
Dante, he uses a journey into the realm of the imagination as a
means of analysing the realities of the contemporary world.
Yoshimasu Gozo was born in the Tokyo suburb ofFussa near the
American air base, an environment which undoubtedly con-
tributed not only to the violent imagery ofhis poetry, but also to the
strong ambivalence (half attraction, half hatred) of his attitude to
all things American. In his essay 'Willing Toward the Center' he
describes a childhood experience that impressed him deeply.
Looking for rocks one day, he found a sea-polished stone which he
smashed open in the palm of his hand. Inside he found the beautiful
but horrible fossil of an echinoid. This led him to the conviction that
constructive action in modern times can only be achieved through a
figurative destruction of the world through violent language.
'Angry young poets' like Yoshimasu strove fiercely in the late
1g6os to restore potency to language when the stresses of rapid
economic growth exploded in demonstrations against the Japan-
US security treaty. Yoshimasu sought new strength in words and
explored new techniques to adequately express the powerful
emotions of the time. The special quality ofhis writing is a 'thrilling
rhythm', whose dynamic images range freely about the universe.
His long, violent poetry is reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, full
New Epics of Cultural Convergence I I I
of imagery such as 'a compound eye like a mirror with myriad

cracks', 'a thousand eyes', 'an eye which has changed all rhythm,
the world itself'. Stimulated by American action poetry, poetry
where the act of creating poetry, and the physical technique used to
create it, becomes as important as the finished product, Yoshimasu
tried to concentrate his energy and all his faculties to a point where
he would seem to explode, forcing his brain cells past their normal
capacity to function. The result was poetry that has been called 'a
volcano of language'.
The following poem, unusually short, he called 'Burning', and it
became a sort of manifesto of his attitude toward poetry.
The golden sword looks directly at the sun

Ah!
The pear blossom passing the face of a fixed star!
In an Asian region
The wind blows
The soul is a wheel speeding on clouds
My will
Is to become blind
to become sun and apple
And not to resemble them
It is to become breast, sun, apple, paper, pen, ink, and dream!
To become ghastly music; that's all!
Tonight, you
In a sports-car
Can you tattoo a shooting star
From the front on your face? You!
Images hurtling wildly, Yoshimasu's poetry is directed toward

the centre of the universe, a universe in which God does not exist, an
ill-omened 'grand hole', 'the substance of zero which breathes gas',
'the great golden void'. His desire to break through to that centre
point becomes a paradox, for the moment he does so he himself
becomes void, ceasing to exist. His poetry is a format of self-
destruction in which he stakes his very existence, with the slight
hope that some imaginary number or sign may be made plain, even
momentarily.
What Yoshimasu calls his 'compound eye' is comparable to

Tamura's 'bird's eye', but is more mobile, nimbly assuming a
variety of perspectives, darting about in space and time. Among his
violent images is the disintegration of a brain in nuclear fission
against the backdrop of the 'hell-city' ofTokyo and the 'hell-world'
of the modern earth. This reflects the ultimate collapse of material
culture and the fearful progress of technology in the modern age.
Below is a passage from his long 'Darting Verse' (shisso shihen).
Let my eyes split into a thousand black spots

0 ancient sculptor!
Guarantee the origin of this voice that the perfect suspension of
the soul earnestly wishes
My universe armed with the imperative mood
0 this voice arising out of the innermost!
Like literary pillow words endlessly gush over the rocks
A catalpa bow forces madness to evaporate
Guarantee such an unsurpassed thrust in no-God
The vessel will love
The wettest middle point of the crowd of flowers
Ah
Though the eyes originally constituted of the split tens of billions
of eyes
Each having its own way of looking
In half of which darkness grows thick, in half of which female
organs grow thick, in halfofwhich the sea grows thick, in half
of which earth grows thick, we forgot such a moment as the
scenery of the ruins is suggested on all the gates and all the eyes
begin to cry at one stroke
He becomes 'a great shooting star' hurtling through the solar

system, shuddering and cursing the civilised societies of the earth.
His words seem to dart away, tearing themselves free of the author
and accumulating endlessly in their own formation. The poet
himself is thus not visible in the poem, the substance of which
appears to the reader to be a disconnected entity, like the reflection
in a severely cracked mirror. This new type of poetry may be called
action-poetry in the true sense of the term. In The Tower ofthe Brain,
which emerged from his travels in Hokkaido, Southeast Asia and
Central Asia, Yoshimasu's 'compound eye' is again present in the
imagistic quality of the poetry. The 'compound eye' might be
New Epics of Cultural Convergence 113
described as something created by a battery of superfast movie

cameras filming the universe.
Yoshimasu uses a power akin to ancient sorcery in his poetry, a
power which most people of this age have forgotten. This magical
power is at its best in Golden Verses. Its imagery-a dead man who
appears dancing, for example- is Yoshimasu delving deep into the
hell of the Japanese collective unconscious. The 'dead man' is a
personification of the Japanese spirit, embodying something of the
soul of an ancientJapanese planting rice in a paddy, or a ghost in a
Hoh play. Yoshimasu seems to have penetrated the hidden layers of
Japanese history more deeply than the 'he' ofTamura or the 'she' of
Irisawa. In the same poem, the apparition of a handsome young
warrior wading in the shallow streams off the Japanese archipelago
emerges from the waters where this world and the netherworld
meet. These two characters are powerful personifications of the
Japanese collective unconscious.
The word 'golden' in Yoshimasu's Golden Verse refers to the
erosion of 'the Land of the Rising Sun' and its gilded materialistic
civilisation. His poetry is an ominous indictment of the distorted
progress of modern civilisation. It is reminiscent of the Red and
Black group of poets of the 1920s who expressed their indignation
with the brutality of the 'hell-city of Tokyo', when the strains of a
modern capitalist society were already being felt. Just as their
violent activities in the early 1920s spawned a revolution of
sensibility which contributed much to the rise of gendaishi, the
activities of the young poets in the late 1g6os brought a new spirit to
contemporary poetry. We sense that the post-war period is over,
and we are experiencing an entirely new spirit and rhythm.
Yoshimasu 's most recent poetry reveals renewed efforts to
conjure up the ghosts and forces that inhabit Tokyo, ominous under
its thin guise of modernity. Some represent influences from the
Asian continent, some from the West. His conjurings illumine a
complex web of cultural inter-relationships and derivations.
Similarly, Irisawa's works register a desire to delve into the
Japanese subconscious and a yearning for the impersonal (as a
grammatical term). Such impulses, I think, represent an impulse to
restore a dynamic relationship between the individual and the
whole. The poems of contemporary writers are longer and larger in
scope than the poems of those who went before. Contemporary
poems have become a variety of epic, a genre appropriate to, and
generated by, an age of awesomely developed technology.
Until recently, we had thought it impossible to write anything

like a modern epic in Japanese, because the firm foundation of
common understanding so essential to that form was lost. Now,
however, a new stage of expression is approaching in which an
organic relationship between the individual and the world is
emerging. This phenomenon is visible not only in the work of the
poets mentioned above but in that of many others. Accounts of the
Supreme King by Yamamoto Taro, for example, in its narration of
the birth and adventures ofits hero, Taroro, ranges over the breadth
of Asian history and thought. It is an inner monologue told in a
vertiginous stream of consciousness, and includes a section on Asian
history that claims to explain how Japanese have developed since
prehistoric times. There is also Shiraishi Kazuko, whose long series
of poems entitled 'Season of the Sacred Lecher' is controlled by the
power of Eros, exploring the universal scenery of sex that surrounds
the psyche of the human race. Shiraishi's poems are set not only in
Japan but "in the Pacific, the United States and, sometimes range
over the whole earth. Her erotic vision journeys beyond the world to
the end of the universe, beyond time and space.
Japan has experienced a rapid cultural convergence of East and
West and now, in the 1970s, it seems to be forging a new unity out of
the disparate elements of many cultures. It seems to me now that the
desire to regain a sense of universality, the desire to re-establish a
dynamic relationship between the individual and the whole, makes
it possible for us to create a new form ofliterature appropriate to a
global age. This is happening, I believe, built upon the recent
cultural convergence of East and West.
9 The Portable Pagoda: Asia and
America in the Work of Gary Snyder
Reuel Denney
It is in fact surprising that such a body of doctrines as the Buddhist,

with its profoundly other-worldy and even anti-social emphasis,
and in the Buddha's words 'Hard to be understood by you who
are of different views, another tolerance, other tastes, other
Training' can have become even as 'Popular' as it is in the
modern Western environment. We should have supposed that
modern minds would have found in Brahmanism with its
acceptance of life as a whole, a more congenial philosophy. We
can only suppose that Buddhism has been so much admired
mainly for what it is not. (Ananda Coomaraswamy)
Where the West does not peer at the stars, it looks to Asia. Or
rather to the kitsch of Asia.
The children of Krishna tango along our soiled pavements.
The stoned, their vacant minds hysterical or supine, mouth dime-
store mantras. The mendacities of Zen and fairground
meditation, prepackaged Nirvanas a la Hermann Hesse (an
immensely over-rated writer) are big business. Neon tantras flash
from the boulevards of San· Francisco and Chelsea, Cadillac-
wafted little tricksters, corrupt butterballs in saffron robes who
proclaim themselves to be the light from the East, fill our lecture
halls and take their tithes . . . (George Steiner)
Despite a certain increasing literacy in the United States since the

Second World War, the poet Gary Snyder is not as well known as he
deserves to be among American readers. Those who do know his
work are proud of the achievement, not only because he is native-
born, but partly because his writing, nourished by adventurous and
disciplined studies in Asia, happens to evoke and replenish themes
that are American. These particularistic expressions are not the aim
115
of his work, but they are without question the unforced by-product
of it. He has had something new to say about how Americans can
and should care for themselves and for others, and for their
environmental and cultural heritage. The newness of the vision
grows out of a tradition of Asian-influenced writing which Snyder
has revivified by the application of imagination, intelligence and
devotion.
There can be little claim to originality in the foregoing remarks;
the critical basis of them has been established already by others.
Snyder's teacher at Reed College, David French, and his teacher at
the University of California, Berkeley, Ed Schafer, were among the
first to recognise and nurture his talent. The poet Kenneth Rexroth
was no less important at a later stage of Snyder's career. As Snyder
became better known, his abilities were recognised by Jack
Kerouac, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, Allen Ginsberg and
Norman 0. Brown, to name only a few. In the last fifteen years,
Snyder's work has received the sensitive and thoughtful attention of
Thomas Parkinson and Bob Steuding, among others who have
written about him. The reader might ask, therefore, why a
comment like this should be in place at a time when Snyder has
deepened our esteem for him by issuing Turtle Island, and is
continuing to add to his long poem Mountains and Rivers Without End.
One answer is that some American elements in his work have
been under emphasised, especially those deriving from an American
'inner-light' religious tradition that in many senses harmonises with
his Buddhism, and in some senses does not. Another is the ambiguity
of his prose-cum-poetry book, Earth Household. This has been widely
and correctly interpreted as a book advocating a cultural
revolution. The difficulty, as we shall see, is the extent to which the
book needs to be read more or less literally. If it is read in this way, it
makes very large demands on our understanding, and fails to
convince us that the anti-industrial, anti-patriarchal society and
economy that is being proposed stands any chance of realisation- or
would be desirable if it did. That is, Earth Household as ideology is in
many ways pretty thin stuff. However- and I incline to this
interpretation- the book should perhaps be taken as the statement
of aU topia. If this is so, the cultural rhetoric of the work operates by
setting up a 'pastoral' ideal model for the future society, and by the
use of this model succeeds in registering important criticisms of the
present state of affairs. But the model itself is not, by this
interpretation, offered as a programme for revolutionary action. In
The Portable Pagoda I I 7
any case, some understanding of Earth Household is necessary as a

context for what needs to be said about Snyder's selection of certain
natural scenes and landscapes as the autobiographical, mythical
and symbolical ground of his work.
This essay draws on the epigraphs quoted from Steiner and
Coomaraswamy. Steiner's comment serves to throw light on Snyder
and his worth, since everything that Snyder has written is exempt
from the charges that Steiner makes. On the other hand, the
remarks by Coomaraswamy are indispensable because they raise a
key question- why is it that Buddhism and certain aspects of
Buddhism, especially the monastic, eremitic and ascetic, have had
such attraction for certain Americans, including Snyder?
Born in I930 in San Francisco, Gary Snyder was raised during
the Depression on a small, struggling dairy farm in the Pacific
Northwest. Having graduated from Lincoln High School in
Portland, Oregon, he enrolled at the prestigious Reed College and
took his BA there in I 95 I. In I 952 he visited San Francisco, became
acquainted with some of the writers then living in the 'Area', and
settled there for about a year. In I953 and 1954 he worked in the
mountains of the Pacific Northwest as a fire look-out. He went to
Japan for the first time in I956, studying the language and living in
a Zen temple. Later, after working on a merchant ship, he revisited
the United States, returning to Japan for study during the period
I959-65. The publication of Myths and Texts, in I96o, made him
famous, the publication of Earth Household, in I969, even more so. In
1975 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Turtle Island.
The best book-length study of Snyder is by Bob Steuding (Gary
Snyder, Boston: Twayne, I976), a well-wrought and sympathetic
study which is accompanied by the essential bibliography of works
by and about Snyder up to I976. Steuding is particularly helpful on
such topics as the influence of Pound, Lawrence, Williams and
Jeffers; the influence and encouragement of Kenneth Rexroth; and
Snyder's relation to Thoreau. He was one of the first to emphasise
the analogies between Myths and Texts and T. S. Eliot's The Waste
Land. Steuding however is like most other commentators in
neglecting the American 'inner-light' sources of Snyder's work.
Moreover, although the influence ofPound is well discussed, there is
no reference at all to the possible connections that exist between the
world view of Snyder and that of Thorstein Veblen.
One of the most illuminating parts of Steuding's book is his
discussion of Myths and Texts in its relation to Eliot's The Waste Land.
Snyder has commented on his own early interest in Eliot's poem; and
he quotes favourably Eliot's dictum on Ulysses, 'In using the myth, in
manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and
antiquity, Mr.Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue
after him .. .'This was clearly a root ofSnyder's purpose in writing
Myths and Texts, says Steuding-who then proceeds to show formal
and even substantive resemblances between Snyder's poem and
Eliot's. The differences between the viewpoints of the two poets is
clear. Eliot's references to antiquity and to primitive myth contain a
hope for a re-vitalisation of Christianity; similar references in
Snyder are unambiguously non-Christian and even anti-humanist.
Going farther than Steuding along this line, we would say that, in its
praise for primitivism, Snyder's work makes an implied attack on
Eliot's general intellectual position; in its praise for a Buddhist
interpretation of man in the world, it is an implied attack on Eliot's
theology and theodicy.
Asian poetry and Asian thought have had noticeably strong
influences on American poetry in the twentieth century. This
influence has worked along at least two lines. The more prominent
line is associated with Ezra Pound's conflation of Chinese poetry
and its written character with the programme of Imagism. The
influence of this is felt in the poetry ofWilliam Carlos Williams and
others. The world-views are, in a loose way, Taoist and Buddhist;
Taoist in the rejection of a formal location of self in the universe,
Buddhist in the interest concentrated on spareness, voids, anti-
decorative employment oflanguage. These characteristics are more
fully present in Williams than in Pound- partly because Pound
became fascinated, early in his acquaintance with Oriental poetry,
by the Confucian- didactic strain in it.
Both of these mentioned elements were previously present in the
writings ofThoreau. Stylistically, the Buddhist tendencies remind
us in some ways of the contemplative metaphysical strain in
American poetry: Thoreau, Emerson, Very and Dickinson. On the
other hand, the Taoistic emphasis on flow reminds us of Whitman.
Most, if not all, of this contrasts sharply with the influence of
Asian thought as it is felt in the poetry and prose writing of
T. S. Eliot. As a student of Irving Babbitt, Eliot shared Babbitt's
distrust of romantically individualistic world-views, and the
traditions, religions, or quasi-religions that might seem to support
them. The mystique ofTao and the resignation ofBuddhism were
not attractive to Eliot. They were, for him, useless attempts to put
The Portable Pagoda I 19
down the 'Great Tradition' by asking of it unanswerable questions.

His sympathies in Western religion- at least at the most conscious
level- went towards the Mother Church and Anglicanism. Without
such institutions of tradition and authority, man loses his chance to
become human. In the same tone, Eliot's references to Asian
religion strike back past Buddhist reformism and Taoist mysticism
toward Sanskrit institutions in language, social forms and religion-
notwithstanding the fact that The Waste Land exploits Buddha's Fire
Sermon. In Pound, the hero is a secular civiliser who stands against
the bad art, and politics of usury-taking bankers; in the line
descended from Eliot, one finds the human hero in the Brahmin and
the aspirant to the Brahmin's state. By this latter view, the Bhagavad
Gita says what needs to be said more fully and effectively than the
fatalistic cerebrations of Buddhism or the shamanistic outpourings
ofTao. A new chapter in the alliance and tension between these two
American attachments to Asian world-views was written when
Gary Snyder published, Myths and Texts and Earth Household. In
many ways the first can be read as The Waste Land turned upside
down, the latter as primitivistic critique of Tradition and the Individual
Talent and The Sacred Wood.
Myths and Texts and The Waste Land arise out of some of the same
elemental concerns and materials. In both poems we are invited to
consider the 'land' as a spiritual landscape as well as a geographical
entity. The land as a physical region offers itself to us as a metaphor
for an entire world- not only in the sense of the planet earth, but
world in the sense of a planetary region which asks for a definition
and asks for the self-definition of the men who inhabit it. In both
poems there is an implied cosmogony, an implied theology and
theodicy, an implied narrative, a sort of heroic search, and a
concern for routes of transcendence.
Many of the differences are all too apparent. The mythographic
materials in Eliot's poem, even though they are not in discord with
certain valid universalisations for all cultures, are largely, if not
wholly, drawn from some Middle Eastern, Classical and European
materials. The equivalent materials in Snyder's poem show a far
larger share of motives suggested by Oriental, especially Far
Eastern cultures. Eliot's poem seems to feed itself on a nostalgia for
European culture before the Reformation. On the other hand,
Snyder's poem seems to arise out of a wish to revive and reinforce
some aspects of the Protestant mentality in Europe and America,
with perceptibly parallel traditions in the East. Thus, for example,
the Buddhist element in Snyder appears to be related to the 'inner

light sects' of European, British and American dissenting
churches.
There is an important mythical sense in which Myths and Texts is a
rejoinder to The Waste Land. In The Waste Land we find a kingdom in
which the leader, the Fisher King, has lost his virility, with the
consequence that the whole kingdom has grown infertile, 'waste' in
that sense. The context in which a possible cure is envisioned is that
of the fertility myth, specifically the vague hope for a re-entrant
religious figure not dissimiliar to Christ or Krishna.
Insofar as Myths and Texts is a kind of answer to that situation, it
implies that the Fisher King, being male, cannot save the situation.
What is more, the identification of spiritual rebirth with sexual
generation is viewed as an 'incongruent' myth; in Earth Household,
there are 'too many people in the world'- the crisis arises quite as
much out of the technically-driven fertility of a male-centred
industrial, exploitative society as it does-in Eliot's terms-out of
the separation of church and state, and the attempt to substitute the
technical and secular for the sacred.
It is clear that the foregoing remarks require expansion and
support, based on a closer look at Snyder's development. How
should that proceed? First, by a look at his pastoral ideology, as it is
revealed in Earth Household. His praise in that book for the hunting
nomad society leads naturally to his deep concern for the culture
and poetry of the American Indians. But this in turn is so intimately
connected with his cult of the wilderness that we must also try to see
Snyder as occupying a place among American natural
conservationists. Snyder's way of dramatising that viewpoint,
however, is attached to particular landscapes and topographical
scenes, chiefly those of the American Western coastal range. To see
how he uses this material, it will be necessary to compare his typical
landscapes with those of certain other poets, both English and
American.
Once we have at least some of these thematic elements under
general control, we can look again at the poetry itself. As we shall
see, the comments of the American critic Thomas Parkinson are
extremely helpful in identifying what is unique in Snyder's way of
locating man in nature. At the same time, the more we consider
Snyder's symbolical uses of Asian and American mountains, the
more we see that his responses to them are deeply based on
American and Western modes of feeling. When this is more fully
The Portable Pagoda I2I
recognised, we can see much more clearly than before the

connection of these feelings with those that Snyder-along with
W. C. Williams-inherits from earlier American and European
adventures in religion, aesthetics and attitudes toward nature.
The pastoral ideology of Snyder is most audible, surely, in Earth
Household (New York: New Directions, Ig6g) which in its very first
months received generally understanding and favourable reviews.
It seems to have almost immediately taken its place as a central
statement for those of the generation roughly under the age of
thirty-five who were interested in any one of the themes that it
touched on: pastoral ideals, peace, Vietnam, orientalism and
ecology. The work is subtitled 'Technical Notes & Queries to
Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries' .It is a discursive prose exposition,
in chronological order, of the development of Snyder's ideas of
nature, man and art, from I952 to Ig68. In 'Lookout's Journal',
(pages I-24) and two other sections, 'Tanker Notes', (Pages 54-6)
and 'Glacier Peak Wilderness Area', it contains diaries in free-verse
form.
Earth Household is a sequence of poems, prose passages, narratives,
essays, prose translations and book reviews that can be considered,
in one of their senses, as a commentary throwing helpful highlights
on the prosodic sections. The whole arrangement is in chronological
order. The successive pieces occur in the time-sequence of personal
experiences from which they arise, and they also occur, we are led to
assume, in the temporal succession of their composition-dates. What
is expressed with some symbolic indirectness in the conventionally
poetic ('typographically-poetic') sections is conveyed in a more
explicit and discursive way in the prose. There is a general forward
movement throughout the book; what is more implicit as viewpoint
in the earlier part becomes gradually more explicit toward the end.
The book is concerned with a man's relation to 'divinity', which is
to some extent identified with nature, with other men, with a past in
which valuable cultural traditions have been suppressed by force.
According to Earth Household, up till now man has moved through
roughly five previous stages into a sixth, the contemporary, chiefly
Westernised, period, in which experiment with applied science
leads some of us to fear that 'the more we conquer Nature the
weaker we get' (p. I 3 I). This is a situation in which we must muster
energy not only in order to scrutinise the objects by scientific and
technical study, but also to scrutinise the human subject that does
the studying.
It is characteristic of the present age, says Earth Household, that

'nationalism, warfare, heavy industry and consumership are al-
ready out-dated and useless'. The next necessary step is toward
bringing to the surface the 'Great Subculture'. This, it is claimed,
has existed everywhere in all the dominant traditions. It is
represented by Tao in China, and in the West by heretical groups,
beginning perhaps with the Gnostics, who emphasised the divinity
of man. Rousseau is referred to as a modern rediscoverer of this
tradition, and William Butler Yeats is mentioned as one of the
earliest modern poets to try to dip into it. One of the great medieval
representations of this Great Subculture was H. Bosch of the
Brotherhood of the Free Spirit, members of which believed in the
immanence of God, and pursued natural life in undress.
The societal vehicle for the move in this direction, according to
Earth Household, would be a community whose familial organisation
could pull down the patrilineal, male-oriented kinship system of the
present and replace it with a matrilineal order. The prescriptions for
this in Snyder are drawn partly out of the literature generated by
the American grandfather of anthropology, Lewis Morgan, in his
pivotal study of the Iroquois. They include also the early redeploy-
ment of Morgan's stages ofhistorical development by Engels in The
Origin f!! the Family, Private Property, and the State; the famous Mother-
right by Johann Jakob Bachhofen- and perhaps the work of
Thorstein Veblen. In order to move in this direction, the Westerner
needs assistance not only from his own past, but also from that of the
Orient. 'The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the basic
insight of the East has been into the basic "self." We need both.'
Presumably, we can have both. In sexuality, the movement is from
romantic love, with its obsessive inter-identification, to another
kind of love which means perfect self-possession.
The ethos required, according to Snyder, is that of discipline that
is not defined as self-constrained, but the discipline of doing what
you truly wish to do- a Nietzschean doctrine. There is more to be
said about how Snyder uses these ideas, of course, but they are
evoked quite clearly enough to make their bearing clear. The
viewpoint approaches that of perfectionism- perfectionism with a
Gnostic base. This is close to the Pelagian heresy which was so
offensive to Eliot, and which he held up, indirectly, to satire and
denial in The Waste Land. The opposition between the two poets
could not be more clear. Yet it is not difficult to see that although
Snyder's critique of modern life differs basically from that of Eliot,
The Portable Pagoda 123
they both reject with equal fervour the social world we have arrived
at in the twentieth century.
It needs to be added here that Snyder's intuitions of the virtues of
pastoral and hunting societies are in tune with recent theorising.
Although it seems probable that Snyder has not been influenced by
the most recent anthropological investigations, they have provided
empirical evidence today for a much higher valuation of the
hunting cultures than that in vogue in most previous periods. The
most recent survey of the known material has come out in the form
of a symposium on primitive nomadic hunters. Contrary to theories
stimulated by Social Darwinism, it appears that nomadic hunting
tribes were probably interculturally peaceful, and did not habitually
struggle with each other for the territorial control of hunting
grounds. Again, it is not true that their level of nutrition was either
sparse or lacking in quality. The authors of the symposium offer as
an illustration the life of the pygmy nomads of the Kalahari desert in
Africa today. A mother among these people can, in two hours,
collect enough animal and vegetable food to supply a small family
for a whole day with a higher calorie and vitamin count than many
of the poorer rice-growers of the world. But how far all this is from
suggesting that the almost Luddite anti-machine feelings and
nostalgia for the Paleolithic found in Earth Household contain a social
programme! Or that even if they did, they would evoke cheers from
the nomads and agriculturalists of the so-called less-developed parts
of the world!
Snyder's interest in pre-agrarian and pre-industrial societies was
stimulated in his early years by his fascination with the Amerindian.
Since John Eliot, the seventeenth-century English missionary,
translator of the Bible into the language of the Indians near Boston,
Massachusetts, and public men such as Albert Gallatin, the Swiss-
born Secretary of the Treasury, who founded ethnology in the
United States, Americans have tried again and again to come to
terms with the Amerindian. Earth Household seems to be one attempt
that succeeds in some measure. The anthropology and ethnology
that vaguely dominated the concerns ofT. S. Eliot were those of the
early stage of post-colonial thought. That is, they were intended,
like the work of Frazer, Frobenius, Boas and others, to bring into
European view the nature of the cultures that had been overrun by
European imperialism. For reasons not too clear, this movement
was less concerned with the primitive backgrounds in the Americas
than it was with those of the rest of the non-European world. Eliot
made no attempt in The Waste Land to make any reference to the

destruction that our culture had brought to the Amerindian. The
only cross-reference of a major sort, and probably not a conscious
one, is that the neolithic myth of the 'Fisher King' has its significant
relatives in the myths of the world creation believed by the
Amerindian- chiefly the widespread idea of the creation of the
world out of water, or water and mud, by a being, sometimes a bird,
who dives to find earth, and brings it to the surface to create land.
Myths and Texts and Earth Household, by contrast, are pervaded by
an anxious sense of Amerindian mythology and culture. The
references and quotations are direct, continuous and explicit. There
are strong implications that the Amerindian themes are to be felt as
related to the Northeast Asian themes. This is realised in the poem
as one product of the increasingly accepted notion that the
Northeast Asian, the Alaskan, the North American Indian and even
the Latin American Indian cultures are more closely related to each
other than once thought. It also has another tonality; the tone of the
assertion that the 'small cultures' of the Amerindian are, in the sense
of Ruth Benedict, the folkish and provincial remnants of primordial
Asia. In all this, he was inspired by the American naturalist Ernest
Thompson Seton.
The obstacles in the way of the American English-speaking use of
North American Indian mythical materials have been enormous.
The original demonstration of this was Longfellow's Hiawatha. Roy
Harvey Pearce has reviewed (in The Savages qf America) the variety
of attempts that have been made to draw some living semblance of
the North American Indian world into a meaningful place in
American writing. There is no evidence that such an effort has ever
succeeded except at something like the level of documentary and
chronicle- the Indian as a real person (Pocahontas in john Smith)
and such early reports. The Pocahontas of Hart Crane in The Bridge
is an attenuated earth-myth. In all of the New World, the only
successful incorporation of the symbols of the native of the Americas
is found in some passages of Mexican painting in the period from the
First World War to the Second World War. In the US and Canada,
the chief cultural by-product, in a poetic sense, has been the
gradually improving quality of translations of folklore and poetry
from Indian tongues. But Gary Snyder's writing is connected with
changes in attitudes towards Indian and Eskimo cultures after the
Second World War- a period in which tribal and cultural claims by
Indians and Eskimos were being treated much more seriously than
The Portable Pagoda I25
ever. It is probably a good guess that the attention of Snyder to the

Amerindian inheritance has not only encouraged other European-
Americans in America to reconsider their received views of the
indigenes, but that it has also helped to inspire young Americans of
Indian blood to re-explore their inheritance through painting,
journalism and fiction, as well as poetry.
The creativity of Snyder is associated not only with his shaman-
like appeal to Indian ghosts, but his interest in their now-lost
apperception of the American landscape before the Europeans
arrived. Roderick W. Nash, in Wilderness and the American Mind,
reviews the term 'wilderness', which acquired the meaning of a
sanctuary in Old Testament, and even in New Testament,
literature, but which Christianity generally defined as the home of
evil spirits. On the other hand, 'freed from the combined weight of
Classicism, Judaism and Christianity, Eastern cultures did not fear
and abhor wilderness'. Early Americans identified the wilderness
with savagery, and felt that they had to conquer it. This even
persisted in the famous passage by the American colonial diarist
Samuel Sewall on Plum Beach, Massachusetts, in which Sewall
shows himself capable of responding to the beauty of Plum Beach
partly because it reminded him of England.
In Europe, however, by the mid-eighteenth century, under
various influences, this view of the wilderness was being reversed by
what came to be known as the Enlightenment. William Byrd II of
Westover, Virginia, anticipated some of the early forms of this,
despite the very urban character of his house at Westover. He was
followed by such an observer as William Bartram, who liked the
wilderness because he found in it what Burke had called the
'sublime'. Nash's analysis of Thoreau and the Transcendental
movement picks up on Thoreau's: 'in Wildness is the preservation of
the world' (I 8 5 I) . Nevertheless, the Maine wilderness around
Mount Katahdin undoubtedly half-frightened Thoreau. Later, the
notion of preserving the wilderness arose slowly in pre-Civil War
days, through the influence of people like Audubon and Bryant -
and, later, the park-planner, Frederick Law Olmsted. Legislative
acts such as the preservation by the Federal Government of
Yellowstone Park, and of the Adirondacks by New York State, soon
followed. Then, in the I87os, came the nature writings of John
Muir, and the conservationist campaigns by a man who directly
through his writing influenced Snyder, Ernest Thompson Seton.
Aldo Leopold is important here, because this conservationist
understood that geology and Darwinism in the nineteenth century

involved a shift in world-view, making man closer to nature than the
Enlightenment had considered him to be. He introduced the phrase
'ecological conscience', and was a major prophet of the conserv-
ation movement, along with George Herbert Marsh, in the
nineteenth century. The influence of this movement is very clear in
Myths and Texts and Earth Household.
Literary scholar Peter Lee, distinguished translator of Korean
poetry and chronicle, says, 'The poetry of the English-speaking
peoples and those of Northeast Asia are based deeply on differing
preconceptions of Self and Time'. These are two of the major factors
that lead to the felt contrast between the writings of American poets
about nature and those of the North-east Asian tradition. Closely
related factors are first, a contrast in attitudes toward geographical
space-homeplace and the faraway place and secondly, a
contrast in attitudes towards the triad of man, machine and land-
scape.
The first domestications of American outdoor nature occurred
with the Romantic Transcendental movement in America, and it
was strongly tinged with the W ordsworthian assumption that
nature was the representative of an immanent God. It was not,
Harold Bloom suggests, polytheistic, or even pantheistic, but a kind
of attempt to realise a divine personalisation of land, sea and
mountain. Something like this is dominant in all American poetry
until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Frederick
Tuckerman was willing to find sinister elements in natural
landscape, and when Poe, in his prose-poetic descriptions, found
terror in imaginary landscapes. Let us observe with what originality
Snyder has created his own landscape.
One of Snyder's favourite locales is the mid-upland West Coast
area, where the logger, the forest ranger, the trucker and the back-
packer share the sharpening slopes that lead up to the high
mountains. Here there is ample opportunity for the quiet dramatis-
ation of relatively unpolluted running water, areas of cut-over,
regions of second growth, small stands of virgin forest and, at certain
seasons of the year, a bounty of flowers, mosses, butterflies and all
that can delight climbers of the Sierra Club and make them lift up
their voices in praise of their patron- naturalist john Muir. It is also
one of the main regions in the United States where logging, mining,
ugly camp towns, commercial entrepots and hideous resorts flourish
mightily. (It is a paradox of American geography that the old,
settled East, now that its farms have retreated from the uplands to
let the forest come back, is today far more Arcadian in appearance
and feeling than much of the Far West.)
These intermixtures of various interests exploiting the wilderness
are employed deftly and equitably by Snyder in his vignettes of old
lumber roads and mining-trails. There is a broad acceptance of the
right of different kinds of people to inhabit and make a living in the
clear-air upper reaches, and a warm feeling for the hard-working,
comradely old days of the lumbermen, when the forests were first
being felled with vengeance.
All of this is largely American, or European-American. The only
equivalent in North-east Asian art is in some of the brush paintings
and woodprints in which we find the equivalent of European genre
painting, pictures in which the scene-viewing intellectual, or
official, or monk, or priest, is represented in conjunction with the
fisherman, or the hunter, or herder, or ferryman going about his
daily task. But Snyder has been very deft in employing certain
'orientalising' approaches to poetry, while at the same time
economically calling up certain scenes that have a definite
American regional flavour. Some comparisons with other poets are
in order.
In Frost, the background is the farm country of New England,
nestled up towards half-wild mountains. It is not treated as being
either deity-like or as completely submissive to man's dreams and
wishes. It is the theatre of a conflict with field and forest, in which
lonely men, women and children struggle with the soil and climate.
Their chief- and often feeble- weapon against a natural scene that
maintains a kind ofDarwinian suzerainty over them is a pragmatic
bent of mind- hard work is understood to be more of an anodyne
against personal tragedy than almost anything else that is available.
In sum, nature has no value except in the Lockean sense that man
can persuade it, or coerce it, to assist him in his survival.
A radically different approach to nature is found in Robinson
Jeffers. The influences appear to come from Darwin and Nietzsche
combined. They lead him to regard mankind as a kind ofbiological
disease separated by his mentality from the 'true' locus of value.
'Value exists only in non-human natural things', he appears to be
saying in some of his most famous poems. Value is attached to, or
inherent in, the persistence of trees and rocks- and the instincts of
animals, including predatory animals. Man and his institutions are
froth on the sea wave, and have no inherent dignity, since their
attachment of values to themselves, their gods and their institutions

are illusions.
Gary Snyder's attitudes toward nature may be closer to Jeffers
than to any other poet before him, certainly closer than it is to the
attitudes associated with Wordsworth and with Frost. But it is more
important to say that he differs from all three- and in certain ways
that makes him a poet of his time, just as this time is partly his as a
poet.
Wordsworth attempted to animate his nature by the extended
use of the pathetic fallacy- by which natural things are in one way
or another almost deified or at least anthropomorphic. There is no
such device in Snyder, who takes off from the Imagists in their
reaction against Wordsworth- there is nothing in nature that can
be personified. It is not man, or manlike. It cannot be internalised
by the human imagination, because its being and presence
internalise man. Contemplation of it does not magnify the self with
expansive sympathies; it simply operates as a kind of projective
screen upon which the self can reorganise itself in an escape from the
bondage of will.
Nevertheless, it is a main object of meditative focus. Where in
Frost nature is what human nature has to contend with, in
friendship and enmity, Snyder's nature stands as a possible escape
from human nature, the so-called 'runaway' aspect of Frost, the
aspect of his work that dramatises a protagonist who departs for the
woods and wilderness bearing a sense of guilt for deserting the
struggle, along with a self-pitying loneliness, appears in Snyder as a
celebration of the heroic anchorite. Other men are left well behind,
at least for periods of time, so that the secular monk can enjoy the
mountain solitudes.
The nature that Snyder enjoys, however, has no great resembl-
ance to that of Jeffers. There is no 'value' inherent in river,
mountain or field, or in the creatures who live there. There is no
evolutionary menace symbolised by the great scale and imperso-
nality ofits operations.lt cannot be engaged in grand conversations
on the meaning of life and on the rise and decay of fashions in
freedom and tyranny. It cannot be moralised.
Frost's attitude toward nature is that of a Yankee farmer's son
who is ambivalent about clearing out or staying to break his back at
the chores; Jeffers', that of the Californian who sees a whole state
taken into charge by industrial farming and irrigation, but doubts
that the conversion has resulted in a civilised harvest. The attitude
of Snyder is an acting out of the attitude of a shaman attached to

the idea of a nomadic band, whose values are those of a gatherer and
hunter, rather than priest, farmer or irrigation engineer.
In reading Snyder we must, of course, think about mountains.
They are not only the apex of wild nature below the heavens; they
are the points on which important changes in cultural vision and
viewpoint have been historically projected. Landscapes entered
Chinese painting long before they entered European art; and
representations of mountains were awarded a place of attention in
both chinese painting and poetry, long before they acquired such
a place in Western poetry. Marjorie Nicolson's investigations
(Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory) do much to throw light on the
reasons for the Western lag. Westerners, until the Renaissance, not
only feared the mountains, but also were repelled by them, as flaws
that had been introduced into the world by the Fall of man. A shift
in view began with Edward Burnett, writing in the seventeenth
century. A believer in the older view that earth was created perfect
by God, but was made messy by the Fall, Burnett was troubled by
his attraction to the Alps, and by the fact that modern investigators
of landscape and geology were leaving the old orthodoxy of
mountain-fear behind. He hardly realised, according to Nicolson,
that some of his comments on his mixed reactions to the Alps, as
grudging as they were, amounted to the beginning of the cult of the
mountain 'sublime'.
Later Western poetry, including that ofWordsworth, gradually
domesticated mountains as an expression of God's creation and,
indeed, made them silent spokesmen of, and for, a domesticated
God. This mood lasted through the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. In our later twentieth century, mountains begin to be
viewed as more or less neutral objects, inhabited neither by the evil
effects of the Fall, nor by the grandeur of God. In short, mountains
became increasingly secularised; and the time came for poets to take
at least some notice of this fact in the sociology of knowledge. The
difficulty is that the scientific West fails to come up with some
alternative to the piety of the picturesque. But a solution to the
problem is suggested in Gary Snyder- for example- in the Cold
Mountain poems. Here the mountains are reintroduced to jaded
Western eyes by relocating them in a new phenomenological
perspective. They are no longer the objects of geological curiosity
and tourist-gaze, but reference points for the demobilisation of an
'experience-hungry' self- and the mobilisation, if that is the right
word, of a self-transcending meditation. The self is a portable

pagoda to which the mountains add their view. In the latter part of
this essay it will be argued that Snyder's pagoda, while being
portable from East to West, from Asia to America, has a tendency to
reveal American foundations and footings the more one looks at it.
In short, it is somewhat like the contradictorily named American
'mobile home', which surprises some Europeans by proving to be a
trailer-house (or caravan-house) firmly attached by electricity,
water and sewage lines to an American suburban allotment.
We must add here that the attitude toward human space in most
North-east Asian poetry is dominated by the Chinese view, which
has no interest in the exotic, and emphasises the attachment to, and
nostalgia for, one's homeplace. As james Liu says-perhaps over-
stating the case-' being an agricultural people and a nation of
landlubbers, the Chinese as a whole are notably lacking in
wanderlust'. He attributes this in part to the vast size of China, and
the difficulties of communication through most of the centuries in
which the major lines of the poetic tradition were established. Li Po:
Raising my head, I look at the bright moon;

Bending my head, I think of my old home.
This strain of Chinese poetry is generally alien to the westward-

stepping, footloose spirit of American litterateurs 'on the road',
including Snyder, who find it delightful to transport themselves
from Terre Haute to Kyoto or Katmandu.
We have seen in some detail that Snyder chooses to locate himself
in natural and human space in his own distinctive way. This
localisation harmonises well enough with his nostalgia for an earlier
period ofhuman development, in which a man's relation to nature
was rather different in many ways from what it is today. Still, there
is the matter of connecting these environmental, historical and
cultural outlooks more closely with the texture of his poetry. Here
the remarks of Thomas Parkinson ('The Poetry of Gary Snyder',
Southern Review, IV (1g68) pp. 616-32) are invaluable.
One of Parkinson's most interesting claims, though not entirely
persuasive, is that Snyder has created a new 'culture', a blend of Zen
Buddhism with the ideas of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the
World, 'Wobblies', attempted to organise lumberjacks as unionists
early in the century), Amerindian tones and a mystique of the
wilderness. Snyder, he says, uses a style learned partly from Pound
The Portable Pagoda
and Rexroth to shape his expression of these themes. Parkinson's

admiration for Snyder does not deter him from acknowledging that
Snyder's work has 'shape' rather than 'form', and a certain tedium
arising out of the changeability of thematic parts and prosodic
patterns. On the other hand, the criticism directed against Snyder
that his work is escapist, and simplistic in its attachment to the
wilderness and to Zen comforts does not strike Parkinson as being
well-founded. Although Snyder's poetry does not 'embody' basic
current problems, it does 'speak' to them.
One must add to the comment of Parkinson the observation that,
although Snyder's poetry has been called impressively sensuous in
quality, this quality is really not widely distributed in his work. It is
true that the most sensuous- and sensual-lines in Snyder, those
dealing with the sensuous dynamics in sexual intercourse, in 'Praise
for Sick Women', are justly famous:
Makes him flick like trout through shallows ...

Rain falls from skull roof mouth is awash with small creeks
Hair grows out, tongue tenses out- and she
Quick tum of the head . . .
They have some of the immediate impact of lines g-I5 in the

celebrated poem quoted from Sappho (Fragment 3 I :'c/Jwvet~i JtOi')
by Longinus, in On the Sublime- especially the phrase that can be
translated from Sappho, line I o- 'suddenly a subtle flame has stolen
my flesh'. And there are undertones of kinaesthetic effect in his
handling of the climbers on mountain trails. Yet, on the whole, the
powers of touch and smell in the armament of the imagination are
strikingly sparse in view ofSnyder's subject matter-perhaps this is
one of the side-effects of a Zen askesis. If so, it has the paradoxical
effect of distancing the agent of the poem, the poet and the reader
from nature, rather than immersing him in it.
Such recognitions force us to press the question of the degree to
which Snyder has learned from Asia- and the degree to which his
writing is basically a reaffirmation of certain forms of American
inner-light doctrines dressed up in Zen clothing.
J.D. Frodsham, in his article 'Landscape Poetry in China and
Europe' (Comparative Literature, XIX, No g, Summer I g67) is helpful
here. According to Frodsham, the earlier Chinese shared Christian
fears of the wilderness and mountains, and did not bring them fully
into poetry until the seventh century or so. Again, not all Chinese
poetry dealing with nature or any other subject was an exercise in

decorum and Buddhist suppression of ego. The poetry of the
Warring States Period was inspired by drugs, and was strongly
individualistic and exotic-hunting. Frodsham continues:
... I should prefer to point out that the poet's ideal, when
meditating in his mountain retreat, is diametrically opposite to
Wordsworth's. Wordsworth was ' laid asleep in body and became
a living soul' but the Chinese poet is laid asleep in mind. Only
when the restless mind has become like dead ashes, deep in a
yogic trance, may the immortal body slough off its mortal husk
like the skin of a snake and go striding off upon the wind. Here I
believe we have touched on one of the fundamental differences
between the poetry of the two cultures. For the European poets-
if I may borrow the terminology of a well-known study of this
subject- mind was either a mirror or a lamp. To the great nature
poets of Europe, mind was primary, Nature herself only gaining
life through the transforming and quickening power of the mind
or soul. As Coleridge put it:
0 lady, we receive but what we give,

And in our life alone doth nature live.
But for the Chinese poet, the mind was neither mirror nor yet
lamp, but rather a veil which shrouded reality. To the Taoist,
mindinterfered with Spontaneity (tzu-jan), the natural operation
of things. For the Buddhist, mind was a false shimmer of
consciousness creating the delusion that an ego really existed. In
both instances the Chinese viewpoint is very far from the
European.
My former student and colleague Professor Yu Yuh-Chao of the

National Taiwan Normal University, member of the Academia
Sinica, who has examined the poems of Cold Mountain and Myths and
Texts with great care, is of the opinion that Snyder remains an
American and a Westerner in his outlook on nature. The 'distance'
between object and subject in those poems is dynamic and
irrepressible, compared with the profound freedom from such a
polarity in much Chinese poetry. Snyder is closer to Thoreau and
Emerson, he suggests, than to any Asian. That there should be this
vital continuity between Snyder and his American and European
predecessors is of course no ground for objection to his work. But if it

goes unrecognised, the effect is to downplay the persistence in his
work of a deeply native note.
This native note in Snyder is clearly Romantic, antinomian,
secessionist and in some senses anti-intellectual. In this connection,
reading Myths and Texts reminds us that W. C. Williams' gnomic
dictum, 'No ideas but in things' lies behind Snyder's poetry, as it
does some of the poetry of his contemporaries. The question that
comes up is what Williams' remark might be taken to mean- if it
means anything at all. Using the same language that Williams
employs, most of us would be inclined to say, 'No ideas but in
human beings', while the Platonist might say, 'No ideas but in
Eternity', and the Christian might say, 'No ideas but in God, Man
and Eternity'. All of these are surely much more acceptable
statements than that of Williams- unless Williams is saying, in a
kind of shorthand, that he prefers writers to generate concepts in so
far as possible by using words to evoke sense experiences that then,
and only then, in due course, stimulate and permit the reader to
conceptualise the experience conveyed.
Perhaps, indeed, this is what Williams meant by his remark. Still,
his way of saying it, and his methods of employing it as a poetic
guide, contain obvious dangers. Many lines and phrases in the
'thingy' poetry of Williams (and of others) have the effect of
representing sense impressions in a portentous way that suggests
that they are generating 'ideas', while in the last analysis they fail to
do so. Moreover, the programme attached to the slogan has the
effect of encouraging the poet to narrow his attention to the relation
between an agent and the 'things' perceived by the agent, and to
underplay one of the poetry's most fruitful possibilities- the
representation of a relation between two or more human beings.
The dialogue between man and the world outside ofhimselfis rarely
as gripping as it is when the 'thing'- be it wheelbarrow, bird,
scythe, fence or road- is made alive for the reader by the part that it
is pictured as playing in a human interaction. It is in this sense that
the wall in Frost's poem 'Mending Wall' is surely more fully realised
than the wheelbarrow in Williams' poem 'The Red Wheelbarrow'.
Apart from this anti-dramatic principle, which renders many
'thingy' poems static and rigid in their effect, there is the question of
the values that are brought to the surface by this aesthetic. The
notion that ideas, and even ideas of value, can be associated with
non-human things is ever present in life and poetry, which attach
values to trees, mountains and streams, for example. But the notion
that non-human nature inheres with value quite apart from man's
use and contemplation ofit is hard for many people to accept-and
the idea that value inheres in natural things and not in human beings
is even harder to accept. Yet the latter is what RobinsonJeffers was
saying much of the time; and what writers like Williams and Snyder
seem to be saying part of the time. The position is at least logically
untenable, in the sense that such a judgement is a valuation made
by human beings, the poets, and is, therefore, a contradiction in
terms.
But-perhaps here is where Snyder comes in strongly-this is of
no great importance. Snyder's particular form of Buddhism is
clearly capable of dismissing any anxiety about this contradiction.
Unlike many philosophies, Zen does not require that what man
makes of the world be what he has made of it; it concedes and even
welcomes the notion that what man makes of the world is in fact
merely the pneumatism of what the world is making of him. Thus,
for example, the infinite dependence of man on nature includes the
presupposition that while nature may be 'judging' him, he is not
necessarily capable of judging it. But this is not merely an Asian
grafting on an American root-stock. In Williams as well as Snyder-
but even more in Jeffers-it wells up from a primitivistic and
deterministic state of mind which has some ofits major sources in the
unfolding ofProtestant dissenting thought in America since the time
of Jonathan Edwards and before.
Among the groups that first settled the United States were sects
such as the Friends, or Quakers, that proclaimed the notion of the
'inner-light'. Their homespun mysticism- sometimes labelled
'Quietism' (even though that term was the invention of a Catholic
Spanish friar) -dismissed the Calvinist orthodoxy quite as vigor-
ously as that of the Mother Church. A direct connection between
man and God, they thought, could be attained without traditional
mediation. In this they resembled other immigrants, such as some
from Germany, who, under the label of Pietism, and in connection
with somewhat more conventional views of church organisation, felt
much the same way.
The orthodox Protestant churches of the United States, espe-
cially in New England, tried to stamp out such manifestations, and
attained some success in this until around 1750. After that the
softening of the Calvinist creed made room on the right for
conservative revivalists such as Jonathan Edwards, and on the left
The Portable Pagoda 1 35
for milder modernists of a definitely pietistic and inner-light turn of

mind. By the time of the Transcendental Movement in the early
nineteenth century there was a strong stream, represented perhaps
most strongly by Unitarianism, that carried these feelings forward
on a large, broad, vague front. In these currents the possibility of a
direct relationship of man to God was increasingly recognised; and
also increasingly heard was the idea that this relationship, which
could not be mediated by a church, could be mediated by the living
temple of nature. Thus a movement that was generally anti-clerical
and anti-ritual, with a pronounced turn toward a mild,
undecorated, low-key sort of mysticism, grafted itself onto the
importation from Europe ofRomantic poetry, and an optimistically
nature-oriented world-view.
From all this it was not too difficult a step to the idea that man
could attain some self-harmony by subjecting himself to a tender
and simpler relationship to nature, a relationship of subsistence with
nature rather than exploitation of it. We find this in Thoreau. Such
ideas, with their pastoral appeal, did much not only to hasten the
development of suburbia in the United States, but to encourage the
rise of a secular-minded nature-worship. This tradition, passed
down in various terms through the work ofThoreau, Emerson and
Whitman, ultimately, in alliance with Romantic thought, took the
form of an enthusiastic primitivism which came to be rejected in
anger and scorn by Irving Babbitt in the pivotal Rousseau and
Romanticism. In that book, Babbitt identified such movements as
harmful because they were utterly at odds with ideas of rational
control and moral involvement- ideas expressed best in such Asian
notions as that of Yoga, in the sense ofself-mastery. Recently, despite
Babbitt's thunder, an enormous re-direction of the 'inner-light'
inheritance has occurred- one in which a search for harmony with
nature, based on release of impulse, claims to be the on[y correlative of
the Eastern vision!
Along these steep and somewhat perilous trails, the paradoxical,
light-footed, mocassin-shod Gary Snyder, who published the poetry
collections Regarding Wave in 1970, and Turtle Island in 1974,
remains the most energetic American literary leader. Syncretising
Eastern and Western ideas, he found in Zen Buddhism a vehicle for
American inner-light notions, and in the course of doing this,
especially in Earth Household, he has concocted an unstable, even
nonsensical, mixture of Zen, Thoreau and Nietzsche. Yet what
most needs to be noticed is that the blend of Asian and Western in
much ofhis lyric poetry is innocent of this farrago. It rises, in fact, to

a powerful and refreshing equipoise of influences. The main thing
that needs to be said in conclusion, therefore, is that Americans are
deeply in debt to Snyder and his Asian learning experiences. One of
their chief effects has been to reactivate and enrich in him, and in his
readers, an interesting American constituent in the resulting poetic
product.
10 Two Readers and Their Texts
Nissitn Ezekiel
The cross-cultural encounter in literature may be approached from

the viewpoint of the cultures involved. If there are, broadly
speaking, only two of them that count in a specific encounter, as
embodied in a literary work, the reader may be identified with one
or the other. It is possible for him to change over the years,
increasing or diminishing his identification and understanding. If
the reader's sensibility is affected by the writer's point of view, as it is
certain to be unless the relevant work is not serious, he moves
towards or away from the general moral and cultural 'lesson' of that
work. The purely literary values it implies are less important than
the critical ones in relation to the reader's culture. He broods over
these as though they are aimed at him personally. He is right to do
so. His response is rarely to the complete and complex artistic
product. Acknowledging the fact that its full meaning is larger than
the more limited one expressed in its cross-cultural theme, he still
focuses on that theme.
Assuming two cultures only in contact, as portrayed in a literary
work, there should be at least two imaginary readers representing
those cultures. And the cultures cannot be 'equal'- one is in some
crucial ways more powerful. It is therefore considered 'superior',
while the other is treated as confused, ineffective or unbalanced.
The reader who is naturally identified with the superior culture is
less troubled by the particular implications of the cross-cultural
encounter depicted in a literary work than the reader identified
with the inferior culture. To the reader within the superior culture,
the reactions of the other representative reader are surprising, one-
sided and non-literary. On the other hand, the reader within the
culture that comes off badly in the work being discussed, regards the
other reader as blind to some of its major aspects. These, relating to
the cross-cultural situations and characters depicted, seem to him
destructive of the literary works allegedly literary values. He insists
137
on the damage done by the writer's cultural stances, while his

counterpart fits them into a pattern perfectly compatible with the
integrity of a work of art.
The dialogue between our two hypothetical readers, as clumsily
indicated so far, does not actually take place. It needs to be
invented. Coming down to concrete cases and particular instances,
I cite Heat and Dust, a novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala which won
the Booker Prize in 1977. The author is a Polish J ewess, educated in
England, and married to an Indian architect practising his
profession in New Delhi. In twenty-five years or so, she has
produced a number of novels and collections of short stories, while
living in India, and occasionally going abroad. She now lives part of
the year in India and the rest in America. The book is set in India
under British rule, and has English as well as Indian characters,
with an inter-cultural love affair at its centre.
I found Heat and Dust worthless as literature, contrived in its
narrative structure, obtrusive in its authorial point of view, weak in
style, stereotyped in its characters, and viciously prejudiced in its
vision of the Indian scene. To the distinguished English novelist,
who was the chairman of the jury for the Booker Prize, and to his
colleagues, this judgement would no doubt be quite inexplicable,
though it was widely shared in India. Indian reviewers dwelt on the
India of Heat and Dust, on the character of the Indian Nawab or
Prince who has an affair with the wife of a British Civil Servant
stationed in his town, and on the explicit and implicit commentary
on Indian mores as well as the Indian setting, things Indian
generally. For them, there could be no separation between these
and the quality of the novel, its authenticity, its literary
authenticity. English reviewers seemed to ask only how such matters
were used within the novel's pattern of events, what light they threw
on the writer's perceptions of character and conduct. The inter-
cultural encounter was secondary, minor, interesting, but not in any
sense disturbing. Heat and Dust did not generate any heat or raise
any dust in Britain. It did both in India, partly because of the
Booker Prize, which put on the novel the stamp of British approval,
naturally without any concern for Indian sensibilities. The gulf
between the two viewpoints seems unbridgeable.
Is there any reason why it should be bridged? Disagreements
about a literary work in areas other than the cross-cultural are often
never finally resolved. They coexist, we are told, as social and
political systems ought to do. It is because each system feels
Two Readers and Their Texts 1 39
threatened by the other that conflicts arise between them. Many

people believe that there are some ultimate spiritual values to which
the appeal must eventually be made. And they also believe that all
social and political systems fall short of those values, so that criticism
of any system is also self-criticism, a sustained scrutiny of the critic's
own starting point, cultural location and assumptions. If the
literature of the cultural contact is systematically studied, it will call
for a study of the critic's assumptions, including the most invisible
ones. In other words, such a study is part of a common cause, the
cause not merely of intercultural understanding, but of humanity
and its future. The focus must remain on literature as literature; the
study should extend from that focus to the marginal meanings, the
least essential perceptions of the writer. These may loom larger than
real life for readers directly or obliquely implicated. To accept what
a literary work means to them as a possible theme of critical inquiry
is one way of reaching out to the most comprehensive of
interpretations. A multicultural viewpoint is likely to emerge from
it.
The multi-cultural viewpoint is rare in the contemporary literary
scene. Its emergence would help greatly to clarify those scenes and
characters in a literary work that were obviously created with cross-
cultural insights in mind. In Heat and Dust, for example, the title
itself would be subjected to an analysis more thorough than
anything it has so far received. Is there not a demeaning motive in
this characterising of a country and its culture in terms of its climate
and the least valuable element lying on the physical territory
designated? How would an English reader respond to a novel set in
England, entitled in the same spirit by an Indian writer Cold and
Fog? When, further, there is more than a hint that heat and dust in
one place, or cold and fog in the other, represent the sum of the
culture fictionally recreated and criticised, would a misgiving not
be justified regarding the author's cultural intentions? I think it
would be. Whatever the author's gifts of observation, style,
narrative structure and character-creation, a suspicion would
remain in the reader that these gifts were being manipulated to
darken rather than to illuminate one's understanding of the reality
inherent in all fiction. Such writing, in my opinion, insults and
degrades reality, deliberately or inadvertently. In the cross-cultural
context such literature needs to be recognised as the weapon of
prejudice which it is, to be exposed and blunted by a new criticism
based on multi-cultural sympathies.
I am not supporting the touchiness and nationalistic chauvinism

which is evoked when a culture is criticised in a literary work. Even
a stereotype has its real roots, in a country and a culture, a class and
a religion, a profession and a way of life. Even a prejudice in
literature is valuable when its causes are probed, and the frequency
of its occurrence examined. No literature worth the name is wholly
impartial and objective; whether or not it deals with cross-cultural
situations some distinctions are clearly necessary in assessing the
national, cultural, class, religious and other major or incidental
meanings of a literary work as drawn out and defined conceptually.
Particularly dangerous is any interest in such concepts outside the
literary work where they are given forms and energies and their
proper context. I would not seem to be on the side of those who
habitually think of literature in non-literary ways, not even when
these ways are sufficiently intellectual and disciplined to merit
respect. I refer to the political and the philosophical modes of
confrontation which reduce fiction, drama or poetry to ideas and
ideologies. What I am after, perhaps obscurely, is a larger grasp of a
literary work than the traditional single-cultural dimension pro-
vides in those special cases which alone concern us here, in the first
place. Interaction of cultures, as reflected in literature, can only be
grasped when there is interaction of cultures within a reader's way
of life.
I do not suggest that only certain readers, for whom the cross-
cultural encounter is a fact of life, are in a position to discuss it
critically when it appears in literature. Certainly, their experience
makes a difference, and their response is worth consulting. The
single-culture approach would benefit by recognising its
limitations, and so seek the means by which they can be overcome.
Clues are often found within the literary work itself as to the writer's
attitudes, conscious and subconscious, towards the culture not his
own, as distinct from those he reveals towards the culture to which
he belongs. The question of double standards may profitably be
raised at some stage. Unease in the presence ofthe unfamiliar leads
to a critical stance which is seen to be so much more flexible in a
familiar cultural ethos. As a rule, it is not the criticism so much as the
alienating effect it has had on the writer that adds a dark colour to
the literary work; dark patches, so to speak, that seem out of control
in an otherwise evenly-handled texture. It is as if the writer as artist
has made room in such areas for the writer as foreign observer,
tourist, temporary inhabitant without cultural, moral, social or
Two Readers and Their Texts
even civic obligations. He is the hotel guest whose convenience and

comfort are uncompromisingly supreme values by which the
environment is to be judged, all the way to the climate which
becomes a cultural grievance, a cause for complaint.
The literature of cultural contact on a global scale, as it becomes
increasingly important for quantitative as well as qualitative
reasons, may appropriately be discussed also on a global scale. In
other words, as significant not exclusively within a national literary
tradition, but cutting across all boundaries. This would subject it to
critical exposure not only from the viewpoint of cultures directly
implicated but from all others. As it seems to expand infinitely in
meaning, it will paradoxically suffer a certain reduction in its aspect
of universal truth. The cultural perspective, I suggest, is likely to
displace the literary one; in fact, the sense of the allegedly literary
may be seen as a weakness attached to its strength. The greater the
achievement as literature, the greater the demands made upon it as
culture, as truth. At that point, a new and more hopeful beginning
will be made in the study of inter-cultural 'transactions' in literature
as a means for the promotion of an integrated global understanding
and self-understanding. Until then, it will remain literature, like
any other, and serve no special cultural purpose.
I I Western Ideology and Eastern
Forms of Fiction: The Case of
Mulk Raj Anand
S.C. Harrex
Any discussion of the formal and technical aspects of Mulk Raj

Anand's fiction necessitates consideration of Anand's intentions,
attitudes and themes. Anand explores aspects of the human
condition, mainly Indian, from the point of view of certain
assumptions; his stories, characters and themes evolve out of the
interactions of these assumptions with mirror images of'reallife'; his
dramatisations of these interactions constitute a quest for a coherent
world view. I would further postulate a close correlation between
this quest for ideological structure and his quest for the fictional
form most compatible with his instincts and prejudices as a writer.
Whether the ideological pursuit initiates, or takes precedence
over, the formal pursuit (or vice versa) is difficult to determine,
though I suspect that in most of his novels Anand has taken the view
that form should be subservient to content. Investigation of Anand's
philosophical ideas, both in his fiction and non-fictional prose,
including letters, prompts me to offer the theory (and the present
essay is based on it) that for Anand the Marxist-socialist pursuit of
the proper (i.e. humanist) social structure and his own fictional
pursuit of the appropriate verbal structure, if not virtually one and
the same, are complementary aspects of a single purpose.
Anand is a serious and moral writer because he sees the salvation
of mankind as dependent on the humane, compassionate, loving,
lasting fulfilment of this single purpose. His viewpoint, or ethical
base, is cosmopolitan-Indian, anti-Brahmin, this rather than other
world-oriented. Perhaps the ultimate form of fiction which he has
Western Ideology and Eastern Forms of Fiction 143
attempted to write might be described as the socio-political

messianic novel.
The close correlation between formal narrative problems and
moral-social questions to which I have alluded is clearly illustrated
in the structure of Anand's first novel, Untouchable. Here, the initial
problem of the writer, in the context ofliterary technique, and that
of the reformer, in the social context, are identical: how to perceive
experience from the untouchable's point of view, how to enter such
an alien individual and caste consciousness? At this level, then, the
writer and social worker are as one; both are 'committed', though
for many writers this type of commitment may be a largely
subconscious process. In Anand's case the commitment is quite
conscious, and I see nothing counter-art in it, providing story is not
turned into diatribe, nor propaganda promoted under a veneer of
literary method. A conscientious desire not to succumb to these
pitfalls of commitment, it is fair to say, has been a motivating
element in Anand's quest for structures.
This quest, however, has been influenced not simply by Anand's
belief that the twentieth-century novelist should be a responsibly
committed writer, but by a complex of factors, included among
which are the following: Anand's phdosophy of Marxist
Humanism; his conception of the authorial self as a dual personality
combining the social observer's detachment with the revolutionary
zeal of the romantic prophet figure; his technique of self-projection
(notably through the invention of characters who act as spokesmen
for his own ideas) whereby the objective social-realist form can
accommodate much of his own 'felt experience', the subjective life
of dream, the autobiographical moment; his effort to define form
and technique in terms of idiosyncratic concepts like 'Indian
expressionism', 'the desire image', 'neorealism', 'poetic realism',
'new myth versus old myth', and 'the body-soul drama'; and, lastly,
his attempt to fuse the Western realist tradition of the novel with the
Indian tradition of the moral fable.
An analysis of Anand's formal and technical achievement,

accordingly, may logically begin with the Anand terminology and
philosophical background, out of which Anand's fictions have
evolved and taken shape. A reading of Apology for Heroism, which
Anand describes as an 'Autobiography of Ideas', indicates that
Anand's stories are, but not exclusively, dramatisations of these
mainly Marxist-humanist ideas. In Apology, Anand makes clear his
own sense ofidentification with the 1930s criteria of commitment,

particularly social responsibility, humanistic idealism and a re-
quirement that the novel change man and thereby society- though
he was also conscious that too inflexible a commitment to the 'age of
concern' could dehumanise literature:
. . . in the Thirties social problems tended to supersede the

problem of the individual in literature. The old 'Fates', 'God',
'Evil in man' and 'Nature', almost gave place to the new 'Fates',
'Economics' and 'Politics' as they affected the 'Common Man',
though ... the intellectual concept tended to dominate imagi-
native literature and made for abstractions in poetry and
fiction. (Apology for Heroism, Bombay; Kutub-Popular, 1957,
P· 83)
Here Anand hints at one of the problems he himselffaced in seeking

a fictional form which would enable him to convey his ideas about
the situation of the common person (Bakha, Munoo, Ganga, Lal
Singh, Ananta, Gauri) without turning that person into an
intellectual abstraction.
Relevant to this problem, as recorded in Apology for Heroism, was
Anand's experience of a crisis of belief and identity which was to
become one of the dominant motives or themes of Indo-Anglian
literature, a conflict between the traditional self and the modern
ego, between the Indi~n Absolutist interpretation of the cosmos and
the relativist interpretation of scientific Marxism, between ideals of
submission and social justice:
This negative tradition tended to pull all my newly-acquired

ideas askew ... apparently, a man who docilely accepted his
position within the framework of traditional Hindu caste society,
however low and humiliating that position, was a good citizen,
whereas those who consciously questioned tradition and suffered
unwillingly were moral lepers. Everyone was born to his position
and had to accept his lot through the cycle of birth to rebirth.
Except, of course, that you had the right to ask the eternal
questions and to see yourself as part of Reality, even though you
could not alter your position in the every-day world of
appearances. So that you remained a frantically agitated,
impetuous, fictional being trying to realize that you were capa-
ble of being filled with God and thus seeking to become one
with the omnipotent, omniscient, all-pervading free spirit, the

Absolute above, but really consigned to the iniquities of hell
on earth, without a hope of bettering yourself. So this was
man! (pp-4o-1)
This view, resulting from the attempt to resolve the tension of

personal identities through 'a rediscovery oflndian ideals' (Apology,
p. 38), had its correlative in Anand the writer as he sought a fusion of
Indian and Western forms of creative expression to match the
philosophy he wanted to advocate. He named his form 'poetic
realism', and we can legitimately name his philosophy Socialist
Humanism.
The line of argument can be better understood if we dovetail into
it further statements from Apology for Heroism. Thus:
The problem then, that I tried to face as a writer was not strictly a
private, but a private-public problem ... the introduction into
creative narrative of whole new peoples who have seldom entered
the realms of literature in India. And experience becomes an
attempt at poetry even though the result is a somewhat ragged
rhythm ... there is a great deal to be said for this approach,
which I may call the flight of winged facts, to poetic
realism. (pp. 78--g)
Anand saw his 'poetic realism' as a 'synthesis' of 'bifurcated'

Western schools of literature, namely subjective formalism and
'social realism', neither of which singly could engage and portray
the 'whole man'. Thus:
Though I believe in realism, I am, as I have said, for a poetic

realism. I would like, for instance, to stress the importance of the
desire image, or the romantic will, in writing, and I stand
altogether for art against literary photography. And just as I
found myself on a synthesis of the values so far bifurcated in
Europe, just as I desired ... a view of the whole man, in order
that a new kind of revolutionary human may arise, so I have been
inclined to stress the need for a truly humanist art commensurate
with the needs of our time. (Apology, p. 86)
Anand proceeds to argue that the artist, by emphasising the

'revolutionary aspect of art' (Apology, p. 88), improves or intensifies
life through '"creative myth", so as to change life in the deeper

centres of other people's experience' (Apology, p. 8g):
Only, there is a living myth and a dead myth, and the desire
image, which is the basis of revolutionary romanticism, must be
really creative and must help men to integrate in society and not
provide a formula for escape. (Apology, p. go)
Here we see in summary, by way of extrapolation, Anand

constructing a dialectic involving subjective form and objective
realism, the old myth of Vedanta and the new myth of Marxian
'individuation', which is to culminate in a poetry of revolutionary
humanism. This connection between form and ideology bears the
impress of much Marxist literary theory that was current in the
I 930s, and particularly as expounded by Christopher Caudwell in
Illusion and Reality (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1937):
The full understanding of the mutual interpenetration of reflex-

ive movement of men and nature, mediated by the necessary and
developing relations known as society, is the recognition of
necessity, not only in Nature but in ourselves and therefore also in
society. Viewed objectively this active subject-object relation is
science, viewed subjectively it is art. ...
Proletarian art in realising itself will become communist art. This

process is simply a parallel in the sphere of ideology to what will
take place in the sphere of material economy. (pp. 279, 282)
For Anand, too, the literary expression and the ideological theory
are complementary aspects of a single purpose. Anand would seem
to require that he be judged as a writer according to how
successfully he fulfils the Marxist requirements of the artist. His
romanticism (or desire image) is equivalent to the species of
Utopianism whereby Marxists idealise the deterministic end-
product of the socio-economic dialectic: the image of a just society in
which the state will wither away. Or, as Anand puts it, the new
myth of love (brotherhood) and the ethic of a new humanism
('revolutionary romanticism') will fulfil both the corporate and
individual dream as a result of a 'struggie for the deepest socialism
and the deepest human personality' (Apology, p. 107). Some years
after making this statement Anand continues to assert:
Western Ideology and Eastern Forms cif Fiction 147
I would like to prove that a new contemporary myth (of growth

to awareness) of the whole potential man is possible, as against
the myths of Ramayana and Mahabharata ... it is possible to have
a contemporary myth. (Author to Critic: The Letters cif Mulk Raj
Anand, ed. with an Introduction and Notes by Saros Cowasjee,
Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1973, p. 29)
What I have tried to demonstrate, to this point, is that Anand's

theory of fiction was influenced by his exposure to Western ideas.
The subject of his fiction, however, is not intellectual cross-currents
in Europe, but India as experienced by the Indian. Because he saw
the core problem oflndia to be the crushing weight of the allegedly
'dead myth' of 'neo-Hinduism' and Vedantic Absolutism, he
reacted at first by expressing himself in a fictional form derived from
Western literary theory rather than traditional Indian sources. As
such, understandably, Anand gained a reputation as a social realist;
but it was a reputation he was to become increasingly unhappy
with. First, because he felt the Indian quality of both his work and
sensibility was undervalued or neglected; second, because he sought
a balance between Western and Indian structures of expression,
especially as the identity crisis could not be resolved through the
adoption of an extreme position, either Anglophile or Eastern, and
moreover his increasing recognition of the deficiencies of Western
societies coincided with a revived sense of positive values within the
Indian tradition; third, because in aiming at balance through a
fusion oflndian fable and European realist novel, Anand, I believe,
was coming to terms with a tendency to contradiction within
himself (ambivalent responses to East and West, tradition and
modernity) despite the fact that the primary pattern of his world-
view remained anti-traditional and Marxist-humanist.
This last development includes various announcements that his
commitment involved a crucial element of romanticism in his
vision, and was strengthened by the presence of an indigenous
Indian response to life, which he refers to as 'the body-soul drama'.
Thus:
Critics around me conceive literary realism as the description of

the world as it is. I was born a Hindu and, therefore, I have never
taken appearances for reality ... I wished to write about human
beings who were not known or recognised as human at all, or
admitted into society-such as the outcastes ... by going below
the surface to the various hells made by man for man with an
occasional glimpse of heaven as the 'desire image'. I have never
been objective, as the realists claim to be. And my aim is not
negative, merely to shock but to stimulate consciousness at all
levels.
There was no tradition in the Indian novel for this. And being
of the thirties, I was mistaken for a proletarian writer, a social
realist. This is nonsense ... I do not believe in the scientific
novel or documentary. I never abandoned human beings in order
to pursue a theory ... I admit that this has led to a certain
formlessness, but look for the fantasies in the labyrinthine depths
of degradation and you will find them there. Perhaps much better
than in Kipling ... I wanted to create in Coolie a boy in all his
humaneness, as against the fantastic Kim. (Author to Critic,
PP· I 15-16)
I rely on my subconscious life a good deal ... and allow my

fantasy to play havoc with facts. I believe all of us Indians are
expressionists, that is to say, we enact a body-soul drama in
everything we write . . . (Ibid. p. 13)
I do not like naturalism. I have consciously, and unconsciously,

written as an Indian expressionist; this expressionism is tra-
ditional with us, imaginative dramatisation ... at the risk of
exaggeration ... The problems of machine exploitation,
Victimhood, unfulfilled potentiality, are tackled in defence of
innocence against the evils of the profit system of the west, in the
spirit ofWilliam Morris and Ruskin and Gandhi. Romanticism is
here as in Rim baud more prophecy than acceptance- the desire
image is important. (Letter to S.C. Harrex, 23 Oct. 1965)
These and similar statements reveal Anand fiercely defending his

authorial self-image, but I am not sure that he has done himself
justice in some of his reactions to what he regards as inaccurate
criticism. Perhaps as a result of over-reacting in spur-of-the-
moment statements to charges that his novels are largely didactic
documents, and given that he is both an energetic thinker and talker
as well as a prolific writer, he has understandably enough been
unable to maintain an entirely consistent position. Thus, for
instance, in one letter to Saros Cowasjee, he comments 'I believe the
old myth lingers in the form of romanticism' (Author to Critic, p. 50),
thereby contradicting his usually approving use of the term

'romanticism', as when he maintains that the 'success' of
'humanism' 'lies in the implied romanticism' (Ibid. p. 77). On the
whole, such discrepancies are unimportant, superficial.
When, however, we examine Anand's doctrine 'body-soul
drama', on the basis of which (as we have seen) he defines himself as
an Indian expressionist, not a social realist, we discover that
Anand's expressionism is not exclusively Indian; that in fact it has
evolved out of the Marxist argument, as becomes apparent if you
compare the following statement by Anand with that previously
quoted from Caudwell:
The body is mind, the mind body. There is no god. And the
dialectical connections in almost all human activity result both in
the knowledge we have of the world and the insights we occasionally
derive. The world of knowledge is the sphere of philosophy and
science. The world of insight belongs to literature and the
creative arts, especially to poetry. The compulsion of curiosity,
the desire for communication, and the necessary expression, are
derived from the same source in both books of knowledge and
books of passion. But while factual truth eliminates metaphor
more and more, the creative truth depends more and more on the
imagination which likens one thing to another . . . there is a
deeper meaning in my theory ofknowledge and metaphysics, and
there is a coherence in the psycho-physical or psycho-social use of
the terms 'body' and 'soul'. The dialectic is just popularly called
drama. (Author to Critic, pp. 112-13)
Here, then, is evidence that in his quest for form Anand has
lndianised a Western materialist structure derived largely from
Marx (perhaps via Caudwell), and has tried to find for this
structure, applied to Indian conditions, an alternative to the social-
realist mode of expression which, in the West, has been the
dominant methodology of fiction. This may explain why, even as
early as Untouchable, Anand sought to heighten or intensify his
representation of Indian life by setting it within a literary structure
which was a version of moral fable.
At this stage of the argument, I offer two points on Anand's behalf.

First, that to trust entirely the teller who maintains 'I would not
consider myself a social realist because I have never professed a

doctrine of that kind' (Letter to S.C. Harrex, 24]une 1965), and
not the tale (e. g. Untouchable, Seven Summers, The Sword and the Sickle),
is to diminish one of Anand's considerable achievements in Indian
fiction. Accusations like 'communist' and 'propagandist', which
have caused Anand to think of Naturalist and Realist as pejorative
terms, are reduced to irrelevance by the fact that Anand, using
conventional techniques of realism, has opened up a vast subject
area of Indian life which had been neglected in literature prior to
Anand's 1930s fiction.
My second proposition in defence of Anand is that the charge of
didacticism levelled against him often ignores a difference, or
disparity of cultural assumptions, underlying Indian and English
canons of criticism; a disparity indeed which has culminated in the
ironic spectacle of the Eastward-looking Marxist critic seeking to
reverse the anti-didactic tradition ofhis Western critical heritage, at
the same time as the Indian critic is revolting against the native
tradition of didactic aesthetics. If, then, it can be shown that Anand
adapted the Indian tradition offable (which assumes that art and
didacticism are not incompatible), I fail to see that this experiment
in itself is aesthetically or technically objectionable. Deficiencies of
execution, examples of which are to be found in Anand's writing,
are another matter.
As this first half of my argument is a theoretical prelude to a
discussion of Anand's technique of structuring his vision within
individual novels, I believe it appropriate to conclude this section of
the essay with two statements from Anand which reveal his
strengthening conviction that his story-teller role was fabulist and
folk-oriented:
... 'expressionism', by which I mean the typically Indian

creative attitude of staging the body-soul drama as in the folk-
literature ... My 'realism' is only superficially like that of the
West-European. Deep underneath, all the characters search for
their human destiny in the manner of the heroes of our forest
books. (Author to Critic, p. 16)
. . . while accepting the form of the folk tale, specially in its

fabulous character, I took in the individual and group psy-
chology of the European conte and tried to synthesise the two
styles. And thus I sought to create a new kind of fable which
extends the old Indian story form into a new age, without the
overt moral lessons of the ancient Indian story, but embodying its
verve and vitality and including the psychological understanding
of the contemporary period. (Preface, Selected Stories, Moscow:
Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955)
In his first novel, Untouchable ( 1935), Anand created a formal model

which went further towards realising the type of structure his
philosophical disposition required than he was perhaps capable of
appreciating at the time. Obviously, the circumstances in which the
novel came to be written are relevant to his attempt to produce a
form appropriate to his ideas and feelings as projected into the
largely fictionalised situation of the largely fictional protagonist,
Bakha.
Anand had previously written a two-thousand page 'confession'
which, by all accounts, was amorphous in form. This confession was
the embryo of the 'seven ages of man' sequence of autobiographical
novels beginning with Seven Summers, a sequence which, given the
style of Morning Face, encapsulates personal history in a sort offree-
verse prose stream that externalises the recollection process.
Untouchable, too, grew out of segments of the original 'confession',
and Anand was conscious that, ifhe was to communicate the novel's
social issues effectively, he needed a tighter structure than was
permitted by a linguistic 'expressionism' which operated like a
whirlpool or expanding gyre. I admit that Anand has taken the
view that the writer may have to sacrifice formal effectiveness in the
interests of 'soul drama':
The novel is a form too amorphous to be controlled precisely. The

relative merits of a book, from an author's point of view, may lie
in his feeling of how much he was able to express of the soul
drama, and at how many levels. Perhaps, in this point of view I
would consider Untouchable to be a more intense work than the
others. (Author to Critic, p. 14)
Despite this assumption, in writing Untouchable Anand engaged in

'the intolerable wrestle' with amorphousness, presumably in the
belief that, whereas the fluid form was appropriate in novels of

purely subjective experience, when an objective interpretation of
reality was to be attempted a formal balance of private and
impersonal elements was necessary. The result was that in
Untouchable, and later in The Big Heart, Anand reverted to a classical
model: a prose-fiction structure shaped by the use of the 'three
unities' technique. In thus facing the literary technical problem,
Anand was simultaneously confronting the caste problem, the
central subject in Untouchable. That is to say, he had an intuitive
sense that the novel medium was amorphous in the same sense,
correlatively speaking, that pre-Marxist society was chaotic. By
'imaging' reality in terms of the dramatic-unities technique, and by
providing 'desire images' of change as well as a climax suggesting a
potential structure to be adopted by society, Anand tackled the
formal and ideological problems simultaneously and as one.
A further correlation in Untouchable between the formal discipline
and the social theme, in the context of relating fact to fiction in
accordance with the theory of commitment, derives from Anand's
reliance on autobiographical experience, and his effort to in-
corporate it in the narrative data from the social environment. In
'The Story of my Experiment with a White Lie' (Indian Literature,
Vol. X, No.3, 1967), Anand informs us that Bakha is modelled on a
boy he knew, and that the novel's compassionate viewpoint arose in
part out of an incident when the untouchable
carried me home when I had been hit by a stone ... without

caring about what my mother would say about his having
polluted me by his touch ... I developed a guilt about him
which compelled appeasement. (p. 18)
The episode is dramatically utilised in Untouchable (Bombay:

Kutub-Popular, n.d. pp. 95-6) and reappears in Seven Summers.
Anand also reveals in the same article that, in order to acquire the
right perspective on untouchability, he went to Gandhi's ashram to
learn first-hand the Mahatma's 'hariJan' philosophy of reform. The
Mahatma apparently advised him to put himself in the
Untouchable's place. Thus Anand cleaned latrines, while learning
from Gandhi how to relate the self-discipline of Hindu idealism to
social purpose. Perhaps this experience helped Anand resolve some
of his formal difficulties as a budding novelist.
Whatever the cause, however, Anand succeeded in formulating a
structure which satisfied his own idea ofwhat he wanted to reveal

and how. This structure, as I said earlier, involved the problem of
defining the personality, consciousness, being, of the protagonist
from the joint point of view of character presentation and social
theme. At the beginning of the day of the novel, Bakha is natural
man; the caste system has not as yet inculcated vice into his
character. He is portrayed at work in the latrines, and the scene
illustrates two concepts: the Gandhian principle that all work is
ennobling, and a 'drama' of contrast between the 'body-soul'
splendour of the youth and the unpalatable nature of his work. This
work, though, is not to be despised because of its menial, sensory,
natural characteristics, but because of the pernicious doctrine of
caste with its vicious-circle identification of the work role- cleaning
up dung-and the state of the outcaste's soul. Filth is to filth.
Out of this situation, Anand evolves a narrative pattern which
combines the moral-fable form and the principle of 'interplay,
indeed interpenetration, of situation and character', which Anand
saw as the 'significant feature of the Western short story' (Indian
Short Stories, ed. Mulk Raj Anand and Iqbal Singh, London: New
English Publishing Co., 1946, p. 8). Present in Bakha's character is
the pathetic incongruity of natural vitality sapped by conditioned
docility. Then in the epiphany-like main 'touching' scene we see the
interplay of character and incident producing the germ of a new
consciousness in Bakha, beginning with a realisation of his social
identity. The birth of this consciousness conforms to Gandhi's
psychological approach to the problem of untouchability, whereby
the outcast is encouraged to develop self-esteem in place of self-
abasement. From this point on, the narrative development-
involving as it does Bakha's increasing enlightenment regarding
work, social discrimination, poverty and the doctrine of pollution-
fulfils the requirement of the moral fable: the evil of the social system
has been exposed, and the novel concludes with a 'desire image'
suggesting how the evil should be eradicated.
Bakha experiences the 'shock; of self-recognition: 'It illuminated
the inner chambers of his mind .... A shock ... had passed
through his perceptions, previously numb and torpid' (Untouchable,
pp. 38-g). After this experience Bakha is developed into something
of a fable figure, and is endowed with an elementary visionary
quality. He has the ability to contrast the familiar with the unknown
and this is described in terms of 'the impulse which tries to create a
new harmony':
1 54 Literary and National Identities
... he had grown out of his native shoes into the ammunition
boots he had secured as a gift. And with this and other strange
and exotic items of dress, he had built up a new world, which was
commendable, iffor nothing else, because it represented a change
from the old ossified order . . . He was a pioneer in his own
way... (p. 62)
Having thus far opposed the two elements ('ossified order',

'impulse . . . to create a new harmony') in the dialectical narrative
structure, Anand employs two devices to bring Bakha to the brink of
a personal and social Hegelian synthesis. The first device is the
'desire image'. As Anand has pointed out, the ending of Untouchable
is conceived as a 'prophecy' 'suggesting a choice of possibilities'
(Christ, Gandhi, Marx, the machine) because ofhis belief that the
writer who does not have a romantic as well as realistic point of view
will not see the whole oflife and will be in danger of affirming only
'the negation of life':
The novel of revolutionary romanticism ... seeks the desire

image, that is to say to suggest what the writer would like life to be
like, by implication, as against what it is . . . ('The Story of
my Experiment with a White Lie', p. 26)
The second device Anand uses to promote his social vision is the
spokesman figure, the young poet, who is introduced in the final
scene and explains the 'choice of possibilities' to a section of the
crowd that includes the receptive Bakha. The poet reveres Gandhi
as 'the greatest liberating force of our age', but suggests that India
'has suffered for not accepting the machine' (p. 128). If Un-
touchables can develop a consciousness of self-respect and India
adopts the flush-system, then untouchability may be eradicated.
Structurally, this conclusion is reached through a coalescence of
desire image and spokesman devices.
The device of the spokesman, discussed above, was for Anand a
means of satisfying two distinct inner urges; thus he projected into
the novel an image of the desired reality and an imagined
connection between himself as the reformist spokesman-author and
the underprivileged on whose behalf he was writing fiction. The
device is reincarnated in the final scenes of Coolie ( 1 936) in the
person of Mohan, a revolutionary intellectual, who says 'come with
Western Ideology and Eastern Forms of Fiction I 55
me and we shall kill the landlord one day, and get your land'
(London: May Fair Books, I962, p. 28o), and who at the end
clutches the dying Munoo's hand thereby signifying that, despite
the tragedy of the past, its victim dies briefly united to a potentially
regenerate future. In Anand's third novel, Two Leaves and A Bud
( I 93 7), the Mohan figure has become a major character (De la
Havre), indicating that in this work Anand regarded the fable
element as equally important as the portrayal of the peasantry and
the expose of corrupt imperialism.
The 'desire image' and self-projection techniques are most
completely synthesised in The Big Heart ( I945), in which the
spokesman figure is again a poet, and undoubtedly Anand's ideal of
himself. The hero of the novel, Ananta, is a spontaneous roguish
Adam whose generous character is evident in his favourite saying:
'There is no talk of money, brother; one must have a big heart'
(Bombay: Kutub-Popular, n. d., p. I I). The poet sees in Ananta the
foundation of the new modern man. However, it is the poet who
articulates the humanism which the hero enacts:
I believe in the restoration of man's integrity ... the reassertion

of man's dignity, reverence for his name, and a pure love for man
in all his strength and weakness, a limitless compassion for man,
an unbounded love especially for the poor and down-
trodden . . . (p. I42)
Thus Ananta embodies those qualities of the heart and the poet
those of the head which in combination will create the new Adam of
Anand's future society. The poet's discourses at the end of The Big
Heart are not merely a choric comment on the tragic action: they are
intended to leave the reader with the image of a desirable social
form for which Ananta is a noble sacrificial prelude.
A new variation of the body-soul or character-author drama
occurs in Private Life of an Indian Prince (I 953), in which Anand
projects himself into the Shankar role while modelling Victor on a
Prince from real life and infusing into the portrait of Victor
traumatic psychological experiences which Anand himself had
undergone prior to writing the novel. Private Life, considered as a
narrative structure, is Anand's most ambitious experiment with
'point of view'. Regarding this aspect ofform, Anand has offered the
following account of his intention and practice:
... the neutral character Dr. Shankar was invented to become

Shiva's third eye and to burn out the dross, confusion and the
chaos of emotions in order to achieve a certain balance .... If
there is any alliance between myself and a character, it is with the
narrator. But, always in my novels, the characters take charge.
The novelist should try to become the great god, Brahma, who
creates mankind, but is not responsible for it, that is to say, does
not determine their destiny. Distance is very important in art,
because art though like life, and reflecting it, is not life. (Author
to Critic, p. I4)
Shankar has clearly defined roles as character and narrator, and

through him Anand attempts to achieve 'distance' by adopting
from psychiatry the technique of clinical detachment. Thus when
the doctor refers to Victor as 'an important case history for my files'
(London: Hutchinson, I953, p. 104) he is speaking both as
character and narrator. Shankar's prismatic analysis of Victor's
condition is a point of view which combines Freudian and
sociological techniques of analysis, further illustrating my conten-
tion that Anand in his fiction is constantly seeking a form in which
literary and social models are subsumed into a single structure.
Clinically, Shankar dwells on the unconscious, biological, sexual,
Oedipal origins of Victor's neurosis. Sociologically, he diagnoses
Victor as the product of historical circumstances in which princely
tradition and modern morality were a destructive combination.
Anand brings off some dark, dramatic effects by contriving Shankar
as a kind ofPoe narrator, who is custodian of a haunted psychotic's
soul and witness to its Empedoclean disintegration. There is also in
this 'secret sharer' situation an echo of the Conrad ian technique of
narrative.
Shankar's fragmentary discourses, which at the end of the novel
fill the narrative vacuum created by Victor's retreat into madness,
are mainly reiterations of some of the main assertions in Apology for
Heroism. Shankar advocates Anand's doctrine of humanistic vita-
lism and revolution- believed to be a product of historical
necessity- as a therapeutic solution both to Victor's and society's
afflictions. Shankar's criticism of non-attachment (p. I 23) and
mysticism (p. 234), his dismissal of the crude distinction between a
spiritual East and a materialistic West, his plea for 'the recognition
of our responsibilities' (p. I 24), his belief in man (p. 233), in man as
a homogeneity, not a 'bifurcation' ofbody and soul (pp. 23I, 33I),
Western Ideology and Eastern Forms of Fiction I57
in man as 'the final fact of the universe' (p. 274), are all attitudes
which parallel exactly, at times even in phrasing, statements in
Apology for Heroism.
An analysis of Anand's quest for structure, then, may fittingly
conclude that Anand's fictional forms are allegorical represen-
tations (sometimes simple moral fables, sometimes mythic
conceptions) ofhis social theories and philosophical ideas. Anand's
trilogy- The Village (I 939), Across the Black Waters (I 940), The Sword
and the Sickle (I 942) -is his most comprehensive attempt to define
through allegory, myth, fable and 'poetic realism' the meaning for
India ofthe modern historical process. The hero of the trilogy, Lal
Singh, evolves out of the world of traditional myth, of religious
ritual and metaphysical powers, into the relativist universe of
Anand's modern myths: the people, humanism, revolution, reason,
human love.
In The Sword and the Sickle this new mythos replaces the ancient
mythos which had provided a dance of death, Kali-Kalyug
symbolic framework for Across the Black Waters. Quite early in The
Sword and the Sickle Anand describes the 'new Fate' which replaced
the 'old Fate' yet was equally 'cruel':
It was a Fate which seemed to him to have been working before

the war ... which had something to do with the school he went
to, with the macadamised roads which had connected the village
to the town for movement and transport, with miles of
railways ... with telephones without wires, and the war ... it
seemed to have been hidden behind the illusions to which he had
aspired, behind the mirage of picturesque Vilayati farms and
Sahibhood. But now from the corroded hearts of the people at
home and his own bafflement, he had vague glimmerings of this
new, inexorable Deity in the Pantheon of Indian Gods. It was
disguised in the din and bustle of the cities ... and in his own
despair ... he would know it and seek to master it. (Bombay:
Kutub, I955, p. 67)
The new Fate then is historical process according to Marx, and

the new Kali is a hybrid Indo-British, bourgeois-capitalist, im-
perialist-landlord ogre. Anand's mythos has archetypal manifes-
tations and values. Its classic incarnation, referred to reverentially,
is the Russian Revolution; Marx, Lenin, Gandhi and Nehru are its
epic avatars; it reveals with mythic certitude and folk simplicity the
division between rich and poor; and it chants the poetry of

humanism, proclaiming that 'love and understanding', not
'murder', is the 'way' to the 'imagined utopia' (p. 339).
Lal Singh faces the classic modern choice of standing apart or
being part of a cause, and as a protagonist in the abyss between past
and present he is modern India personified, if not mythologised. He
confronts the new world as Outsider, faces the choice of becoming
an iconoclastic anti-hero or fulfilling the dharma of Self by losing self
in the Absolute of the Marxist nirvana. Resolution is in favour of the
latter, of what in fact is a modern transfiguration of the traditional
Vedantic motive.
And finally, in this ultimate image ofLal Singh about to serve his
stint in gaol, assured that the iron bars of illusion do not a prison of
Reality make, absorbed into a consciousness greater than self,
Anand defines how, in his quest for structures, he has Indianised
literary and political models derived from the West, and Wester-
nised traditional Indian values.
12 Culture as History: The Filipino Soul
Nick Joaquin
Culture has so come to mean its loftier dicta (like literature and the
arts) that we have needed a Marshall McLuhan to remind us that
the medium itself is the message. And the message is:
metamorphosis. We are being shaped by the tools we shape; and
culture is the way of life being impressed on a community by its
technics.
History then would properly be the study of those epochs that are
new tools, or novelties in media, or advances in technique, because
such epochs, by altering the culture, alter the course of the
community, with vivid effects on its politics, economics and arts. But
it is these effects that usually pass for historical events, to the
exclusion of the real event that produced them.
McLuhan sees the printing press, for instance, as such an epoch,
so disrupting European culture that European man was himself
transformed, displaced from an 'ear' culture (or oral tradition) to an
'eye' culture (or the worship of literacy). The results have been
individualism, Protestantism, nationalism, perspective in painting,
the assembly line, not to mention the purely modern idea that the
illiterate is ignorant. But these results can be, and have been, studied
as history with no reference to their original cause.
Thus, we are not quite conscious of the reason for our disdain
when we refer to the illiterate past as wallowing in ignorance,
though quite aware that such 'wallowers' were able to build superb
churches, had gracious manners, showed skill and taste in utensil
and furniture, developed a polite cuisine, kept a lively festive
calendar, and amassed a wealth of folk-song, folk-dance, folk-art
and folk-tale. What divides us from them is the column of print.
Theirs was a total culture involving all the senses, while ours is a
culture concentrated in the literate eye. They would be amused to
learn that they were wallowers in ignorance, whose lifestyle has left
tokens we perversely enshrine with pride. lffor us culture means but
1 59
museum, library, opera house and art gallery, for them it meant the
activities and amenities of everyday life; and contemplating our
society they might feel that it is confused discordant we, and not
they, who wallow in ignorance. The rift is, of course, between 'folk'
culture, where the unschooled can be wise, and print culture, which
enslaved the other senses to the eye. But this visual culture may itself
be ending; the era of electronics- TV, tape, transistor- has cer-
tainly begun. As McLuhan sees it, the snob standards of the literate
(and a cult ofliteracy must always belong to an elite) are crumbling
before the electronic media, which, by annulling the primacy of the
eye and restoring importance to the ear and the other senses, create
a New Illiteracy, a post-Gutenberg aural culture (a current name
for it is 'pop') where books and framed art may become obsolete and
his tools will reshape man to react again with all his being. Today's
young drop-outs, who would return, through their communes, to
the idea of a folk culture, may be the vanguard of tomorrow's
'global village'.
Such a shift from the 'typographic individual' to the 'electronic
mass-man' would be another illustration of culture as history, of the
tool as epoch, of media as themselves the message, since the point is
not how we use a tool but how it uses us, to our unknowing
transfiguration. Electronics, says McLuhan, extend our nervous
systems into space, just as the house extended our skin and the car
our feet: 'The drama of history is a crude pageant whose inner
meaning is man's metamorphosis through the media.'
Alas, the 'drama of history' is seldom seen in this meaning, except
in preliminary lines on prehistory expounding how man was
changed by the invention of fire or the axe. As soon as the scene shifts
to the stage of history, however, tools recede to the background,
upstaged by their effects (politics, economics, the arts); or if
spotlighted at all, are regarded purely as tools, no longer as the
powerful agents ofhistory. (A modern exception is the atom bomb,
too dreadful an agent to be ignored as mere tool.) The Philippines
provide an example of how the 'inner meaning' of 'man's meta-
morphosis through the media' has somehow got lost in the retelling
of history, though here the metamorphosis occured not in the dusk
of prehistory but right on the brilliant stage of history, for the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were an epoch marked by the
mass arrival among us of revolutionary tools, of media so novel they
could not but have wrought radical changes in the cultures and
societies then existing in the islands.
Culture as History: The Filipino Soul
One reason for the missed 'meaning' is that, to those who brought
them, these tools were already so familiar that they were in no
position to gauge the effects on people for whom these tools were
wondrous novelties; and it was these tool-bringers who first wrote
down our history. A second reason is that, when we Filipinos began
to write the history of our own country, we were very naturally
outraged by the idea that an alien people had intervened in that
history, and just as naturally resolved to reject that intervention as
not our history, not our true history, which we formulate as the era
before the coming of the West, and the era in which we began to
fight to break free of the West, the intervening intervention being
skipped as much as possible as no affair of ours. This is obviously
impossible, if the tools were themselves our history. If Hamlet
without the Prince is absurd, a Hamlet strictly of the climax, with no
reference to the intervening events that turned him finally into this
man of action, would .be incoherent. The problem of the Philippine
historian is how to integrate what is felt to be a disagreeable first act
into the national drama without making either the coloniser or the
colonial embarrassingly prominent, and yet with no downgrading
of their era; with the intent, in fact, of revealing how relevant, how
important, that era was to us.
Can this be done?
McLuhan has shown us how: by shifting the emphasis from
conventional history to the history of culture, a shifting of viewpoint
that would make us behold I 52 I and I 565 not as the time of the
coming of the West to our land but as the time of the coming into our
culture of certain tools (wheel, plough, cement, road, bridge, horse-
powered vehicle, money, clock, paper, book, printing press, etc.)
and how we acted with, and reacted to, these tools. In short: to read
this period as the epoch of 'the Filipino's metamorphosis through
the media'.
Here would be no need to save national pride, since this would be
purely Philippine history: the Filipino at stage centre; with the alien
intervener himself counting as one of the tools with which we acted
and to which we reacted. Even Christianity can be included among
these tools, not in any derogatory sense, but in the McLuhan
meaning, when he says that clothing, money, the house and the
road are tools and that all such tools are 'media of communication'.
Thus could we solve the problem that most irks us about this epoch:
the presence of the alien intruder, who would then be reduced, not
without honour, to the role of medium.
The solution is not new; has been arrived at spontaneously

before- for example, by the Greeks, who reduced a foreign invader
(probably Phoenician) to a mythic figure: Cadmus, whose sole
importance is as the medium through which Greek culture acquired
a new tool, the alphabet, symbolised by the dragon's teeth that
Cadmus sowed. English history, too, has so exorcised the Roman
invader that the event it can now read into the first century before
Christ is not the coming of the Romans to Britain, but the coming of
the road into English culture. Ultimately, it seems, every invader
fades into whatever tool he may have brought along. But what
relevance has the tool as culture to the people as history?
The role of a foreign alphabet in Greek history is obvious enough:
on the one hand, Greek disputatiousness and disunity (the armed
warriors who, springing from the dragon's teeth, slew one another)
and, on the other hand, the glory that was Greek art, science,
poetry, drama and philosophy. The role of the foreign road in
English history is equally epochal: on the one hand, by piercing
through forest, swamp and highland, the road made Britain
vulnerable to invasion, thus facilitating the coming of the Anglo-
Saxon, the Dane and the Norman; on the other hand, by opening
up the island, the road turned it into a cultural unit, ready to
become a nation.
It is from such viewpoints that Philippine history could be
reassessed. What the impact was of new tools on us during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is terrain still to be explored,
and one bound to be a rich dig, since what awaits discovery is
nothing less than the process of the making of the Filipino, a process
we usually assume to be confined to the patriot activities of the
nineteenth century. But if McLuhan be right about the medium
being itself the message, then the process of reformation, of
metamorphosis, must have started with the arrival of the new tools
from the West; and this might be borne out by the economic 'crisis'
at the beginning of the Conquista, a crisis today's sociologist would
probably identify as culture shock, or 'future' shock.
Before the Conquista, ours was evidently a subsistence economy,
with enough food to go around in certain regions (like Central
Luzon), recurrent famine in other places (like the Visayas), and no
production surplus anywhere to sustain a true export trade. The
economic equilibrium was so delicate that the arrival of a few
foreign troops sufficed to upset it- and for a moment an economic
breakdown threatened. But what we next find, instead, is a
subsistence culture being transformed into an export economy-

that is, a country hitherto barely self-sufficient in rice beginning to
export rice abroad. We know from Chinese accounts what our pre-
Spanish exports were- wax, cotton, pearls, tortoise-shell, betelnut
and jute cloth- and that agricultural produce was not among them;
but suddenly we are exporting rice, sugar, tobacco, coffee, copra,
hemp, indigo, and even some spice and silk! The rice exports
continue up to mid-nineteenth century and decline only when, in
the 187os, with the development ofNegros Island, our economy is
geared, not to food production, but to large-scale production for
export of more profitable goods like sugar.
The economic factors behind this change can easily be traced
back to the technical 'revolution' of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries: like the introduction of the plough, the drafting of the
carabao, the development of sugar into an industry, the coming of
road, bridge and fabric a, and the domestication of new crops like
coffee and tobacco. These epochs in our culture are- at last!- being
analysed and given their due place in our history. It is the human
factor that, strangely enough, has still to engage our attention. If the
rice paddies look unchanged from time immemorial, is the man
behind the plough no different either? Has the plough as medium in
no way altered him or his life?
Because we fail to see culture as history, we can make two
contentions that deny the McLuhan thesis. And though these
contentions refute each other, they are often held at one and the
same time, and advanced together.
The first of these contentions is that the coming of the West and
new tools in no way, or in no great way, altered Filipino culture; and
the usual evidence offered is the survival to our day of some native
custom or quirk or institution dating back to pre-Spanish times.
The analogy would be with some mother saying of her grown-up
son: 'Why, that's exactly the way he tossed his head in pique when a
baby' or, 'How he still clowns like he did when a child'; with the
difference that the mother surely does not mean that her son has not
changed since he was a baby or boy, or that church, school, society
and the picking up of skills have had no effect on him, since such an
absence of change or effect would indicate that he was a cretin- and
what woman will boast that she is the mother of a cretin? But when it
comes to Philippine culture, we seem unabashed to assert that it is
cretinous, as when we contend that the coming of new media in no
way transformed us, a non-event which, if true, would show us up as
a people so dull, dense and obtuse that tools dynamic in effect on

other cultures had no effect on ours.
The other contention we make is that the coming of the West did
have an effect on us, which was disastrous, because it corrupted the
Filipino and his true culture.
This charge is familiar enough, having been made so recurringly
against every epoch of a tool that one can imagine some tribal elder
bewailing how the arrival of fire or the axe had corrupted his tribe.
So the industrial revolution was accused of corrupting the old
pastoral order; the automobile, of corrupting the horse-and-buggy
era; and television, of corrupting book culture. But this assumes that
the older society survived the tool that 'corrupted' it, when, as
McLuhan points out, the really innovative tool makes the existing
culture obsolete. After the steam engine there could no longer be a
pastoral order; as after the automobile there could be no more
horse-and-buggy era. And books may survive TV, but the kind of
book culture we know is passing away. We can say that the
invention of photography 'corrupted' painting only if painting had
continued to do what photography can now do better; but we know
that painting did not continue thus and could not have continued
thus, because the very invention of the camera had an effect on
painters, shifting their brushes from landscape and likeness, and so
utterly disrupting the old syntax of colours that, as many people
complain, painting today is a completely different art from what it
was in pre-camera days.
Similarly, disruptions of the syntax of a culture brought on by
new media produce a different culture altogether, in which new
context alone may the rearrangement of terms and tokens be
understood. Such a rearrangement can hardly be called a
'corruption', unless we are prepared to say that Christianity, for
instance, was a corruption of Jewish religion; or Islam, of the old
Arab faiths. Nor would the survival of terms and tokens from the old
culture disprove its declension, especially since such survivals, as
Spengler has observed, may not be as true as they look, and function
differently in their new context. In a profound sense, Jews and
Christians do not share the same book in the Old Testament; what
survived into the new culture was an ancient text that 'revealed'
novel meanings, because it was being read in a new light and with
eyes altered by the tool called Christianity. From an equivalent
viewpoint today can we explain, say, 'Filipino time' as a quality
lingering over from the 'timelessness' of our old culture, and as a
dogged resistance against the advent of the foreign-tyrant clock, and

as a sign of the effort it cost to readjust from clockless to clocked time;
but to identify the problem with a sentiment- that, bah!, we were
unchanged by the dock-would be not pride but prejudice, and
grossly simplistic. That we seek to analyse it at all (which
presupposes self-criticism and therefore self-consciousness) already
proves that this 'survival' is, like the Jewish Bible to Christians, no
longer the same as what is supposed to have survived. If we could
discuss it with our pre-Spanish forefathers, they might not be able to
understand us, since we would be speaking in terms of the Faustian
time that has since entered our culture. The monster called the
centaur, which marked the transition to a new culture (the
horseman culture), would be difficult to explain except to societies
that had already made the transition.
It is such a transition that would make a most absorbing chapter
of our history, except that no such chapter exists in our histories.
What passes among us for 'cultural history' is a description, say, of
the Chinese pottery found in native graves, or a narration of the
career of a Luna or an Hidalgo, but with no attempt to evaluate the
artefact as tool, or to explain the appearance of a Luna or an
Hidalgo. None of the really vital questions get answered because
they are not even asked, though these questions concern our culture
in its most intimate aspects.
For example: if we are what we eat, what effect had metabolic
change on personality when the Bisayans became a corn-eating
people? And if the mind is restructured by new disciplines, what
happened to the age-old modes of thinking of our forefathers when
they began experimenting with the culture of new seed like maize
and tobacco, or of new animals like the cow and the turkey? If they
had to overcome certain fears and inhibitions before they could
thrust a road into sacred wood, or throw a stone span over a
wrathful river, did the besting of the taboos have any impact on
character? What accents and nuances did the Roman alphabet
import into our expression-forms; and did our assimilation of it
bring us to the threshold of modern 'eye' culture? And how much of
what is decried as our 'inertia' or 'indolence' can be written off as
merely the after-effects of 'future' shock? Were the Filipinos of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries somewhat in the same position
as twentieth-century man: suddenly confronted with too many tools
and a numbing rate of cultural upheaval? If so, then, despite the
continuing inertia-and-indolence charge, we can claim of our
I66 Literary and National Identities
ancestors that, although for a while, without doubt, painfully

disoriented they did not go under but eventually emerged:
transformed by the new media, for evidence of this is already part of
our history.
The economic transformation- from a subsistence culture to 'the
first world economy of modern times' (Philippine trade, from
galleon days to the first sugar era, involved two oceans and three
continents) -has already been noted. The cultural transformations
are no less remarkable. We know that when the Spaniards began
building locally, they had to recruit Chinese masons and artisans,
because masonry was among the media new to us. But with the
economic boom during the latter half of the eighteenth century,
native pride began to revise, enlarge and elaborate what had been
built earlier, as well as to engineer entirely new constructions, which
proclaimed the growing wealth and progress of the chief towns; but
now there can be no talk of Chinese labour, for this later
architecture is already Philippine- and achieved, moreover, by the
skills and talents of those we now lament as the ignorant masses of
that day; for it was humble Filipino masons, artisans, carpenters,
painters and chisel-wielders who created these more gorgeous
public works: from the fa11ade of Morong church to the complex of
structures that form the Taal Cathedral Square; from the solidity of
earthquake baroque to the laciness of Antillan-house woodwork;
and from noble town-hall and watchtower to those bridges and
irrigation systems erected with so fine an engineering sense that
many of them have endured to our day, and endure usable. Of this
usable past one might quip: Never was so much functional beauty
achieved by so much ignorance!
The transformation is most telling in the massiveness that became a
trait of native masonry, quite amazing for a people with no ancient
tradition of architecture or engineering, a people so identified with
bamboo and nipa that, for them, one would say, the arch or dome or
spire lifted high up into space must always seem the maddest of
audacities. Yet within a couple of centuries we were committing the
audacity, and doing so with style and exuberance, and doing so in
brick, hardwood, stone and marble. Spengler cites among the things
that characterise a culture its choice of materials. And a time-
travelling Spengler who, after visiting us before I 52 I and observing
our choice of materials then (the soft, the perishable) and our style
(small-scale; stolid), was transported to the late eighteenth century
and found us building in hardwood and stone, and building big,
high, massive and spirited, would reasonably conclude that the

Philippines in the eighteenth century was inhabited by a race
different from that which there dwelt before I 52 I.
A similar conclusion might be made from a study of Philippine
painting, where again, in an art previously unknown and alien to us,
we were to become so adept that painting (which Spengler regards,
along with contrapuntal music, as the most Faustian form of
utterance) has become the premier art in our culture. What
happened in between to effect this? And what happened in between:
would not these be the events vital to Philippine painting, though
they might be events that had nothing at all to do with painting?
McLuhan opines that print, by creating the reader who, from a
fixed point, scans the world, produced the outlook of modern man
and perspective in painting. Did a similar development in our
culture open so astonished a window on the world that the epiphany
created, for us, not only perspective in painting but painting itself?
Are Luna and Hidalgo to be traced back to Pinpin and the first
Philippine book?
What this shows is that tools have cluster effects and exert
influences beyond their respective fields of function. So a
mathematical mind was developed in us not only by the coming of
weights and measures but also by such disciplines as architecture
and organ music; and before it found literary expression, a
biographic sense may have been sharpened in us by the art of
portraiture, which became popular when (or because) we were
acquiring a keen sense of our identity. But the whole ensemble, the
entire constellation of tools that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, revolutionised our culture, must be held responsible for
the two most notable features of our new identity: namely, a sense of
history, and a sense of national community. These have become so
instinctive in us that we become conscious of them only when
confronted by, so to speak, their absence.
Before the war, Christian settlers in non-Christian Philippine
regions were most struck by the fact that the tribesmen in such
regions had no chronology and did not even know when they were
born (when for the Christian Filipino his birthday is an event and
therefore a date engraved in the mind.) This lack ofhistorical sense
was to cause trouble, since deeds of land ownership are history in
document, while an oral tradition of land ownership is mythical
history. Though the word mythical is here used not to mean false, this,
alas, was the meaning that, too often, the Christian settlers chose to
give the tribal claims. The conflict was between a history with dates
and a history without-and we begin to see what a change was
brought about by the tools that created a Philippine historical
culture. Before I 52 I there is not one authentic Philippine date.
After the ensuing technical revolution, dates acquire a great
practical importance- even a person's date ofbirth: he needs it to go
to school, to marry, even to get buried. This sense ofhistory, carried
down to the most personal levels, in turn breeds a sense of
community among those who have it- and again the having is in
terms of the tools used in common, like, for example, the plough.
The plough did not 'corrupt', it begot, the Filipino.
The 'Filipino' thus begotten could only have had, as initial
identity, that of initiate in the mysteries of certain techniques,
which, on the one hand, would make him feel different from those
who knew not of such mysteries and, on the other hand, would make
him feel kin to those who did know. For, aside from their political
and economic consequences, the tools we learned to wield during
the epoch of epiphany must have started a strong sense of social
solidarity among the different regions that were, together, adapting
to those tools. We know that such a solidarity was bred in former
times by mastery of a tool or craft, as evidenced by the medieval
guilds, with their jealous trade secrets, and brotherhood rituals; or
by masonry, which actually begot a 'community' into which one
had to be initiated. In our own day we have seen a tool like the
motorcycle spawning a subculture that is almost an 'inter-nation' of
the youth, with its own laws and language; and another striking
example is today's scientific community, which has become so
distinguished from the rest of the world by its intramural culture
that, in what has indeed come to be known as 'the other culture', an
American scientist, a Chinese scientist, an African scientist and a
Russian scientist can, despite all their differences, feel themselves
belonging to one communion vis-a-vis the 'outside' world. It should
be noted, however, that these craft communities are not as exclusive
as they look; an 'outsider' can be absorbed simply by mastering the
craft that will make him eligible for initiation into this or that
community. Was this one of the ways in which the nation we call
Philippine was developed? Would it not be worth studying if the
mastering of certain tools during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries by the Tagalog, Pampango, Ilocano, Bicolano and
Visayan created among these tribes the beginning of a sense of
common identity, the identity being, to repeat, as the initiates into
Culture as History: The Filipino Soul 169
certain tools and crafts, especially vis-a-vis what tribes were still
outside this tool-culture? This might explain certain mysteries and
certain processes in our history.
For example: let us posit that the Tagalog and Pampango, being
nearest the seat of power and therefore the first to be most intensely
colonised, became the first initiates into this new-tool culture of
wheel, plough, road, etc., and thus became the first to feel
themselves belonging to a community of (in the craft sense)
'Filipinos' -would this explain what has been noted as an intenser
'nationalism' in these two tribes as well as their notorious
arrogance? Would it explain why the Propaganda, the Revolution,
and the First Republic had for theatre the Tagalog-Pampango
terrain? Or, again, let us posit that for a while the Tagalog and
Pampango felt themselves as forming an exclusive craft-community
to which the other tribes (Ilocano, Bicolani, Visayan, etc.) were
'outsiders', but that increasing mastery of the new tools by Ilocano,
Bicolano and Visayan began to bring these other tribes into the
culture-community and initiate them as 'Filipinos' -could this be
taken as the process (or one of the processes) in the making of the
nation, a process in which, more importantly than religion or
Spanish rule, techniques played the leading part; and a process,
therefore, that shows how tribes that still remain 'outside' the
national culture can be assimilated without sacrifice of, say, pagan
individuality or Muslim pride? Does the phrase hindi bi1!Jagan, or
'unbaptised', connote, not to so much a religious distinction, as the
technician's requirement of initiation into his craft (like, for
example, our bar exams)? If, on the one hand, this requirement
aimed at 'outsiders' bespeaks snobbery, on the other hand it
proclaims the pride in craft-mastery that may have contributed to
the formation of a national consciousness; and again it should be
noted that 'outsiders', the moment they master tool or craft, are
instantly, whether baptised or not, absorbed into the culture, and
become indistinguishable from the mass -like the Igorot mechanic,
the Muslim engineer, the Negri to mason. If this be a continuation of
the process started in the sixteenth century, then it indicates that, for
our ancestors, baptism had the significance of a craft-initiation; and
that techniques, or rather, our training in common in new media,
was what forged the identity we now term Filipino.
This will of course offend those who believe that the identity
existed before the term. If we assume that the Filipino, that the
Philippines, antedated those terms, then we must argue that the
name Filipino can be discarded as irrelevant, and should be,

because what exists under that name already existed before it got
that name. But this is to be anti-historical. We are not Methuselah,
nor yet Peter Pan; nor, God forbid, a fellahin people which, under
whatever name or political costume, remains 'immemorial' because
static. But even our name proclaims us dynamic, for the root-word
in Philippine can be paraphrased as horsepower, the unit of measure for
engine energy; so that the name Filipino can be said to mean a 'love
of horsepower', or a 'lover of energy'- and how many other conceits,
from centaur to chivalry to caballero, can be culled from this name
we bear to remind us that it means dynamic!
No, we are not fellahin. History has our dates down in black and
white, and knows that the Filipino, because he was created, in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, be a tool-forged fusion of
Luzon tribes, Visayan tribes, Mindanao tribes, Spanish mestizos,
Chinese mestizos, etc., and moulded into form by a geography only
from then on existing as a political unit, cannot be traced back
farther than that fusion and that form- as no individual existence
can be traced farther back than the moment of conception, which
determined that what was to be born would be this person and no
other. The person may change from baby to child, and from boy to
man, but through all these changes he will remain this person and
cannot be another, because all possibilities to the contrary that may
have existed before the moment of conception ended forever with
the moment of conception.
Before 152 I we could have been anything and everything not
Filipino; after I 565 we can be nothing but Filipino.
We may veer in course, or speak new tongues, or suffer upheavals
of character; but all these changes will only serve to intensify the
identity whose basic outlines were cast in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. This is the difference between the Spanish
advent and the American: that the technical revolution provoked
by the first produced the Filipino, while the cultural upheaval
provoked by the second merely helped us to become more aware of
this Filipino-ness. With the coming of the Americans and of such
powerful new tools as the public school and the English language,
the Fil-Hispano culture became obsolete; but the new culture that
ensued (whether we call it 'eye' culture or 'Saxonised' culture)
remained a Philippine culture, with features (like our style of
religiosity, and of ethics, and of manners, and of expression, and of
cuisine) that, however modified, not only kept it distinct from the
American, but always kept the distinctive marks stamped on it

during the original re-formation, so that, to our day, such things as
the baro, the terno, the adobo, the pan de sal, the town .fiesta, the barrio,
the harana, etc., add up to what we mean by Filipino-ness. Indeed we
can see now how false were the fears of our fathers when they cried
out, in the 1goos, that we were being 'Saxonised' beyond
recognition; for the American period was to culminate, not in our
becoming more and more American, but in our becoming more
militantly Filipino, as flaunted by the 'nco-nationalists' and 'nco-
Propaganda' of post-war years and by the current nostalgia trip
back to santos, to Moriones, to the comedia, to tropical gothic and
baroque, to la az;otea, la plaza and la cocina Filipina.
And we can also see now why all the attempts to stop the
formation of this identity (our early tribal revolts; the Asian
invasions) were doomed to fail: history had decreed the Philippines.
Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the process of
formation of identity could of course have been radically altered-
say, by the Dutch, if they had succeeded in their Philippine wars;
but once the identity had been formed, no invasion could have
changed what was now a Philippine soul. The course of our culture,
yes; but the soul of our culture, never. Perhaps the last attempt with
any possible success in that direction was Diego Silang's during the
British Occupation- and it is significant that it was the Tagalog and
Pampango, the two tribes most conscious of this national soul in the
making, who aborted the attempt.
During the 1goos the Federalistas made another attempt to annul
that identity by getting it absorbed into the American nation; and it
should be emphasised that both they and their supposed antagonist,
the Partido Nacionalista, really agreed on how good it would be for
the Philippines to become, not a nation, but a state of the American
union. Quezon and Osmeiia were never very clear on the
independence question, as the Americans were always sneering. But
if his leaders wavered, the Filipino (by whom Federalismo was
rejected) did not, and could not, waver, for the simple reason that he
could no go against history, which had decreed him. Against such a
decree, thinks Spengler, any effort at resistance will be as futile as an
attempt to stop time. McLuhan and Spengler may seem to be in
conflict here, but a second look will show that they are basically in
agreement. Alongside (not against) McLuhan's 'media as meta-
morphosis' can be set Spengler's figure for the soul of a culture as a
musical theme or melody which, subjected to endless variations,
seems to be always altering, yet always remains itself, although, with

each synthesis, what may be opposed between theme and variation
moves into a resolution that includes both.
The point here is that there must be a self to have a soul.
As Spengler sees it, when diverse elements fuse into a unit that
begins to feel itself a culture-community, a people, a nation, then a
'soul' has been born, unique and organic, having grown from a
parent soil, and with so imperious a sense of destiny and identity
that even should the people possessing (and possessed by) that soul
deny it, or resist it, or try to change it, these very denials and revolts
will only advance the destiny of that identity, as every change will at
last be found to have merely evolved the identity on a farther plane.
From romanesque to gothic to baroque to the modem skyscraper,
though each signifies a shift in the course ofWestem man, the line of
history is nevertheless straight, because all these seemingly different
styles are expressions of a single spirit, the Faustian, and develop
only one theme, the destiny of Faustian man. So with the coming of
the American style among us, the passing of the old Fil-Hispano
culture did not mean a passing away of Philippine culture but,
rather, the start of a Philippine industrial culture, Americanised only
so far as the Americanisation served our destiny and helped to bring
out the points of native genius that this particular change could
bring out; and all future revolutions in our culture can be expected
to be no more, and no less, successful than the American advent. If
we reacted to the media explosion of the sixteenth century by
turning into Filipinos, we can only react to any subsequent upheaval
as Filipinos. Until the Filipino has fulfilled whatever destiny was
appointed for the genius of his race, he can only develop, with ever
greater clarity and confidence, the face (or fate) defined once and
for all (since the process is irreversible; we can stop being Christian
but can no longer go back to being pre-Christian) during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
This is recognised even by those who deny it, as when they assert
that I 52 I marked a deviation from what might have been our true
history; or when they fume that we were Christianised at the cost of
our 'Asian' soul; or when they argue that if the Philippines had only
been completely converted to Islam by the sixteenth century, not all
the arms of the West could have turned us into 'Filipinos'. Now that
is absolutely true; and the argument can be extended with the
observation that if only, by the sixteenth century, the Philippines
were already Buddhist, or Taoist, or Hinduist, or Confucianist, or
Culture as History: The Filipino Soul 1 73
Shintoist, the West would have conquered us in vain, because,

being already formed by the media of the great civilisations of the
East, we would be in little danger of deviating from that Asian form.
What a different kind of Christian, for instance, we might have been
if we had been evangelised, not by Spaniards, but by Nestorian
Christians of Asia; and what a truly 'Asian' art we might have had if
our first teachers in painting had been the Japanese and not the
Europeans. But the office of the historian is not to relate what might
have happened but to inquire why it did not- and in this case the
answer is one we have been so shyly refusing to face as a fact, though
it stares us in the face, that it may be for the best to have it stated
bluntly at last: If it be true indeed that we were Westernised to the
cost of our Asian soul, then the blame must fall, not on the West, but
on Asia.
This charge is best driven in with a fictive analogy. Let us imagine
an Island of Cuba, in a rather primitive condition, surrounded by a
United States, a Mexico, a Central America and a Brazil that are in
advanced stages of culture. The continental civilisations are already
paper and print cultures; the Cubans are still writing on tree-bark.
The American continentals are building in stone and steel; the
islanders are still building in bamboo and thatch. And though the
continentals have a rich technology, their close neighbours, the
Cubans, are still doing all their labour, in field and shop, by hand;
for none of the wonder tools of the continent gets to them. Now this
is a strange, since there is supposed to be some commerce between
island and continent; and yet, despite ages ofthis intercourse, none
of the benefits of American continental civilisation, for some reason,
ever reaches and affects the Cubans enough to alter their condition.
Finally, from across the ocean, come an alien people, say, the
Russians, who take over the Island of Cuba; bring in wheel and
plough, paper and print, plumbing and masonry, and thus
transform the Cuban way oflife. But since these media come under
Russian auspices they impart a Russian accent to Cuban life,
especially since with the tools arrive Russian religion, art and
politics, and other Russian styles of culture, until the Cubans begin
to look more Russian than American. Upon noting this, their old
neighbours- the United States, Mexico, Central America and
Brazil- begin to sneer at the Cubans as traitors of American culture;
they jeer that the Cubans have become not only Slavicised but
slaves and slavish; and they contend that the Cubans have lost their
'American' soul.
Now how would we expect the Cubans to respond to these taunts?

Would we not expect the Cubans to retort that for aeons they had
the continental civilisations for close neighbours and yet had to wait
for someone from across the sea to bring them those blessings of
civilisation that their American neighbours could have brought;
and that therefore if Cuba had indeed lost its 'American' soul the
blame must fall on those American civilisations that had so long
been haughtily ignoring poor little Cuba? Wouldn't we expect the
Cubans to assert that faraway Russia had proved to be a truer
neighbour than the United States, Mexico, Central America or
Brazil? And would we not be dumb-founded if, instead of this, we
were to hear the Cubans beating their breasts in a mea culpa, and
saying to the American continentals that, yes, we have sinned in
having been neglected by you-all and so please forgive us the crime
of being snubbed by you-all. Surely we would not only think the
Cubans illogical, we would also say that they were milksops.
Yet that is exactly what we are- milksops- when, to taunts by
Asians on our 'lost' soul, we respond with a mea culpa and not with a
counter-charge: Where the hell were they before I 52 I?
During the War thejaps strutting among us berated us for having
become 'W esternised' and bade us 'come home to Asia'. Since the
Japanese never did for us, in our pre-West days, what Indian and
Chinese civilisation did for them, what business had they berating a
culture they should have helped to nourish then but did not?
We say we were Christianised to our cultural disaster. Do we ever
ask why we were not Buddhicised, or Taocised, of Hinducised, or
Confucianised, or Shintocised, or Islamised, to our cultural
salvation? The reason cannot have been doctrinal timidity, for the
great East Asian religions produced missionaries every bit as
aggressive as any Paul of Tarsus.
Hinduism was carried so far and wide in our part of the world
that, even today, so distant an outpost as Bali is still a Hindu isle in a
Muslim sea. But though Hinduism got as far as Bali, it never got as
near as the Philippines. Our neighbourhood was converted; we
ourselves were by-passed.
Buddhism was likewise a phenomenal movement, infiltrating,
during a thousand years, every nook and cranny of East Asia- every
nook and cranny, that is, except the Philippines, which was again
by-passed.
The cults and philosophies of even China, such a miser of culture,
managed to leak out to Korea and japan and Formosa- and should
from there have reached the Philippines, which they didn't, although
they did reach the countries on the other side that we now know as
Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Malaya. But poor by-
passed Philippines never got the Dragon nor the Lotus nor the Five
Classics.
Japan, another miser of its culture, did radiate some of its
technical and spiritual lights to Korea and the islands to the south;
but these islands did not include the Philippines, where came not a
ray of Shinto or Zen to enlighten our animist hearts.
Islam arrived in Cathay in the seventh century (the first mission,
in 628, was to the Chinese Emperor Tai-dsung; by 700 there were
mosques in Shantung) and thence spread out along the trade routes
of Asia, speedily Islamising what was Hindu or Buddhist turf,
especially in our vicinity. But again it looked as if the Philippines
was to be by-passed (one theory is that the appearance of the
Portuguese in the Indies, by pushing Arab activity northward, was
what really brought the Philippines into the Muslim sphere) for
Islam reached us last of all, and so very late in its Far-Eastern career
that its initial impetus had long run out. Thus its pace in the
Philippines was turtle-like, especially compared with the speed with
which our neighbours had been rushed into the fold. Anyway, as our
Muslims point out, Islam had been in the Philippines for more than
two centuries before Christianity arrived; and it should be instruct-
ive to compare those two centuries with the other two centuries (the
sixteenth and seventeenth) of the later conversion. Did the former
bring on as awful a media explosion as the latter did? Elephants are
said to have been brought here by the Arabs, but it seems hard to
relate those elephants to any significant shift in our culture.
What is significant is the meagreness of the gains of the earlier
missionary effort. Those of us who believe that a conversion to Islam
then could have been the salvation of the Philippines cannot but feel
impatient with the slow pace, the apparent lack of zeal, of that
effort; an effort we would in frustration deplore as not only laggard
but languid, since after more than two centuries of it in so tiny an
area, only Sulu and part of the southern coast of Mindanao had
been converted. The later leap-frog to Luzon did not appreciably
enlarge the frontier, for the effects of the movement there were
evidently even milder, and only by a stretching of terms can we say
that, in the sixteenth century, Manila, or the Tagalog region, was
Muslim.
Here the significant thing is the leap-frog. One would naturally
have expected Islam to spread from Sulu and South Mindanao to

the Visayas; but, no, the Visayans were by-passed for Central
Luzon. Would the reason be that the Visayas were then, as Legazpi
would later find out, a poor bleak backwater of endemic hunger?
This might throw light on the mystery of why the Philippines was
by-passed by the great Asian religions. Were the Muslims when they
by-passed the Visayas doing in particular what Asian religion had
done in general when it by-passed the Philippines? Were we in
general considered to be too poor, bleak, backward and hungry to
be worth the trouble of a religious catechism?
Certainly it seems odd that for a thousand years and more our
neighbourhood was crisscrossed by the routes of militant faiths that
somehow never found their way to us, at a time when our conversion
to them would have ensured us an 'Asian' soul.
Why did they not get to us? Was the reason expressed by that
Chinese viceroy of old who described what would become the
Philippines as 'a land fittingly inhabited by snakes and savages'?
Were we thought too uncouth for mystical subtleties? Does this
explain our snubbing by Hindu, Buddhist and Confucianist, as well
as the spotty record oflslam in the Philippines, where, for more than
two centuries, only three small bits of terrain were won for the
Crescent? (At that rate, it might have taken up to the twenty-first
century to convert the whole country.) If only any of these creeds
had been more enthusiastic over our uplift! But we had to make do
with the foreigner's Christianity because Mother Asia refused to
share her soul with us.
And not only her soul. Even her technology was denied us. Even
her material resources were withheld from us. Looking back, one
sees no reason why we had to wait for the West to bring us such tools
as wheel, plough, road, etc., when our Asian neighbours were
already using wheel, plough, road, etc. How piteous and vexing is
the testimony of porcelain in our culture! If we prized the stuff so
much, couldn't the Chinese have had the kindness to initiate us in
the craft? One Philippine scholar conjectures that, if Luzon had not
been Christianised in the sixteenth century, the tribes there might
have developed a porcelain culture, but then ruefully remembers
that our Muslim tribes were not Christianised in the sixteenth
century and continued to have direct commerce with the Chinese,
and yet never developed a porcelain culture. So, only one answer is
possible: we did not develop a porcelain culture because Asia
disdained to initiate us in the craft- and the answer covers the entire
mystery of our non-initiation into Asian techniques when such an

initiation, being conducted under Asian auspices, would have
guaranteed us a culture with an Asian accent. There is record, as
early as the seventeenth century, of at least two sons of the
Pampango principalia being sent to Spain to study in a nobles'
school; but is there any record of somebody from our islands being
sent, in pre-West days, to study in some Asian university, monastery
or centre of craft, though such seats oflearning were all around us in
those days? And why were we not invited to those centres of
initiation? Because Asia looked down on us as a land fit only for
snakes and savages?
But if Asia refused to play mother to Philippine culture, then her
role in our history can only be as the Wicked Stepmother, whose
care is confined to favoured daughters, with the Philippines in the
position of a Cinderella, neglected and despised, for whom the West
would be, if not exactly a Prince Charming, then a rather erratic
Fairy Godmother.
And the fruits of no future research revealing, say, an astonishing
wealth of contact between the Philippines and its Asian neighbours
can alter this argument, since the results of that age-old contact are
already on record, and the record would dismally read something
like this:
We did not get the wheel from India, nor the theatre from China,
nor the plough from Thailand, nor the hospital from Cambodia, nor
city-culture from Malaya, nor the horse from Japan, nor spice
culture from the Indies, nor architecture from Java, nor mathe-
matics and the sciences from the Arabs.
In short, in terms of civilisation, we seem to have got none of the
basic media from our Asian neighbours. And however we may
inflate our old relationships with them in an effort to hide their old
scorn of us, the testimonies of history cannot be escaped. Anyway
the inflating has gone so far that a little scepticism may be healthy.
Which brings up the question: What might have been the 'true'
history of the Philippines but for I 52 I? The known facts about us
and about Asia then volunteer the answer. If the West had not
come, and if the local push of Islam had continued to slow down,
and if Asia had remained as indifferent as ever, then we would be
today, much like the Papuans and Samoans, a small Pacific pocket
of paganism, with various Muslim city-states on the coasts, various
river-kingdoms in the interior, various dan-turfs in the hills, and all
these groupings generally unaware of one another and of 'Asia'; as
q8 Literary and National Identities
unaware, say, as the Ilongot is, to this day, of the Zambal or of

anything else beyond his tribal frontiers. In short: no 'Philippines'
(meaning what might have been the equivalent nation), no
'Filipinos', and no 'history'. That this might have been our fate is in
the books; and to invoke our position in Asia as guaranteeing, even if
the West had not come, our advance into civilisation, into Asian
civilisation, is to go against the known facts; for, on this score, history
itself bears witness against Asia.
Through the centuries of our supposed contacts with the Chinese,
they were already a paper culture; we continued to write on tree~
bark. Through the centuries of our supposed contacts with the
lndons, they were already a book culture, we continued to write on
tree-bark. And through the centuries of our supposed contacts with
the Arabs, they were already a print culture, we continued to write
on tree-bark. But within thirty years ofLegazpi we took the first step
into paper culture, print culture, book culture.
The question is: If Asia was uninterested in us, were we similarly
in the dark about Asia? Our answer to this is the claim that we had
an extensive pre-West commerce with our neighbours because in
those days we were a race of sailors and a 'ship-building' people. But
our culture, because it never in those days became Hindu, Buddhist
or Confucianist, puts this claim in doubt. If we were really all over
Asia in those days, then we should not have needed missionaries to
bring us the Asian faiths, because we would have picked up religion
in our ports of call, as so many trader-peoples have done in the past.
That we did not do so already argues that our relations with Asia
may not have been as extensive as we like to think now.
And this is the good thing about studying culture as history: that
we get a corrective to history as superstition, because the culture
itself provides the evidence with which to check and double-check
the history when no data are available, as the cultural remains on
Crete have furnished the clues with which to reconstruct the career
of the Minoan empire. Such clues reveal not only what the culture
was, but also what it was not, as the Odyssey, though it seems to be
about a voyage, indirectly tells us, by the limited scope and endless
ineptitudes of that voyage, that the early Greeks were not really a
seafaring people.
How would such a test work on Philippine prehistory? The
evidence of the religious factor has already been noted. Another
clue would be the almost total absence of the sea in Philippine
folklore, an absence that becomes even more mystifying if we recall
that even such confirmed landlubbers as the Greeks and the

Romans did develop a sea mythology. But if we have a wandering
folk hero he wanders along a river (Juan Tamad); if we have a love
goddess she is not of the foam but of mountain-tope (Mariang
Makiling); and if we have bogies they lurk deep in inland forests or
under the earth (the asuwang; the matanda sa punso). If we have a sea
fairy at all, like the sirena, or a sea ritual, like the pagoda procession,
these are, needless to say, not pre-West. And if we have sea
nomads, these are required by their culture to be buried on land (no
Viking's funeral as for real deep-sea peoples) and have, moreover,
like the Odyssey, so small a scope in their sea-wanderings that we do
not hear of these sea-folk getting even as far as Luzon.
Another clue would be the absence of any native tradition on our
supposed voyagings in pre-West Asia. Surely, if we were so
extensively abroad in those days, our folk-tales would bear witness
to this with some account of a brown Ulysses adrift in fabulous
lands; and our folklore would, however vaguely, remember our days
in the court of Cathay, or in the feudal castles of japan, or among
the glories of Angkor Wat, Malacca and the Javanese temple cities.
But there exists not even the vaguest tradition that our ships were
then familiar to the ports of the Orient. If it be asserted that there is
no record of this because our books were destroyed by the friars, this
assertion, whether true or false, must contend with one undeniable
fact: that it is easy enough to destroy a book, but practically
impossible to destroy the memory of it. Although only a few plays by
the great Greek dramatists survive, we know how many each of
them wrote, and even the titles and themes of the lost plays, because
oral tradition kept alive the memory of those works through the
ages. We also know that there were other gospels of Christ besides
the four that have become canon because, again, oral tradition
preserved the memory of those gospels, and would have continued
preserving it if the memory had not been put on record by the
Gospel of Luke. Does anyone doubt that if every copy of Shakes-
peare were to disappear he would continue to be quoted and
discussed for ages to come because certain lines and entire passages
of his would survive as a 'living' tradition? Or that a similar
destruction ofRizal's works would not destroy the memory of them
for us, and that Filipinos centuries hence would still be saying: 'As
Rizal argued in that lost novel ofhis .. .'and 'As Rizal put it in that
lost farewell poem of his .. .'Between us and the sixteenth century
are only a few generations, comparatively speaking; yet we are
claiming that within that brief span of time all memory vanished of
what 'books' we presume were destroyed during the Conversion.
This hardly seems probable or credible. If such a thing happened,
oral tradition at least would have preserved the memory not only of
the burning but of the books themselves, and we would to this day
be saying, 'As our great pre-West poet Makata said in that epic of
his which the Spaniards burned in Malolos .. .' or 'As our great
playwright Gatdula recorded in that historical drama of his which
the friars destroyed in Arayat .. .' But if no memory of such books
exists as a tradition, then the student of culture as history must
assume that the 'books' never existed- and that they 'exist' today
only as another of the superstitions of our history. To recognise this is
not to hurt national pride but rather to reinforce it, since we thereby
prove that we are cultural adults for whom history has truly become
a science; and that we are no longer, in this field, so to speak,
equating a packaging plant with heavy industry, or a school
laboratory with physics research.
One recalls how in pre-war days we loved to boast that, long
before the coming of the West, we were part of the great Shrivijaya
and Majapahit empires. That we no longer make the boast bespeaks
enough cultural maturity to prompt the realisation that such a boast
does not exalt us but rather humiliates us, since we are exposed as
poor cousins claiming relationship with a great family quite
unaware of our existence. If we were really part and parcel of those
empires, how do we explain that, when they had stepped into the
full light of history, we stayed behind in the dusk of prehistory; or
that the epochal shifts they made in religion, technology, maritime
commerce, architecture and the other arts are nowhere reflected in
our own culture? Such a reflection should have been inevitable,
commerce, architecture and the other arts are nowhere reflected in
but it seems that, as far as cultural influence was concerned, we
might as well have been on the North Pole;
The danger of making propaganda-mountains out of history's
molehills is evidently being recognised enough to generate more
caution in interpreting what data exist of our prehistory, so that we
now hold suspect even what loan-words tempt to be read as
meaning a rich intercourse with, say, ancient India, since we know
that a single missionary to some remote Mrican tribe can import
into the tribe's language a host of words (penicillin, sulfa, radio,
jeep, gospel, etc.) that could rashly be interpreted later as indicating
a more extensive commerce with the outside world than that tribe
actually had. Similarly, if we interpret our possession of Chinese

porcelain as indicating profound cultural relations with the
Chinese, we invite the rejoinder that the contrary may be truer, and
that what relations are indicated were of the most superficial kind:
those between merchant and anonymous buyer. For what those
porcelains publicise is, not any cultural interplay (as existed, for
example, among China, Japan and Korea: mutual borrowings,
developings and learning of each other's tools and crafts), but only a
lack of technology on our part and, on the part of the Chinese, an
exploitation of that technological ignorance, and therefore a desire
to maintain it in order to keep us a captive or colonial market.
Instead of proudly collecting those porcelains, we should be so
ashamed of them as to want to hide them, for they testify to our first
exploitation by foreign industry, our first obsession with the
'imported', and our first misuse of such imports as showpieces and
prestige symbols. But, as tools, those porcelains are completely
unimportant in our culture, as unimportant as the toy totems we
import to hang in our cars, or the silk linings we import to bury with
the dead. Not our possession ofporcelain but the absence then of a
porcelain factory among us is the significant fact for culture as
history, and it puts in question any 'profound cultural relations'
with the Chinese or, for that matter, with the other porcelain
cultures that were so near us and yet so far. This in turn suggests that
we may not have been as known by, and as knowing about, Asia as
we claim.
One Filipino student of Chinese annals wonders why mention of
us there is so slight and so doubtful that scholars are still debating
whether the references were to the Philippines at all; whereas
mention of our immediate neighbours- Borneo, the Moluccas,
Java and Sumatra-are clear, definite and continuous. If we were
really a 'ship-building' people and extensive traders then, vagueness
about us becomes incredible; as incredible, say, as no mention of the
Phoenicians in early Greek annals, or no mention of Carthage in
early Roman annals. Ships were not so common then in Asia as to
pass unnoticed by so keen-sighted a folk as the Chinese, and trade
was so much their life-blood that an extensive Philippine commerce
would surely have been as carefully recorded in their annals as the
trade with Borneo, the Moluccas, Java and Sumatra. The inference
would therefore be that the trade has been as inflated as the ships-
and this is borne out by a report on us we like to cite: the report that
the Chinese traders trusted us enough to let us go off with their
goods and return with the payment months later. This is usually
cited to attest to our honesty, but it may attest to another fact: that
we were so at the mercy of the Chinese traders that we simply dared
not steal their goods for fear that the traders might decide to return
no more, a misfortune we could not afford. In fact, we hear of some
member of a Chinese trading-party being locally kidnapped and
held as hostage to ensure the return of the traders the following year.
If we had our own ships and were so mobile commercially that we
knew our way all around Asia, why should we have to depend at all
on these occasional Chinese traders? Here the inference would jibe
with the vagueness about us of the Chinese annals: Philippine trade
was too slight and doubtful to rate any importance; and the mobility
was strictly one-sided, on the part of the Chinese. Again, culture as
history makes it possible not only to check but to double-check- and
the corroborative evidence here has already been discussed: our
mysterious failure to share in Asian technology.
It just does not seem possible that we went to China and saw their
roads and then came back and went on using jungle trails; or that
we went to Japan and saw their bridges and then came home still
content with a perilous bunch of bamboos across a stream; or that
we went to Java and saw their masonry and then came home as
ignorant as ever of architecture. Unless we are to reflect on the
intelligence of our forefathers, we must assume that we did not learn
of road, bridge, and masonry because we did not often get to where
these were and none of our neighbours knew or cared about us
enough to bring them over.
The Philippine condition in pre-West Asia can thus be summed
up in two words: unknown and unknowing; while the attitude ofour
neighbours to us can likewise be summed up in two words: ignorant
and indifferent. And this ignorance and indifference are exemplified
by their supposed maps of us, which are so wildly inaccurate (even
as late as the sixteenth century!) as to proclaim that, though the
Philippines was not remote nor inaccessible, nevertheless we were,
for our close neighbours, a veritable terra incognita. Only with the
maps of the West do we finally enter geography, so that it can be
said that, even for Asia, the Philippines was 'discovered' in 1521.
Certainly, with the Spanish epoch, what a change in Asian
attitudes towards us! Suddenly we are no longer terra incognita.
Suddenly this land fit for only snakes and savages becomes, for the
Chinese and Japanese, a good place to visit, to settle in, even to
covet. Suddenly this land so ignored by Asian progress finds its
neighbours come crowding with their produce and manufacture,

for the galleon trade dealt not only in Chinese silks but with the
entire gamut of Asian commodities, from the stuffs and jewels of
India and Cambodia to the pearls and herbs of Japan and the
Indies; and Manila, which gathers in all this wealth of the East for
export to the world, becomes, as the port of Asia, an Asian city at
last. And suddenly too, and this time truly, the Filipino is seen in the
ports of the Orient as the Philippine presence is felt in Macao,
Formosa, the Marianas, the Indies, Borneo, Malaya, Indo-China,
on the coasts of China andjapan, and on all the battlefields where
the clangour of Philippine arms seems to be announcing a
Philippine empire in the making. It is a kind ofpoeticjustice-and
further evidence of our sudden involvement in Asia- that Japan,
which for so long was so far away from the Philippines, should slam
its doors to the world because the Philippines had become so near.
This period of the Filipino's emergence in Asia, which may be
symbolised by the appearance of the sirena in our culture, and of the
ship called the Manila Galleon in our commerce, was to have
historic consequences-for example: the rise of the Tagalog-
Pampango principalia, which can be directly attributed to the
special participation of these two tribes in the Asian campaigns. To
this day that period is commemorated in various ways by our folk
tradition- for instance, in the sea rituals of the Santo Niiio de
Ternate and the battle legends of the Santo Rosario; in such dishes
as the kari de pata, kari de pollo and the kari-kare; and also in the moro-
moro, insofar as it is a not-always-conscious expression of the
Filipino's adventures in Asia in the seventeenth century. (Is it
significant that our moro-moro seldom has a Philippine setting but
always travels across the sea?) The cultural effects of our Asian
encounters are the most worthy of study. After ages of being shut up
from Asia, the Filipino was suddenly discovering, and being
discovered by, Asia- and what did the experience do to us? How
many 'recognition scenes' were played out in the Indies and the
Malay lands as we saw ourselves in strange peoples? Surely, in many
ways, these Asian encounters helped to 'Asianise' us- and this
would result in a paradox: that if we are as Asian as we are, it is
thanks to the mediation of the West, which brought us into Asia and
v1ce versa.
This paradox is best demonstrated by the Philippine Chinese.
Though we trace our relations with the Chinese as far back as the
ninth century, the relations were of the most casual kind because the
Chinese formerly did not settle among us, and thus had little direct
impact on our early culture. This can be observed in a department
of our domestic life, where Chinese influence should have been
aboriginal- the kitchen- and where they should have been our first
tutors in cuisine. But somebody else, not they, performed this role.
As a result, so utterly non-Chinese is the terminology of Philippine
cooking (guisa, jrito, sancuchd, asado, tusta, timpla, recado, mantika,
aceite, grasa, kucina, almusal, merienda, vianda, adobo, tinola, caldereta,
estojado, lechon, escabeche, relleno, ensalada, sopa, salsa, caldo, caldera,
sarten,jugon, homo, parilla, etc.) we can only conclude that, through
the ages of our pre-West association, we never became intimate
enough with the Chinese to let them into our kitchen. That we did
so only after I s6s is indicated by the fact that what of Chinese
cookery has entered the Philippine table did so under Creole names:
pancit guisado, camaron rebosado, puerco en agridulce, lumpiangjrito, torta
de cangrejo, jam6n de funda, morisqueta tostada, etc. These have now
become so much a part of our culture that we may think they have
been there since time immemorial when, actually, this development
of the Asian in us was part of our colonial or Creole culture, since,
before that, the Chinese opened up for us no new culinary frontiers.
Had they done so, then we, like the peoples formed by the Chinese
kitchen, would be to this day, West or no West, a chopstick culture.
But the Chinese, in the Philippines at least, seldom played the
pioneer. Rizal knew this, and his account of the town ofSan Diego
could be a parable on the Philippines in Asia. A remote forest
village, San Diego is a miserable heap of huts until along comes a
Creole who starts an indigo plantation and modern agriculture, so
that within a generation San Diego develops into a big prosperous
town. Then, and only then, do the Chinese come in, attracted by
what is no longer a frontier village but a civilised town.
In the same way did Asia in general enter our culture only after
we had been opened up by the West; and having been entered, we
proceeded (as in the case of Chinese cooking) to become more
thoroughly Asianised during the early colonial era than in all the
previous ages. If we bear in mind, moreover, that this era meant not
only a coming in to us of Asia (the inflooding of Asian goods, the
inpouring of Asian immigrants, and therefore the influx of Asian
influences) but also our going forth to Asia (the campaigns that took
us into every land in our neighbourhood), how can we not affirm
that the colonial or Creole era made possible for us the formation of
an Asian identity not possible before? One Mexican scholar says
that our liking for pancit and lumpia is among the things that identify
us as Orientals. Since that liking began, or was developed, during
Creole times, then that period must have been the breeder of this
identity. Unless we mean by Asian identity some vague immemorial
mysticism, and not specific nationalisms evolved and enriched by
advances in Asian technology and civilisation, then we must grant
that, before I 52 I, we had little such identity, because we had little
share in the progressive culture of Asia. After I565, however, we
come into steady contact with the great civilisations of Asia- and so
this is the time when Asian artefacts pour into our everyday culture,
like the chinelas, the tulip lamp, the carved chair and gilt mirror, the
Japanese lantern and clogs, the Chinese lion and scroll painting, the
Indian fabric, the Indon brassware, the sari-sari and the bazaar and
the panciteria.
Should we not rather begin to realise that, during this period, two
processes were going on simultaneously and side by side: one, the
process of our 'Westernisation'; the other, the process of our
'Asianising'- and that the latter process may have been the more
powerful one, since, after all, the Asians then flocking to our land,
especially the Chinese, greatly outnumbered the Westerners?
During the seventeenth century there may have been more Chinese
in Manila alone than had come to the islands in all the preceding
centuries; and how deny that their impact during the seventeenth
century must therefore have been far greater than when they were
only our occasional and contemptuous visitor? We can say, for
instance, that we learned masonry from the Chinese under Spanish
auspices, and that our blending together of those two influences was
what produced Philippine architecture, as can be seen in those old
churches where Chinese and Spanish motifs are juxtaposed in a
purely Philippine harmony. And does this not show the route, the
direction, of our culture; and expose as very illusion the claim that
we must go back to the pre-West Filipino to find the uncorrupted
Asian Filipino -when, in all probability, the post-I565 Filipino was
far more Asian than his pre- I 52 I ancestors?
We refuse to recognise this because then we would have to admit
that the colonial circumstances that we say produced this and this
actually produced that and the other. But our idea of what
happened does not seem to tally with the facts. If we say that the
coming of the West alienated us from Asia, it is easy to prove that, on
the contrary, Asia was then brought closer to us. If we say that we
became disoriented by our turning Westward, it is demonstrable
that, on the contrary, we became so oriented to Asia that Asia

became alarmed. If we say that we lost awareness ofbeing in and of
Asia, we fly in the face of the fact that never before did we range so
far and wide in Asia. And if we say that our Asian soul was
corrupted, then Asian influences no less than Western must have
done the corrupting, since both were at work on us then, and the
former with a more numerous force. Did the rise in the seventeenth
century of a pancit and lumpia culture among us vitiate our Asian-
ness or enforce it? It is doubtful that the pre-West Filipino had so
marked a continental (that is, Chinese) look as the Filipino of today;
and the only known direct transfusion, so to call it, oflndian culture
into our bloodstream occurred during the British war and resulted
in the Cainta physiognomy. When, in the seventeenth century, a
whole tribe of Ternate islanders transferred en masse to Cavite
because they had elected to become 'Filipino', they could have been
symbolising this double movement in our culture: our going forth to
Asia, and Asia's coming in to us.
This double movement was, in turn, twin to the double process of
our Westernisation and Asianising during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries; and when these vital movements and
processes had fused into one (around mid-nineteenth century) the
results were Burgos and '72, the Propaganda, the Revolution, the
First Republic, the Filipino-which must thus be reckoned as the
flower-and-fruit of a culture started (by wheel, plough, road, etc.) in
the sixteenth century.
But this is what we refuse to accept; and the refusal poses the
problem of whether the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are
'Philippine' history at all. If, however, we point to culture as history
and, to represent culture, put up emblems like, say, the adobo and
the pan de sal, these instantly force us to realise that a Philippines
without the adobo and the pan de sal would be no less unthinkable
than a Philippines without a Katipunan or the Malolos Congress.
In other words, culture is itself history. The point is one with
McLuhan's 'The medium is the message', and with Spengler's 'The
method of a science is the science itself.' If, then, the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries brought forth our adobo and pan de sal culture,
what else could the epoch have been but Philippine history? Adobo
and pan de sal are history- and no less so than the Katipunan-
because they, too, fed the process of our becoming us.
Our problem is in the process, or, rather, in history as a becoming,
for what we cannot accept is that we became Filipino any more than
we can accept that we became Asian. (If you are of Asia, then you are
Asian, full-stop.) Even if we do recognise that a double process was
in movement during the colonial era, one process tending to
Asianise us, and the other to W esternise us, we do so only to
discriminate between them, and to aver that the former produced
what may be called our pancit and lumpia culture, which can be
accepted as Philippine because it was Asian; and the other
produced our adobo and pan de sal culture, which is Creole and
therefore to be rejected as a corruption. From a practical, existential
viewpoint, either process seems as Filipino as the other, and both to
be now a single culture in which they cannot be distinguished apart,
being so interfused with each other and with everything else in the
culture, an interfusion that Spengler would call soul-formation and
that McLuhan would call metamorphosis or economic liberation. If
alien corn came as the Visayans' saviour from ancient hunger, in
how many other ways was the new culture our salvation from ruder
forms of toil, want or lifestyle, and therefore historic if only for that
reason? But our instinct, we say, is to seperate what is 'Asian' in that
culture from what is not, because one is 'truly' Philippine and the
other but a 'veneer'.
The 'instinct' is really attitude; and the attitude derives from a
view of culture and history as static. It is to assume that there is a
'timeless' Asian type, defined by certain qualities, to which we must
conform because we are Asian. But all three propositions in that
statement are highly questionable. Because you are a Catholic in a
Catholic community, does it follow that you must be a catolico
cerrado, if that is proposed as the 'true' Catholic type? For ages,
women were told that Woman was a type defined by certain
'womanly' qualities, not to conform to which would brand a woman
as 'unwomanly' and a traitress to her sex. Women's Lib has
exploded that sex superstition- but we still have to rebel against
Asian as superstition. We continue to swallow admonitions to be
'Asian' without knowing just what this Asianness consists of. What is
the true Asian type? Is it the passive Indian or the kinetic japanese?
The earnest Chinese or the careless Malay? The rice peasant or the
pastoral nomad? The sheik, the guru, the coolie? The Buddhist, the
Hindu, the Moslem, the witch-doctor? The many hermit kingdoms
in Asian culture could be used to prove a general Asian tendency
towards selfishness and misanthropy, in contrast with the outgoing
nature of the West; but is the Asian as cultural miser or navel-gazer,
the 'true' type, to which we must conform- or from which we have
been saved? Does Asian-ness consist of withdrawing into a high

regard for oneselfwhile scorning one's neighbours as barbarian? It is
an old Asian custom.
Confusion is compounded by the qualities usually cited as
'typically' Asian, which could just as well be Western- for example:
Greek fatalism, Roman coolie resignation, Celtic languor and sloth,
intense Teutonic blood and clan ties, Latin touchiness and
vendetta, British caste pride, American inscrutability (the famed
Yankee poker-face), etc. Moreover, the supposed Asian qualities
have oftener proved accidental than eternal. Until recently, a cliche
on the Chinese was that they were a culture that could never
understand or operate modern machinery. By becoming an
industrial power in a few years, the Chinese exposed the worth of
such 'truisms'. Yet historical interpretations are still based on such
'truisms' -and Philippine history would still seek its roots in those
cliches.
One reason is shame and guilt feelings on our part because of our
Christian culture, which makes us feel 'freaks' in non-Christian
Asia. As Women's Lib had made some women feel they have
become freaks, neither male nor female, so our peculiar culture, as
we often lament, makes us feel neither fish nor fowl, being neither
East nor West. But why should we feel shame or guilt over our
uniqueness instead of emphasising with bravado the destiny of our
special identity? Why want to be East, West, North or South when
we can be our singular self as culture and history have shaped us? Is
it wrong to be individual, to stand out from the herd? Who prefers
the mass-produced to the custom-built? As the English exult,
England, but for the Norman Conquest, might have been just
another of the guttural minor Saxonies, as churl or slob as any low
Teuton culture. But the Conquest, by bringing in French to
'corrupt' Anglo-Saxon stolidity, turned England into a freak in the
Saxon world, but the freak to bring forth Donne and Dickens, a
nimble empire, the tools of speed, a language ofkings. Even if there
be an Asian type we could conform to, why conform- instead of
pursuing, as the English did, a swerve in destiny? By developing as
Filipinos, and thus adding one more colour or design to the varied
Asian tapestry (as Indian, Chinese and lndon did), are we not being
truly Asian? But those who insist that we must be not only Filipino
but 'Asian' betray feelings of inadequacy. Why, is it not enough to
be just Filipino? Said James Joyce: 'This country and this people
shaped me; I shall express myself as I am.' But what we are being
told is: 'This culture and this history shaped you not; express
yourself as you are not.' Which is the Dorian Gray complex.
The attitude, to repeat, springs from a static view of culture,
which, in turn, breeds the illusion that history can be rejected at
will, as we would reject our Creole history as not Philippine, and not
affecting the Filipino. The Filipino is thus seen, like the Asian, as a
'timeless' type defined by certain persistent qualities; and this
Filipino, throughout history, never becomes but always is, which
would make us a rather godlike being.
Our consciousness that there may be certain elusive qualities
(say, a sense of fatalism, pakikisama, or hiya) that in some way
continue in us from primitive times, makes for intense drama in our
personality, and choice material for poetry. It is when this drama is
taken literally, when it is used to deny or disprove the history of our
becoming, that it becomes preposterous. We know that we can
inherit a nose from a grandfather, asthma from a grandmother, or
left-handedness from a parent; but does our having the nose, the
asthma, or the left-handedness, or all three together, mean that we
are not ourself a new person, but only still our grandfather,
grandmother, or parent? One might as well say that the persisting
use of the term horsepower proves that the machine age is still in a
horse culture! And if the existence among us of witch-doctors proves
that we have never moved away from animism, does the coming
here of Americans to be cured by those witch-doctors prove that
America has not either? Should we not rather recognise that each
person is a sort of unconscious anthology of all the epochs of man;
and that he may at times be moving simultaneously among different
epochs? A Filipino, for example, who knows Tagalog, Spanish and
English, will, with Tagalog, be mentally moving in the world of oral
tradition; with Spanish, in a visual culture; and with English, in the
electronic era. And the fact that he may, in Tagalog, still cherish a
faith in amulets should not reflect on his standing as a citizen of the
contemporary world, if he be skilled in its tools and informed in its
lore, since a person has the right to be judged by the best in him.
That millions of Englishmen were wallowing in ignorance in
Shakespeare's time in no way alters the fact that, with Shakespeare,
though he was only one man, England reached a summit of culture,
and that English culture then must be judged by that summit. But
we judge differently, in reverse, preferring to measure Philippine
culture not by the highest it has reached but by the lowest. Thus can
we argue that a brilliant period of cultural achievement like, say,
the Propaganda Era did not mark a high point in our culture,
because the masses of the time were not all intellectuals- when only
ferment and vivacity in the masses can explain the rise of the
Ilustrado. You get no fountain where there is no water pressure; and
Shakespeare was not an isolated miracle but the expression of a
people who may have seemed raw at the time, but were actually
ripe for their hour of greatness.
The New Illiteracy and its vibrant 'pop' culture (in many ways so
like our old folk culture, even down to guitar and beads) may yet
teach us to be less uptight about our Creole past. We may even learn
to appreciate it enough to recognise as crucial and not reject as
irrelevant the media explosion that was its genesis.
Rejected or not, recognised or not, the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries epoch, meaning turning-point, in our history because then
was started the process of the making of the Filipino-with his
Westernising, if you like, but also with his Asianising; and the fusion
of the two movements is now too established for us to say which one
was basic and which superficial. Enough that both went into the
making of the Filipino, and so effectively that we wear our Asian
ruefulness with a difference. 'Historic is that which is, or has been,
effective.' Spengler selects that quotation to point up what may be
called his view of history as existentialist, if by that we mean the
difference he stresses between idea and fact, between 'truths' and
lived experience.
If you tell the Pinoy-on-the-street that adobo and pan de sal are but
a thin veneer ofW esternisation, the removal of which will reveal the
'true' Filipino (and that could be a 'correct' idea, a 'truth'), the
Pinoy may retort that, as far as he is concerned, adobo and pan de sal
are as Filipino as his very own guts; and indeed one could travel
the world and nowhere find -no, not even in Spain or Mexico-
anything quite like Philippine adobo and pan de sal (which are facts,
or lived experience, and still quite effective.) Culture as history
being existentialist, its dictum on this would probably be that the
epoch that evolved the adobo and pan de sal culture was Philippine
history in excelsis, it being a history that, to this minute, affects every
Filipino in his everyday living; and that those who would slight or
skip that history are, so to say, trying to edit from Philippine life the
adobo and the pan de sal.
13 The Quest for Self in Modern
Korean Poetry
Peter Hacksoo Lee
Modern Korean poetry has matured in a most turbulent setting:

Japanese Occupation (rg10-45), collapse of the independent
movement (rgrg), the Second World War, the liberation (I945),
the Korean War (I950-3), the revolutions (Ig6o, Ig6I). Few
peoples have experienced so many political and spiritual crises in a
span of fifty years. But what is important is that these crises were
occasions for the emergence of a new generation with a new voice.
Each time, new writers subjected the ruling literary fashions to a
fresh valuation. The cultural and moral crises not only fostered the
experimental movements- a rapid succession ofliterary movements
and ideas brought some confusion- but effected the modernisation
of the language and the liberalisation of techniques.!
The advent in Korea of poetry that can be considered essentially

modern in spirit was preceded by a transitional period, the period of
songs and new poetry during the last decade of the nineteenth and
the first decade of the present century. The opening of ports in I876
prompted the rise of songs (ch' angga) to warn the people of the
danger of foreigners and to emphasise the need for enlightenment
and reform. In I 888 the first Sunday school taught Christian
hymns, and from I go6 music became a part of the elementary
school curriculum. With the Secondjapanese-Korean Convention
of I905, which made Korea japan's protectorate, the vague fear of
others turned into the identification of enemies. And contemporary
newspapers carried a large number of such songs, most of them
denouncing corruption in the government, and stressing the
urgency of independence, enlightenment and patriotic fervour.
Song writers still used such traditional verse forms as the sijo and
kasa, or the song form, whose predominant pattern was seven, five
syllables, influenced by the japanese songs (shOka) so popular there

from 1869. They were groping for a new verse form but did not
successfully break away from the limitations of the traditional
prosody, the alternation of fours and threes, and the use of
traditional forms of speech and allusions. 2
The 'new poetry' movement is usually traced back to the
publication of'From the Sea to Children' ( 1908) by Ch'oe Nam-son
( 1890-1957). At the age of thirteen, Ch'oe published editorials in
the leading news papers of the day, and between 1904 and 1910
went to japan three times for short sojourns. In November 1908 he
published the first cultural magazine, Sonyon (Children), to launch a
new literary movement, and to educate the mass in the new
civilisation of the West. An avid reader of geography and history of
Korea and the world, Ch'oe wrote about Peter the Great, Niagara
Falls, the North Pole, the Seoul-Pusan railway, and the city of
Seoul. The first and sixth stanzas of'From the Sea to Children' go:
Splash, splash, slap, roll.
The sea-a soaring mountain-
Lashes and crushes mighty cliffs of rock.
These flimsy things, what are they to me?
'Know ye my power?' The sea lashes
Threateningly, it breaks, crushes.
Splash, splash, slap, rumble, boom.
Splash, splash, slap, roll.
I scorn the world's madness,
The overweening men who seek to use me.
My love (brave children)- that is given
Only to those who come to me with love.
Come, children, let me kiss you and embrace you.
Splash, splash, slap, rumble, boom.
The first and last lines of each seven-line stanza consist of nine
onomatopoeia (four in line 1 and five in line 7). The speaker is the
sea, which addresses children and the reader, future hopes of a new
generation. As the title of the journal and the poem suggest, 'From
the Sea to Children' celebrates the power of the young, beacons in
the darkness, who will carry out a necessary social and literary
revolution. The diction is clean and masculine, and its rhythm and
prosody quite new. 3 The poem, however, was inspired by Byron's
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto 4, cLxxxi-cLxxxiv. 4
The Q_uest for Self in Modern Korean Poetry 193
His dominant images in this and other poems are the sea and the
mountain. To a peninsula like Korea, the sea is a bridge between
nations, an outpost for the new civilisation from the West. Its
majesty, creativity and power are what the youth of Korea needs in
their task of forging a modern expression approximating simple,
colloquial language and a modern civilisation. The mountain, on
the other hand, represents Ch'oe's historical, ideological and
spiritual concerns. He fondly sang of famous mountains such as Mt
T'aebeak, which is associated with Korea's foundation myth, and
the Diamond Mountains, known for their magnificent, scenic
beauty. Soaring high, they represent defiance, integrity, aspiration
and clear purpose. Also used as a symbol of defence against foreign
incursions, it soon came to be associated with Korea, the earth, from
which he and others like him can draw spiritual sustenance.
Ch'oe experimented with a variety offorms- songs, 'new poetry',
free verse and the traditional sijo. But like earlier song writers, his
primary concerns were the introduction ofWestern civilisation, the
enlightenment of people, and the arousing of national
consciousness. From the quarrel with others he made rhetoric-
slogan, propaganda, pamphlet. He had a limited sensibility and
was not aware of poetry as art. He seldom spoke in his own voice.
Contemporary political and social realities were overwhelming,
and he was intent on pointing out the fact that the time was out of
joint. He witnessed the death of old structures, but could not erect
an edifice of form to replace them. 5
Several months before the unsuccessful and costly movement for
Korean independence came a powerful Western influence on
Korean poetry in the form of French Symbolism. 6 (Poe reached
Korea only in 1922 with the partial translation of'The Raven' and
the full version of 'To Helen'.) 7 In late 1918 the Western Literary
Weekry ( T' aeso mutrye sinbo) published translations fl·om Verlaine,
Gourmont and Fyodor Sologub, followed by the description of the
French and Western literary scene. Citing Verlaine, Mallarme and
Gustave Kahn's Symbolistes et Decadents (Paris, 1902), Kim Ok
(1895-?), the principal translator, introduced the tenets of
symbolism, the art of indirection and, magical suggestiveness. He
then calls in Mallarme, 'To name an object is to suppress three-
fourths of the delight of the poem which is derived from the pleasure
of divining little by little: to suggest it, that is the dream' (Nommer
un object, c' est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poeme
qui est faite du bonheur de diviner peu a peu: le suggerer, voila le
reve) 8 and V erlaine, 'Car nous voulons la Nuance encore,/Pas la

Couleur, rien que la nuance!' ('Art Poetique') ('nuance' translated
as 'rhythm' or 'melody' and 'Rime' as 'rhythm' but later corrected
to rhyme).
To Kim Ok, Rimbaud's 'Les Voyelles' is the supreme example of
musical verse in the symbolist technique, and a line from Baudelaire
'Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent'
('Correspondances'), the ultimate of modern poetry, but he fails to
see the correspondences between the material world and spiritual
realities and those between the different human senses. He then
concludes that vers libre is the supreme creation of the symbolist,
defining it as 'the music oflanguage to express the poet's inner life',
misunderstanding Verlaine's 'le vers impair'. He ignores
Baudelaire's aspiration toward mysticism, 'an almost Wordswor-
thian quest for "spots of time"', according to Wellek, 9 or art as
another cosmos which transforms and humanises nature, a totally
alien view to the East Asian sensibility.
Kim also expressed his own view of translation as art and
something of his poetics. Art, Kim says, is a product of the spirit; a
work of art is an expression of the harmony between body and soul.
As a people have a unique language, so does the individual. As his
breathing and pulse have short and long beats, so does each poet his
unique diction, style and rhythm. Such individual characteristics-
inner elements- demand a harmonious and musical form, which
Kim sought in a fixed form or in the characteristic rhythms of the
Korean language. He adumbrates the concept of the independence
and autonomy of the poet as conscious artist and craftsman, as he
says elsewhere that poetry captures a moment of experience in a
harmonious whole. Later he adds that the poet must find the
adequate medium to express the Korean sensibility, probably a
counterpart to the emphasis on the intellect in creation advocated,
for example, by Poe, Baudelaire and Mallarme. The translators like
Kim Ok and others active in the late I910S and early I920s reacted
against sentimentality, rhetoric, description, didacticism and poli-
tical and public themes ('Prends l'Cloquence et tords-lui son cou')
and attempted to mingle music and image ('De la musique avant
toute chose', 'De la musique encore et toujours') to create strange
and sad beauty in their works.
Kim's absorption with symbolism culminated in March I 92 I
with the publication of the Dance rif Anguish ( Onoe iii mudo), the first
volume of translations from Western poetry. It introduced Verlaine
The Quest for Self in Modern Korean Poetry I 95
(2I poems), Gourmont (w), Samain (8), Baudelaire (7), Yeats (6),
and others, a total of eighty-five. Like Ueda Bin's Sound qfthe Tide
(Kaichoon, I905) and Nagai Kafu's Corals (Sangoshu, I9I3), the
book was at once acclaimed as beautiful translations in the
language, and became the favourite reading of aspiring poets till the
I940s. Translating from the Japanese, English, French and Es-
peranto (e.g. Verlaine's 'Chanson d'automne'), Kim produced a
mellifluous, soft and dreamy language, often using the colloquial
honorific verbal endings. Exoticism, the strange and sad beauty,
boredom, anguish- all this appealed to the poets who sought
models to express their frustration, emptiness and despair after the
collapse of the I9I9 independence movement.
Two years later, Kim published the Songs qfa Jellyfish (Haep'ari ui
norae, June I923), the first volume of new verse by a single poet.
Comprising eighty-three pieces, most of which were written in I922
and I923, the book is divided into such sections as Songs of Dream,
Songs of a Jellyfish, Wandering, The Sorrow of Sphinx, The Sea of
Hwangp'o, The Crescent Moon Isle, The Fallen Tears, The Rose of
Twilight and The Girl of the North. Individual poems also indicate
the general mood and tone of the collection: 'Dream', 'Lost Spring',
'MySorrow' 'Solitude' 'Sigh' 'HowSad" 'Tears; 'Death' 'Loss'
'Wandering',' 'Homesickness'.
' . ' goes: 'Sweeping
' 'The Flute' ' ' away'
the empty field,/The Wind fells the leaves before the falL/Chased by
that wind,/My youth abandoned my hope and went away.' Just as
the predominant mood of the Dance qf Anguish is autumn, so also in
the Songs qf a Jellyfish we find autumnal sorrow: a homesick
wanderer starting out for an aimless journey in search of a lost
spring, 'blue blue May' ('My Sorrow'), a home, or a lost country.
The lost youth blowing an old tune sadly on the pipe is a fit
metaphor of the state of mind of the poets of the I920S. Kim's strong
sense ofform (he used the seven, five pattern (7[3,4], 7[3,4], 7[3,4],
and 5), frequent use of metaphors and personifications, and
emphasis on musicality (his choice of words dictated by aural
values) -all this was the heritage ofSymbolism and an advance he
brought to the development of modern Korean poetry. 10
Kim Ok was also active in introducing Tagore. 11 Known to
China and Japan from about I9I4, and to Korea from I9I6,
translations of Gitanjali (93), The Gardener (24), 'The Astronomer'
from The Crescent Moon, and 'The Song of the Defeated' from Fruit-
Gathering, this last especially given to Korean students in Tokyo
when they went to Yokohama to see off Tagore (I I July I9I6),
appeared in November I9I 7· Then came the translation of Sadhana

in I920 by Han Yong-un (I879-I944) and the play, The Post Office,
and Gitanjali I-I8. Finally, the complete translation ofGitanjali was
brought out by Kim Ok in I923, followed by that of The Crescent
Moon and The Gardener in I924.l 2
Known mainly as the prophet of a suffering people under
Japanese colonialism, and the voice of freedom and indepen-
dence, 13 Tagore's works were read by Koreans for their ideas of
sacrifice of the self for the country as the greatest service, and poetry
as the vital quality of life. The subject matter, diction, tone and
poetic devices, such as metaphor and symbol, in his works inspired a
number of poets, for example, Yi Kwang-su, Kim Sowol (I903-34),
and Han Yong-un, who wrote a poem, 'Upon Reading Tagore's
The Gardener' ( The Silence of Love, 7I) .
Of these the last two deserve special consideration for their
achievement. Han Y ong-un, one of the great poets of modern
Korea, was a man ofmany gifts. 14 At the age of fifteen (I894), he
took part in the Tonghak [Eastern Learning] rebellion, whose
rallying cry was to expel foreigners, to preserve native ways and
beliefs, and to liberate the mass from oppression, but which was
ended by the military intervention of japan and China. Han then
fled to a mountain hermitage and studied Buddhism. In I908 he
went to japan to observe the modernisation process of the Buddhist
church there. In his essay, 'On the Revival of Korean Buddhism'
(I909) he preached that Buddhist reform could not be brought
about without the regeneration of man. He rejected the traditional
ills of Korean Buddhism and strove to revive the faith, in which he
saw the spiritual foundation of the salvation of Korean society. In
I910 when Japan annexed Korea, Han went to Vladivostok and
founded, with others, a military school to train a revolutionary
army in Manchuria. He also fought against the japanese infiltration
of the Korean church, and in I 9 I 3 published a digest of Buddhist
doctrine in the vernacular for the people. At the time of the I 9 I 9
independence movement, he helped draft the 'Declaration of
Independence' and signed the document as one of the thirty-three
patriots. In prison he wrote another essay, in which he said that the
desire for freedom and independence is an instinct to every man,
that aggression will eventually fail, that Korean independence is
vital to the preservation of peace in East Asia, and he predicted that
ifj a pan's military aggression continued, it would eventually collide
with the United States and China. In I926 he published The Silence
The Quest for Self in Modern Korean Poetry 197
of Love (Nim ui ch'immuk), comprising eighty-eight meditative

poems. Nim is a complex word in Korean. In love poetry it is the
beloved, in allegorical poetry, the king, and in religious verse, god.
In Han's poetry, nim is the object of our love, be it the nation, life,
the Buddha or enlightenment. His poems are built upon the
dialectic of engagement and withdrawal, motion and stillness,
action and non-action, life and death, nirvana and samsara, en-
lightenment and illusion. 'The Foreword' begins:
The beloved is not the only love, What is dear is the beloved. If
mankind is Sakyamuni's beloved, philosophy is Kant's. If the
beloved of the rose is spring, the beloved ofMazzini is Italy. The
beloved is loved by me, and the beloved loves me.
'The Silence of Love' begins:
My love is gone. Ah, the beloved that I love is gone. Breaking the
blue-green of the mountain, down a little path leading to the
forest ofmaples, she is gone, tearing herself away from me. Our
old vow solid as yellow golden flowers has turned into cold dust,
and is blown away by the wind of sigh.
The immaterial (fil'!)la) is the material (rilpa), and vice versa.

Emptiness (funyatii) is not nothingness, but is not different from the
material which constitutes the world. To attain this view is to attain
wisdom (prajnii). The absent lover is addressed as the lover present.
His nim is the boundless nim, and it is with him, who is truly non-
existent but mysteriously existent, the state which is permanent and
existent, that the speaker seeks reunion. Let us look at another
poem, 'I Don't Know':
Whose footstep is that paulownia leaf that falls silently in the

windless air, drawing a perpendicular?
Whose face is that piece of blue sky peeping through the black
clouds, chased by the west wind after a dreary rain?
Whose breath is that unnamable fragrance, born amid the green

moss in the flowerless deep forest and trailing over the ancient
tower?
Whose song is that winding stream gushing from an unknown

source and breaking against the rocks?
Whose poem is that twilight that adorns the falling day, treading
over the boundless sea with lotus feet and caressing the vast sky
with jade hands?
The ember becomes oil again.
Ah, for whose night does this feeble lantern keep vigil, the
unquenchable flame in my heart?
All phenomena are relative (fiinya). 'Footstep', 'face', 'breath',

'song' and 'poem' are the basic elements of the poet's life. The
beloved who experienced this relativity has experienced fiinya as
fiinya. He has glimpsed the unsurpassed wisdom, perfect
enlightenment, of the Buddha, the true form (tathata) of fiinya.
Han's poems seem to make more sense when we see the true subject
ofhis poems as the way of mystic experience, a witness to the truth.
'The feeble lantern' and 'the unquenchable flame' may also be the
lamp that awaits the rebirth of the fatherland, or that burns brightly
in his consciousness upon attaining the reality ofrelativity (fiinya).
'The ember becomes oil again' can connote the sorrow of loss of
country, his longing and hope for its return, his timeless waiting, or
his firm purpose for his country. Such a reading is reinforced by
Han's criticism of The Gardener as having neglected society, history
or revolution. He chided Tagore by saying, 'Do not weave a net
around the grave with a golden song: plant instead a bloody
standard' ('Upon Reading Tagore's The Gardener').
Kim Sowol is another poet who explores to the full the multiple
meanings of the word nim and others of the same dimension. Under
the tutelage of Kim Ok, he became a poet of nature and folk
tradition, and the effectiveness of his works depends on the
simplicity, directness and intensity of the phrasing. His vitality and
sensitiveness rose to the fullness of poetry in 'Incantation' (Ch'ohon),
which makes an impassioned appeal to the soul of his lady to return.
0 name broken piecemeal,

strewn in the empty void.
Nameless name, deaf and dumb,
that suffers me to die as I call it.
The Q.uestfor Self in Modern Korean Poetry 199
The last word carved in my heart

was never spoken in the end.
0 you that I love,
0 you that I love.
Crimson sun hangs on the west peak,
the deer bell and call sadly.
There on the sheer steep peak
I call, call your empty name.
Until sorrow chokes me and unmans me,
still I will call your name.
My voice goes aslant rejected,
lost between heaven and earth.
Were I to become a stone,
I would die calling your name.
0 you that I love,
0 you that I love.
Literally, the title reads, 'The Summons of the Soul', an allusion
to the poem of the same title, written some time in the second half of
the third century B.c., in the Ch'u Tz'u, The Songs of the South. The
'Name broken piecemeal', 'Nameless name,' and 'You that I love'
repeated four times in stanzas 2 and 5, easily lend themselves to
more than one reading. Whether he assumed the anonymity of a
folk song writer or the individuality of the lyric persona in more
personal pieces, Kim Sowol never lost sight of the function of the
poet in an enslaved society: the preservation and extension of the
hidden possibilities of the language.
Poetry of resistance voicing defiant sorrow over the ruined land
and speaking with power and conviction but without violence and
hatred, occupies a place in history. Yi Sang-hwa (190o-43), Shim
Hun (1904-37), Yi Yuksa (1905-44), and Yun Tong-ju (1917-45)
showed how to express in poetry their encounter with history,
expand the poet's consciousness and establish the authority of the
poet. The speaker in Yi Sang-hwa's 'Does Spring Come to Stolen
Fields?' ( 1926) wishes to return to the earth as a child would to his
mother. But mother and land, or land as mother, are unattainable:
The land is no longer our own.

Does spring come just the same
to the stolen fields?

On the narrow path between the rice fields
where blue sky and green fields meet and touch,
winds whisper to me, urging me forward.
A lark trills in the clouds
like a young girl singing behind the hedge.
0 ripening barley fields, your long hair
is heavy after the night's rain.
Lightheaded, I walk
lightly, shrugging my shoulders, almost
dancing to music the fields are humming-
the field where violets grow, the field
where once I watched a girl planting rice, her hair
blue-black and shining-
I want
a scythe in my hands, I want
to stamp on this soil, soft as a plump breast,
I want to be working the earth and streaming with sweat.
What am I looking for? Soul,

my blind soul, endlessly darting
like children at play by the river,
answer me: where am I going?
Filled with the odour of grass, compounded
of green laughter and green sorrow,
I walk all day, lamely, as if possessed
by the spring devil:
for these are stolen fields, and our spring is stolen.
Shim Hun is as much a novelist and film critic as a poet. His novel
Evergreen (1935) deals with the V Narod ('to the people') movement
active in the mid-1930s, whose objective was to send out the
educated to the country to help and encourage the exploited
farmers. His 'When That Day Comes' reveals his aspiration for
independence in an impassioned language.
When That Day Comes
When that day comes

Mt Samgak will rise and dance,
the waters of Han will rise up.
The Questfor Self in Modern Korean Poetry 201
If that day comes before I perish,

I will soar like a crow at night
and pound the Chongno bell with my head.
The bones of my skull
will scatter, but I shall die in joy.
When that day comes at last

I'll roll and leap and shout on the boulevard
and if joy still stifles within my breast
I'll take a knife
and skin my body and make

a magical drum and march with it
in the vanguard. 0 procession!
Let me once hear that thundering shout,
my eyes can close then.
Couched in the adynata, 15 used in the past as a trope and appearing

in proverbs, vows, and oracles in love, friendship, and praise poetry,
here it is an affirmation of the speaker's unshakable beliefin the day
of liberation. The Chongno bell was struck on festival days in the
past. The speaker looks forward to the day when the bell will
resound and 'the thundering shout' of his people will celebrate the
restoration. My late friend Maurice Bowra commented:
He sets his vision in familiar surroundings with a Korean

mountain and a Korean river and the Chongno-bell in the main
square at Seoul. In claiming that nature will share his joy and rise
and dance with him he uses a very ancient fancy which has
parallels in the Psalms ofDavid, and in an agreeable variation on
'the pathetic fallacy' embodies the notion that on high occasions
the physical surroundings of men cannot fail to share their
delight. But Shim Hun uses it for his own purpose. Since what he
foresees is the liberation of Korea, the actual land will be freed
with its inhabitants, and he shapes this into an image which all his
countrymen, whatever their class or background, will under-
stand. He finds the prospect so wildly exhilarating that he will
lose himself in delight, and this he figures as a joy so violent that
he will burst the confines of his body. He means something that
we all know, that there are rapturous moments which are too
much for us, and we feel that we are annihilated by them. Shim
Hun picks up this idea and puts it into various shapes, all of which
have a certain humorous exaggeration without abating any of
their hints of incredible delight. He speaks very much for himself,
but what inspires him is the perfectly simple prospect of a long-
awaited deliverance from an implacable tyranny. 16
Yi Yuksa was the fourteenth generation descendant ofYi Hwang

( 1501-71), the great N eo-Confucianist whose arcane philosophy on
the li and ch'i influenced Tokugawa thinkers. Yi Yuksa was
imprisoned seventeen times and perished in a Peking prison. Let us
look at his 'The Wide Plain':
On distant days
When heaven first opened,
Somewhere a cock must have crowed.
No mountain ranges
Rushing out to the longed sea
Could have dared invade this land.
While busy seasons blow and fade

With endless time,
A great river first opened the way.
Now snow falls,

The fragrance of plum blossoms is far,
I'll sow the seeds of my sad song here.
When a superman comes

On a white horse after myriad years,
Let him sing aloud my song in the wide plain.
The poem opens with a story of the foundation, then goes on to deal
with the beginning of Korean history, stressing the inviolability of
the land, the symbol of mountains functioning more or less like that
in Ch'oe Nam-son's verse mentioned earlier. The continuity of
Korean history is the subject of the third stanza, with alternations of
the seasons and the river making the way. 'Now' and 'here' localise
the time and place: it is modern Korea where the present speaker
utters his metaphorical reconstruct, a verbal artifact, a poem. The
time is the winter of discontent and trials, the dark period of
Japanese rule. The plum blossoms are generally a symbol of

integrity, for they, as in China, are the first to blossom before the
winter is over. The speaker sows the seeds of song in winter, in the
belief that spring is not far behind, the day ofliberation. The images
of 'a cock' and 'the plum blossoms' capture the elegance and grace
of classical East Asian poetry, while 'a superman on a white horse'
unifies the past and the present, East Asia and the West. Can
anyone, like the superman, 'sing aloud'? Who is 'the superman', and
what is his relationship to the speaker? It is perhaps the same as that
between the lyric persona and 'the traveller' in another of his poems,
'Deep-Purple Grapes':
The traveller I long for would come then,

Wrapping his wayworn body with a blue robe.
If only I could share those grapes with him,

I don't care if the dew wets my hand. (sts. 3-4)
The speaker is a prophet of the future. It does not matter if it is a

myriad of years, a hundred years, or a moment; and it is in some
such terms that the poem is constructedY
The first truly successful poet of modern Korea whose influence is
felt even today is Chong Chi-yang (born I903), the landmark of the
generation of the I 930s. Chong graduated from Doshisha U niver-
sity in English literature with a thesis on Blake and introduced Blake
('To Spring' and 'To the Evening Star') and Whitman ('Whispers
of Heavenly Death' -only the section with the same title
translated-, 'Tears' and others; Whitman reached Korea in I 920).
His was a poetry of sensuous beauty, marked by flawless diction and
freshness of imagery. He had a talent for rendering particulars
exactly- hard, clear and Imagistic. Some of his best poems depend
for effect on the skilful use of onomatopoeic expressions, which, if
translated, lost their original charm and force. The first collection of
his poems ( 1935) was followed by The White Deer Lake (Paengnoktam,
1941 ). Here the Korean language has met its master and can reveal
its hidden potentialities to the fullest. Every word is precisely right,
and every poem reveals a world which the reader has never known,
or even sensed, before. Here the poet, singing of the beauty and
mystery of hills and waters, leads the reader to the harmonious
world of nature.
The sky rolls in the bue ofWhite Deer Lake. Not even a crayfish
stirs.
A cow skirted around my feet disabled with fatigue. Even a wisp
of
chased cloud dims the lake. The lake on whose mirror I floated
day long
is lonesome. Waking and sleeping, I forgot even my
prayers. (section g)
The lake, like Thoreau's pond in Walden (a romantic naturalist like

Thoreau is, however, always haunted by moral ambiguities in
nature), is a symbol of stillness and purity. The speaker describes 'a
condition of the spirit where the self is completely dissolved in the
lucid apprehension of nature' .18 The self and nature reflect each
other, waking and sleeping become one. The collection represents a
symbolic progress of the spirit to the condition oflucidity, the fusion
of man and nature, as in the mountain poetry of Hsieh Ling-yun
(385-433), Sun Ch'o (c. 310-g7), and Han-shan (Cold Mountain).
As the imagery of crags, boulders, precipices, streams and torrents
dramatises the self in the wilderness of the mountain and of the
mind, especially the isolation in its quest for a transcendent vision in
Chinese poetry, so do Chong's symbols, drawn from nature, stand
for the unity and identity of the natura naturans and natura naturata.
The arduous ascent to the summit ofMount Halla, where the White
Deer Lake sits, also stands for the stages of spiritual pilgrimage in
archetypal themes of journey, quest and initiation, as does Cold
Mountain in Han-shan, being at once his name, place of retreat,
and a symbol of Buddhist austerities and final illumination.
I have discussed some highlights and landmarks in the develop-
ment of modern Korean poetry to give some sense of order to a
welter of material. I have also touched on the impact of Western
poetry on poets, but understood the term 'influence' as a problem in
relationships, 'an intra-cultural significance, articulating itself in the
historical, social, psychological, and aesthetic contexts of a literary
work' .19 Our subject demands that we base our discussion on the
history of modern Korea, the tempers of the age, the status of the
poet in society, and the relationships between 'an informing spirit'
and the finished work. When Korea embarked on the modernis-
ation of language and the creation of a new poetry adequate to
contain the complexities of experience, it broke completely with the
past. The repudiation of tradition and convention forced poets to
look not to the past but beyond the horizon. They sometimes
fostered in the backward literary world European literary move-
ments which were not contemporary ones but those of the previous
century. Having rejected their ancestral masters, poets were forced
to resurrect past European movements and theories in order to find
conventions which would give coherence and meaning to their
otherwise confused experience and practices. Also, because new
poetry was doomed to be the poetry of an exploited people growing
in the shadow of colonialism, poets were forced to become invisible,
especially after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937,
hiding their personalities and convictions behind their works of art.
The only territory left for them to explore was the domain of pure
poetry. In the midst of spiritual and cultural crises, poets still
preserved the language, which embodies and manifests Korean
tradition and culture.
Earlier song writers and poets, like Ch'oe Nam-son, couched
their public themes in traditional or hybrid verse forms. Orators in
poets' clothing, they were intent on action, but could not convert
action into thought, or make a good poem out of the situation. Poets
writing in the 1920s, influenced by romanticism and the fin de siecle
decadence, were connoisseurs of darkness, and their domain was the
night of doubt and sorrow; hence the recurrence of dream, death,
night, bedroom or tomb. They were short of means. The poet like
Chu Yo-han (born 1900), however, who wrote the 'first romantic
lyric', 'Playing with Fire' (1919), sought the liberation and
expansion of the self, and yearned for unrealised possibilities oflife.
Later, he turned to folk and children's songs, 'poetry that goes to the
people', as he said, the bright and sound rather than the dark and
sickly. He condemned both exclusive nationalism and blind
imitation, and strove to fashion a language that will create
resonance in the reader, one that will contain a dynamic urge for
life. His emphasis on the dignity of the self and the autonomy of the
poet is carried forward by the next generation.
The importation of Symbolism in itselfhas little meaning. Most
Symbolist techniques, such as the communication of mood, the art
of indirection, the creation of the symbol, the fusion of music and
image, were qualities of the traditional East Asian and Korean
poetry. What it helped advance were the creation of new forms, a
poem as an intimate experience of the self- the conscious artist-
rather than a rearrangement of topoi, 20 and the emphasis on the
intellect in poetic creation. Advocates of Symbolism, such as Kim
Ok and his pupil Kim Sowol, however, reverted to their native

tradition for greater reverberations in their works. A monk-poet,
Han Yong-un, turned to Buddhism and sang of the unity of the
phenomenal world, and the ultimate truth, and of the intuitive
wisdom that all beings are participants of the ultimate Emptiness.
Likewise, Chong Chi-yong, a student of English poetry and a
convert to Catholicism, in his mature poetry turned to his own
tradition to attain the harmony between man and nature. He
therefore placed himself in the great tradition of East Asian nature
poetry, written in the first person singular, that allows the claims of
the self. It is in the solitude of nature that man can best contemplate
the- relationship between man and nature, self and world. Again,
poets of resistance who won poetic victories with loss ofblood (many
perished in prison) depicted the spiritual landscape drawn on
nature imagery, a veiled expression of nostalgia for the stolen
country. All these major poets perfected the art of being themselves,
a Korean voice issuing from Korean themes and the Korean soil.
Chong, a student of Blake and Whitman, did not have to go to
England and America to find his voice. Contrarily, poets like Kim
Ki-rim (born I909), who introduced Eliot, Auden and Spender,
were intimidated by the West. 21 His The Weather Chart (Kisangdo,
I936) and The Sun's Ways (Taeyang ui p'ungsok, I939), imitations of
The Waste Land, were failures. He brought poetry to the city and
deliberately adopted a kind oflow style, but his preoccupation with
his own technique, his cosmopolitan pose, and contempt for the
lowbrows made his works irrelevant then as they are now. Indeed,
major contemporary poets are still seeking matter and manner in
their cultural heritage, drawing upon the undying cyclical patterns
of nature.
Pound's 'Make it new' is an adaptation of Confucius's 'to
reanimate the Old and gain knowledge of the New' (Analects, n, I I).
The Master went on to say that such a way is 'fit to be a teacher'.
Renovation is innovation, and our poets never lost sight of
examining the immediacy of 'now', and reanimating the Old to
gain knowledge of the New. In addition to their contributions to the
creation of a new literary language as heirs of the Korean literary
tradition and the liberation of the self, they also 'illuminated the
problems of the human conscience in our time'. 22
Pak Tu-jin's poem, 'April', from his seventh collection, High
Mountain Plant (Kosan singmul, 1973), demonstrates the poet's ability
to illuminate the Korean realities of today.
Even if you're a dagger pointed at me,

A cup of poison to be drained,
I must embrace you.
I'll open the burning heart to huddle you,
Digest you till my stomach turns,
And walk to the heaven at the earth's end.
One sun one moon
Inextinguishable
The timeless flow of water unending
Till my soles hardened into paws,
This naked body will endure your lashes
Till flowers bloom in profusion.
Unlike Odysseus, who disguised himself as No Man to save himself

(Oqysseus, IX), the speaker's real world is the place of his origins,
where he examines his spiritual plight as it reflects that of every
thinking Korean caught up in the reality of the time. His strong
moral passions, the nobility of the mind, is revealed in the interior
landscape, and his total awareness fully communicates the measure
of his faith and belief. Unlike in Eliot and Tate, for example, April is
not the season of despair: there is a hope of regeneration, spiritual
rebirth, and his images are valid for contemporary Korea to
illuminate it. Flowers will blossom again in the poet and in us, when
we have achieved a victory over suffering and sacrifice. The poet's
quest continues, a quest for the meaning in life.lt may be a long and
dark search, but Pak's voice of conscience has a civilising power in a
barbaric world, which frustrates the cry of the self.
Notes
1. Here I have plagiarised from my Flowers of Fire (Honolulu: University Press of

Hawaii, 1974), p. xiii.
2. I have consulted the following: Chong Han-mo, Han'guk hyondae simunhaksa
(History of Modern Korean Poetry), (Seoul: Ilchisa, 1974), pp. 78-151; Kim
Yun-shik, Han'guk hyondae siron pip' an (Criticism on Modern Korean Poetics),
(Seoul: llchisa, 1975), pp. 162--87.
3· Chong Han-mo, op. cit., pp. 152-209.
4· Samuel C. Chew, ed. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (New York: The Odyssey Press,
1936), pp. 202-3.
5· Chong, op. cit., pp. 23o--42.
6. Ibid. p. 243 ff.
7· Kim Yong-Jik, Han'guk lryondaesiyon'gu (Studies in Modern Korean Poetry)
(Seoul: Ilchisa, 1974), pp. 157-go; Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism:
The Age of Transition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 152--63.
8. Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 869 (from 'Reponses a des
enquetes sur !'evolution litteraire').
9· A History of Modern Criticism: The Late Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1965), pp. 435, 437, 441.
10. Chong, op. cit., pp. 339-93·
11. Ibid., pp. 394-400; Kim Yong-jik, pp. 91-156.
12. I have consulted Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore (London:
Macmillan, 1939).
13. Kuo Mo-jo ( 1892- ) read some of his poems in September 1914 in japan for
which see julia C. Lin, Modern Chinese Poetry (Seattle: University of Washin-
gton Press, 1972), p. 202; Hsii Chih-mo (1895-1931), the founder of the
Crescent Moon Society, compared him to 'a sun over Mount T'ai'.
14. Kim Hak-tong, Han'guk kundae siinyon'gu (Studies in Modern Korean Poets),
(Seoul: Ilchogak, 1974), pp. 47-85; Song Uk, Nim ui ch'immuk-chOnp'yon haesol
(The Silence of Love: Complete Annotations), (Seoul: K wahaksa, 1974); Kim
Yun-shik, op. cit., pp. 2o--31.
15. at!Jnata-a Greek rhetorical term meaning 'impossibility'.
16. Poetry and Politics Igcx>-Ig6o (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966),
PP· 92-3.
17. Kim Yun-shik, op. cit., pp. 125--6; Kim Yong-jik, op. cit., pp. 369-88; Kim
Chong-gil, Chinsil kwa ono (Truth and Language), (Seoul: Ilchisa, 1974),
PP· IOQ--10.
18. U-chang Kim, 'Sorrow and Stillness: A View of Modern Korean Poetry',
Literature East and West, XIII (June 1969), p. 154·
19. lhab H. Hassan, 'The Problem oflnftuence in Literary History: Notes towards
a Definition', Journal of Aesthetics and-Art Criticism, XIV (1955), pp. 66--76; see
also Claudio Guillen, Literature as System (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1971), pp. 17--68.
20. topoi- a Greek rhetorical term (plural) meaning 'topics'.
21. Kim Jong Gil, 'T. S. Eliot's Influence on Modern Korean Poetry', Literature
East and West, xm (December 1g6g), pp. 359-76; Kim Yong-jik, pp. 263-87.
22. Harry Levin, Refractions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 295·
14 Tradition Overturned: A Modern
Literature in Sri Lanka
Ediriwira R. Sarachchandra
The modern Sinhala literature, which appeared at the beginning of

the twentieth century, is everything that the classical Sinhala
literature is not. The attitudes of the writers have changed radically,
the themes are different (they even touch on the tabooed), a
materialistic outlook takes the place of the self-negating, ascetic
philosophy of the older writers, and the only continuity one can
recognise is in the language.
Classical Sinhala literature, as the theory runs, goes back to the
lyrics scribbled on the 'mirror wall' of the ancient rock-fortress of
Sigiriya by casual visitors who climbed up its steep side to see the
paintings that adorned its caved-in watch-huts. They were so
inspired by the sight of the paintings that they 'burst' into poetry.
These were recently discovered and deciphered from their pre-
Sinhala script by Sri Lanka's renowned archaeologist-epigraphist
S. Paranavitana, and form now the first, and perhaps the most
original chapter of the history ofSinhala literature, beginning in the
sixth century A.D., and extending to the ninth. From that time the
tradition becomes less secular and more religious, continuing in
an unbroken flow up to the nineteenth century when it abruptly
stops, and starts again at the beginning of the twentieth century,
turning its back almost completely on the ancient tradition.
At the end of the sixteenth century two of the three Sinhalese
kingdoms came under the dominance of the Portuguese, and within
less than a century the Dutch were in occupation of the territories
originally held by the Portuguese. But although Portuguese and
Dutch influence penetrated many areas of the cultural life of the
Sri Lankans, for some reason literature was unaffected. Western
influences began to touch literature only some decades after the
British occupied the island in 1815. The last halfofthe nineteenth
century was a period offerment, both in the literary and the cultural
spheres. It was characterised by an earnest groping after the
threatened values of the past, which often came into conflict with an
equally intense curiosity about Western values. Side by side with a
denunciation of Western civilisation and a revival of Buddhist
education and the stabilisation of the Buddhist religious order, this
period witnessed the spread of English and the emergence of an
English-educated middle class, to which people of the new
professions, like those of lawyers, doctors, teachers and journalists,
belonged.
It was out of this new class who were, strictly speaking, bilingual,
that is, who read English and even spoke it, but who were able to
express themselves with greater ease in Sinhala and were Western-
oriented in their attitudes, that there arose the creative writers of the
next century, who experimented with the new literary forms with
which they became acquainted through their knowledge of English.
In the last few decades of the nineteenth century the ground was
being prepared for the emergence of this new literature. Western
narrative fiction was being introduced to the Sinhala reader
through translations, among which were Pilgrim's Progress and
Gulliver's Travels. A taste for the plain romantic tale seems to have
been created by the translation of The Arabian Nights' Entertainments,
and this became the vogue for quite a while. Writers began to delve
into the old Sinhala literature to find themes resembling that of
romantic love, and they rewrote them in modern prose or verse and
poured them out to an eager public that was waiting for them. What
was found in the old literature, however, was not sufficient to
quench the thirst of the people. Writers, therefore, went to
European sources, through the medium of English, and translated
whatever they could lay their hands on.
The introduction of printing in the middle of the century played
no little part in the propagation of this kind of taste among the
people. The most popular form was the ballad, and it was a
common sight to see a ballad-singer standing under the shade of a
banyan tree or at a bus stand, chanting a versified story from a
booklet of ten or fifteen pages he held in his hand, and selling the
booklets at the end of his recitation from a pile of copies he would
have on the ground by his side. They were printed on rough demy
and paper with a lurid painting on the cover and were sold, at that
time, for ten or fifteen cents. The prose stories were·usually published
Tradition Overturned 211
in the newspapers and magazines of the time, and the fact that there
was hardly any journal that did not carry a story in every issue,
bears testimony to the vast popularity that this genre enjoyed.
Creative prose fiction by writers following Western models began
to appear at the beginning of the twentieth century, and in
substance, most of it, including the early attempts of Martin
Wickremasinghe, who by his later work deservedly came to be
called Sri Lanka's greatest novelist, consisted of stories of love and
romance grafted on a society whose mores were as far as anything
could be from those of the society out ofwhich the Western novel
sprang. Young men belonging to a rural setting were depicted as
making speeches on the power and the mystery of love, and young
women were shown protesting against arranged marriages, flouting
the wishes of their parents, and leaving their homes to join the lovers
of their own choice. The characters in the world of this early Sinhala
fiction were drawn, therefore, not from the life their writers
observed around them, but from their reminiscences of the fiction
they had read in English. Their plots were very often patterned on,
and sometimes directly drawn from, those of the cheaper, escapist
fiction of the West; and they attained great popularity with certain
sections of the Sinhala reading public, particularly the urban lower
middle classes, who were in need of entertainment in their leisure
hours, and were not very exacting in their literary demands.
Among the ranks of the tradition-oriented reading public,
however, rumblings of discontent began to be heard. The new
literature came to be looked down upon on the ground that it was
not only morally unedifying, but that it was positively dangerous
and should not be allowed to get into the hands of young men and
women because it could corrupt them. Clearly the objection was not
based on the application ofliterary criteria, but on social disapprob-
ation of the attitudes expressed in the new writing. The traditional
elite, being used to the straightforward didactic narratives found in
the old literature, probably found the new forms somewhat
unfamiliar. But they obviously did not miss the message contained
in them. The unconventional behaviour patterns of the heroes and
heroines of these new stories were apparently being approved by the
writers. Heretical attitudes were seeping through them into society,
and threatening its stability. Women were being encouraged to be
independent, the caste system was disregarded, and the wishes of
elders were being slighted. The main purpose of literature was to
inculcate moral values and to lead people along the path ofvirtue.
The new writing was doing anything but this.
A well-known story from the old Sinhala literature could serve to
illustrate clearly how the traditional elite would have felt towards
the new forms of writing introduced from the West, and called
navakatha (novels, literally 'new stories'). A young woman called
Patacara who belonged to a family of rich merchants and was
brought up in affluence and luxury, and would, in due course, have
been given off in marriage to a young man of her status, falls in love
with a servant in her parents' household, and secretly escapes with
him. The two live together in a village some distance away and
when she becomes pregnant, she expresses a desire to go and see her
parents. But her husband objects. When she is close upon delivering
her second child, she expresses the same wish and her husband
objects once more. Notwithstanding this, she leaves home in his
absence and sets out for her parents' home, taking her child with
her. Her husband, however, follows her and finds her and persuades
her to come back with him. On their way back she gives birth to her
second child. Before they reach home they get caught in a heavy
thunderstorm and the man goes to fetch leaves and branches with
which to build a shelter for themselves, but is stung by a snake and
dies. Patacara decides to go back to her parents, and encounters a
stream. She swims across it with her first child, leaving the newborn
babe on a bed of leaves on the bank. When swimming back after
leaving her child on the further bank, she sees her infant being
snatched up by a hawk, and claps and shouts frantically in order to
scare the bird away. The elder child, thinking that his mother was
beckoning to him to come, steps into the water and is drowned.
When Patacara at last approaches her parents' home, she sees
flames raging in the distance, and is informed that their house had
caught fire and that her father and mother had been burned in it.
The story-teller of the past heaped misfortunes on Patacara's
head in order to bring home to the reader that the woman has to be
condemned for her wilful conduct in leaving her parental home
with a man of her choice. How would a writer of the new genre treat
such a theme? What would his attitude be to a modem Patacara?
He would probably make an exemplary heroine ofher, playing up
her infatuation for her servant and the conflict with parents, and
dwelling at length on the elevating passion that love is; and his story
would end with Patacara living happily ever after with the lover
with whom she escaped.
It is interesting to note that Piyadasa Sirisena, who wrote at the

beginning of the twentieth century and was obviously taking the
Western novel as his model, had, however, an ambivalent attitude
towards the form he was using. He denounced the novel as one of
those evils introduced by the West, and stoutly protested against his
stories being given the appellation, saying that there was 'nothing
corrupting' in his books. Sirisena, a journalist by profession, was one
of the well-known figures of the national movement of the early part
of the twentieth century, which was led by the fiery reformer, the
Anagarika Dharmapala. The movement aimed at restoring Buddh-
ism and the traditional values of the Sinhalese, which were eroded
as a result of Western domination, and the Anglicised upper class
became the chief target of the criticism it launched against all
aspects of Western civilisation. While Dharmapala carried on the
campaign mainly through his oratory, Sirisena lent it support with
his pen. The chief vehicle he employed was the novel.
Piyadasa Sirisena was the most widely-read novelist of at least the
first two decades of the twentieth century, and his reading public
consisted of those whom one could describe as the tradition-
oriented, that is, the school teachers, the Ayurvedic (traditional)
physicians, and even the Buddhist monks, who would normally not
be expected to read fiction or anything that dealt exclusively with
the affairs of the layman. In other words, they were the very people
who held the novel in contempt and viewed its growing popularity
with fear. Sirisena won over this public by the techniques he
employed, however naive these were from the point of view of the
narrative art. He employed the theme of romantic love, but made it
look innocuous. The plot of his first novel, and probably his most
popular, makes this clear. In it the hero, named Jayatissa, 'falls in
love' with the heroine whose name is Rosalind, and even exchanges
love letters with her in secret. But he does this after having first
verified, on meeting her, whether she is married or otherwise. He
also checks on her caste, in a cryptic dialogue the meaning of which
only she understands, and which the reader himself may not know
the import of on first reading. Then he discovers that she belongs to
a Christian family, and in his subsequent dealings with her he
concentrates on an effort to convert her to Buddhism by engaging
with her on a debate on the subject. He marries her only when she
accepts Buddhism as the true faith, and as an earnest of her
conversion drops her Western name and takes on a Buddhist name.
Some time after their marriage, however, she is abducted by the
villain of the piece, Vincent, who has to be, of course, a Christian.

Husband and wife pine for each other in separation and after
meeting with several misadventures are finally united.
The plot follows the conventional treatment of love in the
classical Sinhalese and Sanskrit literatures, and is only superficially
a story of romantic love in the Western manner. The well-known
love stories in classical Sanskrit literature, like those of Rama and
Sita, Nala and Damayanti, Savitri and Satyavan, deal with love in
separation, vipralambha sringara, as it is called. That is, they do not
depict the infatuation of one for the other of young, unmarried
people, but dwell on the pangs of separation of those who have
already been united by marriage. There is no romanticised concept
of love, therefore, as in the love stories introduced from the West,
where love is portrayed as a passion that is not contaminated with
baser physical desires, but is an unalloyed, pure pleasure.
Here lovers pine for each other as much because of attachments
formed through physical intimacy as through spiritual consonance.
Even in Sanskrit poetry, no distinction is drawn between physical
love and any kind of idealised passion between two people of the
opposite sexes. Kalidasa's Meghaduta or The Cloud Messenger provides
a famous example. Here a Yaksha has to spend a year in exile in the
Himalaya mountains, in separation from his beloved, and he sends
messages to her through a cloud that passes over the mountains
above him to the Vindhya range where she lives, indulging all the
while in reminiscences of their intimate association with each other.
The old Sinhala literature, which always took its fashions from
the Sanskrit, followed these same conventions. The Kusa Jataka, for
example, a birth story of the Buddha, was an inspiration for writers
in several genres through the ages. A most beautiful princess, by the
name of Pabavati, is given in marriage to an ugly prince called
Kusa, who in spite of his physical shortcomings, is endowed with
many rare virtues and accomplishments. It has been contrived,
however, that neither of them see each other, and that they get
together only at night under cover of darkness, because it was feared
that ifPabavati saw Kusa she would refuse to live with such an ugly
man as he was. One day, however, Pabavati sees her husband, and
is so overcome with disgust at the sight of him that she leaves him
and goes back to her father's palace. The poet-king, Parakrama
Bahu, who uses thejataka for his great epic (Maha Kal!)'a) known as
Kav Silumina is restrained up to this point by literary as well as social
conventions, but is able to give rein to his creative imagination from
now on. In one of the finest sequences of Sinhalese lyric poetry he

gives expression to Kusa's longing for Pabavati, and what he pines
for most is the softness ofher body which he knew only by touch, and
the love-embraces he experienced in the darkness of night.
Piyadasa Sirisena, writing in the twentieth century, is restrained,
however, not only by literary conventions, but by the puritan
morality that came as a result of Christian influence, which would
have regarded any such depiction as pornography. He carefully
avoids, therefore, dwelling on the physical love of his hero and
heroine, and comes very near to treating their love as something
above the baser passions, but justifies the attachment between them
in a very subtle way by leaving the reader to infer that it comes from
their having been husband and wife in a previous birth. Although a
bad novelist, therefore, and one who will be remembered mainly as
a pioneer and a social reformer, he gave the novel respectability and
earned for it a reading public which gave later writers like Martin
Wickremasinghe a better start than he himself ever had.
In the hands ofMalalagama Martin Wickremasinghe, the novel
was able to settle down in its new cultural milieu and reach
maturity. His literary activity spanned a period of more than haifa
century, and naturally in this time many fiction writers with a better
command of the form and a deeper understanding of the com-
plexities of living in a rapidly changing society, appeared. Wic-
kremashinghe began his literary career during times when society
was simpler and more stable, and the youth had fewer problems to
contend with. And although his work continued into more troubled
and uncertain times, he tended to hark back to the settled values of
the village society ofhis youth. But it was a harking-back which was
nevertheless more substantial than that advocated by Piyadasa
Sirisena and other leaders of the national movement. Although not
with much preciseness or clarity, he was instinctively equating the
values of rural society with those of Buddhist culture, and
contrasting them with the selfishness, hardheartedness and the
pursuit of sense-gratification that industrial civilisation seemed to
be holding up as an ideal.
Wickremasinghe began as a rationalist in his youth (he devoured
~he publications of the Rationalist Press Association) and dismissed
some of the cherished beliefs of village Sinhalese as idle superstition.
He was then attracted by Marxism and Communism, finding in
these a fundamental agreement with the Buddhist view oflife, or at
any rate, finding that their doctrines could be reconciled with those
of Buddhism; he later became a stout upholder of the Theravada

ideals of the culture of Sri Lanka, to which he gave his own
interpretation. He was a great lover and admirer of the Upanishads
as well, and it was the influence of these works that gave to his final
interpretation of Buddhism a slightly mystic tinge. This was,
however, a very restrained form of mysticism, and he would have
been the last person to identify it with the effusive forms of mysticism
that Mahayana and the Tantric cults deviated into in later times.
But in the final analysis it would be true to say that he had no
integrated philosophy of life and he died, in all probability, a
sceptic.
A great love for the Sinhalese and a pride to belong to them
dominated the work ofWickremasinghe from his early days. In his
short stories he exposes the follies and the hypocrisy of the Sinhalese
character, but with an indulgent smile on his lips all the while. In his
quasi-anthropological writings he searched for the distinguishing
marks of Sinhalese culture, and was keen to emphasise its unique-
ness and its difference from the culture of the Indian subcontinent.
True Sinhalese culture he found only in the Sinhalese village, and in
his novels and short stories he portrayed the products of this culture
with a rare insight and a fund of human sympathy.
In spite of the fact that Piyadasa Sirisena created a reading public
that accepted the novel as a legitimate literary form, it was clear
that this reading public had no understanding as such of the more
sophisticated techniques ofWestern fiction. Wickremasinghe began
to realise this as soon as he began to write his more serious works of
fiction, and he set about to correct it and to educate his reading
public by introducing them to the principles of Western literary
criticism. Other creative writers followed in his wake. One was
G. B. Senanayaka, who entered the field of literature as a short-
story writer. It would have certainly been a frustrating experience
for writers to see their work grossly misunderstood by the people for
whom they were meant, and the press criticisms of the day would
have shown up this misunderstanding to a most disconcerting
extent. Western critical methods, therefore, had to be introduced to
the reader side by side with Western literary forms, and this could be
done only by the creative writers themselves; for to them only was
the world of Western literature open. It is interesting to note that
when Wickremasinghe brought out one of his early collections of
short stories, he had a long introduction in the book, in which he
quoted profusely from English writers, and sought to explain to his
readers how the modern short story differed in technique from the
didactic narratives of the old literature: that is, he had to
demonstrate how the 'moral' was embedded in the arrangement of
the material and the treatment of the characters, and did not have
to be appended as a homily at the end of the story. This seemed to be
an irrefutable position as far as the modern literature was
concerned. But when Wickremasinghe ventured to apply Western
critical methods to an assessment of the classical literature, and was
obliged to tear to pieces some of the cherished masterpieces of the
writers of the past, the validity of his methods was severely
challenged. Controversies that could be described as 'lively' only if
we are charitably disposed, followed upon the publication of
Wickremasinghe's book on classical Sinhalese literature, and
Wickremasinghe was the first to realise that if his methods yielded
such disastrous results in a literature which enjoyed esteem of people
for a full thousand years, something must be wrong somewhere. He
therefore immediately started delving into Sanskrit criticism, and
came up with the theory that there was essentially no difference
between the criteria of criticism used in the West, and the best
criteria employed by Sanskrit critics in the past. It was by no means
conclusive, because the question still remained whether the best
way to understand forms like fiction was not the application of
Western methods, since there was no critical apparatus in the Indo-
Sri Lanka tradition for this task.
Martin Wickremasinghe's greatest work was his trilogy begin-
ning with Gam Peraliya (The Changing Village), continuing with
Kali Yugqya (The Age of Evil) and ending with Yugantqya (The End
of an Era). In these three novels both his understanding of Sinhalese
character as well as his philosophy of society find their clearest
expression. In the first he shows his village characters submerged in
their ethos, making no attempt to rise above their environment, and
olinging on to the decaying values of a village middle class. The
entrepreneur-individualist slowly emerges from out of this stagnat-
ing milieu. The second novel shows the next generation in their
urban setting, struggling to adapt themselves to the values of
bourgeois culture as yet in the process of formation, pulled in one
direction by the current of Westernisation and in the other by the
customs and habits oflife that have been implanted in them through
their village upbringing. In the third and last novel we move on to
the completely urbanised and Westernised generation, British-
educated and England-returned, deeply concerned with social
problems and wavering between social reform and revolution.

Wickremasinghe's view is that although class distinctions existed in
the village environment, these did not amount to class conflicts,
because a common culture bound the entire community together.
In any case, no one enjoyed great affluence and no one suffered from
want, and there was no ostentation, nor were there tantalising
symbols of status. Westernisation aggravated class distinctions by
creating new classes, which alienated themselves from the common
people by language differences and by adopting different ways oflife
which, being those of the colonial masters, naturally placed them in
an apparent position of superiority to the rest of the people. Class
antagonisms were thus created and they bred revolutionary
tendencies.
Most ofWickremasinghe's major work was written before he was
adopted by the Russians and translated into their language. But
there is no evidence to show that he changed his philosophy from
that of a reformer advocating non-violent change to that of a
revolutionary. As the village ofhis youth receded from his vision in
time, it seemed to have brightened in his memory, the dark patches
disappeared and it stood out as a picture of the ideal human
condition. And even after this village was almost completely wiped
out by the construction of an airfield during the Second World
War, he went back to it, spending a good part of his last years
there, peopling it, no doubt, with the characters who still lived
in his imagination and whom he portrayed so endearingly in his
work.
The conflict between traditional literary values and those
introduced from the West, came to be resolved not so much by the
propagation ofWestern methods ofliterary criticism, a task that the
university seriously engaged itselfin, but by changes in society. The
class that could be called a tradition-oriented elite gradually
became extinct, with the second generation being exposed to
English education and Westernising influences. The sons of Ayur-
vedic physicians, for example, were becoming Western-qualified
doctors, and the generation of Sinhalese schoolmasters was being
replaced by English-speaking teachers in Western dress who taught
in schools some of which, at least in Colombo, were patterned on
English public schools. Mter the conversion of the two ancient seats
of traditional learning, the Vidyodaya Pirivena and the Vidyalan-
kata Pirivena, into modern universities, Buddhist priests entered
them in large numbers and passed out as graduates. The number of
universities increased from one to four, and from them a new elite
was turned out, whose ranks were filled with a rapidity that the
establishment had not foreseen or planned for. This elite had their
roots in village society, but their attitudes were not merely Western
in the earlier sense, they were radical, revolutionary and anti-
establishment. What happened was that when the national
languages, Sinhalese and Tamil, were substituted for English as the
medium of instruction in the schools and the universities, Western
influences, instead of being restricted to one class as they were up till
that time, began seeping through society and touched the classes
that had no direct access to English. The new 'elite' were
impoverished and jobless, but they still formed the backbone of
cultural life in the cities. They formed the main reading public for
fiction and poetry, and swelled the audiences at Sinhalese plays.
Their thinking was largely moulded by Marxism and revolutionary
doctrines.
Fiction was now an established form, but for different reasons it
began to decline in the last decade. With the thinking of the time
becoming predominantly socialist-oriented, novelists came under a
barrage of criticism for being 'bourgeois' in their outlook, and for
dealing with problems that had no relation to those of the masses, or
for depicting negative heroes in their work. Some well-known
writers tried half-heartedly to join the band-wagon in order to
escape the sting of this Marxist criticism; but the result was that they
produced work that was artistically inferior, and was far from
attaining the ideal of 'socialist realism'.
One other reason for the decline in popularity of the novel was
probably the fact that the new reading public did not live in the
settled conditions that would be conducive to private reading and
enjoyment. Students commuted from distant suburban homes
where they had no facilities like electricity, or they lived in Colombo
in crowded rooms where they had no privacy and libraries were few
and badly equipped. These and the lack of leisure (commuting
itself, in over-crowded buses and trains, was an arduous and time-
consuming task), as well as their own anxiety about the jobless
future they were faced with, probably contributed to the falling off
in reading-habits noticed in the last decade or so. The theatre,
therefore, became the more natural place for young people to seek
intellectual stimulus, and in some senses it was a kind of return to the
traditional, community forms of entertainment that were part of
village life.
These were some of the circumstances that led to the decline both
in quality and in popularity of the novel and even of poetry, and the
unprecedented growth of activity in the field of the theatre. Very
soon the theatre adjusted itself to the demand and began providing
its audiences with the kind of fare they wanted. Playwrights
somehow got past the strict surveillance of the Censor Board,
sometimes by omitting objectionable portions from the scripts
submitted to censors, and sometimes veiling their criticism by the
use of myth and legend. They severely attacked governments and
the establishment, and propagated the concept ofrevolution.lt was
not always possible, for a government that functioned as a coalition
with leftist parties to object to the revolutionary content of an
artistic form that had the enthusiastic support of a large section of
the literate population, and was only showing up the evils of
capitalism.
The Westernisation achieved by the theatre was far more
thorough-going than anything that Piyadasa Sirisena objected to at
the beginning of the century. Audiences sit today and watch Brecht,
Sartre, Anouilh, Pirandello, Strindberg and even Tennessee
Williams, watching events that ten or fifteen years ago people would
have been shocked to see described on paper, not to speak of their
being depicted on the stage, and taking in attitudes that people
would have disgorged out of sheer inability to stomach a few years
back.
Cross-cultural influences, therefore, have enabled Sinhalese
literature to move right into modern times in the short period ofless
than a century, and to evolve from a stagnant position, in which its
themes were limited to the religious and the monastic, into a lay
literature enriched by a variety of genres unknown before, and
reflecting the spirit of a people troubled by change and conflict but
aspiring for a better future.
Index
Amirthanayagam, Guy, 3-12 Confucius, 53, 58
Anand, Mulk Raj, 142-58 Culture, 22-4
Across the Black Waters, 157 defining, 13-4, I 7
Apology for Heroism, 143--6, 156 exile and, 48-54
Author to Critic: The Letters of Mulk Raj institutionalising, 14--6
Anand, 147-51, 156 structuralism and redefinition of, 1 7
The Big Heart, 152, 155 see also Literature
Coolie, 148, 154
Morning Face, 151 Dante, 43, 48, 93, 110
Private Life of an Indian Prince, 155 Divine Comedy, 41, 44
Selected Stories, 15 1 Darwinism, 123, 126, 127
Seven Summers, 150 Denney, Reuel, 115-36
The Sword and the Sickle, 150, 157
Two Leaves and a Bud, 1 55 Edel, Leon, 48-54
Untouchable, 143, 150, 151-4 Eliot, T. S., 7, 10, 67, 84, 93, 104, 109,
The Village, 157 200
Arnold, Matthew, 45, 47, 86 The Cocktail Parry, 96
Atsumi, Ikuto, IOI-14 Four Quartets, 50
Auden, W. H., 102, 104, 200 'The Love Song of Alfred J.
Aurobindo, Sri, 66, 97 Prufrock', 50
Ayurvedic Medicine, 213, 218 Notes Towards a Definition ofCulture, 1 7
Tradition and the Individual Talent, 119
Basavanna, 73, 76, 78 The Waste Land, 14, 117-20, 122, 123-
Bengali, 66 4, 206
Blake, William, 76, 84-5, 203 English, 79
Bradbury, Malcolm, 13-25 Ezekiel, Nissim, 137-41
Buddhism, 73, 116, I 18, I 19, 120, 174,
196-8, 204, 213, 215--6 Frost, Robert, 127, 128, 133
Zen, 115, 13o-I, 134, 135
Bunyan, john, 85 Gandhi, Mahatma, 72, 76, 89, 148, 147
The Pilgrim's Progress, 84, 210 Gandhism, 68, 73. 75
Burke, Kenneth, 26-47 Gendaishi, 101, 104, 113
Ginsberg, Allen, 67, 75, 116
Camus, Albert, 72, 76 Howl, 110
The Myth of Sisyphus, g6 Gnosticism, 1 22
Ch'oe Nam-slln, 192-3, 202, 205
CMng Chi-yong, 203-4, 200 Han Yong-un, 196-8, 200
The White Deer Lake, 203 The Silence of Love, 196
Christianity, 118, 164, 173, 175--6,213, Harrex, S.C., 142-58
215 Hindi, 66-7
Confucianism, 118, 174 Hinduism, 144, 147, 152, 174
221
222 Index
Hinduism (Continued) culture learning and, 6, I I, 83, g8

Brahmanism, I I 5 science fiction 34
Sankhya system, 73 social change and, 6--7, 26-47
sutras, 92 sociology and, 2o-I, 83, 85.
vedanta, I46, I47, I56 tensions and ambiguities in, I5
Bhagavad-gita, 89, I I9 Lukac;s, George, 67, 7I, 72
Mahabaratha, 93
Panchatantra, 89 McLuhan, Marshall, I59--64, I67, I7I,
Ramanayana, 89 I86, I87
Upanishads, 7 I, 76, 89, 93 Maoism, 73
Vedas, 53; Rig- Veda, 93 Marathi, 67
Marxism, 7I, 78, I44, I46, 2I5, 2I9
Irisawa Yasuo, IOI, I04, I08-IO, I I3 Marxist-humanism, I42-I50
Fire '![the Summer Solstice, 109 Miller, Arthur
Happy or Unhappy, 109 Death '![a Salesman, 6, 34, gi-2
Mr Langerham's Island, 109 Murthy, U. R. Anantha, 66-78
My /;:.umo, My Repose '![the Soul, I 10
Old Land, 109 Narasimhaiah, C. D., 79---97
Preliminary Essay on the Seasons, 109 Narayan, R. K., 97
Islam, I72, I74, I75 The Financial Expert, 4
The Vendor'!! Sweets, 87---9I, 92
Jainism, 73
James, Henry, 5o-2, 93 Pak Tu-jin
The American, 4-5 High Mountain Plant, 206-7
Portrait '![a Lady, 4, 5 Parkinson, Thomas, I I6, I3o-I
Jeffers, Robert, II7, I27, I28, I34 Poe, Edgar Allen, I26, I93, I94
Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer Pope, Alexander, 83-4, 85
Heat and Dust, I38-4I The Dunciad, 84
Joaquin, Nick, I59---90 Essay on Man, 53
Joyce, James, I4, 52-3, 93, 109 The Rape '![the Lock, 84
A Portrait '![the Artist as a Young Man, Pound, Ezra, I I 7, 206
I5, 53
Ulysses, I4 Rao, Raja, 94
The Serpent and the Rope, 87, 92-3
Kafka, Franz, 67, 72, 76 Religion, see individual headings
Kannada, 67, 78, 6g, 70
Literature of, 77-8 Sanskrit, 6g, 77
Kim 6k, I93--6, 206 Sarachchandra, E. R., 209-20
Dance of Anguish, I 94 Shakespeare, William
Songs '!!a Jellyfish, I 95 Hamlet, I6I
Kim Sow~!, I96, I98---9, 206 King Lear, g6
Kingston, Maxine Hong, 55--65 The Merchant of Venice, 43
The Woman Warrior, 55 Othello, 36
Sirisena, Piyadasa, 2I3, 2I5, 2I6, 220
Languages, see individual headings Snyder, Gary, I I5-36
Lee, Peter Hacksoo, I26, Igi-207 Cold Mountain, I 29
Literature Earth Household, I I6-7, I20-4, I26,
cultural contact and, g8, IOI-2, 103, I35
104, 109, I I4, I37-4I, 220 Mountains and Rivers Without End, I I6
Index 223
Myths and Texts, I I7, I I8-2o, I24, Walden, 204

I26
Regarding Wave, I35 Veblen, Thorstein, I I 7, I 22
Turtle Island, I I6~ I I 7
Spengler, I66-7, I7I, I86, I87 Whitman, Walt, 40-I, 52, 53, I35, 203,
Stevens, Wallace, 10, I4, 52, 86 206
Wickremasinghe, Malalagama
Martin, 2II, 2I5-I8
Tagore, Rabindrinath
Gam Peraliya, 2 I 7
The Crescent Moon, I95, I96
Kali rugaya, 2 I 7
Fruit Gathering, I95
Yugan Taya, 2I7
The Gardener, I95
Williams, W. C., 52, I I7, I I8, I2I, I33,
Gitanjali, I 95, I 96
Sadhana, I 96
I34
Wordsworth, William, I28, I29, I32
Tamura Ryuichi, IOI-8, I I2, I I3 Yeats, W. B., 52, 53, 67, 73, 109, I22
Four Thousand Dqys and Nights, 105 Yi Yuksa, I 99, 202
Taoism, I I8, I I9, I22 Yoshimasu Gozo, 10 I, 104, I 10-I 3
Thoreau, Henry David, 53, II7, II8, Golden Verses, I I3
I25, I32, I35 The Tower qf the Brain, I I2

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ASIAN AND WESTERN WRITERS IN DIALOGUE

Also edited by G'9' Amirthanqyagam

WRITERS IN EAST-WEST ENCOUNTER

New Cultural Identities

First published 1982 by

ISBN 978-1-349-04942-4 ISBN 978-1-349-04940-0 (eBook)

Notes on the Contributors Vll

PART I LITERARY AND CULTURAL ROLES

I Literature and Cultural Knowledge

PART II LITERARY AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES

8 New Epics of Cultural Convergence

9 The Portable Pagoda: Asia and America in the Work

IO Two Readers and Their Texts

14 Tradition Overturned: A Modern Literature in

GuY AMIRTHANAYAGAM, poet and essayist, heads the research

MALCOLM BRADBURY, novelist and critic, is Professor of American

KENNETH BuRKE, writer and philosopher, is also one of the most

LEON EDEL is a critic and well-known scholar, biographer of Henry

MAXINE HoNG KINGSTON is visiting Professor of English at the

U. R. ANANTHA MuRTHY, who writes in the Kannada language, is

at the University of Mysore, India, and was Secretary of the

C. D. NARASIMHAIAH, Professor of English, University of Mysore,

IKUKO ATSUMI, poet and scholar of American and English literature,

REVEL DENNEY, Emeritus Professor of American Studies, Univer-

N1ss1M EzEKIEL is a leading English-language poet in India. His

NicK jOAQUIN, leading Filipino novelist and dramatist, is recipient

PETER HAcKsoo LEE, linguist and specialist in Korean literature, is

Fire: Twentieth-Century Korean Stories. Other titles include Celebration

E. R. SARACHCHANDRA is Sri Lanka's best-known playwright.

One of the greatest adventures of the twentieth century is the

Part I of this book, 'Literary and Cultural Roles', is largt>ly occupied

between literature and the cultural knowledge to be derived from it.

openings in the international literary dialogue. At the same time

Literary and Cultural Roles

complexities of Japanese social life; in R. K. Narayan's The

I want the biggest kind of entertainment a man can get. People,

He uses a metaphor from his business past when he says that he

frontiers that had an apparent capacity for expansion without end.

aspects of the time than its works of major literature. It is undeniable

recreation by artists has profound social meanings. There is

It is in this context that extreme, and exaggerated, demands are

Is it he or is it I that experience this?

No need, am happy, forget need's golden hand

There is a month, a year, there is a time

That in a secular age a poet should fabricate an experience which

We say God and the imagination are one

Out of this same light, out of the central mind

The principle underlying this approach to literary-cultural

it there has been a breaking up, or a collapsing, of old cultural

recent years, but of course in a transformed global situation. The

In 1948, T. S. Eliot published a book called Notes Toward a Definition

experience and consciousness not just in the Western nations but

among sociologists in literature as an expressive centre of ideology.

literature and sociology or social studies; and it is among the

also assumed, an empirical aspect to sociology which would let it

One notable feature of the United States and the European

prevailing in the formation of a contemporary idea of culture. Yet

transmutation or re-articulation. All art is an allusion to art's past

1. In the introduction to my The Social Context of Modern English Literature (Oxford:

I should begin with the problem of beginnings, and say why.

surmountable contradiction- a contradiction which, like the hero

This conception of the relation of the myth to reality no doubt

0 bviously, in so far as these are such 'unconscious categories', the