Kanagaki Robun, Gesaku Rhetoric, and the Production of Early Meiji Literature
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Adjusting to the Times: Kanagaki Robun, Gesaku Rhetoric, and the Production of Early Meiji Literature Charles Woolley Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 ©2016 Charles Woolley All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Adjusting to the Times: Kanagaki Robun, Gesaku Rhetoric, and the Production of Early Meiji Literature Charles Woolley This dissertation attempts a concomitant reexamination of two interrelated phenomena. Its primary undertaking is an analysis of mid-to-late nineteenth century gesaku commercial fiction production and its structural transformations during the first decades of the Meiji period, together with the imbrications of its narratological and rhetorical conventions with the language of reportage writing on the page of the Meiji newspaper. In conjunction with, and in order better to situate, the foregoing, its secondary task is to question the literary-historical emplotment of this period and its authors in the later 1920s, at the moment when Meiji literary history first emerges as an analytical object after the institutionalization of literature and journalism as discrete categories of discursive production. To such ends, this dissertation focuses on Kanagaki Robun (1829-1894), whose diverse career coincides what has come to be considered the transitional moment – and thereby recalcitrant to historiographical analysis not altogether fraught with ambivalence – intervening between the latter decades of the Tokugawa period and the ultimate establishment of Literature (bungaku) as an ideologically self-sufficient category of social value and discursive praxis by the first decades of the twentieth century. His survival in the annals of this later literary history proffers an occasion to reconsider the mechanisms involved in the arbitration of social, literary, and aesthetic value. Chapter I begins with a brief sketch of Robun’s early biography and career before the Restoration, through which we hope to delineate some sense of the social and literary-productive context undergirding his activity, specifically, and, more generally, the attitudes towards authorship, adaptation, and narration constituting the prevailing ethos of the time; here, we take a survey of several of Robun’s earlier works, written before his assumption of the “Kanagaki” penname and his first major success with Kokkei Fuji mōde (Ridiculous Pilgrimage to Mount Fuji, 1860-1), many of which are erotic parodies of well-known kabuki or Chinese vernacular narratives, and analyze the manner in which the author constructs his enunciative position therein, before momentarily considering how Robun, at this juncture in his career, was perceived by his peers. Then in conclusion, we anticipate both Robun’s later career, its ambivalent emplotment in literary history and the fraught evaluation of the early Meiji period in toto through a later retrospective on the part of literary critic Tsubouchi Shōyō as he looks back on the literary ecosystem of the early Meiji period and the ethical conflict, latent in his argument, between the ideological dominance of modern rubrics of literary value and incommensurate pleasures of reading as lived experience. Chapters II and III take as their focus Robun’s work in the comic hizakurige-mono genre pioneered by Jippensha Ikku’s Tōkaidōchū hizakurige (Along the Eastern Sea Road by Shank’s Mare, 1802-22), first with his success with Fuji mōde and subsequently, Seiyōdōchū hizakurige (Along the Western Sea Route by Shank’s Mare, 1872-4), a heavily intertextual updating of Ikku’s classic. Chapter II approaches Robun’s contributions to the genre through formal and narratological analysis, considering how the shift in topos, from domestic travel on foot, as in Ikku, to transpacific nautical travel via steamship, precipitates modulations in narrative structure, and weighs the ramifications of these intrageneric transformations. Chapter III shifts its focus to the intergeneric and intertextual, with attention to the modular configuration of its primary intertext in Ikku’s Tōkaidōchū hizakurige and the paratextual apparatus of hanrei, or the prefatory guidelines explicating a given text’s contents, provenance of sources, and editorial policies followed, etc. inherited from non-fictional and academic writing, and how these operate in Ikku and Robun as a space for conceptualizing social knowledge and the figure of the author. Chapters IV and V address the latter portion of Robun’s career, after the Meiji government’s promulgation of the Three Articles on Education and its efforts to conscript gesaku authors like Robun to assist in the education of the new subjects of the Meiji state. Here, we examine the simultaneous devaluation of and dependence upon popular fiction in Robun’s Bunmei kaika-inflected writing, before his relocation to the emergent newspaper industry, at which point we consider the sort of narrative and rhetoric prevalent in reportage writing in the 1870s and its phenotypical affinity with gesaku stylistics. Chapter IV concerns itself with a discussion of the political and economic factors precipitating Robun’s move away from gesaku production and his subsequent literary activity informed by his new role as a government official employed by Kanagawa Prefecture, before his move to the Yokohama mainichi shinbun (Yokohama Daily News). Chapter V then turns to the space of newspaper narrative and the emergence of tsuzuki- mono or serialized narrative, and how their early status as neither consummately fiction nor non- fiction adumbrates aspects of the epistemological economy of readerly desire and social knowledge, aspects subsequently concealed by the later ascendance of bungaku and the shōsetsu as the dominant lens through which socially valued discursive production comes to be apprehended, and the concomitant institutionalization of Journalism as Literature’s reciprocal in the early twentieth century. In the epilogue, we attempt to locate more precisely the coeval emergence of these ostensibly distinct and antagonistic categories in public discourse in the early 1900s, and the concomitant adjudication of the sociocultural value of early Meiji gesaku production and its affiliated figures, anticipating in turn the more rigorous synthesis of a systematized Meiji literary history in the years immediately following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. Adjusting to the Times: Kanagaki Robun, Gesaku Rhetoric, and the Production of Early Meiji Literature Charles Woolley TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………….........iv Introduction – Looking Back on Before We Were Modern: Literature, Journalism and Retrospection……………………….……………………………………………..........1 Chapter I – Learning to Adapt: Kanagaki Robun’s Early Career in Context………….......38 I.i Growing up an Edokko: Robun’s Early Life I.ii Performance Anxiety and Bedroom Eyes: Dontei Robun and Bobo Sanjin I.iii In the Interstices: Toward an Extraliterary Career Chapter II – In with the Old Out with the New: The Productive Mechanisms of a Meiji Gesakusha………………………………………………………………………69 II.i Robun and the Hizakurige-Mono: From Fuji to Seiyō, Edo to Tokyo II.ii Remapping Trajectories: the Eastern Sea Route and the Western Ocean Road II.iii Narrative and Structure in Seiyōdōchū Hizakurige II.iv The Politics of Language: Translation and Orthography as Narrative Devices i Chapter III – The Little Tugboat: Conceptualizing Gesaku Authorship in Early Meiji................................................................................................................121 III.i Moving Parts: The Composite Structure of Text and Author III.ii Guided Reading: Hanrei in the Hizakurige-Mono III.iii Guided Writing: Hanrei as Formal Legacy III.iv “In the West They Have Things Like the Novel”: The Practical Application of Modern Novelistic Discourse Chapter IV – Staying Current: Writing the Divide between Genres and Modes……..…..166 IV.i Praxis of Reform: From Gesaku to Civil Service IV.ii The Recanter’s Idiom: Responding to a Changing Political Climate IV.iii Writing for the People: Enlightenment as Entertainment IV.iv Print of a Different Type: The Newspaper in Japan IV.v Generic News: Narratology in the Newspaper IV.vi The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth? Saga Denshinroku and Documentary Writing IV.vii The Sociolinguistic Space of the Kanayomi Shinbun Chapter V – The Serious and the Serial: Narrative on the Newspaper Page………….......234 V.i How Should the Newspaper Speak? Journalism as Language and Rhetoric ii V.ii What Makes for a Good Story? Serial Narrative before and after Literature Epilogue – The Discursive Divide: Literature and Journalism Revisited…………………277 Selected Bibliography…..............................................................................................................291 Appendix………………………………………………………………………………………..298 iii Acknowledgments As is most certainly the case with most, this dissertation has been long in the making – far longer than it had any right to be – and as any unfortunate reader will quickly discover, a bit too long in the reading, as well; for that, the author makes full apology. Be that as it may, that it has managed to make it out the proverbial door at all is in itself no small miracle, and certainly one for which the author dare take no credit. While the road has been long, it has been but intermittently hard – at times, rough with cobblestones, or strewn with treacherous pebbles all too eager to shift under