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JAPONISME, ORIENTALISM, and the CREATION of JAPANESE LITERATURE in ENGLISH by JOHN WALTER DE GRUCHY

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JAPONISME, ORIENTALISM, and the CREATION of JAPANESE LITERATURE in ENGLISH by JOHN WALTER DE GRUCHY ORIENTING ARTHUR WALEY: JAPONISME, ORIENTALISM, AND THE CREATION OF JAPANESE LITERATURE IN ENGLISH by JOHN WALTER DE GRUCHY B.A. McGill University, 1986 M.A. McGill University, 1991 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of English) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA September 1999 © John Walter de Gruchy, 1999 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date DE-6 (2/88) ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the principal Japanese translations of Arthur Waley (1889-1966): Japanese Poetry: The Uta (1919), The No Plays of Japan (1921), and The Tale of Genji (1925-33). These works have been overlooked as English literature of the British modern period, although Waley intended most of his translations to function as modern English literature. I include a short biography of Waley's formative years and maintain that aspects of his identity—Jewish, bisexual, and socialist—were important in the choice of his occupation and in the selection and interpretation of his texts. I situate Japanese culture in the context of orientalism and Anglo-Japanese political relations. Japanese culture had a role to play in Anglo-Japanese imperialisms; this is demonstrated through an examination of the activities of the Japan Society of London, where Waley presented one of his first translations. The School of Oriental Studies in London also provided a platform for the translation and dissemination of Asian literature for the express purpose of promoting British imperial interests in the Far East. As an orientalist working through these institutions and the British Museum, Waley's positioning of himself as a Bloomsbury anti-imperialist was ambiguous. His texts, moreover, had a role to play in the presentation of Japan as an essentially aesthetic, 'feminine' nation. There are few letters, and no diaries or working papers of Waley. I rely, therefore, on his published works, as well as the memoirs, letters and biographies of family members and friends, especially those of the Bloomsbury Group with which he was associated. I make extensive use of the Transactions of the Japan Society and historical records of the School of Oriental Studies, as well as critical reviews of Waley and other translators. Social and cultural histories of the period are used to construct key. contexts: the Anglo-Jews, the Cambridge Fabians, British orientalism, Ill and English modernism between the wars. Since I maintain that homoeroticism in Japanese literature was one of its attractions for Waley, I also look to queer theory to assist in my reading of Waley's texts. I conclude that The Tale of Genji enabled Waley to realize a personal ambition to write stories, and he produced a unique English novel that remains not only the most important modernist interpretation of Japanese culture between the wars, but a remarkable record of Edwardian-Bloomsbury language and aesthetic sensibility. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Chapter I The Institutionalization of Taponisme: from Aestheticism towards Modernism 18 Chapter II Arthur Waley 43 Chapter III The Spirit of Waley in Japanese Poetry 73 Chapter IV No-ing the Japanese 105 Chapter V Whose Golden Age? The Tale of The Tale of Genji 148 Chapter VI Conclusion 194 Bibliography 211 V ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude first of all to Kagoshima Immaculate Heart College of Japan for granting me a year's leave from teaching, without which the dissertation would not have been completed. I owe much to the late Francis Johns, Arthur Waley's bibliographer, whose lifelong interest in, and work on, Waley made the preliminary research much easier. I would also like to thank my committee members, Professors Joshua Mostow, John Cooper and Ira Nadel of the University of British Columbia, for all of the time spent reading many drafts, discussing ideas, and for much encouragement. The number of footnotes would be ridiculously large were there one for every valuable hint or suggestion. My greatest debt is to Professor Mostow for lending me more books than I could carry, and more thoughts than I could remember; his kindness and support over the years have been tremendous. Finally, to Tamaki, Walter and Arthur for letting me go away: Thank You. 1 INTRODUCTION Mr. Waley, what I should like to talk most about are your translations from Oriental languages. And I want to talk about them as English poetry more than as translations. For it seems to me that, although they've been famous for over forty years, they've been neglected as English verse and as part of the revolution in English verse against iambic Tennysonian verse which took place just before the First World War. ("Arthur Waley in Conversation," BBC interview with Roy Fuller, 1963: 138) Japanese culture was an important part of the modernist movement in the arts and literature that took place in Europe from the latter part of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. The collection and appreciation of Japanese arts and artifacts is usually referred to as japonisme, though I would say that the definition of japonisme can be extended to include the translation and appreciation of Japanese literature. Countless studies have been written on the influence of Japanese arts on Impressionism, Imagism, and on the poetry, drama and thoughts of the canonical poets W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, who presented themselves as leaders of the avant-garde 'discovery' of Japan. Less well-known in the field of English literature is a younger affiliate of the renowned Bloomsbury Group, the translator Arthur Waley (1889-1966), who, I will argue, was a key figure of the English modernist interpretation of Japanese culture and for this reason deserves the attention that he will be given here. There is a common impression that Waley merely followed in the footsteps of Pound as a translator of Asian literature. This study will show that what Waley followed, and became an important part of, was a distinctly Anglo- European tradition of orientalism, and that he paid less devoted attention to Pound than Pound and his critics would like to believe. I will situate Waley within the context of an Anglo-Japanese socio-political relationship that had 2 been developing and changing since the mid-nineteenth century, and assess the general importance of Japanese culture to the British modernist 'enterprise' using Waley as a case study. But I will also argue that Waley is a creative writer who almost single-handedly created what the English-speaking public understood to be 'Japanese literature' during the modernist era. Japan before Waley was largely admired for its artifacts and pictorial arts, cultural forms that are less dependent upon language; the few Japanese translations that had appeared in English, including the Pound-Fenollosa version of Japanese No plays, were not received with much enthusiasm, as we will see. It was Waley who introduced Japanese literature to a wide public, and at the same time his works were regarded by his contemporaries as English prose and poetry in their own right. Nevertheless, as Fuller suggested in the epigraph, Waley has received very little critical attention, either from the field of Japanese Studies or from the field of English Literature.1 In Japanese Studies he is either venerated as the great deliverer of Japanese literature (e.g., Ivan Morris: "Without Waley's books it is unlikely that the classics of the Far East would have become such an important part of our heritage" ["Genius" 67; emphasis added]); or, conversely, he is dismissed because of the excessive liberality of his translations, which are regarded as being dangerously unreliable renditions of the 'sacred originals' (e.g., Seidensticker: "it should be worth a decade or so of someone's life to have a translation with a little less of the translator in it" ["A Decade" 131]). John Treat, professor of Japanese literature at the University of Washington, on the other hand, has recently stated that "Waley is the greatest 1 Twice in this interview with Fuller, Waley brought up the subject of his Japanese translations, but Fuller overlooked this and kept the conversation on Chinese poetry. In his memoir Spanner and Pen (1991), Fuller gives a brief account of his interview with Waley and says that "getting out of him early~any!-memories of Pound and Eliot was like the proverbial blood from a stone" (25). See also pp. 108-9, where Fuller adds, "...though anything he actually uttered-about metrics, about dining with Pound and Eliot—was absorbing." 3 translator of Asian literatures ever to have lived," but he did not follow up this acclaim with any actual study of Waley's translations (158). Scholars of English literature, on the other hand, usually pass over Waley's Japanese translations as Japanese literature or merely translations. Thus Earl Miner, in his classic Tapanese Tradition in British and North American Literature (1958), wrote, "Arthur Waley . was unquestionably one of the world's great translators, on the basis alone of his Tale of Genji. Waley's The Nd Plays of Japan, are executed with both scholarship and delicacy and are, so to speak, the authoritative English texts" (136-7).
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