Three Japanese Novels
In the past couple of months I have read three Japanese novels in translation, a statement about the recent past that in an earlier stage of my life would have carried effectively no independent semantic value—the way “the sun set in the west this evening” carries none—and that even now is not exactly remarkable. The one that I liked best was also the first one I read, The Emissary by Tawada Yōko. British readers got this book as The Last Children of Tokyo, but The Emissary has the virtue of actually attempting to translate the Japanese title, Kentoshi. The Emissary is a science fiction novel that at points reminds one of something like On the Beach or a hypothetical prequel to The Chrysalids, a quiet look at the day-to-day in a dying world, or at least a dying Japan. The tone is laid-back and almost cheerful, and one hopes that this book’s popularity in translation—Margaret Mitsutani won the National Book Award for it—finally killed off the wisdom once conventional in the West that Yokohoma Kaidashi Kikō’s pace, tone, and structure are impressive achievements. To be sure, The Emissary and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō in fact both are impressive, I might even dare to say “great,” books, but not because those aspects are unique or even particularly unusual for Japanese science fiction of this school. Also like many of these kinds of books, The Emissary abruptly picks up narrative steam at the end, then abruptly stops. I still find this jarring whenever I encounter it, and it helps me to think of Japanese science fiction novels that do this as if the last few pages were ghostwritten by Neal Stephenson. Sometimes, as with Ōhara Mariko’s Hybrid Child, this doesn’t help, but that is because Hybrid Child does this for the first time a hundred pages or so in and then does it every twenty or thirty more pages until the book finally ends. Its page count is over twice The Emissary’s and it, in my opinion, sucks. The Emissary pointedly does not suck, which is why my mother, not much of a science fiction reader to say the least, read it on my recommendation and absolutely loved it as well.
Svengalis
I recently read the 1895 (give or take a year; I don’t feel like looking it up right now) novel Trilby, one of the most popular books of its time but one that is almost never read today. Even in 1946 George Orwell, who enjoyed the novel despite admitting that it is very bad, wrote a newspaper column lamenting that nobody was reading it any more. Orwell admitted this, though, in the context of also admitting the thing for which the novel is best-remembered, which is its intense antisemitism. Artistically, this isn’t even the biggest problem with the book, which is saying something. The book is by George du Maurier, grandfather of the much more famous Daphne; Daphne du Maurier, a writer I like very much, is more famous for good reason.
Must Art Be Good?
For much of the Early Modern period the French were, to most tastes, not at good at playwrighting as the English. This was not because France lacked talented people in its theaters and its literary culture; there were Racine, Molière, and Corneille, to name just a few. The problem was, rather, one of standards being set at the cultural level, especially at the level of the elite culture; French playwrights were still expected to adhere to certain “unities” that artificially constrained things like time and setting, whereas in English theater Shakespeare and essentially all playwrights after him, as well as some before him, had exuberantly dispensed with the unities and with the absolutist, prescriptive attitude towards “good” narrative that they represented. Some playwrights, especially Molière, occasionally mocked the unities, but the fact that they had to be responded to in the first place constrained the dramatic tradition in the French language for well over a hundred years, even as the language and the Parisian literary class that spoke it exploded with creativity in other genres.
Today we can look back on the unities, laugh, and mourn what could have been in terms of French theater in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is easy, however, to get complacent about this. The truth is that current artistic production, too, has rules for good art, especially good narrative art, that seem objective to us most of the time but are in fact just as culture-bound as were the unities.
One Only Has to Use One’s Head
「少し頭を働かしなさいや」
―谷崎潤一郎 『細雪』
A few years ago I remember hearing about a movement in the publishing industry, particularly concerning books for younger readers, called “Own Voices.” Own Voices was based on the idea that writing that involves representational concerns—a term that here means concerns about how historically disadvantaged types of people are represented in the text—should, either generally exclusively, be by people who belong to the groups in question. Thus an LGBT author should be writing about LGBT characters, a black author about black characters, and so forth. Own Voices was roundly criticized, partly for forcing closeted authors of LGBT literature to come out or incur serious reputational harms, and is no longer in vogue. (Personally my criticism of Own Voices was somewhat different: it makes internally diverse ensemble casts of characters impossible. A thoroughly Own Voices literary scene would be one in which most books published in the West are still about straight white people and most that are not are set in homogeneous, pillarized communities. Even among socially aware stories of yore, you can’t have a Deep River that’s Own Voices for Indian people as well as for a religious minority in a country other than India, or an Across the Barricades that’s Own Voices for both Protestants and Catholics. I don’t read a lot of “issues novels,” and someone who does could probably come up with better examples.)
But what about the actual literary and artistic merit of the kinds of books Own Voices was supposed to produce, and those against whom it was supposed to be a reaction? That might be a different question than its effects on the industry or the culture.
“Anxious Not to Appear Unhappy”; or, Why Mansfield Park Is the Austen Novel One Never Knew One Needed
So-called “classic” art and literature comes into and goes out of fashion just as do popular culture trends. For most of the twentieth century Edward Elgar was considered a fundamentally unserious composer; today he has reentered the classical concert repertoire. Johann Sebastian Bach, unbelievably, went through the same rehabilitation in the early nineteenth century. Renaissance castigation of High Medieval art has gradually over the past several centuries given way to appreciation of that art’s numinous aspects. Post-World War II horror at Victorian architecture and interior design, as seen for instance in Shirley Jackson’s novels, seems itself quaint and dated today. In literature, too, we see such long-term trends. To the end of understanding why certain books spend decades or centuries in or out of favor, I recently read the Jane Austen novel Mansfield Park. For many years Mansfield Park was considered a contender for Austen’s best novel; today it is widely seen as her worst.