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

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

I

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 AMIRTHANA Y AGAM, 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 of Critical 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, Univer­sity 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 English­Language 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 Acknowledgements

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 cross­cultural, 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 Fatora­Tumbaga.

My wife, needless to say, was my constant coach.