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February 18, 2007

Notions of Good Government: Japan's Early Modern Case I.

In several instalments, I'm going to try and summarise here some observations on a particular case of comparative history of early modern political discourse ("intellectual history", we sometimes say, presumably to boost our disciplinary self-confidence). This may sound scarier than it actually is. For the thing under scrutiny is actually a rather widespread and commonly practised activity: for whenever we make public statements, invoke criteria of justice, pronounce evaluations of our political affairs, be it at the ballot box or over a drink, we in fact implicitly subscribe to various sets of notions of what a human community is fundamentally for, what the standards are for exercising power and delegating authority, or what the desirable goals of our public policies ought to be. More or less consciously, and more or less consistently, we stick to some notions of what good government is.
It is interesting enough for its own sake to try and take a good look at what such notions of acceptable, laudable, legitimate exercise of political power may have been in other times and other places. But the value added is that one may in fact – by stepping out of one's customary universe of beliefs and convictions for a moment – get to see and understand better precisely those notions one normally relies on without too much questioning.

The main challenge facing everyone who seriously plunges into the waters of studies in history of early modern Japanese thought is still methodological. Exactly how, applying what sort of narrative and using what conceptual vocabulary, should we go about trying to tell the story? These studies have a history of their own by now, and a prolific one, which has seen various attempts to solve or ignore this elementary problem. The question has always centred on the issues of how much universally relevant or exclusively peculiar the discourse studied here was, into what extent the concerns voiced by Japan's early modern theorists writing from the standpoint of their geographically much isolated society can be translated into terms previously found instructive and helpful in the treatment of other self-reflective social and political theories formulated in the West, and into what extent should these concerns be found unique and locally or ethnically specific, be it in the positive or negative sense of grasping this uniqueness. There has always been an all-pervading sense of peculiarity and uniqueness, supported by a lot of self-consciousness, behind most Japanese studies as practiced both at home and abroad. The unique otherness of the culture and its history was taken for granted and most intellectual effort concentrated on accounting for the assumed uniqueness in a consistent manner. Yet, it seems to be too late in history today for us to just presume the peculiar uniqueness of a Far Eastern culture and admit a self-validating explanatory power to its exotic nature.

An enquiry is attempted here into whether two disparate early modern discourses – that of Japan and that of Western Europe, broadly speaking – coming out of widely differing intellectual traditions, historical experience and seemingly incompatible social environments, can still be found sharing some portions of the problems they’re respectively dealing with concerning society, economy and politics, and into what extent the two can be discussed by means of the same concepts and the same vocabulary without committing violence or manipulation on either of them. The genre of history of “political thought” is a category which after all provides a common denomination to the debate of the historical developments of both the western and the Japanese discourse on the subjects of social and political order. To what extent can the two be described by the same vocabulary? To what extent can they be seen as addressing similar sorts of issues, or even offering similar sorts of explanations? Could their respective stories be written at least as much as different chapters of the same book?

Any attempt to answer such questions must necessarily sooner or later confront the crucial problem of the extent into which the history in general and particularly intellectual history of Far East has already been – under the overwhelming influence of Western social sciences rushed in along with modern technology and institutions – retold in terms of categories and patterns of development found previously valid or helpful for organising the material of the Western history of thought.
The approach adopted in this work shall be one of taking sets of general notions found highly significant for either or both of the discourses and exploring the possible parallels and divergences in their respective treatment by individual authors, their relative importance for the respective discourses, ways of converging or diverging developments and evaluation.

Dealing thus with ideas more than with their bearers is not inevitably identical with subscribing to any of those current views which make it their point and article of faith to look away from human agency and the subject of the author. The proposed form of this essay is rather determined by its intended length and purpose and should not be found incompatible with the more classical – biographical – treatments of the themes of early modern intellectual history or history of political thought. However, it should be understood, dealt with here will not be an exhaustive account of chronologically arranged unfolding of social and political thinking in the course of two and half centuries of Tokugawa rule, nor an in-depth analysis of a representative sample of great thinkers of the period. This is because I shall not be looking for enclosed systems of thought and their inner logical coherence as a piece of theory, but rather for change in the uses of terminology – within texts of individual authors or schools as well as across any boundaries between those – and value patterns applied to advocating the available explications of social order and government, and its preservation or reform.

Another reason for intentionally avoiding the chronological treatment of the subject is a conscious attempt to avoid the trap of a teleological interpretation of the material in question. It is tempting to organize the material along the lines of an evolutionary narrative which leads the story from the darkness of feudal prejudice to the dawn of potentially liberal tendencies. Besides being far from evident, such interpretation seems to start from a pre-established answer and only pose questions which lead to confirming such previously known truth.

Posted by david at 11:48 PM | Comments (0)

February 08, 2007

Other Men in Other Cities: Orhan Pamuk's White Tower

There had been rumours, well before the name of 2006 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature was made public, that what with all the moral and political considerations at play behind the scenes at the award, the prize was bound to go to a writer from an Islamic country. So the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk in the end perhaps did not come as so much of a surprise. Whether rightly or not, and almost certainly unwillingly, Pamuk became something of a symbol impersonating freedom of expression and unprejudiced openness in a presumed clash with forces of atavistic nationalism and intolerance. In a widely publicised case, in 2005, he was taken to court on charges brought against him on the base of the infamous article 301 of the Turkish criminal code, which threatens prison sentences for insult to the Turkish Republic, because of his straightforward statement concerning the mass killing of Armenians in Turkey. (This happens while Turkey is still largely in denial about the genocide of a possible million Armenians in 1915). The prosecution caused a worldwide outcry, which arguably contributed, in a Turkey sensitive to the eye of the onlooker ahead of the EU membership talks, to the charges being dropped.

But the sceptics who might denigrate the Nobel committee decision as reflecting much politics and little genuine literary worth had better read well before dismissing the fresh laureate. In his work, Pamuk addresses from various angles a crucial issue of the day, the problem of culturally conditioned identities, especially those along the dividing lines of East and West, Islam and Christianity, tradition and modernity, avoiding any formulaic dichotomies there. He does so with a degree of complexity which can probably only assume the form of a story, because no sort of documentary journalism or anthropological and sociological analysis may possibly do it justice. And he does so from the perspective of a man firmly rooted in the past and present of his country, or perhaps his city (as his loving autobiography–cum-cityguide "Istanbul" shows). Beside that, Pamuk frequently resorts to interesting formal experiment in building up his story; and the language in the translations of his works has a strange and unfamiliar, almost disturbing quality which (excluding the possibility that they are merely bad translations) presumably reflects something powerfully original in his usage of Turkish. All that safely adds up to highly intriguing literature in its own right, regardless of any added value of political correctness and fashionable curiosity about the world of Islam.

Much of the above is exemplified in the recent novel Snow (first published in 2002), a story of tensions of shaken identities at the crossroads played out against the background of a small eastern provincial town of Kars. Another important novel, My Name is Red (1998), digs deeper into Turkey's past and portrays, in a postmodern detective story, the world of Ottoman miniaturists in 16th century Istanbul, but in terms of structure also displays an unusual set of narrators, a different one for each chapter, including such curious voices as that of a dead corpse, or of the colour red. However, while both Snow and My Name is Red have now been translated into Japanese, the translation in this country of another crucial book, The White Castle (originally out in 1985 and the first to reach international stage through Pamuk's first ever translation into English in 1990) is still waiting for publication as this review is written.

On the face of it, The White Castle is a rather straightforward story set in 17th century Istanbul and told by a young educated Venetian who falls into the hands of Turkish enemy on the sea to become slave and assistant to an Ottoman scholar (designated only as Hoja, i.e., 'Master') of approximately same age and presumably striking physical resemblance. The not too numerous pages of the slim novel proceed to describe the relationship of the two as they explore not only bases of science and technology, but increasingly also what makes them each what they are, or what makes the 'fools' around who they are. But the straightforwardness is deceptive. The story unfolds from the first technological achievement of the two, a major public fireworks show over Bosporus, through their sanitary and logistic measures undertaken to curb the epidemic of plague raging in Istanbul, and further to the growing intimacy of the two with the Sultan. But the actual events recede into background and the stage is fully taken by the disquieting amalgamation of the two main characters with their respective universes of individual experience and religious and cultural background. There is little attention to the particulars of the setting of the story, there is minimum of description of the scenery, characters or circumstances, and the language seems to effectively increase the claustrophobia of being caught, as it were, inside the mental world of the two partners.

Just like in Snow, where the main character is a journalist, and in My Name is Red, which revolves around old books playing crucial part in new events, The White Castle uses centrally the theme of writing and text. Hoja, increasingly nervous and keen on his obsessive question of ‘what makes me who I am’, first forces his counterpart to make a written record of his own introspection. Tracing long-forgotten memories and real or invented mischiefs and sins, this project ultimately drags them both on the path of months and years of tortuous self-revelation and self-discovery by means of writing. This development as well as its depiction has a distinctly pathologic feeling to it. And the story which previously spanned years in the space of a few pages suddenly appears stuck in one place and claustrophobically closed into itself. The claustrophobia reaches its zenith in the scene in front of a mirror, almost precisely halfway through the length of the book, where fear of the plague death appears to work as a catalyst to the completion of a metamorphosis of the two originally separate identities. Beyond this point, the borderline between the two characters becomes increasingly blurred even while the contours of the world of actual objects and events grow hazier and things appear onstage ever more as symbols, like the ultimate weapon Hoja is commissioned to construct for the Sultan, or the indomitable white castle of Doppio at the feet of the Carpathian mountains during the last military campaign which brings the story to its climax.

Yet, even as the end approaches, the reader finds himself left with more questions than answers. The last chapter in a way undermines the whole preceding story. Here, the narrator claims to reveal the real purpose and authorship of the text. But which of the two was it that told the tale then? And whose voice is it that narrates this afterword? Did the two men entirely exchange each other’s places in their respective worlds? Or even, had there ever been two distinct individualities to start with? Where did fiction become reality and where did reality melt into fiction? Pamuk’s journey through the labyrinthine tangle of east-western identities is certainly worth exploring.

Posted by david at 08:23 PM | Comments (0)