(Untitled)

[hikarugenji]

I recently finished my MA Thesis on the stories told by the men in the Hahakigi chapter (2), and in the course of that study I came across a very interesting theory of the ordering of the early chapters of Genji. It has long been recognized that there are problems in the early Genji chapters as they stand; they're in rough chronological order, but

Comments

[kristeenamarie]

So your theory pretty much assumes that Murasaki Shikibu was a sloppy writer, right? The sudden appearance of Rokujo is not the only instance in which the narration relies on the assumption that the reader will adapt immediately. The Uji chapters are an example, although the authorship there is in question (again, I like to side with the theory of narrative genius). Regardless, it words. Am I right? As a narrative technique, it is effective and it places the narrator's bias into question. We already know she is unfailingly enamored with Genji, so her perspective is already skewed

[kristeenamarie]

*it works

[hikarugenji]

Just to be clear, this is not "my" theory but a theory that has been written about by a number of life-long Genji scholars, both Japanese and non-Japanese.

If you want to read Aileen Gatten's article for yourself, here is a link (if you have access to JSTOR through a university):
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0073-0548(198106)41%3A1%3C5%3ATOOTEC%3E2.0.CO;2-K

I'm not going to attempt a second-hand defense of the theory since I haven't really done the relevant study myself.

[kristeenamarie]

yes, i noted that in your original entry. my apologies if i attacked you personally. just trying to stir up some discussion in an inactive community!

[hikarugenji]

One thing we always have to remember is that we don't really know when the text reached its present form -- the chapters seem not to have had fixed titles for quite some time, and we know that individual chapters circulated in the Heian period. So it's possible that Murasaki Shikibu herself was not particularly concerned with the ordering of chapters, or perhaps not even in a position to fix them. (Murasaki would not have been the "owner" of her own tale she was writing; it belonged to her patron

[hikarugenji]

I think the trouble with that kind of view is that it's almost circular reasoning -- there are these difficulties in the text, so we explain them in terms of Murasaki's writing skill. But why would we think that Murasaki expected her audience to adapt? Because the difficulties are in the text and we don't want to ascribe poor writing to Murasaki

[hikarugenji]

One other note -- this issue is actually a very old one. One of the earliest commentaries that exists on the Genji is by Fujiwara no Teika (12th cent.), who was an early editor of Genji that made the manuscript line considered the most reliable nowadays. Apparently already by his time there was a theory that a chapter was missing between 1 and 2 called "Kagayaku Hi no Miya", which was said to have contained Genji's first liaison with Fujitsubo (which is alluded to in Waka Murasaki), and Genji's initial relationship with the Rokujo Haven. So these problems are quite old in Genji studies.

(Aileen Gatten says that such problems probably arose several centuries after the writing of the Tale, when the language of the tale had become so difficult that people had to read it slowly and carefully to make sense of it, which made them start noticing all these difficulties.)