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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Lurie, David B. Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011.
Main Argument: "This study is, first and foremost, a history of writing in early Japan, but as the subtitle suggests, it also aims to rethink the wider history of writing in general" (2). "By insisting on the multilingual nature of the 'Chinese' script, which crossed and complicated language boundaries in real time as well as over long periods, this book presents an unfamiliar picture of writing in Japan and the wider region around it. Attention to the history of reading, and to the varied ways in which writing has been linked to language, shows that there are overlaps and intersections between uses of writing that have traditionally been separated into categories like foreign and native or Sinitic and vernacular" (vii).
Historiographical Engagement: History and theory of writing and history of writing in Japan.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples "Deeper understanding of early Japanese inscription will transform comparative discussions of literacy and reading practices, and remake our sense of the wider patterns of the world history of writing systems" (1). Lurie discusses the difficulty of defining what it means to say that writing ever "begins," and he argues that the explosion of writing in Japan in the 7thC, although obviously connected to accelerating state formation, is in fact quite varied: "Rather than a uniform transition from orality to literacy, these materials reveal different modes of writing appearing around the same time and coexisting in a variety of configurations. …different social groups are simultaneously using texts in radically different ways" (4). Lurie also criticizes the implicit "alphabetism" of scholars of writing, who, he says, "should do more to avoid teleological assumptions about progress towards photography, assumptions that are often implicitly linked to claims about the (Greek) alphabet as a guarantor of cultural superiority" (5). He argues, moreover, that the process of kundoku, "reading by gloss," "dominated all modes of literacy in early Japan, from at least the mid-seventh century on. This means that we cannot describe texts arranged in accordance with Chinese vocabulary and syntax as being written 'in Chinese' (no matter what their origins, a conclusion that has profound implications for Japanese cultural history, which has been framed by a linguistic opposition between Chinese and Japanese" (ibid). Moreover, considering Chinese writing as the "East Asian writing system," for example, and early Japanese reading and writing systems, "threatens widely held assumptions about the place of phonographic adaptation in the world history of writing" (6). The history of these questions assumptions about the "historical development of inscription and also more technical discussions of the relations between script and language" (7).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter examines "the material traces of the earliest presence and production of inscribed artifacts in the Japanese archipelago" (15). Lurie does this, however, by way of a theoretical detour into the thickets of the definition of writing and of reading. The takeaway has several points: first of all, presentism leads most modern literates to assume that "reading" and "writing" are universal across any and all contexts, when in fact writing in particular fulfills many functions besides that of communicating language. These functions are also conditioned by power relationships--think of the history of alphabetic writing in the "New World" after contact, for example. Moreover, "reading" often presumes that the same context prevails on both ends of the reception relationship (mediated by the text) when in fact this is not the case. A looser definition of "writing" in particular yields a better field in which to understand its purposes and history: "writing can share purposes and functions with artifacts or behaviors that fall outside a narrow definition; conversely, it can be used in ways that do not fulfill, or even that actively contradict, the terms of such a definition" (46). This discussion leads into the cases of artifacts discovered in the archipelago with writing-like inscriptions; in the case of those (possibly) bearing Chinese characters, these were certainly alegible in the archipelagic context. In other words, written objects did not transform the societies in which they wound up. The case of Chinese coins that have been excavated at various Yayoi sites makes these issues clear: in the case of coins, the value of the object and the meaning of its legend are inseparable from its material composition. Unlike the inscription-bearing objects discovered in the islands, coins have no inherent value or function apart from their inscription. [This is somewhat questionable in the case of gold and silver coinage in other parts of the world, but let it go.] Similarly, the bronze mirrors excavated in the archipelago show that reception cannot be divorced from the history of inscription: "New contexts can transform not only systems of photography (the primary focus of studies of how writing moves across cultural or linguistic boundaries) but also the function and meaning of preexisting texts and practices" (63). Lurie argues that "legibility cannot be ejected from 'literacy' without vitiating the real-world applicability of the concept" (64). In other words, written materials and their reception always have "opaque aspects to them and to their reception. Even rich bodies of texts are surrounded by a penumbra of uses and responses that lie outside of history as we practice it" (ibid). Furthermore, overemphasis on the "transparency" of literacy hides the "ways in which writing facilitates the making of meaning and the exercise of power" (ibid). This relationship is not always one-sided, however; the "appropriation and repurposing of writing" is a key part of its history.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the beginning of systematic use of writing in the archipelago, and in particularly the "feedback between writing and kingship" (68). According to Lurie, "the reasons that writing did not remain a marginal source of talismanic and totemic marks, but expanded to play a fundamental institutional and cultural role, were to be sought in its links to political legitimacy and interstate diplomacy in the region surrounding China from the Han dynasty onward" (69). Before those later heights, however, writing served as a medium for power, but power did not yet serve as a medium for writing; the value of the seals that Chinese emperors bestowed on potentates in the archipelago, for example, was not in their inscriptions but in the fact that they were a valuable prestige object. The level of writing jumps in the 5thC, although it appears that the technology of writing as yet had a limited geographic scope--i.e., it was limited to Korean scribes in the courts of Yamato kings, and the inscriptions the scribes wrote were alegible in the context of their reception: thus, a range of literacies was present in the continuum of people who were involved in these objects' production and reception. Although court scribes were certainly involved, the "administration" of the "state" did not yet require mastery of reading or writing--as indirectly demonstrated by the anachronistic references to court scribes and kingly literacy in the 8thC chronicles.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the evolution of "a world dense with writing" in the archipelago in the 7th and 8thC. In part, this came about through new elite literacies, and also the unprecedented adaptation of the technology of writing to serve as "a means of control over the flow of goods and people" (116). Significantly, the quantitative jump in the contents of the archive of written materials comes during the late 7thC, during the reigns of Tenmu and Jitô. Moreover, Lurie argues that the ritsuryô "state was the result of a kind of feedback loop, in which new uses of writing enabled the development of administrative structures, which in turn produced more and more extensive uses of writing" (119). Lurie emphasizes, however, that "provincial participants in the state structure also engaged in their own production of various genres of writing, both to create the appearance of compliance with legal stipulations and to mask active departures from such stipulations" (130). Lurie goes to some pains to deconstruct the myth of the "Asuka Enlightenment," which centers on Prince Shôtoku as the importer of Buddhism--and writing--to the archipelago, and which was developed to mask the contradiction between Buddhism's historical origins (patronized by lineage groups, preeminent among them the Soga) and its 8thC function of a state religion granting state legitimacy. Lurie concludes that "religious writing, in itself, did not transform the nature of literacy in early Japan"; rather, the "augmentation and expansion of Buddhist writing occurred simultaneously with both the expansion of state control over Buddhist institutions and the emergence of large-scale secular written communication, most prominently embodied by mokkan" (150). However, by the 8thC, "the important point is less that 'literacy' was widespread than that writing was commonplace"--many people in the court were surrounded with written artifacts, and the sight of writing was becoming commonplace. At the same time, however, this world of writing was heterogeneous: "different modes of writing appear, simultaneously and in succession, and eventually coexist in a variety of mutual configurations" (166).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the practice of kundoku, which as Lurie says, was "reading, writing, and translation in a single script." Kundoku, reading by gloss, is central to Lurie's entire account, and he emphasizes four points about it here: "it is interlingual, reversible, productive, and in many cases, invisible" (180). Lurie argues that
Lurie argues that kundoku emerged simultaneously with the diverse literacies of earlier periods, and that "kundoku played a major role in the emergence of widespread reading and writing during the seventh century" (185). This was because the practice of kundoku, i.e. a mixed logographic style, combined the best of both close transcription of spoken language and reliance on the norms of literary Chinese and thus "reduced the level of orthographic training necessary to participate in written communication" (193). These two axes of variation (logography/phonography and the degree of conformity to literary Chinese norms within logography) produced a range of styles of literacy, and "the resulting range of styles does not map onto the linguistic contrast between the Chinese and Japanese languages, although hat contrast ultimately underlies elements such as the different possible word orders of logographs. It is now clear that the entire range of possible styles was already represented as the seventh-century transition got under way" (208). Moreover, kundoku exerted "'artificial' effects in a range of texts, even phonographic ones not directly subject to kundoku reading" (211). Thus "loan-translation, or calque formation" exerts a huge influence on early Japanese texts, and the "relationship of the resulting 'calcolect' to pre-written, purely oral speech is indirect at best" (ibid).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the two oldest written works in Japan, the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki, arguing for "the power of 'Chinese' models of writing and their role, mediated by kundoku, in the creation of new styles that project different kinds of royal authority" (214). This "deliberate engineering" of the same "was integral to several projects dedicated to the legitimacy of the line of sovereigns and the new state whose apex they occupied" (ibid). Lurie concludes that the Kojiki was written in a "vernacular" style, its language being "closely related to the everyday quasi-artificial grapholect/calcolect seen in mokkan," but systematized, "so that the work will be as clear as possible" (232). This is closely connected to the text's presentation of "a model of rulership whose authority is independent of Sinitic textuality, one in which communication between ruler and ruled is presented in oral terms" (ibid). The Nihon shoki, by contrast, on the surface adheres to "transregional Sinitic norms, but on the other level [is] parallel in the manipulation of kundoku to create a local logographic mode" (242). Both texts, in other words, are attempting to balance "literary Chinese structures of meaning, allusion, and reference, on the one hand, and the assignment of Japanese linguistic forms to writing, on the other" (ibid).
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the Man'yôshû and its contents, or how poetry was recorded in writing. The inscription of the text itself values variety and multiplicity, and "sometimes approaches 'free variation' of written style against a constant linguistic background" (260). The Man'yôshû is "dominated by the logographic principle," which puts it broadly in line with early Japanese inscription, which also reserves phonographic inscription for special contexts (276). Indeed, the Man'yôshû itself is at times characterized by "an extreme pursuit of what might be termed literary effects within logography" (277). At the same time, however, since "there are inherent advantages to mixed inscription," writing in either a purely phonographic or logographic style necessarily involved a sacrifice of clarity, which was deemed acceptable by writers (302). What this means, however, is that the two genres of "vernacular poetry" (waka) and Chinese-style poetry (kanshi) "cannot be distinguished as oral versus literate modes of expression, or even as principally aural versus principally visual" (303). Lurie concludes that "waka and kanshi are best seen as distinct regimes of expression integrated internally by canonical verse forms and collections, but also linked in complex ways with each other and with other regimes" (ibid). "Above all else, it is clear that rather than robust inherent significance, particular styles of writing take on most of their meaning from the particular contexts (normally, multiple overlapping contexts) in which they appear" (310). Thus, the Man'yôshû and its contexts reveal that techniques for inscription in early Japan offered, not chaos, but rather a 'festival' of meaning resulting from the encounter between the Japanese language and the Chinese writing system. This polymorphous system was fully employed by writers consciously seeking to generate particular effects via their choices in inscription.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples Lurie argues that the disjunctures in the history of Japanese writing have been overblown; from the seventh century to the twentieth, "kundoku-logography was central to the education aspirations and ideals, and daily lives of elites well into the twentieth century, and represented an expressive model and source of quotations, allusions, and catchphrases even for those who were unable to read and write the texts themselves" (323). Moreover, the logographic/phonographic distinction between various genres of literature is untenable; kundoku facilitated exchange between "vernacular" and Chinese-style writings throughout this era. Furthermore, the so-called "bilingual fallacy" of conceptualizing all of Japanese culture as divided into native and Sinitic spheres distinguished by writing does not hold; Heian distinctions between writing styles took the form of graphical distinctions rather than linguistic ones because kundoku prevented "a firm association between Chinese-style logographic writing and the Chinese language" (328). Lurie points out that "Just as was the case with the Latin writings of 'our forebears,' Chinese-style logography was the transregional norm for formal expression, and its use in its time was as natural, and as automatic, as my employment of standard written English to write this book" (331). Indeed, ideas about "native" and "foreign" did not begin to be constructed until the Edo period, and they took time to diffuse throughout the culture at large, but even so, "no aspect of the writing system used in Japan was a priori foreign to the language or the culture, no matter what its origins or formal similarity to graphs used to write other languages" (333). Moreover, the uses of the Chinese writing system in Japan are extensions of propensities and capacities and systems already present within the writing system itself, as seen in the six principles of the Shuowen, which are a mixture of logographic and phonographic principles. Further, continuously using these principles via exegesis expanded the number of characters dynamically in China; kundoku is the application of these principles in Japan. Furthermore, the spread of the Chinese writing system at its largest is far greater than that of the Chinese state, raising the question of whether it is possible to speak of a "Chinese writing sphere" or of an "East Asia" bounded by this writing system. A more recent, and probably better, analogy is to think of the Chinese writing system as "the Latin of East Asia."
Critical assessment: This is a really excellent book that I am sure these notes have not fully captured. I need to think about everything that Lurie says some more, but I think a lot of his arguments could be profitably applied to technologies other than writing in Japan, such as states. And of course, there's the arguments about the history of writing, which seem to me, from what I know about it (I did some research on the development of the Greek alphabet for a while once, so I know some things; in fact, when it comes to the Greek alphabet, I actually know many things), to be right on the money.
Further reading: Tom Lamarre, Uncovering Heian Japan; Tomiko Yoda, Gender and National Literature
Meta notes: Techno-determinism is as much at work in how we think about writing as it is in how we think about computers.
Main Argument: "This study is, first and foremost, a history of writing in early Japan, but as the subtitle suggests, it also aims to rethink the wider history of writing in general" (2). "By insisting on the multilingual nature of the 'Chinese' script, which crossed and complicated language boundaries in real time as well as over long periods, this book presents an unfamiliar picture of writing in Japan and the wider region around it. Attention to the history of reading, and to the varied ways in which writing has been linked to language, shows that there are overlaps and intersections between uses of writing that have traditionally been separated into categories like foreign and native or Sinitic and vernacular" (vii).
Historiographical Engagement: History and theory of writing and history of writing in Japan.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples "Deeper understanding of early Japanese inscription will transform comparative discussions of literacy and reading practices, and remake our sense of the wider patterns of the world history of writing systems" (1). Lurie discusses the difficulty of defining what it means to say that writing ever "begins," and he argues that the explosion of writing in Japan in the 7thC, although obviously connected to accelerating state formation, is in fact quite varied: "Rather than a uniform transition from orality to literacy, these materials reveal different modes of writing appearing around the same time and coexisting in a variety of configurations. …different social groups are simultaneously using texts in radically different ways" (4). Lurie also criticizes the implicit "alphabetism" of scholars of writing, who, he says, "should do more to avoid teleological assumptions about progress towards photography, assumptions that are often implicitly linked to claims about the (Greek) alphabet as a guarantor of cultural superiority" (5). He argues, moreover, that the process of kundoku, "reading by gloss," "dominated all modes of literacy in early Japan, from at least the mid-seventh century on. This means that we cannot describe texts arranged in accordance with Chinese vocabulary and syntax as being written 'in Chinese' (no matter what their origins, a conclusion that has profound implications for Japanese cultural history, which has been framed by a linguistic opposition between Chinese and Japanese" (ibid). Moreover, considering Chinese writing as the "East Asian writing system," for example, and early Japanese reading and writing systems, "threatens widely held assumptions about the place of phonographic adaptation in the world history of writing" (6). The history of these questions assumptions about the "historical development of inscription and also more technical discussions of the relations between script and language" (7).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter examines "the material traces of the earliest presence and production of inscribed artifacts in the Japanese archipelago" (15). Lurie does this, however, by way of a theoretical detour into the thickets of the definition of writing and of reading. The takeaway has several points: first of all, presentism leads most modern literates to assume that "reading" and "writing" are universal across any and all contexts, when in fact writing in particular fulfills many functions besides that of communicating language. These functions are also conditioned by power relationships--think of the history of alphabetic writing in the "New World" after contact, for example. Moreover, "reading" often presumes that the same context prevails on both ends of the reception relationship (mediated by the text) when in fact this is not the case. A looser definition of "writing" in particular yields a better field in which to understand its purposes and history: "writing can share purposes and functions with artifacts or behaviors that fall outside a narrow definition; conversely, it can be used in ways that do not fulfill, or even that actively contradict, the terms of such a definition" (46). This discussion leads into the cases of artifacts discovered in the archipelago with writing-like inscriptions; in the case of those (possibly) bearing Chinese characters, these were certainly alegible in the archipelagic context. In other words, written objects did not transform the societies in which they wound up. The case of Chinese coins that have been excavated at various Yayoi sites makes these issues clear: in the case of coins, the value of the object and the meaning of its legend are inseparable from its material composition. Unlike the inscription-bearing objects discovered in the islands, coins have no inherent value or function apart from their inscription. [This is somewhat questionable in the case of gold and silver coinage in other parts of the world, but let it go.] Similarly, the bronze mirrors excavated in the archipelago show that reception cannot be divorced from the history of inscription: "New contexts can transform not only systems of photography (the primary focus of studies of how writing moves across cultural or linguistic boundaries) but also the function and meaning of preexisting texts and practices" (63). Lurie argues that "legibility cannot be ejected from 'literacy' without vitiating the real-world applicability of the concept" (64). In other words, written materials and their reception always have "opaque aspects to them and to their reception. Even rich bodies of texts are surrounded by a penumbra of uses and responses that lie outside of history as we practice it" (ibid). Furthermore, overemphasis on the "transparency" of literacy hides the "ways in which writing facilitates the making of meaning and the exercise of power" (ibid). This relationship is not always one-sided, however; the "appropriation and repurposing of writing" is a key part of its history.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the beginning of systematic use of writing in the archipelago, and in particularly the "feedback between writing and kingship" (68). According to Lurie, "the reasons that writing did not remain a marginal source of talismanic and totemic marks, but expanded to play a fundamental institutional and cultural role, were to be sought in its links to political legitimacy and interstate diplomacy in the region surrounding China from the Han dynasty onward" (69). Before those later heights, however, writing served as a medium for power, but power did not yet serve as a medium for writing; the value of the seals that Chinese emperors bestowed on potentates in the archipelago, for example, was not in their inscriptions but in the fact that they were a valuable prestige object. The level of writing jumps in the 5thC, although it appears that the technology of writing as yet had a limited geographic scope--i.e., it was limited to Korean scribes in the courts of Yamato kings, and the inscriptions the scribes wrote were alegible in the context of their reception: thus, a range of literacies was present in the continuum of people who were involved in these objects' production and reception. Although court scribes were certainly involved, the "administration" of the "state" did not yet require mastery of reading or writing--as indirectly demonstrated by the anachronistic references to court scribes and kingly literacy in the 8thC chronicles.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the evolution of "a world dense with writing" in the archipelago in the 7th and 8thC. In part, this came about through new elite literacies, and also the unprecedented adaptation of the technology of writing to serve as "a means of control over the flow of goods and people" (116). Significantly, the quantitative jump in the contents of the archive of written materials comes during the late 7thC, during the reigns of Tenmu and Jitô. Moreover, Lurie argues that the ritsuryô "state was the result of a kind of feedback loop, in which new uses of writing enabled the development of administrative structures, which in turn produced more and more extensive uses of writing" (119). Lurie emphasizes, however, that "provincial participants in the state structure also engaged in their own production of various genres of writing, both to create the appearance of compliance with legal stipulations and to mask active departures from such stipulations" (130). Lurie goes to some pains to deconstruct the myth of the "Asuka Enlightenment," which centers on Prince Shôtoku as the importer of Buddhism--and writing--to the archipelago, and which was developed to mask the contradiction between Buddhism's historical origins (patronized by lineage groups, preeminent among them the Soga) and its 8thC function of a state religion granting state legitimacy. Lurie concludes that "religious writing, in itself, did not transform the nature of literacy in early Japan"; rather, the "augmentation and expansion of Buddhist writing occurred simultaneously with both the expansion of state control over Buddhist institutions and the emergence of large-scale secular written communication, most prominently embodied by mokkan" (150). However, by the 8thC, "the important point is less that 'literacy' was widespread than that writing was commonplace"--many people in the court were surrounded with written artifacts, and the sight of writing was becoming commonplace. At the same time, however, this world of writing was heterogeneous: "different modes of writing appear, simultaneously and in succession, and eventually coexist in a variety of mutual configurations" (166).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the practice of kundoku, which as Lurie says, was "reading, writing, and translation in a single script." Kundoku, reading by gloss, is central to Lurie's entire account, and he emphasizes four points about it here: "it is interlingual, reversible, productive, and in many cases, invisible" (180). Lurie argues that
The development of Japanese writing is commonly conceptualized in terms of the emergence of phonographic methods of inscription, but this profoundly underestimates the significance of logographic writing. Phonography is certainly important, but it is logography, in both Chinese and non-Chinese styles, and mediated through kundoku, that provides the key to understanding the history of Japanese inscription, even up until the present day. (183)
Lurie argues that kundoku emerged simultaneously with the diverse literacies of earlier periods, and that "kundoku played a major role in the emergence of widespread reading and writing during the seventh century" (185). This was because the practice of kundoku, i.e. a mixed logographic style, combined the best of both close transcription of spoken language and reliance on the norms of literary Chinese and thus "reduced the level of orthographic training necessary to participate in written communication" (193). These two axes of variation (logography/phonography and the degree of conformity to literary Chinese norms within logography) produced a range of styles of literacy, and "the resulting range of styles does not map onto the linguistic contrast between the Chinese and Japanese languages, although hat contrast ultimately underlies elements such as the different possible word orders of logographs. It is now clear that the entire range of possible styles was already represented as the seventh-century transition got under way" (208). Moreover, kundoku exerted "'artificial' effects in a range of texts, even phonographic ones not directly subject to kundoku reading" (211). Thus "loan-translation, or calque formation" exerts a huge influence on early Japanese texts, and the "relationship of the resulting 'calcolect' to pre-written, purely oral speech is indirect at best" (ibid).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the two oldest written works in Japan, the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki, arguing for "the power of 'Chinese' models of writing and their role, mediated by kundoku, in the creation of new styles that project different kinds of royal authority" (214). This "deliberate engineering" of the same "was integral to several projects dedicated to the legitimacy of the line of sovereigns and the new state whose apex they occupied" (ibid). Lurie concludes that the Kojiki was written in a "vernacular" style, its language being "closely related to the everyday quasi-artificial grapholect/calcolect seen in mokkan," but systematized, "so that the work will be as clear as possible" (232). This is closely connected to the text's presentation of "a model of rulership whose authority is independent of Sinitic textuality, one in which communication between ruler and ruled is presented in oral terms" (ibid). The Nihon shoki, by contrast, on the surface adheres to "transregional Sinitic norms, but on the other level [is] parallel in the manipulation of kundoku to create a local logographic mode" (242). Both texts, in other words, are attempting to balance "literary Chinese structures of meaning, allusion, and reference, on the one hand, and the assignment of Japanese linguistic forms to writing, on the other" (ibid).
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the Man'yôshû and its contents, or how poetry was recorded in writing. The inscription of the text itself values variety and multiplicity, and "sometimes approaches 'free variation' of written style against a constant linguistic background" (260). The Man'yôshû is "dominated by the logographic principle," which puts it broadly in line with early Japanese inscription, which also reserves phonographic inscription for special contexts (276). Indeed, the Man'yôshû itself is at times characterized by "an extreme pursuit of what might be termed literary effects within logography" (277). At the same time, however, since "there are inherent advantages to mixed inscription," writing in either a purely phonographic or logographic style necessarily involved a sacrifice of clarity, which was deemed acceptable by writers (302). What this means, however, is that the two genres of "vernacular poetry" (waka) and Chinese-style poetry (kanshi) "cannot be distinguished as oral versus literate modes of expression, or even as principally aural versus principally visual" (303). Lurie concludes that "waka and kanshi are best seen as distinct regimes of expression integrated internally by canonical verse forms and collections, but also linked in complex ways with each other and with other regimes" (ibid). "Above all else, it is clear that rather than robust inherent significance, particular styles of writing take on most of their meaning from the particular contexts (normally, multiple overlapping contexts) in which they appear" (310). Thus, the Man'yôshû and its contexts reveal that techniques for inscription in early Japan offered, not chaos, but rather a 'festival' of meaning resulting from the encounter between the Japanese language and the Chinese writing system. This polymorphous system was fully employed by writers consciously seeking to generate particular effects via their choices in inscription.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples Lurie argues that the disjunctures in the history of Japanese writing have been overblown; from the seventh century to the twentieth, "kundoku-logography was central to the education aspirations and ideals, and daily lives of elites well into the twentieth century, and represented an expressive model and source of quotations, allusions, and catchphrases even for those who were unable to read and write the texts themselves" (323). Moreover, the logographic/phonographic distinction between various genres of literature is untenable; kundoku facilitated exchange between "vernacular" and Chinese-style writings throughout this era. Furthermore, the so-called "bilingual fallacy" of conceptualizing all of Japanese culture as divided into native and Sinitic spheres distinguished by writing does not hold; Heian distinctions between writing styles took the form of graphical distinctions rather than linguistic ones because kundoku prevented "a firm association between Chinese-style logographic writing and the Chinese language" (328). Lurie points out that "Just as was the case with the Latin writings of 'our forebears,' Chinese-style logography was the transregional norm for formal expression, and its use in its time was as natural, and as automatic, as my employment of standard written English to write this book" (331). Indeed, ideas about "native" and "foreign" did not begin to be constructed until the Edo period, and they took time to diffuse throughout the culture at large, but even so, "no aspect of the writing system used in Japan was a priori foreign to the language or the culture, no matter what its origins or formal similarity to graphs used to write other languages" (333). Moreover, the uses of the Chinese writing system in Japan are extensions of propensities and capacities and systems already present within the writing system itself, as seen in the six principles of the Shuowen, which are a mixture of logographic and phonographic principles. Further, continuously using these principles via exegesis expanded the number of characters dynamically in China; kundoku is the application of these principles in Japan. Furthermore, the spread of the Chinese writing system at its largest is far greater than that of the Chinese state, raising the question of whether it is possible to speak of a "Chinese writing sphere" or of an "East Asia" bounded by this writing system. A more recent, and probably better, analogy is to think of the Chinese writing system as "the Latin of East Asia."
But the broader point remains: in terms of their functioning in society and development over time, it is difficult to find deep, qualitative differences across various systems of writing. As visually and structurally distinctive as many features of Japanese writing are, it seems that they neither produced, nor were determined by, sharp cultural or social differences. In a sense, this means that although writing in Japan (and to some extent, writing in general) does not work quite in the way that has often been assumed, that difference itself turns out to be less consequential than might be expected. Many scholars and theorists have taken an integral developmental logic of writing to be a key to the history of humanity; but such a logic may not even be a key to the history of writing itself. … Writing's connection to natural language and its catalytic effect on so many other historical developments make it seem to be a special case. Perhaps it is. But in its multifariousness and malleability, it is as resistant as any other human practice to monocausal, deterministic explanation. (363-64)
Critical assessment: This is a really excellent book that I am sure these notes have not fully captured. I need to think about everything that Lurie says some more, but I think a lot of his arguments could be profitably applied to technologies other than writing in Japan, such as states. And of course, there's the arguments about the history of writing, which seem to me, from what I know about it (I did some research on the development of the Greek alphabet for a while once, so I know some things; in fact, when it comes to the Greek alphabet, I actually know many things), to be right on the money.
Further reading: Tom Lamarre, Uncovering Heian Japan; Tomiko Yoda, Gender and National Literature
Meta notes: Techno-determinism is as much at work in how we think about writing as it is in how we think about computers.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-19 21:30 (UTC)I'll be interested in your take on Uncovering Heian Japan -- I don't (yet) have the toolset to adequately analyze why I don't fully buy Lamarre's arguments, though he does have very useful (to me) things to say about the importance of writing forms.
---L.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-19 21:34 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-20 00:19 (UTC)---L.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-20 00:24 (UTC)I would be interested to hear what you think of this book--thinking about it a bit more, I think your objections to Lamarre might be answered by Lurie. (With the caveat that I don't know actually what your objections are exactly. :P)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-20 03:01 (UTC)(I'm also curious what's up behind this review. It's always interesting when reviews are all either 5 or 1 star.)
---L.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-19 22:52 (UTC)I'd love reading something like this as applied to Korea and hangeul as well, since it seems that there's a stronger or earlier tie between writing system and ethnic identification, at least in terms of official party line. And am now reminded that I know almost nothing re: Vietnamese.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-20 00:27 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-01 05:42 (UTC)