aim is "to inhabit those deserted spaces which time misses—beginning to live between the ticks of the clock, so to speak."
The nouveau roman accelerates the idea of time and gives it a much greater intensity. For Claude Simon, for example, time assumes a fearful force of corruption with an increasing, destructive potency. For other authors, like Samuel Beckett, the development of time is so intense that it permeates the action: dominating, absorbing, omnipresent.
About time in the modern Western novel, R. M. Albérès writes;
By giving a relief to the time of the novel and by introducing in it stereophonic effects, and by putting into it a new dimension, the action ceases to be expressed by a straight line on an even surface (the destiny of the hero on the background of a decor). It becomes a net of multiple lines, superposed, alternate, zigzagging and crossing each other and sometimes uniting into polygons in Durrell, or into labyrinths in Robbe-Grillet. It is no longer possible to represent the plot by the simple graphic of a continuous and unique narrative, like in Le Rouge et le Noir or in Germinal; we will need to use more complete graphic representations, some with three dimensions, as it was suggested by a scheme of the work of Proust. The reader of a novel enters no longer into a story by one end to go out by the other, following a continuous path; he must penetrate into a universe in which he wanders, in which he does not know where he goes.24
In contrast to this restless experimenting by Western novelists, in Japan writers have been content with the traditional unilinear treatment of time. Some of the younger Japanese novelists have tried to further the development of time, but always along a single plane.
Sei Ito noticed that in The Tale of Genji) as in other major Japanese tales, such as The Tate of the Bamboo Cutter, Saikaku's The Life of an Amorous Woman and The Life of a Man who Lived for Love, and even in Tanizaki's Makioka Sisters, the passage of time provokes changes and developments through a linear treatment. There are no countercurrents. These novels do not develop a complex interwoven antagonism among the characters in order to create a symphonic treatment, a multiple relationship, or a change in rhythm and in time.
Sometimes we find in the works of Japanese writers of today a first awakening to the complex possibilities of time in fiction, but they never go beyond a thought, a brief reflexion on the subject. We see it, for instance, with Yukio Mishima: "At the thought that he would hear it no more he listened with deep concentration, striving for every corner of every moment of this precious time to be filled. . . . The moments seemed transformed to jewels, sparkling with inner light." Time is thus manifested in a simplified expression of Kobo Abe: "There was only a timeless, artificial illumination. Time measured in units of tens of thousands of years flowed along right outside the wall in subterranean water streams and through the layers of earth, slicing vertically straight down."
It must be said that experiment on the time theme in Western fiction has been the particular enterprise of a few great writers. The transformation of the novel into a bold polyphony was the work of isolated geniuses. Few indeed are "those who have dared to play on the organs of time."25
Even in the ordinary novel which follows the conventional linear treatment of time, the traditional concept of time has evolved in consequence of the great social transformations. While the traditional novel was a story of time against a permanent pattern, writes Edwin Muir, the contemporary novel is a story of time against a background of time.26
The classic Western writers lived in a world based on the law of permanence: transient human life briefly appeared and disappeared against a constant background, an immutable order of Christian verities. With the weakening of religious feeling today, not only individual life but the world itself begins to look transient; nothing is firm and man doubts all values. This has altered the current idea of time in the modern novel. The sense of eternity against which a human life took a particular meaning is lost. This Western concept, in which change is a universal motor, in which nothing in the world is certain or lasting, comes very near to the fundamental Buddhist idea of impermanence. Buddhism gave religious expression to the feeling of constant change which dominated a continent where great invasions and frequent national calamities uprooted human ties and threatened institutions in nearly every generation. In the West, after the collapse of the firm beliefs and unaltered traditions described by the great nineteenth-century novelists, and after two world wars and the advent of nuclear weapons, we have come to the same conclusion, that in the present looms an uncertain future, tinged with fear and calamity. This uncertainty has determined the fundamental concept of time predominant today in the Western novel.
The concept of time adopted in The Tale of Genji—which is fundamentally the same as in the modern Japanese novel—shows similarities to this last Western concept. Based as it is on Buddhist thought and Chinese traditional philosophy, which always emphasized the transient character of all things, The Tale of Genji gives a primordial importance to the time element.
We can say, to conclude, that by abundantly using the traditional Japanese concept of time in its religious and philosophical aspects of alternate importance and evanescence, Murasaki has come surprisingly close in many points to the latest Western novel. Nevertheless, Murasaki never thought of trying to explore complex implications of time such as those elaborated by Proust and his modern successors.
TWO GREAT SYMBOLS: GENJI AND DON JUAN
Only a cultured, and refined society like that of Kyoto in the tenth century could produce a romantic character like Prince Genji. In the psychological portrait of Genji there are the features of a society in which the position of women is inferior. The woman, merely reflects the shining glamour of the prince, obeying his every wish. It is certainly a most inviting study for exploring the provoking and treacherous new realms of comparative literature—by comparing the figure of Genji, the Japanese Don Juan, with the Western Don Juan of the Middle Ages. The Don Juan born under the sun of Spain was of equally noble birth, rich, courageous, proud, courteous towards women, but also unreliable, egotistical, unfaithful, and always searching for a new adventure.
The Japanese type of Don Juan is personified in a prince, son of an emperor (and. one of his concubines), a man at the very top of Japanese society. This evinces already the idea or hero-worship: Murasaki's intention was to idealize a man to the supreme, giving him all the attributes of power, seduction, prestige, and beauty. The women he possesses provide the titles to several books of the novel. He is successful. He has no reason to repent from his adventures, nor does he suffer from a sense of sin; he feels no painful guilt. He is not under the menace of damnation, and he is not condemned. This means that his amorous adventures are not reproved by the society, his pleasures are not illicit, and though not being strictly according to morals, the punishment for them is neither hell nor eternal damnation. The moral sanction reserved for this sort of deed by Buddhism and by Christianism is completely different. Here begins the real separation.
We might note that this difference in religious outlook has a parallel in the literary criticism in Europe and in Japan, for Don Juan and Genji, respectively.
The Chinese Don Juan, Hsi Men, the hero of Chin Ping Mei, evinces the practical, down-to-earth character of the Chinese people; he is the son of an apothecary and himself a trader.
In an article entitled "Contemporary Studies of Genji Monogatari," Prof. Akio Abe referred to a socio-historical school of criticism which tried to clarify the historical position of the aristocratic society or the Heian period within which The Tale of Genji was born. According to this school, Murasaki typifies the contradictions of the society she describes, contradictions which brought about the collapse of the ancient aristocracy. Genji is himself the very symbol of these social contradictions and decadence, this school of criticism contends.27
A more conservative critic, Norinaga Motoori, without considering the character or social meaning of Genji, considers Genji's destiny and morality as symbols of human experience, and tries to find the explanation
