than can be indicated here. It embraces more valuable works and names than I have mentioned. A student should not be content with this book unless he is looking for only the essential. The book is written for the Westerner interested not in history, but in substantive literary culture.
The greatest event of our time is the meeting of East and West. The purpose of this book is to make a modest contribution. It is part of a larger project of finding common ground in the ideas and the artistic and literary creations on which East and West have been building their particular cultures. From the beginning, the great works of men are rooted on the same labours, hopes, and joys. Despite their differences and peculiar aspects, all men are kin. This is why we can go ahead with confidence, working for a universal humanism.
It should be mentioned here that Japanese names given in the text appear in the order of given name followed by family name, in accordance with Western custom. Titles of works in Japanese are followed by approximate English equivalents. The romanization of Japanese words follows the Hepburn system, the exception being that long vowels are not marked.
The listing of translations of Japanese works into languages other than English is far from complete, but perhaps serves to indicate the extent of the impact of Japanese literature throughout the Western world.
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INTRODUCTION: ON THE UNIVERSAL NATURE OF LITERATURE |
To give us the world in its human dimensions, that is, as it unveils itself to people who are simultaneously attached to and separated from each other, is the unique role of literature, wrote Simone de Beauvoir. The purpose of literature is to make us conscious of the world, to make every man more deeply aware of his own personality. By its nature, literature is more capable than any other discipline of penetrating the meaning of life and of grasping that global sense of reality which is deep in individual experience.
Thus literature aims to open new ways of understanding between men, beyond frontiers that were previously impassable. Indeed, an individual man is a product of all men, and every man represents the entire world Thus the work and the aim of literature is a global one. The writer searching for reality discovers a world which contains a truth that is valid for all. The reader can live in the heart of that world with a sense of wonder and plenitude he was unable to discover for himself; there he can share a fullness of experience, grasping the eternal meaning of time.
Because literature is a search for a world of meaning in which communication becomes fuller and more natural, we can easily conclude that world literature offers wide frontiers and vast fields of rich variety. The expression "world literature" (in German, Weltliteratur) became naturally acceptable since Goethe used it. In English, perhaps this appears too all-encompassing; it has been accused of vague sentimental cosmopolitanism, Therefore, some prefer to use the term "general literature." Van Tieghem associated world literature with the concept of comparative literature, and thus narrowed its scope. "Whatever the difficulties into which a conception of universal literature may run, wrote Austin Warren and René Wellek, "it is important to think of literature as one totality and to trace the growth and development of literature without regard to linguistic distinctions."1
The important literary studies today increasingly tend to conceive of literature as a part of culture, thus abandoning what Geörgy Lukacs calls "that exaggerated concern with formal criteria, with questions of style and literary technique,"
The ideal of a universal literary history, which in the last century was shared by great masters like Schlegel, Sismondi, Bouterwek, and Brandes, does not find in our day defenders of the same stature. A return to the ideals and ambitions of the great masters of general literary historiography is overdue, whatever modifications we may make today in the details of methods, and however much more ampler our sources of information may be. Literary history, as a synthesis of many elements on a supernational scale, will have to be written again, affirms Wellek. "Literature is one, as art and humanity are one; and in this conception lies the future of historical studies."2
Through a comparative study between German and English Romanticism, René Wellek has tried to bring out their distinct and original features.3 Studies of comparative literature are more and more frequent and have valuable results for the understanding of various diverse literary schools, national characteristics, and the individual force of creative writers. This certainly justifies a comparative study of Eastern and Western literary ideas.
We need both to define the field of literature and to broaden the scope of its study, the spirit of literary interpretations. We need urgently to broaden all the humanistic disciplines, as Toynbee has shown by establishing in wide perspective a new concept of history.
In an epoch like ours when ideas tend to become universal, world literature aims to bring together great creations of all nations and make them known without consideration of frontiers or national prejudices. Such a world literature can be invaluable for supplying new stimuli, for providing a rich variety of fresh suggestions, and for building a patrimony belonging to all men.
The broadening of the field of science has been impressive in the last fifty years, and with it comes a broadening in all humanistic disciplines. The extraordinary increase in scientific knowledge, having opened a field so vast in every specialized branch that it has become impossible for a man to embrace all human knowledge, has caused a great crisis in modern culture. The moment a man had to renounce knowing everything about the universe in which he lived, says Heidegger, was a tragic moment in culture. Still, every man can, through a choice befitting the inclinations of his spirit, reach that precious wisdom through which he can acknowledge everything that counts for true happiness, and thus not miss the valuable things that make life worthy and beautiful.
Concerning the gap between the two cultures—this area of general culture between humanism and the scientific culture—I do not know of any discipline more capable of filling it than literature. It can express not only man's inner life with its deep suffering and its joyous successes and exaltations, but also the vast sense of communion with other men, of communion with the universe at the mere sight of a cherry tree in bloom, or at seeing the majesty of the sea in peaceful calm or raging storm. The poem, the novel, and the drama have today a much greater role to play in the life of a man unaccustomed to an absurd world in which frequent wars and peace offensives are constantly destroying concepts and values and hindering the emergence of new ones. To the discipline of literature will belong the task of fostering the unity of the knowledge of man, without which all science will disintegrate into useless parcels. The more philosophy becomes specialized or loses ground taken up by science, the more the discipline of literature will broaden its scope and reach further horizons. Perhaps the actual recession of poetry, the novel, and drama into hermeticism and dry formalism is a reaction of evasion and fright in face of the much larger responsibilities of literature. Writers today shrink before the perspectives of the future. That is why they are not far ahead of us, in the proper place which belongs to them, where they can announce and help shape the future.
The science of literature, Literaturwissenschaft, has not won much credit in the last fifty years. It has narrowed instead of broadening its field and failed to recognize the autonomous structure of literature. The danger of falling into these shortcomings does not exist when we consider two literary heritages so far apart as the Western and the Eastern. From the founding genius of Western literature, Homer, to its greatest universal author, Goethe, or perhaps even Tolstoi, there is a period of twenty-six centuries. Japanese literature encompasses a much shorter time if we take its very beginning to be the Manyoshu, a compilation of poems completed in the eighth century. But this perspective is completely altered when we put Japanese literary production beside that of any single nation of the West.
The simultaneous appearance of cultural phenomena in several countries, without any link or
