Vagueness: Identity and Understanding Across Literatures East and West

Abstract

The twentieth century witnessed an explosion in cultural exchanges between East and West. Through the increasing ease with which ideas could be communicated across the globe, and with which people, sometimes willingly, sometimes not, could move between distant countries, intercultural cross-fertilization became increasingly important to both “Eastern” and “Western” art. Yet this intellectual and physical movement also brought new forms of art that defied previous modes of interpretation, and called the very concepts of East and West into question. This dissertation uses the great exchange of people and ideas in the twentieth century to ask what identity cross-cultural literature can have and how we as critics should understand the heterogenous materials “East-West” literature presents us. My study addresses itself to debates in comparative literature and world literature. In particular, the concept of “literary worlds,” or of works of literature as imaginative worlds unto themselves, is the starting point of this thesis. Though the theory of literary worlds is rich and informative, it falters when dealing with texts founded on different ontologies as it can run the risk of highlighting superficial similarities without attending to deep-level differences. Recent work in philosophical logic, philosophical approaches to vagueness, and Asian Analytic Philosophy fortifies the theory, and the strengthened concept of literary worlds serves as a methodological framework throughout this dissertation. The ensuing chapters compare literary responses to East Asian texts or sets of texts, then consider what sort of epistemic and ontological relations obtain between these different literary works. Chapter II looks at Ted Hughes’ and Chou Wen-Chung’s unfinished operatic adaptation of the Bardo Thödol. Hughes and Chou worked to make the Eastern and Western material from which they were constructing the Bardo fuse in a coherent East-West text. The process by which they attempted to carry out that fusion is the subject of the chapter. Chapter III considers two adaptations, one by Paul Claudel and one by Mishima Yukio, of the classical Japanese Nō play Kantan. The ways in which Claudel and Mishima borrowed from Kantan to suit their own aesthetic and philosophical visions provides a fascinating case study of identity relations between literary worlds bearing the same origins but having different coherences. Chapter IV compares the poetry of Paul Claudel and Kuki Shūzō written in the 1920s, during which time Claudel lived in Kuki’s native Tokyo and Kuki in Claudel’s native Paris. To craft short poems on life in one another’s cities, Claudel and Kuki drew from similar sources and experiences, yet, as their critical writings show, held divergent views of the fundamental structure of art and, indeed, of the universe. The extent to which these divergent metaphysical viewpoints affect the structure of each poet’s poetic worlds is considered. Finally, Chapter V treats the exile poetry of Bei Dao along with Ted Hughes’ rewriting of a poem on his native Calder Valley into a “Chinese history”. Both Bei Dao and Hughes have spoken in depth about the effects of tradition on poetic composition and reception, and the chapter ruminates on how that conception changes over time, and what it means for Bei Dao’s and Ted Hughes’ poetry and our comprehension of it. The Conclusion reconsiders the modified theory of literary worlds advanced at the start of the dissertation, and reflects on how the findings of the previous five chapters might affect future study of East-West and comparative literature.