A Review by Robert D. Wilson

Koninklijke Brill NV ©2010
ISBN 978 90 04 18977 5

This is Professor Michael F. Marra’s final book. He passed away this spring. He confided to me in an e-mail that he wanted to give to the world everything he had left to give, knowing he had less than six months to live (which, in reality, was only two months). He further confided to me that he was in intense pain, and yet had a sense of humor, and continued to teach until the day before his demise. He told me he didn’t fear death but saw it the way the Japanese see it - as part of a time continuum.

I will review a chapter of this important book in the field of Japanese Hermeneutics and Aesthetics, since the volume is a compendium of lessons, essays, and to my dismay, my interview with Professor Marra (Chapter 22) for Simply Haiku which he told me was an important journal that was making an impact on the English-language Japanese short form poetry world.

Chapter Four

JAPANESE AESTHETICS: THE CONSTRUCTION
OF MEANING

The funding necessary to do research for the above essay at the Department of Aesthetics (Bigakka) of the University of Osaka was provided by a grant from The Japan Foundation.
 

“What we today call postmodernism cannot be denied the merit of continuing the unfinished business of modernism: to reject the transparency of a master history in which truth unfolds along the lines of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and Hegelian synthetic processes. The grand narrative challenges, the unitarian view of history that has made the masters of the written word the undisputable makers of human destiny. The pluralization of histories has made societies less transparent and less willing to accept the notion of an objective reality whose frame of reference is grounded in the unverifiable fable of the metaphysical world.”

A little farther down in Professor Marra’s paper, he wrote:

“In spite of a multiplicity of interpretative strategies, the current debate on the post-modern focuses on how to dismantle epistemological categories that restrict the human mind within the closed boundaries of a metalanguage that fails to explain itself, let alone the object of its speculation.” 

Continues Marra: “Nietzsche’s murder of the reassuring myth of stability and meaning, as has Heidegger’s concept of the human fluctuation between belonging and lost, deprives humanity of a ‘scientific’ apparatus that might provide legitimation to the process of thinking.”

The French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, brought up a good point when he postulated that the logic/rationalism of metaphysics that guides all interpretative implications and schemata used in metalinguistics introduces what the researcher wants to find before beginning the interpretive process. Metalanguage becomes nothing more than a mental mirror that uses metaphorical and apperceptive props that allow readers to conceptualize what the interpreter wants to get across; the author utilizes a residuum of his past experience to guide readers to a new conceptualization of what was understood previously via a different mindset.

Writes Marra: “The deconstructive practice that suspends the metaphysical correspondence among mind, meaning, and the method allegedly uniting them was not unknown to the Buddhist philosophical tradition.” The aforementioned tradition “characterized truth as an insight into non-differentiating and non-objectifying wisdom (prajna) that frees the interpreter from the danger of thinking of categories as absolutes.”

It is but it isn’t.

“This nameless and formless reality,” continues Marra, “stretching beyond the well-known boundaries of conceptualization has engaged the sharpest minds in Asia in the definition of what language can hardly name and concepts can hardly describe.”

Lao Tzu called this non-definable space, the tao (way). Chuang Tzu called it wu (nonbeing). I refer to it, as do many others, as the unsaid, that which cannot be verbalized in words. This is where Anglo-Western philosophy and aesthetics differ the most with their Japanese counterparts, which are, in reality, not counterparts. The pure Yamato Japanese language is a language not adaptable to the definitions and conceptualizations found in Anglo-Western philosophy and aesthetics.

What the Anglo-Western world calls aesthetics is a term that was not found in the Yamato language used during the lifetimes of poets such as Teika, Shotetsu, Saigyo, and Basho, to name a few. What was written by the Japanese in Chinese was a Japanese metalinguistic version that didn’t always correspond to the Chinese meaning of certain terms and words. The term “aesthetics” didn’t have a counterpart in the Yamato language.

Modern Japanese scholars, including Shiki, in order to communicate with the Anglo-Western world had to form definitions of the non-definable, terms used by the Japanese intuitively. The question was how does one define the non-definable, especially values and styles that didn’t agree with the Anglo-Western interpretation of such values and styles? What we call today “aesthetics” (makoto, yugen, sabi, ma, etc.) were considered by writers in medieval Japan as “styles.”

What resulted was the colonization of the Japanese interpretation of Anglo-Western words and terms that enabled the Japanese after Japan’s borders were opened up to the Anglo-Western world to communicate on what many modern Japanese scholars perceived was the way to communicate and be on equal bearings with Anglo-Western aestheticians and philosophers.

The Japanese university system in modern Japan was restructured by the adaptation of the German university model.

States Marra: ”Whatever goes under the umbrella of Japanese literature, art, religion, history, philosophy and so on would not exist in its modern form without the paradigms that hermeneutics provided in forcing Japanese authors to talk about Japan with a language that was originally devised for interpreting the Bible.”

Shotetsu couldn’t define yugen (thought of as a style); Teika, before him, had the same trouble; but Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, and other Anglo-Western thinkers posited definitions which were culturally adapted by the Japanese.

We have the past which conditions the subjective interpretations of readers and writers. We have a now which is gone before you can blink an eye, and the future is a big if that no one can predict or forecast thorough enough to be considered academically possible. History and hermeneutics allow researchers to examine the past if they go at it as objectively as possible, from which they can find what they think is the true thought behind a term expressed in words, which is easier said than done as the meaning for many Japanese words have more definitions than their counterparts in the Anglo-Western world.

Kenneth Yasuda and R.H. Blyth both wrote and taught that true haiku was a Zen Buddhist literary genre and that for one to write a good haiku, one had to experience an “aha!” moment, where the poet and an object became one.

How can you become one with your own culturally metalinguistic conceptualization when everything is in constant change and nothing is permanent . . . that little nemesis some call the tao, the wu, the “nameless and formless reality stretching across the well known boundaries of conceptualization?”

I’ve covered briefly the beginning of Chapter 4 in the late Michael F. Marra’s remarkable book Essays on Japan. You’ll have to read the Chapter yourself in order to get to the gist of the research the Professor did to develop his conclusions for this particular essay.

Professor Marra’s book is a book anyone seriously interested in an in-depth study of Japanese short form poetry should read and study. Don’t expect to read and understand Marra’s book in a few days or weeks. His book is 500 pages long and should be treated as a textbook for graduate students.

Up until the day before his death a few months ago, Michael F. Marra was Professor of Japanese literature, aesthetics, and hermeneutics at the University of California in Los Angeles.