Over the course of the “Genji monogatari” (“The Tale of Genji,” c. 1008) narrative, roughly fifty characters die. The eponymous hero’s arc starts with the passing of his mother and ends as he himself succumbs to grief at being parted from his beloved Murasaki; the subsequent ten chapters of the text are likewise marked by successive personal losses. However, while the “Genji’s” plot is consistently catalyzed through encounters with death, it would be a mistake to say that the tale is about death: instead, it is the highly aestheticized scenes of grief experienced privately and communally by its characters in the aftermath (and sometimes even in the anticipation) of their loved ones’ passing that motivate much of the action and narrative development.
My dissertation project aims to analyze the intrinsic affective qualities of “Genji monogatari’s” portrayals of death and mourning. Although the text showcases Murasaki Shikibu’s skillful interweaving of Heian spiritual beliefs, social rituals, and funerary practices with classical literary tropes and the preexisting traditions in elegiac poetry, it also represents a significant departure and innovation vis-à-vis earlier and contemporary depictions of death. For one, it resurrects and reinvents the depiction of the corpse which all but disappeared from courtly literature, and expands the narrated experience of bereavement from the point of view of an isolated principal mourner to that of a larger emotional/affective community. What’s more, the narrative patterns and images it establishes early on continue to evolve over the span of the text itself.
The “Genji’s” hallmark death scenes foreground the exquisite bodies of the dying or already dead—and almost exclusively female—subjects, laid out unobstructed to the discerning gaze of the male protagonists. As I will show through a thorough exploration of the poetic vocabulary and affective narrative structuring in situations dealing with grief and sorrow in these scenes, this has the effect of narratively minimizing the moment of death as a descriptive event and instead heralding an affective mode of storytelling that creates communal bonds between the bereaved characters, the narrator(s), and the readers. That said, as the plot progresses, subtle subversive changes start to emerge: the women in the first part of the tale, who remained beautiful but voiceless after frequently meeting sudden ends, give way to characters who anticipate and eventually even will their demise, and whose richer interiority offers insights on their mortality that can counterpoint the ensuing objectifying consumption of their bodies. This development consequently not only brings into question the larger meaning of death retrospectively throughout the entire text, but also allows us to glean Murasaki Shikibu’s own intratextual theorization on the affective and narrative functions of death, in addition to its wider literary potential.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/1f44-nq33 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Komova, Ekaterina |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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