Herman Melville and Modern Japan: A Speculative Re-Interpretation of the Critical History

Herman Melville and Modern Japan: A Speculative Re-Interpretation of the Critical History YUJI KATO Tokyo University of Foreign Studies S erious Melville studies in Japan were initiated, during the 1930s, by the prolific critic, translator, and scholar of British literature, Abe Tomoji, whose subjects ranged from Lord Byron, Jane Austen, and the Brontës, to William Faulkner. His Herman Melville (1934) and his translation of MobyDick (1951) are regarded as his core achievements in introducing Western literature to Japan. Herman Melville is a small, tract-like book, published as one of a series of volumes intended to introduce Anglo-American writers to Japanese university students. In its prologue, Abe recalls the origins of his interest in Melville through an anecdote that links the advent of Japanese Melville studies with British modernism, introduced into Japan by Edmund Blunden, who, in a class at Tokyo University, according to Abe, “cited Shakespeare’s King Lear, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Melville’s Moby-Dick, as the three best tragedies written in the English language.”1 The scholar of a literary genealogy descending from King Lear to Wuthering Heights to Moby-Dick, Blunden was likely conscious of the Nietzschean dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, part of the modernist poetics that introduced Greek mythology into the literary paradigm of the age. Considering the modernist penchant for both extension and revision of received conceptions of tradition, one might say that, in applying “tragedy” to Moby-Dick, he was using the term as does D. H. Lawrence, for example, in such books as Apocalypse, to mean the loss of modern humanity’s contact with the cosmos, leading to our sense of a difference rather than identification with nature. Lawrence laments in the following words: “We have lost the cosmos, by coming out of responsive connection with it, and this is our chief tragedy.”2 Their use of the term “tragedy” and the introduction of Greek mythology and literature into modernism suggest anti-romantic impulses that attempt to C
2006 The Authors Journal compilation C
2006 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc 1 Abe Tomoji, Herman Melville, Kenkyusha Series of Autobiographical Introductions to AngloAmerican Writers, vol. 95 (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1934), v; hereafter cited as Abe. 2 D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 27. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 11 Y U J I K A T O replace the Judeo-Christian myth of identification with Greek mythology and concepts of literature that differ from it. Yet Abe disregards both the anti-romantic view implicit in Blunden’s employment of the term “tragedy” and the Nietzschean and Freudian logic implicit in D. H. Lawrence’s interpretation of classic American literature. In comparing Melville with William Blake, Dante Alighieri, and François Rabelais (Abe 91, 61), writers who belongs to the “subversive genealogy” of the European tradition, Abe reveals that he most likely understands Melville’s dualistic vision of both the romantic and anti-romantic writer. Even so Abe limits his own vision to the dominant Christian, romantic reading of Melville, excluding from view the underlying current of anti-romantic impulse in Melville’s works and his concept of tradition. It is probably not coincidental that Abe’s Herman Melville appeared in the period during which Japan was groping for alternatives to its tradition of cultural assimilation as it moved toward cultural and military imperialism and the climactic conflict with the United States. Melville offered a potent symbol, in the political and cultural context of the time, of a culture beyond that of the romantic tradition of the Meiji era that was modeled on the romantic literature and culture of Europe. In this context, Abe’s Herman Melville comprises one of the first and exceptionally serious attempts to understand the culture of the United States. Yet Abe’s reliance in his interpretation of Melville on the assumptions and devices of the Western bourgeois, imperial tradition, with its implications of progress, technology, and industrialization, unavoidably circumscribed this attempt, particularly in view of Melville’s delving into...