Parody, Irony and Ideology in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku by David J. Gundry (review)

Reading David J. Gundry's detailed analysis of four of Ihara Saikaku's fictional narratives reminds us of the extraordinary breadth of subject matter Saikaku (1642–93) has left us. Starting with his successful career as a haikai poet and teacher in the urban contemporary Danrin school of group composition, Saikaku went on to explore new modes of fiction writing within the narrative subgenre of ukiyozōshi (floating world fiction, p. 1). Saikaku's works were so distinctive compared to the fiction and courtesan critique narratives preceding them that writers began emulating his style, resulting in the establishment of ukiyozōshi as the dominant form of contemporary fiction for the next eight decades. For readers today, however, Saikaku's fiction presents an enigma: how do we reconcile the perspective of the narrator at the start (and sometimes the end) of Saikaku's stories with the often opposite, or at best unrelated, "message" found within the text of the narrative proper? Gundry's study provides us with new ways of reading Saikaku that help us transcend our original naive question regarding the relationship(s) between narrator and narrative, leading us toward more sophisticated ways of reading and appreciating his craft.

In order to accomplish this, Gundry utilizes the dialogic theories developed by Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895–1975), in particular Bakhtin's notions of dialogism and of polyphony that he identifies in the early European novel. Gundry sets his aims as follows:

The goal of this study is to examine the peculiar mixtures of subject matter, of narrative voices and of styles that make up the texture of Saikaku's fiction, as well as its relation to a socio-historical context characterized by great de facto social mobility and cultural ferment at odds with a legally imposed system of hereditary status categories. … Chief among the commonalities I explore are a dialogic quality involving both the blending of the elements listed above and the existence within individual texts of competing ethical stances.

(p. 3)

While Bakhtin has the various registers of class distinction as reflected in the use of language in the early European novel vie with one another for authority, thereby imbuing the works with a kind of social egalitarianism, Gundry argues that Saikaku's works "embody not an egalitarian worldview but rather a bourgeois will to make hierarchy depend on potential acquirable assets such as money and cultural sophistication, rather than depending on birth, thus replacing a hereditary status system with a fluid hierarchy, a sort of meritocracy of the marketplace" (p. 22).

Given that Saikaku hailed from an affluent Osaka merchant house, and that he developed his skills in the acute and critical observation of people in society through his decades of training as a haikai poet and teacher in Nishiyama Sōin's (1605–82) Danrin school of urbane poetic composition, in hindsight we can interpret the elements of parody and irony found in his fiction as indicators of a desire on the part of urban merchants to expose the inconsistencies inherent in the heredity-based bakuhan system controlled by the military-official class (bushi or samurai). However, as Gundry notes, Western scholarship on Saikaku (primarily in English) has focused on the realism detected in his writings, in particular the fine attention to detail, to the relative exclusion of the multiplicity of ideologies (Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist, martial, mercantile) presented there (pp. 9–11).

Jeffrey Johnson's studies of Saikaku's fiction from the perspective of Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque¹ are subject to specific criticism by Gundry, who argues that "the reigning sensibility of [Saikaku's] works … is not iconoclastic or egalitarian but rather that of the ambitious and assertive bourgeois who is concerned with social self-advancement rather than with leveling social distinctions [as Johnson argues]" (p. 19). This approach works well for what is perhaps the most difficult and problematic of Saikaku's writings that...