Classical World Literatures: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons by Wiebke Denecke

Abstract

Reviewed by: Classical World Literatures: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons by Wiebke Denecke Gunilla Lindberg-Wada Classical World Literatures: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons. By Wiebke Denecke. Oxford University Press, 2014. 368pages. Hardcover £59.00/$90.00. This groundbreaking work tackles the core of our engagement in cross-cultural and literary studies: comparisons. The book is one of a kind and could only have been written by a scholar such as Wiebke Denecke, whose wide-ranging academic competence has allowed her to cover a spectrum of topics—as indicated by the book’s title—that would usually involve several experts. For the general reader her work gives intriguing insights into unfamiliar texts and literary cultures and opens up new perspectives on familiar works and genres, not least because she treats the whole spectrum of Japanese literary history, including vernacular and Sino-Japanese texts. The book explores how writers of younger cultures were affected by the presence of an older “reference culture,” focusing on the constellations Japan/China and Rome/Greece. Under consideration are ancient Japan during the Nara and Heian periods and ancient Rome from the Middle Republic of the third century bce to the Late Roman Empire of the fifth century ce. Chapter 1 lays the foundation for the comparison of Japanese and Roman literary cultures, a task accomplished in the remaining seven chapters in the form of case studies. The chapter discusses fundamental similarities and differences: the two literary cultures were both self-conscious “latecomers” that developed against the backdrop of the highly sophisticated stages of literary development in their reference cultures. However, whereas the Roman Empire by 146 bce conquered the Greek mainland and thereby became the agent that spread Hellenistic culture in its Roman inflections throughout the Mediterranean, and later in Europe at large, premodern Japan was marginal to China, and their contacts were predominantly unilateral. Denecke characterizes the Roman elite, at least since the second century bce, as “bilingual—they spoke both Greek and Latin; their education was bicanonical—they were trained in both the Greek and growing Latin literary canon; and their literary production [End Page 377] was predominantly monoliterate—they wrote their works in Latin.” In contrast, she describes the early Japanese elite as “monolingual—with the exception of very few individuals who came from the continent or studied in China for a long time, Japanese could not speak Chinese; their education was tricanonical—including the Chinese canon, and the growing Sino-Japanese and vernacular Japanese canons; and their literary production was biliterate—they produced texts in both Sino-Japanese and the vernacular, and many genre-dependent hybrid idioms in between” (p. 46, italics in the original). Chapters 2 and 3 explore the strategies employed by authors of the younger literary cultures to cope with their “latecomer” situation. Chapter 2 focuses on how they dealt with their belated arrival to the realms of writing and literature in Brutus, a pedagogical dialogue composed by Cicero in 46 bce that traces the development of Greek and Latin rhetoric; in Historiae Romanae, a compendium of Roman history published in 30 ce by Velleius Paterculus; and in the prefaces of Kaifūsō (751) and Kokinshū (905). Chapter 3 explores the younger cultures’ notions of ornate sophistication and pristine simplicity of literary expression and examines narratives of decline in oratory that could, in one way or another, be blamed on foreign influence. In order to capture the use of “ornateness” as a critical concept, Denecke focuses on the Chinese term wen and the Latin term ornatus, debates about which shared one fundamental concern, namely, “whether ornament was simply applied to, or truly constitutive of, substance” (p. 88). In East Asia as well as in Greece and Rome, there was a bias against ornament that haunted debates about the desirable balance between ornament and substance. In De oratore (55 bce), Cicero uses narratives of decline to develop a vision of a truly Roman sapienta, or wisdom, and claims that Roman oratory had its own glorious independent past that called for emulation. As in the Sino-Japanese preface to the Kokinshū, there is a pristine age that is destroyed by the intrusion of a villain equipped with evil...