Triviality

Abstract

During the Heian age (794–1186), a period of Japanese history characterized by a remarkable cultural efflorescence, two widely recognized masterpieces of world literature were produced: Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book (Makura no soshi) and Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari). Although my focus in this chapter will be on the first of these, I would like to begin by comparing the two, for the contrast between their dominant affective qualities—between the joyful inconsequentiality of the former and the melancholic profundity of the latter—could hardly be more pronounced. And here, too, we can detect a clear conflict of aesthetic values, reminding us once more of the opposing tendencies that have competed in literature throughout the centuries. If Genji privileges qualities such as density, linearity, and stability of meaning, then Sei’s narrative does everything it can to achieve the opposite effect, transforming language into a “weightless element that hovers above things like a cloud or better, perhaps, the finest dust or, better still, a field of magnetic impulses” (Calvino, Six Memos 15).KeywordsWorld LiteratureCherry TreeDilatory SpaceAesthetic PleasureWild GooseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.