Literature versus Equality

[cacian]

should literateurs/literates strive to become equal in style and content/ in other words get rid of the concept of classics and canons and strive to all become best at what we write equality fairs?

[luhsun]

(Tongue in cheek) All literary works are equal, but some are more equal than others

[Mohammad Ahmad]

litterateurs= writer, literary man (French)
literates = one who can read and write; educated person
Of course they strive to be equal because the matter is competition and everyone should like to be the best.
It is impossible to be equal due to the variant thoughts and the quality they have and for instance there is no total similarity between two translated literary works have been written by two translators . The matter is concerned to the background of each one and to the unique view of each one.
Suppose I am Italian, do I write like you?
This depend on the level of education, the environment and the conditions which are surrounding the writer, i.e. for example his lifestyle, his age, his political view,gender, and many other factors.

[JBI]

Meh, there is no racism in traditional Japanese literature - it doens't help that there also happens to be no real idea of "race", given the homogeneity of the area.

In that sense, most traditions don't deal with "race" until the modern period. And then when we deal with concepts of "gender" we can easily suggest that gender relations in any given situation are constructed by a culture, including our own, and our own feminism is merely our own construct.

The idea of Equality is interesting in the art, in that art itself, and the very notion of Canon is about the inequality of texts, be it in their form, style, or substance. To suggest that Shakespeare is better than Marlowe that they both are "equal" or something is contradictory in itself. IF we accept equality as a goal, we should just accept "all things are equal" as a maxim, and strive for that.

As it is, most racist works do not centralize their racism as the content - for instance, Shakespeare's Othello is not dependent on Racism, despite Iago basically equating Othello to a Black Ram, using the imagery of violating the white Ewe - such a sense of imagery is actually less telling of the characters than it is of the cultural variance that gives birth to them. To merely gloss this over and dismiss the text is merely glossing over the history - it's easy enough for the winners to do - Americans are pretty good at it in general, and English people not that bad themselves. All countries with ego problems need to lie in their historical understandings of themselves somewhat, so that we can say we honor the greatness of the American Founding Fathers instead of think of them as the bigoted genocidal, war mongering expansionist people that they undoubtedly were. We can praise the idea of Benjamin Franklin loving equality and men, but we do not really emphasize his denying of the same rights he pushed for during American Independence from the people the empire most hated - namely French Canadians, whose relationship with Britain after the Quebec Act was deemed insufferable (he writes about that as one of the greatest abuses of the crown). Such argumentation is merely covered up.

One can go on with examples. The fact of the matter is, we cannot push equality everywhere, or justice, as it would basically kill off any sense of culture or origin. The same way Martin Luther wrote to Erasmus that his idea of religion was to bourgeois, whereas the Lutheran doctrine was anything but freeing or nice - it was bleak, and cold, and hard - what Luther saw the world as, a sort of struggle, and human beings as a sort of bestial thing that needed to sort of suffer for redemption. We now prefer to think of religion as something that gives not takes, the same way we think of history as pride not shame. Such things will not change, as the constructs that keep them in place are indebted for providing the social structure necessary for society to function.

It's the general idea that if Americans work hard, save lives, help the world, develop, feed, and live well, it doesn't matter to me how backward and twisted their history or beliefs are. Literature is the same. The truth or reality of some text is actually quite irrelevant.

Now, should there be equality? Of course not. The world is not equal in any other sense, why should literature be - if Armenia were as dominant as the US, everyone would be studying Armenian literature, but it isn't. This already is a fundamental inequality, yet not something that has a practical answer. Either you ignore all literature you cannot understand, or you accept a limitation.

[cacian]

(Tongue in cheek) All literary works are equal, but some are more equal than others

equality measures intensity to a peak. Literature rather not at the moment anyway. it is not suitable for hidden reasons to show all cards up on the same table. (tongue and speek) :D

[cacian]

In that sense, most traditions don't deal with "race" until the modern period. And then when we deal with concepts of "gender" we can easily suggest that gender relations in any given situation are constructed by a culture, including our own, and our own feminism is merely our own construct.

gender equality is an impossibility not to be sniffed at. whilst we may wish equality to be between he and she there are differences too many.
however equality in thinking is more approachable. I think the same as he and vice versa is appealing to me.
about feminism I am not so sure. where is the masculinism movement to equal it? non existent. oh well that says it all.

[luhsun]

Inequality, like stigma, has a function in society (so said jbi's countryman, irving goffman) - so maybe the strive for equality is not only futile but detrimental to society.

[mortalterror]

Meh, there is no racism in traditional Japanese literature - it doens't help that there also happens to be no real idea of "race", given the homogeneity of the area.
Every society hates it's neighbors, JBI. If you look for it, I'm sure you will find racism against Koreans and Chinese in Japanese literature. It might be a more recent example than you are thinking of, but I read a Japanese short story some years ago by Soseki (I think) that seemed racist against white people. You are definitely going to find some racism and hostility directed against the white traders and priests who visited the islands before they opened to the western world.

[JBI]

Every society hates it's neighbors, JBI. If you look for it, I'm sure you will find racism against Koreans and Chinese in Japanese literature. It might be a more recent example than you are thinking of, but I read a Japanese short story some years ago by Soseki (I think) that seemed racist against white people. You are definitely going to find some racism and hostility directed against the white traders and priests who visited the islands before they opened to the western world.

Traditional, I said, not modern. The traditional Chinese view of their neighbors was actually one of reverence culturally. They had an inferiority complex of sorts til the minute they beat both China and Russia successively, and therefore realized their own personal strength.

One just needs to browse the remnants of Japanese textual history to get the picture - Japanese people preserved much of the Chinese canon far better than the Chinese themselves. Their literature and government structures likewise preserved Tang and Song dynasty structures far longer than mainland China, which adopted much from its conquerors. It is no exaggeration to suggest that China and Japan were rather good friends culturally while China engaged in cultural imperialism in the continent for 2000 years.

[mortalterror]

Traditional, I said, not modern. The traditional Chinese view of their neighbors was actually one of reverence culturally. They had an inferiority complex of sorts til the minute they beat both China and Russia successively, and therefore realized their own personal strength.

One just needs to browse the remnants of Japanese textual history to get the picture - Japanese people preserved much of the Chinese canon far better than the Chinese themselves. Their literature and government structures likewise preserved Tang and Song dynasty structures far longer than mainland China, which adopted much from its conquerors. It is no exaggeration to suggest that China and Japan were rather good friends culturally while China engaged in cultural imperialism in the continent for 2000 years.
I'm aware of how much the Japanese were in awe of Chinese culture, but trust me JBI, that would just salt the wound. You can esteem a people you hate. The Romans were in awe of the Greek, and at the same time highly racist toward them. They loved the art and the philosophy, but viewed Greeks as ingenious, effeminate, liars. Hence, the distrust of Greeks bearing gifts in Virgil's story of Troy. Then there is a well worn motif of the clever slave who accompanies his Roman master and is always getting him out of trouble with his wit and skill in the Roman comedies. It was either Cato or Cicero, possibly both, who railed against the "Asiatic" influence of Greek words corrupting the pure Latin language. There was definitely a love hate relationship going on between the Greeks and the Romans.

Even the Greeks in the days of nation states were racist against other Greeks who didn't come from their town. You see that in things like Aristophanes plays where the non-Athenians talk like cretans and unsophisticated rubes or hillbillies. Besides nation states, you had the Greeks dividing themselves by tribes: Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians, and Achaeans, by region:Boeotia, Euboea, etc. and by what city had colonized their city. You see this come up a lot in Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War.

The Persians have adopted Islam after their conquest, but there's still some lingering resentment of Arabs. The Scottish and Irish aren't exactly thrilled with the English who's language they speak. There are definitely strong racist feelings to this day among the Africans who were colonized in the nineteenth century by the British and French, however much they might have admired the trains and medicine the foreigners brought with them. I'd be surprised if the same sentiments weren't alive in India after centuries of British influence.

But trust me, after millenia of wars and centuries under China's thumb racism is alive and well in the hearts of Koreans and Vietnamese people. Even though they adopted a lot of the culture, they definitely resented it, and you can bet the same feeling was happening across the sea in Japan.

[JBI]

Oh, don't get me wrong. I don't doubt that there is a xenophobia there. I just question the extent to which it would pervade a literature. The first major works of Japanese literature, after all, were quite Chinese in conception (as was the court culture of the time, an import during the Yamoto period). Now, the textual and foreign transactions between the countries during the Tang have been documented, with a rather nice praise, given the Tang's rather interesting position of bestowing massive gifts on visitors in return for acknowledgement of the Emperor (many smaller States from central Asia maintained their finances on such endowments).

Discussion of Race and prejudice a is always problematic in Asia, in that its conception is rather different than the West. Generally it is more a cultural prejudice than one of physicality, with regionalism being more significant than either race or religion.

However, Japanese literature on the whole is rather isolated - it borrows from Chinese literature, but it is not as preoccupied with the other, as lets say, Herodotus writing his History where there is direct contact militarily with the other. From a literature perspective there are thousands of references as early as the Chinese classics to "barbarians". The Book of songs is loaded with such epithets, which are almost all conceived of as negative. Japan in contrast seems less a place preoccupied with neighbors in that poetically speaking, nobody actually goes to Japan. Sure there was some violence in rather pre-literary times off the coast with the Korean states, and some invasions going on later, but from a literary perspective, the court of Japan seems preoccupied with Japan - it is, after all, a series of islands.

The Mongolians more or less change that, but even so, the racism of such argumentation is rather hard to trace in the literary body (not in the historical works mind you). If I am looking for thematic motifs in Japanese literature, I doubt I will come across the vast body of anti-"Barbarian" literature that I find prevalent in China. Rather, the culture is isolated in topic to the culture around it - regionalism is of course rampant, especially with associations to place (which are also trends in Chinese poetry) yet I do not see much in terms of "foreigners" in the literary body. Did they hate them? well, most likely, but not in their texts explicitly.

Now, as for the entire populations writing of works, well, on one hand there was a clear reverence for Chinese sources up until the modern period (even Natsume Soseki wrote a large body of KanShi or Chinese Poems) and physical encounters were rather limited early on from a literary perspective (the "missions" to China ended rather early, and post-Mongol Invasion ushered in an era of rather closed borders). How much then could a textual racism exist in a culture of more or less homogenous ethnic background. Linguistically speaking, even the regionalism is stifled for a written standard.

is there inequality? Of course, but not in the sense that we see white people being inequal to black people in the US (as reflected in literature) since in general, everyone looked more or less the same in Japan. You see more along the lines of family(clan) orientation and regionalism, which is a different form of inequality.