Comparative Literature Studies

While the influence of Japanese woodblock prints on Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting has been well-documented, or at least long-argued [End Page 107] by art historians, Japan's presence in modern Western literature has not been dealt with nearly as well. Much of the scholarship that does exist on the topic tends to be narrowly bibliophilic (Westerner X must have read Japanese writer Y in the August 1912 issue of A Modern Magazine), straight-forwardly laudatory (cross-cultural exchange is always good), or critical in fairly obvious ways (nineteenth-century European representations of Japanese women were exoticizing). There is of course a great deal of fine work to read if one is already interested in the topic, but not much to convince us that "Japan" is essential or even important to our understanding of literary modernism as a whole. This is slowly beginning to change, with works like John Walter De Gruchy's Orienting Arthur Waley, David Ewick's online Japonisme, Orientalism, Modernism (http://themargins.net/bibliography.html) (which provides a stunning bibliography and anthology of primary materials framed by important critical work), and now Jan Hokenson's Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics: French Literature, 1867–2000.

Hokenson's book is a treasure trove for anyone interested in East–West literary relations and a milestone in the study of Japanese–Western literary relations. This ambitious survey—the first work of its kind on French literature since William Schwartz's 1927 The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature, 1800–1925—offers an impressively wide-ranging narrative that traces the presence and influence of Japanese culture in French literature from the 1867 Exposition Universelle to Inès Oseki Dépré's 1995 "You're welcome!" by way of Zola, Mallarmé, Fénéon, Claudel, Yourcenar, Sartre, Duras, Lyotard, the Théâtre du Soleil, and a host of other literary and critical figures, some major, some less so.

After covering the earliest reception of Japanese art by such japoniste critics as Philippe Burty—a body of material covered by art historical scholarship but presented here with new critical force—Hokenson turns to the more difficult question of how Japanese art might have influenced French literature, specifically the works of the enthusiastic japonistes Zola and the Goncourt brothers. Because of the depth of her research and her willingness to take japonisme seriously, Hokenson looks beyond obviously Japanese themes and settings toward the subtler ways in which these writers incorporated into their narrative techniques lessons gleaned from—or at least strongly associated with—Japanese aesthetics. Hokenson then turns to the early scholarly reception of Japanese art, in particular Louis Gonse's L'Art japonais (1883). By comparing Gonse's work with that of his British contemporary William Anderson, she persuasively delineates the specific national character of French japonisme, namely its protracted refusal to consider the details of Japanese history and social context as necessary to the [End Page 108] interpretation of the art. While Anderson and other English critics generally considered Japanese art objects to be artifacts that could explain and be explained by Japanese folklore, religious rituals, social customs, and the like, French critics largely restricted themselves to a form of aesthetic interpretation ostensibly independent of such concerns, so much so that Hokenson concludes that, given these critics' "near complete public ignorance of the culture, the art did not mean" (120). This is one of the most compellingly original arguments in the book: that the (enforced) absence of a referential context for Japanese art helps explain its importance as a model of aesthetic autonomy, a model that would appeal to Mallarmé and to the symbolist generation more broadly.

Hokenson then offers a wonderfully detailed and careful presentation of the earliest translations of Japanese poetry into French, outlining the literary and cultural challenges faced by these pioneering works. She also demonstrates how widely these collections were read. Among other things, this kind of literary history demonstrates the...