The Writing of Disaster - Literary Representations of War, Trauma and Earthquakes in Modern Japan

Front matter

Neuere Lyrik

Leith Morton

The Writing of Disaster

Introduction

1."Amid the Frenzied Sea of Fire": The Great Tokyo Earthquake and Literature

11. The Event

1.2. The Earthquake in Prose

1.3. Ah Tokyo

1.4. Earthquake Poetry Collection

1.5. Aizu Yaichi's Aftershocks

1.6. Kubota Utsubo's Shiny Leaves

1.7. Yosano Akiko's Poetry on the Earthquake

1.8. Wakayama Bokusui's Miscellaneous Poems on the

Aftershocks

2. Writing in Extremis: Wartime Tanka Poetry 24. Writing against War 2.2. Kawada Jun's Wartime Tanka 2.3. Tanka at War 2.4. Writing in Extremis 2.5. Tanka against War

2.6. Conclusion

3.1. Nomonhan: Victory or Defeat?

3.2. Kusaba's Noro Hills and War Memory

3.3. Noro Hills, Volume One: Truth or Fiction?

3.4. Noro Hills, Volume Two: Retrospection and Reality 85 3.5. Brief Concluding Note 89

4. Warin China and the Pacific: Takamura Kotaro, Kusano 91 Shinpei and the Matinée Poétique

44. Takamura Kotaro's War Poetry

4.2. Matinée Poétique and 1946 p 4.3. Kusano Shinpei's War Poetry ió4 4.4. Conclusion yin 5. Self-Censorship: The Case of Wartime Japanese Poetry 115 5.1. Censorship and Self-Censorship 16 5.2. Who is guilty? The Controversy over War Responsibility 19 5.3. Miyoshi Tatsuji's Self-Censorship 121 5.4 Tsuboi Shigeji as a Resistance Poet 124 5.5. Kaneko Mitsuharu: Self-Censorship or Plain, Old Irony? 127 5.6. Takahashi Shinkichi: Uncomplicated Patriot? 130 5.7. Brief Concluding Note 132 6. "Sturm und Drang" in Tanizaki Junichiro's The Makioka 133 Sisters (1948) 6.1. Flood, Storm and Typhoon 133 6.2. Tanizaki and the Great Hanshin Flood 136 6.3. The Great Hanshin Flood and The Makioka Sisters 138 6.4 The Makioka Sisters and the Tokyo Typhoon 142 6.5. Concluding Note 144 7. The Trauma of the Postcolonial Hybrid: Oshiro 147 Tatsuhiro and Yuta 74. The Postcolonial Condition and Hybridity 147

7.2. Yuta and Oshiro Tatsuhiro 149

7.3. Yuta/Hybridity/Trauma 7.4 Postcolonial Hybridity: Matsuyo in the Labyrinth 7.5. Brief Concluding Note

8. The 2011 East Japan Earthquake and Literature: Contemporary Poetry Handbook 2011-2014 8.1. The 3.11 Earthquake as History 8.2. "Confronting the Great East Japan Earthquake": Contemporary Poetry Handbook May 201 8.3. Contemporary Poetry Handbook June-December 201 8.4 Contemporary Poetry Handbook 2012-14 8.5. Fiction and the 201 Earthquake 8.6. Brief Concluding Note g. Trauma and Catharsis: The 2011 East Japan Earthquake and Traditional Genres of Verse

g.1. Trauma and Literature

g.2. Selection of Tanka from Local and Anonymous Poets

9.3. A Diary of the Earthquake in Verse

9.4 Anatomy of a Tanka Masterpiece

9.5. Poems from the Palace of the Dragon King

Reflections Bibliography Notes

204 207 210 212 214

Preface

In writing this book I have been ably supported by many colleagues present and past, some of these scholars I will mention here but the exigencies of space prevent me from listing them all. I wish to express my profound gratitude to all who have arranged seminars and colloquiums, conferences and panels where I could present these chapters in their first incarnations as scholarly papers. I would especially thank my former colleagues at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Kogyo Daigaku) where I spent eleven happy and productive years teaching and researching Japanese, English and comparative literature before returning to Australia in late 2014. On many occasions, former colleagues including Inoue Ken, Inoue Masaatsu, Roger Pulvers, Alison Tokita, Hugh De Ferranti, Garvin Perram, Hashizume Daizaburo, Hattori Takakazu (recently deceased), Tokosumi Akifumi (recently deceased), Saeki Yasuki, Ishihara Yuki and Iguchi Tokio helped my research in many and varied ways.

I should also thank Hamashita Masahiro, Hokama Shuzen, Katsukata-Inafuku Keiko and Nakahodo Masanori at various Japanese universities for their assistance, especially relating to my research on Oshiro Tatsuhiro. After 2015, Omura Azusa, at the Yamanashi Prefectural University, provided me with a number of opportunities to return to Japan to try out my ideas on various audiences, and I owe her a deep debt of gratitude. Also, in Japan, I have to express my deep gratitude to my colleague Suzuki Sadami at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken), who has helped me in ways too numerous to mention, as has the institution itself. I was involved with the International Association for Japan Studies (IAJS) for a number of years, and the various conventions held at universities throughout Japan enabled me to present my findings for the first time on many of the topics in this book. I thank my former colleagues in the IAJS: lijima Takehisa, Tokunaga Mitsuhiro, Kimura Koichi, Tomita Kaoru, Ian Ruxton and Nakajima Tomoko.

In Europe, I should also like to thank colleagues for providing venues where I was able to read early versions of certain some of the chapters: Over the years, the members of the Académie du Midi in France have helped in more ways than I can mention, especially by providing a most hospitable environment in which to try out my ideas; I thank in particular Roger T. Ames, Henry Rosemount (recently deceased), Graham Parkes and Helmut and Lalli Maassen. In Germany and France, Giinter Wohlfart (now based in France), Hans-Georg Moller and Karl-Heinz Pohl have helped enormously, both in the past and present.

Towards the end of my period of residence in Tokyo, I was able to spend time with colleagues in the USA for lectures and at conferences and the like, and these visits helped to focus my research. | thank especially Jon Holt at Portland State University and Massimiliano Tomasi at Western Washington University. I am also grateful for the chance to discuss contemporary Japanese

Preface 9 poetry with Jeffrey Angles (now at Western Michigan University) shortly before returning home to Sydney. Over a number of decades, I have worked with Rachael Hutchinson at the University of Delaware as a collaborator in a number of scholarly projects, some resulting in chapters in this book, and her insights have often changed my thinking to my advantage, and I offer her my most unqualified thanks.

In 2018, I was invited to Trier University in Germany as a senior Research Fellow in residence in the DFG Kolleg Research Group (Russian-language Poetry in Transition) for six months, and this stay in Germany at Trier University not only provided an ideal venue to discuss Japanese poetry but also permitted visits to several other university campuses where I was able to further refine my ideas on Japanese verse. At Trier I thank again Karl-Heinz and Linda Pohl, two special people, and, above all, Henrieke Stahl-Schwaetzer, the director of this massive research project on contemporary poetry (the formal project title is far too modest). Also special thanks to Andreas Regelsberger in Japanese studies and Christian Soffel in Sinology at Trier (also Kolleg members) who helped in numerous ways. I was able to return to Trier in 2019 to refine my ideas even further with colleagues in the Kolleg, and I thank the scholars and postdoctoral researchers whose own work challenged me and made think more deeply about my subject; in particular, Ralph Müller, Peter Geist, Friederike Reents, Angelika Schmitt, Yuri Orlitski, Matthias Fechner and Anna Gavryliuk, whose day to day assistance also proved invaluable. Jasmin Bóhm, a PhD student in modern Japanese literature at Trier, was particularly helpful in aiding me in navigating the campus, and its offices; her assistance is much appreciated. Thanks go also to Katina Baharova whose organizational skills made my stay in Trier much easier. I also thank in particular my old friend Finn Riedel in Weimar, Helmut and Lalli Maassen in Pont, my colleagues in Japanese and Chinese, especially Jana Rosker and Luka Culiberg, at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and Zhiyi Yang at the Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main.

Also, in 2018, I was appointed as an Honorary Associate in the Department of Japanese Studies, School of Languages and Cultures, the University of Sydney. This appointment has helped enormously in providing me with extensive access to academic databases and other resources at the Fisher Library in the university, and I am most grateful to the generosity of my colleagues in Japanese studies—especially Rebecca Suter—at Sydney University for their invitation to rejoin my old alma mater as a researcher. I should also like to thank, at Sydney University, Mats Karlsson, Yasumoto Seiko, and former colleagues Sakuko Matsui and Hugh Clarke for their friendship and assistance over the years, and also Michael Carter, another former colleague, for his sage advice. At the Australian National University in Canberra, I thank Carol Hayes for all her support and friendship over many years.

10 Preface

Very early versions of a number of these chapters have been published in various journals and books over time, and I should like to thank the editors for their permission to republish. Also, I should like to thank the several Japanese authors, and their families, who have generously supported my research over many years by giving permission to translate. I also wish to thank Ekaterina Evgrashkina for her editorial assistance. Finally, I thank my wife Sachiko who has accompanied me on every step of this scholarly journey, and whose research assistance has been invaluable.

Introduction

"Between the vast insanities

That men so cleverly invent

It may be here, it may be here,

A simulacrum of content"

(from) "The Bungaloes" by William Plomer'

In the past few years a number of book-length English-language studies of the cultural dimensions of disasters in modern Japan have appeared in print.” The question arises: Why do we need another? The reason is that none of these books concentrates solely on literature, as this book does, and only a few of the volumes treat the disaster spawned by World War II—the most destructive military conflict in Japanese history. This volume has a deliberate focus on both the literature that emerged from World War II, with four chapters on this topic, and also the literature that resulted from the two major earthquakes that have struck Japan over the course of over the last hundred years—incorporating the writing inspired by one ofthe major floods ofthe prewar period— with another four chapters investigating these subjects. One additional chapter examines the fiction of a well-known contemporary Okinawan author? Also, in this volume, World War II encompasses the Japanese military excursions onto the Asian continent, and thus includes the so-called “Fifteen Years’ War” (1931-1945) in its purview. The small number of volumes previously published examining the literature of war and earthquakes in Japan have almost always focused exclusively on fiction, but this volume has an equal focus on both poetry and fiction. In this sense, this volume breaks new ground in its attempt to draw together and analyze as a single phenomenon the literature produced by these tragedies.*

The literature borne out of war, earthquake and flood, similarly literature that dramatizes disasters, has been explored in some depth by scholars of European literature—Maurice Blanchot’s famous 1980 book L’Ecriture du Désastre (translated as The Writing of the Disaster)—is emblematic, and also by scholars of English literature: Kate McLoughlin's Authoring War (2011) and Christopher Coker's Men at War (2014) are two representative studies of war literature.? Nor do I need to gesture to the many distinguished studies of the Holocaust and modern literature, which have poured forth from presses over many decades, or the select group of books in English on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and literature. Yet the topic of disasters (especially dealing with the disaster of World War II) and writing, save for the important exception of atomic bomb literature, hardly figures at all in English-language studies of modern Japanese literature." Thus this volume is charting a pioneering path rather than ploughing the well-tilled ground of previous scholarship.

This book will examine only a select number of literary representations of war, flood and earthquakes in twentieth and twenty-first century Japan. The literary works all fall into the two categories of prose, both fictional and non-fictional, and poetry (inclusive of free verse and such traditional varieties of verse as tanka and haiku).? My selection of the disasters treated in the book is, I trust, judicious, since the literature produced by the two most destructive earthquakes to strike Japan over the course of over the last hundred years and the most terrible war ever experienced by Japan in its long history are all subjected to detailed scrutiny. Nonetheless, other tragedies exist that are not dealt with here.

For instance, the literature of the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1905 is not treated within these pages. And, because of the manifest need for a much greater depth of analysis than can be permitted in a broad study of disaster such as this volume represents, nor do I examine literature dealing with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (although this book does make use ofsome of the methodologies employed by scholars to analyze these tragic events). Literary works arising from the earthquake that struck the Kobe region in January 1995 and which resulted in over 6,000 deaths are not examined here either, despite the fact that this was the third most destructive earthquake to strike Japan over the last hundred years. And the impact on literature of a host of other tragedies also escape the attention of this volume—this is not because they are not worthy of mention but due to the exigencies of space and, in many cases (but by no means all), their relatively slight impact on literature compared to the disasters actually analyzed herein, the decision has been taken not to subject them to scrutiny. In general, the reasons outlined here, and, above all, the limitations of space, will suffice to explain why my investigation is limited to the specific events chosen for study in this book. Hence this investigation ofthe literature of Japan's wars and disasters over the past hundred years cannot be described as completely comprehensive, and my hope is that this book will stimulate further research on this topic.

There are extensive studies of World War II and literature in the Japanese language, and I have necessarily drawn upon these important studies in this book. Fewer studies exist of natural disasters and modern Japanese literature but because of the impact of the massive earthquake that struck the northeastern coast of Japan on March n 201, and which subsequently spawned the horrific tsunami that took many lives, a number of works have emerged in recent years; in consequence this event has given a significant boost to such scholarship—many new volumes on this subject will appear no doubt in the Japanese language in the near future.? Nonetheless, I have tried to work from primary sources— literature published during times of earthquake and war, or not long after, or faithful reprints thereof—as much as possible in an attempt to capture the sense of the times and also to express my own viewpoint on these issues, as a researcher working from a comparative perspective outside the Japanese language discourse. In this volume, primary sources also refer to the original versions of literary texts published during wartime as, until very recently, postwar reprints often differed significantly from a number of the wartime originals due to self-censorship on the part of the authors.”

The focus will be on the literary works examined in this book, and while on occasion I will cite various works on trauma and disaster written from the broader perspective of anthropology, medical science or the sociology and history of medicine and also psychological and psychiatric studies, my only purpose in doing so will be to help elucidate the contents of the literary works under examination. My expertise is solely in the field of literature and this book will not attempt to draw any conclusions on issues relating to trauma caused by war and disaster outside of the implications expressed in the works of literature themselves.”

The experiences of war and disaster discussed in these literary texts are based on real, historical events experienced by the authors and thus have strong connections to history, but the chief emphasis will be on how these historical events are manifested in the literary texts under investigation. In the course of literary analysis, I will make reference to the historical events that inspired the literature and provide some documentation of the historical reality, but the examination of these events as history is not the prime focus of this book.”

The essence of literary analysis is the assumption that the work of literature is essentially a fiction, in some cases related to real events, but which goes beyond the boundaries of historical truth to express a deeper truth (in the minds of most authors, at least), a truth delving into the human mind and imagination. The beautiful and terrifying lies that fiction or art conjures up define the subject of this study. This comment also applies to a degree even to works of non-fiction as the few works of non-fiction studied in these pages largely consists of an individual’s remaking of oneself through the act of recollection as expressed quite deliberately in essay or memoir form. That is, the essay is a conscious recasting or re-dramatizing of events that have already occurred, and in the skillful hands of the writers scrutinized here, represents a re-imagining of event that approaches literature (“beautiful or terrifying lies”), and in some cases can clearly be recognized as an important literary creation. My understanding is that one of the most important purposes of history is distinguish between the truth and a lie, but literature asks the reader to imagine a lie more truthful than historical reality, and in this it operates on a different set of critical parameters than utilized by historical analysis.”

These remarks may be seen as a protective coloration for a book that does not aspire to or intend to be read as history but they should be read rather as an affirmation of the power of literary narratives to inspire, amaze and move the reader in ways that, by and large, only literature (or in a broader sense, art) does consistently, and has this as its chief purpose. The renowned literary critic Michael Riffaterre has argued that "truth in fiction is not based on an actual experience of factuality, nor does the interpretation or the aesthetic evaluation of fictional narrative require that it be verified against reality". Riffaterre emphasizes verisimilitude, "a system of representations that seems to reflect a reality external to the text" as one means of evaluation but this is far from the only one, especially when applied to poetry. Riffaterre notes that "narrative truth is thus a linguistic phenomenon; since it is experienced through enactment by reading”.” I agree with Riffaterre about the basic nature of literary truth as a linguistic phenomenon, which is why I seek out the subtle differences in rhetoric, tone and register in the texts under examination, keeping a keen eye on the language of the text in my attempts to decode the various meanings inscribed therein. As Riffaterre suggests, “fiction relies on [semiotic] codes”, which he defines as “arbitrary conventions that can be identified independently of the narrative”. The various genres of Japanese literature— whether poetry or prose—have their own critical conventions, which therefore assign codes to the act of reading these works. One purpose of this book will be to clarify and scrutinize these conventions or codes so as to arrive at the most informed and correct readings of these works. This is especially the case with the some of the works examined in chapter three: readings of poetry composed under a complex form of social duress by kamikaze pilots about to embark on their last journeys.

Reading poetry is a complex act of hermeneusis, and to broadly summarize my approach in this book to the interpretations of the many examples of verse analyzed herein, I quote from Peter Verdonk’s 2013 work The Stylistics of Poetry:

I subscribe to the view that a poem, and for that matter all other literary genres,

can be regarded as a verbal composition which represents an utterance or dis-

course between the author and the reader. Discourse may be defined here as a

context-dependent interpersonal linguistic activity whose form depends on its so-

cial purpose, which in our case is a message in a certain literary form transmitted

from author to reader.

Working in reverse order, I think it can be argued that the tenet that literature

is a mode of discourse falls in with [...] the stage of the reader's response and of

pragmatics, in which readers, as verbal creatures, display their habitual communi-

cative behavior by responding to the poet's verbal structure. Readers do so because

the verbal structure encodes a discourse in which a speaker invites them, and

sometimes even provokes them, to create conceivable contexts for it. On this point,

the literary pragmaticist fully agrees [...] that the reader is a vital link in the poem's

discourse and that, as he puts it, the poem does not exist in a practical sense at all,

if there has been no successful reading. Again, in literary pragmatic terms the

poet's text becomes a meaningful discourse only at the time when it is being read,

that is, when the reader starts to build up interpersonal and socio-cultural contexts

by imagining plausible circumstances and motives which could have given rise to

the discourse gradually taking shape.

Indeed, it is an established fact that language in use, that is discourse, is governed by a wide range of contextual factors, which may extend from the phonological, grammatical and semantic context [...] to broader contexts such as the situation within which the discourse occurs, the identities, beliefs, attitudes of the participants and the relations holding between them. Even more broadly, readers might also take into account any social, psychological, historical or cultural contexts if these prove to have a bearing on the act of communication.

With regard to the interpersonal aspects of the poem's discourse, it is only natural that, in order to deepen their insight into the poet's situation, attitudes and feelings, and, indeed, into their identity, readers might also avail themselves of all the knowledge and experience they have gained from previous similar contexts.

In addition, for a profound understanding of the socio-cultural contexts ofthe poem's discourse, the reader should also have experience of institutionalized stylistic registers developed from literary genre conventions such as the epic, the lyric, the pastoral, the sonnet and many others. These literary traditions are facts of society and history, and awareness of them makes the reader and the poet equal (and congenial) participants in a socio-linguistic community [...]. A final and obvious remark we can make about the conception of poetry as discourse is that because it allows, perhaps we should say, persuades readers to create their own contexts of meaning, it enables them to account for the artistic axiom that different readers in different times and places will attach different sets of contexts to one and the same verbal structure.”

This statement is a common-sense exposition of how one reads a poem (and, in many respects, any work of literature), and therefore how an analysis or interpretation of that poem should proceed. It is worth noting that Verdonk's exposition takes for granted that when reading the poem, the reader cannot stand outside the text in a state of disembodied abstraction. As he puts it in his reading of a poem by the English poet Philip Larkin (1922-85), "if we conceive of a poem as a mode of discourse, we are not primarily concerned with its verbal structures as elements of a static object, but as elements of a dynamic communicative process between the author and reader. The poem's verbal constituents are dynamic in the sense that, although presented simultaneously, they are encountered by the reader as a kinetic process of fulfilled and frustrated expectations and of ever-changing emotions stirred up by directive impulses [...]. It is through the analysis of such impulses that our initial response will be reinforced, enlarged, changed and refined."? The notion that the poem, or indeed, any literary work, can be seen or understood from the outside without a dynamic sustained engagement on the part of the reader risks not seeing or reading the poem at all; in this sense, reading literature is not an instrumental act but a process of engagement. Verdonk's arguments bring to mind the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772-1834) admonition for readers when encountering texts to adopt a ^willing suspension of disbelieffor the moment, which constitutes poetic faith"?

A more sustained definition of poetry in general, and the lyric in particular has recently appeared. Jonathan Culler's 2015 book Theory of the Lyric has been well received by critics as it seeks to redefine lyric verse in such a way as to rewrite the contemporary hermeneutic that applies to reading poetry. Culler criticizes contemporary historicist readings of poetry in the following way:

Distinguished by its mode of enunciation, where the poet speaks in propria persona, lyric becomes the subjective form, with drama and epic as alternately the objective and the mixed forms [...].

This conception of the lyric, as representation of subjective experience, while widely disseminated and influential, no longer has great currency in the academic world. It has been replaced by a variant which treats the lyric not as mimesis of the experience of the poet but as a representation of the action of a fictional speaker: in this account, the lyric is spoken by a persona, whose situation and motivation one needs to reconstruct. This has become the dominant model in the pedagogy of the lyric in the Anglo-American world, if not elsewhere. Students are asked, when confronting a poem, to work out who is speaking, in what circumstances, to what end, and to chart the drama of attitudes that the poem captures. In effect, the dramatic monologue, which puts on stage a character speaking to a defined audience or to him- or herself, has been made the model for lyric, which becomes the fictional imitation or representation of a real-world speech act.”

Culler's model of the lyric, although diverse, claims a space for the lyric as an event, often a voice speaking, or as he puts it an "epideictic" (formal, rhetorical) mode of expression. This does not mean that poetry cannot deal with political or ideological subjects but as the quote above states, as lyric is a “mimesis of the experience of the poet", it cannot therefore be read as “a representation of the action of a fictional speaker". This means it is fundamentally different from a prose dramatization of an event. As Culler later argues:

The indeterminacy of meaning in poetry provides an experience of freedom and a release from the compulsion to signify. With its apparently gratuitous chiming and rhyming, its supplemental metrical organization and uses of lineation [...] lyric language works against instrumental reason, prosaic efficiency, and communicative transparency, quite independently of the thematic content of particular lyrics [...]. Hegel argues that once prose has taken dominion of the world, and “the mere accuracy of the prosaic way of putting things has become the ordinary rule,” to lyric falls the task of transforming “the prosaic consciousness’s ordinary mode of expression into a poetic one,” working “out of the mind’s habitual abstractness into a concrete liveliness” and creating estrangement from the prosaic perception of the world. Lyric’s sonorous structures, as they acquire a formal solidity, convey a feeling, Robert Kaufman argues, that we can glimpse alternatives to the concepts that have structured our world. Readers’ encounters with anomalous verbal combinations, along with the kinetic effects of rhythm, offer a challenge to homogenized experience. Song has always ministered to pleasure more than industry, and often has been a form of resistance to the political organization of life; and as the written version of song, lyric operates in the same fashion, but with greater verbal artistry and precision.”

Culler's argument sees lyric poetry as occupying a different kind of space from political rhetoric or ideological argument; as noted above, this does not mean that poetry cannot have political connotations or meanings. To emphasize this point: the complexities of "resistance" poetry are discussed in a number of chapters in this book. Culler elaborates on his earlier observations by citing Theodor Adorno's essay "On Lyric Poetry and Society" where he explains: "[Adorno] embraces the claim of his collaborator Max Horkheimer that ‘art, since it became autonomous, has preserved the utopia that evaporated from religion, insofar as at constitutes a resistance to the economic system, and that 'an element of resistance is inherent in the most aloof art.' In its aloofness, the lyric is nonetheless ‘always the subjective expression of a social antagonism’; the greatness of works of art lies in their power ‘to give voice to what ideology conceals’. Historical relations and social antagonisms are the more effectively constellated when the poem does not make the relation between self and society an explicit theme and this relation is allowed to crystalize ‘involuntarily’ within the poem.”” These observations become immediately relevant to some of the verse written by Japanese soldiers, as we will see in chapter two.

Another useful source on the relationship between literature and history, or literature and reality is the philosopher John Gibson, who in his 2009 essay "Literature and Knowledge" noted the following:

Literary works do not embody conceptual knowledge, if by this we mean that they offer an elaboration of the nature of some aspect of our world, delivered, as it were, in a propositional package. Nor need they, if they are to have a claim to cognitive value. If they embody a form of understanding, it will consist in a more literal act of embodiment, namely, in the capacity of a literary narrative to give shape form, and structure to the range of values, concerns, and experiences that define human reality.

The vision of life we find in literary narratives shows us human practice and circumstance not from an abstracted, external perspective but from the "inside" of life, in its full dramatic form. And [...] we can now see how this dramatic presentation of life might be a very important cognitive achievement. This achievement does not consist in the stating of truths or the offering of knowledge of matters of fact. It is rather a matter of literature's ability to open up for us a world of value and significance and of all that this implies about our capacity to understand fully the import of various forms of human activity. Literary works' mode of engaging with the world is never narrowly or purely cognitive. Literature would not be dramatic if it were. But it is precisely this drama we need if we are to have a textual form that is capable of documenting our particular way in the world. And this is not a minor accomplishment from the cognitive point of view. It shows literature to be among the richest, most potent media we have for the articulation of cultural understanding.”