Oscar Wilde
The Decay of Lying
To be set up as a meditation on Barthes’s Empire of Signs
And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home, and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.
Beatriz Penas-Ibáñez in the following concluding paragraph hints that a number of verbal texts might be approached in the spirit of Wilde.
It is only against the backdrop of esthetic conventions prevalent in a specifically defined sociocultural milieu that the standardness of a narrative form may be borrowed, appropriated and transformed into another culture so that there may be innovation and mutual rapport.
Western narratives like Ulysses [Joyce], In Our Time [Hemingway], One Hundred Years of Solitude [García Márquez], The Garden of Eden [Hemingway], Speak Memory [Nabokov], or Malloy [Beckett], or Japanese ones like Soseki’s I am a Cat, Kawabata’s Snow Country, Enchi’s Masks, Oe’s The Changeling, Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, Yoshimoto’s The Lake, — like old haibun narrative prose and haiku poetry — exemplify textual-generic and cultural hybridity to perfection. They would be the best examples of the new haiku-like ultra-hybrid (post)modernist standard.
from “Emergent Narratological Explanatory Frames: From (non-)naturalness to (non)standardness (the case of haiku-like narratives).”
And so for day 2926
16.12.2014