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Speech on “The Tale of Genji”
Jul. 8th, 2022 09:38 pmLast week, the officers of USPTO Toastmasters were pleading for someone to speak this week, so I signed up, and emailed that I would come up with a topic later. I gave a well-received speech yesterday about The Tale of Genji, and how it was by some reckonings the world’s first psychological novel. I began by saying that human beings of every culture have been telling stories at least since we became fully human, and perhaps longer than that, but that not every form of literature goes back to time immemorial. I pointed out that science fiction, strictly defined, did not exist before Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and arguably not until some time later, although there had been, for example, tales of traveling to the Moon by totally unworkable methods, showing that almost everything builds on some kind of predecessor.
Then I talked about the psychological novel; Lady Murasaki Shikibu was not the first author to describe a character’s feelings, and I mentioned reading a translation of an extract from (I think) Apollonios’ rescension of “Jason and the Argonauts,” describing Medea’s feelings as she becomes infatuated with Jason. The Tale of Genji carried its descriptions of people’s interior lives further than had been done before, however. Genji and his fellow courtiers are esthetes who express themselves obliquely in poems, and whose actual feelings, from experiencing a garden, a wilderness, or an interaction with another person are set forth subtly and in some detail. I gave a very brief summary of the book, a biography of a fictional lord at the Heian court, from before his birth to the lives of his descendants after his death. I said a few other things as well, such as that Genji was lucky that there was no Me Too movement in Heian-kyo, but that would have been very un-Japanese.
All in all, my rather hastily prepared speech went pretty well.
Then I talked about the psychological novel; Lady Murasaki Shikibu was not the first author to describe a character’s feelings, and I mentioned reading a translation of an extract from (I think) Apollonios’ rescension of “Jason and the Argonauts,” describing Medea’s feelings as she becomes infatuated with Jason. The Tale of Genji carried its descriptions of people’s interior lives further than had been done before, however. Genji and his fellow courtiers are esthetes who express themselves obliquely in poems, and whose actual feelings, from experiencing a garden, a wilderness, or an interaction with another person are set forth subtly and in some detail. I gave a very brief summary of the book, a biography of a fictional lord at the Heian court, from before his birth to the lives of his descendants after his death. I said a few other things as well, such as that Genji was lucky that there was no Me Too movement in Heian-kyo, but that would have been very un-Japanese.
All in all, my rather hastily prepared speech went pretty well.
