Another thought-path also brought me to Japan, however. It happened that I visited with dear friends in Utah, Van and Elizabeth Gessel, at a time shortly after Van, a professor of Japanese language at Brigham Young University, had acquired a CD called Music of Hikari Oe. Van played the CD—powerful, skillful, evocative music of the Western, mathematical tradition—as he told me something of the composer. Hikari Oe, he told me, is brain damaged, mentally retarded; but when it comes to music, he is gifted. His father, Kenzaburo Oe, recently received the Nobel prize for literature; and while Kenzaburo Oe has written many things, the most powerful of his works, and almost certainly the ones for which the prize was given, are those that deal with his relationship to his damaged child, both the pain of having such a child and the transformative joy of discovering the true nature of that child while also discovering the true nature of that parent who stays and loves him.
I at once felt a powerful kinship with Kenzaburo Oe, not because my writing in any way resembles his, but because I also have a brain-damaged child and have followed my own course in dealing with the fact of him in my life. Like Kenzaburo Oe, I could not keep my damaged child out of my writing; he shows up again and again. Yet this very sense of kinship also made me avoid seeking out Oe’s writings, for I feared that either he would have ideas about such children that I could not agree with, and then I would be hurt or angry; or his ideas would be so truthful and powerful that I then would be forced into silence, having nothing to add. (This is not an idle fear. I had a book called Genesis under contract with my publisher when I read Michael Bishop’s novel Ancient of Days. Though the plotlines were not remotely similar except that they dealt with primitive men surviving into modern times, Bishop’s ideas were so powerful and his writing so truthful that I had to cancel that contract; the book was unwritable at that time, and probably will never be writable in that form.)
Then, after I had written the first three chapters of this volume, I was at the checkout stand at the News and Novels bookstore in Greensboro, North Carolina, when I saw on a point-of-purchase display a lone copy of a small book called Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself. The author: Kenzaburo Oe. I had not looked for him, but he had found me. I bought the book; I took it home.
It sat unopened by my bed for two days. Then came the insomniac night when I was about to begin writing chapter four, the chapter in which Wang-mu and Peter first come in contact with the Japanese culture of the planet Divine Wind (primarily in a city I named Nagoya because that was the Japanese city where my brother Russell served his Mormon mission back in the seventies). I saw Oe’s book and picked it up, opened it and began to read the first page. Oe speaks at first of his longtime relationship with Scandinavia, having read, as a child, translations (or, rather, Japanese retellings) of a series of Scandinavian stories about a character named Nils.
I stopped reading at once, for I had never thought of any similarity between Scandinavia and Japan before. But at the very suggestion, I at once realized that Japan and Scandinavia were both Edge peoples. They came into the civilized world in the shadow (or is it dazzled by the brilliance?) of a dominant culture.
I thought of other Edge peoples—the Arabs, who found an ideology that gave them the power to sweep through the culturally overwhelming Roman world; the Mongols, who united long enough to conquer and then be swallowed up by China; the Turks, who plunged from the edge of the Muslim world to the heart of it, and then toppled the last vestige of the Roman world as well, and yet sank back into again becoming Edge people in the shadow of Europe. All these Edge nations, even when they ruled the very civilizations in whose shadow they had once huddled, were never able to shake off their sense of not-belonging, their fear that their culture was irredeemably inferior and secondary. The result was that they were at once too aggressive and overextended themselves, growing beyond boundaries they could consolidate and hold; and too diffident, surrendering everything that really was powerful and fresh in their culture while retaining only the outward trappings of independence. The Manchu rulers of China, for instance, pretended to remain apart from the people they ruled, determined not to be swallowed up in the all-devouring maw of Chinese culture, but the result was not the dominance of the Manchu, but their inevitable marginalization.
True Center nations have been few in history. Egypt was one, and remained a Center nation until it was conquered by Alexander; even then, it kept a measure of its Centerness until the powerful idea of Islam swept over it. Mesopotamia might have been one, for a time, but unlike Egypt, Mesopotamian cities could not unite enough to control their hinterland. The result was they were swept over and ruled by their Edge nations again and again. The Centerness of Mesopotamia still gave it the power to swallow up its conquerors culturally for many years, until finally it became a peripheral province handed back and forth between Rome and Parthia. As with Egypt, its Center role was finally shattered by Islam.
China came later to its place as a Center nation, but it has been astonishingly successful. It was a long and bloody road to unity, but once achieved that unity remained, culturally if not politically. The rulers of China, like the rulers of Egypt, reached out to control the hinterland, but, again like Egypt, rarely attempted and never succeeded in establishing longterm rule over genuinely foreign nations.
Filled with this idea, and others that grew out of it, I conceived of a conversation between Wang-mu and Peter in which Wang-mu told him of her idea of Center and Edge nations. I went to my computer and wrote notes about this idea, which included the following passage:
Center People are not afraid of losing their identity. They take it for granted that all people want to be like them, that they are the highest civilization and all else is poor imitation or transient mistakes. The arrogance, oddly enough, leads to a simple humility—they do not strut or brag or throw their weight around because they have no need to prove their superiority. They transform only gradually, and only by pretending that they are not changing at all.
Edge People, on the other hand, know they are not the highest civilization. Sometimes they raid and steal and stay to rule—Vikings, Mongols, Turks, Arabs—and sometimes they go through radical transformations in order to compete—Greeks, Romans, Japanese—and sometimes they simply remain shamed backwaters. But when they are on the rise, they are insufferable because they are unsure of their worth and must therefore brag and show off and prove themselves again and again—until at last they feel themselves to be a Center People. Unfortunately, that very complacency destroys them, because they are not Center People and feeling doesn’t make it so. Triumphant Edge People don’t endure, like Egypt or China, they fade, as the Arabs did, and the Turks, and the Vikings, and the Mongols after their victories.
The Japanese have made themselves permanent Edge People.
I also speculated about America, which was composed of refugees from the Edge, but which nevertheless behaved like a Center nation, controlling (brutally) its hinterland, but only briefly flirting with empire, content instead to be the center of the world. America had, for a time at least, the same arrogance as the Chinese—the assumption that the rest of the world wants to be like us. And I wondered if, as with Islam, a powerful idea had made an Edge nation into a Center nation. Just as the Arabs themselves lost control of the new Islamic Center, which was ruled by Turks, so also the original English culture of America might be softened or adapted, while the powerful nation of America remains at the Center; this is an idea that I am still playing with and whose truth I am not in a position to evaluate, since so much of it will only be known in the future and can only be guessed at now. But it remains that this idea of Edge and Center nations is an intriguing one that I find myself believing, to the extent that I understand it.
Having written my notes, I then began the next night to write the chapter. I had brought Wang-mu and Peter to the end of their meal at the restaurant, and was ready to have them meet a Japanese character for the first time. But it was four in the morning. My wife, Kristine, awake to
take care of our one-year-old baby, Zina, took the chapter fragment out of my hand and read it. As I prepared for sleep, she also dozed off, but then awoke to tell me of a dream she had in that momentary nap. She had dreamed that the Japanese of Divine Wind carried their ancestors’ ashes in tiny lockets or amulets that they wore around their necks; and Peter felt lost because he had only one ancestor, and he would die when that ancestor died. I knew at once that I had to use this idea; then I lay down in bed, picked up Oe’s book again, and began to read.
Imagine my surprise, then, when after that first passage dealing with Oe’s feelings toward Scandinavia, he plunged into analyses of Japanese culture and literature that explicitly developed precisely the idea that had leapt into my mind just from reading those opening, seemingly unrelated paragraphs about Nils. He, a man who has studied and cared about the peripheral (or Edge) peoples of Japan, especially the culture of Okinawa, conceived of Japan as a culture that was in danger of losing its Center. Serious Japanese literature, he said, was decaying precisely because Japanese intellectuals were “accepting” and “discharging” Western ideas, not particularly believing them but caught up in their fashionableness, while ignoring those powerful ideas inherent in the Yamato (native Japanese) culture which would give Japan the power to become a self-standing Center nation. He even used, finally, the words “center” and “edge” in this sentence:
The postwar writers, however, looked for a different path that would lead Japan to a place in the world not at its center but at the edge of it. (pp. 97–98)
His point was not the same as mine, but the world-conception of centers and edges was harmonious.
I took all of Oe’s concerns about literature quite personally, because, like him, I am a part of an “edge” culture which “accepts” and “discharges” ideas from the dominant culture and which is in danger of losing its self-centering impulse. I speak of Mormon culture, which was born at the edge of America and which has long been more American than Mormon. Supposedly “serious” literature in Mormon culture has consisted entirely of imitations, mostly pathetic but occasionally of decent quality, of the “serious” literature of contemporary America, which is itself a decadent, derivative, and hopelessly irrelevant literature, having no audience that believes in or cares about its stories, no audience capable of genuine community transformation. And, like Oe—or let me say that I think I understand Oe correctly in this—I can see the redemption of (or, arguably, the creation of) a true Mormon literature as coming only by the rejection of fashionably “serious” (but, in reality, frivolous) American literature and its replacement by a literature that meets Oe’s criteria for junbungaku:
The role of literature—insofar as man is obviously a historical being—is to create a model of a contemporary age which encompasses past and future, a model of the people living in that age as well. (p. 66)
What the Mormon “serious” literateurs never attempted was a model of the people living in our culture in our age. Or, rather, they attempted it, but never from inside: the pose of the implied author (to use Wayne Booth’s term) was always skeptical and Outside rather than critical and Inside; it is my belief that no true national literature can ever be written by those whose values derive from outside that national culture.
But I do not write only or even primarily Mormon literature. As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers—also rather an edge culture, though one that transcends national boundaries. I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human being writing human literature to a human audience, as are we all who ply this trade. There are times when this, too, seems to me to be an edge culture. We with our passionate involvement in bonding together while standing alone, in staving off death while worshiping its irresistible power, in shrugging off interference while meddling in the lives of others, in keeping our secrets while unmasking others’, in being the sole unique individual in a world of people who are all alike, we are strange indeed among all the plants and animals, who unlike us know their place, and if they think of God at all do not imagine him to be their kin, or themselves to be his heirs. How dangerous we are, like those kingdoms of the Edge, how likely we are to erupt outward into every unconquered kingdom in the effort to make ourselves the center after all.
What Kenzaburo Oe seeks for Japanese literature, I seek also for American literature, for Mormon literature, for science fiction, for human literature. But it is not always done in the most obvious way. When Shusaku Endo explores the issue of the meaning of life in the face of death, he assembles a cast of characters in contemporary Japan, but the currents of magic, science, and religion are never far from the heart of his story; while I do not pretend to Endo’s mastery of storytelling, have I not dealt with the same issues, using the same tools, in this novel? Does Children of the Mind fail as junbungaku solely because of its far-future setting? Is my novel Lost Boys the only one of my works that can aspire to seriousness, and only to the degree that it is an accurate mirror of life in 1983 in Greensboro, North Carolina?
Dare I amplify the words of a Nobel laureate by suggesting that one can as easily create “a model of a contemporary age which encompasses past and future” through the guise of a novel that thoroughly and faithfully creates a society of another time and place, through whose contrast our contemporary age stands clearly revealed? Or must I declare an anti-junbungaku and attack a statement that I agree with and pretend to diverge from a goal which I am also pursuing? Is Oe’s vision of significant literature incomplete? Or am I merely a participant in edge literatures, longing for the center but condemned never to arrive in that peaceful, all-encompassing place?
Perhaps that is why the Stranger and the Other are so important in all my writings (though never at first by plan), even as my stories also affirm the importance of the Member and the Familiar; but is this not, in its own way, a model of our contemporary age, encompassing past and future; am I not, with my own inner contradictions between Inside and Outside, Member and Stranger, a model of the people living in this age? Is there only one setting in which an author can tell true tales?
When I read Shusaku Endo’s Deep River, I am an alien in his world. Things that resonate with Japanese readers, who nod and say, “Yes, that’s how it was, that’s how it is for us,” to me are strange, and I say, “Is this how they experienced it? Is this how it feels to them?” Do I not draw as much value from reading a novel that depicts someone else’s contemporary age? Do I not learn as much from Austen as from Tyler? From Endo as from Russo? Is the world of the Stranger and Other not as vital to me in understanding what it means to be human as the world I actually live in? Is it not then possible for me to create an invented future milieu that has as much power to speak to contemporary readers as the milieus of those writers whose contemporary age is of another era or land?
Perhaps all milieus are equally the product of imagination, whether we live in them or make them up. Perhaps to another Japanese, Deep River contains almost as much strangeness as it does to me, because Endo himself is inevitably different from all other Japanese people. Perhaps every writer who thoroughly creates a fictional world will inevitably create a mirror of his own time and yet also create a world that no one else but him has ever visited; only the trivial details of place names, dates, and famous people distinguish between a madeup universe like the one in Children of the Mind and the “real” universe depicted in Deep River. What Endo achieves and I aspire to are the same: To give the reader an experience of convincing reality, nevertheless piercing the shell of detail and penetrating to the structure of causation and meaning that we always hope for but never actually experience in the real world. Causation and meaning are always imagined, no matter how thoroughly we “create a model of a contemporary age.” But if we imagine well, and do not merely “accept” and “discharge” what we are given by the culture around us, do we not create junbun
gaku?
I do not believe the tools of science fiction are any less suitable to the task of creating junbungaku than the tools of contemporary serious literature, though of course we who wield the tools may fail to use them to best advantage. But in this I may deceive myself; or my own work may be too weak to prove what is possible within our literature. One thing is certain: The community of readers of science fiction includes as many serious thinkers and explorers of reality as any other literary community I have taken part in. If a great literature demands a great audience, the audience is ready and any failure to achieve such a literature must be laid at the writer’s door.
So I will continue to attempt to create junbungaku, commenting on contemporary culture in allegorical or symbolic disguise as do all science fiction writers, consciously or not. Whether any of my own works actually achieve the status of true seriousness that Oe points to is for others to decide, for regardless of the quality of the writer, there must also be an audience to receive the work before it has any transformative power; what I depend on is a vigorous audience that can discover sweetness and light, beauty and truth, beyond the ability of the artist, on his own, to create them.
ENDER IN EXILE
ORSON SCOTT CARD
ENDER IN EXILE
TO
BAYDON HILTON
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 168
