WRITERS IN EAST -WEST ENCOUNTER

Also edited by GID' Amirthanayagam

ASIAN AND WESTERN WRITERS New Cultural Identities (forthcoming)

WRITERS IN EAST-WEST ENCOUNTER

New Cultural Bearings

Edited by Guy Amirthanayagam

© Guy Amirthanayagam 1982 Soft cover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1982

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

without permission

First published 1!)82 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS L TO

London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives

throughout the world

ISBN 978-1-349-04945-5 ISBN 978-1-349-04943-1 (eBook)DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-04943-1

Contents

Notes on the Contributors vn Preface and Acknowledgements 1x

Introduction

Buddhist Meditation and Poetic Spontaneity: Two In­terviews by Paul Portuges and Guy Amirthanayagam ALLEN GINSBERG ro

2 My Fiction and the Aboriginal TOM KENEALLY

3 The Centre and the Periphery KENZABURO OE

4 Cross-Currents: The 'New African' After Cultural Encounters WOLE SOYINKA

5 Whoring After English Gods R. PARTHASARATHY 64

6 Departures and Returns JANET FRAME 85

7 The Man-Eater of Malgudi R.K.NARAYAN 95

8 The Meeting of Language and Literature and the Indian Example WILLIAM WALSH 1 oo

9 Parables and Commonplaces A. K. RAMANUJAN 138

ro Pontifex and Scapegoat: The Poet m Twentieth­Century Western Culture GUY AMIRTHANAYAGAM 150

v

VI Contents

I I Towards a New Oceania ALBERT WENDT

Index

202

2I6

Notes on the Contributors

ALLEN GINSBERG is one of the best known poets and writers in the United States. His works include Howl and Other Poems, Empty Mirror, Early Poems, Reality and Sandwiches, Ankor Wat, Airplane Dreams, Planet News, The Fall of America, Poems of These States and Mind Breaths.

ToM KENEALLY is one of Australia's most prominent novelists. His best known, prize-winning work is Bring Larks and Heroes. Other novels include The Place at Whitton, The Fear, Three Cheers for the Paraclete, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Blood-Red, Sister Rose.

KENZABURO OE is one of japan's leading writers and one of the most popular literary figures in Japan today. Among his works are A Personal Matter and The Silent Cry, both of which have been translated into English.

WoLE SoYINKA, Nigerian dramatist, poet and novelist, is Africa's best known literary figure writing in English today. His plays include The Inventor, The Lion and the Jewel, The Trials of Brother Jero, and A Dance of the Forests. His novels include The Interpreters and Season cif Anomy, and his poetry, the anthology Poems from Prison.

R. PARTHASARATHY, regional editor for Oxford University Press, is the author of Rough Passage and co-editor of Poetry from Leeds ( 1968). He has had poems published in several magazines.

jANET FRAME, one of New Zealand's leading writers, has published nine novels, including Owls Do Cry, three volumes of short stories, including The Reservoir and Other Stories, and an anthology of poetry, The Pocket Mirror.

R. K. NARAYAN, well-known Indian writer, has published eleven novels, three collections of short stories, and received the Padma Bhushan and Magsaysay Awards.

Vll

Vlll Notes on the Contributors

WILLIAM WALSH is Professor of English and Commonwealth Literature at Leeds University, England. His literary criticism has been described as being 'of the best now being written in this country'. Among his publications are Commonwealth Literature, D.]. Enright: Poet of Humanism, R. K. Narayan, V. S. Naipaul and A Manifold Voice.

A. K. RAMANUJAN, Professor, Committee on Social Thought, Uni­versity of Chicago. He is also Professor of Linguistics, South Asian Languages, and Civilisations. Recipient of the prestigious Padma Shree Award for excellence from the Government oflndia (1976). His published volumes of poetry in English include The Striders, Relations and Selected Poems.

Guv AMIRTHANAYAGAM, poet and essayist, heads the research and professional development programme in literature and culture at the East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii. He has published a collection entitled Poems, and several critical essays, including 'The Artist as Agent', 'Culture Learning Through Literature', 'Tagore, The Poet and His Reputation' and 'The Tragic Vision of Emily Bronte'.

ALBERT WENDT, poet and novelist. Among his novels are Sons for the Return Home, Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree and Pouliuli. A collection of his poems has been published under the title Inside Us the Dead. He has edited Some Modern Poetry from Western Samoa.

Preface and Acknowledgements

There has been in recent years a flowering in the study of the relations between literature and society, the position of the writer in society, and social problems as material for the creative artist. A literary-cultural discipline, if it may be so called, has many uses. It could explore the ways in which literature, as a key to the understanding of culture, illuminates a culture's intellectual and imaginative life. It could investigate how literature not only reflects and 'refracts' but also 'lives' and forms the values, social habits and assumptions of cultures. It could help to identify the conditions in a civilisation which foster or discourage creative achievement in literature and the arts, and study the ways in which literature activates or inspires social concerns. Familiarisation with the creative processes in a culture, while ministering to personal enrichment, should contribute to inter-cultural understanding, as the study ofliterature, because of its concern with 'universal values', is a potent means of transcending the confines of particular cultures.

But the studies we have, such as they are, have not always served the cause of international understanding. They have tended to be culture-specific and even ethnocentric. Despite the greater ex­posure of the rest of the world in the twentieth century, several important thinkers in Europe and America still behave as though the countries outside their region are marginal and have little to contribute to an understanding of their own situation; they neglect even the more obvious evidence of interpenetration. When writers condemn modernisation, industrialisation or centralisation, they often embrace the anti-rational, and appeal to a past which is no longer recoverable, even in traditional societies. Composing poetry on the tongue may be feasible for the visionary, but may not be possible where the social conditions for such communal particip­ation no longer exist. Imagistic spontaneity is a virtue, but must it be accompanied by the loss of a sense of art as a form of intellectual sentience, an act of the total mind? In societies which are learning to identify tradition with cultural backwardness, a recommendation of anything less than the exercise of one's total intelligence may seem designed to perpetuate stagnation.

IX

X Preface and Acknowledgements

The greater closeness of diverse geographical regions in our time has brought comfort to some and insecurity to others; it has been seen as especially threatening to weaker nations and small cultures with ancient traditions. On the other hand, the almost incestuous concern with their own societies shown by many Western writers has not been reassuring to the outsiders who want to partake in the great movements and changes of this century.

This is the background for this book; the thinking of the essays here must be seen against this backdrop. This is their main claim to novelty. Of course, no definitive account of the East-West encounter can possibly be provided by one book or even a dozen; but during the many sessions of the colloquium which occasioned this book, considerable illumination was cast in a most inward manner on this complex theme.

I have in my introduction attempted to give some account of the main concerns of the writers; their essays speak best for them, and it should be sufficient for me here to limit myself to a summary survey of the articles.Janet Frame (New Zealander) talks of her interest in the artistic profits and losses experienced by the writer in transitions from home to 'abroad' and back again. Allen Ginsberg (American) and Kenzaburo Oe (japanese) are concerned with the evaluation and literary uses of their legacies or acquisitions of myth. Tom Keneally (Australian) traces the effect on his own work of his deepening sense of the Aboriginal oral tradition. R. K. Narayan (Indian) contrasts 'pseudo-literature'- the mercenary and non­durable- with the literature which impinges on society, the truly creative literature which cannot fail to convey meaning in any social context. R. Parthasarathy (Indian), having whored after English gods, realises that he has to return to his native Indian roots, and exemplifies the tensions created by writing in a language into which he was not born. Wole Soyinka (Nigerian) is concerned with patterns of response to the cross-cultural encounter from the African perspective. Guy Amirthanayagam (Sri Lankan) looks at the changing intellectual and social realities embedded in the actual practice of poetry in the modern West which also modify con­ceptions of the poet's role and status in twentieth-century Western culture. A. K. Ramanujan, using Indian examples, shows how colonisation by a foreign language and manners results in an inventive coping, co-opting and incorporating on the part of the writer. Albert Wendt suggests how the writers and readers of Polynesia might best work out their cultural-literary aims at their

Preface and Acknowledgements XI

present stage of renewed self-awareness; he speaks here as a nation­forming man of letters. William Walsh's study, while recognising the rich flexibility of a language which seems to have limitless capacities for coping with fresh experience, reviews how the aggressive colonising of upper-class India by the English language and English habits of thought led ultimately to an Indian 'reformation' of these influences.

My first thanks are obviously to the contributors themselves, who generously left me free to amend wherever necessary, to suit the size and purposes of the book. Where the writer is not a native speaker of English, minor changes have been made in order to accord better with British or American usage.

It is more than an act of duty when I acknowledge my debt to the East-West Center, and particularly to Verner Bickley, Director of the Culture Learning Institute, for having allowed me to dream up the colloquium, and for his keen interest in this pub­lication.

My friend and colleague Reuel Denney was associated with me in the editorial work so closely that his name is not listed as a joint editor only because of his modesty. His help cannot be adequately acknowledged. He also bears responsibility for the length of my own article, which he marked with the word 'expand', 'expand' in numerous places when he saw it in draft form.

Ediriwira Sarachchandra and A.J. Gunawardana read most of the manuscript with great care and made several suggestions that saved me a considerable amount of time.

Karen Smith, who has been my research assistant this last year, was indefatigable and conscientious in proof-reading and all the administrative chores involved. It would, however, be ungracious of me to limit her contribution in this way, as there were numerous occasions when she made important suggestions regarding the editing of the material; she saved me from many pitfalls, and I consider her as much a colleague as an assistant.

Mrs Hazel Tatsuno and the secretarial staff of the Institute were very helpful in the organisation of the colloquium, and it would be invidious to mention only some of them by name. However, I cannot resist thanking Lyn Moy,Jan Yamane and Betty Wolfram for their careful typing of the manuscripts.

Finally, I must thank my wife for her cheerful tolerance of my absent-mindedness towards family matters during the preparation of this book.

Xll Preface and Acknowledgements

The editor and publishers wish to thank the following who have kindly given permission for the use of copyright material: Faber and Faber Ltd and Harcourt Brace jovanovich Inc. for quotations from 'The Love Song ofj. Alfred Prufrock', 'Preludes III', 'Gerontion', 'The Waste Land', 'Burnt Norton', 'East Coker' and 'The Dry Salvages' in Collected Poems IfJO!rig62 by T. S. Eliot; A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of Anne Yeats and Michael Yeats and Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc. for quotations from the Collected Poems of W. B. reats, copyright 1912, 1919, 1924, 1928, 1933, 1934 by Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., copyright 1940 by Georgie Yeats. Copyright renewed.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders but if any inadvertently has been overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.