Paula R. CurtisHere for one of the few premodern Japan panels at #MLA23! "Embodied Rituals / Ritualized Bodies: Representations of Corporeality in Pre-1900 Japanese Literature" starts now! 🗾📿
First up is Beth Carter (Case Western Reserve U) on "Weeping, Wailing, and Writhing: Corporeal Performance of Mourning Ritual in Eighth-Century Sources" on the work performed by mourners.
Are acts of grief like weeping or writhing on the ground merely expressions of sorrow? Are they simply literary conventions? Or are they post-death rituals that affect spirits of the death?
Carter explores kotodama 言霊 "spirit of words" & how textual explanations of practice are also acts of performance, looking to 8th cen texts like Man'yoshu for how lyrical modes are also a ritual process of putting spirits to rest & controlling possibilities of haunting.
Carter deconstructs post-death scenes in Kojiki and Nihon shoki, examining descriptions of calling out, weeping, weeping while writhing, revival, burial, and the afterworld to understand what such passages accomplish in text/performance interpretations.
Next up is Malgorzata Citko-DuPlantis (U of Tennessee, Knoxville) on "The Ecstasy of Waiting: Rethinking the Poetic Trope of the ‘Waiting Woman’," one of the most recognizable tropes from early in Japan's literary history.
Many readings of the waiting woman, typically centered on aristocratic women waiting and writing poetry, hinge on the agony of waiting, but Citko-DuPlantis wants to rethink this trope. She sees instead a sense of ecstasy and physical excitement referenced in the comparisons.
Ono no Komachi, of course, is famous for being more apparent in her physical references, speaking of her desire and breast pounding with her heart aflame--a rare form of direct expression. But other poets also make more subtle erotic references to the physical and passionate.
Citko-DuPlantis sees the more mainstream writing of the waiting woman as also capable of expressing this intimacy & physical ecstasy; when and how did the agony and suffering become the normative interpretation?
Providing global comparative perspectives, Citko-DuPlantis returns to Japan, suggesting that there are broader themes and processes in play that have to do with virtual pleasure and inherited concepts of femininity, particularly from the continent. We should question assumptions.
The final speaker is Jyana Browne (U of Maryland, College Park) on "Corporeal Ritual and the Performance of Love Suicide in Early Modern Japan," considering how rituals play a role in shinjūmono plays.
In these plays the love-suicides are a form of ritualization, creating intersections of ritual, performance, and everyday life as experienced in embodiedness across story, performers, and audience.
There are patterns to love suicides in the plays--vows, journey, chanting, articulations of belief, & suicide. Symbolic bodily acts become blueprints for future shinjū practitioners, models of true love. The death scenes explicitly suggest they reach attain sacrality.
Plays like the Love Suicides at Sonezaki had particular effects for viewers; in particular moments the puppets served as a sacred vehicle, a religious icon, embodying figures like bodhisattva.
Browne explores how the plays were used as ritualized sequences that had an end goal not unlike sutras, a requiem for the dead that secures salvation.
The body as a site of practice is constant. It's a potential site of worship used as a site of practice & devotion. Performance, too, generates embodied responses (like tears) from viewers, & plays reference one another, characters have visceral responses to memories of stories.