BASHO AND THE MASTERY OF POETIC SPACE IN OKU NO HOSOMICHI.

• Author: CARTER, STEVEN D.
• Position: Critical Essay

I argued, in an earlier article in this journal (JAOS 117.1) that in his travel writings Matsuo Basho reveals himself to be a participant in the process by which a central cultural regime makes claims on territory--poetic, geographical, and historical. The present paper goes on to consider the more specific way's in which Basho's Oku no hosomichi also figures in the specific discourse of haikai poetics. As one of the "foundation texts" of the Japanese canon, that travel record is today generally read as a document in the history of traditional aesthetics, which is, of course, one way it can be approached. Here it is contended, however, that the text may also be usefully read as a pedagogical guide to Basho's poetic practice intended specifically for students of the genre of haikai.

V. S. PRITCHETT, ONE OF THE MOST PROMINENT of twentieth-century British travel writers, begins one of his most famous books with a telling comment:

I am an offensive traveller. I do not mean that I arrive in a foreign country in a state of arrogance and start complaining about the beds, the plumbing, the food, the transport, the prices. I do not refuse to drink the water; I do not see bacteria everywhere. I do not say: "The country is wonderful, but you can have the people." I do not suspect everyone who speaks a foreign language of being a thief.... By "being offensive" I mean that I travel, therefore I offend. I represent that ancient enemy of all communities: the stranger. [1]

Thus, in tones that should be familiar by now, Pritchett speaks for a whole tradition of guilty, self-conscious, and often self-excoriating travelers who conclude that any outsider trespassing on foreign space is at best an intruder, at worst an invader. And he goes on to say that this is particularly true in the case of writers, whose job is to appropriate what they see through language: "I not only look," he says, "I make notes. I write." [2]

Pritchett wrote these words in the late fifties, in a series of essays produced for Holiday magazine. Forty years later, in the academy at least, we use a different, less-elegant vocabulary that attempts to go beyond the personal to focus on the institutional and ideological forces at work behind discursive practices, including writing, about traveling on "foreign" ground, whether explicitly in travel writing or in the novel. Instead of attacking individual travel writers for personal arrogance, fastidiousness, or condescension, scholars and critics are more likely now to dismiss those writers as agents of a kind of cultural imperialism, as part of an "apparatus for controlling territory by producing, distributing, and consuming information about it." [3]

But is this true of all travel writing, in all historical contexts? And--more to the point here--is it true of writers for whom travel was undertaken with explicitly different motivations and in a radically different discursive context? My purpose in this paper will be to consider the practices of Matsuo Basho (1644-94), perhaps Japan's most famous travel writer, in this light.

In an earlier paper in this journal, I have given a partial answer to my own question by showing that for Basho travel was very much a professional practice that yielded professional rewards, pecuniary and otherwise--a practice that put him in the category of oroshiya, or traveling salesman, peddling himself as a haikai master and his poetic wares. Furthermore, I have argued that his attempt in Oku no hosomichi, the most famous of his travel records, to produce a comprehensive record of the central place of poetry in the life of the north country connects him to an imperial and ultimately imperialistic claim that can be traced back at least to Ki no Tsurayuki (d. 945) and the Kokinshu preface. In this sense, Basho can indeed be seen as a participant in the ideological process by which a hegemonic cultural tradition makes claims on territory, very much in the manner of a Kipling or a Conrad or even a Pritchett. [4]

Yet somehow such a characterization does not suffice. To dismiss so central a document as a history of imperialist appropriation of the periphery by the center is to gloss over its specificity as a document of a particular time and place. Inevitably, a careful consideration of Basho's activities as a traveler and travel writer yields a more complex understanding. This is especially apparent when one considers Oku no hosomichi, the one text among his travel records that has garnered the most attention from scholars and general readers alike. Written as an account of a journey undertaken by the poet in 1689, following a semi-circular route from Edo up the Pacific coast to Matsushima, over to Sakata on the Sea of Japan, and then down the coast and inland to Ogaki, the text of Oku no hosomichi is the longest and most detailed of his six travel accounts, providing a record of his longest and most physically demanding journey. As such, it has long been a fixture in school curricula, a "foundation text" of sorts tha t has inspired countless travelers, beginning with a number of Basho's own disciples, to follow in his footsteps, many of them producing travel accounts of their own. [5]

For all its popularity, however, Oku no hosomichi has long been a notoriously problematic text, especially so since the 1940s, when a companion travel record written by Basho's fellow traveler Kawai Sora was first made available in a modem printed edition, revealing that Basho's work is anything but a straightforward factual account of the journey the two men took through the north country in 1689. Most obviously, Basho's account leaves out a great deal--places visited, people met, etc.-- that Sora leaves in. Furthermore, a careful check against Sora's account also reveals that Basho has here and there strayed from the truth in the ordering of events and in representations of various minor details, particularly the weather, and that he has done considerable revision of poems. In one case--the famous episode involving the poets' "brief encounter" with prostitutes at Ichiburi-- scholars, in fact, have concluded that Basho probably fabricated an entire incident. [6]

One common method of explaining away Basho's lapses and embellishments is to invoke the category of fiction, arguing that in his account the poet is more concerned with an imagined rather than a "real" world. It seems to me a mistake, however, to characterize Basho's travel record as in any useful sense fictional, at least in the modern sense of that term. Clearly his text is meant as a factual account, at some level; and Basho makes no attempt to create a viable imaginative world. Likewise, treating the text as a "work of art" with little connection to the real world would seem to deny it immediate relevance in its own historical moment. Instead of seeing his travel record as in any way a "free-standing" aesthetic artifact, then, I would argue that Oku no hosomichi, along with his other travel writings, may be usefully considered as at least partly a highly "constructed" representation of his professional practice as a haikai poet.

Basho had begun his professional practice--by which I mean his various activities as a licensed master of the art of haikai, including among other things instruction, editing, lecturing, producing various kinds of texts, and serving as master of ceremonies in various venues--years before in Edo. By 1689, he had distanced himself from the more overtly commercial aspects of the haikai trade to serve at the apex of the profession, as a public figure sustaining the enterprise generally, thanks largely to the financial support of well-heeled disciples. However untainted by the stains of literary commerce, though, he was, when he set out on the road in the spring of 1689, still a professional entirely dependent upon his poetic activities for his sustenance and status--artistic, intellectual, economic, and even psychological. And it is in this context that his travel and travel writing--two separate if intimately connected fields of practice--may be usefully considered.

For professional artists of Basho's and earlier times, travel was a useful and lucrative activity, though not in all cases a necessity. For many, it was in fact an established professional practice as routine as taking in students or editing and publishing anthologies. As early as the Muromachi period burgeoning castle towns were as much an attraction to those who wanted to peddle their artistic wares as they were to itinerant salesmen and entertainers--a fact to which the existence of seventy or so extant travel records of the medieval period (ca. 1200-1600) attest. By the fifteenth century, castle towns such as Suo in Yamaguchi and Kawagoe in Musashi were popular stopping places for renga masters such as Sogi (1421-1502) and his many disciples. And the rapidly growing provincial towns of the seventeenth century were obviously an attraction for Basho, who was well acquainted both with the travel records of renga poets and with their professional activities on the road.

One obvious motive behind Basho's travels was a desire to visit acquaintances and to make connections with locals who would become students and, in many cases, patrons. As Sakurai Takejiro has argued, Basho's 1689 trip to the deep north--chronicled in part by Oku no...