| In the Konjaku monogatarishû, a large collection of Buddhist and secular narratives compiled by an unknown author in early medieval Japan, each story is given with opening and closing formulaic expressions that present it as the result of an oral transmission, even though the stories were actually assembled from written texts. This recourse to simulated orality is not a literary device, but part of a reaction to the complicated legacy of the Japanese adaption of Chinese written culture, and, on a more immediate level, an attempt to open up a new space of general knowledge within the restricted, often secretive realm of canonical texts. The Konjaku monogatarishû attempts to provide a complete description of the world by drawing materials from all levels of the canon and placing them on the same plane of apparent oral derivation. The ideal recipient for this is a general reader, rather than the text specialist. To understand how this attempt became possible, I survey early Japanese approaches to reading and writing, from their use of texts in religious rituals, to the impact of archival documents upon their daily lives. I then examine the Konjaku monogatarishû, comparing it to other roughly contemporary works, such as the Ôkagami and Ôe Masafusa's Gôdanshô, that also position themselves somewhere ii between oral and textual authority. Evoking a powerful image of orality, rather than writing down an actual oral transmission, these texts were experiments in non-hierarchical ways of representing the world, also functioning as proposals for new strategies of reading and absorbing knowledge. |
