Performance, Visuality, and Textuality: The Case of Japanese Poetry

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the complex relationship among performance, visuality, and textuality, using examples from traditional Japanese poetry, and to reveal how the interaction among these three elements is integral to understanding Japanese poetry as process or action. I use the word performance to mean an action that is carried out, judged, and appreciated according to a set of commonly shared aesthetic, literary, or social codes. Performance is a one-time action, but it is usually repeated so that the audience has an established horizon of expectations. The audience (participants) implicitly will compare one performance to the next. In performance there is direct interaction between the performer and audience, who judge the action according to how well it conforms to, deviates from, or employs a commonly shared set of conventions. As material object, the poem exists in two fundamental forms: the handwritten manuscript and the printed text (which emerged from the early to mid-seventeenth century in Japan, first as movable type and then as woodblock printing). Both kinds of texts can be read and appreciated by audiences who are not witness to the initial utterance of the poem. These texts in turn are appreciated and read according to a set of pre-established aesthetic, literary, or social codes, but those codes may drastically change with time and place.

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