Martin Puchner's "Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop"

Martin Puchner, the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, is a prize-winning author, educator, public speaker, and institution-builder in the arts and humanities. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Puchner applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop, and reported the following:

From page 99:

though the new script was initially seen as less sophisticated, it ended up giving rise to works of the greatest originality and significance, in part because it created a space for women writers to innovate outside the strictures of male, Chinese-oriented literature, with its set canon and literary conventions. (It also gave rise to the first court-sanctioned Japanese poetry anthology, the Kokinshu.) The mostly female diaries written in the kana script were so fresh and successful that male writers started to imitate them.

Despite this newfound independence, Chinese culture continued to be a hugely important reference point in Japan. Murasaki's Tale of Genji, for example, includes almost eight hundred Chinese-style poems and makes frequent reference to Chinese literature. Murasaki is also one of the few contemporaries to have written about Sei Shonagon, whom she regarded as a rival: "Sei Shonagon has the most extraordinary air of self-satisfaction. Yet, if we stop to examine those Chinese characters of hers that she so presumptuously scatters about the place, we find that they are full of imperfections." Even centuries after the end of imperial missions to China and the flowering of the kana script, the best way to put down a rival was to criticize her faulty Chinese writing.

THE CLEAREST EXPRESSION OF THE NEW SPIRIT OF INDEPENDENCE is another account of an imperial mission, one produced with considerable hindsight around the same time as The Pillow Book and comparable to its story of the Chinese emperor's testing of the Japanese. It is a scroll combining text and image to recount the travels of one Kibi no Makibi, a legendary minister who went on an imperial mission to China.

According to other sources, the historical Kibi had mastered thirteen areas of Chinese learning, which included the five Confucian classics, history, yin-yang, calendars, astronomy, and divination, as well as the game of Go. This impressive knowledge of Chinese culture served

The page captures the main thrust of the book surprisingly well in that it speaks about cultural borrowing. Over a period of several hundred years, Japanese emperors sent diplomatic missions across the sea to China to learn about new forms of architecture, literature, and worship. Buddhism played an important role in these deliberate acts of cultural import. The chapter focuses on a Buddhist monk, Ennin (794 AD - 864 AD), who kept a journal of his travels in China, where he collected manuscripts and studied new ways of representing the Buddha through sculpture. He also experienced the sudden persecution of Buddhists in China, which made it even more important for him to bring the latest Buddhist thought and art to Japan.

I think of this kind of cultural transfer as an act of grafting, of one culture deciding to graft elements of another culture onto its own traditions. (Something similar happened when Rome decided to graft elements of Greek culture onto its own traditions.)

Page 99 focuses on the aftermath of this entirely voluntary act of cultural transfer (no one was forcing Japan to send cultural missions to China), especially on two women writers, Sei Shonagon and Murasaki Shikibu, who were writing around the year 1000 AD, after the official cultural missions had come to an end. Their work shows that cultural grafting doesn't imply inferiority or lack of originality. Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book is a great work of social and aesthetic commentary, and Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, the first great novel in world literature. (The chapter--and page 99--concludes with a visual account of these earlier cultural missions, the Kibi scroll, which anticipates Manga comics today.)

The view of culture that emerges from the book is that cultures thrive on borrowing, from the earliest surviving art works to K-pop. With the book, I hope to bring a deep historical perspective to our current debates about culture, from so-called culture wars and debates about the return of looted art to cultural appropriation. Above all, the book celebrates humans as a culture-producing species.

Visit Martin Puchner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue