200
Moving Mirrors
the other hand,
Watchman
takes the reader back to the home provinces
of the Japanese state, where it recommits the genre to a celebration of
traditional court culture (albeit in the form of an attack on innovations),
even as it seems to admit the ultimate impossibility of long-term success.
The fact that the
Mirror
is the textual vehicle selected for both posi-
tions attests to its continuing flexibility and appeal as a mode of reading
and writing. Nevertheless, an examination of the two iterations from the
late Kamakura will also point to where the genre seems to be moving away
from some of the attributes that were indispensable to its early claims to
authority—in particular, a clearly demarcated cosmological framework
and a geographically unambiguous relationship to power.
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