The Literary Ground
A note before reading
This essay deals in inference.
No list survives of what Byun Shi-Ji read.
What is known is that he said, as a young man, that he had wanted to be a novelist; that he is reported to have read Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea in Tokyo; and what the intellectual weather of his years was like.
What follows is circumstance, not fact. The line is not crossed here.
1. Before the Painting, a Sentence
He said that before he wanted to be a painter, he had wanted to be a writer.
When he left the Osaka School of Fine Arts in 1945 and went up to Tokyo, he enrolled at the Athénée Français and studied French.
A man who meant to paint went out of his way to learn a language.
Presumably because he wanted to read.
2. Tokyo in Those Years
Students in the Tokyo of the 1940s read translations and originals side by side.
Dostoevsky, Maupassant, Hemingway.
Natsume Sōseki, Akutagawa, Dazai.
When the war ended and the ruins were left, what they held on to was sentences.
Byun Shi-Ji was in that classroom.
3. Places Where the Two Can Be Laid Side by Side
Hemingway — the sentence that takes away
Hemingway spoke by not speaking. He kept eight parts below the water and let two show.
Byun's surface does the same. It does not explain. It leaves a few lines.
What is not left is more than what is.
The sea of The Old Man and the Sea and the sea of Byun Shi-Ji are different seas.
But the posture of the man standing before them is alike.
He does not win. He does not step back either.
This resemblance has been noted by critics. It is not a statement of the painter's own.
Sōseki — how to look at solitude
Sōseki looked long at the person left alone inside the modern.
That gaze was not a cry. It was a low, steady looking.
Byun's old man does not weep either. He stands on the hill.
A stick, a horse, and far off the horizon.
Maupassant — the sorrow of a life, told coldly
Maupassant put the irony of a life inside a short story, without inflating the feeling.
Byun did not write sorrow large either.
He turned sorrow into colour — into the colour of dry grass.
4. But a Caution
To set literature and painting side by side is a seductive exercise.
It is also a dangerous one.
To say that two things resemble each other is not to say that one influenced the other.
It is common for different people, in different places, to find the same thing.
That Byun read Hemingway is a story handed down.
There is no record that he read Sōseki or Maupassant.
So this essay can say only this:
**These sentences were in the air of those years.
And he breathed that air.**
Beyond that we do not yet know.
To write down that we do not know is also the work of an archive.
5. What Remains
In the end he did not write novels.
Instead he put sentences into his pictures.
The unpainted space is his sentence.
The place left without speaking — that is the longest sentence he ever wrote.
Further research
- - A complete search of the recorded oral history for any mention of reading
- - A survey of the books held in the artist's studio
- - The collection of any literary references in interviews and published writings
As these are confirmed, this essay will be rewritten from inference into fact.
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