Il mito del ‘selvaggio balbettante’ e l’origine della poesia giapponese

In the first volume of his History of Japanese Literature, published in English in 1984, the Japanese student of literature Konishi Jin’ichi (1915-2007) proposed a theory of the development of Japanese poetry whereby poetry evolved from songs whose most primitive form was “a single meaningless line”. Konishi based his model on a corresponding theory found in Cecil Bowra’s 1962 monograph Primitiver Songs. To support this view, both authors assumed that language evolved from a system of communication in which unarticulated cries were emitted in response to immediate environmental stimuli and inner sensations. Such primitive language, unfit for conceptual representation, was in itself a reflection of a pre-logic mentality. At the time of their writing, Bowra and Konishi were of course not alone in believing that mind, language and culture started as a tabula rasa. The existence of such a stage was perhaps unavoidably required by the then dominant Darwinian hortodoxy, which represented hominization as a linear progression toward increased complexity under the cumulative effect of a vast number of small phenotypic changes. In anthropology the ladder model was perhaps best exemplified by the great teleology of Leroi-Gouran’s Le Geste et la parole. Konishi, however, implicitly suggested that that very first stage in human development is very recent in the history of the population of Japan, as revealed by the many primitive characters retained even today by Japanese poetry, mind, and culture. One relic of that original state of nature is the kotodama, or “spirit of the word(s)”, a force hidden in pure Japanese words and in the uta songs that use them. When evoked, kotodama causes a sort of mystic experience in the native speakers of the language. This makes of Japanese people a humanity apart, a lineage in which the whole natural history of humanity is recapitulated in few thousand years only. More primitive, they are purer than the rest of humanity. By discovering Bowra’s works in the Princeton Library, Konishi thus obtained a new tool to support the primordialist arguments of nihonjinron, the nationalistic discourse centered on determining the essence of “Japaneseness”.