@inproceedings{oai:kokubunken.repo.nii.ac.jp:00002150,
 author = {Jones, Sumie and JONES, Sumie},
 book = {国際日本文学研究集会会議録, PROCEEDINGS OF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON JAPANESE LITERATURE},
 issue = {13},
 month = {Mar},
 note = {pdf, That "play" (ge) equals "writing" (saku) is the premise of gesaku, which is maintained as a stance not only by early bushi-class authors but also by later ones who were professional, and sometimes best-seller, authors. Writing is a game in which the reader is invited to participate, the work being an open arena for the play of writing and interpretation rather than a finished product to be read for cohesive meaning. Thus gesaku is characterized by word-play and self-referentiality. This lecture traces these two features in eighteenth-century British poetry and prose and in gesaku writings of the later Edo period, drawing examples from several works in which the author's self-portrait is prominent.
In comical poetry, Alexander Pope, in his "An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," sets up the poet himself as an ideal against which vices are to be attacked and by which the satirist is to be defended for his writing. Jonathan Swift's "On the death of Dr. Swift" portrays the poet as the worst embodiment of human hypocrisy thereby inducing the reader to laugh at himself while laughing at the author. In prose fiction, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy is a "picture of himself," as he calls it, in the sense that the very act of narrating replaces any objective narrative arrangement. Play, not necessity, seems to be the mother of literary invention. Pope invents the mock-epic couplet in which the sublime and the vulgar are mercilessly mixed ; Swift, the plain-style conversation in which the true and dispicable self is exposed ; and Sterne, the free-form narrative in which tricks of sound and spelling open up multiple possibilities for interpretation.
Similarly, Edo gesaku writers are creators of new language. Hiraga Gennai's sense of the self is a match with Pope's, and, indeed, his Hohiron Part II is as much a "bill of complaint" as Pope's "Arbuthnot " Gennai's self-image, however, is double-sided : it is as proud as Pope's while being as self-debasing as Swift's, so that he simultaneously achieves the former's satirical dimension and the latter's depth. His mock-Chinese (kanbun-yomikudashi) style is more complex and open to interpretation than Pope's mockheroic couplet. The ludicrously lovable nose which Santô Kyôden assigns to his own face in his sketches indicates his inclination toward commercial popularity. His "yellow cover "(kibyôshi) books play on the reading of pictures as well as of the written texts. Particularly, his Kiji Nakazawa features the reader rather than the author so that reading constitutes narration, thus challenging Tristram Shandy for the title of the world's strangest narration. His Sakusha Tainai Totsuki no Zu, showing the formation of a book from its conception to publication as an embryo growing in the author’s masculine “womb,” epitomizes the late gesaku of bringing forward the backstage of writing. Many of Jippensha Ikku’s works are of this type but lacking Kyôden’s fictionality. In his Naruhodo Nekkara Ikku ga Saku, a slapstick comedy about the struggle of the author in search of ideas, Ikku, the popular author, depends on the reader’s indulgence in laughing at, and sympathizing with, the misery of the actual author. Here the author-reader relationship is extremely close, to such a degree to invalidate the written work, a case of a game losing its raison d’être by the conspiracy of the players.},
 pages = {113--132},
 publisher = {国文学研究資料館},
 title = {公開講演　戯作の作者・作者の戯作},
 year = {1990},
 yomi = {ジョーンズ, スミエ}
}