I checked the two 漱石全集 that our library had, and both of them preserve the 接続って.  I wasn't really that surprised, this kind of very unusual kanji usage is highly likely to be intentionally stylistic.  It's other cases where you can't really be sure whether you're dealing with an intentional stylistic choice or just free variation coming from a lack of standardization.  Sometimes you have to investigate outside of the manuscript -- I don't know much about Japanese works, but in English, for instance, Walter Scott's manuscripts have little to no punctuation in them.  But we know from external sources that Scott's intent was for the printers to add the punctuation to conform to general standards, so an edition of Ivanhoe that faithfully reproduced the punctuation from Scott's manuscript would actually not be faithful to Scott's intent.  Similar situations may exist in the Japanese literature world as well; it's theoretically possible that some authors may have been slapdash with their orthography, assuming that the printers would do some modification and standardization.  If a writer wrote something in hiragana in his manuscript, it's possible that he just couldn't remember how to write the kanji and didn't want to look it up, or wrote it in kana because it was faster.

This isn't so much an issue with Soseki, but the further back you go (particularly when you get into Meiji and before), the harder the literature becomes to read in its original form -- both in an orthographic and grammar/vocab sense.  When you start getting back into Edo and Kamakura, the original forms of the literature are virtually unreadable except by specialists (even in typeset form).  I don't know of a single edition that attempts to reproduce exactly the form of a Genji manuscript, for instance (even the edition that does the least orthographic changing changes the 変体仮名 to modern kana forms, and most editions do a lot more than that.)  But when you get back this far it also leads to the most chaos in modern editions because everything is up to the whim of the individual editor, leading to situations like I mentioned before where a single poem has 5 different forms (orthographically speaking) in 6 editions.

So the editors are all making choices based on their target readership and the use of their editions, and they balance ease of reading vs. doing damage to the author's original intent.  (Of course, for older works we don't have original manuscripts so we can't be sure what the intent was.)

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2010 March 27, 9:58 am)

@y_t There's also the issue of multiple 'compositors' transcribing the manuscript, as discussed in detail in that Google Books essay I linked earlier on textual criticism.

But, how come no one else wanted to discuss 接続って w/ つながって reading?? I'm still curious about possible stylistic interpretations. Once you see stuff like that, you must wonder what they meant. Is 接続 considered more objective, like I thought, and thus contributing to the detached narrator's description, offset with the つながって to create a witty conflict of connotations?

These days I've seen 'unibrow' written as both 一本眉 and つながった眉毛... maybe Soseki influenced that? Apparently he's quite influential. ;p

Last edited by nest0r (2010 March 27, 2:26 pm)

I somewhat agree, but I think you're overestimating the difficulty to engender such a 'dim view'. I mean, sure, for older works, you have to, depending on previous research that's been shared, invest more effort to factor in the context of the period--or rather, you *can* factor it in--in English literature there are schools of criticism such as New Criticism and New Historicism, ignoring/attending to context beyond the text... in other words, if the goal is to discover authorial intent, his context should probably play a part and thus once you recognize a stylistic device that's been retained and can identify the period, sure, factor that in... but me, yes, I'm big on all these factors and integrating them as much as possible, hence I do appreciate philosophies of textual criticism and editing that seek to preserve authorial intent, and actually think the mutations via editing should also be considered, but I guess that's covered in the literature on textual criticism, is a bit fetishistic, and requires more transparency of the cultural artefact production/distribution process. My ultimate goal is a kind of simultaneous annihilation of authorship and the opposite as well, but I reveal too much and digress.

But I have difficulty believing this sort of wordplay/double-meaning/special readings/etc. with kanji is difficult at all for readers to determine and enjoy regularly. Or that it hasn't already been discussed, especially if it's been regularly maintained throughout its editions.

But I'll have to work on my skills and do my own 'research' I guess before I start making assumptions about readership in Japan. ;p For all I know, kanji/kana play of that sort is super rare and dismissed as anything but a gimmick. Maybe it's reserved for names or stuff like A/B rhyme schemes in English?

But to hint at what I meant in the past with regards to orthography and aesthetics as it occurs in media in a language... This process of identifying the differences of 'form' in the text and deciding what was meant/what it means to you in the context of the read and beyond is part of the communication of meaning through aesthetics. How much effort a reader invests, including research, is part of the fun or lackthereof. I did spend a year once reading a book closely, on my third pass-through--the first was a quick read for a 'sense' of the meaning and form, the second I mostly fixated on my own interpretations through a moderate amount of time. On the third I used an accompanying annotated version to go through every single line across hundreds of pages and read the accumulated research and notes on it and going off on tangents/cross-references. It was very fun! I don't see kanji/kana as doing anything but adding another worthwhile variant to such analyses and expression in both fiction and poetry. Then there was the fourth read... and on the fifth I had a dream about walking through a strange sort of city...

When I say this, it seems like I'm speaking for specific types of people and media, but I think this can be iterated across the board. I wrote an extra paragraph about such iterations, in a sense to cover the non-neuroscientific/literacy-centric aspects of previous arguments, but I don't think that would be worthwhile and would be subject to differences in opinion primarily. I was actually reading more on neuroscience in aesthetics or something but that's still a 'pipe dream' at the moment. I'll wait for the next paradigm shift. ;p

So for Soseki, really, no one in Japan has ever discussed that reading? There aren't notes on it shared in literature classes? No one knows how those two forms of 'connect' were used at the time? No natives read the text and form their own opinions, or do so with difficulty? 接続って w/ つながって, this must be a lonely dead construction, meaninglessly perpetuated until some solitary genius figures out The Truth. Perhaps there's an interpretation for it at Area 51.

Last edited by nest0r (2010 March 28, 1:14 pm)