Notes on Haibun (and its connections with Object-Oriented Writing)
(2024)
Overshadowed by haiku—to which it is related, an extension, a mutant outgrowth thereof—the haibun is a prosimetric form pioneered by Matsuo Basho as a way of documenting, through prose, his travels, while invoking the essence of the places he traversed via verse—typically the three-line hokku, aka the modern-day haiku.
For Basho, the focus was mainly on travel; and, while the haibun tradition has mostly stuck to its origins as proto-travel writing, some have adapted it for other topics. (For John Ashbery, who included several haibun in his 1984 collection A Wave, the form is more important than the subject, which, in typical Ashbery fashion, is purposefully elusive.) Diaristic musings on peregrinations in prose would be followed by a hokku that either arrested or connected the passage to a next one, as in linked verse. In fact, verse’s interweavings were quite loose—Basho would also incorporate haiku written by his travel companions—not so unusual, given that the linked-verse tradition of Japanese poetry was a communal affair, with three-line verses improvised on the spot in response to the originating verse or else one that spurred it; the more masterful communal linked-verse compositions might form an entire poetic landscape.
In Basho’s day, poetry was the most popular art form, and travel was unusual. In fact, travel was difficult and dangerous—not an activity to be undertaken lightly—there was no such thing as a tourism industry in premodern Japan. To choose to travel was to consciously embrace these dangers, and for Basho, it was as much a spiritual as a poetic decision—a means of casting off one’s body, one’s selves, to the wind. The title of one of his haibun, “The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton,” evokes this quite well: this desire to rid the self of the body—a bare-bones means of existence, free from material concerns—still alive, yet exposed in a certain raw sense to those harsh elements that everyone else works to avoid.
While the prose may be composed later and is thus an exercise in reflection, the poem, like the hokku/haiku traditionally, is a product of on-site composition; it is improvisational in nature. The haibun is unique because it can also inform us when a poem was not written, as Basho documents in this passage from “Weather-Exposed Skeleton”: “It was really regrettable that I had come such a long way only to look at the dark shadow of the moon, but I consoled myself by remembering the famous lady who had returned without composing a single poem from the long walk she had taken to hear a cuckoo.”
Moving beyond subject matter (travel) for a moment: it could be said that, much like object-oriented writing, haibun is a metaphysical form of writing, in that it attempts to go one step further than the hokku/haiku in invoking (rather than merely evoking) the essence of a thing.
My favorite of Basho’s haibun, “The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel,” commences with an artist’s statement:
“In this mortal frame of mine which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over the others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another. At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of a court, and at another it wished to measure the depth of its ignorance by trying to be a scholar, but it was prevented from either because of its unquenchable love of poetry. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore, it hangs on to it more or less blindly.
“Saigyo in traditional poetry, Sogi in linked verse, Sesshu in painting, Rikyu in tea ceremony, and indeed all who have achieved real excellence in any art, possess one thing in common, that is, a mind to obey nature, to be one with nature, throughout the four seasons of the year. Whatever such a mind sees is a flower, and whatever such a mind dreams of is the moon. It is only a barbarous mind that sees other than the flower, merely an animal mind that dreams of other than the moon. The first lesson for the artist is, therefore, to learn how to overcome such barbarism and animality, to follow nature, to be one with nature.” [All quotations here are from Nobuyuki Yuasa’s translation, appearing in The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches by Matsuo Basho, Penguin Classics, 1966.]
To be one with nature. Object-oriented writing treats man-made objects, artworks, as nature; like Basho’s conception of the artist (and, by extension, the ultimate function of art), it works to eradicate the artificial divide of culture/nature. The Chinese philosopher Xunzi taught that there is no such thing as “pure” nature, anyway—almost everything conventionally referred to as “nature” has, in actuality, been tamed or else tampered with by human hands. (And Xunzi was writing two centuries BCE.) “Nature,” therefore, is something elusive and unattainable—in other words, the very essence (impossibility, incompletion, inevitable failure, etc.) of art.
Basho’s journey only begins after this extraordinary passage, carving out a pathway for haibun to be more than mere reportage—and then explicitly says that the prose in a haibun should resist mere reportage—should, in a sense, try to transcend the limitations of the prosaic. After launching forth with his own poem—and then relaying two further poems penned by others as departure gifts—Basho then offers the following theory of travel writing: “From time immemorial the art of keeping diaries while on the road was popular among the people […] Later works are by and large little more than imitations of great masters, and my pen, being weak in wisdom and unfavored by divine gift, strives to equal them, but in vain. It is easy enough to say, for example, that such and such a day was rainy in the morning but fine in the afternoon, that there was a pine tree at such and such a place, or that the name of the river at a certain place was such and such, for these things are what everybody says in their diaries, although in fact they are not even worth mentioning unless there are fresh and arresting elements in them. The readers will find in my diary a random collection of what I have seen on the road, views somehow remaining in my heart – an isolated house in the mountains, or a lonely inn surrounded by the moor, for example. I jotted down these records with the hope that they might provoke pleasant conversation among my readers and that they might be of some use to those who would travel the same way.”
These statements of poetics are interwoven throughout, a meta approach that seems intrinsic to prosimetric formats. Among his other projects, Basho sought to heighten poetry to fine art status. This might sound odd in the twenty-first century, but poetry was the social media of seventeenth century Japan—everyone wrote it, from samurai to lowly farmers, and poetry contests were widely popular. The most popular form was senryu, humorous, earthy, and often sexual or scatological. As scholar Makoto Ueda notes in the introduction to his senryu anthology Light Verse from the Floating World: “…a poet moved by the beauty of nature would write a hokku. A poet wishing to vent out a personal emotion like love or grief would compose a waka. Someone with a novelist’s eye but without his ability (or patience) to construct a lengthy plot jotted down senryu.”
While today we might look with envy at a society wherein poetry played such a pertinent role in daily life—this place/time wherein an air of creative productivity, rather than passive consumerism, reigned—Basho felt aggrieved by the belittling of the art form that transpired in senryu and worked to elevate the hokku (which, for the past hundred years or so, we have regarded as the “haiku.”) While the 5-7-5 syllabic form was a mere guideline and could be readily violated, the two sturdy rules were the inclusion of a seasonal word or inference, as well as a kireji, or “cutting word,” that gave rise to a juxtaposition within the poem; in English translations, the kireji is most effectively indicated via punctuation, the strongest being a dash.
Basho took these aesthetic guidelines fairly seriously. From “Travel-Worn Satchel”:
“Had I crossed the pass
Supported by a stick,
I would have spared myself
The fall from the horse.
Out of the depressing feeling that accompanied the fall, I wrote the above poem impromptu, but found it devoid of the seasonal word.” (p. 77)
The haibun, then, could serve many functions—not just travel writing, but also literary (self-)critique, aesthetic theory, and, as Issa would later practice it in his famous haibun “The Spring of My Life,” autobiography.
Above all, the haibun, in its loosest, most spontaneous form, seeks, like object-oriented writing, to go beyond all generic constraints: this intent being its sole constraint.