Running Across Bridgebeams: Similitude of Warrior Identity Between Cultures

Learning is a good thing, but more often it leads to mistakes. It is like the admonition of the priest Konan. It is worthwhile just looking at the deeds of accomplished persons for the purpose of knowing our own insufficiencies. But often this does not happen. For the most part, we admire our own opinions and become fond of arguing. --Hagakure

Determining authorial intent in fictional mediation is an extremely difficult enterprise. Divorcing our own particular religious and political perspectives, as well as our desires to see them justified in great literature, can be immensely tiresome work. Mimetic interpretation in Yvain exists along the lines of implication rather than statement, the suggested question rather than the bald depiction. Chretien de Troyes' use of irony can be argued to have both aesthetic and political aims, each independent of each other. The Heike Monogatari can be equally argued to be aesthetically distanced along these same lines. In the contexts of the Heike Monogatari's development of continued historical revisionism the authors were able to contribute to the text as a whole yet still enjoy the distancing of themselves from their additions by virtue of the text's aesthetic qualities. The end result is that a difference between the ideal and the fiction that represents it develops and text itself is not completely reliable. The key point is that these discussions and parallels of the creation of warrior literature and the methods in which they are mediated is stunning not only in each text's successful representation of fighting men but in each author's unwillingness to become directly embroiled in addressing their opening arguments or assertions and instead present these opening passages in a much more discursive manner. There appears to be three narrative parallels which exists between these two independent texts: the assertion of theme, the retreat of the author from the forefront, and the mixed presentations of meaning in the narrative in both Chretien's Yvain and the Heike Monogatari.

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