"However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world"
About this Quote
Oe is laying out a literary method that doubles as an ethical posture: the private life is not an escape from politics, it is where politics lands. The line begins with a modest throat-clear ("please allow me to say"), but that politeness masks a firm defense of an approach critics often dismiss as merely confessional. In Oe's hands, starting from "my personal matters" is less diary-writing than a way of forcing the state to show its fingerprints on the body, the family, the psyche.
The key move is the verb "link". It suggests wiring, circuitry, obligation. Oe refuses the comforting fantasy that the self is sealed off from history; instead, he treats the individual as a relay station through which society and power circulate. That structure also quietly rebukes a certain postwar Japanese social contract: keep your head down, rebuild, don't probe too hard into wartime memory, nuclear trauma, or the machinery of conformity. Oe's work, shaped by Hiroshima's afterlife and later by the experience of raising a son with a disability, turns vulnerability into a lens. The "I" is not narcissism; it's evidence.
There's a broader literary context, too: a 20th-century shift where the novel becomes a place to audit the nation through the self, but without the cool detachment of the "objective" chronicler. Oe is claiming that intimacy can be a form of public accountability. If the story starts at home, it's because that's where the world first becomes unavoidable.
The key move is the verb "link". It suggests wiring, circuitry, obligation. Oe refuses the comforting fantasy that the self is sealed off from history; instead, he treats the individual as a relay station through which society and power circulate. That structure also quietly rebukes a certain postwar Japanese social contract: keep your head down, rebuild, don't probe too hard into wartime memory, nuclear trauma, or the machinery of conformity. Oe's work, shaped by Hiroshima's afterlife and later by the experience of raising a son with a disability, turns vulnerability into a lens. The "I" is not narcissism; it's evidence.
There's a broader literary context, too: a 20th-century shift where the novel becomes a place to audit the nation through the self, but without the cool detachment of the "objective" chronicler. Oe is claiming that intimacy can be a form of public accountability. If the story starts at home, it's because that's where the world first becomes unavoidable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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