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Days. Though the plotlines were not remotely similar except that they dealt with
primitive men surviving into modern times, Bishop's ideas were so powerful and
his writing so truthful that I had to cancel that contract; the book was
unwritable at that time, and probably will never be writable in that form.)
Then, after I had written the first three chapters of this volume, I was at the
checkout stand at the News and Novels bookstore in Greensboro, North Carolina,
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when I saw on a point-of-purchase display a lone copy of a small book called
Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself. The author: Kenzaburo Oe. I had not looked for
him, but he had found me. I bought the book; I took it home.
It sat unopened by my bed for two days. Then came the insomniac night when I was
about to begin writing chapter four, the chapter in which Wang-mu and Peter
first come in contact with the Japanese culture of the planet Divine Wind
(primarily in a city I named Nagoya because that was the Japanese city where my
brother Russell served his Mormon mission back in the seventies). I saw Oe's
book and picked it up, opened it and began to read the first page. Oe speaks at
first of his longtime relationship with Scandinavia, having read, as a child,
translations (or, rather, Japanese retellings) of a series of Scandinavian
stories about a character named Nils.
I stopped reading at once, for I had never thought of any similarity between
Scandinavia and Japan before. But at the very suggestion, I at once realized
that Japan and Scandinavia were both Edge peoples. They came into the civilized
world in the shadow (or is it dazzled by the brilliance?) of a dominant culture.
I thought of other Edge peoples -- the Arabs, who found an ideology that gave
them the power to sweep through the culturally overwhelming Roman world; the
Mongols, who united long enough to conquer and then be swallowed up by China;
the Turks, who plunged from the edge of the Muslim world to the heart of it, and
then toppled the last vestige of the Roman world as well, and yet sank back into
again becoming Edge people in the shadow of Europe. All these Edge nations, even
when they ruled the very civilizations in whose shadow they had once huddled,
were never able to shake off their sense of not-belonging, their fear that their
culture was irredeemably inferior and secondary. The result was that they were
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at once too aggressive and overextended themselves, growing beyond boundaries
they could consolidate and hold; and too diffident, surrendering everything that
really was powerful and fresh in their culture while retaining only the outward
trappings of independence. The Manchu rulers of China, for instance, pretended
to remain apart from the people they ruled, determined not to be swallowed up in
the all-devouring maw of Chinese culture, but the result was not the dominance
of the Manchu, but their inevitable marginalization.
True Center nations have been few in history. Egypt was one, and remained a
Center nation until it was conquered by Alexander; even then, it kept a measure
of its Centerness until the powerful idea of Islam swept over it. Mesopotamia
might have been one, for a time, but unlike Egypt, Mesopotamian cities could not
unite enough to control their hinterland. The result was they were swept over
and ruled by their Edge nations again and again. The Centerness of Mesopotamia
still gave it the power to swallow up its conquerors culturally for many years,
until finally it became a peripheral province handed back and forth between Rome
and Parthia. As with Egypt, its Center role was finally shattered by Islam.
China came later to its place as a Center nation, but it has been astonishingly
successful. It was a long and bloody road to unity, but once achieved that unity
remained, culturally if not politically. The rulers of China, like the rulers of
Egypt, reached out to control the hinterland, but, again like Egypt, rarely
attempted and never succeeded in establishing long-term rule over genuinely
foreign nations.
Filled with this idea, and others that grew out of it, I conceived of a
conversation between Wang-mu and Peter in which Wang-mu told him of her idea of
Center and Edge nations. I went to my computer and wrote notes about this idea,
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