Organizer: Noriko Aso University of Chicago
Chair: Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University
Discussant: Motoo Kobayashi, University of Washington
The anxiety of cultural influence in modern Japan has often taken the form of a claim that modern Japanese culture, whether as "modern" or self consciously "Japanese," is little more than an imitation or repetition of other or previous authentic cultural productions. However, by closely examining the function of mimesis in three moments of self-representation, the members of this panel will show how apparent repetition is often at the heart of creating new cultural forms.
Yoshikuni Igarashi finds that the doubling or mimesis and the highlighted role of the senses in the mystery stories of Edogawa Ranpo reveal a shift in subject position closely intertwined with the rise of mass formations in the 1920s. Gerald Figal also treats the theme of doubling in his study of tales of the fantastic by Akutagawa Ryunosuke. A desire to establish his name coupled with anxiety regarding his relation to the mass audiences of the Taisho Period inform the complex dynamics of his work. Noriko Aso looks at self-representation on the national level in the form of the prewar Japanese national treasure system. Inspired by and in competition with Western models of "civilization," Japanese bureaucrats constructed a Japanese aesthetic both as international cultural capital and as a means of unifying the Japanese populace.
The ongoing concern with authenticity and repetition in self-representation in the prewar period found its most intense expression during the Taisho era. In cultural media ranging from popular literature to high art, the paradox of the self which can be represented only in a metaphoric relation to the other was a consistent theme. Representations of self lay both in a desire for the other and in the desire to consume or take the other into oneself. The play of images between the two poles of desire for similitude and difference reveals the bounds of the historical discourses which define the cultural products under examination.
Gerald Figal, Lewis and Clark College
With the advent of mass society in Taisho Japan (1912-1926) arose new audiences and new anxieties for a literary artist like Akutagawa Ryunosuke. Already haunted by an anxiety of influence (from previous Japanese and European writers) in his efforts to produce authentic and original modern fiction, Akutagawa also became possessed of an anxiety of identity with the realization that he had little control over the fate of his name amid the reading public, be it professional critic or commoner. In this sense, for Akutagawa, to write entailed a double jeopardy (literally, "divided game"): he freely played on past texts while risking the charge of plagiarism and his texts were free to be played up or down by the judgment of present readers.
It is between these two anxieties in the context of an anonymous and amorphous mass audience (real and imagined) that themes of doubling, repetition, and representation of self are staged and played out in Akutagawa's writing. At stake among these recurrent themes is the status of the modern writing subject who seemingly forms a separate self (a body of texts to which is attached a name), but finds that self ceaselessly wandering away and being re formed at the whim of public opinion. In view of the "fated" astrological circumstance surrounding his given name "Ryunosuke" ("dragon child," so named since he was born in the year, month, day, and hour of the dragon) and the name (image and reputation) given him by his readers, the figure of speech "making a name for oneself" took on literal proportions as Akutagawa struggled to make a name for his self in the face of being named by others.
This paper focuses on Akutagawa's early fantastic tales-"The Dragon" (Ryuu, 1919) and "Shadow" (Kage, 1919) in particular-to lay out the ways in which he self consciously explored the ambiguous relation between writer and writings, between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the enunciated, between the desire for a unified private, psychological ego identity and the reality of a social, disseminated, textual imag-repetoire. The phantasmal and indeterminate quality of such a self renders the fantastic tale a fitting genre for Akutagawa to work in. His contribution to the popular Taisho motif of the doppelganger or double (a prevalent motif throughout nineteenth century European literature) as it appears in these stories is derived from complex interactions between his texts and the previous "original" source texts (his "shadows") and from the effects of a mass social situation on the name and identity of the individual artist. For this reason, my reading of these texts necessarily attends to both Akutagawa's generalized literary intertext and his specific social context in Tokyo during the Taisho period. What becomes clear from this treatment of Akutagawa's texts is that the spectre of modern subjectivity and consciousness they display is generated from an accumulation of and reflection upon traces of the past as well as masses of the present.
Noriko Aso, University of Chicago
In 1897, the Japanese government enacted a law for the protection and preservation within national boundaries of objects defined as "national treasures." According to legend, the passage of this law was in large part an alarmed response to the voracious art collecting of Ernest Fenollosa and his ilk. Despite obvious problems in attributing everything to Fenollosa, the orthodoxy of this myth hints at the stimulating effect of the appraising gaze of outsiders in initiating a reassessment on the part of Meiji bureaucrats regarding such cultural resources. In the course of defining and building up a collection of "treasures" which belonged to the "nation," Japanese officials constructed a national "self" for both foreign and domestic consumption.
On the one hand, the Western gaze spurred a self identification of Japan as rival: distinct but on equal standing. The cultural capital amassed from superlative examples of Japanese art served the Meiji government's push for the inclusion of Japan among the "civilized" nations of the West. On the other, the gaze at home was mobilized in schools and museums for the construction of a "common" aesthetic heritage, despite the fact that objects designated "national treasures" were often far removed from the aesthetic experiences of most Japanese of the time. In time, this conceptual "treasury" contributed to the domestic cultivation of a mass national consciousness.
In this paper about the prewar Japanese system of national treasures, I will focus on the problem of official attempts to "represent" through the idiom of objects an experience of nationality supposedly shared in common. Such scholars as Gayatri Spivak have stressed that official representation involves both speaking for and describing/defining a constituency. The aesthetic "self representation" enacted in the Japanese system of national treasures provides us with a specific case in which official "descriptions" of an artistic heritage served simultaneously as persuasive rhetoric. The specific objects chosen reflected various strategies in self representation: preferences for objects from certain classes and certain periods reveal discursive dictates. As these objects formed a canon, they in turn inflected the course of further imaginings of a national self. The fetishization of particular objects as national treasures, relations between viewers and viewed, and the discursive space shaped by this prewar cultural institution are further issues to be explored in this look at national treasures as a representational system.
Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University
Against the backdrop of 1920's Japan, the mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965) began his prolific career. It is in the awakening of the new social order, namely the mass social situation, that many of his early works explored, in an often shocking and uncanny manner, the spheres of the human senses, particularly those of the gaze and of the touch. In the advent of mass society, Ranpo located a fundamental change in the subject position in the transformation of human relationships. Human senses constituted the realm in which he inscribed the change he intuitively detected among the lives of his contemporaries.
Although Ranpo did not ascribe any radical motive to his own writings, his works demonstrated his desire to problematize the notion of identity as the basis of the social, and to free the subjectivity from conceptual closure. The images he presented amply testify to new formations of subjectivity in mass society: complicit relations between the viewer and the viewed, a fetishization of the mirrored gaze, master/slave relations established through touch, and so on.
In this paper, I will also attempt to address another important motif of Ranpo's work, the doubling of self, in relation to his treatment of the corporeal senses. As a form of mimesis, doubling constitutes a strategy to proliferate the images of self. Rather than simply dismissing the concept of identity, Edogawa Ranpo cherishes and brings a self-referential gaze upon this concept, as manifested in his own rather playful pen name, taken from Edgar Allan Poe. In Ranpo's writings, the concept of self is estranged and concomitantly recuperated in a mimetic form. His early writings as well as later autobiographical accounts provide us with specific examples of his various representational strategies of self.
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