Organizer and Chair: Joseph Murphy, University of Florida
Discussants: Shinobu Ikeda, Chiba University; Yoko Imaizumi, Tsukuba University
Takahashi Seori has called the latter half of the 1990s the "zone of retrospection" on the 20th century, where we take time to rethink all its characteristic technologies and social formations. This panel argues that the exchange between literary and visual cultures in the Taisho and early Showa period is a prime site for this project. Combining questions of representation and subject formation with concrete processes of social change, "visual culture" names for us a set of drives in tension, wherein a relentless organization of vision in the institution of industrial modernity is destabilized by a simultaneous proliferation of image technologies and the mass cultural spaces enabled thereby. Karatani Kojin (1993) and others have stressed the priority of the first movement in approaching literature in the late Meiji period. Using this as a point of orientation, we will rather explore a moment of destabilization during the Taisho and early Showa periods in the encounter of a consolidated literary field with emerging visual media.
We do not regard visuality in this period as a secondary or derivative concern for literature, nor do we see its image-technologies as a hobby or distraction for individual writers. We see it as absolutely crucial to developing modes of expression, imbricated in their social life. Each of our papers takes as its task tracing a specific boundary between the literary and the visual and unfolding the complexities of the space around it. Ayako Kano focuses on performance in Taisho theater, and finds categories of gender, sexuality, visuality, and the body aligned in new ways by actresses and the environment around them. Aaron Gerow finds in the Shinkankakuha’s well-known engagement with film not a diversion or amusement but a vital site of confrontation, out of which emerges a poetry not of words but of light. Joseph Murphy reconstructs the interaction of the bundan and film world in Taisho social space, using field logic from Bourdieu to read this contact zone as a kind of space of play where hierarchies could be articulated in unexpected ways.
Professors Ikeda and Imaizumi are well established experts in visuality and film, and we look forward to the process of response and discussion.
Aaron Gerow, Yokohama National University
If the Shinkankaku school constituted, as Yokomitsu Riichi later said, "a war of utter rebellion against the Japanese language," perhaps its involvement in the 1926 Kinugasa Teinosuke film Kurutta ichipeiji ("A Page of Madness") represented more than just a fashionable diversion for what was often called shallow modernism. Yokomitsu’s insistence that the film be without intertitles intimately connected this thinking with debates on the status of the cinematic image that raged throughout the 1920s. Under the influence of French Impressionist film theory and German discussions of absolute film, elements in the Japanese world were postulating the title-less film as the new, international language free of the tyranny of the word. Kataoka Teppei was considerably taken with this utopian promise and made it the basis of his desire to engage in cinematic production. The cinematic image thus represented another front for attacking the Japanese language and questioning the linguistic construction of subjectivity embodied in the shishosetsu. But as I will argue in this paper, this ideal was fraught with contradictions that are marked on the body of Kurutta ichipeiji itself. The literary confrontation with cinema was embroiled in the issue of whether the image is meaningful, whether it functions in the exact same way as a language, or whether it is something more, exceeding or even undermining the structures of signification itself. Kurutta ichipeiji marks a conjuncture in the debate over the possibilities of cinema, over whether literature would become cinema, or cinema literature. The outcome in many ways marked the appearance of a hegemonic inscription of the image which would ideologically dominate much of Japanese cinematic history.
Ayako Kano, University of Pennsylvania
As part of a collective project to map the changes in the sense of vision and visuality in modern Japan, this paper focuses on theater and the environment around it, and asks what gender, sexuality, and performance had to do with vision and visuality, as physical operation and as social fact. It starts with Jacqueline Rose’s insight in Sexuality in the Field of Vision that the position of woman as fantasy depends on a particular economy of vision, and that it is crucial to understand the psychic imbrication of the sexual and the visual. Examining the circulating images of women as performers and performers as women, such as actresses, onnagata, geisha, and prostitutes, this paper argues that a significant change occurred in Meiji Japan that aligned in new ways the categories of gender, sexuality, performance, visuality, and the body. That alignment opened up possibilities for new forms of disciplinary control as well as for new forms of resistance and pleasure. The spotlight will then turn to the various versions of Oscar Wilde’s Salome that came into view in Japan at the turn of the century, especially the competing performances of Kawakami Sadayakko and Matsui Sumako in 1914. Matsui Sumako’s triumphant performance was paradigmatic of the modern formations of visuality and gender, and Salome’s "Dance of the Seven Veils" can be understood as a synecdoche for that formation.
Joseph Murphy, University of Florida
We all know of the collaboration of major figures like Tanizaki and Kawabata in film production, but this only scratches the surface of the Taisho and early Showa Bundan’s involvement with cinema. By examining surveys, articles and interviews in contemporary popular journals, this paper seeks to make the case that this new media competitor was a focus of energy and interest virtually erased in the subsequent course of criticism. The names that emerge, from Kafu to Shimazaki Toson, will be surprising enough, but more interesting is an unexpected fluidity in the resulting social space. The authority of an established literature vis-à-vis the new medium structures the space of interaction (Mizoguchi goes to Izumi Kyoka, not the other way around), but there is a sense in these popular journals that when the field becomes multi-dimensional (with the introduction of other axes of difference) a kind of energy is released. If a 1929 magazine survey asking male writers to rank actresses on a scale from 1–100 for charm, looks, "as a wife," etc. offers no surprises, there are complex displacements at work in a preceding survey of female bundan members on the charms of Valentino. If regular taidan in Eiga Jidai preceded by a photograph of a male "bunshi" with a female actress seems to oppose a doubly privileged position to a doubly denigrated position, nuances of dress and speech, and the conventions of interviewing deflect the hierarchies. I will argue, on Bourdieu’s model of the cultural field, that the relatively clear and unproblematic hierarchy between literature and film provided a kind of safe space to play with relatively more "charged" hierarchies.