HISTORY, TRAUMA, and the ETHICS of REMEMBERING in the EARLY WORKS of TAKEDA TAIJUN (1943-1955) by PATRICK CHIMENTI B.A., Tufts University, 2013

HISTORY, TRAUMA, AND THE ETHICS OF REMEMBERING IN THE EARLY WORKS OF TAKEDA TAIJUN (1943-1955) by PATRICK CHIMENTI B.A., Tufts University, 2013 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations 2018 This thesis entitled: History, Trauma, and the Ethics of Remembering in the Early Works of Takeda Taijun (1943- 1955) written by Patrick Chimenti has been approved for the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations Dr. Janice Carole Brown Dr. Faye Yuan Kleeman ____________________________________ Dr. R. Keller Kimbrough Date The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. ii Chimenti, Patrick (M.A., Asian Languages and Civilizations) History, Trauma, and the Ethics of Remembering in the Early Works of Takeda Taijun (1943- 1955) Thesis directed by Professor Janice Carole Brown This project seeks to determine the manner in which the early works of the Japanese writer Takeda Taijun present a response to the traumatic experiences accompanying the defeat of Japan following the end of the Pacific War and how this response contributes to conceptions of identity, subjectivity, and ethics in the post-traumatic society of modern Japan. The project will seek to interrogate Takeda's ideas and literary techniques through close readings of his early works across three separate thematic lenses: history, the traumatic, and the absolute (represented in the theoretical term of “landscape”). In interrogating Takeda's fiction in this manner, I intend to demonstrate that Takeda's conception of morality underwent a radical transformation in which he discovered an alterity of self emerging from the relief of the individual against the spatial immanence of history. This discovery allowed Takeda to develop a new conception of ethics privileging an interubjectival regard distinct from previous models of human relations based largely on the ethical blind spots inherent to “humanist” discourse within liberal capitalist society. The project includes two original translations of Takeda's work. iii CONTENTS INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………………………........……...1 CHAPTERS I. RECORDS OF ANNIHILATION Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………..........13 Takeda’s Early Life and the Experience of the Chinese Continent………………………..…….24 Sima Qian and the Nature of the Historical Subject…………………………………………........35 Ethics, Annihilation, and the Authority of Authorship in Sima Qian……………..…...54 “On Annihilation” and the Fragmentary “Potentiality” of Subjectivity…..……………….……60 Annihilation(s) and the Emergence of Historical Plurality ………………………....…...72 Conclusions: History, Fragmentation, and Perspective……………………………………..…......74 II. THE ETHICS OF WITNESSING Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………......77 Judgment: The Emergence of a Matrixial Alliance…………………………………………............86 The Poiesis of Identity and Annihilation: Sugi’s Account………………………………......87 The Confession and the Alterity of the Individual: Jirō’s Account………………..…......104 Conclusions: A Conversation of “Partial-selves”……………………………………………….......117 III. THE “RE-DISCOVERY” OF LANDSCAPE Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………...…...121 Landscapes and Language…………………………………………………………………………..…..136 Textual Landscapes: Intertextuality and Polyvocal “Recording”………………………………….145 Reclaimed Landscapes: Historical Potentiality and Polyvocality in the Dramatic Form……...151 Conclusions: Landscape, the Borders of Subjectivity, and Ethical Resonance………..………...160 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………………………….......163 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………..………………………………………………………………………...……..167 . APPENDIX A. SELECTED TRANSLATIONS Judgment (審判, Shinpan)……………………………………………………………….......180 “On Annihilation” (滅亡について, Mestubō ni tsuite) ………........................................215 iv INTRODUCTION This project will seek, generally, to address the interlocking issues of ethics, history, and memory within Takeda Taijun's (武田泰淳) early work, a period which I operationally define as spanning from the production of his first widely recognized work Sima Qian: The World of Shiki (司馬遷:「史記」の世界 Shibasen: Shiki no sekai) in 1943 to approximately 1955, when both the content and expression of Takeda's oeuvre changed significantly as he moved away from works that related directly to the character and consequences of the Sino-Japanese and Pacific Wars and began to focus on more abstracted conceptions of religious morality and the potential for experimental expression in drama and film. The time period of interest (1943-1955) traces a significant arc in Takeda's development as a writer that is key to understanding the nature of his intellectual project and, ultimately, its successes and failings in formulating an exploration of the moral dimensions of historical trauma and how traumatic events contribute to a conception of individual identity in what Bracha Ettinger, Jean Baudrillard, and other critical theorists term a “post-traumatic” world. Takeda, like many of his contemporaries, including Noma Hiroshi (野間宏), Abe Kōbō（安部公房）, Takeuchi Yoshimi (竹内好), Ōoka Shōhei（大岡正平）, and others, is notable in that he presents a writer who, early in his career, demonstrated a strong commitment to historical materialism and leftist activism, but who suffered what might be very loosely termed a “historical trauma” in which he was conscripted (either directly or indirectly) to participate in the moral atrocities perpetrated by the imperialist government of Japan in its colonialist period. Takeda, like many of these writers was deeply affected by the collapse of the Japanese empire in 1 its defeat, and endured a repetition of the trauma of this destruction following the war.1 As a result, literature became a vehicle by which this trauma was simultaneously recorded, remembered, and relived. Many of these writers, in writing works rooted in their own experience of the various trauma of the war, attempted to make sense of the fissure in their personal and collective identity formed by a “severance” of self across the divide of this historical disruption.2 Where the issue of “ethics” enters into this discussion is in evaluating how the intellectual conception of this movement of the individual (or rather individuals, as trauma is never the experience of one person) in relation to the larger “world” (e.g. history, force, or the absolute nature of the event that supersedes the “individual”) leads one to navigate and interpret the political world around them following the traumatic incident. Thus, this problematique incorporates an assemblage of both one’s own self-identification/formulation vis-à-vis the event (identity) and one’s method of “reacting” to the event within the context of the greater social order (agency). Though not the neatest definition of the word, this process loosely conforms to the term “subjectivity,” a concept which, for Takeda, and many other writers after the war, is inherently an issue with ethical and sociopolitical implications in its expression.3 That is to say, 1 By this I do not mean to imply that Takeda or any of these writers ascribed a positive value or faith to the Japanese nation that they felt was betrayed in the defeat. Rather, I mean to say the destruction of Japan in its defeat presented a historical shift in which both the narratives surrounding Japanese identity and the potential of physical destruction enabled by recent advances in modern warfare (e.g. atomic bombs, the firebombings of Tokyo) unseated previous conceptions of the “limits” established by history, creating a sense of existential crisis. Takeda attributes the term “annihilation” to this disruption, a term that I will develop in the project proper. 2 The concept of severance is an important one to this project, one which I will be writing against at most times. My conception of severance is, on a basic level, based within Lacanian psychoanalysis, referring to a primary point of traumatic separation that is required for both individual identity and language to emerge. Though Lacan's original concept of severance is essentially limited to the individual within the transition to the “mirror stage” of psychological development, both trauma theorists and literary critics (including Bracha Ettinger, Dominick LaCapra, and Cathy Caruth) have, in recent years, demonstrated that there is rich potential for applying the concept to points of historical trauma and, perhaps more importantly, to the strategy of developing political narratives around incidences of historical trauma. It is with this latter perspective in mind that I use the word severance. 3 My concept of “ethics” here and throughout this project is largely reliant on Levinas' conception of ethics as outlined in his work Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961). On ethics, Levinas writes: “Ethics is the spiritual optics. The subject-object relation does not reflect it; in the impersonal relation that leads to it the invisible but personal God is not approached outside of all human presence. The ideal is not only a being superlatively being, 2 for many of these early writers, by nature of their relation to the occurrence of “history” in events of the war, events with which they held an ambiguous relationship due to the collapse (and reconstruction) of established societal

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