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UNIVERSITY OF LONDON See over for Abstract o f Thesis notes on completion . , TRoE-MV Ea/£VA- H7\yTBR_ Author (full names).......................................................................... ...... Title of thesis ^ I *i3 o ± Jc^cwueve,\C K £ > i pTcA -\ »-v\ ....}.. Degree This thesis presents an analysis of Japanese modernist texts from the 1930s, with an emphasis on the writings of Takami Jun (1907-1965), Ishikawa Jun (1899-1987) and Dazai Osamu (1909- 1948). Rather than discuss these experiments within the problematic of influence and see them as secondary gestures imitating the techniques of Gide or Joyce, I attempt to show that Japanese modernist fiction is deeply implicated in its cultural, political and technological moment. I begin with a mapping of the historical and discursive forces behind the so-called cultural revival ( bungei fukkO) and the revolt against the epistemic regime of Westernized modernity: its soulless positivism, its logic of instrumentality which objectified nature and the historical teleologies which inevitably relegated Japan to a secondary place. I examine the works of Takami, Ishikawa and Dazai in this context, against close-ups of specific materia! and discursive developments. The transgressions and dislocations of linear narrative in Takami Jun’s novelShould Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot (Kokyu wasureu beki, 1936) are read as radical deconstructions of the deeply ideological discourse oftenkd (the official term for the political conversion of leftists) as a regeneration of the self, as the return to a natural organic Japaneseness. The narrative of Ishikawa Jun’s Fugen (Fugen, 1936) is structured by dualistic tropes which can be seen as configurations of mediation and unity; I explore the meaning of these narrative strategies against the collapse of political mediation in the mid-1930s and the swell of fascist longings for oneness with the emperor. The marked reflexivity of the stories in Dazai Osamu’s first published collection The Final Years (Bannen, 1936) is discussed in the context of the profound anxieties generated by the accelerated logic of cultural reproduction and the technologically altered texture of experience. I argue that in their shared emphasis on discursive mediation and the materiality of language, the texts of Takami, Ishikawa and Dazai become figures of resistance to a nativism which strove for immediate authenticity and abandoned representation for the metaphysics of timeless Japaneseness. ProQuest Number: 10731391 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10731391 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 Notes for Candidates 1 Type your abstract on the other side of this sheet. 2. Use single-space typing.Limit your abstract to one side of the sheet. 3. Please submit this copy of your abstract to the Research Degree Examinations Office, Room 261, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU, at the same time as you submit copies of your thesis. 4. This abstract will be forwarded to the University Library, which will send this sheet to the British Library and to ASLIB (Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux) for publication in Index to Theses. For official use Subject Panel/Specialist Group BLLD........................................ Date of Acceptance Words Fall Apart: The Politics of Form in 1930s Japanese Fiction Irena Eneva Hayter Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the School of Oriental and African Studies University of London May 2008 Abstract This thesis presents an analysis of Japanese modernist texts from the 1930s, with an emphasis on the writings of Takami Jun (1907-1965), Ishikawa Jun (1899-1987) and Dazai Osamu (1909-1948). Rather than discuss these experiments within the problematic of influence and see them as secondary gestures imitating the techniques of Gide or Joyce, I attempt to show that Japanese modernist fiction is deeply implicated in its cultural, political and technological moment. I begin with a mapping of the historical and discursive forces behind the so-called cultural revival ( bungei fukko) and the revolt against the epistemic regime of Westernized modernity: its soulless positivism, its logic of instrumentality which objectified nature and the historical teleologies which inevitably relegated Japan to a secondary place. I examine the works of Takami, Ishikawa and Dazai in this context, against close-ups of specific material and discursive developments. The transgressions and dislocations of linear narrative in Takami Jun’s novel Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot (Kokyu wasureu beki, 1936) are read as radical deconstructions of the deeply ideological discourse oftenko (the official term for the political conversion of leftists) as a regeneration of the self, as the return to a natural organic Japaneseness. The narrative of Ishikawa Jun’s Fugen (Fugen, 1936) is structured by dualistic tropes which can be seen as configurations of mediation and unity; I explore the meaning of these narrative strategies against the collapse of political mediation in the mid-1930s and the swell of fascist longings for oneness with the emperor. The marked reflexivity of the stories in Dazai Osamu’s first published collection The Final Years (Bannen, 1936) is discussed in the context of the profound anxieties generated by the accelerated logic of cultural reproduction and the technologically altered texture of experience. I argue that in their shared emphasis on discursive mediation and the materiality of language, the texts of Takami, Ishikawa and Dazai become figures of resistance to a nativism which strove for immediate authenticity and abandoned representation for the metaphysics of timeless Japaneseness. 2 Contents Introduction 5 Chapter 1. Intersections 17 The Showa Avant-Garde 24 Fauitlines of Showa: Language, Montage, Perception 28 The End of the Leftist Avant-Garde 40 The Cultural Revival 47 Yokomitsu Riichi’s ‘Essay on the Pure Novel’ 51 Returns and Repetitions 58 Troubled Knowledge 62 Chapter 2. Takami Jun and the Poiitics of Representation 74 Narrative Transgressions, Temporal Perversions 80 Tenko and the Crisis of Subjectivity 88 Fascism and Popular Fiction: The Friendly Literary Society 97 Nihon romanha and Jinmin Bunko 110 Textual Politics: Takami and Yasuda 121 Chapter 3. In the Flesh: The Historical Unconscious of Ishikawa Jun’s Fugen 132 Dualities 142 The Showa Crisis of Representation 148 The Sublime Object of Japanese Ideology 153 Bodies 160 Textual Traces 179 Writing against Immediacy 183 Chapter 4. Reproductions of the Self: Dazai Osamu 193 The Flower of Buffoonery’ 198 The Youth with the Monkey Face’ 209 ‘Metamorphosis’ 213 Enpon Culture and the Commodification of the Literary Work 216 The Mediatized Self of Photography 223 Katari and the Technologization of the Voice 237 The Politics and Erotics of Storytelling 244 Conclusion 253 Bibliography 256 4 Introduction Henceforth, any resurrection of the Greek World is a more or less conscious hypostasy of aesthetics into metaphysics - a violence done to everything that lies outside the sphere of art, and a desire to destroy it; an attempt to forget that art is only one sphere among many, and that the very disintegration and inadequacy of the world is the precondition for the existence of art and its becoming conscious. Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel This study focuses on Japanese modernist fiction from the 1930s, with an emphasis on the works of Takami Jun (1907-1965), Ishikawa Jun (1899-1987) and Dazai Osamu (1909-1948). It argues that modernist texts were deeply marked by the intensities of their political, cultural and technological moment. As an approach this can seem hopelessly demode : it can imply a rigid deterministic relationship between the material and the discursive and an instrumental view of language which takes us back to the worst Stalinist misreadings of Marxism. Post-structuralism and deconstruction have not only asserted the autonomy of the textual, but have also challenged the supposedly obvious premise that a material reality does indeed exist behind language; for post-structuralism, everything is discursive and there is nothing outside the text. My attempt here will be to argue against this solipsistic pan-textualism and to gesture towards a more dynamic politics of reading. It is not my intention to reduce modernism to a superstructural reflection of some universal economic base, but to analyse literature as a cultural practice operating in conjunction with other networks of signification. The aim would also be to open the realm of the discursive and push to the foreground certain intersections between historical forces and textual practices. These convergences are not necessarily found in the thematic concerns and the referential content of the texts. More often than not the relationship between text and history is symptomatic, similar to the psychoanalytic dynamic of displacement, containment and repression. This is a historicist