AESTHETICS AND ETHICS IN THE RECEPTION OF NOH THEATRE IN THE WEST Diego Pellecchia Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosphy (PhD) Royal Holloway, University of London Department of Drama & Theatre Studies September, 2011 2 Declaration of Authorship I Diego Pellecchia hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: ______________________ Date: ________________________ 3 Acknowledgements I wish to express my gratitude to my supervisors, Prof. David Wiles and Dr. Libby Worth, and to my advisor, Prof. Matthew Cohen, for providing invaluable assistance, guidance and feedback at all stages of my research. I owe my deepest gratitude to Master-Actor Udaka Michishige, whose efforts in opening the tradition of Noh to foreigners allow me and other students of the International Noh Institute to practice the art and experience the world of Noh. I will be forever indebted to Monique Arnaud, who initiated me to the way of Noh, and encouraged me to embark upon this project, and to Rebecca Ogamo Teele, whose achievements in Noh motivate me to pursue the study of Noh, and greatly inspired this thesis. A special mention goes to Udaka Tatsushige, Udaka Haruna, John Mac Ateer and Dr. Jonah Salz: numerous discussions on Noh and on its transmission in intercultural contexts greatly contributed to the development of central concepts of this thesis. Special thanks to Elena Cazzaro at Biennale ASAC archive for the technical support, and Hara Maiko at Mie Prefectural Museum for facilitating research on Kitasono Katsue. I would also like to thank Sasakawa Foundation Great Britain for having generously sponsored two fieldtrips in Japan in 2009 and 2011. Finally, I would like to thank my mother and father, Silvana Ballini and Fernando Pellecchia, whose loving care supported me through the highs and lows of this wonderful journey. 4 Abstract Arguing that fundamental aesthetic elements of Noh are deeply imbued with ethical qualities, the thesis describes how, throughout the different socio-economic scenarios that marked the transition of Japan and the West to new phases of modernity, Noh became part of an international debate on theatre and ethics. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, European practitioners such as Yeats, Pound, Copeau and Brecht sought to ‘restore’ theatre by returning to ideals of honesty and spirituality that were thought to be lost as a consequence of the rise of bourgeois materialism. The promotion of Noh in Japan and its reception abroad was appropriated both by right and left wing political discourses that provided contrasting and converging interpretations of its theory and practice. With the advent of ‘interculturalism’ Noh was inscribed in a renewed ethical rubric, and became part of a return to the ‘spiritual’ dimension of Asian theatre by practitioners such as Yoshi Oida and Eugenio Barba. However, today Noh is still enmeshed in misconstructions that limit its understanding: drawing on historical research and ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis uses ethical criticism (Carroll, Cooper, Gaut) and Watsuji Tetsurō’s thought in order to analyse past and present reception of Noh, shedding light on the inextricability of the aesthetics and ethics of Noh and seeking to provide a balanced view of individual/communitarian and spiritual/secular dimensions of its contemporary practice, thus placing Noh within the broader perspective of a global discussion of theatre and ethics. 5 Table of Contents Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. 3 Abstract .................................................................................................................................... 4 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 7 Noh theatre in the West ............................................................................................................... 7 Theoretical premises: a meeting of aesthetics and ethics ............................................. 10 A framework for art reception ................................................................................................ 15 Aesthetically Relevant Ethical Properties ........................................................................... 16 Ethical criticism and Noh theatre ........................................................................................... 19 The ethics of reception ............................................................................................................... 20 Thesis outline ................................................................................................................................ 21 Additional remarks ..................................................................................................................... 23 Chapter One – First Encounters ..................................................................................... 25 Meiji Japan and the encounter of Noh with the West ....................................................... 25 Japonisme and early French scholarship of Noh ............................................................... 28 Diplomats, literates and the British discovery of Noh ..................................................... 31 Lafcadio Hearn and the ethics of Japanese tradition ....................................................... 36 Marie Stopes and the Noh .......................................................................................................... 39 Chapter Two – Aesthetics ................................................................................................ 43 Japonisme and European theatre at the turn of the century ........................................ 43 Ernest Fenollosa’s study of Noh .............................................................................................. 45 Fenollosa’s legacy: Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats’s Accomplishment .............................. 50 W. B. Yeats and Certain Noble Plays of Japan ...................................................................... 54 Reception of Yeats’s view of Noh ............................................................................................ 59 Arthur Waley ................................................................................................................................. 61 Paul Claudel – a French poet laureate in Japan. ................................................................. 64 Chapter Three – Ethics ..................................................................................................... 69 Noh and the new ethics of European theatre ...................................................................... 69 Japanese ethics during the Meiji period ............................................................................... 70 Promotion of Japanese ethics overseas ................................................................................ 73 E.G. Craig and Asian theatre ..................................................................................................... 76 Japanese ethics and theatre in The Mask ............................................................................. 78 The Noh actor and the Übermarionette ................................................................................ 80 Other comments on Japanese and European theatre in The Mask .............................. 81 Noh Theatre and moral cultivation in the theatre of Jacques Copeau ....................... 82 Ethics, acting and imitation ...................................................................................................... 84 Ethics and community ................................................................................................................ 90 Chapter Four – Politics ..................................................................................................... 93 Political responses to the ‘Crisis of Modernity’ .................................................................. 93 From Taishō ‘democracy’ to the Kokutai no Hongi – The revision of Japanese tradition .......................................................................................................................................... 97 Politicisation and promotion of Noh during the rise of Nationalism ...................... 101 Political implications of the reception of Noh in the West .......................................... 107 Ezra Pound and the modernist diplomacy of Noh theatre .......................................... 108 6 Bertolt Brecht’s political reception of the ethics of Noh .............................................. 116 Tanikō ........................................................................................................................................... 120 Chapter Five: Noh in Post-War Japan ........................................................................ 128 The Socio-political condition of Japan after WWII ........................................................ 128 Ruth Benedict and the popularisation of Japanese ethics .......................................... 129 Inconceivable contradictions ................................................................................................ 130 The ethics of censorship ........................................................................................................