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- Convenor:
-
Brett de Bary
(Cornell University)
Send message to Convenor
- Stream:
- Modern Literature
- Location:
- Torre A, Piso -1, Auditório 001
- Sessions:
- Thursday 31 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
Upon publication of the first translation of Õe Kenzaburō's 1961 A Political Youth Dies (Seiji Shōnen Shisu) and its long-suppressed original (Hijiya-Kirschnereit/Held, 2015), the panel assesses implications of Õe's depiction of ultra-nationalism and the Shōwa Emperor for postwar Japan and today.
Long Abstract:
The panel brings together distinguished scholars of Japanese intellectual history and literature on the occasion of a signal event: the 2015 publication of the first translation of Ōe Kenzaburō's 1961 A Political Youth Dies (Seiji Shōnen Shisu) and its long-suppressed original Japanese text. Ōe's fiction depicts the 17-year old perpetrator of the assassination of Socialist Party Chairman Asanuma Inejirō in the wake of the 1960 renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, an assassination sensationalized by being broadcast in its entirety on national television. A striking feature of this text is Ōe's decision to present its narration from the perspective of the protagonist, a young terrorist. On the one hand, the reprisals Ōe immediately faced for this portrait of an "ultra-nationalist," and his reluctance to allow the work to be reprinted, constitute an understudied chapter of Japanese postwar cultural history. At the same time, seeming ambivalences in the text's depiction of the seductive power of ultra-nationalism pose critical challenges that remain to be taken up today. What construction of politics and sexuality informs Ōe's risky decision to represent the subjectivity of the terrorist (and by extension his sexuality), and how might this be related to the figure of the emperor in this text? How might attention to this novella re-orient our understanding of Ōe's oeuvre, leading to a new understanding of the centrality of the Shōwa Emperor (and Rescript Ending the War) in its historical schemata? How might signs of American mass culture (television, popular music) in the text call attention to an often-disavowed complicity between "right-wing" and "democratic" ideologies under the Cold War order in Japan? Finally, what bearing does the text's depiction of what it calls "ultra-nationalism" have for our understanding of forms of fascist politics existing in Japan, then and now? In the spirit of Walter Benjamin's invocation of the "memory that flashes up in a moment of danger" --- and his understanding of translation as transformative for both the original and its "after-life" --- we ask how the present moment casts a new light on A Political Youth Dies, and what perspectives this long buried text offers on the Japanese and, global, political moment today.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 31 August, 2017, -Paper short abstract:
Using Ōe's own reflections on the seductive power of ultranationalism as a springboard, the paper examines the formal structure of A Political Youth dies in relation to the central status given to the postwar emperor system in Ōe's fictional worlds.
Paper long abstract:
In the last month of the last year of the 20th century, the author Inoue Hisashi and I invited Ōe Kenzaburō to participate in the series Postwar Literary History: Roundtable Discussions sponsored by the journal Subaru, and had the opportunity to discuss his life's work with him at length.
At one point during the discussion, Ōe declared, "I'm the type of human being who could easily be dragged in to ultranationalism; it has a strong attraction for me," and "I have always tried to keep it pent up in my unconscious." The novella Seventeen, and especially its second part, A Political Youth Dies---in which the protagonist is modeled after Yamauchi Otoya, who assassinated Socialist Party Chairman Asanuma Inejirō in 1960---"was a work that touched on the most dangerous part of my own mind," he said. He then pointed out that the novel Changeling (Torikaeko), published on the very day of our roundtable discussion, was "a work that dealt with ultranationalism as irony."
These words of Mr. Ōe's came as a shock, and prompted me to write a series of critical essays examining his major works in relation to the topic of ultranationalism, first serialized in the journal Gunzō and then published as The Novel and Historical Consciousness in June, 2002. In the process of writing these essays, I became aware of the central position occupied by the Shōwa Emperor's "Rescript Ending the War" in the postwar Japanese society depicted in Ōe's fictional world. This insight became the basis for yet another book, The Jewel Voice Broadcast
(Gyokuon Hōsō, 2003).
In this paper, I hope to shed light on the relation between the postwar emperor system and the structure of A Political Youth Dies, a text demonstrating the dynamic force of Ōe Kenzaburō's literature for the 21st century.
Paper short abstract:
The "political human being" of Ōe's A Political Youth Dies will be considered with the term, "sexual human being" in other works written in the era of the Cold War. Ōe's efforts to imagine the "inner life" of the terrorist contrasts with the monolithic image of the terrorist in the 21st century.
Paper long abstract:
Ōe Kenzaburō's A Political Youth Dies depicts the inner life of a "political human being" as he commits an act of terror. Ōe defines such a political being as one who "confronts and contests others in a firm, unsympathetic manner; he either vanquishes them or disperses them into his own organization." At the time, Ōe counterposed the "political human being" with the sexual human being. In the 1959 essay, "The World of Our Sex" (Warera no Sei no Sekai), Ōe defines the "sexual human being" as one who neither "opposes nor challenges others, whoever they may be."
The "political human being" and the "sexual human being." Around 1960, Ōe began to consider Japan society and his contemporary era in terms of the struggle between, and inseparability of, the two.
We should also note that the backdrop of A Political Youth Dies is the Cold War system. For this reason, the protagonist "I" wavers between left-wing and right-wing politics. With the demise of the Cold War system and the events of 9/11, however, people's views of terror have changed drastically. Today terrorists are lumped together as "fundamentalists," and under that category turned into the Other. And we do not see any attempt to understand their interiority.
I believe that by re-reading a Political Youth Dies in the twenty-first century, with a focus on the imagination with which Ōe elaborated the inner life of a "political human being" who carries out terror, we can both gain a new perspective on the question of terror and illuminate its current context.
Paper short abstract:
Recalling Ishikawa Takuboku's image of the terrorist, this paper considers how the actions perpetrated by Ōe's 1960's political youth are drowned out in a flood of televisual images. It is time to confront this long-lost text of the 1960's and consider its possible homologies with the present time.
Paper long abstract:
In a collection of poems written in 1911, Ishikawa Takuboku described the heart of the terrorist thus: "the one and only heart/ where words and actions are inseparable." Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the efforts of a terrorism that makes revolution its goal have sprung from the dream of this kind of unity between words and action. In Ōe Kenzaburō's linked texts, Seventeen, published just 50 years after Ishikawa's poems, we find a depiction of a terrorist, or "political youth" who dreams of attaining a "peak orgasm" in communion with the "pure Emperor." Moreover, for this youth, "terrorism" means an action undertaken by the self at the very moment of coitus between action and words. It is proper that the terrorist should be transformed from a historical anonym to a subject of language through action (prior to carrying out terror he or she cannot appear as a subject of speech). In the linked text of A Political Youth Dies , however, the young man's action is obliterated in the flood of images coming from television, and he is stripped of language. In this sense, the youth's situation can be seen as homologous with the terrorism that is bare action stripped of speech, pervasive in our twenty-first century present, when the critical consciousnness Takuboku described as "being deprived of words" manifests itself in a most acute form. A volume containing the translation of A Political Youth Dies into German, together with the original Japanese text, has now appeared. Thanks to this publication, we can at last read the original Japanese text. It is now time for us, who have been "deprived of [this] text" for so long, to turn our attention to it.