2 posts tagged “history”
I was 18 years old and walking home to my apartment on Franklin Avenue in Boise from work as a waiter at Plush Pippin on State Street. As I zipped along the street, Eric, who was Wendy Belcher's boyfriend (my first boyfriend Jerry and I lived with her), was playing football in the field at Boise High and he saw me passing at shouted out: "The Wall fell down, maaaaaan! Those Germans are freeeeee!"
on november 25, 1970, japanese writer yukio mishima finished his last novel (the fourth novel in his sea of fertility tetralogy), then gathered a ragtag army he'd been training for many months, and stormed the headquarters of a military outpost in charge of the eastern defenses. he had been planning a coup d'etat, an unusual task for a famous and well-respected writer. he was 45 years old, had toured the world, given interviews to some of the most famous magazines in the US and europe, he was the darling of a certain east-coast intellectual ivy league set, spoke english fluently, and had been nominated three times for a nobel prize in literature. he had written 30-some novels, dozens of plays, several collections of short stories and was one of the most well-recognized intellectual voices that japan had ever created.
once in the barracks, mishima and his small band of thugs tied the commander to a chair and read his incoherent manifesto to the stunned room. he then went out onto a balcony overlooking a field where japan's eastern defense force had gathered to do some training and gave a speech which he felt would whip them into a frenzy of nationalistic fervor and allow him to lead them to a successful overthrow of the government.
what mishima wanted was complex, but he had become radically right-wing towards the end of his life, believing that the emperor hirohito and his mistakes had caused japan to lose sight of its "noble warrior past." he wanted the americans out (though mishima was very comfortable and familiar in american intellectual circles and had, in fact, lectured at many american universities and had many american friends) and wanted japan to return to its militaristic legacy. the "beauty of violence" was something that fit in perfectly with his outlook on japan and its past. he was an aesthete and anyone else espousing these kinds of views would have been thought merely a crackpot. but he had power and his ability to take his ideas and do something so outrageous, to me, was just a sign of how megalomaniacal his intellectualism had become; he had simply lost touch with what the average "man on the street" wanted or needed in his life. a common enough reason why intellectuals often fail when they attempt to turn theory into practice.
his speech failed to sway the crowd. his coup d'etat seemed doomed to failure. so he returned to the garrison office, stuck a sword in his stomach and committed a ritual suicide, one of this army soldiers then chopped off his head and that was that. at least he went out making a statement!
all this baggage, of course, informs and colors any reading of mishima and i do believe that i was aware of his death and its circumstances long before i ever read anything by him. mishima was obsessed with beauty and power and how pain and sex are connected. he was one messed up puppy, on the one hand, but a brilliant chronicler of human nature on the other. his books, his novels and short stories at least, are among the most highly readable of japanese literature. still. one can't help but prick up the ears when encountering a passage like this one (from spring snow, as a character iinuma, reflects back on an ancient samurai ancestor):
Why is our era one of decadence? Why does the world despise vigor and youth and worthy ambition and single-mindedness? You once cut men down with your sword, you were wounded by the swords of others, you endured the most terrible dangers -- all to found a new Japan. And finally, having achieved high office and esteemed by everyone, you died, the greatest hero in a heroic age. Why can we not recapture the glory of your era? How long must this age of the effete and the contemptible endure? Or is the worst still to come? (translated by Michael Gallagher)
what strikes me about this passage is how it could be any "old man" who might say something similar about his romanticizing of his country's past. such a dangerous habit that people fall into, creating a past that is more glorious and noble than the present -- the realm of the middle-aged and elderly, perhaps. only mishima had the ego and the power to try, at least, to "recreate" this mythical japan that he held as part of his past.
another thing i am reminded of is that iranian/french movie persepolis which i saw the other day. an excellent movie, but what i've been considering in all this is the fact that we've moved so far beyond novels and movies of ideas. it used to be that ideas were the crux of art. now art centers around individual stories and personal anecdotes and histories. to write a "personal" history in japan in the 1960s would have been incredibly decadent, and probably a similar reaction would have greeted personal histories in the west (though earlier, before all that confessional poetry of the 50s and 60s). now we rarely see "art of ideas" and we now are forced to search for our own stories in the stories of others...
so in a movie like persepolis, the ideas take backstage to the story of satrapi and the struggles she faces in her daily life. her story is both common and unique, common in that we intellectually know that she represents one of but millions of people whose lives are governed by and turned upside down because of politics and history. unique because we, as americans or canadians, don't suffer on the whole like satrapi or her characters have. it's a story that illustrates history for us, makes the ideas and notions of history become more human and emotional. she tells a love story, we can relate. she is nostalgic for her grandmother, we can understand. and through the prism of iranian history, we see how the human spirit survives.
this operates differently than mishima's novels of ideas, where the ideas, the political ideology is the governing force. history IS the story, the individuals just the representations of that history.
so i'm wondering what caused this shift, this change that others before me have written about: when did personal histories become more of a guiding force for art than ideas about life and history? is this all a legacy of those confessional poets (lowell and plath and sexton and hughes?) does it represent women having more voice and more influence in literary art? is it an equalizing genderless space that we are moving towards?
