Pacific Rim Modernisms 9781442697553

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Section One: Riffs on a Rim
1. A Rim with a View: Orientalism, Geography, and the Historiography of Modernism
2. Modernisms, Pacific and Otherwise
Section Two: Terrains
3. Unpacking the Present: The Floating World of French Modernity
4. Rewriting the Literary History of Japanese Modernism
5. Modernism and Modern Korean Poetry of the 1930s
6. Bertrand Russell’s Chinese Eyes
Section Three: Tectonics
7. Blackfellows and Modernists: Not Just Black and White
8. From Sydney and Shanghai: Australian and Chinese Women Writing Modernism
9. Fission/Fusion: Modanizumu in Japanese Fiction
10. Oceans Apart? Emily Carr’s and Katherine Mansfi eld’s Encounters with Modernisms
11. The Art of the Bluff: Youth Migrancy, Interlingualism, and Japanese Vernacular Modernism in New Youth Magazine
12. ‘Oriental Wonders, Odd Fabrics’: Walking through Hispanic American Modernismo’s Chinatown
13. Pacific Rim Digital Modernism: The Electronic Literature of Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries
Postscript
14. Waking to Global Capitalism in Seoul, San Francisco, and Honolulu: Pacific Rim Refigurations of the Global and the Local
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

PACIFIC RIM MODERNISMS

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EDITED BY MARY ANN GILLIES, HELEN SWORD, AND STEVEN YAO

Pacific Rim Modernisms

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2009 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9195-6 (cloth)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Pacific Rim modernisms / edited by Mary Ann Gillies, Helen Sword, Steven Yao. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9195-6 (bound) 1. Pacific Area – Civilization. 2. Modernism (Literature) – Pacific Area. 3. Arts and society – Pacific Area. 4. Pacific Area – Civilization – Foreign influences. I. Sword, Helen II. Gillies, Mary Ann, 1959– III. Yao, Steven G., 1965– DU18.P33 2009

909’.09823082

C2009-904572-9

‘Cathay’ (excerpt of 32 lines) by Ezra Pound, from PERSONAE, copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Faber and Faber Ltd. (UK). University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

In Memoriam William J. Tyler

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Contents

List of Illustrations Preface

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Acknowledgments

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SECTION ONE: RIFFS ON A RIM 1 A Rim with a View: Orientalism, Geography, and the Historiography of Modernism 3 s tev e n yao 2 Modernisms, Pacific and Otherwise david pa l u m b o -liu

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SECTION TWO: TERRAINS 3 Unpacking the Present: The Floating World of French Modernity 53 c h rist o p h e r b ush 4 Rewriting the Literary History of Japanese Modernism sada m i su z u k i (Translated by Miri Nakamura) 5 Modernism and Modern Korean Poetry of the 1930s c h oi d o n g h o 6 Bertrand Russell’s Chinese Eyes er ic h ayo t

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SECTION THREE: TECTONICS 7 Blackfellows and Modernists: Not Just Black and White ann stephen

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8 From Sydney and Shanghai: Australian and Chinese Women Writing Modernism 173 susa n c a r so n 9 Fission/Fusion: Modanizumu in Japanese Fiction william j. tyler

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10 Oceans Apart? Emily Carr’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Encounters with Modernisms 233 mary ann gillies 11 The Art of the Bluff: Youth Migrancy, Interlingualism, and Japanese Vernacular Modernism in New Youth Magazine 261 kyoko omori 12 ‘Oriental Wonders, Odd Fabrics’: Walking through Hispanic American Modernismo’s Chinatown 294 francisco morán 13 Pacific Rim Digital Modernism: The Electronic Literature of Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries 316 jessica pressman POSTSCRIPT 14 Waking to Global Capitalism in Seoul, San Francisco, and Honolulu: Pacific Rim Refigurations of the Global and the Local 335 rob wilson Contributors Index

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Illustrations

Figure 5.1 Lee Sang, ‘Crow’s-Eye View, Poem No. 4.’

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Figure 7.1 Frontispiece of the first volume of Carl Strehlow’s Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien (1907). 156 Figure 7.2 Tristan Tzara’s ‘Chanson du Serpent’ appeared in the second issue of the Zurich journal Dada (1917). The original Aranda song appeared alongside Carl Strehlow’s translation in Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien (1910–20). The English translation is by Walter F. Veit, Modernism & Australia (2006). 158 Figure 7.3 Margaret Preston, Aboriginal Flowers (1928), oil on canvas, 53.6 × 45.8 cm. Art Gallery of South Australia. © Margaret Preston / Sodrac 2008. 161 Figure 7.4 Linda Syddick Napaltjarri (Tjungkiya Wukula), ET Returning Home (1994). The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. © Linda Syddick Napaltjarri / Sodrac 2008. 164 Figure 10.1 Emily Carr, Beach Scene with Stumps and Logs (watercolour, 1910). Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2005.026.002). 243 Figure 10.2 Emily Carr, Totem Walk at Sitka (watercolour, 1907). Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, The Thomas Gardiner Keir Bequest (1994.055.004). 244 Figure 10.3 Emily Carr, Totem Poles, Kitseukla, 1912, oil on canvas, 126.8 × 98.4 cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Founders’ Fund, VAG 37.2. Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery. 245

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Figure 10.4 Emily Carr, Vanquished, 1930, oil on canvas, 92.0 × 129.0 cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.6. Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery. 251 Figure 10.5 Emily Carr, Red Cedar, 1931, oil on canvas, 111.0 × 68.5 cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Gift of Mrs J.P. Fell, VAG 54.7. Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery. 253 Figure 11.1 Still photograph from the film Madamu to ny b  (The neighbour’s wife and mine, 1931). 263 Figure 11.2 Shinseinen front cover designs.

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Figure 11.3 ‘Nigao to sugao to funs ’ (Caricatures, actual faces, and disguises), Shinseinen 7.1 (1926), frontispiece. 272 Figure 12.1 A caricature of the Cuban poet Julian del Casal. El Figaro, 28 June 1891. 303 Figure 13.1 The opening screens of Dakota. All images in this chapter are by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries and are used with permission from the artists. 317

Preface

When Lewis Carroll’s Alice plummets down the rabbit hole toward Wonderland, she muses to herself, ‘I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards! The Antipathies, I think.’ Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Ballad of East and West’ limns a different pair of hemispheres: ‘OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’ Both Victorians describe a globe bifurcated by difference: Europe here (north of the equator, west of the sun), the ‘Antipathies’ over there (upside down, oriental, Other). A generation later, in Europe and North America, modernist artists and writers reached out in various ways toward Asia and the Antipodes – consider Pound’s appropriation of Chinese calligraphy, Yeats’s fascination with Noh drama, Tzara’s dada riffs on Aboriginal languages – even while their counterparts in Asia and Australasia developed their own distinctive modernist traditions and forged their own intercultural and intertextual exchanges. Yet literary and historical scholars of so-called international modernism have only recently begun to extend their field of vision beyond the North Atlantic to nations and cultures rimming the largest body of water in the world, a region that geologists have termed ‘the ring of fire.’ While this designation alludes most directly to the remarkable extent of volcanic activity in and around the Pacific Ocean, it just as readily describes the seismic intensity of cultural activity that took place in and through the area during the modernist period. Pacific Rim Modernisms features essays by invited contributors who trace vectors of appropriation, migration, and exchange across Pacific Rim geo-cultural sites including Australia, Canada, China, Japan,

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Korea, Latin America, New Zealand, and the United States. The first section, ‘Riffs on a Rim,’ theorizes and interrogates the Pacific Rim as a conceptual construction and alternative model for the understanding of modernism. The second section, ‘Terrains,’ examines the influence of canonical (i.e., Anglo-Euro-American) modernism on specific Pacific Rim locations and cultural traditions, and vice versa. Section three, ‘Tectonics,’ explores the development of new forms of modernism through close attention to the works of individual Pacific Rim writers and artists. Finally, a postscript by poet-essayist Rob Wilson reflects on modernism’s global legacy: the Pacific Rim postmodern. Appropriately, given their wide geographical and temporal sweep, the fourteen essays gathered in this volume reflect a range of scholarly perspectives and methodologies. We have welcomed varied viewpoints, divergent voices, and even contradictory definitions of modernism itself. By swinging the Pacific Rim into the centre of scholarly inquiry, we seek not only to redraw old boundaries but to open up the modernist landscape to new mappings and new debates.

Acknowledgments

Our effort to trace vectors of cultural interaction around and across the Pacific Rim would not have been possible without the assistance of numerous individuals and institutions. For their generous material and administrative support, we would like especially to thank Hamilton College and Simon Fraser University. In particular, we gratefully acknowledge a grant in aid of publication from Simon Fraser University’s Publication Committee. Additional support was provided by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Centre for Academic Development at the University of Auckland. We owe a special debt of gratitude to our contributors for their collective patience and dedication to this project, working across three continents and from widespread geographical points throughout the Pacific Rim; to Jill McConkey for championing the project at the outset; to Richard Ratzlaff, Barbara Porter, Judy Williams, and the entire staff at University of Toronto Press for their wise and careful shepherding of this work through the copyediting and publication process; and to the two anonymous readers whose generous and helpful suggestions helped improve the manuscript in countless ways. We are also grateful to Ms. Maria Elena Covarrubias for providing permission to the use the cover image, as well as to Peter Summerville at the Treasure Island Development Authority, the current owner of the magnificent mural series by Miguel Covarrubias, Esplendor del Pacifico, for facilitating that process. Thanks too to the Modernist Studies Association for sponsoring a plenary session on Pacific Rim Modernisms at the 2004 MSA conference in Vancouver out of which this volume grew. At Hamilton College, support has come from numerous quarters,

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including Deans of Faculty David Paris, Joseph Urgo, and Patrick Reynolds, each of whose generosity has been crucial to the completion of this project. Members of the English Department, especially chair Catherine Kodat, have provided an ideal work environment. Appreciation also goes to Kirk Pillow for his friendship and professional support. At Simon Fraser University, Deans of Arts and Social Sciences John T. Pierce and Lesley Cormack supplied welcome financial support, but their collegiality was a more important factor in the completion of this project. Nancy Earle provided invaluable editorial services; Diane Gibson and Peggy Lacasse picked up the slack in the associate dean’s office on occasion; and Bev Neufeld offered helpful assistance in preparing grant applications. Particular gratitude is owed to Dr. Maylynn Woo for her care and consideration during the gestation of this project. At the University of Auckland, colleagues in the Centre for Academic Development, the English Department, and the Programme in Comparative Literature have provided intellectual and emotional succor at various stages in this book’s development. Special thanks to Richard Sorrenson, eternally patient partner; to Michele Leggott, Poet Laureate and Pacific Rim Modernist par excellence; and to Hannah Field, indefatigable copyeditor and indexer. Finally, we dedicate this volume to the memory of William J. Tyler, scholar of modem Japanese literature, translator, mentor, and friend. His untimely passing during the preparation of this volume is an irreparable loss for all who have been touched in some way by his work and life.

SECTION ONE Riffs on a Rim

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1 A Rim with a View: Orientalism, Geography, and the Historiography of Modernism steven yao

Virtually from its very beginnings around the turn of the twentieth century, the wide-ranging and overtly international cultural phenomenon commonly referred to as ‘modernism’ in Europe and the United States both in part arose from and developed some of its most distinctive features specifically through a sustained, if decidedly uneven, engagement with the Asian ‘Orient.’ For numerous writers of the period, different sites throughout Asia in general, and in East Asia in particular, served at once as idealized locations and as concrete sources of exemplary (as well as often explicitly redemptive) literary and cultural traditions and practices. These traditions and practices, in turn, stood in generative opposition to an ‘Occidental’ or ‘Western’ society perceived to be mired in crisis. Even considering only its most obvious expressions within the domain of literary production, this engagement stretches at least from Ezra Pound’s (in)famous ‘translations’ of classical Chinese poetry in Cathay (1915) all the way to W.H. Auden’s Sonnets from China (1938) and beyond, with various important momentary appearances along the way, as with the invocation of Buddhism and the use of Sanskrit in the closing lines of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Examples of even more detailed and extensive engagement by Euro-American modernists with the cultures and traditions of the Asian ‘Orient’ include the entire lengthy sequence of ‘China Cantos’ (LII–LXI) in Pound’s ‘poem including history,’ as well as his decision to incorporate Chinese characters, or ‘ideograms’ as he thought of them, into both the expressive structure and the basic textual fabric of The Cantos. Nor did this engagement remain limited to the ‘exotic’ or rarefied domain of poetry. Most famously, William Butler Yeats’s Noh-inspired symbolic dramas, especially At the Hawk’s Well (1917), E.M. Forster’s

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A Passage to India (1924), and Pound’s deeply idiosyncratic renderings of three major Confucian philosophical texts, The Great Digest (1947), The Unwobbling Pivot (1947), and The Analects (1951), together underscore the significance of the Asian ‘Orient’ as a subject of interest and inspiration throughout the full range of Anglo-American modernist literary production. On the Continent, furthermore, canonical figures such as Paul Claudel in Connaissance de l’Est (1895), Victor Segalen in Stèles (1913), André Malraux in La Condition humaine (1933), and Bertolt Brecht in Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan (1938–9), among others, likewise pursued an interest in Asia as a productive counter-example to the West. Collectively, these sustained achievements, along with many other more localized expressions in other texts (such as Lily Briscoe’s ‘Chinese eyes’ in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse), testify to the existence of an ‘Oriental’ dimension within the international scope and ambition of canonical Euro-American modernism. The duration, breadth, and complexity of this engagement have in turn given rise to a sizeable and still growing body of scholarship aimed at elucidating both the internal conceptual logic and the larger cultural stakes of the widespread interest among so many different canonical Euro-American modernists in ‘the Orient’ broadly construed. Not surprisingly, the concerns and methods guiding this critical effort have themselves undergone substantial change over time. Reflecting larger currents within the development of literary and cultural criticism and theory more generally, these changes have propelled a steadily deepening view of this aspect of modernist internationalism. At the same time, however, the understanding of modernism in terms of both its historiography and its cultural geography as a cultural formation has remained firmly rooted in the terrain of the West. The essays gathered in this volume seek collectively to unsettle this long-standing critical orientation. Up to this point, scholarship on the complex interactions among canonical Euro-American literary modernism and different ‘Oriental’ cultures and practices has fallen into three distinct phases or approaches, each with its own set of ideological interests and methodological predispositions. To speak for the moment in admittedly broad and necessarily schematic terms, the first phase or approach involved the fundamental work of explicating references, tracking sources, and assessing or delineating the means by which particular European and American writers incorporated elements of ‘Oriental’ traditions into their texts. The second phase or approach has generally sought to adopt

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a more panoramic view by considering the significance of modernist textual representations and assimilations of Asian traditions in light of larger political, cultural, and economic forces that operated during the period. In the third and most recent approach, scholars have taken even more critical looks at the etiology of modernist conceptions of the Orient, interrogating the operative assumptions about difference and tracing the lineage of notions such as race, gender, and nation, as well as cultural and linguistic identity, within the broader course of Western intellectual history. Yet, for all the demonstrated accomplishment and variety of these efforts at once to recognize and to gauge the ‘Oriental’ aspect of modernist internationalism, the focus of this critical tradition has remained firmly fixed on an established pantheon of solidly ‘authorized’ figures. As a result, Europe and the United States continue to enjoy a privileged status as both the originary site and the principal theatre of operation for the transnational political, economic, and social currents that not only helped give rise to modernism in its most recognized Euro-American formation, but also inspired numerous regionally and locally specific responses in other parts of the world. These responses to the global spread of modernity, in turn, frequently included the setting forth of their own linguistically and culturally distinctive versions of a ‘modernist’ movement. Just as in the notorious cartographic distortions of physical space enacted by the familiar Mercator projection, then, western Europe in particular has occupied a disproportionately prominent and centralized place within existing maps of modernism. Put another way, investigations into the ‘Oriental’ dimensions of canonical EuroAmerican modernist internationalism have yet to translate into a rethinking of the historical and geographical terms for the very category of ‘modernism’ itself. Due in no small measure to the constraints imposed by entrenched disciplinary divisions and their attendant methodological conventions that reinforce familiar national and linguistic distinctions, contemporaneous cultural production in Asia, as well as in other world regions, simply has not figured in any substantial way within existing dominant approaches to conceptualizing, historicizing, and locating the expressly transnational phenomenon known across various particular national contexts and linguistic forms as ‘modernism.’ By the term ‘transnational,’ I mean embedded within and arising through a complex web of political, socio-economic, and other forces that exert their effects across and between boundaries defined and maintained by different nation-

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states, even as nation-states have continued to function as crucial nodes in the (uneven) distribution of those forces in various places around the world. Instead, this transformative task has by and large been left to those operating in relatively marginalized academic fields who examine literary and cultural production that stems from areas outside the privileged terrain of Europe and the United States. Consequently, non-Western regions of the world in general, and the Asian ‘Orient’ in particular, continue to be understood by the hegemonic scholarly establishment in profoundly static terms, mainly as the passive source of (typically ancient or at least ‘pre-modern’) ‘raw’ material, which in turn is discovered, taken up, and finally ‘modernized’ by European and American writers. In this way, critics have reproduced the tendencies of their modernist subjects and predecessors. Related to this critical shortcoming, with the notable exception of African American expression, cultural production during the early decades of the twentieth century by other racialized minorities in the West has failed to gain any systematic or even sustained attention from critics of Euro-American modernism. In her recently published volume Death of a Discipline (2003), Gayatri Spivak has set forth a bold and ambitious strategy for the future of comparative literature. Through a series of three related essays, she charts a course for that embattled scholarly field in light, on the one hand, of the traditional focus within the discipline on the particularities of different languages and idioms, and, on the other, of the more recent developments of multiculturalism and cultural studies. Broadly, Spivak seeks in Death of a Discipline to address the current institutional situation and linguistic methodological conservatism of the comparative literary enterprise (and, one might add here, literary studies in general, including modernist studies in its current Euro-American formation). In doing so, she urges ‘a joining of forces between Comparative Literature and Area Studies’ in order to expand the traditional Western European focus of the former and to challenge the implicitly colonialist epistemology of the latter. More specifically, she argues that ‘We [in the field of comparative literature] must take the languages of the Southern Hemisphere as active cultural media rather than as objects of cultural study by the sanctioned ignorance of the metropolitan migrant.’1 In what follows, I want to extend and adapt Spivak’s position to argue for a comparable agenda for the study of modernism, one in which the rigours and opportunities of an expressly transnational comparative methodology take centre stage. I do so in order to indicate the vast arena of possibilities that lie open to new research and teaching. I also

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want to suggest some ways in which the field of modernist studies can enrich its approach to both the decidedly international cultural scope and subsequent global spread of modernism by entering into an engagement not only with area studies, but also with more recently emergent (as well as non-historically defined) fields such as ethnic studies. For the aggressively multilingual and cross-cultural features of canonical modernist literary production and its distinctive strategies of signification amount to much more than merely a pervasive thematic and formal interest among various European and American writers. Rather, they point toward a deeper dimension of transnationalism that itself comprises one of the most salient, yet still largely untheorized, conditions for the very historical emergence of ‘modernism’ as a cultural phenomenon, not only in Europe and the United States, but most especially in various other parts of the world and in different non-Western languages, particularly those of the Asian ‘Orient.’ To accomplish these goals, I undertake my argument in three parts. First, I map the basic historical trajectory of existing approaches to the subject of modernist ‘Orientalism’ in the West and interrogate the respective critical assumptions informing the three different phases within this ongoing scholarly tradition. As a corollary to this initial step, I also trace out the implications of those assumptions for writing the history of ‘modernism,’ as well as for conceptualizing the relationship of the movement to different geo-cultural areas of the world, not just in its most familiarly canonical Euro-American formation, but also in its varied expressions around the globe. Second, I sketch out the terms of an approach to both canonical modernist Orientalism in particular and to transnational modernism more generally that takes into account the historical and cultural specificity of, as well as the interactions among, different sites within the part of the world now commonly referred to as the Pacific Rim, a regional construct that has received the most attention and elaboration within the domain of area studies as part of the larger discourse of late capitalism. Such an approach, I contend, makes it possible to bring into critical focus not just the geographical spread of ‘modernism’ to other areas of the world, but also the significance of cultural production by certain racialized groups in the West other than African Americans, namely Asian Americans. Third and finally, I will consider a canonical text of Euro-American modernism that both represents and takes inspiration from a particular Asian cultural tradition, showing how we might ‘re-Orient’ our understanding of its meaning and thereby open up entirely new arenas of concern for modernist scholarship.

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Before proceeding further, two explanatory caveats are in order. First, I organize my discussion in roughly chronological order, though admittedly this strategy amounts to something of an enabling or heuristic fiction. For while the history of scholarship on modernist ‘Orientalism’ does follow a general pattern, it does not do so in some sort of neat, teleological fashion, with concerns and methods falling definitively and irrevocably in or out of favour. As with literary production itself, scholarship proceeds in significantly aleatory ways. Established practices and concerns persist, even as new ones emerge and gain broader acceptance. Nor do I want to convey the impression of inevitability with my historical critical narrative, since that would suggest a condition of developmental necessity that I do not think obtains. Second, given the contours of my own knowledge, I have developed this rough periodization based on scholarship that focuses on East Asian cultural traditions in particular and their relationship to Euro-American modernism. Therefore, my use of the term ‘Orientalism’ refers primarily to the historically expansive sense of the designation ‘Orient,’ which includes the ‘Far East’ of Asia, rather than to its more constrained meaning within contemporary critical discourse. To be sure, the Saidean ‘Orient’ – that is, the geographical region commonly designated as the ‘Middle East’ and its attendant cultural traditions – also played an important role for many modernist writers (as Egypt did for H.D., and Byzantium for Yeats), though by and large critics have not yet given the same attention to these interactions as they have to those involving East Asia, particularly China and Japan. Likewise, the role of South Asian contexts and cultures and their relationship to dominant Euro-American modernism also calls out for more extensive and detailed consideration, though the rise of postcolonial studies in recent decades has done much to raise both the quantity and quality of scholarship in this arena. Critical Geographies of the Modernist ‘Orient’ Up to 1978, critics almost uniformly approached the subject of EuroAmerican modernist engagements with the Asian ‘Orient’ through a hermeneutic of authenticity, either implicitly or explicitly. Frequently underwritten by native-level fluency in a particular Asian language, this line of critical thought generally focused on explicating the logic behind and evaluating the putative ‘accuracy’ (or, more frequently, the lack thereof) of different treatments or uses by a given Euro-American modernist of, say, classical Chinese poetry and philosophy or Japanese

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Noh drama. Seeking to mediate the notorious obscurity and constitutive allusiveness of modernist expressive strategies, these scholars performed the valuable, indeed indispensable, labour of tracking down abstruse references, as well as establishing textual genealogies and clear (or speculative) routes of transmission from a given ‘source’ to the work under consideration. The underlying epistemology of these efforts was mainly positivist, and the method primarily empiricist and descriptive. Furthermore, during this early phase, critics who addressed the numerous translations of ‘Oriental’ texts by different Euro-American writers almost exclusively employed what Andre Lefevere has termed a ‘normative’ approach, wherein they sought to assess the ‘fidelity’ of a given rendering to its ‘original.’2 Generally grounded simultaneously in a native linguistic capacity and in an untheorized, largely impressionistic conception of ‘accuracy,’ such judgments often resulted in sharply divergent and even incommensurable evaluations, typically depending upon how the critic viewed the willingness (or presumption) of the canonical Euro-American modernists to produce renderings of works from Asian languages about which they enjoyed little, if indeed any, formal understanding. Classic examples of this approach include Wai Lim Yip’s still largely invaluable study Ezra Pound’s ‘Cathay’ (1969), John J. Nolde’s Blossoms from the East (1983), and the work of Achilles Fang and Hugh Kenner, as well as seemingly innumerable journal articles devoted to tracing the influence and appearance of Noh elements in the work of Yeats and Pound, for instance, or evaluating the ‘quality’ of Williams’s translations of Chinese poetry, and so forth. Illustrating the durability of this approach, Mary Paterson Cheadle in Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations (1997), Ming Xie in Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: ‘Cathay,’ Translation and Imagism (1999), Zhaoming Qian in Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (1995) and The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (2003), and Patricia Laurence in Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China (2003) have each more recently further documented the relationship between Euro-American modernist writers and Asia in carrying on this critical tradition. Vitally important as the best of these studies have been for establishing a common, referential foundation for exploring Euro-American modernist engagements with the ‘Orient,’ their basic positivism carries with it certain critical limitations. Most notably, this positivism simply accepts, rather than critically interrogates, the cultural authority of the

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modernists themselves, as well as the basic ideological benignity, or at least neutrality, of their interest in Asian cultural traditions. Consequently, like the Euro-American modernist writers upon whom they concentrate, these studies generally assume ‘Oriental’ cultures and traditions to be determinate and stable entities, rather than themselves arenas and products of sustained and varied contestation. Moreover, this approach has tended to reproduce the intense anachronism of modernist engagements with the Asian ‘Orient,’ insofar as those engagements focused almost exclusively on ancient or medieval, but in any event decidedly ‘pre-modern,’ cultural expressions. In other words, critics in this vein continue to view the ‘Orient’ in general and East Asia in particular as static and unchanging, rather like the comparatively fixed classical traditions of Greece and Rome in which the Euro-American modernists were also deeply invested. In doing so, they have largely reproduced the long-standing, unfortunate Hegelian conception of the ‘East’ as divorced from the movement of History. Thus, in this work, the directionality of cultural interaction implicitly flows from an unchanging ‘Orient’ to a dynamic and innovative ‘West,’ a model that not only skews all too familiarly toward Europe as the inescapable geographical centre and origin of modernism, but which also thereby effectively obscures the development and dissemination of modernism in other parts of the world as an expressly global phenomenon. With the publication in 1978 of Edward Said’s landmark study Orientalism, critics came to recognize the fundamental imbrication of ‘knowledge’ with structures of ‘power.’ As a result, they shifted their focus away from questions of representational ‘accuracy’ and instead turned to tracing connections between Euro-American modernist engagements with ‘Oriental’ cultural traditions and the larger political project of Western imperialism, as well as to elucidating textual manifestations of power. This period marked the emergence of expressly ‘political’ readings of canonical modernist texts and practices. In this phase, a hermeneutic of suspicion dominated, underwritten by a poststructuralist epistemology and a textualist methodology. No longer primarily concerned with the question of ‘accuracy’ or ‘authentic’ uses of foreign traditions, critics proceeded from the assumption that the modernists inevitably ‘misread’ the ‘Orient’ for their own ideological and political purposes. In doing so, these scholars successfully laid bare some of the more troubling aspects of modernist cultural production, particularly in its engagement with non-Western traditions and societies. Examples include Robert Casillo’s polemical reading of Pound in The Genealogy of

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Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism and the Myths of Ezra Pound (1988), Jean Michel Rabaté’s Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos’ (1986), and Peter Nicholl’s Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing: A Study of ‘The Cantos’ (1984), or in another vein, Tejaswini Niranjana’s Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context (1992) and Eric Cheyfitz’s The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from ‘The Tempest’ to ‘Tarzan’ (1997). Yet, insofar as critics assumed from the outset ‘misreadings’ of the ‘Orient’ on the part of the modernists, they remained beholden to the idealized possibility that there could be an ‘accurate’ or ‘proper’ mode of engagement, one that presumably did not merely serve the interests of established structures of domination. In this respect, they shared with previous commentators a conception of the ‘Orient’ as relatively stable and determinate. Moreover, in this approach the ‘Orient’ remained trapped in the amber of the distant past. Again, it falls outside History; or if it does have history, it amounts to little more than a history of victimization. Consequently, the flow of agency and influence remained unidirectional, though reversed. This time, instead of issuing from an ancient, unified ‘Orient’ to a troubled modern world, cultural power lay firmly in the ‘West’ and could only serve to misrepresent the ‘Oriental’ Other, in complicity with more overtly pernicious forms of political interaction. Thus, despite the underlying impulse to redeem the ‘Orient’ from dangerous misrepresentation, critical attention continued to focus on the West itself and on the consequences of its gaze. Modernism, in this view, is not a movement that happens through or as a result of an engagement with the ‘Orient,’ but rather a set of cultural practices imposed on it. Beginning in the 1990s or so, critics came to recognize the limitations of Said’s largely unidirectional model for the interactions between Occidental and Oriental societies. In response, they undertook to map more complex, non-linear routes of traffic among cultures. By doing so, they have opened up additional ways of thinking about the meaning, dynamics, and logic of Western interest in Asian cultural traditions during the early twentieth century. Furthermore, critics have taken to situating Euro-American engagements with Asia in relation to other strands within the broader trajectory of intellectual and cultural history in the West. These include the centuries-long tradition of interest in ‘the Orient’ throughout Europe and the United States, the emergence of anthropology and ethnography during the modernist period, and the history of translation in English as a mode of literary production. In

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general, this phase or approach has operated through a hermeneutic of process. The methodology has been primarily historicist (though also frequently engaged in explicit ways with a variety of theoretical concerns), with an underlying coherentist epistemology. Works in this vein have by no means abandoned questions relating either to politics or to the ‘accuracy’ or ‘fidelity’ of different representations and perceptions. But rather than seeking mainly to arrive at some kind of normative assessment, they have instead focused more intensely on the processes of cultural movement and the dynamics of cross-cultural engagement. Recent studies of this sort include Robert Kern’s Orientalism, Modernism and the American Poem (1996), Yunte Huang’s Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation and Intertextual Travel in TwentiethCentury American Literature (2002), my own Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (2002), and Eric Hayot’s Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (2003). By further historicizing Euro-American modernist engagements with different Asian cultural traditions, these studies have helped to situate the phenomenon of modernism itself in more precise relation to other legacies of Western thought. In doing so, they have shed new light on the very historical articulation of canonical Euro-American modernism, as well as on the constitutive role that expressly cross-cultural interactions played in the development of the movement from its very outset. From these perspectives, the significance of Euro-American modernist Orientalism lies neither strictly in its success or failure to convey accurately the achievement of particular Asian cultural expressions, nor in the ethico-political violence it committed by inevitably misreading those same traditions for its own ends. Rather, Euro-American modernist Orientalism derives its importance in this approach precisely from the specifically generative role it played in the very constitution of modernism in its most familiar and authoritative formation, or, in other words, from its explicit productivity, over and above the attendant linguistic distortions and hegemonic impulses. Thus, by highlighting the historical articulation of canonical Euro-American modernism, as well as the extent to which that articulation in large measure took place precisely by means of an engagement with different particular Asian cultural traditions, this most recently emergent approach to modernist Orientalism delineates a more reciprocal interaction between East and West. At last, ‘the Orient’ gains a degree of cultural agency in both inspiring and helping to shape the terms of Western literary production, though a strictly limited agency to be sure. Furthermore, in helping to

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constitute Euro-American modernism itself, ‘the Orient’ attains to the historicity that it had previously been denied in other approaches. Even so, for all their dedicated historicization of and challenge to the authority of canonical modernism, these studies have remained well within established disciplinary boundaries by continuing to focus on Western achievement during the period. Scholars in other fields, however, have begun to explore and interrogate the terms for the historical emergence of ‘modernism’ as a category of cultural production in other languages and other parts of the world. This effort has been especially fruitful in the broad arena of East Asian literary and cultural studies.3 Recent studies of this sort include Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang’s Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan (1993), Xiaomei Chen’s Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter Discourse in Post-Mao China (1995), Lydia Liu’s Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity – China, 1900–1937 (1995), Xudong Zhang’s Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema (1997), Shu-mei Shih’s The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917– 1937 (2001), Andrew Jones’s Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (2001), and, within the field of history, Stefan Tanaka’s Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (1993). Efforts focusing on other literary traditions, such as the Japanese, continue to make progress in moving beyond conceptions of ‘modernism’ based on Western models, but foundational and suggestive work has already been done by Suzuki Sadami, William J. Tyler, and Kyoko Omori, among others.4 These studies have demonstrated both the complexity and the creativity of particular responses throughout Asia to the historical and cultural forces that helped to instigate the spread of ‘modernism’ as an expressly global phenomenon. Their value, at least for my interests in this chapter, lies precisely in the extent to which they highlight the transformation, adaptation, and function of the very idea of ‘modernism’ as it migrated and was constructed within contexts other than Europe and the United States. In these works, both ‘modernism’ and the ‘Orient’ emerge as thoroughly fluid and variable in both definition and function. ‘modernism’ no longer designates a comparatively stable set of expressive or representational practices first developed in the West and then adopted more or less successfully by writers operating in other contexts and languages. Instead, it both signifies and operates differently in different historical and cultural contexts, functioning as what linguists call a ‘shifter’ to identify the range

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of cultural and intellectual responses to the advent of socio-political modernity throughout a variety of different locations. Thus, ‘modernism’ becomes ‘modernisms’ in this regime, the seemingly insignificant orthographic change serving to promote a more global, yet also a culturally, historically, and linguistically more specific conception of the term. Concomitantly, cultural interaction flows in both directions. The ‘Orient,’ broadly speaking, gains History, not merely chronology or duration. And the focus of our critical gaze moves beyond the boundaries of the West. Together, the recent critical work on Euro-American modernist Orientalism and on different Asian modernisms effectively demonstrates the limitations of established approaches to the concept of ‘modernism’ that privilege Western achievement as the paradigmatic expression of so-called modernist cultural production, to which writers in other languages and locations around the world conform more or less (usually less) closely. As I have already delineated, such narrow Euro-Americanism suffers from a variety of critical shortcomings. Most obviously, this sharply constrained purview overlooks the explicitly generative role that non-Western and especially Asian languages and cultural traditions played in the very constitution of canonical EuroAmerican modernism in its most familiar and authoritative form. Even more troubling, an approach that centres on Euro-American achievement as the defining expression of ‘modernism’ uncritically reproduces historical patterns of political and economic domination by the West. It is, therefore, a profound and critically consequential irony to recall that this domination reached various crucial junctures during the ‘modernist’ era as it has conventionally been periodized. Thus, for example, the historical span from 1900 to 1945 (especially the years between the two World Wars) witnessed the steep decline and partial dismantling of various official European empires, most notably the British, and the solidification and expansion of the American one. Not insignificantly, these shifts in global power played out in large measure in and across the space of the Pacific Ocean. Complicating matters even further, the rise of a specifically Asian colonialism in the form of Japanese imperial expansion, which eventually came to be justified under the ideological euphemism of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,’ also occurred within the same geographical region and historical span.5 As a fundamental consequence of these transnational historical events, moreover, during this period many non-Western and so-called ThirdWorld nations and traditions began explicitly to engage in cultural terms

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with the advent of socio-political modernity. Together, these complex phenomena in turn led to such conceptually and historically related, yet still culturally and linguistically specific movements or phenomena as xian dai zhu yi in China, modernismo throughout Latin America, and modanizumu in Japan, among others. Hence, the modernist epoch offers not only the unique opportunity to simultaneously examine late and early stages of recent imperialism, but also abundant possibilities for comparative studies of differing and perhaps even incommensurate ‘modernisms’ in various contexts around the globe. In addition, migrations of peoples from different parts of the world to various Western nations reached new levels of intensity, or at least critical phases in their history, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with correspondingly important developments in minority cultural production. And so, the emergence of a number of specific ethnic cultures within the West, especially those contained within the larger rubric of ‘Asian American,’ can be usefully understood as a crucial, if perhaps obverse, dimension of modernist expression. As David Palumbo-Liu has argued elsewhere, ‘Managing the modern was inseparable from managing Asian America’ in early twentieth-century US history.6 Such unexplored territories, as it were, indicate the generative role that attention to comparatively non-dominant traditions can play in broadening the scope of modernist studies in its current state. Furthermore, the particular dynamics of the large-scale geopolitical events and changes in the structure of global power that occurred during the early decades of the twentieth century suggest the critical utility of an expressly regional frame for considering the spread of ‘modernism’ and its historical emergence in different locations and cultures around the world. In order to build productively upon the implications of recent work on Euro-American modernist Orientalism and on different Asian modernisms, I want to argue for both the importance and the possibilities of a ‘Pacific Rim’ approach to the study of modernism, an approach that self-consciously adopts as one of its organizing principles a particular geographical region and its attendant web of historical, cultural, and other interrelationships. In the section that follows, I sketch out the terms for such an approach and trace some of the consequences for the possible future of modernist studies. As I will show, a ‘Pacific Rim’ approach to modernism goes beyond a concern with either ‘origins’ or ‘influence,’ taking as a premise the political dimension of cultural engagement and represen-

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tation. Rather, it focuses on the dynamics of movement and transformation within the context of a particular geographical formation. For in this way we can begin to leave behind methods that seek to fix our conception of ‘modernism’ as a stable and unified notion, a view that tends to reproduce established hierarchies of cultural value in which, not surprisingly, the West occupies a dominant and originary position, whether as source or teleological endpoint of different ideas and processes. Instead, as the essays that follow in this volume vividly illustrate, ‘a view from the Rim’ can open up new avenues of research and teaching that examine the constitutive interactions between familiarly canonical Western modernism and other parallel movements around the world, to the mutual illumination of both. Pacific Rim Modernisms The idea of the ‘Pacific Rim’ as an at once distinctive and cohesive regional formation first emerged during the 1960s in Japan as part of a larger discourse that sought to promote the interests of Japan along with those of other Asian nation-states within the existing structure of the world economy. Subsequently, as Arif Dirlik has noted, ‘the idea of a Pacific community ... was picked up in the United States in the 1970s, and has been kept alive over the years by Australian efforts.’7 Since then, the notion of the ‘Pacific Rim’ has thrived in academic circles primarily within the broad domain of area studies, whose principal participants and audience tend to be social scientists of various disciplinary stripes and government policy-makers. In addition, a lively popular and typically business-centred discourse in both the East and the West has repeatedly invoked the term to prophesy imminent shifts toward Asia in the structure of global economic relations. Depending on the ideological bent of any given pundit, these shifts either spell impending doom for the status quo of European and American hegemony – and therefore require active resistance along any number of fronts – or they present virtually boundless opportunity for those (again, usually in the West) wise enough to heed the alarums, and therewith at once recognize and take advantage of the new opportunities that will emerge in the alwaysabout-to-arrive new world order. In the simplest terms, the notion of the Pacific Rim ‘refers to societies situated on the boundaries of the Pacific Ocean and within it.’8 At the level of practice, however, discourse on ‘the Pacific Rim,’ or what Bruce Cumings has wryly termed ‘Rimspeak,’9 has rarely, if ever, ad-

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dressed all the societies that share this geographical feature. Instead, as a number of commentators have already noted, discussions of the ‘Pacific Rim’ have historically ignored at least as many social formations as they have included, and they have, moreover, generally focused on the civilizations of the northern hemisphere, with a particularly frequent emphasis on East Asia. Such variability and even overt selectivity in the reference of the term underscore the status of the ‘Pacific Rim’ precisely as a discursive and ideological construction. Furthermore, the solidification and broader dissemination of the ‘Pacific Rim’ as a concept owes a great deal to the efforts of Europeans and Americans, just as the Pacific Ocean itself was historically ‘invented’ by the West. Notwithstanding these fundamental epistemological and historical conditions, the ‘Pacific Rim’ remains a powerful optic for considering the significance of cultural production during what has been called ‘the modernist period.’ For the term does (or can be made to) signify something with considerably greater analytic potential, if at the same time giving up a measure of reassuring concreteness. For as Dirlik has pointed out: There is indeed a Pacific region in a different (and more meaningful) sense than the physically geographic. Motions of people, commodities, and capital over the last few centuries have created relationships that traverse the Pacific in different directions and have given rise to regional formations with shifting boundaries. These formations have varied in the area they encompass, in accordance with the nature of the relationships, restricted sometimes to portions of the area designated today as the Pacific, sometimes extending far beyond that area. Such motions continue to this day and account for the gap between the Pacific area (conceived physically) and a Pacific region conceived in terms of human activity. Emphasis on human activity shifts attention from physical area to the construction of geography through human interactions; it also underlines the historicity of the region’s formation(s).10

Accordingly, then, the conscientious development of a ‘view from the Rim’ entails more than simply acknowledging the fact of geography, though such a feat does amount to a necessary first step. Rather, it involves dedicated attention to tracing the manifold historical and material relations among groups within the area and beyond along a number of different vectors, as well as examining how these relations at once occasion and condition cultural production. For literary concerns

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in particular, such vectors include, but are by no means limited to, the particularities of language and various dimensions of power such as asymmetrical economic arrangements underwritten by military and political domination expressed through a variety of channels. Such issues and methods already animate important work in area and ethnic studies, as well as in the allied domain of postcolonial studies. And by actively engaging with developments in these comparatively recently emergent fields, modernist studies has the opportunity at once to open up new cultural terrain for exploration and to reinvigorate existing approaches to the established Euro-American canon. For undertaking such an engagement makes it possible to begin considering the significance of canonical Western modernist Orientalism not only in light of historical and coeval achievements in Europe and the United States, but also in relation to local cultural production in different areas and languages of the Pacific Rim region. In other words, rather than continue to view them as separate, I propose that we consider these activities as tandem phenomena in order to trace the dynamics of exchange and relation between them, how the meaning of each at once interacts with and thereby modifies the other, as well as how they differ in important ways as distinctive responses to contemporaneous historical events and processes. By doing so, we allow conceptual traffic to move in multiple directions, rather than in only one way, from dominant to ‘other.’ Indeed, in this way modernist studies can even contribute to debates about contemporary culture by demonstrating the extent to which the process of ‘globalization’ itself has a history, one with roots in the modernist period. Thus, we might consider such works as the classical Chinese poems written on the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Detention Center by Chinese immigrants to the United States between 1910 and 1940 not only in relation to traditional literary achievement in Chinese, but also in light of the parallel movement of Chinese modernism and the well-known Euro-American fascination (embodied in the work of Ezra Pound, Ernest Fenollosa, Victor Segalen, and others) with things Chinese at this time. And we might further seek to understand the relationship between such work as the Angel Island poems and the efforts of writers of the Harlem Renaissance, who also engaged with and sought ways to work against the dominant culture of the American and English literary traditions, but in markedly distinct ways. Such considerations would in turn necessitate a reassessment of the significance of canonical modernist figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos

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Williams, who each had their own conceptions of the ideal terms for establishing both a national and a distinctively ‘modernist’ culture. Thus, the warrant for a ‘Pacific Rim’ approach to the study of modernism lies not simply in the putative reality of a geographical construction, but rather in the renewed critical productivity that it enables. As a demonstration of such productivity, I conclude this essay by discussing how a renowned work of canonical modernist Orientalism, namely Ezra Pound’s Cathay, takes on an altogether different significance upon a ‘re-Orientation’ of our critical perspective away from the familiar cultural terrain of Europe and toward that of the Pacific Rim. Subsequent essays presented herein will elaborate in greater detail the perspective of a view from the Rim. Cathay, the Pacific Rim, and Asian America In his magisterial (though deeply partial) study of Euro-American modernism, The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner set the dominant geographical frame of reference for considering the significance of Cathay when he wrote, ‘Its real achievement lay not on the frontier of comparative poetics, but securely within the effort, then going forward in London, to rethink the nature of an English poem.’11 When he made this assertion in 1971, Kenner was seeking to move beyond existing approaches to Cathay that were premised on a hermeneutics of authenticity and thereby implicitly situated Pound’s efforts strictly in relation to classical poetic expression in China. In Kenner’s view, this critical tradition had amounted only to ‘a half-century’s sniffling and squabbling’12 over the ‘accuracy’ of Pound’s ‘translations.’ As is widely known, these ‘translations’ were based not on the conventional foundation of actual linguistic knowledge, but rather on a considerable body of notes taken by Ernest Fenollosa during one of his final extended visits to Japan in the late 1890s, where he studied with distinguished Japanese scholars of Chinese poetry. Subsequent commentators have followed Kenner’s lead in conceiving the significance of Cathay only within the context of events taking place in the European sphere. Kenner’s own reading of Cathay as ‘largely a war book,’13 one that obliquely voices the emotional toll of the Great War, has been supplemented by various interpretations; but all of them have remained solidly within the boundaries of a Western cultural geography. Thus, George Steiner declared in After Babel (1975) that the collection ‘altered the feel of the language and set the pattern of cadence

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for modern verse [in English].’14 Additionally, Ronald Bush, Sanehide Kodama, and Ann Chapple have each understood the prevailing moods of isolation and regret in the collection as expressing the difficulties attendant upon Pound’s own early pursuit of a career in poetry in London.15 Comparably, I have argued elsewhere that Cathay ushered in a new stage in the history of translation as a mode of literary production in English by obviating intimate knowledge of the source language as a condition for its practice.16 And Robert Kern and Eric Hayot have each situated the collection in relation to American and European traditions of thought about China and the Chinese language respectively.17 Yet for all the undeniable insight, invention, and even fundamental ‘correctness’ of these diverse readings, their unquestioning focus on Europe and ‘the West’ as the proper context for understanding the meaning of Cathay has thus far obscured how the text also participates in a historical and discursive dynamic specifically connected to the Pacific Rim as a ‘region conceived in terms of human activity.’ For, upon publication of the collection first in Britain in 1915 and in the United States in 1917, the unique representation of Chinese culture and identity in Cathay offered a subtle critique of, as well as an alternative to, the terms underwriting the particularly American cultural and political discourse of Asian (and specifically Chinese) exclusionism that operated throughout the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, though it found its most virulent expressions primarily in California.18 As scholars of Asian American studies, such as Robert Lee, David Palumbo-Liu, Colleen Lye, and others, have shown in extensive detail, the discourse of the ‘Yellow Peril’ that had predominated since at least the middle part of the nineteenth century in the United States, and which persisted well into the twentieth, had sought systematically to deny the very possibility of individual expressive subjectivity among the Chinese as a means of justifying various forms of discrimination, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its several extensions.19 And this discrimination, in its turn, had arisen from the perceived threat of large-scale immigration from China and elsewhere in the region, which itself resulted in part from the widespread and manifold effects of Western imperialist expansion into Asia. Not insignificantly, such expansion included the annexation of the Philippines by the United States in 1898, an act that solidified the role of the United States as an imperial power in the Pacific at the very outset of the so-called modernist period. By contrast, Cathay gives comparatively sympathetic portrayals of

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a series of individual speaking Chinese subjects, each of whom displays an intense, if stylistically understated, emotionalism. Accordingly, then, in addition to its importance within the rise of canonical Euro-American modernism, Pound’s achievement marks a distinctive moment in the process of what Palumbo-Liu calls the ‘introjection’20 of Asians and Asian traditions into the American cultural imaginary, specifically within the domain of ‘high’ culture as embodied in literary verse.21 In this sense, Cathay presents an instance of literary verse functioning to articulate a ‘counter-poetics’ of difference in relation to both juridical formulations and more popular treatments of the same general, racialized subjects. Furthermore, the very textual origins of Cathay attest to the relevance of the Pacific Rim as a context that bears upon both the genesis and the broader significance of the collection. Importantly, the notebooks on Chinese poetry that Pound used to produce his renderings in Cathay represent a culmination of the efforts that Ernest Fenollosa made over the course of virtually his entire professional life exploring, engaging with, and advocating the significance of different Asian artistic and intellectual traditions as part of a larger attempt to bring about a ‘fusion of East and West,’22 a grand synthesis that would unite the best aspects of both cultures, therewith ushering in a new epoch of human development and the achievement of a truly ‘world’ civilization. Such beliefs, together with the diverse efforts at cultural advocacy that they inspired, set Fenollosa apart from the dominant conceptions of Asian peoples and cultures that informed the exclusionist discourses operating in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For these discourses had long characterized Asians in general as inscrutable, barbaric, and insuperably ‘alien.’ More particularly, as Colleen Lye has shown in her detailed examination of ‘Asiatic racial form,’ the discourse of ‘yellow perilism,’ which underwrote the ongoing push for Asian exclusion during the late nineteenth century and afterwards in the United States, focused on three characteristics in its construction of Chinese racial and cultural identity – economic efficiency, abstract labour power, and the sheer force of numerical abundance – as a strategy for negotiating the contradictions of monopoly capitalism and US neo-colonial expansion into Asia. The accompanying tropes of inscrutability, a soulless commercialism, the nerveless coolie, and the faceless mass, among others, together worked to elide the possibility of individual subjectivity among Chinese people, thereby helping to mitigate the ideological inconsistencies,

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within an American context, of designating a single group for exclusion from the body politic based solely on the category of race. As Lye has aptly summarized, ‘by definition the coolie lacks individuality.’23 By contrast, in his own writings published in such popular venues as Harper’s Monthly and the Atlantic Monthly, Fenollosa repeatedly asserted the historical existence of Chinese ‘individuality,’24 at least leading up to and during the supposed high point of Chinese civilization during the Tang and Sung dynasties. For his part, Fenollosa remained bound by certain conservative intellectual forces in adhering to a Spencerian, racialist conception of identity, as well as to a Meiji-era Japanese nationalist version of Chinese history. Nevertheless, his cultural advocacy functioned within a US context to restore (or, more accurately, assert) at least the theoretical possibility of an individual subjectivity among the Chinese. Thus, the notes on Chinese poetry that Pound received in 1913 at once express and condense Fenollosa’s sustained commitment to promoting the very idea of an individual Chinese subject. In this light, Fenollosa’s focus in the notebooks on canonical lyric poems from the ancient and medieval periods takes on a particular significance, over and above the cultural conservatism deriving from the ideological leanings and influence of his Japanese teachers. For within the history of Western poetics at least, the lyric mode at once effectively presupposes and has functioned as the principal means of articulating an individual, affective subjectivity. In his selections from and treatment of Fenollosa’s notes to produce Cathay, Pound both inherited and built upon this latent historical association. Indeed, ten of the sixteen poems appearing in the final version of the collection highlight the presence of an individual speaking subject through the explicit use of singular or plural first-person pronouns, while the remaining six feature third-person narrators who either describe a human subject in the poem itself (as in ‘The Beautiful Toilet,’ ‘Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku,’ and ‘Ballad of the Mulberry Road’) or convey perceptions arising from an individual personal experience (as in ‘Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin,’ ‘Leave-Taking Near Shoku,’ and ‘South-Folk in Cold Country’). By deploying the rhetoric of individual subjectivity for his ‘translations,’ Pound offers both an implicit critique of and an alternative to the terms underwriting dominant constructions of Chinese racial and cultural identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States. In presenting such a sequence of unique speaking subjects (or, to use an expressly Poundian term, personae), the collection foregrounds the idea of distinctive indi-

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viduality among the Chinese, a quality they had been consistently denied within the dominant discourses of the period. If such a claim appears to overemphasize the significance of a seemingly natural, and perhaps even necessary, rhetorical choice for poetry in English, we need only recall that in his other engagements with and depictions of Chinese literary culture, Pound expressly sought ways of moving beyond the trope of individual subjectivity as the enabling condition for poetic production. For example, three of the four ‘Chinese-inspired’ lyrics that he produced only a few months before Cathay as part of his efforts to illustrate and thereby promote the tenets of imagism – ’Liu Ch’e,’ ‘Fan-Piece, for Her Imperial Lord,’ and ‘Ts’ai Chi’h’ – together represent Pound’s attempt to discover an approach to poetry that does not rest primarily upon the conceptual foundation of an individual subject giving voice to personal experience or perception. Thus, ‘Ts’ai Chi’h’ strives to achieve poetic expressivity through the presentation of a spare sequence of images, rather than by narrating the response to these images on the part of an apprehending subject: The petals fall in the fountain, The orange-coloured rose-leaves Their ochre clings to the stone.25

Comparably, in The Cantos, Pound would come to invoke Chinese political, literary, and philosophical history as part of an effort to articulate a form of poetic authority that transcends the limits of an individual, subjective voice, as in the sequence of ‘Chinese History Cantos.’ Pound’s depiction of individual Chinese subjectivity in Cathay also brought with it a sustained focus on the theme of affect, to the extent that the emotional tenor of the collection has long since become its defining (or at least its most recognized) feature. Even more significantly, precisely through making the expression of emotion by the speakers of the poems at once linguistically and culturally legible to a Western (i.e., English-language) audience, Pound delineated the possibility of imagining Chinese identity in ways that challenged the dominant discourses of the period. Now Chinese subjects in English had affect, and they made clear their sentiments, as in these concluding lines from the opening poem of the collection, ‘The Song of the Bowmen of Shu’: When we set out, the willows were drooping with spring, We come back in the snow,

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Or these from one of the acknowledged masterpieces of the collection, ‘The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter’: The paired butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older.27

Or these, from ‘Lament of the Frontier Guard’: A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn, A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom, Three hundred and sixty thousand, And sorrow, sorrow like rain. Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning.28

Or these from Cathay’s other consensus masterwork, ‘Exile’s Letter’: And if you ask how I regret that parting: It is like the flowers falling at Spring’s end Confused, whirled in a tangle. What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking, There is no end of things in the heart.29

Or, finally, these from ‘The City of Choan’: Now the high clouds over the sun And I can not see Choan afar And I am sad.30

In the light of such comparatively frank declarations of feeling, even the traits of obliquity and verbal concentration for which Cathay has been widely and justly praised appear as something more than merely the result of technical innovation or a departure from Edwardian poetic conventions in favour of the tenets of imagism. Nor do they amount simply to Pound’s remarkable success in conveying or capturing some ‘essential’ qualities of the poems in the original Chinese. Instead, they emerge as expressions of the establishment of a veritable grammar for

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the very idea of Chinese emotion in English. Thus, the famous syllogistic explanatory ‘Note’ appended to ‘The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance’ carefully lays out the expressive logic that underlies the otherwise opaque surface of the poem: Note. – Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather. Also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.31

Moreover, it confidently asserts the value placed on such reticence within a Chinese cultural tradition. In doing so, the note quietly insists upon the existence of affect among Chinese subjects, even if such affect might not be immediately visible or legible to Western perception. To be sure, the quality of ‘indirection’ had already long been associated with the Chinese in dominant political and cultural discourses of the period. The missionary Arthur H. Smith, for example, identified ‘A Talent for Indirection’ as one of twenty-six defining ‘Chinese Characteristics’ in his enormously popular work of the same name published in 1894.32 And insofar as Pound’s note calls attention to this quality within both the poem itself and native Chinese assessments of it, the representation of Chinese culture and subjectivity in ‘The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance’ overlaps with existing dominant views. Yet in explaining the particular emotional syntax within the poem, the note works against another, more pernicious Western stereotype that implied a virtually complete and distinctly threatening absence of expressive affect among Chinese subjects, namely that of ‘inscrutability.’ By depicting and explicating the logic of Chinese emotion, then, Cathay not only asserted the presence of affect among the Chinese, but also worked to make that affect at least potentially ‘scrutable’ to readers of English. In terms of its imagery, Cathay adopts a familiar Orientalist stance, reproducing a decidedly exoticist, and therefore conservative, vision of the Chinese landscape and cultural traditions. Indeed, part of the appeal of the collection lies precisely in the abundance of delights that it presents to the (mind’s) eye. Even a cursory survey of the poems reveals numerous alluring details such as ‘blue’ grass in ‘The Beautiful Toilet’ and ‘ivory arrows and / quivers ornamented with fish-skin’ in ‘Song of the Bowmen of Shu.’ Similarly, boats of ‘shato-wood’ with

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gunwales of ‘cut magnolia,’ ‘jeweled flutes,’ ‘pipes of gold,’ purple and crimson houses, and an emperor’s ‘jeweled car’ populate ‘The River Song.’ Even a poem as brief as ‘The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance’ has its ‘jewelled steps’ and ‘crystal curtain.’ Such exoticism finds its most intense expression, perhaps, in the reception recalled by the speaker of ‘Exile’s Letter.’ Certainly a festive occasion, this party included ‘Red jade cups, food well set on a blue jeweled table,’ ‘courtezans, going and coming without / hindrance,’ ‘vermillioned girls,’ and ‘Eyebrows painted green.’ For the most part, these and other comparable visual details such as a ‘canopy embroidered with dragons’ (‘Old Idea of Choan by Roshorin’) appear in the original Chinese poems that Fenollosa studied.33 But both Pound’s taste for and his manner of presenting such images in Cathay index the extent to which the collection at once participates in and carries forward the long tradition of Western exoticization of Asian cultures. Through its technical and prosodic invention, however, Cathay established entirely new formal terms for the poetic representation of Chinese culture and identity in English. Take, for example, ‘The Beautiful Toilet’: Blue, blue is the grass about the river And the willows have overfilled the close garden. And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth, White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door. Slender, she puts forth a slender hand; And she was a courtezan in the old days, And she has married a sot, Who now goes drunkenly out And leaves her too much alone.34

As Kenner has shown, Pound employs remarkably subtle means to convey the reduplication of the initial characters in the first six lines of the original poem, including the internal rhyme of ‘willows’ and ‘overfilled’ in the second line of his rendering, the assonance of short i sounds in the third, a brief anaphora with ‘And’ in lines 2 and 3, and the split repetition of the word ‘slender’ in the fifth.35 Moreover, Pound entirely dispenses with rhyme and fixed stress counts, with the second stanza modulating to shorter lines than in the first. In short, the techniques and paradoxical discipline of modernist free verse provide the

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formal, structuring logic for this poem, as well as, indeed, for all poems throughout the collection. One effect of this achievement has been to make expressly modernist diction and technique in English seem entirely adequate and transparent vehicles for the conveyance of (even medieval) Chinese cultural and linguistic particularity. In addition, because of his total ignorance of Chinese at that point, Pound had to rely through Fenollosa almost entirely on Japanese pronunciations for the sound structure of the Chinese poems and their constituent characters. And such reliance, in turn, resulted most significantly in the extensive use throughout the collection of Japanese versions for Chinese proper and place names. Pound employed this practice at every level within Cathay, from its overarching historical frame as a collection of works by specific Chinese writers down to the rhythmical texture of individual poems and even lines. Thus, names of the Chinese poets featured in the collection include ‘Rihaku’ in place of Li Bai, ‘Omakitsu’ for Wang Wei, ‘Kakuhaku’ for Guo Pu, ‘Rosh rin’ for Lu Zhao Lin, and ‘To-Em-Mei’ for Tao Yuan Ming.36 Comparably, both the titles and the actual text of different poems present names in their Japanese forms. So, Pound gives titles such as ‘Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin,’ ‘Leave-Taking Near Shoku,’ ‘Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku,’ and ‘Old Idea of Ch an by Rosh rin,’ among others. Similarly, ‘Exile’s Letter’ opens with the salutation, ‘To So-Kin of Rakuy , ancient friend, Chancellor of Gen,’ and ‘Separation on the River Kiang’ begins, ‘Ko-jin goes west from K -kaku-ro.’37 Numerous additional examples could be easily adduced, and together they help to create the distinctive rhythm of the collection. Ironically, then, Pound’s treatment of one of the principal linguistic elements for signifying ‘Chineseness’ in Cathay happened to contribute to the formation of an idiom that both partly stems from and more closely resembles the phonetic properties of the Japanese language. Up to this point in the history of critical commentary on the collection, such a practice has generally been regarded either as a sign of Pound’s ignorance or, somewhat more generously, as a strategy for acknowledging his own place in a line of cultural transmission of Chinese poetry that includes not only Fenollosa, but also Japanese efforts in the form of ‘the decipherings of the professors Mori and Ariga.’38 But this culturally imprecise method of nomination and its textual genealogy matter for our purposes here not so much because they illustrate yet again Pound’s well-known limitations as a reader of Chinese or his historical awareness as a translator. Rather, their significance stems from the role they

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played in shaping the distinctive idiom of Cathay, which elides real differences between the sound structure, rhythm, and other phonetic qualities of the two East Asian languages into a lumped English discourse that signifies ‘Chinese’ in this instance, but due to numerous points of intersection, also ‘sounds like’ Japanese in certain crucial ways. Thus, whatever else it reveals about Pound himself as a reader and translator of ‘Chinese poetry,’ the unique idiom of Cathay reflects his own perhaps unwitting participation in the tendency toward what sociologist Yen Le Espiritu has called the phenomenon of ‘racial lumping’ within dominant US discourses about East Asian peoples and traditions, or, in other words, categorization that ‘ignores subgroup boundaries, lumping together diverse peoples in a single, expanded “ethnic” framework.’39 Even more importantly, perhaps, this aspect of his achievement also perpetuates that tendency by blurring real distinctions between Chinese and Japanese languages into a kind of generic ‘Oriental’ tonality in English. Through its historically innovative representation of Chinese (poetic) culture and identity, Cathay managed to accomplish a number of different things. Most familiarly, it helped to underwrite a fundamental change in the course of poetry in English. For its success at a variety of levels definitively proved the viability of an approach to poetry, namely imagism, that Albert Gelpi has called one of the two ‘generative strains of poetic modernism’ in English.40 Equally significant, the collection radically reconfigured the operative parameters of translation as a mode of literary production by demonstrating that both aesthetically pleasing and culturally influential results could be attained without thorough (or indeed any) understanding of the original language of the text one has translated. Additionally, as an acknowledged masterwork crucial to the founding of the movement, Cathay testifies to the importance of an ‘Orientalist’ strain within the very constitution of canonical Euro-American modernism as a whole. And as arguably the paradigmatic example of canonical Euro-American modernist Orientalism, Pound’s accomplishment has helped to shape various trends within the larger body of dominant American poetic expression over the course of the twentieth century and up to the present, including, most obviously, the Beat movement, as well as the subsequent efflorescence of Buddhism-inspired verse by writers such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jane Hirshfield, Gary Snyder, and Sam Hamill, among others.41 The magnitude of these accomplishments notwithstanding, however, the significance of Cathay far exceeds the limits of a cultural geog-

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raphy centred in Europe and the Atlantic sphere. For in departing from the terms informing dominant views of Chinese culture and identity in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the collection at once participates in and complicates a cultural dynamic fundamentally connected to historical events taking place in the region of the Pacific Rim. And having in its turn attained to canonical status, the collection thereby also establishes the horizon of expectation against which other, different articulations of a ‘Chinese’ and, more broadly, an ‘Asian’ ethnic or cultural sensibility in poetry at once gain part of their meaning and have been and will continue to be understood in the wider realm of Anglo-American, and even anglophone, culture. In other words, due to its very canonicity, the terms of Cathay have come to embody the authority of the cultural dominant in defining the framework of evaluation for other voicings of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Asian’ cultural heritage, whether or not specific individual poets write explicitly in response to or reaction against Pound himself. Hence, any effort to take full measure of Asian American (and especially Chinese American) poetic achievement must begin by examining Cathay for the way it maps how the categories of ‘Asian’ and, in particular, ‘Chinese’ intersect with the category of ‘poetry’ within the dominant American cultural imaginary. If these admittedly unorthodox aspects of the broader significance of Cathay have thus far gone unnoticed, they nevertheless serve to highlight both the need and the possibilities of reconfiguring the historiography and cultural geography of existing critical practices by developing a Pacific Rim approach to the study of modernism, one that addresses the movement not just as a cosmopolitan, but an expressly global, phenomenon.

NOTES 1 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 20, 9. 2 See Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, especially 96–7. 3 Important recent work in this vein has also been done in relation to a Latin American context. See, for example, Tace Hedrick’s Mestizo Modernism. 4 See the essays by each of these scholars in this volume. 5 This policy was originally promulgated in 1940 by Japan’s Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke, though the idea went back much further as a means for justifying Japanese imperial conquest throughout Asia under the guise of freeing other Asian nations from domination by the West.

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6 Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, 17. Though it goes beyond the scope of the present discussion, an essay remains to be written about the cultural political logic of modernist Orientalist criticism itself. Such an examination would correlate the trajectory that I have just outlined against the horizon of shifting economic and political relations among the various Western and Asian nations and their respective cultural traditions. As Palumbo-Liu, Lisa Lowe, and other Asian Americanist critics have shown with regard to Japan, China, and the United States in particular, the academy itself at once reflects and remains imbricated in the broader currents of the political sphere. 7 Dirlik, ‘Introducing the Pacific,’ 8. 8 Ibid., 3. 9 See Cumings, ‘Rimspeak; or The Discourse of the “Pacific Rim.”’ 10 Dirlik, ‘Introducing the Pacific,’ 4. 11 Kenner, The Pound Era, 199. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 202. 14 Steiner, After Babel, 358. 15 See Bush, ‘Pound and Li Po’; Kodama, ‘Cathay and the Fenollosa Notebooks’ and Chapple, ‘Ezra Pound’s Cathay.’ 16 See chapter 1 of Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism, 25–51. 17 See Kern, Orientalism, Modernism and the American Poem, and Hayot, Chinese Dreams. 18 For a recent history of Chinese immigration that makes the case for the importance of California within the larger development of exclusionism as an American national policy, see Erika Lee, At America’s Gates, especially 23–109. 19 For a discussion of popular representations of Asians in general and Chinese in particular during the late nineteenth century, see Robert G. Lee, Orientals. For a discussion of ‘Yellow Peril’ discourse in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States, see David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, especially 35–48. For an excellent recent discussion of late nineteenth-century to early twentieth-century realist and naturalist narrative engagements with ‘Asia,’ see Colleen Lye, America’s Asia. 20 Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, 18. 21 For a more general discussion of the movement of specifically Chinese literary forms across the Pacific during the modernist period, see Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement. 22 This phrase serves as the title for an essay by Fenollosa published in Harper’s Monthly, wherein he lays out his visionary conception of the

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34 35 36

37 38 39

40 41

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future of East-West cultural relations. See Fenollosa, ‘The Coming Fusion of East and West.’ Lye, America’s Asia, 54. Fenollosa, ‘Chinese and Japanese Traits,’ 771. Pound, ‘Ts’ai Chi’h,’ in Personae, 111. Pound, ‘The Song of the Bowmen of Shu,’ in Personae, 131. Pound, ‘The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,’ in Personae, 134. Pound, ‘Lament of the Frontier Guard,’ in Personae, 137. Pound, ‘Exile’s Letter,’ in Personae, 139. Pound, ‘The City of Choan,’ in Personae, 142. Pound, ‘The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance,’ in Personae, 136. Smith, Chinese Characteristics. Pound, ‘The Beautiful Toilet,’ ‘Song of the Bowmen of Shu,’ ‘The River Song,’ ‘The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance,’ ‘Exile’s Letter,’ ‘Old Idea of Choan by Roshorin,’ in Personae, 132, 131, 132, 136, 137, and 145. Pound, ‘The Beautiful Toilet,’ in Personae, 132. Kenner, The Pound Era, 193–5. This situation has been ‘corrected’ somewhat in more recent editions and reprints of the collection through the addition of transliterations of the more conventional Chinese names of the writers included. But these additions were absent from the first edition, and, in any event, the names employed in the titles and the texts of the poems have remained unchanged. Pound, ‘Exile’s Letter’ and ‘Separation on the River Kiang,’ in Personae, 134, 137. Pound, headnote to Cathay, in Personae, 130. Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity, 6. This is not to say that distinctions have not been made at the political level at different, pivotal times in American history. Obviously, differences between Japanese, Chinese, and Korean people and culture have been invoked, often by Asian Americans themselves, at crucial moments, such as during the Second World War. But, within the larger domain of the US cultural imaginary, East Asian cultural and linguistic traditions have generally been lumped together to the same degree that people from these traditions have been indiscriminately mistaken for one another. Gelpi, A Coherent Splendor, 5. The other ‘generative strain’ of modern poetry, according to Gelpi, is symbolism. For a recent collection of American Buddhism-inspired poetry, see The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry. For a recent discussion of this poetic lineage and its relation to Asian American poetry, see Park, Apparitions of Asia.

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SOURCES CITED Bush, Ronald. ‘Pound and Li Po: What Becomes a Man.’ In Ezra Pound among the Poets, edited by George Bornstein, 35–62. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Chapple, Ann. ‘Ezra Pound’s Cathay: Compilation from the Fenollosa Notebooks.’ Paideuma 17.2–3 (1988): 11–30. Cumings, Bruce. ‘Rimspeak; or The Discourse of the “Pacific Rim.”’ In What Is in a Rim: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea, edited by Arif Dirlik, 29–47. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993. Dirlik, Arif. ‘Introducing the Pacific.’ In What Is in a Rim: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea, edited by Arif Dirlik, 3–12. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993. Espiritu, Yen Le. Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Fenollosa, Ernest F. ‘Chinese and Japanese Traits.’ Atlantic Monthly 69 (1892), 769–74. – ‘The Coming Fusion of East and West.’ Harper’s Monthly (December 1898): 115–22. Gelpi, Albert. A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Hayot, Eric. Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Hedrick, Tace. Mestizo Modernism: Race, Nation, and Identity in Latin American Culture, 1900–1940. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Huang, Yunte. Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971. Kern, Robert. Orientalism, Modernism and the American Poem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kodama, Sanehide. ‘Cathay and the Fenollosa Notebooks.’ Paideuma 11.2 (1982): 213–29. Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Lee, Robert G. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999. Lefevere, Andre. Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.

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Lye, Colleen. America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Park, Josephine Nock-Lee. Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pound, Ezra. Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound. Rev. ed. prepared by Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz. New York: New Directions, 1990. Smith, Arthur H. Chinese Characteristics. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1894. Spivak, Gayatri. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry, edited by Andrew Schelling. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2005. Yao, Steven. Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

2 Modernisms, Pacific and Otherwise david palumbo-liu

The analysis of history is not a subject separate from history, but that the representations are part of the history, contribute to the history, are active elements in the way that history continues; in the way forces are distributed; in the way people perceive situations, both from inside their own pressing realities and from outside them; if we are saying this is a real method, then the empirical test it’s being put to here is that comparable methods of analysis are being applied to situations which are very far apart in space, have many differences of texture, and have very different consequences in the contemporary world. There is an obvious distance from what is happening in the English countryside, or in the English inner cities, to the chaos in Lebanon. Yet nevertheless I think it is true that the method, the underlying method, found a congruity. Raymond Williams1

In my contribution to this volume I address the question of Pacific Rim modernisms by way of a short meditation on time and space, history and geography, and the question of how comparisons work. Specifically, I wish to consider how two Asian Pacific authors have ventured to map out connections across the Pacific, reaching both within and without. As for what makes these endeavours ‘modernist,’ if indeed they are (and this will be a matter for us to consider in the course of this essay), I will only venture to intuit a set of questions that seem to me to fit well into the modernist project of registering a particular fragmenting of history and geography, and an attempt to shore up these fragments within a particular aesthetic form. But along with this I want to address the notion of Pacific modernisms as a conceptual opening

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and as an intentional act that points to a hermeneutic desire to see the Pacific Rim as such. I am specifically interested in seeing this will to name as connected with particularly structured and structuring concerns. I then turn to two novels, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Fifth Book of Peace and Karen Tei-Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, as examples of how Pacific modernism may be attached to a larger project of making sense of our contemporary historical situation, one characterized by, respectively, war and the contemporary grid of late capitalist consortia (NAFTA, APEC). It is its contingency with these (and other) structuring interests that gives the Pacific Rim its specific character at any given historical moment. In my reading of these two literary texts I propose that the distinction between modernism and postmodernism becomes productively and usefully blurred by each of these authors. Modernism has been depicted as struggling to integrate the fragmented modern world in its aesthetic vision, harking back to the vision of a wholeness inherent in the premodern while recognizing at once its absence from the world. In contrast, the postmodern has been represented as both celebrating and promoting the liberation of the aesthetic from those moorings and championing a reinvention of the aesthetic in altogether different terms (ironizing and pastisching the old lexicon of modernism). Coinciding with that great divide is a distribution of ethical purpose – the former is granted an ethical import within its very nature (for what reason do modernists seek to reintegrate these fragments?), whereas the latter’s capacity for, let alone interest in, what could be claimed to be ‘ordinary ethics’ is an open question, especially given its so-called abhorrence of ‘master narratives,’ by which one means by and large an unreconstructed Western liberal tradition. Postmodernism’s ethics are thus by necessity open-ended and ad hoc. I want to demonstrate that both of my authors delve deeply into the fissures of the contemporary postmodern situation, and yet hold fast to a project to map an ethical passage through it, one which is intimately attached to seeking out the grounds for a reintegrated human community. Does this mean they are modernist by a kind of aesthetic default? My answer is, ‘Yes and no.’ Why a Rim; How a Rim? When I travelled to Vancouver for the Modernist Studies Association meeting in 2004, for which this short essay was originally composed, I was struck at the airport by the wonderful dioramas that convey the

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arriving passenger to the baggage claim area – smooth flows of water accompany flows of people through time and space. These circuits remind one of the connections formed by the Pacific Ocean’s rubbing up against its many shores, the historical discoveries of the continuities of those land masses, but also their historical parcelling out into discrete nation-states. However, upon exiting the airport my attention was drawn to the headlines that leapt out at me from the sidewalk news dispensers. The Asia Pacific’s headline mournfully asked, ‘Where Have All Our Husbands Gone?,’ while the Globe and Mail declared with alarm: ‘China Ready to Buy Up All of Canada’s Resources’ (one day later it contained huge Chinese characters and asked, ‘Can you read this? If not, you’d better begin to learn how!’). Those of us coming from the US might recall Ross Perot’s famous condemnation of NAFTA – he asserted that if it passed, there would be a ‘huge sucking noise’ as jobs flowed out of the United States. Was this the Canadian version of that sentiment, that fear, as the boundaries of the nation were rudely ruptured by a gluttonous Asia, insisting on its particular version of the Pacific Rim? Here I regard ‘the Pacific Rim’ (as something other than a simple geographic designation) as the product of an intentional act, as phenomenologists like to say. It has as much to do with a particularly motivated mapping of peoples, ethnicities, races, nations, and material relations as it does with geographic accident. This intentional act is not a matter of whim or fancy, but of rational and irrational economic, political, and nationalistic longings that have at various times reconfigured the Rim in different ways, to make it signify this, or that, to coalesce a wide variety of microspaces and microcommunities into some family resemblance. This will to name, to consolidate, to objectify, becomes obvious once one asks the question: what is the centre of this Rim? Understanding the historical production of a contingent body of knowledges and epistemological claims from various angles and degrees of power helps us understand why the question ‘why a Rim’ cannot be answered in any other than a contingent fashion – that is, why a Rim as such, now? In all this, one may well ask, what about art, what about modernism? What does all this talk about a Rim and its contingent nature have to do with modernism? Alongside the question regarding the contingency and historicity of the Rim comes a particular questioning of modernism, the aesthetic attempt to capture a moment, equally contingent and historical and perhaps even more elusive. The modernist aesthetic has been characterized in a number of fashions, but there is a consensus over a signal feature – the attempt to reconsolidate the fragments of

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modern life, a life pressed upon by a sense of alienation, separation from traditional forms of social cohesion, and those old forms are fragmented by, among other things, a new sense of alienation and otherness. The dual task then is both to recognize the dissolution of prior forms and to proffer new forms without making any claim to an ability to transcend the conditions of their composition. The modernist aesthetic thus temporalizes itself at each turn, and this lends it both its finite and infinite features – it is always being eclipsed by its not quite different but not quite identical siblings, it is incompletely renewed at each reimagining. And as I have been emphasizing, this phenomenon has everything to do with the historical context in which it is embedded, and within which it finds its voice. And, as Fredric Jameson and others have famously said, modernism finds its voice seeking to map a totality. This is attempted not for purely philosophical or theoretical reasons, but for ethical ones as well – mapping a totality gives us some way of imagining being and acting together, and these imagined ways of being together may well stand in stark contrast and even in radical opposition to things like the will to imagine and to name the Pacific Rim as such that I noted at the start of my essay. The temporal, contingent, history-laden nature of the designation ‘Pacific Rim,’ and also the temporal, contingent, history-laden nature of modernist aesthetics, alert us to a thematic and a problematic at once: modernist writers in the Rim must grapple with the historicity of their designation while at the same time inventing upon a shifting terrain wherein the constitution of the Rim evinces a number of different aesthetic traditions and resources that are put into contact with each other as the Rim itself is constituted and imagined. The writers that I will consider do so for a particular ethical purpose – to make possible, through art, the recognition of how the willed construction of the Rim has affected negatively the human lives that inhabit this designated space, and to positively imagine other ways of being together, or, indeed, being apart. Yet, even as I write these words – ‘negative,’ ‘positive’ – I understand that such judgments must be held up to scrutiny. And such examination is made possible, I will argue, precisely through the mediation and imaginative powers of literature. Maxine Hong Kingston’s corpus has (correctly) been read as an extended meditation on migrancy, locatedness, generational differences and affinities, ethnicity and gender, and finally and perhaps foremost storytelling’s capacity to capture life as being deeply inflected by all. But aside from these core issues, Kingston’s work (and this is to

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be found in every one of her novels) has been in one way or another deeply affected by the issue of war (and of peace). The invention and reinvention of Chinese American identity is seen as intimately linked to the wars in the Pacific, the Cold War, and in the novel in question, the Iraq wars. Whereas I have elsewhere pointed out how, exactly, the Pacific region was and is imbricated strategically and ideologically in the wars in Iraq, here I want to focus on how Kingston’s novel provides an aesthetic and humanistic mapping of that linkage, one that is intimately tied to the issue of modernism.2 In Karen Tei-Yamashita’s work one finds the coexistence of the ‘indigenous’ and the exogenous – the inherited histories of the modern age of globalization and colonization. Tei-Yamashita focuses attention on a newly drawn Pacific hemispherics that entangle South America, Central America, Mexico, California, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Alaska, tracing the economic linkages that force people into proximity and dependency, without necessarily a commensurate degree of control and self-determination. Her work is characterized by the production of dystopian societies built upon the ruins of one or another project – in Brazil Maru, a socialist utopia turns into a fascist spectacle; in Under the Arc of the Rainforest, nothing characterizes modern life in the Rim as much as a contingent historicity symbolized by a gyrating device balancing precariously over the head of our protagonist. Finally, in The Tropic of Orange, the Pacific Rim manifests nothing as much as the interaction of insidious economic networks trafficking in human organs and drugs. Tei-Yamashita is intimately engaged in tracing the residue of tradition as it spins out weakly, but sometimes virulently, into the Rim, and tracing at the same moment the emergence of new (but not at all necessarily better) forms of the modern and postmodern. Like Kingston’s, what makes Tei-Yamashita’s work still part of the modernist project is an unfaltering (albeit often sceptical or even cynical) commitment to some notion of imagined, and realizable, human community. Ultimately, both Kingston and Tei-Yamashita are interested in the issue of affect – their novels are populated by people who register the effects of these reformulations and reinventions of contemporary life in the Pacific, and the world in which the Pacific is embedded. In both, spaces inhabited by indigenous peoples, hybridized migrants, locals constellated around different distinct and sometimes overlapping spaces, speak across these identities and regions in many tongues, registers, rhetorics. Communities are instantiated that live for generations and others that dissolve after a brief encounter. Both Kingston and Tei-

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Yamashita deploy their literary aesthetics to capture these sometimes fleeting moments of consolidation, and at the same time ponder the conditions that permit and restrict, accommodate and contain, these instances. One of the major questions that they ask regards the ways different senses of being in time, in history, can both disturb what might otherwise be seen as a clean line of communication between individuals or groups, and, counter-intuitively, disrupt assumed continuities and thereby enable another kind of recombinatory poetics. This incommensurateness may thus be productive, as well as destructive, and fraught politically. The literary works I discuss here tap into precisely this problematic, probing deeply into the fissures and opened spaces produced in the interstices of different language registers, speech communities, the oral and written word. This is a particular variant of the tropes of modernism, embedded precisely within the Pacific Rim, but stretching out from that locus to different global quarters. In so doing, in testing out the boundaries of that designation and the capaciousness of the imagination, we find a supreme test of affect, read historically and through literature. This can only be achieved, I argue, by asserting the capacity to make connections between assumed incommensurabilities. How to Compare? Time/Space Differentials and Unflatness Around the time I began to work in earnest on this essay, there was a news report that announced that at that moment the war in Iraq had crossed a temporal threshold – it had now lasted longer than active US involvement in the Second World War. This was, for me, a shocking fact, but the sensation of shock quickly gave way to one of puzzlement. I found myself wondering how to register that factoid. The issue slowly clarified – what it seemed we were dealing with were two different historical events that seemed to speak to each other but actually did so only through the most opaque and muddled media. Of course, even before the war in Iraq began, there were comparisons being drawn to the war in Vietnam, and that comparison has only grown more broad and convincing as Iraq falls deeper and deeper into civil war. There seems to be a proliferation of discrepancies that creep into view. While it is only right to insist on careful distinctions, at the same time the family resemblances seem unmistakable. What we have in sum is a deceptively transparent equation vouchsafed by a simple calibration of time being scrambled and clouded by the fact that at the same time one

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historical yardstick is being used to measure another historical event. What does ‘the Second World War’ mean? What does ‘the Iraq War’ mean? In sum, how do we put things together? To understand the formulation, we need to ascertain especially the affective power of such terms, as they are assumed to be in place: if not, what would declaring that fact rely on to be seen as being anything more than stating a fact? This, I argue, is what modernist literature hypothesizes and tests, sometimes across great divides. The problem appears now to be one of what some philosophers of science (namely Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn) called the problematic of incommensurability. As Ian Hacking describes it, ‘It has been said that successive and competing theories within the same domain “speak different languages.” They cannot strictly be compared to each other, not translated into each other.’3 But even if we accept the notion that when articulated in two different theories the same word may not, or, more radically, cannot mean the same thing (for instance, ‘mass’) we can still track the grounds upon which the comparison is made. This is the argument of Dudley Shapere, who writes: If two scientific theories (or more general contexts of scientific thought, such as ‘traditions’ or ‘communities’) differ in so many respects, as they certainly seem to do, in virtue of what do we compare them? Rather than deny that such comparisons can be made, what we need to ask is how it is possible to do so, and what the implications of our way of doing it as we do are: how we manage to compare and even evaluate such scientific usages and the contexts on which they occur.4

That is to say, the focus will shift from the possibility of making comparisons to the conditions of possibility. In the case cited above, of comparing the quantity of time spent warring in Iraq with that spent in the Second World War, the question would then become not the precise nature of the time contained within that quantitative frame, but rather the possibilities of even seeing the two events as equivalent in any way because of that shared feature. Just as before when I asked a series of questions regarding the phenomenological ‘intent’ behind naming the Pacific Rim as such (Why? How? Why now?), I will consider how Kingston makes us think of how and why an event like the wildfires in the Oakland hills that destroyed her home and the entire manuscript of her novel can be compared to (as she does) the burning of the fields of Iraq in the first Gulf War. Such an analysis entails as well revisiting some of

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the key conceptualizations of modernist narrative with regard to time and space. For if we are to argue that seemingly disparate events and instances can be mutually legible, then we have to tackle the idea of the form that might take.5 One way this question has been approached is through the modernist narrative form, which is assumed to be engaged in a sorting out and reassembling of fragments. There lies in the deepest recesses of the modernist project some barely visible template, or at least an intimation of it. And this template is deeply informed by a notion that peoples from discrepant times and places can find some point of commonality. This notion is well represented in Marshall Berman’s essay, ‘Why Modernism Still Matters.’ In a postscript to that essay, reflecting upon the collapse of communism, he notes: 1989 was not only a great year, but a great modernist year. First, because millions of people learned that history was not over, that they had the capacity to make their own history – though not, alas, in circumstances chosen by themselves. Second, because in the midst of their motions, those men and women identified with each other: even in different languages and idioms, even thousands of miles apart, they saw how their stories were one story, how they all were trying to make the modern world their own.6

The other modality would be that of postmodernist narrative, one similarly characterized by fragmentation and loss, but without that recuperative capacity to at least imagine a whole. This, however, is not without its benefit, as this loss at once disobliges one from (and in fact disallows) any adherence to a ‘master narrative.’ In this case, the potential is there for these commensurate instances to connect up without being obliged to form a whole. However, I argue that in certain strong ways both the modernist and the postmodernist modalities disable the kinds of comparisons and ethics that Kingston and Tei-Yamashita favour. Conversely then, their narratives can be seen as efforts to overcome the disabling elements of both modernist and postmodern literature. Irving Howe argues in his essay ‘The Culture of Modernism’ that modernist literature ‘forces us into distance and dissociation; it denies us wholeness of response; it alienates us from its own powers of statement even when we feel that it is imaginatively transcending the malaise of alienation.’7 He asserts that this negation always follows the positive articulation of the modernist ‘statement.’ This aesthetic dia-

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lectic may be linked to a social and cultural one, if Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane are right in asserting that this dissociation and alienation is concomitant with a dis-organization of communal values and ethics. According to them, modernist art is an art ‘consequent on the dis-establishing of communal reality and conventional notions of causality, on the destruction of traditional notions of the wholeness of individual character, on the linguistic chaos that ensues when public notions of language have been discredited and when all realities have become subjective fictions.’8 It is against such a dis-establishing that both Kingston’s and Tei-Yamashita’s narratives militate. Most germane for this essay, they do so by mobilizing key formal features of both modernist and postmodernist narrative, and yet end up advocating an ethics that goes beyond the scepticism of both, and this is done precisely by reanimating ‘real historical time,’ albeit by first passing through a dazzling poetics of fragmentation to arrive at precisely a point of comparison, congruity, and possibly commensurability that is both historically rooted and analytically imaginative. In precisely this regard they approach the methodogical ambition set forth in the statement by Raymond Williams that serves as the epigraph of this essay. Maxine Hong Kingston’s Fifth Book of Peace: Thinking in/outside the Rim; The Problem of Comparison The commensurability of trans-Pacific time/space has been an enduring question for Kingston. As early as her first novel, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976), she poses this question in an exchange between Maxine and her mother, who complains: “Human beings don’t work like this in China. Time goes slower there. Here we have to hurry, feed the hungry children before we’re too old to work.”’ To which Maxine replies, ‘“Time is the same from place to place,” I said unfeelingly. “There is only the eternal present, and biology.”’9 At that point in the novel, Maxine is wilfully ignorant of the shift in material historical contexts, the transformation in class status that has disproportionately burdened her mother’s body and its very real registering of that difference. It is the work of the novel to gradually allow Maxine the ability to feel the unfeeling nature of her non-response. It is exactly the non-equivalence of time senses in different historical contexts that leads Kingston to place, in a weird textual interstice after the dedication page and before the table of contents of Tripmaster Monkey (1987), this cautionary remark: ‘This fiction is set in the 1960s, a time when

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some events appeared to occur months or even years anachronistically.’ From the impact of immigration and the Chinese revolution upon the memoirs of Maxine, to the tumultuous and disruptive 1960s, we see a persistent attention to the manners in which fiction can both exploit, and at times be baffled by, the compression and expansion of history across and through space. It is thus not surprising that The Fifth Book of Peace (2003) couples the creative and destructive, the historical and fictional. The nodal point of this potent combination is the convergence of the Oakland hills fire, which destroyed her home and her book manuscript, and the first Iraq war in October of 1991. This historical moment launches the text, and 9/11 forms its epilogue. And not so long after, beyond the ken of the author (though she may have well anticipated it) as she writes that epilogue, is another instance of textual and human devastation – the looting and destruction of the library in Baghdad. In the conflagration in the Oakland hills Kingston reads the sign of God: ‘I know why this fire. God is showing us Iraq. It is wrong to kill, and refuse to look at what we’ve done. (Count the children killed, in “sanctions”: 150,000, 360,000, 750,000. “Collateral damage.”) ... God is teaching us, showing us this scene that is like war.’10 It is here then that the issue of equivalency, of the capaciousness and legitimacy of analogy, becomes introduced, and forces us, like the question of the duration of the second Iraq war, to puzzle out our sense of how to measure death/time. What do those figures mean, affectively? How can they succeed in traversing the distance between Iraq and the US, given the enormous and perhaps insurmountable, incommensurate, difference in historical position? As might be predicted, Kingston turns to fiction to bridge that distance, to make figures translate into affect and difference melt under the force of compassion: ‘Fiction cares for others; it is compassion, and gives others voice. It time-travels the past and the future, and pulls the not-now, not-yet into existence. The garret where I wrote, which was just my height, burned. A sign. I do not want the aloneness of the writer’s life. No more solitary. I need a community of like minds. The Book of Peace, to be reconstructed, needs community.’11 So we have the erasure of a calibration based on one’s own body, the destruction of the writer’s garret, and a venture out of that private realm and selfreference into a communal space. Nevertheless, Kingston is unwilling to let us imagine that ‘community’ is arrived at simply because of will and good intentions. The ability to forge effective communities by tapping into cognate referents is

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frustrated by both geography and history. At the gathering of antiwar protesters in Hawai’i, Kingston discovers that ‘Hawai’i pales after you have been near the equator. The jungles in Viet Nam are greener than the jungles here, the sea bluer, the soil and the sun redder.’12 We find the same in the autobiographical sections: ‘We go to Oakland Chinatown, Asiatown now – less hassle than Big City San Francisco. Oakland Asiatown is a recombinant Cambodia and Laos and Viet Nam and Thailand and the Philippines and Korea and China, but my mother kept seeing the Stockton Chinatown of long ago.’ Over and against the reality delivered by historical progression, the reality of a ‘recombinant’ polynational diasporic space of ‘Asiatown,’ we find the intractable perception of Kingston’s mother, seeing past (or through) that complex synthesis to exclaim, upon finding the object of her quest into that space, ‘“There they are! ... Joong leaves!”’13 Indeed, The Fifth Book of Peace moves between Kingston’s autobiographical sketches of her pacifist activism and a fictional narrative that reanimates her protagonist from Tripmaster Monkey, Wittman Ah Sing, whom we left at the end of that novel firmly converted to pacifism. There he confronts the meltdown of a sing-along: ‘Nobody joined in, Nobody sang along. The Hawaiians had been through lots of cultural revolutions, and gotten rid of this stuff.’ Kingston is left to conclude, ‘Things that fiction can’t solve must be worked out in life.’14 And this has everything to do with an ancient war in Egypt, the bombing of Kosovo, Clinton’s bombing of Haiti, because ‘life’ is here and always counterposed to death, its measure and measurement. Kingston’s project is to test the ways the Pacific is cohered and at the same time linked to the global. The modernist credo, worn and ragged as it may appear, still offers an aesthetic that can address both the intensely problematic nature of any attempt to map commensurability, and the cost of not trying. Embedded within this open questioning of the postmodern, fragmented, discontinuous space of the Pacific as read through and in its imbrication in an extra-Pacific war is therefore a constant attempt to compare across time and space, to find some token of commensurability. But Kingston presses that aesthetic further by reinserting the discontinuous fragments into a revision of history, one that enlists history in a poetics of comparison. It is only by setting the grounds for comparison that a political response linking seemingly disparate moments and events and peoples can be forged. In like fashion, The Tropic of Orange raises deep questions as to how people are linked together, passively and actively, in the shifting, contingent forces of history. Whereas The Fifth Book

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of Peace took as its focus the intimate connection between war and the power of art to imagine otherwise, based first on art creating an imaginative space within which to test our intellectual and empathetic capacities to map commensurate histories and spaces, and to learn from this exercise, The Tropic of Orange looks at how time/space is reconstructed under the logic of economic networks of affiliation and imprisonment. Time, Space, and the Threads That Bind In The Tropic of Orange, Karen Tei-Yamashita presents a set of interlocking stories that trace the movements of brutally harvested body parts, citrus fruit and drugs, media and capital through and across the Pacific Rim. The ties that bind are those of NAFTA, and even a ‘super-NAFTA’ that is the hegemonic structure of feeling that bedevils the inhabitants of a newly integrated Pacific. If Kingston sees in the Oakland hills fire both the napalmed jungles of Vietnam and smouldering oil fields of Iraq, and as well the bombing of Kosovo and the bloody war plains of antiquity, telescoping time and space and seeing in that optics a commensurability of horror and destruction, one which incorporates both body and soul, then in Tei-Yamashita’s narrative we find that in a single chronotope (let us call it the imagined future of a NAFTA-produced Rim) time and space are warped and shaped as an epiphenomenon of a new arrangement of late capital. This is registered not only in large collective networks and communities invented by these new economics, but also in individual minds and bodies. The connection between a new sense of time and space is portrayed in a vertiginous telescoping in one man’s consciousness. Here we find the mad conductor Manzanar: The past flooded around him in great murky swirls. For a moment, he saw his childhood in the desert between Lone Pine and Independence, the stubble of manzanita and the snow-covered Sierras against azure skies. He remembered his youth, the woman he loved, the family he once had, a nine-year-old grandchild he was particularly fond of. He remembered his practice, his patients, his friends. Curiously. He remembered. The past spread out like a great starry fan and then folded in upon itself. Encroaching on this vision was a larger one: the great Pacific stretching along its great rim, brimming over long coastal shores from one hemisphere to the other. And there were the names of places he had never seen, from the southernmost tip of Chile to the Galapagos, skirting the tiny waist of land at Panama, to Shanghai, Taipei, Ho Chi Minh City, through a

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David Palumbo-Liu thousand islands of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Micronesia, sweeping about that giant named Australia and her sister, New Zealand. Manzanar looked out on this strange end and beginning: the very last point West, and after that it was all East. The inky waves with their moonlit spume stuttering against the shore seemed to speak this very truth – garbage jettisoning back prohibiting further progress.15

Here Tei-Yamashita begins conventionally enough – the thought of the past is anchored in places and objects, and from these derive specific memories of people and Manzanar’s relationship to them, of blood and mind and heart. But the single word ‘Curiously’ inserts a discrepant element – we have no way to judge what motivates that oddness, that off-centredness, nor its precise affective quality. As soon as memory is evoked, attaching people to places, it ‘folds in’ upon itself, withdrawing before a catalogue of an extra-local and extra-personal spatiality. And in place of the familiar we have the ‘names of places he had never seen.’ What invades his consciousness then are the markers of new intimacies and encumbrances, ones that are at once part of this new world and alienated from him as well. Their cohesion is absolute and yet inarticulate, irregular, in its expression and representation, and even contradictory, as west is east, moonlit blackness, advance and blockage. There is, in this double movement, a shared element – the stalling of the narrative at the utterance of one word, ‘curiously,’ and the repulsion of the shore. The mental processes that are set into motion in this new Rim are anything but smooth, as they appear to be a weird admixture of interfolded memories and images. Under these conditions, it is not unexpected that some attempt at finding continuity, commensurability, might be forced, not only for a sense of orientation, but also as armament against an unpredictable future. If the passage above announces an unsettling eclipsing of individual memory by a new sublunary condition, then in the following we see an ardent attempt to mobilize the historical record to pre-empt, or at least to glimpse, doomsday. However, the calibration seems unproblematic compared to the discernment of a point of origin: It was possible to judge the first doom in the Western Hemisphere as having occurred in 1494 when Columbus discovered Jamaica or in 1498 when he discovered Trinidad and Venezuela. Others might place the first doom in 1502 when Columbus discovered Martinique. By these calculations, doomsday could be predicted to be 2014, 2018, or 2022.16

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Thus, not unlike the exercise in finding commensurability between the time occupied by the United States in the Second World War and the time it has been involved in Iraq, or the exercise in trying to qualify the quantity of ‘collateral damage’ done in a time of war versus a simple count of those who have died, we find here an attempt to fix the word ‘doom’ into a history of genocides and enslavements. It is here that Tei-Yamashita touches upon one of the great ironies of history and memory and politics – to make distinctions is necessary, but distinctions can only be made if there is consensus on the terms employed, that is, it is the problem of incommensurability found above. Can we be sure that a word, deployed in two different instances, means the same thing? We find therefore a coterminous movement of separation (analysis, if you will) and contraction, of distinction founded upon similarity. Under these circumstances, all maps become one and yet not the same: ‘There are maps and there are maps and there are maps. The uncanny thing was that he could see them all at once, filter some, pick them out like transparent windows and place them even delicately and consecutively in a complex grid of pattern, spatial discernment, body politic.’17 But this phenomenon, I submit, is an epiphenomenon of late capitalism in The Tropic of Orange, as manifested in the compression of time and space: ‘“Time. It’s got something to do with time. Place. Damn!” Gabriel squinted. ‘Every which way you turn, the sun is in your windshield!’18 If in the long passage cited above personal memory, anchored in place, is swept away by the enormity of an expanded Rim, cohered by networks of finance and commodities, we find also the warping and distortion of the objects of the present as well: ‘Approaching the house, Rafaela looked for the usual landmarks: the orange tree, Rodriguez’s brick work, and the new fence ... She was not sure, but the fence was somehow curved, or maybe even longer, or stretched.’19 This is not simply the optical illusion of a mentalist-bent spoon, but the effects of a newly conceived spatiality and temporality at work. And yet, even in this darkest of visions, Tei-Yamashita sees the potential for a human response, armed precisely by a revolutionary sense of history. In a perfect Benjaminian moment, we find this pronouncement: ‘Time could heal, but it wouldn’t make wrongs go away. Time came back like a reminder. Time folded with memory. In a moment, everything could fold itself up, and time stand still.’20 This then is an instance of counter-memory – against the too easy covering over of violence we find the obdurate insistence on justice. Like that snapshot of historical affinity of which Benjamin speaks, we see time stand still and open to be

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interrogated, and the commensurability of two different historical moments mapped. And this is precisely what allows for a new ‘grid,’ and new mapping, and the possibility of individual memory-work to conjoin with those of others. Compare this passage to the one found above regarding Manzanar: ‘Little by little, Manzanar began to sense a new kind of grid, this one defined not by inanimate structures or other living things but by himself and others like him. He found himself at the heart of an expanding symphony of which he was not the only conductor.’21 This ‘symphony’ is found as well in the newsgroups Gabriel founds, a virtual community of information gathered to ferret out criminality and economic violence – the black market in harvested organs and the preying on the poor: ‘For every budget, I set up a newsgroup over the net ... Almost instantaneously these groups were cluttered with commentary, hearsay, and even legitimate info.’ Nevertheless, Tei-Yamashita, like Kingston, never fully gives way to optimism and idealism: that would be too easy. Instead, Tei-Yamashita ends her novel with an ambition to seek out and find connections, not the revelation of a completed project: ‘I no longer looked for a resolution to the loose threads hanging off my storylines. If I had begun to understand anything, I now know they were simply the warp and woof of a fraying net of conspiracies in an expanding universe where the holes only seemed to get larger and larger ... The picture got larger and larger. I could follow a story or could abandon it, but I could not stop.’22 This narrative compulsion is, I would argue, precisely the modernist compulsion, that which flies in the face of disintegration, disappearance, erasure. Both authors thus delve deeply into the constructedness of the Pacific Rim, how it is that at any particular moment its cohesion is owed to specific historical forces and events. But also, and crucially, how local instances call upon us to follow the thread of narrative that attaches, over and against the challenges of incommensurability, to another narrative. Both lead us through the postmodern back to the modern, which is not to say that they dismiss or sweep away the facticity of a world that is marked precisely by an all-out attack on history, but that neither of these authors has retreated from the challenge to envision another way of being together. However, beyond their employment of modernist forms, their recombinatory poetics reaches out to map a sense of how the historical occasions of war and peace, late capitalist exploitation and minoritarian resistance, provide a new grid of representation upon which to see the filiations, the threads, the connectivity that binds the Pacific and the world at large.

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NOTES 1 Williams, Politics of Modernism, 179. I wish to thank Steven Yao for his many suggestions and patience during the composition of this essay. Any errors remain mine alone. 2 See my essay, ‘Reterritorializing Asia-Pacific.’ 3 Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 66. 4 Shapere, ‘Evolution and Continuity in Social Change,’ 422. 5 See my essay, ‘Atlantic to Pacific.’ 6 In Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman, eds., Modernity and Identity, 55. 7 Howe, The Decline of the New, 12. 8 Bradbury and McFarlane, ‘The Name and Nature of Modernism,’ 27. 9 Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 105–6. 10 Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace, 13–14. 11 Ibid., 62. 12 Ibid., 177. 13 Ibid., 249. 14 Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey, 178, 241. 15 Tei-Yamashita, The Tropic of Orange, 170–1. 16 Ibid., 49. 17 Ibid., 56. 18 Ibid., 61. 19 Ibid., 70. 20 Ibid., 86. 21 Ibid., 239. 22 Ibid., 251.

SOURCES CITED Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane. ‘The Name and Nature of Modernism.’ In Modernism, edited by Bradbury and McFarlane. New York: Penguin Books, 1976. Hacking, Ian. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics on the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Howe, Irving. The Decline of the New. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Fifth Book of Peace. New York: Knopf, 2003. – Tripmaster Monkey. New York: Vintage, 1987. – The Woman Warrior. New York: Vintage, 1975.

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Lash, Scott, and Jonathan Friedman, eds. Modernity and Identity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Palumbo-Liu, David. ‘Atlantic to Pacific: James, Todorov, Blackmur and Intercontinental Form.’ In Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, 196–226. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. – ‘Reterritorializing Asia-Pacific: The Post-September 11 Logic of Hegemony.’ In The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, 187–202. Santa Cruz: North Atlantic Book, 2007. Shapere, Dudley, ‘Evolution and Continuity in Social Change,’ Philosophy of Science 56.3 (September 1989): 419–37. Tei-Yamashita, Karen. The Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1997. Williams, Raymond. Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. London and New York: Verso, 1989.

SECTION TWO Terrains

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3 Unpacking the Present: The Floating World of French Modernity christopher bush

In 1868, French art critic Ernest Chesneau recorded the following apocalyptic vision: Imagine ... that civilization were to accomplish over the course of the centuries one of those formidable turns of the wheel of which the history of humanity cites many examples; that it might let our Occident fall into the Void, as it has let fall such refined peoples as the Persians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, even the Greeks: what testimony about ourselves would we bequeath to these unknown races who would then take up the sceptre of the world? ... Based on the monuments of our art, they will take us for a fantastic people, living now in the style of Greece, now in the manner of the Italian Renaissance or the boudoirs of the eighteenth century, but never having our own, original life. Future archaeologists, future writers who want to write history by means of these monuments, will they, for the nineteenth century, be forced to leave a blank page beneath the word France?1

This grand rhetoric of memory and history, of the rise and fall of great civilizations, was provoked by the diversity of international products on display at the World Exposition in Paris in 1867. Chesneau’s tellingly titled Les Nations rivales dans l’art (Rival Nations in Art, 1868) thus offers dramatic testimony of the perceived importance during this period of not just high art but of arts and crafts for national identity. The very survival of nations seemed bound up with the simultaneously aesthetic and commercial challenge of expressing a national style in even the most banal of objects: the ‘monuments’ to which Chesneau refers

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might well include candle holders or spoons to be uncovered and pondered by future archaeologists. While Chesneau writes of a number of ‘rival nations,’ much of his attention – like that of many of his contemporaries – was directed toward Japan. The late nineteenth-century Euro-American mania for all things Japanese, japonisme, is generally understood to be aestheticist, exoticizing, and perhaps somewhat trivial, and, to some extent, it was all these things. But japonisme should also call our attention to the great passions aroused by historical shifts in these very categories, ‘aesthetic,’ ‘exotic,’ even ‘trivial’: shifts capable of producing, if only in anxious moments, apocalyptic visions of the fate of the modern West.2 The fact that japonisme raised such issues suggests that we have yet to reckon with its broader significance, specifically the ways in which this discourse of both aesthetic and cultural difference was mapped onto the ‘native’ problem of aesthetic modernity. As I will detail below, Japan seemed to represent both the locus of an aesthetic purity – the autochthonous, pre-industrial, pre-modern cultural expression of a people – and a rival source of commodities that might provide valuable lessons for how to become a successful modern nation. In this essay, I will trace some of the different ways in which Japanese art and objects provoked or facilitated new articulations of the relationship between nation and culture, between commodity and art, and between import and indigenousness, at the dawn of aesthetic modernity. Broadly speaking, japonisme as a movement began in Paris and moved outward from there. The earliest French Japan enthusiasts – I will here focus on Ernest Chesneau, Philippe Burty, and Zacharie Astruc – were sympathizers with, and in many cases friends of, the people we today consider the central figures of literary and artistic modernity, most notably Charles Baudelaire, Édouard Manet, and Émile Zola.3 Long before Americans marvelled at the French love of Jerry Lewis, the Japanese profited from the French enthusiasm for the works of such insignificant pop artists as Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai.4 The low esteem in which ukiyo-e woodblock prints were held at the time in their native country is apparent in the perhaps apocryphal story of how they were first discovered in France: as packing material for ceramics imported from Japan.5 In contrast to Chesneau’s vision, this primal scene suggests a different kind of excavation in the form of unpacking import commodities, an archaeology through which French artists were able to excavate some of the tools and blueprints needed for constructing their own vision of the present.

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While the subsequent enthusiasm for Japanese art was to some extent an ‘exoticism,’ it was also motivated by the lessons Japan seemed to offer for the central problem of aesthetic modernity: ‘the representation of the present,’ in Baudelaire’s famous phrase.6 On one level, Japanese prints were valued as representations of scenes of everyday life. Among other critics, Philippe Burty felt the prints represented an ‘encyclopedia’ of the everyday that recalled Dutch genre paintings.7 At a moment when the first impressionist exhibitions were being mounted, naturalism was emerging as a literary movement, and Baudelaire was writing of the need for a painting of modern life, Japanese woodblock prints depicted actors, fishermen, poets, monks, prostitutes, young, old, rich, poor, and petits bourgeois, as well as everyday objects, fashions, and social activities, most of them in an urban setting. Small wonder the ‘pictures of the floating world’ seemed so ‘modern’ when so much of French academic art was still dominated by ivory-skinned nymphs, pastorals, and scenes from Roman history and the Bible. For the majority of the japonistes, however, form was more compelling than subject matter. They understood ukiyo-e prints as pure reflections of the social milieu that produced them and came to believe that Japan was a culture in which beauty and utility, art and industry, had been reconciled. ‘It cannot be repeated too much,’ wrote Ary Renan, ‘the union of the arts, minor and major, is perfect there; the observation of nature is the common foundation.’8 Here already an important tension emerges: Japanese art is a perfect mirror of its society because it is a perfect mirror of nature. Whence the otherwise confusing fact that the two periods of Western art to which Japanese art was most routinely compared were the Gothic and the Greek: the basis of the comparisons is not qualities intrinsic to the artwork, but rather alleged similarities in modes of production and in the aesthetic unity of the diverse products. Ukiyo-e gave the japonistes images of an artists’ utopia less in their content than in their imagined harmony of form and content, unified in a national style. Like the artisans of ancient Athens and medieval Europe, Japanese artisans attained such heights that art and craft were no longer distinguishable. From the 1860s, French artists and art critics claimed they had found a ‘new Greece,’ as Zacharie Astruc put it, not in hope of establishing a new orthodoxy based on East Asian rather than GrecoRoman models, but rather of spurring the production of an art of their own time and place.9 Astruc wrote of the Greeks and Japanese as those who ‘painted their own life and times,’ while Jean Aicard claimed:

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‘The Greeks interpreted Greek life. To truly imitate Greece, as we should, we must express our own lives.’10 Similarly, as Deborah Silverman has observed, ‘Burty emphasized that the lessons of Japan were to be screened through a fine filter of national character. He was not proposing that French craftsmen imitate their illustrious Japanese counterparts but that they adapt the Japanese example to express French realities.’11 Like philhellenism, French japonisme resulted in direct borrowings, pastiche, and quite a lot of kitsch, but its original goals paralleled those of the more profound conceptions of Winckelmann, who called on artists not to copy [nachmachen] Greek art, but to imitate or emulate [nachahmen] its ability to work from Nature rather than convention, an ability prerequisite to the production of a truly national rather than a derivative art.12 Japanese art could be viewed as such a perfect reflection of its context because it was so routinely deprived of context. Unwilling or unable to learn much about Japan except through the artworks and commodities that were being imported, the French japoniste critics made a virtue of necessity by understanding the Japanese mentality as revealing itself more fully in its visual and plastic than in its literary arts.13 The arts were considered the truest and fullest expression of the people and so, tautologically, were also the site where the accuracy of this expression could be confirmed.14 Burty, who seems to be the only one of these critics who made any effort to learn Japanese, presents an emblematic case. He recounts going to one of Léon de Rosny’s language lectures, only to be dizzied by the profusion of written characters in Japanese. He nodded off, visions of hiragana dancing in his head, and was awoken by a fellow student. Frustrated and embarrassed, he stopped on his way home, buying, ‘to console [himself], at a tea shop on the rue de Rivoli, a series of little volumes decorated with very curious woodblock carvings.’15 He subsequently bought more than a hundred, the beginnings of what would become a collection fuelled by obsession. He then proudly concludes: I don’t know a single word of Japanese. And I’m not embarrassed about it, because I proceeded like the naturalists, who have never found the memoirs of the mastodon and the plesiosaurus [but] who nevertheless have succeeded in following them from their traces in ferns and in prehistoric mud. What I have learned about the psychology of the Japanese is certain. I do not always know what causes their anger, their fear, their laughter, their embraces, but I know with certainty that their artists translate these

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sensations, these feelings, or these acts with the precision and poetry that are a universal art and language.16

Unlike those future archaeologists of France imagined by Chesneau – who will be unable to perceive the essence of the culture they study because its remnants are but a clutter of borrowed conventions – Burty is able to proceed ‘like a naturalist’ because he considers the objects he studies to be natural and necessary indexes of their sources, as reliable as a fossil or a footprint. Burty thus not only bypasses but even valorizes his illiteracy by trumping culture with nature. While the causes of the traces he studies might not always be clear to him, he knows ‘precisely’ that they are accurate, that they have reliably encoded the inner life of the Japanese by employing an ‘art and language’ that are ‘universal,’ even if the details of their subject matter are not.17 Other critics came to similar conclusions, including Astruc, who made explicit the extent to which the reliability imputed to Japanese signs inverts the conventional Orientalist hermeneutic: the Japanese ‘want to be seen, since they confide their gestures to so many faithful mirrors ... It is no longer the Arab unveiling his inner life to our gaze through the extreme circumspection of his gestures – placed at a distance – little putting forth his acts and never figuring them. The Japanese tells himself ... His genius is the element that aids our surest investigations.’18 While this all means that Japanese art constantly figures Japaneseness, it also suggests that its ‘genius’ might, strangely enough, demonstrate, in the formal universality of its ‘faithful mirrors,’ a way for French artists to figure their Frenchness. Japonisme was, therefore, not exactly a form of exoticism in that its ultimate object was not Japan but the here and now of modern French life. If traditional Orientalism might be defined by the incorporation of foreign particulars into the (false) universality of Western forms of representation, here that logic is inverted.19 French japonisme is recognizably ‘modern’ to the extent that it deploys the other not as a reflection of, or decorative supplement to, the same, but rather as a way of revealing the otherness of the same and of shocking the everyday out of its invisibility in order to make it representable as the present. The particularity of japonisme as a historical break with, and a proto-modernist reversal of, traditional Orientalism becomes clearer if we consider the extent to which the japonistes themselves explicitly contrasted Japan to China, invariably at the expense of the latter. As Édouard Fraissinet writes in his history of Japan:

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Christopher Bush The Japanese does not eat, does not drink, does not sleep like the Chinese; he does not dress nor shave, nor greet nor sit like him. I would never reach the end if I wanted to signal all the differences of blood and of race that break forth in their being, in their slightest actions as in the most important. The inhabitant of China, more philosophical than a man of action, with a peaceful and modest character, is pleased to lead a tranquil and contemplative life. The Japanese is bellicose, tormented by violent passions.20

In his explicitly racialist discourse, the Chinese embody ‘Oriental’ passivity, the Japanese energetic activity in mind and body. Chesneau echoes Fraissinet’s sentiment, arguing that the European confusion of China and Japan has been completely to the disadvantage of the Japanese race ... Just as much as the narrow and dry rationalism of China contributed to plunging the enormous Mongol population into immobility and to distance it from any idea of the future, to make of it, in its presumption, push away with horror any attempt to progress; so too, on the contrary, have the Japanese people shown an enthusiastic and active intelligence in assimilating all the discoveries of Western civilization.21

Astruc similarly argues that, while the Japanese have learned from the Chinese, the former have incorporated their own more virile, penetrating spirit into the borrowed traditions. He concludes that the Japanese must be distinguished ‘from even the ancient Chinese, who are profound analysts but garish and mediocre in execution.’22 While such stark contrasts served to distance Japan from the broader ‘Orient,’ they continued to draw on the established logic and motifs of Orientalist discourse. Hegel writes in the Philosophy of History that the Chinese have not yet succeeded in presenting the beautiful as beautiful, for in painting they are lacking perspective and shadows. And even if the Chinese painter does a good job of copying European paintings (as he does a good job of copying everything), if he knows precisely how many scales a carp has, how many veins are in a leaf, and how the various trees and the bending of their branches are composed, still the sublime, the ideal, and the beautiful are not the basis of his art and historicity.23

The japonistes’ friend and contemporary Baudelaire complained of artists who lose their sense of overall form in ‘a riot of details,’ rather than

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focusing on the integrity of the whole,24 a concern echoed in Paul Dalloz’s claim that ‘Chinese art is obviously in a state of decadence ... the eye doesn’t know where to rest or find an architectural line; it is a riot of details which make the bourgeois ooh and ah, for he is always seduced by the complicated; but that no longer tempts the connoisseur.’25 For the japonistes, as for Hegel, Chinese rationalism imposed a sort of national contiguity disorder that had led to their current lamentable state: the Chinese had become politically and economically backward because their mentality was essentially restrictive and closed, while the Japanese, on the contrary, were aptly able to adapt to the modern world. Playing a Hegelian air in an art-critical key, these critics viewed Chinese art as a compendium of unsynthesized details, a mere accumulation of the residue of an analytic, materialist rationalism unable to form wholes. The Japanese, wrote Astruc, ‘compose, balance, harmonize, group. They are not bothered by forms. They show nature in its infinite number of frames, with its thousand surprises.’26 However inaccurate, these characterizations marked an important stage in the European image of East Asia. If previous generations had hardly bothered to distinguish Japan from China, these distant lands now seemed to embody opposite principles, as different from one another as two cultures could possibly be. China, understood to be sterile, static, senile, tradition-bound, and atheist, was thought to be overwhelmed by the modern world because it could only repeat the same ancient forms.27 Japan, in contrast, was spontaneous, young, even naïve, and seemingly able to reflect anything with its infinite variety of forms. Japan and China thus seem to embody respectively the naïve/sentimental opposition that appears in so many forms throughout nineteenth-century aesthetics.28 The japonistes’ racialist aesthetic discourse thus participates in the broader late nineteenth-century attack on historicism and cultural eclecticism that would find its perhaps most famous expression in Nietzsche’s ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.’29 These contrasting clichés of ‘China’ and ‘Japan’ are familiar enough today, but I would like to emphasize not only their early appearance (nearly a century prior to Cold War–era development theory) but also, more importantly, the contradictory ways in which they were bound up with the construction of Japan as an aesthetic ideal for the West. As we have seen, while Japan was seen as a kind of model for the production of a truly modern French art, the evidence for the appropriateness of this model lay precisely in the Japanese ability to successfully adopt, as Chesneau claims, ‘the discoveries of Western civilization.’30

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One implication of this contradiction is that ‘Western civilization’ in its then-current form, what was just beginning to be called modernity, was something to which even France would have to adapt. France might be modern in any number of ways – politically, economically, technologically, and so forth – but culturally? The troubling disparity and its possible consequences were vividly apparent to Chesneau. If France risked becoming a nation that had modernity without modernism, Japan seemed to embody a nation that had some version of what would become modernism, even if it was only coming into modernity. While ‘China’ during this period generally functioned in the Western imagination as an emblem of historical and cultural stasis, ‘Japan’ provided a kind of measure of the West’s struggles with its own modernity. French art, it seemed to many, was suffering from a sterility, ossification, and decadence of its own. Contemporary French artists were, wrote Eugene Véron, ‘almost incapable of doing anything but more or less successful pastiches.’31 Astruc broadened the claim: ‘our European art is lacking in originality. We pour ourselves into a few accepted moulds and that’s it.’32 The contrast between Chinese and Japanese aesthetics is therefore not simply a detail in the French reception history of East Asia; rather, it represents a kind of early solution in the emergent discourse of a problematic aesthetic modernity. The salutary role of Japan is explicit in japoniste discourse itself. At a time when ‘already the unprecedented seemed to have disappeared forever,’ writes Siegfried Bing, ‘the barriers behind which a small island people had jealously protected a long aesthetic autonomy were suddenly rolled back.’33 This ‘aesthetic autonomy’ rests, as we have seen, on the foundational claim that ‘The Japanese lives and dies on his native soil,’ as Astruc writes; the Japanese have ‘a national art ... [that] translates the feudal, lordly, complex life of this people, and comes directly from the nature it sees all around it.’34 The direct conjunction of the three cognate forms of natus (native, natural, and national) makes more explicit what japoniste discourse sometimes only implies, namely, that there is in Japanese art an intimate link between the natural and the national. A vigorous national art, it seems, requires the mediation of Nature, lest it become, like French academic or Chinese art, an empty repetition of traditional elements. The japoniste critics therefore invoke the nation as a way to combat tradition, implying a conception of the nation as something that, like nature, is ever-changing, dynamic, always waiting to be discovered anew in the moment. To be more precise: such a national sensibility would reflect and em-

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body a historically specific conception of nature. In the terms laid out in Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses (1966; The Order of Things), this is not the Nature of the classical age, in which unchanging types are repeated across time, but the Nature of Spencer or Darwin, in which the forms of life are variable and contingent, even if the laws of their formation are constant and universal. Modern aesthetic forms, therefore, cannot be constants handed down as artistic conventions, but must emerge as the ever-different traces of an ever-changing world. This is the function and full importance of a ‘Japanese’ aesthetic for the japoniste critics: it represents a different conception of the representation of nature in art, of course, but more importantly it demonstrates a new conception of nature as a new conception of art, specifically in the form of a national style that is, like this Nature, at once ever-changing in its particulars and unified in its laws. By implicitly reinventing the traditional aesthetic alibi of Nature, japonisme is thus able to reimagine Art as modern. It was so important for the japonistes to emphasize the difference between japonisme and chinoiserie, then, because japonisme was supposed not to add one more style to the historicist kaleidoscope of Gothic, classical, Renaissance, and so on, but to articulate a new conception of the universality of the aesthetic, one capable of registering as aesthetic form the transformations of the modern world. In short, the woodblock print ‘pictures of the floating world’ seemed to embody an aesthetic sensibility appropriate to a world in which all that is solid melts into air. Japonisme is not exoticizing in the usual sense, because ‘Japan’ is the here; equally, it is not historicist, because the age of Japan is the now. What distinguishes this formula from the more familiar Baudelairean conceptions of modernity is that it focuses on the here and now not for the sake of individual, subjective artistic experience and expression, but in pursuit of a national sensibility understood to be latent in the historical present but obscured by the bad collectivity of convention. Rather than celebrating the transcendental homelessness of modernity, this ‘exoticism’ was to provide a way home. The case of japonisme suggests, counter-intuitively, that overt cultural difference is central to the articulation of the classic modernist problems of social context and aesthetic autonomy. The understanding of japonisme I have been outlining might contribute to a revision of the senses in which we cite Paris as the ‘capital of the nineteenth century,’ specifically, the ways in which it served as a testing ground for both the representation of the present and the movement of modern Western

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art toward abstraction, a movement in part spurred, according even to conventional art historiography, by the discovery of Japanese art. As we have seen, the notion that Japanese art was a perfect expression of its society was in part a useful tautology for those who knew little or nothing about Japan. That is, a bracketing of any actual knowledge of social context was a precondition for the assertion that the works were a perfect expression of that context. It is this contradictory and/or tautological formulation of the primacy of national-historical context that would give japonisme is enduring power. Because a ‘Japanese’ aesthetic was ultimately understood to be about propriety as such, not about propriety with respect to any one thing, references to ‘Japan’ were increasingly effaced as the influence of ‘its’ aesthetic progressed.35 As Jan Hokenson has argued, emulations of Japanese aesthetics dovetailed with, and indeed helped in the formulation of, the aesthetics of not only the era I have been discussing but also those of the symbolist movement and, through it, modernism; by these later eras, however, the Japanese sources were often no longer identified. What began as a project of cross-cultural fascination led to a situation in which Japan is not only erased but is used to articulate the logic of its own erasure. To give two examples: Proust’s famous meditation on a hawthorn tree was originally about a flowering cherry tree, while Mallarmé’s working title for his unfinished ‘Le Livre,’ certainly an extreme expression of aesthetic autonomy, was ‘Pages from the Lacquered Cabinet,’ after the lacquered Japanese chest in which he kept his drafts. Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs, in which the name ‘Japan’ returns, but precisely as the name of a refusal of reference, might thus be read as a limit case of this tradition.36 In ‘Erasing Panama: Mallarmé and the Text of History,’ Barbara Johnson has written of the ways in which the movement of Mallarmé’s work toward increasingly strong claims of aesthetic autonomy proceeded through the erasure of historical references and proper names. Johnson then attempts to read this work ‘along the asymptote of his teleology,’ rather than at it its end point, that is, to read the process of erasure rather than starting from the blanks left behind.37 Similarly, I propose a reading of japonisme that, needless to say, does not focus on the accuracy of its understanding of Japan, but also does not move too quickly toward its role in the formal development of modernism. The specificity of japonisme is to be located along the trajectory from the claims of the former to the achievements of the latter, the trajectory by which what began as a demand for the expression of social context became a drive toward aesthetic autonomy.

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The broader significance of understanding japonisme in terms of such a trajectory rests in the particulars of how japonisme relocates the aesthetic, transposing it from the quasi-historical distance of eternal values localizable in an ancient Greek origin to an ethnographically conceived elsewhere that is at once contemporaneous (if geographically remote) and banished, in its purity, from the actual. If the early modern and neoclassical conception of the aesthetic is, broadly speaking, structured by the paradoxes of the ideal and its embodiment, the japoniste/modernist aesthetic is structured by the no less paradoxical ways in which Western modernity both flaunts and effaces its transnational character. A relocation of the aesthetic, therefore, marks not simply an abstract distinction between time and space (between the temporal-historical origin of Greco-Roman models and the spatial-exoticist models of the East), but a reconfiguration of the spatio-temporal dynamics through which art is understood to be both a sensuous object in the world and something else. In the logic of aesthetic modernity, the essential past is inseparable from a contemporaneous elsewhere, with the result that the aesthetic as such will henceforth be haunted by the spectre of cultural difference. It is not enough here to speak of Western ‘fantasy’ or ‘projection’ because it is not a question of the imaginary being imposed on the factual; rather, reality itself, the reality of the other, is banished to the realm of the imaginary but returns again and again, as art. It has become a widely accepted notion that nations are less the formal expressions of existing cultures than inventions of relatively recent date that compose themselves through a discontinuous montage of cultural history – inventions for which conceptions of national aesthetics have been essential.38 By way of a conclusion I would like to argue that japonisme stages something essential about the invention of modern nations – of nations as modern, but also of modernity as something national. My readings suggest that aesthetic modernity’s simultaneous desire for and refusal of social context was constitutive of japonisme, but also that japonisme was, in turn, a historically important engine of this dynamic. The trajectory of japonisme, then, from representation of a concrete contemporaneous elsewhere to the self-effacing origin of the aesthetic as such, implies the constitutive erasure of the transnational in the production of the national as culture. If much of the previous history of Western aesthetics was imagined from the unearthed ruins of ancient Greece and Rome, in the case of japonisme we see an aesthetic unpacked from crates of commodities from overseas; the woodblock prints, through which the universality of the aesthetic would be reimagined, had been used to keep those com-

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modities safe on their way to foreign markets. Japonisme thus produces the aesthetic not by unearthing the past, but by unpacking the present as elsewhere.39 No doubt this is not the only instance where we might find international commerce at the very origin of modernist ‘Western’ aesthetics. The mass-produced wares of woodblock prints or Japanese objets were the material prerequisites of a model of aesthetic modernity, an aesthetic based not on new ideal forms but on the ideal of having no ideal, a kind of national negative capability. The erasure of the transnational origins of modern national aesthetics is, therefore, bound up with the translation of the commodity into art. More than an aestheticization of the commodity, this translation entails a commodification of the aesthetic, not simply in the sense that art is bought and sold, but in the sense that the aesthetic as such is now defined by its ability to circulate, to be translated into a universality no longer defined in relation to an eternal origin but in relation to an acutely temporal here and now. To summarize in a formula: ‘Japan’ is transnational capitalism figured as Nature figured as Art, a series of ‘universals’ held together by the mediating particular of the Nation. Japonisme thus in many ways accords with the aesthetic function canonically outlined in Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981): the unification of social-historical contradictions in the utopian space of the work of art. But ‘aesthetic autonomy’ is itself not an abstract negation of history, one that could therefore be negated, in an equally abstract gesture, in the name of history; ‘aesthetic autonomy’ both shaped and bears the marks of the historicity of modernity. Rather than reading the primal scene of japonisme – the unpacking of commodities – as a straightforward debunking of the myths of modernist aesthetics, we might use it to reintroduce the rich historical and social contexts in which aesthetic autonomy was produced as an effect of commodification, and nationalcultural integrity as an effect of globalization, processes figured in the transformation, through asymptotic erasures, of Chesneau’s nightmare of the blank page into Mallarmé’s modernist dream.

NOTES 1 Chesneau, Les Nations rivales dans l’art, 4. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 2 While the general fact of Japanese ‘influence’ on French impressionism is broadly accepted, painters of the period wrote little about it. A number of the impressionists’ friends and early defenders, however, did. While their

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5

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names are not generally well known today, they were important voices in their time. For general discussions of japonisme, see Klaus Berger, Japonisme in Western Painting from Whistler to Matisse; Sigfried Wichmann, Japonismus; Gabriel P. Weisberg and Yvonne M.L. Weisberg, Japonisme; Gabriel P. Weisberg et al., eds., Japonisme; and Elisa Evett, The Critical Reception of Japanese Art in Late Nineteenth Century Europe. Deborah Silverman’s Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France has a relatively brief but excellent discussion of japonisme in the later part of the nineteenth century. For a broader survey of East Asian and Western artistic exchanges, see Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art. For a sceptical assessment of the impact of Japanese art, see Kirk Varnedoe, A Fine Disregard. For an extensive survey of japonisme in French literature, see Jan Hokenson, Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics. For biographies of two of the most important of these lesser-known figures and their relationships with the more canonical ones, see Gabriel P. Weisberg, The Independent Critic, and Sharon Flescher, Zacharie Astruc. On Baudelaire and his contemporaries as central to the emergence of Western modernism, see Baudelaire, ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’; T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life; Antoine Compagnon, The Five Paradoxes of Modernity; Paul de Man, ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’; Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire; and Michel Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ It should be noted that, while japonisme is now described as part of the birth of modernism, at the time it was also strongly allied with naturalism; or, rather, the latter was allied with the former. The major French naturalists, Émile Zola, Champfleury (Jules-François-Félix Husson), and the Goncourt brothers, were all important advocates of Japanese art. Hiroshige’s and Hokusai’s works remain among the most widely reproduced in the West. For a survey of the centrality of Hokusai in the Western reception of Japanese art, see Inaga Shigemi, ‘The Making of Hokusai’s Reputation in the Context of Japonisme.’ No one can determine whether the story is true, but, for my purposes, what matters is that everyone is willing to believe that it is. The story is repeated in most histories of japonisme, up to and including Ken Johnson’s ‘How a Japanese Master Enlightened the West.’ Of course, all exoticisms and primitivisms are arguably forms of selfregeneration through indirect self-representation; my claims are about the history and specific forms of this dynamic in japonisme. For canonical formulations of the ‘representation of the present’ as a modernist problem, see Baudelaire, Clark, Compagnon, De Man, Benjamin, and Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ Burty, ‘Japonisme II,’ 60. Renan, ‘La “Mangua” de Hokusaï,’ 94.

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9 Astruc, ‘Beaux-Arts. L’Empire du soleil levant,’ 1. 10 Astruc, qtd in Sharon Flescher, Zacharie Astruc, 531; Aicard, ‘Salon de 1872,’ 2. 11 Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France, 129. 12 On the ambiguities in Winckelmannian classicism, see Peter Szondi, Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie I. 13 This might have been otherwise. If the japonistes might be said to have made a virtue of necessity, this necessity was only relative. There was, after all, plenty that could be learned about Japan at that point, and English and American japonismes took very different paths from their French counterpart, emphasizing folkloric and religious contexts much earlier. For a discussion of these contrasting styles, see Jan Hokenson, Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics. 14 While the japonistes speak of a Japanese aesthetic in broad terms, they draw largely on woodblock prints and drawings, with a handful of references to architecture and sculpture; literature, for reasons I will discuss below, was necessarily avoided. 15 Burty, ‘Japonisme II,’ 60. 16 Ibid. 17 Such application of the methods of natural science to cultural objects had recently been canonized in Hyppolite Taine’s Philosophie de l’art, originally published between 1865 and 1869, based on lectures given beginning in 1864. Taine emphasizes, for example, how the knowing eye can deduce all the major characteristics of an animal from a skeleton fragment (see, for example, his discussion of the lion, 33). Like Taine, Burty goes beyond the reconstruction of discrete objects and uses them, be they lions’ teeth or Hokusai prints, to reconstruct the environment that must have produced them. Burty’s efforts to link artifact to environment echo Taine’s methodology: ‘We have but one method to fill in the lacunae; lacking a detailed history, we are left with general history; more than ever, to understand the work [of art] we are obliged to consider the people who made it, the customs that suggested it, and the milieu in which it was born’ (272). 18 Astruc, ‘Beaux-Arts. L’Empire du soleil levant,’ 2. 19 For the canonical formulations of the totalizing tendencies of Western representations of ‘the Orient,’ see Edward Said, Orientalism. 20 Fraissinet, Le Japon, 1: 59–60. 21 Chesneau, Les Nations rivales dans l’art, 415–17. 22 Astruc, ‘Beaux-Arts. L’Empire du soleil levant II,’ 2. 23 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 173. 24 Baudelaire, ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne,’ 1167.

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25 Dalloz, ‘Au Japon ... et, chemin faisant, un peu partout.’ 26 Astruc, ‘Beaux-Arts. L’Empire du soleil levant II,’ 2. 27 This contrast would become so well established that Ernest Fenollosa’s late nineteenth-century advocacy of Chinese culture would need to address it explicitly: ‘I have repeatedly heard it said, and seen it written, that the Chinese race and civilization, compared with the Japanese, are of a decidedly inferior type. Unprogressive China is supposed to be ugly, prosaic, and degraded; mechanical in temperament, sordid and practical in aim. The art of Japan, especially, is thought to shine by contrast with that of her Western neighbor. It is expressly asserted that the Chinese have never been a nation of artists, poets, and idealists’ (‘Chinese and Japanese Traits,’ 769). 28 I here use the terms ‘naïve’ and ‘sentimental’ grosso modo, as developed in Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung.’ 29 See Nietzsche, ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben.’ 30 Chesneau, Les Nations rivales dans l’art, 417. 31 Véron, L’Esthétique, xviii. 32 Astruc, ‘Beaux-Arts. L’Empire du soleil levant,’ 1. 33 Bing, Le Japon artistique. Documents d’art et d’industrie, May 1888, 5. 34 Astruc, ‘Beaux-Arts. L’Empire du soleil levant,’ 1–2; my emphases. 35 By the mid-1970s, as Jacques Dufwa writes, the visual borrowings from Japanese art had become so well known that ‘it was no longer necessary to imitate in order to make people realize the connection with Japan’ (Winds from the East, 50). 36 See Christopher Bush, ‘“The Other of the Other?” 37 Barbara Johnson, ‘Erasing Panama,’ 58. 38 The locus classicus of such arguments is Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. 39 I take the phrase and the substance of the idea ‘unearthing the past’ from Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past.

SOURCES CITED Aicard, Jean. ‘Salon de 1872.’ La Renaissance littéraire et artistique 2 (4 May 1872): 2–3. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Astruc, Zacharie. ‘L’Empire du soleil levant.’ L’Etendard, 27 February 1867, 1–2. – ‘L’Empire du soleil levant II.’ L’Etendard, 23 March 1867, 1–2.

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Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Baudelaire, Charles. ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne.’ In Œuvres complètes, edited by Claude Pichois, 1152–92. Paris: Gallimard, 1961. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism. London: Verso, 1997. Berger, Klaus. Japonisme in Western Painting from Whistler to Matisse. Translated by David Brett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Bing, Siegfried. Le Japon artistique. Documents d’Art et d’Industrie. May 1888. Burty, Philippe. ‘Japonisme II.’ La Renaissance littéraire et artistique, 15 June 1872, 59–60. Bush, Christopher. ‘“The Other of the Other?”: Cultural Studies, Theory, and the Location of the Signifier.’ Comparative Literature Studies 42.2 (2005): 162–80. Chesneau, Ernest. Les Nations rivales dans l’art. Paris: Didier, 1868. Clark, T.J. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Compagnon, Antoine. The Five Paradoxes of Modernity. Translated by Franklin Philip. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Dalloz, Paul. ‘Au Japon ... et, chemin faisant, un peu partout.’ Le Moniteur Universel. 31 July 1878. De Man, Paul. ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity.’ In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., revised, 142–65. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Dufwa, Jacques. Winds from the East: A Study in the Art of Manet, Degas, Monet and Whistler, 1856–86. Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1981. Evett, Elisa. The Critical Reception of Japanese Art in Late Nineteenth Century Europe. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982. Fenollosa, Ernest. ‘Chinese and Japanese Traits.’ Atlantic Monthly 69 (June 1892): 769–74. Flescher, Sharon. Zacharie Astruc: Critic, Artist, and Japoniste. New York: Garland, 1977. Foucault, Michel. Les Mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. – ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 32–50. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Fraissinet, Édouard. Le Japon. Histoire et description. 2 vols. Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 1864. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Vol. 12 of Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Edited by Eva Moldenhauser and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970.

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Hokenson, Jan. Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics: French Literature, 1867– 2000. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. Inaga, Shigemi. ‘The Making of Hokusai’s Reputation in the Context of Japonisme.’ Japan Review 15 (2003): 77–100. Johnson, Barbara. ‘Erasing Panama: Mallarmé and the Text of History.’ In A World of Difference, 57–67. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Johnson, Ken. ‘How a Japanese Master Enlightened the West.’ New York Times, 1 July 2005. www.nytimes.com/2005/07/01/arts/design/01john.html. Nietzsche, Friedrich. ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben.’ In Sämtliche Werke, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 245–334. Munich: DTV; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988. Renan, Ary. ‘La “Mangua” de Hokusaï.’ Le Japon artistique, January 1889, 108–12. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978. Schiller, Friedrich. ‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung.’ In Essays of Schiller, edited by Walter Hinderer and Daniel Dahlstrom, 179–262. New York: Continuum, 1993. Silverman, Deborah. Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Sullivan, Michael. The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Szondi, Peter. Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie I. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. Taine, Hyppolite. Philosophie de l’art. Paris: Fayard, 1985. Varnedoe, Kirk. A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994. Véron, Eugène. L’Esthétique. Paris: C. Reinwald, 1878. Weisberg, Gabriel P. The Independent Critic: Philippe Burty and the Visual Arts of Mid-Nineteenth Century France. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Weisberg, Gabriel P., et al., eds. Japonisme: Japanese Influence on French Art 1854–1910. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975. Weisberg, Gabriel P., and Yvonne M.L. Weisberg. Japonisme: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1990. Wichmann, Sigfried. Japonismus. Herrsching: Schuler Verlagsanstalt, 1980.

4 Rewriting the Literary History of Japanese Modernism sadami suzuki

Modernism and Research Methods for Its Reception History The exhibition ‘Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe’ held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1995 was a large-scale attempt to capture the entire history of symbolism. It went beyond the narrow definition, following symbolism’s trail to expressionism and to early modernism.1 In the field of French art, as its aficionados would agree, the borders of the subject progressively move toward the informal in the works of the master symbolist Gustave Moreau (1826–98). The impulse to shift to the abstract had already begun by the end of the nineteenth century, and some of Moreau’s disciples even became important members of fauvism, the forefather of early modernism. Within this artistic shift, could we also locate a connection between the treatment of Hindu mythology in Contes Indiens (1893?) by representative symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) and Moreau’s interest in Indian gods? As with Moreau, who was also known for his japonisme, Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), famous for his turn-ofthe-century ornamental style during his days in Les Nabis, followed the impressionists in expressing his fascination with Tokugawa-era ukiyo-e or ‘pictures of the floating world.’ In 1891, he exhibited a work consisting of four screens, entitled Femmes aux jardins, at the Salon des Independents, stating that the work was ‘inspired by Japanese by bu screens, except I separated each panel.’2 Could we see this perhaps as an example of ‘translation’ where the form of Eastern ‘everyday art’ (seikatsu geijutsu) was translated to fit the rigid criteria of a tableau? This essay aims to introduce a new historical perspective into the history of modern and contemporary Japanese literary art (bungei).

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Drawing connections between literature, art, and aesthetic theory, I want to propose a research method that links the broader reception history of modernism (from European symbolism to early modernism) and the history of ‘traditional art’ criticism. In particular, I will focus on the reception of symbolism in order to analyse Japanese ‘modernism’ in the literary arts, for the shift and ‘translation’ of what ‘symbol’ signified advanced the progress of modernism and were the first steps for the movement in Japan. The French impressionists praised the beauty of ukiyo-e, in particular, the works of Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849). In contrast, William Anderson’s Pictorial Art in Japan (1886) and ‘Revue of the Chapter on Painting in L’art japonais by Louis Gonse’ (Japan Weekly Mail, 12 July 1884) by Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (1853–1908) located the essence of ‘Japanese art’ in Muromachi-era Zen paintings. Art historian Inaga Shigemi elaborates on this point.3 Likewise, Anderson and Fenollosa, before moving to Japan, had the preconception based on their familiarity with wood-screen paintings and ceramics that one could locate the essence of ‘Chinese art’ in sansuiga (paintings of mountain and water). Okakura Tenshin (1862–88), inspired by both Anderson and Fenollosa, began a new movement in Japanese art, along with Yokoyama Taikan (1868–1958) and Kan  H gai (1828–88). Along with Fenollosa, who worshipped Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Äesthetik (Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 1835), he conducted excavations of Buddhist statues. In ‘T y  no ris  – nihon bijutsu o ch·shin to shite’ (The ideals of the East with special reference to the art of Japan), Okakura appropriated the Hegelian aesthetic notion of the three domains – metaphorical or Eastern, classical, and romantic or Christian4 – to designate the art of Muromachi-era Zen monks, such as Sessh· (1420–1506), as examples of ‘Asian romanticism’ (T y teki roman shugi).5 He claimed their art to be the ‘true modern art’ (shin no kindai geijutsu) that encapsulated the essence not just of the art of Japan but of Asia as a whole.6 Should we see this as an ‘appropriation’ of Western art, a ‘translation,’ or a cunning ‘switch’? In the aforementioned work, Inaga Shigemi also describes how, with the exhibit of Japanese art in Vienna in 1900, the German Secession Movement began to discuss an artistic method that could ‘awaken the sentiments’ (Stimmung) of the beholders.7 Inaga thus reveals how Japanese ukiyo-e and woodblock prints contributed to the dominance of the Hegelian theory of ‘feelings and mood’ (kibun j ch ) among the imported aesthetics of German sentimentalism.8

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Two phenomena thus become clear. Within the shift from symbolism to early modernism in Europe, one could locate hints of Japanese and Eastern art. Furthermore, Western aesthetics produced a new way of appreciating ‘traditional’ art in Japan, and there is clear evidence that these two phenomena intersected and unfolded together. No matter how one may situate ‘modernism’ in the artistic context, the main focus of this essay is to explore the connection between art or aesthetics (art criticism) and literature, and to investigate the exchange and the trade of artistic stimulation between Europe/the United States and Asia/ Japan. It is beyond the scope of this essay to include fields such as music. In Japan, modernism was overlooked for a long time in academic studies.9 However, in the early 1980s, sociologists such as Minami Hiroshi first turned critical attention to the movement by expounding on the emergence of mass society (taish· shakai) in Japan. He accomplished this feat through an examination of the left-wing criticisms that undermined the dissemination of Americanism in Japan in the years following the Great Kant  Earthquake of 1923.10 It is unarguable that artistic modernism in Japan became an official movement after the earthquake. Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901–77), studying abroad in Europe, returned home that year, equipped with the vigour of German avant-gardism, and began a movement in both art and theatre. In the literary field, in October of the following year (1924), Kataoka Teppei (1894–1944), Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972), and Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947) began publishing the literary journal Bungei jidai (The era of literature). Yokomitsu’s ‘Head and Stomach,’ the opening tale of the first volume, contained a new kind of depiction that depended on various metaphors. For example, the work begins with the famous line: ‘It was high noon. The special express train was running at full speed, completely full. The small station along its trail was silenced like a stone.’11 Whereas ‘like a stone’ is a simile (chokuyu), personification is also evident in the statement that the station was ‘silenced.’ Starting from around the beginning of the twentieth century, writers began to use metaphors like the one above to represent in a realistic manner the ‘impressions’ of the five senses. This is not to say that they were trying to directly ‘recreate’ the realism of impressions, but rather to replace them with expressions that were new and unexpected for the reader.12 Chiba Kameo (1878–1935), one of the top literary critics at the time, named Yokomitsu’s style ‘New Sensationalism’ (shinkankaku). This term attracted the attention of literary circles and became one of the keystones of Japanese modernism.

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In the early 1980s, literary scholars came to focus on Yokomitsu’s ‘Memorandum 8,’ in which he states: ‘When I look back, the Great Kant  Earthquake of Taish  12 greatly influenced Japanese citizens, an influence that could only be matched by that of world wars.’13 For a time, this analogy served as grounds for using the earthquake as a historical divider, a perspective that is less current today. Unno Hiroshi came to lead this re-examination, when he refuted the idea of the earthquake as a watershed in his Modan toshi t ky  – 1920 nendai (Modern city Tokyo – The 1920s, 1983). He presented depictions of cityscapes and the emergence of mass culture in the 1920s as occurring simultaneously with such phenomena in the rest of the world. Following his book, two exhibits – one called ‘Japon des Avant-gardes’ in Paris (1986), the other, ‘Modern Boy, Modern Girl: Modernity in Japanese Art, 1910–1935’ (1998), organized by Sydney University’s John Clark and Kanagawa Modern Art Museum’s Mizusawa Tsutomu – came to re-examine the periods from 1910 to 1970 and from 1910 to 1935, respectively. We also cannot forget Omuka Toshiharu’s Taish ki shinky  bijutsu und  no kenky· (Research on Taish  Era avant-garde art, 1995), which appeared between those two exhibits. However, there is nothing that matches this development in art history in the field of Japanese literature. In the final volume of the tenvolume collection ‘Modan toshi bungaku’ (Modern city literature), entitled Toshi no shish· (Collected poetries of the city, 1991), I introduced poems that captured the city of the 1910s as a spectacle. Since then I have tackled this issue by connecting it to the notion of ‘Taisho Life-centrism’ (Taish  seimei shugi), a discourse that emerged on the heels of the RussoJapanese War (1904–5). Just as modern European civilization would undergo a crisis brought on by the First World War, Japan went through a similar experience in this period. Even though its own soil had not been trampled upon, Japan witnessed the death and injury of soldiers in the Russo-Japanese War (death toll of 230,000), the sudden, drastic shift within the industrial structure that pushed for the establishment of large factories and heavy and chemical industries, and the ensuing expansion of the city. Many were opposed to the rapid industrialization and urbanization, and art and aesthetic theory arose with this cause as their basis. From the late nineteenth century to the twentieth, gaining a great understanding of the shift that was occurring in Europe around the same time, the art and aesthetic theory of Japan developed into their own individual movements. On a separate note, studying the reception history of art and aesthetics

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also leads us to the problem of cultural translation (bunka honyaku). This problem is clear just by looking at the vocabulary of translation. A word whose concept matches that of a Western word is chosen from traditional conceptions (dent  gainen) as a receptor. It is then transformed into a new word; but, depending on the difference between the existing conceptual system (gainen hensei) and the value system that supports it, gaps and biases may result. There are cases where these things are eventually corrected, but, in general, it is difficult to reconfigure words whose meanings become rooted and systematized by the sphere of education or publication. An example of the challenges inherent in this cultural translation is the various significations of the word ‘art.’14 This article will first sketch out the broader reception theory of modernism in Japan by tracing the shift in its conceptual system and aesthetic principles, and then turn to examples of actual works. I will then take up Matsuo Bash ’s haikai as an example of how this reception emerged through a re-evaluation of classical literature. Lastly, through an examination of The Era of Literature and ‘The New Sensationalism Manifesto,’ I will shed light upon the efficacy of this research method by showing the continuity of Japanese modernism, from the broader sense of the term to its more limited signification, and also by pointing out the rupture that interceded between them. The Reception of Modernism and Its Aspects – Conceptual System, Aesthetic Ideas, Works The Establishment of the Conceptual System From the latter half of the nineteenth century, Japan became engaged in constructing the field of ‘literature’ (as defined by university literature departments) by modelling it after the conceptual system of the humanities in modern Europe. In general, the transitional era of the twentieth century points to a period where modern Western formations became incorporated. To cite a clear example, around 1910, the word ‘art’ (bijutsu) became limited to the field of paintings and sculpture,15 and ‘literature’ (bungaku) (the narrow sense) or ‘literary art’ (bungei) became deployed among intellectuals to denote works of linguistic art (and research on them), mainly poetry, novels, and drama. It was around this time that a new history of linguistic art emerged. Different from the ‘Japanese literary history’ constructed in 1890 and modelled

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after studies in the humanities, this history eliminated kanbun (Chinese texts) and focused on the current trends in literary art.16 However, Japan’s ‘humanities’ did not define the humanities as a study of the human in opposition to Christian theology. Rather, it brought religious studies into the field, and, following other models of European nationalisms that established their own national religions, especially in Germany, it placed Shintoism at the root of its nationhood. Consequently, neither art history nor the history of linguistic art distinguishes art from material or linguistic works belonging to religious thought (Shintoism, Buddhism).17 In late Meiji theories on art, there existed also a certain tone of argumentation that emphasized religious elements and spirituality in their aesthetic reception. Their ideas were tied to transcendental spiritualism as put forth by Emerson (1803–82), Hegel’s Aesthetics, and the theories of Hartmann (1842–1906), who incorporated the ideas on the unconscious by Schopenhauer and Schelling into his own art theory. As the representative receivers and translators of these thoughts, one could name Kitamura T koku (1868– 94), Fenollosa, Okakura Tenshin, and Mori ]gai (1862–1922). In an article published in 2001, Inaga Shigemi examines the concept of ‘l’histoire de l’art du Japonais’ (Japanese art history) that was created and publicized purely for the Paris World Fair Exhibit of 1900. He shows that Okakura Tenshin tried to change the view, popularized by the French impressionists, of Japanese art history centred on ukiyo-e (popular woodprints in the Tokugawa era) and focused on ancient Buddhist statues.18 Okakura, one of the key creators of this construction along with Fenollosa, focused on Nara-period Buddhist statues, which in Hegelian aesthetics would be deemed ‘symbolic and/or Eastern art.’ Okakura regarded these statues as corresponding to the Greek and Roman sculptures of Hegelian ‘classical art,’ representing the balance between spirituality and materiality.19 There was, however, a difference in the historiography of Fenollosa and Okakura. Fenollosa, who returned to the United States in 1890, used the Sung Dynasty in China as the classical or the revival era of the classical in his analogies.20 Okakura, in contrast, located the ‘Eastern ideals’ (t y  no ris ) in Tang Dynasty ‘classics’ and defined the sansuiga, ranging from the Sung Dynasty to the Muromachi period, as ‘true modern art’ (shin no kindai geijutsu). This discrepancy between Fenollosa and Tenshin in the ‘translation’ game of Hegelian aesthetics leads us to explore the relationship between the reception of Western art and the

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evaluation of classical texts in Japan and the East. What was happening in the case of literary art? Aesthetic Principles (geijutsu rinen) In the early and mid-Meiji period, two literary methods arrived in Japan: realism, which sought to capture the reality of civil societies, and romanticism, which placed value on creativity and the imagination. Chinese poetic writings (kanshibun), whose spirit also upheld reality, and nativist thought (kokugaku) functioned respectively as their receptors, and the principle of depicting realistic landscapes and feelings became very visible.21 During the transition to the twentieth century, however, this cultural translation went through a complete makeover. Let me summarize this transformation by dividing it into five points. First, German critic Johannes Volkelt, in his Asthetische Zeitfragen (1895), criticized the move from naturalism to symbolism, focusing on writers such as Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. These playwrights and novelists had moved toward symbolism as they began to be interested in the mysticism that could be found in the depth of nature or in the instincts of organisms. Comparing the work of these writers to the sculptures and fantastic lithographs of Max Klinger, Volkelt named them post-naturalists (Nachnaturalismus). Volkelt’s work was introduced to Japan by Mori ]gai’s Sanbi shinsetsu (New theories on aesthetic appreciation) in 1900. Subsequently, during the rise of religious sentiments and the heightening of spirituality in Japan following the Russo-Japanese War, European symbolist art and its movement toward mysticism, represented by Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), became of interest. As representative examples of this trend, we can cite the introduction by Ueda Bin (1874–1916) of ‘symbolist poetry’ in the early half of the 1900s, the works of Kanbara Ariake (1875–1952), and the proposal for ‘New Naturalism’ (shin shizen shugi) put forward by Iwano H mei (1873–1920) and Shimamura H getsu (1871–1918). Also, in November 1910, the coterie magazine Shirakaba (White birch) published a special issue on Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), bringing about a Rodin boom among young intellectuals; his sculptures, too, were interpreted as symbols of a certain profound ‘life’ (seimei). Second, Henri Bergson’s Matière et mémoire (1896) and William James’s ‘A World of Pure Experience’ (1903) were introduced to Japan. These new philosophies captured consciousness (represented by the senses,

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perception, direct experience, or pure experience) as the basis of human recognition and brought about a trend that focused on the five senses and their impressions, unification with nature, and the unification of the subject with the object. Tayama Katai’s ‘“Sei” ni okeru kokoromi’ (An experiment on ‘life,’ 1908) expands on this emphasis on the five senses by describing writing as ‘a phenomenon of just seeing, listening, and touching.’22 Takamura K tar , in his ‘Midori iro no taiy ’ (Green sun, 1910), also declares that ‘if the sun appears to be green, it is fine to depict it as green.’23 Theories on the unification with nature could be seen in such writing as Fujioka Sakutar ’s criticism on Many sh· (The Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, ca. 759), the essays of poet Yamabe no Akahito in his Kokubungakushi k wa (Lectures on national literary history, 1907), and Mushanok ji Saneatsu’s ‘Rodan to jinsei’ (Rodin and his life, 1910). Third, the notion of ‘feelings and mood’ within the imported aesthetics of German sentimentalism became an important issue. A clear example of this can be seen in Kitahara Hakush·’s phrase, ‘My symbolic poems mainly revolve around the impressions of sentiments and the symphony of mood,’ cited in the introduction to Jash·mon (Heretical Faith, 1909).24 Fourth, on 29 August 1911, Abe Jir  published his ‘Naiseikatsu chokushi no bungaku’ (Literature of the direct portrayals of inner life) in the Tokyo Asahi Newspaper. The term ‘inner life’ refers to the inner workings of life, or how the mind (kokoro) functions. Around the same time, art critic Louis Hynde’s The Post-Impressionists (1911), based on Roger Fry’s London exhibit of ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists,’ became popular among those interested in French art. Kimura Sh hachi thus translated the entire text in an issue of Gendai no bijutsu (Contemporary art, vol. 17) in 1913, accompanying the translation with twenty-four illustrations. In this text, Hynde states that representing the object’s appearance is merely an explanatory, outmoded method and that ‘art is what expresses one’s emotions' (kanj ).25 Fifth, these trends then became categorized under the rubric of ‘the symbolic expressions of life’ (seimei no sh ch  hy gen). This idea does not point to any religious gods or to any matter or laws of motion pertaining to materialism. It is not a universal principle, but rather an expression that upholds the notion of ‘life’ (‘true life,’ ‘the great life of the universe’) and places this idea at its centre. ‘Life-centrism’ in Japan, or ‘Taisho life-centrism,’ emerged from the ‘Life-centrist’ thought in turn-of-the-century Europe. Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) in

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his A Confession (1879–81) and in On Life (1887) proposed that ‘God is life.’ German biologist Ernst Haechel wrote his ‘Theory on All Things Possessing Life’ in Die Lebenswunder (1904). Wilhelm Dilthey (1833– 1911) expounded on ‘interpretations of life’ or ‘philosophies on life’ (Lebensphilosophie), while Bergson published his Creationist Evolution (1907). Japan was also introduced to the philosophy of the women’s liberation movement led by Swede Ellen Key (1849–1926), at the core of whose ideas lay ‘the religion of life.’ Taish  ‘life-centrism’ was a diverse discourse, which incorporated not only all of these European ideas, but also blended together various ideas such as modern biology (especially theories on evolution) and the Eastern (or Chinese) notion of qi (‘spirit’ in Buddhism, especially Zen), the philosophy of Wang Yang-Ming, including its ‘left branch,’ and Shintoism. Beginning with Kitamura T koku’s ‘Naibu seimei ron’ (On inner life, 1893) and ‘Biteki seikatsu o ronzu’ (On aesthetic life, 1901) by Takayama Chogy·, who was inspired by Nietzsche, various philosophies were born, their thinkers ranging from biologists to Buddhists and Shintoists. Some of the key texts are Iwano H mei’s ‘Shinpiteki hanj· shugi’ (Mystical satyr-ism, 1906), Kinoshita Naoe’s Zange (Confession, 1906), Ueda Bin’s ‘Shin d toku setsu’ (New lectures on morals, 1910), Nishida Kitar ’s Zen no kenky· (Studies on the good, 1911), Kakei Katsuhiko’s Koshint  taigi (The great cause of ancient Shintoism, 1912), and Kuriyagawa Hakuson’s Kindai no ren’ai kan (Modern views on love, 1921). In the field of aesthetic theory, we can also cite Okakura Tenshin’s T y  no ris  (The ideals of the East, 1903), Iwano H mei’s Shin shizenshugi (New Naturalism, 1908), Mushanok ji Saneatsu’s ‘Rodan to jinsei’ (Rodin and his life, 1910), Shimamura H getsu’s ‘Seimei’ (Life, 1912), Watsuji Tetsur ’s G·z  Saik  (Revival of idols, 1918), Nishida Kitar ’s ‘Bi no honshitsu’ (The essence of beauty, 1920), Sait  Mokichi’s ‘Tanka ni okeru shasei no setsu’ (Theories of depiction in short poems, 1920–1), and Kitahara Hakush·’s ‘D y  shikan’ (My views on children’s songs, 1926). No matter if one intended to deepen or heighten one’s emotions, trying to depict one’s experience in a realistic manner, or if one wanted to be able to close one’s mind, everything translated into ‘symbols of life.’ The artistic theory of ‘the symbolic expression of life’ implied a certain way to free oneself from all boundaries of expression, and each strand of thought came to seek its own form of expression that suited its ideals. The European movement of artistic modernism underwent this trend as well. Italian futurism, influenced by Bergson’s Creationist Evolution,

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vorticism in Britain, and French surrealism, which was derived from Freudian psychoanalysis, are all examples of this life-centrism.26 Artistic Creation In turn-of-the-century literary art, there is an attempt to learn from the sketches of the impressionists and capture various scenes of nature changing with the play of light. Tokutomi Roka’s Shizen to jinsei (Nature and life, 1900) and Kunikida Doppo’s Musashino (The field of Musashi, 1901) are two examples of this. They drew their ideas from the landscape art of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796–1875) and the poetry of William Wordsworth (1770–1850), respectively, and stated that they were trying to depict and write about the essence of nature, or, in other words, ‘life.’27 In the field of art, Fujishima Takeji (1867–1943) painted Ch  (Butterfly, 1900). In it, he tried to capture the shift from pleinarism to romanticism.28 Using the goddess of love in Greek mythology, Psyche, as his topic, he arranged his work based on the symbolic expressions of French romanticism. In 1900, Aoki Shigeru (1882–1911) also became a seminal figure in introducing impressionism, pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood works, and works by Moreau and Chavannes (1824–98). Aoki’s representative work Umi no sachi (Product of sea, 1904) gave him the opportunity to become friends with Kanbara Ariake, who composed the poetry anthology Shunch sh· (Collection of spring birds, 1905), which is seen as the first Japanese work to actually capture the principles of symbolism. The word ‘symbol’ was first introduced to Japan through the writing of Eugène Véron (1825–89), translated by Nakae Ch min (1847–1901).29 Véron, in his L’Esthétique (1878), criticized the training method at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which consisted of copying other masterpieces, and propounded that the expression of the artist’s individualism and emotions could only be born from depicting actual objects. In other words, he sought to accomplish what the Romantics envisioned by using the methods of realism. He states that, in the art of the past, ‘even sculptors all turned to statues of gods or heroes as their topic. If not, they sculpted strange objects that resisted interpretation and claimed them to be symbols of religious sublimity.’30 His ideas here recall Hegel’s, in that he sees art as a method that symbolizes primitive religious notions, no matter how artistic principles may vary.

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Separate from this, there was also another use of the word ‘symbol,’ one which designated a new movement in the arts. Ueda Bin is credited with being the first person to use this term, when, in an issue of My j  (Morning star) published in January 1904, he translated the title of a poem by the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916) as ‘Washi no uta (sh ch shi)’ or ‘Eagle’s Songs (Symbolist Poem).’ Beginning with this, many symbolist works began to be translated and introduced. However, the term ‘symbolist poetry’ or ‘symbolism’ in Japan came to connote a variety of movements in turn-of-the-century Europe. Not limited to French symbolism only, it included the symbolist poems of Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929), who emphasized the ‘feelings and mood’ aspect of German Romanticism, and whose poems were described as touching on the secrets of life. It also referred to the aesthetic appreciation of English critic Walter Pater (1839–94) and to the works of Arthur Symons, whose aestheticism appeared between impressionism and symbolism. Rossetti’s sonnets, such as ‘The House of Life,’ also emerged during this shift, and Verhaeren’s Les Villes Tentaculaires (1895) even compared machine civilization to an organism, singing about its moving powers and its joys and sorrows. ‘Symbolism,’ then, was a flexible term that encompassed all of the meanings above, not distinguishing one movement from another. This complicated situation also applied to the reception of European paintings, where impressionism, les Nabis, symbolism, and postimpressionism all arrived in Japan as intermixed movements. Students of Western painting, such as Okada Sabur suke (1869–1939), Sakamoto Hanjir  (1882–1969), Nakamura Tsune (1887–1924), and Yasui S tar  (1888–1955), came to assimilate these various styles. From the 1910s to the 1920s, this influence extended to the arena of Japanese paintings as well, and it may be said that the only difference between Japanese and Western paintings lay in their use of pigmentation. Hayami Gyosh· (1894–1935) adopted bold compositions from traditional elements. Tsuchida Bakusen (1887–1936) borrowed from Gauguin’s themes and arrangements. Within Kyoto art circles, many young artists embraced expressionism, including Kawabata Ry·shi (1885–1966), who deployed daring compositions and use of colour. At the same time, Japan also witnessed a revival of nanga – portraiture of literary scholars in a style adopted from the tradition of China’s Zen paintings (nansh·ga) – which had emerged as its own movement during the Tokugawa period. It is said that the revival of nanga occurred along with that of Chinese

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studies (kangaku) in the 1890s;31 however, the actual portraits date from around the 1920s.32 A similar trend can be located in the watercolours of Yorozu Tetsugor  (1885–1927) and Murayama Kaita (1896–1919), both known as painters of the early modernist style. This style is also especially visible in the works of Tomioka Tetsusai, who in his late years became interested in the School of Yang-Ming. With his freeflowing use of the brush, he created numerous ink paintings that could almost be mistaken for expressionist art, a style that led him to become internationally acclaimed.33 The seeds of European early modernism were being blown over to Japan, landing one after another, all around the same time. With this, the art world of Japan came to witness an incredible simultaneous flowering of talents. When Filippo Marinetti (1876–1944) delivered his ‘Futurism Manifesto’ in Paris on 20 February 1909, the Japanese response was swift. Takamura K tar , who was in France at the time, immediately sent his observations to the Japanese newspapers, and Mori ]gai’s abridged translation of the manifesto appeared in the literary journal Subaru (The Pleiades) on 24 March 1909, one month later. Following this, the ‘Futurism Manifesto’ was retranslated about every other year. Kanbara Tai (1898–1997), who published his so-called postcubist poems in coterie magazines from the mid-1910s, began, along with T g  Seiji (1897–1978), to explore a new painting style. This style aimed to divide the movements of the body into units of time. Let me cite from Kanbara’s representative work, 'Manatsu (k ki rittai shi)’ or ‘Mid-Summer (Post-Cubist Poem)’ (1917): oxygen, nitrogen, argon the trembling of the atoms who dance frantically and in disarray air, factories, plants, and roads too come together, unify, then separate to dance to the rhythm of the sun now every colour, every light, every moment infused with life the suffering life of automobiles, cars, airplanes, and bombs all become ours. Oh Mid-Summer, Oh Mid-Summer, Oh the Midday of Mid-Summer

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In 1922, poet and painter Ogata Kamenosuke also produced lyrical abstract art, reminiscent of the constructivism of Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944). In the field of short poems (tanka), Maeda Y·gure (1881–1951) stands out as the exemplary figure. In the introduction to his third collection of poetry, Ikuru hi ni (Days of living, 1914), he states that he created poems that ‘made me feel as if they possessed the most direct connection to the self, gave the strongest sensation of tugging at the self, and gave the feeling of sensing the self’s own flow of life.’35 Among the poems here are ones influenced by Van Gogh and the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944). One can even find direct references to these artists, such as: ‘Remembering the painting of Van Gogh in prison walking in a circle of prisoners’; ‘In the blazing sun, the hollyhock there yonder colours the corner of my world yellow’; and ‘Remembering Munch’s The Room of Deathbed, I listen to the night wind, trying to sleep.’ There are also post-impressionist-style poems that sing of certain beauty in the wild, and are filled with light: ‘The diving girl, who strips her kimono in the setting sun, turns towards the ocean and becomes completely naked.’36 In the famous work by Sait  Mokichi, Shakuk  (Red light, 1913), too, one finds similar phrases: ‘The red head of the lion is soaked in the spinning light of the heavens’; ‘Upon looking at the self-portrait of Gauguin, I remember the day when I killed the yamako (mountain demon) in Michinokuni’; ‘The flower field dripping with the red light of the setting sun, blurs and melts in the distance.’ Additionally, in Aratama (Unpolished soul, 1921), a poem reads: ‘Soaked in the tide, naked boys come towards the fires on the beach, transparent and low.’ These examples reveal how Western art, from impressionism to expressionism, had deeply embedded itself in the sphere of Japanese literary arts by the 1910s.37 Criticism of Bash  and the Shin kokinwakash· In the introduction to Shunch sh· (Collection of spring birds, 1905), Kanbara Ariake claims: ‘When Bash  emerged in the Genroku era, he

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succeeded in creating a certain spirit by endowing sekku (short verses) with the Zen philosophy of Genchi38 and interweaving with it the ordinary. This is the closest thing to symbolism in our literature.’39 In other words, Bash  managed to inscribe the secret of the universe in just a few words, while at the same time creating a sense of heightened spirituality through quotidian words. As is evident here, the discovery of ‘symbolism’ in Japan greatly affected criticism of classical literature. Comparing Bash ’s haikai to Japan’s symbolist poetry thus became a popular practice. Noguchi Yonejir  (1875–1947), who actually began his career as a poet in the United States, was invited to London in 1914, after his return to Japan. There, he lectured on ‘The Spirit of Japanese Poetry’ (1914; Japanese translation, 1915) and spread haiku criticism in Europe. He compared haiku to the poetry of William Blake (1757–1827), whose mystical symbolism was excavated by and fascinated William Butler Yeats (1865–1939). Their poetry could be seen as carrying on the ideas that Arthur Symons expressed in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). In contrast to the popular belief that Japanese haikai was merely a form of linguistic play, Noguchi introduced Bash ’s haikai as something that intensifies one’s spirituality in short, easy words. His words affected his own home country as well and brought about a growing interest in Bash  among symbolist poets, such as Miki Rof· (1889–1964).40 The movement to re-evaluate Bash  reached a peak in the 1920s. At its centre, poet ]ta Mizuho (1876–1955) examined classical poetry as symbolic expressions of universal life. He praised Saigy ’s poems, with their strong overtones of Buddhism, as a form of high art, and he also applauded Bash ’s notion of ‘quiet elegance’ (sabi ). In 1920, ]ta established a research group on Bash ’s hokku (the opening phrase of a renga), along with writer K da Rohan (1867–1947), haiku poet Nunami Keion (1877–1958), critic Abe Jir  (1883–1959), Abe Yoshishige (1883–1966), Komiya Toyotaka (1884–1966), and Watsuji Tetsur . The minutes of their meetings were serialized in the poetry journal Ch on (Sound of the tide). Abe Jir , Abe Yoshige, and Watsuji Tetsur  were seminal figures of the philosophy on universal ‘life,’ and their studies – Bash  haiku kenky· (Study of Bash ’s haiku, 1922), Zoku Bash  haiku kenky· (Sequel to study of Bash ’s haiku, 1924), Zoku Zoku Bash  haiku kenky· (Sequel to the sequel to the study of Bash ’s haiku, 1926) – were published by the firm of Iwanami-shoten, along with ]ta Mizuho’s Bash  haikai no konpon mondai (Fundamental issues of Bash ’s haikai, 1926) and Bash  renga no konpon kaisetsu (Fundamental interpretations of Bash ’s linked poetry, 1926).

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With this movement in motion, Bash ’s re-evaluation also escalated within the literary circles (bundan). Sat  Haruo, in ‘“F·ry·” ron’ (On ‘refinement,’ 1924), names the moment where nature and the self come together as ‘refinement’ and cites Bash ’s literary world as the epitome of this idea. He urges writers to go beyond the modern novel, which focuses on the struggles of the human will, by applying this philosophy. Uno K ji also states, in ‘'Watakushi-sh setsu’ shiken’ (My perspective on ‘the I-novel,’ 1925), that although no Japanese writer could write novels to equal those of Balzac (1799–1850), no Western writer could recreate the world of Bash . He corrects his former opinion that works in essay style, such as Shiga Naoya’s ‘Kinosaki nite’ (At Kinosaki, 1917), could not be considered to be a particular style of novel and comes to accept the value of ‘mental novels’ (shinky  sh setsu), where writers express their states of mind in essay style.41 Meanwhile, poet Hagiwara Sakutar  (1886–1942), who used to be critical of conceptual symbolist poetry and even wrote an essay called ‘Banish the Poetry of the Mikiro F· School,’ began hailing Bash ’s name as well. In ‘Sh ch  no honshitsu’ (The essence of symbols, 1926), he claims that, although nineteenth-century French symbolism led by Mallarmé revolved around the themes of ‘mysticism, enchantment, ghostliness, and Eastern fatalism,’ today’s European modernism was finally understanding its essence intuitively and approaching symbolism in the East, represented by Bash .42 This may sound like an unsubstantiated claim, but he was actually basing his ideas on the words of Ivan Goll (1891–1950), the German expressionist poet, who was born in Alsace and partook in the French avant-garde poetry movement, and who had argued that ‘the model for symbolism is the Japanese haiku.’43 Following this, Japan witnessed various influences of haiku in the Western world, in the imagism of Ezra Pound (1885–1972), the short poetry movement of French poet Max Jacob (1876–1944), and the method of montage practised by Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948). Hagiwara Sakutar , then, in a later essay called ‘Nihon shiika no sh ch  shugi’ (Symbolism in Japanese poetry), professed the imperial anthology Shin kokinwakash· (The new poetic anthology of the present and the past, 1205) to be the embodiment of Japanese symbolism. In this manner, Bash ’s haikai and the anthology came to be narrated as being representative of ‘Japanese symbolism, the king of all symbolisms.’45 In the 1930s, this trend continued to be developed by people like ]nishi Yoshinori (1888–1959), known to be the first researcher of

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Japanese aesthetics, and Okazaki Yoshie (1892–1982), who promoted ‘the study of Japanese literary art’ (nihon bungeigaku). Borrowing the notion of ‘sentimental symbolism’ from German aesthetics, they spearheaded the argument that ‘things of Japanese-ness’ (nihonteki narumono) were represented by Shin kokinwakash· and by the ‘aesthetic of rustic solitude’ (wabi), ‘aged tranquillity’ (sabi), and ‘mysterious subtlety’ (y·gen) propounded by the great Noh playwright Zeami (ca. 1363–1443).45 For this thought to concretize, the Iwanami publishing house once again came to provide the necessary media. Rupture from Early Modernism The word modanizumu in Japanese literary history has often been used to point to the New Sensationalists and their surroundings. However, this designation looks at the surface of the phenomenon only, focusing on the writers’ new metaphorical method or their popular subject of the cityscape. This understanding of modanizumu overlooks the important shift in representation that had been taking place since the turn of the century, mainly the move from direct representation (object to representation) to the representation of impressions (object to impression to representation). There was also a new form of representation that dealt with the expression of inner life (naibu seimei). In fact, the manifesto published by the New Sensationalists in their seminal journal Bungei jidai also surrounded the notion of ‘life.’ Kataoka Teppei’s ‘Wakaki dokusha ni atafu’ (For the young readers, December 1924) emphasized the negotiation between a work’s material and the writer’s ‘life.’ Kawabata Yasunari’s ‘Shinshin sakka no shin keik  kaisetsu’ (Analysis of new trends among up-and-coming writers, January 1925) stated that ‘new happiness’ (atarashii yorokobi) arose from being able to swallow everything (banbutsu) into your subjectivity (shukan) and that, vice versa, if one could allow one’s subjectivity to be swallowed up by everything, that would serve as a ‘new rescue’ (atarashii sukui). Kawabata summarizes that it is precisely this ‘unification of the subject and the object’ that governs the new rising writers of his time.46 The New Sensationalists were trying to theorize the new textual form that was touched off by French works such as Paul Morand’s Ouvert la nuit (1922), where numerous metaphors were freely used as a form of style. In ‘Kankaku katsud  – kankaku katsud  to kankakuteki sakubutsu ni taisuru hinan e no gyakusetsu’ (Sensational Movement – Sensational Movement and the counter-argument to the criticism of Sensationalist

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works, February 1925; later called ‘New Sensationalism’), Yokomitsu Riichi defines his meaning of ‘sensation’ as ‘the instinctive trigger within one’s subjectivity that functions to strip away nature’s outside appearance and jump into the thing itself.’47 This passage has long attracted the attention of scholars, but it is not as if his ideas were so different from those of Kataoka Teppei or Kawabata. To describe subjectivity as something that ‘strips away nature’s outside appearance and jumps into the thing itself’ is akin to saying, in the words of Sait  Mokichi, that it is ‘to enter into reality and depict first-hand the unification of nature and the self.’48 In fact, Yokomitsu follows up on his earlier comment and states: ‘With this alone, it would just be an eccentric explanation, and I have not yet experienced the newness within that new sensation.’49 Yokomitsu continues to argue that the older notion of ‘sensation’ is something that directly symbolizes the content of one’s intuition: ‘One’s intuition turns into “pure subjectivity” because it bypasses subjectivity and projects the object [of the empty subject].’50 As opposed to this, ‘new sensation’ represents an expression where the dynamism of the intellect (that is, the action of understanding taking on a dynamic form) takes one’s obtained cognition (the ‘pure subjectivity’ that emerges as the object within one’s subjectivity or ‘subjective objectivity’) and translates it into a ‘symbol.’ He was promoting a way of effacing subjectivity and creating a situation where subjectivity and objectivity were unified. This would result in a new cognitive content, and, by endowing the content with an intellectual operation, one would be able to re-construct and create a ‘symbol.’ Yokomitsu defines ‘new sensation’ as a way of taking apart a form in order to create a new form. He points to various movements as his examples: futurism and its notion of time, cubism and its concept of space, and the dadaist and expressionist expressions of mental images. From the 1910s onward, what William James termed ‘direct experience,’ ‘pure consciousness,’ or ‘non-reflective consciousness’ was what Japanese philosophers called ‘pure objectivity’ (junsui kyakkan) taken in empty subjectivity. This phrase was used to capture the concept of effacing self-consciousness and subjectivity in order to unify them with the object. Yokomitsu saw the attempt to directly represent this ‘pure objectivity’ as an ‘outmoded expression of sentiments’ in the old meaning (ky·rai no kankaku no hy gen) and called for a more intellectual method of creation. For Yokomitsu, New Sensationalism was not the

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problem of how one sensed or felt the object – it created a different world through new uses of metaphors and fragmented sentiments. This resonates with what Nishida Kitar  claimed in ‘Bi no honshitsu’ (Essence of beauty, 1920), compiled in Geijutsu to d toku (Art and morality, 1923). In the essay, Nishida applies Bergson’s theory of ‘creative evolution’ and argues that ‘the root of artistic creation lies in élan vital (vital force).’ He uses French post-impressionist paintings as examples of art forms that represent the ‘life’ resulting from the unification of subjectivity and objectivity. He argues that the essence of art lies in the ‘symbol,’ which is created as an independent object of aesthetic appreciation through the conflation of one’s perception with one’s mentality. He also calls this blending of the various perceptions ‘the construction function’ (k sei say ). Art is not a matter of cognition. Rather, as Nishida goes on to explain, it is perception (chikaku) that should be reconstructed as the object of aestheticization.51 As a literary example of how this ‘unification of the perceptions’ that Nishida propounds in ‘Essence of Beauty’ could be expressed, one may turn to Kajii Motojir ’s ‘Remon’ (Lemon, 1924). This may be a renowned text, but not until recently was its connection to Nishida made clear. In the story, a lemon – a product of California, like the ones that were actually sold in the city at the time – helps brighten up the narrator’s life, dispersing his depression. In that moment, the ‘I’ feels as if that one lemon is worth ‘every good thing and every beautiful thing’ put together.52 In order to write about this experience of inverted values, the narrator recalls every sensation associated with the lemon – its coldness, scent, colour, and shape – and reconstructs them into a physical object. In other words, he transforms the senses (minus those of taste and hearing) into a three-dimensional object – the definition of cubism. Except, of course, sentences, unlike paintings, are not limited to the sense of sight. Kajii then summarizes this experience as ‘simple senses of cold, touch, smell, and vision,’ attributing Chinese characters to each of the senses.53 This strong linking of Chinese phrases signifies the author’s engagement with the reconstruction of the five senses.54 While studying science at the Third Institution of Higher Education, Kajii had been inspired by Hermann von Helmholtz’s anatomical chart of the sensory organs and had thought about creating a mechanism of communication in literary works that would transport material from conveyor to receiver. From an early age, then, Kajii had grasped the notion that an expression

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possesses material form; it is not merely a one-way expression of the consciousness of the artist. Today, it is virtually undisputed that Kajii was familiar with Nishida’s ‘Essence of Beauty,’ just as he was with the avant-garde art of Kandinsky and Picasso (1881–1973). Yokomitsu Riichi also expressed that his ‘interest was moving’ toward the constructivist movement led by Kandinsky and others.55 In painting, constructivism sought to assemble non-representational colours and shapes. Cubism witnessed the same phenomenon as well. Around 1913, Georges Braque (1882–1963), together with Picasso, pioneered the method of papier collé by cutting up newspapers and wallpapers and creating a surface by gluing them together. This implied a move away from art forms such as the still life. In other words, these artists sought to skip the subject matter – its effect on the senses – entirely and instead pursue the beauty of simply creating a surface. The artist’s senses, perception, and cognition would be tuned strictly to the surface itself, and inorganic substances like paint, canvas, and tableau were recognized for what they are – inorganic substances. Taking this a step further, dadaists and surrealists then turned to creating objets using consumer products, completely turning away from the use of traditional media. Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), signing his name ‘R. Mutt,’ famously titled a ready-made urinal ‘Fountain’ and submitted it in 1917 to the Society of Independent Artists, of which he was a board member, in New York. While the work was rejected, it was successful in undermining the argument that an artwork must be an expression of the inner self. In Japan, Murayama Tomoyoshi is said to have introduced the first objet, which he created upon his return from Germany in 1923. That technique continued to be developed internationally even after the Second World War, and today it can even be found among everyday ornaments. To summarize, Yokomitsu Riichi’s ‘sensationalist movement’ attempted to consider the materiality of works deemed important by the avant-garde movement and to then expound his own interpretation of avant-garde art as a whole. Of course, his movement was limited by linguistic boundaries and could not break away from the perception of demonstrative objects. Although he used the word ‘symbol,’ his definition was completely different from that of Sait  Mokichi, who used the term from the point of view of universal ‘life’ and narrated its significance as if it had derived from ancient China, thus situating himself in the more traditional discourse of symbolic representation within Eastern thought. For Yokomitsu, Sait ’s theory of depiction was only a

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representation of ‘pure subjectivity.’ One may go as far as to say that he saw it as an expression of naturalism. In fact, as we have seen, Japanese naturalism aimed for a direct representation of impressions. Yokomitsu, in contrast, was calling for a revolution of representational methods, where one could reconstruct ‘pure subjectivity’ in a more complex manner with expressions that could stimulate the reader and turn the textual work itself into an object of appreciation. It should now be clear why I focused on the reception of symbolism in order to analyse Japanese ‘modernism’ in the literary arts. It is because the shift and ‘translation’ of what ‘symbol’ signified advanced the progress of modernism, at least in its limited sense. The ‘symbol’ helped Japan’s modern literary perspective divorce itself from the reproduction of actual feelings or landscapes. It instead turned to reproducing impressions or the beauty of y·gen and to ‘feelings and mood’ (kibun j ch ), finally shifting to the construction of images in material forms (busshitsuteki keish ). At the time when France was witnessing a Catholic reaction following the collapse of the revolution of 1848, the French symbolists called upon the symbols of paganism for their poetry and art. When that method was then transported in the twentieth century to a foreign land, the Eastern religious concept of y·gen came to be ‘translated,’ resulting in the invention of ‘Japan’s traditional aesthetics.’ These two events took place side by side. By examining the shifts in both European and Japanese literature and art, I believe that a clearer picture of the development of Japanese modernism has been established. The reception of Japan’s classical art acted as a stimulus for European modernism, and, in turn, the European movements inspired Japan’s own modernism. In this manner, Japan’s modernism in the literary sphere was engaged in a constant dialogue with other movements in art and aesthetics, which advanced through reciprocal interactions with foreign countries and also with critiques of classical literature. When we place it in this context and rethink its position as being intertwined with all these discourses, Japanese modernism emerges with a completely new historical face.

NOTES 1 In the fields of art and architecture, modernism can be defined as a movement that begins with a rejection of traditional forms and values. There are three main shifts that are categorized under its name: (1) the

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Sadami Suzuki move from the impressionism of the 1860s to neo-impressionism of the 1880s, represented by the pointillism of Georges Seurat (1859–91), which was followed by symbolism and art nouveau in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries; (2) the birth of abstract art from the progression of fauvism (1905–) to expressionism (1905–), cubism (1907–), futurism (1909–), constructivism (1912–), and finally to vorticism (1914–); and (3) the shift from dadaism (1916–) to surrealism (1924–) following the end of the First World War. In the first half of the twentieth century, these movements were often referred to as the avant-garde, and the movements of the beginning of the century came to be known as ‘early modernism.’ Modanizumu flourished in the 1920s and 1930s and carried over to the 1960s. In the field of literary arts (bungei), imagism in English poetry and the French esprit nouveau, named by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), are customarily taken up as key examples. Also, ‘post-impressionism’ comes from the exhibit ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ organized by Roger Fry (1886–1934) and exhibited in London in 1910–11. This term mainly refers to works by Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), and Vincent van Gogh (1853–90). Cézanne worked within the impressionist circle, but, in the twentieth century, Gauguin and others took him up as a special case. Bonnard, quoted by the Orsay Museum (audio guide), May 2005. Inaga Shigemi, ‘Nihon bijutsuz  no hensen – insh shugi nihonkan kara ‘T y  bigaku’ rons  made’ [Transitions in the image of Japanese art – Impressionist view of Japan to the ‘Eastern art’ debate]. Hegel, ‘Prospects,’ in Vorlesungen über die Äesthetik [Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art] (1835), trans. Takeuchi Toshio as vol. 1 of Bigaku [Aesthetics], in Hegeru zensh· [The complete works of G.F. Hegel], 18: 144–82. Mut  Michio, ‘Tenshin no y·sh· – sono biishiki no mumeisei’ [Tenshin’s melancholy: The anonymity of his aesthetic consciousness], in Nihon no geijutsuron – dent  to kindai [On Japanese art: Classical and modern], ed. Kanbayashi Tsunemichi, 218–41. This work shows that a copy of Bernard Bosanquet’s English translation of Hegel’s Aesthetics, published in 1886, which was purchased in 1891 by the Tokyo Art School and is now stored in its library, contains marginalia consisting of translations of some of the vocabulary into Japanese. Even though these annotations cannot be dated, Mut  suggests that they are in the handwriting of Okakura Tenshin, and thus evidence that he read the work (226). It is also well known that this English translation, along with the German version of Rudolph Hertmann Lotze (1817–81), was commonly sold in Tokyo bookstores. See the ‘bunkai ih ’ (Bulletin of the literary world) section in Waseda bungaku (October

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1892): 18; and Hijikata Teiichi, Kindai Nihon Bungaku hy ronshi [History of literary criticism in modern Japan], 95. Okakura Tenshin, ‘T y  no ris  – nihon bijutsu o ch·shin to shite’ [The ideals of the East with special reference to the art of Japan], in Okakura Tenshin zensh· [The complete works of Okakura Tenshin], 1: 84. Inaga Shigemi, ‘Nihon bijutsuz  no hensen – insh shugi nihonkan kara “T y  bigaku” rons  made’ [Transitions in the image of Japanese art – Impressionist view of Japan to the ‘Eastern art’ debate], 202. ‘Feelings and mood’ are key concepts in Hegel’s Aesthetics, as seen in the section called ‘Natural Beauty’ (part 1, chapter 1, section 3), in vol. 2 of Bigaku, 337–65. One could explain this neglect by noting that both the Communist International Theses (1932) and ‘Essays on the Development of Capitalism in Japan,’ written by Japanese Communist economists, figured pre-war Japan as a (half-)feudal society, and this historical perspective dominated in postwar Japan as well. Minami Hiroshi, ed., Nihon modanizumu no kenky· – shis /seikatsu/bunka [Studies on Japanese modernism – Intellectual history/daily life/culture]. See also Minami Hiroshi, ed., Gendai no esupuri: Nihon modanizumu – ero guro nonsensu [Esprit d’aujourd’hui: Japanese modernism – Erotic grotesque nonsense]. Yokomitsu Riichi, ‘Atama narabini hara’ [Head and stomach] (1924), in Yokomitsu Riichi zensh· [The complete works of Yokomitsu Riichi], 1: 396. Kawabata Yasunari also uses a similar method. The famous opening line of his book Snow Country (originally published as ‘Y·gureiro no kagami’ [Twilight-coloured mirror], 1935) reads: ‘The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The bottom of the night sky turned white’ (Yukiguni [Snow country], in Kawabata Yasunari zensh· [The complete works of Kawabata Yasunari], 5: 31). Here too, the white, snow-covered field at night is described by the metaphor ‘the bottom of the night sky’ (yoru no soko). This kind of impressionistic metaphor gave a whole new, refreshing sense of imagery to the readers of this period, who were used to the more transparent depictions of the Japanese naturalists. At the same time, the Japanese Marxists, who reduced the issue of representation to a scientific deduction, denounced the New Sensationalists’ style as a symptom of ‘bourgeois’ art that relied on cheap tricks. Yokomitsu Riichi, ‘Oboegaki 8’ [Memorandum 8] (Original publication date unknown), compiled in Oboegaki [Memoranda] (1935), in Yokomitsu Riichi zensh· [The complete works of Yokomitsu Riichi], 6: 225. See Suzuki Sadami, ‘‘Geijutsu’ gainen no keisei, sh ch  bigaku no tanj  –

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Sadami Suzuki wabi, sabi, y·gen zenshi’ [The construction of ‘artistic’ concept, the birth of symbolist aesthetics – Pre-history of ‘Wabi, Sabi, Y·gen’], in Wabi, sabi, y·gen – kono ‘Nihonteki naru mono e no d tei’ [Wabi, Sabi, Y·gen – Their process to ‘Japan-esque things’], ed. Suzuki Sadami and Iwai Shigeki, 65–164. See note 9. Suzuki Sadami, The Concept of ‘Literature’ in Japan, chapter 8, 193–212. This phenomenon has many causes. One is that the Meiji government proclaimed ‘National Shintoism’ to be the act of worshipping the nation’s ancestors and, thus, ‘not a religion.’ Another is that Romanticism in modern Europe took up both Christianity and paganism as its religious subject. Furthermore, works by Nitobe Inaz , who was influenced by German Protestant theology, as well as those by Kakei Katsuhiko, helped establish the idea of Shinto as a form of national religion (minzoku sh·ky ). See Nitobe Inaz , Bushido, the Soul of Japan; An Exposition of Japanese Thought. The book, originally published in English in 1899, was translated into Japanese by Sakurai ]son in 1911. There is also a New York edition: Bushido, the Soul of Japan: An Exposition of Japanese Thought (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908). See also Kakei Katsuhiko, Koshint  daigi [The cause of ancient Shintoism]. Inaga Shigemi, ‘Kindai no kokka korekushon to minkan korekushon no keisei’ [The construction of the modern national collection and the civilian collection], in Korekushon no kig ron [Semiotics of collections], ed. Japan Semiotic Society, 80–2. Okakura Tenshin’s ‘T y  no ris ’ [Eastern ideals] rephrases the notion of ‘symbol’ as an expression of ‘formalism’ (keishiki- shugi), or, in other words, as a pursuit of formalistic beauty. It modifies Hegelian theory by claiming that in Eastern ‘symbolic’ art, it is the form of the material that governs the spirit (1: 83–4). Catalogue on Special Exhibit of Kyoto, Collection at Daitokuji, and Ancient Chinese Buddhist Paintings; Yamaguchi Seiichi, Fenorosa [Fenollosa], 2: 40. In the works of Fenollosa completed after his return, one can trace his departure from the Hegelian three-step theory. One could locate these influences in criticisms of Many sh· and The Tale of Genji, methods for tanka (short poems), and concepts for novels. See Suzuki Sadami, ‘‘Nihon bungaku’ to iu gainen, oyobi koten hy ka no hensen – Many , Genji, Bash ’ [The concept of ‘Japanese literature’ and transitions in classical criticism – Many , Genji, Bash ], in Hy gen ni okeru ekky  to konk  [Border-crossing and mixing in expressions], ed. Inami Ritsuko and Inoue Sh ichi, Nichibunken s sho [Nichibunken Japanese studies series] 36. Furthermore, the spirit of valuing direct expressions

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of one’s emotions, the building of the populace, and linguistic movements came from Ming-dynasty China, in particular from late Ming thought, and it continued to be developed throughout the Tokugawa era. Tayama Katai, ‘“Sei” ni okeru kokoromi’ [An experiment on ‘life’] (1908) in Kindai Bungaku Hy ron Taikei [Collection of critical essays in modern Japan], ed. Yoshida Seiichi and Wada Kingo, 3: 448. Takamura K tar , ‘Midori iro no taiy ’ [Green sun] (1910), in Takamura K tar  zensh· [The complete works of Takamura K tar ], 4: 23–9. Kitahara Hakush·, ‘Reigen’ [Introduction] to Jash·mon [Heretics] (1909), in Hakush· zensh· [The complete works of Hakush·]), 1: 9. ‘A man who expresses his own emotion is artist. A man who merely represents an appearance is illustrator.’ Louis Hynde, quoted in Kitazawa Noriaki, Kishida Ry·sei to Taish  avangyarudo [Kishida Ry·sei and Taish  avant-garde], 11. The phrase ‘expression of life’ (seimei no hy gen) appears, for example, in Yves Duplessis, Le Surréalisme, 105. However, the words of Man Ray, who incorporated the spirit of surrealism in photography, probably reveal its signification in a more concrete manner: ‘No matter what, an effort pushed by desire must be supported by a subconscious energy that automatically helps establish it in reality. It is from this energy that we attain an endless amount of resources. In other words, the resources are retained and ready within ourselves, so all we have to do is to expel all the entrapped emotions.’ Man Ray, ‘L’age de la lumière,’ in Minotaure 134 (December 1933), quoted in Tokyo National Modern Museum’s Shintai to hy gen 1920– 1980 [Body and expression 1920–1980], 254. See Suzuki Sadami, The Concept of ‘Literature’ in Japan, section 10.2, 275–88; and Suzuki Sadami, ‘“Genbun itchi” to “shasei” sairon – “ta” no seikaku’ [Rethinking ‘the unification of speech and writing’ and ‘sketches of natural life’ – the characteristics of the ending ‘ta’]. Pleinarism is a method where, instead of the traditional method of finishing up landscape paintings using the artificial light inside the art studio, one instead pays attention to the effect that natural light brings upon the figure’s shape and shades, in addition to things like moisture level in the air. In England, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was the representative artist of this movement, as was Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796–1875) in France. They both learned from artists in mid-nineteenthcentury Rome, who placed their canvases outdoors and depicted the landscapes there. Claude Monet (1840–1926) and other impressionists all followed this trend, but the term ‘pleinarism’ has also been used to designate the artists belonging to the Ecole de Barbison, who often chose the

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Sadami Suzuki forest of Fontainebleau as their subject. Kume Keiichir  (1866–1934), who studied in Paris, and Kuroda Kiyoteru (1866–1924) brought this method home and started a new era of Western-style painting in Japan. Kimata Satoshi, ed., Kindai nihon no sh ch  shugi [Symbolism in modern Japan], 10. Véron, L’Esthétique (1878), trans. Nakae Ch min as Ishibigaku (1883–4), in Meiji bungaku zensh· [The collection of Meiji literature], ed. Hijikata Teiichi, 79: 115. Anonymous, ‘Meiji bijutsu sh shi’ [Short history of Meiji art]. Suzuki Sadami, ‘Josetsu’ [Introduction], in Wabi, sabi, y·gen, ed. Suzuki Sadami and Iwai Shigeki, 17–62, see especially 57. Sen Gy bai, Tessai no y meigaku [Tessai’s Wang Yang-Ming philosophy], 31–65, 231–46. Kanbara Tai, ‘Manatsu (k ki rittai shi)’ [Mid-summer (post-cubist poem)] (1917) in Toshi no shish· [Collected poetries of the city], ed. Suzuki Sadami, 87–8. The old Japanese alphabet system has been used in this text. Maeda Y·gure, Ikuru hi ni [Days of living] in Maeda Y·gure zensh· [The complete works of Maeda Y·gure]. Ibid., 1: 112, 114, and 129. I omitted the reception history of ‘the flow of consciousness,’ a characteristic in modernist novels. For reference, see Suzuki Sadami, ‘Nakamura Shin’ichir  Kumo no yukiki – aruiwa “umaku tsukurareta henb ”’ [Nakamura Shin’ichir ’s The Coming and Going of Clouds – Or ‘a well-constructed transfiguration’], in Nichibunken s sho [Nichibunken Japanese studies series], vol. 36 of Hy gen ni okeru ekky  to konk  [Border-crossing and mixing in expressions], ed. Inami Ritsuko, Inoue Sh ichi, notes on 134–6. Genchi means to reach to the secret source of the world in intelligent Taoism. Kanbara Ariake, Shunch sh· [Collection of spring birds] (1905), in Meiji bungaku zensh· [The complete collection of Meiji literature], ed. Yano H jin, 58: 286. Hori Madoka, ‘Bash  wa ky·kyoku no sh ch shugi?: Noguchi Komejiro ga aketa Pandra no Hako’ [Is Bash  the ultimate Symbolist?: The Pandora’s box that Noguchi Yomejir  opened], in Wabi, sabi, y·gen, ed. Suzuki Sadami and Iwai Shigeki, 163–227. Suzuki Sadami, Kajii Motojir  no sekai [The world of Kajii Motojir ], 331, 595. Hagiwara Sakutar , ‘Sh ch  no honshitsu’ [The essence of symbols] (1926), in Hagiwara Sakutar  zensh· [The complete works of Hagiwara Sakutar ], 8: 26. Hagiwara Sakutar , ‘Sanbunshi no jidai o ch etsu suru shis ’ [Thought

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50 51 52 53 54 55

that surpasses the era of prose poetry] (1927), in Hagiwara Sakutar  zensh· [The complete works of Hagiwara Sakutar ], 8: 64. See Suzuki Sadami, ‘Taish  j·gonen’ [Taish  15], in Hennentai taish  bungaku zensh·: taish  j·gonen [Historical chronology format collection of Taish  literature: Taish  15], 654–5. Hagiwara Sakutar , ‘Nihon shiika no sh ch  shugi’ [Symbolism in Japanese poetry], in Hagiwara Sakutar  zensh· [The complete works of Hagiwara Sakutar ], 8: 31–40. See Suzuki Sadami and Iwai Shigeki, eds., Wabi, sabi, y·gen. Kawabata Yasunari, ‘Shinshin sakka no shin keik  kaisetsu’ [Analysis of new trends of the up-and-coming writers] (1925), in Kawabata Yasunari zensh· [The complete works of Kawabata Yasunari], 30: 177. Yokomitsu Riichi, ‘Kankaku katsud  – kankaku katsud  to kankakuteki sakubutsu ni taisuru hinan e no gyakusetsu’ [Sensationalism movement – Sensationalism movement and the paradox of criticizing sensationalist works] (1925), in Yokomitsu Riichi zensh· [The complete works of Yokomitsu Riichi], 13: 76. Sait  Mokichi, ‘Tanka ni okeru shasei no setsu’ [My opinion on the sketch in Japanese short poems] (1920), in Sait  Mokichi zensh· [The complete works of Sait  Mokichi], 9: 765–885. Yokomitsu Riichi, ‘Kankaku katsud  – kankaku katsud  to kankakuteki sakubutsu ni taisuru hinan e no gyakusetsu’ [Sensational Movement – Sensational Movement and the counter-argument to the criticism of Sensationalist works], in Yokomitsu Riichi zensh· [The complete works of Yokomitsu Riichi], 13: 80. Ibid., 13: 80. Nishida Kitar .’Bi no honshitsu’ [Essence of beauty] (1920), in Nishida Kitar  zensh· [The complete works of Nishida Kitar ], 3: 270. Kajii Motojir , ‘Remon’ [Lemon] (1924), in Kajii Motojir  zensh· [The complete works of Kajii Motojir ], 1: 11. Ibid. Suzuki Sadami, Kajii Motojir  no sekai [The world of Kajii Motojir ], 55–60. Yokomitsu Riichi, Yokomitsu Riichi zensh· [The complete works of Yokomitsu Riichi], 13: 80.

SOURCES CITED Anonymous. ‘Meiji bijutsu sh shi’ [Short history of Meiji art], Taiy  18.3 (September 1912): 196–205.

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Catalogue on Special Exhibit of Kyoto, Collection at Daitokuji, and Ancient Chinese Buddhist Paintings. Boston: Boston Museum, 1894. Duplessis, Yves. Le Surréalisme. 1950. Translated by Inada Sankichi. In Collection Que Sais-Je? no. 432. Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 1963. Hagiwara, Sakutar . ‘Nihon shiika no sh ch  shugi’ [Symbolism in Japanese poetry]. In Hagiwara Sakutar  zensh· [The complete works of Hagiwara Sakutar ], 8: 31–40. Tokyo: Chikuma shob , 1976. – Sanbunshi no jidai o ch etsu suru shis ’ [Thought that surpasses the era of prose oetry]. 1927. In Hagiwara Sakutar  zensh· [The complete works of Hagiwara Sakutar ], 8: 63–74. Tokyo: Chikuma shob , 1976. – ‘Sh ch  no honshitsu’ [The essence of symbols]. 1926. In Hagiwara Sakutar  zensh· [The complete works of Hagiwara Sakutar ], 8: 21–30. Tokyo: Chikuma shob , 1976. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Vorlesungen über die Äesthetik [Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art]. 1835. Translated by Takeuchi Toshio as Bigaku, in Hegeru zensh· [The complete works of G.F. Hegel], 18: 144–82. Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 1954. Hijikata, Teiichi. Kindai Nihon Bungaku hy ronshi [History of literary criticism in modern Japan]. Tokyo: Seit  shoten, 1937. Hori, Madoka. ‘Bash  wa Ky·kyoku no Sh ch shugi?: Noguchi Komejir  ga aketa Pandra no Hako’ [Is Basho the ultimate Symbolist?: The Pandora’s box that Noguchi Yomejir  opened]. In Suzuki and Iwai, eds., Wabi, sabi, y·gen, 163–227. Inaga, Shigemi. ‘Kindai no kokka korekushon to minkan korekushon no keisei’ [The construction of the modern national collection and the civilian collection]. In Korekushon no kig ron [Semiotics of collections], edited by Japan Semiotic Society, 80–2. Tokyo: T kai daigaku shuppankai, 2001. – ‘Nihon bijutsuz  no hensen – insh shugi nihonkan kara ‘T y  bigaku’ rons  made’ [Transitions in the Image of Japanese Art – Impressionist View of Japan to the ‘Eastern Art’ Debate]. Kan (Summer 2001): 201–2. Kajii, Motojir . ‘Remon’ [Lemon]. 1924. In Kajii Motojir  zensh· [The complete works of Kajii Motojir ], 1: 5–13. Tokyo: Chikuma shob , 1999. Kakei, Katsuhiko. Koshint  daigi [The cause of ancient Shintoism]. Tokyo: Shimizu shoten, 1912. Kanbara, Ariake. Shunch sh· [Collection of spring birds]. 1905. In Meiji bungaku zensh· [The complete collection of Meiji literature], edited by Yano H jin, 58: 285–319. Tokyo: Chikuma shob , 1967. Kanbara, Tai. ‘Manatsu (k ki rittai shi)’ [Mid-summer (post-cubist poem)]. 1917. In Toshi no shish· [Collected poetries of the city], edited by Suzuki Sadami, 87–8. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1991.

Rewriting the Literary History of Japanese Modernism 97 Kawabata, Yasunari. ‘Shinshin sakka no shin keik  kaisetsu’ [Analysis of new trends of the up-and-coming writers]. 1925. In Kawabata Yasunari zensh· [The complete works of Kawabata Yasunari], 30: 172–83. Tokyo: Shinch sha, 1982. – Yukiguni [Snow country]. In Kawabata Yasunari zensh· [The complete works of Kawabata Yasunari], 5: [pp]. Tokyo: Sh gakukan, 1986. Kimata, Satoshi, ed. Kindai nihon no sh ch  shugi [Symbolism in modern Japan]. Tokyo: Ôf·, 2004. Kitahara, Hakush·. ‘Reigen’ [Introduction] to Jash·mon [Heretics]. 1909. In Hakush· zensh· [The complete works of Hakush·], 1: 9. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1984. Kitazawa, Noriaki. Kishida Ry·sei to Taish  avangyarudo [Kishida Ry·sei and Taish  avant-garde]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1993. Maeda, Y·gure. Ikuru Hi ni [Days of living]. 1914. In Maeda Y·gure zensh· [The complete works of Maeda Y·gure], 1:113–37. Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1972. Michio, Mut . ‘Tenshin no y·sh· – sono biishiki no mumeisei’ [Tenshin’s melancholy – The anonymity of his aesthetic consciousness]. In Nihon no geijutsuron – dent  to kindai [On Japanese art – classical and modern], edited by Kanbayashi Tsunemichi, 218–41. Tokyo: Mineruba shob , 2000. Minami, Hiroshi, ed. Gendai no esupuri: Nihon modanizumu – ero guro nonsensu [Esprit d’Aujourd’hui: Japanese modernism – Erotic grotesque nonsense], no. 188. Tokyo: Shibund , 1983. – ed. Nihon modanizumu no kenky· – shis /seikatsu/bunka [Studies on Japanese modernism – Intellectual history/daily life/culture]. Tokyo: Burên shuppan, 1982. Nishida, Kitar . ‘Bi no honshitsu’ [Essence of beauty]. 1920. In Nishida Kitar  zensh· [The complete works of Nishida Kitar ], 3: 241–82. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1965. Nitobe, Inaz . Bushido, the Soul of Japan; An Exposition of Japanese Thought. 5th ed. Tokyo: Sh kawab , 1901. Okakura, Tenshin. ‘T y  no ris  – nihon bijutsu o ch·shin to shite’ [The ideals of the East with special reference to the art of Japan]. In Okakura Tenshin zensh· [The complete works of Okakura Tenshin], vol. 1, [pp?]. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1980. Orsay Museum. Audio tour of the work of Pierre Bonnard. [?] May 2005. Sait , Mokichi, ‘Tanka ni okeru shasei no setsu’ [My opinion on the sketch in Japanese short poems] (1920). In Sait  Mokichi zensh· [The complete works of Sait  Mokichi], 9: 765–885. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1973. Sen, Gy bai. Tessai no y meigaku [Tessai’s Wang Yang-Ming philosophy]. Tokyo: Bensei shuppan, 2004.

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Suzuki, Sadami. ‘‘Geijutsu’ gainen no keisei, sh ch  bigaku no tanj  – wabi, sabi, y·gen zenshi’ [The construction of ‘artistic’ concept, the birth of Symbolist aesthetics – Pre-history of ‘wabi, sabi, y·gen’]. In Suzuki and Iwai, eds., Wabi, sabi, y·gen, 65–164. – ‘“Genbun itchi” to “shasei” sairon – “ta” no seikaku’ [Rethinking ‘the unification of speech and writing’ and ‘sketches of natural life’ – the characteristics of the ending ‘Ta’]. Kokugo to kokubungaku (July 2005): 1–21. – ‘‘Nihon bungaku’ to iu gainen, oyobi koten hy ka no hensen – Many , Genji, Bash ’ [The concept of ‘Japanese literature’ and transitions in classical criticism – Many , Genji, Bash ]. In Hy gen ni okeru ekky  to konk  [Border-crossing and mixing in expressions], edited by Inami Ritsuko and Inoue Sh ichi, 123–61. Nichibunken s sho [Nichibunken Japanese studies series] 36. Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2005. – ‘Josetsu’ [Introduction]. In Suzuki and Iwai, eds., Wabi, sabi, y·gen, 17–62. – ‘Nakamura Shin’ichir  Kumo no yukiki – aruiwa ‘umaku tsukurareta henb ’’ [Nakamura Shin’ichir ’s The Coming and Going of Clouds – Or ‘a wellconstructed transfiguration’]. In Nichibunken s sho [Nichibunken Japanese studies series], vol. 36, Hy gen ni okeru ekky  to konk  [Border-crossing and mixing in expressions], edited by Inami Ritsuko and Inoue Sh ichi. Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2005. – ‘Taish  j·gonen’ [Taish  15]. In Hennentai taish  bungaku zensh·: taish  j·gonen [Historical chronology format collection of Taish  literature: Taish  15], 654–5. Tokyo: Yumani shob , 2003. – Kajii Motojir  no sekai [The world of Kajii Motojir ]. Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2002. – The Concept of ‘Literature’ in Japan. Expanded version. Translated by Royal Tyler. Nichibunken Monograph Series 8. Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2006. Originally published as Nihon no ‘bungaku’ gainen (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 1998). Suzuki, Sadami and Iwai Shigeki, eds., Wabi, sabi, y·gen – kono ‘Nihonteki naru mono e no d tei’ [Wabi, Sabi, Y·gen – Their process to ‘Japan-esque things’]. Tokyo: Suiheisha, 2006. Takamura, K tar . ‘Midori iro no taiy ’ [Green sun]. 1910. In Takamura K tar  zensh· [The complete works of Takamura K tar ], 4: 23–9. Tokyo: Chikuma shob , 1957. Tayama, Katai. ‘“Sei” ni okeru kokoromi’ [An experiment on ‘life’]. 1908. In Kindai Bungaku Hy ron Taikei [Collection of critical essays in modern Japan], edited by Yoshida Seiichi and Wada Kingo, 3: 448. Tokyo: Kadokawashoten, 1972.

Rewriting the Literary History of Japanese Modernism 99 Tokyo National Modern Museum. Shintai to hy gen 1920–1980 [Body and expression 1920–1980]. Tokyo: Tokyo National Modern Museum, 1996. Unno, Hiroshi, Kawamoto Sabur , and Suzuki Sadami, eds. Modan toshi bungaku: Toshi no shish· [Modern city literature]. 10 vols. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1991. Véron, Eugène. L’Esthétique (1878). Trans. Nakae Ch min as Ishibigaku (1883– 4). In Meiji bungaku zensh· [The collection of Meiji literature], edited by Hijikata Teiichi, 79: [pp]. Tokyo: Chikuma shob , 1976. Yamaguchi, Seiichi. Fenorosa [Fenollosa]. Tokyo: Sanseid , 1982. Yokomitsu, Riichi. ‘Atama narabini hara’ [Head and stomach] (1924). In Yokomitsu Riichi zensh· [The complete works of Yokomitsu Riichi], 1: 396– 403. Tokyo: Kawade shob  shinsha, 1981. – ‘Kankaku katsud  – kankaku katsud  to kankakuteki sakubutsu ni taisuru hinan e no gyakusetsu’ [Sensational movement – sensational movement and the counter-argument to the criticism of sensationalist works]. In Yokomitsu Riichi zensh· [The complete works of Yokomitsu Riichi], 13: 75–81. Tokyo: Kawade shob  shinsha, 1981. – ‘Oboegaki 8’ [Memorandum 8] (Original publication date unknown), compiled in Oboegaki [Memoranda] (1935). In Yokomitsu Riichi zensh· [The complete works of Yokomitsu Riichi], 6: 225. Tokyo: Kawade shob  shinsha, 1982.

5 Modernism and Modern Korean Poetry of the 1930s choi dong ho

Modern Korean poetry has been continuously innovative due to two driving forces: realism and modernism.1 Though, at the turn of the twentieth century, the Korean dynasty lost its national sovereignty through the Eulsa Treaty in 1905 and the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910, modern Korean poetry was nonetheless able to expand its influence over the public because of the pressure of Japanese imperialism in Korea. Modern Korean poetry is generally said to have begun with the poem ‘From the Sea to Youth,’ published in 1908 by Choe Nam-Sun. This poem is rightly considered an example of the self-awakening that Korean people experienced in response to general modern civilization, sweeping over Korean poetry like mountainous waves, rather than a poem created under the concrete influence of Western poetry. Modern Korean poetry first encountered Western poetry in the literary journal Taeseomunyesinbo (The Taeseo literary newspaper, 1918–19), in which editor Kim Uk introduced French symbolist poetry. In 1921, Kim Uk published The Dance of Anguish, a collection of Korean translations of French poetry that had previously appeared in Taeseomunyesinbo and which had a profound impact on Korea’s poetry community at the time in terms of its acceptance of Western literature. While translating Paul Verlaine’s poetry, Kim Uk presented French symbolist poetry using his own emotional and exclamatory idioms, the result of his sentimental acceptance of modern Western poetry. In particular, he offered Verlaine’s ‘Art Poétique’ as the model for poetic composition by Korean poets. From the late 1910s to the mid-1920s, modern Korean poetry began to explore its originality, even while imitating the sentimental and romantic trend of French symbolist poetry. In publications appearing in

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1924, critics Ko Han Yong (who was also known as Ko Han Seung and Ko Dda Dda) and Bang Won Yong brought dadaism to Korea. Ko Han Yong, who advocated ‘the negation of old conventional ideas and tradition,’ presented dadaism through its definition and through the literary movement espoused by Tristan Tzara,2 while Bang Won Yong, who professed that ‘Dada denies all ... Dada despairs of everything,’ helped delineate the parameters of dadaism by classifying it into eleven concepts.3 The European dadaist movement would have great influence on the young Korean poets of the 1930s, who had intense aspirations toward new forms of expression. By the 1930s, modernist poetry played a leading role in Korea’s literary world, which centred around Kim Ki Rim, Lee Sang, and Oh Jang Hwan. This era of full-fledged modern Korean poetry arrived by way of an earlier imitative period, beginning around 1926, in which Chung Ji Yong, Lim Hwa, and Kim Kwang Kwun experimented with dadaism, formalism, and surrealism, along with realist poetry, which was made possible through the establishment of the Korean Artists Proletarian Federation (KAPF) in 1925. Four points should be considered in order to understand how Western modernism took root in Korea. First, Korean modernism was led by the young generation who sought social reform, along with the abolition of the old order. This movement served as a source of practical energy, driving Korean social and cultural developments in the long term, not just as a temporal trend. Second, Korean modernism advocated individual freedom and equality emancipated from restraint as a prerequisite for the formation of a modern nation-state. In particular, the Korean language movement, launched as an attempt to identify the spoken language with the written language which had been developed for the establishment of the people’s nation in the early twentieth century, offered an important means to express the new ideas and feelings implicit in Korean modernism. Third, the new Western thoughts and ways of life were expressed through such literary genres as modernist-oriented poetry and novels, which served as an important impetus for innovations in modern Korean literature. Last, in the mid-1920s, during this first phase of Korean modernism, European dadaism and surrealism coexisted with proletarian literature. Subsequently, during the 1930s, surrealist poetry became widespread, and the division between the Anglo-American modernism and proletarian literature became obvious. This essay deals primarily with the 1930s, which may be seen as the full-fledged phase of Korean modernist poetry. What is remarkable

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about its development is that such leading poets as Chung Ji Yong and Lim Hwa first published experimental and dadaist poems in the 1920s and then proceeded into modernist and realist poems in the 1930s. Proletarian poetry’s co-emergence with the appearance of the capitalist factory worker and modernist poetry’s rise alongside that of the modern city mark important criteria to distinguish between the two decades. Finally, the era after 1945 is defined as the phase succeeding modernism. Korean Modernism of the Early 1930s Not only was Korean modernism of the 1930s formed under the influence of Western literature; it was also based on a city culture made possible by Japanese capitalism. Hence, Korean modernism may be called the product of Western civilization and urban culture. At a time when few parts of the Korean peninsula had broken away from agrarian life, the urban culture centring around Kyongsung (Seoul) and Tokyo was like a germinating cultural soil for modern civilization. A characteristic of Korean modernism in the 1930s is that the particular form of urban culture was controlled by Japanese colonialism. This is why Korean modernism, in particular, stood at the forefront of the literary world at almost the same time that KAPF was disbanded by Japanese authorities in 1935. In ‘The Historical Position of Modernism,’ Kim Ki Rim points out that Korean modernism was established through the perspective of Seoul’s urban culture: Modernism, first-born of today’s civilization, caught the impression of civilization with fresh sensibilities. Modernism was the son of the civilization in which he grew up, different from all the attitudes attempting to escape modern civilization. In other words, the son of the city was eventually born in the ideas of our new poetry. New poetry, first of all, sought the materials in the city, and all aspects of civilization appeared instead of the beauties of nature. New sensibilities, emotions, and ideas that were being formed in civilization appeared.4

Kim Ki Rim’s comment that urban civilization replaced nature’s beauty in Korean modernist poetry is a truly accurate explanation of the circumstances surrounding its genesis. In a word, the poets who sought after modernism were children of the city. The representative poets of the modernism of the 1930s included

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Chung Ji Yong, Lee Sang, and Kim Kwang Kwun, and Kim Ki Rim was its major theorist. Chung Ji Yong started out as a member of the literary journal Simunhak (Poetry literature), along with Park Yong Chul and Kim Young Rang. With the publication of Collected Poems of Chung Ji Yong in 1935, Chung Ji Yong was regarded as a leading poet who used imagist techniques in a modern way. His ‘Windowpane, I’ – representing a step up in technique from such earlier poems as ‘Café France’ and ‘A Reptile Animal’ written in the mid-1920s – was published in Chosunjikwang (The light of Chosun) in January 1930 and heralded a new departure in Korean modernism: Something cold and sad haunts the glass. I dim the pane, feebly standing there, It flutters its frozen wings as if tamed. Wipe the glass, wipe it again though I may, Black night ebbs, then flows against it, Sodden stars etched like glittering gems. Rubbing glass alone by night Is a lonely, rapturous meditation, With the tender veins ruptured in your lungs. Ah, you have flown away like a wild bird!5

Chung Ji Yong’s poems are highly valued for their clarity of the senses, obtained from the use of pictorial and sensuous images. He forged a new path for Korean poetry, which had mostly indulged in sentimental sadness. What is significant in the above poem is that Chung Ji Yong made the emotion of ‘something sad’ materialize through the visual image of ‘Sodden stars etched like glittering gems.’ This kind of poetic expression can be identified as a sign of modernity in his poetry, for it differs greatly from Kim So Wol’s work expressing the feeling of sorrow through musical rhythm. While Kim Ki Rim was discussing ‘The Historical Position of Modernism,’ Chung Ji Yong published ‘Paengnokdam’ (White deer lake) in the third issue of Munjang (Sentences) in April 1939: 1 The closer to the summit, the smaller the cuckoo-flowers. As I climb the first ridge, their waists vanish; above the next, their necks are gone; and finally only their faces peep out, etched in floral pattern. The chill of the wind rivals that far up in the north, at the tip of Hamgyong Province; the

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cuckoo-flowers’ stems vanish completely; yet for a time in August they bloom in glorious profusion, like scattered stars. When mountain shadows grow darker, at last stars light up in the cuckoo-flower patches. Stars move in their appointed places. Here I am bone-tired. […] 9 In Paengnokdam’s blue waters, where not even a cat-fish crawls, the sky rolls. A cow skirted round my feet, almost lame with exhaustion. With only a trace of chased clouds, Paengnokdam grows dim. Paengnokdam that reflects my face for half a day looks lonesome. Waking and sleeping, I forgot even to pray.6

Compared with his earlier imitative poems, ‘Paengnokdam’ is conspicuous in the camera-eye technique as seen in the description of the scenes and their connections. The experimentation of the prosaic lines of the poem may rightly be called a new poetic transformation. This is where Chung Ji Yong as a poet and Kim Ki Rim as a critic diverge from one another. Chung Ji Yong, no longer the son of civilization and the city, sought to find his own way out through the classical world of the Orient. He became a natural centre for the poetic group by enlarging and deepening his capabilities in search of the classical world beyond the modernist sensibility and wit of Collected Poems of Chung Ji Yong. Kim Ki Rim joined Chosunilbo (The Chosun daily newspaper) in April 1929, following the completion of his studies in Japan, and began publishing poetry and prose in the paper in 1930. While his literary criticism had a powerful impact on Korean poetry circles, Kim Ki Rim was also widely known as a poet who placed a positive stress on modern civilization. His modernist works, such as ‘Go to the Life’ and ‘Surrealist,’ marked his appearance on the literary scene. The Weather Chart (1936), considered to have been influenced by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Stephen Spender’s Vienna (1935), attracted the attention of the poetic group.7 Manners of the Sun (1939) confirmed his position as a modernist poet of the 1930s. It is very interesting that one of his earlier poems is published under the title of ‘Surrealist’: Passing by the street, haven’t you seen Stupid songs, Queer dancing-figure Of the person with a reed-peaked hat on the back of the neck Wrapping himself with long-sleeved robe woven with Fall sunlight –

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He is the last citizen of the year 1950 – The last person of the descendants of the French Revolution His eyes are multi-colored like a ‘prism.’ The world is thrown down on his white ‘camera’ reflected upside down Though his ears are leaning toward the sound of footprints He is a wretched cripple who cannot follow it.8

Despite the poem’s title, it is doubtful whether it was written using what Breton called ‘automatic writing under hypnosis.’ The description of the exotic pupils of a Frenchman as seen on the surface of the poem does not function more than as a strange prism. However, what is especially remarkable here is that this poem appeared immediately after the ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’ of 1929. Surrealism severed its ties with dadaism following the First Manifesto of Surrealism. It began to exert its literary influence, and this represented the start of a new era. Of great significance, as well, was Kim Ki Rim’s decision to discuss surrealist methodology in a critical essay, ‘The Development of Modern Poetry’ (1934),9 exploring the topic beyond the confines of his poetic works. In this essay, he maintains that surrealism, developing out of dadaism, is a desire for order and also a revolutionary means of writing modern poetry. After first discussing surrealism through such subdivisions as dreams, beauty and ugliness, automatic writing, and the beauty of form, he argues that surrealism is a radical phenomenon in modern poetry. Kim Ki Rim’s essay was one of the most distinguished theoretical treatments of surrealist poetry to have been developed in Korea up to that time. It is of course doubtful whether Kim Ki Rim’s ‘Surrealist’ uses properly surrealist methodology. Nonetheless, it is a good example of his curiosity about things Western, new, and foreign, even in the early stages of his literary career. It was only after the publication of his longer poem The Weather Chart (1936) that his potential as a poet was properly appraised. The strait With scales Coming out Is brought to life Like the back of a snake. Young mountain ranges, wrapped with variegated costume of ‘Arabia’

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The Weather Chart, coloured by innovative ideas in quite the dadaist style, shows fresh and novel images even in the above opening section, ‘The Morning of the World,’ but lacks organic structure or inner depth in general. However, it must not be overlooked that the poem has secured some success in its attempt at a new longer poem, on the assumption that it criticizes the history of civilization. Kim Ki Rim’s individuality as a modernist poet is seen in more detail in Manners of the Sun. In this poem, the world, presented by such words as ‘the sun,’ ‘civilization,’ ‘cheerfulness,’ and ‘novelty,’ is what he sought for on his own as a modernist poet, in contrast to Chung Chi Yong.11 From the time of its publication, The Weather Chart has fostered greatly contradictory opinions. This longer poem, following the epic poem The Night at the Frontier (1925) by Kim Dong Hwan, is regarded as a new attempt in that it intended to understand critically the history of civilization. First published piecemeal in such literary journals as Chungang (The centre), and Samcholli (The whole land of Korea) from 1935, The Weather Chart was reorganized and published by Lee Sang, a modernist poet, who also served as editor and designer of the publication. It comprises seven sections: ‘The Morning of the World,’ ‘A Procession of Citizens,’ ‘The Rising Time of the Tempest,’ ‘A Trace,’ ‘The Sick Landscape,’ ‘The Incantation of an Owl,’ and ‘A Song of the Iron Wheel.’ The Weather Chart starts with a description of the silence of the night before a tempest, then moves to the tempest’s sweeping over the whole world, and finally culminates in the stage of preparation for a new life, along with the rising sun from the regained silent sea. In the poem, Kim Ki Rim glorifies the civilized world emerging from the breakdown of Eastern culture and its sense of values, caused by the influx of Western civilization. During the same period, Oh Jang Hwan, who had made his debut with the poem ‘A Bathroom’ in 1933, wrote such longer poems as ‘A War,’ ‘The Mariner’ (published in 1936 in Nangman [Romance]), ‘Sea Water’ (published in 1937 in Sungbyok [A castle wall]), and ‘The Waste Land’ (a part of which was published in July 1990 in Hangilmunhak [Hangil literature]). The poems of Oh Jang Hwan seem to have been influenced by Kim Ki Rim’s The Weather Chart. Among them, ‘The Mariner’ was the only one published in its entirety. Its opening line,

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‘The cremation ground of the mariner prospered,’ critically describes the prospering and corrupt city culture of Seoul in the mid-1930s.12 ‘The Waste Land,’ using the title of T.S. Eliot’s work, is a product of the critical awareness of the history of civilization and uses formalist elements similar to Kim Ki Rim’s. However, Oh Jang Hwan’s poems were not highly valued for several reasons. First, many of his poems were only partially published. Second, he did not lead the major discourse of modernist criticism. Lastly, Oh Jang Hwan, who was a member of a poetry circle ‘Siinburak’ (The poets’ club, 1936), referred to as ‘Life School,’ and also a member of ‘Nangman’ (1936), ‘went North’ after publishing his collection The Sick Seoul in 1946 and devoted himself to socialist poetry. The poetic transformation of Oh Jang Hwan, who was somewhat of a bohemian, is worthy of close examination, as is that of Lim Hwa, who in the 1920s converted from a dadaist poet to one devoted to the class struggle. While Lee Si Woo and Shin Baek Su, members of the literary coterie ‘34 Literature,’ strove to write dadaist and surrealist poems in 1934, Lee Sang, a former architecture engineer, attempted form-destructive, modernist poems in earnest. After making his debut with the publication of ‘A Strange Reversible Reaction’ in Chosun and Architecture in 1931, Lee Sang published in 1936 a series entitled ‘Crow’s-Eye View,’ whose unconventional poems greatly shocked the literary group and readers as well by subverting the conventional ideas of poetry held by Koreans at the time. 13Children RushdownaStreet. (AblindalleyisSuitable.) The1stChildsaysit’sfrightening. The2ndChildsaysit’sfrightening. The3rdChildsaysit’sfrightening. The4thChildsaysit’sfrightening. The5thChildsaysit’sfrightening. The6thChildsaysit’sfrightening. The7thChildsaysit’sfrightening. The8thChildsaysit’sfrightening. The9thChildsaysit’sfrightening. The10thChildsaysit’sfrightening. The11thChildsaysit’sfrightening.

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The12thChildsaysit’sfrightening. The13thChildsaysit’sfrightening. 13Childrenweregatheredtogetheronlyaseither frighteningorfrightenedChildren. (TheabsenceofanyotherConditionwasquitepreferable.) IfAmongstthem1ChildisafrighteningChildit’sfine. IfAmongstthem2ChildrenarefrighteningChildrenit’sfine. IfAmongstthem2ChildrenarefrightenedChildrenit’sfine. IfAmongstthem1ChildisafrightenedChildit’sfine. (EvenathroughstreetisSuitable.) Evenif13ChildrendonotRushdowntheStreetit’sfine.13

The speed of the poetic diction – as well as the destruction of the conventional form – and the use of numeral formulae and diagrams in this series cannot but be called the reflection of a sense of modern life. The speed seen in the above ‘Crow’s-Eye View, Poem No. 1’ expresses the anxiety of the self, rushing down a blind alley. It also depicts feelings of loss as the self charges toward ruin due to the dissociation between object and the self and the development of modern industrial civilization. This sense of anxiety is also observed through the image of the self cast upon the mirror in another of Lee Sang’s poems, ‘Mirror.’ In this work, the mirror, a product of modern civilization, becomes a medium that projects the crisis of the self’s lost identity. Among the poems of ‘Crow’s-Eye View,’ it is through ‘Crow’s-Eye View, Poem No. 4’ that Lee Sang’s experimental intention is expressed in higher extremes (see illustration 5.1). The piece is composed only of numbers and diagrams. Among the modernist poems of the 1930s, none expresses such an experimental consciousness as this. This poem that almost reaches the impossibility of lingual communication rightly marks a memorable event in Korean modernism of the 1930s, one that aroused shock and awe in literary circles. Modern Korean Poetry after the Mid-1930s From a historical viewpoint, it is true that the wide proliferation of Korean modernist poetry in literary circles in the mid-1930s was caused by both internal circumstances – whereby ‘Kuinhwoe’ (A society of nine persons), established in August 1933 by such writers as Lee Tae Jun,

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Figure 5.1 Lee Sang, ‘Crow’s-Eye View, Poem No. 4.’

Chung Ji Yong, Kim Ki Rim, and Cho Yong Man, extended its range of activities to novels – and external circumstances, such as the enforced disbanding of KAPF in 1935.14 However, that Western culture and the attendant lifestyles began to settle in among the middle and higher classes around Seoul should not be overlooked as another important reason. It was on the basis of those external circumstances, as seen in the cityscapes of modern industrial society, reaching maturity through Japanese capitalism, that Korean modernism began to take a lead position in literary circles, extending its activity to novels. The cityscapes of this industrial society were characterized by such signs of modernity as night streets glaring with electric lights, brightly lit Japanese billboards, signboards scattered alongside rows of cafés and coffee shops, and mannequins attracting customers to department stores such as Miscoshi’s.15 In these circumstances, Lee Sang, who began his career as a poet, transformed himself with the short story ‘The Wings’ (September 1936), in which he expressed the nervous human psychology of modern man. Lee Sang, who went to Tokyo – a stronghold of urbanized civilization – looking for new directions for literature and died there in 1937 in his twenty-seventh year, was the most avant-garde leader of Korean modernist poetry. He and Kim Ki Rim, in particular, felt a strong solidarity with one another because of their common belief

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that modern scientific civilization was represented by mathematics and science. The poetic affinity between the two writers is similar to the one between Chung Ji Yong and Kim Kwang Kwun. Though Chung Ji Yong’s poetic world differs from Kim Kwang Kwun’s urban sensibility in that Chung Ji Yong in his later years renewed his interest in the more classical world, both used imagist techniques, through which they attempted to transform lyricism into a modern poetic form. Toward the close of the 1930s, when the cityscape of Seoul had become familiar to urban intellectuals, Kim Kwang Kwun began to explore another aspect of modernist poetry by adding emotional colouring to his depiction of cityscapes; thus far, only abstract and external elements had been the point of focus. Having previously published ‘My Sister Going Away’ in Jungoeilbo (The inside and the outside daily newspaper) in 1926 and ‘Night Train’ in Dongailbo (Donga daily newspaper) in 1930, Kim Kwang Kwun began participating in such literary coteries as ‘Siinburak’ in 1936 and ‘Jaosun’ (Meridian) in 1937. He secured his position in the literary group by winning an award from Chosunilbo’s ‘Spring Literary Contest’ with his poem ‘Snowy Night’ in 1938, and would go on to publish volumes of poetry including Gaslight (1939) and The Port of Call (1947). In ‘Snowy Night,’ Kim Kwang Kwun displays a distinguished capability to evoke the sorrow of bleak times using polished language and brilliant images. He opens a fresh poetic world by creating his own pictorial rhythm, at the same time relinquishing a conventional way of expression, this in sharp contrast to the musical lyric poetry pursued by Kim Young Rang in the early 1930s. Kim Kwang Kwun’s poems, formed through this brilliant pictorial structure, create an atmosphere quite different from that of conventional lyric poems. Sympathizing with the modernist theory of poetry that ‘Poetry is a picture,’ Kim Kwang Kwun achieved poetic expression based on the formation of images in works that contrasted with Korean lyric poetry of the 1920s, which was based on emotional overflow and musical rhythm. His imagery made him a standard in discussions of Korean imagist and modernist poetry for a long time. Whereas Kim Ki Rim was a pioneering theorist of Korean modernist poetry, Kim Kwang Kwun was its practitioner. In ‘Snowy Night,’ the pictorial structure is remarkable: It drifts noiselessly in the dead of night Like a sweet message from afar. A paper lantern burns feebly under the eaves.

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White snow falls like a sad memory. My breath choked white in the heart, I light a lamp in the void of my heart. As I alone step down the garden, I hear the rustling of a woman shedding her clothes from afar. Flakes of snow drift in the dark Like so many fragments of buried memory Stirring in me a cold remorse and remembrance. With no streak of light or scent around In a glittering garment alone White snow piling up upon the snow incessantly My sorrow calmly harbours on it.16

The principle that in modernist poetry ‘Poetry is a picture’ is realized in Kim Kwang Kwun’s poems more successfully than it is in the work of any other poets of the day. The expression ‘the rustling of a woman shedding her clothes from afar’ has a synaesthetic effect, providing a visual image through sound, which may have been received as novel by the poets of the time. However, the closing line, ‘My sorrow calmly harbours on it,’ indicates that the poem contains a romantic sadness in spite of its fresh technique. This reveals the conspicuous contrast between the poems of Chung Ji Yong and Kim Kwang Kwun. That is, the poems of Chung Ji Yong are formed by materializing the feeling of sorrow that eventually brings forth sensuous clarity, whereas the poems of Kim Kwang Kwun are formed by colouring the feeling of sorrow in a pictorial structure. The feeling of sadness in Kim Kwang Kwun’s poems differentiates itself from the recklessness of the uncontrolled feelings seen in the work of poets of the 1920s. This means that, in the case of Kim Kwang Kwun’s poems, the skill of drawing through poetic language is tinged with modern techniques and sense. In ‘Lyricism of an Autumn Day,’ poetic accomplishment via Kim Kwang Kwun’s own modern technique goes one step further: Fallen leaves are the banknotes of the Polish government-in-exile. They remind me of an autumn sky spread Over the bombed-out city of Turon. The road like a rumpled necktie fades Into the cataracts of sunlight.

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The 2 p.m. express runs across the plains Puffing cigarette smoke into the air. The factory roofs flash their teeth Between the stems of poplar trees. A crooked wire fence sways in the wind A cellophane cloud hangs above. Kicking through the grass tumultuous with chirping insects I catapult a stone into the air as if to shake The desolate thoughts off my chest; It sinks, drawing a parabola, Beyond the screen of a slanting landscape.17

This poem draws upon the pictorial structure with the display of exotica. It shows the poetic technique used to complete the entire structure with images without revealing sentimentality on the surface. Such lines as ‘The road like a rumpled necktie / Fades into the cataracts of sunlight’ (4–5) and ‘The factory roofs flash their teeth / Between the stems of poplar trees / A crooked wire fence sways in the wind’ (8–10) are expressed through delicate images. This poem completes its own poetic aesthetics, in contrast to ‘Snowy Night,’ by ending with the lines, ‘I catapult a stone into the air’ (14) and ‘It sinks, drawing a parabola / Beyond the screen of a slanting landscape’ (15–16). An outstanding skill in combining imagery and lyricism makes Kim Kwang Kwun a representative modernist poet of the 1930s. After 1937, when Lee Sang died, and following the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, Kim Ki Rim published ‘The Historical Position of Modernism’ in Inmunpyongnon (Criticism of humanities) in October 1939. In an essay considered highly important because it reviews from a contemporary perspective the historical significance and value of Korean modernist poetry of the 1930s, Kim Ki Rim argues that Korean modernism proposes two kinds of negations in order to stress its own historicity: one, the sentimental romanticism of the fin de siècle; the other, proletarian literature. In short, he asserts that modernist poetry, which expresses modern civilization with a new sensibility, has significance as true twentieth-century modern literature. He further suggests that modernism’s historical direction provides a vision for the new age: In general, it is the synthesis of the proletarian poetry of the former ages and ‘modernism.’ In fact, toward the end of ‘modernism,’ its self-criticism was aroused in almost the same period as the self-reflection caused by the

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discovery of the value of language even among the proletarian poets. Undoubtedly, it may have been stimulated by ‘modernism.’ Accordingly, the poetry group found its definite direction through the combination of ‘modernism’ and sociality. It was the only and right way for which the poetry group would search. However, it was a hard way. Poets gave up the way for themselves, and they could not but do that. Lee Sang, the most notable and last ‘modernist,’ was a tragic performer who embodied, through his own life, the serious destiny, the transcendence of ‘modernism.’18

Calling Chung Ji Yong the first modernist and Lee Sang the last, Kim Ki Rim evaluates the historical development of modernism from the perspective of the late 1930s. What is interesting is that he identifies a new mode of Korean poetry in the synthesis of modernism and the sociality of proletarian literature. His perspective may be called a synthesis in its own right in that it suggests a desirable direction through a combination of the self-awareness of language and sensibility of civilization as found in modernist poetry, and the sociality of proletarian literature. Nonetheless, to some degree, this kind of synthesis is nothing more than a schematic synthesis, considering the development of Korean literary history which took place thereafter. Just as Lee Sang was a ‘tragic performer’ as the last modernist, so was Kim Ki Rim, who had to cope with the tragedy of the age as a poet and critic. Kim Ki Rim may have had a premonition about the end of his own age. The civilization for which he was an unchallenged leader was, contrary to his expectations, confronted by catastrophe. The historical process that he had undergone as a modernist of the 1930s may well be expressed obliquely in ‘The Sea and the Butterfly,’ published a few months before his landmark essay. Since no one has ever told her how deep the sea is The white butterfly has no fear of the sea. Landing on the sea taking it for a patch of blue radish, She comes home exhausted like a princess Young wings salted in the waves. As the sea, in the month of March, doesn’t bloom The deep blue, young moon chills the waist of the doleful butterfly.19

In ‘The Sea and the Butterfly,’ developed through vivid images, the

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butterfly that attempted to cross the sea, not knowing ‘how deep the sea is,’ may represent Kim Ki Rim as a modernist poet. Like ‘a princess’ coming back, Kim Ki Rim wanted to be a hero of the times through modernist poetry, but a weariness of being in the waves may have been his destiny as a poet and critic. Kim Ki Rim wrote, ‘O! young sea, I am raising the wings flying to you’ in his poem ‘Dreaming Pearl Let’s Go to the Sea’ included in Manners of the Sun; it is not too much to say that those wings were those of ‘the butterfly’ that does not know the depth of the sea. The poem may be said to have symbolic meaning in the progression from the butterfly’s will to begin the journey, to its desperation. In this respect, the prayer of Kim Ki Rim as a modernist of the 1930s may be ‘a great failure,’ as indicated by Kim Woo Chang.20 From the present perspective, Korean modernist poetry can be reviewed through three aspects: first, the progression from an inclination toward Western sensibilities to a re-evaluation of traditional ones, as seen in Chung Ji Yong’s poems; second, self-ruin resulting from extreme experimentation, as seen in Lee Sang’s poems; and, last, the synthesis and the enhancement of the two. Despite Kim Ki Rim’s proclamation that Anglo-American modernist poetry and proletarian sociality must be combined, he did not succeed in uniting the two in his own poetry. The third aspect, however, flanked by the wings of the first two, forms the central impetus in the history of modern Korean poetry, which was accelerated by the driving force of progressive, realist poetry. Successors to Modern Korean Poetry after the Mid-1940s Kim Ki Rim, who saw Korea’s liberation from Japanese imperialism with the end of the Second World War in August 1945, attempted to participate in the building of a new nation by comprehending the new age’s sociality and historicity in New Song (1948), which followed The Sea and the Butterfly (1946). In particular, he wrote in the preface of An Anthology of Avant-garde Poets, published in 1946, which featured such proletarian poets as Kim Sang Hwun, Lee Byung Chul, and Yu Jin Oh, that ‘[t]he consciousness of the destiny of the nation, rather than that of a poet’s poetry, sweeps over the poets.’21 This clearly shows Kim Ki Rim’s desire for the synthesis of modernism and sociality or historicity immediately after the liberation. Nonetheless, the radius of his activity at the time was quite different from that in the 1930s. In 1948, the Korean peninsula was divided into South and North, and, in 1950, the Korean War broke out. As a result, the modernist movement in poetry

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led by the members of the poetry coterie ‘Habangi’ (The latter half) – Park In Hwan, Kim Kyung Rin, Kim Kyu Dong, and Cho Hwyang, who gathered in the refuge of Busan – took the lead in a new age. The Chorus of the New City and the Citizens, published in 1949 by Kim Su Young and the above poets, marked an important milestone.22 In the circumstantial anxiety of the 1950s, Park In Hwan was a leader of modernist poetry, and, in the 1960s, Kim Su Young and Kim Chun Su furthered its genealogy. Korean modernist poetry establishes a large path of movement in the history of modern Korean poetry. This path indicates a connection between four generations. The first generation, coming from the 1930s, includes Lee Sang, Chung Ji Yong, Kim Ki Rim, and Kim Kwang Kwun and came on the heels of symbolist poetry, dadaism, and surrealism, which showed the transitional circumstances of the early 1920s. The second generation, in the 1950s, includes Kim Su Young and Kim Chun Su. The third generation, in the 1960s, includes Lee Seung Hwoon and Oh Kyu Won. Finally, the fourth generation, in the 1980s, includes such poets as Hwang Ji Woo, Lee Sung Bok, and Park Nam Chul. Some postmodernist poetry of the 1980s shows the same avant-garde experimentation as seen in French dadaism, which is worthy of attention because in this, we see another heir to the symbolist and dadaist poetry before and during the 1920s. With regard to Korean modernist poetry, in its early period, dadaist and surrealist poetry took the initiative, followed by British and American modernist poetry in the 1930s; after the 1980s, postmodernist poetry armed with avant-garde consciousness rose to the surface. As a result, Korean modernist poetry made it possible for Korean literary soil to be transformed via the shock of acceptance of Western poetry. What cannot be overlooked here is the question of whether or not French symbolist, dadaist, and surrealist avant-garde poetry as one group, and British and American modernist poetry as another must be definitively differentiated. Given their impact on Korean poetry, it seems appropriate that they fall together under the umbrella of modernist poetry, in spite of differences in characteristics or aspects. However, it also seems necessary to distinguish French avant-garde poetry from British and American modernism, when the aforementioned Western poetry, in addition to postmodernist poetry, is subdivided and discussed in detail.23 In the final analysis, characteristics common to Korean modernist poems are generally defined as reflecting an avant-garde consciousness and techniques resulting from an acceptance of Western methods and ideas.

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From a literary historical perspective, modernist poetry in Korea is significant because it helped Korean poetry move beyond conventional ways, ideas, and sensibilities and launch into a new world. In this sense, modernist poetry appeared in Korea with the introduction of Western civilization. However, just as modern Korean life could not be realized without Western civilization, modern Korean poetry could not develop without modernist poetry. In this respect, it can be rightly said that, to some degree, an avantgarde consciousness lay hidden in the consciousness of poets seeking modernist poetry. Still, what is new and avant-garde contains the danger that it may fade fast in the face of a new era. In this informationoriented age, then, where there is innovation day by day, this trend may be much more accelerated. In this twenty-first-century period of digitalization, no one can easily predict how modernist elements will advance. Nevertheless, without the new breaking through the old, the vitality of poetry and art will dry up. The shock that modernist poetic trends gave to Korean poets and the resulting leap toward a new world have been a significant driving force. As such, the accomplishment and significance of modernist poetry have and will have historical meaning that cannot be underestimated.

NOTES I am grateful to Kim Koo Seul for helping translate the Korean poems into English, and to Brenda Kwon for helping edit this article. 1 There are a variety of arguments about the concept of modernism. This essay develops the discussion, most expansively accepting the opinions of Kim Ki Rim and Lee Seung Hwun. See Kim Ki Rim, Shiron [Theory of poetry]; and Lee Seung Hwun, Hangook modernism shisa [The history of modernist poetry]. 2 Ko Han Yong, ‘Dadaism.’ 3 Bang Won Yong, ‘Segyeeui jeolmang – naega bon Dadaism’ [The desperation of the world – Dadaism I saw]. 4 Kim Ki Rim, ‘Modernismeui yeuksajuk wichi’ [The historical position of modernism], 75. 5 This translation is based on those of Brother Anthony of Taizé, Kevin O’Rourke, and Peter H. Lee, and further revisions if necessary. For Brother Anthony of Taizé’s translation, see David R. McCann, ed., The Columbia

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7

8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

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Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry, 53; for Lee’s translation, see Peter H. Lee, ed., Modern Korean Literature, 86. This translation is based on those of Brother Anthony of Taizé, Kevin O’Rourke, and Peter H. Lee, and further revisions if necessary. For the translations by Brother Anthony of Taizé and Kevin O’Rourke, see David R. McCann, ed. The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry, 54–6; for Lee’s translation, see Peter H. Lee, ed., Modern Korean Literature, 87–9. Kim Ki Rim, ‘Shiwa hyunshil’ [Poetry and reality], 141. For the discussion of the relation between Kim Ki Rim and T.S. Eliot, see Kim Jun Hwan, ‘Youngmi modernismgwa hangook modernism bigyo yeongoo: T.S. Eliotgwa Kim Ki-Rim’ [A comparative study of Anglo-American and Korean modernist poetry: T.S. Eliot and Ki-Rim Kim]. Kim Ki Rim, ‘Surrealist,’ lines 1–11. See Kim Ki Rim, ‘Hyundaishieui balgeon’ [The development of modern poetry]. Kim Ki Rim, Gisangdo [The weather chart], lines 1–8. See Kim Jong Gil, ‘Hangookesuheui jangshieui ganeungsung’ [The possibility of longer poetry in Korea]. See Do Jong Hwan, ‘O Jang Hwan Yeongoo’ [A study of Oh Jang Hwan], 12. This study includes a full-scale analysis of Oh Jang Hwan’s longer poems ‘A War’ and ‘The Mariner,’ which have not been previously discussed. This translation is based on that of Walter K. Lew and further revisions. For Lew’s translation, see David R. McCann, ed., The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry, 65–71. Kwon Young Min, Hangook gyegeupmoonhak undongsa [The history of Korean class literary movement], 338–47. Seo Jun Sup, Hangook modernism moonhak yeongu [A study of Korean modernism], 25–6. This translation is based on that of Kim Jaihiun and further revisions. See Kim Jaihiun, trans. and ed., Contemporary Korean Poetry, 36. This translation is based on that of Kim Jaihiun and further revisions. See Kim Jaihiun, trans. and ed., Contemporary Korean Poetry, 36. Kim Ki Rim, ‘Modernismeui yeuksajuk wichi’ [The historical position of modernism], 77. This translation is based on that of Kim Jaihiun and further revisions. See Kim Jaihiun, trans. and ed., Contemporary Korean Poetry, 26. Kim Woo Chang, ‘Modernismgwa geundaieui segye’ [Modernism and the contemporary world], 574. Kim Ki Rim, Preface to Cheonwi Sigyp [An anthology of avant-garde poets].

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22 Choi Dong Ho, Hangookhyundaishisaeui gamgak [The sense of modern Korean poetic history], 64–6. 23 Oh Se Young, ‘Modernism, Postmodernism, Avant-garde.’ He asserts here that the avant-garde should be distinguished from modernism.

SOURCES CITED Bang, Won Yong. ‘Segyeeui jeolmang – naega bon Dadaism’ [The desperation of the world – dadaism I saw]. Chosunilbo [The Chosun daily newspaper] (Kyungsung, Korea), 1 November 1924, 8. Choi, Dong Ho. Hangookhyundaishisaeui gamgak [The sense of modern Korean poetic history]. Seoul: Korea University Press, 2004. Do, Jong Hwan. ‘O Jang Hwan Yeongoo’ [A study of Oh Jang Hwan]. Doctoral diss., Chungnam University, Korea, 2005. Kim, Jaihiun, trans. and ed. Contemporary Korean Poetry. Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press, 1994. Kim, Jong Gil. ‘Hangookesuheui jangshieui ganeungsung’ [The possibility of longer poetry in Korea]. In Jinshilgwa unuh [Truth and language], 214–22. Seoul: Iljisa Publishers, 1974. Kim, Jun Hwan. ‘Youngmi modernismgwa hangook modernism bigyo yeongoo: T.S. Eliotgwa Kim Ki-Rim’ [A comparative study of Anglo-American and Korean modernist poetry: T.S. Eliot and Ki-Rim Kim]. Bipyunggwa iron [The journal of criticism and theory] 8.1 (Spring and Summer 2003): 127–87. Kim, Ki Rim. Gisangdo [The weather chart]. Seoul: Changmunsa Publishers, 1936. – Hyundaishieui balgeon’ [The development of modern poetry]. Chosunilbo [The Chosun daily newspaper], 12–22 July 1934, 2. – ‘Modernismeui yeuksajuk wichi’ [The historical position of modernism]. In Shiron [Theory of poetry], 70–8. – Preface to Cheonwi Sigyp [An anthology of avant-garde poets], 3–6. Seoul: Nonongsa Publishers, 1946. – Shiron [Theory of poetry]. Seoul: Paekyangdang Publishers, 1947. – ‘Shiwa hyunshil’ [Poetry and reality]. In Shiron [Theory of poetry], 140–4. – ‘Surrealist.’ In Chosunilbo [The Chosun daily newspaper], 30 September 1930, 5. Kim, U Chang. ‘Modernismgwa geundaieui segye’ [Modernism and the contemporary world]. In Hangook hyundaimoonhak baeknyun [Modern Korean literature 100 years], 561–617. Seoul: Minumsa Publishers, 1999. Ko, Han Yong, ‘Dadaism.’ Kaebyok 51 (September 1924): 1–8.

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Kwon, Young Min. Hangook gyegeupmoonhak undongsa [The history of Korean class literary movement]. Seoul: Munyae Press, 1998. Lee, Peter H., ed. Modern Korean Literature: An Anthology. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1990. Lee, Seung Hwun. Hangook modernism shisa [The history of modernist poetry]. Seoul: Munye Press, 2000. McCann, David R., ed. The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Oh, Se Young. ‘Modernism, Postmodernism, Avant-garde.’ In Hangookgeundaimoonhakrongwa geundaishi [The theory of modern Korean literature and modern poetry], 353–441. Seoul: Minumsa Publishers, 1996. Seo, Jun Sup. Hangook modernism moonhak yeongu [A study of Korean modernism]. Seoul: Iljisa Publishers, 1988.

6 Bertrand Russell’s Chinese Eyes eric hayot

What a Line Does Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was – her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.1

The charm of imaginary art, like that of imaginary artists, lies in its unimaginability; whatever it does, however it produces and organizes an aesthetic world internal to the novelistic or poetic space in which it appears, in the end, imaginary art justifies itself directly in proportion to the audience’s inability to evaluate it on terms other than its own. Lily Briscoe finds her central line, draws it, declares her canvas done, her vision accomplished: the novel ends. The conjunction of that metafictional ending and Lily’s line guarantees, more than any mental picture of her painting, the authority and legitimacy of her judgment. And the vectoring together of these two separate worlds – one, coastal Britain around the time of the Great War, the setting of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the other, the moment of interpretation, that awkward, unrepeatable collocation of novel’s space and reader’s time – invites, just like any metafiction, a consideration of their interaction as ideas, a productive, pleasant confusion between the ‘I’ and the ‘vision’ that belong

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properly to Lily Briscoe in one context but might, in another, be said to be properties of Virginia Woolf, whose vision also announces its closure in the blankness of the page below these lines. Whatever aesthetic is articulated here doubles itself in the coincidence of closure, referring to Lily’s world and to Woolf’s all at once. The coincidences that produce an immediately compelling connection between Lily Briscoe and Virginia Woolf have made Lily a central figure in the history of Bloomsbury modernism. Two recent books in modernist studies reinforce such a reading, testifying to the generative force of Woolf’s novel, and to the ongoing struggle to define and understand modernism, a literary movement that has seemed in recent years to approach the present more closely instead of receding, as it should, into its proper historical moment. I will, given the subject of this volume, spare you a lengthy summary and analysis of Anne Banfield’s The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism (2000), and Patricia Laurence’s Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China (2003).2 Both books attempt, through historical and cultural analysis of Woolf and her circle, to describe the origin of the modernist style, to find explanations for the monumental formal shifts that defined the movement. The origins they find are, however, quite different, and it is the difference I wish to explore here, with a sense that it expresses something about the current shape of modernist studies, and indeed the place of the Pacific Rim within it – though what ‘within’ might mean in such a context turns out to be precisely the topic under discussion. To what extent is the optic through which Europe views, and visits, the Pacific Rim itself a product of scholarly habits that govern our literary fields, and to what extent might a recasting of the ‘origins’ of modernism allow us to think its Europeanness as the product of a dialectic between the inside and outside of an internationalist, Pacific frame? The crucial difference between Banfield’s and Laurence’s takes on modernism revolves around especially intense readings of Virginia Woolf. For Banfield, the crucial feature of Woolf’s particularly modernist vision has to do with her adoption and revision of Bertrand Russell’s theory of sensibilia: sense-data unperceived by any particular subject, but which are nonetheless real. ‘In Russell’s conception,’ Banfield writes, ‘in some sense the private world is already there, like an empty room or chair, to receive the subject and in that sense independent of it, imposing a skeletal framework on his point of view.’3 When a person walks into a room

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and stands between two other people already there, Russell argued, ‘a third world, intermediate between the two previous worlds, begins to be perceived.’4 The subject is thus at the centre of a ‘here’ and a ‘now,’ but any given centre or perspective is subjectively neutral, simply an effect of relations in space and the potential reception of sense-data. The result, Banfield says, ‘is a theory of knowledge with at its center the strange notion of a subjectless subjectivity,’ a subject more like a photographic plate than a ‘person.’5 Such a theory, Banfield goes on to argue, becomes a crucial component of Woolf’s modernism, and through Woolf of modernism in general: ‘The debate about modernism stands in need of a new formulation,’ she writes, ‘which takes into account its revolutionary conception of the objects of sensation, at once physical and subjective.’ Woolf wrote through Russell’s conception of sensibilia, and her fictions articulate that epistemological conundrum, manipulate it, and revise it. Russell’s ‘here’ and ‘now’ become Woolf’s well-known ‘moment,’ a local time ‘not simply equivalent to the present,’ and so on.6 As for Patricia Laurence, she argues for the unthinkability of Woolf’s modernism without China. Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes produces an archaeology of Lily’s vision that locates its origins not in Russellian epistemology but in the intellectual, aesthetic, and personal contacts between Bloomsbury and China. These include Julian Bell’s visit to China in 1935, and a series of relationships between Bloomsbury figures and Chinese intellectuals and writers (E.M. Forster with Xiao Qian, G.L. Dickinson and Roger Fry with Xu Zhimo, and the sixteen-month correspondence between Woolf and Ling Shuhua);7 they include also the general aesthetic availability of Chinese art (the subject of essays and lectures by Roger Fry) and Chinese kitsch (in the catalogues of the Liberty department stores), translations of Chinese poetry by Arthur Waley, Ezra Pound, and others, and, of course, the general journalistic coverage of the Boxer Rebellion (1895–1900) and the fall of the Qing dynasty (1911). None of this would be a particular problem – the field of literary studies allows, bless it, for competing explanations of formal origin – if these two authors did not put so much pressure on the singular example of Lily’s final painting. For Banfield, Lily’s ‘centrally divided canvas becomes the very picture of the “logical form” of [Russell’s] proposition “something has some relation to something.’ And Lily’s ‘vision’ functions not as a single viewpoint, but as a series of moments, a ‘vision composed of fragments, yet ultimately achieving a strange, contingent

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unity – contingent on the very having occurredness of these moments, shaped by an uncompromising refusal to turn away from the consequences of this series of givens which constitute a life, a history, a novel.’8 Like Cézanne’s ‘eyeless vision of plastic color,’ made into a figure for the age by Roger Fry, Lily’s painting is a geometric apprehension of a collection of possible (not necessarily human) perspectives. These perspectives are ‘given,’ as Banfield suggests. But they are not given to anyone in particular. ‘Eyeless’: in The Phantom Table the word first appears in reference to Cézanne and post-impressionism; it is later opposed to ‘common-sense’ vision, and then is used to describe the ‘world of logical forms in whose net the empirical is caught,’ before coming to rest on the final page in the ‘vision of plastic color’ given by Cézanne.9 By then it has become a figure for the imaginary English painter as much as for the real French one; Lily’s eyeless vision of the central line closes out her painting, the novel, and Banfield’s book. Lily does, of course, have eyes, but because the quest to ‘describe the world seen without a self’ (as Woolf puts it at the end of The Waves) aims to produce a vision unbeholden to any single subject’s vision, those eyes must subordinate themselves to the possibility of their own non-existence. What to make, then, of the fact that Lily’s eyes are described in the novel, five times, as Chinese? ‘Lily’s picture! Mrs. Ramsay smiled. With her little Chinese eyes and her puckered-up face, she would never marry; one could not take her painting very seriously’ (17); ‘“And now,” she said, thinking that Lily’s charm was her Chinese eyes, aslant in her white, puckered little face, but it would take a clever man to see it’ (26); ‘But, [Lily] thought, screwing up her Chinese eyes…’ (91); ‘in her little grey dress with her little puckered face and her little Chinese eyes’ (104); ‘she stood screwing up her little Chinese eyes in her small puckered face’ (157).10 For Laurence, these eyes are a synecdoche for an entire ethos of investigation, of cross-cultural influence, and of literary hybridity that undergirds both Lily’s painting and the Bloomsbury China experience more generally, one that can be quite explicitly differentiated from a pernicious Orientalism: Lily’s ‘Chinese eyes’ suggest not the Empire’s foraging glance toward the distant lands of China and India for trade and gain, but the new aesthetic voyaging in the East during the modernist period. … Lily’s embodiment of ‘Chinese eyes’ – Woolf’s brilliant cultural, political, and aesthetic stroke

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– suggests … not only the incorporation of the Chinese aesthetic into the ‘English’ artist, but also European modernism’s, and now, our own questioning of our cultural and aesthetic place or ‘universality.’11

Just as Banfield reads Lily’s central line within the context of a Russellinfluenced post-impressionism, then, Laurence reads it as an extension of Bloomsbury’s experience of China. The Chinese, Laurence argues, ‘have been preoccupied with the calligraphic line in painting for centuries.’12 For Woolf, Laurence says, the Chinese emphasis on ‘line’ (at the expense of, say, a perspectival verisimilitude) must have signified as a mark of geometric abstraction, a uniting of artistic practice (the fingers on the brush, the wrist just so) and aesthetic form. And so, in the last lines of To the Lighthouse, as Lily has had her vision, ‘The relationships,’ Laurence writes – and she means, perhaps, both the relationships in To the Lighthouse and the ones between Bloomsbury and modernism – ‘are suddenly clear in the placement of this line. Woolf’s unwitting vocabulary of “rhythm,” “line,” “stroke,” and “pause” to describe Lily’s process and her own not only captures modernism but also Chinese traces: the lines and strokes of the calligraphic brush that creates a continuum from words to paintings.’13 What Laurence means by ‘unwitting’ is, I think, one of the crucial questions here: the word marks the limits of her scholarship, which cannot directly prove what Woolf was thinking as she wrote of Lily’s rhythms and pauses. The coincidences, though, between terms like ‘rhythm’ and ‘line’ and the ones writers and critics like Fry were using to describe Chinese paintings or describe Chinese aesthetic values suggest almost inexorably, at the end of a few hundred pages of literary history and archival research, that something ‘Chinese’ is happening here.14 The difficulty of figuring out what that ‘Chinese’ thing is, or how Chinese it might be – even whether one ought, as some critics have suggested, to rethink the entire apparatus of Anglo-American modernism through the Chinese lens15 – can be measured by the ease with which the words that justify Laurence’s reading of Lily’s line appear in Banfield’s The Phantom Table, but as symptoms of a completely different explanation: The same mathematical knowledge which sustains Mrs. Ramsay undergirds Lily’s painting, whose ‘pauses’ and ‘strokes’ formed a ‘rhythmical movement’: ‘all were related’; ‘she scored her canvas with brown running nervous lines which had no sooner settled there than they enclosed

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… a space.’ … Lily’s solution – ‘something to the right, something to the left, and the whole is held together’ – again resembles Russell’s ‘observed complex fact,’ where ‘this patch of red is to the left of that patch of blue.’ (my emphases)16

Here the critical method, as in Laurence, depends on extensive (and convincing) citational juxtaposition undergirded by the historical fact of physical or literary contact; reading Woolf after Banfield, one feels quite simply that something Russellian is happening here. How Russellian, how post-Cambridge-philosophical, post-impressionist; how Chinese? At one point in Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes, Laurence writes, ‘What the West learns then from the Chinese “codes” of perception and aesthetics is the dissolution of the boundary between the visual and verbal and the subject and the object.’17 But what one might say in response to Laurence is that there is at least one other major competing explanation for how Bloomsbury learns about the ‘dissolution of the boundary between the visual and the verbal and the subject and the object,’ namely, Banfield’s. The encounter between these two books, Banfield’s and Laurence’s, presents scholars of Bloomsbury modernism with two quite different, and differently compelling, derivations of modernist aesthetics. The confrontation staged here between these two books restages one of the more interesting divides in contemporary scholarship on modernism, namely, the one between a philosophical/epistemological approach and a cultural, internationalist one. It is not remarkable that The Phantom Table, for which Lily’s eyes constitute such a major trope, makes no hay of the fact that Mrs Ramsay describes them as Chinese; no more remarkable, that is, than that Laurence deals only cursorily with the entire apparatus of Cambridge philosophy, despite her interest in the Chinese modifications of Western aesthetic subjectivity. What we’ve got here is, as the prison boss said, a failure to communicate. The immediate solution is presumably for more people to read both books. But the real issue has to do with the nature of Anglo-American modernism itself, or, rather, the contemporary critical sense of its nature: Is modernism, following Banfield, an aesthetic movement primarily defined by a new philosophical experience of the ‘objects of sensation,’ a line connected most immediately in the modernist moment to figures such as Henri Bergson and the Cambridge philosophers, and to the phenomenologies of Husserl and others?18 Or is it, instead, the product of a quasi-postcolonial shift in geopolitical experience, a turn eastward

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or southward (or inward to easts and souths already present in the West) in search of modes of resistance to industrial capitalism or a tired romanticism, fired in the crucible of its frequent recourse to translation, primitivism, and appropriation?19 To what extent can it, or should it, make sense to think of a modernism whose most vital origins have been located entirely in Europe as at least partially generated by the Pacific Rim? What if Pacific Rim modernism is not so much a geographic location as a set of influences, or a state of mind? At stake in such a question would be nothing less than the question of modernism itself, of the possibility of thinking modernism globally or internationally, without conceiving of modernism as something which spreads across the world from a single European origin (Eliot’s The Waste Land, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Joyce’s Ulysses) to other countries, which in turn produce local modernisms defined by a combination of their imitation of the aesthetic or philosophical principles of modernism ‘proper’ and the local conditions under which they appeared. Such a theory of modernism will never be able to open itself to the possibility that modernism could not only be imitated but defined by these transformations, and thus will remain trapped in a chauvinism that is both Eurocentric and temporally limited (Eurocentric because temporally limited). In such a schema, the emergence of any Pacific Rim modernism (or one of Hungary, Iran, or Nicaragua) can only be understood as the belated (and often diluted) expression of the authentic original.20 It seems to me that two possible directions will allow us to escape the trap of mapping the great historical canard of capitalist progress (in which the rest of the world is simply a primitive and undeveloped version of the West) onto literary history. The first would reveal that, at the so-called origin of European modernism, the foreign had already inserted itself: in other words, that which has been conceived as an aesthetic movement whose concerns were purely European can be shown to have at its core features that draw from other cultures. The impact of African art on Picasso and other modernist artists is well known. Here, the project is to turn the fact of cross-cultural influence (from South to North, and East to West) into a kind of ‘common sense’ of modernist studies globally. The second approach would reconceive a definition of modernism itself (a project in which Susan Stanford Friedman is currently engaged) that would not simply generalize the traits of the two or three ‘original’ modernist texts of the early twentieth century, but would consider the entire global cultural output that has occurred

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under the name ‘modernism,’ which would permit an understanding of modernism informed by a much larger historical and cultural context. In this perspective, the various ‘other’ national modernisms would find a place not as derivative products of an origin but as full partners in a literary movement that is now, if one begins with Flaubert, over 150 years old and continues to evolve. It may turn out that when the great history of modernism is written, its most ‘central’ works will not be those of its apparent European origins but those of its strongest and most compelling moments elsewhere; it is possible, for instance, to consider much of the contemporary avant-garde performance and visual art produced in China and elsewhere as an ongoing testimony to the relevance of modernist ‘values’ largely conceived. The point would then be that all modernism is partly local, partly defined by local characteristics and local histories. But also that the local makes itself local through a relation to travel, trade, and cultural flow, just as the global does; it is simply a different relation. Everyone knows this, and yet when it comes to modernist scholarship in Anglo-American studies, such a perspective is too frequently forgotten, or, when it is remembered, it is remembered at the expense of philosophy, as though cultural particularity and philosophy were mutually exclusive (or indeed, as though philosophy only emerged from the imaginaries of the ‘West’). What is needed is a kind of double vision: Pacific Rim modernism. This essay provides one, illustrating the general principles contained in these last few paragraphs via an intense attention to and close reading of the philosophical and literary material that Banfield and Laurence address. Bertrand Russell’s Chinese Eyes Imagine a novel. Its hero is the philosopher Bertrand Russell. In the time the novel is written, everyone has heard of him; along with Einstein, he is one of the most famous intellectuals in the world. The novel begins in 1920, with a trip Russell makes to Russia, a trip he expects to allow him a richer sense of the limitations of industrial capitalism; the Bolsheviks, he feels, will offer a serious alternative to the economic and political models of the West. Instead, Russia turns out to be a ‘continually increasing nightmare.’21 Besides a growing sense that ‘the average working man feels himself the slave of the Government,’22 the trip is marred by an unpleasant, dif-

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ficult boat trip down the River Volga, during which his friend Clifford Allen becomes extremely sick. Russell notes the event in his journal: One of us lies at death’s door, fighting a grim battle with weakness and terror and the indifference of the strong, assailed day and night by the sounds of loud-voiced love-making and trivial laughter. And all around us lies a great silence, strong as Death, unfathomable as the heavens. It seems that none have leisure to hear the silence, yet it calls to me so insistently that I grow deaf to the harangues of propagandists and the endless information of the well-informed.23

The silence ‘strong as Death’ that Russell hears binds him to a world beyond politics; as he listens, called to silence by the illness of his friend and the indifference of the loud-voiced around them, he grows ‘deaf’ to the Bolshevik propaganda he has come to Russia to hear. A year later, Russell will write that it ‘was on the Volga, in the summer of 1920, that I first realized how profound is the disease in our Western mentality, which the Bolsheviks are attempting to force on an essentially Asiatic population, just as Japan and the West are doing in China.’24 Readers of this imaginary novel will begin to recognize, in the appearance of the metaphor of ‘disease’ in this last sentence, sustained by the reference to the Volga, Clifford Allen’s actual sickness and the great figural silence of Death it calls forth, a leakage between the body and the body politic, the insistent drip of a metaphor of illness and health, in Russell’s language. Years later, his biographer Ray Monk will write: ‘It was as if, travelling through the vast Russian countryside on a steamboat along the Volga, he underwent another conversion experience, another sudden realisation, this time of the sickness of Western civilization.’25 The metaphor of illness and disease will return throughout Russell’s descriptions of China. There, in late 1920, he seems determined to resist this violence, this disease, on behalf of the Chinese. In early letters home he describes the Europeans he sees as though they were ‘carriers of some deadly affliction.’26 The ones he observes in Shanghai ‘almost all look villainous and ill’; in Changsha, he says, ‘The Europeans have a few factories, a few banks, a few missions and a hospital – the whole gamut of damaging and repairing body and soul by western methods.’27 In a letter he pens to an American businessman, Russell connects Western capitalism to a wilful and deliberate violence and indifference to the pain of others: ‘comfortable plutocrats of other countries con-

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sider every inhabitant of a communist country deserving of death by slow torture. When operations have to be performed, it is impossible to obtain anaesthetics, because capitalists are of the opinion that the anguish endured is deserved by those who threaten to make them less rich.’28 The visit to China thus takes place under the shadow of disease and illness, metaphorical and actual. But Russell may have found in China a cure for those fatal afflictions: ‘Apart from the influence of Europeans,’ he writes, ‘China makes the impression of what Europe would have become if the eighteenth century had gone on till now without industrialism or the French revolution.’29 No industrialization, no French revolution: here the facts of an other history provide – relying, of course, on the old story of Chinese historical stasis – an ‘Asiatic’ alternative to the ‘Western mentality’ being imposed globally by Europe, Japan, and the Bolsheviks. In the throes of this discovery, much Chinese violence can be forgiven. Writing to a friend in February 1921, our hero says: I have no home on this planet – China comes nearer to one than any other place I know, because the people are not ferocious. It is true that the soldiers occasionally run amok,30 sack a town and bayonet all who do not instantly deliver up their whole wealth. But this is such a trivial matter compared to what is done by ‘civilized’ nations that it seems not to count. 20 million people are starving in the provinces near here, and the Chinese do nothing to relieve them. But they are better than we are, because the famine is not caused deliberately by them, whereas we deliberately cause famines for the pleasure of gloating over dying children.31

Readers familiar with the history of the West’s Chinese dreamers will hear in this apologia echoes of Matteo Ricci, Edgar Snow, or Philippe Sollers. The novelist, they will say, has done some homework. But the story cannot go on forever like this. A few weeks after writing that letter, our hero becomes sick; feverish, delirious, he almost dies. So it is that the metaphor of disease and illness Russell carried with him to China becomes realized in his own body. He does not, either during his illness or after his long and strenuous recovery, recognize the irony. It nonetheless produces a temporary change in his opinion of China. Writing to a friend in June, he says: ‘This place seems cruel to Europeans. When one is robust it is full of charm, but in bad health it is terrifying.’ And his partner, Dora Black, in a letter to her mother, reports that ‘People here are horribly callous about relief. They leave

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their neighbours severely alone, even when they are dying … [They] just remain placidly indifferent.’32 The tables, as they say, have turned. And in the last days of our hero’s convalescence, Dora, who has cared for him all through his illness, visits her doctor and learns that she is pregnant. The child Russell has longed for will finally be his. The couple packs their bags and heads back to England. Life usurps death, the West replaces China, the dream is over. But we are not quite done with the story; or, rather, there is an afterword.33 At home, Russell writes a book, The Problem of China. It is full of praise for Chinese history, its culture, its intellectual integrity. ‘[O]n the balance, I think the Chinese one of the best nations I have come across, and am prepared to draw up a graver indictment against every one of the great powers.’ Nonetheless, its author will with reluctance offer a list of three Chinese ‘defects’: avarice, cowardice, and callousness.34 On the subject of callousness, Russell has this to say: ‘Famines in China can be permanently cured only by better methods of agriculture combined with emigration or birth-control on a large scale. Educated Chinese realize this, and it makes them indifferent to efforts to keep the present victims alive. A great deal of Chinese callousness has a similar explanation, and is due to perception of the vastness of the problems involved.’ So far so good; echoes of the letter from February 1921. The text continues: But there remains a residue which cannot be so explained. If a dog is run over by an automobile and seriously hurt, nine out of ten passers-by will stop to laugh at the poor brute’s howls. The spectacle of suffering does not of itself rouse any sympathetic pain in the average Chinaman; in fact, he seems to find it mildly agreeable.35 Their history, and their penal code before the revolution of 1911, show that they are by no means destitute of the impulse of active cruelty; but of this I did not myself come across any instances. And it must be said that active cruelty is practised by all the great nations, to an extent concealed from us only by our hypocrisy.36

It is important to understand the context within which Russell locates the ‘residue’ of Chinese callousness. On the one side, he attributes as much as possible of what might appear to Westerners to be callousness to the distribution of arable land and population; the indifference of the Chinese intelligentsia to structural famine, he argues, must be grasped as a function of an inability to solve the problems that underlie it. On the other side, Russell distinguishes this ‘residue’ from the ‘active

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cruelty’ that he locates broadly in Chinese ‘history’ and more narrowly in the Chinese penal code prior to 1911, both forms of cruelty Russell acknowledges to be practised by all nations.37 The particular experience of the relation between China and pain comes, then, not from a description of torture, violence, or structural indifference, each of which Russell excuses or excises from consideration. The residue, he writes, ‘cannot be … explained’: the average Chinese person finds the spectacle of suffering ‘mildly agreeable.’ Let me rehearse the structure: Faced with a set of cultural differences – an apparent indifference to famine, a penal code invested in judicial torture – Russell places these characteristics within a framework that allows them to be understood as contingent rather than genetic, as functions of particular circumstances (geographic, or indicative of the general tendency of nation-states toward ‘active cruelty’), rather than expressions of some deep-set Chinese national character. Though the Chinese react this way to famine, though they have been actively cruel, these facts do not themselves justify an argument for Chinese callousness. English readers should understand them instead as expected responses to a set of historical facts. Other human beings, other great nations, would, in the same situation, believe roughly what the Chinese do, behave more or less as they behave. But the residue ‘that cannot be so explained’ remains outside the economy of historical causality. In the imaginary novel, Russell’s claim regarding the failure of the ‘spectacle of suffering’ to rouse in Chinese people any ‘sympathetic pain’ echoes Dora Black’s complaint that people ‘remain placidly indifferent’ to their neighbours’ suffering, each claim caught up in a network of associations that revolve around the presence of disease, illness, and indifference to pain (‘we deliberately cause famines for the pleasure of gloating over dying children’). A reading of this narrative as narrative rather than as history foregrounds the presence of illness and pain as figures, allowing for an appreciation of the text’s high-wire structuralism, the mode whereby it organizes its categories, reverses them, moves them from nation to body, body to nation, East to West, and back again. The novel, one might say, not only represents the Western experience of China as a site of resistance to modernity, but also the degree to which any individual experience of that Chinese dream will inevitably – and perhaps always at the moment when it is most invested in its own ‘fairness’ and most on the ‘side’ of China itself – take up and work through the history of a Western-imagined ‘China’ and the tropes of an Orientalism whose broad outlines have become visible since the late 1970s.

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That Russell manages to explain so much about Chinese torture and indifference so rationally marks him as a far more culturally sensitive reader of China than many of his predecessors, even as his discovery of the limits of his explanations on the grounds of a low-grade sadism (‘he seems to find it mildly agreeable’) repeats an all-too-familiar cliché. But in an imaginary novel the cliché proves itself to be simultaneously individually discovered and narratively predictable. So that Russell comes to his story about the dog in the street not only as the latest Westerner to remark this Chinese indifference to the pain of others, but also as a character whose friend fell ill on the Volga, who almost died in Beijing, whose partner in the dawn after a dark hour finds in her own body a surprising, fecund germination. Though his relation to China exemplifies once again the structure of Orientalism that exceeds Russell and is in some sense indifferent to him, it also belongs uniquely to Russell, to the vagaries of his letters, his body, and his political essays: in short, to his person.38 That pairing – the historical relationship to China on the one hand, the personal one on the other – comes in an imaginary novel on Russell and China to take the place of a biographical conclusion that might have to choose between them: rather than forcing a decision that Russell is just another Orientalist (or that he isn’t), the novel produces instead something twined, a sense both of the inevitability of Russell’s position and the set of astonishing ‘coincidences’ that were necessary to produce it. If I have been reading Russell’s life as a novel, then, it is because the word ‘novel’ allows for a reading of coincidence and figure that in ‘real life’ will inevitably seem outlandish and extravagant, precisely because it could have, in real life, happened another way, or because the details chosen to make the story must proceed by excluding the many other details that do not fit. That is why one life can generate any number of biographies, whereas a character in a novel is generated by the story even as it appears to generate it: Vronsky’s horse breaks its back not because it has a weak spine but because the story needs the back to break.39 Russell gets sick in Beijing, but he might have, we think, just as easily stayed well. Seeing the experience novelistically, with all the small distortions this requires, turns coincidence into inevitability and events that were probably in the experiential moments a series of disconnected and jumbled facts into something more like a story. This, in turn, allows one to produce around the body of Russell not simply a particular representation of Chinese indifference – the moment when

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Russell decides to explain the residual callousness that counts as one of the faults of the Chinese – but a narrative in which the character named ‘Russell’ finds himself implicated as both a neutral observer (that is, as a public intellectual making a set of political claims about geopolitical China) and as a body, as a trajectory, as a narratological object. What if, I am asking, Russell got sick because the story needed him to? Or rather, and less extravagantly, how do the coincidences of Russell’s life in this instance come to tell a story – a story unobserved by anyone – that enacts simultaneously a moment in the history of the Western perception of Chinese indifference and, in philosophical terms, a relationship to the history of a particular English modernism? The Narrator’s Difference Russell’s story of the dog in the street is a story about pain, about the recognition and expression of pain and about reactions to that recognition. Inasmuch as it responds to pain, the story functions as an ‘artifact’ of the type described by Elaine Scarry, a verbal or material object that manifests the experience of pain, or attempts to make the inanimate structure of the planet responsive to the human condition of pain. Though such an artifact is in no way sentient, or a being, it constitutes ‘the objectification of that awareness; itself incapable of the act of perceiving, its design, its structure, is the structure of a perception.’40 The structure of a perception: in the same way that a bandage objectifies – makes into an object – a subjectless perception of wounds and wounding, a story that tells of pain objectifies, puts into the ink on the page its own acknowledgment of the state of pain it perceives, or even, as seems to be the case with Russell, the presence of a sympathetic pain that reacts to the fact of the pain it observes. If a dog is run over by an automobile and seriously hurt, nine out of ten passersby will stop to laugh at the poor brute’s howls. Considered in the terms of a Russellian theory of sensibilia, the scene presents four possible ‘subjective’ perspectives: that of the dog, that of the passersby who laugh, that of the single passerby who does not, and that of the observer of the scene. Only one of these perspectives might be said, in this narrative, to be properly ‘occupied’: the observer, who hears the dog’s howls, sees the passersby and their reactions, and frames these within a syntax that makes the former the cause of the latter, reads howling as pain and laughter as pleasure (‘he seems to find it mildly agreeable’). The method of narration is uncomplicatedly realist, epistemologically

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sure-footed. One feels a long way from Lily’s portrait from memory, from the post-impressionist privileging of geometry over representation, from the eyeless possibilities of an encounter with something like the subject’s future death. Considered in terms of its perception of pain, however, the story acquires a more complex geometry. Draw a line from the dog to the laughing passersby, to indicate their relation, and another from the passersby to the observer, since their laughter is effectively what he reports on. Another line must go from the dog to the observer, since it is his being touched by the ‘brute’s howls’ that produces his evaluation of the dog’s pain. And modify that line in turn by the line that connects the dog to the passersby, because the whole reason for telling this story lies in perceived difference between the Chinese reaction and the Western one, between the two different attitudes toward the fact of the dog’s pain. What the observer observes, in this sense, includes the dog’s pain, the Chinese reaction to that pain, his own reaction to that pain, and the difference between them, which makes the fact of the reaction visible as such. The observer occupies, then, not one but two perspectives, one in the immediate moment of a visceral experience and the other in a more evaluative (later?) experience that includes the initial experience of the scene. One more line, then, between the observer of the first perspective and the one of the second; and the lines, gathering and crossing, begin to split the subject of perception from his realistic self. This is not so much eyelessness as the multiplication of eyes, the production and interaction of sensibilia gathered in the story’s arms. A slow generation of modernism inside the realistic, an arrangement of perspectives that contrasts obscure forms of oral signification – laughter, howling – with the epistemological sure-footedness of an observer who thinks he knows exactly what he sees. This assuredness renders him narratologically invisible, or permits him to imagine himself as such. The narrator ‘adds nothing,’ Lacan remarks; and Derrida replies: ‘As if one had to add something to intervene in a scene.’41 That intervention will be clearest to readers of the imaginary novel: the narrative of Chinese indifference recapitulates and allegorizes Russell’s personal experience in China, his own sense of its ‘cruelty.’ What the observer sees without knowing it is the possibility of his own meaningless death. The story of the dog on the street thus reproduces and anticipates both the basic questions of Cambridge philosophy in the modernist period and some of its major tropes: the occupation of perspectives, a more general geometry of vision and experience, to be sure, but also

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the sense of ‘pain’ as a particularly fertile site for the investigation of relations between subjects, the relationship between language and humanity, and so on. That all this happens in a Chinese context, within the frame of an explicit attempt to experience and narrate large-scale cultural difference (remember Russell’s initial motivations for going to China, his sense that it could offer civilizational resistance to Western industrialism), allows the question of subjects, objects, and the nature of human reality to take a final turn. Because, if ‘pity … is a form of conviction that someone else is in pain,’ and ‘pain’ itself depends on a human entry into language (both these ideas from Ludwig Wittgenstein, produced as part of a lifelong supersession of Russell’s own arguments about sensibilia), then indifference or laughter in relation to the pain of others indicates a failure to recognize those others as human.42 That is, the Chinese do not recognize Bertrand Russell in his illness in the way in which he recognizes himself; they do not recognize the dog in the way in which Bertrand Russell recognizes the dog: as a subject.43 The story of the dog thus at first appears to be largely cultural: Russell seems to be explaining to a British audience the difference between ‘us’ and the Chinese, a difference he defines as residual to rational explanation and elaborates with an example. But, for Russell, as for Wittgenstein, as for moral philosophers such as Adam Smith, indifference to pain is not just a randomly chosen example of human behaviour, but rather a central fact of what makes human beings human. Seen from this angle, what looks like a simple story about cultural difference turns out to depend on a complex network of recognitions and failed recognitions, each of which goes to the heart of whether Chinese callousness can in the end define the Chinese as inhuman(e), and on an epistemological history whose privileged trope makes this particular example especially telling. The primacy of pain and pity to the modern conception of self and subject makes the encounter with a different relation to pain still inside the scope of the human effectively unimaginable: indifference to pain is not subject to negotiation. That feeling depends not just on epistemology, not just on culture: it requires both.44 In Banfield’s reading of To the Lighthouse, the encounter with indifference indicates time, not culture: ‘Mr. Ramsay’s final indifference to Scott’s and his own survival … matched by Lily’s “what did that matter?” à propos of her canvas forgotten in the attic, like Principia Mathematica … is not … a moral achievement.’ Mr Ramsay ‘learns not a moral lesson but a law of time, the self’s inevitable end amidst the indifference of things.’ The ‘self’ Banfield refers to is large, and includes not

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only the human subject but also the work of art and the work of philosophy (the Principia is Russell’s masterwork, which, he said, ‘[a]lmost no one could be expected to read’).45 It is not just that the things are indifferent to people, but also the reverse; lost in attics or libraries, buried and misremembered, hidden or forgotten, the things and the people go on with their lives, as, behind them, a mountain of people and things gather themselves briefly together in the arms of the angel of history, then disappear under clouds of newer debris. Russell, attempting to explain why we think the table we saw yesterday is the same table we see today, calls the joining together of multiple possible temporal perspectives a ‘biography.’46 Though the word conjures life, the table’s biography – like the person’s – is a ‘life’ constituted not in the presence of a metaphysical subject but merely in the presence of possible observation: like sensibilia, biographies do not have to be observed to exist. ‘The result,’ Banfield says, ‘is not so much a loss of reality, but a redefinition of it that only increases the conviction of its mind-independence.’47 And in this mind-independence the individual biography, the life of a person or a thing, matters little in comparison to the vast indifference of time, the multiplicity of perspectives from which any one, any one thing, is not, cannot, or never will be seen, located, and differentiated: from which its pain will never produce a recognition, and to which the universe will never respond. By contrast, the meeting with indifference Russell has in China is an encounter with the comparatively small indifferences of human history, the famines and the soldiers running amok and his own illness. But, for Russell, these indifferences are a matter of culture, not ontology. The indifference Black and Russell report experiencing – an indifference marked by the failures of others to see them as they would like to be seen, to occupy the points of view from which their suffering would have mattered – is not universal. It is ‘Chinese.’ Insofar as the recognition of someone’s pain can, in an indifferent world, mark a moment of perception – insofar as the material artifact, a table or a chair, reflects the ‘structure of a perception’ of pain that outlasts the moment of perception (and is, in the long run, completely indifferent to the particularity of it) – the moment of what Wittgenstein calls ‘pity’ reflects a brushing against death, large or small, an awareness of time’s indifference. But also a willingness to remark that indifference, to heal its wound, to produce something like a publicly available testament to the perception of indifference and pain. At least, let us say, in the modern West: if the Chinese seem to Russell indifferent to the pain of others, it is perhaps

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because of a different kind of eyelessness, one that even when it can see pain remains indifferent to it (or finds it ‘slightly agreeable’). This too is cultural; I say so not to condemn Russell for his limitations, but because those limitations define the language game whereby indifference, pain, and China can come to metonymize a modernism whose cultural origins do not have to be named. I am talking here about the structure of a perception. The Chineseness of Suffering In 1926, some five years after Russell’s trip, a year before the publication of To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf published in the New Criterion an essay with the title ‘On Being Ill.’ In illness, she writes, the ‘makebelieve’ of ordinary intercourse comes to a halt; though, while healthy, we pretend to be ‘soldiers in the army of the upright,’ joined in the great human struggle to move forward, holding hands, to improve and to share, to cultivate and teach, in illness ‘we go alone.’ ‘That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you – is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others.’48 The byways of the self’s ‘virgin forest,’ though offering little consolation as regards an incipient human loneliness, nonetheless have some advantages. In illness, Woolf writes, no one can sustain the attention required for history or narrative fiction. But a line or two of poetry, broken off in the name of other tastes, ‘sudden, fitful, intense,’ can lead to an unexpected blooming: In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and the other – a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause – which the poet, knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke, when collected, a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain. … Foreigners, to whom the tongue is strange, have us at a disadvantage. The Chinese must know the sound of Antony and Cleopatra better than we do.49

Hearing sounds divorced from sense, as though prior, then, to language,

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the ill become, like Lily Briscoe, modernists, singing earless lines in the houses of the mind. Relative to an ‘us’ – and only relative to us, though the choice of example matters – the Chinese (all foreigners) are in a state of permanent illness; the dumbshow of an English Shakespeare speaks to them of unoccupied perspectives, of a world without subjects, without language, in which sounds register merely on some autochthonic recording machine. Or, in reverse: illness makes ‘us’ Chinese, the selfestrangement it provides akin to a geographic displacement, an interior foreignness that grants a privileged awareness of the properties of linguistic form (and, thus, to the classic structure of modernist aesthetics). Language’s strange sound – a howl, a bark of laughter, or the bar-bar of a foreign tongue – enters the body like a poison, or an angel, through the ear. Is this coincidence – yet another conjunction of the Chinese, pain, the unoccupied perspective of an inhuman epistemology, and a fairly standard modernist aesthetic of estrangement, each of these intertwined enough with the others to make untangling quixotic – just a coincidence?50 No: this series of conjunctions and coincidences, this improbable network of metonymic connections between China, philosophy, humanity, illness, and pain, means something outside the intimate ingatherings of the fiction I have proposed. This is what the word ‘overdetermination’ is for: to allow us to see how biographical action can be the effect of an ideological discourse, despite the best individual will of its participants. And this discourse tells us that any attempt to simply compare modernisms from two or more national locations will fail if it does not understand that every philosophical and literary modernism is itself subject to an internal, undermining comparative action, in which the ‘foreign’ always and in advance inhabits the ‘native’ national paradigm. The story I have told about Bertrand Russell shows not simply that his relation to China was a feature of some external or extraneous Orientalism, but rather that the categories through which Russell thought – the categories that allowed him to ask the fundamental philosophical questions of perception, of language, and of the nature of the human – were themselves already shaped by a relation to Chineseness. That the relation to Chineseness was itself equally affected, and in advance, by the philosophical categories that it helped shape I take as the paradoxical but necessary corollary to this first idea.51 I am not arguing, therefore, that Russell’s thought was originally or essentially ‘Chinese,’ for some kind of ‘Pacific Rim Russell’ that would come to supplant the Bertrand we already know. That some aspect of

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Russell’s thought included China is, it seems to me, simply true, and was generally true for anyone living in England during that era. The difficulty comes in moving from a claim about ‘China’ as a feature of the cultural and individual experience of the Bloomsbury group to one that says, as Laurence does, that without China Bloomsbury would be unthinkable. Banfield’s work demonstrates the incompleteness of such a story. The problem lies not with Laurence’s work as such – or rather not with the particular claims she and Banfield make for the importance of the issues they discuss to the ferment of modernism. The problem is that the bar for relevance has been set too high, encouraging scholars to turn complex historical claims about literary form (because modernists thought about China sometimes, the modernism they created owes something to China) into simple but impossible causal ones (without China, modernists would not have thought of modernism at all). Given that the latter claim will not convince anyone, what results is a critical world in which competing claims from ‘outside’ the standard cultural context that organizes literary critical work (usually the nation-state; sometimes a continent or region) can never acquire the critical force of those claims that emerge from ‘inside’ the standard context, because the totalities of the latter will never overturn the totalities of the former. It is not that they should; it is that they cannot, and that expecting them to is one of the ways in which modernism retains its monoculturalism and monolingualism. The genius of Said’s Orientalism was to make visible the degree to which the apparent ‘outside’ had been ‘inside’ for a very long time. This did not simply reverse the origins, relocating them from West to East; it undermined the whole structure of Europe’s sovereign originality. Perhaps Lily’s line – like the lines of the two approaches to modernism captured in The Phantom Table and Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes – ought to be considered outside the parameters of Euclidean geometry. If, as Banfield argues, the line hints at perspectives unoccupied by human eyes, then there is no reason for it to obey the Newtonian conveniences of everyday life. It might be said, then, not so much to bifurcate (which gives us, once again, two approaches) as to stretch, to allow parallels to cross, to bend according to historically and geographically local centres of gravity. Following such a line, we would not study – to put the question into its most traditional formulation – the ‘encounter’ between the Pacific Rim and modernism, but rather work the interpenetration of those two categories prior to a generalized awareness of them as categories, understanding that each of them depends, in some way, on

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the apprehension of the other in advance, just as the West’s philosophical fascination with pain lays the groundwork for Russell’s personal encounter with China, and the reverse. No single origins. A scholarship that pursued such a course would be able to affirm that formal line in all its remarkable complexity: Lily Briscoe’s Chinese, yes. But don’t lay down those brushes yet.

NOTES 1 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 207. All further references are cited in the text. 2 You may find one in an earlier version of this essay, published in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. 3 Banfield, The Phantom Table, 73. 4 Russell, qtd in ibid., 73. 5 Ibid., 70. 6 Ibid., xi, 118. 7 Julian Bell, Woolf’s nephew, had an affair with Ling Shuhua during his time in China. The affair is discussed extensively in Laurence’s book; it is also the subject of a novelized account by Hong Ying, who has been sued for defamation by Ling’s descendants. For a reading of the Ling-Woolf correspondence within the optic of Orientalism and feminism, see Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern, 215–21. 8 Banfield, The Phantom Table, 286, 388. 9 Ibid., 258, 266, 363, 388. 10 It is worth noting in three of these instances that Mrs Ramsay is the source of the characterization (in free indirect discourse on 17 and 104, and through direct psycho-narration on 26). The other two instances (on 91 and 157) both appear in sections that feature free indirect discourse through Lily herself; only in the first of the two is Mrs Ramsay diegetically present to focalize the observation. In part three of the novel, Lily’s eyes are never referred to as Chinese; by then, Mrs Ramsay is dead. The care with which the adjective ‘Chinese’ is distributed ought to make readers equally careful about ascribing the adjective to Woolf or pressing too hard on its meaning. The amount of narrative and philosophic pressure put on Lily’s eyes throughout the novel, however, makes an account of their ‘Chinese’ character necessary. 11 Laurence, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes, 10. The distinction between Empire’s ‘foraging glance’ and a ‘new aesthetic voyaging’ that is presumably less

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imperialist aims to absolve Woolf of the potential association with Orientalism. But to believe that Orientalism requires an explicitly ‘foraging’ epistemological form requires a profound misunderstanding of the nature of Orientalism, which is a mode of writing and knowing that does not need explicitly to imagine itself as connected to the imperial project. As an ideological form, Orientalism must be understood as more than simply a kind of ‘taking sides’ for or against imperialism. It is the cultural structure within which knowledge emerged during a specific historical period and within a limited geographic and cultural framework (and which was itself internally complex on the question of ‘sides’ and of cross-cultural influence). Ibid., 352. Whether anyone can really say that as large a group of people as the Chinese has been singly preoccupied (over centuries) with a single feature of the aesthetic, whether the word ‘line’ here manages to denote simultaneously something culturally Chinese and something culturally English, and what the terms of a ‘preoccupation’ would be are all important questions and go to the heart of the long-standing debate (or ‘problem,’ as far as the West is concerned) around the issue of (a) Chinese aesthetic(s) (the first question being, is there one? and the second being, is there more than one?). That is, Laurence’s statement strikes me as overgeneralized. Comparing it with a sentence such as ‘The Europeans have been preoccupied with representational perspective in painting for centuries’ shows how Laurence’s characterization might be simultaneously vaguely right but wrong in many of its particulars. I am not, however, trying to argue with Laurence’s conclusions here. I simply wish to lay out the argument alongside Banfield’s in order to make a few claims about the relationships between China, epistemology, and modernism. For more on the debate around China and aesthetics, see Haun Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic. Laurence, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes, 387. Woolf, Laurence notes, assigned ‘Chinese eyes’ to at least two other people: Mrs Dalloway’s daughter Elizabeth, and John Donne (Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes, 346). In those cases, the ‘something’ that happens is, it is fair to say, less clear, probably because neither figure in Woolf’s work goes on to articulate what are taken to be the author’s own aesthetic principles and values. Zhaoming Qian, for instance, makes this argument at length in Orientalism and Modernism and elsewhere. Banfield, The Phantom Table, 286. Laurence, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes, 384.

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18 A critical tradition that ends with The Phantom Table easily includes such recent works as Sanford Schwartz’s The Matrix of Modernism, Jon Erickson’s The Fate of the Object, and Douglas Mao’s Solid Objects. As I understand this trajectory, it differs in important ways from the recent emphasis in literary and cultural criticism on material culture, perhaps best embodied on the literary side by Bill Brown’s work on ‘things’ (see, for instance, ‘Thing Theory.’ Where the subject-object line depends for its weight on philosophy, work in material culture grounds itself in the comparative lightness of the physical artifact. For a take on Chinese material culture in the context of British modernism, see Judith Green, ‘“A New Orientation of Ideas.”’ 19 In such a context, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes bookends a tradition whose recent work includes Marianna Torgovnick’s Gone Primitive, Michael North’s The Dialect of Modernism, and, in the Chinese context, Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem, and Steven G. Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism. 20 An exception to this trend is the case of Latin American modernismò, which dismisses Eurocentric ‘modernism’ as a pseudo-precursor and sees the term as essentially empty. 21 Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1914–1944, 2: 141. 22 Russell, The Problem of China, 60. 23 Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell, 580. 24 Russell, The Problem of China, 12. 25 Monk, Bertrand Russell, 581. 26 Ibid., 593. 27 Russell, Autobiography, 2: 197, 199. These two citations appear together in Ray Monk’s description of Russell’s trip, contextualized there as here in terms of a larger metaphor of disease and illness (592–3). Monk foregrounds that metaphor throughout his descriptions of Russell’s trips to Russia and China, and I am grateful to him for calling my attention to it in Russell’s language and work. 28 Russell, The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914–1970, 220–1. 29 Russell, Autobiography, 2: 199. 30 The etymology of the word ‘amok’ gives this complaint a strange twist: first found in English as a translation of the Portuguese amouco, it originates in the Malay word amoq, meaning ‘engaging furiously in battle, attacking with desperate resolution, rushing in a state of frenzy to the commission of indiscriminate murder ... Applied to any animal in a state of vicious rage’ (OED). The term’s return East to describe Chinese soldiers

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offers another example of the recursive nature of the history of Western imperialism, as the word borrowed from Malay to describe what seemed to Westerners a particular cultural type of behaviour (from the Voyages of Captain Cook: ‘To run amock is to get drunk with opium ... to sally forth from the house, kill the person or persons supposed to have injured the Amock, and any other person that attempts to impede his passage’) makes its way to Portuguese, then English and England, and then back to China to describe behaviour which it therefore implicitly identifies as ‘Asian.’ The OED gives another instantiation of this recursiveness, turned to quite a different cultural valence, from Thoreau’s Walden: ‘I might have run “amok” against society, but I preferred that society should run “amok” against me.’ I first heard about the etymology of ‘amok’ from Paul Kramer, who spoke of it while giving a paper at Cornell University in summer 2003. Russell, The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, 223–4. Black, qtd in Monk, Bertrand Russell, 602. Things were even more complicated in fact than in my imaginary novel. In late March, having got wind of Russell’s illness, a newspaper in Japan reported that he had died. The news spread quickly around the world, producing emotional reactions ranging from sadness to disbelief; on the latter front, Ray Monk reports that Russell’s brother Frank told English journalists that ‘dying in Peking … was not the sort of thing his brother would do without letting him know’ (Bertrand Russell, 600). One missionary paper, remembering Russell’s vitriolic critiques of organized religion, noted the event with a single sentence: ‘Missionaries may be pardoned for heaving a sigh of relief at the news of Mr. Bertrand Russell’s death,’ an anecdote Russell recounts with some pleasure in his Autobiography: ‘I fear they would have heaved a sigh of a different sort when they found that I was not dead after all’ (2: 189). Indeed, he seems to have got a great deal of pleasure from the misunderstanding. In a letter to Ottoline Morrell in May 1921, he wrote: ‘I have realized one ambition which I almost despaired of, I have read an obituary notice of myself. In Japan I was reported dead, and the Japan Chronicle had a long article on me. My illness has not changed me in the slightest, in fact it has made hardly more impression than a bad toothache. I have missed much by not dying here, as the Chinese were going to have given me a terrific funeral in Central Park, and then buried me in an island in the Western Lake, where the greatest poets and emperors lived, died, and were buried. Probably I should have become a God. What an opportunity missed!’ (Selected Letters, 226). Russell, The Problem of China, 220. The request for such a list comes, cru-

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Eric Hayot cially, from an ‘eminent Chinese writer.’ As Lydia He Liu has suggested, the narration of this fact consolidates ‘the author’s own knowledge about the other even as the subjectivity of the anonymous other is consumed in the process of appropriation’ (Translingual Practice, 46). Liu follows this observation with an extensive discussion of the history of Russell’s Problem of China as it was received in China. Shu-mei Shih also discusses this moment in Russell in The Lure of the Modern, 23–4. Interesting to consider this in light of the American missionary’s reaction to reports of Russell’s death (see note 33), which the missionary seems to have found ‘mildly agreeable.’ Russell, The Problem of China, 221–2. The Qing penal code is one of the long-standing sites of a quasi-voyeuristic Western fascination with Chinese judicial torture. See Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts for an extensive and illuminating discussion of its history in the West. What do I mean by “structure of Orientalism that exceeds Russell and is in some sense indifferent to him”? asks a reviewer of this essay. Only this: that the necessary triumph of Said, which was a great victory for literary criticism and for intellectual complexity and honesty, had one major and unfortunate side effect (which was itself no fault of Said’s): to make Orientalism a feature of the individual person, a sort of moral flaw, rather than the description of a historical structure that was quasi-universal in its range and its application, and which cannot be overcome, any more than the past or its legacies can ever be. Orientalism is best thought of not as a particular way of seeing the world, but as the only way in which the world was seen from Europe for several centuries. And that ‘world’ included not only the so-called Orient, but also Europe itself – Orientalism was a universalizing and organizing optic that included, first, the possibility of a wide range of political and/or moral relations to the Orient (for or against, for instance), and, second, a theory of the entire planet as an organization of races, civilizations, histories, and states, and for which the relation between the Orient and Europe functioned as a privileged metric. Here is Virginia Woolf, reviewing a biography of Christina Rossetti: ‘Here is the past and all its inhabitants miraculously sealed as in a magic tank; all we have to do is to look and to listen and to listen and to look and soon the little figures – for they are rather under life size – will begin to move and to speak, and as they move we shall arrange them in all sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant, for they thought when they were alive that they could go where they liked; and as they speak we shall read into their sayings all kinds of meanings which never struck them, for they believed

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when they were alive that they said straight off whatever came into their heads. But once you are in a biography all is different’ (cited in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, 8–9). Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 289. Derrida, La carte postale, 457. Translation by the author. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §287. It might be possible to say – for someone interested in dividing lines – that the epistemological experience Russell has before he comes to China motivates his reproduction of its tropes when he gets there, though that would not adequately explain Wittgenstein’s references to pain and howling dogs. The ‘Chinese’ response would be: but surely Russell thought of China, thought China, before 1921; surely one can gesture toward a history of Western literary or philosophical relationships to China, to the entire apparatus of chinoiserie, gardens, tea, trading, and wars, and wonder if these did not somehow reach him first. The problem is, it is too late; the stories we tell each other now depend on perspectives unavailable to Russell and his contemporaries, and even scholarship that works to restore old perspectives must do so with the same doubled glance with which Russell observes himself observing the wounded dog. (Why the critique of textualism is limited.) A civilization whose saviour redeems them by taking on their pain – by pitying them enough to do so – and is crucified for it might, from another perspective, to be said to be in the throes of an unhealthy obsession with the topic. But that is another story. Banfield, The Phantom Table, 351. Banfield writes: ‘Presumably the public table itself would have a biography, since it persists over time, just as the person, Scott or Bismarck, would be a “public neutral object” with spatial continuity, known by description’ (The Phantom Table, 100). Ibid., 101. Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 4, 320–1. Ibid., 324–5. On at least one other occasion, Woolf connects China to bodies and pain. In the essay ‘The Chinese Shoe,’ written in memory of Lady Henry Somerset, she laments the degree to which the ‘natural desire’ of Somerset’s ‘lively and courageous nature’ was stunted by those around her, ‘until we feel that the old Chinese custom of fitting the foot to the shoe was charitable compared with the mid-Victorian practice of fitting the woman to the system’ (‘The Chinese Shoe,’ in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3, 390). I have left aside here two references to Elizabeth’s ‘Chinese eyes’ in

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SOURCES CITED Banfield, Anne. The Phantom Table. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Brook, Timothy, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue. Death by a Thousand Cuts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Brown, Bill. ‘Thing Theory.’ Critical Inquiry 28 (Autumn 2001): 1–22. Bush, Christopher. Ideographic Modernism. Forthcoming. Derrida, Jacques. La carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà. Paris: Flammarion, 1980. Erickson, Jon. The Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign in Performance, Art, and Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Green, Judith. ‘“A New Orientation of Ideas”: Collecting and the Taste for Early Chinese Ceramics in England 1921–36.’ In Collecting Chinese Art: Interpretation and Display, edited by Stacey Pierson, 43–54. London: University of London, Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, School of Oriental and African Studies, 2000. Kern, Robert. Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Laurence, Patricia. Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1999. Liu, Lydia He. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity in China, 1900–1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Mao, Douglas. Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Monk, Ray. Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude. London: J. Cape, 1996.

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North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Perloff, Marjorie. Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Qian, Zhaoming. Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Russell, Bertrand. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1914–1944. Vol. 2. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968. – The Problem of China. New York: Century, 1922. – The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914–1970. Edited by Nicholas Griffin, assisted by Alison Roberts Miculan. London: Routledge, 2001. Saussy, Haun, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Schwartz, Sanford. The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early TwentiethCentury Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Shih, Shu-mei. The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 3rd ed. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Woolf , Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 4 vols. Edited by Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press, 1988–94. – Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego: Harcourt, 1981. – To the Lighthouse. San Diego: Harcourt, 1981. Yao, Steven G. Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

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SECTION THREE Tectonics

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7 Blackfellows and Modernists: Not Just Black and White ann stephen

A rim implies both an outer edge and a connection; when coupled with the Pacific, the word conjures up an oceanic space linking hemispheres. Despite globalization, it can be difficult to conceive of Australia as part of its immediate neighbourhood of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, let alone the Pacific Rim. Instead, images of the nation as a small embattled outpost of displaced Europeans marooned in uncertain tides are the common currency of neo-conservative alignments.1 It is against such diminished horizons that this essay is positioned, tracing far-flung exchanges between Australian Aboriginal cultures and several early twentieth-century modernists, both at the heart of dada’s Cabaret Voltaire and on the periphery of the Pacific in suburban Australia. ‘Be Aboriginal’ The desire for ‘Aboriginality’ reverberates through modernist visual and literary cultures in Australia. It was the artist Margaret Preston (1875–1963) who, in the 1920s, first championed Aboriginal art as ‘an art taken from ... the Australian Aborigines: an art for Australia from Australians.’2 Her call to ‘be Aboriginal’ has become a lightning rod for subsequent disputes over appropriation and dispossession.3 Indigenous artists and curators rightly accuse Preston of making ‘Aboriginal art without Aborigines,’ adopting Aboriginal forms and motifs displaced from their context and meanings.4 One of her sharpest critics, Djon Mundine, has compared the critical discourse on Aboriginal art to that most famous Pacific castaway story, Robinson Crusoe, in which ‘a white Western male is shipwrecked on a tropical Pacific island which he believes is deserted; physically, culturally and historically. Then one

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day he sees a “sign,” a mark, and that sign is Aboriginal art. Then he meets the human who made that mark, but he then names him and in naming him appropriates and controls him.’5 Mundine’s warning invokes the spectre of terra nullius, the legal fiction of unoccupied land under which Australia was colonized. The following account scrutinizes several early modernist intersections with Aboriginal art for disruptive signs that might challenge European discourses on primitivism. To examine such cross-cultural encounters involves a shift in focus to include cultural terrains normally quite peripheral to the avant-garde, such as missions and the souvenir trade. Take the first-hand narrative entitled ‘A Blackfellow’s Appeal to White Australia concerning Christian Missions,’ published by a left literary magazine in 1934. Its author begins by explaining how he reclaimed his Aboriginality through the intermediary of a ‘sympathetic white man [whose] picture ... of my people’s achievement in depictive art, mimetic dances and social and religious ceremonies contrasted strangely with my memories of the miserable, depressed creatures who used to squat about our mission compound, making sham boomerangs and raffia work to sell to tourists.’6 Although the narrative is signed with the tribal-language name of Narranyeri, its autobiographic references and rhetoric suggest the author was David Unaipon, a leading Aboriginal activist, preacher, inventor, and writer who probably assumed the name of his people (the Ngarrindjeri, in the present day spelling) as a mask for his attack on Western civilization. Narranyeri/Unaipon’s ‘Appeal’ culminates in a series of accusations: Your anthropologists measure our skulls and index their findings and issue warnings that our disappearance will be a great loss to your science. Your ethnologists ask us questions about our vanishing habits, customs, religions and folk lore and write books about them. Does it ever occur to you that we are human beings? Do you ever give our problems intelligent consideration? ... No, you never ask yourself these questions. Courtesy is a characteristic of my race, so I will refrain from describing you as hypocrites. Yet it would be more honest of you if you collected us in a compound and then turned machine guns on us, and it would also be more merciful, for it would save us from a fate more gradual, but no less horrible.7

Unaipon had good reason to feel betrayed, as his major literary work, based on years of field work transcribing Aboriginal oral stories, had

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been published three years earlier in the name of the amateur anthropologist Dr Ramsay Smith.8 While Unaipon’s language bears traces of a mission education, its ferocity is that of a dada manifesto. Aboriginal Dada Two decades earlier, against the battery of machine-gun fire throughout Europe, the Romanian exile Tristan Tzara had performed Aranda and Loritja songs at dada’s Cabaret Voltaire in the neutral haven of Zurich, in what was perhaps the earliest modernist engagement with Australian Aboriginal cultures as a source for avant-garde art. The Aranda (or Arrernte, now the preferred spelling) of Central Australia were ‘one of the best-known Aboriginal groups in world anthropology, having been the subject of many famous descriptive discourses, as well as heated and obscure debates concerning the nature of so-called “primitive” life.’ However, like all Aboriginal cultures, they were considered by European anthropologists to be ‘uncivilized,’ having no written language, architecture, or sculpture.9 This widely held belief explains why the Surrealists, as members of an avant-garde movement intrigued by the so-called primitive, would remain oblivious to Aboriginal aesthetics, as is apparent on ‘The surrealist Map of the World’ made by the Belgian disciples of André Breton and published in their review, Variétés, in 1929.10 On this mapping, each culture or country is scaled according to its relative importance to surrealism, with the continent of Australia ranking as insignificant beside New Guinea and Easter Island (Ile de Pacques). How, then, had Aboriginal culture caught the attention of Tzara a decade earlier? Another dada poet in exile, Richard Huelsenbeck, had previously sung his Negergedichte (‘negro poems’) with fellow dadaist Hugo Ball in Berlin’s anti-war cabarets, such as the Expressionistische Soirée in May 1915.11 Huelsenbeck continued to invent and perform these poems after joining the Zurich circle in February 1916. By the following month, Cabaret Voltaire was advertising Huelsenbeck’s chants nègres, sung to frenetic pseudo-African drumming and dancing in the company of Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tzara, and Marcel Janco, a fellow Romanian exile who made them all wild masks of cardboard and other scrap materials.12 Janco’s masks and posters for Le Chant Nègre made Picasso’s African-inspired cubist figures dance on the stage of Cabaret Voltaire. Ball reports that, even before the performance, the Cabaret’s Dutch

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landlord, Herr Ephraim, who had been a trader in Africa, questioned the authenticity of the songs. Huelsenbeck dismissed the question, as he was only interested in avant-garde provocation in the vain hope that by ferociously attacking German high culture he would expose its complicity in the war. However, with Ball’s encouragement, Huelsenbeck included some of Ephraim’s African rhythms, which he framed with his mock chant ‘umba, umba,’ subsequently explaining, ‘I recited my new “authentic” Negro poems, and the audience thought they were wonderful. ... Naturally, no force on earth could have gotten me to leave out the “umba” at the end of each verse, although my Dutchman shook his head disapprovingly.’13 The idea of authenticity was meaningless to the inventor of sound poems with no specific cultural source. Huelsenbeck had unwittingly stumbled into a minefield that would explode in postcolonial debates. At the time, however, Ball merely reflected in his diary on dada’s fascination with the ‘primitive,’ speculating that it had a psychoanalytical and political dimension as a ‘kind of internal probing of primeval memory ... the primeval strata, untouched and unreached by logic and by the state apparatus.’14 When the dadaists regrouped at the Galerie Dada in 1917, Art Nègre continued as part of most performances, with the program for the third soirée on 12 May including ‘Vers Nègres (tribus: Aranda, Ewe, Bassoutos ... Kinga, Loritja, Ba-Ronga, traduits de T. Tzara).’15 Tzara noted in his Zurich Chronicle that ‘the public appetite for the mixture of instinctive recreation and ferocious bamboula which we succeeded in presenting forced us to give on May 19 a repetition.’16 He had also begun to collect and write on African art and published several of his Vers Nègres in the first and second issues of Dada, the journal he edited later that year. By 1920, dada’s Zurich circle had dispersed, and when Huelsenbeck returned to Germany he was highly critical of his former collaborator Tzara, who was by then working in Paris. Huelsenbeck accused Tzara of ‘grinding out Negro verses which he palmed off as accidentally discovered remains of a Bantu or Winnetu culture, again to the amazement of the Swiss.’17 The two were always intensely competitive, waging a lifelong dispute over the authorship of the term Dada. Not until the 1970s, however, when rough drafts, scraps of paper, and notebooks held in the Collection Tzara were studied by the literary historian Gordon Browning did it became clear to what extent Tzara’s practice divided from Huelsenbeck’s precisely over the question of the Poèmes Nègres. In contrast to Huelsenbeck, who invented his own pseudo-African words, Tzara had translated his poems from African, Aboriginal,

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Maori, and other South Pacific sources that he found in Zurich’s Technical University Library. Although Tzara never cited the sources but simply identified the Poèmes Nègres by a language or tribal name, such as Aranda or Loritja, Browning notes that he consulted over fifty titles of ethnological studies, including the Viennese journal Anthropos and Carl Meinhof’s Die Dichtung der Afrikaner.18 At the time, Tzara published only a few of these Poèmes Nègres, including four Aboriginal songs. Browning suggests that Tzara’s selection was informed by ‘a poetic solution between the meaningless sound, on the one hand, and the logical, syntactical discourse, on the other. ... Those poems he typed and those few he first published were in French but emphasized rhythm over meaning, subordinating intelligible syntax to the original German word order. ... The poem is an example, without Tzara’s personal imagery, of fragmentation short of nonsense, and of meaning short of narration and personal sentiment.’19 Browning identified the source of the Aranda and Loritja songs as the work of the German émigré Pastor Carl Strehlow, who had been based at the Lutheran Mission of Hermannsburg in Central Australia. Strehlow’s Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien had been issued by the Städtische Völker-Museum in Frankfurt-am-Main in seven instalments between 1907 and 1920.20 The first slim volume opens on a single half-page photograph, like a visual dedication, under which are the words: ‘Die vier Schwarzen, die die meisten Sagen erzählt haben’ (‘The four black men who told most of the legends’) (see illustration 7.1). These men, who worked with Strehlow on the translations between 1894 and 1922, were all steeped in ritual knowledge, although their relations with the Lutheran mission varied. For example, Loatjira, seen on the far left, was a Western Aranda ceremonial elder for Ntarea, where the Hermannsburg Mission was established; although he assisted Strehlow for years, he refused all the pastor’s attempts at conversion and did not live on the mission because of the edicts placed on ceremonies. By contrast, the younger man on the far right, Tjalkabota, known as Blind Moses, would become a leading evangelist and mission teacher among his people.21 Unlike the conventional ethnographic photography that accompanied Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen’s anthropological classic The Native Tribes of Central Australia, published eight years earlier, Strehlow did not strip his subjects of their European dress to make them appear as ‘authentic primitives.’22 Strehlow’s photograph has the serious formality of a studio shot, except that the location is outside and the four Schwarzen are shown kneeling on the

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Figure 7.1 Frontispiece of the first volume of Carl Strehlow’s Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien (1907).

ground, blackfellow-style, facing their translator and, through him, the reader. In this position, they appear as intermediaries negotiating the terms of access to their country and its songs. In 1917, Tzara wrote that it was from such oral cultures, ‘where thought is made in the mouth,’ that inspiration was to be found: ‘Du noir puisons la lumière’ (‘Out of the black let us draw the light’).23 Pastor Strehlow (followed by his anthropologist son, T.G.H. Strehlow) documented the totemic songs of Central Australia with a Teutonic thoroughness that would ensure the Aranda and the Loritja a status equivalent to written cultures. As the literary historian Walter F. Veit explains, Carl Strehlow’s study blends anthropological and philological inquiries, initially describing the songs’ role in ceremony and language and then presenting, in separate columns, two different versions: a transliteration in the Aranda (or Loritja) language with a German interlinear (word-by-word) translation, and a second translation in more readable German. In a recent commentary on the Poèmes

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Nègres, Veit surmises that, as ‘Tzara translates into French the string of words given by Strehlow in his interlinear translations of the texts ... we have to conclude that Tzara chose the interlinear version for his translation into French deliberately in order, I contend, to participate – albeit at least twice removed – in the magic of the Aboriginal cult songs ... to get closest to the original sound and rhythm which he could not fathom in any other way.’24 Tzara saw how a literalness that bordered on abstraction arose when the meanings of the Aboriginal words were rubbed between two foreign tongues. For instance, in ‘Chanson du Serpent,’ which appeared in the second issue of the journal Dada, intelligibility is surrendered to the original word order and rhythms (see illustration 7.2). The Aranda song begins, ‘Larbalarbali iwutjintjima,’ which Tzara renders as ‘Serpentant jeter en avant,’ echoing the repetitive rhyming structure of the original, not heard in Strehlow’s interlinear verse ‘Schlängelnd vorauswerfen,’ which translates as ‘Snaking throwing ahead.’25 Even without knowing the intonation of the Aranda/Loritja songs, Strehlow’s written versions allowed Tzara to make a form of abstraction out of the ready-made sounds and rhythmical patterns. Recent work on Tzara’s pre-dada Jewish Romanian origins have revealed other non-Western influences, including Romanian folklore, absurdist strands in Yiddish theatre, and Hasidic traditions of singing fragments of prayers. As the precocious young Samuel Rosenstock, before renaming himself Tristan Tzara, Tzara wrote symbolist poems as part of the Bucharest Simbolul group with the Ianco (later Janco) brothers, who were also secular Jews. The Swedish art historian Tom Sanqvist draws striking parallels between Janco’s dada masks and those worn in animistic initiation rites of the Carpathanian mountains, likening the ‘inspired speech’ and ecstatic prayers sung by the Hasidic Jews to dada’s simultaneous poetry.26 Just as Rosenstock’s new name embodied his exile state (tzara in Romanian translates as ‘sad in his own country,’ and the Yiddish tzure, ‘misery,’ is pronounced in Hebrew as tsara), his translations were acts of estrangement that distanced him from his own tongue, from ‘its expressionist past in the expressing of the personal subject.’27 The performance of ventriloquism, based as it is on a double identity and ‘voice throwing,’ comes close to describing Tzara’s black poetics. Tzara was not the first modernist to recognize the richness of Aboriginal songs. The Australian-American composer Percy Grainger (1872–1961), who experimented with all kinds of mechanical and electronic sound art, when visiting his birthplace of Melbourne in 1909

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Figure 7.2 Tristan Tzara’s ‘Chanson du Serpent’ appeared in the second issue of the Zurich journal Dada (1917). The original Aranda song appeared alongside Carl Strehlow’s translation in Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stamme in ZentralAustralien (1910–20). The English translation is by Walter F. Veit, Modernism & Australia (2006).

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transcribed three ‘Native Australian Tunes’ from Aranda songs recorded on wax phonographs by anthropologist Baldwin Spencer (the same Spencer whose texts on Central Australian Aborigines proved so influential for English-speaking audiences). Grainger wrote at the time, ‘What lies stand in the Musical Histories re Australian native music, that it moves over a few notes only & is mere repetitions of primitive phrases; not at all! Generally over an octave in compass, a tune is often made up of 4 or 5 distinct phrases, & is no less complex than many European tunes ... I hope he (Spencer) will send several records to England. ... No one has written them down before, although the records were taken many years ago.’28 A quarter of a century later, in the same year that Narranyeri made his ‘Appeal to White Australia,’ Grainger was invited to broadcast a series of twelve lectures with ‘musical interludes’ for the Australian Broadcasting Commission that emphasized the diversity of non-Western musical cultures. Grainger spoke of Aboriginal music having ‘tunes that are lithe and graceful as snakes and highly complex in their rhythmic irregularities’ and concluded that most socalled ‘primitive music is too complex for untrained modern ears.’29 The attentive radio listener would have noticed Grainger deploying a different idea of progress from the prevailing ideology of social Darwinism, an evolutionary model of humankind’s progress that provided a rationale for accepting the inevitable effects of colonialism. However, Spencer and Gillen’s book, which accompanied the pioneering sound recordings, ‘did not account for the songs which were at the centre of those rituals’ because the authors lacked Strehlow’s linguistic knowledge based on years of patient translating.30 A Hybrid Bloom Margaret Preston’s relations with Aboriginal art, while inspired by modernism, were also shaped by local factors, including a fervent nationalism quite unlike the political disaffection of avant-garde exiles Tzara and Grainger. In the early 1920s, after returning to Australia from Europe, Preston began ‘a study of our own aboriginal art’ and wrote the first of a dozen articles on the subject.31 She sought to convert a lay audience by adapting ‘Aboriginal’ craft techniques and promoting Aboriginal art as the basis of ‘a national art,’32 claiming that Australia’s distance from Europe was to be ‘our saving grace’ (a claim that, ironically, echoed the isolationist rhetoric of anti-modernists). One article urged readers to ‘be Aboriginal’ by using earth colours and flat abstract patterns in craft design.33 Like her other early writings, this essay was

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couched in the language of social Darwinism of the type that had provoked Narranyeri’s ‘Appeal to White Australia,’ although her formalist aesthetics were inspired primarily by the British modernist critic Roger Fry. For instance, Fry’s concept of ‘significant form’ encouraged Preston to argue that ‘mythology and religious symbolism do not matter to the artist, only to the anthropologist.’34 By 1941, when the first major exhibition of ‘Art of Australia’ toured North America, Preston’s ideas had been profoundly changed by seeing more of the cultures of remote communities in Arnhem Land and elsewhere. In a short essay introducing the Aboriginal component of the exhibition, she described the art as a convincing refutation of the evolutionist argument, for while ‘its essential truths ... may not be visible to the human eye ... the symbolism expressed through its tribal totems opens up a new world.’35 Her essay met with a stony reception at the Museum of Modern Art, which was publishing the catalogue and touring the exhibition. Elodie Courter, head of MoMA’s Department of Circulating Exhibitions, complained: ‘I am very disappointed with this article as I mentioned to you. It does seem that something very interesting might be written about the aboriginal art although I suppose no one is qualified to write it. Wouldn’t it be wise to include a footnote explaining totemism a little more fully? The average reader knows nothing about it.’36 Preston’s stature as one of the exhibiting artists secured her article a place in the exhibition catalogue. However, the MoMA curator’s objection prefigures vexed debates about what ‘qualifies’ an artist, as distinct from an anthropologist, to engage with Aboriginal cultures. Are Preston’s paintings of Aboriginal subjects, like her writing, no more than historic relics to be condemned, in Djon Mundine’s words, as ‘a display of the victor’s war trophies’?37 The Indigenous curator Hetti Perkins offers a more conciliatory line, arguing that while ‘they are meaningless to Aboriginal people ... the infiltration of “native” art into the domestic and fine art’ was subversive for the time despite its ‘scrambled orthography.’38 I would argue that there is also some redemption in the ambiguity, however unintended, of such works as Preston’s Aboriginal Flowers (1928). The subject – a bunch of colonial ‘feather flowers’ made for trading with Europeans – was a hybrid form specifically shaped by cross-cultural encounters (see illustration 7.3). These were the kinds of souvenirs that Narranyeri damned as signs of his people’s degradation; now, however, it is possible to see how such crafts maintain traditional skills and knowledge. In Preston’s painting, the colours of the feathers, which exquisitely mimic Euro-

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Figure 7.3 Margaret Preston, Aboriginal Flowers (1928), oil on canvas, 53.6 × 45.8 cm. Art Gallery of South Australia. © Margaret Preston / Sodrac 2008.

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pean domesticated taste by emulating a bunch of cinerarias – a popular annual flower – are translated into intense, chalky ochres.39 Preston places them within a Lèger-like composition, juggling two colourful overlapping discs – a concave yellow bowl and the convex dome of the bouquet – on a sketchy monochrome armature. While Aboriginal Flowers makes an adequate late-cubist painting, its hybrid bloom refuses to settle: the feathers are impossible to see separately from the ‘flowers,’ and the posy shimmers with a surreal lightness because of its unnatural ‘Aboriginal’ colours. It is this ontological instability that jeopardizes Preston’s own claims to ‘authenticity’ and raises questions about what Aboriginality might mean at any specific cultural moment. Disturbing Ways of Seeing In 1941, as Aboriginal art was being singled out for attention in the United States through the touring exhibition The Art of Australia, a survey was mounted in Sydney on ‘Australian Aboriginal art and its application,’ partly inspired by Preston.40 Alongside dozens of white artists, architects, and designers, particularly in commercial and public commissions, who now identified their work as ‘Aboriginal,’ the exhibition introduced the artist Albert Namatjira (1902–59), a Western Aranda man born on the Hermannsburg Mission who painted watercolours in a European style, which was for him modern. He did not use ‘Aboriginal’ ochres or flatten the view into a shallow modernist space, but instead represented his country through Western landscape conventions. Namatjira’s work rapidly became popular and was circulated widely in reproductions. Yet his paintings, though European-like in style, in fact disturb conventional ways of seeing. Namatjira’s early work had been circumscribed by the mission compound, where he made boomerangs to sell to tourists. In 1934, he burnt onto several boomerangs a design commemorating the first pipeline to Hermannsburg. With historical hindsight informed by the ‘abstract’ Aboriginal art movement, the art writer Daniel Thomas has proposed that the upraised arms of the nearside men in these works recall the half-circle symbol for man, which we have learned to read in acrylic painting.41 The design can also be read as representing the modern industrialization that Namatjira first witnessed when the major engineering construction crossed his country. The lengths of piping follow the shape of the boomerang, the European technology incorporated into the Aboriginal artifact. Namatjira uses the blond streaks in the mulga wood to give a Western perspective, the

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‘ready-made’ horizon securing the feet of the diminutive workers. An internally complex design is achieved within the economy of incised lines and wood stain, as the figures alternately bend and lift the pipe at regular intervals, linking the ground to the wood grain/sky. Namatjira also painted hundreds of watercolours of his country on the convex body of wooden spear throwers, called woomeras.42 These hybrid objects intersect two distinct cultures: at the edges of the watercolour, the wood grain becomes part of the sky and ground, allowing the woomera to be seen through the Western-style landscape, casting into confusion existing categories of the ‘primitive’ and the modern. Thus, his work articulates an ambivalent engagement with European culture. Significantly, Namajira’s woomera-paintings were particularly sought out by American servicemen based in Alice Springs during the Second World War, a largely undocumented Pacific Rim exchange. These boomerangs and woomera-paintings ‘look through’ the Western landscape by infiltrating its naturalism, drawing the viewer into a deep space, with edges that wrap around us as if the country is seen from the inside. Such a position of imaginary occupation differs from the elevated vision of the colonial frontier. Namatjira’s painting popularized the idea of an Aboriginal relation to land and inspired subsequent generations of Indigenous artists. ET Diplomacy The linguist Christine Nicholls, writing on contemporary Indigenous art from remote communities, has drawn upon models of Aboriginal ‘rituals of diplomacy,’ which are used to negotiate situations of change as well as the tricky relations with strangers and one’s own kin.43 Nicholls explains the model through a series of paintings executed between 1992 and 1995 by the Pintubi painter Tjungkiya Wukula Linda Syddick Napaltjarri of Papunya, called ET Returning Home, which uses references to the Steven Spielberg film ET to allegorize the artist’s desire to return to her country, a remote tract of land in northwestern Australia (see illustration 7.4). Napaltjarri explains her fascination with Spielberg’s film in these terms: ‘ET was talking all the time, “I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home and visit my family.” Same way I feel.’44 The painting introduces a further level of cultural complexity by equating ET with Christ through the concept of ascension, placing the sign of a cross on top of the spaceship. Nicholls cautions that Napaltjarri’s particular form of alienation and introspection

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Figure 7.4 Linda Syddick Napaltjarri (Tjungkiya Wukula), ET Returning Home (1994). The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. © Linda Syddick Napaltjarri / Sodrac 2008.

comes closer to Western individualism than the work of other Pintubi artists, but this tendency can be seen as part of her postcoloniality. Can the model of exchange proposed by Nicholls apply to early modernist encounters between Western artists and Aboriginal culture? The Central Australian elders who recited their songs to Strehlow knew that only those initiated with a special kinship relation could understand all the complexity of a song cycle, yet they were prepared to offer forms of access. Likewise, the dadaists performing the Poèmes Nègres had no interest in the evolutionary accounts of ethnography when they sang against the barbarism of the so-called civilized world. The trauma of those caught up in the European cataclysm gave them some affinity with those on the colonial frontier. But how different is this from the ‘affinity’ underwriting William Rubin’s exhibition, ‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (1983), which notoriously generated all sorts of pseudo-morphic comparisons?45 Does the dadaist example offer just another case of Crusoe appropriating the exotic other? Perhaps all that the exiled Tzara was

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translating through the displaced Central Australian songs was his own displacement. On the other side, from within the confined space of mission culture, some unlikely modern Aboriginal cultural forms emerged to confront ‘White Australia,’ not in the role of a ‘Man Friday,’ but as Blackfellows who articulated the conflicting dynamics of exchange, projecting an Indigenous identity entangled in the dialectics of colonization. In this context, it might be plausible to redeem works by Preston, against her own intentions, which speak of how such exchanges occur between cultures. Viewed side by side with Namatjira’s watercolours, Preston’s work raises a number of compelling questions. Can cultural hybrids force into contention the segregation of fine art from abject souvenir? Or must we continue to operate with categories like ‘traditional,’ ‘tourist,’ and ‘contemporary’? What boundaries have shifted since the advent of the modern Aboriginal art movement now that Aboriginal artists perform and sing their work? Have these Aboriginal diplomacy rituals created a different form of engagement by audiences? One thing is certain, as the examples of Tzara, Preston, Namatjira, and Napaljarri make clear: Aboriginality itself is not a fixed entity but, as the Indigenous anthropologist Marcia Langton insists, ‘arises from the intersubjectivity of black and white’ and can be ‘remade over and over again in a process of dialogue, of imagination, of representation and interpretation.’46 To rethink the bind of Pacific Rim ‘primitivism’ in terms of global economics requires a new ethics of reciprocity to negotiate the intersections among different histories, cultures, languages, races, and subjectivities. Then and only then might it be possible to imagine decolonization.

NOTES I am most grateful for the close reading of and comments on this essay by Andrew McNamara and Walter Veit. This essay may contain images and language that could cause offence or distress to Indigenous Australians. 1 Australian nationhood was from the outset racially inscribed. In 1901 the new federal government’s Restriction Act legislated ‘to place certain restrictions on immigration and to provide for the removal from the Commonwealth of prohibited immigrants’ http:www.immi.gov.au/media/

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2

3

4

5

6

7 8

9 10 11 12

fact-sheets/08abolition.htm This notorious ‘White Australia’ policy was initially directed against Chinese miners and indentured workers from the South Pacific (known as ‘kanakas’). The final vestiges of the policy were removed in 1973 by the then new Labour government. Racist immigration policies were renewed in August 2001, when the Australian government under John Howard led the world in prosecuting an anti-humanitarian immigration policy by refusing to accept 433 asylum-seekers who had been rescued at sea by the Norwegian vessel Tampa. See David Marr and Marian Wilkinson, Dark Victory. Preston, ‘Painting in Arnhem Land.’ As Deborah Edwards underlines, Preston ‘reiterates the implicit assumption that it was white Australians who would forge a truly national art’ (‘“An Art for Australians from Australians,”’ 174). Preston, ‘The Application of Aboriginal Designs.’ For a summary on contemporary ‘white Aboriginality,’ see Ian McLean, ‘Post Colonial.’ The recent literature on Margaret Preston, while dominated by her ‘Aboriginality,’ remains fixed on local issues; see, for example, Terry E. Smith, Transformations in Australian Art. See Djon Mundine, ‘Aboriginal Still Life, 1940,’ and Hetti Perkins, ‘The Brown Pot, 1940,’ in Margaret Preston, ed. Deborah Edwards and Rose Peel, with Denise Mimmocchi, 208, 212. Mundine, ‘Australian Aboriginal Culture and Art.’ In 1992, the High Court of Australia overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius by acknowledging Native title; however, a much-anticipated ‘decolonization’ did not take place. David Unaipon [Narranyeri], ‘A Blackfellow’s Appeal to White Australia Concerning Christian Missions,’ 52. Narranyeri’s ‘Appeal’ originally appeared in Pandemonium (Melbourne) 5 (June 1934): 1–3. Ibid., 53–4. Unaipon, Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. This reissued version reassigns the authorship to Unaipon and includes the editors’ account of the appropriation. John Morton, ‘Country, People, Art,’ 24. ‘The Surrealist Map of the World’ is reproduced in ‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth Century Art, 2: 556. Leah Dickerman, et al., eds., Dada, 422. The plain typed sheet announcing the ‘Programm’ for the First Dada Evening, 14 July 1916, held at Waag Hall, Zurich, is reprinted in ibid., 34. The thirteen items listed among the collaborative performances are: ‘Chant

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16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25

26

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nègre I (nach eigenen Motiven aufgeführt von Ball, Huelsenbeck, Janco, Tzara.)’ and ‘Chant nègre II (nach Motiven aus dem Sudan, gesungen von Huelsenbeck und Janko.)’ Marcel Janco’s poster, Le Chant Nègre, 31 March 1916 (reproduced in ‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth Century Art, 2: 536) was subsequently reused for the Sturm soirée at Galeria Dada in 1917. Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, 50. Ball’s diary entry for 8 August 1916, in Ball, Flight Out of Time, 73, 75. The program for ‘Alte und neue Kunst’ (Old and New Dada Art) at Galerie Dada, 12 May 1917, is discussed in Dickerman et al., eds., Dada, 42, footnote 51. See also extensive notes in Tristan Tzara, Oeuvres Complètes, Tome I (1912–1924), ed. Henri Béhar (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 714–17. Tzara, Zurich Chronicle 1915–1919, 238. Tzara’s text was first published in Richard Huelsenbeck’s Dada Almanach: Im Auftrag des Zentralamts der Deutschen Dada-Bewegung (1920), translated by Malcolm Green as The Dada Almanac (London: Atlas Press, 1993). Huelsenbeck, En Avant Dada (1920), cited by Gordon Browning, ‘Tristan Tzara,’ 51. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 44–5, 46. For biographical information, see Walter F. Veit, ‘Strehlow, Carl Friedrich Theodor.’ Philip Jones, ‘Traveller between Two Worlds,’ 122. W. Baldwin Spencer and Frank J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia. The photographs reproduced in this volume became a veritable pattern book for representing Aborigines, as seen in works ranging from Blamire Young’s Buckley Acting as Interpreter at Indented Head (watercolour, 1901), Gert Sellheim’s Corroboree Australia (poster, c. 1930), and Len Lye’s film Tusalavu (1930) to Margaret Preston’s Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (colour stencil, 1950). Tzara, ‘Note 6 sur l’art nègre.’ I am most grateful to Walter F. Veit for both translating Strehlow’s and Tzara’s work and for allowing me to read the manuscript of his paper, ‘Dada among the Missionaries.’ Veit juxtaposes Carl Strehlow’s two translations in German with his own translations into English and Tzara’s poetic renderings in French. Veit’s translations of ‘Chanson du Serpent’ and ‘Chanson du Cacadou’ are also anthologized in Modernism and Australia, ed. Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, and Philip Goad, 96–8. Sandqvist, Dada East, 262, 301. Sandqvist compares Tzara’s impersonal

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27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39

40

41 42 43 44 45

experiments in which ‘he nullifies himself’ to both the modernist practice of désœuvrement and Hasidic ecstatic rapture which involves repeated recitations of prayers and fragments of prayers. Ibid., 305. Grainger, The Farthest North of Humanness, 297, 300. Grainger, ‘The Universalist Attitude toward Music.’ Barry Hill, Broken Song, 11. This biography of Pastor Strehlow’s son, Ted Strehlow, is an intellectual recovery of the translation work undertaken by both father and son. Hill writes: ‘the work of a son who has enshrined the work of his father has been put before us as a kind of testament to that work, as well as the older testaments of the senior men of the Aranda tribe’ (13). Preston, ‘Art for Crafts.’ Preston, ‘The Indigenous Art of Australia.’ Preston, ‘The Application of Aboriginal Designs,’ np. Preston, ‘Away with Poker-worked Kookaburras and Gum Leaves.’ Preston, ‘Aboriginal Art of Australia.’ Elodie Couter, director, Department of Circulating Exhibitions, to Professor Theodore Sizer, director, Yale University Art Gallery, 15 September 1941, in Department of Circulating Exhibitions, 11.1/38 (1), The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Mundine, ‘Aboriginal Still Life, 1940,’ 208. Perkins, ‘The Brown Pot, 1940,’ 212. Recent research has identified one Aboriginal feather-worker, an ‘Agnes Crow’ (!) (1873–1928), who used her skills of netting and trapping to make such bouquets for trading with Europeans; see entries by Jan Penney on ‘Agnes Crow,’ and Ann Stephen on ‘Margaret Preston, Aboriginal Feather Flowers, 1928,’ in Kerr, ed., Heritage. For the identification of the flowers and their popular meaning, see Julie Ewington, ‘Aboriginal Feather Flowers, 1928.’ See the exhibition catalogue, Art of Australia 1788–1941. While the exhibition surveyed 150 years, the US media focused on the Aboriginal art, noting its similarity to North American Indian art. Thomas, ‘The Hermannsburg Watercolourists.’ For an account of Albert Namatjira’s woomeras, see Ian Burn and Ann Stephen, ‘Namatjira’s White Mask.’ Nicholls, ‘God and Country,’ 46. Ibid., 46. See the exhibition catalogue, ‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth Century Art: Affin-

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ity of the Tribal and the Modern; for the ensuing debate, see Hal Foster, ‘The “Primitive” Unconsciousness of Modern Art, Or White Skin Black Masks.’ 46 Langton, ‘Imagining Indigeneity.’

SOURCES CITED Art of Australia 1788–1941: An Exhibition of Australian Art Held in the United States of America and the Dominion of Canada under the Auspices of the Carnegie Corporation. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1941. Ball, Hugo. Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary. Edited by John Elderfield. Translated by Ann Raimes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Originally published as Die Flucht aus der Zeit. Munich and Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1927. Browning, Gordon. ‘Tristan Tzara: The Genesis of the Dada Poem or From Da Da to Aa.’ PhD diss., Northwestern University, Evanston, 1972. Annotated copy, Getty Research Institute, Research Library, Los Angeles. Burn, Ian, and Ann Stephen. ‘Namatjira’s White Mask: A Partial View.’ In Hardy, Megaw, and Megaw, chapter 8. Department of Circulating Exhibitions, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Dickerman, Leah, et al., eds. Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005. Edwards, Deborah. ‘“An Art for Australians from Australians.”’ In Edwards, Peel, and Mimmocchi, 173–251. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2005. Edwards, Deborah, and Rose Peel, with Denise Mimmocchi, eds. Margaret Preston. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2005. Ewington, Julie. ‘Aboriginal Feather Flowers, 1928.’ In Edwards, Peel, and Mimmocchi, 108–9. Foster, Hal. ‘The “Primitive” Unconsciousness of Modern Art, Or White Skin Black Masks.’ In Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, 181–9. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1985. Grainger, Percy. The Farthest North of Humanness: Letters of Percy Grainger, 1901–14. Edited by Kay Dreyfus. South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1985. – ‘The Universalist Attitude toward Music’ (Lecture 1 of 12). In ‘A Commonsense View of All Music’: Reflections on Percy Grainger’s Contribution to Ethnomusicology and Music Education by John Blacking, 151–9. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

170 Ann Stephen Hardy, Jane, J.V.S. Megaw, and M. Ruth Megaw, eds. The Heritage of Namatjira: The Watercolourists of Central Australia. Port Melbourne, Vic.: William Heinemann Australia, 1992. Hill, Barry. Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession. Milsons Point: Random House Australia, 2003. Huelsenbeck, Richard. Memoirs of a Dada Drummer. Edited by H.J. Kleinschmidt. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Originally published as Mit Witz, Licht und Grütze: Auf den Spuren des Dadaismus. Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1957. Jones, Philip. ‘Traveller between Two Worlds.’ In Hardy, Megaw, and Megaw, 97–136. Kerr, Joan, ed. Heritage: The National Women’s Art Book. [Australia]: Craftsman House, 1995. Langton, Marcia. ‘Imagining Indigeneity.’ In Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Edited by Michele Grossman, 118–20. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2003. Marr, David, and Marian Wilkinson. Dark Victory: The Tampa and the Military Campaign to Re-elect the Prime Minister. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003. McLean, Ian. ‘Post Colonial: Return to Sender.’ Australian Humanities Review (December 1998). www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive. Morton, John. ‘Country, People, Art: The Western Aranda 1870–1990.’ In Hardy, Megaw, and Megaw, 23–62. Mundine, Djon. ‘Aboriginal Still Life, 1940.’ In Edwards, Peel, and Mimmocchi, 208–9. – ‘Australian Aboriginal Culture and Art.’ Abstract for Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Conference, Canberra, November 2004. www.aiatsis.gov.au/research_program/events2/comferences_and_workshops/ (accessed 20 January 2007). Nicholls, Christine. ‘God and Country.’ Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 4.1 (2003): 41–60. Penney, Jan. ‘Agnes Crow.’ In Kerr, 180. Perkins, Hetti. ‘The Brown Pot, 1940.’ In Edwards, Peel, and Mimmocchi, 212–13. Preston, Margaret. ‘Aboriginal Art of Australia.’ In Art of Australia 1788–1941, 16–17. – ‘The Application of Aboriginal Designs.’ Art in Australia, 3rd series, 31 (March 1930): np. – ‘Art for Crafts: Aboriginal Art Artfully Applied.’ Home 5 (December 1924): 30.

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– ‘Away with Poker-worked Kookaburras and Gum Leaves.’ Sunday Pictorial, 6 April 1930, 22. – ‘The Indigenous Art of Australia.’ Art in Australia, 3rd series, 11 (March 1925), reprinted in Stephen, McNamara, and Goad, 155–60. – ‘Painting in Arnhem Land.’ Art in Australia, 3rd series, 81.25 (November 1940): 58–9, 61–3. ‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. Edited by William Rubin. 2 vols. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984. Sandqvist, Tom. Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Smith, Terry E. Transformations in Australian Art: Modernism and Aboriginality. Vol. 2 Sydney: Craftsman House, B V I, Thames and Hudson (Australia), 2002. Spencer, W. Baldwin, and Frank J. Gillen. The Native Tribes of Central Australia. London: Macmillan, 1899. Stephen, Ann. ‘Margaret Preston, Aboriginal Feather Flowers, 1928.’ In Kerr, 180. Stephen, Ann, Andrew McNamara, and Philip Goad, eds. Modernism and Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2006. Strehlow, Carl. Die Aranda – und Loritja-stämme in Zentral-Australien. 7 vols. Veröffentlichungen aus dem Städtischen Völker-Museum. Frankfurt am Main: Joseph Baer, 1907–20. I. Teil. Mythen, Sagen und Märchen des Aranda-Stammes. Bearbeitet von Moritz Freiherrn von Leonhardi. 104 p., Tafeln (1907). II. Teil. Mythen, Sagen und Märchen des Loritja-Stammes. Die totemistischen Vorstellungen und die Tjurunga der Aranda und Loritja. Bearbeitet von Moritz Freiherrn von Leonhardi. 84 p. (1908). III. Teil. Die totemistischen Kulte der Aranda und Loritja-Stämme. I. Abteilung. Allgemeine Einleitung und die Totemistischen Kulte des Aranda-Stammes. Bearbeitet von Moritz Freiherrn von Leonhardi. 140p., 3 Tafeln (1910). II. Abteilung. Die Totemistischen Kulte des Loritja-Stammes. 75p. (1911). IV. Teil. Das Soziale leben der Aranda und Loritja. I.Abteilung. Mit Atlas und 9 Stammbaum-Tafeln. 103p. (1913). II.Abteilung. Mit 4 Textabbildungen. 78p. (1915). V. Teil. Die materielle Kultur der Aranda und Loritja. Mit einem Anhang: Erklärungen der Eingeborenen-Namen. 46p. (1920). Thomas, Daniel. ‘The Hermannsburg Watercolourists: The View from the Art Museum.’ In Hardy, Megaw, and Megaw, 211–12.

172 Ann Stephen Tzara, Tristan. ‘Note 6 sur l’art nègre.’ Sic. [acronym for ‘Sons Idées Couleurs’], edited by Pierre Albert Birot, ed. Société d’Etude du Vingtième Siècle, nos. 21–2, September–October 1917. – Oeuvres Complètes, Tome I (1912–1924). Edited by Henri Béhar. Paris: Flammarion, 1975. – Zurich Chronicle 1915–1919. In The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, edited by Robert Motherwell, 233–42. New York: Wittenborn, 1951. Unaipon, David. [Narranyeri]. ‘A Blackfellow’s Appeal to White Australia Concerning Christian Missions’ [edited extract]. In Stephen, McNamara, and Goad, 51–3. Unaipon, David. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. Edited by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2001. Veit, Walter F. ‘Dada among the Missionaries.’ Forthcoming in Intercultural Migrations: Germany Australia, edited by A. Bandhauer and S. Veber. Sydney: Sydney University Press. – ‘Strehlow, Carl Friedrich Theodor.’ In Australian Dictionary of Biography, edited by Jon Ritchie, 12: 121–2. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990.

8 From Sydney and Shanghai: Australian and Chinese Women Writing Modernism susan carson

In the 1930s and 1940s, Australian women writers published novels, poems, and short stories that pushed the boundaries of their national literary culture. From their location in the Pacific they entered into the global circulation of the transformative aesthetic, cultural and political positions attributed to modernism. In the Australian context, the writers used this new imaginative space to interrogate the pressing questions of modernity, as well as contest received notions of literary history. My interest in Australian women prose writers of this period acknowledges a vital but regionally focused engagement with the many expressions of ‘Western modernism,’ but more importantly recognizes interesting literary commonalities with contemporaneous Chinese women writers. Women in Shanghai and Sydney wanted to write about how they saw the world from the Rim: they connected across culture in an attempt to privilege the experiences of the so-called periphery in relation to modernism/s. Such connections are but one aspect of a complex history of relationships between China and Australia, a history that has always had an imaginative aspect as well as a literal formation. Lachlan Strachan argues that there is a discernible psychic history that produces a situation in which ‘Australians feel drawn towards China: they cannot leave it alone,’1a situation exacerbated today by the intensity of cultural and commercial connections with China that has consolidated an Australian sense of regionalism in general and activated yet another stage in the history of its relationship with China. The work of the Australian and Chinese authors examined below is one aspect of this continuous history. In the mid-twentieth century, Chinese and Australian women writers discussed were not in direct com-

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munication but the literary practices with which they engaged were framed jointly by what Jessica Berman identifies as a geomodernism, one of the ‘new possible geographies’ of modernism.2 The 1930s and 1940s are especially important, however, in the context of this discussion not only because of the expanding global discourse on modernism and the incursions attempted by the writers into this system of production, but because China and Australia were embroiled in wide-ranging conflict in the Pacific in these decades. The strains of war, both forthcoming and actual, feature as an ominous sound-track to the modernist narratives of the period. In the following discussion the Chinese material serves as a revealing point of reference because the writing demonstrates commonalities with the practices of select Australian authors, thereby expanding the discussion, hopefully, of both Australian and Chinese modernisms in this period. The Chinese writing examined here is restricted to authors who wrote at least some material in English and whose work is available in translation. In this context, Australian writers Eleanor Dark and Christina Stead and Chinese writers Ling Shuhua and Eileen Chang each represent a form of gendered modernism that speaks directly to the local and regional and stands in contrast to dominant narratives privileged in their respective traditions. The essay proposes three topics of interest in the women’s fiction: representations of the city, the lives of women, and war. In each topic gendered narratives are linked by their refractory relationship with respective national literary traditions but also with the received notions of modernism. The narratives privilege everyday use of localized city space within the operations of a universalized modernity and offer a regionalized vision of the global conflict that will revolutionize their immediate social context, especially in relation to marriage. As noted above, this writing is consistently framed by conflict that provides a Pacific echo to similar distress in Europe, with Virginia Woolf’s well-known battle to keep writing in wartime England a case in point. Writing from China, Ling Shuhua sadly remarked to Leonard Woolf that she could not write because she ‘had to face all the difficulties and to take up all the duties of a Chinese. I had to put off writing until the war ended.’3 In Australia, Eleanor Dark often mentioned that she could only write depressing scraps as war in the Pacific gained intensity. In her novel of Sydney during the Second World War, The Little Company, the protagonist, Gilbert Massey, suffers from a warinduced writer’s block. In referring to the relationships of Australian and Chinese responses

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to various aspects of modernism I am mindful of Shu-Mei Shih’s argument that the concepts of difference and similarity can mask hierarchical and binary modes of thinking and function as sites of appropriation in discussions of non-Western modernisms.4 In writing of white Australian women in relation to the work of Chinese authors, I am conscious also of the complexities of the imperial and colonial relationships that can work to reify such appropriation. As a nation of largely European settlers, it is not surprising that Australian responses to China before the Second World War were largely based on Anglo-centric notions, but at the same time geo-political positioning produced a more fractured and complex engagement than is often assumed. As a colony, then settler nation, Australia had its own complex, often unruly, and always contested relationship to an imperial centre that dominated, but did not entirely determine, its relationships with neighbours in Asia. The intention below therefore is to frame the imaginative community of the Pacific Rim by bearing this history in mind and focusing on what is ‘like,’ rather than difference in regard to literature. For many of the interwar Australian writers referred to below their staunch nationalism, and socialism (together with a strong sense of ‘old world’ decay), prevented a sense of being minor to Europe, and China’s presence in the Australian imaginary meant that China might be regarded as ‘foreign’ and all this term implies, but it would never be regarded as minor. In this context, Rey Chow’s discussion of what she calls the ‘politics of admittance’ is useful in exploring the nature of the relationships of an imaginative community that is at once a part of, and excluded from, an internationalism derived from and labelled by Europe. Chow remarks on the ways in which a community can be constituted by what its members ‘do not absolutely have in common in terms of blood, skin color, or ethnicity.’5 The women writers of China and Australia did not share such characteristics, but, located on the Pacific Rim, they experienced a similarly complex dialogue with European thought and publishing. This world view was refracted through colonial, postcolonial, or semicolonial perspectives from a geopolitical region linked by ocean passage, trade, and continuous cultural exchange. The Pacific Rim stories from this ‘community’ mediate the politics of their admittance to European literary and cultural movements in London via Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Sydney. A focus on ‘like’ rather than ‘than ‘unlike’ (to appropriate Meaghan Morris’s framework for intra-Asian studies)6 illustrates the imaginative connections that operate for Australian writing in much the same way as Patricia Laurence has argued in relation

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to the China–Bloomsbury link.7 Before proceeding with the textual investigation, however, I briefly refer to select biographical issues and respective literary histories and make a few necessary points about geopolitical positioning. Today, the work of Ling Shuhua and Eileen Chang is the subject of scholarly interest in and outside of China. Ling Shuhua belonged to an elite grouping of Beijing writers who were interested in Westernized literary aesthetics, and she engaged directly with European modernist circles. In contrast, Chang’s stories of the early 1940s were part of popular culture. Hu Lancheng says that Chang ‘was not interested in the Western classics ... [w]hat attracted her was the populist spirit of the modern West.’8 Her now famous novella ‘Love in the Fallen City’ (1943) as well as her short stories depict the struggles of young men and women in Shanghai and Hong Kong during war, focusing on female emancipation and the everyday meeting of tradition and modernity – the bars, streets, apartments, theatres, trams, and cars of the modern metropolis are the sites of tightly focused and localized but diverse narratives. In these narratives Chang contradicts both national and international social and political conventions. Shu-Mei Shih identifies an ‘oscillating’ allegiance to nationalism in Chang’s writing, as well as a related critique of the colonial presence in Shanghai9 (as a conversation in Chang’s ‘Love in the Fallen City’ about being ‘Modern’ as opposed to being ‘Westernized’ testifies).10 In Australia, the literary histories of women writers of the interwar period were similarly cross-grained. In her influential study of Australian interwar women’s writing, Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925–45 (1981), Drusilla Modjeska uses the term ‘exile’ to denote the network of important socialist, nationalist, and feminist writers who dominated the home front of Australian writing of the 1930s (as opposed to luminaries such as Christina Stead and Ethel Robertson, who wrote under the pseudonym of Henry Handel Richardson and who lived overseas). The positioning of Stead and Dark in later accounts of Australian writing is indicative of the contradictory debates about Australian literary culture which have often polarized around the global/local and responses to a former British imperial hegemony. As Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra stated in 1991 (in language that has connections to Lee’s account of Chang above), the modernist phase in Australia could also be read as one of the subjectivist modes of ‘romance, fantasy, modernism, the artistic,’ and the discursive regimes disrupted by these modes continue to have ‘wide currency.’11

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Such perspectives are valuable but speak to the common conception of a constricted vision of modernist practice and an under-acknowledgment of existing modernist-mediated works in Australian writing. The desire to shape Australian literature was an important force in this period, but Dark and Stead had very different means of going about this business. Their experimentation, like that of their Chinese counterparts, melded the modern with earlier literary modes, such as realism, into their particular version of modernism (or geo-modernism). Of the Chinese modernists, Wendy Larson and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg state: ’1930s modernists frequently made use of techniques and images from traditional Chinese poetry, opening up new possibilities for a modern synthesis.’12 Australia’s published literary tradition was young, in comparison, but generally nationalist, masculine, and white. Dark and her colleagues, the so-called exiles, wrote into and contested dominant accounts of this tradition-in-the-making as they attempted to balance their feminist, nationalist, and socialist ideals. Their letters to each other show their frustration at not finding the time to write in the face of family and financial obligations and they met only occasionally when time and money permitted. In contrast, Stead, having left Australia in 1928, was outside this community. After publishing one groundbreaking novel set in Sydney, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), Stead situated her major works in various locations in Europe or America, usually critiquing rampant nationalism and capitalism, but her writing was always substantially informed by her Australian heritage. What is ‘like’ about these respective journeys is the way in which the writers from the Rim negotiated cultural change so as to complicate, and sometimes challenge, received notions of the flow of modernism from Europe and North America. In Australia the challenge is embedded in the work of writers who combined representations of national identity and questions of nationalism with modernist stylistic practices. In so doing they confronted the image of the country as a passive recipient of European ideas and disputed hegemonic local views that endorsed a nationalist literature. Indeed, there were sporadic attempts to engage with modernism, usually in the visual arts, as John F. Williams has demonstrated. Williams’s study, The Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism 1913–1939 (1995), examines the complexity of the so-called cultural isolation, or ‘quarantining,’ arguing that the ‘either/ or’ approach to Australian culture (cosmopolitan modernism versus nationalism) is simplistic. While Williams acknowledges the endur-

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ance of the notion that Australia (in the first decades of the twentieth century) was uniformly nationalist and independent, he also provides instances of connections to European and American culture in the interwar period, showing that the ‘quarantine’ was fracturing by the late 1930s, partly owing to ‘mixed cultural signals from abroad.’13 But, as Williams observes, the notion of nationalist cultural dominance in this period is difficult to displace. Angela Woollacott, writing in 2001, states that, in Australia, ‘[i]n contrast to women artists, the women writers who gained recognition did not experiment with textual or formal modernism but more often with political modernity (in the form of socialism or communism) and nationalism.’14 As I argue below, a more nuanced approach to modernism, as per Berman and others, allows the extent of textual experimentation to be acknowledged and this process is supported by discussion of the interwar Chinese writing. A splitting of the modernist/nationalist agenda can elide the way in which cultural flow works in regional operations and it also displaces the continuing questioning of nation and nationalism in European modernist narratives. However, Woollacott’s discussion of Australia’s Asia-Pacific trade and transport network is instructive. She argues that after the First World War ‘Australians were highly conscious of the evolving political relationship between Australia and Britain and their developing autonomy and growing significance as a power in the Asia-Pacific region.’15 Despite the infamous ‘White Australia Policy’ instigated in 1901 to curb Chinese immigration, by the 1930s Australia was part of a thriving trans-Pacific steamship network operated by Japanese, American, and Dutch companies while the British-based P&O (Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company) steamships carried mail and passengers from Sydney and the ‘Orient’ back to the ‘old world.’ Australia, then, was not cut off from European time. In the same period, China, according to Shih, as noted above, was attempting to catch up to European time by adopting modernity and modernist practices. Across time and space, then, the writers are both attracted to and disturbed by the materiality of modernity: some of the narratives discussed below delight in European or American fashion, fast cars, hotels, and dancing, while others often are framed by an urban isolation that is near despair. As Ling’s statement about ‘being Chinese’ makes clear, writers had to negotiate a range of nationalisms in their private and professional lives, and some, such as Ling, pursued European

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publication. Ling’s affair with Virginia Woolf’s nephew, Julian Bell, in 1938, initiated the correspondence with Woolf that culminated in the publication of Ling’s autobiography, Ancient Melodies, by Hogarth Press in 1953.16 Chang, who came from a less privileged background, is famed for her stories based in the popular culture of urban China, although she was published (and lived) internationally in later years. Leo Ou-Fan Lee notes that Chang was ‘the only one of the [Shanghai] Chinese writers who was capable of writing bilingually’ in Chinese and English.17 In essence, the women from the Rim ‘make it new – again’ by interrogating the grand narratives of modernity and telescoping the global into the local. The relationships they describe take place in small urban spaces, although the technology and built environment is often naturalized. The response to the horrors of war is complicated by a recognition that conflict can also provoke social mobility. Many of the characters in these narratives look out to a changing society from windows and doors opening onto the ocean or city streets. In this process, the narratives often reference and subvert traditional genres: for example, the ‘double gesture of inheritance and parody’ of the Boudoir Complaint form, as identified by Shih, in Ling’s work,18 or the mixed historical, realist, romantic, and national frameworks in the writing of Dark and Stead. In the following accounts, the narratives are examined in relation to their engagement with modernist techniques and the wider intellectual and political challenges of modernism. The writing displays a predilection for the mixing of literary modes that both references past traditions and incorporates the new (time-shifts, emphasis on the visual, the filmic, and motion). The authors destabilize their social and political environments by taking the reader into an unexpected and often dreamlike world in language that addresses the familiar paths of women’s lives but conveys a continuous note of tension. Readers enter the consciousness of the women by way of visual experience in a process that encourages a sense of displacement in time and space at the same time as the characters situate themselves in the everyday. This privileging of the everyday involves practices that can be identified with Michel de Certeau’s theorizing of the network of relations in which the ‘dispersed, tactical, and make-shift creativity of groups’ that walk through the spaces of a city constitutes an antidiscipline.19 In Shanghai and Sydney the refractory women of these stories debate their roles in the family and in their culture, while they investigate both

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the horror and the opportunity of war. This community is in dialogue with a colonized or semi-colonized past, the occupation of territory, and a changing Europe. Big Cities, Small Spaces Pacific Rim city spaces in the modernist context, like their European counterparts, are sites of instability in which old certainties are eroded. In these cities, however, there is a fascination with new technology that women writers celebrate but at the same time attempt to naturalize. The city of these narratives demonstrates the machinery of modernity through technology; however, the site is not the rationalized concept city of modern development but rather a series of spaces in which women’s narratives disrupt social regulation. These cities are made up of buildings occupied by stories, or ‘hauntings,’ to refer to de Certeau, built by familial or romantic relationships. Chinese narratives by male writers such as Mao Dun or Mu Shiying specifically celebrate the technology and speed of the city and the frenzy of interwar finance spiralling out of control. However, the frantic scenes on the floor of stock exchanges, the factory strikes, and the latenight drinking sessions in dance clubs that we meet in Mao’s Midnight or Mu’s ‘Shanghai Fox Trot’ or ‘Five in a Nightclub’ (where everyone contracts the ‘malaria’ of modern jazz)20 do not feature in Chang’s narratives, nor those of Dark and Stead. In Chang’s ‘Love in the Fallen City’ (1943), a story of Shanghai and Hong Kong at war, Bai Liusu’s first sighting of Hong Kong prefigures the later violence of the Hong Kong bombardment. The novel begins thus: ‘To save daylight, the people of Shanghai turned their clocks one hour ahead. But the Bai family said, “We use the old time”’ (32). Liusu, a young divorced woman of the Bai family, moves away from this ‘old’ time to Hong Kong. Her first sight of the city is a swirl of modern advertising: From what she could see, the most conspicuous things surrounding the dock area were those huge advertising billboards. Red ones, orange ones and pink ones were reflected in the dazzling slick green sea. These brilliant colors contrasted sharply with each other, like so many swords bobbing and fighting violently in the water. In this city of contrasts, even just stumbling probably would be much more painful than it was in other places, Liusu thought. (45)

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Liusu experiences Hong Kong as a space of cosmopolitan modernity in which commercial competition, symbolized in the giant billboards, illuminates the natural world, soon to be the centre of another form of combat. Liusu and her putative lover, Fan Liuyuan, taste the delights of the city: restaurants, casinos, the Cantonese opera, movies, the Green Bird Coffee Shop. The couple go where, and when, they please, in a repudiation of the traditional life of the Bai family in Shanghai, who reject the city’s modernity and whose treatment of Liusu has pushed her into this risky meeting with Liuyuan in an attempt to escape servitude to her family. Leo Ou-Fan Lee reads Hong Kong in this story as an exoticized space in which a quite unlikely match is eventually made, noting that Chang often uses Chinese urban spaces to denote warmth and closeness, whereas Western buildings or areas are associated with relationships ‘of estrangement and disturbance.’21 He comments on Chang’s ‘small public and private spaces’ (especially in the Shanghai stories) that draw the reader into ‘the congested world of the Shanghai petty urbanities.’22 In ‘Love in the Fallen City,’ however, this response is complicated: Liusu’s life is disturbed by her arrival in colonial Hong Kong but she is equally disturbed in her domestic life on Hong Kong’s Babington Road. Certainly such closeness is apparent in Chang’s essay ‘Notes on Apartment Life,’ written from occupied Shanghai, but once again in this piece Chang moves outside of the building: ‘The thoughts of city people unfold across a striped curtain. The pale white stripes are streetcars in motion, moving neatly in parallel, their streams of sound flowing continuously into subconscious strata.’23 As in ‘Love in the Fallen City,’ the closeness is undercut by the motion that connects the characters, often via a dream state, with events or ideas outside of their immediate small space, moving them into a modernity that offers a temporary respite from this ‘closeness.’ For Chang, the sway of the streetcar melts into the seductive flow of the city, and the cars function as a site of both pleasure and restraint. The filmic quality of Chang’s writing, in both fiction and the essay, captures a play on light, and especially the properties of light on water, that is a feature of modernist writing. We are reminded of the opening sequence of Woolf’s The Waves, in which dawn is described as the figure of a woman on the horizon holding a lamp to the shoreline. The eye of the camera is invoked in ‘Love in the Fallen City’ when Liusu concludes her talk about marriage with Mrs Xu. The camera pans the drawing-room with its gloom and squares of yellow light, as Liusu specifically relates the play of dim light to the words of

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the conversation and to her feeling of being ‘like those words, drifting and unconnected’ (66). While Chang’s Liusu looks out on the multicoloured hues reflected in Hong Kong’s harbour and is reminded of swords fighting, in Eleanor Dark’s Waterway (1938), Lois Denning finds a temporary solace in a dream state while watching the play of light on the water of Sydney Harbour. In Waterway, time is marked by a steadily ticking watch as Lois enters into a dream dimension, while another character, Jack Saunders, is moved to reverie by a medley of impressions ‘so poignant that he seemed for a moment actually to smell hessian, dust, sweating horses, petrol, and through them, struggling, the smell he loved of salt water lapping darkly under the wharves, gleaming through their diagonally running cracks.’24 Published on the eve of the Second World War, Waterway focuses on a problematic romance that is resolved by a chaotic and chance event, a ferry accident that occurred in 1927 on Sydney Harbour. Dark fictionalizes the 1927 incident, and uses the collision, as does Chang with the bombing of Hong Kong, to shuffle the decks of the characters’ lives. Whereas in ‘Love in the Fallen City’ the relationship is consummated in a hotel room in the British colonial edifice of the Repulse Bay Hotel (later bombed), the illicit relationship in Waterway (between Ian Harnet and Winifred Sellman) is confirmed in a car, by the beach. In negotiating these relationships, the couples walk through a changing landscape in which water and views of the harbour enhance the dream resonance of the scenes. In both Dark’s and Chang’s work the characters could be said to demonstrate de Certeau’s notion of an urban practice in which Walkers make use of spaces that cannot be seen. He says: ‘their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others ... it is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness.’25 This type of walking practice avoids ironic detachment and does not quite connect with the Baudelairean flâneur, who is distant from, and observant of, the spaced crossed. In Sydney, the largely suburban cast of Waterway moves from one significant site to another, negotiating the wharves, streets, parks, art galleries, offices, and clubs of the city. For example, Ian Harnet speaks about ‘walking his brain’ along the foreshore of Watson’s Bay, as his ruminations on his love life are interspersed with speculation on the colonial history of Sydney (34–5). Like Chang, Dark uses the city as a

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template for a discussion of class and gender tensions against the growing momentum of war. The working-class or middle-class characters traverse the modern world in the urban space, effecting a trace of a moment in time. Here, Marc Augé’s writing on the importance of everyday geography enhances de Certeau’s framework by offering a perspective on the flow of pedestrian traffic in such spaces. Augé argues that everyday geography is definitional in that it shows the ways in which crossroads and open spaces in village, domestic, and monumental centres are ‘concretized in and through time.’26 Much of the modernity of the narratives comes from the representations of such streets, the intersections and passages, the forming and disbanding of groups or urban dwellers at particular moments, as Chang’s ‘Love in the Fallen City,’ as well as her essay ‘Seeing with the Streets,’ so aptly captures. In ‘Love in the Fallen City,’ Liuyuan and Liusu’s concretized moment in time is represented in their arrival at Liusu’s hotel room, by nature a transient space. Liusu’s body frames the window which itself frames the view of the ocean: ‘It was as if the whole room were but a dark picture-frame around the big painting in the window. The roaring oceanbreakers spilled right onto the curtains, turning their edges blue’ (73). It is interesting to note that Chang’s story and Dark’s narrative represent a built environment in which the metropolis is naturalized by evocative descriptions of the land- or seascapes of Hong Kong and Sydney. The response to the built environment is therefore one of ambivalence: it can represent a colonial or capitalist space, or, in other work, such as Chang’s essays in Written on Water, a site of localized comfort and security. Such traces suggest again the mediated modernism of the writers who attempt to connect to the natural as well as the built environment. The inclusion of the natural landscape is an informative addition to the expanded definitions of modernism that critics such as Sara Blair call for in discussion of the relationship between the historical, realist, and modernist novel.27 The landscape becomes an almost overpowering presence in the long walk that Chang’s Liuyuan and Liusu take from the hotel to the hillside house at Babington Road in “Love in the Fallen City.” When the built environment of the Repulse Bay hotel is bombed, the colonial moment disintegrates: ‘the dark scene looked like an ancient Persian carpet, with all kinds of people woven into it – old lords, princesses, scholars and beauties,’ while the landscape retains stability and power (89). In Dark’s Waterway, the characters move across the harbour so that the foreshores frame the narrative figuratively and thematically. Her

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Sydneysiders indulge in interior monologues about Australian identity and ‘difference’ from Europe while walking in art galleries or famous parks. The built environment exists as a technological wonder, but one that can be naturalized. Oliver Denning sees Sydney’s Harbour Bridge as a rainbow: ‘The long waterway beneath lost itself in a western haze of paling gold, the bridge spanned it like a rainbow, the city skyline sank into a lavender-coloured mist’ (384). In another of Dark’s novels, the bridge becomes a ‘miraculous beauty curving and spinning way over your head, this cobweb wizardry of steel, of soaring arches.’28 Similarly, in Hong Kong, Liusu and Liuyuan’s relationship is played out around the foreshores of that city: the harbour, the beach (where Liusu found the behaviour of the people ‘a bit too free’ [53]), the Repulse Bay Hotel and its tropical gardens and Liusu’s Babington Road house. The house is a refuge from war, but one that is isolated and empty, and a space in which Liusu experiences both anxiety and freedom. She luxuriates in the absence of the crowds in a traditional Chinese home but realizes that she has ‘no interests except people’ (86) and wonders how she will mind the house ‘when there is nothing to mind’ (87). Christina Stead’s cityscape in Seven Poor Men of Sydney is both like and unlike the scenes depicted in Dark’s and Chang’s stories. Set in Sydney in the 1920s, but published in 1934, the work explicitly critiques European modernism while taking up the innovative form and subject matter of modernist practices. Like Dark and Chang, Stead infuses the narrative with impressions of the natural landscape. When the men and women of the novel move around the harbour and into the city, Stead, perhaps working with Corbusier’s radiant city concept, includes tributes to ‘our radiant city’ that is ‘folded in morning lavender’29 and describes in rich detail the sea life of the coves and beaches. Her engagement with the city proper, however, is closer to Chang’s treatment of the teeming Shanghai. At the start of the novel, children scamper along the Sydney headland to see liners from Singapore, Shanghai, Nagasaki, Wellington, Hawai’i, San Francisco, Naples, Brindisi, Dunkirk, and London. They are poor and restless, an urban and suburban group clasping the rim of a continent where the city is a tough masculine space: as one of the ‘seven poor men’ remarks, ‘I always feel most a man when in the city’ (313). The political, philosophical, and cultural conversations that dominate the novel are internationalist in intent, but Stead subverts an uncritical allegiance to a European modernism. Her sardonic reference to the English dilettantes, Marion and Fulke Folliot, who flaunt their modernism (they

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carry ‘high the rushlight of their metropolitan culture at the same time, talked Cezanne, Gauguin, Laforgue, T.S. Eliot, Freud and Havelock Ellis’ [57]), is one of several attacks on Eurocentric modernism. Ann Blake contends that Seven Poor Men of Sydney is a work that ‘evokes the city in a depth still unparalleled in Australian fiction.’30 In Stead’s novel, we meet a life from the underground that does not appear in Dark’s fiction: the novel consistently references the alleys, rats, the bloody rags, the conversations of prostitutes and the insane. Although Stead includes T.S. Eliot in her list of suspect Europeans, her city alleys imaginatively resonate with the alleys of The Waste Land. One of the poor men, a Jewish printer and intellectual, Baruch Mendelssohn, knows ‘by heart the foetid rooms, eyes opening on littered streets, heavy wombs, market-gardeners’ carts trailing a cabbage smell, moustaches washed in beer, working-men’s tramcars rattling out to brown dusty suburbs’ (141). Stead’s narration of Joseph Baguenault and his friend wandering through Sydney at night and looking in the well-stocked shop windows resonates with Chang’s ‘Seeing with the Streets,’ an essay on wartime Shanghai, in which she descends from her urban high-rise to trace her journey to the market through the smoky streets at dusk. Both Stead and Chang use the lights of the city in dusk or rain to contribute to an intensifying sense of dislocation and displacement. This modernist sense of dislocation is, however, complicated by the presence of women who celebrate home but who attempt to move outside of social boundaries. The Refractory Spirit The common struggle for women’s rights that is played out in the narratives from the Rim is constrained by perceptions of the importance of the development of a national literature that speaks to grand narratives, especially given the semi-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial histories. The emphasis on a national writing influenced modernist writing by Chinese men as well, as Shih points out in noting that the work of Mu Shiying and Shi Zhecun was circumscribed by the politics of nationalism after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war,31 but such pressure points are complicated further for the women. Shih appropriates Deniz Kandiyoti’s phrase ‘modern-yet-modest’ to describe Ling’s literary approach: that is, to be non-threatening and to enact what Chow calls the ‘virtuous transaction,’ the process by which writing appears to be in a contract with patriarchy but at the same time undercuts

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and parodies that institution.32 The attempt to be ‘modern-yet-modest’ could be equally ascribed to the writing of Eleanor Dark, whose work is often seen to retreat from the radicalism of contemporaries, such as Jean Devanny (who wrote about interracial relationships), despite Dark’s querying of modern marriage and outmoded social and sexual practices. Indeed, Dark’s work was received as ‘the acceptable face of modernism’ by some reviewers, as her biographers, Barbara Brooks and Judith Clark, point out.33 The Chinese and Australian writers share a wistfulness and longing that speaks directly to the difficulties of their subordinate status as women. In 1942, Christina Stead wrote from New York on the subject of social constraint: Yet, although there isn’t a woman alive who doesn’t understand all this in early childhood and is not perfectly aware of the ignominy, detestation, and social death that awaits her if she does not conform, there are a lot of women who cannot conform. The refractory spirit is in them. If they could they would take a pack and go out on the roads, looking for the strange new country which is over every hill and which is seen in the delirium of hunger and the hatred of communities. Some do this but most can’t.34

The ‘refractory spirit’ in the Pacific Rim fiction discussed here shows that the work is tempered by the constraints of political, social, or cultural censorship. Chang laments: ‘The women on the tram filled me with sorrow. Women – women whose lives are consumed in talking about men, thinking about men, resenting men, now and forever.’35 Such subjugation evokes sorrow rather than rage. In her personal life, Chang was fiercely independent, and a measure of this independence infuses her prose. Hu Lancheng comments of Chang that ‘[m]en with a mission may be broadminded about marriage, but it was surprising to find this attitude in a woman.’36 In ‘Love in the Fallen City,’ Liusu’s decision to live with Liuyuan in Hong Kong supports Hu’s claim on Chang’s stance. In Australia, women writers were similarly constrained by ideologies of masculinism and nationalism that made experimentation difficult, even if these ideologies played out differently in the antipodean context. These writers were also subject to the agendas of English and American publishing houses, as Australian publishers would not be firmly established until after the Second World War. The continual referral of material to readers and publishers overseas had a substantial impact on the work of many women writers. For example, in the early

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1940s, Dark’s publisher, William Collins London, suggested that she move away from the modernist twenty-four-hour form and take up historical fiction to meet market demands. In response, Dark began work on a trilogy in which her interest in the process of modernity and the role of women was sublimated in narratives of nation founding. In China, writers had already substantially deployed a range of established narrative modes to express their ideas about the subjugation of women. Ling may be unusual in her later application to Bloomsbury for literary advice, but her famous short story ‘The Embroidered Cushions’ (1928) is typical, for Shih, of a ‘virtuous transaction.’ In this story, Ling illustrates tensions between the interior and exterior lives of women, making use of a spatial strategy also employed by Dark in her Sydney and Blue Mountains fiction of the 1930s. The world of ‘The Embroidered Cushions’ allows for no possibility of resistance on the part of the subjugated woman. The dedication of the Eldest Young Mistress to her embroidery task results in fine work that is soon degraded. Ling shows the woman’s retreat into silent confusion and the absence of hope: Eldest Young Mistress just sat there, hypnotized by the two pieces of embroidery. Whatever Xiaoniu was saying, she did not hear any of it. She was remembering when she had to undo the embroidery on the crest of the bird. Three times she had redone it. The first time, sweat had stained the delicate yellow threads. It had not become apparent until she had finished embroidering. The second time she mixed the wrong green pigments for the threads. In the evening, she had picked the wrong color. She could not quite remember what happened the last time ...37

Chow has commented on the sense of sacrificial suffering in this story.38 The overpowering sense of oppression evoked by the description of the minor details of women’s lives strikes a resonant note in women’s modernist writing in general. These are the small stories that illuminate the larger issues of constraint: Mrs Dalloway’s flowers, Lily Briscoe’s painting, Eldest Young Mistress’s fine stitching. The pressure is almost palpable in the concentration of emotion in such everyday activities. Pressure comes from another quarter in Chang’s ‘Love in the Fallen City,’ when the members of the traditional Bai household scheme toward arranging a marriage for Liusu. Liusu in part enters into this scheming, knowing that as a divorced twenty-eight-year-old woman she is a social problem. Failure to arrange a marriage with Liuyuan

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means staying in the Bai household and a lifetime of servitude. Thus, as Shu-ning Sciban notes, Liusu is ‘shown as reluctant and extremely calculating in her courtship of Liuyuan.’39 Liuyuan understands the game Liusu is playing, and with her decreasing prospects for remarriage, Liusu must place economic considerations first. Liusu decides to take the risk and stay in Hong Kong to be kept by Liuyuan regardless of the consequences. In an essay called ‘Writing of One’s Own,’ the title of which suggests a familiarity with Woolf’s essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929), Chang offers the following comment on ‘Love in the Fallen City’: I like writing by way of equivocal contrast because it is relatively true to life. In ‘Love in a Fallen City,’ Liusu escapes from her corrupt traditional family, but the baptism of the Battle of Hong Kong does not transform her into a revolutionary. The Battle of Hong Kong does affect Fan Liuyuan in the sense that it steers him toward a more settled existence and finally marriage, but marriage does not make him a saint or compel him to abandon completely his old habits and ingrained tendencies. Thus, although Liusu and Liuyuan’s marriage is healthy in some ways, it remains prosaic, earth-bound, and, given their situation, it could be nothing more.40

Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Chow, and Shih have each written about the importance of Chang’s privileging of domestic details, with Lee arguing that such domesticity connects Chang’s work to the Butterfly School’s semitraditional fiction, rather than to Western modernism.41 Shih, however, contends that the central role of romance in Chang’s narratives gives a ‘central tension and conflict’ to the narratives, and this means the works are not derivatives of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly School.42 In fact, in ‘Beating People,’ Chang refers to the work typified by this school as ‘systematic naivety that leaves a lot to be desired.’43 Although Australian women were not subject to arranged marriages as were many of their Chinese counterparts, entrapment in a bad union is a persistent fear in Dark’s work. Her novels feature a string of clever young women who find themselves caught either between a profession and a relationship, or between social expectations and a romance. In Waterway, for example, Winifred Selman is not prepared to leave her husband and risk losing custody of her blind daughter in a divorce dispute, whereas the New Woman figure of this narrative, the independent, socially aware Lesley Channon, narrowly avoids the wrong marriage.

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Dark’s work addresses issues that are not the usual stuff of novels of the 1930s: rape in marriage and abortion in Waterway, and eugenics in Prelude to Christopher (1934), which is often described as Australia’s first modernist novel. Each work stresses the necessity for women to work outside the home. The modern world of Dark’s novels offers women a way forward through education and political action, but the debates about science, politics, and the environment also indicate her ambivalence about the speed of change and the impact of global capitalism. In Prelude to Christopher, Linda is unable to resolve her trauma-filled past with the social expectations of being a doctor’s wife, until at last her sanity, always under threat, gives way during a confrontation with a servant over a pair of shoes. At the opening of Prelude to Christopher, Linda is the emblematic modern girl. With a bob haircut and exotic looks, she is a sexually liberated laboratory scientist. Despite her eventual suicide and her husband’s burgeoning relationship with a blonde all-Australian girl, the charismatic figure of Linda dominates the narrative. Likewise, Stead’s Catherine in Seven Poor Men of Sydney lives an eccentric existence, both as a child and as an adult, and, like Linda, suffers terribly for her out-of-step views on life. Catherine justifies her position thus: ‘In the lowest places I find my answers: I’ve fought all my life for male objectives in men’s terms’ (214). The relationship between Catherine and her half-brother Michael dogs her life until he commits suicide and she admits herself to an asylum. Dark’s and Stead’s women, then, speak to the long-held association of modernism and madness that began with early twentiethcentury discourses on modernism. Hermione Lee, in her biography of Virginia Woolf published in 1996, describes the reaction to modern art in Britain that suggested the ‘mental health of the nation’ was at risk in such new forms of expression.44 In Australia, Williams shows that ‘modernism and madness went hand in glove’ by relating some of the many accounts in which modernist artists have been described in these terms.45 The struggle of the woman painter for creative independence is a recurring motif in Dark’s work, and it is no coincidence that the ‘mad’ Linda of Prelude to Christopher has a fine appreciation of art. However, neither Dark nor Stead can allow their eccentric women a future: both become sacrificial females, as does Eldest Young Mistress in Ling’s ‘The Embroidered Cushions.’ Dark’s and Chang’s narratives similarly demonstrate the penalties for being out of step with social expectations. Whereas Australian women of this period had not experienced at first hand the tumultuous

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political events witnessed by their Chinese counterparts, they had seen the development of radical groups (both right- and left-wing) that resulted from the dislocation and poverty of the Depression. By the late 1930s, the writers held out little hope of escaping war, but they did have a common point of interest in that their stories show women experiencing the horror of war, but at the same time using the dislocation of war to a limited advantage. Women and War One of the most important aspects of this Pacific Rim community is the response to war in the Pacific. As European powers renegotiated their presence in the region after the First World War, it was not difficult to be aware of impending changes to the Pacific ‘theatre,’ especially after Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Virginia Woolf wrote extensively on the bombing of London in 1940 and on how, by 1942, the war made it impossible to write in anything but fragments, saying that what she did write was worthless.46 By this time China had experienced a substantial period of conflict, but Australia was not bombed until 1942 (Japanese planes bombed Darwin and a Japanese submarine destroyed a ferry in Sydney Harbour). Despite war in the Pacific dominating the region, the writers shied away from the grand narratives of war and the Chinese and Australian material is shaped by recourse to the ‘everyday’ in a narrative realignment that privileges a network of relations, or ‘tactics,’ to refer once more to de Certeau’s framework. In the following discussion, this antidiscipline becomes a feature of the group or community response from Pacific Rim writers: their war narratives are defined by their refusal of the nationalist approach to war. The Australian modernists were generally anti-fascist and of socialist inclination and could be more outspoken in regard to their political beliefs than their Chinese counterparts because they were not speaking from occupied territories. This sense of dislocation in the writers’ stories is depicted in fluctuating physical and emotional states. In Australia, women novelists responded to ‘the war’ with narratives that represented a sliding scale of political positioning. Certain novels were heavily censored because of their radicalism (for example, Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow [1947]), while others focused on the daily lives of women in wartime (Dymphna Cusack and Florence James’s Come In Spinner [1951] comes readily to mind). In The Little Company (1945), Dark brings a radical political edge to the story of a Sydney family in

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wartime, including in it a romance involving that ubiquitous figure of the period, the American soldier. In the Chinese work discussed here, the traumatic invasions of Hong Kong and Shanghai are not discussed as history and are not shaped, according to Nicole Huang, ‘by modernist high culture.’47 Larson and Wedell-Wedellsborg argue that the fourth generation of modernists, working in the 1940s, ‘developed Chinese modernism further by reconciling autonomism and symbolism with social and historical consciousness, allowing them to write poems about the war that were not “war poems.”’48 In Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney, one of the poor men, Baruch Mendelssohn, leaves 1920s Australia for America and a vision of the future, one that includes Marx, Ranke, and Fustel de Coulanges. He declares, ‘In ten years I will be a citizen of a future state’ (310). For those left behind in this stretch of the Pacific, the next ten years produced an even more complex response to modernity in which the United States assumed an increasing importance. Chinese writers confronted an occupation that complicated fierce nationalist struggles and in Australia, the presence of American troops electrified popular culture and provoked new conversations about race and gender. The writers’ accounts of this period offer a valuable perspective that often sits uneasily with hegemonic histories. Huang writes of Chang that her ‘most important literary legacy from the 1940s is her construction of an alternative narrative to war, one that contradicted the grand narratives of national salvation and revolution that dominated the wartime literary scene.’49 Chang’s ‘Love in the Fallen City’ describes the beginning of the Battle of Hong Kong as follows: On December 8, 1941, the cannons roared. Amid the cannon shots, the white winter fog of early morning slowly dispersed. On the mountain tops and in the valleys, everywhere on the island, people were looking out at the sea saying, ‘The war’s begun! The war’s begun!’ Nobody believed it but in the end the war had started. (64)

The bombardment instigates Liusu and Liuyuan’s decision to announce their informal marriage in the local newspaper. The relationship, until now acted out in the restaurants and hotel rooms of Hong Kong, is changed forever by the shelling, as the population scrambles for food and shelter. Chang uses the invasion to disrupt the conventions of ordinary life and to again privilege random chance in the modern world. As

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Liuyuan insists, to Liusu’s bewilderment, ‘as if we were able to be our own masters!’ (58). Chang dispenses with any further historical detail and focuses on the reactions of Liusu and her servant and their rescue by Liuyuan. When Hong Kong is bombed, life itself seems to fragment: ‘in this turbulent world, money, property and everything else that would last as long as heaven and earth, all these were unreliable’ (68). Chang’s sense of the instability of history is repeated in her wartime essays. In ‘Writing of One’s Own,’ she says that, until a new world order is restored, ‘all certainty will remain an exception.’50 Similarly, in ‘Seeing with the Streets,’ Chang speaks of being caught at a military blockade. The military force is not named: the narrator focuses on the passivity of the crowd and notes that ‘even the authorities seemed to realize that the scene had lacked a certain suspense.’51 The fear of arrest is made palpable by Chang’s demonstration of the ease with which the soldiers enter the crowd and arrest the criminal. The tension does not completely subside, and the reader remains very aware of the everyday dangers in moving around the city. The arrest is followed by a description of the way in which a woman in the crowd has stretched her knit blouse out of shape. As the occupied and the occupier confront each other on the streets of Shanghai, the stress is displaced into an observation of everyday dress. Chang’s essay ‘From the Ashes’ recounts her own experience of the Battle of Hong Kong and its aftermath in similar terms: ‘Hong Kong discovered anew the joy of eating. Strange that the most natural, the most fundamental of functions, when suddenly accorded excessive attention and subjected to the glare of intense emotion, can come to seem sordid and even perverse.’52 Like many left-wing Australians, Dark was hoping that the end of war would see Australia become a socialist state that was inflected by humanism. In The Little Company, the working-class character Sally Dodd recounts that her two eldest children are Reds who support a ‘New Order,’ that is, the overthrow of capitalism.53 Unlike Chang, who carefully avoids specific politics, Dark’s works of the 1930s and 1940s include many debates on the possibilities of political change, debates which take place within the home. Gilbert Massey, the writer protagonist of The Little Company (1945), argues for this New Order, saying, ‘this, finally, was the issue which split the world in two, split nations, split parties, split friendships and families – do you believe in human beings, or don’t you?’54 As Gilbert and his lover Elsa watch the searchlights sweeping the harbour for Japanese submarines, Gilbert remembers his experiences in France in 1917. His reaction to the bombing produced resentment and boredom rather than fear and anger. Predict-

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ably, The Little Company attracted acrimonious reviews in newspapers of the day in contrast to Dark’s 1941 historical novel, The Timeless Land, which had been sent to Australian troops in action. The war offers the lovers a freedom not afforded by peacetime: the blacked-out windows of Elsa’s flat provide the necessary privacy, and Gilbert gains the opportunity to have the affair that will finally terminate his marriage. For a number of characters in ‘Love in the Fallen City,’ the war also offers an opportunity to change direction, although this movement might not mean freedom. Dark’s use of war is like Chang’s in that she defers pro-nationalist propaganda. War is experienced as an all-encompassing, all-pervasive carnage in universal, rather than in nationalist, terms. Dark saves her strongest critique in The Little Company for the local police who arrived to inspect Massey’s home for banned political works. Chang’s finely balanced stories made her, as Huang notes, a spokesperson of wartime popular culture.55 In her essay ‘What Are We to Write?’ Chang makes clear that she is constrained by military occupation. She says that once ‘I believed that I could write whatever I please: historical fiction, proletarian fiction, modernist fiction, even the relatively vulgar genre of “family ethics” fiction, not to mention social exposé and martial arts novels or decadent stories of romance and seduction.’56 Chang valued firsthand experience of the spaces and places she represented in her fiction, but because of the Japanese occupation she could not go to the interior to experience life in the places she wished to depict in her writing.57 For Chang the war meant the complete disruption of the everyday activities necessary to her creative practice. Conclusion After the Second World War, political and cultural renegotiations around the Rim saw Eurocentric allegiances begin to crumble and the geo-cultural past of colonization give way to new political formations. The response of the writers to the process of modernity is complex, multifaceted, and ambiguous, but their writing produced between the wars does speak to common problems in becoming ‘modern,’ or, at least, experimenting with modernist form. The writing considered in this study functions as an alternative type of ‘community,’ as the concept is theorized by Rey Chow. Given the wide disparity in their cultural milieus, these women writers challenge the boundaries imposed by the triangulation of race/nation/gender through markedly similar negotiations of modernist practice and mod-

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ernisms. These ‘tactics’ involve representing a gendered appropriation of urban space in narratives that consider the possibilities for social change for modern women in their respective cultures. They welcomed the new technologies of the twentieth century but were concerned for the long-term impact on their social world. Dark remembers watching the arrival of Charles Kingsford Smith, the Australian aviator, on the conclusion of his record-breaking journey from England in 1918. She later recorded her unease at this shrinking of time and space: ‘When I was seventeen and saw Kingsford Smith arriving in Sydney after the first flight from England to Australia I felt that nations could never again be separate as they had been before, and this feeling became a conviction as the years passed.’58 Chang and Dark depend on a familiar reality to couch their social commentary – but their characters also take the reader into an unexpected and often violent inner world, a process that critics, such as Marianne deKoven, have argued is indicative of the stylistic practices of modernist form.59 Ling’s writing works with and subverts conventional form, thereby representing issues of critical importance to modern Chinese women. Stead, perhaps the most experimental of the Australian writers of this period and the most ardent internationalist in material and literary terms, juxtaposes the everyday with an intellectualism that resonates with Chang’s preference for incorporating classical Chinese tales into stories of the commonplace. Huang notes that ‘[f]ew writers in twentieth century China so persistently experimented with new literary language as Eileen Chang.’60 In general, the writers produced their most important work in the interwar period, and for a number of different reasons their output diminished in later years. Dark stayed close to home from the 1950s onwards, and she wrote little after 1959. The story of Chang’s departure for the United States and her death there is well known. Christina Stead returned to Australia in the 1970s, at last finding acceptance in that country as an important writer, and Ling mostly lived overseas after the Second World War. The dynamism of political and economic expansion in the Pacific Rim requires, one can argue, a renewed focus on the history of antidisciplines operating in these regions, as well as connections between established cultural makers, past and present. The discussion of the texts in this ‘community’ of refractory women who looked out across the Pacific from their diverse locations in the 1930s and 1940s and who specifically engaged with modernist practices shows the writers found common imaginative ground in relation to working with modernity

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and in their responses to European modernism. The level of commonality across the vectors of family, relationships, nationalism, and global change in the writing of these women suggests that it is important to engage with the process and politics of admittance in cross-cultural modernist studies.

NOTES 1 Strahan, Australia’s China, 321. 2 Berman, ‘Modernism’s Possible Geographies,’ 296. 3 Ling Shuhua, quoted in Patricia Laurence, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes, 287. 4 Shih, The Lure of the Modern, 3–4. 5 Chow, ‘The Politics of Admittance,’ 69. 6 Morris, ‘Participating from a Distance.’ 7 Laurence, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes, 33. 8 Hu Lancheng, ‘This Life, These Times,’ 135. 9 Shih, The Lure of the Modern, 232. 10 Chang, ‘Love in the Fallen City,’ 49. All further references are cited in the text. 11 Hodge and Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream, 39. 12 Larson and Wedell-Wedellsborg, Inside Out, 16–17. 13 Williams, The Quarantined Culture, 245, 13, 242. 14 Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London, 214. 15 Ibid., 220 16 Woolf, Leave the Letters till We’re Dead, 327–8. 17 Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, 311. 18 Shih, The Lure of the Modern, 224. 19 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xiv–xv. 20 Mu Shiying, ‘Five in a Nightclub,’ 11. 21 Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, 272. 22 Ibid., 270. 23 Chang, ‘Notes on Apartment Life,’ 24. 24 Dark, Waterway. All further references to this edition are cited in the text. 25 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93. 26 Augé, Non-Places, 58. 27 Blair, ‘Modernism and the Politics of Culture,’ 168. 28 Dark, Return to Coolami, 26. 29 Stead, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, 313. All further references are cited in the text.

196 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Susan Carson Blake, Christina Stead’s Politics of Place, 64. Shih, The Lure of the Modern, 301. Ibid., 222–3; Chow, ‘Virtuous Transactions.’ Brooks with Clark, Eleanor Dark, 204. Stead, quoted in Heather Stewart, ‘Feminism and Male Chauvinism in the Writings of Christina Stead 1902–1983.’ Chang, ‘With the Women on the Tram,’ 146. Hu Lancheng, ‘This Life, These Times,’ 134. Ling Shuhua, ‘The Embroidered Cushions,’ 29. Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 134. Shu-ning Sciban, ‘Introduction,’ 14. Chang, ‘Writing of One’s Own,’ 17. Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, 72. Shih, The Lure of the Modern, 381. Chang, ‘Beating People,’ 136. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, 291. Williams, The Quarantined Culture, 30. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, 758. Huang, ‘Introduction,’ xxiv. Larson and Wedell-Wedellsborg, Inside Out, 16–17. Huang, ‘Introduction,’ xii. Chang, ‘Writing of One’s Own,’ 17. Chang, ‘Seeing with the Streets,’ 61. Chang, ‘From the Ashes,’ 46. Dark, The Little Company, 255. Ibid., 128. Huang, ‘Introduction,’ ix. Chang, ‘What Are We to Write?’ 129–30. Ibid., 130. Dark, Unpublished working papers, MLMSS4545, box 14, Eleanor Dark Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney, Australia. DeKoven, Rich and Strange. Huang, ‘Introduction,’ xvi.

SOURCES CITED Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Berman, Jessica. ‘Modernism’s Possible Geographies.’ In Geomodernisms: Race,

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Modernism, Modernity, edited by Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, 281–96. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005. Blair, Sara. ‘Modernism and the Politics of Culture.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, edited by Michael Levenson, 157–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Blake, Ann. Christina Stead’s Politics of Place. Crawley, Western Australia: Western Australia University Press, 1999. Brooks, Barbara, with Judith Clark. Eleanor Dark: A Writer’s Life. Sydney: Macmillan, 1998. Chang, Eileen. ‘Beating People.’ In Written on Water, 135–6. – ‘From the Ashes.’ In Written on Water, 39–52. – ‘Love in the Fallen City.’ Translated by Shu-ning Sciban. In Dragonflies: Fiction by Chinese Women in the Twentieth Century, edited by Shu-ning Sciban and Fred Edwards, 32–70. Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2003. – ‘Notes on Apartment Life.’ In Written on Water, 24–8. – ‘Seeing with the Streets.’ In Written on Water, 57–63. – ‘What Are We to Write?’ In Written on Water, 129–30. – ‘With the Women on the Tram.’ In Written on Water, 145–6. – ‘Writing of One’s Own.’ In Written on Water, 15–22. – Written on Water. Translated by Andrew F. Jones. Co-edited by Nicole Huang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Chow, Rey. ‘The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation, and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon.’ In Ethics after Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading, 55–73. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998. – ‘Virtuous Transactions: A Reading of Three Stories by Ling Shuhua.’ In Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism, edited by Tani E. Barlow, 90–105. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. – Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between East and West. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Dark, Eleanor. Eleanor Dark Papers. MLMSS4545. Mitchell Library, Sydney, Australia. – The Little Company. Sydney: Collins, 1945. – Return to Coolami. London: Collins, 1936. – Waterway. London: Collins, 1938. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. DeKoven, Marianne. Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

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Hodge, Bob, and Vijay Mishra. Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind. North Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1991. Hu, Lancheng. ‘This Life, These Times.’ Translated by D.E. Pollard. Renditions 45 (Spring 1996): 129–35. Huang, Nicole. ‘Introduction.’ In Written on Water by Eileen Chang, ix–xxvii. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Larson, Wendy, and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg. Inside Out: Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literary Culture. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1993. Laurence, Patricia. Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Vintage, 1996. Lee, Leo Ou-Fan. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China 1930–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Ling, Shuhua. ‘The Embroidered Cushions.’ Translated by Heather Schmidt. In Dragonflies: Fiction by Chinese Women in the Twentieth Century, edited by Shu-ning Sciban and Fred Edwards, 26–30. Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2003. Morris, Meaghan. ‘Participating from a Distance.’ In Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic, edited by Koichi Iwabuchi, Stephen Muecke, and Mandy Thomas, 249–61. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004. Mu Shiying. ‘Five in a Nightclub.’ Translated by Randolph Trumbull [sic]. Renditions 37 (Spring 1992): 5–22. Shih, Shu-Mei. The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Shu-ning Sciban. ‘Introduction.’ In Dragonflies: Fiction by Chinese Women in the Twentieth Century, edited by Shu-ning Sciban and Fred Edwards, 1–23. Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2003. Stead, Christina. Seven Poor Men of Sydney. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1978. Stewart, Heather. ‘Feminism and Male Chauvinism in the Writings of Christina Stead 1901–1983.’ Unpublished paper presented at the Australian Women’s Studies Association Conference, St Lucia, Brisbane, 16 July 2003. Strahan, Lachlan. Australia’s China: Changing Perceptions from the 1930s to the 1990s. Cambridge and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Williams, John F. The Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism, 1913–1939. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Woolf, Virginia. Leave the Letters till We’re Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf. London: Hogarth Press, 1980. Woollacott, Angela. To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

9 Fission/Fusion: Modanizumu in Japanese Fiction william j. tyler

Until a decade ago, surprisingly little was published in English on the subject of modernism in Japanese fiction. Aside from a handful of translations and studies on individual writers, no comprehensive survey of the topic or anthology of translations provided a systematic introduction to Japanese modernist authors and styles. Equally curious is the fact that, even where distinguished examples of Japan’s modernist fiction were available after their introduction to the English-speaking world in the late 1950s and early 1960s – one thinks here of such modernist classics as Kawabata Yasunari’s Snow Country, Tanizaki Jun’ichir ’s ‘Tattooer’ and Portrait of Shunkin, or Nagai Kaf·’s A Strange Tale from East of the River1 – the modernist elements were typically overlooked or discounted in favour of discussions of what the works said about the traditions of Japanese life, culture, and aesthetics. Thus, Kawabata’s Snow Country was the quintessentially haiku-esque novel, and Tanizaki’s Portrait of Shunkin, a glimpse into the world of traditional Japanese music or a Zen homily on the virtues of personal sacrifice and instant enlightenment. As for Kaf·’s Strange Tale, was it a poem diary in the classical mode or a highly experimental new genre? Even use of the words ‘modernism’ and ‘modernist’ is of relatively recent practice in the discourse on modern Japanese literature in English. They were often avoided or used with reluctance, critics seemingly haunted by doubts about equivalence and authenticity vis-à-vis Western European modernism. One has to ask why this was the case in view of the fact that modanizumu – as modernism is called in Japanese2 – has been a literary movement central to the history and evolution of Japanese letters in the twentieth century. Moreover, it has been the focus of much lively research, study, and recuperation among Japanese scholars since the 1980s.

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A recent groundswell of interest suggests, however, that the situation is changing, and the field of Japanese literary studies in English is generating a critical mass of materials and translations that will make systematic study and appraisal of Japanese modernist fiction accessible to non-Japanese-speaking readers and scholars. In the case of studies of Kawabata and Tanizaki, for example, Roy Starrs’s Soundings in Time: The Fictive Art of Yasunari Kawabata (1998) and Thomas LaMarre’s Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichir  on Cinema and ‘Oriental’ Aesthetics (2005) were the first monographs to rethink these canonical figures as important modernists. Moreover, Alisa Freedman’s annotated translation of Kawabata’s Asakusa kurenaidan (1930; trans. The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, 2005) has made available a work that is key to understanding and assessing Kawabata’s modernist style. Meanwhile, translations of other modernist texts – such as Uno Chiyo’s Iro zange (1935; trans. Confessions of Love, 1989), Ishikawa Jun’s Fugen (1936; trans. The Bodhisattva, or Samatabhadra, 1990), Inagaki Taruho’s Issen ichiby  monogatari (1923; trans. A Thousand and One-Second Stories, 1998), and Uchida Hyakken’s Meido (1922; trans. Realm of the Dead, 2006) – now provide access to lesser-known writers and remind us that we have seen only the tip of the iceberg concerning what are to be examined as Japanese modernist texts. At the same time, Seiji M. Lippit’s Topographies of Japanese Modernism (2002), William Gardner’s Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s (2006), and Miriam Silverberg’s Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (2006) have moved beyond studies of single authors to inaugurate a synthetic approach. My own research, Modanizumu: Modernist Prose from Japan 1913–1938 (2008), combines analysis, commentary, and translations in order to introduce a fuller spectrum of works and writers and offer a systematic and comprehensive survey of the larger spectacle. What did it mean to be modanist in Japanese prose? How was literary modernism in Japan a product of its own internal fission and, concomitantly, fusion with external sources such as the West? These are the questions that the field has begun to explore.3 Effective examination of modanizumu in Japanese fiction requires, then, that we acquaint ourselves with many moderns who have not been previously introduced or translated. Of course, Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) and Tanizaki Jun’ichir  (1886–1965) are well known, and readers of detective fiction – a prominent genre in Japanese modernist prose – will be familiar with the ‘Edgar Allan Poe of Japan,’ namely, the novelist Edogawa Rampo (1894–1965). But such modernists as Asa-

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hara Rokur  (1895–1977), Makino Shin’ichi (1896–1936), Murayama Kaita (1896–1919), Ry·tanji Y· (1901–92), Tachibana Sotoo (1894–1959), Tani J ji (who also wrote under the names of Maki Itsuma and Hayashi Fub , 1900–35), and Yoshiyuki Eisuke (1906–40) will be entirely new to non-Japanese readers. Others, like Abe Tomoji (1903–73), Funahashi Seiichi (1904–76), Hayashi Fumiko (1903–51), It  Sei (1905–69), Kajii Motojir  (1901–32), Okamoto Kanoko (1889–1939), Osaki Midori (1896–1971), Takeda Rintar  (1904–46), and Yumeno Ky·saku (1889– 1936), have been favoured with an occasional translation; however, these translations are often scattered across many texts. What is more, they are typically presented in isolation from literary history, not to mention the story of modanizumu. Thus, the introduction of unknown or inadequately recognized writers is scholarly work essential to fleshing out the gamut of the many new, neo, and nouveau schools of prose modanizumu that, each prefacing itself with the ubiquitous monikers of shin or shink , competed in the 1920s and 1930s to define the meaning of ‘making it new,’ or, more precisely in the case of Japan, of ‘making it modan’ in the first half of the twentieth century. The shin kankaku or ‘new sensation’ school, for example, is already fairly well known as a result of Kawabata’s fame and subsequent studies of his prose. But we need to remember that it represents only a fraction of the larger story of modanizumu that includes, for example, the ‘new or modern art’ of the shink  geijutsu authors, the ‘new psychological literature’ of shin shinrigaku bungaku, the ‘new society’ of the shin shakai-ha, the New Youth of Shinseinen magazine, and the new woman (atarashii onna) associated with the rise of feminism, women writers, and the moga or modern gal. Furthermore, because commercial journalism played a definitive role in the promotion and popularization of Japanese modernist fiction, a proper survey must cover not only the small, self-financed coterie magazines (d jin zasshi) that were the initial driving force of the movement, but also the general-interest journals (s g  zasshi) that subsequently turned avant-gardism into a lively modernist cocktail designed to appeal to a rapidly expanding urban audience of students, intellectuals, whitecollar workers, and housewives. Enjoying hefty circulation figures and run by powerful editors and brokers of literature, such as Kikuchi Kan (1888–1948) and Nakamura Murao (1886–1949), these general-interest journals became the venue by which many young writers moved beyond the little magazines to establish themselves as professionals. As the mass market for creative fiction expanded in the late 1920s, a youthful exuberance emerged as a hallmark of Japanese modernist writing.

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Not only did it soften the Caligari-esque jagged edges of the prose style of the early coterie magazines, but it also served to mitigate withdrawal into the surreal or emphasis on alienation that bulks large in European modernism. Japan’s young moderns embraced the speed and novelty of the twentieth century, engaging in a literary and political actionism (k d shugi)4 that manifest itself, on the literary side, as experimentation in narrative, and on the political or social front, in advocacy of the individual versus the ideological. Looked at broadly, Japanese literary modanizumu can be organized into rubrics such as anti-naturalism, internationalization, or the concept of the non-essentialist self. Or it can be examined in terms of formalistic traits. Readers of its texts in the original will note not only the remarkable use of dashes and ellipses typical of modernist fiction in Western language materials, but also the abrupt switching of tenses internal to a paragraph or passage, and the frequent identification of characters and place names by single capital letters – both markers of Japan’s modanist writings. There is also the epiphanic visuality of the many spectacles, or k kei, that appear with striking regularity. As the characters for ‘light’ (k ) and ‘scene’ or ‘scenery’ (kei) suggest, Japanese modernists sought to highlight or illuminate the deliberately constructed nature of their narratives in much the way that movie moguls and fashion photographers employed the newly invented Klieg lamp to light up sets constructed for motion pictures or fashion photography. One need only recall the powerfully specular moment in Kawabata’s Snow Country when a singular and seemingly disembodied eye, illuminated and magnified in the train window, floats across the opening pages of the novel. Likewise, as Snow Country illustrates, double exposure, superimposition, layering, and palimpsest construction are commonly utilized innovations.5 Other formalistic techniques, such as the ingenious deployment of interlineal and bilingual glosses (via the agency of mini-phonetic symbols or furigana set alongside larger typeface), give Japanese modernist texts a transnational voice and permit their dramatis personae to speak in two languages at once, as it were – and in a manner not unlike subtitles that provide a second voice or subscript in foreign films. It is best illustrated by such texts as Tachibana Sotoo’s comic ‘true-tolife’ novella Sakaba ruretto funj ki (1936; trans. A Tale of Trouble from the Bar Roulette, 2008).6 Albeit a textual device not readily reproducible in English-language print, it points to the pervasive double-voicedness characteristic of the ironic and at times facetious tone typical of modernist texts in Japanese. Not only is detecting the tone of a modanist text

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an important critical task, but this tone is also an essential element to be transmitted in translation. Failure to recognize the centrality of the serio-comic voice in modanist literature is to miss out on both its verbal fascination and its philosophical relativism, not to mention its chic urbanity and/or youthful exuberance. Those already familiar with modanizumu as a movement in Japanese art and lifestyle circa the 1920s and 1930s will already be aware of catchphrases associated with historical and journalistic treatments of the topic. I speak here of the oft-told tales of ‘the modern boy and girl,’ the razzmatazz of the dance halls and milk bars of ‘Japan’s Jazz Age,’ and ‘the nonsense of eroticism and grotesquerie’ – or ero-guro nansensu as the phrase has it in Japanese. These shibboleths make excellent starting points for drawing in readers and evoking a bygone age. Yet, there are limitations to this journalistic approach to understanding Japanese modanizumu because it promotes an image that is exciting, yet superficial or derivative. As a matter of fact, the stereotype of being intellectually and politically lightweight has dogged modanizumu since its heyday, when the attack against the movement was led in Japan by ultranationalists on the right and Marxists on the left. For the ultranationalists, its association with individualism, liberalism, and urbanization was too modan, alien, and subversive of Japanese tradition. For Marxists and practitioners of proletarian literature, its actionism was not izumu or ideological enough to contribute to the class struggle. As a result, Marxism and modernism were uneasy left-of-centre bedfellows in Japan from the 1920s, when they vied for the moral, cultural, and political high ground in the arena of progressive thought and praxis. The tension between the two posed a nightmarish dilemma for many intellectuals in the pre-war period – as It  Sei (1905–69) makes clear in his famous novella Y·ki no machi (1937; trans. Streets of Fiendish Ghosts, 2008). In this classic modanist text, It  creates a fictional encounter between Kobayashi Takiji (1903–33), Japan’s most famous proletarian writer, and Akutagawa Ry·nosuke (1892–1927), an early modernist and advocate of the principle of art for art’s sake (geijutsu shij shugi). The two writers return to life to conduct their respective ‘Last Judgments’ on the Japanese literary establishment, in which writers are saved or damned according to their commitment to ‘Cultural Materialism’ or ‘Writing Beautifully.’7 In more recent times, modanizumu has come under attack from postmodern critics who see the sleek athleticism of its aesthetics as implicitly and unreflectively fascist. This is a refrain that echoes the Marxist complaint of three-quarters of a century ago. Or it is

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theme-and-variation on a postmodern cultural critique of Japan as an ‘Empire of Signs.’ Writing in 1930, in an essay titled ‘Modânizumu bungaku-ron’ (On modanizumu in literature, 1930), the novelist Ry·tanji Y· makes a point of objecting to ‘the metaphorical critique that says modanizumu is nothing more than the latest display of imported cosmetics.’8 This pejorative view, which he sees as endemic to modanizumu’s detractors, is typical of the naïveté of the ‘o-nobori-san,’ an affectionate but derogatory term for country folk who go to the big city of Tokyo for the first time and mistake all that is new and state-of-the-art as alien and imported. ‘They are agog at the most ordinary and commonsensical accessories of modern living,’ he complains with the air of an urban sophisticate. He then says in a tongue-in-cheek passage, which involves play on the French word cancan, that what is needed to understand modanizumu is an atarashii kankan – a ‘new sense-sense’ or ‘new feel-feel.’ Via his smart turn of phrase, Ry·tanji intimates that Japan has devised a kan-kan of its own, just as the cancan was a unique expression of Moulin-Rouge moderne in France. Over three decades ago, the study of Japanese literature in English took its first steps toward initiating a discourse on the subject of modanizumu when Dennis Keene introduced the novelist Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947), a prominent member and – along with Kawabata – founder of the ‘new sensation’ school, via his translations of Yokomitsu’s early fiction, ‘Love’ and Other Stories (1974), and through his pioneering study, Yokomitsu Riichi: Modernist (1980). In the 1920s and 1930s, Yokomitsu had been an immensely famous writer, if not a ‘god’ of modern Japanese literature, but his reputation plummeted after the end of the Second World War and his death two years later. As a result, he never received the international recognition that came to his contemporary and close friend Kawabata Yasunari, with whom he started Bungei jidai (The Age of Literary Art, 1924–7), the magazine that showcased literary modernism in the ‘new sensation’ style. By translating Yokomitsu’s stories and writing a monograph about their author, Keene made a leading but neglected writer known outside Japan. He also enriched the broader cause of Japanese studies in English as the first critic to employ the terms modernism and modernist in talking about twentiethcentury Japanese literature. In truth, Yokomitsu had joined forces with Kawabata and other friends to found the coterie magazine Bungei jidai, believing, as the group did, that art and literature had a central role to play in supplanting religion in the twentieth century and providing a new rai-

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son d’être for living in modern times – thereby anticipating by more than a half century the stellar role that soft culture, creativity, and art now play in contemporary Japan. Praised for its fresh and innovative prose style – as well as its rejection of ideology in literature in favour of art for art’s sake – the magazine was quickly identified as possessing what the critic Chiba Kameo (1878–1935) dubbed the shin kankaku or new sensation. Most simply translated, the phrase means ‘the new touch’ or ‘modern feeling.’ Or, to put it in the evolving parlance of the period, the writers of Bungei jidai were seen as having captured the spirit of being modan, a neologism that entered the Japanese language to replace the older usage of kindai (modern, or modern period) as a buzzword for all that was new and au courant. In the same year the phrase modan gâru, or modern gal, was also coined to describe the arrival of a new kind of Japanese woman on the cultural scene – a woman who was liberated and dashing not only in her attitudes and ideas but also in her appearance.9 Tanizaki Jun’ichir ’s novel Chijin no ai (1925; trans. Naomi, 1985) captures the spirit of the moga and of a man – a ‘fool for love’ as the title means – who is slavishly enamoured of the new woman’s lifestyle. Indeed, being modan was very much in the air when the first issue of Bungei jidai was published in the fall of 1924. The Great Kant  Earthquake of 1 September 1923 had levelled much of Tokyo and Yokohama the year before, erasing not only the last vestiges of the old city of Edo, but also much of the London-town look that had been the officially sanctioned architecture of the Meiji era. Suddenly, Tokyo was being redesigned and modernized as never before. Bridges of steel were flung across the Sumida River and other waterways. Land and houses were cleared to accommodate broad avenues designed as fire lanes and arteries for automotive traffic. Ferroconcrete was used for the first time to construct five- to six-storey department stores, theatres, and apartment houses. As the showcase of the nation, Tokyo became a veritable tabula rasa upon which the modan was writ large. Thus, while the beginnings of modernist prose in Japan predate Bungei jidai by more than a decade – the appearance in 1910 of Tanizaki Jun’ichir ’s ‘Tattooer’ is typically cited as marking the onset of the movement – the identification of the magazine as possessing the shin kankaku gave a name for the first time to what was modanist in Japanese fiction. It was twelve noon. Packed to capacity, the special express train raced down the tracks at top speed. The smaller stations were ignored like stones along the wayside.

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Mahiru de aru. Tokubetsu ky·k  ressha wa man’in no mama zen-sokuryoku de kakete ita. Ensen no sh eki wa ishi no y  ni mokusatsu sareta.10

These three short sentences in Yokomitsu’s story ‘Atama narabi ni hara’ (1924; With the head, and guts too) – which subsequently became the object of praise and controversy, as well as legend in Japanese literary history – were identified as the essence of a new prose style characterized by a cinematic, frame-by-frame reproduction of key images; sleek, terse, and telegraphic sentences; and a tone of cool, authorial detachment. If older critics found the style mechanistic and alienating – as seen in the express train relegating the local stations to physical and metaphorical insignificance – others embraced it as a welcome departure from the prosaicness of the mainstream style of Japanese naturalist writers or the cant of the proletarians. By streamlining prose and creating a new kind of narrativity, Yokomitsu engaged in what he called his ‘lawless fight to the finish to overcome [the constraints of] the national language (kokugo to no futei kiwamaru kessen).’11 He sought to push the limits of known expression and make new the rhetorical range of Japanese modes of expression. Yokomitsu and Kawabata soon became the principal exponents and past masters of the new style. Yokomitsu used it to great effect, for example, in his novel Shanhai (1928–9, 1931; trans. Shanghai, 2001), in which images of urban vitality and decay are powerfully and repeatedly juxtaposed to evoke the steamy, semi-colonial atmosphere of Asia’s most international city. At the same time, the novel experiments with exploring the mental landscape of a Japanese expatriate who ventures into the terra incognita of cultural deracination – a world in which the old pedigree markers of nation, race, and class begin to lose their traditional meaning and hegemonic power. While Yokomitsu’s development of this second theme is often frustratingly ambiguous and the novel’s ending left wide open to interpretation, still Shanhai was ahead of its time by being among the first of Japanese novels set in a foreign locale. Furthermore, it has its protagonist step outside the physical, mental, and social confines of what it meant to be Japanese in the 1920s, especially as an ex-pat residing in China, over which Japan’s imperial designs were already apparent. In broaching issues of transnationality and diversity, Yokomitsu was not only exceedingly modan but also even postmodernist in his desire to break out of the prison house of his native language. Meanwhile, Kawabata worked at perfecting his own version of the

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new sensation. Borrowing an oft-cited phrase from the suicide note left behind by the previously mentioned novelist Akutagawa Ry·nosuke, he likened his method to writing ‘with the eyes of a dying man’ (matsugo no me),12 a narrative strategy that paradoxically combined, on the one hand, an attitude of cool detachment, if not resignation, toward living with, on the other hand, a heightened sense of visual acuity and a tenacious commitment to the act of writing. To write in this fashion was to emulate the intensity that Akutagawa brought to his writing even in dying – for, as the lethal dose of Veronal took effect, Akutagawa continued to write, recording his last moments in which ‘nature never looked more beautiful.’13 Writing with the eyes of a dying man became Kawabata’s lifelong credo, and Yukiguni (1937, 1948; trans. Snow Country, 1957) is one of the finest expressions of this intensely visual style. Snow Country is a superbly modernist text not only in its deliberate disordering of the narrative’s time sequencing but also, as pointed out earlier, in its spectacular superimpositions such as the eye that floats in the train window. Coincidentally, it too begins with three short sentences that, like Yokomitsu’s famous opening lines, rank among the best-known passages of twentieth-century Japanese literature. On the other side of the mountain was the snow country. As the train emerged from the long tunnel, everything turned white – white to the very bottom of the night. The train stopped at the signal. Kokky  no nagai tonneru wo nukeru to yukiguni de atta. Yoru no soko ga shiroku natta. Shing sho ni kisha ga tomatta.14

With the publication of Kikai (1930; trans. ‘The Machine,’ 1970, 1974), however, Yokomitsu moved in a dramatically different direction. In contrast to the compact style of his early short stories, ‘The Machine’ is known for its long, run-on sentences and its stream-of-consciousness (ishiki no nagare) style. It tells the tale of a young man who, desperate for work, takes a job handling dangerous chemicals at a small metalplating factory. The text is a verbal tour de force – indeed, some have argued it is but one long, continuous sentence. By the end of the story’s long-winded and nightmarish convolutions, the reader often feels unable to determine whether it is the noxious chemicals or the mind-boggling incompetence of the boss and other workers that has poisoned the protagonist’s brain and driven him to the brink of madness and possibly murder. ‘It took my breath away,’ exclaimed the novelist It  Sei

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upon encountering Yokomitsu’s j zetsu-tai, or garrulous style, when the story first appeared in Kaiz  magazine in September 1930. Once again, Yokomitsu led the way in creating a new kind of narrative that many Japanese novelists were to adopt as characteristic of the second or ‘late’ phase of literary modernism that commences circa 1930–1. Although Yokomitsu’s reputation rapidly went into decline after his death because of his conversion to active support for Japanese imperialism during the war, there can be no gainsaying the fact that, as a stylistic innovator twice over, he was one of the leading writers of his generation in inventing and defining the nature of Japanese modernism in prose. Despite Yokomitsu’s innovations and their impact on other writers, however, in his introduction to the translations, ‘Love’ and Other Stories, and, in his study, Yokomitsu Riichi: Modernist, Dennis Keene comes to the unhappy conclusion that, as Japan’s ‘only serious counterpart’ to European modernist writers,15 Yokomitsu failed to introduce modernism into Japan in a significant or permanent way. First, writes Keene, he lacked the native competence to emulate the works of Flaubert and Gide, whom he greatly admired. Gide’s Les faux monnayeurs (1926) was, for example, Yokomitsu’s ideal of the anti-omniscient, self-conscious modernist novel. Yet, he did not grasp, let alone replicate, Gide’s twotiered structure in which a narrative is told in tandem with a journal chronicling the writing process. Second, Yokomitsu failed to define and develop his clarion call for creating a popular modernist novel designed to introduce vernacular elements into highbrow fiction. To make matters worse, he took to referring to this hybrid narrative as the junsui sh setsu or pure novel – thereby confusing matters all the more by employing a term already in circulation in literary circles in Japan and abroad.16 In any event, Keene’s study Yokomitsu Riichi: Modernist ultimately declares that its subject is not much of a modernist after all. If there is a counter-claim to this argument, as Keene writes in the introduction to ‘Love’ and Other Stories, the evidence for it lies solely in Yokomitsu’s early literature ... [that] is perhaps the one serious attempt in Japanese to write a modernist literary prose, a prose which has something in common with what was going on in Europe in the 1920s. It is certainly true that one can find things written in Japanese in the ’twenties ... such as futurist poems and manifestos, cubist and surrealist poems, [and] prose works more aggressively modernist than Yokomitsu’s, but these look now like merely the sad detritus of dead fashions, and even in terms of lit-

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erary history it is difficult to give them any kind of serious attention. ... Yokomitsu’s prose is Japanese modernism of the 1920s, the only literary modernism of that period in Japanese which can be read with an interest that goes beyond mild curiosity. (Keene’s emphasis)17

Moreover, as Keene goes on to contend, the fault was not Yokomitsu’s alone: ‘I have argued that modernism in Japan had to fail, since the symbolist tradition from which European modernism got its life did not exist in Japan. One needs only to alter the terms of this argument to see this as a pattern existing in other areas of Japanese life in this century.’18 One can hardly imagine a bleaker conclusion. It effectively strips Yokomitsu of his title as Japan’s one and only modernist. Furthermore, it treats Japan as an intellectual miasma into which external ideas, such as European modernism, gain entry only to wither on the vine for want of the solid intellectual ground needed to sustain and foster them. Such was the doro numa or ‘mud swamp’ theory of Japanese culture much in vogue thirty years ago when Dennis Keene produced his study. Advanced by the writer End  Sh·saku in his famous novel Chinmoku (1966; trans. Silence, 1969), End  used it to explain why Christianity failed to put down roots in medieval Japan or to attract a large following in modern times.19 Subsequently, it was applied to a host of other shortcomings and errors in the transmission of external – most notably Western – ideas to Japan, as Keene implies by detecting ‘a pattern [of failure] existing in other areas of Japanese life in this century.’ Given, however, that ideas and customs are transmitted across cultures in ways that are invariably eclectic, random, unchronological, and often contradictory, one wonders why Japan is excoriated for a pattern of deficiency and error, especially given the volume of ideas and technology imported into Japan after the middle of the nineteenth century. That value judgments concerning cultural equivalence and authenticity are at work in Keene’s pronouncements is evident in the way that ‘what was going on in Europe’ becomes the measure of modanizumu in Japan. A similar judgment surfaces in the next major foray to appear in English on the topic of modanizumu in Japanese prose, namely, the chapter on ‘Modernism and Foreign Influences’ in Donald Keene’s hefty compendium on modern Japanese literature, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era (1984). Donald Keene also begins by focusing on Yokomitsu, yet he takes the step of adding three new names to the list of Japanese modernists: Hori Tatsuo, It  Sei, and Sat  Haruo. Like

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Yokomitsu vis-à-vis Gide, the three new names are discussed in light of the influence of a European author – Proust, Joyce, and Wilde, respectively. Their early fiction is seen as derivative, although little concern is expressed concerning cultural preconditions such as the presence or absence of a symbolist tradition. Instead modanizumu is treated as a heady and febrile ‘passing phase’ during which Japanese writers became infatuated with the avant-garde poetry and prose emanating from the cultural capitals of Europe. As a result, the Japanese threw themselves into the business of importing, imitating, translating, and on occasion pirating the principal works of Western European modernism. In the process, they drew upon the mantle of Western cultural authority to legitimize this new agenda. Yet, like acne or the flush of first love in adolescence, the Western rash (seiy  kabure) eventually went away, and the passing phase was outgrown. ‘The modernist experiments [of these writers] tended to lose significance,’ Keene concludes, ‘when they came in different ways to carry out ... an inevitable return to Japan.’20 Thus, the typical and proper trajectory of a writer’s career lay in abandoning external contamination and effecting a safe and proper return to Japan (Nihon e no kaiki). Modernism was a sidetrack at best. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Kawabata and Tanizaki are treated in Dawn to the West not as modernists but as the embodiment par excellence of the volume’s thesis, namely that true maturity in twentieth-century Japanese literature resided in a return to and a mastery of native styles and tropes. The poet Hagiwara Sakutar  (1886– 1942) was the first to articulate this concept of writers’ inevitable return to Japanese tradition. In a famous essay by the title Nihon e no kaiki (1938; trans. ‘Return to Japan,’ 2005). Hagiwara called upon Japanese writers to rediscover their roots, albeit without becoming jingoistic or ultranationalistic. During the height of the war in the Pacific, however, the phrase became associated with wartime talk of overcoming the modern (kindai no ch koku) – a euphemism for rejecting past importations of Western culture. In the postwar years, the xenophobic overtones attached to Nihon e no kaiki during the war disappeared, and the concept has come to express a popular notion that Japanese invariably rediscover the simple and shibui (understated) taste of green tea over rice (o-chazuke no aji) as they age and mature. In the case of Tanizaki, his decampment from Tokyo to Kansai in the aftermath of the Great Kant  Earthquake of 1923 is typically cited as supporting the validity of this paradigm. The story goes that, faced with the erasure of traditional culture in Tokyo, and a growing dissatisfaction with the

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exoticism of the West pursued early in his career, Tanizaki abandoned the site of his birth and youth and retreated to the Japanese cultural homeland of Kyoto, Osaka and the Hy g  area. Only then did he become a fully developed writer and creator of such masterpieces as Tade kuu mushi (1929; trans. Some Prefer Nettles, 1955) and Manji (1930; trans. Quicksand, 1993), both of which Keene ranks ‘among Tanizaki’s best.’ With Quicksand, Keene tells us, Tanizaki abandoned ‘Modernism … Westernism’ once and for all. 21 Yet such a heavily Orientalist interpretation obscures the degree to which Tanizaki and Kawabata were actively engaged in the production of modernist fiction throughout their careers. As previously mentioned, Kawabata’s Snow Country is easily read as a modernist novel. Meanwhile, Tanizaki’s Quicksand is surely better understood as a modernist parody of women’s fiction rather than ‘narration … rooted in the Japanese past … [and] reminiscent of the old storytellers.’22 Likewise, his In’ei raisan (1933–4, trans. In Praise of Shadows, 1977), which Keene calls ‘Tanizaki’s most moving defense of the traditional aesthetic,’23 requires a more nuanced reading. For surely Tanizaki was writing a tongue-in-check takeoff and critique of the pomposity and ubiquity of Nihonjin-ron theories of culture in describing the shadowy virtues of the Japanese toilet and pitting them against the cold lily-whiteness of the Western bathroom.24 But most telling of all is the extent to which both writers were fascinated by the new medium of the cinema with its enviable facility to replicate the experiences of dreaming and seamless narration. Early on in his career, Tanizaki was a film buff and critic, writing essays such as Katsud  shashin no genzai to sh rai (1917; trans. ‘The Present and Future of Moving Pictures,’ 2005), Eiga zakkan (1921; trans. ‘Miscellaneous Observations on Film,’ 2005), and Karigari hakase wo miru (1921; trans. ‘A Viewing of Dr Caligari,’ 2005).25 Moreover, he was one of the first in Japan to argue on behalf of cinema as a serious art form, emphasizing the importance of the scenario writer as a ‘literary consultant’ and ‘cinema-composer.’26 Both he and Kawabata wrote scripts and photoplays for the avant-garde ‘pure film’ movement – Kawabata’s scenario for the avant-garde film Page of Madness (1927) being well known in film circles outside Japan.27 Thus, an assessment of the creative genius of these two writers is obliged to recognize the skill with which they straddled cultures East and West, thereby synthesizing native and foreign influences in their prose, as well as embracing the medium of film which, like the camera and the photograph, were not of Japanese invention but were rapidly taken over, naturalized, and

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experimented with in new ways that came to exercise immense influence on the culture. Although Yokomitsu Riichi: Modernist resolutely closed the door on the viability of modernism in Japan, Dawn to the West opened it again, albeit ever so slightly. At least the latter work argued that Japan possessed more than ‘one serious counterpart’ to European modernism, and the three additional writers it cites – Hori Tatsuo, It  Sei, and Sat  Haru  – pursued styles different from Yokomitsu’s and were not aligned with his coterie magazine or the new sensation style. Finally, Dawn to the West emphasizes the importance of the pedagogical role that all four writers played in acquainting Japanese readers with trends in Western literary circles. Still and all, both Dennis Keene and Donald Keene see Western European modernism as a unilateral source of influence and authority. Neither challenges the prioritizing of the West and its ur-texts. Nor do they entertain a less dichotomous relationship between East and West, thereby embracing degrees of engagement and separation, or the diversity, auto-generation and/or simultaneity of the international modernist experience. Their views held sway among Japanologists for the next decade and a half, and the study of Japanese modernism in English fell dormant. Modanizumu was rarely discussed, and no modernist novels were translated with the exception of the previously cited celebration of the moga, namely, Tanizaki’s Chijin no ai (1925; trans. Naomi, 1985), a book very much at the heart of the modernist project with its focus on a Euro-Asian-type woman and its playful subversion of gender expectations. Even so, the prefatory materials to the translation make no mention of modanizumu or modernist literature except to call the novel ‘the evocation of popular culture in Tokyo between World War I and the earthquake’ and to briefly point to ‘another phenomenon of the early twenties … the “modern girl.”’28 By the late 1990s, however, modanizumu was beginning to make a name for itself outside Japan. Modernist paintings from exhibitions held at the Kanagawa and Mie Prefectural Museums travelled to Paris in 1986, and then to Sydney in 1998. In 2002, the Academy of Arts in Honolulu mounted its own show, ‘Taish  Chic – Modernity, Nostalgic and Deco.’30 Meanwhile, Edward Seidensticker’s Tokyo Rising: The City since the Great Earthquake (1990) was the first historiography of modern Tokyo to appear in English, and it has been followed by popular reworkings of the topic as seen in Phyllis Birnbaum’s Modern Girls, Shining Stars, and the Skies of Tokyo (1999). Researchers also began to dig

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into the details essential to a fuller understanding of the period and its various movements in the arts. Jonathan Reynolds took up the ‘secessionist’ or bunriha movement in Maekawa Kunio and the Emergence of Japanese Modernist Architecture (2001), while Gennifer Weisenfeld explored the installation and performance art of the ‘constructionists’ in MaVo – Japanese Artists in the Avant-garde 1905–1931 (2002). Joanne Bernardi’s Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement (2001) drew attention to the Japanese pure film movement, and E. Taylor Atkins’s Blue Nippon – Authenticating Jazz in Japan (2001) plumbed issues of cultural transmission and authenticity in his history of the reception of jazz in Japan. In the field of literature, scholars of modern Japanese poetry, such as Hosea Hirata, Miryam Sas, Hiroaki Sato, and John Solt, took the lead in producing translations and writing monographs on the modernist poets Hagiwara Sakutar , Kitasono Katsue, Nishiwaki Junzabur , Takamura K tar , Takiguchi Sh·z , and Tomotani Shizue.30 Of special interest to these scholars was the study of ch genjitsu-shugi, or surreal/ hyper-realism, and the constellation of talents who gathered around Haruyama Yukio (1902–94), poet and inspired editor of Shi to shiron (Poetry and poetics, 1928–33), the literary journal that represents the core of modernist Japanese poetry. In a relatively short time, Japanese modernist poetry has become available – ‘like morning as a gem o’erturned’ (kutsugaesareta h seki no y  na asa), to quote Nishiwaki’s famous and felicitous phrase. In the field of drama, Thomas J. Rimer’s Toward a Modern Japanese Theater: Kishida Kunio (1974) was a precursor in identifying the impact that modernism had on the stage. Nonetheless, old ways of thinking linger. Modanist works continue to be read in the context of the journalistic catchphrases and shibboleths of the period. Or their treatment reflects ongoing reservations concerning the value of Japanese modernist fiction, especially as to its authenticity vis-à-vis European modernism. Take, for example, Uno Chiyo’s Iro zange (1935; trans. Confessions of Love, 1989). While the existing commentary on Confessions alerts us to the fact that the famous modernist painter T g  Seiji (1897–1978) is the real-life model for the novel’s first-person protagonist, Yuasa J ji, and his string of failed romances – and it points out that the novel introduces several examples of modern girls31 – only perfunctory mention is made concerning Confessions as an anti-naturalist, and therefore potentially modernist, sendup of the confessional ‘I-novel’ (shi-sh setsu). Furthermore, little is said about the novel’s overall serio-comic or tongue-in-cheek tone, although

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facetiousness in a text is a tip-off that modernistic relativism is at work. Ever the unflinching flapper and devotee of style across her long, madcap career as novelist and fashion designer, the author Uno Chiyo knew how to create a sensation, literary or otherwise – including marrying the artist who was the subject of her novel. In Confessions, she has great fun parodying the conventions of romantic love and courtship East and West – from vamp women à la Hollywood to peeping Toms who hark back to the kaimami practices of the Heian period. She even includes a traditional double suicide that goes hilariously awry. Just as Tanizaki took great delight in subversively reversing gender roles in traditional male/female relations by, for example, turning a man into the servant of a woman in Portrait of Shunkin (and, to a lesser extent, in his story ‘The Tattooer’), in Confessions, Uno creates a modernist farce that mocks not only male privilege and passivity but also the supposedly modern girls who are all too eager to indulge the whims of the ‘J ji boy’ – Yuasa J ji – who is the artist and supposed Lothario of the novel. Needless to say, grasping the tone of this work and other Japanese modernist novels is an important interpretative task. Tone is especially important because authorial intent is central to the anti-naturalist revolt against commonsensical realism that is a hallmark of some modernist texts. Or, for example, take the interpretative problems that surround readings of Nagai Kaf·’s A Strange Tale from East of the River. In the past, A Strange Tale has been seen as an odd and difficult text, its idiosyncrasies attributed to the stylistic vagaries of traditional Japanese genres of the essay novel, poem story, or linked verse.32 As a result, one welcomes Stephen Snyder’s Fictions of Desire – Narrative Form in the Novels of Nagai Kaf· (2000) and its treatment of the tale as a metafictional, auto-referential, and parodic success worthy of the very best modernist fiction. The strangeness and fascination of Kaf·’s text resides in its special brand of ‘Asian fusion’ – to borrow a phrase from nouvelle cuisine – in which Kaf· creates a new and original mode of narration by combining elements of classical Japanese mono-no-aware lyricism, the ‘story-within-the-story’ (saku-ch·-saku) style of Edo prose, and the novel-as-commentary-on-the-novel as exemplified by André Gide in Les faux monnayeurs. Yet, in discussing what makes Kaf·’s tale unique, Snyder is willing to consider Kaf·’s modernism as only ‘covert,’ and he genuflects before what he calls ‘a general consensus’ that modernism in Japanese fiction was ‘by and large a failure’ or ‘at best one-dimensional’ because the Japanese modernists were sorely lacking in ‘the revived Shandean

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spirit’ that inspired their European counterparts.33 So, while Snyder’s praise for Kaf· at ‘hav[ing] grasped the essence of Modernist self-consciousness’ 34 is welcome, his overall assessment parallels to a remarkable degree reservations concerning the limits of Japanese modernist fiction expressed by Dennis Keene nearly three decades ago. Indeed, one hears the echo of Keene’s symbolist critique, if not its churlish tone of disappointment. Snyder writes that, in being all too earnest in emulating the West, Japanese modernists mistook the Shandean tone of European modernist prose ‘for yet more dead seriousness,’ thereby missing the spirit of playfulness essential to the modernist point of view and stunting their own creative growth in the process. Devoid of play, spontaneity, or chicness, modanizumu in Japanese prose became little more than ‘the attempt to find a Japanese idiom in which to render the verbal pyrotechnics of the European brand.’ As a result, ‘the use of such techniques is not generally associated with [the] finest work … of Yokomitsu Riichi, It  Sei, Hori Tatsuo, Kawabata Yasunari and Sat  Haruo.’ 35 Most recently, this ‘general consensus’ is replayed in Donald Richie’s foreword to The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, Alisa Freedman’s translation of Kawabata’s Asakusa kurenaidan. Richie not only quotes Snyder on the failure of Japanese literary modernism on the part of Yokomitsu, It , Hori, and Sat  in a restatement of Donald Keene’s remarks taken from Dawn to the West, but he also typifies The Scarlet Gang as an example of ‘one-shot modernism.’ Kawabata’s Asakusa caper was, we are told, an instance of ‘selling oil’ (abura wo uru). Significantly, ‘selling oil’ actually means to dawdle or loiter on an errand; however, Richie (along with Ian Buruma, who repeats and expands on Richie’s comment in his review of the translated work in the New York Review of Books) incorrectly glosses the phrase as ‘pulling a fast one and getting away with it’ – the metaphor and method that Richie assigns to Kawabata’s achievement in writing The Scarlet Gang.36 Doubtless there is considerable fabrication in Kawabata’s narrative structuring of the novel, but rather than being a one-shot affair, it is part and parcel of an ongoing exploration of modanizumu that runs through his career and is readily apparent in one of his most interesting and revealing works, Kinj· (1933; trans. ‘Of Birds and Beasts,’ 1969).37 Kawabata went on to employ many of the modernist techniques that Richie cites: detachment and distancing, randomness, a succession of images, and a flâneur-like slumming. In this last regard, one is struck by the remarkable parallel between Kawabata’s Snow Country and Nagai Kaf·’s Strange Tale from East of the

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River – namely, the search for atypical beauty in marginal places and the loosely knit and perambulating way in which both novelists narrate their stories. Finally, Seiji Lippit’s Topographies of Japanese Modernism represents the first effort in the study of literary modanizumu to move beyond individual writers and introduce a synthetic approach that traces the four ‘topographies’ of Akutagawa, Yokomitsu, Kawabata, and Hayashi Fumiko. Lippit is fully cognizant that modernism in Japanese prose ‘cannot be reduced solely to the assimilation of an external culture or an identification with the West.’ Yet, he associates it in nearly every direction with disorientation, dissolution, disruption, estrangement, fragmentation, and, finally, the defeat of literature – to cite key words used with noticeable frequency. There is no denying that formal rupture is a salient feature of international modernism because, as many have pointed out, the onset of modernism in Western art and letters arose from a crisis in representation. At the same time, rupture moved toward reintegration, creating new forms of narrative that combined mimesis with relativistic and ironic self-perception. Thus, where Lippit sees, for example, the concept of the urban landscape as ‘the ground for representing a fragmented consciousness of modern culture’ or ‘cultural homelessness,’38 one might easily argue that the modern city was the seat of liberation, engagement, and integration. This is, I contend, more than a matter of looking at a glass as half-empty or half-full, because the emphasis on disintegration reflects a habitual uneasiness among scholars of modern Japanese literature working in English concerning the status and importance to be bestowed on modanizumu in Japanese prose in comparison with Western models. As a greater range of primary and secondary materials becomes available in English, it will be possible for readers to judge for themselves. Indeed, the time is ripe for Japan’s modernists to emerge from the closet, so to speak, and let us hear firsthand how they sought to express themselves in their modanist prose. To do so is to look ahead to a far more ambitious project, namely, rethinking the parameters of international or global modernism. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane broke new ground more than three decades ago by including Austrian Secessionism, German Expressionism, and Russian Constructivism alongside chapters on the Anglo, French, and Italian movements in their handy volume, Modernism: 1890–1930 (1976). At the time such expansiveness was innovative, if not provocative. Nonetheless, as Astradur Eysteinsson acknowledges in The Concept of Modernism, ‘Anglo-centrism’ has long been ‘the hall-

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mark of a great deal of modernist studies.’39 Bradbury and McFarlane’s advances notwithstanding, Modernism is international only within the framework of Europe and North America.40 Much the same can be said of Eysteinsson’s exploration of the topic. A global view is long overdue. Surely part of the appeal of Japanese modernist fiction for foreign readers ought to reside in those points at which the literature departs from its Western counterparts. ‘They don’t write like us!’ exclaimed an external referee and non-Japanologist in a PhD defence, speaking both in wonder and frustration after reading Tani J ji’s Shanhai sareta otoko (1925; trans. ‘The Shanghaied Man,’ 2005). If Japanese modernists wrote differently, what was it that set them apart? What did they have in mind when they thought and wrote about the modan? How did they see modanizumu as affecting their art, life, and ideas? Intellectuals the world over found themselves contending with the modern as it evolved in their respective languages and cultures at the beginning of the twentieth century. How does the response of the Japanese – which may or may not be contiguous with the West or other parts of the globe – enrich and enlighten our appreciation of modernism overall? In the early 1960s, it was commonplace to prioritize formalistic characteristics in analysing modernist texts. The trend also prevailed in Japan, where it was abetted by an effort to sanitize modernist literature of pre- and postwar accusations that modanizumu was guilty of collusion with elitism and moneyed capital. These charges emanated chiefly from Marxist critics, but there is no denying that the 1920s and 1930s saw explosive growth in the print and commercial art industries, as well as the birth of mass culture and literature (taish· bunka, taish· bungaku). The trend toward emphasizing modanizumu’s formalistic side was also driven by a desire to promote to the world an image of Japanese literature as aesthetic and apolitical – the Chrysanthemum without the Sword, as it were – once modern Japanese novels began to appear in translation during the decade following the Second World War. As a result of these twin pressures, the discourse on modanizumu came to focus on the noncommercial little magazines. Among the many coteries that appeared in the 1910s and proliferated in the 1920s, the shin-kankaku writers of Bungei jidai were seen as exemplars of a pure or high modernism committed to not only formalistic priorities but also disengagement from commercial influence and ideological issues. As a result, they received considerable attention at the expense of other modernist groups. Since the mid-1980s, however, a different view has emerged, especially among Japanese scholars. Following the theory of synchronicity

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or simultaneity, it champions the point of view that modernism unfolded contemporaneously across the globe, or at least in nations or social sectors sharing parallel – or perhaps not-so-parallel – levels of economic, technological, and cultural development. This view of d jisei, or simultaneity, has enjoyed considerable currency in Japan in recent years. Initially, the impetus for this view came from exhibitions and catalogues related to the fine and applied arts. The shift in thinking was fuelled, moreover, by the ‘modanizumu boom’ that swept Japan starting in the mid-1980s. The postwar economic miracle was at its zenith, and the 1920s and 1930s – Japan’s last golden age of international power and affluence prior to a half-century of war, destruction, and national reconstruction – became the object of much interest and nostalgia. The revival commenced with the rediscovery and exhibition of modernist painting, and it led in turn to retrospective exhibits in the plastic, commercial, and decorative arts – ceramics, lacquerware, sculpture, photography, film, advertising, art deco, and kimono design. Many out-of-print works by modernist writers were reissued, and bookstores set up special corners to display them. Subsequently, NHK national television capitalized on the boom by turning the lives of the modernist novelist Yoshiyuki Eisuke (1906–40) and his wife Aguri (1907–) into an avidly watched saga on Japan’s quintessentially modernist couple. In particular, the series focused on Aguri as a new woman (atarashii onna) who, by opening one of Tokyo’s first beauty parlours in 1929, defied the conventions of the times by insisting on a career and going into business. Hiring no less a figure than the famous modernist artist, dramatist, and stage designer Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901–77) to create her avant-garde salon, she provided her clientele with the bobbed haircuts and cold-wave sets that were the height of fashion. The television series also led to republication of Eisuke’s brassy paeans to the watering holes and nightspots of 1930s Tokyo.41 If interest in the 1920s and 1930s flagged in Japan during the years immediately following the Second World War, and for a time the term modanizumu was used in Japanese chiefly to refer to surrealistic poetry, suddenly modernism and art deco were all the rage (in much the way that the United States in the 1970s witnessed a ‘Thirties Revival’ which centred on the film stars of the 1930s). Modanizumu – as modernism was rendered into Japanese in the late 1920s – returned to everyday parlance and broader definition, covering a broad range of phenomena that were considered modan, especially modan in the context of ‘the modern city’ (modan toshi). Scholarly recuperation of modernist paint-

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ing, artifacts, and texts also proceeded apace. In the field of literature, the task was taken on by Kawamoto Sabur , Maeda Ai, Sekii Mitsuo, Suzuki Sadami, Unno Hiroshi, and Yamashita Takeshi. A comprehensive, ten-volume anthology of short modernist fiction, Modan toshi bungaku (The literature of the modern city, 1989–91), edited by Unno, Kawamoto, and Suzuki, was the first to appear in fifty years and to provide contemporary readers with a broad range of works by modernist writers. In addition, the publishing house of Yumani shob  was instrumental in reproducing texts of modernist novels and promoting scholarly research.42 These new stirrings reflected not only a departure from past strategies that had employed the aura of the West to bolster modanizumu’s claims to cultural legitimacy – a strategy often advanced by Japanese modernists in their own day – but also the construction of new ways of thinking and defining Japanese modernism on the basis of its own or global terms. A new discourse evolved that, by deviating from the hegemonic notion of a singular nationality or cultural hemisphere as fountainhead, redefined modernism in terms of the emergence of the modern metropolis, an experience shared by denizens of the twentieth century the world over. In Modan toshi Tokyo (Modern city Tokyo, 1983), for example, the journalist and urbanologist Unno Hiroshi takes to the streets of Tokyo to recapture something of the mood and spectacle of the city as it looked three-quarters of a century ago when it became Japan’s first modan metropolis. In doing so, he assumes the mantle of the flâneur (toshi y·hosha), walking in the footsteps of not only such famous ramblers as Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin but also – and more importantly – a host of Japanese novelists who, from Tamenaga Shunsui of Edo to Nagai Kaf· in Tokyo, have a long-standing tradition of perambulating and chronicling Japanese urban life. As Unno rambles across the bridges that span the Sumida River, or wanders down the back alleys of Asakusa and the broad avenues of the Ginza, he narrates his tour by citing a miscellany of sources that range from restaurant menus and handbill advertisements to novels such as Ubukata Toshir ’s T ky  hatsu-nobori (First trip to the capital, 1923), Kamitsuka Sh ken’s T ky  (Tokyo, 1928), Gunji Jir masa’s Misutà Nippon (Mister Nippon, 1930), and Kawabata’s Asakusa kurenaidan. The task that confronted modernist writers was, he posits, the creation of ‘a spatial dimension in the novel’ (sh setsu k·kan) capable of reflecting the complexity and diversity occasioned by the expansion and explosive growth of Tokyo during the 1920s and 1930s. Viewing Tokyo as a vast playground for personal exploration and

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urban socialization, Unno depicts the modern city as an urban space (toshi k·kan) in which autonomous individuals from all parts of Japan – namely, the o-nobori-san, or country folk who visited or relocated to the capital – lived and wandered, revelling in their anonymity and the new identities they created for themselves independent of the constraints of the traditional Japanese family system or the demands of the nation-state. For Unno, modern metropolises, such as Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto, were the birthplace and natural home of the modern, liberated self in twentieth-century Japanese society. He takes a highly optimistic view of modern urban life, seeing it as a setting in which city and citizen live in happy symbiosis. There is little talk of angst or alienation. It is virtually impossible to find ‘modernisms’ that operated in total isolation. This is especially true in the case of Japan because of the country’s history of cultural reception and assimilation, as well as the speed with which that process accelerated after the middle of the nineteenth century. Even in the case of literature, news of developments in Europe arrived in Japan quickly. By the 1920s, translations appeared with striking rapidity, the time lag never running behind by more than a decade, even in the case of the most prodigious and difficult works to translate. Indeed the alacrity with which Japanese accessed information external to Japan puts to shame the level of cross-cultural intercourse moving in the opposite direction, as seen in the slow and limited extent to which the West acquainted itself with Japan. Nonetheless, as Steve Yao reminds us, the ‘generative importance of the practice of translation’ was itself a salient feature of modernism the world over because it prioritized not only going far afield for new sources of inspiration but also breaking down the walls of the prison house of national languages or canonical notions of style.43 If translation was an important aspect of literary modernism in the West, it was even more highly prized and routinely practised by modanist writers who had experience as literary translators of English, French, and German texts. Perhaps one of the best examples of the resultant alchemy of the effect of translation on the production of creative works of literature is to be found in an example cited early in this essay – namely, It  Sei’s novella Y·ki no machi / Streets of Fiendish Ghosts. It  was the leader of a team of writers who translated James Joyce’s Ulysses into Japanese, publishing the novel in two instalments in 1931 and 1934. Thus, he was keenly aware of Joyce’s magnum opus when he wrote his own quasi-autobiographical work Streets of Fiendish Ghosts in 1937. As a matter of fact, Streets nods in Joyce’s direction when It  names

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his novella Y·ki no machi, a partial play on the name [Y]ulysses. As in Joyce’s novel, the plot concerns a man who has returned to his hometown impoverished and ambivalent; moreover, events take place in the course of a single day in June. The central character, Ut  Tsutomu, is also compared to Leo Bloom sauntering along the Liffey River in Dublin when he seeks refuge on the banks of the My ken-gawa that flows through his – and It ’s – hometown in the city of Otaru in Hokkaid . Similarly the nightmarish quality that permeates Streets – ghosts of past love affairs or aggrieved friends – has been likened to the Circe chapter or Walpurgisnacht scene in Ulysses. But comparisons go no further. In Streets, there is little of the wordplay or classical allusions typical of Joyce’s novel. Likewise, there are no stream-of-consciousness passages per se, although the reader is made privy to the third-person central protagonist’s thoughts, fears, and rationalizations. Rather, the focus of Streets is on the numerous social and political issues – abortion, the status of women and foreigners, the concept of blood purity in defining Japanese nationality, the colonial mentality on the part of regional cities like Otaru vis-à-vis Tokyo; and, most conspicuous of all, the great debate between the deceased spirits of the novelists Kobayashi Takiji and Akutagawa Ry·nosuke regarding an artist’s allegiance to politics or art – or the paradigm of Marxism versus modernism. Furthermore, the issues are contextualized in the protagonist’s highly self-centred struggle to survive as a writer and learn how, vehemently if not violently, to protect his life, livelihood, and vitality. In this eccentric bildungsroman – where the protagonist struggles to define himself as either a ‘dull cudgel’ or a ‘dried sardine’ – It  presents his personal brand of vitalism. Although Streets may take Ulysses as its starting point in developing its basic structue, and the city of Otaru, like Dublin, is presented as a labyrinth revisited, the work soon turns down alleys that are native to its own landscape and that run in directions different from those pursued in Joyce’s masterpiece. For examples of works that are even more fission than fusion, one might take a look at Kikuchi Kan’s Shinju fujin (1920, Madam Pearl) or Yumeno Ky·saku’s Dogura magura (1935, Dogura magura). Alas, the former is not available in translation, although there is a French-language translation of the latter. Thus we find that modanizumu in Japanese fiction is a combination of both fission and fusion – on the one hand, it is the fission of independent creativity and an exploration of the modan within Japan. On the other, it is the product of fusion resulting from cross-cultural interaction. Just as the representation of the word ‘modernism’ was trans-

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formed and naturalized by its rendition into Japanese via the katakana syllabary, its divergent pronunciation and orthography as mo-da-ni-zumu simultaneously foreground its affinity with, yet also distance from, other modernisms.

NOTES 1 Kawabata Yasunari, Yukiguni (Tokyo: S gensha, 1937, 1948), translated by Edward Seidensticker as Snow Country; Tanizaki Jun’ichir , ‘Shisei’ (Tokyo: Shinshich  magazine, November 1910; Momiyama shoten, 1911) and Shunkinsh  (Tokyo: S gensha, 1933), translated by Howard Hibbett as ‘The Tattooer’ and Portrait of Shunkin, respectively, in Seven Japanese Tales, 160–9; 3–84; and Nagai Kaf·, Bokut  kidan, translated by Edward Seidensticker as Strange Tale from East of the River. 2 Modernism, or modanizumu, as the term was rendered into Japanese in the late 1920s, became a powerful intellectual idea, mode of artistic expression, and source of popular fashion in Japan from approximately 1910 to 1940, a period that coincides with the emergence of other modernisms across the globe. It manifested itself as radically new movements in the arts, dramatic shifts in lifestyle, and sweeping socio-economic changes. It redefined the age-old Japanese rule-of-taste by casting aside the authority of tradition and continuity in the name of the modan as the measure of fashion, mores, and manners. As a form of cultural rebellion, it sent shock waves through Japan’s political and social establishment, which censored it as alien, injurious to public morals, or anti-Japanese. Bracketed by the democratic years of the Taish  era (1912–26) and the hapless first decade of Sh wa (1926–36), it shared much in common with other alternative lifestyle-isms – notably, individualism, internationalism, liberalism, and feminist liberation (kojin-shugi, sekai-shugi, jiy·-shugi, josei kaih ) – that departed from the nation-centred and group-oriented values of traditional mainstream Japan. At the same time, it aligned itself with what we now recognize as the first of the information and consumer revolutions of the twentieth century, when the new technologies of speed, sound, and light – the motorcar, aeroplane, telephone, radio, rotary press, and moving picture – made it possible for culture to be mass-marketed to the emerging middle class in Japan’s urban centres. 3 For other important translations, see Hayashi Fumiko, Diary of a Vagabond, trans. Joan Ericson, in Be a Woman; Ishikawa Jun, The Legend of Gold and Other Stories, trans. William J. Tyler; Tanizaki Jun’ichir , Quicksand, trans. Howard Hibbett; and Yokomitsu Riichi, Shanghai, trans. Dennis Washburn.

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4 K d shugi (literally, action-ism) was a term coined by members of the literary magazine K d  (Action, 1933–5) to describe the activist and political element of modanizumu and the position of modernists who moved beyond writing ‘art for art’s sake’ (geijutsu shij shugi). By the mid-1930s, controversy over Japan’s domestic and international policies made retreat into art increasingly untenable. I apply the term broadly to describe the modanizumu’s effort to be more activist in literature and politics while resisting adoption of an ideological stance. 5 In translating and analysing Ishikawa’s Fugen (1936; trans. The Bodhisattva, 1990), I described the work as a palimpsest constructed in the modernist vein: ‘In this century, the uses of the multitiered construction of the palimpsest fired the imagination of the Imagists ... more recently, it has been the key concept employed by the literary critic Gérard Genette in Palimpsestes: La literature au second degré and his analysis of the novels of Marcel Proust as “surimpressionism”. Ishikawa does not use the word palimpsest per se, there being no equivalent in Japanese; nor does he attempt to turn it into a paronym, as is often the case when Japanese borrows from a foreign tongue. But the idea is everywhere in evidence, given the deliberate and patterned alignment of characters ... [the] transparencies ... and lacquerings [in the novel]’ (Tyler, ‘The Art and Act of Reflexivity in The Bodhisattva,’153). Interestingly enough, Ishikawa himself used the term nij·-utsushi (‘writing twice’ or ‘over-writing’) in translating André Gide’s L’immoraliste (1902; trans. Haitokusha, 1924). See Matsumoto Shin’ichir , ‘Ishikawa Jun to hon’yaku.’ Gide’s text – ‘Et je comparais aux palimpsests’ – is given alongside Ishikawa’s translation of ‘Watashi wa onozukara wo nij·-utsushi-bon ni hi-shita’ (my emphasis). Still, it is not possible to determine whether, in turning The Bodhisattva into a palimpsest, Ishikawa was following Gide’s lead or his own erudition concerning the frequent use of glorified analogies (mitate) after the style of classical and medieval literature of Japan. 6 Tachibana’s novella appears in Tyler, ed., Modanizumu, 187–241. For explanation of the use of the ‘bilingual gloss,’ see pages 178–81 in the same volume. 7 It ’s novella appears in Tyler, ed., Modanizumu,105–67. It was originally published in the magazine Bungei (August 1937): 96–154. 8 ‘Gaikoku no kesh hin no hairetsu ni suginai to iu hiy·teki hihy .’ Ry·tanji Y·, ‘Modanizumu bungaku-ron.’ The essay originally appeared in Shin-bungaku kenky· 2 (April 1931). 9 An appraisal of the style of Yokomitsu and the new magazine, Chiba Kameo’s ‘Shin kankaku no tanj /The Birth of a New Sensation,’ appeared in Seiki magazine in November 1924. Until and throughout the 1910s, kindai

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William J. Tyler (modern, modern age) was the code word for the new and modern, but by the 1920s, the word modan was entering the language as a neologism – as in, for example, the essay ‘Modan gâru no hy gen’ [The emergence of the modern gal] in the April 1923 issue of Josei kaiz  /Women’s Reform magazine by Kitazawa Sh·ichi, who was the first to coin the phrase modan girl and announce her arrival on the cultural scene. By the 1930s, modan was very much in vogue, as seen from the plethora of modan-go or ‘modernese’ dictionaries. Fujin hissh· modan-go jiten [Dictionary of Modernisms Essential for Ladies], Modan manga jiten [The Modernist Manga Manual], and Modan j shiki ensaikuropedea [The Encyclopedia of Modern Common Sense] all appeared in 1931. The Urutora modan jiten [The Dictionary of the UltraModern] of the same year tells us, for example, that the proper sequencing of modern girl and boy (moga, mobo) is ‘Ladies First’ – with the moga in the lead. The term new woman (atarashi onna) had already arrived on the scene with the appearance of the leading feminist magazine, Seit  [Blue Stocking, 1911–16]. What was modern about the modan gal was her ability to combine feminist ideals with the art of being chic. Yokomitsu Riichi, Teihon Yokomitsu Riichi zensh·. The story appeared in the initial issue of Bungei jidai of October 1924. My translation. See Odagiri Susumu, ed., Nihon kindai bungaku daijiten, 3: 454. Kawabata’s famous essay ‘Matsugo no me/With the eyes of a dying man’ appeared in Bungei magazine in December 1933 and is reprinted in Kawabata Yasunari, Kawabata Yasunari zensh·, 27: 13–28. The phrase matsugo no me appears in ‘Aru ky·y· e okuru shuki’ [Memorandum to be sent to a certain old friend] that Akutagawa Ry·nosuke wrote on 24 July 1927 as he was commiting suicide by means of a lethal dose of poison. It describes the intensity of his perception of nature in his final moments. See Akutagawa Ry·nosuke zensh·, 9: 275–80. The phrase appears on page 279. For the opening lines from Yukiguni, see Kawabata Yasunari, Kawabata Yasunari zensh·, 10: 9. My translation. Keene, ‘Introduction,’ in Yokomitsu Riichi, ‘Love’ and Other Stories by Yokomitsu Riichi, vii. Ibid., xvii–xviii. Ibid., x–xi. Dennis Keene, Yokomitsu Riichi, 190. End  Sh·saku, Silence, trans. William Johnston, 237: ‘This country is a swamp. ... Whenever you plant a sapling in this swamp the roots begin to rot; the leaves go yellow and wither. And we have planted the sapling of Christianity in this swamp.’ For the original Japanese passage, see End 

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Sh·saku, End  Sh·saku bungaku zensh· (Tokyo: Shinch sha, 1999), 2: 295. The term that End  uses in this passage from Chinmoku is numa-chi (marsh or swampland), a synonym of doro numa. Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, 708. Ibid., 757. Ibid. Ibid., 772. Theories of Japanese culture are frequently published and debated in Japan. The tone of parody is most pronounced in part one of Tanizaki’s essay. The essay is available in English translation, although the translators tend to treat Tanizaki’s pronouncements literally and see them as an earnest exercise in writing a theory of Japanese culture or Nihonjin-ron. See Tanizaki Jun’ichir , In’ei raisan, translated by Thomas Harper and Edward Seidensticker as In Praise of Shadows. In’ei raisan is also conceived in the spirit of Tanizaki’s novella Tomoda to Matsunaga no hanashi [The story of Mr Tomoda and Matsunaga-san, 1926]. In this rollicking farce, likely inspired by Stevenson’s story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (a theory advanced by Tanizaki’s private secretary, Ibuki Kazuko, in Ware yori hoka ni), Tanizaki creates a man who alternates between his thin and wan Japanese personality (Matsunaga Ginsuke) and his robust Western or modernist self (Tomoda Ginz ). For a brief synopsis of the novella, see Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals, 237–8. Rubin notes how the story ‘turns Tanizaki’s famous aesthetic of shadows on its head, negating the very core of Japan’s cult of restraint and suggestion’ (238). In this connection, it is interesting to note how the views on Tanizaki’s ‘orientalization’ and ‘return to Japan’ held by the scholar and translator Edward Seidensticker changed over time. In his memoirs, Tokyo Central, Seidensticker writes of Tanizaki as ‘a very experimental writer. He liked experimenting with traditional forms, or non-forms.’ Moreover, Seidensticker challenges the received wisdom concerning Tanizaki’s departure for Kansai after the earthquake of 1923: ‘I find it harder all the time ... to believe that Tanizaki was drawn to Osaka because it was more traditional than Tokyo. In this regard I have changed, for I clearly oppose a traditional Osaka to a modernizing Tokyo in my introduction to the translation [of Tade kuu mushi, 1929; trans. Some Prefer Nettles, 1955]. I now think one of the chief charms of Osaka, of which I am very fond, to be its lusty, unapologetic modernism’ (Seidensticker, Tokyo Central, 116). The translations of Tanizaki’s essays on film appear in Thomas LaMarre, Shadows on the Screen. See Joanne Bernardi, Writing in Light, 26, 32, 103–5, 142–3, 165. Bernardi

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William J. Tyler also notes that the participation of two prominent members of the literary community, Tanizaki Jun’ichir  (1886–1965) at Taikatsu [Taish  katsuei Film Studio; founded 1920] and Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928) at Sh chiku [Cinema Company; also founded 1920] marked a turning point in the ‘film as art’ argument. Tanizaki and Osanai (founder of the new or free theatre movement) were involved in the production of a number of films, notably the Taikatsu production Amateur Club, inspired by American slapsick, and Sh chiku’s Souls on the Road, a film with closer ties to European literature and theatre, and one of only two surviving examples of all early ‘pure film’ efforts (26). In 1926, the film director Kinugasa Teinosuke (1896–1982) asked Kawabata to write the scenario for the silent picture Kurutta ippeiji (Page of Madness), Kinugasa’s first independent film production. Long thought lost or destroyed, the negative and positive prints were discovered in 1971. See Kawabata, Page of Madness. Anthony Chambers, ‘Introduction,’ vi, viii. For the catalogue from the Museum of Modern Art, Kanagawa Prefecture, in Kamakura, see Mobo-moga-ten, 1910–1935, ed. Mizusawa Tsutomu et al. The museum has mounted a number of modernism-related exhibitions. See the catalogues Murayama Kaita no subete and Dada and Constructivism by the Kanagawa Prefectural and Seibu Museums. For those from the Mie Prefectural Museum, see Nij· seiki Nihon bijutsu saigen [I] – 1910 nendai – hikari kagagyaku inochi no nagare and Nij· seiki Nihon bijutsu saigen [II] – 1920 nendai. For the exhibitions held in Paris and Sydney, see Japon des avant gardes, 1910–1970; and Modern Boy Modern Girl. For the Honolulu exhibition, see Taish  Chic. See Hosea Hirata, Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzabur ; John Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning; and Miryam Sas, Fault Lines. See also Takamura K tar , A Brief History of Imbecility. Neither Phyllis Birnbaum’s ‘Translator’s Note’ that prefaces her translation of Confessions of Love nor her article on ‘Modern Girl’ in the New Yorker (reprinted in Birnbaum’s Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo) directs attention to the novel’s tongue-in-cheek tone. Mention is made only of ‘a very human craziness.’ Birnbaum writes that ‘The novel is often seen as a chronicle of the 1920s, when so-called “modern girls” flourished in Japan ... [It] shows three independent, “modern” women experimenting with new freedoms’ (‘Translator’s Note,’ viii–ix). Although Rebecca Copeland, in The Sound of the Wind, recognizes that ‘in each scene, just as the melodrama is reaching its peak, Uno interjects a ludicrous detail that turns potential pathos into something approaching comedy’ (53), her treatment of the novel emphasizes praise for Uno’s mas-

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tery of the I-novel form and ‘achievement ... [in being] able to narrate the story in [a man’s] voice, using his persona’ (52). Nagai Kaf·, A Strange Tale from East of the River, trans. Edward Seidensticker, first appeared in Kaf· the Scribbler by Seidensticker in 1965. In discussing the work, Seidensticker does not treat Kaf· as a modernist. Instead he emphasizes the ‘leisurely, discursive’ structure of the novel, which is suggestive of classical genres such as diaries (nikki bungaku) or essays (hitsudan). But mention is also made that ‘the device was probably borrowed from Gide, but here it works to a much different effect. The Counterfeiters [Les faux monnayeurs] is a book about writing. A Strange Tale ... is about the moods of man who happens to be writing a novel’ (148–9). Tomi Suzuki was the first to present an alternative reading of A Strange Tale as an exercise in ‘defamiliarizing the I-novel.’ See her chapter ‘Crossing Boundaries.’ Snyder, Fictions of Desire, 127. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 127. Of the author’s ‘one-shot modernism,’ Richie writes: ‘If Kawabata was ashamed, he shouldn’t have been.’ While Richie suggests there is something potentially embarrassing about a derivative and short-lived flirtation with European modernism, he also seeks to exonerate The Scarlet Gang as an important novel of manners, which ‘effortlessly captures a remarkable era and a fascinating place, both now gone’ (Richie, ‘Foreword,’ xxx). In her ‘Translator’s Preface,’ Alisa Freedman subscribes to the view that works written after The Scarlet Gang represent a departure from the concerns of the novel: ‘In this playful yet highly complex work, Kawabata strives to create a mode of expression that conveys both the sensory perceptions of rapidly modernizing Tokyo and the aspects of social relations and material culture that he believed best represented the allure and anxieties of earlytwentieth-century urban life. As a result, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa differs markedly from Kawabata’s later work on Japanese aesthetics and introduces another side of this 1968 Nobel Prize winner’ (xxxiii–xxxiv). Richie cites Malcolm Bradbury’s Modernism (xxi; xxxi, n. 18) in defining modernism, and both Richie and Freedman note Kawabata’s evolution in this work from a writer working in the new sensation (shin kankaku) mode to the modern art (shink  geijutsu-ha) style, which Freedman identifies as ‘more journalistic’ (xxvii, xxxv–xxxvi; xlvi, n. 6). Ian Buruma’s review of the translation, ‘Virtual Violence,’ perpetuates the view that Kawabata ‘quickly went on to develop a very different, very classical style’ (12). The novella is included in Kawabata Yasunari, The House of Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories.

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38 Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism, 5, 32–3. 39 Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, 88. 40 See especially Bradbury, ‘The Cities of Modernism.’ In this essay, Bradbury uses the terms ‘polyglot cities’ and ‘culture-capitals,’ but he makes no mention of Tokyo or Shanghai as relevant examples. 41 The television series on Japanese national television (NHK) was titled Aguri. See Yoshiyuki Eisuke, Yoshiyuki Eisuke to sono jidai – modan toshi no hikari to kage [Yoshiyuki Eisuke and the age in which he lived – Light and shadow in the modern city], a typical example of the publications appearing at the time of the Eisuke/Aguri boom. 42 For Kawamoto Sabur , see Sampo. For Maeda Ai, see the essays ‘SHANGHAI 1925’ and ‘Gekij  toshite no Asakusa.’ For Sekii, see Shiry  – an example of the many source materials that Yumani Publishing has edited and reissued. For Suzuki Sadami, see ‘Sh wa bungaku’ no tame ni; Modan toshi no hy gen; Nihon no ‘bungaku’ wo kangaeru; ‘Seimei’ de yomu Nihon no kindai; and Seimei no tanky·. Suzuki is also the editor of the definitive editions of the complete works of Ishikawa Jun and Kajii Motojir : Ishikawa Jun zensh· (Tokyo: Chikuma shob , 1989–91); Kajii Motojir  zensh· (Tokyo: Chikuma shob , 1999–2000). He emphasizes what he calls ‘genre mix’ – a commingling of genres and the ‘post-disciplinary’ (datsu-ry iki) crossing over of interdisciplinary art forms. For Unno Hiroshi, see Modan toshi T ky . Unno’s other works include Toshi to supekutakuru and Modan toshi sh·y·. The former is a study of ‘spectacles’ seen in European cities since the Middle Ages; the latter, on modernism in Tokyo, Dairen, Shanghai, and Paris. For Yamashita Takeshi, see ‘Shin seinen’ wo meguru sakkatachi. Yamashita has been especially interested in modernist literature in its popular forms. See, for example, his edited volumes of the stories and novels of Tachibana Sotoo, Tachibana Sotoo wandârando. 43 Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism, 2. For an excellent illustration of the ‘generative importance ... of translation’ relevant to the subject of modernism in the West, see John Walter de Gruchy, Orienting Arthur Waley.

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Birnbaum, Phyllis. ‘Modern Girl.’ In Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo: Five Japanese Women, 165–97. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. – ‘Translator’s Note.’ In Confessions of Love by Uno Chiyo, translated by Phyllis Birnbaum, v–x. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1989. Bradbury, Malcolm. ‘The Cities of Modernism.’ In Modernism: 1890–1930, edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, 96–104. London: Penguin Books, 1976. Buruma, Ian. ‘Virtual Violence.’ New York Review of Books 52.11 (23 June 2005): 12–15. Chambers, Anthony. ‘Introduction.’ In Naomi by Tanizaki Jun’ichir , translated by Anthony Chambers, v–x. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. Copeland, Rebecca. The Sound of the Wind – The Life and Works of Uno Chiyo. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1992. Dada and Constructivism. By Kanagawa Kenritsu Bijutsukan, Seibu Bijutsukan, and Tokyo Shinbunsha. [Tokyo]: Tokyo Shinbun, 1988. de Gruchy, John Walter. Orienting Arthur Waley: Japonism, Orientalism, and the Creation of Japanese Literature in English. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003. Endo, Sh·saku. Silence. Translated by William Johnston. Tokyo: Sophia University and Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1969. Eysteinsson, Astradur. The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Freeman, Alisa. ‘Translator’s Preface.’ In The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa by Kawabata Yasunari, translated by Alisa Freedman, xxxiii–xlviii. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Hayashi, Fumiko. Diary of a Vagabond. Translated by Joan Ericson. In Be a Woman – Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women’s Literature by Joan Ericson, 121–219. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997. Hirata, Hosea. Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzabur : Modernism in Transition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Ibuki, Kazuko. Ware yori hoka ni – Tanizaki Jun’ichir  saigo no j·ninen. Tokyo: K dansha, 1994. Ishikawa, Jun. The Legend of Gold and Other Stories. Translated by William J. Tyler. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998. It , Sei. The Streets of Fiendish Ghosts. Translated by William J. Tyler. In Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan 1913–1938. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. Japon des avant gardes, 1910–1970. Edited by Françoise Bonnefoy. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1986. Kawabata Yasunari. Kinj·. Translated as ‘Of Birds and Beasts.’ In The House

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of Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories, translated by Edward Seidensticker, 127–48. Tokyo: K dansha International, 1969. – ‘Matsugo no me’ [With the eyes of a dying man]. In Kawabata Yasunari zensh·, by Kawabata Yasunari, vol. 27, 13–28. Tokyo: Shinch sha, 1982. – Snow Country. Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956. – Page of Madness. Translated by Hiroaki Sato. In Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan 1913–1938, edited by William J. Tyler, 92–104. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. – The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa. Translated by Alisa Freedman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Kawamoto, Sabur . Sampo. Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 1993. Keene, Dennis. ‘Introduction’ in Yokomitsu Riichi. ‘Love’ and Other Stories of Yokomitsu Riichi, ix–xxii. Translated by Dennis Keene. Tokyo: University of Tokyo, 1974. – Yokomitsu Riichi: Modernist. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1984. Kitazawa, Sh·ichi. ‘Modan gâru no hy gen’ [The emergence of the modern gal]. Josei kaiz  [Women’s reform], April 1923. LaMarre, Thomas. Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichir  on Cinema and ‘Oriental’ Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2005. Lippit, Seiji M. Topographies of Japanese Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Maeda, Ai. ‘Gekij  toshite no Asakusa.’ In Maeda Ai chosakush· – Toshi k·kan no naka no bungaku, 288–300. Tokyo: Chikuma shob , 1989. – ‘SHANGHAI 1925.’ In Maeda Ai chosakush· – Toshi k·kan no naka no bungaku, 251–83. Tokyo: Chikuma shob , 1989. Matsumoto, Shin’ichir . ‘Ishikawa Jun to hon’yaku.’ In Waseda bungaku 158: 56–7. Tokyo: Waseda bungakkai, July 1989. Mobo-moga-ten, 1910–1935/Modern Boy, Modern Girl Exhibition, 1910–1935. Edited by Mizusawa Tsutomu et al. Kamakura: Kanagawa kenritsu bijutsukan, 1998. Modern Boy Modern Girl: Modernity in Japanese Art 1910–1935. Edited by Jackie Menzies. Sydney, NSW: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998. Murayama Kaita no subete. Kamakura: Kanagawa kenritsu bijutsukan, 1982. Nagai, Kaf·. Bokut  kidan. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1937. Translated by Edward Seidensticker as Strange Tale from East of the River. In Kaf· the Scribbler: The Life and Writings of Nagai Kaf· by Edward Seidensticker, 278–328. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965.

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Tanizaki Jun’ichir . ‘Shisei.’ Translated by Howard Hibbett as ‘The Tattooer.’ In Seven Japanese Tales, 160–9. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1963. – Shunkinsh . Translated by Howard Hibbett as Portrait of Shunkin. In Seven Japanese Tales, 3–84. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1963. – Chijin no ai. Translated by Anthony Chambers as Naomi. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. – Manji. Translated by Howard Hibbett as Quicksand. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993. – In’ei raisan. Translated by Thomas Harper and Edward Seidensticker as In Praise of Shadows. New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1977. Tyler, William J. ‘The Art and Act of Reflexivity in The Bodhisattva.’ In The Bodhisattva by Ishikawa Jun, translated by William J. Tyler, 137–74. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. – ed. Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan 1913–1938. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. Unno, Hiroshi. Modan toshi sh·y· – Nihon no nij·nendai wo tazunete. (Tokyo: Ch· k ronsha, 1985. – Modan toshi T ky . Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1983. – Toshi to supekutakuru. Tokyo: Ch· k ronsha, 1982. Yamashita, Takeshi. ‘Shin seinen’ wo meguru sakkatachi. Tokyo: Chikuma shob , 1996. Yao, Steven. Translation and the Languages of Modernism. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2002. Yokomitsu, Riichi. ‘Love’ and Other Stories of Yokomitsu Riichi, ix–xxii. Translated by Dennis Keene. Tokyo: University of Tokyo, 1974. – ‘Atama narabi ni hara’ [With the head, and guts too]. In Teihon Yokomitsu Riichi zensh·, vol. 1, 396. Tokyo: Kawade shob , 1981. – Shanghai. Translated by Dennis Washburn. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2001. Yoshiyuki, Eisuke. Yoshiyuki Eisuke to sono jidai – modan toshi no hikari to kage. Edited by Yoshiyuki Kazuko et al. Tokyo: Tokyo shiki shuppan, 1998.

10 Oceans Apart? Emily Carr’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Encounters with Modernisms mary ann gillies

‘The cultural effects of European expansionism,’ writes James Clifford in Routes, can ‘no longer be celebrated, or deplored, as a simple diffusion outward – of civilization, industry science, or capital. For the region called “Europe” has been constantly remade, and traversed, by influences beyond its borders.’ But it is not only Europe that is constantly being remade, for, as he suggests, ‘Virtually everywhere one looks, the processes of human movement and encounter are long-established and complex. Cultural centers, discrete regions and territories, do not exist prior to contacts, but are sustained through them, appropriating and disciplining the restless movements of people and things.’1 I invoke Clifford not because I plan to embark on an ethnographic study of the kind that he produces so provocatively in Routes and elsewhere, but because his concepts work well to frame the arguments I want to make in this essay about the travelling culture that is at the heart of modernism. Even a cursory glance at Anglo-American modernism illustrates how pervasively people and texts travelled. The emigration of American writers, such as Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Hilda Doolittle, to Europe is a well-told story, and European writers including Joseph Conrad, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce moved constantly across borders. The ‘diffusion outwards’ of modernists and their texts from Europe to other parts of the world is also well known. From Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1900), through E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India (1924) to W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s prose-poetry-photography montage A Journey to War (1939), modernism sets out to collapse the distances between the ‘great urban centers’ from which these writers embarked on their travels and the ‘discrete regions and territories’2 they sought to depict – Africa,

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India, China. In this essay, I want to set aside the many contentious and problematic issues that enclose the discussion of Anglo-American modernists’ depictions of other ‘regions and territories,’ concentrating instead on the movement of peoples and texts that led to such depictions. But rather than focus on overly familiar territory, I will shift the discussion from the men who travelled away from the ‘great urban centers’ and instead look at two women modernists who travelled the route in reverse: Canadian Emily Carr and New Zealander Katherine Mansfield.3 What did their journeys look like? How did their ‘New World detours through the old’ rewrite modernism in both the Old and New Worlds?4 Roots Much has been written about the lives of both women and there is no need to traverse this terrain yet again.5 Yet some comment on their roots is necessary in order to understand the places – literal and psychic – from which each woman began her journey. Carr and Mansfield were a first-generation Canadians and New Zealanders respectively, yet as members of the white settler class, they found themselves caught between two worlds. Their families still looked to England as ‘home,’ and the manner in which they lived was thoroughly steeped in the values and customs of late-Victorian England. The male heads of the households – Richard Carr and Harold Beauchamp – dominated their families, with life revolving around their interests, needs, and work. The roles assigned to Emily and Katherine were patterned on what was appropriate for daughters of an upper-middle-class British family. They were expected to obey the decisions of their fathers, to conform to the social and moral codes society set down for them, and to obtain an adequate education that would enable them to fulfil their destiny as wives and as mothers. At the same time, however, the women were granted a degree of freedom that they might not have been given had they actually lived at ‘home.’ Both attended public schools, with Katherine beginning her schooling at Karori Public School with her sisters and ‘all the children of the valley – farm children, the milkman’s children, the bus-driver’s, the storekeeper’s, the washerwoman’s, the children of the dentist,’ all of whom received the ‘“free, secular and compulsory” education which had been prescribed for all of the colony’s children, white and brown, by its Education Act of 1877.’6 As children, they came to know the countryside around them well, with Emily, in particular, find-

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ing her greatest happiness there, whether she was in the family’s cow yard, where she ‘would climb up on the woodpile, take her pet rooster in her lap and serenade the cow at the top of her lungs’ or ‘wandering through the groves of firs, the scrub oak thickets and masses of broom on [nearby] Beacon Hill.’7 The flowers, trees, birds, ocean, and light that were so exotic to visitors from ‘home’ were the natural heritage of these women. As a consequence of their direct experience of life in Canada and New Zealand, and their families’ continued allegiance to the ways of ‘home,’ Carr and Mansfield, like so many of their contemporaries, occupied a liminal space. Despite having been born in New Zealand and Canada, they were not considered indigenous inhabitants of their homelands; that status was reserved for the Aboriginal peoples of each country. Yet neither woman was considered truly British, as they discovered when they travelled ‘home’ to England. How they negotiated that liminal space in their artistic work proves a fascinating study. Travels – at Home and Abroad Had Emily Carr and Katherine Mansfield remained rooted in their colonial homelands, it is doubtful that they would have produced the important work that they did. Although both women travelled throughout their lives, I will restrict my focus to their early travels, which arguably had the most significant impact on the artistic choices each woman made. I will look at Mansfield’s first trip to London and the Urewera camping trip that she undertook just before she left New Zealand for good; and Carr’s sojourns at art schools in Britain and France, as well as her early journeys up the west coast of British Columbia. The collision of the New and Old Worlds that took place in these early travels provided them with both the training and the material for their very best works.8 In 1903, the Beauchamp family sailed from Wellington for London, where Katherine and her two older sisters were to attend Queen’s College.9 Queen’s provided Katherine with the opportunity to live away from home for the first time, free from the overwhelming presence of her father; it also offered the intellectual and cultural stimulus that was to prove pivotal in her choice to become a writer. Mansfield remained at Queen’s until 1906, attending lectures (though not as faithfully as her teachers wished), taking cello lessons, writing for the school magazine, and participating in other school activities. She also explored London,

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getting to know the capital of the Empire well by going to the theatre, concerts, and art galleries, as well as to parks and other public spaces. By late 1905, Mansfield had discovered the works of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, and other decadents, becoming strongly attracted to their aesthetics. She thoroughly enjoyed her time in London, making enduring friendships and falling in and out of love. Indeed, London was where she grew into an adult, and the city was to retain a formidable hold on her for the rest of her life. Brief trips to Europe during the three years she studied in London reinforced her growing belief that a return to New Zealand would stifle her growth as an artist and as a woman. England and Europe were where she wanted to live. Yet, in late 1906, accompanied by her parents and sisters, eighteenyear-old Katherine returned home filled with loathing for the provincialism of Wellington and with despair at her family’s failure to understand her. Whether due to adolescent rebellion, a growing sense of her own sexuality, her strong desire to stay in London, or her attachment to the aesthetics of Wilde and others, life was nearly unbearable for her, as she made clear in a letter to her cousin Sylvia Payne: ‘I feel absolutely ill with grief and sadness here – it is a nightmare ... Life here’s impossible – I can’t see how it can drag on.’10 Despite these desperate words, her life in Wellington was not quite as she painted it. She continued to study and play the cello; her father obtained a General Assembly Library reader’s ticket for her that enabled her to read widely (principally in contemporary literature, including Henry James, Shaw, Ibsen, Nietzsche, and others); and she participated in an active social life. However, her restlessness continued and she frequently found herself in conflict with her father over her desire for an independent life and career in London. In November of 1907, partly to get away from the ongoing conflict, she joined a group of friends on a camping tour of New Zealand’s North Island. The details of this memorable trip were inscribed in her Urewera Notebook, which reveals a Katherine who was awed by the natural beauty she encountered, writing to her mother, ‘Just before lunch we came to the Waipunga Falls – my first experience of great waterfalls – they are indescribably beautiful.’11 She had encountered a totally different New Zealand from the provincial culture in which she felt trapped. Gillian Boddy remarks that Mansfield ‘momentarily forgot the sophistication of London life, even the difficulties of the last few months, as she met and responded warmly to the Maori people and absorbed the wild beauty of the bush and the barren open spaces of the plains.’12 Yet,

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even while the bush country entranced her, she questioned whether she belonged, remarking in her notebook, ‘Give me the Maori and the tourist but nothing between.’13 Self-consciously placing herself among the ‘betweens’ she despised and longing to return to a place where she believed she did belong, she continued to agitate for a return to Europe. In July of 1908, she was on her way back to London. Mansfield’s early travels thus went in two diametrically opposed directions: toward the heart of the Old World and deep into the bush of the New World. For her, London symbolized all that she wanted in life – freedom to pursue her own literary path at the heart of contemporary culture – and New Zealand symbolized what she believed she had to reject in order to obtain her heart’s desire. That view was to be challenged by the reality of living in Europe as an outsider, and, ironically, Mansfield wrote to her father late in her life, ‘I thank God I was born in New Zealand. A young country is a real heritage, though it takes one time to recognize it. But New Zealand is in my very bones.’14 Mansfield was to find herself caught between these two worlds, occupying a perpetually liminal position. As we will see, it is just this position that enabled her to write some of literary modernism’s finest short stories. Emily Carr’s early trips can also be viewed as explorations of dramatically different cultures: the Old World from which she hoped to obtain her artistic training and the New World from which she was to derive her deepest inspirations and her most important subjects. For ease of discussion, I will look at her journeys to the Old World and the New World separately; however, for Carr, it was the counterpointing of the journeys between these two worlds that shaped the art she produced. Before looking at her trips to Europe, I will glance quickly at Carr’s first extended journey away from home – to San Francisco – since it serves as bridge into the Old World that Carr longed to visit. This destination was a compromise worked out by Carr in order to satisfy her family, who did not approve of her ambitions to become an artist and who opposed her wish to study in Europe. San Francisco was closer to home, and there were still friends of her father’s there who were willing to watch over his daughter while she learned her craft. Thus, in 1891, Carr travelled southward to the California School of Design in San Francisco. As Maria Tippett notes, The majority of the school’s teachers, though largely American-born, had studied in Paris at the Académie Julian or the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Some had been inspired by the intuitive approach of James McNeill Whistler,

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others by the flat decorative motifs of Puvis de Chavannes. However diverse their styles, they offered their students sound instruction in the tradition of the best schools of Europe.15

Carr was to remain in San Francisco until December 1893, absorbing what her teachers had to offer her and enjoying the relative freedom of life away from family in a city far more cosmopolitan than Victoria. Yet it was not the longed-for London or Paris. Once Carr returned to Victoria, she spent the next six years teaching art, establishing herself as an artist, and saving money for a trip to Europe. Finally, in August of 1899, she left Victoria for London to study at one of its leading art schools, the Westminster School of Art. Carr’s choice of school illustrated how out of touch she and her fellow artists in Victoria were with the English art scene. The Slade School of Art had by then usurped Westminster’s pre-eminent place. Westminster students still received a sound training, but for the most part they ‘were oblivious of the French Impressionists,’ and they ‘perpetuated the classical and historical painting that kept England in the backwater of European art.’16 Nonetheless, she spent two years at the Westminster School, and, when it closed for the summer in 1901, she joined fellow students in St Ives, Cornwall, where she remained until Christmas, producing landscapes and seascapes and, most memorably for her, painting in Treganna Wood. By March of 1902, she had moved to Bushey – some fourteen miles from London – where she continued to paint the surrounding woods. Carr’s time in England proved an enormous strain on her physically and emotionally, and, by late 1902, her sister Lizzie had arrived in London to care for a very ill Emily. In January 1903, Carr entered the East Anglia Sanatorium for treatment of what was diagnosed as hysteria.17 She was to stay at the sanatorium until March 1904, when she was discharged with a clean bill of health. A few months later, she was homeward bound, her stay in England apparently a failure. For another six years, Carr eked out a living teaching art first in Victoria and then in Vancouver. But she was still drawn to Europe, in particular to France because ‘everyone said Paris was the top of art’ and she ‘wanted to get the best teaching [she] knew.’18 So in July 1910, Emily and her sister Alice left Victoria for France. Emily’s year in France was to prove pivotal. Her contact and guide to the French art scene was an Englishman, Harry Phelan Gibb, who attended Gertrude Stein’s salon regularly, knew Braque and Matisse personally, and had in fact sold Matisse’s first painting. He insisted Carr enrol in the Académie

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Colarossi, rather than the more conservative Académie Julian, believing that ‘Emily would gain from seeing the stronger work of male students.’19 Whistler, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Modigliani, and Matisse had all been students at the Colarossi, and the school still retained its position at the leading edge of artistic experimentation. At Gibb’s urging, Carr left the daytime classes at the Colarossi to join the private studio classes of Scotsman John Duncan Fergusson, whose art at the time was heavily influenced by fauvism and with whom Carr likely began to explore how to create rhythm in her paintings. After only a few weeks’ study with Fergusson – which she enjoyed – Carr became ill and was hospitalized for six weeks. Upon returning to his classes, she once again became ill, again being hospitalized for six weeks. After release from hospital, Carr took a trip with Alice to Sweden, allowing Emily to continue to regain her health. When they returned to France in May 1911, Harry Gibb was embarking for the countryside where he proposed to teach landscape painting and to avoid the heat of a summer in Paris. Carr followed him and spent the summer sketching and painting in oils. She learned a great deal in the four summer months spent with Gibb, enough to encourage her to continue to experiment and to seek out another teacher before she had to return to Canada. Carr left Gibb to study for six weeks with the New Zealand artist Frances Hodgkins. September found her in Concarneau working in watercolours again alongside her colonial compatriot. When Carr returned to Paris, she discovered that two of her paintings were exhibited in the Salon d’Automne – along with paintings by the cubists, whose works generated an enormous response from critics and the public. As Tippett notes, ‘Emily’s name did not appear in any of the many newspapers and art journals that praised, or more frequently scorned, the contributions of the rebel Cubists.’20 Nevertheless, that her work was judged worthy of hanging in the Salon suggests not only that her new style fitted in with the leading art of the day, but also that it was sufficiently accomplished. Carr returned to Canada later that month a changed artist. Carr’s attraction to London and Paris as centres in which she would find the very best of contemporary teachers is an important factor in her artistic development. However, her journeys within her own province were also of central importance to her art and to her later standing as a cultural icon in Canada. In 1899, she travelled up the west coast of Vancouver Island to Ucluelet,21 where she stayed with a missionary friend of her sister. She spent her time there sketching; her subjects included

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many of the First Nations people who inhabited the village, as well as their dwellings. This trip was crucial for Carr, for, as her many critics have noted, it was here that she began ‘a deeper connection with the native people’ than she had formed with those she met and observed in Victoria, and it was here that she also ‘confirmed a relationship to the natural world she had felt since childhood without really being able to put it into words.’22 In 1907, she took a second, longer trip with Alice to Skagway, Alaska. From Skagway, they journeyed to Sitka, originally a Tlingit village, but which had become a Russian trading post. In Sitka, Carr encountered her first carved totem poles along the Totem-Pole Walk, which was a showcase of Tlingit carvings set up as a tourist attraction. She also found her way to the Native village on the outskirts of Sitka, where she spent hours sketching and became imbued with the desire to ‘return to record as much of what remained as she could, before it was completely lost.’23 Although she never returned to Alaska and it would be several years before she returned to northern British Columbia, over the next two years she made a number of trips up Vancouver Island to Alert Bay, Campbell River, and other settlements, in order to sketch the carvings of First Nations peoples. After her return from France in 1911, Carr made another long journey north. She set off for Alert Bay, detoured to the ‘Kwakiutl villages on the east coast of Vancouver Island,’ eventually ‘made her way far up the Skeena River, on the mainland, to the Gitksan (Tsimshian) villages,’ and, finally, ‘visited the Haida villages of the Queen Charlotte Islands.’ This journey was a formidable one for a ‘lone woman’ to undertake, and though Emily was ‘never totally alone on this trip in the sense of being out of touch with humanity,’ she nonetheless ‘had to make her way from one [guide or host] to another as best she could.’24 What drew her to these isolated locations was the same desire that she had felt in 1907: ‘to record as much of what remained’ of the Native carvings, in particular the totem poles, as she could before they disappeared. Carr’s trip of 1911 was the last of her major early trips in British Columbia. She was to make a number of trips in the late 1920s, but one can argue that it was these early journeys that provided the foundation for her subsequent paintings. Critics have challenged Carr’s depiction of First Nation peoples and artifacts and also the legend that has grown up around her role as ‘interpreter of native art.’ Recently, Gerta Moray has rightly asked, ‘How have we acquired and for so long sustained an image of the artist Emily

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Carr that pays scant attention to the historical realities of the First Nations peoples she pictures in paint and words, or to her actual dealings with them?’25 Yet, one cannot dispute the fact that Carr’s encounters with First Nations peoples and cultures, and the landscape she traversed to encounter them, had a profound impact on her art. And it is evident that the experimental art of modernism – the work of painters and teachers such as Fergusson, Gibb, and Hodgkins; the work of the cubists and, most importantly, the fauves – also had a great impact on her. In truth, the blending of these permitted her to find her own artistic idiom. As Carr herself notes, she, like Gibb, was convinced that ‘the “New Art” was going to help my work out West, show me a bigger way of approach.’26 In her autobiography, Emily Carr noted that the [Canadian] West was ultra-conservative. They had transported their ideas at the time of their migration, a generation or two back. They forgot that England, even conservative England, had crept forward since then; but these Western settlers had firmly adhered to their old, old, outworn methods, and, seeing beloved England as it had been, they held to their old ideals.27

While her comments were aimed at proving how backward her western Canadian compatriots were and to justify her own artistic choices, they also serve to underscore two concepts that are central to this essay’s consideration of the interaction between modernist aesthetics and the Pacific Rim landscapes of New Zealand and Canada, namely, the liminal position of Carr as an artist and woman and the central role that translation played in her artistic practice. As we will see, these concepts also apply to Mansfield. Views from the Outside Initially, Carr’s liminal position was reflected in two very different ways. Her early work depicts British Columbia through colonial eyes, making her an outsider in her own country, since eyes trained to see European landscapes were ill equipped to see the Canadian landscape. Most of the paintings and sketches produced prior to 1910 were done largely in the ‘restricted and conventional limits of the late-Victorian English watercolour school.’ Consequently, the colour palette, brush work, and subjects were of the kind one would find used to depict a

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rural English scene rather than the more unruly landscape of the Canadian West Coast. This is evident in Carr’s watercolour Beach Scene with Stumps and Logs (1910) where the blues and greens and the soft brush work do little to convey the rugged shoreline and difficult lives led by the inhabitants (see illustration 10.1). Tellingly, these early works elicited mostly positive reviews, with critics calling her portraits ‘quaint and pretty, and her botanical drawings ... charming.’28 Despite these reviews, Carr found herself at odds with Victoria and Vancouver’s community of artists and critics. She believed that they did not take her work seriously because she was a woman and because she failed to play up the social aspect expected of the female artist. Carr’s subject matter, particularly the paintings featuring First Nations subjects that she began to produce after 1907, further marginalized her. Though images of First Nations people and villages had long been a motif used by British Columbia’s male painters, the fact that Emily was now incorporating them into her works led to disapproval from those who felt it was unseemly for a woman not only to travel and live among them but also to depict their lives. Despite her bold new subject matter, she nonetheless continued to employ the same lateVictorian techniques in her First Nations paintings from this period. Her painting Totem Walk at Sitka (1907), a watercolour with the usual English Academy palette and orderly arrangement of objects, provides such an example (see illustration 10.2). Carr’s initial placement as an outsider thus had more to do with her self-construction as an artist and her chosen subjects than her techniques. Yet that was soon to change, for reaction to her work was more mixed after she began to incorporate into her paintings what she had learned in France. Carr said that she returned home from France ‘stronger in body, in thinking, and in work than I had returned from England. My seeing had broadened. I was better equipped for teaching and study because of my year and a half in France.’29 The key phrase here is ‘My seeing had broadened.’ The change in her art was evident to all. The English watercolour palette was replaced by ‘brighter, cleaner colour, simpler forms and more intensity,’ 30 as we can see in her oil painting Totem Poles, Kitseukla of 1912 (see illustration 10.3). Although the newspaper reviews of her first post-France exhibition in February 1912 were largely positive, an anonymous letter to Vancouver’s Province newspaper captured nicely the resistance to the new art that Carr had chosen to champion. The letter was printed under the heading ‘Against French Art,’ and the writer’s chief accusation ‘had to do with Miss Carr’s “Vanity” in

Figure 10.1 Emily Carr, Beach Scene with Stumps and Logs (watercolour, 1910). Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2005.026.002).

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Figure 10.2 Emily Carr, Totem Walk at Sitka (watercolour, 1907). Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, The Thomas Gardiner Keir Bequest (1994.055.004).

thinking that she could “eclipse the Almighty” by producing “bizarre work” that was thought to be “more satisfactory than nature itself.”’ The writer believed that Carr ‘“had shown no inconsiderable talent in depicting the local scenery” before she had gone to France, and “had she continued in these lines she might have become one of those of whom British Columbia could speak with pride.”’ The writer ‘regretted that she had now “given up her inspiration” and exhibited “nothing but the work of an excited and vitiated imagination.”’31 Such comments were spoken privately among Carr’s family, friends, and peers, with

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Figure 10.3 Emily Carr, Totem Poles, Kitseukla, 1912, oil on canvas, 126.8 u 98.4 cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Founders’ Fund, VAG 37.2. Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery.

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the end result being that she felt even more isolated than she had before she left for France.32 While Carr’s new techniques enabled her to come closer to her goal of representing the people and landscape of British Columbia through the eyes of a British Columbian, they also led to a further positioning of herself as an outsider in the local and national art communities. At this point in her career, Carr had created for herself a liminal space that had multiple dimensions in order to accommodate the many ways in which she situated herself in the growing Canadian art scene. She sought to be taken seriously as a professional artist, rather than as a woman who pursued art as a ‘polite hobby for genteel ladies.’33 She was a post-impressionist in a community of artists who largely continued to paint in the traditional, English Academic style. And she was a Canadian artist who was learning to see and then render the Canadian landscape through the eyes of a native inhabitant, compelled to capture the reality of the landscape that was her birthright. However, the outsider position would take her only so far. She would have to learn to translate her unique vision in a way that would teach her audience to see both her art and her subjects with new eyes. I will return to this point shortly. Like Carr, Katherine Mansfield was an outsider. In England and Europe, she could easily be dismissed by some as a bourgeois colonial, by others because of her gender. Mansfield could have attempted to mitigate this position, as other non-European modernists did; instead, she consciously chose the position of outsider. She distanced herself from her colonial, bourgeois background, adopting a bohemian lifestyle that caused no end of anxiety to her family. Her lifestyle provided an entrée into the social milieu inhabited by some of the emerging Anglo-American modernists, and she eventually developed friendships with Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, among others. However, as Sydney Janet Kaplan observes, her background was ‘tainted with “money” and “trade”, while her revolt against it left her without money and without “connections.”’ And, as Kaplan perceptively notes, ‘From the beginning of her career Mansfield chose to ally herself with other writers excluded from the establishment. Her association with A.R. Orage, Beatrice Hastings, and the rest of the iconoclastic group who produced The New Age, beginning in 1909, situated her entry into the literary world with that of other newcomers to the intelligentsia.’ Kaplan comments further that Mansfield ‘was attracted to the sense of security she noted in the lives

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of Virginia Woolf and other members of Bloomsbury, but she remained always an outsider to a considerable extent.’34 This outsider position permeates her early short fiction in two different and interesting ways. In the first instance, she opts to have her narrator adopt a literal outsider position, thereby providing a platform for the biting social critiques found in her first collection of stories, In a German Pension (1911). The narrator’s satirical portrait of her fellow diners in ‘Germans and Meat,’ the collection’s first story, is immediately evident in the opening lines: Bread soup was placed upon the table. ‘Ah,’ said the Herr Rat, leaning upon the table as he peered into the tureen, ‘that is what I need. My Magen has not been in order for several days. Bread soup, and just the right consistency. I am a good cook myself’ – he turned to me. ‘How interesting,’ I said, attempting to infuse just the right amount of enthusiasm into my voice.35

Also evident is the way in which the narrator positions herself apart from her companions, setting herself up as an outsider in this social setting. The narrator asks the reader to identify with her, to join her in an alliance against the other characters, thereby creating a community of outsiders who sit in judgment of the bourgeois or pseudo-bohemian inhabitants of many of Mansfield’s stories. Interestingly, the outsider position is also evident in Mansfield’s early New Zealand stories; here, however, she positions the reader as an outsider by emphasizing what would have been exotic for her English readers. ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped,’ a short story published by Mansfield under the pen name of Lili Heron in Rhythm in September 1912, provides an interesting example of this positioning.36 From the beginning, the story’s title character, Pearl Button, is set apart from her family and others who reside in the ‘Houses of Boxes’ – she swings on ‘the little gate, all alone’ – which makes her more susceptible to the ‘big women,’ one ‘dressed in red’ and the other ‘dressed in yellow and green,’ who invite her to come with them because they ‘got beautiful things to show [her].’ Pearl goes off – walking ‘between the two dark women down the windy road, taking little running steps to keep up and wondering what they had in their House of Boxes’ (136). Pearl’s journey with the Maori women takes her to ‘a log room full of other people the same colour as they were’ (137) then on a ride in a cart

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through the countryside at night, during which ‘Pearl had never been happy like this before’ (137), and, finally, to the seaside. Pearl’s first glimpse of the sea prompts her to scream with fright and demand of the Maori woman upon whose lap she has been curled: ‘What is it? what is it?’ (138). Her fear dissipates as she watches the waves fall rhythmically on the beach, and then she is taken into one of the Maori houses on the shore where she is fed. Her outsider status in this new world is underlined by the question she asks of her new hosts: “Haven’t you got any Houses in Boxes?”she said. “Don’t you all live in a row? Don’t the men go to offices? Aren’t there any nasty things?”’ (139). Yet, minutes later, she is fully at home with her new friends on the beach, shrieking with delight as the water laps over her feet. She is so happy and excited that ‘she rushed over to her woman and flung her little thin arms round the woman’s neck, hugging her, kissing.’ The moment is interrupted by the appearance of the police – ‘little men in blue coats’ who are ‘running towards her with shouts and whistlings’ (139) – coming to remove Pearl from her kidnappers and take her back to the House in Boxes where she played all alone. Pearl clearly occupies a liminal space in this story. She is a white New Zealand child who feels alienated from her own family and culture. At the beginning of the story, she plays alone in front of her home; at its end, she is clearly terrified of the policemen who come to rescue her. She is happy among her Maori ‘kidnappers,’ yet even with them, she feels like an outsider – not understanding why their houses are not Houses in Boxes all in a row, or why the men are not at offices. Pearl does not really belong in either culture; she oscillates between the two. Typical readers of Rhythm would also have found themselves positioned as outsiders when reading this story; they would have been, like Pearl Button, caught up in the novelty of the Maori world she was discovering, but at the same time trying to equate the events and people of the story to their own Houses of Boxes. Even more interestingly, this story enacts Mansfield’s own liminal position. Although born in New Zealand, as we have seen, she felt alienated from the lives led by her family and others of her class and race. She was just as aware that the London she inhabited considered her an outsider; and in many ways, as she acknowledged toward the end of her life, Europe was an inhospitable place for her. Unlike Carr, who returned to her West-Coast home in Canada where she at least felt more comfortable, if no less an outsider, Mansfield elected to stay in Europe,

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thereby ensuring that she would always be caught in a liminal space between the land of her birth and the countries of her residence. Translation as a Means of Seeing Lydia Liu’s notions of translation help to flesh out the second concept with which I am concerned here. Liu says, in Tokens of Exchange, that ‘The problem of translation has become increasingly central to critical reflections on modernity.’37 She elaborates on this opening comment, stating that the contributors to Tokens of Exchange ‘are interested in the processes whereby translation has helped universalize the “modern” by rewriting and reinventing it in the diverse languages and societies of the world during the shared and much embattled moments of globalization.’38 I want to refine her concept to make it both more specific and more inclusive. Translation, as Liu and other critics have argued, is inherent in all artistic activity; for example, in the act of creating a painting, a play, or musical composition, the artist uses a particular medium to translate his or her experience into a form that can be shared with a viewer, reader, or listener. The history of art is punctuated by the periodic emergence of new forms, techniques, or movements whose innovations remind us of the link between creation and translation. The emergence of modernist art is marked by just such an epochal shift; in fact, modernists laid bare the artist’s act of translation, making that translation as central to the actual artwork as the objects being translated. In post-impressionist visual and plastic art, for example, the use of geometric shapes to render landscapes or figures forced viewers not only to confront the obvious fact that they were viewing the artist’s translation of an object or scene into non-representational forms, but also to perform their own acts of translation in order to make sense of what they were seeing. Several critics have pointed out the centrality of translation to literary modernism. Recently Steven Yao has claimed that ‘the age of Modernism was, quite literally, an age of translations.’39 He takes his discussion beyond the usual considerations of authenticity and authority when he persuasively argues that, for modernists, translation was generative: ‘Modernist writers [sought] to expand the range of cultural, linguistic, and generic fields in which they could participate.’ Tellingly, translation ‘helped them to determine and establish the defining boundaries of their own cultures [and] it provided a means by which to broaden

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their sources for material and inspiration.’40 Pound, Eliot, Joyce, H.D., Woolf, and many others engaged in translation not only to enrich their own art, but also to draw attention to the fact that art was a conscious act of translation. The role of artist as translator takes on an even more complex cast when artists use techniques developed in cultures different from their own, as we see in the art produced by so many modernists. This is the case as well for both Carr and Mansfield. In 1913, Carr moved back to Victoria, determined to carry on her experiments and to continue using First Nations figures, particularly totem poles, as the subjects of her art. She struggled both financially and artistically, and her family provided little moral support. As she recounts, in this period, My sisters disliked my new work intensely. One was noisy in her condemnation, one sulkily silent, one indifferent to every kind of Art. The noisy sister said, ‘It is crazy to persist in this way, – no pupils, no sales, you’ll starve! Go back to the old painting.’ ‘I’d rather starve! I could not paint in the old way – it is dead – meaningless – empty.’41

Carr persisted in pursuing the new way of painting, and in the process she had to engage in two levels of translation beyond that of the artist translating her vision into her chosen medium. First, she had to take the new techniques she had learned in France and adapt them to the Canadian scenes she was painting. This involved finding a colour palette that was suitable for West Coast landscapes, since the greens and blues, in particular, that were suitable for depicting a French landscape did not do justice to the greens and blues of the landscape of British Columbia. In paintings rendered shortly after her return from Paris, such as Totem Poles, Kitseukla, she still used the French palette. Later works, in which she sought to adapt the French techniques to the landscape she was painting, show her shifting to a different palette, one that emphasized a different range of greens, browns, and blues, as can be seen in her painting Vanquished (1930) (see illustration 10.4). More importantly, she was required to adapt and extend what she had learned about creating rhythm and movement. For to capture the majestic cedar forests of the West Coast on canvas required that she find a way of building on the techniques she learned from Fergusson, Gibb, and Hodgkins. We can see in the paintings completed just after she returned from Paris (illustration 10.3) a significant difference from

Figure 10.4 Emily Carr, Vanquished, 1930, oil on canvas, 92.0 u 129.0 cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.6. Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery.

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those completed prior to going (illustrations 10.1 and 10.2) in terms of the rhythm and movement. Yet we see an even greater difference in her later work, where she has translated the techniques that had been devised to disrupt the orderly and civilized French countryside to the more chaotic forested landscape. It was not enough to use geometric shapes such as cubes or spheres or slashes of brilliant primary colours to destabilize a forest scene, especially when the gnarled old-growth trees were foreign enough to most viewers without being distorted further. Only after many years, and further study with the help of mentors such as Lawren Harris, did Carr succeed in translating the techniques she learned in France to her paintings of the West Coast; but in the end her persistence paid off, as can be seen in The Red Cedar, painted in 1933 (see illustration 10.5). Carr’s second act of translation involved her way of seeing the actual landscape and figures that she painted. More specifically, it involved a series of cross-cultural translations that she had to work her way through in order to arrive at a uniquely Canadian vision. Upon her return from France, she remarked, ‘I was better equipped both for teaching and study because of my year and half in France,’ but she also confessed that she was ‘still mystified, baffled as to how to tackle our big West.’42 What was required was that she unlearn the ways that she had been taught to see; she needed to clear out her preconceptions of what the land should look like so that she could paint what it did look like. Carr was right when she said, ‘who except Canada herself could help me comprehend her great woods and spaces?’43 But in order for her to find Canada, she had to learn to see like a Canadian. The process of learning to see like a Canadian entailed laying bare the ways in which she did not see like one. First, she had to recognize the ways that her English training and heritage resulted in her seeing the land and people around her through eyes more suited to the English countryside than Vancouver Island. She was drawn to First Nations art as a means of both instruction and liberation from this English influence. She acknowledges that Indian Art broadened my seeing, loosened the formal tightness I had learned in England’s schools. Its bigness and stark reality baffled my white man’s understanding. I was as Canadian-born as the Indian but behind me were Old World heredity and ancestry as well as Canadian environment. The new West called me, but my Old World heredity, the flavour of my upbringing pulled me back. I had been schooled to see outsides only, not struggle to pierce.44

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Figure 10.5 Emily Carr, Red Cedar, 1931, oil on canvas, 111.0 u 68.5 cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Gift of Mrs J.P. Fell, VAG 54.7. Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery.

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Yet ‘Indian Art’ did not teach her all she felt she needed, in large part because she was as distanced from the culture that had produced it as she was from the England that had influenced her early painting. She spoke no First Nations language, and her knowledge of the First Nations cultures was limited. She was neither an English woman nor a First Nations one. Finally, her encounters with post-impressionism in France taught her to see beyond the surface of any object, to find its essence and paint that essence no matter how tenuous the relation to the outward form might be. This awareness of the need to capture the inner form provided a turning point, but it was insufficient to enable her to capture the big West on her canvas because the subjects and materials she learned to use in France were foreign to her; they were not her familiar West Coast scenes and colours. What she was faced with on her return was the task of finding a way to take what she had learned from these encounters with three different cultures and aesthetics and use them to see and then paint her ‘big West.’ Following much struggle over many more years, Carr ultimately accomplished her goal. In effect, the later paintings that are now hailed as masterworks of Canadian art exist because Carr was able to translate the aesthetics and techniques of all three cultures into a form that was Canadian. Her art is thus a hybrid, built from material she drew on from English, First Nations, and French art and culture and augmented by her own ability to see and translate the natural landscape of her own land. Without that ability to translate and then synthesize her translations into a new hybrid, it is unlikely that Carr would have created the art that she did. Mansfield similarly created a hybrid art form through a process of translation. Her translation was less obviously anchored in a need to find a mode of representation that would do justice to the land of her birth, although New Zealand never lies far from the surface in many of her stories. More immediately important for her, as for other women writers of this period, was to take techniques, genres, and aesthetics that had been devised by men and make them work to express female, rather than male, experience. The very act of writing thus enacted a translation of male discourse and experience into female discourse and experience. Just as Carr had looked to England and France for training that would allow her to find a means of depicting her own unique vision of Canada’s West Coast, Mansfield looked to the literary and cultural avantgardes of these countries, finding in the writings of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, and the French symbolists themes, techniques, and, above all,

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what Vincent O’Sullivan notes as the chief legacies from her encounter with Wilde’s work in particular: ‘the supposition that one can give to life the shape one decides upon, and the demand that experience be intense.’45 These two desires – to shape life according to what one decides it should look like and to experience life intensely – are at the heart of Mansfield’s stories. Yet how she takes the short-story form and uses it to embody these desires from a female perspective not only sets her apart from her male contemporaries, but also transforms the short-story genre. The vignette or slice-of-life story format is one of the most important means used by Mansfield to represent the female perspective. The brief snapshots of life that form the heart of each story in her first collection, In a German Pension, or in many later stories lack the formal apparatus of short stories written by male contemporaries such as Joseph Conrad or Henry James; instead, they attempt to capture immortality by focusing with full concentration on a single intense moment. In the process of depicting these intense moments, Mansfield not only creates new spaces to represent women’s experience, but she also makes use of her New Zealand life, translating it in ways that extend modernism beyond its Anglo-European boundaries. As she says in a letter to her friend Dorothy Brett written in 1917, she felt ‘intensely a longing to serve my subject as well as I can,’ and New Zealand scenes and memories often formed the core of that subject in her stories. In that same letter, Mansfield wrote, ‘You know, if the truth were known I have a perfect passion for the island where I was born.’ She continues, Well, in the early morning there I always remember feeling that this little island has dipped back into the dark blue sea during the night only to rise again at the beam of day, all hung with bright spangles and glittering drops – (When you ran over the dewy grass you positively felt that your feet tasted salt.) I tried to catch that moment – with something of its sparkle and its flavour. And just as on those mornings white milky mists rise and uncover some beauty, then smother it again and then again disclose it. I tried to lift that mist from my people and let them be seen and then hide them again ... It’s so difficult to describe all this and it sounds perhaps overambitious and vain.46

The story she refers to in this letter is Prelude, soon to be published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, but she might as well have been referring to her other stories, those that explicitly featured New Zealand and those that did not. For the essential thing to notice here is that Mansfield’s way of seeing, of searching out the essence of the moment she wanted

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to capture in a story, had its genesis in her New Zealand childhood and youth. There she learned to look for the moments when what her friend and rival Virginia Woolf called ‘the cotton wool’ of ordinary life was pushed aside for an instant to reveal the beauty and truth normally hidden from view. Far from home and frequently ill, Mansfield never lost sight of those magical childhood moments. The embedding of such moments in her stories is what renders Mansfield’s work truly innovative because it forced her contemporaries to see fiction and, through fiction, the world, differently. I want to conclude this essay by circling back to James Clifford. In Routes, he said that he ‘began to imagine rewriting Paris of the twenties and thirties as travel encounters – including New World detours through the old – a place of departures, arrivals, transits. ... The great urban centers could be understood as specific, powerful sites of dwelling/traveling.’47 The ‘detours’ Carr took through Paris and London led her to ‘rewrite’ her art, leading her to create a new form of modernist expression that did justice to the ‘big West,’ her most compelling subject. Carr’s iconic place in Canadian art and culture serves as a testament to the lingering power of her brand of modernism. Mansfield, in contract, chose to make the ‘great urban centers’ of Europe her dwelling place. But Mansfield’s New Zealand experiences permeated her art, providing more than a simple backdrop or subject matter for the stories that she crafted. The white settler’s ‘between’ position that she felt so keenly after her return to Wellington from London gave her a vantage point from which to observe and comment on society. More importantly, it gave her the freedom to experiment with her art because she owed allegiance to no particular style or literary coterie. Mansfield’s continuing presence in the upper echelon of twentieth-century writers attests to the powerful and lasting impact of her ‘rewriting’ of both ‘the great urban centers’ and her native New Zealand. In the end, then, Mansfield’s and Carr’s ‘New World detours through the old’ are just as important to the story of twentieth-century modernism as the journey of those who took modernist culture to the discrete regions and territories of the Pacific Rim.

NOTES 1 Clifford, Routes, 3. 2 Ibid., 30.

Oceans Apart? Emily Carr and Katherine Mansfield 257 3 Throughout this essay I will refer to Katherine Mansfield by the name she assumed as a writer, rather than her given name of Kathleen Beauchamp. 4 Clifford, Routes, 30. 5 Notable biographies of Mansfield include Anthony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield; Gillian Boddy, Katherine Mansfield and Jeffrey Meyers, Katherine Mansfield. Carr’s biographers include: Maria Tippett, Emily Carr; Paula Blanchard, The Life of Emily Carr; and Doris Shadbolt, Emily Carr. 6 Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, 13. 7 Blanchard, The Life of Emily Carr, 37, 35. 8 I am using Clifford’s terms here again, with the Old World denoting Europe and the New World denoting the newly colonized countries of Canada and New Zealand. I do so sharing Clifford’s awareness of the Eurocentric colonial ethos that is contained in this use of the terms. I believe that the terms could just as easily be reversed, with the Aboriginal cultures of the Maori and Canada’s First Peoples assuming the position of the Old World culture and the white settler culture assuming the New World position. But that is an argument that must be left for another day. 9 Mansfield critics note that, in a characteristic show of affluence, Harold Beauchamp booked the entire passenger accommodation on the cargo ship – S.S. Niwaru – for himself, his wife, and their four daughters and son. See Boddy, Katherine Mansfield, 8; Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, 21. 10 Mansfield to Sylvia Payne, 8 January 1907, qtd in Boddy, Katherine Mansfield, 13. 11 Mansfield, The Urewera Notebook, 45. This quotation comes from a draft of a letter to her mother that she wrote in the notebook. 12 Boddy, Katherine Mansfield, 20. 13 Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 140. 14 Mansfield to Harold Beauchamp, 18 March 1922, in The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield, 260. This letter was written to her father less than a year before her death. 15 Tippett, Emily Carr, 18. 16 Ibid., 36. 17 Hysteria was the official diagnosis and was a term applied to female patients who had experienced a breakdown. Carr likely suffered from severe depression brought on by overwork and by the stress of living in London. 18 Tippett, Emily Carr, 81. 19 Ibid., 87. 20 Ibid., 97. 21 Within British Columbia, place names, spelling, and terminology are in flux as recognition of First Nations’ stewardship of their traditional ter-

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Mary Ann Gillies ritories becomes more widely acknowledged and accepted. In this essay, I have used the place names used by the settler culture of Emily Carr’s time, rather than those of the First Nations, though I recognize that this choice is controversial. Blanchard, The Life of Emily Carr, 72–3. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 128. Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 2. A discussion of the complex and difficult issue of Carr’s use of/interaction with First Nations peoples and cultures is beyond the scope of this article. Carr, Growing Pains, 265. Ibid., 277. Tippett, Emily Carr, 73. Carr, Growing Pains, 276. Ibid., 277. ‘Against French Art,’ Province, 3 April 1913, 12, qtd in Tippett, Emily Carr, 101. Tippett and other biographers note that when Carr returned to Vancouver, she expected to take up her old job at the Gordon Neighbourhood School for Girls and to resume her place among local artists whose works were displayed by the British Columbia Society of Fine Arts, of which she was a founding member. She ascribed her failure to be re-employed at the school and the society’s decision not to include in the April show all of the new works she submitted to the failure to appreciate her new style. The rejection she felt may well have been out of proportion to the actual events and comments about her work, but it did have the effect of prompting her to adopt the position of one who lives apart from the mainstream because the mainstream is unable to accept her genius. Tippett, Emily Carr, 68. Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, 13, 12. Mansfield, ‘Germans and Meat,’ 3. Mansfield, ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped.’ Subsequent references to this edition are given the text. Liu, ‘Introduction,’ 1. Liu’s use of the word ‘modernity’ is very specific and ought not to be mistaken for a synonym of modernism. Ibid., 4. Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism, 5. Ibid., 7. Carr, Growing Pains, 280. Ibid., 276. Ibid., 258.

Oceans Apart? Emily Carr and Katherine Mansfield 259 44 Ibid., 258. 45 O’Sullivan, ‘The Magnetic Chain,’ 100. It is important to note that Mansfield’s attraction to Wilde’s writings and his aesthetics is still the source of much discussion. Mansfield herself played down his influence later in her writing life, choosing an alternative heritage that saw writers such as Chekhov more centrally positioned. But her notebooks, letters, and the stories themselves reveal the strong influence of Wilde’s aesthetics on her work, though her genius here is the way that she transmutes them to serve her own concerns. This is not the place to examine more fully her interactions with the works of Wilde, Chekhov, Pater, or any of the other male writers whose works influenced her, nor do I have space to discuss the interesting role sexuality plays here. Both of these issues are dealt with well by other critics. 46 Mansfield to Dorothy Brett, 11 October 1917, in The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 1, 1903–1917, 331. 47 Clifford, Routes, 30.

SOURCES CITED Alpers, Anthony. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Blanchard, Paula. The Life of Emily Carr. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1987. Boddy, Gillian. Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer. New York: Penguin, 1988. Carr, Emily. Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Kaplan, Sydney Janet. Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Liu, Lydia H. ‘Introduction.’ In Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations, edited by Lydia H. Liu, 1–12. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Mansfield, Katherine. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 1, 1903–1917. Edited by Vincent O’Sullivan with Margaret Scott. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. – ‘Germans and Meat.’ In In a German Pension, 3–7. London: Hesperus Press, 2005. – ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped.’ Rhythm 2.8 (September 1912), 136–9.

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Available online through the Modernist Journals Project, http://orage.mjp .brown.edu:8080/exist/mjp/index.xml. – The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks. Edited by Margaret Scott. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. – The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield. Edited by C.K. Stead. London: Allen Lane, 1977. – The Urewera Notebook. Edited by Ian A. Gordon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Meyers, Jeffrey. Katherine Mansfield: A Biography. New York: New Directions, 1980. Moray, Gerta. Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006. O’Sullivan, Vincent. ‘The Magnetic Chain: Notes and Approaches to K.M.’ Landfall 114 (June 1975): 95–131. Shadbolt, Doris. Emily Carr. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990. Tippett, Maria. Emily Carr. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1979. Yao, Steven G. Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language. London: Palgrave, 2002.

11 The Art of the Bluff: Youth Migrancy, Interlingualism, and Japanese Vernacular Modernism in New Youth Magazine kyoko omori

At the climactic moment in Japan’s first full-fledged ‘talkie’ movie, Madamu to ny b  (The neighbour’s wife and mine, 1931), the protagonist, Shibano Shinsaku, a playwright experiencing writer’s block, sings the chorus of a cheery, quick-paced jazz song called ‘Supµdo hoi’ (Speed, Hey!). Won over to the partying spirit of the jazz-performing neighbours, to whose Western-style house he had originally come to complain about the excessive noise, Shinsaku now chants lustily in unison with the rowdy band, ‘supµdo, supµdo, hoi’ (‘speed, speed, hey!’). By doing so, he inspires himself to meet the deadline for a play commissioned by a Tokyo theatre. Humming ‘The Age of Speed’ at home that night, he effortlessly finishes the entire play in one sitting.1 The final scene of the film straightforwardly links this feat of accelerated artistic production to a positive economic outcome. Walking home from a shopping spree, Shinsaku and his daughter are happily dressed in brand new Western clothes, and his wife sports a fashionable Western hairdo, all clearly the result of his speedy and successful writing. In its depictions of the playwright and his family’s happy state, the film flatly rejects the traditional image of a writer, aloof from the forces of the market, waiting in seclusion for artistic inspiration. Here, the inspiration for artistic activity comes not primarily from internal and spiritual processes, but rather from the immediate and capriciously fragmentary stimuli of popular and commercial entertainment. Of course, the concept of speed involves not only time, but space. Thus, it is not surprising that this film portrays the writer’s restlessness as a necessary condition for his successful literary production. It is telling, for example, that Shinsaku’s original attempt to write by sitting ascetically in his study meets with failure owing to the disruptions of

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noises of all kinds emanating from all directions. Shinsaku’s various efforts to restore a quiet and serene atmosphere – from trying to scare the mice running around in his attic by provoking the growls of a stray cat, to soothing his children’s cries and whimpers – only further interrupt his writing process. It is only when he finally walks over to his neighbour’s house the next morning to complain about the loud jazz performance in progress that he encounters the stimulating ‘distractions’ of music-making, dancing, drinking, and chatting with the neighbour’s jazz-singing wife, all of which ironically function to enable his productivity. The distance Shinsaku travels here covers only a physically small span from his house to the neighbour’s. Nevertheless, it traverses considerable symbolic ground, from his traditional Japanese-style home to his neighbour’s modern Western-style house (see illustration 11.1). Through such depictions of constitutive travel across culturally compressed distances, Madamu to ny b  engages in discursive and imaginative terms with the state of perpetual and accelerated movement that average people were experiencing in early twentieth-century Japan. As cultural critics, such as Kon Wajir  and Gonda Yasunosuke, and, more recently, economists, such as Ryoshin Minami, and literary critics, including Unno Hiroshi and Isoda K ichi, have shown, people at that time constantly ‘travelled’ between multiple stages (or infinite gradations) of modernity in their everyday lives, at times in a frantic or trial-and-error manner.2 Because the town to which Shinsaku and his family move in the beginning of the film is a new suburb of Tokyo developed for the emergent middle class, his house doubly signifies as a space of constant negotiations among different levels of familiarity and foreignness, or, in other words, between a slow-paced traditional way of conducting things and a fast-paced and technologically productive modern urban lifestyle. The above-mentioned closing scene symbolically portrays the continuing and larger-scale motion of the Japanese middle class during this period, as well as of the entry of Japan itself as a political and cultural force onto an expressly world stage through the theatre of the Pacific Rim. When Shinsaku and his wife look up into the sky to see an airplane flying over them, they hear its roaring but cheerful engine sound. Following the airplane’s trail with a bright smile, Shinsaku’s wife declares that she is willing to fly and travel, showing that she no longer harbours any anxiety about the changes and movement brought by technological modernization. She is even open to travelling threedimensionally through the air. On multiple levels, then, the film ad-

Figure 11.1 Shinsaku at his traditional Japanese house before going next door. Still photograph from the film Madamu to ny b  (The neighbour’s wife and mine, 1931).

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dresses, through a variety of narrative, visual, and auditory means, a change in the perception of the relationship between time and space that came with the advent of modernity in Japan. Among the various artistic expressions prompted by this dramatic shift in established perceptions of time and space, I would like to focus in particular on a highly colloquial and multilingual type of travelogue that sought to depict the experiences of migrating middle-class youngsters in the 1920s. This set of expressions emerged as a response to economic, political, and cultural forces that involved widespread cultural and human traffic on the regional scale and stage of the Pacific Rim. More specifically, I want to give a historical account of the cultural logic of such travel narratives aimed at mobile youth during the mid-1920s, as textual examples of what Miriam Hansen has called ‘vernacular modernism.’3 To that end, I will discuss the ‘Meriken jappu’ (‘Merican-Jap’) stories of Tani J ji (1900–35), who, following his debut in a popular commercial magazine, Shinseinen (New youth), in the mid-1920s, went on to become the most commercially successful writer of popular fiction in his day.4 Tani’s stories relate the diverse and often bizarre experiences of Japanese ‘hobos’ living across the Pacific Ocean from Japan.5 Through such narrative representations of migrant existence (primarily in the United States, at once a site and symbol of Western modernity), these stories seek to mediate and to illustrate for modern Japanese youth different responses to the condition of increased migrancy (both domestic and international) that accompanied the modernization of Japanese society. In order to delineate the broader significance of these works, I pursue my argument in two stages. First, I will focus on Tani’s strategic engagement with, and depiction of, English phonology in Japanese, or what we may call his ‘phonologocentrism.’ Through this concern with the sonic dimension of language, Tani attempts to reinterpret and reshape reality from multiple and perpetually shifting perspectives, instead of depicting life in America from a deceptively stable and unified viewpoint by employing the language of narrative simply as a transparent medium. Second, I will examine how this concern with the transgressive potential of a vernacular encounter with the foreign shapes the articulation of another of Tani’s stories, namely ‘Shanhai sareta otoko’ (‘The Shanghaied Man’). Through an ironic deployment of established rhetorical/literary conventions associated with mystery fiction, ‘The Shanghaied Man’ relates a narrative of mistaken identity, the violation of social norms, and relentless movement presented in a polyphonic,

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multilingual verbal style that mixes different social dialects, as well as elements of English. By subverting the narrative resolution and restoration of civic order that characterize the conventional mystery story, ‘The Shanghaied Man’ advances an extreme perspectivism wherein exist infinite, incommensurable ‘truths,’ since each individual ‘truth’ merely results from the idiosyncratic reconstruction of fragmentary impressions and unreliable memories into a plausible explanatory narrative. Furthermore, the story also works to draw attention to the intrinsic volatility of identity itself, underscoring both the murderous and the generative power of perpetual motion and random contact with other individuals. My analysis of this work in its social and cultural context highlights the significance of vernacular modernism as a movement (or set of movements) responding to the age of constant motion in early twentieth-century Japan. It also thereby underscores the utility of the Pacific Rim construct as a lens for examining modernist cultural production beyond the familiar terrains of Europe and the United States. Human and Cultural Traffic across the Pacific Rim: Migrancy, Language, and National Politics From the second half of the nineteenth century to the period of the Second World War, the Japanese government actively sanctioned the idea of large-scale mobility among its people, as seen in its active promotion of the ideology of kaigai y·hi (launching themselves abroad for success). This ideology arose in response to a perceived economic challenge to the prosperity of the nation brought on by the advent of socio-economic modernity. Having resisted international engagements from the midseventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, Japan opened its doors to the world.6 Following the nation’s military victories over China and Russia in 1895 and 1905, respectively, and geared to promoting nationalistic success through the exemplars of its citizens, the government urged young people to practise the neo-Confucian idea of sh·y  (the cultivation of the mind) and to undertake kaigai y·hi in the Americas, the South Sea Islands, Manchuria, and Sakhalin.7 In other words, by expressly seeking to advance into the theatre of the Pacific Ocean, Japanese officials sought to promote what can be considered feats of colonialistic adventure on the individual level.8 In addition, owing to the shortage of domestic jobs for the growing number of employable individuals, the government was prompted to paint the image of emigration in grandly positive terms, so that the

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surplus workers would voluntarily move overseas, even without financial or systematic support from the state.9 The success of this campaign produced a sizeable migrant population of youth, who moved from smaller villages to metropolitan centres, as well as to locations outside of Japan entirely, in order to seek better jobs and, in many cases, opportunities for higher education.10 No sufficient census data are available regarding the scale of youth migration from the countryside to large cities in terms of raw numbers. However, we can gain a rough sense of its magnitude through indirect means. In the brief fifteen-year span between 1920 and 1935, the populations of the four largest metropolitan areas – Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and Kyoto – all roughly doubled in size. During this same period, the total population of Japan increased only by around 23 per cent, indicating a sizeably disproportionate transfer of human capital to urban areas.11 This process had strong and lasting repercussions for the experience and perception of space among youth: the initial shock of travel brought about a sense of displacement; increased urban density gave rise to certain mental disorders that may be diagnosed as agoraphobia or claustrophobia in our contemporary psychiatric terms; the recently emerged necessity of commuting to a workplace in an anonymous environment altered the borderlines and forms of privacy; the large-scale migration saw diverse cultural assumptions and practices from different parts of the country collide; and the overall confusion, mystery, and excitement that accompanied these complex sets of events tempted some into voyeurism. In their various travels, young people encountered a social fabric composed of multiple cultural, ethnic, and linguistic strands. An unprecedented sociological phenomenon, the emergence of this population in turn produced a varied set of cultural responses to the conditions its members faced in their everyday lives of perpetual motion.12 The socially dominant reacted to these events along a number of fronts, including campaigns for the establishment of a standardized national language, which arose in response to the encounters with multiple cultural Others and the forced confrontation with constitutive linguistic heterogeneity that accompanied such encounters.13 Within the largely ‘high art’ cultural domain of literary realism, writers responded to the language reform movements by seeking to achieve a style that could claim to represent reality in a fully transparent and accurate way, thereby at once ‘naturalizing’ and consolidating the notion of a standard, authoritative ‘national’ language (with an implicit, paradoxical claim to universal representativity). In the case of Japanese elite modernism,

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now-canonical figures, such as Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Kajii Motojir , undertook various forms of stylistic experimentation on the models of Western high modernists, such as Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and the avant-garde poetry of the dadaists. By contrast, the newly emergent middle-class youth culture focused on adaptive strategies that sought to incorporate, rather than to exclude or imitate, the variety of foreign elements influencing everyday lives during the period. In particular, fiction aimed at this population often featured protagonists who frantically seek to navigate a rapidly changing and complex social environment with no assets other than their own wits and ability with language. The major venue and organ for such narratives was a commercial journal, Shinseinen (New youth, 1920–50), that explicitly marketed itself as a forum for developing the variety of strategies needed to negotiate the challenges of modan raifu (modern life). Shinseinen (New Youth) Magazine A general monthly magazine, Shinseinen was first published in 1920, originally targeting rural, young-adult readers (see illustration 11.2).14 Riding the tide of democratic movements that had arisen since the second decade of the 1900s, early contributors offered a variety of inspirational messages in a highly earnest tone, calling for active participation among youth toward building a peaceful and just society. At the time, such calls were welcomed because of both the widespread hope for a democratic society and the anxiety stemming from the unstable economic conditions in the years following the First World War. Many of Shinseinen’s pages contained didactic stories and essays in an effort to encourage youth to better themselves for larger causes through diligent self-cultivation. Take, for example, the following poem featured in Shinseinen’s first issue. Composed by the writer Shiratori Seigo (1890–1973), a poet and advocate of the popular arts movement, this piece calls for the democratic awakening of youngsters on a global scale. At the same time, however, it exhibits an undertone of the neoConfucian ideology of diligent self-cultivation for the greater purpose of world peace (though a distinctly nationalist impulse remains unmistakable): ‘A Poetic Manifesto to New Youth’15 The fires and the clanging swords are now far away,

1:1 (1920)

6:5 (1925)

9:10 (1928)

14:12 (1933)

Figure 11.2 Shinseinen front cover designs. Note how Shinseinen cover designs became more urbane and international between 1920 and the mid-1930s.

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And the spring has returned. Through the rift in the smoke from the gunpowder explosions, Now look at the new sun. Those who were powerful but wrong have Fallen into the dark destiny. The righteous and powerful ones will work hand in hand, Walking towards the bright light. Oh, League of Nations, democracy. The voices for world reform are rushing on our Far Eastern shores like floods, exciting us, the youth Indeed, the cry for a revolution in this Taisho Era tells us, the youth, That we have an important duty. Look how poor Japan’s human resources are, While we are standing in front of the world. While we hear the news of D’Annunzio’s flight to Japan, our planes are still learning things from dragonflies. When Thomas Woodrow Wilson is roaring like a lion in Paris, Who could idly remain silent like ivory? The world has actually become peaceful. Yet, in the shadows of the bright lights, And in the shadows of the cosmopolitanism in which all are advancing hand in hand, We know that contradictions and falseness are all lurking.

Other literary pieces and essays included in Shinseinen also tried to inspire young readers to pursue higher education and become better prepared in order to contribute to improving the world; such messages were typically delivered in a patriotic and hegemonic tone.16 In addition, many of the reports, travelogues, and memoirs in early issues of Shinseinen touched upon the theme of a newly global mobility by portraying ordinary people’s accomplishments abroad through stories of encounters by fellow Japanese with foreign cultures and peoples, as well as their heroic deeds to help others. One example is a series, published in five instalments in 1921, entitled ‘Hokubei h r  20-nen’ (Wandering in North America for twenty years) by Kat  Ry nosuke, an ordinary man who migrated first from a small farming village to

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Tokyo and then sailed to San Francisco when he was nineteen. An editor’s introduction explains that Kat  migrated to the United States because ‘even Tokyo was too small for him,’ and from ages nineteen to thirty-eight, he made ‘exciting, manly leaps on the grand stage.’ It goes on to say that he ‘experienced great sorrow from unfulfilled love’ with an upper-class Caucasian woman in San Francisco owing to jealous interference from others. Heartbroken, he moved to Fresno, where he ‘fought white men’s prejudice with his great skill with guns,’ became a local celebrity, and was called ‘Captain’ for his brave deeds in helping the local police. Later he moved to South America to lead a successful revolution, travelled in Europe, and helped people during the war between America and Spain. Subsequently, he returned to Asia to fight in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5). After all his ‘brave and heroic actions,’ the editor concludes, the author is finally back in Japan and writing essays about his experiences over the last twenty years.17 Although the magazine initially targeted rural youth, within a few years, it began shifting its target audience to young-adult urbanites, as the youth population continued to migrate from farming and fishing villages to large cities, therewith increasing the market for commercial periodicals.18 Typically, these youths were college students or salaried workers, as well as unemployed job seekers riding the global economic roller coaster. In the midst of the increasing fervour for democratic social change during the 1920s, these young professionals – or professional hopefuls – looked for sophisticated mental exercises to help them digest the flood of new information and ideologies. Shinseinen met their needs in more innovative and appealing ways than did government-approved school material, with its neatly packaged takes on history and social studies.19 Incidentally, Shinseinen began as a sequel periodical to the publisher’s adventure magazine B ken sekai (The world of adventures, 1908–19), which had pursued similar themes of penetrating into the unknown by publishing stories of adventures and expeditions, as well as providing reportage on encounters with foreign cultures and peoples. However, in response to the large-scale social and political changes that marked the period, and which affected the lives of its target audience, the magazine soon adopted a playful and sometimes even self-ironic style, promoting an approach to solving mysteries through a process of ratiocination based on factual information.20 Although discussed most frequently as a trailblazer in promoting mystery fiction as the modern literary genre, Shinseinen also sought to

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provide ideological, scientific, and literary guidance to its readers.21 It published a variety of educational news items on findings in science and technology, informational essays discussing such fields as criminology and economics (often, in the late 1920s to early 1930s, from a Marxist perspective), articles on the latest fashions, travelogues, and journalistic accounts of foreign cultures, customs, and languages. In short, during this period the magazine as a whole sought to help young people manage the increased mobility of modern society and successfully navigate its challenges. Furthermore, each issue of Shinseinen exploited a range of signifying modes and media, offering its readers texts, photographs, cartoons, illustrations, diagrams, charts, and so forth, occasionally linked by a shared theme. Even the featured advertisements frequently referred to the subject at hand. For example, Shinseinen number 5 from 1923 centred on the theme of coding and decoding. It included an informational essay, ‘Kinko seiz sha tai kinko yaburi’ (Safe-makers versus Safecrackers), by Alfred Edgar in Japanese translation, as well as two works of fiction, ‘Ni-sen d ka’ (Two-Sen copper coin), a debut work by arguably the most famous Japanese mystery-fiction writer of the twentieth century, Edogawa Rampo, and ‘Yama mata yama’ (Mountains after mountains), an original story by a leading translator of mystery fiction, Hoshino Tatsuo.22 These pieces and others in several numbers of Shinseinen from 1923 provide information about how to devise a secret code, the purposes of codes used in actuality, and codes in literary fiction. Equally significant, the issues extended the idea of cryptography by showing how one could ‘decode’ even ordinary things in everyday life, such as Japanese traditional music scores and Buddhist sutras. While the majority of Shinseinen’s young readers were not likely to become professional spies or detectives, they could all presumably benefit from these mental exercises. Shinseinen also frequently used multimedia elements, employed in combination, to illustrate new strategies for analysing different forms of expression. For example, as part of a reader participation contest from 1926, the magazine presents a photograph of Charlie Chaplin dressed as the tramp character in the upcoming film Gold Rush. The picture of the highly popular Chaplin is provided as the easiest example of identifying actors disguised as a character in a film (see illustration 11.3). Next, Shinseinen challenges readers to identify other celebrities. Next to Chaplin’s photograph is that of an unidentified actor in character, whose identity the reader is asked to guess from his

Figure 11.3 ‘Nigao to sugao to funs ’ (Caricatures, actual faces, and disguises), Shinseinen 7.1 (1926), frontispiece. Note the surrounding caricatures are by the famed New Yorker caricaturist Alfred Frueh (1880–1968).

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physical and facial characteristics (Harold Lloyd). While Lloyd is yet another fairly easy one to identify, the third to sixth questions present highly abstracted cartoon portraits of celebrities (such as Rudolph Valentino, Will Rogers, and Jack Dempsey) done with stenographic letters. The instructions on the sides of the images invite readers to compare these highly simplified portraits (which apparently contain another coding apparatus in the stenography markings) with more realistic representations of the same actors captured in photographs. This is a playful exercise that draws attention to the duality in acting, acquainting readers with the appearances of both the actual actors and the characters they play. While the above contest borrows American cartoon images presumably published in an American magazine, the feature from issue number 2 of the same year shows Shinseinen’s original images. These images include photographs of two Japanese men, examples of their handwriting, and their fingerprints. Their professions are also given. The feature goes on to explain that these men possess exactly the same name, but spelled with different kanji characters. They are, after all, two different individuals. One is a reporter for a newspaper in Tokyo, and the other works for a newspaper company in Osaka. They are both famous as translators, one for his translation of the French writer Maurice Leblanc, and the other for his translation of the American writer Herman Landon. In addition to their similar careers and talents, the article displays these two Hoshinos’ handwriting to explain how identical they are. Then it asks readers to surmise which Hoshino authored each set of handwritten texts. This is another exercise in nearly identifying individuals, this time employing other types of clues that focus on highly individualistic traits of handwriting. This same issue featured the first of two instalments of Johnston McCulley’s mystery tale ‘The Avenging Twins,’ as well as other stories and essays about various methods of identifying both criminals and victims. In issue number 3 from 1926, an article by a medical researcher, ‘Issues of Individual Identification in Legal Medicine,’ discusses the use of genetic data in legal medicine as a way of identifying individuals.23 The article begins with the definition and purposes of legal medicine and proceeds to discuss actual cases in and outside of Japan. Such elements as these testify to the global scope of interest among readers of Japanese popular expression at the time. In yet another distinctive strategy that explored the fertile interaction among media, Shinseinen instituted a series of cartoon contests. The

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magazine provided a single-frame cartoon and called for readers’ contributions of a witty line to accompany the images, a long-established ploy that has been more recently resurrected in the pages of the New Yorker beginning in 2005. Such mental exercises encouraged readers to see that a given image did not simply provide a passive reader with information, but could be interpreted in a virtually infinite number of ways; each reality was constructed by the viewer through his or her own engagement with the image. As a result, the hybrid texts in Shinseinen promoted an interest in language not as a neutral, transparent medium, but rather as itself a subject of concern and interrogation in its capacity to mediate, and thereby define, ‘reality.’ Furthermore, the process of deciphering highlighted in many of Shinseinen’s literary works drew attention to the active role of language in depicting and even shaping subjectivities. Such primary attention to constituting a ‘language,’ rather than merely conveying an independently existing content, aimed to help readers think analytically and critically about the transformation of Japanese society by identifying hidden meanings and deciphering codes in the texts. Shinseinen even went so far as to solicit readers’ participation in the very production of the magazine by writing their own mystery fiction or joining the editorial staff. In the pages of Shinseinen, a variety of cultural organizations also responded to the needs of the newly emergent population of migrants, helping them navigate the flood of information. For example, the Christian-based Nippon Rikk kai (founded in 1897) published a regular advice column in the magazine, answering questions and dispensing advice about matters concerning immigration, ranging from how to obtain a visa and choosing what foreign languages to learn, to how to purchase land in a foreign country.24 Additionally, occasional short essays provided glimpses of different vocations in various parts of the country and even outside the borders of the nation. Thus, a series appearing in 1921, ‘R d  seinen no shuki’ (Essays by working youths), comprises an assortment of essays and a poem written by a number of authors variously engaged in fishing, textile work, charcoal making, typesetting, pharmacy, and the postal service. ’Merican-Jap Stories as Representative Texts of Youth Anxiety in the 1920s Also appearing in Shinseinen, but approaching travel and migrancy

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from a different angle, was a series of stories by Tani J ji, collectively referred to as the ‘’Merican-Jap’ sequence, which portrays young Japanese male migrants travelling in the United States, from New York to California and from Texas to Michigan, in their everyday struggle for survival. Employing an upbeat and colloquial narrative style, these stories depart from the conventional pattern of the Bildungsroman that underwrote the dominant naturalist lineage of fiction in early twentieth-century Japan. ’Merican-Japs rarely experience spiritual or moral growth, and thereby challenge the notion that a youth’s coming of age is the typically arduous process of attaining to ethical subjectivity. Instead, the protagonists constantly transgress and traverse different classes, races, ethnicities, religions, and languages in their voyages through America. Unlike the more elegant figure of the flâneur, Tani’s characters frantically walk about the shifting and multidimensional environments they experience as America using a survival skill called burafu (bluffing). Collectively, these stories served as a creative textual response to, and mediation of, the experience of migrancy that shaped in both concrete and imaginative terms the everyday lives of Japanese youth during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tani’s stories of young migrants differentiate themselves from the travelogues that often appeared in The World of Adventures and earlier issues of Shinseinen by employing an innovative narrative style that is jumpy and garrulous, mixing American slang into the Japanese text and constantly switching perspectives as though the texts were movies shot by multiple cameras. The following excerpt from ‘Dass ’ (Running away) provides an illustration of the distinctive style that characterizes Tani’s short prose pieces: Speaking of what I find most disgusting, it’s people’s aggressive peddling of kindness dispensed in chopped small pieces, when they decide there must be something good they can do for others. And that’s my prologue to this story. Now, let me tell ya – 25

By starting with this throwaway remark, this story opens with a highly colloquial rhythm, providing the image of a storyteller facing his audience. The subsequent sentences continue in this chatty, confiding tone: That was when the train stopped squeaking. The inside of the car was all green, because of the fresh green of the spring leaves reflecting into the car

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through the windows. I heard birds chirping. – Let me tell ya that this is countryside in the central part of America. The train was an express [written both in Japanese characters as tokky· and spelled out in a phonetic transliteration of the English word, ‘express’] from Toledo to Cleveland.26

The double line typesetting, with the Japanese kanji characters on the bottom and their phonetic reading on top, was not unusual in Japanese printing, especially in magazines for younger readers. Such phonetic readings were necessary for those unfamiliar with advanced characters. However, Tani J ji was one of the first to use English words on top of Japanese words. As a result, these polyphonic lines add further garrulousness and a seemingly haphazard quality to the narrative, which occasionally digresses from topic to topic and even switches viewpoints: ‘Hey, you are getting off here,’ said a deep voice. That’s the conductor. Conductors in America speak rough. The person the conductor spoke to in that manner was a young man sitting in front of him. It’s an oriental man, a little odd kind to see around here. He is smiling politely, but it’s a strange sort of smile – It’s as if he were doing his best to move his ears so that he could bare his teeth. Rather it looked like he was exercising his facial muscles. Everybody was looking at him as if they were watching a rare animal.27

As soon as the young man gets off, the passengers burst into laughter as if they had been watching a comedy show. Up to this point, the story has been told in the third person. But, in the third paragraph, the narrative voice abruptly switches to the first person (watashi) or the ‘I’ who has travelled all the way from Japan to a small town in Ohio in order to go to college: I – who literally kept running all the way from Japan day and night – with my scholarly mind flaming up – oh, please, my scholarly mind, stop flaring up like that – so, I placed my glorious first step in this college town in the countryside of this State. A row of huge elm trees covered both sides of the white street, and between those trees, old houses were scattered. A breeze would pass through the lace curtains in the windows, and a floor piece [i.e., a rug] hung on a rack. Beside the floor piece was a flock of chickens pecking at the soil – After all, this is what I had learned [about America] in the National Reader III. And I hear cicadas in the distance.28

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This story describes an occasion when a recently emigrated Japanese man perceives a tangible gap between his own self-image and the one being imposed on him by Americans, namely, the disparity between the self-image of a man who has excellent literary skills in his own language, and that of an Asian with little ability to communicate in English. Dramatizing the frustrating conflict between the narrator’s garrulousness in his native Japanese and his relative silence in English, the story is presented in fragments, multiple points of view, and the forced collision of two language systems. Casual as it sounds in translation, the original Japanese passage also employs uncommon, even strange, diction, as if to convey the artificiality of the expression and the handicap that the well-educated Japanese youth experiences as he faces the reality of English-speaking quotidian life in the United States. In this scenario, the ‘Pacific Rim’ and the ‘West’ come into conflict as incommensurate systems of signification and even epistemology. Tani J ji’s own life experience exemplifies that of the emergent group of ‘new youth,’ or mobo (modern boys) and moga (modern girls), to use the vogue terms from that era.29 Taking up the government’s call to ‘launch out abroad,’ Tani migrated first from his home in Hakodate to Tokyo, and then from Tokyo to the American Midwest, where he wandered about for four years from 1920 to 1924, after withdrawing from Oberlin College in Ohio in his first semester of study. After these years of transience, Tani returned to Japan on a freighter, on which he worked illegally as a boiler man. Although he was soon making plans to return to America, the Immigration Exclusion Act of 1924 made entering the United States a second time extremely difficult. At this point, Tani began writing the ’Merican-Jap short stories and sending them to Shinseinen.30 During the next ten years, before his early death due to exhaustion from overwork in 1935, Tani became the most commercially successful writer of genre fiction, taking in at the height of his career approximately 78,000 yen per year, earning a hundred times the starting annual salary for bank clerks, an ‘unparalleled’ amount for a writer.31 In a way similar to Fernando Pessoa’s use of pseudonyms, each of which represented a different authorial personality and writing style, Tani J ji used one of three names – Tani J ji, Maki Itsuma, and Hayashi Fub  – for his narratives in various distinct genres, including the multilingual and garrulous stories of ’Merican-Japs, as well as romance novels, mystery fiction, and samurai fiction. In writing samurai stories, Tani created one of the most famous heroes (or rather, antiheroes) in modern Japanese vernacular literature, Tange Sazen. Under

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all his various pen names, he achieved astonishing levels of production and sales. Within Tani’s considerable body of work, however, his ’Merican-Jap stories deserve special attention because of their immense popularity. The enthusiastic response to the stories led to an increase in sales of Shinseinen during the second half of the 1920s. Their appeal for young readers stems from their dual role as journalistic reports of the quotidian lives of Japanese migrants in the United States, which could provide vital knowledge for their own future migration, and as satirical engagements with the increasingly capitalist and multi-lingual modern society within Japan itself.32 While the ’Merican-Jap stories are modernist in their foregrounding of the capacity of language itself to produce various ‘estrangement effects,’ Tani’s style and themes differ from the conventional high modanizumu of writers such as Yokomitsu Riichi and It  Sei. Notably, they did not arise primarily out of a desire to adapt, mimic, or otherwise reproduce the achievements of Western writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot. Rather, Tani proudly depicts the vernacular and common responses of modern, middle-class youth to their intra-national and international migrations during the interwar years. A key element in Tani’s vernacular modernism is the survival strategy of ‘strategic bluffing’ (burafu), which bears a structural resemblance to what moral philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt has discussed in his work On Bullshit (2005). Like Frankfurt’s conception of the verb ‘to bullshit,’ burafu manifests whenever ‘a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic,’ and not necessarily because the speaker wants to lie and trick others.33 The circumstances faced by the ’Merican-Jap characters in their daily struggles for survival demand just such pressed, quick responses, even (or perhaps especially) when a character has no knowledge of a given subject. Moreover, the perpetually digressing, verbose narrative style indicates that even the narrator of the stories engages in the practice of bluffing in order to negotiate between America and Japan, and between English and Japanese. Far from a trivial feature, the strategy of burafu that marks these stories at different levels reflects Tani’s larger concern with the power of vernacular language in contrast to that of formal or state-sanctioned discourse. Through this strategy, Tani examines and warps American colloquial English of the Jazz Age in an attempt to critique the lived reality (as opposed to textbook depictions) of the capitalist giant, the United States,

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from the liminal perspective of Japanese hobos travelling in a WASPdominated American society that was experiencing an increase in anti-Japanese sentiment at the time.34 Tani frequently gives idiosyncratic representation in Japanese of the phonetics of colloquial spoken English, ignoring established standardized spellings, as seen in examples of nonsensical combinations of sounds such as ‘azumori’ for ‘admiral,’ ‘eiri’ for ‘eighty,’ and ‘semichi’ for ‘sandwich.’ On the other hand, the narrator laughs at the Americanized pronunciations of Japanese words like ‘Yokoheima’ (for Yokohama) and ‘jujutsu’ (for j·jutsu).35 He also employs playful bilingual puns such as the use of the classical-sounding Japanese phrase ‘setsu ni’ (sincerely) to mean ‘certainly,’ which is given as a polite response to different requests, showing the ’Merican-Jap’s pride in the mistaken notion that Japanese is spoken by Americans because of its universal influence. Similarly, one narrator refers to Philadelphia as ‘furu d fu-ya’ (a shop that sells old tofu),36 demonstrating a phonetic displacement, but with the hint of mockery directed at a major American city. The author also takes full advantage of the rubi (ruby) system, a common practice in youth magazines in the early twentieth century, to spell a hot dog as ‘atsui inu’ (literally, ‘hot’ and ‘dog’). The humour arising from the use of such a calque highlights the different metaphoricity of another language (English, in this case). In this instance, Tani not only undercuts the tendency at the time to view English as a privileged vehicle for modern, logical rationality, but also subtly reverses a common derogatory stereotype in the West of Asians in general as ‘dog eaters.’37 The narratives of ’Merican-Jap stories almost always jump from one topic to another through a process of phonetic association rather than by unfolding according to a more conventional structure of causal or temporal development. The verbose narrators fire off words one after another, often by omitting copulas and listing materials and phenomena, rather than developing a story that has a conventional beginning, climax, and ending. By focusing on the absurd effects arising from an attention to the sound of vernacular English diction, Tani relativizes the value of English as a hegemonic language of modern rationality. Such a move also implicitly touts the flexibility of Japanese and its capacity to serve as a medium for representing experience on a newly global scale. ‘The Shanghaied Man’ While most of Tani’s ’Merican-Jap narratives share the interlingual or

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translingual phonologocentrism described above, one story in particular approaches the relation between multiple languages and the fluidity of identity or nationality in an especially sophisticated manner. Beneath the surface of seemingly lighthearted cleverness in ‘The Shanghaied Man,’ Tani inverts the rules and logical conventions of orthodox mystery fiction, thereby displaying a nuanced conception of the heterogeneity and multivalence of language, as well as the volatility of identity that arises as an effect of global migrancy. Thus, instead of restoring a conservative social order through his successful resolution of a conundrum, the young male protagonist of the story loses his name (i.e., his identity) and nationality (i.e., his affiliation), yet also manages to commit a crime and avoid capture by the police through his use of language to reshape his identity and subjectivity. The story concludes with an image of the young man launching out on a journey of perpetual wandering, unmoored from ties to any nation and transgressing national borders. As such, the story reflects the lives of young Japanese adults in the 1920s, many of whom were in a state of constant transition and migration for economic reasons. More specifically, ‘The Shanghaied Man’ eloquently displays the process by which a detective’s language ultimately shapes the ‘truth’ about a murder case. But the suspect protagonist reshapes such reality to his own advantage. While the story appears to proceed from the revelation of a murder to the search for the killer and, finally, to the resolution of the case, this piece satirically inverts the conventional chain of causality characterizing mystery fiction, suggesting that what is presented as logical and scientific evidence can be re-examined from different angles and perspectives to reveal a more complex system of social causation. The very title of this story (Shanhai sareta otoko) cleverly gestures toward the (unwilling) movement of bodies and language around the Pacific that I have been emphasizing throughout my discussion. Presented in both kanji (which originated as Chinese characters imported into Japan) and hiragarana, the neologistic Japanese title adapts a slang term in English meaning ‘to kidnap for the purpose of forced labour.’ Moreover, the American slang term itself derives from the redeployment of a Chinese place name. Such complexity of linguistic and cultural provenance plays out even more forcefully in the narrative itself. The protagonist of this story, Mori Tamekichi, is a young Japanese man who has ceased to belong to any specific country over the course of his years spent travelling the world as a sailor under different flags. Currently out of work, he checks in at the seamen’s lodging houses in

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the cosmopolitan port town of Kobe, Japan, to see if there are any jobs on long-distance lines posted on their bulletin boards.38 At the end of a fruitless day, he finds himself sharing a room with another unemployed sailor, Sakamoto Shintar . However, when Tamekichi gets up the following morning, he is met not by Shintar  but a detective, who declares that Tamekichi is the prime suspect in his roommate’s murder. The detective lists a string of evidence implicating him: the fact that Shintar  has been missing since the previous night and that Tamekichi was Shintar ’s roommate; a large pool of blood found in front of the inn; Shintar ’s belongings scattered at the end of a fifty-metre trail of blood that continues from the inn to the nearby wharf; a fresh cut on Tamekichi’s finger; and the discovery of Shintar ’s knife in Tamekichi’s pocket. The only remaining evidence needed to clinch the case is, most important of all, the physical object of Shintar ’s body. The story invites Shinseinen readers to identify with Tamekichi because the unstable narrative voice repeatedly describes him as being uncertain about his own identity or actions (the story is narrated in the third person, but Takemichi provides the focalizing consciousness of the narrative). He is not sure what he did in his sleep the previous night, and his confusion about even his own self-identity is tied to the fact that he has no job or family. As the detective walks him to the police station, Tamekichi remains unperturbed, watching the events unfold with a detached eye. His desire to return to sea is more important to him than proving his innocence, as ‘his long life as a vagabond taught him to adopt a devil-may-care attitude toward himself,’ indicating that geopolitical borders and established ethical, legal, and moral rules no longer obtain for the perpetual migrant.39 Thus, driven by a strong longing for the sea and foreign ports, and knowing that his arrest will prevent him from enjoying such a life again, he grabs the detective by the leg and knocks him over. He runs to a nearby Norwegian ship that is hoisting its anchor, and shouts to the foreign sailors for help in ‘the brand of English understood the world over only by men who sail the sea.’ This communication between Tamekichi and the sailors is done smoothly and quickly because they speak the hybrid language that does not belong to any particular nation. Instead, it belongs only to the world of international sailors, whose members are constantly changing. The ship has already set sail by the time the detective gets to his feet and arrives at the wharf. He shouts that Tamekichi is a killer, and he repeats the Japanese word, hitogoroshi (killer), in an attempt to communicate with the sailors. The word, however, is meaningless to the for-

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eign sailors, who hear it merely as a string of funny sounds. The scene portrays the powerlessness of language outside of its own culture. English – or more specifically the hybrid English used among the sailors whose ‘identities have become unknown’ during such a nomadic life – has become the best language for Tamekichi to express himself as a person without a singular identity. This invented or hybrid language is emphasized by the story’s constant reference to the special vocabulary of seamen, and to the multivalence of the terms glossed with rubi or furigana.40 Having escaped from the detective, Tamekichi signs his name in romanization as ‘Shintar  Sakamoto’ on his dummy work contract. He then begins happily working on the ship as Shintar , or ‘Shin Saki, second-class mate on the Victor Karenina,’ and regains a concrete identity, so to speak. Only later that night does he think of the crime that he was accused of committing, and he falls into ‘a perverse state of mind in which he truly believes he did commit the crime of which he was accused.’ Still, he does not care, because by now he is completely cut off from Japan. However, he wakes up the next morning only to discover the ship has been called back to port and the Kobe police are after him. While Tamekichi might have been physically cut off from Japan the previous night, his fate actually remained under the control of Japan owing to the power of shortwave radio – one of the new, popular technologies that fascinated youngsters of the time. The irony here is that, while young people may be able to migrate and wander out of their confined physical space thanks to modern technology, as soon as they think they are liberated, technology arises as an invisible fence to confine them, unless they obey the government’s rules and officially become expatriates under existing law. The chief mate and the boatswain report that the Japanese authorities will arrive soon to arrest Tamekichi and suggest he hide in the boiler room. They continue to be indifferent to the matter of murder, so long as Tamekichi contributes to the boat as a skilled labourer. In other words, laws, which may be absolute on land, are suspended at sea. Tamekichi descends to the hold of the ship and hides in a space by an unfired donkey boiler surrounded by water pipes. Soon, he hears someone tapping out the telegraphic code of the wireless, or ‘the universal ABC code by which every nation communicated’: ‘tap, tap, tap, scraaatch.’ Tamekichi decodes the message as ‘S.O.S.’ Using the penknife he borrowed from Shintar  the previous night, he taps on a pipe to send a reply: ‘What’s the matter?’ The answer is ‘have been shang-

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haied.’41 Tamekichi hurriedly opens the door to the cold boiler, and out crawls Shintar , who explains that he was shanghaied by the sailors of Victor Karenina when he stepped outside late at night. The people who saved Tamekichi’s life are, ironically enough, the actual criminals and the source of Tamekichi’s trouble with the police. At this point, the narrative describes Tamekichi holding the knife in a backhand grip and starting to grin like a lunatic, and the guiding consciousness of the narrative shifts for a moment to Shintar , looking at Tamekichi’s grin. Then Tamekichi asks himself: Wasn’t he supposed to be dead, having been murdered by none other than myself? Tamekichi’s mind kept turning the idea over and over. That’s right. I killed him just like the detective said. How dare this pale shadow suddenly wander out of nowhere and ruin everything for me! ... According to the evidence, I’m the lowly bastard who murdered him. ... Yes, it was the detective’s idea. He’s the one who suggested it all. Everything is going to be just like he said it would.42

The detective’s bluffing has seeped into Tamekichi’s brain. It now has the power to influence him to commit the murder foretold at the beginning of the story. Finally, ‘The Shanghaied Man’ ends on an expressly vague note: Everything was just as the police said. Sakamoto Shintar  was dead. At the same time, a man named Mori Tamekichi had disappeared from the face of the earth. Gone. Lost forever. Shortly after the Norwegian ship, the SS Victor Karenina, weighed anchor at Kobe and set out for the high seas, a big bundle wrapped in sailcloth, with a heavy weight attached, was thrown overboard into the surging waves. On deck, whistling and smiling, Sakamoto Shintar  bid his final adieu to Japan. Following the timehonored custom that is the unwritten code among seamen the world over, neither Sakamoto Shintar , who was the ‘shanghaied man,’ nor Sakamoto Shintar , who was ‘the man who shanghaied himself,’ ever stepped on land again.43

Thus, the actual killing in ‘The Shanghaied Man’ takes place only at the very end, and it is catalysed by suggestions deriving from the seemingly logical explanation of the detective. It is also the case that Tamekichi ‘dies’ twice: first, when he signs himself on as Shintar , and, second, when he murders the original Shintar , who has crawled out of the

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boiler and identified him, once again, as ‘Tamekichi.’ This theme of the suggestive power of language is explored through the communication, or lack thereof, between individuals of various backgrounds. The list of conflicts between languages in this story includes Japanese versus English, the terminology of interrogation versus the jobless delinquent’s slang, the language of the police versus that of the sailors, national languages versus the universal Morse code, the slang belonging to the sailors on international lines versus domestic lines, and different idioms belonging to different social classes. The encounters among these various languages and their respective cultures produce identity articulated in opposition to the fact of other language systems. In the more journalistic stories about ’Merican-Japs that Tani wrote for Shinseinen, he repeatedly portrayed young Japanese male migrants getting jobs by feats of verbal ingenuity, such as presenting themselves as excellent cooks or as filial sons trying to support sick mothers. One of Tani’s ’Merican-Jap narrators also ties such mundane verbal artistry with the act of writing, boasting that imagination and wits are what help young people like him make a living by publishing stories. ‘The Shanghaied Man’ steers away from the journalistic posture that characterizes the majority of the ’Merican-Jap stories. And, in doing so, it gives a deeply ambivalent illustration of both the freedom and the danger attendant upon the condition of modern global migrancy. A concern with wandering and contingent identity resonated with Japanese youths during the 1920s. Such a concern helps to explain the broad appeal of the theme in the popular literature of the time. The early twentieth century was a time of increasing migrations among ordinary Japanese, especially the newly emergent middle class. Young people travelled from the countryside to large cities, dreaming of career success and improved modern life in general. However, in many cases, even after finding jobs in large cities such as Tokyo, they did not cease travelling. Salaried workers commuted daily from newly developed suburbia to downtown by modern mass-transportation systems like trains and buses. A large number of young people also continued drifting abroad looking for a better life, with ambitions of climbing up the social ladder by labouring at foreign farms and returning to Japan with savings, or by earning higher degrees at universities in the West and securing good posts at home. Such migrancy prompted literary expressions with decidedly modernist approaches. This essay has focused on Tani J ji’s work as one exemplary case of such linguistic and literary innovations. Tani portrays

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the linguistic disadvantages of Japanese wanderers in the United States by contrasting fragmented and brief reported dialogues with garrulous narrative voices. To highlight the fragmented realities of modern times, he also employs multiple and shifting narrative perspectives on Japanese hobos and other social components of America. Tani’s keen interest in exploring language as a tool for examining and expressing multiple and fragmented realities may be situated in the larger context of Shinseinen’s editorial emphasis on mystery stories. The magazine considered mystery fiction as the literary genre that most effectively highlighted the utility of language for navigating a society in flux. In the early 1920s, through the promotion of more orthodox whodunits, Shinseinen had presented language as the logical tool for coolly examining criminal confessions and witnessing testimony, and for putting fragmented and multiple ‘realities’ back in order. The dénouement in such stories invariably arrives when the authorities restore the social order, whether in or outside Japan. Such plots may be seen to be closely linked to the nationalist and colonialist enthusiasm for ‘launching abroad,’ an ideology promoted by the government and embraced by ordinary individuals. In the mid-1920s, however, Shinseinen began publishing increasingly subversive mystery stories whose interest was in using language to create infinite ‘realities’ from the perspectives of criminals or tricksters. By placing mystery stories side by side with informational essays providing readers with materials and ideas for their own original work, Shinseinen drew readers to the active pursuit of creating their own versions of reality.

NOTES 1 Tellingly, the kanji characters (Chinese characters used in the Japanese writing system) for ‘Shinsaku’ mean ‘New Production.’ 2 By this, I do not mean to simply define modernization as Westernization, but to suggest that Western-style customs and items were used in cultural productions to indicate the levels of modernization in everyday life. See, for example, Isoda K ichi, Shis  to shite no Tokyo: Kindai bungaku-shi ron n to [Tokyo as ideology: Notes for the history of modern Japanese literature]. 3 In her provocative essay, ‘The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,’ Miriam Bratu Hansen defines the notion of vernacular modernism in the following terms: ‘I take the study of modernist aesthetics to encompass cultural practices that both articulated

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Kyoko Omori and mediated the experience of modernity, such as the mass-produced and mass-consumed phenomena of fashion, design, advertising, architecture and urban environment, of photography, radio, and cinema. I am referring to this kind of modernism as “vernacular” (and avoiding the ideologically overdetermined term “popular”) because the term vernacular combines the dimension of the quotidian, of everyday usage, with connotations of discourse, idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, and translatability’ (60). While Hansen focuses her discussion of vernacular modernism specifically on film, her definition of the term obviously remains relevant for understanding other mass media (including popular literary texts) from the early twentieth century. Shinseinen was published from 1920 to 1950 by one of the largest publishers of the time in Japan, Tokyo’s Hakubunkan. See Shinseinen fukkoku-ban [Reprint of Shinseinen, 1920–1950]. I use the term ‘hobos’ that Tani phonetically transliterates and inserts into his Japanese text. The Japanese government restricted international trade during this period to dealings with the Dutch, Chinese, Koreans, Ainu, and Ryukyuans at a limited number of ports. For information about moral education focusing on the concept of jinkaku (roughly, ‘the individual with a certain moral character’), see Kyoko Inoue, Individual Dignity in Modern Japanese Thought. See Kawamura Minato, ‘Imin to kimin’ [Sending people, shedding people], and, for related issues, see Kawamura’s book, Sakubun no naka no Dai-nihon teikoku [The Great Nippon Empire in school essay exercises]. For data of ‘Kaigai kakuchi zairy· honp  naichi-jin shokugy betsu jink  hy ’ [A list of population of Japanese nationals abroad: Grouped by their vocations], see also Nihon teikoku t kei nenkan: 1905–1914 [The Empire of Japan: Census yearbooks for 1905–14)] . These yearbooks were originally published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Japan. This increasing level of migrancy was a product of technological advancements that enabled the mass production of goods and high-speed transportation, as well as the globalizing/globalized economy that colonial Western powers promoted and Japan participated in since at least the First World War. As a result, Japan became increasingly susceptible to both the upward and downward changes in the international economic network. Modern emigration from Japan began in 1868 when an American businessman recruited 150 Japanese to sugar plantations in Hawai’i and 40 to

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Guam. In 1885, the Japanese and Hawaiian governments officially concluded the Immigration Convention and began the long-term project of sending 29,000 Japanese to Hawai’i over the next nine years. Outside of such government-assisted immigration, Japanese also migrated to South Pacific locations such as Thursday Island, New Caledonia, Australia, and Fiji, again, for economic reasons. Also in 1893, several Japanese intellectuals, politicians, and government officials started an organization called Shokumin Ky kai (the Colonization Society). As the name pithily suggests, the purpose of the organization was to promote the construction of overseas Japanese colonies, so that the country could provide the overflowing domestic labour force with opportunities for jobs. Such colonies, of course, would also provide additional markets for exported commercial goods from Japan. We see examples of this strategy in the establishment of an agricultural colony in Mexico in 1897, and the subsequent immigration of Japanese to Peru for contract work starting in 1899. Nihon no 100-nen: 20-seiki ga wakaru dêta bukku [Japan over a hundred years: Data book on the 20th century), table 2-7: ‘Fuken-betsu jink  I’ [Census on population changes divided by prefectures I], 49–55; table 2-17: ‘Jink  kaiky·-betsu no shich son-s·’ [Number of municipalities divided in different population size rankings], 70; and table 2-18: ‘Toshi no jink  no hensen I’ (Changes in population in cities I], 71. For additional discussion of the youth population and its quotidian experiences, see David R. Ambaras, Bad Youth. Tomi Suzuki gives a concise description of the process of standardization of Japanese language in conjunction with a series of movements aiming at the genbun-itchi (unification of the spoken and written languages) in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. See Suzuki, Narrating the Self, especially 42–8. Most significantly, the genbun-itchi movement gained momentum after the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5), which convinced the Japanese of the decline of Chinese civilization and led to a devaluation of the authority of a Chinese-based writing system. Additionally, in 1895, the linguist Ueda Kazutoshi argued that the establishment of a standard national language (hy jungo, kokugo) was the foremost priority of a modern nation-state. In 1900, the government began promoting the establishment of a national, standardized vernacular language. See also Massimiliano Tomasi’s Rhetoric in Modern Japan for further information on the development of narrative style in modern times. The publisher, Hakubunkan, conceptualized Shinseinen as targeting teenagers in the villages in the countryside, that is, the same target readership

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Kyoko Omori as for their other magazines, N gy  sekai [The world of agriculture] and Ch·gaku sekai [The world of high school]. ‘Atarashiki seinen ni geki suru uta’ [A poetic manifesto to new youth], Shinseinen 1.1 (January 1920), frontispiece. The poet was also known as Shiratori Sh go, which is a slightly different reading of the kanji characters for his actual name, Shirotori Seigo. Translation by Kyoko Omori. For the ideology of sh·y  and, more widely, the education of self-improvement in the Meiji period, see Kyoko Inoue’s Individual Dignity in Modern Japanese Thought. Kat  Ry·nosuke, ‘Hokubei h r  20-nen’ [Wandering in North America for twenty years]. The editor’s unsigned introduction to the serialization appears at the beginning of the first instalment in Shinseinen 2.4 (1921): 104. From 1920 to its last issue in 1950, Shinseinen always placed the mystery genre as its centrepiece. However, its editorial directions shifted rather dramatically at pivotal moments of political, economic, or social change. Shinseinen’s early years were marked by the economic boom, technologization, and the popular fervour for democratic society (represented by desire for universal suffrage) that followed the First World War; it experienced heavy censorship by the increasingly militarist government from the late 1920s into the Second World War; and, during the Occupation Era in the second half of the 1940s, the magazine once again shifted its editorial direction under the US Occupation. For a discussion of the nation’s tendency to package history neatly and the occasionally chaotic state of different information and ideologies coexisting, see Harry Harootunian, ‘Shadowing History.’ Shinseinen’s third editor-in-chief, Yokomizo Seishi, declared in 1927 that the knowledge and skills readers were gleaning from Shinseinen – and more particularly from the serialization called ‘Shinseinen shumi k za’ (literally, ‘Shinseinen taste lectures,’ a lecture series designed to help the readers acquire the refined ‘new youth’ taste) – would be useful for their shumi (hobbies or tastes), namely, things that would bring personal pleasure and a sense of satisfaction about their own sophistication, rather than for socially useful nationalistic goals. See Yokomizo Seishi, ‘Shinsenen shumi k za’ and ‘Hensh·kyoku yori’ [From the editing room]. See Nakajima Kawatar , ed., Shinseinen kessaku-sen [Shinseinen best works]; Shinseinen Kenky·kai [Shinseinen Research Group], ed., Shinseinen dokuhon: Showa gurafiti [Shinseinen reader: Showa graffiti]; Suzuki Sadami, Sh wa bungaku no tame ni: fikushon no ry ryaku [For the literature of the Showa Era: Understanding fiction].

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22 Shinseinen 4.5 (April 1923): 194–201, 244–63, 330–51. 23 Furuhata Tanemoto, ‘H igaku-j  no mondai to naru kojin shikibetsu’ [Medicolegal issues of individual identification]. 24 Francis Xavier, a founding member of the Society of Jesus, established the first mission in Japan as early as the sixteenth century. However, Christianity was restricted until the mid-nineteenth century, when the Meiji government withdrew religious sanctions. Missionaries began founding schools in Japan in the late 1800s. Nippon Rikk kai never became an institution of higher education, but as an organization it functioned to give advice on studying abroad to youngsters from less privileged families. 25 Tani J ji, ‘Dass ’ [Running away], 150. Translation by Kyoko Omori. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. The ‘National Readers’ series by Motoki Sadao was a series of English textbooks published by Sakakibara Bunsei-d  in the early decades of the 1900s in Japan. 29 For further information regarding mobo and moga, see the exhibition catalogue Modern Boy, Modern Girl. 30 For details about immigration laws in the 1920s, see Mitziko Sawada’s Tokyo Life, New York Dreams. 31 See Sh·kan Asahi Magazine Editorial Staff, ed., Nedanshi nenpy  and Iwasaki Jir , ed., Bukka no ses  100nen for comparisons of prices and salaries. Tani’s sister recalls him holding a manuscript paper and declaring that he would surpass what Kikuchi Kan, his archrival, was making – namely, ten yen per page – to earn twelve yen per page. The issue of whether to regard writers as moneymakers began drawing the attention of writers and critics by the 1920s in the general context of a heightened interest in Marxist thought. See Satomi Ton’s ‘Bungei no shokugy -ka ni tsuite’ [On the professionalization of literary art], as well as Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke’s ‘Geijutsu no shokugy -ka ni tsuite’ [On the professionalization of art] (1924), in Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke bungei hy ron zensh·, 3: 207–12; and ‘Bungaku no shokugy -ka to saitei genk ry  mondai.’ [On the professionalization of literature and the issue of the minimum wage for manuscripts] (1929), in Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke bungei hy ron zensh·, 3: 328–33. 32 The former editors of Shinseinen all agreed that Tani’s immense popularity was what brought fortune to Shinseinen, leading to an increase in sales during the second half of the 1920s. The first editor-in-chief pointed out that Tani’s works gave Shinseinen a ‘contemporary feeling’ (jidai kankaku) that it lacked when it had focused on tantei sh setsu (mystery fiction) of a more serious nature prior to 1925. Tani’s short-shorts offer satiric journal-

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Kyoko Omori istic accounts of news incidents and their socio-cultural aspects, as told by individuals of different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds involved. See ‘Shinseinen rekidai hensh·ch  zadankai’ [Round-table discussion by the editors-in-chief of Shinseinen]. Frankfurt, On Bullshit, 63. For historical and literary studies on anti-Japanese and anti-Asian sentiment, see Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore; Robert G. Lee, Orientals; David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American; and Colleen Lye, America’s Asia. Tani J ji, ‘Sail, Ho,’ 188, 190. Tani J ji, ‘Maruu Shippu’ [Mar· Ship], 169. Tani J ji, ‘Bonsà Jimmy’ [Bouncer Jimmy], 121. The story explains that the seamen’s lodging houses, ‘in addition to being places to sleep, served as employment agencies for jobless sailors’ (Tani J ji, ‘The Shanghaied Man,’ 528). Ibid., 533. For example, the title of the story contains the verbalized place name, shanhai-sareru (to be shanghaied), which is slang among seamen. The text also includes Japanese terms in kanji characters dubbed with the rubi fonts on the right side of the main text lines to indicate the (English or pidgin English) equivalents. This helps to convey the sense that the actual language spoken among these drifters is highly creolized. Tani J ji, ‘The Shanghaied Man,’ 537. The Oxford English Dictionary (online version) cites an article appearing in the New York Tribune in 1871 as the earliest usage of the term in English. Tani J ji was the first to employ the term in a Japanese literary context. Tani J ji, ‘The Shanghaied Man,’ 538–9. Ibid., 539.

SOURCES CITED Ambaras, David R. Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Furuhata, Tanemoto. ‘H igaku-j  no mondai to naru kojin shikibetsu’ [Medicolegal issues of individual identification]. Shinseinen 7.3 (1926): 269–75. Hansen, Miriam Bratu. ‘The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism.’ Modernism /Modernity 6.2 (1999): 59–77.

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Harootunian, Harry. ‘Shadowing History.’ Cultural Studies 18.2–3 (March/May 2004): 181–200. Hirabayashi, Hatsunosuke. ‘Bungaku no shokugy -ka to saitei genk ry  mondai’ [On the professionalization of literature and the issue of the minimum wage for manuscripts] (1929). In Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke bungei hy ron zensh·, vol. 3, 328–33. Tokyo: Bunsend  Shoten, 1975. – ‘Geijutsu no shokugy -ka ni tsuite’ [On the professionalization of art] (1924). In Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke bungei hy ron zensh·, vol. 3, 207–12. Tokyo: Bunsend  Shoten, 1975. Inoue, Kyoko. Individual Dignity in Modern Japanese Thought: The Evolution of the Concept of Jinkaku in Moral and Educational Discourse. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2001. Isoda, K ichi. Shis  to shite no Tokyo: Kindai bungaku-shi ron n to [Tokyo as ideology: Notes for the history of modern Japanese literature]. Tokyo: Kokubunsha, 1990. Iwasaki, Jir , ed. Bukka no ses  100nen [A chronology of prices: From the late nineteenth through late twentieth centuries in Japan]. Tokyo: Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1982. Kat , Ry·nosuke, ‘Hokubei h r  20-nen’ [Wandering in North America for twenty years]. Shinseinen, vol. 2, nos. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 (1921). Kawamura, Minato. ‘Imin to kimin’ [Sending people, shedding people]. Kokubungaku:kaishaku to ky zai no kenky· 44.12 (October 1999): 44–50. – Sakubun no naka no Dai-nihon teikoku [The Great Nippon Empire in school essay exercises]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002. Lee, Robert G. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999. Lye, Colleen. America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Madamu to ny b  [The neighbour’s wife and mine]. Directed by Gosho Heinosuke. Performances by Watanabe Atsushi, Tanaka Kinuyo, and Date Satoko. 1931. Modern Boy, Modern Girl: Modernity in Japanese Art, 1910–1935. By Chiaki Ajioka and Jackie Menzies. Sydney, NSW: Art Gallery of NSW, 1998. Nakajima, Kawatar , ed. Shinseinen kessaku-sen [Shinseinen best works]. 5 vols. Tokyo: Ripp· Shob , 1970. Nihon no 100-nen: 20-seiki ga wakaru dêta bukku [Japan over a hundred years: Data book on the twentieth century]. 4th ed. Edited by Yano K tar  Kinenkai. Tokyo: Kokuseisha, 2000. Nihon teikoku t kei nenkan: 1905–1914 [The Empire of Japan: Census yearbooks, 1905–14). Reprinted as volume 3 of Senzenki shakai jigyo tokei shiryoshu [The

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collection of sources for data on society and industry in the pre–Second World War period), and volume 4 [Census yearbooks, 1915–33]. Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sentà, 1999. Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. ‘R d  seinen no shuki’ [Essays by working youths]. Shinseinen 2.3 (March 1921): 120–5. Satomi, Ton. ‘Bungei no shokugy -ka ni tsuite’ [On the professionalization of literary art]. Kaiz  6.3 (March 1924): 230–4 and 6.5 (May 1924): 236–9. Sawada, Mitziko. Tokyo Life, New York Dreams: Urban Japanese Visions of America, 1890–1924. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996. Shinseinen fukkoku-ban [Reprint of Shinseinen, 1920–50]. Tokyo: Hon no Tomosha, 1993–2002. Shinseinen Kenky·kai [Shinseinen Research Group], ed. Shinseinen dokuhon: Showa graffiti [Shinseinen reader: Showa graffiti]. Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 1988. ‘Shinseinen rekidai hensh·ch  zadankai’ [Round-table discussion by the editors-in-chief of Shinseinen]. H seki (December 1982): 98–119. Shiratori, Sh go. ‘Atarashiki seinen ni geki suru uta’ [A poetic manifesto to new youth]. Shinseinen 1.1 (January 1920), frontispiece. Sh·kan Asahi Magazine Editorial Staff, ed. Nedanshi nenpy : Meiji, Taisho, Showa. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1988. Suzuki, Sadami. Shinseinen dokuhon [Shinseinen reader]. Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 1988. – Sh wa bungaku no tame ni: fikushon no ry ryaku [For the literature of the Showa Era: Understanding fiction]. Tokyo: Shich sha, 1989. Suzuki, Tomi. Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston: Little Brown, 1998. Tani, J ji. ‘Bonsà Jimmy’ [Bouncer Jimmy]. Shinseinen 7.9 (August 1926): 120–6. – ‘Dass ’ [Running away]. Shinseinen 6.7 (June 1925): 150–6. – ‘Maruu Shippu’ [Mar· Ship]. Shinseinen 7.5 (April 1926): 169–75. – ‘Sail, Ho.’ Shinseinen 7.7 (Special issue on selected Japanese works, 1926): 185–91. – ‘The Shanghaied Man.’ Translated by Kyoko Omori. In The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, Volume 1, edited by J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel, 527–39. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. The original text in Japanese, ‘Shanhai sareta otoko,’ appeared in Shinseinen 6.5 (April 1925): 100–11.

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Tomasi, Massimiliano. Rhetoric in Modern Japan: Western Influences on the Development of Narrative and Oratorical Style. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Yokomizo Seishi. ‘Hensh·kyoku yori’ [From the editing room]. Shinseinen 8.8 (July 1927): 288. – ‘Shinsenen shumi k za’ [Shinsenen’s lectures on cultural refinement]. Shinseinen 8:6 (May 1927): 247.

12 ‘Oriental Wonders, Odd Fabrics’: Walking through Hispanic American Modernismo’s Chinatown francisco morán

Straying from Hispanic America’s Volcanoes In an illuminating article concerning what she calls the ‘politics of posing,’ Sylvia Molloy reminds us that, for a long time, Hispanic American decadent literature had been read ‘as frivolous and therefore reprehensible posturing.’ She quotes Max Henríquez Ureña, who, in reference to Rubén Darío’s adopted pose, states: ‘All this is a pose that he will overcome later, when he takes on the voice of the continent and becomes the interpreter of its anxieties and ideals.’1 That the notion of posing has, in fact, been perceived as directly related to modernist decadence is illustrated by Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s statement that the latter ‘represents and important and necessary facet of our artistic evolution.’ He further states that ‘even in the ostensibly Greek or Scandinavian, French imaginations of Guillermo Valencia, of Leopoldo Díaz, of Jaime Freire a cell of the American psyche is fully operative.’ As a result, he continues, ‘while, unfortunately, exotic and mystical idle pursuits seem to delay the appearance of the poets of the future ... we now have a small group of precursors ... whose fervent brains one might describe as a poor imitation of their country’s volcanoes’ (my emphasis).2 Molloy, on the contrary, considers posing ‘as an oppositional practice within those very discourses and concerns, a decisive cultural statement, whose political import and destabilizing energy [she wants] to recuperate and assess.’3 These considerations bring to the forefront the dichotomy on which to this date almost all critical readings of Hispanic American modernismo have been based: the opposition of duty and desire. On one hand, the former takes us to the call for that voice of the continent, which Henríquez Ureña invokes. The latter, on the other hand, brings us to posturing, the steamy style of the pose, the

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mask, the disguise, and the resistance of modernismo to be understood just in terms of the demands of the group. This has produced, at its best, a bitter criticism, and, at its worst, denigration of the modernistas.4 In tune with Molloy’s thinking, rather than condemning modernismo for its posturing and affectation – or ‘rehabilitating’ it by virtue of its ‘authenticity’ – I propose, quite the contrary, to reclaim its flights as the signs of a modernista defiance of cartographies of the nation, gender, and, ultimately, the self. It is true that modernismo itself was not exempted from this binary mode; the writings of José Martí are the best example of this tendency. Almost all critics, often reflecting a militant Latin Americanism, have leaned toward the extremes: they either emphasize the revolutionary inclinations of modernismo – criticism of modernity, of the emerging imperialism of the United States, or simply the renewal of the literary language – or they stigmatize it for its posturing, its bal masque, and its aestheticism. Modernismo, then, becomes exotic. It deviates from the norm and looks away. And what could be more exotic in modernismo than Orientalism? Orientalism suggests the embossed object, self-containment, stylized works, and an ephemeral identity. This crossing of the threshold of modernista Orientalism forces us to enter the world of the objects of modernity: the museum, the department store, the workshops of seamstresses and artisans, and those of writers, worlds that revolve around the dressing room. To state it succinctly: they all bear the stamp of simulation, play, and affectation. We should not be surprised, then, that critical readings of modernista Orientalism are very difficult to find. Araceli Tinajero, one of the few authors who has addressed the subject, concisely explains this negligence: ‘Modernista Orientalism was repeatedly assessed to be the product of servile imitation or an oddly bizarre phenomenon. In short, an examination of the existent critical analyses demonstrates that their conclusions followed along two lines: imitation (French influence) and exoticism (escapism).’5 Nevertheless, Tinajero’s criticism of these readings also circles around those same presuppositions. That is why she counters the accusations of exoticism and escapism by proposing a Hispanic American essence, an authenticity, a genuine cultural concern (taken from the peripheral position of the Hispanic American), which, supposedly, would differentiate the movement from its European counterpart. ‘In this sense,’ she states, ‘modernista Orientalism, which doesn’t originate in a colonizing space, doesn’t correspond to European Orientalism as conceived by Said.’ In the chapter dedicated to modernista travellers to the Orient, she adds that ‘the travel account

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enriches the emphatically Latin American way of perceiving and understanding cultural interpretations in depth’ (my emphasis).6 Her position favours neither the pose nor the pleasure, but the strong, politically correct identity. From my perspective, the emergence of Latin Americanist discourse within modernism7 is parallel to the racist, medical-hygienist, anthropological, criminal, and sexual discourses that achieved a particular peak in the West at the end of the nineteenth century. Along with these two tendencies, there was also an increasing visibility of homoerotic desire in Hispanic America in the fin de siècle, as well as the homosexual panic it provoked.8 We cannot forget that, by donning Oriental robes, modernismo was attracting those very derogatory names – pederast, degenerate, and inveterate opium smoker – that positivism gave the Chinese. Modernismo enters the controversy concerning the Oriental subject, but does so in its own way: it does not reject the stereotypes that seek to characterize the Chinese in particular or Oriental culture in general, but rather appropriates them. Modernismo’s trip to the Orient reflects the slippage of the signifier that invariably involves crossdressing. We must distinguish, then, between the Orientalism practised by the enlightened Hispanic American elite of positivistic orientation, and the modernista Orientalism, expressed in terms of posing and affectation. In the first case, the Oriental subject is persistently represented as an intrusive body, completely foreign to the body of the Nation, and, because of that, the bearer of decadence. For the latter, Orientalism was but one of its ample repertoire of masks, destined precisely to subvert the elites’ nationalistic and continental dream of a pristine, gapless identity. In addition, I would like to emphasize that modernista Orientalism focused preferentially on the so-called Far East. This obliges us to reconsider Said’s view that ‘one could discuss Europe’s experience of the Near East, or of Islam, apart from its experience of the Far Orient.’ Because, as he points out, Orientalism ‘is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident”’; we would have to admit that it is not easy to perceive or arrive at that distinction other than in relation to the Far Orient. Christianity, Said says later, ‘completed the setting up of main intra-oriental spheres: there was a Near Orient and a Far Orient, a familiar Orient, which René Grousset calls “l’empire du Levant,” and a novel Orient.’9 It follows, then, that the Far East should be the natural repository of that extreme otherness of the Orient.

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In Hispanic America, the Oriental, particularly the Chinese, provided the absolute otherness, the limit of rationality itself, a far beyond from where it would be impossible to return complete, unchanged, either as a Hispanic American or even as a human being. We find an example of this in the Colombian Nicolás Tanco Armero’s accounts of his trips to the Orient. Tanco Armero states that ‘particularly’ in China ‘everything ... besides being different from what we have in the West, is the opposite, diametrically opposite.’ He mentions the astonishment caused by the strangeness of ‘the Indian of our pampas, the fierce Bedouin, or the Malaysian savages and Bengals from the other part of Asia.’ But, he asks us if that ‘would compare to this surprise when we see a Chinese.’10 Even as late as 1929, Rómulo Gallegos in his well-known novel Doña Bárbara describes his character Melquiades as ‘one of those unsettling men, of Asiatic features, that make you think of some seed of the Tartars that fell upon the soil of America, who knows when or how,’ that is, ‘[a]n example of inferior races, cruel and morose, completely different from the people from the plains.’11 Gallegos, of course, is not alluding to the Chinese, but rather to the Mongols. It goes without saying that this perception homogenizes all Asian cultures. Heading to Chinatown By the excessiveness of their horror, the commentaries of Tanco Armero and Gallegos betray a fascination that, according to Ziauddin Sardar’s Orientalism, does nothing more than reflect ‘[those] problems, fears and desires of the West that are visited on a fabled, constructed object by convention called the Orient.’12 He perceives the West as a traveller whose desires and fears visit and, at the same time, construct the Orient. Likewise, I will refer to the Orient in fin-de-siècle Hispanic America as a discursive place and a way of mapping its outside (in opposition to its inside). But it is for this reason that Orientalism constitutes, in turn, the ideal place to rethink modernismo as that moment when, paradoxically, the entrance of Hispanic American literature into modernity coincides with, and expresses, two things: the realization, for the first time, of a true community linking our writers, and the frustration of critics. That is, the technological progress in communications made exchanges among writers more frequent and strengthened their bonds as a community of readers and authors. This experience was pivotal in the development of a sense of belonging to the continental literary community of ‘Nuestra América’ (Our America), the name coined by José

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Martí. However, at the same time, it also signalled frustration because many critics also questioned the Americanness of a movement that was so fond of Europe (particularly France) and was so given to exoticism. This is due in particular to modernismo’s posing and its murky borders shot through with numerous openings. These strange desires and images supposedly did not belong to us. Modernismo, like Orientalism, implies a voyage, an escape to a vague ‘far away place.’ Since Orientalism is the far beyond, the radical otherness to Hispanic America, modernistas could not avoid fleeing to Chinatown. Therefore, the texts that I propose to read constitute a kind of textual Chinatown in the sense that they both assert and dismantle all rights of identity. It is a place, of course, that we enter not by way of a door but of a frame, a frame that pictures or ‘holds’ simultaneously the outside and the inside. It is a false door, a frame, with the breeze passing through, as it raises in the air a swinging bridge between the East and the West, between the masked object and the ‘authentic’ one. By promising us the exoticism of a domesticated otherness, Chinatown, whether in Havana or in San Francisco, is little more than a tribute to affectation. Passing through one of those cultural cracks forces us to participate in transvestism, simulation, and play. This frame, in turn, suggests, paradoxically, an inevitable foreignness. In crossing through this portal, one passes into another place. For that reason, I am interested in emphasizing the fundamental need of the West for drawing the line – which is essentially what every Chinatown suggests – and, at the same time, for crossing it. Thus, to enter one of these spaces means to execute a rite of passage, a kind of initiation trip to the ‘farthest there’ of the Orient and to remain, nevertheless, in the ‘closest here,’ within the intimacy of the same. Hispanic American modernismo perceived, with a mixture of fascination and horror, all the dangers that were lying in wait from behind those displacements. Ramón Meza on a Divan Ramón Meza (Havana, 1861–1911) is the author of the second most important Cuban novel of the nineteenth century: Mi tío el empleado (My uncle, the employee, 1887). While he was not a modernista writer, he became one of the editors of La Habana Elegante, the standard-bearer of modernismo in Cuba. His articles, chronicles, short stories, and novels may be classified as regional, dealing with customs and manners, falling in the categories of realism and sometimes naturalism.

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In his essay ‘Julián del Casal’ on the Cuban poet (Havana 1863–93), he refers to him as the evasive, exotic poet. For this reason, as Oscar Montero declares, Casal’s work ‘is both canonical and marginal.’13 Casal is our Chinatown. Within him, the outside and the inside are bound together. Meza begins by presenting Casal to us a ‘strange’ one, the face ‘that [was looking] all around him, but whose gaze emerged from a very deep source and always remained beyond ... in the region where the nacre of the clouds floats ... in the country where forget-me-nots and chrysanthemmus ... flourish.’14 As Ben A. Heller has perceived clearly, the reading by Meza brings into play two complementary operations: Casal’s exoticism parallels his feminization. ‘Casal,’ comments Heller, ‘stretched out on his divan, is seduced by Gautier and then by “the graceful magnificence of form” of [Rubén] Darío,’ to which he adds that the image of Casal wearing a kimono insinuates ‘homosexuality, at least, latent.’15 Significantly, the section to which Meza dedicates his presentation of an exotic Casal opens with two markers of exclusion. The first, as Heller has said, is the ambiguous statement, repeated elsewhere in Meza’s essay, that ‘the poets, although they walk in this world, are strange beings, that don’t belong to it.’ The second, which follows immediately and occupies an independent line, simply states, ‘Casal stopped visiting me.’ That being the case, the disembodiment and strangeness of Casal are parallel to his being distanced from Meza. Both statements construct and frame Casal with his eccentricities and his Oriental pose, thus separating him ‘from this world’ and separating this world and Meza from Casal. This territorialization initiates the construction of a textual Chinatown, and Meza has us accompanying him going to view Casal’s monstrosity on exhibition: ‘I was the one,’ says Meza, ‘who was visiting him.’ Not only does Meza’s trip distance us from Casal; it also converts him into an object of public curiosity. However, unsatisfied with that, Meza also makes the city disappear. Casal’s room, he declares, ‘was behind the modest editing room for La Habana Elegante, far from the very busy nearby corners of Havana and O’Reilly.’ This expulsion of Casal from the city also alienates him from the Nation itself, since ‘he wanted to surround himself, to become immersed in and saturated by the real, voluptuous sensations of that exotic and distant civilization’ (my emphasis). Yet, by the same token, in order to report Casal’s eccentricities, Meza has had to enter his interior, to become close to his strangeness. Although Meza emphasizes the distance (behind, the

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one far away, distant, exotic) that we have to conquer in order to reach Casal’s ‘authentic, if modest, Japanese dwelling,’ he does so by insisting on a strange familiarity that domesticates the supposed exoticism and actually draws us toward Casal. Then, the very idea that Casal has transformed – in Meza’s words – his ‘little corner into an authentically Japanese room’ leads us, not to authenticity, but to the potential of the pose and cross-dressed signs.16 Proceeding from this point, rather than ask what Meza tries to do with Casal, I am interested in asking what effect Casal has on Meza. Somewhat like a voyeur, who watches from a safe distance, Meza spies and reports the sinuous movements of the body and the amphibious sexuality of Casal: He tried to surround, immerse, and saturate himself with the real, voluptuous sensations of that exotic, distant civilization. He would read and write on a divan with cushions that displayed the gold, the lacquer, the vermilion of the screens, and decorative corbels, and huge jars, ... the paintings with their blue background, and a sea still a deeper blue, an interminable string of birds flying, great flocks of white gulls, with red beaks, long feet, over pagodas, in marshes rimmed with bamboo, and Chinese junks sailing in the clouds with young couples as passengers with little ivory faces. He was fanning himself, reading on the divan, losing the notion of time and forgetting the need for food. He loved flowers; he had made an idyllic garden of ornamental flowers, showing a preference for chrysanthemmus, ixora, amaryllis, forget-me-nots, ilang, clorilopsis ...17

Casal is being constructed through the stereotyping of the Orient, which explains the scenic quality of Meza’s account. We perceive a fetishistic pleasure from that horizontal, openly eroticized and sexually accessible image, so frequent in Orientalist texts. Through the explicit references to the third person (‘He tried’), as well as the use of the reflexive, also in the third person (‘he was fanning himself’), Meza insists on marking the distance between himself and Casal, and neatly territorializing the gaze. However, Meza employs a dangerous verbal mode: the past in movement. The action, incessantly repeated in the past, carries the stamp of performance, theatricality; the participle contributes to the emphasis. ‘He was fanning himself, reading on the divan, losing the notion of time,’ says Meza, and one sees him, like Casal, having lost the notion of time, dallying, wandering in the air stirred by

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Casal’s fan. In order to show us Casal, Meza has to take his place; he has to languish, so that we can see Casal languishing, strolling through his Oriental garden. Meza becomes Oriental in Orientalizing Casal: he performs effeminacy in his act of feminizing him, and – obliged to cover the distance in order to reach Casal – becomes exotic when making Casal exotic. Between the Casal who stops visiting Meza, and the Meza who goes out and carries us along in search of Casal, the masks get switched. Casal is the signifier of seduction, so he hides. Meza, while reading Casal, writes him, writes him over, interprets him, and acts through him. The pose of writing traps Meza, entertains him, delays him, on Casal’s divan. That is, by performing the other (Casal, the Orient), Meza (the West) cannot but bear its lack, its posing. According to what Meza himself records, ‘it was extremely difficult (to dissuade Casal) from his intentions of going out into the streets of Havana in luxurious pajamas, embroidered in gold, like [Théophile Gautier] through the streets of Paris, wearing a queer attire.’18 Casal is portrayed as a cross-dressed, foreign subject, who must be restrained, dissuaded, and, if possible, corrected. These and other stories, repeatedly told, weave the legend, profile the Oriental foreignness of Casal. Nevertheless, Meza’s text demonstrates for us the dangers awaiting him behind those efforts. We see Casal on a divan, but where is Meza? Perhaps in the time they spent together Casal did nothing but pose, while Meza observed him in silence? Meza says only one thing that might be vaguely suggestive of a ‘conversation’: ‘What caught his attention were things like this; he worried about whether the princess Nourjihan, in the empire of the Great Mongol, was the one who discovered the perfume taken from the essence of roses and chose it for her favourite.’19 As the poet strays, so does Meza, who remains absorbed by the pose Casal assumes, fascinated by that wretched condition, which, in reality, seems to be a hiatus, a parenthesis, between the museum and the department store, between a Japan of operetta and another ‘authentic one,’ between Havana and a confused Orient, between the masculine and a strange, perverse femininity. Fascinated as he is, Meza himself forgets the pastiche of the representation, the profusion of masks, and believes he is in ‘the modest, but authentic dwelling, of a Japanese person.’ This belief bankrupts the intent to territorialize Casal in terms of an outside and of affectation, as opposed to the inside and the authenticity of the national space. In affirming Casal’s strangeness, he has to delve into the cosmetics of the style of modernismo, to replace the brusque movement by the soft,

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voluptuous line for the picture to come out Oriental. The writing is constantly pleated to capture the sinuous folds that remind us of those of a kimono, the touch of the silk beneath which the body may acquire capricious forms, unspeakable contours. It is especially notable in the original Spanish text in which Meza, himself not a modernista writer, evokes Casal’s performance through a highly decorative speech, multiple enumerations, extensive and lengthy subordinate clauses. Meza, in making Casal a precious object, must himself be transformed into a subject that desires that object. He is also the object fascinated by the feminine Orient that supposedly denationalizes Cuba, which he wants to represent in Casal. According to Emile Benveniste, the third-person pronoun is often the unmarked member, inasmuch as it does not have its own content.20 Along these same lines, the notion of the person in Spanish belongs only to I/you and is lacking in s/he. Such a vacuum makes that pronoun particularly apt for the performance of the transvestite. It is in that he (that Meza tries to distinguish, to mark emphatically) that the one who is looking and the one who is looked at end up getting lost, each one in the desire of the other. Casal dragged everyone into his representation. Meza thought it was possible to enter and to leave Chinatown unaffected. In this sense it is not by chance that Pacific Rim Modernisms seeks to emphasize ‘the significance of Asian Pacific cultures and locations either as subjects of enduring concerns or as specific sites of articulation.’ As my reading of Oriental’s pose of Hispanic American modernismo suggests, the hotly debated identity and literary canon of Latin America is definitely tied to the cultural, political, economic and social impact of Asian Pacific cultures as much as the Atlantic ones. I consider it very useful for my own reading to follow the metaphor proposed by the editors of Pacific Rim Modernisms, who, in reference to the ‘region that geologists have termed “the ring of fire,”’ tell us that the volcanic activity this designation refers to ‘could just as easily serve to describe the seismic intensity of cultural activity taking both in and through the area during the modernist period.’ I have been reading that earth tremor that destabilizes the supposedly fixed identities of both West and East. What I stress time and time again with regard to Hispanic American modernismo is precisely the seismic activity, introduced by cultural contact with Asian Pacific cultures. And now I want to call to the attention of my readers that very seismic activity that was also felt, more or less at the same time, in France.

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Figure 12.1 A caricature of the Cuban poet Julian del Casal. El Figaro, 28 June 1891.

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So, let us turn to the Parisians attending the World’s Fair in the City of Lights in 1889. In recreating the Chinese pavilion, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüe constructed a theatre of horror, a kind of Chinatown that he called ‘le quartier de l’Indo-Chine.’ Its fascination resided, exactly, in its offering the visitor the illusion of an exoticism and radical otherness within just a few steps from the Seine. However, the belief that ‘le quartier de l’Indo-Chine’ could not spill over into the perimeter of the exposition proved to be only an illusion. The very flow of the Parisian river, where Chinese junks could sail, suggests the flights that riddle the Orientalist knowledge with unpredictable leaks, the porosity of its border line, the seismic activity with which it unsettles now the map of the city: Le promeneur isolé avançait de quelques pas, et par-delà ce monde encore familier qui s’évanouissait derrière lui, il entrait dans un autre monde, inconnu, inquiétant comme un cauchemar: kiosques gardés par des monstres, pagodes aux figures grimaçantes, toits retroussés de la Chine; derrière les portes de bambou, devant les Bouddhas tirés de l’ombre par un reflet de lumière électrique, sur les marches du temple d’Angkor, il apercevait d’autres sentinelles, des noirs immobiles, de petits soldats jaunes qui le suivaient de leur œil oblique; nulle autre vie, dans les ténèbres des maisons irréelles, que la vie énigmatique de ces hommes et de ces monstres, animés par d’autres âmes que les nôtres. Les premiers soirs, encore mal orienté dans le quartier de l’Indo-Chine, le visiteur attardé sentait toutes ses idées se brouiller, il avait hâte de regagner la berge de la Seine, pour s’assurer qu’elle ne porte pas de jonques et ne roule pas sous les palétuviers.21

The entrance into that Chinatown has its price. Nothing can guarantee that the ‘other world, unknown and disquieting,’ or ‘the enigmatic life of these men and of these monsters,’ supposedly ‘animated by souls different from ours,’ will not mix with ours, cannot be now among us, or be, in an extreme case, we, ourselves, perhaps surprised in the act of posing like them, becoming those ‘others.’ As it was with Meza before, Vogüe’s “solitary walker” finds himself lost in a Paris shaken by a seismic activity unleashed by the contact with the ‘other,’ with an Orient which has become too close for comfort. Will Vogüe’s advice, which arrived too late for Meza, be heard by Rubén Darío? Darío and Casal in the Havana of 1892 In some of the scattered papers from Rubén Darío’s Autobiografía, he

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recorded his stay in Havana in 1892 and his encounter with Casal. Despite the warm reception which he received from the Cuban writers, Darío only comments, offhandedly, in his Autobiografía that ‘[i]n Cuba Texifonte Gallego came aboard ship; he had been the secretary to, now I don’t remember, what Governor.’22 As far as we can see, he does not even remember having disembarked in Cuba. Darío’s other texts, nevertheless, do allude to it and recount his visit to Havana in 1892. One is the chronicle entitled ‘Recuerdos de La Habana. El General Lachambre,’ published in La Nación of Buenos Aires on 7 March 1895. Another is the prologue Darío wrote for a volume of poetry, published in 1911, by the Cuban Manuel Serafín Pichardo. In ‘Recuerdos de La Habana,’ Darío recounts that during his stay in Havana he met Raoul Cay, writer for the Cuban newspaper El Fígaro, who on the night following that presentation, invited him home and introduced him to his father, an ‘old chancellor to the Imperial Consulate of China in the capital of the island.’ Darío was also introduced to María Cay, Raoul’s sister, and to General Lachambre, her fiancé. Then, Darío continues, he, Raoul, and Casal went ‘to an adjoining small parlour to see decorative objects from China and Japan.’23 This passage marks textually, we might say, the entrance to Chinatown in the chronicle. This kind of crossover is signified not only by the ritualization of the passage itself, but also by the spatial reduction: the entry into the ‘small parlour.’ To a certain point, this space is the first Oriental artifact that the chronicle offers us, since it evokes a kind of miniaturization, which is a stereotypical characterization of the Oriental. Then, Darío, assuming a kind of group eye, guides us through the Orientalist china cabinet. ‘First,’ he says, the party is shown ‘Mr. Cay’s distinctions granted by the government of the great empire: the parasols, the silk robes embroidered with golden dragons, the exquisite fans, the lacquerware, the painted silk and paper scrolls on the walls, the small Japanese netsukes, the weapons, the varied ivories.’24 In reproducing – rather than directly quoting – the voice of Raoul Cay, who leads them, Darío replaces him and takes charge of having us enter the small parlour, and then, of walking us through the Oriental intimacies. Nevertheless, despite the chronicle’s sense of group – emphasized by the use of we – Darío, surprisingly, steps aside to report the strangeness of Julián del Casal: ‘the poor and exquisite artist who now sleeps in the tomb, took pleasure in that entire installation of precious oriental objects: he began wrapping himself in the silk robes, and making for himself unbelievable turbans of odd fabrics.’25 The solid we breaks away from Casal’s he, going off the rails.

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But years later – and now I refer specifically to the prologue to Pichardo’s poems – Darío’s memory, in alluding to this scene, varies significantly as he recalls, ‘Raoul Cay, the charmer Raoul, in whose house we drank a tea worthy of Confucius and dressed up as Chinese mandarins with splendid authentic clothing.’26 In the first version, Darío is a mere observer who gives us an account of what he sees. From his privileged space, he constructs what we could consider to be the first ‘official’ report of cross-dressing carried out by a Cuban writer. In the second version, aside from being the narrator, he is also a performer. He participates in staging the scene, only this time the transvestite elements (‘the silk robes,’ ‘the odd fabrics,’ ‘the incredible turbans,’ as well as the body that is being wrapped in them) have been carefully removed and replaced by being dressed up, or, even disguised, but without the ambiguities that we had seen initially. In fact, now ‘[we] dressed up’ is in opposition to ‘[he] began wrapping himself,’ and ‘authentic’ clothing opposes ‘odd fabrics and unbelievable turbans.’ This manipulation extends to the verbal constructions: the past in movement describes perfectly the sinuous moves of a dancer, like Salomé’s, while the simple past alludes to a virile, rapid, energetic action, executed without hesitation or interruption. When we read both texts as a continuum, we see more clearly the similarity with Meza’s depiction of Casal’s Chinatown: the construction of the difference obliges the speaker to perform it, to re-enact it. The crossovers and interchanges – the frank shuttering, between we and he – suggests Darío’s homosexual panic, a panic expressed by the volatile nature of style, of the odd fabrics of a stereotyped Orient that modernismo could get lost in.27 The open break in Darío’s memory between the drag wrapping up in and dressing up is imprecise and at the same time revealing, in the sense that both participate in the same adventure: the passion for disguise. In between the two, a sexuality, an eroticism, and more generally speaking the self’s identity, emerge constituted by and through the act of posing. Whence this pose dismantles, in turn, the apparently safe divide between the one doing the seeing and the one seen, the subject and the object, the Nation and the foreign, the self and the other. A Frightening Self-Discovery Ziauddin Sardar emphasizes a conception of Orientalism that merits consideration. For Sardar, ‘Orientalist scholarship was – is – the scholarship of the politics of desire: it codifies western desires into academic disciplines

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and then projects these desires onto its study of the Orient’ (my emphasis).28 The contrast between Sardar’s perspective and that of Said provides an interesting theoretical background for me to examine Orientalism in Hispanic American modernismo and to reclaim its flights as the signs of a defiance of any attempt to construct solid, strong identities, which, more often than not, implies mapping an other to be excluded, and sometimes even erased. Although Sardar does not depart entirely from Said’s view of Orientalism in the sense that desire remains pivotal, for the former, desire and seduction are disruptive forces that challenge the construction of an absolute Oriental other. For the latter, seduction and desire lead precisely to the Oriental’s emasculation, and for that matter, to loss of power and of identity as subject of his own history and self. As Jane Miller puts it, ‘[it] is with the distortions of male sexuality produced by the language of Orientalism’ that Said seems to be ‘chiefly concerned.’ She notes that Said links the power of seduction with ‘the apparatus and practices of cultural domination and, significantly, of the processes involved for those who are dominated as they internalize the rationale for, and even the justice for, others’ domination of them.’29 Said’s Orientalism could then be read as projecting castration anxiety. Paradoxically, this fear mirrors the very same discourse that the critic sets out to dissect. In fact, Said’s anxiety shows itself where knowledge and seduction intersect with each other. ‘If Arab society,’ he writes, ‘is represented in almost completely negative and generally passive terms, to be ravished and won by the Orientalist hero, we can assume that such a representation is a way of dealing with the great variety and potency of Arab diversity, whose source is, if not intellectual and social, then sexual and biological.’ Regarding this matter, the conclusion of Said’s Orientalism (also quoted by Miller) is quite revealing: ‘If the knowledge of Orientalism has any meaning, it is being a reminder of the seductive degradation of knowledge, of any knowledge, anywhere, at any time’ (my emphasis). His concern that ‘what is really left to the Arab after all is said and done’ is but ‘an undifferentiated sexual drive’ demonstrates that what is at stake is the unsettling effect of seduction on the Oriental man, specifically the Arab.30 If such oppositions as West/East, masculine/effeminate, oppressor-oppressed, subject-object, and so on are to be overcome, I cannot see it happening unless we remove the hyphen that legitimizes them. I seek to challenge those dichotomies by focusing on the power to disrupt borders held by masks, folds, and style. Once the oppressed refuses to see his humanity as different and less than the oppressor’s, it will pave the way for an undifferentiated being, that is,

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one that will remain forever an endless becoming. Since there are essentialisms at both sides of any spectrum, I propose that overcoming oppression is necessarily tied to embracing loss, to sacrifice. The place for sacrifice will be then the in between the combatants. I locate that place for loss and sacrifice, in the veil, be that of style, mask, visor, or folds of a kimono. Just as the veil has been used to map the Orient as a mysterious and feminine object open to subjugation, it is in its veiled games, in its foldings where that difference can and has to be challenged. It is in this sense that I believe that Hispanic American modernista writing becomes particularly significant. I am very much aware of the material and political realities that, because of their impact in real people’s life, cannot be overlooked. However, let us not forget either that those realities themselves – as the media, political and religious discourses, and movies demonstrate it – do not happen outside of the symbolic order; just the opposite is true. It is in the order of discourse, of the imaginary and the symbolic, that they seek to legitimize themselves and where they are most effective. The passivity and muteness of the Oriental subject in Said’s Orientalism seem to be the sine qua non that legitimizes his own discursive position, and, furthermore, all strong identity discourses, whether from the colonialist or the emancipationist gaze. Although Said knows that ‘as both geographical and cultural identities ...“Orient” and “Occident” are man-made,’ at the same time, he states that ‘it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality’ (my emphasis).31 Methodologically, when the moment comes to defy the imperial construction, making reference to it or emphasizing it makes sense. However, if we do not move from that stance, we run the risk of committing the grave error that is found in many decolonizing readings. It consists in suggesting or stating that the dominated object possesses in essence a reality that is misrepresented and appropriated by the colonizer. Thus, both the colonizer and the colonized get locked in the fight over the ‘truth.’ Also, in both cases, the colonized subject is posited as an object to be enslaved or freed. This position, whether we like it or not, implies the hegemony of that subject, because it purports both to know and define itself and the other. Moreover, this ‘intimate’ knowledge is the source of its power. Decolonizing criticism, I believe, would be more effective, if, instead of operating – like its adversary – in a binary mode, it emphasized the fractures in the hegemonic gaze. It is in this environment of errant confusion that desire comes to play a crucial role.

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The Orientalist text, articulated, woven, trapped, in the web of fear, desire, and seduction, brings to the forefront the crisis of the signifier, the collapse of reason, that is, the bankruptcy of the epistemological pillar on which the West has based its symbolic transactions with its otherness. It matters little whether it refers to the Orient, or, for example, Hispanic America. After all, if what it is really at stake for Orientalists is to find the Orient, that is, to orient themselves – to map, to fix, to unveil the ‘mystery’ of the Orient – the best move to counteract those attempts it is not to oppose to them a ‘true’ Orient, but to emphasize instead its endless disorienting power. Said, of course, was very conscious of the crucial importance of desire in the composition of Orientalist fiction. ‘Woven through all of Flaubert’s Oriental experiences, exciting or disappointing, is,’ he comments, ‘an almost uniform association between the Orient and sex.’ He adds, ‘[i]n making this association Flaubert was neither the first nor the most exaggerated instance of a remarkably persistent motif in Western attitudes to the Orient.’ Although he poses a very interesting question about sexuality, he nonetheless refuses to inquire into it. ‘[I]t is not,’ Said tells us, ‘the province of my analysis here, alas, despite its frequently noted appearance.’ Yet, he admits the importance of sexuality ‘as something eliciting complex responses, sometimes even a frightening self-discovery, in the Orientalists’ (my emphasis).32 We cannot state, of course, that discarding the relationship of the Orient with an ‘unlimited desire’ had its origin in that ‘frightening self-discovery’ that Said mentions. But, on the other hand, neither can we dismiss the possibility of a Said trapped by the same anxiety as other Orientalist scholars. What would then be the reason for that horror? What if the other turns out to be an active performer, even an accomplice of its own stereotyped image? If, following Said’s view, the Occident orientalizes the Orient, then bringing desire into play in this discussion, that is, reading it as an axis that entraps both players, would open a fluid space for the free trade of identities. It is not only that the Occident orientalizes the Orient, but also that, by doing so, it in turn orientalizes itself, and disorientation – its seismic activity – becomes the final outcome. Therefore, as I have insisted again and again, what interests me here is not the Orient as an effect, a passive entity constructed by the Occident’s will to exercise power, but rather the entanglement of both Occident and Orient in the locker room of desire. It is a process through which, in the final analysis, Orient and Occident are but ambiguous players in the game of seduction, understood here as an economy of the mask, of the veil, of the pose, and

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of affectation. Seduction knows – following Baudrillard – ‘that there is no anatomy, nor psychology, that all signs are reversible.’ It may seem a contradiction to bring together desire and seduction. After all, Baudrillard himself distinguishes sexuality and desire – as processes of production – from seduction, which, he maintains, ‘belongs to the order ... of artifice ... of signs and rituals.’ We must stress, however, that sexuality as well as desire and seduction meet in the body. The body is the ultimate trophy disputed by seduction and desire, either as a reality subjected to a productive economy (economy of pleasures, of gender) or as a masquerade and artifice. Seduction allows for the dismantling of the ‘truth’ about the Orient as an open, available, feminine body, as opposed to a complete, solid, masculine West. Notice how close this notion of dismantling of truth is to a seismic activity that is brought about as soon as either West or East attempts to hold to a firm identity. What Pacific Rim Modernisms brings to light is that Pacific cultures are really transpacific but also transatlantic ones, or more specifically, they are transcultures. Their seismic activity has been felt in Europe, Africa, the Americas. I do not want to finish without pointing out – if briefly, since this will be the point of departure of my next project – that, as I have suggested, if we travel in reverse (from East to West) our findings will not be different from those we have already seen. For that purpose, I will look now to Yukio Mishima’s passion for mask and disguise. The Mask in the Mirror Generally, for the critics of Orientalism – and Said, as we discussed, is one of the most obvious examples – the point of departure is an Orient poorly represented and oppressed by the colonizing discourse. Rarely does Orientalism take the opposite course – perhaps because it is inconceivable – being that of an Occident appropriated, occupied, by Oriental desire, or even of an Oriental posing as an Oriental.33 That is why I find so fascinating Yukio Mishima’s body and writing, inalienable as they are from each other. Perhaps two of the most meaningful moments in Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask are the references, first, to the frustration of the boy who discovers that the figure he had thought was a knight (Joan of Arc) turned out to be a woman; and then, the well-known scene when Mishima masturbates for the first time when he sees an image of Saint Sebastian. It is somewhat ironic that the image of the Western knight who captures the desire of the boy, Mishima, was not a man but a woman. And

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not only for that reason, but also because here the desire is attached to the veiled body, the face semi-hidden (precisely one of the most stereotyped images of the Oriental): ‘There was a beautiful coat of arms on the silver armor the knight was wearing. The knight’s beautiful face peeped through the visor.’34 The visor of the helmet, like the curtain or the veil in so many Oriental scenes, promises the body and hides it. It is a sign made by veiling, well disposed toward deceit. We can see this better if we review another anecdote from Mishima’s infancy. Having seen the stage show of the magician Shokyokusai Tenkatsu, Mishima felt the desire ‘to become Tenkatsu.’35 One day he entered his mother’s room and opened one of the drawers of her wardrobe: From my mother’s kimonos I dragged out the most gorgeous one, the one with the strongest colors. For a sash I chose an obi on which scarlet roses were painted in oil, and wrapped it round and round my waist in the manner of a Turkish pasha. I covered my head with a wrapping-cloth of crepe de chine. My cheeks flushed with wild delight when I stood before the mirror and saw that this improvised bandana resembled those of the pirates in Treasure Island.36

Similar to the transvestite performance before the mirror – which does not fail to remind us of Casal’s – an Orient emerges that, in performing its self, discovers on the other side, a monstrous, bicephalous image of itself. The pirate, having escaped from one of the novels of Robert L. Stevenson, cross-dressed, re-dressed in a kimono of outrageous colours, could then be the antidote to the Orientalist gaze, its parody. Distanced from the heroic, great gesture and the action, the pirate is caught up in the pleasure of contemplating himself in the mirror. And when another Western heroic male figure emerges in the mirror – the knight with the sword unsheathed – he becomes she. Each piece of apparel and each face are, then, called to the stage, one mask added to another. The Turkish pasha, the pirate, the Japanese woman, Mishima in drag, the East and the West, they all are but an endless, blissful becoming. If the Orientalist discourse aims to produce a ‘real’ Orient, signified and delimited as an object of study, seduction, as Baudrillard argues, ‘by producing only illusions, obtains all powers, including the power to return production and reality to their fundamental illusion.’37 Driven by the passion of the mask and disguise, Orient and Occident inter-

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change their signs; they erase and rewrite each other. The only thing that remains is the representation, the affectation, the pose. Subject and object, Orient and Occident, Casal and Meza, Mishima and Saint Sebastian, Casal and Mishima are but cards to be shuffled in the wages of seduction.

NOTES I want to express my deepest gratitude, first, to Elizabeth Gamble Miller, PhD, Professor Emerita, for her marvellous work in translating my article into English – quotations included, unless otherwise indicated – as well as to those colleagues and friends whose advice helped me with the process of editing my work: James Pancrazio, Gordon Birrell, Ignacio López Calvo, Elizabeth Russ, Andre Winandy, Bill Beauchamp, Jorge Camacho, and my partner Michael A. Mire. Finally, I would also like to thank Steven Yao and the book’s editors for their assistance and highly stimulating recommendations. 1 2 3 4

5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12

Molloy, ‘The Politics of Posing,’ 183–4. Henríquez Ureña, Ensayos, 4–5. Molloy, ‘The Politics of Posing,’ 184. At first, modernismo was considered a movement that started with Darío‘s publication of Azul in 1888 and ended with his life in 1916. Recent criticism, however, has pointed out that modernismo is a much bigger and complex process. It falls into what we call modernity, a process that covers the last two decades of the nineteenth century and goes until the 1920s. Tinajero, Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano, 7. Ibid., 20, 33. Modernismo produced two of the canonical texts of Latin Americanist thought: ‘Nuestra América’ [‘Our America,’ 1891] by José Martí, and ‘Ariel’ (1900) by José Enrique Rodó. My reading of the ‘homosexual panic’ in modernismo follows the proposal of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who, in Between Men, considers it ‘the most private, psychologized form in which many twentieth-century men experience their vulnerability to the social pressure of homophobic blackmail’ (89). Said, Orientalism, 17, 2, 58. Tanco Armero, Viaje de Nueva Granada a China y de China a Francia, 373. Gallegos, Doña Bárbara, 10. Ziauddin Sardar, Orientalism, 13.

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19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

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Montero, Erotismo y representación en Julián del Casal, 3. Meza, ‘Julián del Casal,’ 221–2. Heller, ‘Alteridad, sexualidad y nación en Julián del Casal,’ 45. Meza, ‘Julián del Casal,’ 225. Ibid., 225–6. Meza writes ‘traje raro,’ but since, in Hispanic American fin-de-siècle, raro often codified the unspeakable and the flights of the signifier, I use ‘queer’ to signify both the ambiguous in general (rare) and a queer identity. Meza ‘Julián del Casal,’ 226. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, 217. ‘The solitary walker advanced by a few steps, and beyond this still familiar world which vanished behind him, he entered a different world, unknown, unsettling like a nightmare: kiosks guarded by monsters, pagodas with grimacing faces, turned-up Chinese roofs; behind bamboo doors, in front of Buddhas drawn from the shadows by a reflection of electric light, on the steps of the Angkor temple, he saw other sentinels, black and motionless, small yellow soldiers who followed him with their slanted eye; no other life, in the shadow of unreal houses, than the enigmatic life of these men and these monsters, animated by souls different from ours. The first evenings, poorly oriented in the Indo-Chinese district, the delayed visitor felt all his thoughts scrambled, he was in a hurry to get back to the bank of the Seine, to make sure that there were no junks upon it and that it did not flow through the mangroves’ (de Vogüe, ‘A travers l’Exposition’ [translation by Michael A. Mire]). Darío, Autobiografía, in Obras Completas, 1:82. Darío, ‘Recuerdos de La Habana,’ 88. Ibid., 88. Ibid. Darío, ‘Manuel Serafín Pichardo,’ in Obras Completas, 1:609. I thank my colleague and friend James J. Pancrazio for suggesting that Darío’s responses could also be read as a castration anxiety. As a matter of fact, this type of panic is equally connected to the possibility of Darío seeing himself trapped in and by the Oriental image, as well as to the realm of the feminine. The Cuban street saying ‘tenerla como un chino’ (to have a penis like a Chinese’s man) carries with it masculine insecurity and fear of castration. Because of their physical appearance, typically having less body hair and being slighter in stature, Chinese men were perceived as less manly than Europeans and Africans. Moreover, their occupations – as laundrymen, cooks, or greengrocers – were often associated with tasks performed by women.

314 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37

Francisco Morán Sardar, Orientalism, 5. Miller, Seductions, 118, 114. Said, Orientalism, 311, 328. Ibid., 5. Said cannot be reproached for an explicit affirmation of an essence or Oriental ‘truth’ in opposition to the Orient created by the Occident. Nevertheless, he does not deny either explicitly or completely that Oriental ‘truth’: ‘There were – and are – cultures and nations,’ Said comments, ‘whose location is in the East, and their lives, histories, and customs have a brutal reality obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the West. About that fact this study of Orientalism has very little to contribute, except to acknowledge it tacitly’ (Orientalism, 5; my emphasis). Some time later, in Culture and Imperialism, Said acknowledges that what he ‘[had] left out of Orientalism was the response to Western dominance which culminated in the great movement of decolonization all across the Third World’ (xii). But, again and again, we are given only two choices: either it is Them (the West) against Us (the Orient, the Third World), or it is Us against Them, that against being the key to the construction of strong, exclusive identities. True, Said warns us about the fact that ‘ideological concern over identity is understandably entangled with the interests and agendas of various groups – not all of them oppressed minorities,’ and also states that ‘[w]e are the inheritors of that style by which one is defined by the nation, which in turns derives its authority from a supposedly unbroken tradition’ (Culture and Imperialism, xxx) (my emphasis). Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 188. A notable exception to this general tendency is Xiaomei Chen’s Occidentalism. Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, trans. Meredith Wetherby, 11. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 17–18. Baudrillard, Seduction, 70.

SOURCES CITED Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. Miami: University of Miami Press, 1971. Chen, Xiaomei. Occidentalism: A Theory of Counterdiscourse in Post-Mao China. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Darío, Rubén. Autobiografía. In Obras Completas, vol. 1, 16–177. Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado, 1950.

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– ‘Manuel Serafín Pichardo.’ In Obras Completas, vol. 1, 607–15. Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado, 1950. – ‘Recuerdos de La Habana. El General Lachambre.’ In Prosa Dispersa, 87–90. Madrid: Mundo Latino, 1919. De Vogüe, Eugène-Melchior. ‘A travers l’Exposition.’ Revue des Deux Mondes 95 (1889): 449–65. Gallegos, Rómulo. Doña Bárbara. Madrid: Austral, 1988. Heller, Ben A. ‘Alteridad, sexualidad y nación en Julián del Casal: lectura meta-crítica.’ In El sol en la nieve: Julián del Casal (1863–1893), edited by Luisa Campuzano, 43–50. La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1999. Henríquez Ureña, Pedro. Ensayos. La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1973. Meza, Ramón. ‘Julián del Casal.’ In Poesías by Julián del Casal, 221–64. La Habana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1963. Miller, Jane. Seductions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Mishima, Yukio. Confessions of a Mask. Translated by Meredith Wetherby. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1958. Molloy, Sylvia. ‘The Politics of Posing: Translating Decadence in Fin-de-Siècle Latin America.’ In Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, edited by Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky, 183–97. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Montero, Oscar. Erotismo y representación en Julián del Casal. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1993. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. – Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Sardar, Ziauddin. Orientalism. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Tanco Armero, Nicolás. Viaje de Nueva Granada a China y de China a Francia. Paris: Imp. de Simon Raçon y Comp, 1861. Tinajero, Araceli. Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2004.

13 Pacific Rim Digital Modernism: The Electronic Literature of Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries jessica pressman

Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) is the name of the collaborative duo responsible for some of the most innovative electronic literature online. Situated in Seoul, South Korea, Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge push the boundaries of their art form and our expectations of it. But why should they be included in a collection on modernism? As previous essays in this volume have shown, modernism is an assemblage of pluralities that spans geographic and temporal boundaries. This fact is made vitally and visually evident by the latest iteration of modernism: the contemporary movement I call ‘digital modernism.’1 In this essay, I introduce digital modernism by way of the example provided by YHCHI, arguing that the work of these Korea-based writers exemplifies digital modernism because it consciously challenges assumptions about electronic literature and promotes reconsideration of how modernism operates in contemporary culture. The result is an opportunity to read both contemporary and canonical literature through a digitally informed lens. Digital modernism is a strategy shared by writers across literary genres and programming platforms, writers who adopt and allude to literary modernism; they adapt aesthetic techniques and seminal works from the modernist canon to construct immanent critiques about a contemporary culture that privileges images, navigation, and interactivity over narrative, reading, and textuality. The result: works of predominantly textual web-based literature that are aesthetically difficult and ambivalent in their relationship to mass media and popular readership. Digital modernism is not just an example of postmodern pastiche or retro-remixing but, rather, part of a larger cultural project that produces serious literature and promotes critical reading practices both online and in our digital culture at large.

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Figure 13.1 The opening screens of Dakota. All images in this chapter are by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries and are used with permission from the artists.

To examine how digital modernism operates and the ways in which it has an impact on our understanding of modernism, I turn to YHCHI’s Dakota (2002) and The Art of Sleep (2006). These works in turn return to modernist strategies of crafting, conceptualizing, and presenting literary art as a means of situating literature and critical reading practices at the centre of contemporary culture. Reading YHCHI as digital modernists enables us to see how these Pacific Rim writers uphold the stakes of modernism, pushing it in new ways and into new media, to identify the Internet as a space for reading and thinking about modernism. The title of the literary partnership, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, implies a merger between high art – with its serious, ‘heavy,’ affect – and the popular culture of mass-produced ‘industries.’ This convergence, we will see, is central to the aesthetic presented in the individual works. The Flash-based, flashing texts contain narratives that straddle high and low as well as the local and the global: the specificities of life in Korea and the experiences of living in a global network connected by the World Wide Web. YHCHI both revels in and critiques Internet culture. Its works are all accessible free of charge on its website (www .yhchang.com) and are available in a variety of languages: English,

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Korean, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, and Japanese. Despite this free and global impulse, however, YHCHI uses English as its primary language. Chang, one half of YHCHI, explains the decision: ‘I am very conscious of working on the world wide web. Often, I first make my pieces in English, which is synonymous with globalism.’2 The result is an oeuvre that both engages and critiques a globally networked, multilingual readership as well as its reading practices. YHCHI pursues this dual agenda by adapting formal techniques from literary modernism and remediating them in Flash. Sleek black text, capitalized and unornamented, in Monaco font flashes against a stark white background. The minimalist aesthetic visually harkens back to the avant-garde experiments in typography from the beginning of the twentieth century, while the large letters scream at the reader in the manifesto tone of the modernist period. Individual words and phrases pulse out from centre-screen to take possession of the white surface before they are replaced by more text. YHCHI’s works are programmed in Flash and create a speeding synchronization of text to jazz music, the musical sibling of the modernist era. As the music speeds up, so does the text. There are no control buttons, no options to pause or slow the work. Instead, the animation proceeds by flashing to the music’s beat, often at speeds that render the text illegible. The effect is a visual onslaught of text that produces an affect of difficulty through illegibility. This is a conscious choice on the part of the writers; YHCHI explains, ‘We present our work the way we do to make it indeed more difficult.’3 For a work of online literature to strive for an aesthetic of inaccessibility may seem counter-intuitive, but this paradox is central to YHCHI’s project and to the writers’ digital modernist status. John Guillory argues that the canonization of modernism by the New Critics depended on the difficulty of these texts, making difficulty an identifiable aspect of modernist literature.4 As Leonard Diepeveen explains, difficulty became ‘a litmus test’ not only for modernist works but also for their readers, a test through which ‘one could predict both a given reader’s response to modernism by his or her reaction to difficulty, and a writer’s place in the canon by the difficulty of his or her work.’5 YHCHI generates aesthetic difficulty couched in visual illegibility to draw upon a form of modernist ‘cultural capital’ and create a ‘litmus test’ that identifies serious literature online. As becomes particularly and painfully obvious to the unblinking and dry-eyed reader, YHCHI employs speed as a technical tool to enhance

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the work’s difficulty and promote an acute awareness of the material conditions and constraints of reading text onscreen. Craig Dworkin reads the aesthetics of illegibility in postmodern poetics and describes how print poets, such as Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe, strive for illegibility using such practices as overprinting with the goal of ‘retarding the automatic process of reading, much less any speed-reading, and frustrating that illusion of the blank page.’6 YHCHI produces both of the effects that Dworkin describes by digitizing the print practice of layering words on top of one another. Its speeding textual montages are, in effect, palimpsests that promote and destabilize the reading process. The reader must speed-read to keep up with the pace of the flashing text, but even the most diligent and attentive reader soon realizes that one read-through will not yield a thorough understanding of the content. Rereading thus becomes an implicit aspect and agenda of YHCHI’s aesthetic. One effect of this aesthetic resonates with the experimental print poetics Dworkin describes: YHCHI’s Flash-ing works ‘frustrate’ the ‘illusion’ of a ‘blank,’ flat screen. All digital works are in fact performances of processed codes enacted across levels of languages within the computer whose end-products appear on the screen. YHCHI employs various methods to make the reader aware that the flat surface on which the text appears is actually, as Katherine Hayles calls it, ‘deep.’7 For example, the artists program into their animated performance the visual appearance of depth onscreen: dynamic text is often swallowed up into a white vortex of the screen.8 Unlike the print poetry Dworkin examines, however, YHCHI’s text evades reader control not only aesthetically but actually. The writers heighten the real-time performativity of electronic literature and refuse reader-controlled interactivity in an effort to remind the reader that the screen shields, and thus makes illegible, the coded processes that enable the text to appear on it. The hidden nature of the programming code reflects the fact that the reader is not alone in engaging with the text, for the computer, too, is reading. YHCHI’s work depends upon the tension between the visible and the obfuscated, the legible and the illegible, at the levels both of the screen and the code. In contrast to HTML, the building block of the World Wide Web, Macromedia Flash is a proprietary platform that hides its source code from the reader. Whereas most Flash files can be downloaded into a Flash player and the code made accessible through the reader’s effort, YHCHI disables this option. Not only is some of the onscreen text obfuscated but so too are the central codes of the work:

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literally, the programming codes. This foregrounding of the reader’s inability to coherently access the work ‘frustrates’ another ‘illusion’ associated with the printed page: the critical strategies inherited from the New Critics for analysing modernist literature. YHCHI’s digital, speeding text disturbs the New Critical assumption that close reading can illuminate the central operations of the literary work. Simultaneously, however, YHCHI prompts readers to pursue a New Critical approach when reading the Flash-ing texts. In authorial statements, YHCHI claims that Dakota is ‘based on a close reading of Ezra Pound’s Cantos part I and part II.’9 The statement is both a declaration of alignment with modernism and also an invitation to read Dakota by close reading it. One look at Dakota’s flashing text, however, prompts the question: how do we close read this work? How do we analyse the formal structure and metaphorical content of a work that uses its medial format to consciously evade such investigations? Dakota’s poetics may be closer to those of film or performance art than literature, but the authors consciously situate their work in a literary context and encourage readers to read it in relation to Pound’s Cantos. The process of reading Dakota by close reading and comparing it to Pound’s magnum opus illuminates how modernism operates in contemporary, digital literature and also how contemporary, digital literature operates in discussions of Pacific Rim modernisms. Dakota begins in medias res, in the middle of a road-trip narrative. The narrator and his booze-loving buddies enter the Badlands of South Dakota. Dakota opens mid-sentence and mid-action, with the shock of obscenity in large, capitalized letters: ‘FUCKING – WALTZED – ØUT – TØ THE CAR – PUT THE KEY IN – THE IGNITIØN – READY TØ HIT THE RØAD.’10 Although the language, setting, and mode of action have changed, the plot follows the opening of Pound’s first canto, which follows a section from Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey. The Cantos begins with Odysseus and his men plunging into the Underworld: ‘And then went down to the ship, / Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea.’11 In YHCHI’s digital remix, a car replaces the ship, the Badlands supplant the Underworld, and the epic quest is filled with clichés rather than conquests; yet, the parallels are undeniable. I will not go into detail explicating the adaptation of the epic travel narrative here, for I have done that work elsewhere.12 Instead, I turn to Dakota’s enigmatic ending, which is particularly relevant to examining the Pacific Rim aspect of YHCHI’s digital modernism. As Dakota speeds toward its end (the work runs 5:56 minutes), the

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narrative takes a surprising turn. The story of a teenage road trip frays into fragmentation, and the lyric voice of the modernist narrator shifts abruptly from an internal mindscape to a geographical location that is not only external to the narrator’s individual consciousness but also to the national boundaries circumscribed by the American road trip. The narrator is no longer listening to the recording of Art Blakey’s drum solo on a car radio while driving across South Dakota but is instead listening ‘RIGHT – HERE! – I – MEAN – HØNESTLY, – IN PALPAN-/ DØNG!’ Palpan-Dong is a street in Seoul, the home of YHCHI, and the sequence opens up Dakota to new interpretative options: is the narrator located in Seoul and fantasizing about an American road trip? This shift in location is particularly surprising and substantive because it reconfigures the significance of the ubiquitous stereotypical allusions to American culture that populate the narrative. For example, the characters eat ‘HAM – AND – CHEESE – SANDWICHES’ while dreaming about Elvis and Marilyn Monroe (‘MARILYN, – YØU ØWNED/ THE – SILVER / SCREEN, – CLØTHED/ ØR NAKED, – WEARING/ JUST/ CHANNEL – NØ. 5’). With the shift of ‘here-ness’ from South Dakota to South Korea, Korean imagery – ‘GINSING,’ ‘SAMSUNG’ – proliferates and turns the focus from a clichéd American culture to a stereotypical Korean one: ‘KØREAN GEISHAS’ appear with ‘STØCKINGED THIGHS,’ and ‘SØUSED EXECUTIVES – FRØM KANGNAM’ / ‘PAY A LØT for them ‘TØ LAUGH’ at ‘EVERY LAME JØKE.’ What is the effect of this shift? Is it an expression of the racial ventriloquism that, as Michael North argues, is central to modernism?13 Or is it a critique of the contemporary concept that the Internet enables identity ‘passing’?14 Perhaps Dakota’s deployment of cultural stereotypes comments on its source material, modernist persona Ezra Pound and his Cantos, whose poetics depend, particularly, upon the appropriation of cultural references from the Asian East. This shift in perspective and location near Dakota’s ending prompts the reader to reconsider the narrative and her interpretations of it. In other words, it demands rereading – an effect echoed in Dakota’s final act of programming as the work loops back to the beginning, reloads, and begins again. Dakota’s ending situates the Pacific Rim as central to its adaptation of Pound’s Cantos and, thus, identifies the region as central to contemporary efforts to reread and rethink modernism. Digital modernism seeks to challenge the status quo of electronic literature, and for YHCHI this confrontation is expressed by challenging the status quo of contemporary Korean culture. In an interview YHCHI

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states, ‘Korea isn’t very interested in literature.’15 To rectify this situation, the writers seek to redefine what literature is by attracting a particular readership. YHCHI’s eye-popping, energetic works appeal to both a popular audience that responds to its heavy beat and retro style and to those whose keen interest in literature propels comparative close readings between Dakota and The Cantos. This dual approach to attracting attention to its literature enables YHCHI to inhabit a position both inside and outside the literary establishment. The authors’ relationship to Korea’s art institutions is one of self-proclaimed outsiders, a position that propels their modernist challenge to the status quo. In an interview with one half of YHCHI, Young-hae Chang, the artist expresses strong views about Korean culture and the art it produces: ‘The Korean education system, whether it be art education or another, is at the root of most of the prejudice, conceit and intellectual laziness in Korea. A Korean diploma usually signals the end and not the beginning of thinking. The same goes for a Korean art diploma.’16 Chang revels in the fact that she has no formal artistic training: ‘And now that I make web art, I’m an outsider. Phew.’17 It is from this position outside the system that Chang receives a commission from a leading institution in the art world to produce a work of web-art. The result of this commission is The Art of Sleep. Modernism teaches us about this paradoxical situation: rebellious art demands the dedicated attention of the reader and, in particular, the professional reader or critic. Through the work of these particular readers, the experimental work becomes part of the canon. YHCHI expresses awareness of and complicity with this process. The writers claim (or feign) disinterest in lofty cultural ambitions for their work: ‘I take the attitude that art has no important place in society,’ Chang has stated, ‘Or rather, professional art is less essential to our lives than the personal esthetics of day to day living. That’s why I like being an artist. Because it’s unimportant.’18 Such a statement might seem to express an anti-modernist stance, but the opposite is true. Chang inhabits the position of her modernist persona, Ezra Pound, when she claims that art should not be didactic but, rather, essential to culture (or, in Pound-speak, ‘Kulchur’). Even as the writers of YHCHI denounce ‘professional art,’ they express a desire to have their amateur works taken seriously by professional readers. In an interview, they state, ‘We’re not inclined to do the work of the literary or art critic. We stick to our job, which is to create something that otherwise wouldn’t have existed, then marvel at what we’ve done and hope others do, too’ (emphasis added).19 YHCHI thus strives

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to attract serious attention from serious readers, readers who will carefully read, close read, and reread the entire 18:30 minutes of The Art of Sleep. As such a reader, I can tell you that The Art of Sleep presents a commentary on the role of art in digital culture. The work reflects upon the relationship between avant-garde modernism and the modern artistic moment. It does so in two ways. First, The Art of Sleep engages in a discussion of the value of art in modern society, an issue at the heart of modernism. Second, the context in which the work was created and distributed reflects and illuminates the complicated relationships between high culture and mass culture, art and capital, creators and critics, which remain central to discussions of modernism. The Art of Sleep was commissioned by the Tate Gallery and is available on its web-portal (www.tate.org.uk/netart/artofsleep). The link that opens the work is framed by a curatorial essay written by new media critic Mark Tribe. Tribe introduces YHCHI by describing its retro-aesthetic as a source of controversy in the digital arts community, as seen in the response to YHCHI’s nomination for (and winning of) a Webby award for digital art in 2001. Some members of the jury, Tribe writes, ‘argued that selecting Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries would send the wrong message to the art world, since their work does not embody such distinctive features of the net art medium as interactivity or algorithmic computation.’20 Yet, as I contend, it is precisely YHCHI’s conscious rejection of the ‘distinctive features of the net art medium’ that renders its work modernist and makes it relevant to any discussion of contemporary digital art and literature. Pertinent to my argument, Tribe elaborates on the jury’s debate by describing the critique of YHCHI in modernist terms: This argument derives from Clement Greenberg’s view that ‘the essence of Modernism lies ... in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.’ Although Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ work fails the Greenberg test, it exemplifies many of the historical and relational dynamics of new media art: an experimental engagement with emerging media technologies; the use of new media to reach audiences directly, without art-world intermediaries; collaborative production; and a global perspective.

Tribe is right to situate YHCHI in relation to Greenberg’s defining

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thesis on visual modernism, but he too quickly dismisses YHCHI’s Flash-ing, non-interactive aesthetic as ‘fail[ing] the Greenberg test.’ The opposite is true: YHCHI uses and abuses the ‘characteristic methods’ of its discipline ‘to criticize the discipline itself,’ but it does so by consciously not employing those methods. In the seminal essay that Tribe quotes, ‘Modernist Painting,’ Greenberg writes, ‘Modernism criticizes from the inside, through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized.’ YHCHI does not use the ‘procedures’ of hyperlinks, mouse-overs, and so on, in its work, but it does use Flash, the program that is ubiquitous online and in electronic literature. Flash invites and enables vast opportunities for artistic interactivity, which many, if not most, digital artists choose to utilize. In contrast, YHCHI’s decisive restraint in employing the possibilities of the program functions as a form of immanent critique and, thus, according to Greenberg’s definition, as a form of modernism. In fact, YHCHI uses Flash against the grain of the platform. Macromedia Flash is marketed as ‘the industry’s most advanced authoring environment for creating interactive websites, digital experiences and mobile content.’23 YHCHI builds all its digital works in Flash but creates an aesthetic of non-interactive difficulty through the very authoring tool extolled for its ‘mobile’ capacities, that is, facility in accessing, adapting for, and interacting with various media forms and technologies. Specifically, YHCHI resists the platform’s trademark functions: seamless animation of multimedia images and interactive effects. Instead, the artists employ Flash to pursue a retro-aesthetic that focuses on typography and timing to gesture toward the analogue medium of celluloid film. This is made immediately evident in the fact that all of their pieces begin with a cinematic countdown. YHCHI’s retro-aesthetic presents the screen as a large, white backdrop upon which images appear in a series of replacements. The visual effect both highlights the rectangular frame of the screen and alludes to the serial replacement of the photogram in analog cinema. Flash is part of a family of animation software or 3D modelling programs that uses a timeline-and-scene cinematic paradigm, and film is an operating metaphor for the program. Products created in Flash are called ‘movies’ and are generically recognized as ‘animations.’ Yet, YHCHI resists the associations attached to Flash-based works, expressing unease at such medium-based categorizations: ‘At first, we didn’t realize we were creating an animation. But it seems that by a certain new-media-art definition of things, when you use Flash you’re doing animation.’24 YHCHI uses Flash as a means

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of challenging the expectations associated with mainstream electronic literature, Korean art culture, and the end products of specific software. In many ways, then, its work is fashioned as an act of critique. The Art of Sleep is one such work that offers a critical contemplation not only on the state of art in digital culture but also on the state of criticism. It indicts the narrow views shared by critics such as those dissenting Webby jurors, as well as those who expect certain outcomes from a specific authoring tool. The writers respond by showing that such efforts to circle the wagons and promote a particular kind of digital art limit the definitions and possibilities of what literary art can be. Paradoxically, considering the criticism launched against its aesthetic, YHCHI has done more to promote the cause of digital art and literature than any artists, it could be argued, since the first-generation writers of such classic electronic hypertexts as Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) and Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story (1987).25 As the commission by the Tate attests, YHCHI’s work is being taken seriously, and the seriousness of digital art is precisely what The Art of Sleep is all about. The Art of Sleep presents a contemplation on the state of the arts by an insomniac narrator. The work begins:

A few seconds later, the following screen appears, expanding on the work’s first word-sentence:

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This late-night epiphany is enabled by the ‘UNENDING, UNNECESSARY, / UNFATHØMABLE WHINING / ØF THE DØG NEXT DØØR.’ The undesired intrusion by the annoying neighbour provides a stimulus for a long visual soliloquy about what art is, where it is located, and what it does in the contemporary world. The text blares, ‘TRUTH IS, – ‘MØST PEØPLE / CØULD GIVE / A DAMN ABØUT / ART.’ However, this statement neither impedes the narrator’s monologue nor the reader’s viewing of it, a fact that identifies the narrator and the reader as sharing in a small minority of people who do ‘GIVE / A DAMN ABØUT / ART.’ Speaker and reader are bonded by virtue of the circumscribed boundary separating them, the minority, from the majority of ‘MØST PEØPLE,’ based upon the value each places on art. The text continues, ‘ASK SØME GUY / IN THE STREET / IF ART IS / WØRTH A DAMN, – HE’LL GIVE YØU / A SMACK UPSIDE / THE HEAD JUST / FØR ASKING.’ The reader, like the speaker, is not just ‘SØME GUY’ off the street, but, rather, an enlightened individual who cares about art. The text thus produces a division between the reader and the average person, which reproduces the distinction between elite and mass culture that remains so central to modernism and its critical discourse. The Art of Sleep then segues into an exercise in logic that attempts to lay out a foundation for an aesthetic theory. The text develops by gliding between similes and metaphors: ‘NØT, ART IS / LIKE A DØG, / BUT, ART IS / A DØG’ (emphasis in original). The narrator recognizes that ‘I HAD, IN MY SLEEPLESSNESS, / MØVED FRØM / METAPHØR TØ / MATERIALITY.’ The sleep-deprived speaker comes to the conclusion that everything is futile, and, if that is the case, ‘THEN ART IS / FUTILE, TØØ.’ Rather than see this as a bad thing, however, the narrator repeats that ‘ART IS / FUTILE’ until the phrase becomes a platform for building more extensive and extenuating conclusions: ‘IN FACT, ART / IS NECESSARILY / FUTILE.’ The necessary futility of art goes back to Kant’s disinterestedness, wherein a certain amount of futility is a requisite for beauty and aesthetics. Following the logic displayed in YHCHI’s Flash-ing work, if art is futile, and ‘EVERYTHING / IS FUTILE,’ then ‘EVERYTHING IS ART.’ With this realization, the narrator continues, ‘THE REST / WAS A PIECE / ØF CAKE. – ART WAS / A PIECE / ØF CAKE. – NØT, ART IS / LIKE A PIECE / ØF CAKE, BUT, – ART IS A SLAB / ØF BELGIAN / CHØCØLATE CAKE.’ For, if art is a piece of cake or a whining dog, then, of course, art is also a urinal: ‘FØR ART IS / EVERYTHING. – NØT, ART CAN BE ANYTHING. –

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THE IDEA IS / AS ØLD AS THE / URINAL – (WHICH, / IS ART).’ The invocation of Duchamp and the modernist avant-garde identifies YHCHI’s rebellious ideas about art as having become canonical; the contentious claim that a urinal is art is now ‘SØ ØLD I FØRGET / WHØ SAID IT.’ However, as the work continues, it becomes evident that YHCHI has forgotten neither who presented the idea that ‘ART CAN BE ANYTHING’ nor its importance. The Art of Sleep depicts the question of what art is and why it matters. Further into the nearly nineteen-minute animation, the narrator addresses the reader directly as if responding to a silent challenge or rebuke: ‘WHAT’S / THAT? – IF IT’S SØ / CLEAR THAT EVERYTHING / IS ART, – WHY ISN’T / ANYØNE SAYING / IT BUT YØU? – THAT’S AN / EASY ØNE.’ The narrator’s answer posits the importance of this discussion as being of crucial concern to the power structures of contemporary culture: ‘IF SØMEØNE DID / TELL THE TRUTH, / THE PØWERS THAT / BE WOULD FALL.’ The truth about art is thus tied to the truth about cultural power and politics. In a rebellious voice laden with manifesto-like aplomb, the narrator calls for a revolution: ‘GØØDBYE ART / WØRLD, HELLØ / ART.’ Given that the role of art is so central to the cultural ‘PØWERS THAT/ BE,’ such a revolution would be transformative. Such was the goal of the revolution sparked by Duchamp’s urinal, a rebellion that ‘ØPENED THE / FLØØDGATES.’ The narrator continues, ‘BUT THE / FLØØDGATES / DIDN’T ØPEN. – AND WHY / NØT? – BECAUSE THE / PØWERS THAT BE / DIDN’T WANT / THEM TØ ØPEN!’ The failure of the flood to purge the art world and bring about its rebirth cannot simply be blamed on intangible ‘PØWERS,’ for, as the narrator states, ‘DUCHAMP / HIMSELF DIDN’T WANT THEM TØ / ØPEN.’ The artist exemplar of the avantgarde, whose frontal attack on the institution of art redefined it for the twentieth century, is here implicated in conspiring to maintain the status quo. Why? Because ‘MR. D. / WAS DEALING / BRANCUSI’S!’ and ‘WHY WØULD A / GUY MAKING / GØØD DØUGH – ØFF ØF MØDERNIST / ART WANT TØ RUIN / A GØØD THING?’ The depiction of Duchamp as creator and dealer, rebel and member of the old guard, marks a shift in The Art of Sleep and a reflexive move on the part of the authors. These recipients of the Tate commission may work in a medium that seems to be beyond the pale of the art world – and, as they claim, outside of the Korean art world – but the Internet is, in fact, a central facet of this cultural system. When YHCHI receives a commission from the Tate Museum, a leading institution in the art

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world, the authors find themselves in the standard modernist bind: the modernist rebel/outsider is adopted by the institution and incorporated into the system. From within this paradoxical position, the authors present an appropriate ending to their contemplation and condemnation of contemporary art. The Art of Sleep ends with the following reflexive reminder in the form of a personal, playful prayer: ‘PLEASE, LØRD, LET / ME SLEEP A MØMENT. – I’VE GØT TØ GET / UP EARLY AND / START THIS DAMN / TATE CØMMISSIØN.’ In both The Art of Sleep and Dakota, YHCHI pursues a connection to modernism but in different ways: while Dakota claims to adapt Pound’s Cantos, The Art of Sleep adopts a key concern of modernism – the role of art in modern culture. Both works pursue a return to modernism as a means of ascribing the cultural capital of this now-canonical heritage to contemporary, literary art. But how does YHCHI’s digital remediation influence our readings of modernism? What does YHCHI offer to our efforts to reconsider modernism and, in particular, Pacific Rim modernisms? YHCHI challenges simple definitions that distinguish between modernism and the avant-garde, postmodernism, or post-postmodern literature; they complicate delineations of modernism that are limited by geography or nationality, genre or medium; they obfuscate central concepts about literary invention and reception that the modernists helped to standardize. For example, the fact that YHCHI is a partnership between two individuals, each of whom refuses to describe the specifics of his or her labour process, promotes awareness of the collaborative aspect of literature, which can inform our readings of other modernist works beyond Ezra Pound’s famous influence on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Further, the fact that YHCHI comprises a Korean and an American disturbs categorizations based on nationality: is this Korean literature, American literature, or are these terms outdated? The question of nationality among modernist writers has always been a thorny issue (e.g., is T.S. Eliot American or British?), and YHCHI’s digital modernism foregrounds the politics at stake in such categorizations because its works appear on the World Wide Web, a vehicle that enables new levels of global connection and communication. From its position online, YHCHI’s digital modernism encourages reflection both on the state of contemporary literature and also on discourse about modernism. Mark Tribe’s essay introducing The Art of Sleep on the Tate website is titled ‘The Ornithology of Net Art,’ and Tribe explains his enigmatic reference in the essay’s compelling last line: ‘Maybe the real point of The Art of Sleep is, to paraphrase Barnett Newman, that art critics are

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to artists as ornithologists are to birds, that art should not be taken too seriously, and that critics should find something better to do with their time.’ Reading the artists of YHCHI as digital modernists exposes the error of this conclusion. Rather than viewing with distant disregard the critics they critique in The Art of Sleep, YHCHI steadfastly depends upon them. Importantly, its critique of art and the art world appears on the Tate Museum website. From this location, with the cultural capital imbued by the Tate Museum and its tutelage, the ideas and aesthetics that the artists present are bound to receive careful, and indeed critical, consideration. In true modernist fashion, YHCHI attacks the cultural institution in order to strengthen it. In ‘Canto LIII,’ Pound writes, ‘Day by day make it new/ cut the underbrush, / pile the logs / keep it growing.’27 YHCHI ‘keeps it growing’ by critiquing, deconstructing, and rebuilding the position and appearance of literary art in our contemporary, digital culture.

NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

For more on digital modernism, see Jessica Pressman, ‘Digital Modernism.’ Molly Hankwitz, ‘An Interview with Young-hae Chang.’ Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, email to the author, 28 February 2004. Guillory, Cultural Capital, 168. Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism, xi. Dworkin, Reading the Illegible, 54. See Hayles, ‘Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep.’ I use the language of ‘vortex’ consciously to create a parallel between the dynamic centre of the white screen, through which YHCHI’s words emerge, and Pound’s concept of the image as vortex: ‘The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing’ in (Gaudier-Bzreska, 106). 9 Thom Swiss, ‘“Distance, Homelessness, Anonymity, and Insignificance.”’ 10 Of course it is impossible to describe and transcribe Dakota into print. For the sake of differentiating between consecutively flashing screens and linebreaks contained on a single screen, I use the conventional forward slash (/) to denote a line break, and en dashes ( – ) to designate movement, in this case the flashing replacement of text on screen. Also, throughout Dakota, YHCHI uses Monaco font and substitutes the zero sign for the capital ‘O’; I follow them on the latter.

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11 Pound, The Cantos, 3. 12 For a detailed reading of YHCHI’s adaptation of The Cantos, see Jessica Pressman, ‘Close Reading Dakota Close Reading The Cantos.’ 13 See North, The Dialect of Modernism. 14 For more on the issue of ‘passing’ in cyberspace, see Lisa Nakamura, ‘Race In/For Cyberspace.’ 15 Hyun-Joo Yoo, ‘Intercultural Medium Literature Digital.’ 16 Molly Hankwitz, ‘An Interview with Young-hae Chang.’ 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Hyun-Joo Yoo, ‘Intercultural Medium Literature Digital.’ 20 Tribe, ‘An Ornithology of Net Art’ (2006). This argument seeps beyond the Webby jury; I was also personally accused by a colleague of faltering as an advocate of electronic literature because I elected to include Dakota in my research. 21 Tribe, ‘An Ornithology of Net Art.’ 22 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting.’ 23 Macromedia Flash, website. 24 Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, artists’ statement for the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center. 25 Both works are published by Eastgate Systems (www.eastgate.com). 26 For more on the topic, see Wai Chee Dimock’s ‘Planet and America, Set and Subset.’ 27 Pound, The Cantos, 264–5.

SOURCES CITED Diepeveen, Leonard. The Difficulties of Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2003. Dimock, Wai Chee. ‘Planet and America, Set and Subset.’ In Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, 1–13. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Dworkin, Craig. Reading the Illegible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003. Greenberg, Clement. ‘Modernist Painting,’ Forum Lectures. Washington, DC: Voice of America, 1960. Reprinted in Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, edited by Francis Frascina, Charles Harrison, and Deirdre Paul. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

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Hankwitz, Molly. ‘An Interview with Young-hae Chang: Web Artist,’ fine art forum 14.1 (2000), www.msstate.edu/Fineart_Online/Backissues/Vol_14/ faf_v14_n12/text/ review08.htm. Hayles, Katherine. ‘Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of MediaSpecific Analysis.’ Poetics Today 25.1 (2004): 67–90. Hyun-Joo Yoo. ‘Intercultural Medium Literature Digital: Interview with YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES.’ Dichtung-Digital (2005). www.dichtung-digital.com/2005/2-Yoo-engl.htm. Macromedia Flash. Website. www.macromedia.com/software/flash/ flashpro/?promoid=BINT (30 July 2007). Nakamura, Lisa. ‘Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism on the Internet.’ In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, 712–20. New York: Routledge, 2000. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pound, Ezra. The Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1934. – Gaudier-Bzreska. 1916. New York: New Directions, 1974 [1970]. Pressman, Jessica. ‘Close Reading Dakota Close Reading The Cantos: The Strategy of Digital Modernism.’ Modern Fiction Studies (Spring 2008). – ‘Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media.’ PhD diss., University of California (Los Angeles), 2007. Swiss, Thom. ‘Distance, Homelessness, Anonymity, and Insignificance: An Interview with Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries.’ The Iowa Review Web 4 (2002), www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/younghae/interview .html. Tribe, Mark. ‘An Ornithology of Net Art’ (2006). Tate Online. www.tate.org. uk/netart/artofsleep/essay.htm. Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries. Artists’ statement for the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, an affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. www.ps1.org/cut/animations/web/chang.html.

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14 Waking to Global Capitalism in Seoul, San Francisco, and Honolulu: Pacific Rim Refigurations of the Global and the Local rob wilson

In this essay, I will be pressurizing the contradictory and capacious meanings of ‘Pacific Rim’ as a cultural-production framework more than I will ‘modernisms’ as such, which others (from Fredric Jameson’s temporal remapping of capitalist totalities to Evelyn Ch’ien’s modes of mongrelized modernity in Weird English) have already done in thick descriptive, de-situated, and speculative ways.1 As a contributor to forces of ‘minority becoming’ in the region, I have published a globallocal manifesto of sorts called Pacific Postmodern – wherein the paradoxical mix of place-based and Indigenous longings in Hawai’i as across Oceania meet a will to pidginized code-switching and a more multilingual postmodern experimentation.2 When the learned comparativeliterature scholar Marjorie Perloff read a draft of this work, she wrote an email back to this affirmative localism with the tender rejoinder in her subject heading, ‘Pacific Most Modern,’ suggesting that this kind of Pacific experimental work was not all that experimental or postmodern in effect; and, as for the placed-based and Aboriginal claims to represent voices of cultural authenticity, ‘nuff said already,’ as Lee Tonouchi might say in his recalcitrant in-your-face Hawaiian pidgin English. But, as the title of this book suggests, the ‘Pacific Rim’ still enchants and beckons diverse players in all its mysterious allure and contradictoriness, as if this contemporary geo-imaginary gestured toward a kind of vaguely utopic global destiny hailing disparate countries from Korea and Taiwan to Chile and Australia into its motivated transnational mapping of region, place, community, and cultural identity.3 It is as if the vast Pacific Ocean (the world’s biggest), or its ever-dangerous ring of volcanic formations, still configures and links us around this ‘Rim’ to a common planetary future.

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Allow me, at the outset of this speculative remapping, to approach this global geo-imaginary framework of contemporary cultural production with some personal global/local situating within Korean/ American modernity. Such poetics, while more minor in function and scope, are interrelated to more interior emergences taking place, then as now, across the vast and complex Pacific. In 1988, reflecting dominant contexts of Korean internationalization and the crazed, hyper-modernist buildup to the infrastructures and global retooling via the Seoul Olympics, I published a book of mixed poetry and prose called Waking in Seoul, which a writer-friend said would have been better (after Baudelaire in Paris or Ferlinghetti in San Francisco) called ‘Walking in Seoul’ – since that was all I seemed to be doing, aside from partaking in too many OB beer-guzzling conversations – and which the postcolonial cultural critic of Chinese postmodernity Arif Dirlik had more shrewdly retitled ‘Waking to Global Capitalism.’4 For that was indeed what the collage-text had portrayed: waking to modes of global capitalism, walking inside cosmopolitical stupefaction, and (in effect) awakening as a political-cultural being of newness to the American-decentred forces of transnational globalization spreading across the emerging Pacific Rim, as it would come to be called. The Rim was lived in as global-local space of techno-creative newness where all is in the mix, flow, and brash interface of codes and callings. The title poem conveys these intoxicating clashes and brave new in-mixtures of a language (World English cum Korean) trying to become ‘postOrientalist’ – what Chris Connery characterized (in his ground-breaking essay on ‘Pacific Rim Discourse’ [1994]) as the ‘non-othering’ claims for equivalence and global coexistence of this Rim-speak – aiming at speaking ‘a kind of metonymic equivalence’ between objects, nations, and people, in a globalizing world space of commodity presencing.5 WAKING IN SEOUL I awake to the bells of banging sewer pipes being dumped from a truck and a Hangul version of ‘Love’s Been a Little Bit Hard on Me.’ It’s another quiet Saturday, I’m beer-sodden in Seoul, South Korea playing Italy in some World Series of Baseball I never heard of, called on TV the universal family of man.

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A young woman from Harvard is watching Promise Place, a soap opera, using a ponderous dictionary of ideograms to figure out each face of marital torment as the husband first shouts then begs for beer money from his wife. Finally, the autumn moon of Chu’sok, forgiving the noise. Here a marriage can last forever through bus smogs party girls and broken promises. Another world I thought mine reaches me through Time and Newsweek: huge women working on muscles in suits, interest rates falling and climbing like rice farmer’s dok. When I walk out to little Sinchon Station, monkey man and foreign devil from the Beautiful Land across the sea, some neighborhood kids want me to play stickball again by the traintracks, trying to throw the ball over my hulking head as college girls from Ewha cover their mouths to smile.6

For the fall term of 2004, I happily returned to South Korea as a visiting professor at the Korea National University of the Arts working on understanding in later phases these same inter-Asian and Pacific cultural modes of globalization, Pacific Rim visions major and minor, ‘waking to global capitalism’ once again in its ever-expansive and richly innovative modes. This second-time-around visit became a huge Benjaminian education yet again in the disappearance of aura and the shock of a perpetual urban modernity, altering all that I had taken as poetic orientation points of everyday existence and daily survival when I was working and living in the capital of South Korea from 1982 to 1984.7 On the Asian Rim, this time around, I felt less like some clunky Texan giant and more like some small American ghost or a goofy neo-liberal Rip Van Winkle searching (yet again along the nuclearized DMZ border) for past space or everyday modes of cultural interaction that by then had all but vanished into globalization-as-hybridization. By now, from 1984 to 2004, all this everyday modernity had become even more transmogrified into the globalized textures of the everyday

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and ordinary. Little Sinchon Station that I had written about in several poems now connects to a huge nexus of subways and bullet trains linking city and country and international airports. The front of the train station (where we used to play stickball or watch the milling urban and incoming country crowds) had become a parking lot filled with large, fancy cars both foreign and domestic. The surrounding area at Ewha and Yonsei University is dwarfed by new eclectic postmodern construction; the divorce rate is soaring in these same cosmopolitan spaces. Rather unexpectedly, all the more so a spectacular ‘Korean Wave’ of pop music, soap operas, blockbuster films, and modes of technovideo culture has been sweeping through Asia and across inter-Asia and the Rim, from Beijing to Los Angeles, in effect topping the allure of Japanese and Hong Kong cultural products in the region, and further decentring the loosening hold and sway of what had been called the ‘US global popular culture.’8 Eight or nine Korean baseball players are playing in the US Majors. By wireless online in Seoul, I could read the Newsweek cover story on Bob Dylan’s Chronicles before a Boston friend had learned that the unexpected autobiography was coming out. Globalized in mores and modes as well as linked to not one but two subway stations in a revived neighbourhood in eastern Seoul, Korea University had gone from being ‘Makoli Dae-hakyo’ (nicknamed after a rural Korean fermented rice drink) to having a glassed-in Starbucks on campus and declaring its campus ‘centennial “memorial”’ drink to be a Chateau La Cardonne wine from the Medoc region of France. At times, I felt like one of those incoming country bumpkin students from rural Korea that Korea University was so proud to educate, across the modernizing twentieth century, and I was coming there to live and teach from the so-called vanguard Northern California region on the Rim.9 The Asia/Pacific Rim space (‘technoscape’) of cell phones, wireless, bullet trains, flat screens, and digital interface is not so much behind the globalizing West (California North and South has yet to install even one bullet train), that is to say, but up ahead, linking city, country in a space-time globalized maze of libidinal interface on the Pacific Rim.10 It is not enough to figure these modes of cultural production in Asia or on the Rim as the strategies and technologies of perpetual latecomers or late-modern derivatives, leapfrogging strangers, or bastardized mixtures in any sense. The postcolonial Empire that is the United States combined with the New Europe has much to learn from a pedagogical immersion in the everyday mores and modes of these Pacific

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Rim global cities like Seoul, Shanghai, Tokyo, Sydney, Jakarta, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Washington Irving, in ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ one of his Sketch Book stories of 1819, had his work-ethic and wife-fearing Dutchman wake up to early modern capitalism from a nativist brew-induced sleep of twenty years to find the American Revolution had already happened, new hotels had sprung up across his town and region, and (all the more strange) new political parties had come into being, thus baffling the British Loyalist, who gapes at the flood tide of development and waves of immigration that has swamped his Tappen Zee pastoral enclave with vital postcolonial modern change. As such, Rip Van Winkle (a sort of old-school representative American subject) was waking to a form of early modern capitalism that went on bypassing the old mores and local enchantments in the modernizing Americas to the north, as the state of New York would soon displace New England as vanguard region, via a huge shift of commerce, power, cultural semiotics, and geomaterial influence from the port city of Boston to that trans-Atlantic if not world hub, New York City. Van Winkle’s most memorable line – ‘Strange names were over the doors – strange faces at the windows – everything was strange’11 – speaks to an early modern trace of this perpetual disruption, this world decentring and uncanny displacement of homeland spaces and cities by un-convivial strangers from abroad (that is, my relatives from Scotland, Ireland, and Italy), back when (to invoke the more brutally Asian-ignoring postmodernist Jean Baudrillard) ‘America [was] the original of modernity and Europe is the dubbed or subtitled version.’12 Pacific Rim modes of these displacements and global-local interfaces continue to make the United States at times look like Van Winkle’s Hudson River hamlet and less like that venture-capital rich yet ideologically sleepy Silicon Valley suburban haven, namely Palo Alto, California. But this Pacific Rim consciousness of leadership, vanguard cultural semiotics, and techno-innovation is not, in these more traumatized post-9/11 contexts, a generally available mode of world reckoning. Indeed, both Christopher Connery and I would concede that the Pacific Rim may nowadays be just another dying or aborted imaginary of neo-liberal global or ‘worlding’ conviction, weakening even ‘in its hold [over] the US global imaginary’13 since the collapse of the socialist bloc and the seeming demise of Cold War civilizational binaries, even as this strategic region is given a new urgency by the George W. Bush regime’s turn back to security state binaries and borders.14 Within these

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sites of Rim-based cultural production, as in the journal Inter-Asian Cultural Studies and pop-culture genres like manga and the telenovela, the turn to inter-Asia regionalism that amplified during the 1990s in many ways means, in effect, a hugely consequential turn back to China and Japan as geo-material and cultural core. But this ‘return to Asia’ implies, as well, a regional consolidation into Asian transnational solidarity that regrettably very much occludes and ignores the interior Pacific as well as sublimates the lurking heritages of Japanese imperialism across Asia, not to mention the staunch differences of Islamic Asia across the region from Manila to Jakarta and Mumbai. This ‘return to Asia’ also presupposes a form of region-making that is all but completely non-oceanic in its spatial and cultural turn back toward some continental inter-Asia that is latently China-centred and, at times bitterly I must say, very much reactive and reactionary in relation to the United States and the West as those still ‘running imperial dogs’ and so on. China’s imperialism toward Tibet, or even toward Taiwan, gets very much washed out in this turn back to ‘harmonious’ China. Still, despite its array of historical and cultural-political contradictions leading the region from Chairman Mao to Andy Warhol and back, we might want to hold on to the Pacific Rim imaginary in all its transcultural and transnational dimensionality as something worth linking to and preserving, I would here once again affirm, as something all the more utopic and visionary in its decentred, trans-local, and interlinked regional vision of Rim cultures as a transnational and planetary solidarity movement. Conceiving the Pacific Rim as such a transcultural region of imagined transnational belonging might allow us to forge a different pedagogy, history, and framework of canonization and museum display, wherein once ‘minor’ or occluded energies and formations are given the renewed agency and hyper-visibility they have long deserved as a cultural semiotics, as I have tried to suggest in my raw lyric turn to portraying everyday modes of techno-existence in Seoul (‘waking to global capitalism on the Rim’) from 1984 to 2004 and beyond as I return back to Honolulu and San Francisco to live, teach, and work. A Transcultural Pacific: Pacific Islands inside the Rim Whatever the turn to Asia and return to mainland ex-imperial China, as it were, there is still a need for articulating the Pacific region as a transnational and transcultural space of uneven flows and uncanny or spectral conjunctions. This has been my project while working in Hawai’i

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from the late 1970s to the present. We still need to include and respond to these Indigenous, Aboriginal, and Native Pacific perspectives on the transnationalizing of the Pacific, and all the more so to articulate how these various ‘spectral’ peoples now respond to the transformation of the Pacific into regional coalitions of imagined transnational community and confederated solidarities or global ecumenes troping ‘Asia/Pacific’ or ‘inter-Asia’ into contemporary forces and global-local peoples. What role can culture and culture-based politics play in this geo-political struggle for equality and for resources and recognition? Is culture just doomed to late-capitalist subsumption, a hollowing out into what Fredric Jameson and other postmodernists call the ‘Disneyfication’ effect of local simulation and worlding death? Not to be foreclosed from hope, counter-vision, or social struggle, we still need to deal not only with land-based claims and national identity issues of an imagined Native Pacific community, but to theorize – and to culturalize as well – the trenchant makings of a transnational and/or transcultural Pacific from multiple angles of Native and neo-Native vision. Can Asia or the dominant US formations hear the Pacific, or the Pacific enlist Asia into to some kind of critical dialogue? Can the interior Pacific be articulated to formations of the Pacific Rim, inter-Asia, or so-called Asia/ Pacific without being evaporated in the modernizing and re-signifying process of translation? If, following upon the dialectics of conquest in Hegel, we can still see the ocean as capital’s dominant element for the installation of regional and global hegemony, we need to see that the trans-Pacific oceanic imaginary does not just belong to transnational capital as such. The Tongan novelist and social scientist Epeli Hau’ofa has notably figured ‘Oceania’ in big, new, interconnected, and mostly upbeat terms that are non-expansionist, viewing seafaring across the Pacific Islands as a kind of network-building or writing on and across the water. His fictional works, such as Tales of the Tikongs (1983), counter the capitalist ocean with fables of anti-development and satires of failed development, as the Protestant work ethic flips over into a Pacific ethos of mockery, play, leisure, prayer, joke, and dream.15 But in this era of so-called Internet democracy which is booming in sites such as South Korea, Hong Kong, and Mainland China, how can the mounting ‘digital divide’ and the spread of technological unevenness ever be overcome? Singapore is wired with half a million computers, for example, whereas Papua New Guinea abides as everyday Rim culture with less than one per cent of its computers on the World Wide

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Web. By many accounts (and most of them understandably gloomy as the world market hits a global recession in 2008), the Pacific Islands are all the more entangled in a web of globalization forces that will not let go of the drive to Pacific profits, and many of these forces across the island region of Oceania emanate from Asia, via Manila, Tokyo, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Singapore, among other centres. The global tourism industry still enlists further sites of erotic and primitivist fascination and survival syndromes, from Bali to Honolulu and Fiji, even as automobile, garment, biogenetic, and mining industries expand in offshore networks across the region. ‘One of the most striking characteristics of contemporary globalization in the Pacific Islands is its increasingly Asian complexion,’ Terence Wesley-Smith has remarked in a special issue of Contemporary Pacific devoted to the rise of ‘Asia in the Pacific.’16 In Alan Duff’s novel Once Were Warriors (1990), for example, the ghettoized Maori of New Zealand resent the successful Chinese restaurant owners as much as they do the ex-British white settlers whose suburbs of Twin Pines elude and encompass their Native claims to the land and priority of history. The resentment against ‘market-dominant minorities’ capitalizing on globalization now aggravates an array of ethno-nationalist forces, from Southeast Asia to Latin America, Central Europe, and Africa, as Amy Chua warns in World on Fire (2004) in terms that challenge the neoliberal faith in free markets and the invocations of democratic teleology. The globalization agenda of neo-liberal market forces shows little interest in small places or culture-based claims. The second or cybernetic wave of globalization, following upon earlier colonial patterns of spatial peripherilization and ethnic marginalization, is underway, incorporating these far-flung island territories into the global economy in terms that almost always suit the dominant powers and their bankand-credit-driven institutions, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. Island nations at times appear to be the canary in the coal mine of globalization, crying out in the huge darkness that they are threatened everyday, here and now, with global warming as well as Indigenous, planetary, and ecological extinction of diversity. This is to urge that any strong version of Asia/Pacific or inter-Asia, as propagated on the Pacific Rim, cannot afford to forget or ignore internal Pacific dynamics, these contradictory claims of pre-capitalist Aboriginality, communal alternatives, and anti-modern memory. Asia/Pacific and inter-Asia do not just belong to the imagined community of transnational capital and the

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astronaut class of frequent flyers. We can all the more so, in these days of cynical postmodern reason and marketized wanhope, still seek the antagonistic synergy of postcolonial Asia/Pacific forces, flows, linkages, and networks that are spreading across the region. To the post–Cold War United States, Asia all too easily can refract into a space of dynamism, danger, threat, allure, and promise. Nonetheless, we cultural producers in the region of Pacific Rim conjugations have been dreaming of another transnational and transcultural Asia/ Pacific, not some ocean-submerged continent bespeaking exploration and expansion for marines, politicians, and tourists to claim as site of adventure and metropolitan life-writing (region as ‘absorbed’ into Euro-American geo/graphy). Holding onto the Pacific Rim, as Global/Local Peril and Promise Given these global/local transformations, the utopic appeal of the Pacific Rim as a site of transnational co-prosperity and capitalism’s transcendental future no longer beckons with quite the same gleaming promise.17 For a metonymy of this lost-aura effect, consider the graying flat skylines of high-rise Tokyo and the romantic dead-end entropy of loser bars and bad whiskey ads in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), not to mention the emperor-worshipping genuflections of Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai (2003), which evokes a nostalgic form of Meiji Japan that is so romanticized and history-denying in its longings that it stands for a higher and more deviously sublimated mode of American neo-Orientalism altogether. Any version of current Pacific Rim discourse can no longer just factor in postwar Japan as the sublime dynamo of trans-Pacific transnational promise (as model minority in the global sphere) and/or peril (as threat to US-run geopolitical stability and economic supremacy in the region). We must more fully factor in the presence of post-socialist and booming China on the Rim, with its seismic rural/urban shifts to global capitalist restructuring and huge port-city nexus on the trans-Pacific front, as well as multicultural and techno-savvy India, with its booming offshore service resources and modes of data-connectivity taking place in its transnationalized megacities of silicon skills that go on overflowing the nation-state confines or Asian regional containment.18 This North American ambivalence toward Asia (its promise as mimic model/peril as rising threat) is a function not of deep national psychic structures but of history and geopolitical entanglement in the

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Pacific, nation, place, and world. Nonetheless, I would still want to claim that the trans-binary Pacific Rim effect of imagined transnational community still functions as a key worlding space, as it were, of globaltransnational flows suggestive of an emergent, as yet untheorized formation. Whatever the stasis and dead-end effect of global capitalism as portrayed in the burnt-out careers, lost romances, and entropic Tokyo urbanscape in global-slacker movies like Lost in Translation, the US Pacific Rim remains a crucial locus of global capitalist dynamism in all its hyper-speculative risk, as well as more phobic labour-class modes of transnational othering and transnational and transcultural becoming. But, admittedly, this contemporary Pacific Rim nexus is surely a swirling and uneven mess, full of huge rural/urban imbalances and labour/capital injustices and IMF ruses, all the more aggravated by the contradictions of peril and promise after 9/11. Allow me to juxtapose some uneven but globally interlinked instances of this emergent, contradictory Pacific Rim that still goes on diversely rising and worlding. In February 2004, King Sihanouk of Cambodia, influenced by the struggle for queer marriage rights and legal legitimacy in the left-coast city of San Francisco, suddenly decreed via a handwritten message on his website that Cambodia would allow ‘marriage between man and man … or between woman and woman.’19 Gap Inc., a San Franciscobased garment nexus which makes post-hip clothes for yuppies trying to look like Jack Kerouac on weekends and includes Old Navy and Banana Republic under its corporate domain, has some 3,009 factories scattered across 50 countries in its global ‘contado.’ Its annual revenues are close to US$16 billion, even in a bad year. In the spring of 2004, China, with 241 factories, was accused of 73 plant violations in a public-relations attempt by Gap to improve its US/global image by surveying and monitoring work conditions in its Technicolor-garment ‘sweatshops.’20 Geo-strategically centred around an offshore conglomeration of nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, and cruise missiles based at Pearl Harbor and linked to the DMZ and Iraq theatres of war, Rim of the Pacific 2004 (RIMPAC) held its biennial multinational warfare exercise in the Hawaiian waters off Kauai by blasting decommissioned navy destroyers, which had served in the Cuban blockade and the Vietnam War, into sub-oceanic oblivion and decay.21 Full of market boom-andbust vitality, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, and Singapore are held up as global ‘model minorities’ by that cheerleader for global neo-liberalism, Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times. Their economic growth and

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entrepreneurial creativity show backward countries ‘cursed with oil,’ like Iraq and other Middle Eastern polities tied to ‘pathologies of the Arab world’ (sic), how they might survive the global order of transnational capitalism cum US-hegemonic mimicry.22 Shamefacedly, Thomas Friedman has become the ever-troping Pangloss for the rise of global capitalism and US Empire, who never seems to hesitate to boost his global triumphalism by hook or crook, weaponry or circuitry, like some idiot wind blowing across the newspapers of the ‘flat’ world. Resisting Bollywood cover-ups in pelvic love and cultic folk dance, Arundhati Roy decries the real/virtual discrepancies and ‘the most violent increase in rural-urban income inequalities since independence’ in techno-rife India.23 At the blockbuster level of spectacular capitalism, Kill Bill and anime-based films amp up the inter-Asian and global ‘cultural cachet’ of ‘cool Japan,’ and Hong Kong martial-arts film genres and action techniques explode in some kind of ludic transcultural burst of sexuality, violence, digital Zen, cyberspace flight, and Asia-pop idolatry.24 Thomas Friedman should take a sabbatical from his weekly New York Times globalization-puffery and read some manga or the beat poetry of Bob Kauffman or Bob Dylan. Whatever the peril and promise the Pacific Rim poses as a region of transnational interface and transcultural possibility, we need to delve into the ever-shifting discourse of American Orientalism as a neoracialized process of geopolitical othering enacting what Gayatri Spivak calls the ‘crisis management’ of transnational circuits and planetary emergence.25 This phobic othering persists, at the same time as the so-called Asia-Pacific region of APEC goes on fitfully morphing into a porous, user-friendly, ever-globalizing space of post–Cold War, postbinary, ‘post-Orientalist’ interaction and communal hybridity – the neoliberal capitalist space, as it were, of global-transnational flows.26 As the economy continues to grow at a fast pace in the AsianPacific, Arif Dirlik has suggested, the Pacific as a geopolitical space can be redefined so that its future might finally belong to the peoples in the Asian-Pacific.27 Along with Chalmers Johnson, whose anti-Empire work includes Blowback (2000) and The Sorrows of Empire (2004), wherein the Asian Rim figures prominently as a security region, Meredith Woo-Cumings warns that the Pacific still serves as an American lake, in the sense that the United States ‘holds sway not just with the Seventh Fleet, myriad military bases, and a panoply of high-tech and nuclear weapons, but also with a U.S. presence that in all its forms – cultural, political, economic – remains pervasive.’ Woo-Cumings, following her

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structural stress on military and economic hegemony, misses the booming new assertiveness of cultural power in sites like Singapore and Seoul and Kyoto when she sweepingly claims, ‘East Asia lacks the language and psychology for self-assertion, which is an artefact of its long domination by the West.’28 Who can believe such large-brush claims anymore for cultural or racial abjection on the Pacific Rim? Although memories of war, racism, Cold War, and empire do haunt the postcolonial region we live in as ‘inter-Asia’ or ‘Asia/Pacific,’ we can still seek to retrieve and create a different regionalism, and thus hope to counter (via alternative coalitions, creations, theories, and movements) any lurking expansionist designs or proto-colonial dreams of conquest or containment in this, our shared transnational Pacific Rim region. Transitioning to a new era admittedly takes much imaginative work – for distancing the present, evoking other pasts, and conjuring alternative futures across the Pacific, or ‘Wansalwara’ (‘one salt-water’), as a pidgin-English term from Papua New Guinea riffs upon the Pacific. This turn to the postcolonial, pidgin-speaking Oceania seems a good trope to counter Captain Ahab’s ocean-engulfing hunger for sacralized commodities in the Empire-drenched American Pacific outreach desires of Moby-Dick. Korean films nowadays can allow us to see a Pacific Rim global city and national context where activism has not died out, but has gone underground and become subliminal and psychic in innovative ways that (as in such class-haunted works as Park Chan-Wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance [2005] or Oldboy [2005]) demand global/local attention and interpretation. The world of cultural production, as Koichi Iwabuchi puts it, is being ‘recentered’ on the Pacific Rim in ways that recall the haunting of history and the deformations of capitalism we cannot forget in our lust for the shopping mall, the Internet, and rush to the superhighway debt systems of global capitalism and its global popular imaginary.29 Toward ‘Minority Becomings’ on the Pacific Rim We need to rescue the Pacific Rim from APEC and make it serve different transcultural, pedagogical, historical, and ‘minor’ uses tied to alternative energies of transnational becoming. Allow me to end with a turn to some suggestive Korean/American gestures that would move toward a different postmodern/postcolonial becoming in this important world region.

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A major framework (such as Pacific Rim Modernism) often feeds upon minor expression and fears it like a strange pidgin speech that mocks and warps the standard currency. What minority groups construct inside of and against a major language like English is not an essence but a movement, a position of unrest and agitation, a mode of ‘deterritorialization’ that (at its best) outflanks and outwits the workings of the capitalist market, social regulation, and the state as apparatus of identity. Politicized by necessity, minority literature remains tied to the collective enunciation, energies, and aspirations of a social grouping fed up with being excluded, dominated, or considered to be substandard, illiterate, or underdeveloped. Minority literature develops alternative forms, practices, and outlets that are the equal of the major leagues and major languages; the major leagues of literature try to get into the minors, but they have been locked out and abandoned by the minority forms.30 Displaced and nomadic at its core, that is to say with Deleuze and Evelyn Chi’en, minority literature remains a mongrel mixture of roots and wings traced across huge and multilingual spaces, such as the trans-Pacific. To invoke the mixed modes of aggravated diasporic affiliation in Jessica Hagedorn: ‘I’m not interested in just writing “an American novel.” ... Though I’ve been living in America for 30 years now, my roots remain elsewhere ... back there [in the Philippines].’31 More so than British English today, ‘American English’ has become a global language, a globalizing language of mongrelized complexity that goes on expanding the territory of global capital and the power of Americanization, yes; but also as a language that is being ‘deterritorialized’ at multiple points, which is to say being worked over and transformed daily by minor expression, and worked upon by minorities and migratory forces of the interconnected world of Internet connectivity.32 American English is becoming Konglish and Singlish, that is to say, and is linked to Ebonics and Hawaiian Creole English. World English, unlike monolingual Microsoft-speak, is amplifying its variations and mongrel mixtures at the transnational and local interface.33 In this process, minority literature may at best help to articulate this ‘borderlands’ interface, forging this language of blasted emergence where the past and the future mix and form something new, wild, and strange: World English becoming Weird English. Let me say this much toward a concluding overview. In my scholarship and poetry over the past three decades, from the time I founded the Berkeley Poetry Review on the UC Berkeley campus in 1974 until the

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present moment of world crisis, promise, and danger, I have always sought to challenge and complicate common-sense understandings of what ‘minority literature’ is by challenging the homogeneity of whiteness or white language as a US identity category (in a practice similar to that of Deleuze and Guattari reading Kafka as Yiddish writer countering majority-German in Prague). In various works of cultural criticism and poetry, I have challenged the sense of what Asian American literature is, in its hold on non-white ethnicity, via articulating the mongrel site of Hawai’i as inside/outside the dominant US model of minority literature. At times, I have pushed toward showing the rise of diasporic pulls across borders of nation and nation-state culture in the global era, as in sites like San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Watsonville, California for that matter, at the same time revealing that a heightened rooting down in culture and location still takes place inside the nation (as in a site like Hawai’i). The pulls of the transnational and the local are quite strong now, and we need to find new ways of articulating what national literature is in the process of becoming. King-Kok Cheung, surveying Asian American minority literature in post-representational terms in her An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, writes: ‘Whereas identity politics – with its stress on cultural nationalism and American nativity – governed earlier theoretical and critical formulations [of Asian American literature], the stress is now on heterogeneity and diaspora. The shift has been from seeking to “claim America” to forging a connection between Asia and Asian American.’34 Or, in the emergent field-imaginary terms of Elaine Kim, who did much in the 1980s to install and ratify Asian American as an American ethnic terrain of fixed closure and banal repetition: ‘The lines between Asian and Asian American, so important to identity formations in earlier times [of Asian American cultural nationalism claiming to be a part of mainstream America], are increasingly being blurred.’35 Minor writing is not just what a minority writes; it is a distinctive kind of writing that aims to do something different, in a language that is often experimental and risky and unpredictable in voice and angle of cultural-political vision. Milton Murayama does not aspire to become Garrett Hongo. To invoke Deleuze and Guattari on the social visionary language-experiment that is ‘becoming minor’ in the full, decolonizing sense: ‘To make use of the polylingualism of one’s own [major] language, to make a minor or intensive use of it, to oppose the oppressed quality of this language to its oppressive quality, to find points of non-

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culture or under-development, linguistic Third World zones by which a language can escape, an animal enters into things, an assemblage comes into play.’36 A more detailed reading and study of a minority formation of becoming, for instance, that of ‘Korea American literature’ (in authors such as Gary Pak and Theresa Cha), would show both of these tendencies, toward the forging of ‘diasporic wings’ and ‘cultural roots.’ ‘Bringing the migrating birds home’ became the Korean expression for reclaiming overseas immigrant literature in the 1980s. This diasporic reclaiming of Asian/American work is also now taking place in Taiwan, rather indiscriminately, so the Flower Drum Song author, C.Y. Lee, and Maxine Hong Kingston are seen as part of Greater Chinese Diaspora. But, according to Korean poet Ch’oe Yun-Hong, writing on the cusp in 1989: ‘Korean American literature could extend the reach of Korean literature were it not for Koreans’ lack of sympathy for or interest in Korean Americans’ and their strange new iminmunhak (Korean immigrant literature).37 Minority literature offers us a fully social terrain in which to study and explore dynamics of globalization and localization that are pulling at the canon of US national literature and making it into something different, strange, exemplary, and new: not exactly the ‘Internet Goldrush’ of Bill Gates and Microsoft, but a terrain of newness and adventure in which Korea and Korean Americans are playing a strong and contentious part. Works like Gary Pak’s novel, A Ricepaper Airplane (1998), and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s mixed-genre work, Dictee (1982), have enriched the cultural poetics of American identity by showing the complicated linguistic, cultural, and political ties to Korean national struggles which such writers carry across the Pacific: struggles for national survival, artistic experimentation, linguistic coexistence, cultural difference, and so on are articulated in such works.38 Their Korean transnational ‘lines of flight’ and rooting down in place and language have once again showed the power of minority literature to reflect and refract the dynamics of globalization and to alter the makings of national and local culture.39 THIRD COMING Turning and turning in the widening slime, the cyborg cannot tell the television set from the ideological-state-apparatus. Objects fall into mute commodification, becoming profane-illumination,

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Heaven Wind Stars Cellphones Down to the last day of my life clear as a laptop screen at dawn fifth biggest investor in India on Arirang News clear as a sudden blue sky over mountains of Seoul I will follow the calling set for me ‘waking to global capitalism’ whacked out on Rim a road forever new cum interest in modernity even from a breeze stirring the earth-small leaf tonight the stench of ancient sewers rises in the gut magpie’s crying appeased by echo of the cellphone nobody hears in the subway stall or video game parlor waking or was it Weastern walking (embodiment) in Seoul

NOTES 1 See Jameson, A Singular Modernity, and Ch’ien, Weird English. On these transpacific interactions of literary modernity spreading across the region,

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then and now, from Paris to Tokyo and San Francisco and back, see also Josephine Park, Apparitions of Asia. Rob Wilson, Pacific Postmodern. Ch’ien’s Weird English makes a comparable approach to ‘Chinglish’ as a literary language of postmodern social becoming. In 2004, APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) held its twelfth summit, this time in Santiago, Chile, the first time for a meeting to be held in South America since APEC’s formation in 1989. One of its organizing founders, along with Australia, Korea attaches high importance to APEC’s neo-liberalist concept of ‘open regionalism,’ especially since trade with APEC’s twenty members accounted for some 68 per cent of Korea’s total trade in 2004. See Rambabu Garikipati, ‘APEC Provides Platform for Free Trade, Investment.’ For APEC, ‘Asia-Pacific Region’ very much means what we and most other global shapers and players would call ‘the Pacific Rim.’ On Dirlik’s comment and the critical contexts and their impact on Asian and American studies, see Rob Wilson, ‘“Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & the University”’; and Arif Dirlik, ‘American Studies in the Time of Empire.’ Connery, ‘Pacific Rim Discourse,’ 32. Rob Wilson, Waking in Seoul, 14. I so much liked this everyday life as a teacher and writer based in South Korea, and based at Korea University, Ewha University, and Seoul National University, that I resigned my tenure-track teaching position at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Not much later (after some three troubled months) I had for various reasons, personal and professional, rescinded that ‘rash’ decision and returned from Seoul to Honolulu to teach as an (untenured) assistant professor of English. If it had turned out that I had become appointed as director of the Fulbright Center in Seoul (I came in second for that job position in 1984, so they said), I might have stayed on the Pacific Rim for the duration of my career. Fate and the world turn upon such hazardous bargains, and life choices. See the insightful study of trans-Asian cultural flows, Recentering Globalization, by Koichi Iwabuchi, who gestures toward the rise of Korean cultural flows in the ‘Japan’s Asian dreamworld’ space (208–10) in his final chapter. On the complexities and shifts of San Francisco configured as a Pacific Rim city of post-Beat culture and techno-driven newness, see Rob Wilson, ‘Spectral City,’ in a special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies on ‘Urban Imaginaries’ on the Pacific Rim coedited by Meaghan Morris, Markus Reisenleitner, and Caroline Turner. This is what Asada Akira had traced, in its Japanese postmodern version,

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Rob Wilson as ‘infantile capitalism,’ based around the perpetual neo-differentiation of niches, linkages, desires, and codes: see ‘Infantile Capitalism and Japan’s Postmodernism.’ Irving, ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ 1349. Jean Baudrillard, America, cited in Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 41. Connery, ‘Pacific Rim Discourse,’ 50–6. On the shifting configurations, so-called new spatialities, temporal connections, spectral disjunctions, and recurrences now taking place as ‘worlding’ modes across Asia and the Pacific, see the collection of cultural criticism coedited by Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery, The Worlding Project. For a sustained reading of Hau’ofa’s counter-converting turn to Oceania as an ecumene on the Pacific Rim, see Rob Wilson, Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted, chapter 4. Wesley-Smith, ‘Introduction,’ 309. The promise of capitalism’s creative-destructive ethos still drives the market-geared urban forms and shopping-mall cities of China as outlined in the Harvard Design School Project on the City, Great Leap Forward. On rural/urban imbalances in globalizing India, see Gayatri Spivak, ‘Megacity’; on rural/urban boom and bust in China, see ‘The Second Industrial Revolution.’ See also the globalization tactics and national crisis-management of post-socialist Chinese knowledge/power as mapped in Wang Hui, China’s New Order, particularly section 3 on ‘Alternative Globalization and the Question of the Modern.’ ‘Cambodia King Backs Gay Marriage.’ Michael Liedtke, ‘Gap Inc. Details Working Conditions in Global Garment Factories.’ Timothy Hurley, ‘Navy Destroyer to Go Out in Blaze of RIMPAC Glory.’ Friedman, ‘Cursed with Oil.’ Roy, ‘Let Us Hope the Darkness Has Passed.’ I thank Anjali Arondkar for drawing my attention to this item. See Susan Peques, ‘“Samurai,” “Lost in Translation”’ Boost Japan’s Cinematic Potential.’ On Korean cinematic interventions into global and local culture, see also Rob Wilson, ‘Killer Capitalism on the Pacific Rim. For a ‘translational’ version of ‘transnational literacy’ and ‘crisis management’ in US area studies, ethnic studies, and comparative literature, see Spivak, Death of a Discipline, especially chapter 3, ‘Planetarity,’ as a challenge to US globalism from the internationalist left which cannot be merely ‘antiglobal’ as a reaction-formation to neo-liberal domination.

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26 On US Orientalism, see Edward W. Said’s defamiliarization of postwar liberal humanities and social sciences in Orientalism, 284–328, which tracks the discourse of state-department driven ‘American Orientalism’ as formation of area studies in the 1950s. See also Colleen Lye’s archival work in America’s Asia on its racial, state, and class origins in Jack London, Frank Norris, and others, as well as the kind of self-orientalizing formation in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. 27 Dirlik, ‘The Asian-Pacific Idea.’ 28 Woo-Cumings, ‘Market Dependency in U.S.-East Asian Relations.’ See also Chalmers Johnson, Blowback, and The Sorrows of Empire. 29 At 0:27 PM -0700 04.9.28, Rob Wilson wrote to Koichi Iwabuchi via email from Seoul: ‘I just thought you might be interested to know that, while I was teaching globalization/localization dynamics these past weeks via Stuart Hall and Appadurai to film students at Korea National University of the Arts, they informed me that Iwabuchi’s idea of ‘globalization-ashybridization’ is now the commonplace and dominant conception in Korea. So Hall offered them nothing new.’ From: Koichi Iwabuchi Subject: Re: something on global local Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 19:48:21 +0900 To: Rob Wilson ‘Wow, really? That’s so interesting. I do not know why. Maybe because my book was translated into Korean. Yes, as you know well, what comes next when globalization-as-hybridization becomes banal would be a crucial question for all of us. Not just celebrating the local nor despairing of the Empire, as suggested in your collection. Enjoy your stay in Seoul, which is a hottest pop culture spot in East Asia and perhaps another Asian cool after Japan in the US, cheers, Koichi’ 30 Minority and minor is not the same thing, but the minority can remain tied to the minor literature and minor leagues and need not see this as a failure but as a distinctive achievement. 31 Hagedorn, ‘The Exile Within/ The Question of Identity,’ 181. 32 ‘The first and most fateful deterritorialization is then this one, in which what Deleuze and Guattari call the axiomatic of capitalism decodes the terms of the older precapitalist coding systems and “liberates” them for new and more functional combinations. ... [T]here comes a moment in which the logic of capitalism – faced with the saturation of local and even foreign markets – determines an abandonment of that kind of specific

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34 35 36

37 38 39

Rob Wilson production, along with its factories and trained workforce, and, leaving them behind in ruins, takes its flight to other more profitable ventures [such as new forms of financial speculation shorn from land and place] ... Globalization is rather a kind of cyberspace in which money capital has reached its ultimate dematerialization.’ See Fredric Jameson, ‘Culture and Finance Capital,’ 152–4. See Evelyn Nien-ming Ch’ien’s Weird English, chapter 2 on innovative and trans-normative Chinglish forms of ‘Chinky Writing.’ See also Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, on myriad forces of ‘American English’ now being deployed ‘in the service of minorities,’ Third-World linkages, and counter-national becomings that defy normative canonization or social control (58). See Cheung, ‘Re-Viewing Asian American Literary Studies,’ 1. Kim, ‘Foreword,’ xi–xvii. See also Kim, Asian American Literature. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka, 27. In a review-essay written for a special ‘Santa Cruz’ issue of Postcolonial Studies (2008) coedited by Christopher Leigh Connery and Venita Seth, I survey the richly articulated fictional work of Milton Murayama as portraying a rooted and routed labour diaspora of Japanese-Hawaiian-Americans moving across the twentieth century from Japan to Hawai’i to California and New York City and back: in other words, Milton Murayama’s four novels offer a fully worlded, interacting, and complex Pacific Rim and Pacific Basin vision. As paraphrased by Elaine H. Kim, ‘Korean American Literature,’ 164. For an overview of such narratives of minority identity and diasporic linkages, see Henry Kim, ‘Cover Stories.’ On ‘diasporic’ and mixed cultural dimensions of such works, see Sheng-mei Ma, Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures.

SOURCES CITED Akira, Asada. ‘Infantile Capitalism and Japan’s Postmodernism.’ South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (1988): 629–34. Baudrillard, Jean. America. Translated by Chris Turner. London and New York: Verso, 1988. ‘Cambodia King Backs Gay Marriage.’ BBC News, 20 February 2004, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3505915.stm. Ch’ien, Evelyn Nien-Ming. Weird English. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

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Cheung, King-Kok. ‘Re-Viewing Asian American Literary Studies.’ In An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, 1–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Chua, Amy. World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. New York: Anchor Books, 2004. Connery, Christopher Leigh. ‘Pacific Rim Discourse: The U.S. Global Imaginary in the Late Cold War Years.’ boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 21.1 (Spring 1994): 30–56. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Dirlik, Arif. ‘American Studies in the Time of Empire.’ Comparative American Studies 2 (2004): 287–302. – ‘The Asian-Pacific Idea: Reality and Representation in the Invention of a Regional Structure.’ In What Is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea, 2nd ed., edited by Arif Dirlik, 15–36. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Friedman, Thomas L. ‘Cursed with Oil.’ New York Times, 9 May 2004, http:// query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D00EFD9143CF93AA35756C0 A9629C8B63. Garikipati, Rambabu. ‘APEC Provides Platform for Free Trade, Investment.’ Korea Herald, 11 November 2004, 3. Hagedorn, Jessica. ‘The Exile Within/The Question of Identity.’ In The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, edited by Karin AguilarSan Juan, 173–82. Boston: South Point Press, 1994. Harvard Design School Project on the City. Great Leap Forward. Edited by Rem Koolhaus et al. Koln and Cambridge, MA: Taschen/Harvard Design School, 2001. Hurley, Timothy. ‘Navy Destroyer to Go Out in Blaze of RIMPAC Glory.’ Honolulu Advertiser, 4 May 2004, http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/ article/2004/May/04/ln/ln03a.html. Irving, Washington. ‘Rip Van Winkle.’ In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume 1, 3rd ed., edited by Paul Lauter et al., 1342–54. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Iwabuchi, Koichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Jameson, Fredric. ‘Culture and Finance Capital.’ In The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998, 136–61. London and New York: Verso, 1998.

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– A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London and New York: Verso, 2002. Johnson, Chalmers. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. – The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. Kim, Elaine H. ‘Foreword.’ In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, edited by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim and Amy Ling, xi–xvii. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. – ‘Korean American Literature.’ In An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, edited by King-Kok Cheung, 156–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. – Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Kim, Henry. ‘Cover Stories: A Guide to Every Published Korean American Novel.’ KoreAm Journal, June 1999, 14–24. Liedtke, Michael. ‘Gap Inc. Details Working Conditions in Global Garment Factories.’ San Francisco Chronicle, 12 May 2004, business section. Lye, Colleen. America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Ma, Sheng-mei. Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Park, Josephine. Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Peques, Susan.‘“Samurai,” “Lost in Translation” Boost Japan’s Cinematic Potential.’ Japan Today online, 16 January 2004. Roy, Arundhati. ‘Let Us Hope the Darkness Has Passed: India’s Real and Virtual Worlds Have Collided in a Humiliation of [BJP] Power.’ Guardian [UK], 14 May 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/may/14/india .comment. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. ‘The Second Industrial Revolution.’ BBC News, 11 May 2004, http://news.bbc .co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3701581.stm. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. – ‘Megacity.’ Lecture presented at University of California at Santa Cruz, 13 May 2004. Wang, Hui. China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition. Edited by Theodore Huters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

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Contributors

Christopher Bush is assistant professor of French and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, where he researches comparative and interdisciplinary modernisms, especially East Asian/ Western relations. He is the author of Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (forthcoming) and co-editor of a critical edition of Victor Segalen’s Stèles (2007). Susan Carson is head of Postgraduate Studies (Research) in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. She publishes in the area of Australian studies in general with a particular focus on Australian modernism and literary tourism, as well as comparative Chinese and Australian women’s writing. Choi Dong Ho is professor of Korean literature at Korea University, Seoul. An acclaimed poet as well as a scholar, he is vice-president of both the Korean Poetry Society and The Critics Society of Korean Literature. An author of more than a dozen books, he is regarded as a leading figure on twentieth-century Korean literature. Mary Ann Gillies is professor of English at Simon Fraser University. Her books include Henri Bergson and British Modernism: 1880–1920 (1995), Modernism: An Introduction (co-authored with Aurelea Mahood, 2007), and The Professional Literary Agent in Britain: 1880–1920 (2007). She is currently working on a book about Katherine Mansfield and Emily Carr, which focuses on the ways in which modernist literature and art travel.

360

Contributors

Eric Hayot is associate professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies, and Director of the Asian Studies Program, at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of essays on contemporary poetry, Asian America, digital culture, and comparative modernism, and of The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (2009). Francisco Morán is a poet and professor of Latin American literature at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of Julián del Casal o los pliegues del deseo (2008), and articles on Hispanic American modernismo. Morán is the editor of the journal La Habana Elegante (www .habanaelegante.com) and is currently completing a book-length project on Orientalism. Miri Nakamura is assistant professor of Japanese Language and Literature at Wesleyan University. She specializes in modern Japanese literature, and teaches courses on popular fiction and narrative theory. She is currently working on a book exploring the rise of the uncanny in modern Japan. David Palumbo-Liu is professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has published widely on literary, social, and cultural criticism, and is completing a book on narrative, ethics, and globalization. He is also co-editing, with Bruce Robbins and Nirvana Taoukhi, a collection of essays, Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture (forthcoming). Kyoko Omori is associate professor of Japanese at Hamilton College. She is currently completing a book entitled Detecting Modanizumu: Shinseinen [New Youth] Magazine, Tantei Sh sestu [Detective Fiction], and the Culture of Japanese Vernacular Modernism in the 1920s–1930s. Her translation of ‘The Shanghaied Man’ (by Tani J ji) has been published in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, Volume One (2005). Jessica Pressman is assistant professor of English at Yale University. She researches digital literature, twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, and media theory. Her articles on experimental literature have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in American Fiction, and Dichtung-Digital. She is completing a manuscript titled Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media. http://jessicapressman .commons.yale.edu.

Contributors 361

Suzuki Sadami is professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto. A graduate of the University of Tokyo, he received his doctorate from the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Japan, 1997. He is the author of numerous books on Japanese literature and culture, especially modern and contemporary. Ann Stephen is an art historian and senior curator at the University of Sydney. Her recent books include On Looking at Looking: The Art and Politics of Ian Burn (2006); and Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917–1967 (2006) and Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia (2008), both co-edited with Andrew McNamara and Philip Goad. Helen Sword holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and is head of the Academic Practice Group in the Centre for Academic Development at the University of Auckland, where she also teaches in the English Department. She has published widely on modernist literature, higher education pedagogy, academic writing, and digital poetics. Her books include Engendering Inspiration (1995), Ghostwriting Modernism (2002), and The Writer’s Diet (2007). She is currently working on a book titled Stylish Academic Writing: A Manifesto. William J. Tyler was professor of modern Japanese literature at Ohio State University. A translator of modern Japanese fiction, he also edited the anthology Modanizumu in Japanese Fiction – An Introduction to Modernist Prose from Japan, 1914–1938 (2008). His translations include The Psychological World of Natsume S seki (1976), The Bodhisattva (1990), and The Legend of Gold & Other Stories (1987). Rob Wilson is author of Waking In Seoul, Reimagining the American Pacific, The Worlding Project, and Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted. He teaches in the World Literature and Cultural Studies program in the University of California at Santa Cruz and was recently a visiting professor at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. Steven Yao is associate professor of English at Hamilton College. He is the author of Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (2002) and co-editor of Sinographies (2008). His most recent study, Foreign Accents: An Historical Poetics of Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Post-Ethnicity, is forthcoming.

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Index

Abe, Jir , 77, 83 Abe, Tomoji, 201 Abe, Yoshishige, 83 Aicard, Jean, 55 Akahito, Yamabe no, 77 Akutagawa, Ry·nosuke, 203, 207, 216, 221 Allen, Clifford, 128 Anderson, William, 71 Aoki, Shigeru 79; Umi no sachi (Product of sea), 79 Asahara, Rokur , 200–1 Astruc, Zacharie, 54, 55–9, 60 Atkins, E. Taylor, 213 Auden, W.H., 3, 233; Sonnets from China, 3 Augé, Marc, 183 Australia, ix, 38, 151, 152, 153, 159, 163, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 186, 189, 190, 192, 194, 335 Ball, Hugo, 153–4 Balzac, Honoré de, 84 Banfield, Anne, 121–5, 127, 135–6, 139 Bang, Won Yong, 101 Barthes, Roland, 62

Bash , Matsuo, 74, 83–5 Baudelaire, Charles, 54, 55, 58, 336 Baudrillard, Jean, 219, 310, 311, 339 Beauchamp, Harold, 234 Bell, Julian, 122, 179 Benjamin, Walter, 47 Benveniste, Emile, 302 Bergson, Henri, 76, 78, 87, 125; Creationist Evolution, 78; Matière et mémoire, 76 Berman, Jessica, 174, 178 Berman, Marshall, 41 Bernardi, Joanne, 213 Bernstein, Charles, 319 Bing, Siegfried, 60 Birnbaum, Phyllis, 212 Black, Dora, 129–30, 131, 136 Blake, Ann, 185 Blake, William, 83 Blakey, Art, 321 Boddy, Gillian, 236 Bonnard, Pierre, 70; Femmes aux Jardins, 70 Bradbury, Malcolm, 41, 216–17 Braque, Georges, 88, 238 Brecht, Bertolt, 4 Breton, André, 105, 153

364

Index

Brett, Dorothy, 255 Britain (England), 20, 79, 120, 189, 234, 235, 246, 254 Brooks, Barbara, 186 Browning, Gordon, 154–5 Burty, Philippe, 54, 55, 56, 57 Buruma, Ian, 215 Bush, George W., 339 Bush, Ronald, 20 Canada, ix, 38, 235, 239, 241, 248, 252 Carr, Alice, 238 Carr, Emily, 234–5, 237–46, 248, 250–4, 256; Beach Scene with Stumps and Logs, 242, 243; Red Cedar, 253; Totem Poles, Kitseukla, 242, 245, 250; Totem Walk at Sitka, 242, 244; Vanquished, 250, 251 Carr, Lizzie, 238 Carr, Richard, 234 Carroll, Lewis, ix Casal, Julián del, 299–306, 311, 312 Casillo, Robert, 10–11 Cay, Maria, 305 Cay, Raoul, 305, 306 Cézanne, Paul, 123 Ch’ien, Evelyn, 335, 347 Ch’oe, Yun-Hong, 349 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, 349; Dictee, 349 Chang, Eileen, 174, 176, 180–5, 186, 187–8, 189–93, 194; ‘Love in the Fallen City,’ 176, 180–5, 186, 187–8, 191–2, 193; Written on Water, 183 Chang, Kim-Woo, 114 Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne, 13 Chang, Young-hae, 316, 318, 321–32 Chaplin, Charlie, 271 Chapple, Ann, 20

Chavannes, Pierre Puvis de, 79 Cheadle, Mary Patterson, 9 Chen, Xiaomei, 13 Chesneau, Ernest, 53, 54, 57–60, 64 Cheung, King-Kok, 348 Cheyfitz, Eric, 11 Chiba, Kameo, 72, 205 Chile, 335 China, ix, 8, 15, 19, 20, 57, 58, 59, 60, 75, 80, 88, 122, 123, 127, 128–33, 136, 138, 139, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 187, 190, 206, 233, 265, 340, 343, 344 Cho, Hwyang, 115 Cho, Yong Man, 109 Choe, Nam-Sum, 100; ‘From the Sea to Youth,’ 100 Chow, Rey, 175, 185, 187, 188, 193 Chua, Amy, 342 Chul, Lee Byung, 114 Chung, Ji Yong, 101, 102, 103–4, 106, 109, 110, 111, 113, 115; ‘Café France,’ 103; Collected Poems of Chung Ji Yong, 103, 104; ‘Paengnokdam’ (White deer lake), 103–4; ‘A Reptile Animal,’ 103; ‘Windowpane, I,’ 103 Clark, Judith, 186 Claudel, Paul, 4 Clifford, James, 233, 256 Connery, Christopher, 336, 339 Conrad, Joseph, 233, 255; Heart of Darkness, 233 Coppola, Sofia, 343; Lost in Translation, 343, 344 Corbusier, 184 Corot, Jean-Baptiste Camille, 79 Coulange, Fustel de, 191 Courter, Elodie, 160 Cruise, Tom, 343

Index Cuba, 298, 302, 305 Cumings, Bruce, 16 Cusack, Dymphna, 190; Come In Spinner, 190 Dalloz, Paul, 59 Darío, Rubín, 294, 299, 304–6; Autobiografia, 304–5 Dark, Eleanor, 174, 176, 177, 179, 180, 182–4, 186, 187, 188–91, 192–3, 194; The Little Company, 174, 190–1, 192–3; Prelude to Christopher, 189; The Timeless Land, 193; Waterway, 182–4, 188, 189 Darwin, Charles, 61 de Certeau, Michel, 179, 180, 182, 183, 190 Defoe, Daniel, 151–2; Robinson Crusoe, 151–2 DeKoven, Marianne, 194 Deleuze, Gilles, 347, 348 Dempsey, Jack, 273 Derrida, Jacques, 134 Devanny, Jean, 186 Dickinson, G.L., 122 Diepeveen, Leonard, 318 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 78 Dirlik, Arif, 16, 17, 336, 345 Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.), 8, 233, 250 Doppo, Kunikida, 79; Musashino (The field of Musashi), 79 Duchamp, Marcel, 88, 327; Fountain, 88 Duff, Alan, 342; Once Were Warriors, 342 Dworkin, Craig, 319 Dylan, Bob, 338, 345; Chronicles, 338 Easter Island, 153 Edgar, Alfred, 271

365

Edogawa, Rampo, 200, 271; ‘Ni-sen d ka’ (Two-Sen copper coin), 271 Egypt, 8, 44 Einstein, Albert, 127 Eisenstein, Sergei, 84 Eldershaw, Barnard, 190; Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 190 Eliot, T.S., 3, 104, 126, 185, 233, 246, 250, 267, 278, 328; The Waste Land, 3, 104, 126, 185, 328 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 75 End , Sh·sake, 209; Chinmoku (Silence), 209 Eysteinsson, Astradur, 216–17 Fang, Achilles, 9 Fenollosa, Ernest, 18, 19, 21–2, 26, 27, 71, 75–6 Fergusson, John Duncan, 239, 241, 250 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 28, 336 Feyerabend, Paul, 40 Flaubert, Gustave, 126, 127, 208; Madame Bovary, 126 Forster, E.M., 3–4, 122, 233; A Passage to India, 3–4, 233 Foucault, Michel, 61 Fraissinet, Édouard, 57, 58 France, 54, 57, 60, 81, 204, 235, 238, 239, 240, 244, 246, 252, 254, 298, 338 Frankfurt, Harry G., 278 Freedman, Alisa, 200, 215 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 126 Friedman, Thomas L., 344–5 Fry, Roger, 77, 122, 123, 124, 160 Fujioka, Sakutar , 77 Fujishima, Takeji, 79; Ch  (Butterfly), 79 Funahashi, Seiichi, 201

366

Index

Gallegos, Rómulo, 297; Doña Bárbara, 297 Gardner, William, 200 Gates, Bill, 349 Gauguin, Paul, 80, 239 Gelpi, Albert, 28 Germany, 75, 88 Gibb, Harry Phelan, 238–9, 241, 250 Gide, André, 208, 210, 214; Les faux monnayeurs, 208, 214 Gillen, Francis, 155, 159 Gold Rush, 271 Goll, Ivan, 84 Gonda, Yasunosuke, 262 Grainger, Percy, 157–8, 159 Greece, 10, 63 Greenberg, Clement, 323–4 Grousset, René, 296 Guatarri, Félix, 347, 348 Guillory, John, 318 Gunji, Jir masa, 219; Misuta Nippon (Mister Nippon), 219 Hacking, Ian, 40 Haechel, Ernest, 78 Hagedorn, Jessica, 347 Hagiwara, Sakutar , 84, 210, 213 Haiti, 44 Hamill, Sam, 28 Hansen, Miriam, 264 Harris, Lawren, 252 Hartmann, Karl Robert Eduard von, 75 Haruyama, Yukio, 213 Hau’ofa, Epeli, 341; Tales of the Tikongs, 341 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 76 Hayami, Gyosh·, 80 Hayashi, Fumiko, 201, 215 Hayles, Katherine, 319

Hayot, Eric, 12, 20 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 58–9, 71, 75, 79, 341 Heller, Ben A., 299 Helmhotz, Hermann von, 87 Hennings, Emmy, 153 Henríquez Ureña, Max, 294 Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 294 Hirata, Hosea, 213 Hiroshi, Minami, 72 Hiroshige, Utagawa, 54, 71 Hirshfield, Jane, 28 Hodge, Bob, 176 Hodgkins, Frances, 239, 241, 250 Hofmannstahl, Hugo von, 80 Hokenson, Jan, 62 Hokusai, Katsushika, 54 Homer, 320; Odyssey, 320 Hongo, Garrett, 348 Hori, Tatsuo, 209, 212, 215 Hoshino, Tatsuo, 271; ‘Yama mata yama’ (Mountains after mountains), 271 Howe, Irving, 41 Howe, Susan, 319 Hu, Lancheng, 176, 186 Huang, Nicole, 191, 194 Huang, Yunte, 12 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 153–4 Hungary, 126 Husserl, Edmund, 125 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 76 Hwang, Ji Woo, 115 Hynde, Louis, 77 Ibsen, Henrik, 76, 236 Inaga, Shigemi, 71, 75 Inagaki, Taruho, 200; Issen ichiby  monogatari (A thousand and onesecond stories), 200

Index India, 233, 343 Iran, 126 Iraq, 38, 39, 40, 43, 45, 47, 344, 345 Ireland, 339 Irving, Washington, 339 Isherwood, Christopher, 233; A Journey to War, 233 Ishikawa, Jun, 200; Fugen (The Bodhisattva, or Samatabhadra), 200 Isoda, K ichi, 262 Italy, 339 It , Sei, 201, 203, 207–8, 209, 212, 215, 220–1, 278; Y·ki no machi (Streets of fiendish ghosts), 203, 220–1 Iwabuchi, Koichi, 346 Iwano, H mei, 76, 78 Jackson, Shelley, 325; Patchwork Girl, 325 Jacob, Max, 84 James, Florence, 190; Come In Spinner, 190 James, Henry, 233, 236, 255 James, William, 76, 86 Jameson, Fredric, 37, 64, 325, 335, 341 Janco, Marcel, 153 Japan, ix, 8, 15, 16, 19, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 81, 84, 88, 100, 104, 129, 190, 199, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 218, 220, 221, 261, 262, 264, 265, 266, 270, 273, 275, 276, 280, 301, 340, 341, 343, 344 Johnson, Barbara, 62 Johnson, Chalmers, 345; Blowback, 345; The Sorrows of Empire, 345 Jones, Andrew, 13 Joyce, James, 126, 210, 220–1, 233, 250, 267, 278; Ulysses, 126, 220–1 Joyce, Michael, 325

367

Jun, Lee Tae, 108 Kafka, Franz, 348 Kajii, Motojir , 87–8, 201, 267; ‘Remon’ (Lemon), 87–8 Kakei, Katsuhiko, 78 Kamitsuka, Sh ken, 219; T ky , 219 Kanbara, Ariake, 76, 79, 81–3; ‘Manatsu (k ki rittai shi)’ (Midsummer [post-Cubist poem]), 81; Shunch sh· (Collection of spring birds), 79, 82 Kanbara, Tai, 81–2 Kandinsky, Wassily, 82, 88 Kandiyoti, Deniz, 185 Kàno, H gai, 71 Kaplan, Sydney Janet, 246–7 Kataoka, Teppei, 72, 85, 86 Kat , Ry nosuke, 269–70 Kauffman, Bob, 345 Kawabata, Ry·shi, 80 Kawabata, Yasunari, 72, 85, 86, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204, 206–7, 210–12, 215–16, 219, 267; Asakusa kurenaidan (The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa), 200, 215, 219; In’ei raisan (In Praise of Shadows), 211; Kinj· (Of Birds and Beasts), 215; Yukiguri (Snow Country), 199, 202, 207, 211, 215–16 Kawamoto, Sabur , 219 Keene, Dennis, 204, 208–9, 212, 215 Keene, Donald, 209–12, 215 Keion, Nunami, 83 Kenner, Hugh, 9, 19, 26 Kern, Robert, 12, 20 Kerouac, Jack, 344 Key, Ellen, 78 Kikuchi, Kan, 201, 221; Shinju fujin (Madam Pearl), 221 Kill Bill, 345

368

Index

Kim, Chun Su, 115 Kim, Dong Hwan, 106; The Night at the Frontier, 106 Kim, Elaine, 348 Kim, Ki Rim, 101, 102–3, 104–7, 109, 110, 112–15 ; ‘Dreaming Pearl Let’s Go to the Sea,’ 114; ‘Go to the Life,’ 104; Manners of the Sun, 104, 106, 114; ‘The Morning of the World,’ 106; New Song, 114; The Sea and the Butterfly, 114; ‘The Sea and the Butterfly,’ 113–14; ‘Surrealist,’ 104–5; The Weather Chart, 104, 105–6 Kim, Kwang Kwun, 101, 110–12, 115; Gaslight, 110; ‘Lyricism of an Autumn Day,’ 111–12; ‘My Sister Going Away,’ 110; ‘Night Train,’ 110; The Port of Call, 110; ‘Snowy Night,’ 110–11, 112 Kim, Kyu Dong, 115 Kim, Kyung Rin, 115 Kim, Sang Hwun, 114 Kim, So Wol, 103 Kim, Su Young, 115 Kim, Young Rang, 103, 110 Kimura, Sh hachi, 77 Kinashita, Naoe, 78; Zange (Confession), 78 Kingsford Smith, Charles, 194 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 35, 37–9, 40–5, 48, 349; Fifth Book of Peace, 35, 42–45; Tripmaster Monkey, 42–3, 44; The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, 42 Kitahara, Hakush·, 77, 78 Kitamura, T koku, 75, 78 Kitasono, Katsue, 213 Klinger, Max, 76 Ko, Han Yong, 101 Kobayashi, Takiji, 203, 221

Kodama, Sanehide, 20 Komiya, Toyotaka, 83 Kon, Wajir , 262 Korea, ix, 100, 101, 116, 316, 317, 321, 322, 335, 337, 338, 341, 344 Kosovo, 44, 45 Kuhn, Thomas, 40 Kuriyagawa, Hakuson, 78; Kindai no ren’ai kan (Modern views on love), 78 Lacan, Jacques, 134 LaMarre, Thomas, 200 Landon, Herman, 273 Langton, Marcia, 165 Larson, Wendy, 177, 191 The Last Samurai, 343 Laurence, Patricia, 9, 121–5, 127, 139, 175–6 Le Espiritu, Yen, 28 Leblanc, Maurice, 273 Lee, C.Y., 349; Flower Drum Song, 349 Lee, Hermione, 189 Lee, Leo Ou-Fan, 179, 181, 188 Lee, Robert, 20 Lee, Sang, 101, 103, 106, 107–8, 109, 112, 113, 115; ‘Crow’s-Eye View,’ 107–8; ‘Mirror,’ 108; ‘A Strange Reversible Reaction,’ 107; ‘The Wings,’ 109 Lee, Seung Hwoon, 115 Lee, Si Woo, 107 Lee, Sung Bok, 115 Lefevere, Andre, 9 Lewis, Jerry, 54 Lim, Hwa, 101, 102, 103 Ling, Shuhua, 122, 174, 176, 178–9, 185, 187, 189, 194; Ancient Melodies, 179; ‘The Embroidered Cushions,’ 187, 189

Index Lippit, Seiji M., 200, 216 Liu, Lydia, 13, 249 Lloyd, Harold, 273 Lye, Colleen, 20, 21 Madamu to ny b  (The neighbour’s wife and mine), 261–4 Maeda, Ai, 219 Maeda, Y·gure, 82; Ikuru hi ni (Days of living), 82 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 76 Makino, Shin’ichi, 201 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 62, 64, 70, 84; Contes Indiens, 70 Malraux, André, 4; La Condition humaine, 4 Manet, Édouarde, 54, 77 Mansfield, Katherine, 234–7, 241, 246–9, 250, 254–6; ‘Germans and Meat,’ 247; ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped,’ 247–9; In a German Pension, 247, 255; ‘Prelude,’ 255 Mao, Dun, 180; Midnight, 180 Mao, Zedong, 340 Marinetti, Filippo, 81 Martí, José, 295, 297–8 Marx, Karl, 191 Matisse, Henri, 238, 239 McCulley, Johnston, 273; ‘The Avenging Twins,’ 273 McFarlane, James, 41, 216–17 Meinhof, Carl, 155 Mexico, 38 Meza, Ramón, 298–304, 312; Mi tío el empleado (My uncle, the employee), 298 Miki, R fu, 83 Miller, Jane, 307 Mishima, Yukio, 310–12; Confessions of a Mask, 310–11

369

Mishra, Vijay, 176 Mizusawa, Tsutomu, 73 Moby-Dick, 346 Modigliani, Amedeo, 239 Modjeska, Drusilla, 176; Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925–45, 176 Molloy, Sylvia, 294, 295 Monk, Ray, 128 Monroe, Marilyn, 321 Montero, Oscar, 299 Morand, Paul, 85; Ouvert la nuit, 85 Moray, Gerta, 240–1 Moreau, Gustave, 70, 79 Mori, ]gai, 75, 76, 81 Morris, Meaghan, 175 Mu, Shiying, 180, 185; ‘Shanghai Fox Trot,’ 180; ‘Five in a Nightclub,’ 180 Munch, Edvard, 82 Mundine, Djon, 151–2, 160 Murayama, Kaita, 81, 201 Murayama, Milton, 348 Murayama, Tomoyoshi, 72, 88, 218 Mushanok ji, Saneatsu, 77, 78 Nagai, Kaf·, 199, 214–16, 219 Nakae, Ch min, 79 Nakamura, Murao, 201 Nakamura, Tsune, 80 Namatjira, Albert, 162–3, 165 Napaltjarri, Tjungkiya Wukula Linda Syddick, 163–5 ; ET Returning Home, 163–4 New Zealand, ix, 38, 235, 236, 237, 241, 247, 248, 255, 256 Nicaragua, 126 Nicholl, Peter, 11 Nicholls, Christine, 163 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 59, 78, 236

370

Index

Niranjana, Tejaswini, 11 Nishida, Kitar , 78, 87 Nishiwaki, Junzabur , 213 Nolde, John J., 9 Noneguchi, Yonejir , 83 North, Michael, 321 Nunami, Keion, 83 O’Sullivan, Vincent, 255 Ogata, Kamenosuke, 82 Oh, Jang Hwan, 101, 106–7; ‘A Bathroom,’ 106; ‘The Mariner,’ 106–7; ‘Sea Water,’ 106; The Sick Seoul, 107; ‘A War,’ 106; ‘The Waste Land,’ 106 Oh, Kyu Won, 115 Okada, Sabur suke, 80 Okakura, Tenshin, 71, 75–6, 78 Okamoto, Kanoko, 201 Okazaki, Yoshie, 85 Omori, Kyoko, 13 Omuka, Toshiharu, 73 ]nishi, Yoshinori, 84–5 Osaki, Midori, 201 Otà, Mizuho, 83 Page of Madness, 211 Pak, Gary, 349; A Ricepaper Airplane, 349 Palumbo-Liu, David, 15, 20, 21 Papua New Guinea, 153, 341, 346 Park, Chan-Wook, 346; Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, 346; Oldboy, 346 Park, In Hwan, 115 Park, Yong Chul, 103, 115 Pater, Walter, 80, 236, 254 Payne, Sylvia, 236 Perkins, Hetti, 160 Perloff, Marjorie, 335 Perot, Ross, 36

Pessoa, Fernando, 277 Philippines, 20 Picasso, Pablo, 88, 126 Pichardo, Manuel Serafín, 305, 306 Pound, Ezra, 3, 4, 9, 10, 18, 19–29, 84, 122, 233, 250, 320, 321, 322, 328–9; The Analects, 4; ‘Ballad of the Mulberry Road,’ 22; ‘The Beautiful Toilet,’ 22, 25, 26–7; ‘Canto LIII,’ 329; The Cantos, 3, 23, 320, 321, 322, 328–9; Cathay, 3, 19–29; ’The City of Choan,’ 24; ‘Exile’s Letter,’ 24, 26, 27; ‘Fan-Piece, for Her Imperial Lord,’ 23; The Great Digest, 4; ‘The Jewel-Stairs’ Grievance,’ 25, 26; ‘Lament of the Frontier Guard,’ 24; ‘Leave-Taking Near Shoku,’ 22, 27; ‘Liu-Ch’e,’ 23; ‘Old Idea of Ch an by Roshorin,’ 26, 27; ‘Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin,’ 22, 27; ‘The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,’ 24; ‘The River Song,’ 25–6; ‘Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku,’ 22, 27; ‘Separation of the River Kiang,’ 27; ‘The Song of the Bowmen of Shur,’ 23–4, 25; ‘South-Folk in Cold Country,’ 22; ‘Ts’ai Chi’h,’ 23; The Unwobbling Pivot, 4 Prague, 348 Presley, Elvis, 321 Preston, Margaret, 151–2, 159–62, 165; Aboriginal Flowers, 160–2 Proust, Marcel, 62, 210 Qian, Zhaoming, 9 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 11 Ranke, Leopold von, 191 Renan, Ary, 55 Reynolds, Jonathan, 213

Index Ricci, Matteo, 129 Richie, Donald, 215 Rimer, Thomas J., 213 Robertson, Ethel, 176 Rodin, Auguste, 76 Rogers, Will, 273 Rohan, K da, 83 Rome, 9, 63 Rosny, Léon de, 56 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 83; ‘The House of Life,’ 83 Roy, Arundhati, 345 Rubin, William, 164 Russell, Bertrand, 121–2, 127–40; Principia Mathematica, 135–6; The Problem of China, 130–1 Russia, 127–8, 265 Ryoshin, Minami, 262 Ry·tanji, Y·, 201, 204 Said, Edward, 10, 11, 139, 296, 307–9, 310 Sait , Mokichi, 78, 82, 86, 88–9; Aratama (Unpolished soul), 82; Shakuk  (Red light), 82 Sakamoto, Hanjir , 80 Sanqvist, Tom, 157 Sardar, Ziauddin, 297, 306–7 Sas, Miryam, 213 Sat , Haru , 209, 212, 215 Sato, Hiroaki, 213 Scarry, Elaine, 133 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 75 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 75 Sciban, Shu-ning, 188 Scotland, 339 Segalen, Victor, 4, 18; Stèles, 4 Seidensticker, Edward, 212 Sekii, Mitsuo, 219

371

Sessh·, 71 Shakespeare, William, 138 Shapere, Dudley, 40 Shaw, George Bernard, 236 Shi, Zhecun, 185 Shiga, Naoya, 84 Shih, Shu-Mei, 13, 175, 176, 178, 179, 185, 187, 188 Shimamura, H getsu, 76, 78 Shin, Baek Su, 107 Shiratori, Seigo, 267–9; ‘A Poetic Manifesto to New Youth,’ 267, 269 Shokyokusai, Tenkatsu, 311 Sihanouk, 344 Silverberg, Miriam, 200 Silverman, Deborah, 56 Singapore, 341, 344 Smith, Adam, 135 Smith, Arthur H., 25 Smith, Ramsay, 153 Snow, Edgar, 129 Snyder, Gary, 28 Snyder, Stephen, 214–15 Sollers, Philippe, 129 Solt, John, 213 Spain, 270 Spencer, Baldwin, 155, 159 Spencer, Herbert, 61 Spender, Stephen, 104; Vienna, 104 Spivak, Gayatri, 6, 345 Starrs, Roy, 200 Stead, Christina, 174, 176, 177, 179, 180, 184–5, 186, 189, 191, 194; Seven Poor Men of Sydney, 177, 184–5, 189, 191 Stein, Gertrude, 233, 238 Steiner, George, 19 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 311 Strachan, Lachlan, 173 Strehlow, Carl, 155–7, 158, 159

372

Index

Strehlow, T.G.H., 156 Suzuki, Sadami, 13, 219; Toshi no shish· (Collected poetries of the city), 73 Sweden, 239 Symons, Arthur, 80, 83 Tachibana, Sotoo, 201, 202; Sakaba ruretto funj ki (A Tale of Trouble from the Bar Roulette), 202 Taiwan, 335, 340, 344 Takamura, K tar , 77, 81, 213 Takayama, Chogy·, 78 Takeda, Rintar , 201 Takiguchi, Sh·z , 213 Tamenaga, Shunsui, 219 Tanaka, Stefan, 13 Tanco Armero, Nicolás, 297 Tani, J ji, 201, 217, 264–265, 275–85; ‘Dass ,’ 275–7; ‘Shanhai sareta otoko’ (The Shanghaied Man), 217, 264–5, 279–84 Tanizaki, Jun’ichir , 199, 200, 205, 210–12, 214; Chijin no ai (Naomi), 205, 212, 214; In’ei raison (In praise of shadows), 211; Manjii (Quicksand), 211; Portrait of Shunkin, 199, 214; Tade kuu mushi (Some prefer nettles), 211; ‘Tattooer,’ 199, 205, 214 Tayama, Katai, 77 Tei-Yamashita, Karen, 35, 38–9, 41–2, 44–8; Brazil Maru, 38; Tropic of Orange, 35, 38, 44–8; Under the Arc of the Rainforest, 38 Thomas, Daniel, 162 Tinajero, Araceli, 295–6 Tippett, Maria, 237–8, 239 T g , Seiji, 81, 213 Tokutomi, Roka, 79

Tolstoy, Leo, 77–8; A Confession, 78; On Life, 78 Tomioka, Tetsusai, 81 Tomotani, Shizue, 213 Tonouchi, Lee, 335 Tribe, Mark , 323–4, 328–9 Tsuchida, Bakusen, 80 Tyler, William J., 13, 200 Tzara, Tristan, ix, 101, 153–8, 159, 164–5; ‘Chanson du Serpent,’ 157 Ubukata, Toshir , 219; T ky  hatsunobori (First trip to the capital), 219 Uchida, Hyakken, 200; Meido (The Realm of the Dead), 200 Ueda, Bin, 76, 78, 80 Uk, Kim, 100; The Dance of Anguish, 100 Unaipon, David, 152–3 United States, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 13, 18, 20, 21, 22, 29, 36, 39, 43, 47, 72, 75, 162, 191, 194, 264, 275, 277, 278, 218, 265, 295, 338, 339, 340, 343 Unno, Hiroshi, 73, 219–20, 262 Uno, Chiyo, 200, 213–14; Iro zange (Confessions of Love), 200, 213–14 Uno, K ji, 84 Valentino, Rudolph, 273 Van Gogh, Vincent, 82, 239 Veit, Walter F., 156–7, 158 Verhaeren, Émile, 80; Les Villes Tentaculaires, 80 Verlaine, Paul, 100 Véron, Eugène, 60, 79 Vietnam, 39, 45 Voge, Marc, 316 Vogüe, Eugène-Melchior de, 304 Volkelt, Johannes, 76

Index Waley, Arthur, 122 Wang, Yang-Ming, 78 Warhol, Andy, 340 Watsuji, Tetsur , 78, 83 Wedell-Wedellsborg, Anne, 177, 191 Weisenfeld, Gennifer, 213 Wesley-Smith, Terence, 342 Whistler, James McNeill, 239 Wilde, Oscar, 210, 236, 254 Williams, John F., 177–8, 189 Williams, Raymond, 34, 42 Williams, William Carlos, 9, 18 Wilson, Rob, 335, 349–50; ‘Heaven Wind Stars Cellphones,’ 350; Pacific Postmodern, 335; ‘Third Coming,’ 349–350; Waking in Seoul, 336; ‘Waking in Seoul,’ 336–7 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 56 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 135, 136 Woo-Cumings, Meredith, 345–6 Woolf, Leonard, 174 Woolf, Virginia, 4, 120–5, 135–6, 137, 174, 179, 181, 188, 189, 190, 246, 250, 256, 267, 278; To the Lighthouse, 4, 120–5, 135–6, 137; The Waves, 123, 181 Woollacott, Angela, 178 Wordsworth, William, 79

Xu, Zhimo, 122

Xiao, Qian, 122 Xie, Ming, 9

Zhang, Xudong, 13 Zola, Émile, 54

373

Yamashita, Takeshi, 219 Yao, Steven, 12, 220, 249–50; Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender Politics, Language, 12 Yasui, S tar , 80 Yeats, William Butler, ix, 3, 8, 9, 83, 233; At the Hawk’s Well, 3 Yip, Wai Lim, 9; Ezra Pound’s ‘Cathay,’ 9 Yokomitsu, Riichi, 72, 85–7, 88–9, 204–10, 215, 216, 267; ‘Atama narabi ni hara’ (With the head, and guts too), 72, 206; Kikai (The machine), 207; ‘Love’ and Other Stories, 204; Shanhai (Shanghai), 206 Yokoyama, Taikan, 71 Yorozu, Tetsugor , 81 Yoshiyuki, Aguri, 218 Yoshiyuki, Eisuke, 201, 218 Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI), 316–29; The Art of Sleep, 317, 322–9; Dakota, 317, 320–2, 328–9 Yu, Jin Oh, 114 Yumeno, Ky·saku, 201, 221; Dogura magura, 221