La educación intercultural desde el enfoque oficial tradicional

One is an artist at the cost of regarding that which all non-artists call form as content, as the matter itself. To be sure, then, one belongs in a topsy-turvy world: for henceforth content becomes something merely formal - our life included.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

in the representation of human beings through the apparatus, human self-alienation has found a most productive realization.

Walter Benjamin, The Artwork in Its Age of Technical Reproducibility’ (first version)

in Fugen Ishikawa Jun’s narrator resists the kind of writing which relies on the figure of the author behind the text; the suffocating proximity of writer and work, as we saw, is evoked through graphically physical language: the grease of the hand holding the pen, the tensed blue veins on the forehead, the sweat of the nose. If we go along with the corporeal metaphor, Dazai’s body is present in his texts probably more than that of any other modern writer. The life inscribed onto this body - flirtations with radical politics, alcoholism, drug addiction, failed suicide attempts - cannot but strike us as the stuff of modern media celebrity par excellence] the death as sensational and uncanny as the life: Dazai’s body was found in the Tamagawa river on 19 June 1948, exactly thirty-nine years after he was born, on 19 June 1909; there were speculations that this was not a double suicide, that his lover Yamazaki Tomie had strangled him before dragging him into the water. A strand of critical writing on Dazai barely conceals a voyeuristic impulse, and the whole discourse which has coalesced around him reveals the shishosetsu paradigm in its clearest form with its reigning themes of biography and ethics. But even if we fall into the trap of intentionality and accept that Dazai put too much of himself in his writing, his approach is radically different from the sincerity expected of autobiographical fiction. In Dazai’s texts the disjunction between the raw experience and the biographical fact, on the one hand, and their narrativization, on the other, is emphasized and held for scrutiny. The

life is objectified and relentlessly fragmented; fragments are inserted into different contexts or juxtaposed in collage-like assemblages. While some of Dazai’s best known works are indeed driven by deeply ethical questions, at the same time they are obsessed with words, with the duplicity of language. Formally, they are anything but straightforward;

perspectives shift and multiply, parodies rework existing texts, letters and direct addresses to the reader disrupt the narrative flow. While Dazai’s hypersensitivity to language is often noted, the dominant approach has tended to overlook the complex rhetorical structures of the texts. Even critics who have engaged seriously with Dazai’s radical experiments in The Final Years are still tempted to reach for ethics, in a familiar hermeneutical manoeuvre; Togo Katsumi, for example, writes that ‘the destruction of narrative form in the early Dazai means a collapse of the author’s sense of order, a reflection of his nihilism; this is a disintegration of the novel which corresponds to the disintegration of the s e lf.1 The construction of what some more complex readings have called 'the Dazai myth’ has meant an obsessive search for an authentic voice and a naked face.2 This is, of course, a necessary generalization; unlike Takami Jun and Ishikawa Jun, two writers who if not outright marginalized, have nonetheless remained peripheral in the canon of modern literature, Dazai has generated an impressive corpus of criticism, with a staggering number of monographs and literary journal specials devoted to him. The fascination of the critics is matched by the seductive hold he has on general readers: Ningen shikkaku (No Longer Human, 1948), canonized as his representative work, has sold more than eight million copies; the paperback bunko edition still sells about 100,000 copies every year.3 Lately, some interventions have attempted to deconstruct the myth, focusing instead on the complex intertextual performance of the Dazai persona, the subtlety with which his texts simultaneously evoke, cite and then distance themselves from shishosetsu models. On the other hand, the obsession with ‘the real Dazai’ persists: each volume of the most recently published complete works contains a section of reminiscences by friends and contemporaries. Ironically, these are of the

1 Tog6 Katsumi, 'Dazai Osamu: ironii to shite no shosetsu’, Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshd 44:1 (1979), p. 145.

Sakakibara Richi, 'Review of Dazai Osamu: yowasa o enjiru to iu koto by And6 H iro s h iNihon bungaku 52:4 (2003), pp.84-85.

writer who exposed the unreliability of memory; for whom origins are fictionalized and always mediated by language.

The emphasis of critical writing outside Japan understandably has been different. Although incomparable to Mishima, Kawabata or more recently Murakami Haruki, Dazai is a widely translated writer, although the absence of more experimental works from The

Final Years, such as The Flower of Buffoonery’ and 'Mekura soshi’ (Random Writings)

among the English translations is conspicuous. No Longer Human is easily assimilated into a universalist existentialist framework of reading: as Donald Keene has remarked, it is refreshingly free of cherry blossom reveries and puzzling Oriental character

motivations.4 Reviews of the English translation of No Longer Human have indeed compared the novel to Kafka (‘brings us face to face to with the formless, nameless terror of life’) and Dostoyevsky.5

But the narrative experiments from The Final Years have been seen by western critics as deeply flawed: Masao Miyoshi, for example, notes the absence of coherent unity in the collection: ‘Even as short stories, the items in this volume are fragmentary. There are a few stories which are meant to be collections in turn of shorter units, these having, however, no common denominator between them’.6 it is not difficult to see here that Miyoshi implicitly privileges the principles of the nineteenth-century western realist novel: ‘rounded’ characters, unified narrative perspective, the construction of a fictional world independent from that of the writer. In a familiar Orientalist figure, Dazai’s texts are conceptualized as absences, as secondary gestures which fall short of duplicating faithfully their western originals.7 In a response which emphatically valorizes what Miyoshi perceives as lack, Phyllis Lyons argues that compared to the ‘painfully clear boundaries of the modern Western self’ (the phrase is Miyoshi’s) what we have in Dazai is a ‘diffuse-

4 Donald Keene, Landscapes and Portraits: Appreciations of Japanese Culture, Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1971, p.186.

5 Quoted in ibid. p.188.

6 Masao Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence: The Modem Japanese Novel, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974, p.125.

7 In his later work Miyoshi has been one of the first critics to problematize such assumptions, especially in his ground-breaking essay ‘Against the Native Grain: The Japanese Novel and the "Postmodern" West’, in his Off-Center: Power and Culture Relations Between Japan and the United States, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991, pp.9-36.

focus’ self-concept.8 This conceptualization of the self, according to Lyons, makes Dazai’s fiction even more modernist and reflexive than Western fiction, and thus offers

possibilities for bridging East and West. On the other hand, Lyons sees Dazai as the raw voice of ‘"unreconstructed” emotions’ in a society that ‘ritualizes all forms of interpersonal expression'; in this insistence on unmediated expression her analysis converges with

shishosetsu writing.9 The essentialist conceptions of a Japanese self and a Western self

employed by Lyons; the monolithic view of culture which elides questions of history and conflict; the construction of smooth unproblematic continuities between modern fiction and premodern aesthetics (the lack of depth in the characters); the making of these premodern Japanese aesthetic practices into precursors of Western postmodernism (a recurrent theme from Barthes’ Empire of Signs to Peter Greenaway’s Pillow Book): Lyons’s interpretive system still implies the primacy and centrality of the Western

experience. It is easy indeed to criticize Lyons and Miyoshi from where we stand, as their essays show the limits of critical discourse before the theoretical turn forced it to be reflexive about its own methods and assumptions. While a Foucauldian genealogy of the main currents in Dazai discourse has yet to be written, Alan Wolfe gets close to such an approach in his treatment of Dazai ‘as a convenient construct revealing certain underlying premises of Japanese literary studies’.10 Wolfe’s study of suicide and its textualization is not centred entirely on Dazai, but still remains the boldest attempt to deconstruct the Dazai myth; to historicize the discourse without losing sight of the texts themselves. For Wolfe Dazai criticism is complicit with more unambiguously ideological discourses: ‘Dazai’s emergence as the earliest postwar manifestation of the genuinely alienated writer may best be seen as part of the effort, by both Japanese and Western critics, to re­ present a recently militarist Japan as a “human society” sharing a universal humanity with the West’.11 Universalist-existentialist readings, in other words, have depoliticized and decontextualized Dazai’s work. Wolfe makes a compelling case for a historicized reading; for him Dazai’s texts confront allegorically dominant interpretations of Japanese history

8 Phyllis Lyons, '"Art is Me": Dazai Osamu's Narrative Voice as a Permeable Self, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 41:1 (1981), p. 102

9 Ibid. p.102.

10 Alan Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative in Modem Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, p.4.

and modern literature. Wolfe sees Dazai’s textual strategies -fictionalization,

discontinuous temporality, refusal of closure - as devices of resistance to the hegemonic narratives of Japanese modernization as a linear teleological process.12

This chapter will attempt a similar historical reading which, however, will be concerned more with immediately relevant material and discursive contexts. My focus will be on the narrative experiments from The Final Years, such as The Flower of Buffoonery1 and 'Sarumen kanja’ (The Youth with the Monkey Face). I am interested in the figures which disrupt the established structures of the shishosetsu and emphasize the Fictional, bringing forward the material existence of language. The customarily made distinction between these complex works, on the one hand, and a simple folkloric tale such as Gyofukuki (Metamorphosis) or the supposedly autobiographical Omoide (Memories) can be challenged, as these texts also employ techniques which problematize the textualization of experience and transgress genre conventions. But my reading will also attempt to flesh out how the formal intersects with the historical: I see Dazai’s destruction of shishosetsu norms as symptoms of a realist representational regime altered by the technologies of cultural dissemination. I argue that the evacuation of authenticity and the collapse of narrative hierarchies in works such as The Flower of Buffoonery’ and The Youth with the Monkey Face’ are related to the epistemological anxieties brought on by an intensified logic of reproduction. But my analysis also uncovers a different dynamic: these same stories work to forge an intimate bond between the narrator and his readers, referred to either as the affective community of shokun, gentlemen, or as the singular and more personal kimi, you. The often employed addresses to the reader call attention to the scene of writing, but at the same time they dramatize a yearning for perfect

communication, a vision of authentic communion which transcends the deceptions of language. Writing often masquerades as oral storytelling, invoking a concrete situation of address. These stories are of course written texts, literary artefacts which appeared at a time when the traditional bundan community was being transformed irrevocably by the

commodification of the artwork and the shift to an opaque mass readership. My reading will attempt to grasp the meanings of this contradictory dynamic - the exposure of literary artifice which at the same time seduces the reader with figures of intimacy - and the ideological implications of this reconstruction of the orality and immediacy of a storytelling situation, in the context of the 1930s.