Hierophany

Mircea Eliade. The Sacred and the Profane. Trans. Willard R. Trask. 1957. pp. 8 - 65.

Simple, but massive in implication. How does Buddhism fit into the sacred/profane dichotomy? I have a feeling it's no mistake that, so far as I read, Eliade makes not one single note about Buddhism.

Them Bones

今野達編『今昔物語集　一』新日本文学大系（岩波書店）二七二〜二八九.

I'm reading a series of stories (説話) that have to do with the death of the Buddha (S. parinirvana, J. 涅槃), trying to approach some sort of broader historical context for understanding the painting. One point of interest: after the Buddha attains parinirvana, he is to be cremated. All the necessary preparations are undertaken and his coffin is lit on fire. This fire burns and burns, showing no sign of petering out. Several deities visit the burning coffin and attempt to extinguish the fire with perfumes, but to no avail. Why? Because they're hoping to take the bones back to their respective realms. Poised on the edge of death (as in the painting), the Buddha provides a focal point for the diverse beings of the universe. Once he dies, however, the universe is shaken: what used to be a centripetal cohesiveness is reduced to a few objects, rife with symbolism, that will be claimed and warred over.

The painting displays this transitory moment between life and death, order and chaos. Everyone is watching (and not only watching the Buddha) but no one knows for sure what is going to happen. Mental wheels are turning and age-old rivalries are in the process of being ressurected again on the grand cosmological stage.

Useful visual metaphors

Michel Foucault, "Panopticism," Discipline & Punish: the Birth of the Prison [Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison], pp. 195 - 228.

『平治物語』小学館日本古典文学全集、四〇九〜四三八.

『愚管抄』岩波書店日本古典文学大系、二二五〜二三九.

"The right to conquer and humanize"

Pam Morris, ed. The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov. pp. 194 - 206.

Clifford Geertz. Negara: the Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. pp. 98 - 120.

An attempt to reevaluate the interpretation of "uncivilized" cultures. Geertz does a compelling reading of negara, the Balinese ritual that celebrates/laments the death of a king, making the interconnectednes of "inside" and "outside" into a holistic paradigm for understanding it. Instead of transforming the ritual--which involved several of the king's concubines hurling themselves into pits of fire--into a justifcation for Western imperialism and modernization (as does the British observer whose account of negara prefaces this chapter), Geertz focuses on the meaning of the ritual for its practitioners. Set against the British observer, Geertz emerges as open-minded and far less ideological -- but it would be a mistake to think that he doesn't have his own agenda. If I were to read more of the book, I'd ask myself: What is this agenda? Where does he place himself as the scholar/investigator/observer? And is he up-front about it?

Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: an Introduction [La Volenté de savoir]. Trans. Robert Hurley. 1978 [1976]. pp. 3 - 131.

Between mask and face

Mimi Yiengpruksawan. "What's in a Name? Fujiwara Fixation in Japanese Cultural History." Monumenta Nipponica, 49:4, 1994. pp. 423 - 453.

A spirited (and no doubt controversial) critique of the dominant image of eleventh- and twelfth-century court culture. Yiengpruksawan digs through kanbun nikki (diaries of male courtiers written in Chinese) as though they were treasure troves, pulling up countless invaluable novelties. On the basis of this and other evidence, both documentary and stylistic, she argues that the paradigm of Fujiwara as representing a unified and unifying period, culture, and style (what she calls the Fujiwara construct) is based on the privileging and totalizing (and, I would add, suppressive) of select cultural artifacts. It's hard to get away from such a monolithic construct: for example, I recall my Japanese history professor in college lecturing romantically about the splendor, sensuality, and effeteness of the Heian court from the eleventh century onward. But the Fujiwara construct has led us to dwell so much on the mask that we have transformed it into a face, forgetting that there exists something underneath.

Futurity

Gayatri Spivak, Death of Discipline, 2003, pp. 1 - 24.

Spivak attempts to reorient comparative literature: cultural studies falls by the wayside as she calls for collaboration with area studies. Depoliticize the discipline and expand your sensitivity to text and language, she says, and read literature that has not been read before (viz., that written in the southern hemisphere).

Uncanning reality

Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" [Das Unheimliche], pp. 1 - 17.

Freud sets out to define the uncanny (unheimlich or, interestingly enough, heimlich (meaning something like "intimate" or "friendly")) first as an aesthetic/historical concept and then as a clinical concept. He defines this sensation that everyone has experienced as "that class of the frightening which leads back ot what is known of old and long familiar." Etymologically, it becomes clear that heimlich, as a word, over time acquired the connotation of its diametric opposite (unheimlich), as shown in Klinger's, "At times I feel like a man who walks in the nighta nd believes in ghosts; every corner is heimlich and full of terrors for him." In "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" Freud identifies the compulsion to repeat as stronger and more fundamentally influential in the unconscious than the pleasure principle. He connects the uncanny, written a few years afterwards, to this idea: "what reminds us of this inner 'compulsion to repeat' is perceived as uncanny." For example, the character of the Sand-Man--the creature who, when children are being bad and refuse to go to bed, swoops in, throws sand in their eyes, rips their eyes out, and takes them back to the moon for his children to feast on--strikes us as uncanny because the having one's eyes ripped out reminds of (and repeats) some repressed infantile complex, in this case castration.

Freud goes on to differentiate between the uncanny in the real world and the uncanny in the fictitious world. There are two types of real-world uncanny experience: that which occurs when repressed infantile complexes are revisited, and that which confirms some "primitive" (animistic) belief that we thought we had surmounted (e.g., my uttering "I wish you would turn into a chocolate cake!" and subsequently observing your transformation into a chocolate cake). On the other hand, Freud thinks literature is much more fertile ground for the uncanny. This clearly rests on the assumption that the author possesses a fundamental authority over the reader. Freud's author manipulates us, manufacturing the uncanny by setting up seemingly realistic fictions only to interject "events which never or very rarely happen."

Several interesting anecdotes are interspersed throughout the narrative, one of my favorites being Freud's account of getting lost in Italy. Wandering around an unknown town, he happens upon an alleyway which he gradually identifies as a sketchy area. He turns out of the alley the first chance he gets, and continues to search for a road that he recognizes. Several minutes later, however, he stumbles upon the same exact alleyway. This time he leaves via a different cross-street, but before long he encounters the alleyway once again. The situation is uncanny because it attempts to persuade us that we are being summoned magically (invisibly) to the alley over and over again, when ("in reality") we believe that we have overcome such a superstitious belief. Repetition of this kind implies a breakdown of scientific perspective: we think we know how the world works, but then comes along an experience like this that makes us question that understanding. What an odd feeling!

Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," trans. James Strachey, pp. 237 - 257.

Mikhael Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, 1968, pp. 59 - 75.

Started to read "Rabelais in the History of Laughter" in an attempt to learn about Bakhtin's ideas of the carnival and the grotesque. I'm thinking these concepts will help cultivate some fresh ideas about the parinirvana painting for my art history seminar.

Protozoa to animals

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle [Jenseits des Lustprinzips], trans. James Strachey, 1961 [1920], pp. 1 - 59.

I don't know much about Freud--the only other essay I've read is Civilization and Its Discontents, and that was five years ago--but it's pretty clear that this is a landmark essay. We observe the beginnings of the Eros and Thanatos theories, the invocation of recent research trends in biology, and some precious posturing about the future status of psychoanalytic research. (Freud ends the essay with a few lines from Al-Hariri: "What we cannot reach flying we must reach limping.... The Book tells us it is no sin to limp." Freud wants us to know that he's A-OK with the prospect of being proved horribly wrong because, after all, isn't that what speculative science is all about? Yes, we get it, but I wish he didn't devote several pages to this disclaimer -- although, to be fair, I don't have any idea how embattled he was writing essays like this. Perhaps it's an obnoxious right earned by someone forced to endure all manner of criticism.) One aspect of this essay that interested me in particular was the idea of repetition as compulsion. In the Butlerian view, repetition of language is what keeps it vital and unable to succumb to a final referrent (i.e., linguistic death), which in turn creates the possibility of the creation of new meaning. Here, however, repetition always has its beginnings in trauma: the death of child love (the narcissistic scar), an excessive penetration of external stimuli, etc. Freud says that this compulsion to repeat overrides the pleasure principle, the tendency of the mental apparatus to always move towards a healthy stasis in terms of pleasure/unpleasure. So if the compulsion to repeat moves us beyond the pleasure principle, how do we account for it? Freud posits two other instincts that govern mental behavior: the life instinct (Eros) and the death instinct (Thanatos, although note labeled as such in this esay). I'm still not sure what the relationship is between these two instincts and the pleasure principle (except that it's complicated), but Eros and Thanatos at least hold fundamental roles in the hierarchy of mental processes. Eros drives us towards sexual activity--the "immortality" of two germ cells coming together and producing offspring--but problematically so, because the drive for life turns us away from our organic urge to restore our earlier state (that is, death). Thanatos tells us that the point of life is death, a return to that which we originally were. The compulsion to repeat might then be a forestalling of both Eros and Thanatos: stuck in a feedback loop, you neither progress towards life or regress towards death. In a situation like this the task of the psychoanalyst, Freud says, is to appeal to the patient's reality principle: if he can perceive the structure of this repetition, he can then in turn observe that there is a difference between his reality and the past trauma that refuses to let go of him.

Mimi Yiengpruksawan, "Monkey Magic: How the 'Animals' Scroll Makes Mischief with Art Historians," Orientations, 31:3, 3/2000, pp. 74 - 83.

This is an essay my art history professor wrote for a magazine that is, according to its subtitle, "for collectors and connoiseurs of Asian art." It's a short, fantastic piece with fresh take on a complicated situation. The "Animals" Scroll 鳥獣人物戯画 is a permanent fixture of introductory Japanese art courses (maybe even East Asian art courses, which is where I first encountered it). Not much of it survives, but what does is fantastic. Frogs, rabbits, monkeys, and cats engage in all sorts of "human" activities: archery competitions, Buddhist ceremonies, wrestling, dancing, horse-riding, etc. I was lucky enough to see the scroll last year at the Tokyo National Museum (東京国立博物館), which was on loan for exhibit from its usual resting place in Kyoto. Critically, the standard treatment is to note two points about the scroll: its humorous nature and the fact that no one really knows anything definite about it. As a picture scroll, "Animals" is unique in that it has no writing on it -- no preface, no afterword, no nothing -- besides the periodical stamp of the Kyoto temple (高山寺) that possesses the only extant copy of it. It's usually dated to the twelfth century, but this is based on circumstantial evidence -- again, no writing anywhere on the text itself. (The extant copy dates from the sixteenth century.) Mimi gives us a cross-section of modern scholarship on "Animals," which tends to stick to the notion that it was created by a court painter for the enjoyment of the aristocracy. She then switches gears and provides us with a "parallel universe" reading of the scroll: fraught as it is with depictions of peasant performance arts in twelfth-century Kyoto such as sarugaku, why not see what happens when we read it as something created by a commoner? "Why not the Kyoto commoner as the originator of the picture-scroll format, its ultiamte consumer, and possibly, even in teh case of the great masterpieces now attributed to various court painters, its primary producer?" Of course, there is no proof for any of this -- but then again, there's not really any proof for the made-for-the-aristocracy interpretation either. Furthermore, as Mimi points out parenthetically, "self-ridicule was not a general tendency of the Kyoto aristocracy." One point I would add--she doesn't mention this, perhaps because it's so obvious--in support of her thesis is the connection between the almost universal illiteracy of commoners and the lack of writing in the scroll. On the other hand, it seems that most twelfth-century picture scrolls (e.g. Ban Dainagon Emaki 伴大納言絵巻) do have text that accompanies the pictures.

記し

Joshua Mostow, "Modern Constructions of Tales of Ise: Gender and Courtliness," Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, pp. 96 - 119.

An unexhaustive but methodical look at the reception of Ise monogatari, with an eye to the shifting roles of femininity (and its eventual association with courtliness [miyabi]). Mostow gives us the names of some twenty commentaries and studies, and their authors, which makes for an information-heavy article, one that is more useful as a starting point for further research as opposed to a well wrought argument iteslf. We get the general thesis that commentaries were heavily influenced by contemporaneous social and political forces, but Mostow doesn't go into detail about the mechanics of this process. One of the most interesting parts is his reading of nineteenth-century "literary Darwinism" (i.e., the focus on "progress" and telos that accompanied the accession of nation-state ideology) and its claim that Ise was the "seed-text" of the Japanese literary canon. Ise becomes a convenient pivot in creating a literary history of Japan, used alternately as a break and a link.

Look up: Mikami Sanji 三上参次 and Takatsu Kuwasaburō, Nihon bungakushi, 1890. Mostow labels this the first history of Japanese literature.

Palimpsest

I'm creating this blog, which will soon be awash in academic errata and arcana, in order to present myself with a virtual dumping ground that I can use when my own brain rebels. (An unfortunately frequent event.) I envision some combination of boring lists of books and articles (to) read, scattered musings on (Japanese) literature, and the occasional but unsurprisingly periodic (i.e., December and May) nod to a very special type of delirium caused by the vagaries of graduate school. Don't say I didn't warn you.