The Marginal World of Oe Kenzaburo: A Study of Themes and Techniques

A Study of Themes and Techniques

Michiko N. Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315286273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sull'etnia

The first full-length book devoted to Japan's 1994 Nobel Laureate, The Marginal World of Kenzaburo Ôe introduces the literary universe bursting with the explosive energies of Bakhtinian grotesque realism. In its center stands the "idiot son, " a trickster and soulful healer, unknowingly thrown into the world of myth-making and history. The diverse voices of Ôe's characters resonate with one another within and between reinvented texts as the book's analysis flow into the very pores and veins of his masterful writing.

1

Introduction

Although the narratives of Ōe Kenzaburo (1935–) are deeply rooted in the indigenous culture of Japan, they are ultimately concerned with what is uniquely literary, not with what is uniquely Japanese. In this sense his narratives are “transcultural and transhistoric”¹ to the core. In scope of vision, breadth of subject matter, and brilliance of artistic imagination and experimentation, no other Japanese writer equals Ōe.²

In a lecture delivered to the first Japanese Semiotics Conference held in August 1981, Ōe humorously meddled with the ending of Shiga Naoya’s (1833–1971) A Dark Night’s Passing (Anya kōro, 1937), regarded as a masterpiece and a model of “pure literature” (jun bungaku).³ After Ōe links semiotically the protagonist’s anxiety over his wife’s adultery with an appearance of a flying object (an airplane), he calls attention to the way Shiga concludes the novel: the protagonist climbs a mountain, experiences the suffering of life and near-death, and comes one step closer to self-salvation. Just before the climb, he has a severe bout of diarrhea. He stops it artificially by taking a heavy dose of herbal medicine. In the mountain he feels his physical exhaustion turning into rapture, his mind and body merging into the great bounty of nature that surrounds him. After the climb, he develops intestinal catarrh and goes into delirium. Ōe emphasizes two points: (1) the protagonist dissolves the confrontation between nature and himself by merging into nature, and (2) the novel “does not end with Tokitō Kensaku gaining self reliance and moving into new territory.”⁴ Here, Ōe raises an issue never voiced by any of his predecessors or contemporaries: “Wasn’t there another way of ending the novel? If there were, Japanese literature would have taken a slightly different course.”⁵

To illustrate a different ending to A Dark Night’s Passing, Ōe brings in semiotics, specifically the concept of “grotesque realism” put forward by Mikhail M. Bakhtin in his famous Rabelais discussion. Based on the image system of carnivalization in Europe, one of the images of “grotesque realism” deals with human excrement. Central to Bakhtin’s analysis is the ambivalent nature of excrement. In ancient scatological images, excrement is “linked to the generating force and to fertility. On the other hand, excrement is conceived as something intermediate between earth and body, as something relating the one to the other. It is also an intermediate between the living body and dead, disintegrating matter that is being transformed into the earth, into manure. The living body returns to the earth its excrement, which fertilizes the earth as does the body of the dead.”⁶ Possessing this dynamic element, excrement plays the key role in Ōe’s version of how to end A Dark Night’s Passing: “Shiga Naoya did not have to make Tokitō Kensaku take the herbal medicine. He could have come up with another solution: let Kensaku continue his bout with the diarrhea. For example, let us say Kensaku runs around [on the mountain] with diarrhea. He shits all over the place…. Through this, a dynamic regeneration takes place. Rather than letting him merge into nature, and dissolving the confrontation between him and nature, Shiga could have regenerated Tokitō Kensaku as a character who actively interacts with nature. Had he concluded A Dark Night’s Passing with the [alternate] ending, would not Japanese literature have changed a little?”⁷

The usual approach to fiction in Japan tacitly but doggedly assumes that “in the process of writing a novel, there is actually no need, at a conscious level, to use a mechanism or methodological device.”⁸ Ōe makes a radical break with this conventional wisdom exercised by the still popular “I-novel” (shishōsetsu), whose most consummate artist is Shiga Naoya. What the definition of this traditional fiction exactly is still generates debate among critics.⁹ It is commonly held that the “I-novel” records and exposes the writer’s candid emotions, failures, and lifestyle, i.e., his “undisguised personal preliterary self” in the manner of a narrative.¹⁰ Its viewpoint is inevitably confined to the writer’s limited environment as it replaces “the pluralist ‘real world’ with a private universe.”¹¹ Based on the fusion or confusion of art and life, the solemn tone of the “I-novel” leaves hardly any room for humor, imagination, and experimentation. In fact, one critic goes so far as to say that this autobiographical novel is “the essential pattern of Japanese prose fiction toward which even the most panoramic social novel gravitates.”¹² One of the most popular yet controversial novelists in Japan, Ōe openly questions the historical concept of autobiographical fiction, shishōsetsu, because it “stoically restrains the function of imagination” as it binds the protagonist “I” to the everyday environment.¹³

Shiga Naoya wrote A Dark Night’s Passing without any conscious literary device, thereby establishing a modus operandi for the writer in Japan that stressed the production of antimethodological novels. According to the “dictates” of the god of “pure literature,” the writer should strive for clear, one-dimensional sentences, never polysemic ones. On the contrary, Ōe argues, literature depends on the very creation of a kind of electric transformer that changes polysemic reality to fiction while still employing language that is one-dimensional. “This transformer is a device of literary expression [i.e., poetic language contrasted with everyday language]. This is what I mean by creating literature, creating fiction.”¹⁴

Under the influence of the works of Russian semioticians, notably those of Yurij M. Lotman as well as Bakhtin, Ōe has stated repeatedly the inadequacy of the kind of personal, confessional writing advocated by his predecessors:

As long as the reality we live in has an obscure, multifaceted appearance, narrative representation by means of traditional, one-dimensional descriptions is no match for reality. Therefore, by setting up various devices in narrative discourse, we must present expressions that can cope with the multifacetedness of reality. This is the gist of what semioticians are saying. One of the characteristics of contemporary literature is that, by linking various levels [of reality], it expresses reality, not one-dimensionally, but by extending itself to the human psyche within and without. To that end, we must chisel out different levels and strata. These levels and strata sometimes constitute different times, sometimes different places. Or, different levels and strata of human consciousness. We must distinguish one level from another, one stratum from another, and at the same time must synthesize them into a wholeness to organize a novel. In other words, we need to invent something that connects all the multiformed strata.¹⁵

Lotman views literature “as an intricate modeling system that is an analogue to complex phenomena of life” and also “as a special kind of system of signs.”¹⁶ His theory of art as a model serves to validate Ōe’s belief in the similarity between art and life: created by synthesis, art models both reality and an artist’s own consciousness. This structure of reality that the artist creates in turn affects him. “But since the work itself is, once created, a part of reality, it can influence the perception … of the perceiver. Thus the interaction of art and life is a spiralling process or movable correlation.”¹⁷

Writing in the simplest of narrative forms, Ōe began his career with certain images, interests, topics, and obsessions that continue to appear in his latest works. These raw data—his childhood in a village on Shikoku, the defeat of Japan, the figure of the divine Emperor, the specter of the A-bomb, and the birth of his retarded son—have continuously inter meshed with Ōe’s art, as they grow increasingly complex in his later works. That his narratives model both reality and his own consciousness, that his own structure of reality affects him, is clearly stated in a 1976 essay: “The birth of the handicapped first baby in my real life has continuously influenced my fictional world long after the composition of A Personal Matter [Kojinteki na taiken, 1964]. If I had not existed in this real world, my son would not be here. But, on the other hand, if he were not here, I could not be living the way I am. At the time of his birth … in the midst of confusion and commotion, as I almost prepared both birth and death certificates, I let my instinct have its way and named the boy Hikari [light]. My instinct was right. His existence has since illuminated the dark, deep folds of my consciousness as well as its bright sides.”¹⁸

This type of raw material would have tempted many Japanese writers to produce the “I-novel.”¹⁹ However, Ōe learned to transform experiential material into an artistic experience that releases both the writer and the reader from reality’s limitations, and, in Ōe’s words, activates man in his entirety.

I have written a lot about the physical abnormality of my child and his retardation. However, I have not done so in the manner of the “I-novel.” … I am the father of a brain-damaged child, and I have written stories about him, but I have not presented him as I would in an “I-novel.” His existence in real life continues to make various kinds of impacts on me. To live in this world, for me, is to live with him. What these impacts had produced, what was at the core of our communal life—only when these things became imaginatively independent and came out of my interiority, did I write about him.

I live in this cosmos-world-society as a human being. This child of mine deeply and sharply influences the structure of my flesh and spirit. Therefore, when I write about trees and whales, these words, which embody symbolic meanings, constantly reflect the shadow of the child’s existence. Conversely, I write about the idiot infant. The words that describe him, however, do not portray the retarded child who exists in my own family. My words … like a surrealist painting that places the sky and an ocean in the orifices of a human body, are the very image of this cosmos-world-society which I glimpse through the flesh and spirit of the idiot child.²⁰

What is at work in this re-creation of reality, the reflection of Ōe’s retarded son, is the notion that considers imagination to be the faculty of deforming images offered by perception, of freeing ourselves from our immediate images, rather than of forming images: it is “especially the faculty of changing of images. If there is not a changing of images, an unexpected union of images, there is no imagination, no imaginative action. If a present image does not recall an absent one, if an occasional image does not give rise to a swarm of aberrant images, to an explosion of images, there is no imagination.”²¹

As a novice writer, Ōe was not yet familiar with Bachelard’s revolutionary concept of imagination. Neither was he aware of the trickster theory, the cultural hero, the archetype of a clown, which supports the aesthetics of his later novels. Another aesthetic concept, “grotesque realism,” did not enter his literary universe until after the completion of The Waters Have Come in unto My Soul (Kōzui wa waga tamashii ni oyobi, 1973).²² However, in his psyche and his imagination there always resided the germ of all these ideas formulated by scholars of psychoanalysis, anthropology, folklore, mythology, and literary theory. In a sense these scholars have indirectly served Ōe, who needed a theoretical basis for his literary formulations. We might say that the encounter with their works is a rediscovery as well as a learning process for him.

When he began to write short stories at the age of twenty-two, stories that focused on college students who take part-time jobs killing dogs kept for experiments (“A Strange Job” [Kimyō na shigoto], 1957), or transferring corpses at a university hospital (“Lavish Are the Dead” [Shisha no ogori], 1957),²³ deformation of images was already his essential methodology. Whether he dealt with the child/infant in a village community or youths in postwar Japan, his characters play the role of outsiders who occupy the periphery of a society. Many years later he was introduced to Victor Turner’s theory of “liminality” in the ritual process and the marginal world of “communitas,” which firmly reassured the Japanese novelist of the validity of his own literary experimentations.²⁴ Marginality always subsumes something dangerous or even subversive. If his early stories contained the belligerent, subversive elements of Norman Mailer or Henry Miller, this fact originated in the spirit of “grotesque realism” and “communitas,” the debasement and degradation in laughter, rather than the political imagination of a revolution. If, from the earliest works on, Ōe revealed the vitality of Rabelaisian comedy or slapstick farce sometimes verging on literary obscenity, this tendency has everything to do with his inborn skill as a clown.²⁵

“The writer’s job is the job of a clown,” Ōe insists, “the clown who also talks about sorrow.”²⁶ It is also to make a “violent, urgent confession through language and imagination.” And, as Blake put it, this imagination is “not a State: it is the Human Existence itself,”²⁷ which extends to the cosmos-wo...