Kobayashi Hideo, Apologist of the "Savage Mind"

Though Kobayashi Hideo (1902-81) has been known as the most influential literary critic of modern Japan, the author of this article considers him above all as a thinker whose discourse can be summed up as an apologia for "the savage mind." "The savage mind" is a translation of the term, "la pensée sauvage," coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-) .¹ In a book with this same title and throughout the rest of his work, Lévi-Strauss sought to correct the prevailing idea that less technologically developed, non-literate peoples were incapable of rational or abstract thought. "Savage thought," he wrote, "is definable both by a consuming symbolic ambition such as humanity has never again seen rivalled, and by scrupulous attention directed entirely towards the concrete, and finally by the implicit conviction that these two attitudes are but one."² This article will show how Kobayashi can be considered an apologist for that way of thinking, which is highly visible among so-called "primitive" people, but more difficult to find in "civilized" men and women. As for the possibility of Lévi-Strauss's influence on Kobayashi, we can say there is no obvious direct influence, though the latter could read French and was contemporary to the former. However, Kobayashi (like Lévi-Strauss) was influenced and inspired by other French authors, for example, Arthur Rimbaud and Henri Bergson.

The word "apologia" means "a public discourse to defend one's own position." It implies an offense, against which one needs to defend oneself. If Kobayashi was an apologist for the "savage mind," there must have been something or somebody he considered as attacking this mind. Kobayashi's discourse shows that the modern "civilized mind" was the offender, taking over the world. Using terms such as "primitive," "archaic," "instinctive", etc., Kobayashi tried to defend the unconscious, mythological and poetical mind residing at the bottom of our psyche, against the overwhelming oppression of modern civilization.

From a historical point of view, Kobayashi's discourse could be interpreted as a nationalistic defense against modern Western ideologies. Born just before the Russo-Japanese war, he began his literary career with a critique of Marxism, and participated actively in Japanese wars against the Allied Forces, which certainly proved his support for Japanese nationalism. However, his discourse never became propaganda or a defense of Japanese political ideology, and even if some part of his discourse did coincide with nationalistic ideology, it, as a whole, cannot be regarded as an expression of anti-Western ideology. From the beginning to the end of his career, the main theme of his discourse was always the same: an apologia for the "savage mind."

It is a common mistake to consider one of Kobayashi's earliest writings, "Samazama-naru ishoo" ("On various literary artifices," 1929), as a manifesto of anti-Marxism. This short critical essay attacked Marxist literary theory, for sure, but it attacked also other theories such as "art for art's sake," Symbolism, and Expressionism, etc. He intended to carry out a critical examination of all the literary "artifices," that seemed to him nothing more than "theoretical armaments" harmful to literary creation. If he attacked Marxist literature, it is because he considered it to be one of the typical theoretical armaments that could pollute literature.

To him, literary creation had to be free from any theoretical and conceptual framework. He wanted it to be as close as possible to perception, as the following citation shows:

A child learns from his mother that "the sea is blue." Then he goes to Shinagawa Bay to draw it and discovers that its color is neither blue nor red. If he gets so surprised that he abandons the idea of drawing it, he must be a genius, though the world has not known such a "monster" yet. Of course, the child has no notion of "sea" or "blue." "The sea is blue" is to him just a phrase, a series of words that make no sense. To him who lives near Shinagawa Bay, "the sea" means Shinagawa Bay, nothing else. To him, words do not indicate any abstract...