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5. Gothic Stylistics: Arishima Takeo and Melodramatic Excess
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Chapter
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C H A P T E R 5 G O T H I C S T Y L I S T I C S Arishima Takeo and Melodramatic Excess I never knew such happiness. I never knew such happiness could exist. Not that the dark world was removed or brightened, but Each thing in it was slightly enlarged, and in so seeming became its True cameo self, a liquid thing, to be held in the hollow Of the hand like a bird. . . . —John Ashbery, from Flow Chart I am not so afraid of the dark night As the friends I do not know, I do not fear the night above, As I fear the friends below. —Stevie Smith, from “Dirge” T he connection between the gothic and the melodramatic mode of writing is how a foreign style of writing, indeed a foreign mode of expression, came to dominate Arishima Takeo’s (1878–1923) fiction. It was in this sense that Arishima incorporated elements of the gothic in his fiction although the sources of this style lie not only in Western literature but in Edo literature as well. Arishima discovered the exotic, the alien within—within the highly wrought language from which he constructed his fiction—and without, in the choice of subject matter of much of that fiction. In subject and expression the notion of the alien held a great attraction for him. Gerald Figel in his 1999 study, Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan has argued that “the fantastic allows the modern to be thought.”1 The fantastic has affinities with the notion of the alien as used in this study but, more pertinently, Figel links the notion of “otherness” to the foreign: Arishima Takeo and Melodramatic Excess • 127 What we see occurring simultaneously with the colonization of the “outer territories ” (gaishi) is an endocolonization of the demons and spirits of the “other world,” a world conceived as other both spatially (rural periphery) and temporally (past beliefs). In the case of modern Japan, external and internal sources of blackness were thus at the disposal of the builders of a nation-state, the cultural, political, and social integrity of which would rely on an overdetermined spiritual ethnos to mask domestic differences and foreign similarities. The foreign took over the role of present Other while the fushigi of the folk was consigned to an anachronistic but respected past of national essence and origins.2 The taking over of the Other by the foreign is a response to modernization, as Figal notes, and this idea constitutes one of the central arguments of this book. This chapter will examine various aspects of Arishima Takeo’s “foreignizing ” style, using the notion of the “melodramatic imagination” as developed by Peter Brooks in his 1976 book of the same name. Such a study will not only provide a general insight into the gothic as it was manifested in Japan but will also illustrate how Arishima incorporated the alien into his fiction and thus illuminate his overall oeuvre. We begin by briefly considering the overall stylistic landscape in Japan when Arishima began writing and explore how Arishima’s style fits or does not fit the conventional schematization. Towards an “Un-Japanese” Style Yamamoto Masahide in his magisterial Kindai buntai hassei no shiteki kenky ü (A historical study of the birth of the modern style, 1965) links the victory of the colloquial style (genbun itchi) with the domination of Japanese letters by such Naturalist writers as Shimazaki Töson (1872–1943) and Tayama Katai (1871–1930).3 By 1910 this process was complete, and writers belonging to the anti-Naturalist school, most notably Natsume Söseki (1867–1916) and Mori Ögai, (1862–1922), had brought a new richness and freshness to literary style. However even the anti-Naturalist writers, because of their classical education, were still fond of using recondite Chinese characters and occasionally preserved Sino-Japanese (kanbun) features in their work. Yamamoto argues that the final break with the past was made by writers associated with the Shirakaba (White Birch) literary coterie.4 The break occurred after 1910 because the young Shirakaba writers did not share the same educational background in the Japanese and Chinese classics as [52.54.111.228] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:46 GMT) 128 • Chapter 5 their predecessors. Yamamoto observes that a knowledge of Western rhetoric was needed to bring about this final severing of past traditions, and the White Birch magazine was one of the leading advocates of...