A Passion for the Past: History, Narrative and Desire in Stendhal and Tanizaki

There is a literary-historical relationship between the two works under discussion here: Stendhal's L'Abbesse de Castro (The Abbess of Castro, 1839) and Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's¹ Yoshino kuzu (Arrowroot, 1931). Tanizaki translated part of Stendhal's novella into Japanese in 1928, at the same time as he was working on the initial version of Arrowroot (Chambers, "A Study of Tanizaki's Yoshino kuzu" 488).² However, what connects the two is not simply this detail but also, and more significantly, the shared narrative and thematic features between them. It will emerge that L'Abbesse de Castro and Arrowroot are strikingly similar not because of Tanizaki's translation, but because both use distinctive narrative techniques to present the same idea: that the individual's relationship to the past must be mediated by romantic desire in order to acquire meaning. Both authors use this precise structure to build their plots, but the settings they choose in order to do so are diametrically opposed: where Stendhal sets his romance in the confines of a moral dystopia, Tanizaki will instead wrap it in a utopian space.

Somewhat counterintuitively, I will examine Arrowroot before addressing L'Abbesse de Castro, then bring the two works together for a discussion of their common and contrasting features. The reason for treating the later text first is that Tanizaki's use of character delineates the major points of this analysis in clearer fashion than Stendhal's, and approaching them in this order will allow a firmer understanding of the questions the two works raise.

Tanizaki's translator and critic Anthony H. Chambers noted that "the narrative technique of […] Arrowroot […] seems to have been inspired by Stendhal's The Abbess of Castro" ("Introduction" viii) in introducing the translated text in 1982. However, his comparison rests on a small but important inaccuracy, namely the claim that "the narrator of Stendhal's story, much like the narrator of Arrowroot, travels to a remote part of Italy to search out the truth of a story that has been covered up by partisan historians" (viii). In fact, as I will discuss in greater detail below, Stendhal's narrator does not assert or achieve the goal of resolving the past mystery through travel; he uses manuscripts found in Rome and Florence, not Castro itself. Rather, the features of Arrowroot that can better establish a comparison with L'Abbesse de Castro are the distinctions between different means of accessing and representing the past, and especially the individual subject's relationship to those varied sources. Let us summarize the novella's plot before examining how Tanizaki connects character and tradition.

Two men journey into the remote and mountainous region of Yoshino, in the Kii peninsula to the south of Osaka. The narrator immediately informs us that (3) ["some twenty years have passed since I traveled to the interior of Yoshino in Yamato. It was around 1912, at the end of the Meiji period or the beginning of Taishō" (145)].³ The significance of the date in Japanese history is, as the narrator underlines, its representing the transition between two imperial eras, as the Meiji emperor died that year. His death marked the end of the first modernization period which had begun in 1868, and its mention alerts us to the fact that the wheels of Japan's national history are turning in the background of Arrowroot's plot. Furthermore, the displacement of the framed narrative recounting the journey to Yoshino twenty years into the past from the point of view of the narrating self is a first indication of the multiple layers of time present in the text.⁴

The reader quickly learns that the narrator is a writer, who is undertaking the journey in preparation for a historical novel on the Southern Court of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: a pretender to the Imperial throne known as the 'Heavenly King' by his followers had taken refuge and then made his last stand in Yoshino, and the narrator hopes to find (4) ["the lingering traces of the Heavenly King" (146)] to inspire his writing. He...