Japan and the Cosmopolitan Gothic

Specters of Modernity

M. Blouin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137305220
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

Japan is imagined routinely in American discourse as a supernatural entity. Gothic tales from these two cultures have been exchanged, consumed, and adapted. Here, Blouin examines a prevalent tendency within the United States-Japan cultural relationship to project anxiety outward only to find shadowy outlines of the self abroad.

CHAPTER 1

GHOSTS AND SPIRITS IN EARLY JAPANOLOGY

In the 1890s, Japanese curios filled American living rooms in parallel with a rising cosmopolitanism. This chapter focuses upon how early Japanologists utilize the trendy formulation of an imaginary Japan to contemplate unseen forces in a modernizing world. Ernest Fenollosa, a professor from Salem who taught philosophy at Tokyo University, spent the bulk of his career documenting these curios to reveal the energy behind world “progress.” Lafcadio Hearn was a nomadic journalist who was sent to Japan in 1890 to write about its unfamiliar aspects. Hearn’s writing, though radically different from Fenollosa’s in style, likewise exploits an assortment of Japanese curios to express a supernatural essence within modern life, marked by its absence. Early Japanology thus marks a significant shift in how a discourse of the invisible came to represent Japan.¹ These two authors expose the emptiness beneath Gilded Age artifice while also projecting, through gathered Japanese materials, narratives of other-worldly forces upon an illusory archipelago.²

Following Commodore Perry’s mission to the country in 1853 to open its doors to foreign trade, Japan continued to modernize at a rate unheard of previously. In the government’s zeal for Westernization (to “catch up”), doubts concerning modernity arose, on both sides of the Pacific, and figures seized upon the nation as an invaluable case study. Subsequently, on the one hand, it became a place onto which American consumers could project modernization as a successful (and predetermined) phenomenon. On the other hand, discontents could point to the splendor of a culture being meticulously destroyed and lament a romanticized life prior to modernity—which, of course, never truly existed. Both versions of Japan relied upon specters, be they reassuring or terrifying in consequence.³

This fictional movement “further West” in American discourse contributed to what David Mogen calls the “frontier Gothic.” After the proclaimed closure of the frontier, fictional Japan was the next logical step in a collective wandering outward. Fantasies involving the archipelago consequently inherited the dual sensations associated with “progress”: “An ambivalent sense of destiny, projected into dreadful apprehensions of personal or cosmic apocalypse” (Mogen, 102). Regarding the phantoms behind expansionist politics, Renée L. Bergland adds, “The lore and language of ghostliness are particularly appropriate for describing the encounters that take place within the mysteriously shifting grounds of American cultural frontiers” (Bergland, 93). The fantastic realm of Japan serves as an intersection between the Ghost of everything denied by Enlightenment thought (the Romantic, irrational, intangible) and the Spirit of everything the Enlightenment supposedly promised (global order, the triumph of rationalism, the divine made tangible via materialist “progress”).⁴ As American influence stretched beyond its westernmost boundary, authors re-inscribed ambivalent attitudes toward a nationalized supernatural upon tales adapted from the land of the Rising Sun—a dialectical undertaking I have labeled as the “cosmopolitan Gothic.”

Critic Edward J. Ingebretsen, S.J., charts this spiritual unrest from the time of the Puritans through current trends in popular horror fiction by applying critical maps in order to explain a recurrent search for imperceptible powers: “To remember the Holy as a divine principle is in effect to remember, and in some cases to set, boundaries or limits beyond which the human does not or cannot go” (Ingebretsen, xv). Early Japanology instills a poetic cartography by drawing invented margins. It comes perhaps as no surprise that what Ingebretsen recognizes as a defining ambivalence between the invisible as divine and the invisible as a cause for trembling emerges in initial reflections concerning Japan. After all, he envisions the slippery dichotomy as a long-standing rite in American culture: “It re-presents—makes present again—a familiar pattern of events by which to embody and to make right the relationship between the community and its transcendent possibilities” (177). Hearn and Fenollosa reveal that these literary rituals were not restricted to descriptions of the wilderness, the borderlands of a Puritan mindset, but were in fact disseminated further, into constructions of the Far East.

To examine the clash of supernatural powers at the dawn of the twentieth century therefore unveils competing impulses emergent in American discourse, articulated through the fictive framing of the archipelago. In Fenollosa’s model, readers primarily revel in a metaphysical presence, a timeless structure that radiates across all cultures; in the works of Hearn, readers focus on a proto-modernist absence, a vanished (or vanishing) essence.⁵ However, instead of reading these notions as oppositional, we might read them in conversation to understand how they reveal a transition between familiar positivisms and “cosmopolitan modernisms” (to borrow Rebecca Walkowitz’s term, discussed at length in the Introduction).⁶ Theorist Fredric Jameson sets the tenor of the conversation as follows:

In the first great period of bourgeois hegemony, the reinvention of romance finds its strategy in the substitution of new positivities (theology, psychology, the dramatic metaphor) for the older magical content. When, at the end of the nineteenth century, the search for secular equivalents seems exhausted, the characteristic of a nascent modernism … circumscribes the place of the fantastic as a determinate, marked absence at the heart of the secular world.

(Jameson 1981, 120–121)

These two figures therefore offer readers a moment to reflect upon how structural transitions were negotiated around the popular idea of the Far East. This reflexivity exposes dueling forces within their respective positions and their arbitration of an outward push for imperialism in correlation with the daunting enclosures of modern existence. Hearn and Fenollosa, in the midst of a deep cultural transition, (unconsciously) reach common ground through their respective phantasms.

This fluctuation among unseen forces serves as an important connection between American and Japanese culture at the turn of the century. Marilyn Ivy’s study Discourses of the Vanishing analyzes nativist ethnography during the Meiji Era, concentrating primarily upon Yanagita Kunio’s seminal Legends of Tono (1910). Ivy argues that modernity is defined by competing phantasms in Japan: an amalgamation of specters that trigger lamentation for lost beliefs in a higher power while building confidence in an invisible force that guides “progress.” She writes about “a discipline that ensures the disappearance of its origins as it constructs them” (Ivy, 95). Gerald Figal’s Civilization and Monsters also explores the complex commodification of phantoms during the Meiji Era. As Figal notes, “The scientific study of the supernatural … indeed appears to be universal phenomena of modernity. Whether Japan’s modernity is particularly distinguished from that of other nations in its preoccupation with the fantastic, however, is a question left for future comparative studies” (Figal, 14–15).

This chapter seeks to develop Figal’s dialogue across the Pacific. While he and Ivy attend to Japanese discourse, scholars could readily apply their analysis of ghostly depictions to American writers contemplating Japan at the fin de siècle.⁷ Specters recorded within the archipelago serve an analogous purpose for both cultures during a time of unprecedented international growth. Authors describing the Far East for an American audience play out a comparable impulse as the one that Ivy and Figal locate among Japanese writers, including Yanagita (who was directly influenced by Hearn’s methodology). Yanagita’s ethnographic writings are similarly torn between a desire to manifest a cohesive Japanese Spirit, emerging during a time of rapid national advancement and imperial longing, and a desire to depict primitive beliefs as grotesque Ghosts that unsettle the rigid frameworks of Western-style modernization. Like Fenollosa and Hearn, he fashions a mystical essence for the recently unified body politic while concurrently deconstructing confidence in such a body through the presence of ghostly remainders. Frontiers posited at the edges of two rapidly modernizing countries remain haunted by expressions of transcendence—boundary-crossing and growth into infinity—at odds with a dramatic recession of faith, much like the push and pull of Hiroshige’s emblematic wave that would come to serve as a metaphor of interactions between the two nations.

The methods with which Hearn and Fenollosa re-imagine this supernatural paradigm, and the justifications with which they support their narratives, make them distinct from one another. Yet it would be a mistake to view their approaches as clearly delineated into two schools, Jameson’s differentiation between what might be read as Fenollosa’s “new positivities” and Hearn’s “nascent modernism.” It remains a shift that moves, like most, in starts and spurts.⁸ Although by focusing upon ends rather than means, each Japanologist earned a posthumous reputation as an unabashed Orientalist, critics can also tease out the dynamic complexities of modernization via their common reliance upon aesthetic specters. To illuminate a collision between Spirits and Ghosts imported from a newly opened land will allow us to consider why images of Japan were aligned with the invisible throughout the last century.

DISCOURSES OF THE INVISIBLE

Behind their positions, one more vocally resistant to modernization (Hearn) and the other far more optimistic about its prospects (Fenollosa), the language retains a basis in popular incantations of Western metaphysics.⁹ They frequently ground their philosophies in consultation with the works of one particular popularizer of “progress,” Herbert Spencer. Fenollosa formed the Herbert Spencer Club while at Harvard. He regards Spencer, as did many Americans at the time, as an idealist regarding the development of their nation. Hearn, on the other hand, idolizes the man in excess. Yet he regards Spencer as advocating a mystical determinism that cannot be fully understood, an unwieldy terror beyond our consciousness that will be articulated in the decades to follow (by horror writers including H. P. Lovecraft). Capitalizing upon Spencer’s moments of uncertainty, Hearn justifies his brand of literary ghostliness through a marriage of Spencerian thought and Far Eastern culture. Fenollosa’s wife, Mary McNeil Fenollosa, the subject of the next chapter, writes in one letter: “(Hearn) spoke of the sympathy between Herbert Spencer and Buddhism. We don’t agree to this but didn’t contradict it” (Chisolm, 6). The foundational split over how to interpret Spencerian thought affirms a key distinction between the two men: Fenollosa believes human beings will be emboldened by his discovery of a new telos present in Japan, while Hearn anticipates that humankind will be humbled by its profound absence (a concept he trusts to be eminent already in Japanese culture).

These stances derive in part from differing interpretations of a celebrated philosophical work, Spencer’s First Principles (1862). Spencerian theory, symptomatic of modernity at that historical moment, is plagued by an internal conflict between fantastic energies as “self-enclosed” and fantastic energies as “self-reflective,” even “self-destructive,” in nature. Figures harness his methodology, broadly speaking, for two ends—to tear down older phantoms and then replace them with an alternative invisible entity. This phenomenon is not dissimilar from the one identified by Ivy in Japan, a maneuver to proclaim relentlessly a shrinking potency—in many cases, theological in nature—while simultaneously attempting to fill this lacuna with a revised presence (typically a brand of science or industry).

Readers quickly discover the influence of a younger Spencer upon Fenollosa’s philosophical renderings of the Far East through Spencer’s dedication to the order and logic of the cosmos. In the closing of First Principles, the author espouses a “new positivism”: “Knowledge of (the ‘unknowable’) remains incomplete until it has united the past, present, and future histories into a whole” (Spencer 1937, 246). After much labor, he uncovers “a single metamorphosis universally progressing,” and his project seems to shift more purposefully toward idealism (491). “In their ensemble the general truths reached exhibit, under certain aspects, a oneness not hitherto observed” (483).

However, within the same work germinate the seeds of a “nascent modernism.” Earlier chapters predict Hearn’s brand of mysticism: “In its ultimate nature nothing can be known” (54). Using terms including “vague consciousness” and “shadowy and indefinite” to describe the meaning behind “progress,” Spencer at the opening of First Principles compliments a notion akin to Hearn’s version of Eastern cosmology (72, 94). Spencer’s “unknowable” reminds Hearn that people’s knowledge remains confined and, after the endless collection of small facts, eventually confronts an unanswerable question: “What lies beyond?” (12).

Fenollosa takes solace in the earlier works of Spencer that can more easily be reconciled with his idealism. He supports himself with the Spencer he views to be optimistic that the “unknowable” is, in fact, knowable—it simply requires a more advanced epistemology. Hearn resembles the later Spencer, who, according to biographer Mark Francis, “learned to avoid the archaic language of theology” (Francis, 210). Hearn, glossing over Spencer’s ambivalence, appreciates the figure that Francis writes “rejected German Idealism in social explanation as he had in biology … (and had) no faith in reason in history” (300). Spencer’s shift in emphasis parallels his reference by the two men. Fenollosa gradually shifts away from Spencer as the British philosopher appears to grow more cynical; Hearn encounters Spencer later in his career, attracted to a skeptical worldview. Neglecting aspects of First Principles that fail to complement their arguments, these Japanologists borrow ad hoc from the Spencerian canon. In truth the philosopher, despite his status as a thinker embraced widely by the American academy, was unsure of how to resolve his conflict with invisible forces. His doubts subsequently shape the spectral framework for those viewing Japan as an ideal social experiment with which to test the margins of modernity.

Nonetheless, Hearn and Fenollosa, like Spencer, posture themselves as pragmatists. Spencer works out his philosophy through exhaustively detailed processes, leaving no element of the natural world unturned and therefore endowing his analysis with a sense of gravitas. Influenced by these techniques, Hearn catalogues the minutiae of everyday Japanese life, including the daily rituals of its insects, to establish broader philosophical claims about the archipelago. Fenollosa depends upon factual evidence he collects in material artifacts for the Japanese government to assist in assembling its national artwork. Representing an uneasiness for, as well as attraction to, overarching narratives of “progress” at the turn of the century, both these writers garnish their interpretations with scientific language to compensate for the supernatural aspects of their claims. Despite this compensation, beneath rationalist explication lingers an impulse to convey the guidance of angels—and a concomitant impulse to watch these angelic forms dissipate in the winds of change.

FENOLLOSA’S SPIRIT

Supernatural sentiment appears throughout Fenollosa’s endeavors to record the Far East. He describes the art of the Buddhist Tendai sect, to which he belongs:

(Buddhist art allows) the opening of the inner eye to natural facts and spiritual presences that are veiled from lower forms … the power to image forth truth in forms of glowing vision … to project angelic groups upon the background of contemplation … all this is of the very substance, not of poetry and music, but of visual art.

(Fenollosa 2007a, 122–123)

Harboring affections for American Transcendentalism, he trusts that his spiritual experience with Eastern art entitles him to peek into the inner workings of a hidden sphere. In short, he revises religious determinism, and expands it in correspondence with scientific determinism, through intellectual engagement with the Japan Idea. The “progress” of humans, for Fenollosa, inherently revolves around human potential to glimpse once again the presence of a higher power guiding humanity back toward harmony. The tools for uncovering that harmony exist in bits and fragments of Asia’s fictional past. His “magical narratives,” to appropriate Jameson’s term, suture disparate cultural products to resurrect feelings of faith. In so doing, Fenollosa synthesizes American and Japanese culture to propose a teleology in line with emergent twentieth-century values: “The two halves of the globe come together for the final creation of man … within the coming century the blended strength of Scientific Analysis and Spiritual Wisdom should wed for eternity the blended grace of Aesthetic Synthesis and Spiritual Love” (Fenollosa 2007b, v–vi). Human beings retain science, enrich it with pieces of spirituality and art from Japan, and preserve confidence in what unfolded previously (and what is yet to unfold). This alternative teleology stands not at odds with exposure to non-Christian cultures, an unlikely insularity for Fenollosa in his role as a practicing cosmopolitan in an age of glo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Specters of a Wandering Mind
• 1. Ghosts and Spirits in Early Japanology
• 2. Ghostly Maidens in Sidney McCall’s Fiction
• 3. Japonisme and the Female Gothic
• 4. Nuclear Criticism and a Deferred Reading of the Toho Terror
• 5. Japan Inc. and the American Nightmare
• 6. Atemporality and Communal Ethics in the Films of Shimizu Takashi
• 7. Difference and Doubt in Christopher Nolan’s Inception
• Conclusion: Haunted Echo Chambers
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index