Yukio Mishima, "Confessions of a Mask"

Last winter I forayed into the works of arguably the greatest Japanese author of the 20th century, Yukio Mishima. I was not unscathed; you might say I'm still "working through it". In any case, I can't put this fascist bastard's books down.

I've already blogged about how Mishima's fiction, singularly crafted and aesthetically interesting on its own, makes much more sense - or in any case, gains considerably in depth - when one is familiar with his biography, psyche, political ventures, etc. In fact, there's good reason to suspect that Mishima cannot be divorced from his literary work, or vice versa; rather, since he lived his life as a work of art, to read his novels is only to scratch the surface. Whereas other authors I've recently blogged about, such as Cormac McCarthy, for the most part cultivate themselves as impersonal and remote with respect to their works, Mishima seems at all times to be engaged in creating the work of art that is Mishima; hence, each novel must be read in the context of the larger creation (less charitably, the larger spectacle).

For this reason, "Confessions of a Mask" is a particularly interesting Mishima novel. It's the closest he gives us to a straight-up, confessional autobiography, and although his surviving family would apparently still be (somehow) reticent with respect to this interpretation, it chronicles in a very literal way his own changing and largely painful relationship to his queerness. It's widely known that Mishima had affairs with men and trans-women throughout his adult life; "Confessions of a Mask" provides his own take on this, executed with incomparably violent and flowery prose.

It would be tempting, perhaps, to read the novel as in some way exemplary of postwar Japanese queerness. I suspect however that Mishima is too rare a bird for this to be true. His homosexual desire is to some extent polymorphous (armpits!), and is deeply tangled with a desire for images of violence, destruction and death; case in point, his description of erotic fantasies wherein his schoolmates are tortured to death, and his vivid description of masturbating to an image of St Sebastian bristling with arrows. Perhaps something about this sheds light on coming of age at the height of Japanese militarism and imperialism; Mishima did seem to regret faking his way out of military service, having missed his chance to die a "beautiful death" like so many other young Japanese men. I hesitate to make such sweeping generalizations, however. At best, I might agree that Mishima, as always seems the case, is something like the canary in the mineshaft: if something bizarre is going on in Japan, however buried, his prose and his gestures seem sure to reflect it in spectacular fashion.

Larger questions surrounding a "Queer Canon" can be posed in light of this novel. It strikes me that Mishima, like William S. Burroughs, presents something of an enigma, if not an outright problem, for constructions of queerness as somehow inherently liberal (if not radical). Let's not forget his cartoonish ultra-nationalism, his problematic celebrations of "manliness", and what is - arguably? - his gross misogyny. If Mishima belongs in a canon of any kind, I would suggest that it's as a liminal figure. The questions that can be spun from his confession are legion, and in my mind they suggest that the simplistic notion of a "queer author" is deeply troubled.

Cormac McCarthy, "Cities of the Plain"

(Vintage, 1999)

"Every man's death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honour the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale?"

The final installment of McCarthy's Border Trilogy unites John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, the protagonists of the first and second novels respectively. It takes place three years after the narrative of "All the Pretty Horses"; it is the early 1950s and John Grady is now twenty and Billy twenty-eight. The two work on a ranch near the US-Mexico border, situated on land which is soon to be bought up by the American military. Billy and John Grady share a friendship akin to brotherhood, for among other reasons John Grady in many respects reminds Billy of his long-dead younger brother Boyd.

On a short visit to a brothel across the border with Billy, John Grady is struck by the beauty of one of the brothel workers, who young and epileptic. He falls in love with her; the problem is that her pimp has fallen in love with her too. John Grady vows to marry her and live with her just off the ranch, but in order for this to happen she must somehow escape her situation. This precipitates a nailbiting climax that is arguably ultra-violent even by McCarthy's standards.

While "Cities of the Plain" does not exactly tie the preceding novels together, it does expound upon their themes and offers something by way of a repetition that is worth pondering. John Grady's tenacity and Billy's decisive, elder-brotherly comportment shine through, but in a rapidly shifting context. The wilds of the previous novels are giving way to the prerogatives of commerce and the military-industrial complex. The actions and ethical codes of the protagonists, quixotic at best in a land where gas stations and highway developments stand in for windmills, figure as positively alien or anachronistic in places; in fact the bulk of the narrative seems something of a dream in light of the novel's epilogue, which takes place fifty years later at the turn of the 21st century (to be sure, yet another improbably philosophical stranger shows up to enlighten the protagonist at this point, discoursing at length about dreams and dreamers). Perhaps the trilogy taken as a whole is best read as a kind of requiem for a certain time and place and way of life which have long since given way to the visions of other dreamers. Or perhaps the point, more accurately, is that capitalism and American empire are, properly speaking, a dream dreamt by no one in particular, though for all that making demands upon and shaping an environment and a people with brutal violence.

As is standard for McCarthy, there is however a tiny and simple glimmer of light in this novel. Billy Parham's travels reveal, perhaps, that even in a situation of violent environmental and cultural upheaval, there is a goodness waiting in the interstices of wandering lost.

Cormac McCarthy, "The Crossing"

(Vintage, 1995)

The second volume of McCarthy's Border Trilogy concerns a different set of characters and takes place around ten years before the action of the more highly regarded "All the Pretty Horses". If I'm not mistaken, what I characterized as the negative romance of the latter is all but gone from "The Crossing". Overall the second novel is far bleaker and more meditative/philosophical (at its worst, plodding and overly long). Though to be sure there are some pulse-pounding sequences in the best tradition of the Western genre.

The "crossing" in question is ostensibly that of the main character, teenager and vaquero Billy Parham, across the New Mexico / Mexico border. He sets out, without telling his family, to return a she-wolf he has caught near his father's farm to what is most likely her original habitat in a Mexican mountain range. He must also make subsequent crossings and re-crossings in the wake of the events this decision sets in motion. True to McCarthy's style and substance, Billy and later his younger brother Boyd wander a desolate, violent and improbable Mexico torn between cultures as well as between past and future. Along the way various people they meet give philosophical substance and stylistic embellishment to what is otherwise a taut, Spartan tale of young men out for justice and troubleshooting the various pitfalls of living on the road in an inhospitable land.

I would suggest however that the true notion of "crossing" at play in this novel pertains to the nigh-infinite distance between the particular beings who inhabit McCarthy's chaotic, violent world. Much is made in the sequence with the she-wolf of the imponderable difference separating her from her captor Billy - just as in "All the Pretty Horses", John Grady and other vaqueros frequently muse on the distance separating man from horse. The sequence with the wolf comprises only the novel's first section, however. What is most interesting is how McCarthy spins the allegory of the wolf into a world where human beings are separated from each other by a veritable chasm, between which words and gestures make paltry communion. That is perhaps the point: for all the distance between beings, there is a type of communion, fleeting and unsure, that may be struck. The crossing is tenuous and terrifying and without guarantee, but it may be risked nonetheless; witness Billy standing in the dog-fighting pit with the wolf, or Boyd in his silent understanding with the young Mexican girl who joins them on their journey.

All of this puts me in mind of the later Lyotard, about whom I'm writing a doctoral thesis. In his later writings, Lyotard pondered the possibility of passage between what appear to be incommensurable faculties, genres of discourse, etc. His writings on Malraux in particular stress the notion of communion, love and solidarity between wholly alien beings (i.e. between human beings, who are essentially wholly alien to each other). "The Crossing" is, among other things, a singular study of these seemingly impossible yet altogether possible passages.

Cormac McCarthy, "All the Pretty Horses"

(Vintage, 1993)

There's a metaphysic, an entire universe at the bottom of McCarthy's fiction; the hard part for me has been to dig it up, and the following is simply a musing on that topic.

McCarthy seems, for the most part, to deliver a chaotic, almost high-modernist metaphysic of chance and naked force (see in particular No Country for Old Men or Blood Meridian). But the more I read him, the more I'm convinced that this can't be the whole picture. All the Pretty Horses, the first book in his acclaimed Border Trilogy, is rife with symbols and discursions betokening the aforementioned universe of constant, chaotic change. Something else emerges however: as long as I'm bandying about "isms", I might call it a negative Romanticism or something close to that.

The book is a Western set in the early 1950s near the Texas-Mexico border. The main protagonist finds himself homeless at the age of sixteen, and enlists a friend to travel with him by horseback to Mexico in search of work and adventure. A third youngster, a stranger, joins them on the road, and this eventually sets off a series of violent events which escape the protagonists' control. In the meantime, however, they find work with a rich landowner/rancher. The main protagonist falls in love with the rancher's daughter, becomes her lover, and attempts to overcome the massive obstacles put in their way.

For me, the following passage sums up the entire novel: "He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower".

Nature is not an infinitely creative source of abundance as in Romanticism, but rather an insatiably vampiric entity dragging down beauty, or allowing it to appear only briefly, and at an exhorbitant cost. One thinks here of the bleakness of The Road, but on further reflection the fragility of beauty and goodness in an otherwise indifferent or malevolent world is a constant theme throughout McCarthy's fiction. Humanity itself is ephemeral; it is in any case bought at what may seem too high a price, as the main protagonists of both The Road and All the Pretty Horses learn firsthand. In general the Western is, perhaps, one of the best genres through which to lay all this bare. Of McCarthy's Westerns, however, I would suggest that the interested reader start with All the Pretty Horses lest the novelization of this metaphysic offered by what is arguably his best work, Blood Meridian, prove altogether too terrifying or unpalatable.

High-brow horror novels

When it comes to books and movies I'm something of a horror buff, but I'm rather finicky about what precisely, to me, constitutes good horror. Over the past year I've had the good fortune to stumble across some amazing horror fiction - the kind of stuff that is rightly considered world class literature first, horror fiction second. What follows is a brief summary of the top two highlights.

1. Yukio Mishima, "The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea" (Vintage, 1994, 192 pages)

Mishima's stands out as one of the most beautifully crafted, as well as profundly frightening and disturbing tales I've ever read. The story centres on a 13 year old boy, Norobu, whose widowed mother begins a relationship with an idiosyncratic, sympathetic sailor. Influenced by "the chief", another boy his age who commands a group of like-minded boys with his eerie charisma, Norobu develops a nihilistic, creepily detached attitude which increasingly colours how he deals with his mother's new love. This leads to a shocking climax which is, in my opinion, among the best in fiction. What makes the novel so profoundly good is the convincing way in which Mishima crafts the boy and the sailor; those familiar with Mishima's other works, especially the more autobiographical "Confessions of a Mask", will recognize something of the author's own idiosyncrasies in both. Mishima's abiding obsessions with death and sex - one might say, with the real - turn an otherwise prosaic blend of coming of age story and mid-life crisis story into a vision of hell.

2. Cormac McCarthy, "Child of God" (Vintage, 1993, 208 pages)

Those who know McCarthy through the popular film "No Country for Old Men" will probably expect his fiction to be violent and terse. What they probably won't expect is the sheer extremity of the violence, and the fact that he delivers his tales in a lyrical, Faulknerian language that is practically unmatched. Moreover, the actual novel version of "No Country for Old Men" is arguably the least challenging of his works, and in this sense it is not representative. One should look elsewhere in his corpus to get a true measure of his aesthetic abilities; "Child of God", beautifully written and far less imposing than his masterpiece "Blood Meridian", is a good place to start. "Child of God" tells the story of Lester Ballard, a strange, dispossessed Tennessee man who slowly goes insane and resorts to murder and necrophelia. The tale is all the more chilling for the extent to which Ballard's descent is rendered plausible by his loneliness and material deprivation. McCarthy paints squallor and degradation with a loving attention to detail that makes his worlds as real as they are horrifying.