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Articles / Essays		□　John Solt　"Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning (意味のタピストリーを細断する)" ［ 日本語 ］
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		■　INTRODUCTION (pp.1-8.) Where will the people of the twenty-first century look to discover the most creative impulses in twentieth-century Japanese poetry? Certainly not in rehashes of four centuries of haikai. Rather, they will have to look at those Japanese who were themselves cosmopolitan, who had the audacity to ignore the expectations of Japonisme that so many Westerners, in their cultural Orientalism, imposed upon the Japanese. This book examines the life, poetry, and poetics of Japan's flamboyant and controversial avant-garde leader, Kitasono Katue (1902-78), [1] whose activity spanned the middle fifty years of the twentieth century and left an indelible mark on poetry written in the international idiom.　 　　In spite of numerous volumes in English on twentieth-century Japanese poetry, it is surprising that so little has been written about the most vital antitraditional current, that mishmash of-isms collectively referred to as the "avant-garde" (zen'ei)--futurism, dadaism, constructivism, and surrealism before the Pacific War, and abstract expressionism, minimalism, pop, op, and concrete poetry after the war. [2]　 　　To clarify my general approach, a few words should be said about my choice of vocabulary. I have opted to use the word "avant-garde" to mean those movements influenced by the West both before and after the Pacific War. Not only was the word "modernism" not current in Japan until after the war but "modernism" and "postmodernism" tend to create an artificial division that is more accurately depicted in the Japanese context simply as "prewar" and "postwar." Moreover, the way "postmodern" has been defined in the West--as, for example, a mix of styles without hierarchical ordering--applies in Japan equally well to prewar "modernism" and even in many respects to premodern (Edo period) Iiterature. [3] Imported Western movements were uprooted and transplanted and then interacted with the vibrant Japanese tradition, which stretched back over a millennium. This special mix needs to be understood on its own terms.　 　　A story often told by Japanese poets active in the prewar period is that André Breton, founder of the surrealist movement, was shocked to learn in 1936 from a Japanese artist in Paris that 500 poets and painters in Tokyo considered themselves "surrealists." [4] Most books on surrealism in the West, however, continue to treat the movement as if it had never existed in Asia. The reasons for this neglect are themselves worthy of consideration. Despite an active history of exchanges between Western and Japanese avant-garde poets since the early 1930s--which made their work quite accessible to one another--scholars in the West have for the most part been introducing more traditionalist Japanese poets, not those associated with the avant-garde West. Given a choice between Japan as the "exotic Other" and Japan as a creative amalgam of traditional Japan and the West, Westerners have been attracted to the former. This curiosity is understandable, but it has come at a price--namely, the distortion by neglect of a series of imported literary movements and the story they relate of intercultural activity. 　　Westerners teaching dadaism and surrealism invariably register surprise and amusement when told about the movements that thrived in Japan in the two decades preceding the Pacific War, claiming that books on the subject omit mention of Japan. This book was written partially to dispel the widespread misconception that futurism, dadaism, surrealism, and other avant-garde movements spread only in the West. Much groundwork still needs to be done. 　　I have chosen to concentrate on one poet, Kitasono Katue and trace his life, poetry, and poetics. I could have focused on any of a dozen fine poets active before the war--such as Takiguchi Shuzo (1903-79), Nishiwaki Junzaburo (1894-1982), Kondo Azuma (1904-88), Haruyama Yukio (1902-94), Sagawa Chika (1911-36), or Yamanaka Sansei (Chiruu or Tiroux; 1905-77)--I found Kitasono Katue, however, to be the most original poet among them, especially because of the esthetic thread that wove through his poems, essays' book designs, and photographs; his poetics, which were strict and yet allowed for perceptive playfulness; and most of all the sheer quality of his poetry. In this book, I examine Katue's work in terms of the societal context in which he functioned and the constraints under which he worked. These include not only the obvious pressure of the war, which especially impinged between 1939 and 1945, but also the on-and-off neglect by the poetry establishment, which forced him to publish almost exclusively through the coteries he led. Though focusing on Katue, I use him as a window to look at the literary activity of his colleagues and their poetry circles. Especially in Chapter 6 on the wartime years, I stress that Katue's case is not unusual, since almost every Japanese poet responded similarly to that oppressive situation. 　　Katue is relatively understudied in Japan, perhaps because his literary activity abroad has been either inaccessible or alien to critics at home. The neglect, however, gave me added incentive to view his domestic and foreign production in relation to one another. Now that his generation has mostly departed, interest in writers of the prewar era has steadily been growing. 　　Generally speaking, literary studies in Japan focus more on the presentation than on the interpretation of data. This is partly because of restricted access to most archival holdings. University libraries, for example, are rarely open to the public or even to scholars from other institutions. Therefore, scholars tend to regard the possession of a private library as a key source of legitimacy. Some zealously guard texts from those whom they consider rivals. This atmosphere takes on added significance in the subfield of prewar avant-garde literar studies, because many literary magazines were published in small print runs and seldom circulated outside Tokyo (the center of almost all the movements). Few personal libraries in Tokyo survived the wartime firebombing. Therefore, even such an act as publishing the tables of contents from a few rare magazines of the 1920s and 1930s has been considered a valuable scholarly enterprise. 　　The presentation of data is also highly regarded because interpretation and evaluation tend to be held in low esteem as too subjective and conjectural. Western studies usually take a bird's-eye view of a subject and search for an overriding theory with universal applicability. This study of Kitasono Katue takes a methodological approach between the two sides, presenting data from a microscopic viewpoint, while also raising pertinent, macroscopic questions about the particular nature of intercultural transmissions. 　　I never met Katue, but to trace his roots I visited his birthplace several times, and to gain a deeper understanding of his life, poetry, and poetics, I interviewed over 100 people who had known him personally or who had had a connection with his literary activities. Because the subject of this book is a poet who lived until 1978 and not a figure of remote antiquity, it seemed advisable to meet the many poets, artists, photographers, musicians, and others who had worked with Katue from the 1920s until his death. This study therefore draws to a large extent on information of an oral-biographic nature. One of the benefits of interviewing people from three generations was that I glimpsed how Katue changed over time. For example, colleagues from the 1920s and 1930s told me that Katue would get into lengthy, heated discussions about poetry, whereas younger poets who worked with him only after the war or near the end of his life said he never engaged in such discussions at their monthly meetings. If I had started this project a decade later, when many of those who knew him before the war would have been dead, I am sure that a quite different portrait of Katue would have emerged. 　　I was fortunate in receiving the cooperation of his family and friends, as well as the critics of his poetry. The Japanese poetry world (shidan) is every bit as factionalized as the political world it often appears to ignore. As a foreigner, I took advantage of my marginal status and talked to people who refuse to talk to each other. Although I became close to my subject and praise Katue at times, as do others moved by his work on occasion I am as critical of him as his harshest opponents. Katue's writing tends to polarize readers, and I attempt to evaluate him in terms of what he was writing at a given time, and not in an absolute manner. 　　Immersing myself in his life and works, I decided to read not only his important poetry and essays, which were available in print, but also to cull out-of-print writings and drawings for a broader picture of his activities. It is often with the more ephemeral and obscure publications that one glimpses the extremes of a writer and gains insight into the way he or she ticks. I was fortunate in being the only person outside Katue's nuclear family allowed to read his wartime diaries (analyzed in Chapter 6).　 　　The hardest part of the research was locating Katue's patriotic poetry, which had been written with prompting from the government during World War II. When I began this study, I believed that Katue had resisted penning patriotic poetry, as he and others had insisted in print. It was only after meeting many people and discussing a multitude of issues that I ascertained the breadth of his involvement. Ferreting out Katue's seven patriotic poems from public and private collections was a laborious process. [5] 　　Having accumulated material about Katue from before, during and after the war, I decided to analyze his poems in light of his entire production. Dissatisfied for the most part with the literary histories written in Japan on the avant-garde in general and on Katue in particular, I have re-evaluated the arguments of scholars, especially regarding key aspects of dadaism, surrealism, and patriotic poetry. 　　I have not used the book as a framework to legitimize the universality of any currently popular trend of literary theory, using Katue as the Japanese model. A theory evolves or devolves into the next one, and interest in an author's work seen only through one lens tends to recede with the demise of the theory. Some readers may find my unwillingness to pull everything into one neat theoretical package to be a weakness of the book. My goal, however, is to establish a firmer understanding of the life, times, and work of Kitasono Katue. As opposed to an overarching theory, I deal with a series of issues relevant to specific contexts. In the final chapter I do relate Katue's poetics to theorizing by Michael Riffaterre, Roland Barthes, and Marjorie Perloff to suggest Western strategies that have been devised for interpreting modernist and postmodernist abstract poetry like Katue's, but on the whole I am not aiming to interpret his work through the lens of other critics. 　　In any case, innovative theorizing is necessary to better account for what it means to import literary methods from one culture, in this case the prewar West, into another culture, in this case Japan. Until recently, the power and prestige of the hegemonic West have dictated the terms of discourse on matters literary, political, economic, and military. But literary theorizing has not adequately taken into account the particular ambivalences encountered by those importing and adapting literary movements on the neglected margins, as opposed to those holding the reins at the centers of origination. 　　For example, dadaism and surrealism originated in the West; hence the measure or standard of what is Dada or surreal becomes a construct of the West. But to judge someone an authentic dadaist or surrealist in Tokyo (or in Eastern Europe, South America, Africa, and elsewhere), one would need to define the measure further in terms of the degree of deviation from the norm developed at the movement's place of origin. Otherwise, a poet's originality paradoxically would be acknowledged only when it was imitative, and even composition in one's native language would be simply a "translation" of method. Japanese adaptation or deviation from the Western norm is the most reliable measure of originality, but it has often been perceived as misunderstanding or inept copying. There are numerous other theoretical concerns peculiar to the process of importation; for example, importers have to establish not only a foreign movement but also their claims to legitimacy in introducing it--their licenses to advocate, so to speak--whereas for the originators their manifestos and genealogies are ample proof. Conversely, the complexities--both positive and negative--involved in importing were rarely accessible to the West, the dominant culture. I believe that the foundation laid in this book raises questions pertinent to a comprehensive theory that would adequately encompass the experience of the Japanese avant-garde. That theory would take into account the societal constraints imposed at home, such as the emperor system, and the paradoxical bind of double alienation--from mainstream Japanese poetry and from the Western movements that so influenced these poets.　 　　I envision two main audiences for this book--readers with an interest in Japan and those with an interest in poetry--and I have not addressed myself exclusively to one group or the other. Japan specialists may have preferred more information than I provide in certain cases about literary developments in the West. Although I try to make the point that the avant-garde is of vital importance to twentieth-century culture, having been the fountainhead for many styles and motifs that later became popular, I do not dwell in detail on the significance of figures such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Kenneth Rexroth, all of whom at one time or another lavished praise on Katue's poetry. I take it for granted that the reader is fairly well informed about them; if not, information on them is easily available elsewhere. [6] In a similar vein, readers of poetry and criticism who know little of Japan may occasionally feel at a loss but I have tried to rectify that situation by adding a few, brief background sections on historical and cultural trends. 　　The book is organized chronologically and thematically, with an eclectic structure that gives it a multidimensional focus. I conceptualized it metaphorically as a wheel: Katue is the hub, and each chapter, which treats a separate set of issues, functions as a spoke. My chapter arrangements intentionally mimic the cubist experiment in trying to create a third dimension with the illusionistic tools of only two. By viewing Katue from various angles and not glossing over the contradictions, we discover a complex poet whose existence and work raise many questions. 　　In Chapter 1, I present Katue's roots, based on trips I took to his hometown and meetings I had with his relatives and boyhood friends. I was also fortunate to have access to his school records. Katue did not return to his hometown for the last forty years of his life, but an understanding of his family background and childhood provides a starting point for this study. 　　In Chapters 2 and 3, I discuss Katue's role at the forefront of introducing and writing Dada and surreal verse. I place the narrative about him within the larger context of the history of the literary movements in Japan during the 1920s and compare them to the Western versions. 　　Chapter 4 focuses on Katue's activity in the early 1930s and the three different styles of poetry he developed simultaneously. I examine his leadership of the Alcueil Club of poets and reveal for the first time one of his pen names, Kasuga Shinkuro. Katue's creation of Kasuga has a bearing on the persona we find in his wartime poetry.　 　　Chapter 5 continues the chronological presentation and deals with Katue from the mid-1930s until the Pacific War. I focus on his thirty-year correspondence with Ezra Pound, who enthusiastically introduced Katue's work along with that of his newly formed VOU Club to the West. Ezra Pound the American--a citizen of Japan's declared enemy from 1941 to 1945--lived in Italy before and during the war and was supportive of fascist Italy, Japan's ally. I begin with Katue's letter of self-introduction in 1936. Ezra Pound's subsequent praise of Katue's poetry (in English translation) opened the way for the Japanese poet's reception by other top writers in the West. Pound and "Kit Kat," as he affectionately called Katue, never met in person, but their relationship as revealed through their correspondence provides interesting clues on the two authors and the state of East-West cultural communications in the interwar period. Because of Pound's favorable introduction, Katue became the most highly respected Japanese poet of his generation among avant-garde literati in Europe and North and South America, and he was repeatedly invited to publish with them. [7] 　　In Chapter 6, I take a close look at Katue's controversial wartime activity and offer a comprehensive analysis of his patriotic poetry. This chapter is even more rigidly chronological than the others in its attempt to gauge what literature was written and what literature could be written as the government's grip tightened on all artistic expression from 1939 to 1945. We also glimpse Katue as revealed in his 1944-45 diary and juxtapose that view with the persona found in his poems. I trace the trajectory of his ideological zig-zags from liberal to conservative and, after the war, back to liberal again, not to judge his culpability or complicity, but to demonstrate his responses to the shifting political situations in their complexity. 　　In Chapter 7, I turn to Katue's life in the postwar period, but turn away from politics to take an in-depth widely considered his peak period, the early 1950s. I also discuss his appropriation of the particle no (の), with which Katue fragmented the Japanese language to an unprecedented degree. Finally, in Chapter 8 I review his role at the forefront of the international concrete poetry movement from the 1950s through the 1970s. The movement was an attempt to demolish language barriers in the new technological age, defined by Marshall McLuhan as the "global village." Concrete poetry was as vital to this goal as were readings and sound poetry in the cultural renaissance of the late 1960s. Kitasono caused a mini-incident by declaring the movement dead while it was in full swing. In retrospect, his pronouncement was prescient. His response was to start a new genre, "plastic poetry," which were photographed constructions. His plastic poems were published as book covers and magazine graphics in over a dozen countries. I trace the development of his photographic activity from cover layout designs to plastic poems and focus on the relationship of the photographs to his word poems. 　　My aim in writing this book has been to inform the general reader unacquainted with Kitasono Katue's literary experiments as well as to satisfy the expectations of specialists well acquainted with his work m the original. While disavowing the authorial fallacy (taking at face value what the author says his poem means), I am nevertheless interested in presenting what the author thought he was attempting--his poetics--as well as how his work has been interpreted by others. Although it is fashionable these days to treat a text as a wholly unique event that transcends what the author knew or could know about it, I believe that my contextualization approach, based on literary history is valid in introducing a relatively unknown poet such as Kitasono Katue. My time will have been well spent if this book lays a foundation for further study of Japanese avant-garde poetry, and helps later generations transcend my readings and contribute new interpretations of Katue's poetry. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. □　Reproduced from John Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (1902-1978). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999. © The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1999. Reproduced by permission of the publisher. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..
		■　NOTES 　　 [1]　The poet, who translated from French and English, usually chose to romanize his name as "Kitasono Katue" (or "Katué"). Over one hundred published documents exist with this spelling, and Westerners are often familiar with it through numerous references to him in Ezra Pound's essays. In deference to his preference and not to confuse those who already know him into thinking that I am dealing with a different person, I decided not to revise the spelling into the currently standard, modified Hepburn romanization of "Kitazono Katsue."　 　　 [2]　Valuable exceptions include Hosea Hirata, The Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzaburo: Modernism in Translation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Earl Jackson Jr., "The Heresy of Meaning," in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 51, no. 2 (1991): 561-98; Dennis Keene, Yokomitsu Riichi: Modernist (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); Lucy Beth Lower, "Poetry and Poetics From Modern to Contemporary in Japanese Poetry," (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1987); Ko Won, Buddhist Elements in Dada: A Comparison of Tristan Tzara, Takahashi Shinkichi, and Their Fellow Poets (New York: State University of New York Press, 1977); and Vera Linhartova, Arts du Japon: Dada et surrealisme au Japon (Paris: Publications Orientalistes de France, 1987).　 　　 [3]　Karatani Kojin makes a similar point, "The Japanese nineteenth century may have been an impediment to 'modernization,' but it promises to be an accelerating factor for a postmodern society" ("One Spirit, Two Nineteenth Centuries," in Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, eds., Postmodernism and Japan [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989], p. 265).　 　　 [4]　Conversation with the literary historian and poet Nakano Ka'ichi on Nov. 11, 1985.　 　　 [5]　Interview with Takahashi Kei on Nov. 18, 1985. Incidentally, the head curator of the Japanese Modern Literature Library (Nihon Kindai Bungaku Kan) informed me that on several occasions poets had torn out the pages on which their patriotic poems appeared before donating volumes to the library collection, so ashamed were they of their complicity in the war effort.　 　　 [6]　Birth and death dates are provided in the text for Japanese but omitted for Westerners.　 　　 [7]　In his lifetime, only thirty-five of Katue's over five hundred poems were printed in translation in small magazines outside Japan. The meager quantity, although enough to establish Katue's reputation, was insufficient to reveal the breadth of his development. For a volume of Katue's poetry in English translation, see my Glass Beret (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Morgan Press, 1995); copies may be ordered directly from the publisher at 2979 S. 13th Street, Milwaukee, WI, 53215.　 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 　　Top of this page ▲