Mishima, Yukio - Michael Thomas Carroll (essay date 1993)
Michael Thomas Carroll (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: Carroll, Michael Thomas. “The Bloody Spectacle: Mishima, The Sacred Heart, Hogarth, Cronenberg, and the Entrails of Culture.” Studies in Popular Culture 15, no. 2 (1993): 43-56.
[In the following essay, Carroll explores commonalities in imagery of sacrificial violations of the human torso, including in Mishima's writing and ritual suicide.]
Of the many acts of violence in literature, few compare with that which forms the central scene of Yukio Mishima's “Patriotism,” in which a young lieutenant performs seppuku—the military form of ritual suicide—when he finds that his fellow officers have not included him in a coup attempt. David Lodge, addressing the subject of literature in translation, notes that literary narrative operates a number of codes simultaneously, and in most of them “(for instance, enigma, sequence, irony, perspective) effects are readily transferable...
[The entire page is 5003 words long]
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