[In the following essay, Dissanayake lists the reasons for the success of the cinematic adaptation of Abé's novel The Woman in the Dunes.]

The change in the sand corresponded to a change in himself. Perhaps, along with the water in the sand, he had found a new self.¹

—The Woman in the Dunes

The novel and the film are two of the most powerful media of symbolic communication in the modern world, and the relationship between them is as complex as it is fascinating. There appears to be an almost inverse relationship between the literary worth of a novel and the artistic worth of film based on it. Some of the outstanding novels of internationally acclaimed novelists such as Tolstoy, Joyce, and Lawrence have been made into films without much success while great works of cinema have been created based on undistinguished novels—Antonioni's BLOW-UP is a case in point. However, occasionally we come across a great work of cinema that is based upon an equally great novel. Hiroshi Teshigahara's film version of Kobo Abe's Suna no onna or The Woman in the Dunes is a good illustration of this. Kobo Abe, who is one of the leading playwrights and novelists of Japan, is the author of such well-known novels as The Face of Another, The Ruined Map, The Box Man, and, of course, The Woman in the Dunes. Many consider The Woman in the Dunes, which won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature in 1960, to be Kobo Abe's finest novel, a judgment with which I certainly agree. Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1963 film version of the novel, which was awarded the Jury Prize at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in 1963, provides us with an excellent and rare example of a distinguished novel yielding up an equally distinguished work of cinematic art. The object of this [essay] is to examine, what I believe to be, the primary reason for this success.

One of Kobo Abe's abiding themes has been the alienation of man and his perennial quest for identity. He has chosen to explore this theme with the power, the clarity, and the elemental attraction of myth. This is clearly the case with The Woman in the Dunes. This novel tells the story of a man held captive with a young woman at the bottom of a dangerous sand pit in a remote seaside village, and his attempt to make sense of the bizarre world into which he has been transported much against his will.

The protagonist of the novel, Niki Jumpei—who throughout the novel is referred to not by name but by the pronoun “he”—is a school teacher and avid insect collector who disappears one August afternoon. The opening of the novel, with its casual and matter-of-fact tone, sets the stage for the strange experiences that are to follow:

One day in August a man disappeared. He had simply set out for the seashore on a holiday, scarcely half a day away by train, and nothing more was ever heard of him. Investigation by the police and inquiries in the newspapers had both proved fruitless.

(3)

In his search for insects, Niki Jumpei arrives at a desolate seaside village near the sand dunes. As “sand and insects were all that concerned him,” he is hardly aware of the grim and forbidden terrain into which he has wandered. When he eventually does survey his surrounding reality, he finds it anything but pleasant:

The slope suddenly steepened. It must have been at least sixty-five feet down to the tops of the houses. What in heaven's name could it be like to live down there? he thought in amazement, peering down into one of the holes. As he circled around the edge he was suddenly struck by a biting wind that choked his breath in his throat. The view abruptly opened up, and the turbid, foaming sea licked at the shore below. He was standing on the crest of the dunes that had been his objective.

(9)

As fate would have it, Niki Jumpei misses the last bus. The villagers, however, invite him to spend the night in the village. He readily accepts their invitation, and, in what will trigger a series of bizarre incidents, asks to spend the night in a shack at the bottom of a sandpit. It is a strange place:

Indeed, if it had not been for the warm reception, the house itself would have been difficult to put up with at all. He would have thought they were making a fool of him and would doubtless have gone back at once. The walls were peeling, matting had been hung up in place of sliding doors, the upright supports were warped, boards had replaced all the windows, the straw mats were on the point of rotting, and when one walked on them they made a noise like a wet sponge. Moreover, an offensive smell of burned, moldering sand floated over the whole place.

(24)

Here, in this nightmarish world, he is held captive with a young woman. The only reality is the ever present sand:

The more he tried to sleep, the more wide awake he became. His eyes began to smart; his tears and his blinking seemed to be ineffective against the ceaselessly falling sand. He spread out his towel and wrapped it over his head. It was difficult to breathe, but it was better this way. He tried thinking of something else. When he closed his eyes, a number of long lines, flowing like sighs, came floating toward him. There were ripples of sand moving over the dunes. The dunes were probably burned into his retina because he had been gazing steadily at them for some twelve hours. The same sand currents had swallowed up and destroyed flourishing cities and great empires.

(41)

The woman, whose husband and daughter had died the previous year by being buried by sand, is destined to live with him in the shack at the bottom of the sand pit. He is a prisoner, and experiences a whole range of emotions toward her ranging from anger and annoyance to erotic love and compassion. He tries to escape from this nightmarish world five times but never succeeds; his efforts to outwit his captors repeatedly fail.

Toward the end of the novel, Niki Jumpei realizes, quite by accident, that he can obtain water through the capillary action of sand, a discovery that serves to bring about a fundamental change in his attitude and outlook. It is almost as if he had discovered a new self. The interaction between self and place has opened a new chapter in his existence, and escaping from the shack is no longer uppermost in his mind. The novel closes with the following memorable passage:

There was no particular need to hurry about escaping. On the two-way ticket he held in his hand now, the destination and time of departure were blanks for him to fill in as he wished. In addition, he realized that he was bursting with a desire to talk to someone about the water trap. And if he wanted to talk about it, there wouldn't be better listeners than the villagers. He would end by telling someone—if not today, then tomorrow. He might as well put off his escape until sometime after that.

(239)

The Woman in the Dunes deals with the themes of alienation and identity, themes which are explored with the power of a fabulist imagination. Sand is the ruling trope of the novel; it is everywhere, pervading the thoughts, revelations, imaginings, ruminations and actions of the protagonist. As Currie aptly points out,² sand is the novel's central metaphor, standing for the shifting reality in which the protagonist needs to come to terms with himself and his circumambient reality, in which he needs to sink roots to anchor his existence. Many literary critics and scholars have interpreted the significance of the symbolism of the sand in diverse ways. It is my conviction that Abe's symbolism is deeply rooted in Buddhism, according to which sand signifies samsara or worldly existence, and water signifies wisdom and insight.

Hiroshi Teshigahara has made a visually stunning and critically acclaimed film from Kobo Abe's novel. How does one account for this rare success—a great film born out of a great novel. One can argue that Teshigahara is a hugely talented director in the way that Kobo Abe is an outstanding novelist. One can also argue that the novel is visually conceived so that it made the task of the screenplay writer and the director that much lighter. It is also true that the director of the film worked very closely with the novelist. All these factors, in their different ways, no doubt, contributed to the successful animated transcreation of the novel. There is, I believe, yet another, and in some ways, deeper reason for this success, namely, the dialectic between self and place that is so crucial to the thematic and stylistic intent of the novel and its bearing on the art of cinematography.

Teshigahara has sought to stick as closely as possible to the novel; even the dialogue is, by and large, taken directly from the novel. He has added a few incidents like the rape scene and the scene dealing with his old girlfriend that occurs at the beginning of the film, and shortened the escape scenes which are much longer in the novel. But beyond these changes, the film adheres very faithfully to the novel.

A distinguishing feature of The Woman in the Dunes is the vital dialectic between self and place. Niki Jumpei is realized, defined and assessed in relation to place. First we are shown how he attempts to escape from the urban environment that he inhabits; next we see him against the background of the desolate and remote seaside village; the third stage, which constitutes the bulk of the novel is his encounter with the pervasive sand in the shack at the bottom of the sand pit; finally his struggle with the environment and his triumph over it with the discovery of water, resulting in the emergence of a newer self. The interplay between self and place, then, is pivotal to the meaning of the novel.

Interestingly, something that cinema does far more effectively and cogently than the other media of symbolic expression is capture the mutual interaction between self and place. It is almost a power invested with the art of cinema. Therefore, the fact that Kobo Abe's novel deals precisely with this aspect certainly helped to make it a literary work full of cinematic possibilities, and the director, Hiroshi Teshigahara, was quick to exploit them to the maximum advantage.

The central trope in the film, as in the novel, is sand. It is at once beautiful and frightening, attractive and repulsive. Director Teshigahara has captured with remarkable skill and power the various shapes, forms and patterns of the sand. At one point, he magnifies a single grain of sand so as to fill the entire screen; at another point, he shows how the sand flows on and on in a cascade-like manner. Throughout the film we are shown how Niki Jumpei's and the woman's bodies are covered with sand, investing their very being with its presence. Indeed, I can hardly think of any other film in which sand plays such a dominant role.

Hiroshi Teshigahara has an acute sensitivity to the sense of place. Niki walking all by himself across the dunes as the sun sinks beyond the horizon; the pitiful condition of the shack in which he is condemned to live with the woman; the woman holding up an umbrella to keep the sand from falling on the food as Niki eats his dinner; the torrential fall of sand on the shack; the shack as seen by the villagers from above; the faces of the villagers transformed into diabolic masks; how these sequences are presented through Teshigahara's wonderful use of the camera and editing bears testimony to this fact. Niki Jumpei's new awareness of himself is a direct consequence of his confrontation with his environment, and the film brings this out graphically.

As I mentioned earlier, The Woman in the Dunes communicates powerfully the emergence of the protagonist's newer self. This is accompanied by a significant shift in his cognitive style. It demonstrates the proneness of human beings to adhere to specific cognitive styles and to structure and reify reality in accordance with that style. What the novel points out is the imperative need to get out of such a rigid cognitive style as a way of realizing one's self fully. Needless to say, these cognitive styles are products of, and embedded in, specific discourses.

Niki is a product of the modern, urban environment and the discourse which brought it into being. He may not be totally happy with all facets of this discourse, but he certainly operates within its parameters. He structures his reality in relation to the signification systems that he has inherited from his environment. In addition, he is a resolute insect collector; the entomological and scientific discourse has deeply penetrated his being. He has a rational and analytical frame of mind; he likes to reduce things to their basic constituent elements. He privileges reductionism over holism. As early on in the novel, we are told

His head bent down, he began to walk following the crescent-shaped line of dunes that surround the village like a rampart and towered above it. He paid almost no attention to the distant landscape. An entomologist must concentrate his whole attention within a radius of about three yards around his feet.

(15)

Niki is used to classification and atomization rather than to seeing things holistically, as a consequence of his experiences in the shack with the woman, and as he becomes increasingly acquainted with her ways of thinking and perceiving, his cognitive style begins to change. As he says toward the end of the novel:

He was still in the hole, but it seemed as if he were already outside. Turning around, he could see the whole scene. You can't really judge a mosaic if you don't look at it from a distance. If you really get close to it you get lost in detail. You get away from one detail only to get caught in another. Perhaps what he had been seeing up until now was not the sand but grains of sand.

(235)

As a consequence of Niki's experiences in the shack—as a consequence of the interaction between self and place—he acquires a new cognitive style which is more contextualized, holistic and experiential. This shift in the cognitive style is closely associated with his newly emergent self.

The dialectic between self and place is at the heart of The Woman in the Dunes. Kobo Abe has explored this with a great measure of sensitivity and concreteness. His powerful visual imagination has caught this interplay with subtlety and cogency. As I stated earlier, the dialectic between self and place is one that the art of cinema handles with undiminishing enthusiasm. This fact, more than anything else, in my judgment, has contributed to the stunningly successful cinematic transcreation of Kobo Abe's novel.

What Kobo Abe has sought to do is to remove his protagonist from his cultural environment and to probe deeper and deeper into his own psyche as a way of attaining his authentic selfhood. However, culture plays such a formidable role in the combination of self that by merely removing Niki from his familiar cultural surroundings, Kobo Abe is not able to achieve this. As a matter of fact the dialectic between self and place that is clearly a pervasive presence in the novel and the film gain much by way of force and definition from Niki's cultural reflexes.

When discussing the dialectic of self and place in The Woman in the Dunes, it is very important that we pay attention to the concept of body that is so central to the textual strategies of the novel and the film. Once Niki is imprisoned in the sand pit, the only reality is the ever present sand and his own body. Much of the communication, experience of diverse emotions, imaginings' ruminations are anchored in the body. Many of the most memorable passages in the novel are associated with the human body.

She was stark naked.

She seemed to float like a blurred shadow before his tear-filled eyes. She lay face up on the matting, her whole body, except her head, exposed to view; she had placed her left hand slightly over her lower abdomen, which was smooth and full. The parts that one usually covered were completely bare, while the face, which anybody would show, was concealed under a towel. No doubt the towel was to protect her nose, mouth, and eyes from the sand, but the contrast seemed to make the naked body stand out even more.

The whole surface of her body was covered with a coat of fine sand, which hid the details and brought out the feminine lines; she seemed a statue gilded with sand. Suddenly a viscid saliva rose from under his tongue. But he could not possibly swallow it. Were he to swallow, the sand that had lodged between his lips and teeth would spread through his mouth. He turned toward the earthen floor and spat. No matter how much he ejected he could not get rid of the gritty taste. No matter how he emptied his mouth the sand was still there. More sand seemed to issue constantly from between his teeth.

(44)

Here Niki is experiencing the strange and bizarre situation into which he has found himself in terms of the body; indeed, the body becomes the instrument by which the strangeness and the abnormality that surrounds him is measured and assessed. Similarly, the attractions and antagonisms that Niki and the woman experience for each other are signified in terms of the body. The human body assumes the stature of a master signifier in the novel.

Without paying any attention, he poised his arms to strike, but the woman, screaming, rushed violently at him. He put out his elbow and twisted his body in an effort to ward her off. But he had miscalculated, and instead of the woman he himself was swung around. Instantly, he tried to counter, but she held on as if chained to the shovel. He did not understand. At least he could not be defeated by force. They rolled over two or three times, thrashing about on the earthen floor, and for a brief moment he thought he had pinned her down, but with the handle of the shovel as a shield she deftly flipped him over. Something was wrong with him; maybe it was the sake he had drunk. Anyway, he no longer cared that his opponent was a woman. He jabbed his bended knee into her stomach.

(131)

As he was being soaped he pretended to be aroused and pulled at her kimono. He would wash her in return. Caught between confusion and expectancy, she made a gesture of resistance, but it was not clear just what she was resisting. He quickly poured a bucket of warm water over her naked body and without a washcloth began to pass his soapy hands directly over her skin. He started with the earlobes and shifted down to the jaw, and as he passed over her shoulders he reached around and with one hand grasped her breast. She cried out and, sliding down his chest, crouched level with his stomach. Undoubtedly it was a posture of expectation. But the man was in no hurry. With measured cadence, his hands went on with their painstaking massaging from one part of her body to another.

(166)

Throughout the novel we find tropes, passages of description which suggest to us that the human body in the novel has become the measure of achievement of all things human. For instance, the author says that, “They say the level of civilization is proportionate to the cleanliness of the skin” (122). When discussing the dialectic of self and place in The Woman in the Dunes, then, it is very important that we not lose sight of this very significant dimension of signification.

The last decade or so has witnessed a remarkable increase in the scholarly interest in the human body with a clear focus on the understanding of different modes in which the human body is constructed. The nature and significance of the human body as a reality that is being continually produced and reproduced in society is increasingly attracting scholarly attention. The mapping out of the modalities of construction of the human body, understandably enough, leads into discussions of politics, ethics and questions of power and knowledge. The pioneering work of Foucault, Elias, and Kantorawicz and the writings of Nietzsche from which they took their cue, have significantly inflected this newly generated interest.

The human body, it should be noted, is at the center of a plurality of discourses that produce and reproduce culture. It has, consequently, become a useful analytical tool with which to decode some of the cultural meanings embedded in fictional and filmic texts. For example, modern film theorists of a feminist persuasion are engaged in the task of symbolically reclaiming the body as a means of displacing patriarchal narratives that dominate filmic enunciation. Focusing on a hermeneutic of dominance and submission, they seek to call attention to the diverse ways in which women are situated as objects of male gaze and desire and how the female body is specularized as a rhetorical strategy of male domination over it.

In The Woman in the Dunes, the human body is portrayed as a central fact of self; this somatic facticity that runs through the novel inflecting all human emotions, perceptions and ratiocinations has a metaphysical dimension rooted in Japanese thought. It is interesting at this point, to compare the attitudes to body and mind in the Western and Eastern traditions of thought. The Western tradition, by and large, subscribing to a Cartesian duality, posit a definite separation of mind and body whereas the Eastern traditions posit a unity. This unity is perceived as an accomplishment, and wisdom, the highest achievement of human existence, is seen as a physical and intellectual attainment. Truth is not perceived merely as a way of examining the world, but is seen as a modality of being in the world, and a significant aspect of this has to do with our somatic existence. Their line of thinking has a direct bearing on Niki Jumpei's experience. As Yuasa Yasuo remarks, true knowledge cannot be obtained simply through theoretical thinking; it can be obtained only through “bodily recognition as realization” (tainin or taitoku), that is, through the utilization of one's entire body and mind.

The body and the somatic experiences associated with it play a central role in the novel bearing much of its existential meaning. And one thing that cinema in the hands of gifted filmmakers can do extremely well, is to capture the nuanced experiences and complex responses of the human body. Kobo Abe in writing his novel, has given much attention to questions of corporeality, embodiment, and somaticity. Hiroshi Teshigahara, in translating the literary experience into a cinematic experience has fully utilized the power and beauty of the human body. The centrality accorded to the human body in the novel is another reason that facilitated the transcreation of it in cinema by Teshigahara.

In discussing the relative success of the novel and the film, and the ways in which the novel had enabled its cinematic conversion, the question of male gaze, which is closely related to the representation of the human body, merits closer attention. The Woman of the Dunes is essentially a male-centered novel obeying all the laws of representation associated with patriarchy. The novel in essence charts the physical experiences and the ensuing cognitive metamorphosis of Niki, and the woman in the dunes is the catalyst that brings about the changes in Niki. Indeed, the focus of interest in Niki, and the woman is seen and evaluated through his eyes. This is, of course, a limitation of the novel. Once again this feature in the novel is one that ties in very nicely with the dictates and imperatives of the medium of cinema as we know it today.

In Western cinema—and Teshigahara is clearly following the conventions of Western cinema—the female is generally dichotomously and fetishistically constructed as a symbolic outcome of female desire. The female becomes an object of male gaze and her subjectivity is denied, entrapped as she is in the complex dictates of patriarchy. In cinematic representation, the woman being a product of the male gaze, continues to be an object devalued as the site of male voyeurism. She is relegated to a position of marginality and that marginality being vital to the ahistorical, essentialist, and negative image of women created by cinema. Feminist film critics like Laura Mulvery have argued persuasively that women as represented in cinema are entrapped within the economy of male libidinal pleasure obtained in the dark world of fantasy of theater. The woman in the film The Woman in the Dunes suffers a dual entrapment; she is physically entrapped in the sand pits, and communicationally entrapped in the male gaze. And her plight serves to underline the mechanisms of scopophilia (the pleasure of looking) outlined by psychoanalytically-oriented film scholars. So what we find in the representation of the woman in the dunes in the film is the faithful adherence to the androcentric conventions of Western filmmaking. And once again, the built-in patriarchal biases in the novel helped the filmmaker immensely.

The relationship between the self and culture is another dimension that merits close analysis. Clearly, the distinction between society and culture is not an easy one to establish. Anthropologists such as Marcel Mauss who have pointed out the shaping role of society on the evolution of the human self have also talked about the importance of culture. Other anthropologists, like A. Irving Hallowell, who have placed emphasis on the role of culture in the creation of the self, have not ignored the crucial role played by society. The dividing line between society and culture is a finely drawn one, and it is really with shifts of emphasis that we are concerned here.

Of the many scholars who have pointed out the vital role played by culture, it is perhaps Hallowell who invites the closest attention. He pointed out the importance of what he termed the “behavioral environment” on the formation of the self, and this behavioral environment, as he sees it, is essentially culturally constituted. While agreeing with the notion that self-awareness is a generic human trait, Hallowell goes on to make the following observation:

The nature of the self, considered in its conceptual context, is a culturally identifiable variable. Just as different people entertain various beliefs about the nature of the universe, they likewise differ in their ideas about the nature of the self. And, just as we have discovered that notions about the nature of the beings and powers existent in the universe involve assumptions that are directly relevant to the understanding of the behavior of the individual in a given society, we must likewise assume that the individual's self-image and his interpretation of his own experience cannot be divorced from the concept of the self that is characteristic of his society. For such concepts are the major means by which different cultures promote self-orientation in the kind of meaningful terms that make self-awareness of functional importance in the maintenance of a human social order. In so far as the needs and goals of the individual are at the level of self-awareness, they are structured with reference to the kind of self-image that is consonant with other basic orientations that prepare the self for action in a culturally constituted world.³

This passage brings out clearly Hallowell's orientation toward the self as a product of culture. As Andrew Lock points out, culture constitutes man's behavioral environment and provides him with basic orientations that make him capable of acting intelligently in a world so constituted. All these are orientations for the self and facilitate giving it its particular structure. As he goes on to point out, culture provides a self-concept through the linguistic marking of self from non-self. He further remarks,

while one of the constant functions of all cultures … is to provide a concept of self along with other means that promote self-orientation, the individuals of a given society are self-oriented in terms of a provincial content of the self-image.⁴

What this means, of course, is that while each culture provides the idiom for self-orientation, the idiom of one culture cannot be directly translated to another culture. This makes the role of culture in the formation of the self even more important.

Clifford Geertz, who did not totally endorse Hallowell's views of the self, nevertheless makes the point that becoming human is becoming individual, and we become individual under the guidance of cultural patterns, historically created systems of meaning in terms of which human beings impart form, order, point, and direction to their lives. Hence the role of culture and inherited history is crucial to Geertz. He then proceeds to note that as culture has shaped us as a single species, so too it shapes us as separate individuals. What we have in common, then, is neither an unchanging subcultural self nor an established cross-cultural consciousness. In his analysis of the Balinese person, he shows very clearly how cultural codings and presuppositions are vital to a proper understanding of the notion of self in that particular culture. In his exegesis of Balinese self, the concerns that come to the fore are not those of motivation, will, and individuation, which would figure very prominently in a similar discussion in the context of Western culture, but an entirely different set intimately linked to Balinese culture. In his essay, “Person, Time and Conduct in Bali,” which seeks to delineate some of the cultural apparatus in terms of which the people of Bali define and perceive persons, Geertz starts out by categorically asserting:

Human thought is consummately social: social in its origin, social in its function, social in its focus, social in its applications. At base, thinking is a public activity—its natural habitat is the houseyard and the market place and the town square.⁵

The implication of this fact for the understanding of self are vast and complex. In recent times, several studies have appeared that seek to uncover the cultural formulations of the self (Heelas and Lock;⁶ Shweder, and Levine;⁷ White and Kirkpatrick⁸). With a justifiably greater interest being evinced in ethnopsychologies, more and more attention will be paid to the cultural codings of self.

The way in which different cultures across the face of the earth have sought to conceptualize, and thereby contribute to, the formation of self is indeed fascinating. For example, Alfred Smith, in an interesting essay on the self and experience of Moon culture, notes, employing a motoring metaphor, that if the self in the Western view can be seen as the driver of the car, then in the Moon view it must be seen as the passenger in its body.⁹

Some of the concerns of Hallowell and Geertz have been fruitfully extended by modern ethnopsychologists who are interested in the cultural understanding and cultural formulation of the self and the processes and dynamics of interplay by means of which these formulations find expression in quotidian life. These ethnopsychologists are trying to rectify some of the deficiencies associated with earlier culture and personality studies, in which the emphasis was clearly on the motivational constructs of individuals and their centrality in shaping behavior. In these studies, very little attention was paid to the modalities of interpretation of the people regarding questions of self and how they have a direct bearing on the wider cultural discourse of a given society. Hence, the work of some of the new ethnopsychologists serves to open up a new and useful dimension of inquiry into the concept of self.

These discussions on the cultural construction of self have a direct bearing on The Woman in the Dunes. Kobo Abe has selected a middle-class character who grew up in the city and transfers him to a situation that is bizarre and cultureless. However, the way Niki behaves in that situation only foregrounds his cultural upbringing. The way his newer self emerges from his unanticipated encounters and the way his attitudes are inflected can best be understood against the background of his culture.

Another important area that merits close analysis is the relationship between the self and the psyche. In the case of the self and society, and of the self and culture, the emphasis was on exteriority; now it shifts to interiority. Here the writings of Freud and Jung and their respective followers are of paramount importance. Let us first consider the view of self expounded by Freud. In a sense, it is difficult to summarize Freud's view because over a period of more than four decades of conceptualizing and writing, it changed constantly. When analyzing Freud's views of the self, one can talk of three stages—the somatic, the psychological, and the metapsychological—depending on which area one chooses to emphasize. In the early period of his conceptualizations of self, during which he was primarily interested in the somatic nature of self, Freud saw the self as a function of the organism's physical drives, the sex-instinct and the ego-instinct. During the next stage, when his emphasis was on the psychological, the dualism between the sex-instinct and ego-instinct was transformed into twin manifestations of a unitary psychic energy, object-libido and ego-libido. In the metapsychological stage, these two concepts were transformed into Eros, the life-instinct, and Thanatos, the death-instinct.

As we examine the evolution of Freud's concept of self, one thing becomes clear: he conceived of the self in dualistic terms. He saw it as a relation between psychic reality and material reality. The concept of psychic reality was of supreme importance to him:

The unconscious is the true psychic reality: in its inner nature it is just as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and just as imperfectly communicated to us by the data of consciousness as the external world by the reports of our sense-organs.¹⁰

Freud was interested in getting behind the phenomenal self to its inner reality. For this purpose, he sought to analyze dream processes.

As Freud envisioned it, the self begins as an organism, and instinctual impulses dominate its behavior. However, for the purpose of social survival, it needs to find a mechanism whereby this libidinal expenditure is inhibited and directed toward realistic paths of gratification. This is achieved by investing the libido in the reality-ego. However, in certain specific cultures, certain forms of gratification are not allowed. The requisite libidinal inhibition and sublimation are achieved by means of a projected ego ideal which functions in the capacity of a censor. The energy that was originally invested in the reality-ego is now invested in the ideal-ego. Therefore, Freud saw the self to be a relation between the libidinal desires of the pleasure-ego and the transcendental norms of the ideal-ego. The stability of this relationship is always in danger. The repressed portion of the self, the unconscious, constantly threatens to upset this relationship. Therefore, according to Freud, if the self is to remain a self, it must endeavor to maintain this relationship.

In his book, The Ego and the Id, Freud delineated clearly the nature of this interaction, using far more precise terminology than before. Instead of the three terms, pleasure-ego, reality-ego and ideal-ego, he now began to employ the terms id, ego, and superego. It is the dynamics among these three entities that result in the formation of the self. What is of interest in this early analysis of Freud, from our point of view, is his attempt to delineate self in terms of psychic reality. The highly stimulating lines of inquiry opened up by Freud have been further developed in newer directions by such influential theorists as Heinz Kohut, Jacques Lacan, Erik Erikson, and Roy Schafer.

Although Jung differed considerably from Freud in his general analysis of the inward behavior of human beings, he too sought to define the self in terms of inner experience. Jung saw the self as the totality of the psyche and distinguished it from the ego, which he saw as constituting only a small portion of the entire psyche.

According to Jung, the self is an inner guiding factor that is clearly different from the conscious personality. It can be grasped only by means of an investigation of one's own dreams. An analysis of dreams, in his opinion, will demonstrate the fact that the self is indeed the regulating center which serves to bring about an extension and maturation of the personality. At first this larger aspect of the psyche emerges as only a possibility. It may appear very dimly or in a more developed form later in life. Its development is largely contingent upon the inclination of the ego to listen to the signals and messages sent out by the self. Jung, then, saw the self as the totality of the psyche, which is the organizing center of the personality. Freud and Jung and many psychologists who have chosen to follow in their footsteps define the self in terms of the psyche and inward experience. This, of course, is not to suggest that they have totally ignored the social and cultural dimensions. However, their emphasis in seeking to define self has unmistakably been on the psychic as opposed to external reality.

These discussions on self and psyche, just like the discussion on self and culture, shed interesting light on the experiences of The Woman in the Dunes. The behavior of Niki in its most inwardness can best be understood in relation to the interplay between self and psyche. As a novelist, Kobo Abe has always been fascinated by this interplay, and The Woman in the Dunes bears ample evidence of this fact. Teshigahara's visual imagination and Kobo Abe's literary imagination met very productively on the terrain of self and psyche. What I have sought to do in this paper is to examine one of those rare instances in which a highly successful novel has been made into a highly successful film, and to examine some of the reasons that may have contributed to this productive venture. In this regard, I chose to focus attention on what I think are three key entities: self, place, and body, and to discuss them in relation to current intellectual discourse.

Notes

1. All quotations are from The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe, translated by E. Dale Saunders (New York: Vintage Books, 1972).

2. William Currie, “The Woman in the Dunes,” in K. Tsuruta and T. E. Swan, Approaches to the Modern Japanese Novel (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1976).

3. A. Irving Hallowell, Culture and Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951).

4. Andrew Lock, Universals in Human Conception in Indigenous Psychologies, Paul Heelas and Andrew Lock, eds. (London: Academic Press, 1981).

5. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

6. Leelas and Lock.

7. R. A. Shweder and R. A. Levine, Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

8. Geoffrey M. White and John Kirkpatrick, Person, Self, and Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

9. T. P. Kaulis, Wimal Dissanayake and Roger T. Ames, The Philosophy of The Body (State University of New York Press), forthcoming.

10. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (London: Hogarth Press, 1961).