[In the following essay, Mortimer discusses reflexivity in several of Doppo's short stories]

The word “reflexivity” has become an inescapable and, perhaps, all-too-fashionable term of contemporary literary criticism. At the risk of simplification, one might say that it is used to indicate the way in which a literary text defines itself as literature, and it involves the presumption that every literary text, implicitly or explicitly, exhibits some degree of self-contemplation, some reflection upon its own textual status. One may well accept the theory that reflexivity is an inevitable component of the literary text, but this does not necessarily mean that it is the component most worthy of critical attention. Before we can usefully speak of “reflexive texts,” or récits spéculaires, we ought to admit that some texts are a good deal more reflexive than others and that we are justified in using reflexivity as a starting point for critical analysis only insofar as the text itself demands such an approach. In point of fact, reflexivity as an essential rather than marginal or occasional factor in literature (and especially in fiction) would seem to be a salient characteristic of modernism. The self-conscious narrator, for example, may not be a modern discovery, but it is only at the turn of the century, with Conrad and Henry James, that he begins to dominate the fictional scene. It is in this context that the reflexivity of Kunikida Doppo (1871-1908), in such stories as “Gen Oji” (“Old Gen,” 1897) and “Haru no Tori” (“Spring Birds,” 1904), assumes its full significance as a mark of exceptional maturity and sophistication in Japanese fiction of the Meiji era (1868-1912).

The opening section of “Gen Oji” establishes a structure of considerable complexity. It is, indeed, composed of a number of embedded narratives. We begin by meeting the somewhat ambiguous character of a young English teacher whose presence at Saeki is, we are informed, only temporary. About a year later he returns to the capital, and we see him, on a dark winter night, in his Tokyo room, engaged in writing a letter to his friend about the stay at Saeki—and it is easy enough to associate Doppo with the young writer, and ourselves, as readers, with the recipient of his letter. But there is more to it than that, and the process of transmission is by no means simple. The letter, as it happens, does not report direct personal experience: instead, it recounts a story he has heard down in Saeki from two people who, unlike the narrator, have really seen and known Old Gen. Thus, if we take the author Doppo as a starting point, we end up with no fewer than three narratives: that of Doppo himself as ultimate creator of the fiction, that of the English teacher who serves as created narrator, and that of the old couple from Saeki, which allows us finally to meet the protagonist, Old Gen himself. Thus “Gen Oji,” the first of Doppo's published stories, establishes the kind of embedding that was to become so frequent in his later work.

The result or aim of this narrative technique is to create an impression of distance and detachment. Instead of introducing Old Gen directly, Doppo filters the vision of his protagonist through a variety of intermediaries. The effect resembles a calculated optical illusion and serves to strip Old Gen of all bodily palpable reality. Gen's first appearance (or apparition) in the story has an aura of hallucination. The young teacher, alone in the silence of a Tokyo night, beholds, as he writes, the figure of Gen emerging as the narrator's eyelids close. What makes the episode almost magical is the fact that the teacher now sees Old Gen for the first time. Previously he has only heard the old couple of Saeki speak about him. This is not, therefore, an image recalled by the memory, but rather an aural experience that mysteriously becomes visual. And here, surely, the teacher-narrator becomes a model for the reader who, confronted with a text, must perform the same transformation from aural to visual, must make the same effort of concretization. But the effort leaves its traces. One remains conscious of the gap between unmediated reality and the concretized image of that reality. The intimate vision of what is factually unseen provokes a dreamlike atmosphere where facts become spectral. Indeed, the whole episode suggests an almost supernatural visitation. Later on we shall be told explicitly (by author Doppo, not teacher-narrator) that, at the moment of the vision, Gen is already dead. Thus the role of the teacher is revealed as that of unwitting medium, and one should not fail to note the profound convergence between the literary and psychic senses of the term.

Shortly after this episode, the young teacher disappears definitively from the text. The elimination of the figure we had come to accept as narrator may seem, at first reading, not only surprising, but downright awkward. And yet it may be argued that here we have evidence of Doppo's conscious and refined handling of narrative options. The limited third-person point of view is replaced by an omniscient narrator, Doppo himself. The young teacher may never know that, during his absence from Saeki, a tempest has destroyed Gen's boat and Gen himself is dead. His experience, as writer within the text, subject to the limitations of time and space and human memory, has served an intermediary function, that of bringing Old Gen to our awareness. He demonstrates, within the text, the way in which a story germinates in the mind of a novelist, who can then assume his privilege of omniscience. We are made conscious of the gap between the incomplete stories of our own experience and the completion that only the maker of fictions can provide. The implication would seem to be that Doppo, like the teacher, has heard something of an old ferryman at Saeki: unlike the teacher, he happens to be a novelist and can, therefore, give us that whole story, which exists only in fiction.

“Haru no Tori” presents and combines two radical aspects of reflexivity: literary allusion and mise-en-abîme. Literary allusion is, of course, to some extent inevitable, since it is impossible to imagine a text without relation to preceding texts (pretexts). But it is when the literary reference becomes explicit, through direct quotation or the mention of specific works and authors, that the reader is forced to abandon the illusion of a perfect transparence between text and reality. He is obliged to recognize the filter of pretexts. Thus, when Doppo refers to a Wordsworth poem at the end of “Haru no Tori,” the reader becomes aware that the narrator perceives the reality of his story through the refractions of a literary tradition—a tradition that, by this device, is both renewed and called into question.

Mise-en-abîme (a term derived from heraldry) indicates a passage or an episode that constitutes a mirror of the whole narrative, a kind of condensed anticipation or recapitulation of its overall structure, a microcosm within the fictional macrocosm. The narrator of “Haru no Tori” does not make a casual or merely illustrative allusion to Wordsworth: he gives us the summary of a specific text, “There Was a Boy,” which tells the tale of a child who is identified with nature, who seems to reject the language of men, and who dies young—in short, a tale that is almost a précis of “Haru no Tori.”

It should be stressed that what matters here is not the influence of Wordsworth on Doppo, however significant this may be. That the text cited happens to be by Wordsworth counts less than the way this text functions as a subtle and ambiguous device of reflexivity in Doppo's story. Like so many Meiji writers, Doppo turned toward Western models, but the kind of intertextuality that we find in “Haru no Tori,” the conscious and critical relation between text and pretext, takes us well beyond imitation. The Wordsworthian allusion is not the homage of a disciple to his master, but the recognition of a common apprenticeship.

“Haru no Tori” is, indeed, a story that rewards close reading. Its narrator is once again a teacher, this time of English and mathematics, two disciplines that would suggest a man who has opted decisively for modernity and the future. We soon learn, however, that his attitudes are far from unilateral. Although he teaches English, he also loves the past of his own country represented by the ruined castle. His mathematical competence does not exclude the urge to immerse himself in nature. But perhaps “immerse” is not the right word, since, from his vantage point on the hill, he regards nature, as it were, from above, like a detached spectator. We note that he takes a book with him, which might suggest that his vision is filtered through literature. His meditations are interrupted first by peasant girls gathering firewood, and later by a strange boy who emerges from the dark depths of the forest. In this way we are shown three types of relation to nature, which correspond to essential stages in human evolution: first, modern man, contemplative and detached; then his predecessor, the rural stage, practical and dependent; and finally his distant ancestor, primitive man, unconscious and instinctive. We are taken back to our origins, and, in this context, it is worth stressing that the strange boy has no social identity. He appears as the son neither of peasant nor of townsman—that is, he belongs to the childhood of the world that precedes agriculture and urbanization, a world without categories.

The narrator, already disturbed by this apparition, is even more surprised to find that the boy, Rokuzō, seems to know him. He may well say that everybody knows him as a teacher who has come from the capital to a small provincial town; but the reader is not convinced. One suspects the refusal of modern man to acknowledge his roots, his kinship with the child of the forest. Wordsworth might offer a relevant gloss: “The child is father to the man.”

Predictably, the narrator tries to normalize the situation with his attempts to establish a teacher-pupil relationship; but Rokuzō does not collaborate. To the question “Why don't you go to school?” he replies first with incomprehensible cries and then with “See the crow flying,” as if, in some way, the flight of a crow could disprove the value of education.

Since Rokuzō himself supplies no answer to his perplexities, the narrator seeks elsewhere and finds, through Mr. Taguchi, what might be called a scientific or sociological explanation of Rokuzō's weird behavior: he is the son of a mentally deficient mother and a drunken father. Yet here again one suspects a literary or cultural filter: we are given the story of Rokuzō as it might have been written by Zola or some lesser Naturalist writer of the period. The young teacher is still trying to normalize the situation by locking Rokuzō into a category, that of “incurable idiots.” It is yet another way of denying the obscure kinship to which the boy has called him, a refusal of some instinctive ancient relation. And yet, despite himself, he feels darkly attracted to Rokuzō. How otherwise can we read the violence of his rejection, the exaggerated disgust of his statements about imbecility? “The dumb, the deaf, and the blind are happy by comparison … idiots are like animals.” Moreover, if Rokuzō is merely an incurable idiot, why does the teacher continue to see him? Through pity, according to his own account; but this is surely a conventional moral explanation for a fascination that has its roots elsewhere. As the story proceeds, we understand that the narrator can never completely grasp the truth of his own emotions.

The third section of the story offers a fuller portrait of Rokuzō and, at the same time, shows a positive evolution in the narrator's attitude toward him. The most striking thing about Rokuzō is his refusal of signs: numerical signs—he cannot count; verbal signs—he will not learn the names of birds and he confuses the black crow with the white heron; even object-signs—he cannot follow a marked path. This is a refusal of language in the broadest sense of the word, and, therefore, a denial of all distinctions and categories. What is the point, he seems to say, in distinguishing between black and white? Here we touch the essence of the story. If Rokuzō is not merely an idiot, if he merits our attention, what do we make of his denial of language? Why should it seem, as it does, an essential aspect of his attractive vitality? The answer, one suspects, lies in the fact that to name a thing is to limit it, to fix it, to prevent it from becoming something else. Language is incapable of seizing the totality of a universe that lives by change and transformation. The word gives us natura naturata, but not natura naturans. Language, therefore, reflects the initial fracture, the primal wound, that has separated man from nature, man from his own nature. Rokuzō enjoys total and primitive liberty because he refuses to accept the limits imposed by language. Language, it is said, constitutes the memory of man. For this precise reason Rokuzō has no memory: he weeps when he is beaten and smiles immediately after. This may provoke the narrator's compassion, but there is surely a virtue in lack of memory insofar as it means forgetting pain.

The unmistakable emphasis on the function of language brings us back to our starting point in the concept of reflexivity. A narrative presupposes language: how then, in a narrative, can one present the experience of nonlanguage, a nonlinguistic experience? The very existence of Rokuzō would seem to exclude his representation in literature. The narrator, already seduced, makes a valiant effort: “an idiot and an angel … not so much an imbecile as a child of nature.” But the vocabulary is inadequate: “angel” is sentimental and diminishes Rokuzō's anarchic, earthy energy; “child of nature” invokes the literary ghost of Rousseau. Pretexts intervene inevitably between the narrator and Rokuzō.

There remains only one solution: a language that works to its own dissolution, a narrative that denies its own validity, a word that recalls us to silence. And this is exactly what Doppo enacts after the death of Rokuzō. The narrator, incapable of expressing his experience, invokes a great Romantic poet who has known something similar. Doppo does not quote the conclusion of Wordsworth's poem, but there is no mistaking its relevance:

A long half-hour together I have stood Mute—looking at the grave in which he lies.

The enjambement and the dash stress the importance of “mute.” Wordsworth's silence justifies that of Doppo and his narrator, united at last by the limits of speech. The narrator tells us that the life of Rokuzō “seemed to have a deeper meaning” than Wordsworth's poem. But since the poem is nothing more or less than the mise-en-abîme of Doppo's story, we can only conclude that the two texts share the same fate, that of being radically incapable of re-creating or communicating a lived experience that is beyond language. It is no accident that Doppo's story ends with an unanswered question: “What might she have felt at the sight of this crow?” The narrator admits implicitly his own incompetence; the text denies an answer to the reader's question; the word dissolves in silence.

The literary sense of reflexivity is ultimately no other than “language that speaks of itself.” And if one agrees that literature can never escape from this condition but, on the contrary, tends to stress it, then one is drawn to the paradoxical conclusion that literature speaks most effectively through its constructed silences. Doppo's characteristic strength and the sign of his maturity lie in his capacity to build toward such silences. His reflexivity is not the mark of an exasperated narcissism or a technical vanity: it is the fruit of a profound meditation on the tension between words and things.

NOTE ON DOPPO

Kunikida Doppo (1871-1908) was a poet and writer of prose fiction. After teaching for a time in a rural school, he moved to Tokyo, where he worked as a journalist. During the Sino-Japanese War, he made a name for himself as a war correspondent. Later, he ran a small publishing house but went bankrupt, ruining his health in the process.

“Old Gen” (“Gen Oji,” 1897) is Doppo's maiden work. In it and other of Doppo's early works are many elements of Romanticism. Perhaps due to the unhappy circumstances of his later years, Doppo's later works are more pessimistic, and are now generally associated with Naturalism.