[In the following essay, Smith examines Mishima's revelation and concealment in Confessions of a Mask.]

Confessions of a Mask (Kamen no Kokuhaku) was written in Japan just after World War II and is ostensibly an autobiographical account of Yukio Mishima's youth. The title already suggests an opposition between what one authentically expresses and what one surreptitiously constructs for public perception, and in reading we are confronted with questions concerning our own habitual notions of truth and deception. How is a mask capable of confession? Should we believe what we hear if what we perceive is not a human face? What are the criteria for understanding the difference (and/or similarity) between the assumptions of truth in confession and deception in the mask? An explication of the mobile, unfixed, process nature of this apparent opposition, as made manifest by a subject who has put himself on trial,¹ can provide insight into the intentionality of a mask who/which confesses to those who risk listening. Mishima, in writing Kamen no Kokuhaku, inscribes the poetic movement of his life-world. Reading Confessions of a Mask compels a radical reflection on what we believe constitutes the truth of this poetic world.

My interest in Mishima's autobiographical writing stems from the problematical task of evaluating the dialectic between the aesthetics and politics of his seppuku (ritual suicide).² Since his death, any reading of Mishima's literary work is saturated with irony. What may have been read as fiction while he was alive is now used by critics, biographers, and film makers as a guide to depicting his motivation for killing himself.³ Mishima provides warrants for this depiction in political and autobiographical essays that reveal an obsession to unify art and action.⁴ Wayne Booth's notion of the implied author of fiction as “an ideal, literary version of the real man … the sum of his own choices”⁵ would seem to take a poetic twist in Mishima's case: he creates a literary version of himself that becomes the object of his own desire. Indeed, he has described his writing as rehearsal for action, and in a note to his editor on November 2, 1948, Mishima claims that Confessions of a Mask will be his first autobiographical novel. He suggests more:

I will turn upon myself the scalpel of psychological analysis I have sharpened on fictive characters, I will attempt to dissect myself alive. I hope to achieve scientific accuracy, to become, in the words of Baudelaire, both the condemned and the executioner. It requires determination, but I will hold my nose and write ahead.⁶

Mishima's intent appears clear enough: he proposes to both be himself and not be himself at the same time. This logic of non-contradiction coheres with the notion of one whose confession is given through a mask, and we might assume that the hope for scientific accuracy makes the truth value of the text unproblematic. If we acritically accept this assumption, then we could easily accept the views of those who use Mishima's literary work as a way of symbolically representing his political motivation for seppuku. However, after completing Confessions of a Mask, Mishima qualifies the autobiographical emphasis. He states that writing the novel has been a recovery of life out of “the realm of death I had hitherto been living,” and this reinvigoration of life through inscription necessarily includes lies:

Although this is a confession, I have allowed “lies” to pasture freely in my novel, and when it seemed appropriate I gave them fodder to eat. Filling the stomachs of the lies in this way kept them from molesting the vegetable patches of “truth.”

In the same sense, only a mask which has eaten into the flesh, a mask which has put on flesh, can make a confession. The basic nature of a confession is that “confessions are impossible.”⁷

Mishima's statement makes the locus of truth problematic, but if we approach his text searching for the “vegetable patches of ‘truth,’” then we are attempting to tear loose the mask from the flesh. We should rather attempt to depict how a mask puts on flesh, or how flesh is formed into a mask. In this essay I argue that the locus for analysis should move from symbolic forms enunciated in the confessions of a mask, to an unveiling of the signifying processes discovered in the reversible relation between a mask and a confession. Mishima's truth can be heard in the movement of this living paradox,⁸ and by listening carefully we can begin to gain some insight into the ethical relation between his aesthetics and politics.

Julia Kristeva's theory of the writing/speaking subject of poetic language is especially well-suited as a methodology for this textual analysis. Kristeva's notion of the signifying process as an embodiment of symbolic forms and semiotic functions⁹ provides a way of explicating the non-contradictory opposition between Mishima's mask and confession. I introduce Kristeva's theory of poetic language and her methodology for semanalysis in the following section. The terms of the Japanese title, Kamen no Kokuhaku, are then defined as a way of perceiving the reversibility of a mask's confession as a poetic function operating on paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of language. The poetic function of Mishima's text structures two movements which I analyze, following Kristeva, as mimetic transpositions. One transposition is embedded in the story through depictions of the real and imaginary world of a young man who (1) is seduced by a demonic force, (2) progressively embodies the objects of his desire, and finally (3) rejects the sexuality of the ideal woman. A second transposition is embedded in Mishima's discourse with the reader where direct and indirect appeals are made for (1) a suspension of judgment, (2) a critical reflection on the moral status of action, and (3) an intuitive grasp of a higher aesthetic morality.

Mishima's revealing confession necessarily entails a concealing mask. Kristeva's theory articulates the continual motility among signifying practices that both reveal and conceal, and her methodology provides sharp light for explicating the poetic and rhetoric of a text. My task is to interrogate the mobile nature and function of Mishima's truth in Confessions of a Mask. I believe this interrogation will provide a basis for further critical inquiry into Mishima's aesthetics, ethics, and politics in particular, and Japanese axiology in general.

TEXTUAL NEGATIVITY

Kristeva's theory of poetic language constitutes a conjunction between two theoretical traditions, the first emanating from Freud and the psychoanalytic school of semiotics and the second originating with Husserl and transcendental phenomenology. The former is primarily concerned with the motivated sign relation¹⁰ found in the drives and their articulations, while the latter develops a structure of categorical meaning which can situate a fixed transcendental ego.¹¹ Kristeva characterizes this latter designation of the position of the subject historically situated in discourse as the realm of the symbolic, that which is represented in language, the signified. She argues that even though this predicative operation is a valid aspect of poetic language, it is “only one of its limits, certainly constitutive, but not all encompassing.”¹² She contends that if we restrict ourselves to the meaning and intent of poetic language, then we will fail to see that which “departs from the signified and the transcendental ego and makes what is known as ‘literature’ something other than knowledge: the very place where the social code is destroyed and renewed. …”¹³ Kristeva challenges us to locate this place in textual practice and suggests ways in which we may perceive what she defines as the semiotic chora and explicate its dialectical relation with the symbolic realm.

The semiotic chora serves the primary poetic function in that it is anterior to meaning and signification and emerges as a break in the symbolic realm.¹⁴ The anteriority of the semiotic chora can be detected, for example, in an infant's drive to acquire language. The infant's articulations precede the first phonemes, morphemes, lexemes, and sentences, and what we hear are rhythms and intonations that are associated with the primary processes of the drives (biological, psychological, socio-cultural). Kristeva argues that these same primary processes are at work in poetic language, and the presence of this semiosis in a text is suggested through articulations such as repetition, elision, opposition, symmetrical and asymmetrical rhythm, tonality, continuity and discontinuity, and other nondiscursive functions. The semiotic chora musicalizes through these functions, and is continually at work on a path of assimilation and/or destruction. The child poetically assimilates as s/he attempts to express h—self, represent her world, and respond to people and things. S/he is creating her grammaticality through the semiotic flow. The “schizophrenic flow,” on the other hand, poetically de-structures through language, “approaching and displacing the signifier to practice within it the heterogenous generating of the desiring machine.”¹⁵

If the symbolic realm is conceived as categorical structures for the representation of meaning, and the semiotic chora is understood as pre-symbolic drives that musicalize articulations for meaning, then the multiple possibilities for the generation and interpretation of texts should reside in the dialectical relations between the symbolic and the semiotic. Kristeva conceives this dialectical threshold of language as “negativity (Negativitat), which may be thought of as both the cause and the organizing principle of the process. … The concept of negativity, distinct from that of nothingness (Nichts) and negation (Negation), figures as the indissoluble relation between an ‘ineffable’ mobility and its ‘particular determination.’”¹⁶ Negativity generates the semiotic function and creates a path for meaning that “exceeds the signifying subject, binding him to the laws of objective struggles in nature and society.”¹⁷ That is to say, each of us pre-reflectively embodies natural and social orders that situate our signifying practices.¹⁸ If we wish to reflect critically on these practices, then we necessarily engage negativity as conscious experience. This engagement, understood as a splitting of self, entails both a binding and a rejection. Negativity binds us to family, work, class, ethnicity, history, biological processes, and Nature, and it rejects when we posit any one of these structures or systems as an object “separate from the body proper.” When this object, previously embodied as a pre-reflective experience, is separated, negativity “fixes it in place as absent, as a sign. In this way rejection establishes the object as real. …”¹⁹ We shall see how Mishima discovers his binding to the natural and social order, and posits objects as absent and real. This rejection exacerbates the force that splits him as a signifying subject, which has its destructive impulse, but also enables him to succeed in moving through the “linguistic network” and practice “the objective process by submerging in it and emerging from it through the drives.”²⁰ He becomes both the condemned and the executioner because he participates in a signifying practice that redefines his relation to nature, society, and his body.

We also experience negativity as binding and rejection when we become immersed in a book, film, discussion, our work, another person, or any other text. Indeed, immersion is possible only when one embodies the negativity of textual experience. In order to grasp negativity as readers of Confessions of a Mask we should be willing to become subjects in process/on trial and redefine our relation to nature, society, and the body proper. As readers we become inscribers of a signifying practice that requires us to reject (make conscious) fixations of self-identity, prescriptions for propriety, inferences, and moral judgments. We essentially engage in a moral dialogue with Mishima, and in so doing we are poetically affirmed by his style of writing, morally repulsed by actions he depicts, and rhetorically negated through his analytical appeals. These processes, which direct and redirect the path of negativity between writer and reader, are constraints realized by a particular syntax.²¹ Syntax in the broad sense used here includes grammaticality, narrative dysjunctions and conjunctions, repetition of schemes and tropes, as well as the structure of textual voices (protagonist, narrators, implied author, implied auditor, our own). Mishima's syntax is capable of leading us to the place where he “is both generated and negated, the place where his unity succumbs before the process of charges and stases that produce him.”²² Following this path of negativity is possible only when we perceive the “logical functioning of the movement that produces the theses.”²³ Rather than becoming fixated by particular theses such as poetic affirmations, moral pulsations, or rhetorical negations, we instead consciously experience the logic which functions as the binding force among these positions. Again, such perception requires rejection. The explication of negativity then becomes a radical reflection on one's own experience of reading, which differs from every other reading, and involves a maieutic of speaking and listening. Natural and social codes can be both destroyed and renewed in this maieutic, and the perils of such engagement in reading Mishima cannot be overemphasized.

A maieutic in the Socratic sense means that we participate in an interrogative dialogue, through a conscious experience of immersion, where voices overlap and the distinction between who is speaking and who is listening becomes blurred.²⁴ This maieutic is precisely where we find Mishima in his writing of a confession by a mask. He posits himself as an other for himself and presents the ensuing dialogue to the world, which involves an intricately complex blending of voices between self and other.²⁵ Participating in a maieutic while reading does not necessarily mean that one identify with a character, the narrator, or the implied author; it means that one embody the negativity offered by the textual experience and genuinely engage the movement among aesthetic, ethical, and rhetorical topologies. In the reading process the maieutic becomes a transpositional movement between writer and reader among choices of narrative, metalanguage, contemplation, and poetic text.²⁶ Although these four signifying practices are Kristeva's designations for specific genres of writing, in Mishima's work they organize a recursive movement. Negativity is the encompassing and mobilizing force of this entire revolution that becomes heard and actualized through the “genuine pretense” of engaging in a maieutic with a text.²⁷

Kristeva's methodological concept of semanalysis provides a way to explicate the workings of negativity in Confessions of a Mask. Semanalysis examines what Kristeva defines as the phenotext, the genotext, and the text. The phenotext resides on the plane of expression where denotative and connotative meanings in the structure of the sign relation of signifier and signified are taken as objects for analysis. For example, both of the terms “confession” and “mask” have particular denotations and connotations in the English language that condition our initial understanding or confusion about Mishima's autobiographical novel. The phenotext involves a description of these predispositions of meaning since they constitute “the signifying system as it presents itself to phenomenological intuition … describable in terms of structure, or of competence/performance, or according to other models.”²⁸ The phenotext coheres with our previous definition of the symbolic realm where we find deep structures of semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic meaning. I begin my analysis of the phenotext in Confessions of a Mask with a discussion of the title's Japanese terms, then move to metaphorical and metonymic significations whose reversibilities suggest the semiotic functions of a genotext.

The genotext resides on the plane of perception where we imaginatively associate signifiers with each other and transform that which is signified into other signifiers, a process which in turn initiates what Peirce defines as unlimited semiosis. This continual motility is a process where “one might see the release and subsequent articulation of the drives as constrained by the social code yet not reducible to the language system. …”²⁹ The genotext coheres with our previous definition of the semiotic chora where motivated pre-symbolic movement follows a path for imminent expression. This movement is seen, for example, in the pattern depicted by reversibilities, discontinuities, and tonalities; it constitutes the underlying foundation of language.³⁰ For example, in the following section I depict how a mask can be perceived as a confession, and how a confession can be expressed as a mask. Both processes are constrained by a socio-cultural code and yet are anterior to the deep structures of the language system. The symbolic representation of a genotext is impossible, because the minute it is expressed as a mark or a trace, it no longer is serving its semiotic function. An analogy can be drawn to quanta in physics which pass through material forms and lose their identity and force as quanta when fixated as either particles or waves.³¹ The explication of the genotext is necessarily a self-conscious practice where we should realize both the limitation of the sedimented language system and the power of speech as it passes through and materially changes that system.³²

Finally, the notion of text can be understood as the dialectical relation (negativity) produced between the phenotext and genotext. The text encompasses and exceeds the signifying practices of narrative, metalanguage, and contemplation, and embodies “instinctual binomials,” or “two opposing terms that alternate in endless rhythm.”³³ In addition to the textual dyads of Confessions of a Mask mentioned previously, instinctual binomials include the negativity between phenotext and genotext in general as well as, following Jakobson, any “double-sensed message” that “finds correspondence in a split-addresser, in a split-addressee and … split reference.”³⁴ This “poetic function” of the message makes subject, object, and reference ambiguous. I discuss this ambiguity as the basis for the reversibility between confession and mask in the following section. The terms “mask” and “confession” explicitly mark a phenotext, and the oppositional reversibility of these terms suggests the locus of a genotext. The truth of the autobiographical novel becomes situated as a condition of this reversibility, which further contextualizes possibilities for insight that exceed the novel itself. This excess, fostered by the split of ambiguity, is what biographers of Mishima seize upon in their symbolic depictions of his motivation for seppuku. In contrast, I wish to suggest a movement of negativity that can be understood as Mishima's poetic truth, which necessarily includes ourselves as readers. The depiction of this truth is not a hypostatization of fundamental Cause or absolute Truth, but can be conceived as a hypothesis, or a formation of judgment that requires further inquiry.

A MASK'S CONFESSION

Mishima's expressed intent to “dissect myself alive” is a way of creating a split in the symbolic realm of the self. This symbolic split between mask and confession is Mishima's existential thesis. Kristeva suggests that a thesis “is structured as a break in the signifying process, establishing the identification of the subject and its object as preconditions of propositionality.”³⁵ This split can be understood as an enunciation which “requires an identification … the subject must separate from and through his image, from and through his objects.”³⁶ Mishima's positioning of himself as both “condemned and executioner” precisely expresses the notion of identification through separation and demarcates the forces of opposition in the symbolic realm. Symbolically dissecting the living self unleashes the power of desire and the desire for power which defines his existence. Explicating the reversibility between apparent oppositions reveals the path of textual negativity. I begin this semanalysis with the Japanese title, Kamen no Kokuhaku, which grounds the field of Mishima's existential situation in the breach between autobiography and novel, truth and lies, and confession and mask.

The literal translation of Kamen no Kokuhaku is ‘A Mask's Confession.’ The English title of the novel makes confession plural, which implies a series of statements. The Japanese Kokuhaku (Confession) leaves the singular/plural ambiguous; it can be understood both as a contiguous arrangement of voices and as a simultaneous whole marked by a singular voice. The Japanese particle “no” indicates the possessive form; thus “mask's” can be understood more significantly as attribution: the mask is the subject who gives voice(s) to a confession. The Japanese title is marked by ambiguity, active voice, and attribution, which are all left unmarked in the English translation. An analysis of the terms Kamen and Kokuhaku suggests an ethnographic context for understanding the reversibility of their signification.³⁷

Kamen is the Japanese term for “Mask” and contains two morphemes.³⁸ The kanji for Ka means that which is borrowed temporarily, provisional, or assumed. The associated Buddhist Ke means vanity or a preoccupation with the image of oneself. The kanji for men refers to facial features, the surface, or superficial aspect; it is also associated with the term omote, which means the face as external appearance, what is shown to the public, one's public self. Kamen can be understood as one's ‘assumed (public) self’.

Kokuhaku is the Japanese term for confession and also contains two morphemes. The kanji for koku is associated with the modern form of the verb tsugeru, which means to tell or inform—thus, speaking. Tsugeru is derived from the older form tsuge which denotes an oracle and implies an experience of revelation. The kanji for haku denotes whiteness (shiro) and connotes innocence. Kokuhaku as confession can be understood as ‘innocent (oracular) speaking’.

Kamen no Kokuhaku means ‘an assumed (public) self's innocent (oracular) speaking’. An assimilation of the normative identity of a collective other, taken from the conscious experience of sedimented socio-symbolic codes, is contrasted with the innocence and power of authentic speech in a timeless and prophetic world. A Mask's Confession is a sedimented self's authentic speaking. This contrast is non-contradictory, and in fact conditions the poetic articulation of the reversibility between self and other in Confessions of a Mask. For Mishima this articulation is the nexus where the social mask becomes positioned as an oracle and the oracular confession is situated socially. There are cultural precedents for this perception of reversibility, which Mishima incorporates into his story and discourse.

Girard discusses how in primitive societies the mask is a source of power and marks the equivocal frontier between the human and the divine.³⁹ This function of the mask can be seen in Japanese Noh drama and certain Shinto festivals, for example, where the human and divine intermingle with the aid of masks. Mishima narrates how as a child he becomes transfixed by a priest carrying a fox mask at the head of the “Summer Festival” (Obon). He also elaborates throughout the novel how his (protagonist's) masking process (“masquerade”; “machine of falsehood”) unleashes a demonic force beyond his will to control. In both instances, contact with a deity is intensified through masking. Intentional configuration of the mask is a ritual process whereby alignment with and embodiment of an imminent force becomes possible.

Confession in Western tradition has also served the symbolic function of aligning the human and the divine, and Mishima draws upon this tradition through his references to St. Augustine, predestination, and various experiences of “sin.” To confess is to engage in a process of purification through speaking, and in this light Ricoeur has characterized confession of sin as the “experience of being oneself but alienated from oneself” that through speaking “gets transcribed on the plane of language in the mode of interrogation.”⁴⁰ Being oneself while simultaneously being alienated from oneself suggests Mishima's insight concerning the mask of confession. Any confession necessarily wears a mask of language that expresses truth in the same logical manner as a mask taking on flesh. In this sense, truth is not possible without the simultaneous expression of lies. The logic of Mishima's statement that only a mask taking on flesh is capable of confession and a confession not masked is impossible, becomes clearer. We now move to a discussion of this non-contradictory logic as it functions on two dimensions of language. This analysis, based primarily on Jakobson's communication theory, provides a linguistic framework for the explication of negativity in Mishima's text.

A mask which is part flesh is a metaphoric substitution for both one's actual face and an autonomous mask; the relation between mask, face, and fleshy mask is paradigmatic. A confession as masked suggests a metonymic arrangement of various speech acts, each act of the confession signifying the mask; the acts are given syntagmatically. The paradigmatic axis of language can be conceived as a vertical dimension of absent forms which can be selected and substituted for those symbols of a syntagmatic chain which serve similar functions. For example, in a sentence nouns in absentia can be selected and substituted for similar nouns in presentia, verbs with other verbs, and so on. Thus a mask substitutes for the face depending upon perceived prescriptions or proscriptions in the unfolding of textual situations. The syntagmatic axis of language is the horizontal combination of various linguistic forms presented contiguously according to syntactic rules. The sentence is the most obvious example of syntagmatic arrangement, but any text is combined syntagmatically. In this sense we can think of the confession as an elaborate intentionally constructed interrogation.

Jakobson has shown how reversibilities on the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of language are characteristic of the poetic function of a textual message. He states that the “poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.”⁴¹ In Kristeva's terms, the absence (“outside”) in the paradigmatic dimension established by rejection is projected by a speaking subject to a position within the signifying system of the syntagmatic dimension (“predicate”).⁴² The poetic reversibility of mask and confession on the two dimensions of language means that through reading we project the mask as an intentionally constructed utterance and the confession as a functional face. Negativity becomes embodied as we perceive the mask absorbing the confession and the confession becoming a camouflaging mask. This perceptual shift operates on the level of the genotext and requires a process of rejection. For example, Mishima discusses in the text how as a child he constructs a “machine of falsehood” based upon what others do, think, and say because what he truly desires is too bizarre to acknowledge. This contrivance becomes his “masquerade” systematically created over a period of time. The masking process connotes an unfinished product continually molded according to the subject's expression and perception of social relationships. The mask, previously conceived as a surrogate face, now becomes a syntagmatic arrangement of features that constitute the desire for confession. The confession, on the other hand, relates a masking process as story while simultaneously creating a metalevel masking through face-to-face discourse with the reader. These reversible movements on the axes of language find their concrete actualizations in Mishima's story and discourse as two forms of mimetic transposition.

MIMETIC TRANSPOSITION

Throughout Confessions of a Mask Mishima describes (1) the pantheistic forces that speak to him, (2) those persons whom he desires to become, and (3) his configuration of the ideal woman. Each of these sets constitutes a series of transformations where one voice, object of desire, or ideal form condenses and replaces what has come before in the series and displaces each of the other contiguous sets. Identification is substantiated metaphorically while identities are differentiated metonymically. The reader is also confronted with questions, comments, and arguments which situate (1) a suspension of judgment, (2) a critical reflection on the moral status of action, and (3) an intuitive grasp of a higher aesthetic morality. These sets make the mask of language self-conscious and challenge the reader to judge him or herself on the same terms that he or she judges the writer. The positioning of the appeals redirects the semiotic flow from one signifying system (the world of the story; monologue) to another (the world of the reader; dialogue).⁴³

I have just identified two distinct yet complementary movements, each of which operates on both the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of language. Even though these movements are commonly understood as forms of intertexuality, Kristeva uses the term “transposition” as a way of capturing the change of perspective since it “specifies that the passage from one signifying system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic, of enunciative and denotative positionality.”⁴⁴ I have limited each transposition to a movement within and among three sets, and suggest that each movement is motivated by mimesis. Kristeva considers mimesis to be:

the construction of an object, not according to truth but to verisimilitude, to the extent that the object is posited as such (hence separate, noted but not denoted); it is, however, internally dependent on a subject of enunciation who is unlike the transcendental ego in that he does not suppress the semiotic chora but instead raises the chora to the status of signifier, which may or may not obey the laws of grammatical locution. Such is the connoted mimetic object.⁴⁵

For Mishima, the connoted mimetic object is continually re-articulated, positioned, and questioned as a signifier. As we shall see, each transposition retains a resemblance of truth that is not absolute Truth. For us the interrogation of this movement makes conscious our own ideological assumptions,⁴⁶ which in turn become mobilized as signifiers and potentially placed in abeyance. Participating with the text in this manner engages a maieutic that enables us to mime Mishima's movement of desire, even though we are repulsed by the particular determinations of this desire. Wilshire helps us understand these processes of mimesis more clearly. His definition is a “continuous energy and absorption” characteristic of the “dangers and powers of … engulfment.”⁴⁷ And the reader's assimilation of a text which repulses him/her is understood as a pre-conscious taking over of another's attitudes “without realizing that it is he who is taking over the other's attitude towards himself.”⁴⁸ There are two poles for each of these forms of mimesis in reading Mishima's text. The protagonist vacillates between dark (symbolized by metaphors of evil) and light (symbolized by metaphors of Woman) as he is engulfed in the continuum of his desire. And the reader who is repulsed vacillates between his or her own assumed criteria for judgment made conscious through the criteria generated by Mishima.

The change of perspective in each mimetic transposition is significant. The movement of Mishima's desire can be heard as a melody (continuity) while the reader's assimilation constitutes the development of a harmony (discontinuity). The sets in the first movement intermingle with the sets in the second and constitute variations in tone, rhythm, recurrence, as well as sudden clashes and breaks which stop short any predictable path for negativity. Mishima's description of the “Summer Festival,” which I quote at length below, is a condensation of the entire text's musicality.⁴⁹ This fragment provides one of the first images of an absent power that is heterogeneous to the signifying subject and poised for release. The absence appears to be conducting the orchestra of the ritual.

On this particular day I was standing in front of the gate with other members of the household. Both leaves of the vine-patterned iron gate had been thrown open, and water had been sprinkled neatly on the paving stones outside the gate. The hesitant sound of drums was drawing near.

The plaintive melody of a chant, in which individual words only gradually became distinguishable, pierced through the confused tumult of the festival, proclaiming what might be called the true theme of this outwardly purposeless uproar—a seeming lamentation for the extremely vulgar mating of humanity and eternity, which could be consummated only through some such pious immorality as this. In the tangled mass of sound I could gradually distinguish the metallic jingle of the rings on the staff carried by the priest at the head of the procession, the stuttering roar of drums, and the medley of rhythmic shouts from the youths shouldering the sacred shrine. My heart was beating so suffocatingly that I could scarcely stand. (Ever since then violent anticipation has always been anguish rather than joy for me.)

The priest carrying the staff was wearing a fox mask. The golden eyes of this occult beast fastened themselves too intently upon me, as though to bewitch me, and the procession passing before my eyes aroused in me a joy akin to terror. Before I knew it, I felt myself grab hold of the skirt of whoever it was from our house that was standing beside me: I was ready to run away at the first excuse. (Ever since those days this has been the attitude with which I have always confronted life: from things too much waited for, too much embellished with anticipatory daydreams, there is in the end nothing I can do but run away.)

Behind the priest came a group of firemen … and then a crowd of children. … Finally the principal shrine of the procession drew near, the majestic black and gold omikoshi. From afar we had already seen the golden phoenix on its peak, swaying and rocking dazzlingly above the din and bustle, like a bird floating to and fro among the waves; already the sight had filled us with a sort of bewildered feeling of uneasiness. Now the shrine itself came into view, and there was a venomous state of dead calm, like the air of the tropics, which clung solely about the shrine. It seemed a malevolent sluggishness, trembling hotly above the naked shoulders of the young men carrying the omikoshi. And within the guardrails of the black lacquer and gold, behind those fast-shut doors of gold leaf, there was a four-foot cube of pitch blackness.

This perfect cube of empty night, ceaselessly swaying and leaping, to and fro, up and down, was boldly reigning over the cloudless noonday of early summer.

(29-31)

The narrative continues to describe the sensual forms of the young men carrying the shrine, how they lose control of themselves all in one movement, and in a Dionysian frenzy destroy the garden in front of the protagonist's house. This passage illustrates the topology and potential destruction of the semiotic chora, symbolically positioned as a movement of “pious immorality.” The symmetrical and asymmetrical rhythms, tones, and textures of the procession mark the ritual boundaries which contain a power poised for release, a power situated in the omikoshi as “empty night.” When the power takes a path for release, “wanton destruction” and sacrifice are the inevitable result. The semiotic chora heard in the festival and unleashed in the garden is revealed in other forms and transposed to other sets in the story.

The first indications of Mishima's connoted mimetic objects can be heard early in the text. Transpositional movement is introduced through a narrative description and interpretation of “tragic lives.” The first tragic life the young Mishima perceives is the “night-soil man … a ladler of excrement.”

The scrutiny I gave the youth was unusually close for a child of four. Although I did not clearly perceive it at the time, for me he represented my first revelation of a certain power, my first summons by a strange and secret voice. It is significant that this was first manifested to me in the form of a night-soil man: excrement is a symbol for the earth, and it was doubtlessly the malevolent love of the Earth Mother calling to me.

I had a presentiment then that there is in this world a kind of desire like stinging pain. Looking up at that dirty youth I was choked by desire thinking “I want to change into him,” thinking “I want to be him.”

(8-9)

I somehow felt it was “tragic” for a person to make his living in the midst of such an odor. Existences and events occurring without any relationship to myself, occurring at places that not only appealed to my sense but were moreover denied to me—these, together with the people involved in them, constituted my definition of “tragic things.” It seemed that my grief at being eternally excluded was always transformed in my dreaming into grief for those persons and their ways of life, and that solely through my own grief I was able to share in their existences.

(10-11)

These two segments of narrative together provide a condensation of oppositional movement. The former introduces the desire to become what one is not, and the latter indicates the social exclusion and grief associated with such desire. An imagined inclusion exacerbates exclusion. Mishima explicitly states that this experience is “transferred through these same emotions” to others who share an apparent tragic fate. The reader is introduced to each figure in turn as the novel progresses. They include soldiers in uniform, ticket punchers at the train stations, pictures of St. Sebastian, a delinquent classmate named Omi, and the “ephebe.” The protagonist experiences transference of self-identity to an other, then connotes the identity of this other with others who embody all that he is not.

The above passages also illustrate the first commingling of mythological power, mimetic desire, and tragic fate. Mythological power is expressed by “the malevolent love of the Earth Mother.” The Japanese “Ne no haha akui aru ai” literally translated means ‘(the) Root Mother's evil intent of love.’ Ne no haha (Root Mother) is a poetic expression of an opposition between a Root … evil and Mother's … love. This association initiates a metaphoric transformation which reveals the movement of negativity between the two poles of mimetic desire. The dark pole is expressed as a presence of some absence which holds a fateful power. We have already discussed this force as symbolically residing in the “empty night” of the omikoshi, which coheres with the darkness of the “Root Mother.” This living pantheistic force, which resides in the natural and socio-cultural worlds, eventually is given a voice which mobilizes mimetic desire. Desire increases in intensity through each new embodiment and the demonic force is unleashed, again in Dionysian frenzy, beyond the protagonist's power to control. The imaginings and desires that result constitute a self which must be masked, and the protagonist begins weaving an intricate web of personal and social deception.

The protagonist's relationship to the ideal woman forms the opposite pole of his mimetic desire and forces him to confront his masquerade. Certain performers and historical figures are singled out early in his life whose features correspond to the beauty and purity of a goddess. As he matures he develops an artificial attraction toward most girls until he meets Sonoko, who invokes his earlier imaginings.

When she was almost at the bottom of the steps Sonoko noticed me and smiled. Her fresh cheeks were flushed from the cold. Her eyes … were glistening as though trying to speak. Then … she came running down the platform toward me with a graceful motion like the trembling of light.

What I saw come running toward me was … the herald of morning tidings. Had it not been for this fact, I could have met her with my usual fraudulent hopes. But, to my perplexity, my instinct was forced to recognize a different quality in Sonoko alone. This gave me a profound, bashful feeling of being unworthy of Sonoko, and yet it was not a feeling of servile inferiority. Each second while I watched Sonoko approach, I was attacked by an unendurable grief. It was a feeling such as I had never had before. Grief seemed to undermine and set tottering the foundations of my existence. Until this moment the feeling with which I had regarded women had been an artificial mixture of childlike curiosity and feigned sexual desire. My heart had never before been swayed, and at first glance, by such deep and unexplainable grief, a grief moreover that was no part of my masquerade.

(143-144)

Sonoko serves as a pivotal moment in the text, the moment where the protagonist realizes that the grief experienced in her presence is the totalizing embodiment of the grief sensed earlier toward tragic figures. This final “unexplainable” grief experienced through the “trembling … light” of Sonoko is a grief associated with the gradual realization that the exclusive tragic figure has become himself. In her presence Mishima sees himself unmasked. Grief is the modality of recognition which serves as a sufficient condition for confession.

We have just discussed one mimetic transposition, the protagonist's desire to become the tragic figures of desire, which are in turn associated with both a demonic force at one extreme and the radiance of a beautiful woman at the other. This movement of desire is punctuated throughout by grief, which is motivated by masking and unmasking processes that define conditions for confession. Confession entails the expressed recognition of the capitulation to the external force, the deception in the masquerade, and the potential for revelation. Mishima's discourse with the reader introduces interrogative dialogue as the modality for confession and a metalevel of masking. His questions, comments, and arguments displace our immersion in the story and our tendencies to judge prematurely.

One form of discourse is psychoanalytic commentary. For example, the protagonist's first encounter with the picture of St. Sebastian tied to a tree and pierced with arrows arouses his sexual desire. The depiction of this scene is quite graphic, and my initial repulsion is tempered by the poetic expression of the scene, the apparent innocence of the boy, and finally by Mishima's parenthetical statement:

(It is an interesting coincidence that Hirshfeld should place “pictures of St. Sebastian” in the first rank of those kinds of art works in which the invert takes special delight. This observation of Hirshfeld's leads easily to the conjecture that in the overwhelming majority of cases of inversion, especially of congenital inversion, the inverted and the sadistic impulses are inextricably entangled with each other).

(41)

This reference and subsequent references which again draw upon the insights of Hirshfeld and others provide a category for our response to the anomalous nature of increasingly sadistic (imagined) sexual acts. The testimony brackets the bizarre and indicates that the relation between inversion and sadism is a clinical condition which the author will assist us in evaluating. Subsequent to the above commentary, a short historical sketch of St. Sebastian is given, followed by a direct appeal: “Desiring that my own rapture before the legend … be understood more clearly as the fierce, sensual thing it was, I insert the following unfinished piece, which I wrote several years later” (42). Here again there is a break in the temporal locus of the story. The “prose poem” which follows this comment is replete with metaphors of ideal form, tragic fate, pagan ritual, and sacrificial violence. The topology of the chora is shown as continuous over time through discontinuity in the story, and Mishima's discourse nurtures intellectual and emotional assimilation.

Interrogation takes another form in the narrative when the protagonist hears a voice which admonishes him for his monstrous inclinations and self-deceit in the context of his attempt to feel sexual desire toward Sonoko.

Then again a different voice mocked me, secret and persistent. This voice was filled with an almost feverish honesty, a human feeling I had never experienced before. It bombarded me with questions in quick succession: Is it love you feel? If so, all right. But do you have a desire for women? Aren't you deceiving yourself when you say that it's toward her alone that you have never had a “lustful desire”? Aren't you trying to hide from yourself the fact that actually you've never had a “lustful desire” for any woman? What right on earth do you have to use the word “lustful”?

(173)

This voice continues in second person with a detailed analysis and castigation of the young man's fantasies, desires, and false pretenses. And it is through this voice that we begin to hear our own. Which text are we reading? Is it the manifest text or the text of our own judgment? Here again we transgress the phenotext and begin to hear the rhythms and intonations of the genotext. The protagonist's struggle conveyed to us through internal questioning exposes our own tendencies to judge before the confession is complete. Our pre-reflective drives to judge are made self-conscious as we witness self-conscious judgment being made reflective. This negativity, understood as a transpositional movement that structures an alignment (mimesis) between reader and writer, is made even more explicit through direct dialectical questioning.

The confession is that which is manifest in questioning, and is grasped only through the maieutic actualized between writer and reader. In order to hear the authenticity of both the mask and the confession, we should embody the melodies, harmonies, and voices of the genotextual experience. This listening becomes the necessary and sufficient conditions for judgment on the moral status of emotion, thought, and action to which we stand witness. We participate in setting the boundary conditions for accommodating an other who is quite different from, yet somehow resembles, ourselves. Mishima does not give us much of a chance to be hypocrites. For example, in considering his masquerade Mishima asks if we are innocent of desire functionally similar to his own.

But, it may well be asked, can a person be so completely false to his own nature? even for one moment? If the answer is no, then there is no way to explain the mysterious mental process by which we crave things we actually do not want at all, is there? If it is granted that I was the exact opposite of the ethical man who suppresses his immoral desires, does this mean my heart was cherishing the most immoral desires? In any case, were my desires not exceedingly petty? Or had I deceived myself completely? Was I actually acting in every last detail as a slave of convention? … The time was to come when I could no longer shirk the necessity of finding answers to these questions. …

(116)

The logic of these questions can be understood as follows: If as a reader you shirk the necessity of finding answers to these questions for yourself, then in judging you deceive yourself and become a hypocrite. If you do not shirk the responsibility, then you necessarily make culpable your own predispositions for judgment. We are asked to displace ourselves and face the oppositions of our own mask and confession. Either we legitimize our mask and prematurely judge, thus standing with the executioner who is executing the condemned, or we legitimize the confession and identify with the protagonist, thus standing with the condemned and executing ourselves. The only other alternatives are either to quit reading or to realize the reversible relation between a mask and a confession as actualized in the transpositional dimensions of textuality and sense an orientation (Sens) toward another dimension of truth. These are the logical choices in reading that need to be considered if we can begin to understand the significance of Confessions of a Mask as well as Mishima's life and death.

DISCUSSION

We have seen that Mishima's confession is an interrogation through both the story's masquerade and the discourse's mask of language. Mishima's rejection of an external, pantheistic force that is materially absent yet real suggests a conscious experience of a presence which binds him to the natural and socio-cultural network. Through this binding we see quite graphically that negativity as rejection assumes both a presence and an absence, involves an intersection between these oppositional positions, and produces the possibility of embodying others that are distinct from oneself. The placement of a power which is ostensibly beyond Mishima's will to control generates a modality of perception and expression which becomes mutated for the protagonist in ways that must be concealed from the public eye. The young boy, as an ostensible victim of the demonic predestined force, finds it necessary to create a masquerade to hide his real identity and protect himself from both himself and others. The masquerade is fodder for the demon; the greater the deception, the greater the demonic power, and conversely, the greater the need to speak the truth.

The expression of truth emerges through the genotext as a transpositional process of desire and questioning which concerns not simply individual acts and events, but also the logic and operative intentionality of a person who is reconstructing, disclosing, and in fact creating himself through the production of a text which includes ourselves. Mishima engages this structuring and de-structuring practice by unleashing and symbolically harnessing a semiotic flow which is continually on the brink of destruction of the self and assimilation of the other. This signifying practice defines the questionable subject-in-process/on-trial. Mishima depicts a conscious experience of anomalous desire in the face of socio-cultural norms, and through dialogical interrogation suggests the criteria upon which any ultimate judgment of the voice(s) we hear depends. In unabashedly facing the truth of his deception, Mishima challenges all those who read or perform his work to face such a truth for themselves. And this “feverish honesty” suggests a higher aesthetic morality that transcends moral repulsion of acts depicted in the story.

As a reader who engages in the interrogative dialogue with Mishima, and as one who is critically aware of his politics and seppuku, I can escape neither the irony of reading the text nor the desire to render a moral evaluation based upon a knowledge of his life and death. There are two ways to handle this irony of desire. The first is to produce a performance of Confessions of a Mask that depicts my interpretation of the path of negativity through both forms of mimetic transposition.⁵⁰ This depiction could then serve as a basis for intercultural dialogue on the ethical relation between aesthetics and politics. The two films mentioned previously⁵¹ introduce the complexity of representation and interpretation of Mishima's ethic. Schrader's film suggests a strong coherence (iconically, indexically, symbolically) between Mishima's literary work, his autobiographical writings, and his final day. The viewer is left with a concrete judgment of Mishima's motivation.⁵² The BBC documentary presents more ambiguity in signification through narratives of those who knew Mishima; discussions with Mishima himself; and actual film footage of his seppuku speech, photographic sessions, and other public performances. Both films serve as models for performance, and part of my project involves the critical review of this material.

The second way to handle irony of desire in an engagement of the ethical problem is to investigate the cultural history of the pantheistic force that Mishima posits as a unitary subject. Mishima is repulsed by the “pious immorality” of this force's representation in Shinto ritual, yet he ultimately assimilates the negativity of the path this force offers. Mishima appears to become the embodiment of a unitary subject grounded in Japanese cultural history. Confessions of a Mask depicts the complex psychological and social developments of this process. If we accept the overriding view of biographers and critics, Mishima's literary work consists primarily in working through the aesthetics of this embodiment process as a political act. I have two problems with this epistemology. First, Mishima's corpus should also be read and appreciated for its own sake without a persistent imposition of political or ethical inferences. Second, a critical perspective of Mishima's aesthetics should avoid simply laying a theoretical template on Mishima's process of embodiment. Such potential ethnocentric and/or logocentric positions reveal more about the critic than about Mishima, and probably legitimize the aesthetics it proposes to critique.

I suggest that we approach the problem of rendering a moral evaluation of the ethical relation between Mishima's aesthetics and politics by first explicating the terms presented by Mishima himself and by Japanese cultural history. Some of these terms, and the judgment they implicate, are expressed eloquently in Confessions of a Mask. Perceiving Mishima's truth as a transpositional movement of mimesis enables us both to suspend our pre-conceived political and ethical terms for evaluation and to discover the terms offered by the textual experience. These terms include, but may not be limited to (1) individual sexuality as situated between pantheistic forces and idealism, and mobilized toward others who become the objects for mimetic desire; (2) the spatial structure and function of the mobilization process, which includes both the tragic identity of the persons emulated and the affective forms of mobilization; and (3) the relation between the human and divine as expressed by Japanese cultural history, which for Mishima includes living through World War II, and in Confessions of a Mask situates an ambivalence between desiring death and savoring life. These terms structure further inquiry into Mishima's dialectics of text and performance.

Notes

1. The notion of a subject in process/on trial comes from Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia UP, 1984).

2. The moral questions of this dialectic as embedded in Japanese cultural history are discussed in my essay “Mishima's Seppuku Speech: A Phenomenology of His Rhetorical Situation,” WSCA Convention, Salt Lake City, Feb. 1987.

3. The most accessible biographies of Mishima in English are Henry Scott Stokes, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (New York: Ballantine, 1974), and John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1974). Donald Keene provides an introduction to Mishima's work, in which he discusses salient aspects of his life, in Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984). For a more aesthetic view of Mishima's death, see Joyce C. Lebra, “Mishima's Last Act,” Literature East and West 15 (1971): 279-298. Ivan Morris dedicates his historical volume to Mishima and makes a case for a generic classification of Mishima's aesthetics-politics epistemology. See The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975). Japanese biographies of Mishima include Kuzuaki Yoshida, Mishima Yukio (Tokyo: Gundai Shohun, 1985). This account contains a diversity of analyses and graphics concerning the event of Mishima's death in particular; it also provides an extensive bibliography of Japanese publications on Mishima. See especially Matsumoto Kenichi, Mishima Yukio: Bomei Densetsu (Tokyo: Kawide Shobo Shinsha, 1987). This analysis argues that Mishima ‘defects’ (in the sense of ‘elopement’) from conventional mores while affirming certain traditions on a path of lonely excess. Paul Shrader's film is based closely on the biographical accounts, but obviously provides a unique interpretation. See Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, dir. Paul Shrader, Toho-Towa, Tokyo; Warner Bros., Los Angeles. 1985. For a documentary account of Mishima, which includes personal interviews and film footage of the speech made before his death, see Biography: The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima, dir. Michael Macintyre, prod. Anthony Wall and Nigel French, BBC, RM ARTS, London, 1985.

4. Mishima's most succinct discussion of the relation between art and action can be found in Yukio Mishima, Hagakure: The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan, trans. Kathryn N. Sparling (London: Souvenier Press, 1977). See also “Yukio Mishima,” The Japan Interpreter 4 (Fall, 1971). Perhaps the most poignant literary example of the ethical relation between Mishima's aesthetics and politics is seen in his short story “Patriotism,” in Death in Midsummer and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 1966), 102-127. Mishima produced, directed, and took the lead role in his adaptation of this story for stage performance. His performance of seppuku in the story appears to have served as rehearsal for his actual seppuku. Both Scott-Stokes and Nathan provide a guide to Mishima's other literary work as it corresponds to his theory of art and action.

5. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961), 75.

6. In Nathan, 94.

7. In Keene, 1183.

8. See D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Princeton UP, 1959). The practice of living paradox is of course not peculiar to Mishima or Japan; indeed, it is characteristic of any textual experience whose actualization passes beyond the arbitrary limit of its own presupposed social or symbolic boundaries. Eric Peterson and Kristin Langellier address the same issue for performance in “Creative Double Bind in Oral Interpretation,” The Western Journal of Speech Communication 46 (1982): 242-252. See also Kristin Langellier, “From Text to Social Context,” Literature in Performance 6 (1986): 60-70. Isaac Catt discusses ethical considerations of such embodiment in “Textual Fidelity as a Problem of Communication,” paper presented to the WSCA Convention, Salt Lake City, Feb. 1987. Catt constructively critiques the post-structuralist turn in performance theory and locates the existential subject in the dialectic between text and context, which is precisely where Mishima consciously places himself. Many would argue that Catt's concerns of textual embodiment are appropriated through language and speech: See Eric Peterson, John Hollowitz, Kay Ellen Capo, Jacqueline Taylor, Carol Simpson Stern, Kristin Langellier, Kristina Minister, Jill Taft-Kaufman, and Stanley Deetz in “Symposium: Post-Structuralism and Performance,” ed. Mary S. Strine, Literature in Performance, 4 (1983): 22-64.

9. Kristeva, Revolution, 19-90. The discussion of the semiotic and symbolic constitutes the entire first part of the book.

10. In contrast to Saussure's notion of the arbitrary relation between the signifier and the signified. Kristeva, Revolution, 22. For a discussion of semiology in the philosophy of communication, see Richard Lanigan, Phenomenology of Communication: Merleau-Ponty's Thematics in Communicology and Semiology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1988).

11. Kristeva, Revolution, 22-23.

12. Kristeva, Desire in Language, ed. Leon S. Rudiz, trans. Thomas Gors, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Rudiz (New York: Columbia UP), 132.

13. Kristeva, Desire, 132.

14. My discussion of the semiotic chora is a synopsis taken from Kristeva, Revolution, 25-29.

15. Kristeva, Revolution, 17.

16. Kristeva, Revolution, 109. Merleau-Ponty's distinction between thetic and operative intentionality is pertinent to this discussion of negativity. Kristeva's “‘particular determination’” can be compared with Merleau-Ponty's “intentionality of act,” which is thetic insofar as we judge and take positions. The “‘ineffable’ mobility” coheres with Merleau-Ponty's notion of “operative intentionality,” which, following Husserl, is “that which produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the world and of our life, being apparent in our desires, our evaluations and in the landscape we see.” See Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, rev. by Forrest Williams and David Guerriere (1962; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1986), xviii.

17. Kristeva, Revolution, 119.

18. Critical theorists are concerned with oppressive and repressive aspects of this embodiment in practical consciousness. For an interpretation grounded in political communication theory, see Michael Huspek, “Language Analysis and Power,” Semiotica 72.3-4 (1988). For a discussion which addresses the Kristevan semiotic/symbolic relation in aesthetic production see Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Toward a Revolutionary Criticism (New York: Verso, 1981.)

19. Kristeva, Revolution, 123.

20. Kristeva, Revolution, 126.

21. Kristeva, Revolution, 124.

22. Kristeva, Revolution, 28.

23. Kristeva, Revolution, 109.

24. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964), 97. He states: “To the extent that what I say has meaning, I am a different ‘other’ for myself when I am speaking; and to the extent that I understand, I no longer know who is speaking and who is listening.”

25. For an explication of this process as polyphony, see Linda M. Park-Fuller, “Voices: Bakhtin's Heteroglossia and Polyphony, and the Performance of Narrative Literature,” Literature in Performance, 7 (1986): 1-12.

26. Kristeva defines these four signifying practices in Revolution, 90-106.

27. Peterson and Langellier discuss the genuine pretense of performance in a similar light in “Creative Double Bind,” 242-252.

28. Julia Kristeva, “The System and the Speaking Subject,” The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 28. See also Revolution, 86-89.

29. Kristeva, “The System and the Speaking Subject,” 28.

30. Kristeva, Revolution, 86-89.

31. Kristeva, Revolution, 86.

32. The distinction between the sedimented language system (parole parlée) and authentic speaking (parole parlante) is made by Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception and Richard Lanigan in Phenomenology of Communication.

33. Kristeva, Revolution, 99.

34. Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, ed. Robert. E. Innis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985), 167.

35. Kristeva, Revolution, 43.

36. Kristeva, Revolution, 43.

37. Keene suggests that “Confessions of a Mask” is the most appropriate translation of “Kamen no Kokuhaku.” See Dawn, 1186, n. 47. I am suggesting the interpretation ‘A Mask's Confession’ as a way of introducing negativity in the opposition. My analysis develops Hjelmslev's semiotic model of explicating the relation between expression (signifier) and content (signified) on three levels of connotation and denotation. See Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitlow (Baltimore: Waverly Press, 1953). A “connotative semiotics” suggests that each plane of expression and content contains other presupposed levels of expressible meaning; see Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976), 54-57. For both eidetic and empirical developments of Hjelmslev's model in communicology see Richard Lanigan, Phenomenology of Communication, esp. ch. 7.

38. The meanings associated with these Japanese characters are developed from Andrew W. Nelson, The Modern Reader's Japanese-English Character Dictionary, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Charles E. Tuttle, 1974).

39. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1977), 168. It should be noted here that Mishima read the classics of the Greek theater at a young age, and was seemingly aware that here, too, the mask functions as a persona which expresses the essential feature of a character. For a discussion of the mask in Greek theater see Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theater as Metaphor (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982), 38-42. Wilshire's synopsis presents Nietzsche's description of Greek theater as music which coheres nicely with Kristeva's discussion of the chora.

40. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 8.

41. Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement,” 155. For an introduction to Jakobson's Selected Writings that is particularly pertinent to communication studies, see The Framework of Language (Michigan Studies in the Humanities, 1980). See especially the chapter on metalinguistic functions. See also Elmar Holenstein, Roman Jakobson's Approach to Language: Phenomenological Structuralism, trans. Catherine Schelbert and Tarcisius Schelbert (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976). In a complementary manner Heidegger defines logos as a gathering (reversibility?) of opposites, characterizing that which is “distinct in itself” while simultaneously gathering itself into “togetherness … Heraclitus says in Fragment 8: ‘Opposites move back and forth, the one to the other; from out of themselves they gather themselves. The conflict of opposites is a gathering, rooted in togetherness, it is logos.” Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven: Yale UP, 1959), 131.

42. Kristeva, Revolution, 123.

43. See Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” 34-61.

44. Kristeva, Revolution, 60. In “Word, Dialogue and Novel” Kristeva uses the term intertextuality to designate this movement.

45. Kristeva, Revolution, 57.

46. For a discussion of the inferential process in reading as a projection of ideological disposition, see Umberto Eco's account of the story “Lector un Fabula” in The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979), 200-266. See also Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach” in The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1974), 274-294. Kristeva discusses the inferential process as a textual productivity beyond the discursive structure of the novel in “The Bounded Text,” Desire in Language, 36-63.

47. Wilshire, 287.

48. Wilshire, 169. Merleau-Ponty takes up mimesis in the context of the problematic of being-in-itself and being-for-itself. See especially the chapter “Other Selves and the Human World,” Phenomenology of Perception, 346-365.

49. All of the following quotations are from Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, trans. Meredith Weatherby (New York: New Directions, 1958). Page numbers are indicated in the manuscript.

50. Confessions of a Mask lends itself to lyrical adaptation for performance. See Marion L. Kleinau and Janet Larsen McHughes, Theaters for Literature: A Practical Aesthetics for Group Interpretation (Sherman Oaks, California: Alfred Publishing Co., 1980). See especially the discussion of musical form in Chapter 6.

51. See note 3.

52. I critique Schrader's mode of representing Mishima's aesthetic/politics relation in “Mishima and the Confluence of Reality and Illusion,” paper presented to the Film Semiotics Division, Semiotic Society of America Conference, Cincinnati, Oct. 1988.