SOURCE: Nayman, Shira. “‘Sadly Wasted by Words’: Mishima's Search for the Proustian Self.” Boulevard 7, no. 1 (spring 1992): 73-92.

[In the following essay, Nayman compares the work of Mishima to Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, focusing on the conflict between writing and action, and the search for self-realization.]

Two years before his suicide in 1970, the Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima, endured several months of daunting training in a fighter-jet simulator so that he might take to the skies and experience the speed of sound. He anticipated the day of his flight in the F104 military plane with heightened excitement; and when it finally arrived, he was not disappointed. Once in motion, the chest-gripping pressure of zero gravity gave way to an extraordinary feeling of calm, a rare moment of serenity for Mishima, who usually felt as if his physical and intellectual worlds had been sundered. For a brief moment he was able to feel the glorious state in which, as he later wrote, “(t)he flesh should glow with the pervading prescience of the spirit; the spirit should glow with the overflowing prescience of the body” ([Sun and Steel.] SS, p. 100)

Mishima spent much of his life trying to free himself from language, a domain he felt had preceded his bodily self and kept it from developing. He documents this struggle in his early autobiographical novel, Confessions of a Mask, written in 1949 when Mishima was twenty-four, and almost twenty years later, in the autobiographical essay, Sun and Steel. Contemporary psychoanalysis tells us that narrating can be the scaffold for the construction of the self, but less often noted is the fact that for some, who sense that the self can only evolve in action, “telling” can be the self's undoing. This seems to have been the case for Mishima, who felt that words, strange weapons of obliteration, had laid siege to his very being.

The self-loathing that is palpable in Confessions has a lot to do with the protagonist's feeling that a “literary man” cannot know the unself-conscious, purely physical and heroic life of the man of action—of the samurai warrior, say, or the patriotic soldier. By the time he wrote Sun and Steel, Mishima had become a kendo swordsman and a serious body builder, as well as the leader of a private army, yet he was still plagued by the conflict between writing and action that so permeates Confessions.

It is difficult to take the violent imagery of this late essay lightly (although his friends at the time failed to take it as seriously as they might have). When Mishima invokes the image of an apple cleaved in two so that it might satisfy the wish to “see” its own core, one senses he has found an eerily precise metaphor for his own notion of self-realization; the solution he was to settle on—existence through the undeniable act of self-immolation—would certainly slam the door on literature, although also on life itself.

Yet for all his railing against the undermining power of words, Mishima was a writer, and a devoted one—so consistent that he never once missed the stringent deadlines typical of Japanese publishers, so meticulous that he seldom had need of the editor's pencil. Mishima was by no means unaware of this paradox: indeed, one of his great laments was that he should feel so at home in the literary domain, a climate he saw as fundamentally life-denying.

To gain a better understanding of Mishima's paradoxical autobiographical quest, we might compare his work to Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, perhaps the quintessential example of a successful literary quest for the self.¹ The work of both Proust and Mishima considered here reflects the modern search for self-realization and the problems of alienation that such a search entails. According to Lionel Trilling, it was Hegel who first described the inevitable alienation that is associated with the constant examination of one's own experience.² In Hegel's schema, however, alienation should ultimately lead to a greater sense of authenticity. This is, finally, the case for Proust's narrator in the Recherche, whose recognition of his vocation as writer places the self's possibility for fruition squarely in the narrative domain; the act of “telling” becomes an act of both redemption and creation, rescuing past time from oblivion at the same moment as it gives birth to the narrator's identity, or “true self.” The atmosphere of Mishima's journey, however, is altogether different and its outcome is in many ways antithetical to that of the Recherche [R]; for Mishima sought to dispossess himself of his native, writerly tongue, but as long as he kept writing, he continued to feel alienated, trapped within his isolation and despair. He lacked the irony which might have allowed him to see his own self as paradoxical but nonetheless real, a self whose burning theme is the dubiousness of its own existence and whose vision is, to borrow the apt subtitle to Marguerite Yourcenar's book about Mishima, a “vision of the void.”³ For Mishima, such a vision was as good as no vision, and literary self-representation came to seem simply out of the question. If he could be said in the end to declare any self at all, it is an anti-self, a mask.

I.

Proust's “moments bienheureux” contain a brilliant flash of paradox. As the narrator sips his tea or stands on the uneven cobble-stones in Venice, his senses resolve the mysteries of time by immersing him in time as they simultaneously remove him from its flow. Proust's narrator does not seem troubled by this contradiction, although he is not unaware of the ambiguity; in fact, the duality of the moment infuses him with an exalted sense of selfhood:

An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me.

(R, I/p. 48)

The odds and ends of his daily life vanish as the present fills with immediate sensations, sensations whose wellspring, the narrator later discovers, is the long-forgotten past. The present is at the same time vivified and effaced, all under the aegis of a violently satisfying intrusion of the past. And this, to the narrator, is a recovery of time, a removal from time, and a regaining of the self (“it was me”).

It is hard to imagine a better word than Auerbach's “omnitemporality”⁴ for capturing this kind of temporal experience: time is here everywhere and nowhere, undeniably present to experience yet as far as could be from life's usual pace and concerns. The fate of the self in this moment is allied to the simultaneous expansion and crystallization of time: the narrator experiences a profound sense of wholeness, vitality and personal continuity.

Proust's narrator undertakes his famous search and ultimately makes sense of the intoxicating moments of involuntary memory—through realizing that art (writing) will allow him to fix these otherwise impossibly fugitive instances, and thereby to regain time. But perhaps even more interesting than the exaltation of the moment of spontaneous, visceral recollection is the way in which Proust comes so gracefully to understand that the “time” and the “self” he regains were somehow there all along, like pearls hidden in the obfuscating folds of habitual experience:

I had arrived then at the conclusion that in fashioning a work of art we are by no means free, that we do not choose how we shall make it but that it pre-exists us and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature, that is to say to discover it.

(R, III/p. 915)

One finds time and self in fashioning the work of art, but this artwork “pre-exists us”: the notion of “fashioning,” then, transforms to that of “discovering.” Yet the work of art consists in the narrating of all the events of the narrator's life, a movement through time that must have predated the narrating. But remember, the work of art is taken to pre-exist this movement through the time that is found through the art. Thus, time and the self both prefigure and derive from the work of art, which also prefigures and derives from time and the self. A confusing state of affairs! Yet for all this, the narrator remains ultimately quite clear-headed on the subject, his confusion dissolved by the conviction that all along, no matter what else he might say, there is something to discover, be it now the work of art, now true time, now the true self. The order that prevails here is the order of the pre-ordained.

As perhaps with any ordering device, there appears to be some distortion here. For while Proust and his narrator seem convinced that the true nature of time and of the self have been regained, the reader may sense that Proust's search has itself created the treasures it set out to find: after all, it is in the writing of the narrator's book—the book Proust produced and we are reading—that both time and the self are given birth. On this point, the spiralling of the gyre must come to rest, for the book could not have predated the book: it had to be created, could not have been found.

The literary scholar, Gérard Genette, notes how Proust's penchant for relating repetitive events creates a feeling of eternal recurrence.⁵ In fact, repetitiveness is so important for Proust that even in cases in which a happening really took place just once, he often relates it as if it had happened many times. Despite the fact that Proust often explores the themes of relativism, ambiguity, and doubt, his narrative technique engenders a feeling of permanence and security: what happens has occurred before and will occur again; nothing is ever merely what it is in the moment, which is to say, purely fleeting.

As an example of the “zigzag round-trip” characteristic of Proust, Genette notes the situations in which “the narrator introduces a present, or even a past event through the anticipation of the memory he will have of it later”⁶: the event multiplies in the echo of the anticipated memory. Time is made to congeal in the bringing together of past (memory), future (anticipation), and present (event). Proust's famous use of prolonged metaphor contributes further weight to the repetitive feel, doubling an event or experience in the elaborate playing out of the comparison. Proust's narrative method thus layers filmy recollections into a graspable wad one can call time or the self.

An even more pervasive narrative element in the Recherche, Genette notes, further serves to reify Time and the Self: the knowing “voice” of the narrator, which derives from the fact that the “narrating I” is a transformed individual, a realized self no longer subject to the self-undermining doubts suffered by the “narrated I.” As the philosopher Richard Rorty puts it, “[h]e had written a book and thus created a self—the author of that book.”⁷ For Genette, the later revelation of the Recherche—that the narrator indeed becomes a writer—amounts to a “quasi-monopoly” of knowledge which infuses the entire account: the reader is subordinate to the authority of the mature narrator who willfully determines if, when, and how to include her in the circle of his knowledge.

These narrative levels make for a curious coexistence of two seemingly contradictory tones: the uncertainty which imbues the narrator's formless experience, and the “certainty of Truth”⁸ which is stamped into the narrative method. The work of Henri Bergson can illuminate this intriguing mix of tones—the strange coming together of a fundamentally evanescent experiential flow and a self grounded in certainty. Proust had been a careful and thorough reader of Bergson and was often seen as strikingly Bergsonian, although he minimized the extent of the philosopher's influence on his work (a minimization that at least one important critic has called disingenuous⁹). Proust's disavowal notwithstanding, the Recherche in many ways embodies Bergson's notions of time and experience.

While Bergson depicts lived experience as a ceaseless flux of “immediate sensations,” he identifies this flux with a deeper consciousness—the “élan vital,” or vital spirit. By truly living in the “durée réelle,” or real duration, we discover the vital spirit which returns us to our “essential selves.” Thus the sensory flux is both as unbounded as sunlight and as fixed as an anchor. Bergson conceives of these realms in a way that dissolves the possible contradiction between experience as flux and experience as containing an essence: the “élan vital” is not a fixed, static entity, but a kind of cosmic momentum, a momentum which binds us to ourselves as living, existing beings at the same time as it propels us toward some unknown telos in the shared universe of moving time.

Like a current in a stream, the present of the “immediate sensation” cannot be separated from the currents of past and future, a notion that is fully manifest in Proust's Recherche. Bergson suggests that the experiential flux is always shot through with all modalities of time¹⁰: when you smell a rose, for example, there is the drift of rose fragrances from other times, the recollection of the rose-embroidered nightdress your mother wore when you were a child, perhaps, or of a flower garden visited in the south of Spain to which you hope to return this summer. Such a confluence of sensation, recollection and expectation is decidedly idiosyncratic: no two people would experience the smell of the rose in quite the same way.

While such a vision stresses the seamless unity of time's past, present and future, we can see how the past is nonetheless accorded primacy: the accrual of associations and sensations both weights the immediate present with meaning and propels itself into the future, which will likewise come to be an accrual of sensations. The uniqueness of the experience lends further density to this grounding of the self: it is not just any meaning that permeates the present, but my meaning, my own Personal History. Bergson's notion of the present, then, contains the past as an actual and enduring force. The narrator of the Recherche has a similar notion of the present, a present in which the past inheres as the repository of vital, “true” experience.

Proust's arduous labor to create a language of the senses, like Bergson's, was enchanted by the belief that he could not fail. For Proust's “moments bienheureux” cannot go wrong: they are the startlingly authentic elements within a usually fallible memory, and it is they which can lead us back to “the discovery of our true life,” (R, III/p. 915), to a true self much like Bergson's “true and concrete self.”¹¹

Mishima was already a serious writer when he first read Proust, shortly after his fifteenth birthday. The opening lines of Confessions, [C] the novel he wrote in his early twenties, recall the Recherche in a number of ways:

For many years I claimed I could remember things seen at the time of my own birth. Whenever I said so, the grownups would laugh at first, but then, wondering if they were not being tricked, they would look distastefully at the pallid face of that unchildlike child. Sometimes I happened to say so in the presence of callers who were not close friends of the family; then my grandmother, fearing I would be taken for an idiot, would interrupt in a sharp voice and tell me to go somewhere else and play.

(C, p. 1)

The early pages of the novel take us back to the narrator's early life, as do those of the Recherche, in which the narrator's semi-conscious kinesthetic sensations unpack the stages of his life in room-images. Here, too, the narrator plunges into the tale of his life with an unusual kind of memory; a recollection of a moment that is neither wakeful nor dream and which we are likely to take as being associated with the mysteries of the unconscious. Even the opening phrase echoes Proust's (“For a long time …”) and similarly establishes a particular kind of narrative vantage: the narrator sees not only that moment recalled, but also the ripples of habit and happening surrounding that moment which were to spread through the time of many years and the space of the family drawing room, with its nodal figure (the grandmother) and its world of social activity.

The final sentence of the passage, however, institutes a principle of extrusion in which Mishima's young alter-ego protagonist is cast out of the family circle—sent off “somewhere else” so as not to be an embarrassment to the guests. How different from the safe family circle enclosing the young narrator in the early sections of the Recherche—a portent of the estrangement and exclusion from the world of others that runs through both Confessions and Sun and Steel.

Still, Mishima situations his novel within the Proustian tradition of an inward journey toward self-discovery. Early on, Mishima, like Proust, has his narrator recount crucial childhood memories and tell of his belief that the key to his life lies in making sense of these images. Like Proust's narrator, the narrator of Confessions assesses his memories as they unfold, leafs through them to locate the origins of his later aesthetics and philosophy, fidgets at the tangle of threads that have made him a writer. Throughout, we are made aware of the dual existence of the young and the mature narrator and of their complex and shifting relationship, as in the following passage:

Ever since childhood my ideas concerning human existence have never once deviated from the Augustinian theory of predetermination. … I had been handed what might be called a full menu of all the troubles of my life while still too young to read it. But all I had to do was spread my napkin and face the table. Even the fact that I would now be writing an odd book like this was precisely noted on the menu, where it must have been before my eyes from the beginning.

(C, p. 14-15)

Both narrators embark on an interior journey, but whereas Proust's narrator seems fortified from the start by the enlivening recollection of the madeleine, Mishima's narrator trudges along with the gloomy presentiment of certain failure. The above quotation reveals the belief that casts a dark shadow over Mishima's autobiographical quest, the belief that ultimately there can be no quelling of the forces of predetermination. For Mishima, this meant there would be no escape from the emotional climate he discerned in those images of the past. Far from evoking the kind of cosmic harmony that flooded Proust's narrator as he tasted the tea-soaked crumb, Mishima's early recollections fill him with horror; and the more completely they present themselves, the more he feels at their mercy. Casting back to childhood for the “wellsprings of [his] own feelings and actions,” the narrator finds, to his alarm, that he is little different from his past self: these early moments contain the same dreaded feeling of emptiness which now plagues him—an emotional climate which the narrator senses is unlikely to change. If anything, the narrator intuits that the present is the harbinger of an even more troubling future.

[The] so-called “tragic things” of which I was becoming aware were probably only shadows cast by a flashing presentiment of grief still greater in the future, of a lonelier exclusion still to come.

(C, p. 11)

This passage reveals a soothsayer's form of reminiscence: the narrator reads his later life back onto his childhood, seeing his earlier distress as merely the shadow flashed backward of what was later to be. This is an inverted kind of predetermination in which present and past take their shape from the future, a reversal of the temporal cosmology found in the Recherche, where it is the past that is dominant and authentic—the vault of truth.

Unlike both the narrator of the Recherche and Proust himself, Mishima had had no revelation, prior to writing his novel, about the efficacy of art (writing) in regaining (creating) the self. Without advance knowledge as to what he would find, the narrator of Confessions is, at the beginning of the book, much closer to the reader's state of innocence than is the narrator of the Recherche: we feel as if we are embarking on the journey together.

Indeed, in his autobiographical quest, Mishima senses that art will be of little use. The fact that reality is fleeting and that one can never be certain of capturing it are for him two sides of the same issue. “For me,” Mishima wrote, “beauty is always retreating from one's grasp” (SS, p. 24); as skillful a writer as he was, he felt his art could lay no claim to grasping reality, and in fact might actually efface it:

[T]here comes into existence a kind of fictional “thing”—the work of art—and it is this interference from a large number of such “things” that has steadily perverted and altered reality.

(SS, p. 34)

More and more, for Mishima, art comes to seem but a shameful, skulking shadow of life, his writerly pursuits nothing more than cowardice. This sentiment could not be more different from that of Proust's narrator, close to the end of the Recherche, in the following passage:

The greatness of true art … was to find, grasp, and bring out that reality which we live at a great distance from … that reality which we run the risk of dying without having known, and which is quite simply our own life. True life, life finally discovered and illuminated, is literature.

(R, III/p. 895)

The narrator of Confessions has no such answers. The mature narrator is as puzzled as the reader: while he knows many facts about the young narrator's life, this earlier self remains a mystery. The literary task of Proust's mature narrator seems to lend itself more naturally to a narrative story line than that of Mishima's narrator, for it is a story of a fait accompli, of how Marcel became a writer. The mature narrator of Confessions, on the other hand, is pushing ahead to an unknown telos. He spreads out before himself the painful, hollow images of his past in the hope of gleaning some understanding of his present, pressing dilemmas. Mishima's autobiographical works thus read less as narratives than as chronicles—are less stories told than experiments described, an approach Mishima may well have consciously adopted. “I will turn upon myself the scalpel of psychological analysis I have sharpened on fictive characters,” he wrote in a note to his editor of Confessions, which he was in the midst of writing. “I will attempt to dissect myself alive.”¹²

II.

The first crucial moment of involuntary recalls initiates the narrator of the Recherche into the belief that the past contains the essence of a greater reality—a belief so compelling that one wonders whether, despite all the signs of contradiction and distortion of time, there is some truth to the narrator's implied claim that the events of his early childhood contained the real kernel both of time and of his self. Yet, from the start, there seem to be clues that the narrator senses this “essence” might be more fabricated than revealed. In short, a puzzling question remains: are time and the self in Proust's Recherche totally fashioned by distorting, narrative means, or are the narrator and Proust more like the oyster, worrying a pre-existing speck of self with narrative until it becomes the lost pearl?

Early in the Recherche the young narrator, on a walk with his grandfather, pauses to inhale the scent of hawthorn flowers. Aware of the evanescence of this sensory pleasure, he deliberately turns away from the flowers in order to return to them afresh, as if this might make the moment of smelling more tangible, but the gesture fails. Miraculously, however, the moment is fixed once and for all by the unexpected voice of the narrator's grandfather calling from across the way: “You're fond of hawthorns; just look at this pink thorn-bush—isn't it lovely?” The narrator is immediately inspired to a state of almost divine pleasure, of the sort one is likely to feel

when we are shown a painting of which we have hitherto seen no more than a penciled sketch, or when a piece of music which we have heard only on the piano appears to us later clothed in all the colors of the orchestra.

(R, I/p. 151-2)

The smell of the flowers was certainly heavenly to the child but the rapture of this scene is the rapture of having his fondness for them named. The narrator is to spend many long years in search of just this kind of joy and will find it, ultimately, in the act of telling, an act which will transform the ephemerality of lived experience into something tangible, much as his grandfather's words had done many years earlier.

The narrator himself explains that the power of these important memories comes from the fact that they “concealed within them not a sensation dating from an earlier time, but a new truth.”¹³ Yet we cannot ignore the child narrator's delight in the pretty scent which was clearly present, if somewhat precariously, before his grandfather called out to him. It is in this element of true pleasure, in the “penciled sketches” or “simple piano melodies” that animate the narrator's past, that one can see the precursors of the self he is later to fashion more fully through writing.

As the novel progresses, the narrator moves towards a more conscious awareness of the creative nature of the self he has set out to find. This awareness does not, however, undercut his belief in the reality of the object of his journey but rather, heightens it. It is from within this paradoxical idea-climate that the narrator's theory of art develops: the closer he comes to realizing that the fullness of being he seeks emerges only by way of creative “interpretation,” the more compelling he finds the idea that a “greater reality” is to be reached through art.

Late in the Recherche, reading the journal account written by the Goncourt brothers of evenings at Mme. Verdurin's, Marcel is enchanted by the crowd and their glittering exchanges and yearns to be included in their charmed circle. As vivid as the account appears, however, Marcel becomes distracted by another reality which seems to be rapping steadily at the pasteboard door of this written salon—his own recollections of how tedious evenings at the Verdurin's had come to seem; how commonplace the guests, how predictable and empty the conversation and social niceties.

Marcel gives voice to the thought that these no doubt “insignificant creatures … owed their prestige only to an illusory magic of literature,” and at this thought, his regret for having “no gift for literature” momentarily eases. But almost immediately his anguish returns, intensified. Literature can hardly be dismissed as mere sophistry if it can create such full-bodied meaning. And who is to say that this literary world is not, after all, a greater reality than the one in which he had sat among “insignificant creatures,” sipping soup? In his zeal to believe in adventure and in the vitality of the spirit, the narrator blurs the line between these two “realities” and the one comes to seem a transforming conduit to the other:

[R]eading teaches us to take a more exalted view of the value of life, a value at the time we did not know how to appreciate and of whose magnitude we have only become aware through the book.

(R, III/p. 740)

Marcel is determined to consider as the “greater reality” that which most fully endows the “exalted view of the value of life.” This is a vision that conflates objective “fact” and subjective “creation”: the past is seen as more truly alive for having been apprehended through literature. It is art that makes possible “the discovery of our true life” (R, III/p. 915).

The tenor of Mishima's autobiographical literary enterprise, by contrast, is one of deep distrust. For him, language is always tied to thoughts which can only push further away the immediate sensations it was summoned to retrieve. Mishima concludes not only that narrative decisively undoes the self, but also that from early childhood, words had prevented him from ever feeling real, alive and whole. To what extent, we might now ask, was Mishima's retrospective conviction about his past an accurate recollection, and to what extent a projection backward of the opaque emotional reality of his adult self?

I do not know whether it was my mother, a nurse, a maid, or an aunt who was leading me by the hand. Nor is the season of the year distinct.

(C, p. 7)

With these words the narrator of Confessions begins the account of his earliest memory. Gone is the social and familial activity of the novel's opening paragraph; here we see a child unaware of the beauty and rhythm of nature and attached to a mere hand: “Someone was coming down the slope. … He was a night-soil man, a ladler of excrement” (C, p. 7). The young narrator, a child of four, is transfixed by the image of this young man, but it is a painful encounter: “Looking up at that dirty youth, I was choked by desire, thinking, ‘I want to change into him,’ thinking, ‘I want to be him’” (C, p. 9).

We know that the early memories of Proust's narrator opened for him a mystically pleasurable emotional domain. How different recollection is for Mishima's narrator, who tells us that the series of memories he is about to recount “kept tormenting and frightening me all my life” (C, p. 8). But what was the source of this anguish? To begin with, the above passages reveal the child's extreme isolation. There is no god-like maternal presence, no favorite nurse or relative, only some “unremembered woman.” Simply unaware of the possibility of human involvement, the child's attention fixes on the surfaces of things and palpates them for meaning. Unable to imagine emotional exchange, the child improvises another means of allaying his isolation, at least in his mind's eye: the idea of virtually climbing into the skin of the other, whose existence seems embedded in the specificity and strangeness of his occupation (“‘I want to be him’”).

The narrator puzzles to understand the curious reaction of this past four-year-old self and discovers that the night-soil man's occupation seemed to embody “a feeling like a remarkable mixture of nothingness and vital power” (C, p. 9). Other occupations would invoke in the child this same unsettling emotion, and the narrator circles around these images, gleaning further clues to their mystery:

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 trying to share in their existences.

(C, p. 10)

Feeling excluded from existence itself, the child fixes his gaze on the visible signs of “identity” he sees around him, as if by the sheer force of his yearning he might take them for his own. The mixture of “nothingness and vital power” that the child attributed to the night-soil man's occupation might now be more easily understood. Feeling unformed himself and without an identity, the narrator could perhaps most strongly identify with the force of nothingness: how potently attractive, then, might seem an occupation which could whip “vital power” into this self-same realm.

The narrator comes to believe that he is excluded from the world of others and from the possibility of an existentially grounded identity because of his physical weakness. This he attributes to a precocious facility with words which overtook him long before he could issue protest and which estranged him from the life of the body. The “re-creation” possibilities of narrative in the Recherche that Genette points to, then, could not be further from Mishima's notion of writing:

In the average person, I imagine, the body precedes language. In my case, words came first of all; then—belatedly, with every appearance of extreme reluctance, and already clothed in concepts—came the flesh. It was already, as goes without saying, sadly wasted by words.

(SS, p. 6)

Mishima's is a very specific kind of Cartesianism. The mind-body duality of his vision involves a split between intellect and flesh in which the emotional life, like some extra organ, is just another aspect of physicality. Mishima explains that language had corroded his emotional universe from early childhood the way acid acts on a metal plate; elsewhere, he says words had infested his being like termites, eating away his emotional and physical vitality as it struggled to emerge.

Implicit in these images is the narrator's belief that he had never really experienced a vital, existentially secure self in the past. It is partly this supposition that leads the narrator early in Confessions to intuit that his self-discovery mission is futile. In the following passage from Sun and Steel, Mishima is referring to a childhood moment that was to stay with him his entire life—the time that he stood, mesmerized, watching the shrine-bearers shouldering their festive yoke:

I had a premonition at that instant that all my feeling of subjective time, or timelessness, might one day gush forth from within me and flood into the mold of that scene, to become an exact imitation of its people and movements and sounds; that simultaneous with the completion of this copy, the original might melt away into the distant perspectives of real and objective time; and that I might be left with nothing more than the mere imitation or, to say it another way, with nothing more than an accurately stuffed specimen of my childhood.

(SS, p. 29)

The first part of the passage is an uncannily close description of what in many ways Proust did achieve in the Recherche. But Mishima then voices the fear that such a recollected self would be a “mere imitation.” The narrator does not believe, ultimately, in the possibility of self-creation through even the most evocatively relived or narrated memory: he would be left with only “an accurately stuffed specimen” of childhood, no more than a false and useless replica. Mishima had read Proust when he wrote this passage, which seems to judge as misguided any attempt to create a self through recovering lost time.

On the other hand, it may be that Mishima did not so much condemn the idea of a self grounded in literary recollection and expression as bemoan his own inability to achieve such a self:

In a more “healthy” process of development, the two tendencies [physicality and writing] can often work together without conflict, even in the case of a born writer, giving rise to a highly desirable state of affairs in which a training in words leads to a fresh discovery of reality.

(SS, p. 7)

Although he was not, of course, without conflict, Proust's narrator, as we have seen, did believe in the possibility of rediscovering reality through writing, a possibility Mishima sees as resting on a crucial precondition, that of having first “possessed the reality of the flesh still unsullied by words” (SS, p. 7). Mishima could be talking about his literary predecessor, Proust, whose Recherche does achieve a “rediscovery” of reality. But Mishima goes on to say that any attempt on his own part to “rediscover” reality would be simply absurd, because he had never, in the first place, achieved the kind of “reality of the flesh” he equates with “reality.”

Unlike Proust's narrator, then, Mishima could not see childhood as a reservoir of emotional plenitude, since he believed that from the start words had precluded his own “healthy” emotional development. Far from feeling he needed to find the writer in himself, Mishima longed to be free of an art that possessed him, an art that was not the soil in which the self might grow, but a burial ground for its remains.

Mishima himself wrote that words could return a once healthy self, gone astray, to itself. But without a self to be waylaid in the first place, he came to feel that writing could only increase his alienation. In this sense, Mishima differed from his romantic and modernist predecessors who believed their task lay in finding ways to put true experience into words. The challenge, as Mishima saw it, was not to overcome some gap between words and experience, but to free the body from the strangle-hold of language in order to make true sensation possible.

We recall Mishima's belief that from an early age he had been “sadly wasted by words”; he was convinced he did not have the automatic birthright to existence that others had. But one can't help hearing in his repeated, emphatic claims, a certain, if somewhat inverted, cult of the self, just as one sees the worshippers in a black mass gripped by a driving, if perverse, faith. Circling around the image of his own enfeebled self, Mishima pays homage to that same priesthood of the self which is so sanctified in Proust's Recherche.

Both Proust and Mishima finally took extreme measures in their respective quests for self. Proust, as is well known, sealed himself away from society for the last nineteen years of his life so he could devote himself to his monumental book, reducing his once flamboyant social existence to exchanges of letters or the briefest of visits from the occasional friend. Mishima, on the other hand, became increasingly committed to physical activities. For the last ten years of his life, he devoted his days to muscle-building and swordsmanship, although he continued to write through the nights as he had always done. At the age of forty-three, two years before his death, Mishima formed the private army he called the Shield Society and threw himself into running the organization—designing uniforms and writing manifestos, making public speeches and plotting military-style strategies. Those who knew him say Mishima became noticeably happier from this time on, and more affectionate toward others. He particularly enjoyed his leadership role and acted the father-figure to his young recruits, receiving them at all hours of the night to hear their troubles or to offer advice (Mishima had never before allowed his night writing-time to be interrupted). Determined to achieve the kind of heroic life he had for so long glorified, Mishima gradually withdrew emotional energy from his literary endeavors.

The Shield Society was to be his vehicle to action. Although many people saw this right-wing organization as an indication that he had become politically driven, Mishima had, in fact, never really been a political man. In his biography, Mishima, John Nathan argues convincingly that in founding his organization, Mishima was simply looking for a means to enact his long-held vision of a certain kind of life. “[T]here was something inside me that couldn't be satisfied with art alone,” Mishima explained to students at a “teach-in” late in 1968: “It occurred to me that what I needed was action with which to move my spirit.”¹⁴

“Action” soon came to mean “seppuku” for Mishima. Nathan suggests that as Mishima's commitment to this idea firmed, he became impatient with his writing. Mishima had never left any project incomplete and was hardly about to abandon his final work, then in progress, The Sea of Fertility. But, Nathan goes on to say, entire sections of the final volume of this tetralogy were written in distraction, for he was at this time concentrating on the plans for his ritual suicide. Mishima completed the novel about three months before his death, and from that day on, occupied himself almost exclusively with the final, elaborate arrangements for his final, horrifying deed. On November 25 of 1970, Mishima strode into Army Headquarters with his three assistants and tied up the head of the Japanese Armed Forces, keeping dozens of officers at bay with ancient, wildly swinging ceremonial swords. After delivering a speech to the troops (he had insisted they be assembled) about the need to return to the Samurai ways of Old Japan, Mishima disembowelled himself, then was beheaded by an assistant, all according to his carefully devised scheme.

“Dress my body in a Shield Society uniform,” he wrote as a last request to the intelligence officer of his organization:

Give me white gloves and a soldier's sword in my hand, and then do me the favor of taking a photograph. My family may object, but I want evidence that I died not as a literary man but as a warrior.¹⁵

Who is Mishima, here, intent on convincing? He no doubt guessed that the world would continue to think of him as an author—after all, he had written some hundred volumes of drama, fiction, and criticism, and had been nominated three times for the Nobel prize in literature. Perhaps Mishima wanted this “evidence” for himself: the request has the ring of a man who protests too much. But as aggressively as he tried to distance himself from his literary life, Mishima was, in the end, buried also as a writer. His wife, Yoko, perhaps understanding just how irrevocably her husband had been a man of words, flouted his final wish to be buried only with his sword. At the last minute, she slipped Mishima's fountain pen into the coffin, along with a handful of manuscript pages.

Notes

1. The works of Mishima discussed here are more avowedly autobiographical than Proust's, and so one must exercise caution when drawing parallels between the narrator of the Recherche and Proust himself. We do know, however, that Proust had a revelation about his literary vocation that was similar to the narrator's in the Recherche and that generally, there was a close parallel between Proust's and the narrator's relationship to writing. (See, for example, Roger Shattuck, Marcel Proust, New York: Viking Press, 1974; and Wallace Fowlie, A Reading of Proust, Chicago: Midway Reprint, 1963) On this point, then, the parallel between Proust and his narrator might be less controversially made than on points having more to do with biographical detail or the relationships between characters.

2. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).

3. Marguerite Yourcenar, Mishima: A Vision of the Void (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1986).

4. See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 544.

5. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans, by J. E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 159.

6. Genette, Narrative Discourse, p. 82.

7. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 102.

8. Genette, Narrative Discourse, p. 259.

9. See Roger Shattuck, Marcel Proust (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 142-4.

10. See Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. T. E. Hulme (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1949), pp. 160-165.

11. See Schwartz, Matrix of Modernism, p. 25-30.

12. Quoted in John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1974), p. 94.

13. Quoted in Paul Jay, Being in the Text (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 148.

14. Nathan, Mishima, p. 241.

15. Quoted in Nathan, Mishima, p. 273. Nathan also quotes from Mishima's last letter to his family: “I have thrown the pen away. Since I die not as a literary man but entirely as a military man I would like the character for sword—bu—to be included in my Buddhist (posthumous) name. The character for pen—bun—need not appear” (p. 273).