“À chacun son Tokyo.”¹: Marguerite Yourcenar’s Reading of Yukio Mishima as a Revolutionary Exemplar for Western Literary Art

Abstract

Marguerite Yourcenar may well be best known for her prize-winning novels that accent the trope of homosexuality, but there is another, equally engaging aspect to her work that highlights her originality: her deeply syncretic cultural perspective. Regarding her strong interest in Japanese culture, she was intrigued by the polemical and ostentatious Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima, and her 1980 text, Mishima ou la vision du vide, stands as an important milestone in the longstanding dialogue of East-West cultural relations. Mishima fascinated Yourcenar, above and beyond his interest in homosexual themes, and she identified in him a uniquely powerful exemplar of rebellion. After forming his own militia, barricading himself in the Tokyo headquarters of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, holding the commandant hostage, and committing suicide publicly on a balcony of the building through the ritual act of seppuku, Mishima became for Yourcenar a figure of almost hagiographic dimensions. Describing him dramatically as “le martyr […] du Japon héroïque,” Yourcenar presents Mishima as a figure whose art serves as inspiration both for Eastern and Western writers, while she explores his violent ideology, portraying his work as a compelling and paradoxical example of the potential of aesthetics to alter directly human culture.

Keywords:

• Marguerite Yourcenar
• Yukio Mishima
• East-West Relations
• France
• Japan

Notes

1 Marguerite Yourcenar, Le Tour de la prison. Essais et mémoires. Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” 1991.

2 Marguerite Yourcenar, Mémoires d’Hadrien. Œuvres romanesques. Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” 1982; L’Œuvre au noir. Œuvres romanesques. Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” 1982.

3 Obviously, the nature of homosexuality in Yourcenar’s work is a rich and engaging topic; on this question, see Judith Holland Sarnecki and Ingeborg Majer O’Sickey, Subversive Subjects: Reading Marguerite Yourcenar. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2004.

4 On the general influence of Eastern cultural philosophy in the novelist’s work, see Yinde Zhang, “Perspectives orientalistes: Marguerite Yourcenar et le taoïsme.” Perspectives Comparatistes, edited by Jean Bessière and Daniel-Henri Pageaux, Paris, Honoré Champion, 1999, pp. 313–335; and Pacharee Sudnasa, Marguerite Yourcenar et la voie bouddhiste: Étude de l’œuvre romanesque. Villeneuve d’Ascq, ANRT, 2003.

5 Marguerite Yourcenar, Le Dialogue dans le marécage. Paris, Gallimard, 1988.

6 Describing Yourcenar’s collection of Eastern-based stories (Nouvelles orientales. Œuvres romanesques. Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” 1982), Jan Walsh Hokenson writes: “Yourcenar’s early japonisme operates like a central hinge between the East and West portals […], while allowing her to experiment with the stylistic ventriloquism of a classical Japanese narrative voice. When most japonistes in Paris were imitating the form and tones of haiku, Yourcenar focused on the antique Noh and Monogatori, two quite different bases of Japanese classical tradition” (298). For more on this collection, see Carles Besa, “Les Nouvelles orientales de Marguerite Yourcenar: Du texte des nouvelles aux nouvelles comme texte.” Neophilologus, vol. 89, 2005, pp. 343–369; Anne-Yvonne Julien, Nouvelles orientales de Marguerite Yourcenar. Paris, Gallimard, 2006; and Catherine Barbier, Étude sur Les Nouvelles orientales, Marguerite Yourcenar. Paris, Ellipses, 2008.

7 On the specific juxtaposition of sexuality and Eastern motifs in Yourcenar’s work, see Patrick Laude, “La Connaissance orientale et le féminin chez Marguerite Yourcenar.” Symposium, vol. 60, no. 2, 2006, pp. 81–92.

8 Actually, this histrionic event did not go exactly as intended—the man whom Mishima had designated as his second, who was to complete the ritual by beheading Mishima after his evisceration, was unable to carry out his task effectively, and, in a truly grotesque fashion, was only capable of hacking gruesomely at Mishima’s neck and shoulders. Another member of the group finished the task, while the appointed second then himself also committed seppuku. On the eccentric life and creative art of this extraordinary figure, see John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography. Little, Brown and Company, 1974; Roy Starrs, Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence, and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima. U of Hawai’i P, 1994; and Richard Appignanesi, Yukio Mishima: Terror and Postmodern Japan. Icon, 2002.

9 Yourcenar is of course not the only twentieth-century French writer with whom persuasive parallels to Mishima’s thought can be established. As an example, Philippe Forest explores the dynamics of self and world, centering on what he names “l’intime” in the work of Mishima and Georges Bataille. Describing Mishima’s demise as “le plus littéraire des suicides jamais accomplis” (223), Forest demonstrates how Bataille shares with the Japanese author a multifaceted appreciation for the interconnected systems of eroticism and violence, as well as a marked influence of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.

10 On the connections between Mishima’s own preoccupations (and Yourcenar’s analysis of them) and the actual historical developments concurrent with his post-war literary activity in Japan, Langhorne argues that Mishima is “an author writing of his country in the throes of defeat, of a Japan, in fact, engaged with problems imported directly from the culture of our contemporary West” (521). In such a way, we sense the complexity of the web of East-West relations implied both in Mishima’s reading of his own culture (specifically with regard to the impact of the West) and in Yourcenar’s interpretation of that reading.

11 This passage is not included in the 1991 Pléiade version of Mishima; in the 1980 independent Gallimard version, it is presented on p. 91, in note 1. All other citations of the Mishima text come from the Pléiade edition.

12 In fact, Maindron criticizes the French writer for unilaterally depicting Mishima’s life (and death) in abstract generalizations, as she chooses to present her troubled Eastern subject as an idealized, transcendent being. Maindron asserts that what Yourcenar perceives in Mishima can only be an artificial image, an echo of the poètes maudits of the 1800s, exemplified in a figure such as Gérard de Nerval, “une manière de chevalier des temps modernes; un chevalier luciférien; une réincarnation japonaise du beau ténébreux […]” (69). See also Agnès Fayet, “Marguerite Yourcenar et ‘les voies secrètes du mysticisme’.” Bulletin International d’Études Yourcenariennes, no. 29, 2008, pp. 25–34.

13 Yourcenar states further in Mishima: “L’auteur a voulu faire l’équivalent d’un shunga, ‘peinture printanière,’ autrement dit d’une estampe érotique de la grande époque. Il y a pleinement réussi” (226).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pamela Genova

Pamela Genova is David Ross Boyd and Presidential Professor at the University of Oklahoma. She researches French literary culture (nineteenth century to the twenty-first century). Publications include many articles and three books: André Gide dans le labyrinthe de la mythotextualité, Symbolist Journals: A Culture of Correspondence, and Writing ‘Japonisme’: Aesthetic Translation in 19^th-century French Prose; the two latter won the annual book prize of the South Central MLA.