it is the best of times, it is the worst of times (2)

And yet another small serendipity that mitigates the exhaustion and discomfort of departure. How strangely comforting indeed to find this long-forgotten book in a corner of my messy, in-transit library and to retrieve a passage that pretty much sums up my current frame of mind.

A salutary reminder -- and a celebration -- of the absolute necessity of breaking out from the traps in which we often find ourselves caught and which can shield us from truth and emotion, from life itself: the trap of false comfort and safety, the trap of spurious alibis and reassurances, the trap of numbing habits and routines, the trap of fear.

Despite and beyond all the uncertainties, the hesitations, the despairs.

*       *       *

They walked into what you call traps because they find a lot more shelter and a bit more food in the trap than elsewhere, even though they might finish up in the trap with no room or chance to do anything but wait patiently to be pecked to hell.

--Gwyn Thomas, All Things Betray Thee (1949; London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986).

writing matters (4)

The invading letter I could have written, I should have written, no matter what.

But will never write.

You are not a memory, you are a landscape; at a certain moment of your suffering, you sent me a landscape that is a dune in front of the sea; a landscape with the scent of the sea breeeze in which I lay my spirit to behold time; no being of a companion dwells therein, but I see him, and it seems to me that the dune should not always be deserted; we are sitting on the sand, marvelling at the beauty coming out of our emptiness; and I cannot efface the pain, but on the sand of the dune, amidst some trees, there is the joy we recognised as fragile and precious.

--Maria Gabriela Llansol, Na Casa de Julho e Agosto / In the House of July and August (Lisbon: Relogio D'Agua, 2003), p. 29. Translated from the Portuguese by DK.

the murmur of the world (2)

Computer technology, driven by the pilot-industries of the military-industrial complex, places top priority on transmitting the message as effectively, efficiently, and effortlessly as possible. It is computer technology that shaped and forms contemporary communication theory. But so little of what we say to one another makes any sense! So little of it makes any pretense to be taken seriously, so much of it simple malarkey, in which we indulge ourselves with the same warm visceral pleasure that we indulge in belching and passing air. It really is, Nietzsche long ago pointed out, bad taste to make serious pronouncements and work out syllogistically valid arguments in civilized company. So much language added to industry and enterprises that are programmed by the laws of nature or rational science and that operate all by themselves, so much of language added to fumblings and breakdowns and even disasters has no other function than to provoke laughter. Laughter mixing in moans, howls, screams into the racket of the world. As much of what we say when we embrace we say to release our sighs and our sobs into the rains and the seas.

All these stammerings, exclamations, slurrings, murmurs, rumblings, cooings, and laughter, all this noise we make when we are together makes it possible to view us as struggling, together, to jam the unequivocal voice of the outsider: the facilitator of communication, the prosopopeia of maximal elimination of noise, so as to hear the distant rumble of the world and its demons in the midst of the ideal city of human communication.

--Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 104-05.

the murmur of the world (1)

How painfully meaningless, despite the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated means at our disposal, what passes for communication has become.

In our search for effectiveness and efficiency, how ruthlessly unforgiving, how intolerant to noise, blunders, hesitations, detours, breakdowns, stammerings, rumblings, creakings, murmurs we have become.

In our self-absorbed search for sameness, how insensitive to the otherness of the other -- his face, her voice, his body, her time and rhythm, his vulnerability, her struggles, his faults and demons, her loneliness, his difference, our irreducible uniqueness.

How deaf to the unruly, unpredictable murmur of the world.

How sadly in-humane it has all become.

*       *       *

To address someone is not simply to address a source of information; it is to address one who will answer and answer for his or her answer. The time delay, between statement and response, is the time in which the other, while fully present there before one, withdraws into the fourth dimension -- reaffirming his or her otherness, rising up behind whatever he presents of himself, and rising up ever beyond whatever I represent of her and present to her -- to contest it or to confirm it.

To enter into conversation with another is to lay down one's arms and one's defenses; to throw open the gates of one's own positions; to expose oneself to the other, the outsider; and to lay oneself open to surprises, contestation, and inculpation. It is to risk what one found or produced in common. To enter into conversation is to struggle against the noise, the indifference, and the vested interests, the big brother and little Hitlers always listening to -- in order to expose oneself to the alien, the Balinese and the Aztec, the victims and the excluded, the Palestinians and the Quechuas and the Crow Indians, the dreamers, the mystics, the mad, the tortured, and the birds and the frogs. One enters into conversation in order to become an other for the other.

--Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 87-88.

'the nymph with the broken back', or: enduring misogynistic clichés...

Scene from Alban Berg's Lulu
Soloists, English National Opera, 2005
http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2005/Jan-Jun05/lulu1804.htm

Enduring but most definitely not endearing clichés.

And wouldn't it be wonderful indeed—a sign of genuine, humane Progress—if men and women began to see, through the glossy veneer of aestheticised morbid violence, what these images really stand for and the profoundly sad truths they convey?

Again: sic transit gloria mundi...

*       *       *

The term masochism was invented by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who, in his Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), linked the phenomenon he defined as "the wish to suffer pain and be subjected to force" (86) to the name of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a popular author of the period whose heroes usually spent their time in enthusiastic pursuit of maltreatment. But Kraft-Ebing saw the phenomenon of masochism as being a true "perversion" only in men. "In woman," he contended, "voluntary subjection to the opposite sex is a physiological phenomenon. Owing to her passive role in procreation and long-existent social conditions, ideas of subjection are, in woman, normally connected with the idea of sexual relations. They form, so to speak, the harmonics which determine the tone-quality of feminine feeling." Nature itself, Kraft-Ebing insisted, has given woman "an instinctive inclination to voluntary subordination to man; [who] will notice that exaggeration of customary gallantry is very distasteful to women, and that a deviation from it in the direction of masterful behavior, though loudly reprehended, is often accepted with secret satisfaction. Under the veneer of polite society the instinct of feminine servitude is everywhere discernible" (130).

The late-nineteenth-century male thus had it from the very highest, most advanced "scientific" authority that women, even if they might seem to indicate otherwise, wanted to be beaten and subjected to violence. In addition to being instructed by what Kraft-Ebing was saying, men were by 1893 being reassured by such other eminent--and widely read--authorities as Lombroso and Ferrero, that the "normal woman is naturally less sensitive to pain than a man" (The Female Offender, 150), so that there was clearly absolutely no reason to be squeamish about pushing women around a bit. On the basis of the "findings" of these and other "scientific" observers, the proponents of dualistic thought thus installed another durable antifeminine myth whose ramifications still echo daily through the popular arts of our time. In the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an author's adherence to the theory that women just naturally liked to be beaten was a sign of extreme intellectual sophistication. It was an indication that one was truly well informed about matters of scientific interest. . . .

In France, Pierre Louys, in Woman and Puppet (1898), had the perverse heroine of that novel, Concha, respond in spasms of yelping ardor to the narrator's violent attack upon her, during which "for perhaps a quarter of an hour" he "struck her with the regularity of a peasant pounding a flail . . . and always on the same spots, the top of the head and the left shoulder" (218). In a paroxysm of masochistic ecstasy she cries, "How well you have beaten me, my heart! How sweet it was! How good it felt--" Later Concha confesses to her attacker that if she told him lies, it was specifically "to have you beat me, Mateo. When I feel your strength, I love you, I love you so; you cannot imagine how happy it makes me weep because of you." And, beguilingly, she asks, "Mateo, will you beat me again? Promise me that you will beat me hard! You will kill me! Tell me that you will kill me!" (220)

Like Louys' heroine, Frank Wedekind's Lulu, the archetypal woman at the center of his play Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box (as well as Alban Berg's opera based on Wedekind's plays) does not really become interested in a man until he becomes violent toward her. To one of her early lovers she exults, "How proud I am that you will do anything to humiliate me! You degrade me as deep as a man can degrade a woman . . ." (77). For Lulu, as for Concha, the male's violence toward her is supposed to be proof of her power over her man, and this knowledge presumably makes that violence an erotic stimulus for her. The dictum pronounced by another of the men in Lulu's life, that "beating or love-making, it's all one to a woman" (122), had become one of the most common clichés among intellectuals at the turn of the century. . . .

It is clear that few of the anti-feminine clichés which had become institutionalized by the 1890s have had a more immediately destructive influence on the daily lives of women throughout the twentieth century than this particular pair of male wishfulfilling items of late-nineteenth century "scientific" knowledge. This is the period in which recourse to scientific truth rather than "faith" became the principal justification for the brutal and widespread oppression of human beings on the basis of race and sex, and for the institutionalization of concepts which ultimately led to the blanket justification of violence done to others because one group had decided that another "had asked for it." The women-want-to-be-raped theory is an integral part of the overall self-serving pattern of the rationalization of aggression which still dominates the world today, and which was crucial to the development of the imperialist mentality at the turn of the century.

It may seem a rather bathetic mismatch of causes to point to the supinely sprawling feminine nudes favored by painters of the Paris salons as a contributing factor to the spread of the aggressive mentality in the late nineteenth-century life. But inevitably the mentality of rape, whether it be personal and physical or cultural and intellectual, requires that guilt and temptation, and hence the justification for punishment, are to be seen in the other, in this case the woman. All too often the gestures and expressions of ecstatic transport accompanying the supine posture of these nudes suggest a perverse excess of erotic abandonment as the origin of the women's forced posture, as if somehow, in the midst of an intense spasm of uncontrollable desire, they had succeeded in breaking their own backs, thereby dooming themselves to stay forever paralyzed and helpless in the distorted position in which the artist chose to paint them. The sprawling nymphs' helpless postures, joined with their obvious ecstasy, thus suggested quite deliberately to the viewer that these women were, so to speak, "asking to be raped." 

--Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (0xford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 101-05. [emphases added]

Arthur Hacker (1858-1919), "Leaf Drift" (1902)

a season in purgatory (6)

Sexual helplessness bears monsters of perversion. Symposia of Amazons, and other horrible themes. A threefold cycle: Carmen-Gretchen-Isolde. A Nana cycle, Théâtre des Femmes. Disgust: a lady, the upper part of her body lying on a table, spills a vessel filled with disgusting things.

--Paul Klee, Diaries.

Another perplexing contradiction in Kyoka's depictions of women (or of 'Woman', as he never really describes real women, but an archetypal, ghostly femininity): on the one hand, he has been regarded as a fierce critic of the then new ethics of Meiji society that pursued worldly success at all costs, to which he opposed, in the gothic tradition of Poe, love as a substitute for social and economic power. Yet, on the other hand, his fascination with women as the embodiment of evil was also unwittingly attuned to that very same emerging ethos within which the evolving male was expected to combine an attitude of socioeconomic belligerence and distrust of others with an ideal of personal sacrifice or abstinence in the service of worldly success.

Such dynamics were already at full throttle in the West, as Bram Dijkstra illustrates in his wonderfully provocative study Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture:

The symphonic incantations of ever newly curving female bodies were like the choral movements of a satanic invitation to worldly abandon. Women offered melodies of cradled melancholy to the laboring brain of sainted masculinity. Steely-browed and lean-loined Ulysses sailed past these aching calls, seeking financial self-sufficiency among the shoals of vice. The late nineteenth-century middle-class male already knew that Superman's ego was powered by gold. He feared that the Kryptonite of beauty could only weaken the essence of a transcendent power he knew to embed in his seed. Even the thought of a strong woman with a will, a mind, and wishes of her own was enough to weaken the musculature of a selfhood nourished by the bitter herb of monetary gain. The ardor of man's will to power seemed to shrivel into insignificance before the tumescent homage of his body to the wonder of a woman radiant with life and unmoved by the commands of cash. (p. 235)

(The recently) modern Japan, of course, had its own blend of native and imported traditions—Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism—which, combined with the newly imported Western logic of capitalism, did even more ruthlessly contribute to put women in their proper place. (And thus the 'natural order of things' has been, to this very day.)

Hence the wanderers and the 'holy men' who traverse the anxiety-ridden sexual territory of Kyoka's stories are not, ironically, that different from the men of the business world he so intensely despised for their lack of refinement and taste. What all these male 'ascetic' figures have in common is their search for some form of transcendence and their ultimate determination to keep Woman within her role as the soft, passive human clay that can be molded according to male fantasies and perceptions concerning the structures of ideal beauty and behaviour.

The idyll is shattered, lo and behold, when she slithers out of the frame of domestic bliss and motherly self-negation to reveal, in Dijkstra's words, 'the animal beneath the veneer of civilization with which the poetic spirit of man had covered her'—'a swamp, a palpitating expanse of instinctive physical greed whose primary natural function [is] to try to catch, engulf and, if possible, absorb the male and make him subservient to her simplistic physical needs' (p. 237).

And in Kyoka, as usual, the escape from such predicament is self-denial and/in death.

*       *       *

My base desires had brought me to this, to this point of indecision. As long as I could see her face and hear her voice, what did it matter if she and her idiot husband shared a bed? At least it would be better than enduring endless austerities and living out my days as a monk.

I made up my mind to go back to her, but just as I stepped back from the rock , someone tapped me on the shoulder. "Hey, Monk."

I had been caught at my weakest moment. Feeling small and ashamed, I looked up, expecting to see a messenger from Hell. What I saw instead was the old man I had met at the woman's cottage. . . .

"What are you doing here?" he asked me. "You should be used to this kind of heat, or did you stop for something else? You're only twelve miles from where you were last night. If you'd been walking hard, you'd be in the village giving thanks to Jizo by now.

"Or maybe you've been thinking about that woman. Your earthly passions are stirred, aren't they? Don't try to hide it. I may be a bleary-eyed old man, but I can still tell black from white. Anyone normal wouldn't still be human after a bath with her. Take your pick. Cow? Horse? Monkey? Toad? Bat? You're lucky you're not going to be flying or hopping around for the rest of your life. When you came up from the river and hadn't been turned into some other animal, I couldn't believe my eyes. Lucky you! I guess your faith saved you. . . .

"So now that you know her story, you probably feel sorry for her. You want to gather firewood and haul water for the woman, don't you? I'm afraid your lustful nature has been awakened, Brother. Of course, you don't call it lust. You'd rather call it mercy or sympathy. I know you're thinking of hurrying back to the mountains. But you'd better think twice. Since becoming the idiot's wife, she's forgotten how the world behaves and does only as she pleases. She takes any man she wants. And when she tires of him, she turns him into an animal, just like that. No one escapes. 

"And the river that carved out of these mountains? Since the flood, it's become a strange and mysterious stream that both seduces men and restores her beauty. Even a witch pays a price for casting spells. Her hair gets tangled. Her skin becomes pale. She turns haggard and thin. But then she bathes in the river and is restored to the way she was. That's how her youthful beauty gets replenished. She says 'Come,' and the fish swim to her. She looks at a tree, and its fruit falls into her palm. If she holds her sleeves up, it starts to rain. If she raises her eyebrows, the wind blows.

"She was born with a lustful nature, and she likes young men best of all. I wouldn't be surprised if she said something sweet to you. But even if her words were insincere, as soon as she gets tired of you, a tail will sprout, your ears will wiggle, your legs will grow longer, and suddenly you'll be changed into something else.

"I wish you could see what the witch is going to look like after she's had her fill of this fish—sitting there with her legs crossed, drinking wine.

"So curb your wayward thoughts, Good Monk, and get away as quickly as you can. You've been lucky enough as it is. She must have felt something special for you, otherwise you wouldn't be here. You've been through a miracle and you're still young, so get on with your duties like you really mean it." The old man slapped me on the back again. Dangling the carp from his hand, he started up the mountain road.

I watched him grow smaller in the distance until he disappeared behind the mass of a large mountain. From the top of that mountain, a cloud rapidly blossomed into the drought-cleared sky. Over the quiet rush of the waterfall, I could hear the rolling echoes of clapping thunder.

Standing there like a cast-off shell, I returned to my senses. Filled with gratitude for the old man, I took up my walking staff, adjusted my sedge hat, and ran down the trail. By the time I reached the village, it was already raining on the mountain. It was an impressive storm. Thanks to the rain, the carp the old man was carrying probably reached the woman's cottage alive.

This, then, was the monk's story. He didn't bother to add a moral to the tale. We went our separate ways the next morning, and I was filled with sadness as I watched him begin his ascent into the snow-covered mountains. The snow was falling lightly. As he gradually made his way up the mountain road, the holy man of Mount Koya seemed to be riding on the clouds.

--Izumi Kyoka, ‘The Holy Man of Mount Koya’ (1900), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 65-72.

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a season in purgatory (5)

I have been focusing on 'One Day in Spring', my favourite story by Kyoka, but it is in 'The Holy Man of Mount Koya' that his recurrent themes, and, in particular, his morbid misogyny and truncated eroticism are more explicitly aestheticized. Images of a dangerous, violent, deadly nature recur and are inextricably associated with the woman who seduces and tempts the hero. She personifies throughout the regressive, atavistic, bestial element in woman's 'nature'—taking men, ensnaring them, and, once tired of them, turning the hopeless creatures into animals.

The ultimate symbol of the male's sense of fear and need for female nurturing, she is invariably encountered in the water, her privileged milieu. And it is here that the mendicant, on the verge of yielding to temptation and giving up his ascetic life, withdraws in hesitation and fear.

Once again, in the climactic scene of the tale, he does not take her into his arms but sees the woman being ravished by the dark, turbulent waters. 

Once again, violence and death prevail—and, with them, the failure of love in passivity.

*       *       *

To tell the truth, ever since I had left her earlier that morning this single idea dominated my thoughts. No snakes spanned my path, and I encountered no leech-filled forest. Still, though the way might continue to be hard, bringing tribulation to my body and soul, I realized that my pilgrimage was senseless. My dreams of someday donning a purple surplice and living in a final monastery meant nothing to me. And to be called a living Buddha by others and to be thronged with crowds of worshippers could only turn my stomach with the stench of humanity. . . .

After the woman put the idiot [husband] to sleep, she came back out to my room. She told me that rather than going back to a life of self-denial, I ought to stay by her side in the cottage by the river, there where the summer is cool and the winter mild. Had I given in to her for that reason alone, you'd probably say that I had been bewitched by her beauty. But in my own defense let me say that I truly felt sorry for her. How would it be to live in that isolated mountain cottage as the idiot's bed partner, not able to communicate, feeling you were slowly forgetting how to talk?

That morning when she said goodbye in the dawning light, I was reluctant to leaver her. She regretted never being able to see me again, spending the rest of her life in such a place. She also said that should I ever see white peach petals flowing upon a stream, however small, I would know that she had thrown herself into a river and was being torn apart bit by bit. She was dejected, but her kindness never failed. She told me to follow the river, that it would lead me to the next village. The water dancing and tumbling over a waterfall would be my sign that houses were nearby. Pointing out the road, she saw me off, walking along with me until her cottage had disappeared behind us.

Though we would never walk hand in hand as man and wife, I kept thinking I could still be her companion, there to comfort her morning and night. I would prepare the firewood and she would do the cooking. I would gather nuts and she would shell them. We would work together, I on the veranda and she inside, talking to each other, laughing together. The two of us would go to the river. She would take off her clothes and stand beside me. Her breath upon my back, delicate fragrance of her petals. For that  I would gladly lose my life!

Staring at the waterfall, I tortured myself with these thoughts. Even now when I think back on it, I break out in a cold sweat. I was totally exhausted, both physically and spiritually. I had set off at a fast pace and my legs had grown weary. Even if I was returning to the civilized world, I knew that the best I could expect was some old crone with bad breath offering me a cup of tea. I could care less about making it to the village, and so I sat down on a rock and looked over the edge at the waterfall. Afterward, I learned it was called the Husband and Wife Falls. . . .

The smaller stream was trying to leap over the rock and cling to the larger flow, but the jutting stone separated them cleanly, preventing even a single drop from making it to the other side. The waterfall, thrown about and tormented, was weary and gaunt, its sound like sobbing or someone's anguished cries.  This was the sad yet gentle wife.

The husband, by contrast, fell powerfully, pulverizing the rocks below and penetrating the earth. It pained me to see the two fall separately, divided by that rock. The brokenhearted wife was like a beautiful woman clinging to someone, sobbing and trembling. As I watched from the safety of the bank, I started to shake and my flesh began to dance. When I remember how I had bathed with the woman in the headwaters of this stream, my imagination pictured her inside the falling water, now being swept under, now rising again, her skin disintegrating and scattering like flower petals amid a thousand unruly streams of water. I gasped at the sight, and immediately she was whole again—the same face, body, breasts, arms, and legs, rising and sinking, suddenly dismembered, them appearing again. Unable to bear the sight, I felt myself plunging headlong into the fall and taking the water into my embrace. Returning to my senses, I heard the earthshaking roar of the husband, calling to the mountain spirits and roaring on its way. With such strength, why wasn't he trying to rescue her? I would save her! No matter what the cost.

--Izumi Kyoka, ‘The Holy Man of Mount Koya’ (1900), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 62-65.

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a season in purgatory (4)

"In a nap at midday, I met my beloved." He returned to the poem. "Then did I begin to believe in the things called dreams." . . .

He had just seen a dream, but then—

What about dreams? he thought. He felt as though he were seeing one now. If you wake up and realize you were asleep, then you know you were dreaming. But if you never wake up, how could it be a dream? Didn't someone say that the only difference between the mad and the sane is the length of one's periods of insanity? Like waves that grow wild in a blowing wind, everyone has times of madness. But the wind soon calms, and the waves end in a soothing dance. If not, then we begin to lose our minds, we who ply the seas of this floating world. And on the day that we pray for repose yet find no reprieve from the winds, we become seasick. Becoming seasick, we quickly go mad.

How perilous!

We find ourselves in the same situation when our dreams don't stop. If we can wake up, it's a dream. If we can't, then it's our reality. And yet, if it is in our dreams that we meet the people we love, why wouldn't we dream as much as we could? If the world asks, 'What's gotten into him?' The dreamer answers, 'Here I am,' fluttering in tandem with another butterfly, enjoying his enlightenment.

--Izumi Kyoka, ‘One Day in Spring’ (1906), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 115-16.

a season in purgatory (3)

"There you go again. If you doubt me that much, then I'll have to spell it out for you." [She said.] "See this glorious grass? These trees? They have blood and passion. They're hot beneath the sun's red light, and the earth is warm like skin. The light penetrates the bamboo grove, and the blossoms are without shadows. They bloom like fire, and when they flutter down unto the water, the stream becomes a red lacquered cup that slowly floats away. The ocean is blue wine, and the sky . . ."

She turned the white palm of her hand so it was facing upward.

"The sky is like a green oil. Viscous. No clouds, but still murky and full of dreams. The mountains are stuffed like velvet pillows. Here and there, the heat waves shimmer like thick coils of smoke rising fragrantly into the sleeves of a kimono. The larks are singing. In some faraway vale, the nightingale is calling, 'Isn't life a pleasure?' It has all its needs, and not a complaint to make. On a bright sunny afternoon like this, you close your eyes and right away you're drowsily dreaming. What do you think?"

"I don't know what I think." He looked away from the brightness of the spring day that her words had conjured. He focused on her.

"What are you feeling?"

He didn't answer.

"Are you having fun?"

"Fun?"

"Are you filled with joy?"

"Joy?"

"Do you feel alive?"

"Do you?" he countered.

"No, I feel sick, just the way I did when I saw you for the first time."

The wanderer sighed and took back his walking stick. Grabbing it with both hands, he held it near his knees, as if punting in the sea of love. Then he folded his arms and found himself staring at her.

--Izumi Kyoka, ‘One Day in Spring’ (1906), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 124-25.

a season in purgatory (2)

Kannon, Goddess of Mercy! The wanderer silently prayed for help. His defenses had all come to naught.

"Your stockings are all covered with mud. Why don't you take them off and let me have them cleaned? I live right over there."

He hastily pulled back from her fingers as they reached for his leg. He collapsed onto the embankment, then sat up, the nape of his neck hot because of the warm grass. He was sweating. His face was flushed. His eyes were blinded by the intense spring light.

"Forget about my stupid stockings." His words sounded like something a second-rate storyteller would say. He shuddered. When his vision finally became clear, the woman was picking up his walking stick. She held it gracefully with both hands and stood before him in a relaxed fashion.

Her sash was tied with its end hanging freely. Her lined kimono fit loosely on her shoulders. With the slight movement of her body, the crimson silk slipped down slightly over the edge of her sky-blue sash. The style of her clothing hardly matched the walking stick. She looked pitiful, crushed by love's burden, as if she was being held captive in place of her husband.

"Thank you so much." Again, she took the initiative. "I'm not sure what I should do." Her eyes were half-closed in thought. She seemed worried and weighed down with sadness, like the blind when they sigh. "I shouldn't have said that. I really didn't mean it that way. I didn't want to say I began feeling ill because I saw you. Even if that were true, how could I say such a thing? I saw you. And then I started to feel ill. . . ."

She repeated what she had just said, whispering to herself. "Please. I know you understand what I'm trying to say." She came closer and sat down. Leaning back, she spread her sleeves out on the the embankment. She parted the green spring grass with her shoulder. Their skirts spread out toward the wheat field before them.

"I didn't mean to insult you. You understand, don't you?"

"Yes."

"You do?"

He nodded, but he still seemed to be bothered by something.

"You're mean for getting mad at someone because of the way they talk," she said.

What a disagreeable woman! He looked at her, feeling as if he had to defend himself. "You should talk. I didn't get mad at you for the way you said it. You're the one with a bad temper. All I was doing was repeating what you said to me."

"Yes, and you lost your temper."

"No, I didn't. I was going to apologize."

"But you should have known what I really meant. It's a matter of expression, you know. Like a morning-glory leaf. From the top it looks thin and flat, but underneath it's quite full. You should listen to the underside of language."

"The underside of language? Now just wait a minute." He closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and took a breath. "You're trying to tell me you meant the opposite of getting your feelings hurt. Which is this: that after you saw me, you felt better right? So why don't you just leave me alone? It's perfectly clear that you're just playing around." He took her to task but laughed as he did.

She stared at him coolly. "You're such a complicated man. What did I say to make you talk that way to me? You shouldn't pick on people who are weaker than you. Can't you see I'm suffering?"

She put her hand on the grass and moved her knee. "Listen to what I have to say. All right?" She smiled as if enraptured. Her mouth was so seductive it seemed as though her teeth had been dyed black. "Let's suppose there's someone I dream about all the time, someone I long for. Can you imagine that?"

--Izumi Kyoka, ‘One Day in Spring’ (1906), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 121-23.

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a season in purgatory (1)

“It’s almost impossible to tell you how this sunny spring makes me feel. It’s like talking about a dream. This quiet sadness. Can’t you feel it? It’s like seeing the most vivid part of a dream, don’t you think? . . . 

“I feel more vulnerable in the spring than in the fall. That’s why I’m so damp. This isn’t sweat. It’s something the sun has wrung from my heart. Not pain, not distress. More like blood being squeezed from the tips of a tree’s tender leaves, as though my bones are being extracted and my skin is being melted. Yes, that’s the perfect expression for times like this. I feel like I’ve turned into water, as though what’s being melted of me will soon disappear, and that there will be tears—though neither of sadness nor of joy. 

“Sometimes you cry when someone scolds you. Other times you cry when someone comforts you. But on a spring day like today, your tears are of this latter kind. I suppose they’re sad. Yet there are different types of sadness. If fall is the sorrow of nature, then spring is the anguish of human life. . . . 

“Invited by a warm, gentle wind, the soul becomes a dandelion blossom that suddenly turns into cotton and blows away. It’s the feeling of fading into death after seeing paradise with your own eyes. Knowing its pleasure, you also understand that heaven is vulnerable, unreliable, sad. 

--Tamawaki Mio in ‘One Day in Spring’ (1906), from Izumi Kyoka, Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 125-26. 

*       *       *

In time of departures, thinking of beginnings. Of what once brought me here, of what awoke the passion—and, later, the disappointment.

Of why the fascination never ends.

My view of Japan was always from the ground, between the country and the city, working, living among Japanese people. I was never one to seek company among groups of expats, be they struggling academic researchers or well-off Roppongi types.

Yet, at the same time, mine was always a Japan of the mind, because fundamentally mediated by literature. It was in certain Japanese writers, in their words and images, that I have found something which resonates deeply within me and with which I have played hide-and-seek ever since. Something I cannot fully explain but that is at once universal and unique, as is the hallmark of all great art.

While I did feel the initial attraction for the quaint and pretty vanishing Japan of the Western exotes—Lafcadio Hearn, Pierre Loti, Wenceslau de Moraes—it soon struck me as stereotypical, remote, outdated.

What I was looking for and have found, heartbreakingly, here is a dark and unsettling truth that, once one touches it, one cannot but recoil—in horror, in disgust, and, above all, in sadness. One cannot avoid seeing and thinking of it, though, at times judgmentally, at times sympathetically, but never with indifference.

Were I to name the writer who has struck the deepest chord with me in this respect, it would be Izumi Kyoka. His tales of madness and death sound so quintessentially Japanese, and yet so archetypal and thus universal in the human struggles, oppressions, inequities, and impossibilities they embody.

As a feminist—that is, as someone who is committed to social change in order to achieve more balanced,  fairer and thus happier relationships between women and men—what puzzles me in Kyoka is, on the one hand, his sympathetic depictions of witty and lovely female heroines, who, precisely because of their wit and loveliness, are crushed by a brutal, callous patriarchal society that values them only for their outer beauty and fertility. They are never more than coadjutants, helpers, or mere toys. Countess Kifune in ‘The Surgery Room’ (1895), Tamawaki Mio in 'One Day in Spring’ (1906), among others: their desire for love, their lives stifled and destroyed by a society that oppresses the true emotions of people. These women are invariably bright and beautiful, weak and strong, passionate and pure-hearted, but also mad and downtrodden.

And herein lies the 'on the other hand’, the all-pervasive double standard that has haunted the male images of femininity, time out of mind: Woman as maternal, nurturing, but also as dangerously alluring; Woman as the saviour of Man but as someone who must be subjected to unspeakable suffering and sacrifice to qualify for the honour of bringing the male his inner peace. There is no doubt as to who remains at the centre, shaken and embattled at times, but fundamentally immovable in the end. Woman is to be fought as a demon or altogether avoided; or, even worse: Woman is to be placed on a pedestal and lovingly revered as a being from a distant star, divinely powerful. She has no agency in this world though, no subjectivity, no reality. In a word, she is better dead—or asleep or subdued—than alive. (Some call this misogyny, but who am I to stick on labels?)

All these sexist stereotypes trammelling women have existed in the West, under different guises, since time immemorial. Yet in Japan they assume particularly disturbing sexual overtones, because Japanese masculinity is so grounded in the psychology of amae—mother-dependent sons who never really grow up—and Japanese femininity trapped in the interplay of female spoiling and male dependence. The dominance of the mother in this culture is what has, ironically, perpetuated what Chizuko Ueno coined the Japanese 'transvestite patriarchy': a patriarchy that cloaks itself in femininity, making thus women's situation more complicated and the struggle against male dominance more difficult.

Charles Shiro Inouye, in the magisterial Introduction to his selected translations, argues that Kyoka’s sexually hesitant heroes mark ‘the birth of the weak male’, the beginning of a process of male regression that is so blatantly obvious to anyone familiar with contemporary Japanese society. In Kyoka, the sexually immature, neurotic male is tempted and crazed by a desire which he rarely has the courage to test and which remains therefore unfulfilled, as in ‘The Holy Man of Mt. Koya’ (1900). To quote Inouye again: 'They make beauty, not love'… A truncated eroticism.

And this seems to happen not so much out of moral principles but because of the male’s impossible attempt to reconcile Woman as nurturer and Woman as lover. Maternal and erotic love can only meld in death, out of this world. Love’s fulfillment is thus always linked to death and lovers must die to be together, as Countess Kifune and Doctor Takamine do in 'The Surgery Room':

Although their graves are in different places—one in the hills of Aoyama, one downtown in Yanaka—the countess and Doctor Takamine died together, one after the other, on the same day.

Religious thinkers of the world, I pose this question to you. Should these two lovers be found guilty and denied entrance into heaven? (p. 20)

Or as in the drowned corpses at the end of ‘One Day in Spring’:

The boy’s head was like a jewel pressed against the woman’s breast, the red lion’s cape still wet and tangled around her white arm. Beautiful and alluring, Tamawaki Mio had finally discovered the destination of the dead.
The wanderer would never forget how they had parted at the embankment, how he had looked back and seen her, holding her purple parasol to the side, her black hair weighing down upon her as she watched him walk away. As the sand on the beach spread and drew back soundlessly, hollowing out and filling back in, he thought of how the waves must have ravished her. From the sand there appeared only beautiful bones and the color of shells—red of the sun, white of the beach, green of the waves. (pp. 139-40)

And it is here that Kyoka’s unsettling ambivalence lies, as well as my own ambivalence towards him and the world he stands for. A world where oppression and death are viewed as beautiful and virtuous, and which has bred both images of striking beauty and the most dangerous, wrongheaded delusions and mistakes.

Not a heaven, most definitely, but a purgatory of unfulfilled love and lost souls, epitomised in Kyoka’s strangely oppressing, dark Spring.

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the rise of the academic bully

Warfare is common and no less deadly because it is polite.

--J. Victor Baldrige (cited as epigraph to Faculty Incivility)

Dark times. I read the book a couple of years ago, shortly after it was published, in an attempt to make sense of certain behaviours whose increasing frequency seemed to me to suggest a disturbing pattern and a sea-change in human relations.

Little did I realise then that I would come full face with it as, having been forced to emigrate in search of an academic position (non-existent in my country), I struggled to survive in another culture that generally treats foreign scholars with the utmost contempt.

Again, it is not that Japanese universities are alone in this appalling rise of academic incivility and camouflaged aggression. However, certain cultural traits – namely the overvaluation of consensus (和) and the mechanisms of social control developed to suppress criticism and dissent as well as to manipulate or hide information – make it more covert, insidious, and yet no less deadly. As the authors of Faculty Incivility argue:

To keep cultural acts hidden is a subtle form of incivility; secrecy permits control, and control contributes to a culture of incivility. . . . A façade of social order and control often masks an underlying current of the general rudeness that prevails throughout society in general and the academy in particular. (p. 5)

It would take far too long to summarise the intricate argument developed by Twale and De Luca in the book, but since someone else has done it quite nicely in a review available on Amazon.com, I take the liberty of reproducing it here:

Some journalists . . . have ascertained that today . . . selfishness, disrespect, rudeness, and self-absorption are on the rise and incivility has become a serious societal problem. Since academy represents an image of society, the incivility amongst academics is dominantly visible. Generally, civility increases amongst individuals as they age but it rarely increases as a result of educational level. Uncivil acts occur among academics more often than one would like to admit. According to the authors, people bully and aggress others because of their personal insecurities, lack of self-confidence, envy, and inability to cope with the challenges of life. A hostile workplace often is the result of a power imbalance that leads to aggression, and workplace incivility. Further, when silent treatment, micromanagement, demotion, being given less responsibility , gossip, overloading with work, indulging in self-promotion, harboring rumors, breaking confidentiality, playing favorites, ignoring positive contributions, backstabbing, scapegoting, marginalizing, dismissing others' valid opinions and ideas, consistently interrupting, envy, and lies persist over a longtime, a bully or mob culture begins to develop and flourish in the academy. In some departments, bystanders are aware of what is going on but usually do nothing to support the target(s) for fear of retaliation. Through careful manipulation, bullies who are usually "charmers" and liars may acquire roles and responsibilities of a leader such as department chair or even dean. The way academy conducts its business, mobbing or group-bullying through committee decisions camouflages and insulates the real bully or singular instigator.

The authors point out that academic life can become competitive to the point of being dysfunctional. The individual faculty competes for space in top-tier journals, most publications per year, biggest offices with windows, grant money, and the most golden status in the administration's eyes. Further, in academy, at times, selected faculty members reach the status of urban legend. The value of their credentials is so inflated by themselves or administration that students and distant colleagues may believe that they walk on water and gain legendry reputation that is more pomposity and pretence than actual value and substance.

In sum, the book presents an insider's view of the sad tale of academy where individuals with doctorates [and sometimes even without them!] proclaim godlike status for themselves. They engage in underhanded acts of brutality towards one another usually unheard and unseen by the general public. Ironically, most outsiders to the academy think of it as a peaceful, nourishing haven where scholarly minds ardently pursue the quality life of the intellect. The authors conclude by emphasizing that incivilities and the bully culture of the academy are inconsistent with the normative expectations of civil society. They make suggestions on how the incivilities of the professorate and the bully culture of academy can be curtailed. This book is an eye opener.

In a dog-eat-dog world where self-absorption, unscrupulousness and philistinism have become the rule of the day and the privileged instruments of career advancement, there seems to be little protection or hope for those exiles who are in academia because they still believe it is a place where ideas may count and intellectual life flourish.

A belief that is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

Some, witnessing the gradual devaluation of humane inquiry in an academia now entirely at the service of the status quo and a ruthless managerialism, have already proclaimed ‘the death of universities’. I tend to agree, more and more. Also, from what I have observed here over the past four years, I cannot but fully agree with the view that Japanese universities in particular are 'a huge tatemae erected against the very idea of education' (a quote from Alex Kerr's Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan, if I'm not mistaken) – and of scholarship, I should add.

Once again, Japan leads the way -- in the worst possible manner.

being alive

Some people, some things are still worth waiting for, though - and for this particular one I waited over a year. An immense joy to find it inside my mailbox yesterday. I shall immerse myself in it as soon as I finish some pressing tasks on my desk.

I've been reading each and every work by Tim Ingold and never cease to be amazed at how he gets better and better every time.

And how can you not feel energised by someone who proposes such an exhilarating and, at the same time, sensible, down-to-earth approach to scholarship?

Why do we acknowledge only our textual sources but not the ground we walk, the ever-changing skies, mountains and rivers, rocks and trees, the houses we inhabit and the tools we use, not to mention the innumerable companions, both non-human animals and fellow humans, with which and with whom we share our lives? They are constantly inspiring us, challenging us, telling us things. If our aim is to read the world, as I believe it ought to be, then the purpose of written texts should be to enrich our reading so that we might be better advised by, and responsive to, what the world is telling us. I would like to think that this book serves such a purpose.

--Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), p. xii.

More, much more on this soon...

in transit

Historically, the discourse of absence is carried on by the Woman: Woman is sedentary, Man hunts, journeys; Woman is faithful (she waits), man is fickle (he sails away, he cruises). It is Woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction, for she has time to do so; she weaves and she sings; the Spinning Songs express both immobility (by the hum of the Wheel) and absence (far away, rhythms of travel, sea surges, cavalcades). It follows that in any man who utters the other's absence something feminine is declared: this man who waits and who suffers from his waiting is miraculously feminized.
--Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), pp. 13-14.

*       *       *

And does it follow, I wonder, that the woman who does not patiently wait nor weaves nor sings, Penelope-like, but journeys and sails away is disgracefully masculinised?

Or does this woman cross into some liminal space where she remains forever untouchable, unrecognisable, neither home nor away, unloving beloved, loving unbeloved?

Forever in transit. Intransitive.

the erotics of trust

It's inevitable. You dwell on and long for those things that are so pitifully missing here, amidst the general iciness and spiritlessness, along the barbed wire fences erected everywhere, everywhere.

And how to avoid yielding to anguish and disappointment?

By hoping there are better people and a better world out there, where the miracle of trust and courage may still happen.

There must be.

*       *       *

Once one determines to trust someone, there is not simply a calm that enters into one's soul; there is excitement and exhilaration. Trust is the most joyous kind of bond with another living being. But isn't it true that whenever we enjoy being with someone, there is a factor of risk there, and also a factor of trust, which gives our enjoyment an edge of rapture?

[...]

Courage and trust have this in common: they are not attitudes with regard to images and representations. Courage is a force that can arise and hold steadfast as one's projections, expectations, and hopes dissipate. Courage rises up and takes hold and builds on itself. Trust is a force that can arise and hold on to someone whose motivations are as unknown as those of death. It takes courage to trust someone you do not know. There is an exhilaration in trusting that builds on itself. One really cannot separate in this exhilaration the force of trust and the force of courage.

Sexual attraction [is] also [a force] that [breaks] through images and representations. [...] Erotic impulses are excited by all the artifices of adornment and masquerade. Sensuality is aroused by the intense colours of sumptuous garments and by jewellry whose metal and crystal glitter across naked flesh; it is ensnared by the suggestive shiftings of someone's eyes, his or her pirouetting fingers, provocative poses and gamy words. But the fascination with these seductive appearances and accoutrements unleashes lustful drives that crave to break through the images to take hold of and penetrate the anonymous animal body behind them. The sexual craving that torments us shuts us off to the projects and solicitations of the common and practical world, but it is also anonymous and spreads by contagion, making us transparent to one another.

[...]

In the way that sexual craving [breaks] through the images and representations and labelling of things and [makes] contact with the singular reality, [it has] a kinship with courage and with trust. Indeed, just as there is courage in trust, so there is pleasure and exhilaration in trust: trust laughs at dangers. And sexual attraction is so like trust: it careens toward sexual surrender to another as into an unconditional trust. Conversely, there is something erotic in trust, for trust is not a bare thrust of will holding on to the unintelligible core of another; it holds on to the sensibility and forces of another. There is something erotic in the trust that a skydiver extends to his buddy plummeting after him bringing him his parachute, as there is in the trust that an individual lost in the jungle extends to a native youth. Trust is courageous, giddy, and lustful.


--Alphonso Lingis, Trust, Theory Out of Bounds 25 (2004), pp. x-xii.

in praise of shadows

This regained dimness in Tokyo, to which my eyes are slowly and gladly getting used, has brought back memories of a book I always re-read with mixed feelings, Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows. *

Published for the first time in the early 1930s, the essay can be read as an interesting example of nihonjinron, a constellation of discourses revolving around Japanese cultural identity which, in an ethnocentric, essentialist and a-historical manner, stresses the uniqueness, exceptionality and 'mystery' of the national psyche and customs on the basis of simplistic binary oppositions like Japan / the West, traditional / modern, inner / outer.

In Praise of Shadows discusses Japanese aesthetics in its various dimensions - from architecture to food, from ideals of beauty to ghosts - by contrasting it with Western thought. In Tanizaki's view, Japan differs from the West in the distinct relationship it establishes with light and shadow. While the West, in its obsessive quest for Progress, privileges the clarity and assertiveness of light, Japanese sensibility delights in the subtle play of shadows, in ambiguity and understatement:

But what produces such differences in taste? In my opinion it is this: we Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow. **

Shadows appear in Tanizaki as the ultimate symbol of a Japanese authenticity on the verge of extinction, and he entertains no illusions about the survival of a sensibility fostered by ways of life and material conditions which have altogether disappeared. Such pessimism, which also pervades his novels, makes Tanizaki an unorthodox figure who does not easily square with the artistic establishment and its commodities - commodities that have shaped Japan's official imagery for Western consumption: the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, calligraphy, traditional dance and theatre.

Since for Tanizaki beauty is not a substance in itself but a mere configuration of shadows -- 

Such is our way of thinking—we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.

-- what truly begets his nostalgia is not so much the physical disappearance of certain practices and objects - the Noh costumes, the wooden toilets, the lacquerware, the decorative metals - as the removal of all these things from their vital source of beauty in the shadows of a dimly lit theatre, a temple, or a home, and their conversion into inert museum pieces (because) exposed to an excess of light.

In comparison with Lafcadio Hearn/Yakumo Koizumi, another nostalgic of vanishing Japan, Tanizaki seems to be more acutely aware of the sheer impossibility of bringing back a whole way of life whose very existence the import of western ideas, institutions, technology, and, above all, notions of Progress, has relentlessly eroded. Yet both converge in the identification of the one and only place where the shadows, memories and phantasmagorias of this agonising culture may still be rescued from the inevitability of oblivion. It is thus with the following words that Tanizaki closes his Praise:

I am aware of and am most grateful for the benefits of the age. No matter what complaints we may have, Japan has chosen to follow the West, and there is nothing for her to do but move bravely ahead and leave us old ones behind. But we must be resigned to the fact that as long as our skin is the color it is the loss we have suffered cannot be remedied. I have written all this because I have thought that there might still be somewhere, possibly in literature or the arts, where something could be saved. I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.

Well, I couldn't agree more - and that's why I'll go on reading Tanizaki (and Hearn), despite all the mixed feelings.

=========================================

Notes:

*This text draws heavily on another one I wrote in Portuguese a few years ago, and which was posted here.

**All excerpts from In Praise of Shadows are taken from this English translation available on line.

beginnings

I love the beginning of books (well, I love the beginning of everything that is good and new and promising). Every now and then I find myself returning to the opening lines of books I read ages ago, and realise how the spell never ends. It is always a fresh beginning.

Were I to choose an all-time favourite, it would be this most amazing beginning about beginnings, about the beginning of everything. Everything.


Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began.

Let no one be mistaken. I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.

So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing. How does one start at the beginning, if things happen before they actually happen? If before the pre-history there already existed apocalyptic monsters? If this history does not exist, it will come to exist. To think is an act. To feel is a fact. Put the two together - it is me who is writing what I am writing. God is the world. The truth is always some inner power without explanation. The more genuine part of my life is unrecognizable, extremely intimate and impossible to define. My heart has shed every desire and reduced itself to one final or initial beat. The toothache that passes through this narrative has given me a sharp twinge right in the mouth. I break out into a strident, high-pitched, syncopated melody. It is the sound of my own pain, of someone who carries this world where there is so little happiness. Happiness? I have never come across a more foolish world . . . .

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), pp. 11-12.

rarities

They're quite a rarity, but there are still some serious male scholars genuinely committed to interesting and relevant feminist research, away from the creepy and female-phobic jargon of high theory & their high priests (and often priestesses).

Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Female Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (London: Oxford University Press, 1988).

An amazing study of misogynist genitalphobia in Western literature and painting over the past 100 years:

At the turn of the century, an unprecedented attack on women erupted in virtually every aspect of culture: literary, artistic, scientific, and philosophic. Throughout Europe and America, artists and intellectuals banded together to portray women as static and unindividuated beings who functioned solely in a sexual and reproductive capacity, thus formulating many of the anti-feminine platitudes that today still constrain women's potential.

Bram Dijkstra's Idols of Perversity explores the nature and development of turn-of-the-century misogyny in the works of hundreds of writers, artists, and scientists, including Zola, Strindberg, Wedekind, Henry James, Rossetti, Renoir, Moreau, Klimt, Darwin, and Spencer. Dijkstra demonstrates that the most prejudicial aspects of Evolutionary Theory helped to justify this wave of anti-feminine sentiment. The theory claimed that the female of the species could not participate in the great evolutionary process that would guide the intellectual male to his ultimate, predestined role as a disembodied spiritual essence. Darwinists argued that women hindered this process by their willingness to lure men back to a sham paradise of erotic materialism. To protect the male's continued evolution, artists and intellectuals produced a flood of pseudo-scientific tracts, novels, and paintings which warned the world's males of the evils lying beneath the surface elegance of woman's tempting skin.

Reproducing hundreds of pictures from the period and including in-depth discussions of such key works as Dracula and Venus in Furs, this fascinating book not only exposes the crucial links between misogyny then and now, but also connects it to the racism and anti-semitism that led to catastrophic genocidal delusions in the first half of the twentieth century. Crossing the conventional boundaries of art history, sociology, the history of scientific theory, and literary analysis, Dijkstra unveils a startling view of a grim and largely one-sided war on women still being fought today.


[Source: http://www.amazon.com/Idols-Perversity-Fin-Si%C3%A8cle-Paperbacks/dp/0195056523]


Note: Also worth reading Bram Dijkstra's Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood, though a far less well achieved book.


Then and now, indeed, misogyny holds sway and manifests itself in all sorts of camouflaged, disappointing ways...