Tanizaki’s Diary of a Mad Old Man provokes more questions than it seems to answer, which is part of its intelligence. How little guilt the protagonist feels, and no embarrassment, over his attachment to Satsuko’s feet! He seems so at ease with his fetish that we cannot forfeit the impression that he has pursued it before. But Tanizaki fails to tell us the place of such preoccupations in the old man’s life, whether this is a late outbreak — a final burst, as it were — or whether his fetishism has been his life’s work. If you were adapting the novel for film these are questions you’d not only have to ask, but to decide on.
In 1927, around the time he was thinking about religion and society, Freud wrote an essay, ‘Fetishism’, in which he mentions the Chinese custom of mutilating the female foot, and of worshipping it when it has been mutilated. He says, ‘It seems as though the Chinese male wants to thank the woman for having submitted to being castrated.’ Tanizaki became interested in Freud as a student and the Complete Works were translated and published in Japan between 1929 and 1933. Also in this paper, Freud tells us that the fetish is a substitute for the penis, being an ‘approach to the genitals from below’. But not any penis. Here Freud makes a bold, new move: he tells us that the fetish stands for the missing penis of the woman; of, in fact, the mother. All fetishists, according to Freud, have an aversion to the actual genitals, for which the object is a substitute. Not that this is unusual. Freud makes a further startling statement here, ‘Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital.’ (Freud suggests that it is enough to make anyone homosexual.)
If an old man sucks on a younger woman’s toes, is he, at this moment, regressing also to childhood? Oddly, and perhaps wisely — showing his subtlety as a writer — Tanizaki doesn’t comment on the old man’s obsession: he merely shows it. Tanizaki is a psychologist in the sense that he is spellbound by his characters’ internal lives, of that which is offered only symbolically to the world. But he’d never be so crude as to tie a whole aspect of experience to one cause. By not being over-insistent or too schematic, Tanizaki leaves us with more symbolic complexities. The work of an imaginative writer is to suggest, not to solve.
Yet without doubt there is something of an enigma in the book here. The old man himself, an intelligent, cultured man, has no curiosity about his own preferences. It seems unlikely, but he never questions this sudden enthralment. This is not so unusuaclass="underline" Freud asserts that few people seek analysis because of a fetish. Most go because they have difficulties at work; the fetish might not be mentioned for a long time, if at all. Not that fetishistic pleasure would be that unusual. For Freud, the child is the ultimate narcissist and pervert, concerned only with his own pleasure and, perhaps, how to stage and re-stage it. Others are merely actors in this scenario. Perhaps sexual feeling is so powerful it has to be modified, by an obstacle, in order to be bearable.
In his own way Tanizaki does take these ideas further, throwing open the whole question of love itself, of what it is we love about the other. The characters in his work are deeply involved with others. But in what way and what does it mean? How do perversion and love interact? Is fetish love real love? Is being excited by only a part of the other real sex? Is fetishism a version of love, or its obverse? Is it only, as Havelock Ellis designated it, ‘auto-erotic’?
Much as they might like to be, Tanizaki’s characters cannot be self-sufficient. They never stop needing one another, or trying to solidify that need. As both characters struggle for ultimate, complete control over the other, the engagement is almost comical. Tanizaki is aware that in the end you are always dependent on the other; indeed, you are, partly, creating them, having them play a role with which you identify. This is not only the case in exhibitionism or voyeurism, but in sadism too. Yet the freedom of the other, which resides in their words — or perhaps a diary — will ultimately elude you; it has to. Total control would end in the death or murder of one of the subjects, at which point the game ends.
The novel left me with a strong after-impression, and the sense that the film I wanted to write would be concerned with some of these ideas. After I’d made some notes and sketched out several scenes, the director, Roger Michel, and I, began to assemble the elements of the film, which would concern two elderly actors and a girl who comes to stay with one of them.
It wasn’t long before Venus began to move away from the Tanizaki set-up. The relationship had to be less claustrophobic and more complex, always dipping and turning. If the man wants something from the girl, she wants something else from him, so that their relationship becomes a series of successful misunderstandings. Failed exchanges are, at least, a kind of exchange. Venus also concerns a girl finding a father; at the end, briefly, she finds a mother too. Then she can leave home again.
It is the girl who makes the story work. Her entry on to the scene disturbs all their lives. But why a girl? Even political correctness always leaves someone — or a group — out; it needs to. A new scapegoat is created. I noticed that young working-class women — slags, mingers, munters, dogs, chavs — were easy targets, perfectly representing our greed, lasciviousness, immorality. Condemned for the pursuit of pleasure, and regarded only as consumers without inner texture, they are one of the few groups who can be satirised without complaint, damned for their stupidity and inarticulacy; a group with no lobbyists and little power. It is a new snobbery, and almost unnoticed. Why not develop such a character, and, combining them with the conventional idea of a stranger coming to stay, see where it goes?
I couldn’t move forward with the film until I saw how it might end. I tried numerous exits. Perhaps I didn’t want to accept it could only end one way. It was Roger who saw it had to finish with a journey and a death. As a child my family would go on holiday to the Kent resorts, and I’d started taking my children to Whitstable with its beach huts and stony beach. For a while I’d been thinking of setting a story there. Of course, both The Key and the Diary end with the death of the male protagonist; and it is, in fact, illness which precipates them into late desire. How else, then, could the novel end? It is only death which gives life true intensity.
WRITING
Something Given: Reflections on Writing
‘Now, whether it were by peculiar grace.
A leading from above, a something given …’
Wordsworth, ‘Resolution and Independence’
My father wanted to be a writer. I can’t remember a time when he didn’t want this. There were few mornings when he didn’t go to his desk — early, at about six o’clock — in one of his many suits and coloured shirts, the cuffs pinned by bejewelled links, before he left for work carrying his briefcase, alongside the other commuters. Writing was, I suppose, an obsession, and as with most obsessions, fulfilment remained out of reach. The obsession kept him incomplete but it kept him going. He had a dull, enervating civil service job, and writing provided him with something to look forward to. It gave him meaning and ‘direction’, as he liked to put it. It gave him direction home too, since he wrote often about India, the country he left in his early twenties and to which he never returned.