The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a serious book, but there is nothing in it to deter a general reader who brings to it a willingness to think seriously. It is an eye-opening study of how we, as a civilization, have come to know what we know about the universe, and of the factors that will condition the expansion of our knowledge in the future.
J.S.M.
131
MISHIMA YUKIO
1925-1970
Confessions of a Mask, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Although both Tanizaki [114] and Kawabata [120] published extensively after World War II, in effect Mishima was Japan's first true postwar writer. Excused from military service during the war on medicai grounds (a source of shame that plagued him throughout his life), he burst upon the postwar literary scene in 1949 with the publication of Confessions of a Mask.
Confessions is a highly autobiographical work about a young man growing up as a homosexual, and the "mask" he needs to don to protect himself from social scorn. Mishima^ own mask was that of hypermasculinity; he became a bodybuilder obsessed with sculpting himself into a form of perfect beauty, a latter-day samurai obsessed with a largely made-up version of the warriors cult of the sword, and an actor whose roles were virtual parodies of noble manhood. At the same time he was a sadomasochist fascinated by suicide and self-sacrifice; it seems likely that his bodybuilding was related to a desire to create himself as a perfect sacrificial victim, and to prepare his body to be a beautiful corpse. He liked to pose for homoerotic- masochistic photographs in such roles as a dead shipwrecked sailor washed up on the rocks, as St. Sebastian riddled with arrows, and as a samurai committing seppuku (ritual suicide).
But for what cause was he to sacrifice himself? Here again one finds contradictions. Mishima was in some respects a play- boy and a materialist; he lived in a luxurious Western-style house, dressed in Western clothing, and had cosmopolitan interests. At the same time he became increasingly devoted to a cult (of his own devising) dedicated to restoring Japan's samurai spirit, expressed as reverence for the emperor. He recruited a private army, the Shield Society, of handsome young men, and drilled his troops both in his ideology and in traditional martial arts. On November 25, 1970, he led some of his followers onto a base of Japan's National Self-Defense Force and addressed the soldiers, calling upon them to join him in an uprising to restore the emperor to power. His speech was met with derision, whereupon he drew a sword, slit open his abdфmen in ritual fashion, and was decapitated by his chief lieutenant: the ultimate acting-out of fantasies that had driven his intensely troubled but also brilliantly creative life.
Mishima was regarded as a literary genius even by the great majority of Japanese who thought that his political beliefs were loony. His personal obsessions inform his writing to such an extent that his work really does not resemble anyone else's very closely, except insofar as a confessional attitude is one common aspect of modernism. His work was highly regarded by Kawabata, who befriended his much younger fellow writer and championed his career. The work of contemporary Japanese writers like Oe Kenzaburo and Murakami Haruki has clearly been influenced by Mishima^ style.
I recommend that you read Confessions of a Mask, and also The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, a novel based on real events, in which a young monk, deranged by the American occupation of Japan, burns down a famous old temple to prevent it from falling into foreign hands. If you find yourself drawn into Mishimas weirdly brilliant mind, you might also want to try The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and his four-volume masterpiece and final testament, The Sea of Fertility.
J.S.M.
132
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
1928-
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Garcia Marquez and Borges [121] are usually considered the two world-famous Latin American writers of our time. The term magic realism is often applied to their work and to that of others of the same school, such as the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, the Argentinian Jъlio Cortizar, and the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa. The rather tired criticai clichк does suggest their slant on the world, which diverges sharply from the mainstream tradition of English and American fiction.
"Magic realism" was first used back in 1925 to describe a group of German painters who used precise literal techniques to image fantastic events flowering in the unconscious. These artists addressed the nonlogical element deeply buried in ali of us; and so do the contemporary novelists of magic realism.
Garcia Marquez speaks somewhere of "the mistaken and absurd world of rational creatures." The phrase would seem perfectly acceptable to many South American and Central American writers. They have ali been affected, to the point of obsession, by the disorderly, often nightmarish history of their native lands. Thus, though their magic realism was also influ- enced by French symbolism and surrealism (and in Garcia Marquez's case by Faulkner [118]), it developed as a special technology of the imagination, designed to cope with the abnormal experience of a whole people.
One Hundred Years of Solitude traces the rise, decline, and fali of Macondo, presumably the authors hometown of Aracataca, Colombia. The era is marked by civil strife, frightful violence, political corruption, and the abuse of power. Five— perhaps seven—generations of the Buendia family compose the materiais with which the narrative is constructed. Over the years, first names (Aureliano, Josй Arcadio) recur, identities blur, family traits reassert themselves, making us feel that Macondo's life is cyclical, without forward movement, devoid of a goal. While the outside world of industry and progress at times touches them, essentially the Buendias remain immured in their sad and sometimes mad solitude.
Winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in literature, Garcia Marquez has spent much of his life as a working journalist. Thus he has a keen nose for fact; much of One Hundred Years is realistic enough. But the story is also full of ghosts, visions, monsters, prescient dreams, happenings contrary to nature (such as mass insomnia), a man two hundred years old, another returned from the dead, others who levitate.
The book is a kind of allegory of Latin American history, as much hallucination as family chronicle. Macondo is "the city of mirrors (or mirages)." Past and present fuse. One historian of the Buendia family, the author tells us, "had not put events in the order of conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they co-existed in one instant." Josй Arcadio Buendia, we learn, "was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room."
In its energy, its humor (for it has a kind of grim humor), its conscious exaggeration, its distortions of language, and its drive to transform human experience into myth, One Hundred Years recalls Gargantua and Pantagruel [35] as much as any title suggested in this volume.