Political responses to the ‘Crisis of Modernity’
This chapter will look into the political resonances of the reception of Noh theatre in Europe during the Modernist period. Chapter Three pointed out how, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the reception of Noh in Europe was thickly interwoven with the criticism of bourgeois ethics. For a number of European practitioners, Noh theatre represented a positive model to copy in order to save Western theatre from the decadence into which it had fallen. Ethics were the necessary premise for the production of good art, and Japan shifted from being mainly an aestheticising practice to being the cure for the social and artistic disease embodied by the ‘crisis of modernity’. Instead of merely imitating the East, this new generation of artists used the inspiration they drew from Japan in order to resurrect their own traditions, as in the case of Yeats’s Irish theatre or Copeau and Claudel’s medieval theatre.
The first decades of the twentieth century in Europe were characterised by a profound crisis that marked the terminal phase of the political, social, and economical changes brought by the ‘age of modernity’. For historian Roger Griffin, ‘Western modernity can be identified […] with the breakdown of community, with the erosion of a “healthy” mental, physical, social, or spiritual dimension that endows its inhabitants with a higher, suprapersonal, but not necessarily suprahistorical, significance’ (Griffin 2008, 11). This was a process that led to the erosion of the social order in the form of its religious and secular institutions of church and nobility, which eventually collapsed under the weight of the ever-imposing, capitalist-driven bourgeois class. This progressive decay of the established order was propelled by the rationalist thought that, from Decartes through to the age of Enlightenment, shifted the medieval-based transcendental vision of the universe into individual-located particularism, and reached its political climax with the egalitarian spirit that led to the upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth century revolutions. The outcome, Griffin argues, was ‘a process of disaggregation, fragmentation, and loss of transcendence with respect to premodern societies’ (2008, 10) that resulted in the dissolution of the social and familial bonds between community and the individual, now transformed into a self-sufficient entity. As the Enlightenment emphasised rationality and relativism, bourgeois capitalism grew
along with the cult of self-help. The industrial revolution drove masses of men and women to migrate from the countryside to the urban centres, dissolving the existent familial bonds, and contributing to the worsening of a social disease that had its major symptoms in social alienation and in a general, yet acute sense of loss.
A response to this critical condition came from political movements that aimed at healing the ‘evils’ of modernity by opposing different forms of what Shmuel Eisenstadt called ‘alternative modernities’: Fascism and Communism. Eisenstadt emphasises the complexity of the political responses to modernity: while Communism fitted within the framework of modernity brought by Enlightenment, albeit contesting its incompleteness, Fascism sought for the constitution of a new form of collectivity that would blend the universalistic and the particularlistic, creating a ‘semi-universalistic’
ideology founded on race (Eisenstadt 2000, 11). Though their demagogy might suggest otherwise, the ideological matrix of Socialism, from which Fascism and Communism stemmed, did not reject modernity, but re-moulded it into new, though idiosyncratic shapes.
The political movements that took the form of European Fascism were propelled by populist concepts that sought for the creation of a classless society. However, unlike Marxist socialism that utterly rejected institutions of self-development and private property, developed during the Enlightenment, but encouraged self-reflection and cultural tolerance, Fascism operated ‘as an identificatory ideology, encouraging total symbiosis with the ideological community’ (Griffin 1996, 15). Instead of a radically egalitarian community, Fascism proposed the myth of an ethnically uniform people-grounded racial ideology. In order to achieve the aim of healing society from its decadence, and resurrecting the national spirit, Fascism offered a ‘third way’ between Capitalism and Communism, mixing tradition and modernity, old and new myths, populist elements, such as the participation of the working class, with the elitist attitude that had as extreme expression the cult of the Fascist leaders.
The contradictory nature of European National-Socialism was reflected in the artistic phenomenon of Modernism. As Griffin put it, Modernism aimed at reinstating ‘a sense of transcendent value, meaning, or purpose in order to reverse Western culture’s progressive loss of a homogeneous value system and overarching cosmology (nomos) caused by the secularizing and disembedding forces of modernization (2008, 15).
Modernism mirrored the forms of political response to the ‘crisis of modernity’ that National Socialism had provided. At the base of the complex interweaving of ethical
and aesthetic concepts underlying Modernism was the elaboration of the community-individual dyad upon which both left and right-oriented forms of socialism were centred. Modernist art generally condemned individualism, to which it preferred forms of secular or spiritual communitarianism. However, Fascism utterly rejected egalitarianism and democracy, against which it opposed a form of elitist populism that, unlike Capitalist plutocracy, was based on ethical meritocracy exalting the virtues of courage and selflessness. Although with hindsight it is possible to understand Modernism as an evolution of the ‘crisis of modernity’, rather than its nemesis, most of the Modernists conceived of their work as a revolutionary endeavour that radically rejected all that constituted the canon imposed by the previous regimes.1
Modernism was generally characterised by a political ambiguity: the rejection of the capitalist mode of production was the basis of socialist doctrine from which both right and left-wing ideologies stemmed. Fascism and Communism preached the abhorrence of individualism, to which they opposed a communitarian conception of society, and shared a common enemy: the bourgeois.2 As Raymond Williams points out, the movement that adopted the form of symbolic abstraction, despite being anti-bourgeois, was also ‘the culmination of the weakest tendency of the bourgeois epoch:
the attempted stabilisation, at a new level of abstraction from society and from history, of the mystery of general human processes: a mystery now finally located […] within the individual (Williams 1981, 174). A retreat into folklore and tradition countered the materialism and commercialism of the naturalist scene, and yet this refutation of the bourgeois world tended towards the construction of new forms of elitism and psychoanalytical subjectivity. The seemingly contradictory presence of populist and elitist elements is what characterised Fascist ideology. As the political life of several Modernist artists testifies, the line dividing the ethics of Left and Right Socialism was often blurred.
1 Discussing the intersection of Fascism and Modernism in Italy, Emilio Gentile notes how Italian ‘artists and intellectuals were to abandon the privileged isles of aristocratic individualism and immerse
themselves in the impetuous flux of modern life in order to become the artificers, the spiritual guides of the New Italy’ (Gentile 1994, 58). Originality and genius were identified with the voice of dissent, and only accepted when fitting within the larger plan of the artistic manifestos, that is, in the track of a newly founded tradition. Nevertheless, Gentile points out how Futurism, the most prominent form of Italian Modernism, emphasised the abandon of the old for the new, with a particular insistence on the disdain for tradition (1994, 56). The co-presence of these apparently antonymic forces within the same artistic movement reveals a clash that went beyond the debate on the aesthetic canon: while tradition meant the re-establishment of the relationship with the ethos of a nation, artistic advancement presupposed the originality of the individual genius.
2 A Fascist saying goes: ‘The belief of the bourgeois is egoism. The belief of the Fascist is heroism’ (in Segàla 2000, 23 my translation).
The case of Ezra Pound probably constitutes one of the most complex forms of ethical and political thought of the Modernist period. Advocate of the inalienability of individual freedom and property, and opposer of finance capitalism and usury, Pound admired figures such as Thomas Jefferson and Mussolini, both critics of the banking institutions and reformers of agrarian politics. Feng Lan’s study of Pound and Confucianism proves how Pound’s adoption of Confucian doctrine contained the paradoxes of Fascist ideology, at once advocating individual freedom and submission of the self to the greater authority (Lan 2005, 84-135). On the one hand, Pound’s shift to Fascism paralleled the growth of his interest in Confucianism, reflecting the authoritarianism contained in the teaching of Confucius, on the other hand it reflected an ideal of power and independence embodied by the figure of Mussolini. If Pound discussed tradition as the richness of distant cultural areas, he certainly did not do so out of sheer fascination or reverence for an imposed canon, but in sympathy with approaches to politics and art that he would assimilate and convert into his own syncretic philosophy.
In France, Jacques Copeau held an equally ambiguous profile: the socialist ideals of unselfish, communal spirit and erasure of the individuality for the sake of
‘honesty’ in performance, proposed in the 1916 Vieux-Colombier manifesto could be read both from Fascist or Communist perspectives. Serge Added describes how Copeau was forced into assuming a clearer political stance when, in 1940, the year in which France started to suffer the German offensive, he was appointed to the direction of the Comédie Française. Added documents how Copeau’s policy appears to be in accord with the official Vichy government line: ‘[t]he opening night on 7 September 1940 betrayed a worrying politicisation on stage. It was a poetic patchwork interlaced with the watchwords of the collaborationist regime: the return to life on the land, traditional crafts, the family, the fields, in clear allusion to Pétain’s Travail, Famille, Patrie’
(Added 1996, 284). The echoes of the nationalist policy of Vichy France resonated in Copeau’s Le Théâtre Populaire, published in 1941, in which he stated that the ‘unique duty of all Frenchmen’ was ‘the remaking of France’, envisaging the creation of a
‘Theatre of the Nation’ through the creation of a government-funded state school (Copeau 1963, 184-5).
Clearly, theatre arts could not but reflect the governmental policies, especially when its interpreters filled institutional roles. As has been described in chapters Two and Three, the ethics of Nationalistic ideology pervaded Noh after it was restored as the
official performing art, establishing a connection with the Imperial family. The following section will explore in greater detail how, as the second global conflict approached, Japan developed a Nationalist theory in opposition to the promotion of Western culture that characterised the first phases of the ‘modernisation’ of Japan, in which Noh theatre, as well as other traditional arts, was considered the highest expression of Japanese ethics.
From Taishō ‘democracy’ to the Kokutai no Hongi – The revision of Japanese tradition
Though it is uncertain whether dubbing Japanese Nationalism as ‘Fascism' is appropriate, it is anyway possible to notice how the escalation of nationalist feelings in Japan from the early Meiji period until Second World War shared common points with European Fascism. Nationalist spirit was initially born within the old samurai families that lost their position with the restoration of imperial centrality. Unlike Germany, in which nationalistic ideology grew on the ruins of World War I, Japan approached the 1930s with important military victories against Russia and China at its back.
The Taishō era (1912-1926) is often depicted as a relatively liberal period, though it in fact was the furnace where late Meiji conservatism moulded into the shape of Showa militarism (Eisenstadt 1998, 86-95). This was a period pervaded by nostalgia and a sense of loss of traditional values, which became one of the principal topics of intellectuals such as Natsume Sōseki, Tanizaki Junichirō, Watsuji Tetsurō, and for those who adhered to the so-called ‘culturalist’ movement. Najita and Harootunian pointed out how, for the Taishō conservatives, the Western conceptions adopted by the bunmei kaika polity were seen as ‘manipulating the indigenous cultural values in ways that were inimical to the legacies of a distinct history, particularly the aesthetic impulse of an elegant inheritance, and contrary to the communitarian experience vivified by the collective memory of the folk’ (Najita and Harootunian 2008, 714). These ‘indigenous values’ were subsumed under the concept of kokutai (lit. ‘body of the country’, the expression now refers to national polity in general), a synthesis of national traits that lies at the foundation of the nihonjinron discourse.
The re-appropriation of ‘indigenous’ culture described by Najita and Harootunian quickly escalated into nationalism and militarisation that led to the second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and eventually to the global conflict. In 1937, at the apex of
Showa nationalism, Prime Minister Konoe Fumimarō, who would later become the leader of the para-fascist organisation Taisei Yokusankai, ordered the publication of the Kokutai no hongi (lit. ‘True Meaning of the Nation’), a pamphlet containing the governmental line on themes of internal and foreign affairs, economy, culture and education.3 This document testifies to the official Japanese response to the Western
‘crisis of modernity’ that led to a revision of the concepts of self and community. The premise of the book was that Japan had forgotten the original way of its ancestors ‘due to the fact that since the days of Meiji so many aspects of European and American culture, systems, and learning, have been imported, and that, too rapidly’ (Hall 1949, 52). The responsibility for weakening the spirit and dividing the thoughts of a people until then united could not but originate in an alien form of social illness, which the authors of the Kokutai no hongi attributed to what they considered an all-Western phenomenon: individualism. In fact, the whole document can be read as an articulated criticism of individualism, described as the Western plague that contaminated Japanese society. However, in line with the post-bunmei kaika attitude of Okakura and Nitobe, combining Eastern and Western thought, the Kokutai no hongi described how Japan did not foolishly refuse anything that might come from the West. Rather, Japan skimmed and absorbed Occidental thought and technique, purifying and rendering Japanese whatever would be profitable for the sake of the nation’s wealth. The authors clearly stated: ‘Our first duty is the task of creating a new Japanese culture by sublimating and assimilating foreign cultures which are the source of the various problems in keeping with the fundamental principles of our national entity’ (emphasis added, Hall 1949, 175). They later elaborated on this concept by asserting that:
Western cultures are the spectacular developments of the natural sciences which are based on positivism and of the material civilisation which is their fruit. […]
Our nation must increasingly adopt these various sciences […] However, these scholastic systems, methods, and techniques are substantiated by views of life and of the world peculiar to the West, which views are due to the racial historical, and topographical characteristics of the Occident. Hence, in introducing these things in our country, we must […] scrutinise their essential qualities, and with the clearest insight adapt their merits and cast aside their demerits (1949, 179).
The Kokutai no hongi is often redundant in its treatment of the issues of individualism and absorption of Western culture, yet frequent repetitions give the idea of how this very point was considered essential in this phase of the construction of the Japanese
3 Sections from the Kokutai no hongi quoted hereafter are from J. Owen Gauntlett’s translation, edited by R. Hall (1949).
national identity.4
Written in a poetic language, rich in hyper-textual references recalling mytho-historical chronicles such as the Kojiki and the Nihongi, the Kokutai no hongi describes the origins of Japanese civilisation and opposes them to the history of Western thought.
Occidental civilisations are seen as rooted in the individualism, liberalism and rationalism that stemmed from classic Greek philosophy, through Christianity and the Enlightenment: the Western mistake was ‘[having lost] sight of the totality and concreteness of human beings and [having deviated] from the reality of human existence’ (1949, 176). To this ethical mistake the book opposed the virtues of loyalty and filial piety of Confucian origin. However, the authors thought that Chinese Confucianism contained the germ of individualism, and became pure only once
‘sublimated and assimilated’ into the Japanese ‘national entity’ (1949, 177). It would have been impossible for the nationalist hierarchs to admit that the philosophical foundation of their country, including Buddhism, was simply imported. Moreover, by claiming the perfection of Japanese Confucianism, they automatically hinted at the dangers of deviant forms, which might have led China to embrace Communism.5 The core of this discussion was ethical in nature, and hence of political application: at the roots of all Western ‘ill’ ideologies, both in extreme versions (communism and anarchism) and moderate versions (liberalism and democracy), is a view of the world in which the individual is seen as completely independent, and his or her freedom strictly related to this autonomous condition. According to this line of thought, what the West seemed to have forgotten is that true moral freedom (dōtoku no jiyu) is not to be found in the self (kojin), but in ‘serving’ (hōshi) the community (1949, 180).
Chapter IV of the book, entitled ‘Ceremonial Rites and Morality’ explained how Japanese ethics are based on Confucianism. The authors showed how in Japan the virtue of loyalty is strictly related to that of filial piety: because the Japanese people was believed to be ethnically homogeneous, descending from the Emperor Jimmu, serving the Emperor meant serving the father of a big family – Japan. Here the nationalist ideologues found the perfect intersection of Confucianism and state Shinto. Besides, the
4 The expression ‘individualism’ (kojinshugi) occurs 140 times, while ‘sublimate and assimilate’ (junka suru) 34 times.
5 Criticism of individualism was not only directed toward utilitarianism and liberalism, but also socialism, identified with the revolutionary events taking place in Russia. Following the attempted assassination of the Emperor Meiji by leftist revolutionaries, a strong anti-communist campaign was brought forward and the socialist heretics who believed in a class-less society were fiercely prosecuted. B. Victoria documents how anti-socialist anathema came especially from high members of the Buddhist sects (Victoria 2006:
50).
Kokutai no hongi pointed out the important role that Bushido played in transcending the teaching of Confucianism into an all-Japanese ethics of self-effacement and defiance of death. As is typical in all regime literature, the Kokutai no hongi delivered its content with a strong, assertive tone. The concept underlying the whole narrative of the book is the uniqueness and superiority of Japan, especially in the ability to absorb the best of what was offered by foreign civilizations, developed since the dawn of its civilisation.
The ethical principle that governed all importation and ‘purification’ of foreign culture was the principle of effacement of the self in order to serve the higher ‘good’.
This elemental concept had its application in the field of artistic production, too.
The Kokutai no hongi described the ‘truly Japanese’ approach to the arts by stating at
The Kokutai no hongi described the ‘truly Japanese’ approach to the arts by stating at