The language of self, power, meaning: Japanese literature and the cultural boundaries of ideology

Abstract

To understand the idioms used in representing literary selfhood as enactments and rhetorical assertions is to observe their contextual construction within shifting fields of power and meaning inseparable from the specific and discernible situations, culturally specific conventions affecting their narration, in short, the specificity of historical moment. In the Japanese context, identity is clearly not the unified essence implied by the Cartesian premise, but it can be the presentation or performance of a spatiotemporal locatedness of contradiction and disunity, a nexus wherein multiple discourses temporarily coincide in remarkable and discernible ways we apprehend in the abstracted self. But it is not enough that we as readers celebrate in the particularity of these performance as expressions of what is often dismissed as “local knowledge.” Rather, we must question what social institutions--be they alien or indigenous--these performances address. What conventions did they oppose? What apparatus of power does the dialectic of the gaze set itself in opposition? For only by questioning the strategies that erected the facade of boundedness in general and one in particular that created the illusions of insulating the self from the play of power relations in specific works of fictional self-representation can we hope to force a larger reconsideration of selves and their pathways to emergence. In many ways, my task as a member of a particular reading audience has been and will always be to visualize the overall impact of cultural forces on patterns of fictional self-representation and to accept that identity is negotiated, open, shifting, ambiguous, the result of culturally available meanings and the open-ended, power-laden enactments of these meanings in everyday situations.