Table Of ContentAnywhereOut of the World
Translating DécadenceinJapanese Literature,1885-1925
Isabelle Lavelle
5615D011-9
January24,2018
Adoctoral dissertationsubmittedto
theGraduateSchool of International Cultureand CommunicationStudies
WasedaUniversity
inpartial fulfillment oftherequirements forthedegreeof
DoctorofPhilosophy
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor Professor Adrian
Pinnington for the continuous support, for his patience, motivation, and immense
knowledge.His guidance andpassionhelpedmeinall thesteps ofthis research.
I would like to thank my sub-advisors, Professor Graham Law and Professor
Morita Norimasa, for their insightful comments and encouragement, which
incentivized me to widen myresearch from various perspectives. I am also grateful to
Professor Asō Takashi for his careful reading and numerous helpful comments.
This research was made possible thanks to the generous funding of the
JapaneseMinistryofEducation.
I also thank my fellow Ph.D. candidates Paula Martínez and Hayakawa
Yumiko for the stimulating discussions and for the friendship we have had in the last
three years.
Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Dr. Tarek Katramiz, for
proofreading and formatting the thesis, and for contributing to my foray into
Decadence.
TABLE OFCONTENTS
LISTOFABBREVIATIONS
INTRODUCTION------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1
PARTONE.THEDECADENTMILIEU--------------------------------------------------23
CHAPTERONE
TRANSLATIONASACREATIVEART.THELANGUAGEOFDECADENCE----------------28
1. IntroducingSymbolism: UedaBin’s Linguistic Revolution --------------------29
2.Kaichōon’s Legacy: thePoet-Translator-------------------------------------------43
3.TheJapanese LanguageofDecadence ---------------------------------------------55
CHAPTERTWO
TRANSLATINGARTANDLIFE:JAPANESEAESTHETICISMANDDECADENCE----------66
1.Against Naturalism? Decadent Individualism-------------------------------------68
2.WorshippingPan: Aestheticism as a Lifestyle------------------------------------81
3.ThePast Revisited.Edo/Tokyoas theCapital of Decadence-------------------92
PARTTWO.APERMANENTEXILE--------------------------------------------------- 101
CHAPTERTHREE
‘THEDECADENTISANOTHER’:THEAESTHETICSOFNOTBELONGING------------- 103
1.TheEternal Foreigner--------------------------------------------------------------- 104
2.France: thePromised Land--------------------------------------------------------- 111
3.Domesticatingthe Foreign: AnAestheticofHybridity------------------------ 117
CHAPTERFOUR
THEDECADENTDISCOURSEOFOTHERNESS-------------------------------------------- 137
1.ObjectifyingOtherness: JapanandOrientalism--------------------------------- 138
2.Anti-modernJaponism: Throughthe Lens ofPierre Loti---------------------- 152
CONCLUSION------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 168
BIBLIOGRAPHY---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 173
LIST OFABBREVIATIONS
HDZ - Horiguchi Daigaku zenshū (The Complete Works of Horiguchi Daigaku). 9
vols. Tokyo: Ozawa,1983.
KMZ - Kinoshita Mokutarō zenshū (The Complete Works of Kinoshita Mokutarō). 24
vols. Tokyo: Iwanami,1981.
KHSS - Kitahara Hakushū sakuhin shū (Anthology of Works of Kitahara Hakushū). 6
vols. Tokyo: Kawade,1952.
OZ - Ōgai zenshū (The Complete Works of Ōgai). 38 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1972.
KZ -Kafū zenshū (The Complete Works of Kafū). 30 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1992.
SHZ - Satō Haruo zenshū (The Complete Works of Satō Haruo). 12 vols. Tokyo:
Kōdansha, 1969.
UBZ - Ueda Bin zenshū (The Complete Works of Ueda Bin). 10 vols. Tokyo: Kyōiku
shuppan sentā, 1980.
INTRODUCTION
In a 1911 essay, Nagai Kafū wonders: ‘What will be left on this Japanese land
[...] when the beauty of the landscape will have been unsparingly destroyed for the
“progress” of civilisation”?’ (KZ, vol. 9, p.133)1 The individualist and Francophile
Kafū (Katō Shūichi, 2004, p. 171), the hedonist aesthete famously censored for
speaking up against his countrymen’s increasing militarism following the Russo-
Japanese War (Rubin, 1984, pp. 117-125), also developed in his works a consistent
critique of modernity. In the short story Dentsūin (The Dentsū Temple, 1911), he
deplores how ‘the trend of Démocratie and Positivisme is erasing day by day the last
beautiful colours of history, relentlessly killing the dream of the anachronistic poet’
(KZ, vol.7, p.206).2 ‘Démocratie’ and ‘Positivisme’, written in Roman letters, jar
with the surrounding Japanese text. Does Kafū use the French words rather than their
Japanese equivalent to better denounce democracy and positivism as foreign bodies,
or is he hinting towards a shared intellectual distaste that goes beyond the Japanese
borders, thus including his discourse within a larger transcultural and translinguistic
context?
In these two hypotheses, which are not necessarily antithetical, lies the
founding ambiguity of Japanese Decadence; inheriting its pessimistic vision from
Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and others, while the very ills
being denounced are born out of the philosophical and technological advances that
make intercontinental exchanges — of both body and mind — easier than ever been
before. Kafū justifying his self-proclaimed aversion to democracy and positivism by
favouring aesthetics over practicalityand rationalitypositions the Japanese writer as a
direct heir to Baudelaire, and in his writings Kafū oftentimes proclaims his allegiance
to the French poet, designating Les Fleurs du mal as his ‘gospel (fukuinsho)’
(Sasabuchi, 1976, p.17). Baudelaire’s attacks on progress as the main reason for
modern societies’ disregard of beautyhad unfolded as earlyas 1855 in a violent essay
on contemporary art. ‘The idea of progress (l’idée de progrès)’ is described as an
‘obscure beacon, invented bythe present philosophism’, ‘a modern lantern [that] casts
1「将来に於て日本の風景美が文明の「進化」の為めに惜し気もなく破壊されてしまつたなら、[...]
日本の国土に何が残るであろう。」Ontheessayfromwhichthisquoteistaken,seeChapter4-2.
2「Démocratie と Positivisme の時勢は日一日に最後の美しい歴史的色彩を抹殺して、時代後れの詩人
の夢を覚さねば止むまいとする。」
1
darkness on all objects of knowledge (ce fanal obscure, invention du philosophisme
actuel, [...] cette lanterne moderne [qui] jette des ténèbres sur tous les objets de la
connaissance)’(Baudelaire,1962,p.217).3 Withprogress,
freedom vanishes [...]. This grotesque idea, which has flourished on the
rotten terrain of modern fatuity, has discharged us all from our duty, has
released every soul from its responsibility, has unburdened the will from
all the bounds that the love of beauty had imposed on it; and the
diminished races, if this dreadful madness endures, will fall asleep on the
pillow of fatality in the dotard sleep of decay. This infatuation is the
symptom of a decadence that is already too visible (Baudelaire, 1962,
pp.217-218).4
Believing in the idea of progress hinders men’s intellectual evolution, as they
passively expect the objective movement of history to shape their destiny, thus
surrendering their claim to a superior existential status transcending the blind laws of
materiality. This is how ‘freedom’ comes from the awareness of men’s ‘duty’ and
‘responsibility’ as spiritual beings, the core value around which this superior human
existencerevolves being, accordingto Baudelaire, ‘theloveofbeauty’.
This denunciation of progress is part of a wider reflection on modernity that
Baudelaire develops in his essays on art.5 For Baudelaire, ‘modernity is what is
transitory, fleeting, contingent; it is half of what art is, the other half is the eternal and
the immutable (la modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de
3‘Philosophism’referstotherationalistthoughtoftheeighteenthcenturythatledtonineteenthcentury
positivism.BaudelaireconsistentlydenouncestheEnlightenment,writingforinstanceinMoncœurmis
ànu:‘IamboredinFrance,especiallybecauseeveryonethereresemblesVoltaire.[...]Voltaire,orthe
anti-poet, the king of the idle onlookers, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist [...]. Voltaire, like
all lazy people, hated mystery (Je m’ennuie en France, surtout parce que tout le monde y ressemble à
Voltaire.[…]Voltaire,oul’anti-poète,leroidesbadauds,leprincedessuperficiels,l’anti-artiste[…].
Voltaire,commetouslesparesseux,haïssaitlemystère)’(Moncœurmisànu,ch.29).
4‘lalibertés’évanouit[…].Cettegrotesqueidée,quiafleurisurleterrainpourridelafatuitémoderne,
a déchargé chacun de son devoir, délivré toute âme de sa responsabilité, dégagé la volonté de tous les
liensqueluiimposaitl’amour dubeau:etlesracesamoindries,sicettenavrantefoliedurelongtemps,
s’endormiront sur l’oreiller de la fatalité dans le sommeil radoteur de la décrépitude. Cette infatuation
estlediagnosticd’unedécadencedéjàtropvisible)’.Expositionuniverselle1855,“Beaux-Arts”.
5The French word modernité appeared precisely around that time. In 1853, Théophile Gautier wrote:
‘the character of English painting is, as we have said, modernity. Does this noun actually exist? The
feeling it expresses is so recent that the word could well not be in the dictionary (le caractère de la
peinture anglaise est, comme nous l’avons dit, la modernité. Le substantif existe-t-il? Le sentiment
qu’il exprime est si récent que le mot pourrait bien ne pas se trouver dans le dictionnaire)’ (Hobbs,
1998,p.64).
2
l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable)’ (‘La Modernité’, Le Peintre de
laviemoderne,1863; Baudelaire,1962,p.467).Baudelairedoes not holdart from the
past as inherently superior; on the contrary, true art is always innovative, as it strives
to capture what has never been expressed before; the famous last line from the poem
“Le Voyage” sums up this idea: ‘Plunge into the Unknown to find the new! (Au fond
de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!)’ (Baudelaire, 1961, p.160). However,
because ‘all beauty contains [...] something eternal and something transitory —
something absolute and particular (Toutes les beautés contiennent […] quelque chose
d’éternel et quelque chose de transitoire — d’absolu et de particulier)’ (‘De
l’héroïsme de la vie moderne’, Salon de 1846, ch. 18; Baudelaire, 1962, p.195), art
which forsakes the ‘eternal’ and the ‘absolute’ is doomed to failure. Modern societies
happen to be infatuated with constant motion, both physical — made possible by
technical innovations — and spiritual — with this ‘dreadful madness’ that is the idea
of progress. They are thus dangerously close to becoming impervious to beauty in its
entirety.
Kafū shared a similar critical viewpoint on Meiji Japan, and Sasabuchi
Tomoichi highlights how for aesthetic reasons and ‘as a reaction against
modernisation, Kafū adopted an anti-conformist posture (hanzoku-teki shisei) which
made him deliberatelyseek out societies and areas that had maintained a conservative
air. On this point, Kafū’s position is extremely close to Poe’s, Baudelaire’s, and
Wilde’s’ (Sasabuchi, 1976, p.56).6 These writers indeed have in common a complex
positioningtowards modernitythat has been identified, concerningthe French context,
as anti-modern by Antoine Compagnon. As Compagnon argues, the creative spirit of
an artist such as Baudelaire is ‘inseparable from the resistance against “the modern
world” (inséparable dela résistance au «monde moderne »)’; Baudelaire is therefore
the ‘prototype’ of these anti-modern writers who are also, at the same time, modern’
(Compagnon,2005,p.7).
Anti-moderns are not tenants of classicism, academism, traditionalism, or
conservatism (Compagnon, 2005, p.18); on the contrary, they constitute the
intellectual and artistic avant-garde specifically because they develop a complex,
6「彼は [...] 近代化への反感から意識的に保守的な気風を残している社会や地域を求め、反俗的姿勢を
とった。」Stephen Snyder writes: ‘Kafū was, perhaps above all, a contrarian. Throughout his career,
hetooktheculturalpulseofhisburgeoning,metamorphosingnationandthendidandsaidpreciselythe
opposite’(Snyder,2000,p.1).
3
critical reflection on modernity.7 ‘The anti-moderns [...] are the real moderns because
they are not duped by modernity.8 The anti-modern within the modern appears as a
demand for freedom (Les antimodernes [...] ne seraient autres que les modernes, les
vrais modernes, non dupes du moderne. L’antimoderne dans le moderne, c’est
l’exigence de liberté)’ (Compagnon, 2005, pp.8-14); freedom not to abide by social
norms, freedom not to believe in the dominant values of the times, and freedom to
indulge in artistic and sensory pleasures wherever and whenever the artist may find
them.
This often pessimistic striving for intellectual freedom is what unites
independent minds such as Kafū and Baudelaire. Capturing their aesthetical revolt
against what they identify as the same features of the same modernity, affecting the
industrialised world as a whole, allows for a much more complex understanding of
intercultural interactions in the twentieth century. Much more than the one presumed
by the often held assumption that, identifying modernity with a unilateral process of
Westernisation, the critique of modernity and the critique of the West are the same.
On the contrary, a shared genealogy of anti-modern critique applies to the Japanese
variationofDecadent literature.
Baudelaire indeed sees in progress the clearest sign of modernity as a global
decadence.9 Decadence is the stage anycivilisation reaches when its advanced state of
evolution makes it put the idea of progress at the centre of its belief system; which
also means that progress is both the product and the agent of decadence. AsMattei
Calinescu puts it in his seminal study on Decadence,‘progress and decadence imply
each other so intimately that, if we were to generalize, we would reach the
7Compagnonfurthernoticesthat‘theintellectualandliteraryhistoryofthe19thand20thcenturieshas
always been reluctant towards the dogma of progress, has resisted rationalism, Cartesian thought, the
Enlightenment, historical optimism — or determinism and positivism, materialism and mechanisation
(l’aventure intellectuelle et littéraire des XIXe et XXe siècles a toujours bronché devant le dogme du
progrès, résisté au rationalisme, au cartésianisme, aux Lumières, à l’optimisme historique — ou au
déterminismeetaupositivisme,aumatérialismeetaumécanisme[...]’(Compagnon,2005,p.11).
8Baudelaire writes about Poe: ‘He has never been duped! — I do not believe that the Virginian who
calmly wrote, amidst an outburst of democracy, “The people has nothing to do with laws except obey
them”, hasever fallenvictimto modern wisdom. (Car ilne futjamaisdupe!—Je ne croispasque le
Virginien qui a tranquillement écrit, en plein débordement démocratique: «Le peuple n’a rien à faire
avec les lois, si ce n’est de leur obéir», ait jamais été une victime de la sagesse moderne)’ (‘Notes
nouvellessurEdgarPoe’;Baudelaire,1962,p.622).
9As Compagnon writes, ‘after Baudelaire [...], mistrust of progress becomes a commonplace of anti-
modernity (après Baudelaire [...], la méfiance à l’égard du progrès devient un lieu commun de
l’antimodernité)’(Compagnon,2005,p.61).
4
paradoxical conclusion that progress is decadence and, conversely, decadence is
progress’(Calinescu,1977,p.155).10
Myapproach to Decadence takes the paradoxes contained within the notion as
its starting point, and I therefore subscribe to Charles Bernheimer’s outlook in his
ownstudyon thequestion: ‘It is not thereferential content ofthe term that conveys its
meaning so much as the dynamics of paradox and ambivalence that it sets in motion’
(Bernheimer, 2002, p.5).11 The tenant of Decadence, being the one who believes that
the societyhe lives in is in a state of decadence, is the one who articulates the concept
and develops a suitable aesthetic for the times; this makes him the one accused of
promoting decadence by those who do not partake in his pessimistic vision of history
(Hustveldt, 1998, p.10; Gilman, 1979, p.158; Calinescu, 1977, p.157). Replying to
his critics, Baudelaire thus proudly concedes that he and his peers ‘are guilty of
rejoicing in [their] destiny (nous sommes coupables de nous réjouir dans notre
destinée)’, while boasting about the ability of ‘poetic minds’ such as themselves to
‘find new delights in the play of lights of this dying sun (Dans les jeux de ce soleil
agonisant, certains esprits poétiques trouveront des délices nouvelles)’.
And the setting sun will indeed appear to them as the marvellous allegory
of a soul heavy with life, which descents behind the horizon with a
magnificent reserveofthoughts anddreams (Baudelaire,1962,p.620).12
Alongside Baudelaire, French Decadents in general constantly nourished this
ambiguity. Verlaine extends the metaphor of the Decadent as a worshipper of a dying
sun a couple of years later in his interview with Jules Huret in L’Écho de Paris
(Stephan,1974,p.47):
We kept having this epithet [‘decadent’] thrown at us, like an insult; I
picked it up as a war cry; but it did not mean anything specific, as far as I
10 In this study, I use the capitalised word ‘Decadence’ to refer to the literary aesthetic born in
nineteenthcenturyEurope;theun-capitalisedwordreferstothegeneralideaofdecay,degenerescence,
anddeterioration.
11See also Calinescu quoting Jankélévitch: ‘Decadence is not in statu but in motu’ (Calinescu, 1977,
p.155).
12‘Et le coucher du soleil leur apparaîtra en effet comme la merveilleuse allégorie d’une âme chargée
de vie, qui descend derrière l’horizon avec une magnifique provision de pensées et de rêves’. ‘Notes
nouvellessurEdgarPoe’.
5
know. Decadent! Is not the twilight of a beautiful day worth every dawn!
And the sun that seems as though it is setting, will it not rise again
tomorrow? (Huret,1891,pp.70-71)13
Verlaine’s declaration of decadence follows a characteristic double-movement: first
angrily rejected and declared void, the adjective ‘decadent’ is then immediately
infused with an aesthetic quality that applies to the poet’s own artistic sensitivity.
Verlaine seems to imply that this overlapping refutation/affirmation comes from the
inevitably cyclical nature of decadence; decadence is simultaneously an end and a
beginning, and the poet, byacceptingto be decadent himself, both invites and escapes
decadence.
When approaching this much-debated notion of literary and cultural history,
one therefore needs to acknowledge this contradiction: the Decadent both denounces
and embraces decadence.14 In this paradox lies the specificity of Decadence as a
nineteenth century literary phenomenon. As Paul Bourget wrote in his famous 1881
essayon Baudelaire, ‘We delight in our so-called corruptions of style as well as in the
refined beings of our race and our time (Nous nous délectons dans ce que vous
appelez nos corruptions de style, et nous délections avec nous les raffinés de notre
race et de notre heure)’ (Bourget, 1885, p.28). The idea of decadence in general is
indeed by no mean specific to the fin de siècle, nor to literature; in Europe, it had
previously been articulated by numerous thinkers, from Polybius to Bossuet,
Montesquieu, Vico, Rousseau, Gibbon... to name but a few (see Freund, 1984).
However, for the first time in ‘Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe’, the 1857 essay on his
13‘On nous l’avait jetée comme une insulte, cette épithète [de décadent]; je l’ai ramassée comme un
cride guerre; maiselle ne signifiaitrien de spécial, que je sache. Décadent! Est-ce que le crépuscule
d’unbeaujournevautpastouteslesaurores?Etpuis,lesoleilquial’airdesecoucher,neselèvera-t-
ilpasdemain?’
14 This fundamental semantic instability prompted the relative disgrace of the notion in literary
criticismformostofthetwentiethcentury.RichardGilmanfamouslywrotein1979inDecadence:The
StrangeLifeofanEpithetthat‘thereisnothingtowhich[decadence]actuallyandlegitimatelyapplies’,
goingasfarasadvocatingthebanishmentof‘thisinjuredandvacantwordfromhistory’(Gilman,1979,
p.158). Recent research on Decadence adopts an opposite approach by putting this ambiguity at the
centreofthedebate.
6
