Like The Sun and the Iron, in The Novelist's Vacation we can still read mishima's most personal speculations, yet rich in thought. If in the former, Mishima is using a sharp knife to dissect and even separate his flesh and bone from the outside to the interior, then in this book, he reverses the handle of the knife, from the inside out, with his philosophy as the handle, and the tip of the knife points to literature, art, society and the diseases of the times.
In The Sun and the Iron, Mishima inadvertently mentions muscles: "In my conception, there is nothing more in my definition of a work of art than the form of inner power. That is, it must be a 'organic' work full of life. This sentence is impressive (speaking to the idea of a regular reader), how to understand it concretely? Maybe it's a blood book like Nietzsche said? Is it a work written with life? In The Novelist's Holiday, this idea may be explained.
"The Novelist's Holiday" is actually a diary of a certain period of time in Mishima, but it is not a casual record of daily affairs and thoughts. The style of the diary is to record the weather and the itinerary of the day in the first few strokes, and then record (or write) in a large way (or write) your own thoughts on literature, art, philosophy, and other aspects of the day. Even in the diary, the ideas are put into writing, and many of the pages can be regarded as monographs. This may be what he later called "tagewerk".
In addition to this diary, the book also compiles two essays on writers, two novels, a drama essay, a critic by a painter, a composition of modernity, and Mishima's unfinished "A Brief History of Japanese Literature" during his lifetime. To say that it is a "small history" is only slightly thinner in thickness, but it is not "small" at all in challenging mainstream literary history. From the diaries and these articles, Mishima's breadth of literary reading, ease of moving between East and West, as well as deep philosophical thinking and a thorough knowledge of art history are revealed.
It is difficult to look back on reading, and other aspects are inherently insufficient, and reading Mishima is naturally a difficult task. After reading through it, I would like to try to summarize the specific meaning of Mishima's so-called "vibrant 'organic'" work. The "form of inner strength" of a work, as Mishima speaks, may contain three elements: one is that the work is functional and predominantly perceptual; and that the work is dominated by the reversal of the two laws; then, the work must have a strong cultural will.
In the second diary, Mishima writes that "art, which proceeds from the demands of inhumanity, becomes the only thing that still exists that has humanity." This sentence concisely (inexplicably) sums up the first two elements. In Mishima's view, faculties mean a strong desire for real life, to resist the world that looks like it is, and to return to the world that actually exists, that is, a world in which only its own existence is enough. This requires the writer to resist the intrusion of external forces into all emotions, sensibilities, and senses at the same time, and to let them follow their laws until death.
Although powerful reason can construct the world and make various interpretations of the world, the rich sensibility is always invading the rational world with the chaos it feels, and guiding and pulling life. And life here must be familiar with the law of enthusiasm, must recognize the real law, that is, believe only in the motive force of action from the heart. As "Bushido is the way to return" in "Ye Yin", in Mishima, the senses lead to death, whether it is the death of a beautiful teenager who died in his own ideals, or the works he loved, such as the early death of the prince in his big book in the "Little History of Japanese Literature".
For Ye Yin, Mishima's judgment is "a paradox inspired by actions full of wisdom and determination." Mishima's passion for the backlash of the second law is triggered by the faculties. In The Sun and the Iron, Mishima deliberately ignores the flesh in order to create a dichotomy between language and reality. Beginning with The Novelist's Holiday, Mishima wrote about walking in the summer sun, recalling "the scene of the period after the end of World War II that was both brutal and lyrical." ”
"Brutal and lyrical" is exactly the duality of beauty that Mishima loves, the aesthetics of violence that readers speak of. For Mishima, summer is the opposite of life and death—"golden decay, blood-wounded vitality." The two, like these opposites, exist really and reasonably, but are often unified on an individual, a certain work. In Mishima, the moment he decided to live, despair and disillusionment rose in his heart.
Thus, Mishima saw in Jean René at the same time "obscenity and sublime, despicable and noble", a guy who wrote about the wildness or evil itself, but finally achieved the restoration of the combined action- creation, trial- trial, death row prisoner- executioner, and achieved the divine unity of man and god. The only salvation of literature and art is that creation is also like suicide. In The Symbolic Composition of Modernity, The Demon, Mishima depicts two contrasting compositions of death, or the will to power of death, in which the random killer attempts to prove himself to be the absolute other, while the one who desires death prays for the appearance of the absolute other. The two often met but did not know each other, and eventually, unity was reached in the writer and the poet.
Regarding the writing of writers, Mishima believes that it is impossible to write works worth reading based on inspiration and life experience alone, but cannot easily manipulate words. Writers should be born with a sense of language and maintain "a kingdom of happiness brought about by the power of language." Language is masterable—from a functional point of view—the weight of vocabulary, the pleasantness of phonology, the visuality of words, the slowness of rhythm, etc.
Speaking of music that "teases and tease on the edge of the dark abyss of human beings," Mishima divides the enjoyment of art into masochistic and abusive types, which he considers to be abusive. Controllable language, abusive art, both of which quietly lead to Mishima's so-called cultural will. Such will is like a seed, and in Mishima's writing and symbolic composition of modernity, he refers to a similar generation from a moment or a scene to a whole picture.
Mishima's A Brief History of Japanese Literature aims to challenge the traditional way of writing literary history that theoretically renders "trivial matters of insignificance into important events," and the works he chooses, no matter who writes them or in what form, must have a cultural will running through them. "The essence of literary works is the cultural will", and literary history is the process of change and transformation of the cultural will. Works with cultural will are pioneering works, not derivatives and imitations.
Mishima not only explicitly rewrites the history of Japanese literature from this point of view, but he also views and comments on the writers and works he loves from this point of view. "Every novel is born like a new building in the world."
The characters in Adolf, whom he had repeatedly read, were "a complex of intellectual and frailty that appeared desperately watching over himself," and the form of this work, a book of diaries or memoranda, a naked novel, was considered unprecedented by Mishima. However, even if Gunsdang worked hard all his life, he could not even have the innocence of a true artist compared to Stendhal's Jullien. In contrast to Stendhal's active enthusiasm, Jean-Genet reawakens the emotional appeal of sublime sentiments with a passive personality in his works, and René calls the deep pain of the bottom of the rebelliousness sublime.
In this way, I may have a general understanding (non-understanding) of the meaning of some of Mishima's works that have "forms of inner power" and "'organic', full of vitality.". It is precisely because of the strong sense of fetishness in a work and the unity but collision of the two laws, and the power of strong cultural will, that these three catalyze each other to produce a work with strength. Perhaps my understanding deviates from the meaning of Mishima, but it does not change from their collision and supplement to the ideas of this ordinary reader.
2021.11.03