NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET

 

Far more modest in size and limited in scope is the last book written by the late William S Haas, The Destiny of the Mind, East and West (New York, Macmillan; 319 pages). Professor Haas does not attempt to formulate or even suggest a philosophy of history, but he does isolate and identify a phenomenon that will have to be taken into account in formulating a valid theory of history.

Professor Haas attacks — and I believe, demolishes — an assumption that underlies almost all modern theories of history: that the minds of all human beings, if not defective or disordered, work in essentially the same way.

I suspect that Haas's work will instantly convince every Westerner who has made a really intensive study of an Oriental culture. He will find in the book a sudden clarification of his own disconcerting experience. Reading it, he, like the heroine of one of Edith Wharton's best stories, "will say, long after, that was it!"

I should suppose that no one begins serious study of an Oriental culture without a certain romantic enthusiasm, for nothing less is required to surmount the very formidable linguistic barriers. It takes a long time to surmount them, and during that time the student's studies seem to bring him ever nearer to a fundamental unity of mankind underlying the diversity of regional cultures. But when language has ceased to be an obstacle, there inevitably comes, sooner or later, a day when the student has to admit to himself that the more he learns, the less he understands. He is confronted by minds whose operations he can glimpse from time to time, but cannot follow. He realizes, for example, that to the Hindu mind it simply does not matter whether George Washington lived earlier than Christopher Columbus or later. And then he realizes that he cannot himself really understand how it is possible to think about events without considering the sequence in which they occurred. While pondering that enigma, he will perceive that he has been translating Hindu doctrines into the terms of Western thought, assuming that each proposition has logical antecedents or consequences of which there is usually no trace in the original texts, and so he comes to suspect that his understanding of a specific doctrine, such as Vedantic karman or the Buddhistic skhandas*, is no more a reproduction of what the doctrine means to a Hindu mind than Puccini's Madame Butterfly is a reprod uction of life in Japan. He can learn a great deal about such doctrines, to be sure, but only so long as he remembers that he is an observer standing outside a barrier that he can never cross.

Professor Haas went through this common experience, but he resolved to ascertain precisely what the barrier was. In the book that he wrote as the conclusion of many years of study, he identifies and by copious illustration demonstrates the existence of two generically different mentalities. The Occidental mind, which appears fully formed in the earliest Greek philosophers and has not since changed, is the mind of conceptual thought — of thought directed from the mind toward an object. So completely are we dominated by this mentality that the only way in which we can think about ourselves is by placing ourselves momentarily in the position of an outside observer looking at us — we must try (as best we can) to make an objective study of ourselves. The Oriental mind, which appears fully formed in the earliest Upanishads, does not think conceptually; its thought is never directed away from itself. The Oriental mind cannot separate what it is thinking about from itself.

The capacity for objective thought is peculiar to the philosophical mind of the West. For the Oriental mental configuration, Haas coins the term philousian.

One consequence of this distinction is that there is, and can be, no Oriental philosophy; for when we apply the word "philosophy'' to an Oriental doctrine, we misrepresent it as grossly as though we were to call a woman's intuition "logic". It also follows that there is no Oriental mysticism. Mysticism is the term by which the philosophical mind designates what is for it a leap over the logical steps of conceptual thinking; the term therefore misrepresents a mental process which is not conceptual and in which, therefore, there can be no leap.

The Western mind simply cannot understand the Eastern mind without disowning itself. And not even then, unless it destroys its own capacity for the only kind of thinking that it recognizes as rational.

Professor Haas, as a conscientious scholar, warns us that his conclusions concerning the Orient are based on his own observations in the two fields in which he is specially competent. Thus he is primarily concerned with India and secondarily with China.

The use of India as the primary source of data greatly simplifies the problem: it shows that the difference in mentality cannot be a result of linguistic structure and suggests that it may not be racial. When we study a language of radically different grammatical structure and basic metaphors, such as Hebrew or Japanese, we realize that persons who think in those languages must do so in a way that seems very strange to us, though not necessarily by a different process; but Sanskrit (with its derivative, Pali) is an Indo-European language. Although it is more complicated, it does not differ from English or German or Greek in its basic way of expressing thoughts. And if the philousian mentality appears in the Upanishads, it is noteworthy that most students are inclined to believe that the earliest of those "mystic" rhapsodies were written before the Aryan blood was absorbed in the teeming masses of polyphyletic India, which would make it seem likely that the authors were Aryans themselves.

Professor Haas's analysis may need to be refined or elaborated, and it is entirely possible that there are more than two kinds of thinking. But by showing that there is a difference so fundamental - a difference more elemental and deeper than Spengler's idées maîtresses - the author has, I believe, done for the study of comparative history what Böhr did for atomic physics.

Although Professor Haas in his concluding chapters reveals a certain pessimism, as though he shared the fashionable view that our only future is liquidation, he and Professor Voegelin agree in regarding the unique civilization of the West as a unity — a single continuity that runs, with fluctuations but no break, from the ancient Greeks to ourselves. How crucial this conception is may be seen from the two books to which I now turn which deny such a continuity.

* So called skhandas are phenomenal descriptions of various aspects of experience and as such are universal. Inability to understand the meaning of these descriptions is caused only by lack of intellectual capacities.

Oliver Revilo

Cioran as a black sheep

 

At a table next to Sartre, who confidently draws on his pipe, sits a quiet young man, chain-smoking cheap Gauloises. Modestly but correctly dressed with coat and tie, his fedora hat carefully placed on top of a heavy navy overcoat folded next to him on the red velvet bench, there is a vaguely foreign, un-French air about this man, something formal and old-fashioned which strikes an odd note in the bohemian atmosphere of the café. He has a remarkable face: a head of light-colored hair like a lion’s mane, brushed backward, piercing green eyes under a permanently frowning brow and a pinched, willful mouth set in a square jaw which he pushes forward in a moue of great determination. He comes every day, from eight to twelve in the morning, two to eight in the afternoon, and nine to eleven at night. “Like a clerk.”1 He smokes and listens to the heated arguments at the next table. He always sits next to Sartre but never says a word to him. Simone de Beauvoir is also there. Whenever she takes out a cigarette, the young man stands up, bends towards her ceremoniously, and, still silent, lights it for her. She thanks him with a nod of her head; he nods back respectfully and sits down. Every day that winter the silent ceremony is repeated. No one ever asks who the foreign-looking young man is. Every day, he sits without a word next to the “idol” of the French cultural scene. Is he never “tempted” to speak to the idol?2

The young man’s name is Emil Cioran. At the time we see him eavesdropping on Sartre and his group, he is a Romanian doctoral student, in Paris on a renewable fellowship since 1937. But he hasn’t yet written a single line of his thesis. He never will, in fact. He is not really a student; he is a writer. Nor is he as young as he seems: though thirty-three is not old for a doctoral student, some of Cioran’s apparent youth is a feature of his foreignness, which he will cultivate as a permanent aspect of his persona.

He is not even a French writer, yet. His equivocal position on the margins of Sartre’s group, gravitating around the axis of French intellectual authority, always silent but always present, sums up this ambitious and divided young man, in quest of a center that will focus his own creative energy. In Romania, he is well known, the published and controversial author of five books and numerous articles. In Paris, in 1943–44, he is nobody, just an exile from Eastern Europe, hoping to make a name for himself in the City of Light. He is finishing a book about Nazi-occupied Paris as symbol of the final decay of Western civilization. But the book, written in Romanian, will remain, forgotten or abandoned, in manuscript form until its publication in 1991. For the young Romanian suddenly decides, the very next summer, to abandon his native language and to write henceforth in French, at last to break into, as it were, the conversations of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. (...)

In retrospect, young Cioran’s silent position next to Sartre at the Flore was not at all accidental. Cioran chose it deliberately. He watched and waited like a spy, quietly measuring his forces against Sartre’s to find out his own worth. “My path was the reverse of Sartre’s,” he said later, even though his essay on Sartre in the Précis, “On an Entrepreneur of Ideas,” shows how much Sartre’s model was on his mind.7 He could speak as well as Sartre, he had read much more, he would write as well as they—Sartre’s circle—were writing. His silence was not shyness or intimidation, but inordinate pride. With his body strategically placed on the margins of fame, Cioran made a statement. He was nearly inside the magic circle of Sartre and French cultural life, which had enormous prestige in the eyes of European intellectuals, especially marginal Europeans like Romanians. Just outside the circle, or rather on its border-line, the ambitious interloper worked silently and tenaciously in isolation for another five long years—scribbling away like Dostoevsky’s underground man, in the cheapest hotel rooms in the Latin Quarter—to gain the place at the table he had marked out for himself, next to Sartre, publicly recognized in France. But unlike Dostoevsky’s underground man, whose “revenges” were never more than pathetic failures to impress imaginary opponents, Cioran’s “revenge” was a blazing success. Hailed by Nadeau as a “twilight thinker,” by André Maurois as the new “moralist or immoralist,”8 by Claude Mauriac for “masterly language . . . closer to Pascal than Vigny,”9 the Romanian-born Cioran had not merely arrived on the French literary scene; he blazed across it like the meteor, symbol of obscurely powerful poetic genius, in Mallarmé’s poem, “calme bloc icibas chu d’un desastre obscur”10 [calm [granite] block fallen down here from some dark disaster].

This is the story my book has to tell: how an unknown young man from the margins of Europe, with a fanatic will to transform himself, achieved fame “in a country where prestige is everything.” Tnis biography covers the crucial first stages of his career, from 1911, the year of his birth, to 1949, the year of his consecration as a French writer, which marks his final break with his Romanian roots.
(...)
Emil Cioran first saw the light of day on April 8, 1911, the second of three children born to Emilian Cioran, one of the Orthodox village priests and his twenty-two-year-old wife, Elvira Comanici. They already had a three-year-old daughter, Virginia (Gica), and two years later Cioran’s younger brother, Aurel (Relu), would be born. As the oldest son, Cioran was given his father’s name.
Emil(ian) is not a traditional peasant name. It is a Roman, Latin name—as are Virginia and Aurel(ian)—chosen by the parents expressly for its Roman connection.

The choice of a Roman name for a Romanian child in multi-national Transylvania of the Austro-Hungarian empire was a political statement. Like many other children of educated Romanians, the Cioran children were given names that were meant, first, to affirm the Latin origins of the Romanian people, as opposed to the non-Latin origin of the other nationalities of the region, the Hungarians and Germans, and, second, to suggest that as the descendants of the Romans, the original colonizers of the province, the Romanians had more right to exist on its territory than the other populations, who arrived later during the Middle Ages.

Cioran’s first name thus already marks the newborn child twice, investing him with a split identity. As a Roman name, it claims that he is a son or citizen of Rome, legitimizes his birth, placing him in a noble, heroic lineage. However, as a Romanian name—that is, the kind of name used by a certain class of Romanians—it sets him apart as marginal and lower caste in another empire, the Austro-Hungarian, where the Romanians’ right to be is questioned and their existence merely tolerated. In its former capacity, the name participates in a national fiction of self-definition and survival; in the latter, it denotes a historical reality.

On the other hand, his family name marks him literally as a black sheep even among his own people. According to the genealogist Mihai Rădulescu, “cioran” derives from a Slavic word for black and was applied to black sheep (and their shepherds) who ranged far away beyond the Carpathians in winter, sometimes as far as the Crimea.19 If any Cioran might be said to have fulfilled the destiny of his etymology, it was E. M. Cioran, whom we might call a “black sheep” in spades.

Furthermore, generations of Romanians in Transylvania had been haunted by a need for self-definition which they hoped would lead to political self-determination.

Like all other Romanian nationals born in pre–World War I Transylvania, Cioran inherited at his birth an “identity problem” which was existential in a literal sense, since the very existence of Romanians in the Austro-Hungarian province was questioned on political and historical rather than metaphysical ground.

Searching for Cioran Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston 

Kant and Heiddeger on being alone

 Kant, for his part, distinguishes between inferior and admirable reasons for wanting to be alone:

We must, however, remark that separation from all society is regarded as sublime, if it rests upon Ideas that overlook all sensible interest. To be sufficient for oneself, and consequently to have no need of society, without at the same time being unsociable, i.e. without flying from it, is something bordering on the sublime; as is any dispensing with wants. On the other hand, to fly from men from misanthropy, because we bear ill-will to them, or from anthropophoby (shyness), because we fear them as foes, is partly hateful, partly contemptible. There is indeed a misanthropy (very improperly so-called), the tendency to which frequently appears with old age in many right-thinking men; which is philanthropic enough as far as goodwill to men is concerned, but which through long and sad experience is far removed from satisfaction with men. Evidence of this is afforded by the propensity to solitude . . .13Kant otherwise warns against a learned philosopher eating alone, as he will lose his vivacity and mental gaiety, exhausting his thoughts and, furthermore, allowing him to miss out on those thoughts he could have enjoyed in conversation with others.14 Placing such stress on the idea that a philosopher should seek out society is rather atypical. As we shall see, it is more common to consider solitude a prerequisite for philosophical discernment.

(...)

Surprisingly enough, solitude remains an undeveloped theme in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. As far as I can tell, the expression does not appear in Being in Time (1927), but the phenomenon is briefly addressed in his lectures from 1929–30, and appears in isolated places in his later writings. Still, we find no overall discussion of solitude in his works. One main problem with Heidegger’s philosophy is that the ‘I’ has a tendency to hide from itself by erecting a kind of wall of ‘self-evidence’ against itself.43 The goal is to make the self transparent in order to grasp an authentic life.44 Our being is always a being-with, and being-with others is just as intrinsic as being-in-the-world.45 That is the reason solitude can exist. If others were not already a part of my existence, solitude would not be a problem, because it would not exist. Being-with is wholly compatible with not being with others – it is wholly compatible with being a hermit – but even a hermit cannot avoid the thought that he is a self in a world with other selves.46 However, Heidegger also has a tendency to emphasize that being left to oneself is actually the most innate condition. Every single one of us is predetermined to die.47 Our being is a being-until-death. Death is a negation of who you are, but it is also that towards which you are always moving. Death individualizes. It is I myself who will die. No one can die my death for me, as they might do some other job for me, such as doing the cleaning or making a meal. Death is my death, a moribundus sum that reveals itself to us as anxiety.48 Because death as such belongs to you alone, anxiety individualizes you and draws you back into yourself. According to Heidegger, however, this withdrawal is also a condition where the bonds to all other people are torn asunder, and such tearing is a prerequisite for living in freedom, truth and actuality.49 Heidegger argues that our concrete being-with becomes irrelevant in this condition.50 He uses the expression ‘existential solipsism’, that is, that in an existential sense one’s I is the only thing that exists.51 In that state, you are thrown entirely back on yourself, and all ties to others are cut. When you enter into truth and freedom, then, it is a freedom and truth without ties to others. That is the background for Heidegger’s assertions that philosophical discernment requires solitude. Solitude can essentially be regarded as a kind of degenerative phenomenon for Heidegger, since being alone is described as an inferior mode of being with others, but for Heidegger solitude is simultaneously a prerequisite for an authentic life. Therefore it is also a prerequisite for an authentic community. For example, he writes that there are certain things that prove determinate for a community, but which cannot grow within a community – just in the individual’s solitude.52 For Heidegger, the way to self-knowledge passes through solitude. He writes that in solitude people come close to the essential in all things, close to the world and close to the self.53 It is only in solitude that you can become who you are. And all true philosophy takes place in ‘enigmatic solitude’.54

From A Philosophy of Loneliness

Lars Svendsen

JAPANESE NŌ DRAMAS

General Introduction

The Japanese nō theatre is one of the great achievements of civilization. No art is more sophisticated than this intricate fusion of music, dance, mask, costume, and language, nor does any uphold higher ideals. Nō plays, like those of other theatres, were written to be performed, but some can stand as literature beside any play ever put between the covers of a book. The aim of Japanese Nō Dramas is to demonstrate that this is so and to convey all that the printed page can convey of the beauty of nō.

Nō, which means ‘accomplishment’ or ‘perfected art’, is no doubt an expression of practical as well as aesthetic ambition. The actors and musicians of the early fifteenth century, when nō achieved its classic form, needed audiences and patronage. In those days, their theatre was known more often as sarugaku (a word that does not lend itself to useful translation), so that sarugaku no nō meant something like ‘sarugaku of the best sort’. Having been enshrined long ago as a cultural treasure, modern nō no longer needs to make any claims. But despite its present, rather esoteric reputation, at home as well as abroad, it was once simply the theatre of its time.

The choice of plays

Since the twenty-four nō plays in this collection were chosen for their literary interest, they are not a representative sampling of the whole modern repertoire, which includes well over two hundred works. Some plays in the repertoire make good theatre but unsatisfactory reading; others have only modest virtue of any kind; while a few – depending on one’s own tastes – are deplorable. For every masterpiece of the order of The Fulling Block, there are several unabashed melodramas; for every ‘warrior play’ of the quality of Tadanori, there are several martial thrillers. Some plays have lovely dances but only a slight text. In short, not all nō plays are worth translating for a wide audience. This selection represents only those that are.

 Seeing and reading

Although the introductions, notes, stage directions, etc. surrounding these translations acknowledge matters of performance, they treat the plays above all as literary texts. This approach is not self-evident. The best Japanese authorities on nō, especially before the Second World War, have held that since the plays exist only in performance, they cannot be considered literature in any sense, and this opinion remains influential. Japan has had no tradition of reading nō as literature. By now, some critics do write literary essays on various plays, but the approach is not yet fully developed. One champion of literary analysis (Tashiro Keiichirō) has cited foreign translations, and their reception as literature, in defence of his own work.

English speakers first met nō in books, thanks to Ezra Pound’s beautiful paraphrases made from the notes of Ernest Fenollosa, or to the fine translations by Arthur Waley. Yeats’s interest in what he knew of nō sealed the literary reputation of nō in the English-speaking world. However, the many translations published since then have been made by translators increasingly familiar with nō not only as text but as theatre. In the last twenty years or so, many English-speaking students of nō, impressed by the difference between seeing and reading, have concerned themselves especially with performance. Some have in their turn adopted the position that nō exists only on the stage. Consequently, many recent translations are meant above all to guide the spectator or the drama student. Meanwhile, nō plays by now have been done by English-speaking actors in all sorts of styles, from modern dance with electronic music to faithful reproductions (in English or the original) of a Japanese performance. One can also find ‘fusion’ productions that combine nō techniques with Western ones.

Anyone interested in the plays in this book should of course see them performed, if possible. However, reading does have its place, for nō texts are so difficult to follow in performance, even for the Japanese, that they must be studied separately. Besides, some performances can be disappointing and some plays (like Komachi at Seki-dera) are rarely performed. In any case, nō can seldom be seen outside Japan’s major cities, let alone abroad. For most people, reading is the only way to approach nō at all.

For reasons like these, Japanese Nō Dramas provides a certain amount of technical information about the plays for those readers who need it,  but leaves many technical terms undefined. It would not help to give brief definitions of musical forms or dance types and patterns. These things must be not only seen and heard, but learned in practice.

 The Playwrights

The theatre now called nō began to reach its present form in the mid fourteenth century. It was then a provincial theatre, centred mainly in the Yamato region south of Kyoto. Four touring troupes were affiliated with Kōfuku-ji, a great temple in the old capital of Nara, in Yamato. Komparu Gonnokami (fl. mid 14th c), the original author of The Diver, was among the actor-playwrights of the Yamato troupes. Another was Kan’ami (1333–1384), who made key contributions to early nō. Among these was his use in plays of the kusemai, a song and dance  form that survives in the important kuse section of most nō plays. Another was simply that he fathered Zeami.

Zeami (1363–1443) was the genius who created classic nō. Nothing untouched by him or his influence survives from early nō, not even the plays written by his father. Certain extant plays used to be identified with Kan’ami, even though it was recognized that Zeami must have reworked them extensively. However, the most recent scholarship suggests that Kan’ami’s literary traces have all but vanished.

Zeami remembered his father’s acting talent with awe, as his writings show, and Kan’ami’s contemporaries appear to have been similarly impressed. In 1374, Kan’ami received the signal honour of being invited to perform nō for the first time before the shogun, die young Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408), in Kyoto. Zeami, then a boy, also appeared on stage. Yoshimitsu instantly fell in love with him, removed him from his father’s care, and brought him up at his court. This son of a provincial actor was now the protégé of the most powerful man in Japan, and he received his education from the greatest men of letters of his time.

Zeami’s ability was equal to the challenge. Thanks to such patronage, he developed a theatre of beauty and grace (which were not always what country audiences called for), and could stage the most elevated works. He had a superb mind and great warmth of feeling, as this collection shows. Beside his many plays (no one can say for certain how many) he also wrote penetrating treatises on the arts of acting and playwriting. Like Shakespeare or Molière, Zeami was the master of his own troupe and an all-round man of the theatre.

Later in life, Zeami suffered severe reverses. After 1429, he and his eldest son, Motomasa (c. 1400–1432), were barred by the shogun Ashikaga Yoshinori (1394–1441) from the shogunal palace and from all the great performance occasions in the capital. In 1430, his second son gave up nō to become a monk, and in 1432 Motomasa died. (This book includes Motomasa’s most famous play, The Sumida River.) Then in 1434 Zeami was exiled, for reasons unknown, to the remote island of Sado. He returned to Kyoto only a few years before his death.

Despite Zeami’s pre-eminence in the history of nō, his only personal successor was his son-in-law, Komparu Zenchiku (1405–1468), the grandson of Komparu Gonnokami. Zenchiku was active not in Kyoto but in Nara, where the relatively small Komparu school of nō is based even today. Zeami thought highly of him. Few plays can be attributed to him on the basis of solid documentary evidence, but there is reason  to believe that The Kasuga Dragon God, The Wildwood Shrine, and Tatsuta are his. These show him to have been an excellent playwright. Zenchiku, like his father-in-law, left behind several critical writings.

The latest playwright represented here is Kanze Nobumitsu (1434– 1516), the author of Benkei Aboard Ship, although the latest play in the book is probably the anonymous The Feather Mantle. Nobumitsu was in the lineage of Zeami’s nephew, the actor On’ami (1398–1467) who, thanks to Ashikaga Yoshinori’s patronage and much against Zeami’s own will, continued the formal line of succession from Kan’ami. (The name Kanze is made up of the first syllables of Kan’ami’s and Zeami’s names.) He was a fine playwright, too, but by his time the style of nō had changed. Benkei Aboard Ship is more frankly dramatic, colourful theatre than the other plays in this book.

Some plays still in the modern repertoire were probably written in the sixteenth or even the seventeenth century, and at least one (Kusu no tsuyu) dates from the late nineteenth. However, many of the late works have little to do with those in this book, beyond the basic performance techniques that distinguish nō from other theatres. Hundreds, if not thousands of other plays exist outside the repertoire, including some by Zeami himself. Meanwhile, new ones are still being written for special occasions, and formally correct nō plays have even been written in English and other languages.

Dramatic Roles and their Language

All the roles in nō are performed by male actors. Women study nō singing or dancing and may perform whole plays as amateurs, but even now there are not many professional women actors. Most plays have at least one masked role, unless the face of a mature man – the actor – is suitable for that of the main character. Nō masks are often very beautiful, and a fine mask may be the very soul of a performance. The costumes of nō, too, are impressively lovely. Actors playing feminine roles do not ‘impersonate’ women in any obvious way, for acting in nō is on an entirely different plane from ordinary acting as the term is now understood. Gestures are restrained and miming highly abstract.

At the beginning of each play in this book, a list of ‘Persons in order of appearance’ gives the name or description of each person in  the play, together with the name of the mask, when one is used. Opposite the person’s name appears the name of the corresponding role-type, as defined by Japanese usage: waki, wakizure, shite (often subdivided into maeshite and nochijite), tsure, kokata, or ai. Modern Japanese editions of the plays all identify speakers by role-type rather than name, although some of the earliest nō manuscripts use names or descriptive words. The idea that role-type overrides the passing identity of a figure in a single play is characteristic of nō. Music, dance, and text are similarly built up of established ‘modules’. Consequently, although each performer (whether an actor or a musician) learns his part separately, nō performances are hardly rehearsed. All the parts fit together precisely, because of their modular structure.

The waki and wakizureIn most plays, the first person to appear is the waki (‘person on the side’ or ‘witness’). It is difficult to generalize about the waki’s identity or function, since these differ visibly from play to play. (In some later plays, the differences of function between all these role-types break down.) In principle, however, the waki watches, from the side, the display of the shite. The Monk in The Well-Cradle perfectly follows the theoretical model of a waki. Often, the waki is accompanied by companions or attendants who are called wakizure (‘companions to the waki’). These generally have little to say.

Waki and wakzure roles are performed by lineages of actors that are quite distinct from the shite lineages. Waki actors never perform shite roles. In theory, the reverse is true as well, but in fact, for various reasons, shite actors do sometimes perform as waki.

Waki figures speak in both verse and prose. Verse will be covered below, in connection with the language of the shite. As to prose, the waki’s self-introduction, at the start of the play, is a good example, and Benkei’s prose speeches, in Benkei Aboard Ship, illustrate the style at length. It is often weighty, with a high ratio of bulk to semantic content. In performance, these passages are impressive to listen to. The translator’s main difficulty is to make them sound suitably formal without allowing them to become unbearably stiff.

 The shite and tsureThe shite (‘actor’) is the centre of attention in any play that follows the classic form. The role may be subdivided into maeshite (‘shite in part one’) and nochijite (‘shite in part two’). It is the shite who is masked, and who sings and dances. Some plays have more than one, shite-like figure, and in these cases, one is the shite and the others, defined as subordinate, are called tsure (‘companion’). Tsure figures, too, can be masked, although they do not normally wear so fine a mask as the shite. Shite actors also perform tsure roles. Their major lineages are known as the five ‘schools’ of nō, discussed below. An amateur who studies nō singing (utai) and dancing (shimai) studies them as they apply to the shite roles.

Like the waki, the shite may speak either in prose or in verse, but verse dominates. Actually, the distinction between prose and verse, in most passages that involve the shite, is not nearly as clear as it is in English. There are several intermediate styles of sung prose or quasi-verse.

One of these intermediate styles is epic prose of the kind found in Heike monogatari. Another is the style used for passages that are, or that are meant to resemble, Japanese translations of Chinese poetry. In this book, passages of such language are laid out like verse, but against the left-hand margin of the text.

Most of the shite’s sung passages, in most plays, are in the metre of classical Japanese poetry: alternating five- and seven-syllable phrases. As a rule, the more intense the emotion, the more regular the metre. The waki sometimes sings similar verse or enters into sung verse dialogue with the shite.

The true poetry of nō can be extraordinarily dense and complex, even though its vocabulary is relatively restricted. The difference between the lyrical prose and the poetry of nō is roughly that between the poetry of Walt Whitman and that of Hart Crane, or between Charles Péguy and Stéphane Mallarmé. Cascades of images, telescoped into one another far beyond the limits of consecutive grammar, like double and triple exposures on film, and echoing each other in an inspired play of precise conventions, render the very concept of literal translation meaningless. The translator simply does his best (I speak of myself), sometimes not even understanding how it is that he grasps the heart of such poetry. Among these translations, Pining Wind probably comes the closest to conveying a glimpse of this kind of language.

Only one device of nō verse has been regularly attempted in these  translations, and especially in Pining Wind. This is the ‘pivot word’ (kakekotoba. A word, or even a part of a word, may mean one thing when taken with what precedes it and something else when taken with what follows. The meaning ‘pivots’ on that word. There also exist what one might call ‘pivot phrases’ or ‘pivot lines’ that go both with what precedes and what follows, although these, unlike the pivot word, do not involve a double meaning. A particularly common pivot word in these translations is ‘pine’ (‘pine tree’ and ‘to pine’), since this word corresponds precisely to the double meaning in Japanese. However, there are far more pivot words than this in the originals.

In these translations, passages originally in verse, regular or irregular, are centred on the page. Passages that look like verse but are aligned against a narrower left-hand margin are, as already explained, translated from one style or another of lyrical prose. The short passages of verse which are indented to the right of the median are poems or parts of poems quoted directly from earlier sources. A full poem makes five short lines.

The Chorus

To one side of the stage sits a chorus of about eight people. It has no identity of its own, even when it sings lines that do not clearly belong to any single figure on stage. Usually, it sings for the shite and occasionally, especially in part two of a play, for the waki. The language of chorus passages is lyrical, sung prose, or verse. Members of the chorus are all shite actors, sometimes senior ones. The chorus may have been less prominent than now in the early period of nō.

The kokataSome plays have roles for children (kokata.) These are always boys, and as a rule they are the sons of professional shite actors, in training to become professionals themselves. Kokata may have to remain silent and immobile for a long time, but when their turn comes to speak, they deliver their lines in ringing tones.

The aiMost plays include a role-type known as the ai. The word can perhaps be taken to mean, literally, ‘interlude’, since the ai’s major function is  usually to perform the interlude between parts one and two of the play. The principal purpose of this interlude is to fill in the interval while the shite actor changes costume and mask in preparation for part two. Most ai characters are local villagers.

Ai actors are not nō actors at all. Their main speciality is performing the comedies (kyōgen, ‘mad words’) that are traditionally done between nō plays. As a result, their bearing, dress, and language are quite different from those of either a shite or a waki. In the hierarchy of the nō world, the shite actor is supreme, but the waki has his own dignity. In comparison with either, the ai role is on a distinctly lower plane.

The sections of a nō play that involve the ai are not considered a part of the text proper. They are the province of the kyōgen actors, and in the past, printed nō texts omitted them entirely. Nowadays they are generally included in annotated editions, but in smaller type, and the stereotyped dialogue surrounding the ai’s major speeches may be left out. The full text of an interlude may compare in number of words with a major section of a nō play, but it goes by more quickly and is usually far less absorbing. Since print can exaggerate the ‘weight’ of an interlude, the size used for interludes here is smaller than that of the main text.

The language of the ai lacks the formality of the waki’s prose but is none the less ceremoniously verbose. Moreover, most ai speeches are delivered in an intentionally monotonous manner quite unlike the same actor’s delivery in a kyōgen play. A shite actor may scold an overly animated ai for upstaging him. A translation that conveyed the combined impact of the ai’s language and usual delivery would be unreadably dull. In these versions, the tone of the ai speeches follows the overall tone of the play. The colloquial tone adopted for the ai parts in Chikubu-shima, Benkei A board Ship, and The Mountain Crone is in keeping with the way these exceptionally lively passages are done in performance. In Benkei Aboard Ship, in particular, it is essential to convey a difference of weight and dignity between the waki, Benkei, and the ai, the Boatman.

Persons speaking for one another; inconsistencies of grammatical person

Japanese avoids specifying grammatical subject, verbs are invariant as to person or number, and nouns have no plural form. This may make the subject of a verb difficult to determine with certainty. Moreover, in  texts like these the very concept of ‘person’ may at times seem to be indistinct, or at least different from what one assumes to be normal in English. Sometimes the waki and shite seem to speak for one another, although inevitable choices of grammatical person obscure this phenomenon in English. In some Chorus passages, the reader or translator must decide from line to line who is really speaking. Finally, a speaker who seems to be in a first-person mode may suddenly shift to a third-person point of view in order to narrate his or her own actions. Various explanations of this phenomenon have been offered, but the best solution is simply to accept it.

ROYALL TYLER, educated partly in France, graduated from Harvard and obtained a doctorate in Japanese literature from Columbia University. After teaching in Canada, the United States and Norway, he moved to Australia and taught until retirement at the Australian National University. His other books include Japanese Tales (1987), French Folktales (1989), The Miracles of the Kasuga Deity (1990) and, also in Penguin Classics, The Tale of Genji (2001).

LaPiere, The Freudian Ethic: An Analysis of the Subversion of American Character

 One of the most important books of our time is the singularly courageous work of Richard LaPiere, The Freudian Ethic: An Analysis of the Subversion of American Character (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, New York; 301 pages, $5.00). The author, who is Professor of Sociology in Stanford University, has limited himself to a dispassionate and objective description of the disastrous effects on American society produced by the general acceptance of what he calls the "Freudian ethic" which has gradually and almost surreptitiously replaced the doctrine of individual responsibility and rationality that sociologists, following the lead of Max Weber, somewhat inaccurately call the "Protestant ethic." (Historically this view of human nature, which made possible all the achievements of modern civilization, may be traced directly to the Italian Renaissance.) 

Dr LaPiere begins by showing succinctly but clearly that there is no scientific basis whatsoever for the Freudian psychology. Its method is the very reverse of scientific, for it depends not on truths demonstrable by experiment and self-evident to reason, but on revelation. The Freudians unabashedly declare that a man must accept and believe in the Freudian doctrine before he is capable of recognizing the motivations of human beings. You must believe in pixies before you can tell who is pixilated. Fire is caused by unseen spirits, because people who think otherwise are not competent  to study chemistry. Such propositions can be maintained only by fanatics, and it is small wonder that, as Dr LaPiere puts it, "the Freudians profess to an omniscience that is, to the scientific mind, simply frightening." Although "a case of sorts can be made for the claim that Freudianism is a new version of Judaistic doctrine" it cannot properly be considered a religion, because "it is a doctrine of social irresponsibility and personal despair" whereas every religion necessarily imposes on its adherents ethical obligations and holds out to them a hope of becoming morally better. Freudianism is as much an inversion of religion as it is of science; it is an anarchical and purely destructive superstition. It is, in the strict sense of the word, witchcraft. 

Dr LaPiere, who carefully follows the ethically neutral methods of sociology, finds the social essence of Freudianism in its denial that man is a creature of reason and, above all, its denial that a man is responsible either toward himself or others. "The psychoanalyst.. . strives to relieve the patient of all responsibility for his difficulties, and to shift it to society." Man is the helpless victim of society, which is the only evil in the world, because it frustrates him by repressing his natural and necessary desire to commit incest with his mother and to castrate all his male children. 

Now Freudianism, in defiance of all logic and even of Freud's own conclusions, is used to disseminate and justify the grotesque belief, rapidly becoming universal in this country, thai man is an imbecile creature whom government must somehow protect from society and even from himself. 

With emotionless lucidity Dr LaPiere shows that under the influence of this delusion we are now committing national suicide. In our homes children are systematically corrupted by gullible mothers who treat them "as though man were in fact what Freud's fancy made him out to be". Our public schools perforce "strive to prevent any individual from rising above the intellectual mediocrity of the majority." Our colleges are being taken over by ignorant and feckless bureaucrats, the instinctive enemies of learning and intellectual integrity. Our government madly attempts to relieve citizens of responsibility for themselves, and therefore "necessarily becomes itself irresponsible." 

We can already see all about us the ineluctable consequences of Freudianism, "the creation of a population of indolent undisciplined, unprincipled, and incompetent people quarreling in random and fretful ways over the diminishing fruits of a dying social system." This is a book which should be read by everyone interested in the future of the United States. The sorcerers' guild will try to howl it down, and the innumerable parasites who find in "social welfare" a license to feed upon us will try to have it suppressed with either obloquy or silence. It is therefore incumbent on a reviewer to point out that Dr LaPiere has written with an extreme restraint. At seven major points, either by stopping short his analysis or by failing to raise crucial questions, he magnanimously gives the Freudians the advantage of every possible doubt. 

There is, for example, abundant evidence that, under the veneer of culture and urbanity imposed upon it by a great university, Freud's mind was hopelessly diseased. You may find the evidence for yourself even in a eulogistic biography such as Helen Walker Puner's Freud: His Life and His Mind (Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1947). 

Someone should expound in detail the remarkable similarities between Freud's doctrine and the tenets of the Hasidim, a strange sect which flourished in eastern Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - tenets which the learned and generally sympathetic historian of Kabbalism, Dr C D Ginsburg, can explain only in terms of "the evil effects of nervous degeneration." Was Freud directly or indirectly influenced by the doctrine of the Hasidim? 

Anyone who dares to speculate concerning the motivations of Freudianism could profitably examine the appalling history of demonolatry and Satanism, which almost attained the proportions of a mass movement in western Europe at the close of the Middle Ages. 

Other inquiries will suggest themselves, but there is one question of great and immediate urgency: To what extent has this weird witchcraft been used as a subtle and terrible weapon by the Communists in their unremitting warfare on Western civilization? 

 Dr LaPiere's book should remind us of the frenzied agitation about ''mental health" which is principally financed from the three- billion dollar budget of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, although, of course, an effort is made to wheedle contributions out of every available sucker. 

The main purpose of this hypocritical propaganda is to induce fatuous Americans to waive their few remaining legal safeguards, and to confer powers of arbitrary imprisonment on "experts" — most of whom, at least, are Freudians. One wonders how many Americans realize that under the proposed legislation their sanity will be determined by persons who passionately believe that every father really wants to castrate his son, and that every boy spends his childhood in abject terror lest the old man grab a butcher knife and go to work. October 1959

Alone on the Same Side

 

One evening in the late 1940s, Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy found themselves standing together on a subway platform in uncomfortable silence. 

Though both were returning home from an editorial meeting for the magazine politics, on which they had served for some time, neither had spoken to the other since their disastrous first encounter at a party six years earlier. 

Arendt approached McCarthy and said in her typically blunt manner, “Let’s end this nonsense. We think too much alike.”1 Each then apologized and so began one of the most vital intellectual friendships of the last century. Brock Brower aptly surmises why they were able to make peace: over the years at politics, “they found that on any number of public questions they always ended up on the same side, and ‘usually alone.’”2 Carol Brightman, McCarthy’s biographer and the editor of their letters, suggests that they formed a “party of two,”3 but it is more accurate to make use of Brower’s felicitous turn of phrase: on the same side and alone. Being “alone” “on the same side” seems to me an unusually precise characterization of the detached quality of relation they sought in each other and in their political affiliations.

Their preference for going it alone has made them difficult to categorize politically. McCarthy could have been referring to herself or Arendt when she described her other close friend, the Italian drama critic and political anarchist Nicola Chiaromonte: “His ideas did not fit into any established category; he was neither on the left nor on the right. Nor did it follow that he was in the middle— he was alone.”4 (...)

Arendt’s and McCarthy’s detachment, their preference for solitude over solidarity, sets them apart from the type of political affilation later favored by the progressive social movements that emerged in the Cold War era, all of which advocated bonds of intimacy and group identification, and during which their reputations were forged. Indeed, their repudiation of both in theory, to say nothing of their refusal in practice, marked these women as pariahs within groups that expected to win their support. When the social movements of the late twentieth century recommended the healing power of empathy as the glue of solidarity and the fuel of progressive politics, Arendt and McCarthy recoiled, not from the goal of social justice, but from the path to it. It was not always easy for their readers to make this distinction. Because it is difficult to imagine ethics without empathy, Arendt and McCarthy have been perceived as psychologically cold rather than engaged in an ethical project with different assumptions. The ethical models of relation ascendant since the eighteenth century’s advancement of moral sentiment and thrust forward by the tragedies of the midcentury have tried to bring the self face-to-face with the Other. If we return to the image of two women standing side by side, facing the subway, we might imagine a countertradition of ethical relation, one that seeks not to come face-to-face with the Other but to come face-to-face with reality in the presence of others. Since reality and the Other cannot be faced at the same time, McCarthy and Arendt chose to face reality, however psychically wounding.

from the book Tough enough Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil
Deborah Nelson

Young Pessoa

Since both parents were literary in their different ways, they did not find it strange that Fernando chose words as his favorite playthings. As the small boy rode on the streetcar with his mother, it tickled him to call out each letter of the signs they passed. This caused a fellow passenger to remark on his unusual ability to recite from memory what he had previously heard his mother spell out. No, she corrected, he already recognized all the letters of the alphabet.28 By age four he was reading whole sentences.

*

While Pessoa the adult would retain certain childlike traits, the young boy named Fernando already possessed a grown-up sense of his own dignity. Shy but not easily intimidated, he despised being treated with condescension, no matter how innocent or good-humored. When a family friend from the Azores finally laid eyes on the bright five-year-old he had heard so much about, he hoisted the boy up in his arms, saying, “Pleased to meet you! I’ve been very curious to make your acquaintance.” Fernando, with his feet back on the ground, smoothed the ruffles out of his suit and commented with a dash of pique in his voice, “So now your curiosity has been satisfied.”30 Proud and independent, occasionally even insolent, Fernando was at the same time mild-mannered, timorous, preferring indoor games to rough outdoor play. He could be violent in his words, never in actions. He was also, already, a very private individual.

 *

But nothing better illustrates the boy’s intellectual precocity than his astonishing performance at school. A foreigner who arrived at Durban with practically no English, he was soon at the top of his class—and not because of his skill in mathematics. In fact, “top of his class” states only half the case, since he left his class behind and jumped ahead. Although he had had a year and a half of (probably at-home) schooling in Lisbon, his lack of English meant he had to start all over in Durban, where he completed the five-year primary school program in just three years. At a graduation ceremony on December 20, 1898, the school would award Fernando the Examination Prize for all-around academic excellence, the First Prize in Latin, and, most remarkably, the First Prize in English.20In addition to Latin, English, and arithmetic, Fernando’s class schedule during his last year of primary school included geometry, history, science, and French. Some subjects were taught on alternate days; Latin was taught every day, Monday through Friday. So was English, but the Tuesday and Thursday classes were devoted specifically to poetry. Two hours of weekly poetry instruction seems to have been a peculiarity of the convent school rather than a standard feature of the fifth-grade curriculum in South Africa. Black-robed and white-bibbed Catholic nuns, while they may not have served as inspiring muses, were the ones who instilled an early love of poetry in Fernando. It was in the form of a poem that he scrawled a warning to would-be thieves in the front of Principia Latina, his Latin primer, opposite the flyleaf where his class schedule was affixed:

Don’t steal this book

For fear of shame

For in it is

The owner’s name.

And if I catch

Him by the tail

He’ll run off

To Durban gaol.†

At the back of the textbook he wrote a bilingual message, in English and French, instructing whoever might find the book to return it to him at his home address. In February 1898 Fernando, four months away from his tenth birthday, was flaunting his still rudimentary skills as a linguist and poet.

From: PESSOA

A Biography

Richard Zenith