ABSTRACT
However, there is another element revealed in Mishima’s Sun and Steel that concerns me even more: the repression of the erotic elements of the constitutively erotic drive toward death, or, its subordination to an ontological yet thoroughly politicized, mythic, community of the same. The result is that for Mishima desire lost its potential for free-flow to become fixed in a specific articulation at this point. This is the perverse formula of “you shall experience jouissance in this fashion,” an articulation that moreover was avowedly ideologically fascist in spite of its political impossibility given the social context of its emergence, dissemination, and expression. Matsumoto pointed out the obvious: in spite of the “subjective” nature of Mishima’s literary resurrection of the emperor and endorsement of neo-fascism, literature can and frequently does, have social and political impact.1 Moreover, his non-fictional essays certainly circulated as political documents, even if they were met primarily with ridicule. Before his suicide Mishima wrote a quasi-political manifesto explaining the Shield Society’s objectives; he also wrote several articles explicating his now apparently politicized ideals (such as his “Bunka bdei ron”). In these texts, and in Mishima’s Sun and Steel, unlike in Patriotism, the (constitutively) erotic drive toward death (the Real) is subordinated to a sort of politics. Sun and Steel appears to describe objectively the process of the first-person narrator’s search for an authentic selfhood (in relation to, first, the other and finally, the Other) and a way to experience “authenticity” (to apprehend the Other) that led Mishima to the conclusion that it is only in death that authenticity can be experienced. (The sun, of course, must also be understood to be a metaphor for the emperor and the nation-state Japan.) The problem, which Mishima also clearly understood, was that actual apprehension of the Real meant the actual (real, biological) annihilation of the experiential subject. Sun and Steel, moreover, abruptly loses its analytic focus and intellectual rigor, to end in a romantic postulation of a thoroughly homosocial, but here not explicitly homosexual brotherhood of warriors as the only context into which the individual subject can be diffused and therefore fulfilled in death.
