[ Panels by World Area Main Menu ]
[ View the Timetable of Panels ]
The Avant-garde and the Vanguard in Japanese Proletarian Literature
Organizer and Chair: Heather Bowen-Struyk, Independent
Discussant: William O. Gardner, Swarthmore College
This panel seeks to re-examine assumptions about the avant-garde and vanguard with respect to Japanese proletarian literature. As this panel demonstrates throughout each of its papers, proletarian arts shared an interest in transforming media and aesthetics with other modernist movements in the 1920s and 1930s in Japan, and in many regards should be considered an avant-gardist arts movement. The goal of political revolution led many participants to envision themselves as a vanguard, using the arts to lead the masses into political consciousness.
Each of these papers investigates the idea of the avant-garde and vanguard in different ways. Orna Shaughnessy introduces a forgotten proletarian writer, Noguchi Hiroshi, in the context of the 1927 factionalizations within the proletarian literary arts movement, and she investigates his attempt to create a literature that harnesses political activism to what is conventionally thought of as modernist aesthetics. Samuel Perry argues that the innovative short-fictional form, the wall-novel, was a proletarian avant-gardist form, and he offers examples and a discussion of the international context. Heather Bowen-Struyk examines the idea of the avant-garde (and vanguard!) as a quasi-militaristic, masculinist idea that has led to the suppression of women and families in proletarian literature.
Noguchi Hiroshi’s Aesthetics of Activism
Orna Shaughnessy, University of California, Berkeley
In answer to Lenin’s call to create a literature inseparably linked with the working-class movement, Noguchi Hiroshi’s literary aesthetics attempted to demonstrate the best way for literature to embody a Marxist political mandate. Noguchi’s work, Kyôri—haru (Hometown—spring), published in the important July 1927 issue of Puroretaria geijutsu (Proletarian arts), is a provocative mixture of explicit politics and experimental literary technique that differs strikingly from other contemporary proletarian writers of the late 1920s in Japan. This difference was surely intentional and possibly confrontational; this paper explores Noguchi’s aesthetic innovations, created in a contentious atmosphere of criticism within the left wing on the topic of the appropriate relationship of art to politics. Noguchi’s fiction reveals a mixture of confidence in the imminent revolution his clique predicted, and defensiveness resulting from the increasingly isolated and reduced membership of his group. In many ways the aesthetic characteristics of Kyôri—haru are a result of these insecurities and related demands for a literature different from his left-wing rivals and “correct” in a Marxist context.
Noguchi’s fiction reveals a mixture of confidence in the imminent revolution his clique predicted, and defensiveness resulting from the increasingly isolated and reduced membership of his group. In many ways the aesthetic characteristics of Kyôri—haru are a result of these insecurities and related demands for a literature different from his left-wing rivals and “correct” in a Marxist context.
“The Wall Novel and the Proletarian Avant-garde”
Samuel E. Perry, University of Chicago
In February of 1931, the Japanese proletarian arts journal Senki (Battleflag) published a two-page short story entitled “Food in the Cafeteria,” written by Kubokawa [Sata] Ineko and illustrated by Arai Mitsuko. This was the first example in East Asia of what would become a distinctive genre of the proletarian literary movement: the wall novel [kabe shosetsu, or by°ûk sos°ûl]. Depending on how one defines the genre, several hundred of these extremely short stories were produced in Japan and colonial Korea in the early 1930s by proletarian writers, though the term itself quickly faded out of popularusage until the DPRK re-established it as a revolutionary form after WWII. The kabe shosetsu distinguished itself from the equally short, but far more well-known “palm novel” (tenohira shosetsu) not only by the specific audience it sought to address, but by the wholly different set of social relations within which it imagined its own status as a form of art in the world. As I enviably reflect on a moment in history when it was still possible to imagine the fictional representation of experience as crucial to the transformation of it, my paper situates this new genre within an international network ofEuropean and Asian writers who posed a challenge to the institutional separation of art and politics. I offer three wall novels, by Kobayashi Takiji, Tokugawa Nao and Yi Tong-gyu, to speak in a concrete way about the relation of proletarian literature to both the historical avant-garde and to the broader social world it sought to transform.
“Domesticity and the Proletarian Avant-garde”
Heather Bowen-Struyk, Independent
Christopher Reed writes: “A definitive feature of modernism, it has been argued, is the invention of the ‘avant-garde,’ a term drawn from military theory that asserts ideas of art as onslaught and of the artist as hero. Exploiting the Odyssean contrast of heroic mission with domestic stasis, the modernist avant-garde positioned itself in opposition to the home.” However, Reed goes on to argue, this “suppression of domesticity” fails to recognize that modernists were intent on re-imagining themselves in the context of changing social relations that included families, intimate relationships and indeed, homes.
Proletarian literature in Japan—like its modernists cousins—has similarly suffered a “suppression of domesticity” despite the importance of issues of changing gender, marriage, and the family in proletarian literature. This paper will address a few of the many works of fiction and criticism by Tokunaga Sunao, Miyamoto Yuriko and Hirabayashi Taiko that foreground the question of romantic relationships and the family in a revolutionary society.