Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics: French Literature, 1867-2000Jan Walsh Hokenson
About the Author:
Jan Walsh Hokenson is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Florida Atlantic University, where she founded the graduate Program in Comparative Literature and is currently Head of French Studies. Educated at the University of California at Berkeley (B.A.) and Santa Cruz (Ph.D.) and the University of Paris, author of numerous essays and book chapters on modern French and European literature, coeditor of Forms of the Fantastic, she has long worked in the field of East-West studies, with emphasis on France and Japan. At Florida Atlantic, she is also a member of the Classics faculty and the Women's Studies Faculty.
As art historians have long known, the discovery of Japanese woodblock prints in Paris, following the opening of Japan to the West in 1854, was a startling aesthetic encounter that played a crucial role in the Impressionists' and Post-Impressionists' invention of Modernism. Japan, France shows that leading French writers shared that shock of encounter and also experimented with Japanese aesthetics in their own work, in ways that similarly thread into the foundations of Modernism. Over the past 150 years, literary japonisme (the practice of adapting Japanese aesthetics to creative work in the West) has become a sustained French tradition, as each generation discovered new Japanese arts and genres, commented on the work of their predecessors in this vein, and broke still more new ground in the poetics of East-West aesthetics, always in order to innovate in the forms of Western literature and thought. To read French literature of 1867-2000 in this way unsettles some basic assumptions about many of the canonical French writers who are commonly considered the founders of Modernism and postmodernism. Japan, France, examines this phenomenon through close readings in literature, theater, and philosophy, situated in the changing contexts of French culture, in texts by such writers as Zola, Mallarmé, and Proust through Malraux and Yourcenar to Barthes, Kristeva, Lyotard, and Bonnefoy. From the beginning, in literature as in painting, French japonisme has been unique in two ways: unlike their British and German contemporaries, beginning with Baudelaire and the Goncourts, French writers' interest in Japan was artistic rather than cultural or political, and the writers, like the painters, were fascinated with the aesthetic while caring little, if at all, about the real Japan; second, French japonisme rarely entails a Japanese character as figure of the foreign Other because it is rather the rendering of an aesthetic, in critique of the very grounds of occidental arts and letters. Through the generations, French japonisme has been about France, about expressive problems in the always dying Cartesian and mimetic codes of French arts and letters, and only secondarily about Japan, imagined source of proposed solutions. This aesthetic focus has led to misreadings abroad, where such japonistes as Claudel, Malraux, and Barthes are still often read as Eurocentric or dehistoricizing. Far from orientalist in Said's sense, however, japonisme exalts the arts of the Other, who possesses agency to a remarkable, even enviable extent. Part I examines the writers' impassioned defense of the painters' revolution as the basis for the first French apprehension of Japan as "a new aesthetic continent," tracking the premises in Naturalist and Symbolist texts. Part II shows how the Modernists outstrip all such predecessors in their magisterial use of the Japanese aesthetic as counter-system to Western aesthetic assumptions. Part III traces efforts beginning in 1928 to equilibrate Japanese art and literature with Bergsonian intuition, structural linguistics, and Heideggerian phenomenology through the twentieth century.
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