Beyond Byzantium: Aesthetic Pessimism in Mishima's Modern Noh Plays

Abstract

N 'Sailing to Byzantium', William Butler Yeats articulates an important mood in modern artistic endeavors. The unageing Byzantine monuments provided, for him, an alluring harbor, a compelling raison d'etre. Yeats perceived the monuments of Byzantium, indeed, the very aesthetic atmosphere of the city, as sufficient unto themselves: art preserves for eternity and itself becomes eternal. Such a mood characterizes the work of a number of modern writers such as Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater in Britain, Stefan George and Gottfried Benn in Germany, Stephane Mallarme and Paul Verlaine in France. So enamored was Gustave Flaubert of this aesthetic Weltanschauung that he wrote what amounts to a pithy manifesto: 'Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of Art.' Irving Howe affirms this view as peculiarly modern: 'The idea of art as a sanctuary from the emptying-out of life is intrinsic to modernism....9 Nor were Japanese writers immune to the delights of Byzantium. At certain periods in their lives, Takayama Chogyul iANiI-T4, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro : Nagai Kafua 7 i,T Miki Roful Yokomitsu Riichi IY -, Nishiwaki Jun'zaburo NUJRE1$, and Yoshioka Minoru 1 among others, were all mesmerized by what Yeats calls 'the artifice of eternity'. Nishiwaki typifies this aesthetic mood when he writes in Shi to Shiron i a 11 'The beauty I seek allows us to forget everything.... We are to think of nothing, but just to be receptive of that very abstract sense which comes purely from the sense of sight. Meanwhile, we should not feel any meaning in life.... We should simply live in a world of color, a world of form. a world of light and darkness,'2