Cutting the Surface of the Water: Butoh as Traumatic Awakening

Abstract

In this paper, I examine Robert Jay Lifton's belief that 'imagery, symbolization, and meaning are in a life-death model or paradigm' and that traumatic experience, in particular as a death-equivalent, 'sever[s the mind] from its own psychic forms, [and] impair[s] the symbolization process itself'. Lifton believes that, for survivors of Hiroshima and for other survivors of trauma, this 'shattering of prior forms' leads to new insights and 'new dimension[s] of experience' that not only reconstitute and re-integrate the traumatized self but, more accurately, mirror the human condition. I examine this thesis within the context of a comparison and contrast between post-war Japanese poetry and the postmodern Japanese dance form called Butoh (originally Ankoku Butoh , meaning 'dark dance of the soul'). I argue that Butoh, in drawing upon traditional Japanese forms, and by displacing, extending, and exploding them, more successfully re-figures prior imagery and reintegrates the traumatized Japanese culture in ways that some post-war poetry, which relies on language and, especially, traditional Western models of language, cannot. I also consider the materiality of the body versus the materiality of language, and consider how dance, which emanates from the phenomenological body, has a materiality that escapes language and carries greater tropological power. Finally, I consider how Butoh, in troping on the Hiroshima disaster, displaces 'phallogocentric' semiotic structures and comes closer to realizing Julia Kristeva's notion of a pre-Oedipal symbolic order.