Humanism and the Hikari-Event

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of Ōe’s journalism and public speaking after 3.11 to argue that what he says implicitly about his disabled son’s musical sensibility is more interesting for a postdisaster ecocriticism than what he says explicitly about nuclear power and Article Nine. Having come of age both politically and emotionally at the moment of the promulgation of the postwar constitution in 1947, Ōe still speaks powerfully six decades later of his conviction that Japan’s decision to renounce weapons is the ultimate triumph of the rational over the irrational, of language over aggression. After 3.11, he wants legislation that would outlaw nukes as resolutely as Article Nine outlaws war. This chapter traces this yearning into two literary texts to which Ōe himself alludes suggestively after 3.11: ‘Flame Circling Bird’ (Hi o megurasu tori), an autobiographical short story from 1991, and Death by Water (Suishi), an autobiographical novel from 2009. In both texts, the narrator co-opts his disabled son’s musical sensibility for a liberal humanist model of subjectivity predicated on language and the autonomy it implies. The chapter proposes that these same texts also convey the transcendence that comes from the son’s having no autonomy—from being intruded upon by the enormity, mediated by music, of the material universe. Emphasizing Deleuze’s distinction between sensation and opinion, intensity and signification, vibration and narration, the chapter argues that the father’s attempts to assimilate the son’s music to the latter term are consistently undone by the power and wonder of the former. The chapter references philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers’s 2009 eco-manifesto In Catastrophic Times to propose that it is the Hikari-figure, and not his father, who maintains the ‘two-partner game with nature’ that Stengers says is essential if we are to respond to ecological catastrophe without falling into barbarism.