My Child Deus

Abstract

Manoel Barreto’s Japanese miscellany contains “Dialogues on the Instruments of the Passion,” which show how closely complex cultural structures are intertwined with the machinery of grammar. Featuring the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, the dialogue sublimates maternal and erotic energies in turn while contemplating the usual series of violent instruments. The speeches display not only linguistic competence but literary skill in their use of the personless poetic flow of renga linked verse and the noh theatre. However, the Latinate double-entendre on filho [son (of God and of Mary)] misfires because the Japanese language uses honorifics to maintain stable intersubjective reference and so cannot simultaneously refer to Jesus as both a superior and an inferior. This failure is supplemented with Portuguese marginalia and bold catachresms. Mary Magdalene’s erotic sublimation is presented with less success as excessive literalism frequently produces comedy. Then, an appendix entitled “The Meaning of the Passion” repeats the exercise in halting, clinical prose marred by occasional errors of grammar and style, cataloguing the instruments as dōgu (implements), the word used for art objects in the tea ceremony, and outlining their theological function with attention to precise doctrinal formulations. Frequent use of Portuguese loanwords conveys a (justified) anxiety with regard to the ability of the Japanese language to transmit (European) truth. I identify the dueling Zeami and Aquinas of this piece as a Japanese convert and his or her European mentor, then venture a hypothesis as to the precise historical figures behind these voices in tension.