The Transgressive Figure of the Dancing-Girl-in-Pain and Kanai Mieko’s Corporeal Text

Hannah Osborne

doi:10.5195/jll.2019.81

Abstract

In ‘The Transgressive Figure of the Dancing-Girl-in-Pain and Kanai Mieko’s Corporeal Text’, Hannah Osborne analyzes the figure of the dancing-girl-in-pain in Kanai Mieko’s 1968 essay, ‘Nikutairon e jostesu dai’ippo’ (‘Towards a Theory of Corporeality’). She advances that, through its discussion of this transgressive figure’s manifestation in both the folk stories of Hans Christian Andersen and the butō of Hijikata Tatsumi, Kanai’s essay articulates a radical understanding of both body and text whereby the body (and its consciousness) serves as a template for text, and the two are seen to intersect with each other across performance spaces. As such the figure holds profound implications for a re-understanding of literature as a shared event akin to performance, and of the act of reading as an active re-writing (rather than a passive reception) of the text’s meaning. For Osborne, the uniquely corporeal theory of Kanai Mieko encourages readers to actively engage with interpretive boundaries. This is later made explicit in Kanai's 1984 essay, "Text/Reality/The Body," which echoes Barthes notion of the writerly text in advancing that "[t]ext itself has a body, and it is particularly text that relentlessly attempts to exceed its own body that is very corporeal in nature." Finally, looking at some of the strategies that Kanai herself deploys in her fiction, notably "Rotting Meat," we see how such a theory might explain how gendered systems which underpin the generation of meaning itself through literature might be overturned.

Highlights

What is literature? Who gets to determine its meanings and define its boundaries? How do these meanings interconnect and overlap with those generated through other forms of art? How can literature conceivably exceed its textual form, as black marks upon a white page, and become as performed as dance or theater? What are the implications for gender and identity when literature is re-imagined in these ways? This article examines these questions via a trope, often to be found in the writings of Kanai Mieko (1947–), of “the corporeal text”, whereby a physical body, deemed possessed of a consciousness, becomes metaphorical for text and its relationship to and with the readership.[1]
Focusing first on her essay “Nikutairon e josetsu dai-ippo” (Towards a Theory of Corporeality,” 1969), I aim to show how Kanai reads the dancing-girl-in-pain—a figure she discerns both in the writings of Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) and in the butō performances of Hijikata Tatsumi (1928–1986)—as a metaphor for what she terms the “originary” nature of the body, and its ability to transgress its own boundaries through both literature and performance
Having offered the above example of how Kanai’s early short stories attempt, through various narrative strategies, to resist closure and provide ample opportunity for the reader’s own creative interpretation, we should be mindful that to try to account for the corporeal text as a tangible, physical commodity—or to enumerate its strategies—is to already have misunderstood it; to have reconfigured it, re-installed it back within the conventional sociocultural frameworks of literary production, dissemination, and reception; to have re-situated it back into a world of authorial world-views, literary reputations, bookshops, bestseller lists, and professional critical evaluations