The Victorian Counterarchive: Mikimoto Ryuzo, John Ruskin, and Affirmative Reading

Abstract

The perverse ambition of Mikimoto Ryuzo was to transform Japanese modernity through the dissemination of the writing of the Victorian art critic and socialist John Ruskin, whose work he assiduously collected, translated, and glossed. Mikimoto—the son of Mikimoto Kokichi, a successful Meiji businessman who developed a technique for artificially culturing pearls—founded both a library and a society in Tokyo to assist in the circulation of Ruskin's work, and in 1930 he launched a monthly journal, in which he published his own translations of critical essays about Ruskin by major British scholars, including the socialist anticolonial writer J. A. Hobson and the philosopher R. G. Collingwood, as well as many essays and memoirs and sketches of his own composition, in both English and Japanese. Yet while Mikimoto's careful work in establishing a Japanese readership for Ruskin flourished in Taisho Japan, a place characterized by broad cultural obsessions with labor, aesthetics, and crafts, what remains of that effort is confined to a rarely visited collection in a small Tokyo office, a fragile testimony to the intensity of feelings of an unusually enthusiastic reader of Victorian literature. Mikimoto was a bricoleur, experimenting with and recontextualizing Ruskin in the service of new personal and political demands, his library evidence of the capacity of literary writing to shape, and be shaped by, distant acts of reception. His always insightful and often outrageous writing on Ruskin records the triumphs of a scholarly son of wealth and narrates a relationship with a father whose successful business was a source of a shame freighted with gendered meanings. Yet his work always braids his own familial dissent with broad political reflections, reflections on the violence of Japanese modernization, on the history of racism, and on the crimes of empires, producing an immanent critique of capitalism, the theoretical coordinates of which are to be found not only in Ruskinian socialism but also in Marxist commodity theory and in the syncretic anticapitalist writings of his mentor, Kawakami Hajime. What Mikimoto learned from Ruskin above all were the radical possibilities for a life in which emotional and political commitments could be considered part of a single, breathtakingly complex whole, which was reflected in what Caroline Levine calls “the close intertwining of Ruskin's iconoclastic aesthetics with his radical political principles.”1Recent scholarship on Ruskin has striven to find a singular theme underlying his work, a unifying notion that might yoke together texts as diverse as Modern Painters and the Fors Clavigera letters. Questioning a long-held dissatisfaction with what early reviewers called his “crotchety contradictions and peevish paradoxes” and “if not insanity, sheer extravagance,” the aim has been to recover Ruskin as a systematic thinker after all. While scholars such as Levine and Jonah Siegel, among others, have done much to reveal Ruskin's philosophical sophistication, they have inevitably underplayed the almost manic energy that characterized Ruskin's literary style from his earliest texts through until his last, almost incoherent, letters.2 Consider the following passage from “The Nature of Gothic,” the excerpt of The Stones of Venice that was printed as a pamphlet in 1854 and that circulated among working men's clubs: And, on the other hand, go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children.3 Ranging freely between gothic fiction, instructional literature, and art criticism, Ruskin's prose models the very liberty that he attributes to the free laborer and picks up most of the qualities he attributes to Gothic architecture: savageness, changefulness, naturalism, grotesqueness, rigidity, and redundance. Even nineteenth-century critics of Ruskin were quick to note that much of his reputation derived from the intensity of his style rather than from his claims or readings, with one commentator comparing him to Thomas de Quincey, who, he euphemistically notes, “sought to obtain by prose effects commonly associated with poetry.”4 As the comparison implicitly suggests, the disruptive, aggressive force of Ruskin's prose was not merely purple but pushed against boundaries of acceptable discourse. Such a force is legible without relying on what Raymond Williams called the “almost wholly irresponsible biographical attention” that Ruskin has received, but the affective incoherence of Ruskin's prose is only amplified by his biography, beset as it was by sexual scandals and madness.5 The work of freedom as Ruskin records it is autopoietic and hysterical, a stylistic practice whose effects are felt as emotions rather than internalized as doctrine.To treat Ruskin as a dilettante is not necessarily to blunt the force of his social criticism but to relocate it. Ruskin himself understood that the value of a work of criticism did not depend on its engagement with existing sources or its conceptual completeness—indeed, in The Political Economy of Art, he explores ways in which such a dependence might itself befuddle a critical insight: “The statements of economical principle given in [this] text, though I know that most, if not all, of them are accepted by existing authorities on the science, are not supported by references, because I have never read any author on political economy, except Adam Smith, twenty years ago. Whenever I have taken up any modern book upon the subject, I have usually found it encumbered with inquiries into accidental or minor commercial results, … by the complication of which, it seemed to me, the authors themselves had been not unfrequently prevented from seeing to the root of the business.”6 To engage with the habitual vocabulary of a discipline, even with the intention of displacing that vocabulary or radically undoing the structures of its claims to legitimacy, is inevitably to reinforce many of the structuring assumptions of that discipline. This inconvenient truth of humanistic study—flashes of which were already visible in the central texts of Victorian radicalism—was, for the better part of the twentieth century, treated as one among many unpleasant but inevitable symptoms of the saturation of language by sovereign power. Deconstruction has proven an especially helpful theory for critics grappling with this problem. Derrida's description of paleonymy as “the ‘strategic’ necessity that requires the occasional maintenance of an old name in order to launch a new concept” effectively defined the scope and ambitions of the deconstructive political project: to wrest control of semiotics from dominant regimes of power—and, in opening up new possibilities in language, to begin to produce new acts of resistance.7I propose that affirmative readings (such as that on which paleonymic politics is built) depend on a nonconceptual cognitive practice—a “yes” whose meaning is ultimately affective. Though such a separation of conceptual from affective forms would no doubt seem naïve to Derrida, the recent turn to affect has opened up new possibilities for evaluating naive criticisms and faddish enthusiasms.8 How are we to approach the uncritical Ruskinism of Mikimoto Ryuzo, which makes itself known in spasmodic bursts of genre-subverting adoration? The middle section of his essay “Ruskin's Views of Economic Art” turns on just such a moment, in which Mikimoto recognizes the illegitimacy and excessive emotion of his interest in Ruskin: I do not like exaggeration and overestimation. I am criticising Ruskin. I think Masashige Kusunoko was a great man. And I think Napoleon was a great man, too. I think Carlyle was a great man, and that Mr. Kosen Sakai is praise-worthy. I have once wept over Mr. Natsume's Sore-Kara, and [have been] deeply moved by Dr. Kawakami's Story of Poverty. Though criticising Ruskin, I feel tears stand in my eyes when I think of his love affairs.With such a sentiment I keep studying Ruskin. I sometimes wish I would rather be influenced by his personality than by his reasonings. A merchant's son should be a merchant. If I am gently engaged in accounting, I can do without Ruskin, and can go to the Kabukiza Theatre or a London comedy month.9 This jarring confessional moment intrudes into a text that has hitherto restricted itself to a descriptive précis of Ruskin's essay “On the Political Economy of Art” (1857) and returns both Mikimoto and his readers to a set of painful feelings. The poignancy of Ruskin's ill-fated love affairs urgently demands that the author veer off course, necessitating the still-greater confession that even Mikimoto's veneration of Ruskin is the result of a substantial failure to conform to the plot attached to his name. This moment of reflection might serve as an emblem for the entire project of transnational aestheticism, formalizing as it does a broad array of aestheticist themes: an intense homosocial affection distributed among a pantheon of great men of letters, a dissent from the scripts of gender patrolled by capitalism, and a desire for greater intimacy with a thinker than the mere act of reading can provide. Casting himself as Dorian Gray and Ruskin as Lord Henry, Mikimoto theorizes the scope and limits of his own experience of textual influence and treats the transcultural counterarchive as simultaneously momentous and incomplete.What does the reading practice exhibited in “Ruskin's Views of Economic Art” have to say about the way we read Victorian literature now? Like the surface readers described by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, Mikimoto responds to the affective life of his subject and is unwilling to engage in symptomatic reading.10 Like those surface readers, moreover, Mikimoto embraces sympathetic reading as an ethics, even at the expense of his social legibility: as he puts it in another essay entitled “What Is Ruskin in Japan?” “though some may censure me for believing Ruskin too much and for not noticing his errors, yet my belief in him will never decrease” (19). Mikimoto's sense of the racial and transnational differences that separate him from Ruskin results in an discipleship that also foreshadows Anne Cheng's call for a “hermeneutics of susceptibility” that would follow the contradictions of racial, gendered embodiment under the conditions of modernity rather than preempt such contradictions with a critical intervention or conceptualization.11 Cheng's approach to primitivism turns on the aesthetic pleasure that modernism derived from racial structures of knowledge and from the dramatic staging of racial performance on which such pleasure depended. The history of the Ruskin Library of Tokyo attests to the racial limits placed on Mikimoto's capacity to pass as a legitimate Ruskinian—limits placed both by the British contemporaries who received him on his many trips to Brantwood and by the posthumous scholarly reviewers who take great pleasure in the spectacle of a Japanese Ruskin enthusiast without in the least engaging him as a reader of Ruskin.Nonetheless Mikimoto's reading habits fail to conform to the ethics of reception espoused by Best, Marcus, and others in one very important sense. Over the past decade or so, Victorianists have preferred to affirm the critical perceptiveness of Victorian writers wherever possible, a sign of this turn being that the rhetorical structure “x was a theorist rather than a symptom of y” has become ubiquitous. Amanda Anderson's defense of the position is trenchant and precise: she notes that the “polemical thrust” of her book The Powers of Distance is “to take seriously the specific ways in which individual Victorians constructed their ideals, to consider not only the limits but also the distinctive virtues of their conceptions of enabling detachment.”12 Eve Sedgwick, making a similar point to a different end, cannily notes that “paranoia has by now candidly become less a diagnosis than a prescription” and that a “reparative” reading can work toward remedying problems at which more aggressive critical practices can only harrumph.13 Anderson and Sedgwick both oppose the heroic critical intervention with a gentler rehabilitation and calmly situate the Victorian writer by insisting on the explanatory power of her conceptual creations. Yet reading practices sometimes attributed to the affective turn in Victorian studies have generally restricted themselves to a single affect—that of emollient, complicit appreciation. As Elaine Freedgood and Emily Apter put it, “The recalcitrant, mystified, out-of-control, and conflicted texts of Marxist-psychoanalytic reading have been replaced by texts that are friendly, frank, generous, self-conscious, autocritiquing, and unguarded.”14 At the core of such an opposition is an Arnoldian faith in the soothing, and possibly improving, power of literature, a faith Mikimoto could certainly be said to have shared. His encounters with Ruskin, however, confront him with a text that is neither friendly nor frank but as monstrous as the fantasies of Sedgwick's paranoid reader. His response is to amplify, rather than resolve, Ruskin's incoherence—he performs, in other words, an affirmative reading practice predicated on feelings far uglier, and far more risky, than those of subdued respect or generous deference. It would be tempting to invoke Homi Bhabha's theory of mimicry in order to explain a hyperbolic anglicization of Japanese culture, to argue that Mikimoto rehabilitates colonial discourse on the unstable discursive terrain of the excluded other with the effect of deconstructing such discourse's underlying assumptions.15 Yet rather than treat Mikimoto as a deconstructive function of discourse, here I treat his engagement with Ruskin as a self-conscious experiment with the poetics and politics of readerly fidelity. The Tokyo library offers contemporary readers of Ruskin particular insights into the affective labor that sustains literary reception and that ensures that literature can continue to generate new meanings in contexts remote from the scene of their composition.Yet the key questions raised by Mikimoto's work concern the collector's painful consciousness of his distance from Ruskin—a distance with implications for both his body and his soul. At the heart of “Ruskin's Views of Economic Art” is a desire for intimacy with Ruskin's “personality” rather than his “reasonings.” What are the politics of a sympathetic reading that fails to achieve sympathy? Further, how are the sympathetic readings of professional critics interrupted or complicated by the hysterically affirmative readings of the dilettante, the dogmatist, the uncritical acolyte? These questions have begun to surface in our own moment, particularly in Carolyn Dinshaw's moving image of queer reception, the “touch across time,” the desire for “partial, affective connection” in the distant past that might ground alternative communities in the present.16 But when Mikimoto remarks that he wishes to be influenced by Ruskin's personality, he also points to the necessary failure that structures all such attempts to find community. The two are separated by something other than the passage of time: a history that disqualified Mikimoto's love for Ruskin. (Such a disqualification, incidentally, also characterizes the few notices that the Ruskin Library of Tokyo's publications have received among Western scholars since its reopening in 1984.) In the end, the Jamesonian ontology of the history that hurts is not incompatible with the Marcusian ethics of unsuspicious reading—such readings and reconstitutions can be and have been a strategy for processing trauma and loss and for building a politics of radical affirmation in the present.Let me constellate the terrain of what I am calling “affirmative reading” with two other examples of twentieth-century radicals whose fidelity to Victorian literature derived more from the affect and style of that literature than from any of its propositional content. In the introduction to Sarvodaya (1908), his adaptive translation of Ruskin's Unto This Last, M. K. Gandhi refers to his work as a “paraphrase”: “What follows is not a translation of Unto This Last but a paraphrase, as a translation would not be particularly useful to the readers of Indian Opinion. Even the title has not been translated but paraphrased as Sarvodaya [the welfare of all], as that was what Ruskin aimed at in writing this book.”17 Gandhi's paraphrase invents a syncretic Ruskin who might serve the dual functions of exploiting the veneration of British sage writers in the colonial education system in order to disseminate dissent and of visibly reproving the hypocrisy of such a system that would insist on the applicability of liberal culturalism to the colonial situation while escalating violence at home and abroad and eliminating even the fragile provisions that midcentury liberalism had afforded the British state. But, no less importantly, the “paraphrase” indicates Gandhi's awareness that fidelity to Ruskin required creative reinterpretation. In his autobiography—whose title, “My Experiments with Truth,” indicates its author's capacity for imaginative, nondogmatic criticism—Gandhi records reading Unto This Last as a moment of conversion rather than one of persuasion: “I could not get any sleep that night. I determined to change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book.”18Gandhi's concept of the paraphrase can be usefully contrasted with the theory of “orthodoxy” with which Georg Lukács characterizes his relationship to Marx. Seeking to maintain a viable relationship to Marxism after the successful establishment of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Lukács emphasizes that the indispensable part of Marx's writing is his “method” and that the notion of orthodoxy “does not imply the uncritical acceptances of the results of Marx's investigations.”19 So, like Gandhi, Lukács seeks a methodology for reading Marx that is not dependent on any particular Marxist concept. His argument is formulated in fractious, combative prose, and his conclusions are complex and dialectical: Great disunity has prevailed even in the “socialist” camp as to what constitutes the essence of Marxism, and which theses it is “permissible” to criticize and even reject without forfeiting the right to the title of “Marxist.” In consequence it came to be thought increasingly “unscientific” to make scholastic exegeses of old texts with a quasi-Biblical status, instead of fostering an “impartial” study of the “facts.” These texts, it was argued, had long been “superseded” by modern criticism and they should no longer be regarded as the sole fount of truth.If the question were really to be formulated in terms of such a crude antithesis it would deserve at best a pitying smile. But in fact it is not (and never has been) quite so straightforward. Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx's individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious “orthodox” Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and dismiss all of Marx's theses in toto—without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment.20 The desire to strip Marxist orthodoxy of any indicative statement and replace it with a “dialectical method” whose most vital element is “the dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical process” cannot be taken at face value: of course Lukács, who has read Hegel, cannot imagine that this description alone will suffice for describing Marx's unique contribution.21 The indisputably Marxist character of the passage, rather, is located in its electric, nervy style, swerving between scare-quote ventriloquism and withering bathos, in a rhetorical escalation no doubt designed to recall Marx's own prose style, which Benedetto Croce called “that note of violent indignation and bitter satire which is felt in every page of Das Kapital (Capital).”22 Yet in a text whose ostensible purpose is to recover Marxism from literalism, the imitation of Marx's style comports a special meaning, suggesting, if not declaring, that true fidelity to the Marxist tradition is to be sought in the intensification of certain affects. Lukács's enthusiastic embrace of a simulated speech—a kind of stylistic masochism—is useful to our present critical situation in pointing to a new direction for sympathetic reading, and indeed sympathetic rewriting, a “method” compelled by the exigencies of the present.In the most obvious sense, affirmation is neither inherently radical nor conservative—anybody can do it. Yet the examples of Mikimoto, Gandhi, and Lukács reflect more than a recumbent idiocy or fandom—they share a desire to theorize without theory, to create new meanings from old literary texts by maintaining contact with a writing subject rather than a text. Mikimoto identifies this proximity as “personality,” but Gandhi's “paraphrase” and Lukács's “orthodoxy” speaks to it as well, just with a different inflection—each represents a truer bearer of a text's potential than the text itself. A deconstructive reading would no doubt ascribe such a move to the workings of stupidity—a cognitive function that, as Avital Ronell writes, “makes stronger claims to knowledge than rigorous intelligence would ever permit itself to make.”23 Yet these three contexts reveal, too, the ways in which affirmation is a particularly vital strategy for historical subjects excluded from the Enlightenment project of rationalism—non-Western intellectuals, the colonized, and workers, to name the categories these each of these three authors examines. In such a mode, affirmative reading turns Lacanian disavowal—“je sais bien, mais quand même”—into a strategic response to the political dominance of reasoning. Such a response is explicitly authorized by Mikimoto, for whom fidelity to Ruskin entailed both risk and glee: “I do not care even if the socialists laugh me to scorn. And if there is any one who laughs at me, I think I will advise him to read G. F. G. Masterman” (2). But such a reading is also part of a broader set of concerns that have existed since the beginnings of empire: how to begin dismantling the structures of power that support the dominant colonial order of things without discarding the possibilities afforded by such structures? Mikimoto's response is not to provincialize Europe but to expropriate and hystericize its cultural treasures, to return Victorian Britain's aestheticizing gaze in a gesture of ambivalent celebration and rebuke. In order to explore the ramifications of such a gaze, I turn first to Mikimoto's understanding of the differences between Marx and Ruskin and then to the transnational network of friends and associates he built around his collection.Mikimoto's own descriptions of his citations from Ruskin were usually counterposed to those of the joyless, mechanistic readers of Marx. He had read at least Capital and The Communist Manifesto and disparaged Marx himself as a weak counterpart to Ruskin, a vulgar materialist who didn't deserve his newfound popularity among Japanese anti-imperialists—the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) was formed in 1922, and remained a focus of public dissent, especially among intellectuals and academics, until many of its members were imprisoned on 15 March 1928. But the insistence that Marx and Ruskin were comparable figures was hardly outside the mainstream of Japanese left thought in the period. Both were read widely and in tandem at Kyoto Imperial University under Kawakami Hajime, who was fast becoming the most prominent advocate for Marxist critique in Japan.24 Kawakami's early socialist manifesto Bimbo monogatori (The Tale of Poverty), published in 1916, drew heavily on both Marxist and non-Marxist socialisms, citing both Ruskin and William Morris, but in 1919, he began publishing the Marxist journal Shakai mondai kenkyu (Studies on Social Questions), as well as writing articles on Marx in a wider array of radical magazines. Under Kawakami's influence at Kyoto, a left student organization called the Labor-Student Society formed, whose members included Nosaka Sanzo, a founder of the JCP, and Sano Manabu, a leading Communist who in 1933 broke off from the Communist International in favor of the ideology of “Tenko”—a nationalist, proimperialist revolutionary theory. The radical context of Kyoto Imperial University is vital to understanding how revolutionary Ruskin seemed to Mikimoto, who frequently aligned him with other, more celebrated, revolutionaries: “Some socialists say that Ruskin is not sufficient. In some respects he may seem illogical. But there is an ideal course or order in things. The society which is idealized by humanitarian economy is a form of society which may bring happiness on mankind. Lenin is great. And Ruskin is great as well” (16).The implicit comparison to Lenin, unexpected as it may seem, draws on an essay called “Ruskin the Prophet” by a senior Liberal member of the British Parliament, the aforementioned Charles Masterman, which was published in a collection of essays published by Ruskin's own press, George Allen and Unwin, to commemorate Ruskin's centenary. Prefiguring the old cliché (sometimes attributed to the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson) that the Labour Party owed “more to Methodism than to Marx,” Masterman writes enthusiastically of the Russian Revolution as an extension of Ruskinian humanism: “I think when the story is told, and if this great experiment emerges from its present difficulties and succeeds, you will find that Lenin and his ideal community owe less to Karl Marx than to John Ruskin.”25 Wishful thinking, no doubt, but striking in demonstrating the surprising competition between Marx and Ruskin as originary moments for Communist radicalism. Nor was Masterman alone: the American Christian socialist W. D. P. Bliss had already published an anthology of Ruskin's work designed to claim him as the fount of global socialism, under the title The Communism of John Ruskin (1891), drawing on volume 7 of Fors Clavigera, in which Ruskin declares himself “a Communist of the old school—reddest also of the red.”26 The passage has remained less widely known than the similar formation in volume 10 of Fors Clavigera: “I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school”: whichever political position Ruskin preferred at a given moment, he certainly preferred it to be “of the old school.”27Although Mikimoto was aware of the tactical benefits of comparing Ruskin to the more celebrated Lenin and Marx, it is clear that the stronger benefit he derived from Ruskinian thought was its capacity to work on the individual soul: “Now that Marxian political economy is enlightening the populace with an extraordinary power, I have chosen Ruskin as a guide who enables me to settle down” (16). Yet Mikimoto's attempt to separate such a personal, reflective politics from a wider, rabble-rousing one was tested dramatically and repeatedly in his searchingly self-critical texts. The first of such challenges presented itself in the figure of Kawakami Hajime himself, whose reputation as a Marxist firebrand threatened to obscure his debt to Ruskin—which was, naturally enough, far greater than his debt to Lenin. To Mikimoto, Kawakami was emphatically a Ruskinian first and a Marxist second. Before the 1920s, Ruskin had been the subject of articles and monographs by a large number of literary critics and art historians in Japan, including the poet Shimazaki Toson, who translated parts of Modern Painters, and the modernist novelist Natsume Soseki, who included a section on Ruskinian aesthetics in his book Theory of Literature.28 But Kawakami was the first professional economist in Japan to write extensively on Ruskin, and he had also written the preface to Kenji Ishida's translation of Unto This Last (1918). Mikimoto discussed his teacher at length in a lecture delivered in front of the International Women's Institute at Girton College, Cambridge, in 1929 called “Ruskin's Influence in Japan,” calling his preface “the shortest … and most noteworthy” introduction to Ruskinian economics. In it, Kawakami also counterposes Ruskin and Marx, though he does so more systematically than Mikimoto. For Kawakami, according to Mikimoto, the critique of political economy had generated two compatible, but discrete, forms of discourse, which he called “socialistic economy,” represented by Marx, and “humanistic economy,” represented by Ruskin (42). Unacceptable though such a view would appear from the familiar perspectives of Western Marxism, Mikimoto held not only that a unification of romanticism and Marxism was possible but also that Kawakami had ensured that such a unification was uniquely possible in Japan: “In Japan Ruskin has been raised, though temporarily, by Dr. Kawakami to the same level as Marx's throne” (43). Even during his many travels abroad, Mikimoto was keen to emphasize the particular contribution of a Japanese critic to the ongoing project of reading Ruskin. In the same lecture he joked that “it may be an unexpected fact that the greatest Marxian teacher in Japan has once been so Ruskinian that he was called the Japanese Ruskin by his colleagues” (40).The phrase “Japanese Ruskin” aptly communicates Mikimoto's feeling that being inspired by Ruskin was not just a matter of reasonings but also of personality. Indeed, in neither “Ruskin's Views of Econo