Truth from a Lie: Documentary, Detection, and Reflexivity in Abe Kōbō’s Realist Project by Margaret S. Key (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Truth from a Lie: Documentary, Detection, and Reflexivity in Abe Kōbō’s Realist Project by Margaret S. Key Richard F. Calichman (bio) Truth from a Lie: Documentary, Detection, and Reflexivity in Abe Kōbō’s Realist Project. By Margaret S. Key. Lexington Books, Lanham, Md., 2011. x, 197 pages. $63.00, cloth; $59.99, E-book. Margaret Key is to be congratulated for writing an extremely intelligent book, one that is thoroughly researched and endowed with an understanding of Abe Kōbō that is both broad (in the sense of the scale of information provided) and deep (in the sense of theoretical acuity). Japanese literary scholarship in the United States frequently suffers from an imbalance in offering up great reams of empirical data that are held together by frameworks and methodological assumptions that remain disproportionately slight and underexamined. Key’s work is quite unusual in this regard, and it is clear that she attains this depth by thinking not only of Abe but of literature in general. Specifically, she commits herself to the difficult task of engaging with Abe’s engagement with literature in its relation to reality. The title of her book, directly taken from Abe’s 1963 essay “Uso kara deta makoto,” points to this elusive bond between fictional and factual, and in this way gets to the very core of Abe’s project. Profoundly dissatisfied with the representational logic undergirding naturalist realism, Abe sought to probe the limits of both subjectivism, which he dismissed for its indifference to the question of materiality, and objectivism, which he criticized for its naïveté in believing itself capable of accessing external reality as such. If the former is guilty of effacing the object, overestimating the power of the imagination while ignoring the concrete conditions upon which artistic (and indeed all human) activity necessarily takes place, the latter proves no less negligent in its failure to take into account the problematic of mediation, for textual representations of external reality are enabled by a subject through whom the transition from the real to the represented real is invariably effected. [End Page 507] One of the great virtues of Key’s work is her understanding that this grappling with the question of reality and its literary representation was for Abe an aesthetic concern with immense epistemological and ethical implications. Abe’s artistic commitment to the avant-garde is often misunderstood by critics as signaling a suspension of the real, but the fact is that Abe viewed his work as primarily realist in nature. This realism, however, grounded itself upon an awareness of the difference between, or more accurately the impossibility of collapsing, subjective reality and objective reality. The repeated motif of walls or barriers throughout Abe’s work attests to his recognition of the need to think this difference in all of its deceptive complexity. For this difference is in no way straightforward: at no point can the subject ever present the object in the bareness of its existence, apart from the traces of his own intervention. This does not mean that the object owes its existence to the subject but rather that the task of repeating the object in the project of representation irrevocably alters it. The encounter between subject and object in representation ends by compromising the integrity of each, such that the one comes to some degree to be infected or contaminated by the other. Hence the difference between these two entities is simultaneously a putting into relation, and Abe envisioned the role of art as openly revealing the various tricks, false steps, and artifices involved in this conjoining. As Key points out, Abe’s project bears important similarities with great twentieth-century artists such as Bertolt Brecht, Luis Buñuel, and Alain Robbe-Grillet (whose work he knew and admired) in emphasizing that art succeeds on the basis of neither its entertainment value nor its opportunity for emotional catharsis, as these function strictly to maintain the status quo in its aesthetic, political, and ethical dimensions. Rather, the goal of art must be to shock readers and spectators in such a way as to encourage them to critically and self-consciously challenge those modes of acting and...