Runaway Horse Research Articles

The Animalification of Nationalist Sentiments: Horse, Herder and Homeland

This paper is about what I call the animalification of nationalist sentiments, based on stories, poems and films about some runaway horses returned to their birthplace, which Mongolians commonly call the nutag (homeland). These stories, poems and films deliver a message that even “Mongol horses” have a sense to love, miss, find and return to their nutag, and critiques those involved in mining and other businesses with environmental destruction as being worse than horses. The analogy of man and horse in this paper helps us to understand, first, how Mongolians perceive and explain sources of nationalist sentiment as natural and inevitable and, second, how a sense of nutag shared by both man and animal shapes human-animal relations.

Crossing a River without a Horse

SUMMARYWhile stories sit with you, their meanings may shift over time. This piece of creative ethnographic nonfiction shares the experience of what it is like to be there, live this life, and know this person. Beyond crossing rivers and runaway horses, I highlight the complexity, risk, and ingenuity of rural living in a part of Chilean Patagonia that the government calls “extreme,” “isolated,” and “backward.” This is a story about relationships and different forms of knowledge and expertise that become increasingly muddied across gendered town and country divides. It explores what it means to belong to a place and to make it one's own. [Patagonia, risk, knowledge, place, relationships]

Race, Politics, and Nation in Albion W. Tourgée's American Historical Novels Series: The Example of Hot Plowshares

Race, Politics, and Nation in Albion W. Tourgée's American Historical Novels Series: The Example of <i>Hot Plowshares</i>

The film adaptation of Yukio Mishima’s three novels and his shocking “death-story” in Schrader’s A Life in Four Chapters

Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) is one of the most comprehensive biographical representations of Yukio Mishima’s literature and life, which were retroactively overshadowed by his sensational death. In this film with a multi-layered and complex temporal structure oscillating between documentary and fiction, Schrader concisely adapts The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956), Kyōko’s House (1959), and Runaway Horses (1969), as well as some anecdotal episodes of Mishima, for cinema. The story centres on Mishima’s bizarre act of terror which he executed with his four young soldiers from his militia force, the Shield Society, on November 25, 1970, at the headquarters of the Japan Self-Defence Forces. He committed suicide by seppukku when his call for “Shōwa Restoration” was ignored. Hence, as this biographical film focuses on Mishima’s “death” and his anecdotes connected with his “death wish” rather than on his “life-story,” its genre should be renamed as a “death-story.” On the other hand, Schrader consciously transformed Benjamin’s “shock effect” theory into a method. According to Benjamin, the “shock effect” is caused by the constant and sudden change of images in cinema which subverts the viewer’s consciousness. However, in this way, the spectator, who is forced to re-establish her/his consciousness by taking a productive stance, comprehends the film more efficiently. Our goal is to reveal how Schrader utilised Benjamin’s “shock effect” in his film. To this end, we analysed the above-mentioned literary works and their film adaptations comparatively, with a particular focus on the “death-story” of Mishima.

The Search for Meaning and the Illusion of Escaping: Martin Walser’s &lt;em&gt;Runaway Horse&lt;/em&gt; – a Novella about the Midlife Crisis

This article is an analysis of Martin Walser’s novella Runaway Horse (1977) about the midlife crisis. It describes the search for meaning of a man in his mid-fifties, his imprisonment in futility and the illusion of a possible flight from this abyss. With this novella, Walser embarked on the broad field of philosophy, the ambiguity of postmodern existence and the questioning of traditional lifestyles. In addition, Walser is one of the first writers to artistically address the challenges and crises of age—especially in times of demographic change and the “aging of society,” a highly controversial topic. The question that runs through Walser’s novella is: how to live and how to love? Walser does not offer simple answers to all these questions, but he exacerbates the problems that we perceive only vaguely in our everyday life, at the highest level in literature and philosophy. That is why Walser’s characters appear so credible and why Runaway Horse represents a palpable example of the expressive power of literature.

Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies: Lafayette Park, Detroit by Danielle Aubert, Lana Cavar, Natasha Chandini

170 The Michigan Historical Review recommended reading for those with radical/alternative interests and tastes. Benjamin Thomason Central Michigan University Danielle Aubert, Lana Cavar, and Natasha Chandini, eds. Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies: Lafayette Park, Detroit. New York: Metropolis Books, 2019 (second edition). Pp. 304. Bibliography. Illustrations. Paper: $29.95. Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies: Lafayette Park, Detroit provides a very different look at Lafayette Park than anything else written about it. Built between 1958 and 1962, it was a postwar urban renewal project designed by architect Mies van der Rohe, landscape designer Alfred Caldwell, and urban planner Ludwig Hilbersheimer. The complex consists of single and two-story condominium townhouses and three high-rise rental towers. Rather than an architectural history, the book focuses on the residents. Therefore, it adds to the context of Mies’s work by considering how the buildings and the complex actually function, what assumptions made by the design team were correct, and which were not. The book was originally published in 2012, when the city was still reeling from the economic depression and white flight to the suburbs. It had not yet become the hip place it is now, and Lafayette Park had not reclaimed its iconic status. Two new essays by Marsha Music and Matthew Piper, plus a new preface, were added to consider these significant positive changes, but the rest is as originally published. As this is a snapshot in time, the reader needs to keep in mind how substantially different the situation is now. As with many collections of interviews, there is some overlap, and not all are equally substantial. Nevertheless, the wide range of stories by long-term residents creates a multilayered look at those who lived/live in Lafayette Park. For some, especially the tower residents, the motivation for living there had less to do with the architecture and more about affordable rents, convenience to downtown, and the diversity of the residents and well-maintained grounds. For others, particularly those who purchased the town- and court-houses, the aesthetics of space and place were important. For all, it seems like living in a modernist structure helped develop an appreciation of International-style large windows, open views and planned urban space. In one section, short interviews are paired with views from that person’s apartment window, allowing the reader into Book Reviews 171 spaces that are normally off-limits. Likewise, photographs of residents in the interiors of their homes with their varied furniture, belongings and pets are evidence that the stark modernist architecture did not dictate the interior design. As discussed by several people, it is also striking that without the gates and fences that are ubiquitous throughout the rest of Detroit, there is a sense of safety, security, and community achieved through the architecture and the setting. Additionally, the complex has always been racially integrated, as well as economically and age-diverse. Fifty years after construction, and seven since the original book’s publication, Lafayette Park has not only become increasingly valuable real estate altering the profile of the residents, but there has been a lot of attention paid to Michigan Modern architecture in general through the State Historic Preservation Office’s project. Exhibitions at Cranbrook Art Museum and the Grand Rapids Art Museum that followed their publication featured Lafayette Park, including a full-scale mock-up of a townhouse apartment living room. It would have been helpful to update the selected bibliography, but this does not detract from the unique contribution made by this book. Susan J. Bandes Michigan State University Sandy Barnard, ed.; Thomas E. Singelyn, comp. An Aide to Custer: The Civil War Letters of Lt. Edward G. Granger. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. Pp. 295. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Cloth: $39.95. On August 20, 1863, 2nd Lt. Edward G. Granger from Detroit was appointed as a staff officer in the Michigan Cavalry Brigade by Bvt. Brig. Gen. George A. Custer, sometime resident of Monroe, Michigan. Granger was twenty, Custer twenty-three. Granger was shot off a runaway horse less than a year later while carrying orders to two regimental commanders who were charging Confederate positions at the Battle of Crooked Run. Custer, still...

Reading Manipulation In Runaway Horses by Mishima Yukio

In her seminal work, Authoritarian Fictions: Ideological Novels as a Literary Genre, Susan Rubin Suleiman emphasizes the co-optational dimension of romans à thèse, which seem addressed to readers who are already converted to the ideological perspective of these works. Political novels therefore tend to divide readers into two categories: proponents on the one hand, denigrators on the other. Based on a close reading of Runaway Horses (1969), Mishima Yukio’s most overtly ideological fictional work, this article is meant to enrich Suleiman’s model by showing that the most elaborate authoritarian fictional works use specific rhetorical tactics to soften or compensate for the excess of their message and to appeal to nonsympathizers. Focusing on chapters 9 and 10 of Runaway Horses, where the novel shifts from a classical and realist tone (chapters 1 to 8) to an ideological and authoritarian one (chapters 9 to 40), the article analyzes three of these rhetorical tactics: (1) the lightning rod, which consists of attracting criticisms about one specific and clearly delineated locus of the text, fulfilling an apotropaic function and serving as a foil for the rest; (2) prolepsis, which anticipates the reader’s likely negative comments and thus becomes in tune with his perspective; and (3) the tactic of enlarging the audience by which the narrator reincorporates a sectarian ideology into a larger and more universal ensemble. The conclusion questions the place of the reader and investigates the reading strategies that he or she may adopt in order to respond to this manipulation.

What does a terrorist want? Empathising and sympathising with terrorist voices

This paper poses the question of what it means to be ‘inside’ the terrorist’s mind and explore the terrorist’s mentality by means of a narrative, such as the terrorist novel and the terrorist memoir. Consequently, the paper focuses on authorial strategies of empathy and sympathy in texts that privilege the terrorist character’s subjective viewpoint and experience. The discussion operates on the premise that narrative techniques have bearing on the readers’ response to the story, even if it there is no guaranteed correspondence between a certain technique and a certain effect. Thus, the paper asks how first-person narration, the interior representation of a person’s consciousness, and extended direct representation of speech, can contribute to empathic and sympathetic effects in specific ways. After a brief look on the ironic method, i.e. alternation between ironic distance and sympathy for the terrorist character, and the narrative of changing minds, i.e. a story where a character abandons his plot for destruction, the discussion moves into an extended analysis of three examples where the narrative as a whole suggests sympathy for terrorist cause and tactics. The examples include Yukio Mishima’s novel Runaway Horses (Honba 1969), Richard Jackson’s dialogue novel Confessions of a Terrorist (2014), and Omar Nasiri’s memoir Inside the Global Jihad (2006).

Reutilización de material literario en las comedias de Calderón: un análisis desde sus piezas más tempranas

This article identifies different recurring elements (often) used by Calderon in his plays. Sometimes they can be a motif like the runaway horse; one or two lines or even a whole strophe as we can see in the case of the decima, which is shared by Amor, honor y poder and El principe constante; or a scene like the hidden king who spies on his beloved. Thus, it is important to be aware of this tendency in Calderon in order to deal with a critical edition and, at the same time, it is a useful resource for recognising and verifying the authorship of a play of doubtful attribution.

Early economic encounters in the Pacific or, proto-globalization in Tonga

This article aims to demonstrate the degree and nature of local autonomy in long term processes of globalization in Tonga. Tonga is exceptional in that it has never been officially colonized and in the continuity of its political (paramount chiefly) system. Also, but this is less exceptional, it has never had a pure modernistic, capitalist economy. Globalization is a specific, contemporary configuration in the relationship between capital and the nation-state or, in the words of William Greider (1997), it is like ‘a runaway horse without a rider’. Global capital is characterized by strategies of predatory mobility. However, the global and the national are not necessarily exclusive but are interacting and overlapping. Social scientists work with the nation-state as a container which would represent a unit in time and space, a ‘unified spatiotemporality’ according to the sociologist Saskia Sassen (2000). She adds that much history failed to confirm the latter hypothesis. The author may add from his part that anthropologists, although alike ‘social scientists’, rather work with the notions of culture and society which, in the case of more recent Tongan history, overlap with that of the nation-state. Although the notion of globalization is a rather recent invention with an exclusive contemporary application, we may discern the roots of its practice already in the early trading contacts between Europeans and Tongans.

Writing Home: Martin Walser's Ein fliehendes Pferd as Anti-Tourist Literature

This paper examines the novella Ein fliehendes Pferd (A Runaway Horse) by Lake Constance author Martin Walser as ‘anti-tourist literature’. The popularity of Lake Constance as a tourist destination owes much to its beautiful natural landscape, which is often depicted in romantic images and words in the tourist brochures and guidebooks from the region. Local author, Walser uses similar descriptions of the natural landscape in his novella, which tells the story of four disillusioned tourists and their disappointing holiday by Lake Constance, but provides a local, critical perspective on constructions of the place Lake Constance by the tourist industry. The paper reflects on the ways in which Walser's ‘anti-tourist’ characters react to, and are influenced by, the natural landscape and the holiday destination. It focuses on the satirical use of typical tourist brochure and guidebook descriptions of the landscape, and the ways in which changes in the landscape mirror changes in the destructive relationship between the four characters. The paper makes an important contribution to the field of tourism and cultural change in its focus on anti-tourist literature as a literature of resistance to the impacts of tourism and tourist literature on places and their inhabitants.

Competence, Power, and the Nostalgic Romance of Piloting in Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi

Competence, Power, and the Nostalgic Romance of Piloting in Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi Brian McCammack Mark Twain's fascination with competence and power is evident in many of his characters, particularly in his largely autobiographical works that explore his formative experiences in the western frontier—Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi. While Twain admires aspects of both powerful characters and competent characters, in the final analysis competence commands more of his respect than does sheer power. He often expresses ambivalence toward powerful characters in his texts, while competent characters are almost always revered. Embedded in discussions of power and competence are conflicting romantic visions of a radically individualistic western American character. One vision derives from the myth of a Wild West violent individuality, the other from a more scientific and professional rugged individualism. Yet the relation cannot be so easily reduced to a sort of binary; there are many complexities and ambivalences prevalent in Twain's writing on this subject. Several critics have explored aspects of these issues as they appear in Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi, but the interrelations between Twain's attitude toward issues of competence and power and his romantic nostalgia for piloting the Mississippi have not been adequately explored. This essay will first explore the issues of competence and power as they apply to Roughing It and more extensively to Life on the Mississippi. It [End Page 1] will then connect the issues of power and competence to Twain's romantic nostalgia depicted in Life on the Mississippi. Before the reasons for Twain's differing attitudes toward competence and power can be examined, however, a working definition of what it means to be a competent character or powerful character must be offered. One way to articulate respective definitions and differentiate between competence and power is to examine characters that transparently exemplify each quality. Both types of characters appear in Twain's Roughing It. The quintessential powerful character of Roughing It is the outlaw Slade, who "was supreme judge in his district, and he was jury and executioner likewise" (Roughing It 63). Enlisted to clean up the desperadoes and outlaws along a portion of the overland stage route, Slade, ironically, becomes perhaps the most storied and feared outlaw of the West. All of Slade's power is derived from pure force. He rules with his gun, and morals or reason usually do not enter into the equation. This is essentially what a powerful character is for Twain: someone autonomous and violent in the solving of problems and construction of right and wrong. Although not every powerful character in Twain's fiction meets all of these criteria, a man like Slade represents an unquestionably powerful man. The powerful man takes complete control of his environment, shaping it to his needs or desires by any means necessary. In stark contrast to the outlaw Slade, the exemplary competent character of Roughing It is Captain John Nye, who accompanies Twain and his fellow travelers on a portion of their western travels.1 Twain writes that upon entering an inn where "there was no welcome for us on any face," Nye's memory of past acquaintances, along with his helpful competence in instances diverse in nature as stopping a runaway horse and mending a child's toy, so ingratiates Twain's group to the people at the inn that when they leave, they are "lamented by all" (Roughing It 228–229). Twain implies that a competent character does not necessarily try to overcome or control his environment like the powerful character. Instead, he negotiates it by working with what he is given. Nye does not attempt to use force to control the situations and people he encounters. Rather, he adjusts to them with good judgment and precision to meet his needs. Knowing that it would win him good favor at the inn, Nye produces "a later paper than anybody had seen for a week and sat himself down to read the news to a deeply interested audience" (Roughing It 229). It is this judgment, knowing exactly what he needs to do and when he needs to do it, that makes Nye a competent character. So Slade...

"Absolutamente necesario": The Express Train in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, Chapter Twelve

In Under the Volcano, Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, despairs over a failed marriage in the bars of Quauhnahuac, Mexico. On this day his former wife, Yvonne, returns to save him, hoping to lure him away from Mexico to an Elysian cabin. Stagnant failures of the past coalesce with apocalyptic visions when the narrative engine of a lifetime comes to a halt and all the boxcars of a lifetime collide with the present.2 The Consul is physically killed by an Indian’s runaway horse that is frightened by the storm, so the express train is only the figurative cause of his death. On the Day of the Dead, November 2, 1938, from seven a.m. to seven p.m., a lifetime is contained in a day that speeds towards death in a stream-of-consciousness narrative with the accelerating structure of an express train. Typographically, we are on a swift course winding through the Mexican terrain. From the figurative broken track ending Chapter 1 to its continuation in Chapter 2, Under the Volcano makes it clear we have boarded a speeding narrative that conveys death: Pam Fox Kuhlken finished her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside, in 2005 and currently lectures at the University of San Diego and Perelandra College. Her essay is part of a projected book on the poetics of time in modern novels and films that are set in a day.

Smithsonian Institution Secretary, Charles Doolittle Walcott

Ellis Yochelson, 2001, Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio, 589 p. (Hardcover, $55.00) ISBN: 0-87338-680-9. Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850–1927) was director of the U.S. Geological Survey from 1894 to 1907, and director of the Smithsonian Institution from 1907 until his death in 1927. He was instrumental in the founding of the National Museum of American Art and heavily involved with the early days of aeronautical research. But in the geoscience community, he is probably best remembered for discovering the fossil invertebrates of the Burgess Shale. In Smithsonian Institution Secretary, Charles Doolittle Walcott, Ellis Yochelson has completed a two-volume biography of Walcott. In this second volume, Yochelson picks up Walcott's story in 1907, the year that he left the U. S. Geological Survey and became director of the Smithsonian. Drawing heavily on Walcott's diary, Yochelson provides a detailed, nearly day-by-day description of Walcott's life, as he administered the Smithonsian, served as president of the National Academy of Sciences and later the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was a founding member of the National Research Council. Even though Walcott ran the Smithsonian and hobnobbed with Presidents, perhaps the most interesting aspect of his life was an undying devotion to fossils and field geology. Well into his 70s, Walcott went to the Canadian Rockies every summer to collect fossils; measure, describe, and correlate rock sequences; take panoramic photographs; and fish for trout. During these trips, Walcott (as described by Yochelson) became the classic field geologist, the kind who never lets a little bad weather or run-away horses, or even advancing age, keep him from his passion. It is impossible not to admire a figure so committed to the rocks that nothing—not administrative duties, a world war, family tragedies—got in the way. This must have been a man of ceaseless motion. …

Letter across the Pacific.

Dear Terry, Your recent letter dealt with the issue of self-awareness and the capacity to form “deliberate intent to put an end to one’s self.” You made the point that animals generally do not have the latter capacity. A number of points follow from this: first, we have the fact that suicide seems more or less unique to the human species and we have already covered that adequately. The next point is the issue of the relationship between self-awareness and the capacity to from suicidal intent. Originally the concept of suicide arose in the context of morality. We still tend to talk about “committing” suicide as if it were still a legal and, thereby, a moral offense. The moral basis to suicidology may have locked us into a witch-hunt with respect to suicidal intent. This is, of course, important in every day clinical practice, but I can’t help feeling that it has locked us into that mode of thinking. Of course, the evidence suggests that when it comes to prediction we are not very good hunters. You also make the point that thinking may be driven by feeling states, at least some of the time. This is very apparent in a patient with borderline personality who last week was on top of the world and this week hates himself to his very core and is certain there can be no absolution, so death must be the way to go. In a legal sense, it could be challenged whether he had capacity to form intent in either of the two weeks, although I would hate to see a society that became too paternalistic in this regard—especially clamping down on happiness! Nevertheless, it illustrates your point about thoughts often following feelings, rather than directing them. I wonder whether we need to re-visit types of suicide or suicidal intentions. I believe as a discipline we have tended to get stuck on hero-worshipping Durkheim far too much. He did a great job, but that was over a century ago and it is time we should be able to make most of his conclusions redundant. From what we have been talking about, we have, in effect, already come up with an irrational feelings based suicide type, e.g., a la borderline personality disorder. Similarly, we might delineate an abnormal cognitions type of suicide, e.g., one driven by delusional ideas. In addition, of course, there are the more rational sorts of suicide in which there is a reasonable balance of feelings and cognitions and the reasoning is not too remote from reality. Hence, following this reasoning we have three basic types of suicide—abnormal feelings driven suicide, abnormal cognitions driven suicide and rational feelings/cognitions driven suicide. Now I am talking about them as if they were discreet categories simply because my pigeon brain struggles to cope with the reality of dimensional approaches to psychopathology, although I have no doubt that they are more correct. Perhaps these dimensions might be approached as three corners of a triangle. The further a profile is from a corner, the more mixed is its underlying basis. Durkheim’s typology came from the moralistic era. The typology I am suggesting so far has nothing to do with what moral/immoral act is about to be committed, but is based on the nature of the psychological processes driving the behavior, which as we have already stated, originates in self-awareness which is virtually a precondition for self-destructiveness, at least in the suicide sense. You have referred to Freud’s analogy of the horse and it’s rider in which he compared a compromised ego to the rider on a runaway horse. Borderline personality disorder would presumably be a typical example of the runaway horse. Of course there has been research in recent decades that has emphasized the relevance to suicide of hopelessness (feelings + cognitions), impulsivity (largely feelings), cognitive inflexibility (largely cognitions), and other findings. However, the limited progress that has occurred in the understanding of what psychologically underlies suicide is concerning. At the time of writing this, the Gulf War fortunately seems to be settling down. I do hope those words do not require revision by the time this is published. You may

Yukio Mishima (review)

Reviewed by: Yukio Mishima Sanford M. Goldstein Peter Wolfe . Yukio Mishima. New York: Continuum, 1989. 200 pp. $18.95. Peter Wolfe asks in the opening of his Yukio Mishima why a reader should bother to read this book, but for the first thirty-eight pages one may wonder why Wolfe wrote it, for his attitude toward Mishima is so negative as to become annoying. Wolfe seems to go along with Gore Vidal and Jiro Kawamura in seeing Mishima as "a minor writer because his only subject was himself," a judgment I find totally erroneous merely from the viewpoint of the brilliant cast of characters Mishima created. Wolfe further blunders into such irrationalities as the following: "Rather than promoting slum clearance, clean air, or educational reform, Mishima disemboweled himself"; Mishima "has forgotten that one of his goals is providing some integrated, holistic picture of human nature." When Wolfe occasionally praises Mishima, a negative note intrudes: "Mishima has some of Dickens's vitality. But unlike those of Dickens, [Mishima's] people are not joined by benign affection or loyalties." And finally, to cite only one more in a long catalogue of negative reflections on Mishima, Wolfe writes in relation to Mishima's public and private suicide, "Showing off to himself as always, he staged his last clown act as a media event and accepted the consequences." After John Nathan's brilliantly objective and moving report of this culminating event in Mishima's life in Mishima: A Biography (1974), Wolfe's words are shallow and insensitive, influenced as they are by Japan's embarrassed critical evaluation of the suicide. Yet even Wolfe refers to Kawabata's pronouncement that a writer like Mishima appears only once in five hundred years. Mishima, furthermore, was apparently considered one of three Nobel Prize possibilities among Japanese writers. The fact remains that Mishima continues to fascinate us and Wolfe as well. Almost as if Wolfe is himself caught within the contradictory impulses of a Mishima character, he proceeds to give a fascinating analysis of twelve of Mishima's novels translated into English. This criticism carries us from Mishima's apprenticeship in Confessions of a Mask (1949) and Thirst for Love (1950) to the magnificent tetralogy, Sea of Fertility, whose Spring Snow (1968), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), and The Decay of the Angel (1971) take up the last fifty pages of Wolfe's short but remarkable critical study. Wolfe concludes that Spring Snow is Mishima's greatest novel, but the second book in the tetralogy, Runaway Horses, he finds flawed by the unresolved tensions between reincarnation and samurai codes as well as other problems, all of which "sabotage the remaining works in the Sea of Fertility cycle." [End Page 656] Possibly Wolfe was trying to be faithful to the complexity of the Japanese view toward Mishima, a mixture of admiration and derision and embarrassment, for it continues to do tricks with Wolfe's judgments. His analysis of each novel aids the Western reader, and certainly his comments are essential in helping us see into the complexities of Forbidden Colors (1951), The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956), After the Banquet (1960) (the editors have left this novel out of the chronological listing on page 8), and the Sea of Fertility tetralogy. Yet even in Mishima's most joyous novel, The Sound of Waves (1954), Wolfe finds in the last two paragraphs of the novel an assertion of male supremacy that "both cheapens [Mishima's] earlier affirmations and smears the luster of what had been, up to now, his most lyrical novel." To continue this positive/negative admixture, Wolfe sees Confessions of a Mask as "sketchy, fragmentary, and puzzling," but he almost grudgingly notes "the work defies one to forget it." Of the controversial Forbidden Colors, Wolfe affirms that the novel "questions our root values with painful concentration." His fine analysis of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963) concludes with the insight that Sailor "light[s] the dark currents that flow within us all" and that the book's "echoes extend our humanity." For a long time I have felt that Mishima critics, Wolfe among them, make too much of the biographical...

Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972): Tradition versus Modernity

literature. prize, once monopolized by Western writers, was given to a Japanese for the first time in 1968. x Japan had arrived as a modern nation in the economic and political sense, and it had staged the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 superbly. Perhaps the time had come to recognize a great Japanese writer, a hundred years after Japan's entry into the modern world with the Meiji Restoration of 1868. paradox is that Kawabata, who seems to have been recognized for Japans modernity, focused on traditional culture and gave little attention to things modern and Western, even though he wrote in a Japan undergoing modernization and all his novels had a contemporary setting. It is a truism that novels provide some of the best primary sources for writing social history, as the popularity of such works tells us what people think is important about themselves. One would expect that Japan's one writer to achieve worldwide celebrity as a Nobel laureate would provide a deep well of materials on class and family, on work and leisure. Such is not the case. historian would do better to look to Kawabata's contemporaries such as Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, who wrote the classic novel of the Japanese family Makioka Sisters (1944-48), or even Yukio Mishima, who re-created both the world of the Taisho elites (in Spring Snow, 1968) and that of the right-wing patriots of the early Showa era (in Runaway Horses, 1969). Instead, it is a private world of beauty and culture that engages Kawabata, who belonged to the so-called lyric school of Japanese writing. He consciously rejected the proletarian school, which was in vogue during his university days in the 1920s; and he eschewed commentary on social and political problems, at least in his literary works, throughout his career. Still, the historian must put Kawabata in the context of his times and reconstruct those times as best he can from the fragments about the world around the writers and artists, the dilettantes and lovely traditional Japanese women who inhabit his stories. This most eminent writer lived and worked through turbulent times: the Taisho democracy, Showa militarism, the Pacific War, the American Occupation, and at the end the Economic Miracle or at least its beginnings. As with most Japanese writers, Kawabata's work tends to be autobiographical. Edward Seidens ticker has asserted that Kawabata was much like the men he wrote about, in contrast to Tanizaki, who created protagonists very different from himself. young student depicted in The Izu Dancer (1926) who goes down the Izu peninsula on vacation and carries on a tentative romance with the little dancer from the traveling troupe is undoubtedly the adolescent Kawabata. Tokyo dilettante Shimamura who is the protagonist of Snow Country (1935-48), with his halfbaked learning about the European ballet, is ostensibly the kind of person Kawabata disdained, yet he has the same tastes in women and an identical love of traditional crafts such as the making of chijimi cloth by peasants working in the snows of the North. old men who have memory lapses or face death or are romantically linked with much younger women in the later works are undoubtedly alter egos of the author.2 Kawabata was a man of his times, one who emphasized certain themes at the expense of others and was more concerned about the decline of an old culture than about the emergence of a new society or econ-

It Has Been Said

IT HAS BEEN SAID and collected by ERWIN DI CYAN* "Facts are meaningless except as part of a system."—Morris Cohen "I have gathered a bouquet of other people's flowers and only the thread that holds them together is mine."—Michel de Montaigne "You can't have a better tomorrow when you are thinking ofyesterday most of the time."—C. F. Kettering "Obstinancy is the strength of the weak."—Lavater "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute—then it is longer than any hour. That's relativity."—Albert Einstein "There are no whole truths; all the truths are half-truths. It is treating them as whole truths that plays the devil."—Alfred North Whitehead "The heart has its own reasons for which reason itself has no answer."— Blaise Pascal "To be alive at all involves some risk."—Harold Macmillan "It isn't the things we don't know that give us trouble, but the things we know which just aren't so that are hell."—Josh Billings "He who gives promptly gives twice."—Miguel de Cervantes *Address: 1466 East 33 Street, Brooklyn, New York 11234. Material appearing under this title is collected with the aim of making the serious a bit less serious, the ponderous a bit less heavy, and the reading hours a bit more fun. Toward this goal we invite a guest editor of this feature for each issue. Will readers volunteer to share their senses of humor by collecting or recollecting items that have brought smiles to their faces? We invite your participation. Originals are also welcomed. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 30, 3 ¦ Spring 1987 | 399 "It is those who have a deep inner life who are best able to deal with the vexations of outer life."—Evelyn Underhill "Concepts without words have no existence, and words without concepts no meaning."—Morris Cohen "Imagination is more important than knowledge."—Albert Einstein "And to this thought I hold with firm persistence The last result of wisdom stamps it true: He only earns his freedom and existence Who daily conquers them anew." Goethe "To be miserable you must have leisure to wonder if you are happy or not."— G. B. Shaw "A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience."—Miguel de Cervantes "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for the good men to do nothing."—Edmund Burke "One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life—that word is love."— Sophocles "Satire is a sort of mirror in which onlookers discover everyone's face but their own."—Johnathan Swift "Justice will be achieved only when those who are not injured are as outraged as those who are."—Solon of Athens "Only the rich preach contentment to the poor."—Anon "Envy and mediocrity are an explosive mixture."—Irvine H. Page "A man wants all he can get; a woman wants all she can't get."—Anon "Men will believe more easily that which they do not understand."—Michel de Montaigne "Don't use big words for little matters."—Samuel Johnson "People mistake obscurity for profundity."—Anon "There are thousands hacking away at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."—Henry Thoreau 400 I Is Has Been Said "Once you have missed the first buttonhole you will never manage to button up."—Goethe "Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who only dream at night."—Edgar Allan Poe "The years wrinkle our skin, but lack of enthusiasm wrinkles our soul."— Socrates "What one can conceive and believe one can achieve."—Anon "Let not your sun go down on your wrath."—Ephesians "Little things console us because little things afflict us."—Blaise Pascal "Man is born to live and not to prepare to live."—Pasternak "The speed of a runaway horse counts for nothing."—Jean Cocteau "To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind."— Théophile Gautier "The louder he talked of his honour the faster we counted the spoons."— Samuel Johnson...

The Use of Free Skin Grafts for Post-Traumatic Cicatricial Stenosis of the Laryngopharynx

The use of free skin grafts for reconstruction of the pharynx after laryngopharyngectomy for neoplastic disease is well documented.1,2,5,8-16However, the opportunity to use these grafts for benign post-traumatic and postinfectious cicatricial stenosis of the pharynx finds infrequent application. A review of the literature reveals very few recorded instances of this use.3,4,6,13 The mechanism producing post-traumatic stenosis must be extraordinary. Many of these patients probably die as a result of the initial injury and never reach the stage of stricture formation. We recently have had experience in managing one such case who lived to develop a stricture and merits recording. Report of Case The 8-year-old son of circus performers sustained an injury to his neck and pharynx when he was pulled by a rope about his neck for a distance of 300 ft. by a runaway horse. The injury included fracture of three cervical vertebrae without neurological sequelae

Influence of Recent Civil Airworthiness Requirements on Aircraft Design

In preparing this lecture I found it necessary, when considering recent changes in aircraft design, constantly to ask myself the question “Is this particular change due to airworthiness requirements or does it arise from reasons other than airworthiness?” In fact, one must consider whether requirements have any influence at all on the development of trends in design. Should design be likened to a runaway horse with requirements following some way behind, or are requirements a strict rein by which the pace and direction of design is controlled?My own answer to these questions is that the pace at which development takes place is not influenced at all by airworthiness requirements, but that requirements help to prevent design from running off the path of safety. To carry the analogy a little farther, the faster the development is, the more difficult it is to keep it running on the path of safety.