Yoshimoto Taka'aki's 'What Is Beauty for Language': Toward an Aesthetics of Literary Language
Manuel Yang (University of Toledo)
Cite Article: Vitalpoetics, Vol.1 No.1, January 2008
When Yoshimoto Taka’aki published Gengo ni totte bi to wa nanika (What is Beauty for Language) in 1965 – after its serialization on the pages of the New Left journal ShikM that he co-founded and edited – many of Yoshimoto’s ardent readers among the Japanese radical student movement, expecting a political directive for the movement, were bewildered. Few however grasped its significance in relation to their own work in the field of Japanese literature. The following two contrasting testimonies are exemplary:
When What Is Beauty for Language first came out, I think many readers had the impression of it being unexpected. Yoshimoto Taka’aki, who up until then had been criticizing the old progressive intellectuals, suddenly started speaking about "language." What was this about? I had read a few of Miura Tsutomu’s books earlier so I understood that Yoshimoto was starting to talk about the problem of language with Miura as a stepping stone…But I couldn’t understand the necessity of Mr. Yoshimoto working on language. Why did Yoshimoto Taka’aki, who was within the discursive space of the Left – and this includes Miura Tsutomu – had to show interest in language? What is the relationship between the problem of taishk [popular agency], the problem of politics, and language? I couldn’t understand that. (Kawade 197)
When What Is Beauty for Language came out in 1965, I was a student in the Department of National Literature at Tokyo University and bought the book immediately and read it. And I still remember vividly that Mr. Akiyama Ken, a scholar of national literature, came to where we were gathering in our office and said, "An incredible book had just come out." When we asked him "what’s that?", he said "it’s Yoshimoto Taka’aki’s What Is Beauty for Language." On that occasion Mr. Akiyama candidly told us "it’s quite incredible, he had done everything that I wanted to do." (Yoshimoto Taka’aki ga kataru 86)
The contrasting reactions indicate the gulf between the political temper of the times and the care with which Yoshimoto, an ostensibly non-academic literary critic and poet, wrote the book, which advanced a set of arguments aimed to directly engage the most venerable and conservative field of his profession (koku-bungaku or "national literature"). It was true that What Is Beauty was a decidedly theoretical work without any reference to the immediate issue of the day and that it dealt with literary language, a realm that appeared far removed from the political zone of engagement wherein since the 1960 anti-Ampo (U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Agreement) Yoshimoto had become a central voice of the newly emergent New Left. But to view the book as not "political" in the deeper, non-topical sense was a mistake. Such an impression no doubt was fostered by many of the students’ unawareness of Yoshimoto’s polemical interventions against the orthodoxy of the postwar Japanese Left prior to the book’s publication, by-then two-decades-long and involving questions of literature and politics, war responsibility and aesthetics.
The orthodoxy’s position was buttressed by the resuscitated and increasingly hegemonic status – within cultural and intellectual discourse even after the anticommunist "reverse course" taken by the U.S. Occupation after 1947 – of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) following Japan’s defeat in World War II. As a self-proclaimed antiwar and democratic "vanguard" of the working class, the JCP and its fellow literary writers went on an offensive against those they deemed "collaborators" in the Japanese imperialist war. On the pages of the widely influential literary journal Shin Nihon bungaku (New Japanese Literature), they had listed the names of those writers whom they denounced as war collaborators. According to Yoshimoto, there were several obvious problems with this condemnatory approach. One was its counterfactually self-serving nature: because many of the accusing writers had themselves penned pro-war verses or gave succor to the wartime militarist state in one form or another, they were merely concealing their apostate past and making a sweepingly ideological bid for a superior moral and political "higher ground" under their newly found patronage of the JCP. Another problem, directly related to this, was its inability to fundamentally come to terms with the virtually unanimous "apostasy" (tenkM) of prewar Leftists under the coercive pressure of the military police and with the failure of the minority of the Communist Party leadership (who did maintain their ideological purity in refusing to recant) in making any inroad to engage popular consciousness, which was overwhelmingly in support of the war. In short, the postwar Japanese Left swept under the rug the very "war responsibility" they had to ask of themselves and instead indulged in a delusion of ideological purity as uncritically as their apostate majority formerly celebrated the purity of Japanese nationalist and militarist objectives.
This latter question was the crux of Yoshimoto’s theoretical problematic during the 1950s and had a directly personal bearing on his devastating "experience of defeat". As a working-class youth who was mobilized into a munitions factory and was willing to give up his life for the emperor during the war, the Japanese defeat and the subsequent U.S. Occupation literally came as an existential shock to him, an overturning of all his former fundamental values and commitments. Yoshimoto was a working poet and literary critic trained in chemistry and for a time had to earn a living in a chemical factory, where he felt compelled to organize a labor union, only to soon resign in the wake of the workers’ defeat (after a short-lived stint in graduate school, he later secured a position in a patent office to obtain subsistence for his family). Unlike most members of the Japanese literary and intellectual establishment who put themselves at a distance from the actuality of day-to-day working-class life and who were products of prestigious university education, Yoshimoto took such grassroots events and relationships in his life as a distinctive ground of experience from which to initiate a virtually solitary attack on the conventional wisdom of the orthodox Left. He drew theoretical sustenance for his polemics against the literary left establishment from his secular reading of the Gospel of Matthew and ideologically independent interpretation of Karl Marx.
The Marxist dialectician Miura Tsutomu, an autodidactic print-engraver who theoretically elaborated the nature of Japanese language and popularized critical philosophy for the working class, was a significant influence on Yoshimoto. Before the rise of the New Left, during the long night of Stalinist hegemony wielded by the JCP, Miura was one of the rare voices who preserved the fierce light of radically democratic reason within the shell of his Marxist dialectic. Indeed any global history of mid-twentieth-century dissident Marxism would be amiss without assessing Miura’s contributions, next to those of Isaac Deutscher, Socialisme ou Barbarie, Johnson-Forest Tendency, and the British Marxist historians. Later a regular contributor to ShikM, Miura’s theory of Japanese language (synthesized for the general public in his 1956 Nihongo wa dM iu gengo ka What Kind of Language Is Japanese) affected Yoshmoto’s own approach in at least two ways. It confirmed the intellectual vacuity of the Stalinist or generally orthodox Marxist view in which language was treated merely as an instrument that reflected human consciousness and stressed the necessity of any literary theory worthy of its name to be able to explain the subtle nuances, in many cases non-semantic, turns of linguistic expression.
The questions of wartime responsibility and political commitment in literature, which were of immediate political relevance during the 1950s, also carried within them the seed of this theoretical discussion of linguistic expression in literature. In order to properly combat the orthodox Left’s one-dimensional reduction of literary value to an ideological position, valorizing politics as a category to evaluate the value of a literary work, Yoshimoto traced the prehistory of their arguments to the prewar debate over "proletarian literature". One of the most important moments of this earlier debate was one conducted between the literary critic Kobayashi Hideo and the Marxist defenders of "proletarian literature" who advocated a variation of socialist realism as the only literature worth producing. Kobayashi single-handedly founded the practice of modern Japanese literary criticism as an "impressionist criticism" that took the critic’s consciousness as its central vortex, taking to heart the modernist ethos of viewing literature as an expression of individual personality (he famously defined the objective of literary criticism to be one of "speaking doubtfully of one’s own dream"). Accordingly he blasted the Marxist writers for utilizing theory as a commodity, a reified mechanism incapable of capturing the psychological depth and irreducible individuality of a literary work and, in an intriguingly dialectical move, took them to task for their failure in radically reconceputalizing Marx’s labor theory of value for literature.
Had Marx written Aesthetics instead of Capital, he would not have started from the analysis of Tolstoy’s "What is Art?", as Plekhanov did. He would have directly started from Anna Karenina or, better yet, from the analysis of language. Of course such a speculation is foolish. What I’m saying is that the problem is simply one of whether to deeply understand the difficulty of discovering art’s socially equivalent value or to perceive it superficially. Difficulty is synonymous with reality, and reality is synonymous with effort. But to deny this possibility is even more foolish. And yet even more foolish to dream and preach this theoretical heaven. I only say after Engels: "The science of art is as possible as it is impossible. And this is the necessity of all." (Kobayashi 20)
As a critic of acutely poetic sensibility and enormously wide-ranging breadth who practiced criticism as a form of creative, literary expression by other means, it was not for Kobayshi to bring down to earth and make real the said "theoretical heaven". That was a task that unwittingly fell upon Yoshimoto, who out of necessity had to work out this problem of value to his satisfaction. He took the shifting and overlapping senses of "value", as in Marx’s sense of the congealed notation of socially necessarily labor that goes into the making of a commodity and in the more ill-defined sense of literary and aesthetic worth, and wove Kobayashi’s notion of language as the essence of literary value into the theoretical fabric of What Is Beauty for Language.
By 1959, on the cusp of the anti-Ampo struggle, Yoshimoto’s sense of his own work was that the polemical charges that obtained in his criticisms against the JCP and its literary minions were all but exhausted. His publication that year of Artistic Resistance and Breakdown, in effect a record of the last ferocious stage of this polemical battle, showed that the arguments had been pushed to as far as they could go. The only way left for him was to put into deed what he had attacked his opponents for failing to produce, namely a literary theory of linguistic expression that could comprehensively and rationally explicate the determination of "literary value". In the next five years, through the rise and fall of the anti-Ampo movement, Yoshimoto expended much of his effort in composing that very work of theory in What Is Beauty for Language.
There was no question that What Is Beauty was a tour de force that demanded of Yoshimoto all his creative and intellectual energies. It occasioned for him perhaps for the first time in the postwar years a taste of "victory", albeit a solitary one with no discernible sense of its significance, as he noted in the afterword of the one-volume edition of the book:
Because this journal bases itself on a direct subscription system that makes it a semi-non-purchasable commodity, only a small number of people read it during its serialization. I continued to write this manuscript with these small readers in mind. During that time, I think my mind kept whispering in silent words, "It’s a victory, it’s a victory."
I cannot say in clear words what the "victory" was and against what and why it was a "victory." Those may have been words uttered against myself or may have been words uttered against all the conditions under which the manuscript was written. It was just that I could not cover up the impression that I had been overcoming someone. (Yoshimoto Taka’aki zen-chosakushk 623)
What was the nature of this "victory", be it real or imaginary?
One was obviously a theoretical one. Two crisscrossing categories, like two interweaving fabrics, shape the entire theoretical scope of What Is Beauty: jiko-hyMshutsu (self-expression) and shiji-hyMshutsu (indicative expression). Jiko-hyMshutsu refers to expressions that arise directly and viscerally for oneself, such as the groans of pain or ecstasy, not for the purpose of communicating to those outside the self. Shiji-hyMshutsu, on other hand, denotes those expressions that are communicative, intended to indicate something out in the world. "Self-expression" and "indicative expression" are obviously not mutually exclusive categories but heuristic devices intended to underscore the defining characteristics of language. They work in tandem with each other, for in the actually existing world of linguistic expressions what we find are a wide swath of expressions that contain lesser or greater degrees of both.
The textile analogy, of crisscrossing fabrics, which is Yoshimoto’s own, is not accidental. For that is what Marx employs too in his exposition of "use value" and "exchange value" in Part I of Volume One of Capital. Indeed an observant reader would immediately recognize that Marx’s two intertwining central economic categories in his labor theory of value are radically reconfigured under Yoshimoto’s hands into two intertwining categories for linguistic expression. The determinants of "use-value" derive from the act of labor itself, the uses to which that product of labor is put; similarly self-expression is expressions that are singularly self-referential, deriving its value from the immediate impulses and urges of the user. "Exchange-value" of course is premised on the existence of a network of historically determined social relations, a capitalist world of commerce and accumulation, and, therefore, is a singularly social category; the same can be said of "indicative expression", for that entire realm of signification and communication that make up linguistic expressions only make sense within a historically determined community of shared expressions and signs.
This analogy can of course only be pushed so far. As we can see with the class privileging of certain accents or linguistic expressions over another and the commodification of phrases and terms under the privatization of trademark laws, language is certainly not free from incorporation into the commodity-form. However, given the plethora of independently structured forms of linguistic expressions that we use from day to day, the defining axis of "self-expression" and "indicative expression" is not ideological or economic (just as Marx’s economic categories, though linguistically expressed, are not reducible to mere linguistically determined reflections). In fact, the bulk of What Is Beauty is allotted to empirically proving this very point by surveying the history of Japanese literary expressions.
We can obtain a synoptic sense of What Is Beauty by a glance at its table of contents, consisting of seven major chapters, spanning over seven hundred pages in the paperback bunko (pocketbook) edition (I: 4-6):
Chapter I: Essence of Language
1. Mechanism of Origin
2. Specific Features of Evolution
3. Phoneme – Rhythm – Part of Speech
Chapter II: Attributes of Language
1. Meaning
2. Value
3. Letter – Image
4. Image in Linguistic Expression
Chapter III: Rhythm – Choice – Conversion – Metaphor
1. Tanka Expression
2. Poetic Expression
3. Tanka Metaphor
4. Prosaic Expression
Chapter IV: Theory of Expressive Transition
Part I: Historical Theory of Modern Expression (I)
1. Concept of Expressive History
2. Early Meiji Period
3. "Dancing Princess"; "Furyu mijin-zo"
4. "Teriha kyogen"; "Suicide at Imado"
5. "Musashino"; Flower of Hell; "Watercolorist"
Part II: Historical Theory of Modern Expression (II)
1. Meaning of Naturalism and Romanticism
2. Sorekara; Vita Sexualis
3. "To Abashiri"; "Tattoo"; Grass on the Wayside
4. Light and Darkness; Descendants of Cain; Pastoral Melancholy
Part III: Theory of Contemporary Expression
1. Meaning of New Sensibility
2. Solidity of New Sensibility (Literary Style)
3. Solidity of New Sensibility (Vernacular Style)
4. Cutting Edge of New Sensibility
Part IV: Theory of Postwar Expression
1. Expressive Time
2. Expression of Rupture
3. Transformation of Ruptured Expression
4. Height of Ruptured Expression
Chapter V: Theory of Composition
Part I: Poetry
1. Premises
2. Premises of Origin Theory
3. Mechanism of Origin
4. Origin of Poetry
5. Original Form of Ancient Poetic Song
Part II: Tale
1. Locus of the Problem
2. Phases of the Tale
3. External Factors of Formation
4. Orikuchi’s Theory
5. Tale within the Song
6. Genealogy of the Narrative
7. Genealogy of the Singing Tale
8. Characteristics of the Diary Literature
9. Meaning of the Tale of Genji
10. Composition
Part III: Drama
Section I: Theory of Formation
1. Linguistic Range of Drama
2. Stage – Actors – Props – Audience
3. Formation of Dramatic Language
4. Dramatic Essence
5. Original Form of Drama
6. Composition of Drama
Section II: Theory of Development
1. Phase of "Iki" and "KyM"
2. Philosophy of Drama
3. Philosophy of Composition (I)
4. Philosophy of Composition (II)
5. Specific Qualities of Development
Chapter VI: Content and Form
1. Content and Form in Art
2. Content and Form in Literature
3. Annotation
4. Debates on Formalism
Chapter VII: Standpoint
Part I: Linguistic Development (I)
1. Contemporary Nature of Language
2. Structure of Self-Expression
3. Value of Literature (I)
Part II: Linguistic Development
1. Value of Literature (II)
2. Space of Theory
3. Sign and Image
Even a cursory glance at this table of content tells us something about the general outline and approach that Yoshimoto takes in his book. First, in the presentation of its arguments, What Is Beauty has a carefully designed architectural structure, building on the most concrete micro-component (language), to progressively expand into a more general application of expressive "value" in the sphere of literature (historical modes of literary expression from modern to contemporary times) and further into an ever-more abstract questions of genre, content and form, and, finally, literary value. Second is the significance of the sequence informing this structure. The first two (essence and attributes of language) start at the very point where previous analysis of literary value (i.e., literary criticism) has taken for granted and thus fallen short of examining: the function of language in its most elementary sense as pertaining to literary expression. The four categories of "rhythm, choice, conversion, and metaphor" are a logical elaboration of how the intersection of self-expression and indicative expression – which belong to the realm of language proper – comes to function as literary expression, and their own sequence is not without careful design either:
Beauty of linguistic expression begins with the fact of an author choosing a particular scene as an object. This contains the same meaning as, for example, when an author chooses from the contemporary world a particular relationship with "society". And next comes the conversion of a scene as expressed by language, abstracted at a higher level than the chosen scene. This analogously means that the author has consciously and unconsciously entered into a dynamic relationship with "society".
Even later, metaphor comes as something abstracted at a higher level than the conversion of a scene. And the problem of metaphor is similar to the author perceiving his or her current dynamic relationship with "society" as lying outside the author and being prompted by the working of the unconscious to try to recover the author’s true self.
If we think along this line, it can be said that we are in possession of a stage of expression that, with rhythm at its most fundamental root, posits the choice of scene as the next expressive stage, which, via the conversion of the scene, spirally ascends and descends from the highest problem of metaphor. As literary expression, these layered processes that language has cumulatively layered are all latently contained within the contemporary level of expression. And here, where language as indicative expression intersects and expands as "meaning", is depicted the contemporary level of poetic and prosaic spaces.
Also, the long process that language has cumulatively layered, from the world of ancient poetry – in which, as in Kojiki and Nihon Shoki songs, expression could not choose its object – to the world of contemporary literature which indicates a desire to transcend, with the use of high-level metaphors, the relationship with "society" that it has already chosen in reality, forms the contemporary linguistic space. (Beauty I: 182-183)
The phrase "cumulatively layered" appears twice in this concluding passage in chapter 3, immediately preceding the plunge into the four-part historical chapter of Beauty. This is not without significance, for the historical chapter furnishes us the empirical elaboration of what Yoshimoto says here in a necessarily compressed and abstract manner. But how are we to assess what Yoshimoto says here about literary expression?
The fact that the above usage of "cumulatively layered" is at once synchronic (a spiraling staircase structure of rhythm, choice, conversion, and metaphor) and diachronic (from ancient poetry to contemporary literature) provides us with a vantage point to consider this question. The synchronic part of it shows us that Yoshimoto’s four categories are, viewed in dynamic interrelationship with each other, posed as a method for the analysis of literary expression while the diachronic part remind us that this method is a historically constituted one, each expressive stage corresponding to a historical "stage" of literary expression. Indeed, to put the matter a little differently, we could argue that this theoretical section requires deconstruction in the light of the historical chapter that follows (just as Marx’s part I of Capital requires to be deconstructed in relation to the historical Part VIII on "so-called primitive accumulation").
"Rhythm" is the first stage because literary expression originates in singing and chanting, which in the ancient, even primitive context, often fulfilled religious and communal function. Rhythm is also what is tied up closely to the labor-process, as observed in the slave and factory songs that set the rhythm of work. "Choice" marks the stage in which literary expression can become to some extent individuated, "alienated" from the necessity of the collective and social function to which it was previously subordinated. As is, "choice" remains in a static state but of course in reality it never is, being spirally linked to "conversion" and "metaphor". "Conversion" in one sense signifies a dynamic mobilization of "choice"; a rough analogy would be to say that "choice" is to photography what "conversion" is to film. "Metaphor" finally gives us, in Yoshimoto’s words, the "highest level" of abstraction because the "conversion" of a scene is made to stand outside of its original place, as it is approached as something radically other. It is a stage in which the self and its thought-process, in the form of literary expression, achieve a most resolute "alienation".
I use the word "alienation" advisedly here, to underline the larger intellectual framework in which Yoshimoto formulated his quartet of interdependent categories. Part of this framework is the question of Marxism’s relationship to aesthetics, literary theory in particular. As noted before, What Is Beauty was a culmination of Yoshimoto’s critique of heretofore existing Marxist aesthetics and took as one of its seminal points of departure a radical reconstruction of Marx’s labor theory of value. In fact a year before the publication of What Is Beauty, Yoshimoto published two companion texts on Marx, one an intellectual overview and the other a biographical sketch, which formed a single book entitled Karl Marx. As typical of those who had exerted a formative influence on the New Left (e.g., Herbert Marcuse, E.P. Thompson, Raya Dunayveskaya), Yoshimoto drew important conclusions from the early Marx’s writings that dealt with alienation. However his focus was decidedly different from those of his international colleagues. He did not extract from Marx’s discussion of alienation the lesson of Marxist or socialist "humanism", which was counterpoised against the "alienation" of Eastern totalitarian state socialism and Western liberal technocratic capitalism. Yoshimoto rather put the emphasis on "alienation" as a necessary process of human consciousness being divorced from nature, one of whose product was language. To put the matter Biblically, language was then a "curse of Cain" that marked humanity’s emergence from the concrete, immediate, and instinctual world of animal nature. And corresponding to the development of such linguistic alienation was the alienation of abstraction that the human intellect necessarily produced.
Yoshimoto’s conclusion was then that there is nothing inherently "privileged" about the intellectual process, the higher levels of abstraction it progressively achieved, because it was merely a natural process of human consciousness. The postwar JCP and progressive intellectuals who posited the necessity of the vanguard or the intellectuals to "enlighten" the masses or "raise class consciousness" were therefore ass-over-backwards in assuming that the acquisition of knowledge and high degree of theoretical abstraction gave them some "inherent" right to lead, dictate hegemonic guidelines, including those over literary values, which they reduced to questions of political commitment or description of social content. What was required to escape this fate of political and intellectual reification was to acknowledge the necessarily autonomous (i.e., "alienated") logic of intellection and language and, upon reaching their highest level of abstraction, descend into the dynamically shifting world of popular experience.
As it circumspectly analyzes literary expressions found in representative examples of modern and contemporary Japanese literature, the historical chapter of What Is Beauty demonstrates the autonomous logic and constitution of literary expression, how their changes and developments are irreducible to the logic of the economic base privileged by the Marxist theorists. Yoshimoto advances seven "laws" from his lengthy, historical elaboration:
1) The literary expression of a certain age can always be and must always be thought with the vernacular and literary styles as its basis. If we do not misunderstand the meaning of expression, of the division toward expression and representation, that writing brings forth, we can think to a time even before the formation of literature.
2) If we posit the expression of the vernacular style as an unconditional necessity, it ascends on its own toward the direction of the literary style. What maintains vernacular expression as such is nothing other than conscious philosophy. Apart from that, it can only ascend toward the literary style or be ossified as a vernacular style, in other words, take the form of popular fiction.
3) Literary style, as an unconditional necessity, ascends to an even higher literary style. When literary style descends toward vernacular style, it is none other than the conversion of a writer’s consciousness when a determinate factor in reality exists in the foundation of his times to elicit this conversion.
4) Those writers today who maintain themselves by neither ossifying the vernacular style nor enacting the natural ascent toward the literary style always possess a philosophy of abandoning reality.
5) The shift in expressive style from one age to the next occurs by copying and changing the expansion and quality of linguistic space that is presupposed by the complex interplay of ascent and descent of vernacular and literary styles. This could appear as the extremely extended width and expansion of literary and vernacular styles or could appear as the fusion of vernacular and literary styles or their contact to the point of indistinctness. What can correspond to this is the degree of the language’s expressive consciousness and the total determinate factors of real society. But that is not all. Other correspondences are not only imperfect; making them correspond is also difficult.
6) Expressive history is not reducible to the history of reality. What is reducible is the expression of consciousness as a generality, and, in the form of expression that "writes" by way of "letters", reduction to reality is no permitted. It is only reducible to the generality of "writing".
7) What initially makes the expression of a certain age transition to the next age is always the expression of literary style. That is true even from now on.
Within literary expression, these laws cannot be broken, no matter what ideology or force is exerted.
Even the subsequent direction of postwar history of expression from now on cannot escape the frame of these laws. As long as society does not radically change the foundation of the movement of reality. And that is not the problem of literature itself but of politics itself. Within literary expression, it is still impossible to break the laws that have been studied here. (I: 387-388)
What Yoshimoto says here about expressive autonomy follows the same logic we have seen in his writing on the relationship between intellectuality and popular consciousness: the ascent toward "literary style" and descent toward "vernacular style", these are more or less literary stylistic equivalents of the aforementioned "ascent" toward abstract intellectuality and "descent" toward popular ("vernacular") consciousness. Out of this logic, we are confronted with an intriguing proposition, namely that a "style" of a literary work is not merely its form but the very ground of its being, wherein the distinction between form and content are meaningless (indeed in the subsequent chapter Yoshimoto would advance this point systematically). In order to grasp the essence of "style" or literary expression, we therefore have to study the said history on its own terms, to understand it in the fullness of its unique, irreducible logic.
Such a point may seem self-evident, at least rhetorically, to some practitioners of literary criticism and theory. But what this is usually taken to mean, as in the case of New Criticism for example, is a reification of literature to universally abstracted typologies, purged of historical and social content. And it is not the unique history of literary expression that grounds the arguments but the general ideology of the times in which the critic is writing, advanced uncritically as an objective measure of literary value for all times. For this and other reasons, questions of value, in economics as well as in aesthetics, bring with them the danger of fetishism. Yoshimoto’s greatest contribution in What Is Beauty is to de-fetishitize the notion of literary value by demonstrating it to be not a product of subjective perception or ideological construction but as a phenomenon rooted in the very structure of literary expression:
…the concept of linguistic value is a concept established only by returning consciousness back toward the direction of consciousness and in this sense language is reducible to consciousness. But literary value as an aesthetic expression of language is not reducible to consciousness. It moves outside of consciousness, into the internal structure of expression. Here the indicative expression of language pushes up and down the wave-form of this composition and forms its accompanying integration. Hence literary value can be very simply defined from the perspective of language by shifting linguistic value from the concept of reduction (reduzieren) to the concept of production (produzieren). The development of the total structure of linguistic expression from the perspective of self-expression is what is called "literary value". (II: 303-304)
In other words, while the value of language proper can only be understood by reading back its structure (or "reduced" in Yoshimoto’s sense) into the structure of human consciousness – as has been the most enabling trend in contemporary linguistics – literary value could only truly make sense in terms of how the structure of linguistic expressions in their totality are developed historically from the perspective of those who "produce" these expressions ("perspective of self-expression"). This latter perspective should not be confused with the intention or the biographical peculiarities of the author but the "self" of the author as it actually appears in the expression.
Although, given the constraints of space, it is not possible to elaborate the empirical significance of Yoshimoto’s theory, I aver that there is something of a Copernican clarity and simplicity in his conception of literary value as linguistic expression. Much ink has been spilled in the theoretically muddled debate on the literary "canon" in the "culture wars" of recent years. But neither the defenders of the "canon" nor its opponents have managed to offer a fundamental, convincing answer in explaining what "literary value" is (in part this is because the very question of the "canon" ideologically obfuscates such serious investigation of literary aesthetics). Consequently, we have seen "literary theory" turn into a niche within an academic marketplace for the purchase of various "theoretical models" (be they feminism, deconstruction, Marxism, reader-response, poststructuralism, etc.) to be applied willy-nilly on the text on one hand and a ringing endorsement to go back to the Western canon (emblematized in such works as Harold Bloom’s latest flurry of reactionary books on the subject) on the other. Yoshimoto’s theory of "literary value" suggests one possible way out of this unproductively dichotomous morass. His work helps us to avoid the fetishism of both theory and text, inducing us to historically and analytically look at literary expressions on their own terms. Whether or not the fine points of his theory – whether the axial relationship between self-expression and indicative expression or the four categories of rhythm, choice, conversion, and metaphor – can be empirically validated or require adaptation for non-Japanese works of literature is something we have to work out on our own. At the very least, What Is Beauty for Language forces on us a confrontation with that necessary mystery that defines the study of literature: its value as language, as linguistic expression.
Works Cited
Kawade yume mook bungei bessatsu Yoshimoto Taka’aki shijin-shisMka no aratana zenbM Tokyo: KawadeshobM-shinsha, 2004.
Hasizume, DaisaburM. Eien no Yoshimoto Taka’aki. Tokyo: YMsen-sha, 2003.
Kobayashi, Hideo. Kobayashi Hideo zen sakuin 1. Tokyo: ShichM-sha, 2002.
Yoshimoto, Taka’aki. Yoshimoto Taka’aki zen-chosakushk. Vol. 6. Tokyo: KeisM-shobM, 1972
—-. Gengo ni totte bi to wa nanika. Vols. I & II. Tokyo: Kadokawa sofia bunko, 1990.
—-. Karl Marx. Tokyo: KMbunsha bunko, 2006.
—-. Jicho o kataru. Tokyo: Rocking On, 2007.
Yoshimoto Taka’aki ga kataru sengo 55-nen: sengo bungaku to gengo-hyMgen ron. Vol. 2. Tokyo: SankM-sha, 2001.
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