Death Sentences (36 page)

In a sense, the last line of the novel provides a solution, adding the resolve of Sakamoto to the melancholia of Breton and the anguish of Who May, and arriving at a compound subject that looks back on the role of twentieth-century art not only with "an expression of sadness" but also with "a trace of satisfaction." Such a mixture of sadness and satisfaction seems to hinge on a paradox: the operative tendency of surrealism must be at once fully experienced and erased. The compound protagonist (Who May and Sakamoto) stops the "death sentences" by returning to the past and assuring that they are never written. In this respect, the novel may invite a Heideggerian or Derridean reading, as an instance of "surrealism under erasure," and with SF as the renewed yet eternally deferred promise of surrealist poetics. Still, it is the virtue of Death Sentences, as literature rather than political or literary treatise, that it prefers to stage these questions instead of providing a definitive answer, not even settling for a deconstructive answer such as "surrealism under erasure." In fact, the novel's staging of the politics of art in the era of global militarization runs counter to a reading centered on the play of presence/absence of the magic poem, in which the real experience of the poem never arrives. The novel appears determined to stage the real experience of that poem, to translate the vortical experience fully, even as it explores the poem's "condition of (im)possibility," to evoke a deconstructive turn of phrase. It strives for the reality and objectivity of surrealism, beyond its possibility or impossibility. And this is precisely how surrealism proves "bad for society."

The society in question is initially that of the surrealist group centered on Andre Breton, especially during the wartime years of exile in New York. Through Breton's eyes, we see a society of artists, writers, and intellectuals that entails both jealous rivalries and genuine friendships. To its credit, Death Sentences doesn't fall back on a spurious opposition between surrealism and militarism in terms of "art community" versus "military society." The surrealist group does not afford a model of community without alienation but presents a society with actual conflicts and discontents. And interesting enough, Who May and his poem certainly prove bad for this surrealist society. But how can a poem be bad for the militarized and mobilized society of total war?

Death Sentences presents an unusual take on questions about art and resistance. While the novel stresses Breton's resistance to the war, it does not entertain a vision of a social alternative to militarized society, and so it actually deepens the sense of the futility of resistance, and despair over the future of art. Even as the novel dwells on French resistance to Nazism or fascism, it avoids any idealization of resistance. In this unwillingness to idealize resistance, the novel seems to respond to Japanese legacies of understanding French resistance.

In the mid-to-late-nineteenth century, in Japan as elsewhere in the world, the French Revolution was naturally an important point of reference for democratic aspirations and political institutions. But it was especially in the wake of Japan's Fifteen Year Asia-Pacific War (1941-45) and in the context of Japan's defeat and the American occupation (1945-52) that the political experiences of France took on new resonance. In the early postwar years, Doug Slaymaker remarks, "That France had `won' and Japan had lost did not change the fact that both countries shared both hope and despair in the specters of defeat and occupation, shortages of food and housing, rationing, black markets, complicity, resentment, victimization, and defiance."13

Because of the sense of sharing with France an experience of defeat and occupation, the ideal of French wartime resistance proved compelling in postwar Japan. Take the example of the Matineepoetique, a group of Japanese scholars of French literature. During the war years, as Nishikawa Nagao tells us, its members "were able to maintain a sensibility and a manner of thinking which was opposed to militarism."14 Yet if Nishikawa also stresses the general antipathy toward this group, it is because their opposition to militarism largely took the form of an elitist and culturalist sentimentality that avoided dealing directly with the realities of the war. As one of the Matineepoetique group's more renowned members, Kato Shuichi, later remarked, "those of us who had lived through the war were very much surprised, indeed shocked, when we learned of the existence of the French litterature de la resistance, even during France's occupation by the Nazis."" In this way, the idea of French wartime resistance, so strategically promoted by de Gaulle and meticulously explored in postwar French literature and thought, became something of an ideal in postwar Japan, and Japanese writers and thinkers began to gauge their wartime experience in terms of that ideal, asking why there had been no literature of resistance in Japan. There were even efforts to produce such a literature retroactively. But such literature has subsequently met with harsh criticism, as with Nishikawa's assessment of Kato Shuichi's novel, Aru hareta hi ni (One fine day, serialized in 1949): "To write a `Resistance novel' after the war is already over is a pathetic joke.""

Nonetheless, the ideal of French resistance encouraged an ideal of antiestablishment individualism in Japan, which afforded a critical alternative to the hegemonic model of U.S. democracy. The American model lost considerable credibility during the "reverse course" of the American occupation in the early 195os as capitalism came to take precedence over democratic aspirations, quite brutally. Thus the ideal of French resistance in postwar Japan served to open questions about the political role of artists and intellectuals, not only in the past under the Japanese empire, but also in the present in the context of Japanese collaboration with American imperial aspirations in East Asia.

While Death Sentences shares this legacy of engagement with French wartime resistance, it does not hold it up as an ideal to be emulated. Instead, it imbues resistance with a sense of impotence and failure, dealing with artists who experience the war as if at a great distance, who struggle yet doubt their very efforts. This is partly because the novel's point of reference is surrealism not existentialism, and artists who found refuge in New York rather than those who remained in France. But more important, by the time Death Sentences appeared in the mid-ig8os, the combination of the Japanese economic miracle and the ascendency of the United States in East Asia made for a situation in which the nature of resistance had to be seriously reconsidered. There was widespread dissatisfaction with the maintenance of American military bases in Japan, the political stranglehold of the Liberal Democratic Party (initially leveraged into power by the United States), and the continual undermining and compromising of national sovereignty, and yet it seemed impossible to argue with prosperity, regardless of its hidden costs. This is what Takayuki Tatsumi refers to in his foreword as "Pax Japonica."

The resistance of the editor Sakakibara exemplifies this new situation of Pax Japonica that propped itself up on Pax Americana: where Breton strives to challenge fascism by working with the Voice of America and sustaining the surrealist movement in exile and after the war, Sakakibara resists the inroads of corporate capital by founding a publishing house devoted to publishing high-quality works, especially literature in translation, and eschewing large runs and profits. Significantly, however, like Breton's, Sakakibara's resistance may be said to fail, or at least to meet with serious compromise. Offered the windfall of working with recently discovered surrealist materials and mounting a major retrospective exhibition with a massive budget, Sakakibara ends up working within the very circuits that he has previously resisted.

If the novel avoids making Breton or Sakakibara into heroic agents of resistance, however, it is in order to work through resistance and historical transformation at another level. In keeping with the surrealist interest in the unconscious, the novel shows something at work behind the conscious efforts of these characters. For instance, although Sakakibara would surely never publish the "death sentences" of the phantom poem if he had looked at them rationally and consciously, everything conspires to make him an unwitting collaborator in the mass dissemination of these poems. Similarly, by locking away Who May's poems, Breton actually transmits them to future generations, instead of taking them out of circulation. The novel invites us to consider these actions on two levels. On the one hand, we may read them in terms of the subconscious desires of individuals: Breton and Sakakibara covertly want to put the poem in circulation. On the other hand, the novel also insists on metaphors of contagion and epidemic and stresses the materiality of different modes of distribution and circulation of texts. The poem spreads by way of a kind of media contagion. In sum, the poem entails an unconscious agency, one that does not belong to anyone in particular, and that operates at a very fine level of materiality-a sort of media unconscious.

Interestingly enough, it is not the newest mode of media distribution that proves effective in getting the poem to people. In the surrealist era, it is handwritten copies rather than typewritten pages that circulate it most effectively. Years later, as police crack down on photocopy machines, mimeographs become an effective means of distribution. Similarly, it is fanrecorded cassette tapes of concerts rather than studio-recorded albums that reach the largest audience. In other words, it is not the fastest, latest, or even dominant modes of media distribution that prove operative, but residual modes or nonmainstream circuits. The residual or outmoded continually eludes control and slips through the cracks.

Moreover, these residual circuits are frequently associated with what today might be dubbed subcultures or fan cultures: Who May's poem makes the rounds of rock fans, SF fans, and school clubs, which invite us retrospectively to look at literary societies or art circles as precursors of contemporary fan cultures. And Death Sentences seems especially prescient in its portrayal of educators and bureaucrats referring to the effects of the poem on the young in terms of "fatal autism." In contemporary Japan, fans whose consumption is deemed excessive are frequently pathologized as suffering from social withdrawal syndrome, multiple personality disorder, or autism. Those who read the poem experience a vortex, but those who witness the affliction see a fatal shutting down of the self within itself. To the uninitiated, the vortex looks like autism.

Although Death Sentences does not necessarily provide a sympathetic portrait of such fans, it makes clear that small, informal, residual networks of distribution and interpretation are genuinely a force to be reckoned with. And it is their residual materiality that affords resistance to those authorities who strive to control the force of the poem's spell, the operative unconscious itself. Such residual materiality plays a crucial role in reversing the effects of the poem as well: Who May cannot return to the past because he has become completely disembodied, while Sakamoto's soul still feels the pull of physical bodies, gravitating toward them. Resistance, then, lies in the lingering materiality of the soul that continues to feel the gravity of bodies, remembering their attraction.

Ultimately, then, resistance in Death Sentences is not the property of individuals but is an unconscious material force. As with the disease vector of the poem, it cannot be grasped or contained. Yet it is precisely what must be stopped, for it threatens to destroy the world, to bring about the apocalypse. There are, however, very different kinds of relation to the end of time in Death Sentences, and the novel explores different ways of "stopping" the poem, which are at once different relations to the unconscious and different political responses. This is where the politics of surrealism truly come into play. Although the resistance of individual characters does not present a political solution (alternative societies are too easily swept away by totalitarian formations), their resistance does set up a political orientation. In the first context of surrealism (Breton), militarism comes to the fore as the enemy (Nazism, fascism), and in the second (Sakakibara), the emphasis falls on resistance to corporate capitalism (Pax Japonica, Pax Americana). But as foreshadowed in the prologue to the novel, militarism and corporate capitalism turn out to be two faces of the same foe. And on Mars in 2131, this foe-militarized capitalism or corporate militarism-has reached its peak.

While the leap of the story to Mars may feel abrupt, it follows directly, even logically, from the prior political orientations, making them explicit. The story follows the Martian Guard as it exterminates the population of a settlement-provocatively called the Golgi Camp-where an English translation of the Japanese version of Who May's French poem has already contaminated the inhabitants. The Martian Guard is a corporate enterprise, an extralegal militia, all about profit, doing whatever it takes to keep the peace. But the peace here is the peace of commerce, of diminishing obstacles to flows of capital: "Ultimately, the raison d'etre of the Martian Guard lay in maintaining this felicitous relation between supply and demand, and, if possible, enhancing it. In a word, it was a matter of population adjustment through extermination."

Thus the underlying political contrast of the novel comes into focus: not just Breton's resistance to fascism and militarization, not just Sakakibara's resistance to the rise of postwar corporate capital, but the two folded together against a compound enemy, corporate militarism on Mars. A compound (French Japanese surrealism) faces the militaryindustrial complex. And consonant with the Japanese reception of French resistance in the postwar era, the situation on Mars can be seen as the continuation of a tendency within postwar Pax Americana. Mars, the New World, pushes the American combination of multiculturalism, militarism, and corporate hegemony to its limits. Still, the novel is not antiAmerican. Rather, it is deeply concerned with articulating resistance to a political tendency within modern societies that becomes pronounced in the American political model. As the appearance of Carl Schmitt indicates, Death Sentences is ultimately concerned with the subordination of politics and thus war to the dictates of commerce.