Death Sentences (35 page)

The novel ultimately doesn't eliminate dialogism and alterity but, as we will see, resituates it in relation to the militaryindustrial complex. Nonetheless, acknowledging the dangers implicit in the figural emphasis of the novel forces us to ask: What is the point of an experience of the vortex? Is it just a thrill, or a distraction? Or does it afford a new critical edge in fiction? Such questions lead directly to Kawamata's engagement with the politics of surrealism.

It is particularly in the use of rebus-like words that the novel engages surrealism. The largest instance is the name Who May, which not only appears to voice a query or permission in English but also works as a Chinese name (Hu Mei) and is subsequently complicated by a Japanese pun on the name asfumei, that is, unknown or anonymous (rendered in the translation to underscore the double entendre). The novel redoubles the oscillation implicit in the name Who May in broad and sometimes tendentious ways, describing the character, born of a Vietnamese mother and a French father, as poised between West and East, and even between feminine and masculine. Who May or Hu Mei comes to function as a verbal and visual cipher, and as a sexual and geographical enigma. In addition, when the editor Sakakibara, an expert on surrealism, launches his series of books on surrealism, each of the titles adopts a relatively common two-character term beginning with the sound gen and uses the character gen meaning illusion or phantom. Terms such as source (genryu), form (genkei), language (gengo), principle (genron), reality (genjitsu), present (genzai), and limit (genkai) are written with the character for illusion or phantom, resulting in a series of visual-verbal puns that resist smooth translation, for they implicate connotations of the illusory into each of these ordinary terms. English translation can only qualify the terms, for example, phantasmatic source, illusory form, visionary languages, hallucinatory principles, and so forth.

While such rebuses are evocative and resistant to translation, they are more clever than profound, and like Andre Breton in the novel, some readers may find it difficult to suppress a groan when Hu Mei writes his name in the air as Who May. It feels too clever, almost precious. But then such puns or rebuses are not intended of themselves to afford an experience of the vortex. In fact, it is their resistance to translation that in some sense disqualifies them. After all, the novel insists that the effects of the "death sentences," the lines of the prose poem that "kill" the reader (her earthly body at least), are eminently translatable. One exemplary instance of such effects, the word "dobaded" (doubado)-which is said to function as a noun, verb, or adjective-appears in the first poem by Who May, "Another World."

"Dobaded" is said to accomplish in the dimension of space what "The Gold of Time" produces in the dimension of time. Again, what is important is that such effects lend themselves to translation from the original French into Japanese or English. The novel does not gravitate toward a paradigm of the untranslatable, a paradigm that tends to confine the power of words to national languages, reducing literature to the parlor games of national sensibilities. The power of words, of poetry, of this novel, lies in the figural. We can give this figural force a name and a shape-vortex-but it is in fact a force that comes prior to words and images, arising in their interactions and in the gaps between them. Thus, as magical and phantasmatic as such a force might seem, it is entirely translatable. It is not entirely beyond our grasp. This is where Death Sentences takes up the mission of surrealism much as Peter Sloterdijk describes it, "to demonstrate a precise method to make it possible to master access to the 'unconscious.'"'

Sloterdijk stresses the objective and operative goals of surrealism, underscoring that "the point was to render the content of dreams and deliriums objective with the precisions of an old master."4 This is a point worth emphasizing. We have become accustomed to thinking of surrealism in terms of a delirious stream of enigmatic words, unfiltered gestures, and incongruous images that somehow result in "convulsive beauty."5 Naturally, characterizations of surrealist art often do confront the question of its objectivism, as in Michael Greenberg's formulation of "concentrated exactitude: faithfulness to reality turns reality into a dream of itself,"' and yet we generally approach surrealism in narrowly aesthetic terms, lingering on its dreamlike qualities, largely ignoring its operative, objective claims on reality. As such, Sloterdijk's shift in emphasis is welcome: "Surrealism ranks as a manifestation of the operativist `revolution' which aimed at continually forging advancements in modernization."' And we begin to see how surrealism can be taken as a precursor of science fiction, as it is in Death Sentences.

If we gauge surrealism entirely in terms of an avant-garde resistance to, or critique of, modern mass culture, we miss its engagement with modernization, its willingness to work on the same ground, to occupy the same site as what might loosely be dubbed technoscientific modernity. While the idea of a poem with the power to kill, to detach the human soul from its body, might appear mawkish and predictable in some respects, it unequivocally establishes the stakes of the surrealist method: to produce an aesthetic object with the power to forge an advancement in modernization. This is precisely why the poems of Who May prove so dangerous, and why the paragons of surrealism in Kawamata's novel-Breton, Duchamp, Gorky-are at once fascinated and terrified by them. Although the poems are not exactly surrealist in a narrowly aesthetic sense, they are precisely surrealist in an operative sense. It is above all the operative dimension of surrealism that Death Sentences brings to the fore with its vortical experience of the phantasmatic poem.

In a review essay written on the occasion of the 2002 exhibition of surrealist art at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, James Fenton succinctly outlines the impasses of surrealist aesthetics.' He cites at length from "The 1934 Dialogue" between Andre Breton and Marcelle Ferry:

FERRY: What is beauty?

BRETON: It is an ethereal cry.

FERRY: What is mystery?

BRETON: It is the proud wind through a suburb.

FERRY: What is solitude?

BRETON: It is the queen sitting at the base of the throne.

FERRY: What is jealousy?

BRETON: It is a bugle on a laid table.

FERRY: What is debauchery?

BRETON: It is the place in the meadow where the grass

suddenly becomes thicker. It can be seen from a long

way off.'

As Fenton points out, for all the genuine poetic value that potentially emerges through this surrealist "trick" or "game," ultimately, the bugle on the laid table "could equally well stand for solitude, or mystery, or indeed beauty."" Likewise, the proud wind through a suburb could stand for jealousy, or debauchery, or even solitude. Kawamata places a similar critique in the mind of a university student, his character Misa in chapter 5, leafing through surrealist literature and scholarly work on it: "If everything were an instance of something, then anything could surely be anything. Then there wasn't anything that couldn't be explained." She concludes that it is all nonsense.

It is not surprising then that in Death Sentences Kawamata largely avoids the received, narrowly aesthetic gestures of surrealism. It has become painfully evident that many such aesthetic tricks and devices are so rote in popular culture that they may appear silly and shopworn. When the novel does play with "classic" surrealism, the moments are brief and generic, as in this citation from Who May's "Another World":

A fish. Dobaded. Its eyeball sliced down the middle. Sections quivering. Images reflected on the split lens are stained with blood. Dobaded. The city of people mirrored there is dyed madder red. Reversal of pressure, dobaded, and there you go! It's taking you there....

Needless to say, these two dimensions of surrealist procedures-the operative and the aesthetic-are inseparable. They are more like tendencies. And what I have for the sake of simplicity called the (narrowly) aesthetic is really an emphasis on procedures of representation. If we approach surrealism primarily in terms of its style of representation, we will probably find that what once passed for gut-wrenching imagery, absurd juxtapositions, and deft verbiage today feel familiar and even hackneyed. This is no doubt why such procedures of representation largely drop out of Death Sentences in favor of the operative tendency of surrealism. Indeed, the readers of Who May's poems remain indifferent to the niceties of poetry, to avantgarde procedures of representation and depiction. Rather, they read for the rush, for the high-the vortical experience. In this respect, Kawamata's work also presents a significant departure from the strands of surrealist aesthetics that Japanese avant-garde artists unraveled and entwined in so many different ways across the twentieth century." If the familiar aesthetic procedures of surrealism are nearly eliminated, it is surely because Kawamata, like the editor Sakakibara in this novel, studied surrealism in college, and he is well aware of the critiques and impasses of it. Indeed, in his exploration of Andre Breton's responses to other surrealist artists, and in his treatment of Sakakibara's concerns about the commercial renewal of surrealism in Japan, Kawamata touches on the very points that Fenton enumerates:

Surrealism ... gave a multitude of artists (painters, poets, photographers, and so forth) the opportunity to be part of something larger than themselves. It handed out badges that were gleefully worn. It also tore the stripes off its perceived renegades, for it was clamorously factional, politicized in the worst sense. Of all movements, it should have been most free (it was antibourgeois, it dealt with an unruly subconscious), but it had phases of willed instrumentality. It wanted, in such moments, to be good for society. It should have stuck with wanting to be bad for society.12

is the challenge to which Death Sentences responds, with an unusual hypothesis. What if there were a tendency, within surrealism or on its fringes, not entirely recognizable or acceptable to it, that in fact fulfilled its aims better than the surrealist movement itself? What if it were the "instrumentality" (the operative tendency) of surrealism and not its resistance to instrumentality that posed a challenge or even a danger to society?

Now, however, another challenge arises. If surrealism is to be bad for society, for what society, and in what historical context? After all, it is not possible or particularly productive to speak of society in general. And it is here that the preoccupation with French surrealism in the context of the German occupation of France during World War II in Death Sentences takes on new urgency. The novel lingers on the exile of Breton and fellow surrealists in New York during the war, posing questions about resistance to war, militarism, and fascism, which are extended into the postwar experience:

March 1946-

Breton returned to Paris.

The terrible reality of the postwar world immediately fell on him, swallowing him up.

The birth of the atomic bomb cast a cloud over humanity, darkening the end of the Great War.

His former comrades had split into various factions, some hostile and some friendly. Thus began the days that severely taxed Breton-battling for an applied surrealism while fighting against social realism, and then critically confronting a situation in which the return to power of those authorities who had collaborated with the Vichy government was simply ignored.

and despair. And, in keeping with the Japanese experience, the postwar era does not herald a luminous new world but a sense of deeper complicity with militarism. What can art do under such circumstances? Is it doomed to be simply inconsequential, or fated to be complicit in the mobilization of the masses and the destruction of the world?