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A review by casparb
The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (anag): A looping TV film, telephone Ed
It is no exaggeration to say that the first real problem I faced in my life was that of beauty
I don't want to call this a meditation but here is something of an expostulation of beauty, as fascism proclaims it. Or as Mishima has wrapt it in desire & disgust ! There's an opening here -- sexuality awakens in self-abasement, Mizoguchi's desire-dreams become sexuality in his dreamed transformation into an ugly ungeziefer, and frankly I don't see it as straying too far into biographical reductionism to gesture at this incredible twinning of desire & disgust, sexuality & self-abasement as Mishima sees it here.
I see why Schrader in his biopic presents Pavilion as a kind of Noh play, the realm of archetypes hyperbole & -- Mishima.
We remember our friend Walter Benjamin's dictum that Fascism is the aestheticization of politics & I find that an immensely useful reading of this novel I'm sure there's a paper on that out there somewhere. The word beauty seems to occur on just about every page I'd be curious to know how many times & it seems so adjacent to the occupation in Sailor - purity. Perhaps purity is something that Can be reached, uncharacteristically, for Mish. Hence the bodybuilding the ascetism so forth. I just find the use of Mizoguchi & Kashiwagi so fascinating (etymology) in developing something actually Interesting to say about, first of all, authorship (to stutter, to reiterate, self-perception as sack of potatoes. & This from arguably Japan's most beautiful writer he's not distancing he's identifying! An artist!) -- it's so much more exciting there than what fascism actually Is in the world & I think that comes through YM as a person an artist of neverending complications.
I think it’d be fun to design a module on Problems of beauty in 20thc literature - you could through this against The Waves & the Cantos for chaos.
Also the final ten pages are really just some of his best, ever. beauty ! here !
that terrifying concept of beauty, which makes people powerless act - seems to speak to the relatively sustained references to Hamlet Now tread carefully
It's worth saying also that this is based on a true story & Mishima apparently interviewed the 'real' Mizoguchi- is there a transcript let me know
Now we know to be careful with these to take tweezers & divide this feels such an essential text in the Mishima canon for his own relationship to what he believed as the teleology of fascism, for the purpose of the body & self-perception as an artist. It's a difficult chew & I expect there's an awful lot of scholarship erring on quite the wrong side of the matter. But worthwhile, after others from YM. It’s kind of the apotheosis of a study on how fascists attempt to reconcile what they want to call beautiful & ugliness. And my doesn't it just tap into perennial concerns for those involved. See below
I have brought the great ball of crystal;
who can lift it?
Can you enter the great acorn of light?
But the beauty is not the madness
Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.
If love be not in the house there is nothing.
The voice of famine unheard.
How came beauty against this blackness,
Twice beauty under the elms ---
-EP, CXVI
A single gunshot can never destroy the beauty of fascism!
-Peggy Gravel
It is no exaggeration to say that the first real problem I faced in my life was that of beauty
I don't want to call this a meditation but here is something of an expostulation of beauty, as fascism proclaims it. Or as Mishima has wrapt it in desire & disgust ! There's an opening here -- sexuality awakens in self-abasement, Mizoguchi's desire-dreams become sexuality in his dreamed transformation into an ugly ungeziefer, and frankly I don't see it as straying too far into biographical reductionism to gesture at this incredible twinning of desire & disgust, sexuality & self-abasement as Mishima sees it here.
I see why Schrader in his biopic presents Pavilion as a kind of Noh play, the realm of archetypes hyperbole & -- Mishima.
We remember our friend Walter Benjamin's dictum that Fascism is the aestheticization of politics & I find that an immensely useful reading of this novel I'm sure there's a paper on that out there somewhere. The word beauty seems to occur on just about every page I'd be curious to know how many times & it seems so adjacent to the occupation in Sailor - purity. Perhaps purity is something that Can be reached, uncharacteristically, for Mish. Hence the bodybuilding the ascetism so forth. I just find the use of Mizoguchi & Kashiwagi so fascinating (etymology) in developing something actually Interesting to say about, first of all, authorship (to stutter, to reiterate, self-perception as sack of potatoes. & This from arguably Japan's most beautiful writer he's not distancing he's identifying! An artist!) -- it's so much more exciting there than what fascism actually Is in the world & I think that comes through YM as a person an artist of neverending complications.
I think it’d be fun to design a module on Problems of beauty in 20thc literature - you could through this against The Waves & the Cantos for chaos.
Also the final ten pages are really just some of his best, ever. beauty ! here !
that terrifying concept of beauty, which makes people powerless act - seems to speak to the relatively sustained references to Hamlet Now tread carefully
It's worth saying also that this is based on a true story & Mishima apparently interviewed the 'real' Mizoguchi- is there a transcript let me know
Now we know to be careful with these to take tweezers & divide this feels such an essential text in the Mishima canon for his own relationship to what he believed as the teleology of fascism, for the purpose of the body & self-perception as an artist. It's a difficult chew & I expect there's an awful lot of scholarship erring on quite the wrong side of the matter. But worthwhile, after others from YM. It’s kind of the apotheosis of a study on how fascists attempt to reconcile what they want to call beautiful & ugliness. And my doesn't it just tap into perennial concerns for those involved. See below
I have brought the great ball of crystal;
who can lift it?
Can you enter the great acorn of light?
But the beauty is not the madness
Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.
If love be not in the house there is nothing.
The voice of famine unheard.
How came beauty against this blackness,
Twice beauty under the elms ---
-EP, CXVI
A single gunshot can never destroy the beauty of fascism!
-Peggy Gravel