The Ocean Libidinized : Yukio Mishima and the Cold War

Abstract

The titles of the major works of novelist Yukio Mishima clearly illustrate his preoccupation with sea imageries, while his language urges us to examine them psychoanalytically. In other words, these images function as an aesthetic and psychic screen onto which his radically divided subjectivity is projected. Mishima’s divided self is a product of logical complication and semantic opacity worthy of psychoanalytic interpretation. The images in Mishima’s work are evidence of his divided mindset, in limbo between denial and acceptance of post-war Japan, and the historical consequence of Japan’s complete military defeat in WWII. In terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, his conflicting thoughts can be viewed as the simultaneous acceptance and denial of Japan’s castration, which, as Freud famously argues, is the psychic structure of fetishism. Taking this perspective, we can regard his fascination with the post-war ‘Symbolic Emperor’ as Mishima the fetishist’s fascination with the ‘sublime object’ of his phantasy. The political and cultural icon of the ‘Symbolic Emperor’ enables him to deny and accept the historical fact of Japan’s unconditional surrender to America as a psychical compromise. A set of sea imageries in Mishima’s works also contribute to this kind of psychoanalytic compromise, as they are sublimated and libidinized in a similar way while manifesting themselves as allegorical references to the Cold War. In this context, his ‘sublime’ serves as a metaphor for ‘nuclear weapon’—the absent and lethal cause of the Cold War. It is the ontological absence of a ‘nuclear weapon’ that brings about the Cold War. Once this absence is cancelled, the semantic and actual system of the Cold War disappears instantaneously. Yet, the existence of nuclear weapons is also the ontological assumption of the Cold War. This structural dilemma—the simultaneous existence of semantic and ontological maximum and zero degrees—is precisely the same double-bind plight in which we find Mishima’s representation of the ‘sublime’. This simultaneity can also be seen in Mishima’s representational omnipotence and impotence, or the acceptance and denial of castration.