The deformation of the modern spectator

Synaesthesia, cinema, and the spectre of race in Tanizaki

Dados Bibliográficos

ID6195342
AutoresThomas Lamarre (McGill University, autor correspondente)
Ano1999
Volume11
Fascículo1
Páginas23-42
Data de publicação1999-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJapan Forum (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0955-5803 • E-ISSN: 1469-932X
EditoraInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09555809908721620
OpenAlexW2062561524
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas3
Referências citadas10

In order to complicate the opposition between Western modernity and Japanese tradition that is often said to characterize the works of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, this essay explores the logic of synaesthesia in some of his works from the early Taisho period such as ‘The mermaid's lament’, ‘The present and future of motion pictures’, and ‘The tumor with a human face’. Synaesthesia in Tanizaki involves not only a decomposition and recombination of different perceptual modalities but also an erotic encounter with the foreign. It affords an intensification of the procedures of Japan's Orientalist history (tōyōshi), by allowing artifacts and ethnographic detail to swarm into the story as spectacle rather than fact. With its emphasis on the hybrid, the awkward and misplaced, synaesthesia calls attention to the corporeality of perception, to what Jonathan Crary calls ‘the emergence of the body as a productive physiological apparatus’. In Tanizaki, the emergence of such synaesthetic, corporeal modes of perception is also intimately linked to questions of race. It is in this way that Tanizaki's use of synaesthesia reminds us that viewers and readers are already deformed, already inscribed in fictive ethnicities

Aesthetics · Art · Inscribed figure · Lament · Literature · Modernity · Movie theater · Perception · Psychoanalysis · Spectacle · The Imaginary · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Japanese History and Culture · Philosophy · Psychology