Bio
Mary A. KNIGHTON is Professor at Aoyama Gakuin University, where she teaches and researches modern American and Japanese literature and culture. Recent essays have appeared in Faulkner and Money, ed. Jay Watson (2019) and Animal Comics: Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives, ed. David Herman (2017). Translations and articles on Kōno Taeko and Kanai Mieko have appeared in Japanese Language and Literature (2022), Japan Forum (2017) and U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal (2011). Her current book project focuses on insects in Japanese literature and culture.
How to Make Good Use of Lost Causes: Reproducing Faulkner’s Impotent Fathers in Japan
When William Faulkner (1897-1962) came to Nagano, Japan in 1955, he acted as emissary of the state even as he also represented to the recently conquered Asian nation a fellow “country” (the real South and fictional Yoknapatawpha) felled as much by its own errant masculine pride as by the opposing monolithic power of the victorious, paternalistic “United States.” This talk centers on Faulkner and Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992) while contending that numerous postwar Japanese writers and scholars took inspiration from Faulkner’s experimental modernism. Faulkner’s narrative techniques complicate modern race/class/gender dynamics and revive “Lost Cause” themes, while impotent Faulknerian “fathers” function as a perversely generative force. Representative figures such as Popeye and Ike McCaslin each reject in very different ways “civilization” as represented by the South’s quasi-feudal family and class system (in Japan, the ie seidō, and for Nakagami, the emperor system). Faulkner’s impotent fathers rise to eminence wrapped in paradoxically powerful stories of emasculation.
What, after all, is the legacy of Faulkner’s modernism, in the U.S., Japan, or elsewhere? Fraught with reactionary resistance to modernity and often shrouded in Romantic nostalgia and the quietism of defeat, it reinforces models of a future still being consumed, Kronos-style, by the sins of the fathers. And yet, Nakagami Kenji’s riff on impotent Faulknerian fathers may usefully clear a path (or roji) leading less to a hopeful or predictable future than to an imagined space from which new texts rooted in that geography might emerge. Nakagami’s fiction contests, sometimes savages, whatever invented traditional history or modern past is said to have spawned it, finally generating from a polluted wasteland some future. Postwar Japanese literature and film offers insight into how Faulkner’s Southern Modernism might be creatively reimagined for either Global South political purposes or from within a Trans-Pacific literary frame.