Mishima: The Aesthetics of Fascism

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters-Kyoto ‘s House-Paul Schrader 1985

While watching Paul Schrader’s excellent, and underrated biopic of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters,  I was struck by how contemporary and up to date a figure Mishima seems, in fact far more relevant today than when the movie was first released.  Of course certain individuals tend to be ahead of their time, however, as Mishima was a narcissistic nihilist who espoused a highly individualistic form of extreme right-wing nationalism for the most dubious of reasons, this is more of a reflection on the perilous state of current affairs than an inspirational story of a heroic touch bearer from the past lighting the path to a better world for present and future generations. Regardless of this disturbing fact, Mishima remains one of the better of the twentieth century’s right-wing writers (not exactly a crowded field, but still) with a lucid self awareness, fanatical determination and fatalistic steeliness that warrants a closer look through the glass, however darkly.

A sickly and isolated child who wasn’t permitted by his grandmother to play with other boys or even go outside in the sunlight, Mishima became aware of his sado-masochistic and homosexual tendencies at an early age while leafing through a book and discovering a reproduction of a Renaissance painting of St Sebastian. In his first, breakthrough novel Confessions of a Mask, Mishima describes the occasion for his first orgasm in decadent prose,’The arrows have eaten into the tense, fragrant, youthful flesh, and are about to consume his body from within with flames of supreme agony and ecstasy,’ and he would later pose as St Sebastian for a photograph, one of a series of aggressively stylised portraits published in the book Torture By Roses.

This strain of theatrical narcissism and exhibitionism that Mishima displayed time and time again shows a profound lack of a core identity. He would pose as St Sebastian, a yakuza gangster, a bodybuilder, a samurai and as a soldier. Particularly as a soldier. Along with this addiction to his own image adopting various roles, he obsessively cultivated a cult of the body. One of the requirements placed for his arranged marriage was that his wife couldn’t encroach on the time he spent either writing or body-building.

Along with the inherent masochism required to achieve the perfect body, body-building enabled Mishima to indulge his fixations on virility, health and purity, but also conversely on their opposites, sterility, decay and perversion. In a particularly convoluted example of self-loathing (a speciality of his, and one that he undoubtedly derived a perverse pleasure from) Mishima adopted a fierce anti-intellectualism but which was defended purely on intellectual grounds.

Given Mishima’s inveterate ability to aestheticize every facet or experience in his life, not only experiences that are typically aestheticised like art and the body, but also action, violence and death itself, perhaps it is no surprise that Mishima adopted fascism* as his ideology. After all, as Walter Benjamin shrewdly noted, one of the hallmarks of fascism is that it is the aestheticization of politics. It’s theatricality, militarism and not so coded homo-eroticism and rituals of dominance and submission seem tailor-made for Mishima, with the added bonuses that its nihilistic emphasis on ‘blood, fire and the night’ gave him the opportunity to write the perfect ending to his life, achieving his desired aim of writing a line of poetry with a splash of blood.

During the last years of his life Mishima became increasingly pre-occupied with politics. He published essays about fascism, wrote a play called My Friend Hitler and founded a private militia called Takenokai (English: Shield Society-or the SS-as Mishima was fluent in both English and German the coincidence doesn’t seem so coincidental) comprised entirely of handsome university students, with the express purpose of defending the abstract ideal of the Emperor’s dignity. Mishima increasingly desired to be seen as a man of action, noting that both Lord Byron and the Italian decadent writer and one of acknowledged originators of Fascism, Gabriele D’Annunzio had both commanded their own private armies.

Mishima is most famous for his spectacular suicide in 1970 by seppuku after the failed coup d’etat,, which Schrader rightly centres his movie around. This act was the culmination of Mishima’s solipsistic vision; a fusion of life, art and action and a expression of fascistic aesthetics: Mishima’s Gesamtkunstwerk.

When this movie was first released, fascism seemed spent as a living force, rightly confided to the trash heap of history. Subsequent events have proved how wrong this assumption is with virulent nationalist movements sweeping across the world. Although Mishima nationalism was a somewhat idiosyncratic affair, it does highlight certain aspects of fascist aesthetics and  the appeal it may possibly possess beyond the merely economic factors that are always tepidly cited as its chief cause of its spread.

Fascism is a purely reactionary force, and is best viewed in the light of everything it opposes and seeks to cure; namely modernity. Tradition is seen as a bastion of lost greatness, with gender roles set in stone, rigid conformity and static hierarchy. With its cult of the strongman who personifies the state, its staged presentation of might and the quasi-mystical emphasis on symbolic talismans (the flag, uniforms, anthem, rallies and parades) fascism is in itself a decadent response to decadence and in a certain respect the very essence of the modernity that it rejects so vehemently.

*  I use the term fascism with caution. Please note that in the above article I am not labelling Mishima a fascist in the lazy pejorative sense, of say, a leftist from the 80’s towards anyone who was slightly centre-right, or indeed present day hard right apologists who indulge in verbal gymnastics by claiming  that it is, in fact the liberals who are the actual fascists; but in the sense that fascism is understood as a term in classical political philosophy.

Extension of the Domain of the Struggle

Robert De Niro-Taxi Driver 1976

To judge from the  photos of the participants at the ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia it was attended exclusively by two types. One was the usual knuckle dragging good ole boy Klansman and skinhead bovver boys, the kind of people who live for brawling and probably instigate a confrontation with their own shadows when nobody else is around. The other type was the alt-right who are laughably called the intelligentsia of the far right. Aiming for the preppy with white polo shirts these toy soldiers still convey the stench of male adolescent geekiness. It was to the second group that the accused killer of Heather Heyer, James Alex Fields, undoubtedly belonged.

Reading the details of Fields life leads to a depressing feeling of deja vu. All the standard tropes that feature heavily in the biographies of so many psychopaths, school shooters and spree killers are present. Quiet, introverted, kept himself to himself, socially inept, intelligent (but I suspect that they are never as intelligent as they think they are), absent fathers, unsettled childhoods, thwarted desire to serve in the military/police. And, although this remains unsaid, everyone knows to fill in the blanks, an unmitigated disaster with the opposite sex. In other words, real life imitations of Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro’s character in Martin Scorsese’s seminal movie Taxi Driver.

Travis Bickle frequently rails against the degradation and filth that he sees all around as he drives through the New York City night and longs for a return to purity (with unstated but definite racialist overtones). Yet we soon begin to have doubts about Bickle, especially as he chooses the night shift himself and spends part of the day watching blue movies. We only begin to fully understand Bickle’s profound disconnect and lack of social mores when he takes the beautiful and classy Betsy (played by Cybill Shepherd) to a hardcore pornographic movie theatre on the first date.

Paul Schrader the screenwriter for Taxi Driver has long acknowledged the debt the movie owes to Existentialism, and Bickle’s alienation bears some resemblance to the classic of Existentialism, Albert Camus L”Etranger (The Stranger), the story of the affectless Meursault who indifferently commits a murder.

Michel Houellebecq, the controversial French novelist and right wing provocateur first novel  Extension du domaine de la lutte (literally  Extension of the Domain of the Struggle, a parody of the titles of Situationist texts popular during the student uprisings of 1968, translated in English as Whatever) updates and expands upon The Stranger. Central to Extension and other novels by Houellebecq is his theory regarding the sexual revolution of the 1960’s which he believes resulted in sexual capitalism instead of communism.

In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate. In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.

This dynamic is given racialist overtones in Houellebecq’s work. According to Houellebecq black men and Asian women are the greatest benefactors of this liberal sexual system while the standard white collar, white male office drone is no longer guaranteed a mate. This would go some length to explaining the alt-right’s obsession with ‘cucking’ and their veneration of Trump, after all here is a white male who has enjoyed a successful sex life and wants to reverse the tide of sexual liberalisation back toward the way things used to be. Trump in return refuses to distance himself from these toxic movements because of deep seated insecurities resulting from his sense of absolute sexual entitlement.

The alt-right’s ugly and incendiary language and actions are a perfect example of Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment, a reassignment of socially maladjusted inferiority projected onto an external scapegoat. Their inadequacies are not their own fault, it is the fault of other people. Because the typical alt-righter has lost out in the sexual marketplace and cannot get laid, others must suffer.

No Passaran

CNT-FAI Poster

The volatile political situation of 1930’s Europe with the rise of competing extremist factions saw the increased use of art for propaganda purposes, and also the realisation that propaganda itself could be an art form (Hitler, Goebbels and Mussolini were all failed artists: Hitler of course was a mediocre painter; Goebbels and Mussolini fifth rate novelists). Nowhere was this more apparent than Spain, which after the military uprising by General Franco and his fascist inspired Nationalists against the democratically elected, left leaning Republic descended into a vicious Civil War that soon took on an international dimension.

The above poster commemorates the successful defence of Barcelona by members of the anarcho-syndicalist trade union CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo-Federación Anarquista Ibérica) on 19th of July 1936. Although the government had denied arming the anarchists, union members led by Buenaventura Durutti captured weapons from army barracks, manufactured home-made grenades and improvised armoured vehicles leading to the defeat of the rebels. After the events of 19th of July  the CNT-FAI became the de facto power in Barcelona and implemented a social revolution that George Orwell pays eloquent tribute to in his memoir Homage to Catalonia.

Below is some fine examples of the posters that would have lined the buildings and windows of the Republican controlled zones.

Decline & Fall

Cut with the Kitchen Knife DaDa through the Beer Belly of the Weimar Republic 1919-Hannah Hoch

It’s all starting to feel a bit Weimar. The recent economic crisis, the unscrupulous charismatic populist demagogues that exploit the disconnect between the political elites and the populace that have caused a surge towards  the various strands of extremism. Most disturbing of all is the resurgence of that particularly insidious form of reactionary nationalism that believes the future lies in a return to a mythical golden age, before the appearance of the loathed ‘other’ ruined the mother/fatherland. As with the Weimar Republic there is a feeling that the old order is soon to come crumbling down; to be replaced by who knows exactly what. All we need now to complete the comparison is a bit more decadence, a lot of street-fighting, a spot of hyper-inflation and some cabaret.

The art of the Weimar Republic is exceptional in its savagery. Berlin Dada was the most aggressively politicised of them all (see my “Everyman His Own Football”). Above is a particularly brutal satire of the contemporary society of the Weimar Republic by Hannah Hoch, whose ground-breaking photo-montages were deemed ‘degenerate art’ by the Nazis when they began their purge of modern art in the late 1930’s.

(This was originally posted back in June 2016).