Citation

Greene B. Critique Stud. Contemp. Fiction 2022; 63(4): 454-469.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022)

DOI

10.1080/00111619.2020.1859443

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Within Mishima's autobiographical essay entitled Sun and Steel, he explored his growing unease and dissatisfaction with his ability to fully convey his meaning through the written word and that he had begun to seek a means of collapsing the divide between the materiality of his bodily phenomenology and the abstraction of words-a conundrum only resolved by his suicide in late November of 1970. Through this act, Mishima collapsed the boundaries between his fictional world and that of reality and, hopefully, ended the tension between the abstraction of word, thought, and the flesh, that caused, according to his own writings, deep psychological anguish. This compulsion to merge the Symbolic Order into the Real through an action that can only result in self-annihilation is present in Mishima's work as early as his 1956 novel, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. To further explore this aspect of the "Mishima-text," as described by Hirata (1990), this text will explore the dysfunctional understanding of the Symbolic Order possessed by the novel's lead character Mizoguchi and how this disfunction is echoed in Sun and Steel. © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Language: en

Keywords

Lacan; Ethical Act; Kinkakuji; Mishima Yukio; Temple of the Golden Pavilion