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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2022

The Japanese No-Body

Résumé

My reflection on the role the human—or, for that matter, any living—body plays in Japanese culture, starts with the remark of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō who, in his In Praise of Shadows / 陰翳禮讚 / In’ei raisan (1933-34), describes the presence of women as a mere face devoid of body and shrouded day and night in obscurity. Indeed, Tanizaki speaks about the Taishō and Meiji periods, but what he is saying may be shown to be true of any previous period of Japanese history of which we have either literary, pictorial, social as well as linguistic, conceptual and behavioural testimony. We don’t need much persuasion to realize that Tanizaki’s impression applies word for word to the Tale of Genji, for example. We wouldn’t be able to find a more substantial description of the body in all of Heian period literature, nor would we find in all of pictorial representations of these times—in the painted scrolls, in portrait painting and sculpture—anything more explicit. Apart from the face and, incidentally, the hands, the body is absent, silent. The masterpieces of the medieval pictorial arts focus entirely and exclusively on the face, which, in its physical traits, in its physiognomy, expresses the essence of the persona, the character, the raison d’être, all that is the human being. The so-called nise-e 似 絵 is its most typical expression. Pictorial sources do show us, however, that, if nothing else, there is a social dimension to the appearance of the physical body. If we see the denizens of the uppermost classes almost completely wrapped in garments, we notice that the lower the people are in the social scale, the less they are covered: the carpenter and others doing menial jobs are down to their loincloths, but only beggars, outcasts and heavy sinners go naked. One of the most characteristic features of the traditional conception of the body appears in the absence, in the Japanese (Chinese and Korean) language of the gender distinction, between the male and female sex in particular. Were it not for the idiosyncratic aspects of the costume and its parts (headdress, scepter, etc.), we would be hard put, in the Tale of Genji scroll paintings for one, to distinguish between a male and a female person on the faith of the face alone. The lack of gender is even more apparent in the conception of the physical body in traditional Sino-Japanese medicine. The schematic diagrams of the body do not distinguish between the male and the female physique, except for the reproductive organs of the woman. Significantly, Sino-Japanese medicine is not interested in the anatomy nor the other purely physical constituents of the body (bones, muscles, sinews) nor its mechanical functions. The non-consideration in which, unlike in the Western civilization, the physical body as such, apart from the persona, is not an object of any kind of consideration, we do not find any conscious, objective, anatomical or esthetic description of the body, neither in literature nor in the pictorial arts. In striking contrast to Western arts and sciences, there is, in particular, no such concept of the nude, the academic observation and study of the naked body, of the esthetic appreciation of the nude, of the beauty of the female and male bodies. The reflection can be extended into a number of other fields that all point into the same direction: the body, nowhere in traditional Japanese culture, constitutes an independent object of consideration, observation or study. One is surprised to discover that, until the intrusion of Western civilization in the late 19th century, physical condition and training, gymnastics, hygienics, bodily exercise, are non-existent; not only are there no sports or athletics for the sake of physical health (sumo has different ends), for endurance or aesthetic form, but the fit, muscular and disciplined body is not a requisite neither in the martial arts nor military warfare. One may be tempted to make an exception of the so-called erotic or pornographic imagery (shunga) of the pre-modern period, but even the explicit representations of the male and female sexual organs, as accurate, exact or naturalistic as they appear to be, are not anatomical studies in any way, but are meant to be funny (warai-e), to relieve with humoristic verve the tension inherent in the social and ethical restrictions of sexuality. Maybe the most striking difference in the perception and conception of the body between East and West, is the idea of physical beauty that, expressed in terms of harmony of proportion, of religious, ethical, and aesthetic ideals, of mathematical and scientific law even, constitutes from the age of classical Greece through the Renaissance and up to this day a major paradigm of Western culture.
意識以前の身体。 身体の存在は感覚によって知覚される。 統覚が直接の知覚対象とする以前に、身体は知覚 の主体、かつ客体として存在している。 身体は、客体化の過程に先立つ文化的な条件によって制約されてい るため、統覚、表現、身体の使い方は文化によって違う。 事実、東洋と西洋では、身体、あるいは身体の各部 分が知覚され、想像され、表現され、利用される方法が、大きく異なっているのだ。 本質的な相違点を明らかに するため、ユ-ラシア大陸の両端で身体を見る方法を調べてみよう。 まず文学作品を比較し、続いて、二次元・ 三次元画像など、視覚的資料を分析する。これらの資料を起源から検証すると、これらの資料の多くは、誤っ た解釈に従属させられた上で理解されているように思われる。谷崎潤一郎は『陰翳禮讚』で次のように書いて いる。「胴や足の先は裾の長い衣裳の裡に包まれている、昔の女と云うものは襟から上と袖口から先だけの存 在であり,他は悉く闇に隠れていたものだと思う。.... ただ闇の中に五體を埋めつつその顔だけで存在を示していたと云へる。 ...が、昔はあれでよかったのだ、闇のなかに住む彼女たちに取っては、ほのじろい顔ひとつあれば胴體は必要がなかったのだ。... 極端的に云えば、彼女たちには殆ど肉體がなかったと云っていい。 私は母の顔と手の外、足だけはぼんやり覚えているが、胴體については記憶がない。」この描写を出発点に、日本文 化とその歴史の進展を辿りながら、日本に独特な身体性、そして人体の知覚方法を考察しよう。
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Dates et versions

halshs-03948093 , version 1 (19-01-2023)

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Domaine public

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Gérard Siary, Toshio Takemoto, Victor Vuilleumier, Yinde Zhang, Josef Kyburz. The Japanese No-Body. Collège de France. Le corps dans les littératures modernes d’Asie orientale : discours, représentation, intermédialité., 2022, Institut des civilisations, ⟨10.4000/books.cdf.12710⟩. ⟨halshs-03948093⟩
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