Abstract

Immediately before the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1894, one heated debate took place among Japanese intellectuals regarding the question: is writing literature a purposive activity? Confronting Yamaji Aizan (1865–1917), Kitamura Tōkoku (1868–1894) underlined literature’s non-purposive quality. Because of Tōkoku’s strong emphasis on literature’s transcendence, scholarship from the later period oftentimes read Tōkoku’s theory against a backdrop of his biography, idolizing this writer as an ultimate advocator of literature’s autonomy. Even in more recent scholarship, the biographical reading of Tōkoku’s work appears prevailing, reinforcing the primacy of biographical historicization. This article challenges such a scholarly predilection and offers fresh understanding of Tōkoku’s theory of literature as the dialectics of historicity and ahistoricity. What Tōkoku posits as pure literature ultimately poses an aporia; it exists only as an impossibility, whose realizability and sustainability are pre-empted at its gestational moment. Taking pure literature’s aporia as a point of departure, this article delves into the implication of the historical claim of literature’s ahistoricity. Tōkoku’s logic operates in a self-cancelling manner, not to overcome, but to dislocate that aporia. Closely examining Tōkoku’s rhetorical move, this article demonstrates that coinciding formation and dislocation of the aporia is in fact constitutive of the pure literature envisioned in Tōkoku’s theory. Precisely because of this aporia, pure literature can serve not as a divider between, but as a relaying point of, historicity and ahistoricity.

摘要

1894年抗日战争爆发前夕，日本知识分子就这样一个问题进行了激烈的争论：写文学是一种有目的的活动吗？面对山治相山（1865-1917），北村东国（1868-1894）强调文学的非目的性。由于东国非常强调文学的超越性，后期的学术界常常以东国的传记为背景来阅读他的理论，将这位作家奉为文学自主性的终极倡导者。即使在最近的学术研究中，Tōkoku 作品的传记阅读似乎也盛行，这加强了传记历史化的首要地位。这篇文章挑战了这种学术倾向，并为将东国的文学理论作为历史性和非历史性的辩证法提供了新的理解。Tokoku 所假定的纯粹文学最终构成了一个难题；它只是作为一种不可能而存在，它的可实现性和可持续性在其孕育时刻就被抢占了先机。本文以纯文学的困境为出发点，深入探讨文学非历史性的历史主张的含义。Tokoku 的逻辑以一种自我取消的方式运作，不是为了克服，而是为了打破这个困境。本文仔细研究了东国的修辞举动，证明了绝境的同时形成和错位实际上构成了东国理论所设想的纯文学。正是因为这个绝境，