/lit/ - Literature

>>10721403
>>10721381
>There's a tremendously misguided (and deliberately obfuscatory) effort in academia to portray Mishima as a ''closeted gay man'' - Roy Starrs is one of the only Western scholars who has made an effort to refute this narrative. His primary source, of course, is Mishima's thinly-veiled autobiography, Confessions of a Mask. Confessions describes a boy who was emotionally maimed by an overbearing grandmother who prevented him from associating with other boys, who was emotionally incestuous towards her charge, who preyed upon the boy's introversion and sensitivity, and who demanded he suppress his own willful impulses. His other parental figures were a callous, workaholic father who was cruel to the boy on grounds of his physical and emotional frailty and ill-health, and a mother who had abandoned him to the demented and selfish wiles of his grandmother. The legacy of this was that Mishima the boy became alienated from the world - to the point that his sense of self and his developing moral core fractured irreparably. The introversion he relied upon to sustain an ''inner-world'' which was essential to his psychic survival rendered him increasingly unable to relate to the world and its demands as a complete person. As he grew older, he was forced to don ''masks'' to deceive others with an appearance of superficiality and emotional normalcy. In reality, he was becoming less and less normal as his mind matured. He was literally becoming obsessed by macabre and erotic fantasies and fascinations, the expression(s) of which would, if brought into reality, make him a monstrous and criminal figure.

>The erotic ideal in Mishima's canon is expressed in Patriotism and Kyoko's House - the latter of course being the more significant. Mishima's alter-ego in the novel is a fractured personality who pursues narcissism to mitigate his emptiness. First as an actor, then as a bodybuilder. Aimless and unsatisfied, he is rescued by a female Yakuza who wishes to enslave him - on the condition that he never purport to love her in exchange for her patronage and he agree to mutual suicide on her terms. He agrees with the stipulation of, ''you mustn't kiss me until I am dead''. She obliges, and their pact is consummated - the underlying idea being that life can only be defined by death, and that erotic love can only host meaning if it constitutes sacrifice. Mere lust, be it animalistic and free or constrained by matrimony, is a ruse - people who believe love entails ''risk'' in and of itself are sentimental and deluded.

>The motifs here, obviously, are extremely homoerotic - that doesn't tell us anything. Homoeroticism is a basic component of high culture and passion. Its context is basically religious, anti-rational, anti-liberal, and highly traditional if not primordial and pagan. In contrast, the ''gay'' identity and ideology are the opposite - Larry Kramer actually gets into this quite extensively, as does Michael Foucault. Both are/were deranged in their own right, but they're absolutely correct in their assessment of the origin of ''gay'' identity. We can examine this further if you wish, but for now its best not to go that far outside the scope.