by K. R. Bolton
Potocki replied to the invitation by writing that his attendance was conditional on Colin Jordan not being there, and that he could propose a motion “recognizing the nullity of the Partitions of Poland (18th century) and Hungary (20th century).” The acceptance of his conditions gave Potocki “a very good opinion of the honorableness of the New European Order.”480 Potocki recounts: “I was elected enthusiastically Delegate for Poland, and my motion passed unanimously.”481 The motion reads:
Poland and Hungary
The Assembly did not believe a new order can be based on the domination of another European nation, and recognizes the invalidity of the partitions of Poland (late thirteenth century) and Hungary.
The meeting considers that an understanding between the peoples directly concerned is desirable and is awaiting proposals based on the agreement of representatives of nations touched by this problem.
Potocki mentions that a few days after the congress the Croatian Delegate, General Vjekoslav Luburić, was murdered on what Potocki believed to have been the orders of Tito. He states that Luburić was “sincerely friendly to Poland and Hungary and spoke fluent Hungarian. PRAISE BE TO HIS NAME.”482
Potocki also moved another resolution calling for recognition of “any human freedom” so long as it does not harm the citizen or the state, stating that some social and moral changes are irreversible and there can be no return to the 19th century. “Mindful also of a renaissance of European culture, the New European Order recognizes that ‘a state of rigid disciplinary spirit could harm the development of the arts.’” The resolution deplores the political consequences of Puritanism, starting with the Cromwellian revolution. Potocki, as an advocate of aristocracy and traditional hierarchy, also considered the rebirth of high culture to be predicated on the freedom from the burden of work by the culture-bearing stratum, and the necessity of “a leisured class as useful to the culture.”483
RETURN TO NEW ZEALAND
Potocki returned to New Zealand in late 1983, after an absence of fifty-six years, accompanied by some media interviews and commentary, and the publication of his Recollections of My Fellow Poets.484 His respect among certain sections of New Zealand intelligentsia endured, however, and he was given access to an old platen press at Victoria University. Traveling to the South Island, he stopped off at Christchurch Cathedral and expressed dismay at the modernization of Anglican procedure there.
He also visited the University of Otago. The Otago Daily Times described Potocki as “vigorous, learned and cosmopolitan,” “an avowed royalist and an enemy of democracy.” Potocki was reported as stating: “The whole thesis upon which democracy is based is totally unjust . . . like one man, one vote. The biggest idiot can have a vote whereas a valuable person also has one vote.” The undimming of his aristocratic views in the aftermath of the victory of democracy might be accounted for by the Times comment that, “he said he did not care about public opinion because the public were stupid.”485 With such views, it is clear enough why he had not been in New Zealand, the epitome of democratic and egalitarian values, for 56 years, “where no creative life exists except in animal form, and where all the loveliness of European civilization exists only in a weird state of caricature.”486 An interesting and worthy account of his life was produced and aired on the Tuesday Documentary of Television One in 1984, entitled The Count—Profile of a Polemicist.
Spending the summer in Provence in 1985, he returned to New Zealand later that year, and moved into a friend’s house in Hamilton, a city of loathsome pseudo-academics and charlatans with an equally loathsome university administration.
Dr. F. W. Nielsen Wright, an energetic poet, critic, and chronicler of New Zealand culture, describes Potocki as “the all time bad boy of Aotearoa letters.”487 Wright, a notable figure in New Zealand literature, and former professor of English at Victoria University, also involved in the obscure and short-lived Communist Party of Aotearoa, states that “nobody else comes close to Potocki,” and that he was “treated as a pariah by New Zealand academics488 without exception to the day of his death.”
Potocki should long ago have been awarded a Doctorate of Letters for his translation into verse . . . of the Polish classic, Forefather’s Eve, a romantic verse play by Adam Mickiewicz. This translation has a higher standing internationally than any other piece of New Zealand verse.489
In 1990, Potocki travelled to Poland at the invitation of Dr. Andrzej Klossowski of Warsaw University and the Polish National Library and gave well-attended readings of his poetry.490 In 1993 Fleming’s collection of interviews and writings by Potocki was launched. That same year, Potocki returned to Provence despite declining health.
Potocki died on April 14, 1997 at Draguignan. His grave was marked by a simple granite slab etched “G. Potocki de Montalk 1903–1997.”491
Wright states that on Potocki’s death in France of “extreme old age” his personal papers were shipped back to New Zealand. This caused protest from the French Government which regarded them as a French cultural treasure. To Wright it was Potocki who was
. . . the leading figure in a group of Aotearoa writers who in the 1920s asserted the value of poetry and challenged their fellow countrymen and women to give them recognition and honor as poets. . . . All felt that the country in fact rejected them and all went into external or internal exile. But their claim remains true. They are the most outstanding group of poets so far in our literature in English.
He has never been forgiven in New Zealand for espousing fascism, even though other literary figures who went the same way have long since been rehabilitated and count as honored writers: people like Knut Hamsun in Norway, Maurras in France, Ezra Pound in the United States, and P. G. Wodehouse in Britain.492
“A GOOD EUROPEAN”
In pondering the Count’s character, Chris Martin wrote:
How best to describe the Count? Whilst possessed of opinions with which I personally often disagreed, he was a small and handsome figure, extremely attractive to the ladies, exceptionally well-spoken (to the extent of correcting my own English), obviously extremely talented but, equally obviously, an embittered victim of the English judicial system, and what in 1932 passed for reality. His nephew Peter Potocki described him as “Uncle Nero.” I can state personally that the Count was an extremely interesting person to know; his position in literary history is pretty well irrefragable. However, I will say that he was most interesting company and one of the most informed people one has met about virtually any aspect of European history. For a person born in New Zealand in 1903, the Count was what, with Nietzsche, we might term “a good European.”
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
August 14–16, 2010
CHAPTER 7
YUKIO MISHIMA
Yukio Mishima (1945–1970) was born into an upper middle-class family. Novelist, essayist, playwright, and actor, he has been described as the “Leonardo da Vinci of contemporary Japan,”493 and is one of the few Japanese writers to have become widely known and translated in the West.
THE DARK SIDE OF THE SUN
Since World War II, the West has forgotten what C. G. Jung would have termed the “Shadow” soul of Japan, the collective impulses that have been repressed by the “Occupation Law” and the imposition of democracy. The Japanese are seen stereotypically as being overly polite and smiling business executives and camera snapping tourists. The soft counterpart of the Japanese psyche, the “chrysanthemum” (the arts), has been emphasized, while the “sword” (the martial tradition) has been repressed.494
The American cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote of the duality of the Japanese character using this symbolism in her study, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
,495 to which Mishima referred approvingly.496 Benedict had been commissioned by the US government in 1944 to write a study of Japanese culture. Portraying the Japanese as savages was fine for the purpose of war propaganda, but a more nuanced understanding was considered necessary for post-war dealings
.
What Benedict described was the ethos of probably every Traditional society, regardless of time, place, and ethnicity. This “perennial Tradition” was described by Julius Evola, who showed that traditional cultures have analogous outlooks. They perceive the earthly as a reflection of the cosmos, the mortal as a reflection of the divine. They regard the King or Emperor as a link between the earth and the cosmos, the human and the divine. This was the Traditionalist ethos W. B. Yeats desired to revive in Western Civilization, in a manner similar to Mishima’s demand for the revival of the Samurai ethic in Japan. In such traditional societies, the King is also a priest who serves as the direct link to the divine,497 the warrior is honored rather than the merchant, and society is strictly hierarchical and regarded as an earthly reflection of divine order. Fulfilling one’s divinely-ordained duty as a king, soldier, priest, peasant, or merchant is the purpose of each individual’s life, and is sanctioned by law and religion.
Hence, in traditional societies the role of the merchant is subordinate, and the rule of money—plutocracy—as in the West today, is regarded as an inversion of the traditional ethos, a symptom of cultural decay. In traditional Japan, as Inazo Nitobe explains:
Of all the great occupations in life, none was further removed from the profession of arms than commerce. The merchant was placed lowest in the category of vocations—the knight, the tiller of the soil, the mechanic, the merchant. The samurai derived his income from the land and could even indulge, if he had a mind to, in amateur farming; but the counter and abacus were abhorred.498
Nitobe states that when Japan opened up to foreign commerce, feudalism was abolished, the Samurai’s fiefs were taken, and he was compensated with bonds, with the right to invest in commerce. Hence the Samurai was degraded to the status of a merchant in order to survive.499
According to Benedict, during the war, the Japanese regarded themselves as the only nation left in the world that had maintained the divine order. They believed it their duty to re-impose this order upon the rest of the world. Japan’s Bushido, the “Way of the Knight,” is therefore analogous to that of other traditionalist societies, such as the chivalry of Medieval Europe and the warrior code explained by Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. To the Japanese warrior aristocracy the sword (katana) was a sacred object, forged with ceremony, its use subject to precise rules.500
Mishima insisted that Japan return to a balance of the arts and the martial spirit. To use, once again, the terminology of Jung, Mishima was calling Japan to “individuation” by allowing the repressed “Shadow” archetype, “The Sword,” to reassert itself. Mishima was himself a synthesis of scholar and warrior who rejected pure intellectualism and theory in favor of action.
Nitobe, in explaining Bushido, wrote that intellectualism was looked down upon by the Samurai. Learning was valued not as an intellectual exercise but as a matter of character formation. Intellect was considered subordinate to ethos. Man and the universe were both spiritual and ethical. The cosmos had a moral imperative.501 This was discussed by Mishima in his commentary on Hagakure.
The American occupation was such an inversion of the Japanese spirit that Ian Buruma, writing in the “Foreword” to the 2005 edition of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, states:
Young Japanese today might have a hard time recognizing some aspects of the “national character” described in Benedict’s book. Loyalty to the Emperor, duty to one’s parents, terror of not repaying one’s moral debts, these have faded in an age of technology-driven self-absorption.502
THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI
Mishima’s aesthetic ideal was the beauty of a violent death in one’s prime, an ideal common in classical Japanese literature. As a sickly youngster, Mishima’s ideal of the heroic death had already taken hold: “A sensuous craving for such things as the destiny of soldiers, the tragic nature of their calling . . . the ways they would die.”503
He was determined to overcome his physical weaknesses. There is much of the Nietzschean “Higher Man” about him, of overcoming personal and social restraints to express his own heroic individuality.504 His motto was: “Be Strong.”505
The Second World War had a formative influence on Mishima. Along with his fellow students, he felt that conscription and certain death awaited.506 He became chairman of the college literary club, and his patriotic poems were published in the student magazine.507 He also co-founded his own journal and began to read the Japanese classics, becoming associated with the nationalistic literary group Bungei Bu, who believed war to be holy.
However, Mishima barely passed the medical examination for military training. He was drafted into an aircraft factory where kamikaze planes were manufactured.508
In 1944, he had his first book, Hanazakan no Mori (The Forest in Full Bloom) published,509 a considerable feat in the final year of the war, which brought him instant recognition.
While Mishima’s role in the war effort was obviously not as he would have wished, he spent the rest of his life in the post-war world attempting to fulfill his ideals of Tradition and the Samurai ethic, seeking to return Japan to what he regarded as its true character amidst the democratic era in which the ideal of “peace” is an unquestioned absolute (even though it has to be continually enforced with much military spending and localized wars).
THE WILL TO HEALTH
In 1952, Mishima, then an established literary figure, traveled to the USA. Sitting in the sun aboard ship, something he had been unable to do in his youth because of his weak lungs, Mishima resolved to match the development of his physique with that of his intellect.
His interest in the Hellenic classics took him to Greece. He wrote that, “In Greece there had been however an equilibrium between the physical body and intelligence, soma and sophia . . .” He discovered a “Will towards Health,” an adaptation of Nietzsche’s “Will to Power,” and he was to become almost as noted as a body builder as he was a writer.510
LITERARY ASSAULT
In 1966, Mishima wrote: “The goal of my life was to acquire all the various attributes of the warrior.”511 His ethos was that of the Samurai Bunburyodo-ryodo: the way of literature (Bun) and the Sword (Bu), which he sought to cultivate in equal measure, a blend of “art and action.”512 “But my heart’s yearning towards Death and Night and Blood would not be denied.” His ill-health as a youth had robbed him of what he clearly viewed as his true destiny: to have died during the War in the service of the Emperor, like so many other young Japanese. He expressed the Samurai ethos:
To keep death in mind from day to day, to focus each moment upon, inevitable death . . . the beautiful death that had earlier eluded me513 had also become possible. I was beginning to dream of my capabilities as a fighting man.514
In 1966, Mishima applied for permission to train at army camps and the following year wrote Runaway Horses, the plot of which involves Isao, a radical Rightist student and martial arts practitioner, who commits hara-kiri after fatally stabbing a businessman. Isao had been inspired by the book Shinpuren Shiwa (“The History of Shinpuren”) which recounts the Shinpuren Incident of 1877, the last stand of the Samurai when, armed only with spears and swords, they attacked an army barracks in defiance of government decrees prohibiting the carrying of swords in public and ordering the cutting off of the Samurai topknots. All but one of the Samurai survivors committed hara-kiri. Again Mishima was using literature to plot out how he envisaged his own life unfolding, and ending, against the backdrop of tradition and history.
In 1960 Mishima wrote the short story “Patriotism
,” in honor of the 1936 Ni ni Roku rebellion of army officers of the Kodo-ha faction who wished to strike at the Soviet Union in opposition to the rival Tosei-ha, who aimed to strike at Britain and other colonial powers.
The 1936 rebellion impressed itself on Mishima, as had the suicidal but symbolic defiance of the last Samurai in the Shinpuren Incident of 1877. In “Patriotism”
the hero, a young officer, commits hara-kiri, of which Mishima s
tates: “It would be difficult to imagine a more heroic sight than that of the lieutenant at this moment.”515
Mishima again wrote of the incident in his play Toka no Kiku516 Here he criticizes the Emperor for betraying the Kodo-ha officers and for renouncing his divinity after the war, which Mishima viewed as a betrayal of the war dead. Mishima combined these three works on the rebellion into a single volume called the Ni ni Roku trilogy.
Mishima comments on the Trilogy and the rebellion:
Surely some God died when the Ni ni Roku incident failed. I was only eleven at the time and felt little of it. But when the war ended, when I was twenty, a most sensitive age, I felt something of the terrible cruelty of the death of that God . . . the positive picture was my boyhood impression of the heroism of the rebel officers. Their purity, bravery, youth and death qualified them as mythical heroes; and their failures and deaths made them true heroes in this world . . .517
Mishima frequently expresses the sentiment that “failure and death”—the outcomes of both the 1877 and 1936 rebellions—made the traditionalist rebels “true heroes in this world.” This indicates that Mishima regarded not the result of an action as of significance but the purity of the action per se. This attitude goes beyond politics, which aims to achieve results, or “the art of the possible,” and enters the realm of what the Hindu would call dharma.