Cross-cultural Aesthetics in a Global Context

Focus on In Praise of Shadows

". . . twentieth-century Westernization in many countries not only promised advances in literacy and standard of living but seemed to require the suppression of indigenous traditions. . . . the clash of opposites is also a set of inextricably intermingled experiences, pointing to a fuller understanding of cultural (and multicultural) identity." - Introduction, The Modern World, pp. 1579–80

"After centuries of intermingled traditions, it is difficult for any society to wrest apart fused layers of cultural identity." - Introduction, p.1595

". . . one cannot discard the cultural legacy one has inherited without in the process ending up empty. . . ." - Introduction, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, p. 2046

Japanese water vessel
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Aesthetic self-consciousness in the twentieth century

Perhaps because Japanese culture derived ultimately from Chinese and Korean influences, its artists have been unusually attuned to aesthetic concerns, eager to define that which is quintessentially Japanese in the way they live and perceive the world. The zuihitsu tradition, in which writers literally "follow the brush" and explore random thoughts, has been the vehicle for defining personal taste since the days of its first practitioners, Sei Shonagon and Yoshida Kenko. In the twentieth century, when new modes of transportation and communication made contact with other societies and cultures the norm, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's In Praise of Shadows expresses attitudes that transcend their Japanese origins and reach toward a self-awareness that is also universal in a global world. An idiosyncratic artist if ever there was one, nevertheless, when he investigates the impact that foreign cultural traditions have had on native sensibilities, Tanizaki voices a concern that many other writers in the anthology echo. Aesthetics may be taken for granted when they are broadly shared; when they collide with other ideas of utility and beauty, they become the object of scrutiny. By alerting us to the ways in which different societies manage many apparently mundane tasks, Tanizaki's essay helps us understand that everyday objects tell us a great deal about value and taste. Witty and often outrageous, he makes us look anew at our surroundings.

Technology and culture

Aesthetics and the world of the senses

Without giving it much thought, most of us understand architecture as an aesthetic statement. In Praise of Shadows constantly reminds us that "aesthetics" involves more than a theory of the beautiful. Indeed, the Greek word from which the term derives—aistheta—means "perceptible things." Tanizaki's comparison of the Gothic cathedral and the Japanese temple, for example, makes the theoretical palpable by demonstrating how the reverence in which light is held in the West and the primacy of shadow in the East take concrete form in structures that make manifest what each culture sees as sacred.

The ideal Gothic cathedral envisaged by Eugene Emmanel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79), the influential architect who helped restore many of France's Gothic masterpieces
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Japanese temple
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The aesthetic tension between native culture and imported forms

Main entrance hall and lobby of the Imperial Hotel
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Tanizaki pursues the topic of architecture, looking at its commercial as well as its religious uses. It is striking that in comparing the Imperial Hotel, built in Tokyo by Frank Lloyd Wright between 1913 and 1923, to the Miyako Hotel in Kyoto, Tanizaki prefers the work of the outsider. Traditions are uprooted not only by the invasion of an alien culture, but by the eagerness of native artists to emulate the foreign. Often, as the contrast between these two hotels suggests, greater cultural loss occurs at the hands of the local craftsmen ashamed of the old-fashioned styles than by the intrusion of the visitors who value the old precisely because it is new to them and thus exotic.

The aura and influence of common utensils

Moving from the large scale to the small, Tanizaki celebrates the dark drinking bowls of his native land (see the illustration of a water vessel at the top of this discussion). In this case, he directs his satiric comments at the habits of the foreigner, mischievously citing the porcelain toilet bowls and well-lighted bathrooms of the "Westerners, who regard the toilet as utterly unclean and avoid even the mention of it in polite conversation" (p. 2051). Here he brilliantly (if one may use the term) illuminates something fetishistic in the aesthetics of the Art Deco world that he had in mind.

Yet commentators from within the culture of the West made similar observations in the early twentieth century. Dada-Surrealist artists like Marcel Duchamp also looked critically at the design of the most common articles of everyday life, seeking to "awaken minds that had been numbed by habit" (p. 2109) and force us to think about the implications of the style of the objects that we take for granted.
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Cultural identity

Movement and dress

Bunraku puppets on the stage
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Aesthetics govern individual self-presentation in subtle ways that complement the structures and the utensils that shape our experience of the world. Tanizaki's oddly moving reflection on the self-effacing women of his mother's generation takes his metaphor of the shadows about as far as it can go. The puppets of the Bunraku theater "consist only of a head and a pair of hands . . . the very epitome of reality, for a woman of the past did indeed exist only from the collar up and the sleeves out" (p. 2063). We move as we do because of what we wear, and we wear what we wear less from personal choice than as an expression of cultural attitudes that are more powerful than our individual tastes because they are the stuff from which our tastes are made.

Confronting the other

This 1895 Japanese woodcut shows a Japanese soldier at war dreaming of home—and of an older, traditional culture that has been lost.
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More than half a century after Commodore Perry sailed into Edo Bay in 1853, forcing American trade and government contact upon Japan, Tanizaki calculates the cost imposed by the embrace of the West during the Meiji Era (1868–1912). While a fascinating hybrid art resulted from the Meiji emperor's enthusiasm for the technology and crafts of Western civilization, the wholesale importation of Western ideas devalued the work of centuries. For all its humor, In Praise of Shadows speaks for a threatened tradition with an almost truculent defensiveness that anticipates the tone of much post-colonial literature.

The resistance of the colonized

On the one hand, the colonized resent the easy complacency with which invaders attempt to uproot old customs and the aesthetics that they embodied. In Africa, China, and the Americas, witness the work of writers like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, Lu Xun and Zhang Ailing, Aimé Césaire and Lorna Goodison, the inheritors of ancient civilizations sought to balance the new with the old, to reaffirm the value of tradition even while reforming what had become decadent. By calling attention to manifestations of culture as fundamental as gestures and movements that seem instinctive but are really learned, works like Death and the King's Horseman, Love in a Fallen City, and Guinea Woman reveal the ways in which a new aesthetic may be perceived as an affront to the old.

The admiration of Western artists

On the other hand, fascination with the Other fueled the work of many of the great European artists of the twentieth century. Often, they misunderstood and sometimes patronized the art forms of Asia and Africa; but, witness the work of artists like Frank Lloyd Wright, Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, W. B. Yeats, and Bertolt Brecht, the cross-cultural exchange bred something new, a global aesthetic with a vibrancy and power of its own.
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Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel continues to fascinate, as many recent books demonstrate.
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The American Wright (like many of the most influential visual artists of Western Europe) fell in love with Japanese art and culture:

In 1905, [Wright] left the United States for the first time to spend three months in Japan. With information clearly gained in advance from books and Japanese associates, Wright systematically sought out historic shrines and gardens, Japanese art and craft. By 1916, when he sailed for Japan to spend the majority of the next six years in Tokyo building the Imperial Hotel, he was eager to accumulate not only thousands of wood block prints but screens, textiles, ceramics, printed papers, bronzes, sculptures, and rugs. Intellectually, these six years were ones of study and reflection, in which Wright found inspiration for many of the themes that would rejuvenate his works between 1925 and 1936. In Asian art, Wright discovered an aesthetic which revealed the inner geometrtic structure of nature, and which used elements of flora and fauna to symbolize a powerful and meaningful cosmology. - Kathryn Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright:America's Master Architect, pp.8–11

Condescending to the Other

Yeats's "Chinamen"

This magnificent Lapis Lazuli egg might be carved to display a scene such as that described by Yeats.
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A similar fascination emerges in the work of the Irish Yeats and the German Brecht. Yeats's late poem "Lapis Lazuli" is dedicated to Harry Clifton, who gave the poet for his seventieth birthday a gift Yeats described in a letter dated July 6, 1935, to his friend, Dorothy Wellesley:

a great piece carved by some Chinese sculptor into the semblance of a mountain with temple, trees, paths and an ascetic and pupil about to climb the mountain. Ascetic, pupil, hard stone, eternal theme of the sensual east. The heroic cry in the midst of despair. But no, I am wrong, the east has its solutions always and therefore knows nothing of tragedy. It is we, not the east, that must raise the heroic cry. - Allan Wade, Letters of W. B. Yeats, 1865–1939, p. 836

Brecht's Chinoiserie

Mei Lan-fang, the actor famous for playing female roles who was so much admired by Brecht
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In 1935, Brecht saw Chinese theater for the first time on a visit to Moscow. Although he seems to have misinterpreted much of what he saw, he was fascinated by the acting of Mei Lan-fang and appealed to it as an example of his theory of "epic theater." The Good Woman of Setzuan, given its setting and structure, offers a particularly good instance for studying Brecht's appropriation of the aesthetics of Chinese dramatic traditions.

The Chinese artist's performance often strikes the Western actor as cold. That does not mean that the Chinese theatre rejects all representation of feeling. The performer portrays incidents of utmost passion, but without his delivery becoming heated. At those points where the character portrayed is deeply excited the performer takes a lock of hair between his lips and chews it. But this is like a ritual, there is nothing eruptive about it. - Bertolt Brecht, "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting," Brecht onTheatre, p. 93.

As you study the texts in Volume F of the anthology, consider whether works of art can—or should—in the twenty-first century be read anymore as pure manifestations of untouched cultural traditions.