Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 4 Number 2, July 2003
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Brown,
Steven T., Theatricalities of Power: The Cultural Politics of Noh (Stanford,
Stanford University Press, 2001), ISBN: 0-8047-4070-4
Reviewed by
Steven
T. Brown’s Theatricalities of Power: The Cultural Politics of Noh adopts a
‘new historicist’ approach to the study of noh theatre. In contrast to the
dominant tendencies of western scholars, Brown is not interested in ‘reducing
noh to its theatrical conventions nor abstracting its style and poetics from its
performance materiality’ (p. 1). Rather he concentrates on noh as an example
of a ‘micropolitics of culture’ (p. 3), which, according to him, is a type
of politics grounded in ‘power relations and effects associated with
figurations of authority, gender, subjectivity, naming and patronage’ (p. 3).
Brown’s
primary intention in the Theatricalities
of Power is to trace the historical process whereby noh became
institutionalised as the official art form of Japan during the Edo period
(1603-1867). Although Brown narrates the history of this institutionalisation by
highlighting specific historical events and practices in medieval and early
modern Japan, he is also anxious to disclose the dynamic relationship between
history and performance. To this end, he is concerned to investigate the
‘history in noh’ as much as the
‘history of noh’ (p. 1). This
statement is crucial: it highlights the productive power of noh theatre, the way
in which it was used to consolidate shogunal authority and create new identities
and subject positions:
Rather
than simply mirroring the socio-political contexts in which they were performed,
I argue that these plays constituted an active, productive force in the theatre
of the medieval cultural authority [in Japan]. (p. 2)
Theatricalities
of Power
is composed of six chapters divided into three sections. Section one,
‘Theatrical Technologies of Power, Self, and Signification in Medieval
Japan’, charts the historical development by which noh theatre shed its folk
and ritualistic trappings and became the official, state-sponsored form of
entertainment. According to Brown, the key moment in this process occurred in
the late fourteenth century when the young shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu
(1358-1408), decided to patronise and financially support the Yuzaki troupe, led
by Zeami’s father Kannami. For Brown, patronage radically transformed the
aesthetics and purpose of noh because it caused practitioners to create a new,
more sophisticated form of drama that would appeal to and reflect the desires
and aspirations of the aristocracy and military elites. Thus, while there is no
explicit political agenda in the theories of noh’s great dramaturge, Zeami,
Brown concludes that his theatrical ideas are enmeshed, implicitly, in cultural
politics and material practices:
Although
Zeami never wrote in any of his treatises that the characters in noh speak
politically […] nevertheless, Zeami’s aesthetics of alterity is historically
marked by the political ambition to secure and maintain patronage from the
ruling military aristocracy upon which it depended. (pp. 31-2)
Brown
accounts for the subsequent institutionalisation of noh in Japan by referring to
Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital, the exchange mechanism whereby
cultural forms and artefacts perpetuate existing power relations via a process
of mimetic transference from one social class to another:
In
a strange turn of events, court aristocrats began to imitate the cultural
interests and practices of military aristocrats such as Yoshimitsu, insofar as
their continued survival depended to a large extent on the generosity of the
military. (p. 33)
In
the second section, ‘The Powers of Performativity’, Brown reads the
spiritual rhetoric of the noh play Aoi no
Ue as an attempt to mask harsher socio-economic realities. In Brown’s
view, the haunting of Lady Aoi, the pregnant wife of the prince Genji, by Rokujō,
his secondary wife, is neither a dramatisation of the dangers of karmic
attachment, nor an archetypal embodiment of feminine jealousy. On the contrary,
it is symptomatic of the transformation in female inheritance rights that
dispossessed and disenfranchised women during the Kamakura and Muromachi
periods. According to Brown’s micropolitical interpretation, Aoi spiritual
possession is caused by Rokujō’s anger and resentment at her economic
dispossession. Given that the play effectively demonises Rokujō, Brown
claims that Aoi no Ue is a performance
that both confronts and excuses patriarchal guilt:
Without
reducing the plot to demonise Rokujō to a full-blown conspiracy, I would
argue that the staging of jealousy in Aoi
no Ue […] was also an exorcism of the contingencies associated with the
reversal of female inheritance rights, which played an important role in the
further consolidation of Ashikaga shogunal authority and its differentiation
from imperial authority (p. 87)
The
third section of Theatricalities of Power,
‘Performativities of Power’, continues its exploration of the
‘micropolitics’ of noh theatre by showing how plays such as Ominanmeshi
and Tomoe use the tropes of female
suicide and female-to-male cross-dressing to consolidate and reproduce male
supremacy in Japan. In these chapters, performance is conceived as a way of
structuring and producing the real: it creates new identities and knowledge. Noh
theatre’s productive role is emphasised in the final chapter of the book,
‘The Hegemon as Actor’, when Brown describes how the shogun, Toyotomi
Hideyoshi, trained as a noh performer and acted in self-commissioned plays that
rhetorically displayed and cemented his prestige and authority:
The
Taikō noh plays written for Hideyoshi are […] unique in the history of
world drama by virtue of the unprecedented role played by Hideyoshi in his own
self-staging, thus blurring the boundaries between theatricality and politics to
a degree unimaginable even on the Shakespearean stage. (pp.126-7)
Theatricalities
of Power
is a well-argued and informative book offering an alternative interpretation of
noh drama. For this reason, it is to be welcomed as a valuable addition to the
study of noh theatre. However, while Brown’s scholarship is exemplary, his
investment in new historicist methods is, in my view, limiting: he says little
about - indeed he is unable to answer - a nagging question that bothered me
while reading his book: why does noh theatre continue to fascinate modern
audiences and practitioners in the East and West? To answer this a more dynamic
model of historical enquiry is needed.