From Experience to Representation: Stories of Hiroshima Bombing

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From Experience to Representation Stories of
Hiroshima Bombing
"Little Boy" --the atomic bomb dropped on
Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. "Fat Man" --dropped
on Nagasaki August 9, 1945.

• Summer Flower 1947
• Human Ashes 1966
• Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

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Outline

• Introduction
• From Experience to Representation to Reader
  Response
• Hiroshima Literature
• two generations Oe vs. Mishma
• First responses
• Summer Flower (a widower for one year)
• "Human Ashes (a boy reaching puberty)
• Hiroshima mon amour a Japanese man and a French
  woman

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Trauma Texts From Experience to Representation

1. The Work of Memory (like Dream)
2. Mediation

Representation as Acting-out (re-enactment) or
Working-through (understanding and
contextualization)?
4

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Trauma Texts From Experience to Representation

• Recollection
• Experience turned to images, which then get
  accumulated in the folds of our minds, our eyes
  and urban landscape (//history as palimpses)

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Trauma Texts From Representation to Reader
Response

• Mediation
• fact selection emplotment
• dramatization, visualization
• 2. Self-Projection
• 3. Contextualization

Reader Response as Acting-out , Working-through
or Mere Consumption?
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Trauma Texts From Representation to Reader
Response

• Historical Facts
• Personal Accounts
• Personal Record
• Usually less attractive than filmic
  dramatization or news spectacles
• image fragments on the news ? for consumption or
  genuine understanding

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How do we respond to spectacles?
Image
A man stands on a roof as he awaits rescue in
heavy flooding in Taimali, south-eastern Taiwan's
Taitung county on August 8, 2009 during Typhoon
Morakot. (AFP/AFP/Getty Images)
p. 18 A Female Negro Slave with a Weight Chained
to her Ankle, from Narrative of a Five Years
Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of
Surinam 1772-77, 1796 John Stedman
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Between the Trauma Spetacles Ai-Hsin(Mustard
Seed) Childrens Home

• Equation?
• Purposeful actions in a local context

http//www.mustard.org.tw/ah_home/news.asp
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Hiroshima literature according to Kenzaburo Oe
(?????)

• First generation witness account or realistic
  descriptions of the victims
• second- generation survivors with a broader
  perspective, acknowledge clearly that Japan and
  the Japanese were partly to blame (as aggressors
  in the Pacific War, and also their invasion of
  China). (Introduction Crazy Iris)

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Kenzaburo Oe (?????) vs. Yukio Mishma (?????)
my limited knowledge

• Yukio Mishma wrote Patriotism, formed the
  Tatenokai (Shield Society), a private army
  composed primarily of young students who studied
  martial principles and physical discipline, and
  swore to protect the Emperor
• -- staged a coup to perform the suicidal rite of
  seppuku.
• Kenzaburo Oe -- The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My
  Tears Away an ill father (with a growth
  resembling mushroom/chrysanthemum) who fantasizes
  about having a coup to kill the emperor and blame
  it on the Americans

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First Reactions

• First Responses to the bombing in the two
  stories
• It came all of a sudden p. 38 p. 68-69
• lack of understanding, puzzled at not seeing
  holes 42 flame and gasoline from the sky --
  helpless 45
• losing contact with the surrounding, numbness
  (the boys terror 70, a groups numbness 73)
• Bewilderment p. 39 someone rushed in
• Senseless actions

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First Reactions

• Common signs
• Burned bodies, houses, twisted trees (40)
• First reactions
• Disgust at injuries (infected body 41 two
  injured women 45 nausea at seeing Mr. Nakayama
  71
• Wandering or escaping to the river
• First actions
• leaving the city
• some helpful, some unable to help (the shelters
  by a dispensary 49 the boys being dragged out
  of the line 83)
• Main concerns
• Search for ones family members or the teachers
  wife

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Hara Tamiki ??? (1905-1951)

• An English major familiar with Russian lit,
  wrote poems himself, too.
• Summer Flower in 1947
• The Land of Heart's Desire in 1951.
• -- A suicide note in the form of an account of
  troubled dreams recalling memories of the
  Hiroshima bombing.
• -- The author committed suicide in 1951, when
  there were rumors about the use of A-Bomb in the
  Korean war.

His works (in Japanese) http//www.aozora.gr.jp/i
ndex_pages/person293.html
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Summer Flower (1947) Human Ashes (1969)

• What are their main themes? What are the details
  that stick in your mind?
• Do you see any artistic transformation of the
  events?
• Compared with Summer Flower, does the narrator
  in Human Ashes show greater distance from, or
  better understanding of, the event?
• Why does Human Ashes take a diary form? Do you
  see other literary techniques here?

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Summer Flower (1947)

• A straightforward account of scenes witnessed by
  the author after the bomb was dropped on
  Hiroshima. The story begins with the narrator
  visiting the graves of his wife (with incense and
  flowers) and parents three days earlier, and
  concludes with a friend searching for his wife's
  remains mingled with the bones of her pupils in
  the ruins of the girls' school where she taught.
• The narrator with suicidal thought What had
  been threatening me, what had been destined to
  happen, had taken place at last. I could
  consider myself as one who survived. I have to
  keep a record of this (41).

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Summer Flower Verbal Construction of
non-verbal memories

• Central Pattern
• Plot wandering and searching (to satisfy basic
  needs), amidst the injured, broken pieces and
  corpses. ? picked up by the eldest brother (50)
• Irony the wifes grave, flower and incense as
  the only sign of beauty and grace memory of
  childhood a peaceful scene p47
• ? Images the tree 40 the ruins of his house
  The Fall of the House of Usher sounds
  voices(46-47)
• ? Images Fumihiko 51 corpses 51 (haunting
  rhythm)
• ? Ns experience 53-54

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Summer Flower Verbal Construction of
non-verbal memories (2)

• Central Pattern
• Irony Images the sight of the living green,
  true miseries began after the escape (52)
• Poem ? open ending

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Katsuzo Oda Human Ashes (1969)

• a boys experience of displacement and his
  adolescent desires Two dreams kamikaze vs.
  physical desires ? lonely 64-65
• Contrasts
• avoiding his aunt (listless, displaced), 63-64 ?
  looking for the aunt 79
• Respect for soldiers/authorities (teachers
  upperclassman) and even kamikaze (?????) the
  role of the military 64 a soldier in uniform
  kicking a student 65-66 ? Ichikawa and the other
  one 67- ? Dragonfly 69 the lieutenant Yamane
  71 the student 73 Ichikawa? P. 72 a rowdy
  student 73
• The teacher 70-71 ? the teachers wife 82

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Katsuzo Oda Human Ashes (1969)

• Contrasts
• Destruction of human bodies
• feeling his own body 73
• naked women no longer sensible or attractive
  (74)
• vs. survival of nature (84)

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Human Ashes (1969)

• Other Ironies
• People losing their mind (72 74)
• People unable to help each other p. 74 violent
  when it gets to getting food (crackers) ?
• Order and calm only apparent p. 76
• nightmare of childhood 84
• Ash-Covered bodies with oil and sweat, streams of
  blood (76) ?Human ashes (burial ritual) 84

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Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

• What is the film about?
• -- The atomic destruction of Hiroshima and the
  psychological consequences of World War II?

Director Alain Resnais  ScriptMarguerite
Duras Actors Emmanuelle Riva   Eiji
Okada
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General Introduction Background

• 1959 the beginning of French New Wave also
  the year when Godard's Breathless, Truffaut's The
  400 Blows were released.
• Resnais By 1959 Resnais had produced a lot of
  documentaries e.g. 1955 Night and Fog, which
  Godard has called a documentary on the memory of
  Auschwitz.
• After seeing the documentaries already produced
  on Hiroshima, Resnais changed his mind, asking
  Duras to write the script for him.

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General Introduction Impossibility of Historic
representation

• Reenacting the pain and horror of such events
  cannot be portrayed in a documentary manner
• such representation is possible only if it is
  mediated through human experiences of love and
  death.
• Plot -- the sexual tryst between the French
  actress, who is married, and her Japanese lover,
  an architect who is also married,

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General Introduction Structure and Plot

• But the story goes deeper as they dig up her
  past, and they have a mutual recognition.
• five panels (not labeled, as such in the film
  itself) Prologue, Night and Morning, Day, The
  Café by the River, and Epilogue.

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General Introduction Structure and Plot (2)

• five panels (not labeled, as such in the film
  itself) Prologue, Night and Morning, Day, The
  Café by the River, and Epilogue.

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Starting Questions

• What does the beginning shots of the film mean?
  And the opening sequence?
• "You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing," "I saw
  everything.... Every thing." What does she see?

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Remembering and Seeing

• Bodily memory, or enactment of ones memory.
  (bodies in sex bodies covered by atomic ashes)
• Opposed to the visualization of memories
  hospital, museum (with photos and artifacts),
  peace square, newsreel, and a film about "peace.
  
• The reconstructions were as authentic as
  possible. The films were as authentic as
  possible.
• what else can a tourist do but weep?
• I saw them. I saw the newsreel
• Like you, I Know what it is to forget. Like
  you, I forgot.

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What she sees

• Hospital with patients averting their faces,
  documentaries, Hiroshima park and museum

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Hiroshima at the present time

• The film and the parade

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Lui (Him) and Elle (Her)

• Both traumatized
• I was never younger than I was in Nevers.
• Why Nevers?
• I somehow understand that it was there that I
  almost lost you and ran the risk of never. ever
  meeting you. somehow understand that it was
  that you began to be who you are today.
• ? enactment of the past with him.

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Her traumatic moment liberation of Nevers

• Fragmentation narration driving at the central
  event He was my first love
• I couldn't find the slightest between his dead
  body and my own.

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Example from enactment to working thru

• She I think of you but I no longer speak of it
• He Madwoman!
• She Madly in love with you. My hair grows back.
  
• He Are you ashamed for them, my love?
• She You are dead. I'm too busy suffering.
  Night falls.
• I hear nothing but the sound of the scissors on
  my head. It eases the pain of your death a bit.
  Like _ I don't know how else to say Like for
  my nails... the walls... my anger. What a pain
• He And then one day. my love. your eternity
  comes to an end. A long time. They said it was
  a long time. One day I hear themthe cathedral
  bells .

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Example from enactment to working thru

• My life that goes on,
• your death that goes on.
• Its horrible! I remember you less and less
  clearly.
• (remembers the death again)? screams ? feel the
  warmth of a marble

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Forgetting the past
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Torn between the Past, the Present and future
forgetfulness
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Saying Goodbye to both the Past or the present?

• Walking thru Hiroshima, with flashbacks of
  Nevers.
• Elle I consigned you to oblivion.
• Lui Were sad about leaving each other

38
Self-Othering

• Casablanca (Hollywood film) // the woman as a
  desirable object increase the inevitable
  distance between him and her

39
The ending

• What does it mean to call each other by the name
  of their cities?

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References

• Summer Flower (in Japanese) http//www.aozora.gr
  .jp/cards/000293/files/1821_6672.html
• The Crazy iris and other stories of the atomic
  aftermath Google Books