William Vollmann - Kissing the Mask - Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines

Such is my resume of female Noh masks. 7Needless to say, any other book will categorize them differently. I have bypassed the higaki-no-onna , which the Kanze School occasionally employs to play the fabled Ono no Komachi; and doubtless I have committed many other errors.

“Do you have any general advice for people going to a Noh play for appreciating the beauty of a female mask?” I asked Ms. Nakamura.

“If you have an opportunity to look close up, the combination of the actor’s ability and the mask makes a change in the expression of the mask.”

“When a mask maker fails, what is the most common failure?”

“Too much engraving. Sometimes, that you can fix by painting something over it, but when it’s complete, sometimes I just don’t like the expression.”

In short, the trick was understatement.

In both Noh and Kabuki the changing of one mask for another provides critical information (for instance, a shite who first appears as an old woman returns as the young girl-ghost whom the old woman always was). In Kabuki one additionally sees the changing of wigs. Kabuki is more prop-rich in every way: Gorgeous groups of man-women arranged by color, ladies all in a row, sing to the shamisen up and down; while the warrior struts and stamps like a whitefaced devil.

Kabuki is the way that I so often write; Noh is how I would write if I were more “spiritual,” more understated or perhaps just older.

Steps to Ineffability

Zeami is not only one of the greatest artists of all time, but a brilliant and inspiring adviser to anyone who either makes art or appreciates it. Given the arcane character of Noh drama, which takes so much study merely to watch with understanding, given further that his treatises were secret documents, for the benefit of his eldest male descendants only, I find Zeami’s relevance to my own obsessions remarkable. But, after all, he sought to further one of the most profound of all artistic aims: namely, the creation of beauty.

Because the beauty he describes consists of epiphanies and ineffable accomplishments, it seems to me more universal than it probably was; and there is no doubt, as I continually remind myself, that because so much of Zeami lies beyond me (for instance, his musical theories, right down to their very technical melodic terminology), I am mis-applying him. No matter. The jungles in Rousseau’s paintings (none made from life) have been attacked as misunderstandings not only of jungles, but of basic painting technique; all the same, Rousseau’s paintings are beautiful. Accordingly, I insist on appropriating Zeami for myself, and I invite you to do likewise; because he indicates, insofar as a human can, the infinite heights of beauty. The possibilities he raises within me magnify my freedom and my ambition, now and for the rest of my life.

In the treatise “Fushikaden” (“Teachings on Style and the Flower”), he writes that a successful play of the first rank is based on an authentic source, reveals something unusual in aesthetic qualities, achieves an appropriate climax, and shows grace. To me the first requirement is inconsequential, and I will ignore it in what follows. As for the third requirement, appropriate climax, here it suffices to repeat that Zeami builds his plays out of parts which escalate the movement, song and dramatic action right up to the proper point. 1The important points here are that no aspect of artistic presentation should be ignored, and that each level of organization considered has its scaled counterparts on all the other levels.

The second matter, unusualness, is at the heart of what Zeami calls “the flower” — namely, the beauty of a Noh performance. This flower will under certain conditions be “false”; for example, an actor might through his youthful voice and appearance make a handsome impression, and complacently believe himself to be a master. (In my own epoch, the cinema’s leading ladies usually are, and the heroines of erotic centerfolds almost always are, young, or at least young-looking. Here one Japanese expression for prostitution, selling spring , is à propos.) The false flower must fade, of course, and the performer who, as an American would say, “banks on it,” will presently find his credit dwindling. Meanwhile, one of the many astonishing achievements of Noh is when a dumpy old man becomes a lovely young girl, all the while showing his swollen feet in the white tabi socks and working his Adam’s apple as he sings in his old man’s bass. No matter what his body is, the young girl lives in him! He possesses the true flower.

Zeami writes that each flower has its season, so that any flower is of itself ephemeral, like a Noh performance itself; therefore, when an actor possesses “the flower,” he owns in fact the ability to flower in the appropriate way. He “possesses all the flowers.” “Flower, charm and novelty: all three of these partake of the same essence. There is no flower that remains and whose petals do not scatter.” For just that reason, when a new flower comes into bloom, it will seem novel. And novelty is indeed the thing. A Noh actor who sets out to portray only demon roles will not possess the flower, because his demons will merely be demons; whereas an actor who can play not only demons but also women, old men and warriors will manage to impart some characteristic of one or more of these other roles to the demon role, so that his demon will unexpectedly, yet convincingly resemble “a flower blooming in the rocks.” To take a still stranger case, an actor who has over time achieved greatness by systematically excluding all impurities of technique wins the freedom to color his representation with novelty by introducing this or that impure element — a strategy which would only make the performance of a lesser actor all the more deficient.

These considerations lead me to wonder whether all beauty is somehow surprising. This is a question to which I do not have the answer. It is certainly true that when an alluring lady sweeps in, be she a woman or a man in a mask, I feel a sense of unfamiliarity; and part of my joy in gazing at the loveliness of a woman I know well is trying to determine what makes her so beautiful; I wish to solve a mystery, and so my gaze cannot be satisfied. In any event, there is no single final form for beauty; if there were, it would not be novel. Hence Zeami reminds us that “the flower does not exist as a separate entity.”

It follows that “a flower blooms by maintaining secrecy.” This is why the mirror room where the Noh actor dons costume, wig and mask is out of sight of the audience; and surely this explains why so many self-transformers, especially cross-dressers and old women, hate to be seen at their makeup. And due to this secrecy, even the principle that novelty is essential must be kept hidden. The point is to make the audience experience skilled unexpectedness . If they anticipated novelty, they would undervalue it.

We now arrive at the fourth requirement: grace. This is the quality that “stage characters such as Ladies-in-Waiting, or women of pleasure, beautiful women, or handsome men, all show alike in their form, like the various flowers in the natural world.” Grace is represented by the deportment, “dignified and mild appearance,” “refined and elegant carriage” (which must move us without being ostentatious) and “beautiful way of speaking” of the nobility. — But what is grace exactly? Zeami does not say, because his effects exist beyond words. In the treatise “Shikado” (“The True Path to the Flower”) he advises us that “roles requiring great taste and elegance come naturally from the style of women’s roles,” and he may well have grace in mind here; in any event, there are plausible if contradictory indications that for Zeami as for me, the representation of femininity is the profoundest art . In “Kakyo” (“A Mirror Held to the Flower”) he speaks of the five skills of dancing, each of which is an extension of the preceding one into greater inexpressibility. The penultimate skill, “mutuality in self-conscious movement,” which is already nearly indescribable, and then so only by extension from the three skills before it, is appropriate for male roles. The most arcane skill of all, “mutuality in movement beyond consciousness,” “produces an art beyond any mere appearances” and is, I am happy to say, proper to female roles.