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

Or again, understated clothing and breast forms sometimes protect the male bodies of transgender women from being recognized. 1Is this treachery or something else?

A transgender woman writes: “The one thing that women share is that we are all perceived as women and treated accordingly… the most important differences between women and men in our society are the different meanings that we place onto one another’s bodies.” — Since a Noh woman is more likely than not to be a man, what gender does that make her? The brilliant black zebra-stripes of a Kabuki geisha’s kimono, the delicious clatter of her clogs upon the wooden stage, they titillate my belief — in what? And since I who watch the performance and am allured, knowing all the while that between her legs she has what I have, does that mean simply, as I used to believe, that the mask, costume, acting and choreography achieve — as of course they do — such artistic perfection that their beauty itself allures me? What is her story or any other to me at all?

In Mr. Otsuka’s studio, orange-cinnabar pigment gets softened with oyster shell into a flesh-blush on a Noh mask for “Dojoji.” Is that understatement or actuality?

Actuality reifies itself within those Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic figurines which archaeologists jocularly call “Venuses”: faceless, grossly breasted and buttocked, incised with what deserves to be called by that frank Anglo-Saxon word, a cunt ; what is hidden here, what understated? — Only the individuality of any woman. — My intimacy with my own body, and with the bodies of women I have loved, allows me to feel an instant comprehension of these stylized miniatures, which must in part be spurious, since their context is conjectural, their fecundity idealized, sometimes beyond the final extremes of human femininity; all the same, there is no longer any wall between me and the garden; the cunt is here . The slit between Venus’s thighs is as bright as the lips upon a geisha’s white-painted face. Miekakure and iki are in the eye of the beholder; I could for instance project my longings upon the Venuses’ haunting facelessness; but there is a sharp distinction, nearly an opposition, between a Venus and Yuya. It is the same distinction that one can make between Proust and Kawabata, David and Rothko, laws and mores, exposition and suggestion.

The American fashion magazines of my time create their own partial Venuses. Their approach is to employ something vibrant, often gaudy, new , more often than not unsubdued, hence, so Mr. Otsuka would say, “shallow.” — Is it or isn’t it? Is a Venus-slit vulgar or revelatory? — Only you can say. In any event, here is Allure magazine: “In punchy shades of purple, green and blue, eyeliner shifts out of neutral and into high gear.” The reason that Allure ’s projection of femininity remains not entirely Venusian is that, after all the glaring lipstick and dramatic eyeshadow, the skin itself remains; and what woman does not wish to conceal her pores, lines and blemishes beneath a curtain of mist? Yukiko spent most of her effort with me attempting to achieve precisely this objective on my face. — Chun’e’s autumn hills would still look pretty without the mist; my face would not. Keats’s famous assertion that truth equals beauty is valid only some of the time. — The onnagata conceals his hands, the Noh actor masks himself, the geisha whitens her face, for much the same reason. Sometimes the wall conceals a garden’s blightedness — another reason that disenfranchisement may be cause for gratitude.

But when I start down this path, I remember with pain the man who declined to see unpainted geishas because “I don’t want to know their tricks; I don’t want to know their sad stories.” 2Understatement is evil when it facilitates our dismissal of the suffering of those who are beautiful. To take pleasure in the bound feet of a Chinese concubine might have been permissible; why make her feel that her years of agony had been in vain? But to take pleasure without respecting that agony, never!

On the Noh stage, Matsukaze and her sister-ghost Murasame mime dipping sea-brine, gracefully. “Although they are peasants,” a scholar writes, “they embody the refinement of a centuries-old courtly aesthetic…” And so our gaze is pleased. How would it be if they truly had to dip brine all their lives and afterward?

Mist lies on the autumn hills. That can mean so many things.

An Apology

And because understatement is so enigmatic a quantity (understating even itself), I propose to seek it in ever widening hunting-swathes, beginning in ancient Scandinavia.

The Beauty of Valkyries

The genius of the sagas and Eddas lies almost entirely in their action. Feminine beauty is represented not, as in English poetry, through comparison and description, nor, as in Noh, through a controlled neutrality of stylized demeanor; in both of those cases, Beauty dances before us as a reified Subject; whereas in Norse poetry and prose, Beauty reveals herself through her effects on her objects. My Anglo-American heritage happens to be expository, and from this point of view, both Japanese and Norse wordcraft is understated, all the more so to me since I can evaluate them only through the smoked glass of translation. This befits my situation. An astronomer dares to gaze upon the sun only through a filter of almost leaden opacity. And in The Saga of the Volsungs we find this sentence: “They saw a large band of shield-maidens,” meaning Valkyries; “it was like looking into a fire.” Great beauty can be unbearable to look upon.

HER MAGICAL WHITE ARMS

Begin with the most fundamental and alien of all Norse literary artifacts, the Elder Edda . This group of poems stands richer by far in descriptions of men, battles, weather and ships than of women. Consider the Lay of Volund, whose eponymous hero marries a Valkyrie; it is on her restlessness that the action turns. Who is she? Well, we are informed that she comes of “fair southron maids.” What constitutes her hold on him? After all, “for the white-armed woman he waited long.” We learn nothing else about her appearance, but this whiteness of her arms gets mentioned twice. Her beauty is less directly manifested by means of the loveliness of the seven hundred ornaments he forges in hopes of winning her home; these in turn express their own irresistibility through the misfortunes they cause: Volund will be kidnapped and maimed for their sake.

Taking all the Elder Eddas together, the lovely Norsewoman, 1and presumably her various supernatural sisters, is slender, and snow-white or sun-bright like a sword. Indeed, it is through her whiteness that she is most often reified. Why might that be so? The white-painted figure on a Greek terra cotta vessel is somebody dead. The white-skinned Scandinavian lady, I suppose, has simply avoided outdoor labor. At any rate, in this category her fair brow and breast get singled out, as does her neck. Surprisingly, her eyes and lips never get described at all. (In erotic ukiyo-e prints the revealed bodies of women tend to be whiter than the pinkish-beige bodies of the men who are penetrating them. In American fashion magazines, the advertisements often depict a woman with very very white skin, white teeth, eyes of muted brilliance — for instance, bluish-grey — hair which does not unduly contrast with the skin — blonde, or reddish, or very pale brunette — but then red, red lips!) She is ornamented with gold or silver — very likely arm-rings such as Volund made. She may wear a blue shirt, or a brooch. Contradicting a twentieth-century “zoologist’s portrait, celebrating women as they appear in the real world,” which asserts that “the arms are the least erotic part of the female body,” her most notable claim to beauty is her arms, for in the Eddas they receive more frequent mention — eleven times in total 2— than any other feminine attribute. Usually (seven times) the female arm is simply white, twice it is soft, once shining and once gleaming. This last, which occurs in “Skírnismál,” renders eerie praise to the giant-maiden Gerth, whose “arms did gleam,” so that “their glamor filled all the sea and the air.” (In the Younger Edda’s retelling, “when she lifted her arms and opened the door…, light was shed from her arms over both sea and sky, and all worlds were made bright by her.”) The kiss takes a prominent place in my own culture’s erotic and romantic narratives, and this must be one reason why Hollywood actresses (like geishas) so often accentuate the redness and moistness of their lips. I suppose that the embrace plays an equivalent role in Eddic poetry; hence the female arm’s irresistible powers of beguilement. Odin himself warns: “In a witch’s arms beware of sleeping, / linking thy limbs with hers” because she will bewitch a man into isolation and sorrow. The same point gets made in the Lay of Svipdag, which is essentially a love tale. The glamor of its heroine, Mengloth, gets expressed most of all by the eerie journey required to claim her, with the necessity to call up the hero’s dead mother in her grave for protective witchcraft, the wall of flame around the heroine, then the happy outcome, like a jewel of gold glowing all the more in darkness. Like Volund’s wife, Mengloth is twice described as soft-armed. As for the hero’s stepmother who forced him to undertake the adventure, how did she gain her ability to rule him? This anti-heroine, who is evidently as dangerous as the ghost of a Christian woman, is presented to us as “the crafty woman / in her arms who folded my father.” It is as if the father were helpless.