Romantic Legacies

Transnational and Transdisciplinary

Contexts

Edited by Shun-liang Chao and

John Michael Corrigan
Foreword by James Engell

Josef Danhauser, Franz Liszt am Flügel phantasierend (Franz Liszt Fantasising

at the Piano), 1840. Oil on wood, 119 × 167 cm, Staatliche Mussen zu Berlin,
Germany. Public Domain.
First published 2019
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Contents

List of Figures ix
Foreword xi
Notes on Contributors xvii
Acknowledgements xxiii

Introduction: Romantic Legacies: An Incomplete Project 1

S h un - liang C h ao and J o h n M ic h ael C orrigan

Part I
Realist Romanticism 31

1 Romantic Walking and Railway Realism 33

R ac h el B ow lby

2 The Use and Abuse of Romance: Realist Revisions of

Walter Scott in England, France, and Germany 50
G eoffrey B a k er

3 Chekhov on the Meaning of Life: After Romanticism

and Nihilism 67
Y uri C orrigan

Part II
Fin-de-Siècle Romanticism 83

4 Keats Gone Wilde: Wilde’s Romantic Self-Fashioning at

the Fin de Siècle 85
Ya - F eng Wu
vi Contents
5 Delacroix, Signac, and the Aesthetic Revolution in
Fin-de-Siècle France 102
S h ao - C h ien T seng

6 Mediating Richard Wagner and Henry Bishop: Frederick

Corder and the Different Legacies of German and
English Romantic Opera 123
David C h andler

Part III
(Post)Modern Romanticism 139

7 Platonism, Its Heirs, and the Last Romantic 141

A rt h ur V ersluis

8 Vexed Meditation: Romantic Idealism in Coleridge and

Its Afterlife in Bataille and Irigaray 158
J ustin P rystas h

9 “You have to be a transparent eyeball”: Transcendental

Afterlives in Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men 175
J o h n M ic h ael C orrigan

Part IV
Environmental Romanticism 193

10 Tracing Romanticism in the Anthropocene:

An Ecocritical Reading of Ludwig Tieck’s Rune Mountain 195
C aroline S c h aumann

11 The Eye of the Earth: Nonhuman Vision from Blake to

Contemporary Ecocriticism 213
S op h ie L aniel - M usitelli

12 “Indistinctness is my forte”: Turner, Ruskin, and the

Climate of Art 233
C armen C asaliggi
 Contents  vii
Part V
Oriental Romanticism 249

13 ReOrienting Romanticism: The Legacy of Indian

Romantic Poetry in English 251
S teve C lar k

14 Grafting German Romanticism onto the Chinese

Revolution: Goethe, Guo Morou, and the Pursuit of
Self-Transcendence 270
J o h annes D. Kamins k i

15 Two Chinese Wordsworths: The Reception of

Wordsworth in Twentieth-Century China 287
Ou Li

16 “The world must be made Romantic”: The Sentimental

Grotesque in Tetsuya Ishida’s “Self-Portraits of Others” 304
S h un - liang C h ao

Index 329
16 “The world must be made
Romantic”
The Sentimental Grotesque in
Tetsuya Ishida’s “Self-Portraits
of Others”1
Shun-liang Chao

Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1994, 45)

[R]omantic [is that] which presents a sentimental theme in a fantastic

form.
—Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry (1968a, 98)

In this chapter, I argue that the incongruous body of the self-portraits

by Tetsuya Ishida (石田徹也, 1973–2005) is a modern form of the gro-
tesque growing out of a German Romantic notion of humour that values
sympathetic inclusion and fantastic amalgamation. Romantic humour,
vital to Romantic ethics, is rooted in love, one form of which is self-­
mockery that drives audiences to extract the general from the particular.
By age 26, Ishida (2013), a prize-winning painter whose works have
been exhibited worldwide, had already declared his will to predicate his
self-portraits on redemptive self-mockery (267): he fashioned himself as
those plagued by the ills of Japanese modernity in order to embody their
“psychical wounds” (精神的外傷) (Ejiri 2013, 5) through the grotesque
degradation of the artist himself.
During his ten-year career as a painter, Ishida composed nearly 200
paintings, set during the Lost Two Decades (1991–2010) of economic
depression and dubbed “self-portraits of others” (他人の自画像) (Horikiri
2010, 8). Ishida’s paintings feature a chagrined self-portrait—frequently
as a salaryman or a secondary school student—that is merged comically
with rusty machines or everyday objects into a hybrid, 2 a grotesque vi-
olation of the human body that symbolises the unequal battle between
the self and the mechanised society that engulfs it. The two identities
are socially significant: salarymen are the bedrock of Japan’s economy
and school students the promise of Japan’s future. An untitled painting
of 1997 (Figure 16.1), for instance, evinces the grimness of Japanese
work culture that “working to the point of exhaustion is regarded as
 “The world must be made Romantic”  305
a virtue and proof of one’s indispensability” (Tipton 2008, 228). Here
Ishida portrays himself as a drained salaryman fused into a worn down
lifebuoy on a stretcher that, ironically, is waiting to be saved, a short
step away from karōshi (literally, overwork death), a social issue that has
become alarming since the 1970s and that, as we shall see, is symptom-
atic of the Japanese culture of collectivism and conformity. Likewise,
in another untitled painting of 1997 (Figure 16.2), Ishida mulls over
the brutality of the “exam hell” (juken jigoku) that has turned students
into spoon-fed yet tortured exam machines: he casts himself as several
students who sit an entrance exam apprehensively with their left hands
turning into sewing machines that fill in optical answer sheets. In these
two self-portraits, as well as others we shall see, Ishida degrades or de-
preciates himself grotesquely so as to unveil the inhuman toll on individ-
uals in modern Japan.
During the Lost Two Decades, Ishida was devoted to healing the social
ego crushed and caged by the inhuman forces of capitalist modernity:
economic recession, institutional violence, and intense urbanisation. He
thereby joined Japanese avant-garde artists in the 1990s in challenging
“the legacy of [prewar] imperial policies” (Mason 2005, 346) devised to
turn Japan into the first industrialised country outside the West. These
artists sustained the cultural critique of modernity in the 1930s and
1940s, one that Meiji Japan (1868–1912) built by adopting Bismarckian
“iron-like political control and cold efficiency” to enhance the Confu-
cian supremacy of the state over individuals (Nagai 1971, 76). Intellec-
tual groups, including the Japan Romantic School (Nihon Rōmanha),
revolted against Western utilitarianism while calling for a revival of

Figure 16.1  Tetsuya Ishida, Untitled, 1997. Acrylic on board, 103.0 × 145.6 cm.
Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).
306  Shun-liang Chao

Figure 16.2  Tetsuya Ishida, Untitled, 1997. Acrylic on board, 182.0 × 91.0 cm.
The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan. ©Tetsuya
Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

folk culture that Meiji bureaucratism smothered. Western Romanticism,

Löwy and Sayre stress (2001), emerged as “a reaction against the way
of life in capitalist societies” within capitalist modernity itself (19), and
this self-criticism is also true of the School. Founded in 1935, the School
sought to reinstate “a native aesthetic sensibility” as the foundation of an
ideal society to come (Najinta and Harootunian 1988, 755) by following
Frühromantik to advocate an aesthetic education as the key to socio-­
political reform, to overcoming modernity (Doak 1994, xxxv–xxxvii;
 “The world must be made Romantic”  307
Beiser 2003, 47–50). During the Second World War, however, the School
lost its critical edge when its pursuit of sublimity was appropriated by
Imperial Japan as part of its militarist discourse (Ohnuki-Tierney 2002,
267). After the fall of the Japanese Empire, the wheel of Japanese moder-
nity did not stop turning. As postwar Japan implemented American capi-
talism to drive its economy to become the world’s second largest by 1968,
the School, stripped of its militarist potential, has been restored since the
mid-1960s as “a moral basis for individual action in a world where poli-
tics seemed totally corrupt and devoid of any possibility for shaping new,
critical responses to the threat of modernity” (Doak 1994, 150).
In line with this shaping of an ethical subject, Ishida (2013) intended
his paintings to inspire moral action against the onslaught of industrial
capitalism: “I am strongly drawn to saint-like artists, those who truly
believe that ‘the world is saved a little with each brushstroke,’ who ‘can
hear the pain of all humankind in the face of a sheep’” (265). Amongst his
“saint-like artists” are Ben Shahn (1898–1969), Anselm Kiefer (1945–),
and Franz Kafka (1883–1924), the last two of whom were heavily in-
fluenced by German Romanticism. Ishida valorised the works of Kiefer
(249), a German Neo-Expressionist painter who followed in the foot-
steps of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and employed art to explore
his individual psyche and the collective psyche of Germany (Rosenthal
1987, 14, 17). More importantly, Ishida’s “favorite novelist” was Kafka
(Hanawa 2010, 127), who regarded Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811)
as an artistic relative perhaps because of Kleist’s “Michael Kohlhaas”
(1810), a novella which tells the story of a man who stands up to bu-
reaucracy and unfairness only to be cruelly treated and punished horri-
bly. In his novels like The Metamorphosis and The Trial, Kafka shares
Kleist’s Romantic desire to “overcome the polar divisions of existence”
in modern civil society (Grandin 1987, 15, 93) and his Romantic belief
that “without love of human beings there is no possible [true] happiness”
(quoted in Fink 2014, 40).
As we shall see, Ishida’s ethical project, while in line with the legacy
of the Japan Romantic School, goes one step further by taking on board
self-mockery, a type of humour central to German Romantic ethics. In
the following pages, I shall first elucidate the nature of Romantic ethics
formulated by early Romantics and picked up by Kafka, and then move
on to illuminate how Ishida’s grotesque self-portraits figure a confined
world that, as Novalis (1997, 60) would say, “must be made Romantic.”

A Romantic Bildung of Love: The Sentimental, the

Grotesque, the Humorous
Love lies at the heart of Romantic ethics, whose goal is to liberate hu-
mankind from the cage of capitalist realism and restore holistic human-
ity. In Dialogue on Poetry (Gespräch über die Poesie, 1800), Friedrich
308  Shun-liang Chao
Schlegel (1772–1829), the ringleader of Frühromantik, grounds Roman-
tic ethics on sentimentality: “The source and soul of all [sentimental]
emotions is love, and the spirit of love must hover everywhere invisibly
visible in romantic poetry” (1968a, 99). By “romantic poetry,” Schlegel
refers to all creative activities, including the sciences, in that Frühroman-
tik seeks to educate (bilden) “all human powers into a whole,” a holistic
ideal that exists perfectly in ancient Greece but vanishes with the advent
of modern society (Beiser 2003, 19, 22): “render poetry living and so-
cial, and life and society poetic, poetize wit, fill and saturate the forms
of art . . . with vibrations of humor,” Schlegel (1968a, 140) writes in the
Athenäum (1798–1800) (see also Novalis 2007, 8).
To foster holistic humanity, Schlegel and his fellow Romantics aligned
themselves with the pre-Romantic Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), who
aimed to aestheticise feeling and thereby satisfy our “play drive” (Spiel-
trieb)3 —an exercise of creativity that Jean Paul Richter (or Jean Paul,
1763–1825) later described as “the first poetry of the human being” (1891,
152) in his treatise on early childhood education and thus paved the way
for Freud (1959) to advocate children’s play. In Schiller (1993), such satis-
faction will optimally coordinate our sensual pleasure and moral duty to
turn us into “a complete being” (125–127, 144), one that does not yield
to the primacy of (Kant’s) rational morality and fall prey to the “fragmen-
tary specialization of human powers” (103): “Everlastingly chained to a
single little fragment of the whole, man himself develops into nothing but
a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel
that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being” (100).
Unlike Schiller, though, the early Romantics celebrated the aesthetic
Bildung of love as the antidote to “the divisive wounds” (or weltschmerz
or le mal du siècle) that capitalist modernity had inflicted on human-
kind: self-alienation, social alienation, and the alienation of the self from
nature (Beiser 2003, 30–33). Like Schlegel, Novalis (1772–1801) had
in mind the spirit of love, “the unum of the universe,” when urging hu-
mankind to Romanticise, or re-enchant, the world: “The world must be
made Romantic” so as to render it all-embracing again (1997, 122, 60).
To Romanticise the world is to cultivate a loving heart with which we
sensuously and spiritually experience the world without and within us,
thereby realising the ideal and idealising the real4:

[W]e can rediscover its [the world’s] lost beauty, mystery, and
magic—only if we see all things in the spirit of love. It is through
love that we see ourselves in nature and others, and so again identify
with the world and become at home with it once more.
(Beiser 2003, 104; see also Nassar 2014, 67–70)

Schlegel granted art the cardinal role in the Bildung of love. For him,
crucial to Romantic art are three intertwined elements—the sentimental,
 “The world must be made Romantic”  309
the grotesque, and the humorous—each of which symbolises the Ro-
mantic striving (Sehnsucht) for the combination of disparate realms into
a whole, for all-inclusiveness. In Dialogue on Poetry, Schlegel (1968a)
puts forth these three elements in the section on the novel (Roman)—a
literary genre that, derived from medieval romances, inspired him to
coin the adjective romantisch—when defending Richter’s humorous
novels against the criticism that they are “a colorful hodgepodge of
sickly wit” and that they are “sentimental” (95, 98). 5 Responding to the
first criticism, Schlegel connects “a colorful hodgepodge of sickly wit”
to the “grotesque,” saluting the “grotesques” of Richter’s novels as “the
only romantic productions of our unromantic age” (95). By “grotesque,”
a term he interchanges with “arabesque,” Schlegel refers to the style Ra-
phael adopted to decorate the Vatican Loggia in the 1510s (99), a style
that, established as early as 100 BC, features hybrid images of human,
animal, and vegetal forms (Dacos 1969, 8).6
Schlegel finds it necessary to “cultivate [bilden] in ourselves this
sense for the grotesque and remain in this mood” (1968a, 97; 1968b,
332). For one thing, the composite form of the grotesque encapsulates
the Romantic persistent pursuit of all-inclusiveness. With its unfinished
metamorphosis of one bodily form into another, the grotesque body is
forever in the state of “becoming” as is “Romantic poetry,” “a progres-
sive universal poetry” (Schlegel 1968a, 140–141). “Romantic poetry” is
“universal” because it never stops embracing manifold forms and ele-
ments (be they literary or not); it is “progressive” due to its self-reflexive,
self-critical, and even self-annihilating nature (Dahlstrom 2014, 123).
“One can,” as Schlegel (1971) writes elsewhere, “only become a phi-
losopher, not be one. As soon as one thinks one is a philosopher, one
stops becoming one” (167). For another, Schlegel deems the grotesque
an imaginative “form” so “witty” as to “nourish the play of our inner
makeup [­Bildung]” (1996a, 96; 1996b, 330), an echo of Schiller’s Spiel-
trieb. For Schlegel (1971), wit, or coincidentia oppositorum, is “the out-
ward lightening bolt of the imagination” (243) and finds a happy habitat
for itself in the grotesque, whose coalition of disparate items provides a
richest loam for new associations to grow. While endorsing the “divine
wit” in the Romantic imagination of Cervantes and, notably, Shake-
speare, Schlegel justifies the “sickly wit” in the imagination of Laurence
Sterne and Richter as the natural product of the “sickly environment”
of their time (1968a, 97). Between them, Schlegel continues, Richter’s
“imagination is far more sickly, and therefore far more eccentric and
fantastic” such that “his [German] sentimentality” eclipses Stern’s “En-
glish sensibility” (97).7
This comparison leads us to Schlegel’s response to the second disap-
proval of Richter’s novels as being “sentimental.” In Schlegel (1968a),
sentimentality, whose marrow is love, underpins the cultivation of
wit (100)—or, as Novalis called it, “the menstruum universale”
310  Shun-liang Chao
(1971c, 32)—since nothing is more powerful than love in integrating
incongruities, in piercing into the affinities, however occult, between
things apparently unlike and distant. We can, therefore, infer that by
“fantastic” Schlegel may well mean “witty” when proclaiming “roman-
tic [is that] which presents a sentimental theme in a fantastic form”: the
fantastic, or witty, form could be literally grotesque by commingling
human and inhuman parts into aesthetic hybrids or figuratively gro-
tesque by coalescing imaginatively remote realms into aesthetic entities.
Both serve to invest the theme of moral beauty with humour to delight
our imagination with something higher and ideal: “Humor,” as Schlegel
once put it, “is the wit of sentiment” (1971, 195).
In School for Aesthetics (Vorschule der Äesthetik, 1804), Richter
(1973) goes one step further than Schlegel by equating “romantic”
with “humorous” (90). Richter anchors humour in cosmopolitan be-
nevolence that “recognizes no individual foolishness, no fools, but only
folly and a mad world . . . because before infinity everything is equal”
(88–89).8 Within this “world-humor” (88), individual folly, like Uncle
Toby’s mock-military campaigns in Sterne’s 1759 Tristram Shandy, rep-
resents “the allegory of all human hobbyhorses” (89). Richter goes on
to differentiate between the true humourist and the “cold persifleur” (or
“­pseudo-humorist”) according to compassion. While the latter is “self-
ishly aware of his own superiority,” the former, “rich in feeling,” bears
the image of Christ because “he cannot deny his own kinship with hu-
manity” (91, 95):

The humorist . . . would almost rather take individual folly into

protection, while taking the constable of pillory together with all
the spectators into custody; it is not civic folly but human folly, the
universal that touches him within.
(89)9

For Richter (1973, 96), this “noble spirit” of the true humourist mani-
fests itself paradigmatically in Shakespeare’s self-parody “when he uses
the humorous Falstaff as commentator of his wild life of sin!” Richter
himself used comical characters in his novels like the one-legged Jean
Paul and the timid and paranoid Schmelzle to parody his own hypo-
chondria (1883, 353; 1898, 176). In short, the true humourist wounds
nobody but himself to impel audiences to induce the universal from indi-
vidual follies and foibles, to measure out the small against the great. His
self-victimisation or self-annihilation is thus “a lex inversa”: “its descent
to hell paves its way for an ascent to heaven” (Richter 1973, 91–92; see
also Vieweg 2013).
Richter’s “world-humor,” typical of his novels, took nineteenth-­
century Europe by storm: apart from Schlegel, his admirers include
German-speaking authors like E. T. A. Hoffman, Heine, and Gottfried
 “The world must be made Romantic”  311
Keller, French authors like Nerval, Hugo, Baudelaire, and Flaubert
(Fleming 2006, 9–12), and British authors like Coleridge, De Quincey,
and Thomas Carlyle (Tave 1960, 237–243). Carlyle best portrayed Rich-
ter as a sui generis humourist. In line with Schlegel’s plaudit of Rich-
ter’s sentimentality, Carlyle (1847) stressed that no writers had ventured
more deeply than Richter into the heart of humour, where “warm, ten-
der fellow-feeling with all forms of existence” triumphs (15–17). In his
novels, Richter shows a colossal intellectual faculty of “piercing into the
most hidden combination of things” because he “feels, imagines, acts as
a humorist” (14).
In the twentieth century, within the borders of the German-speaking
world alone, writers like Herman Hesse and Paul Celan revealed their
debt to Richter (Fleming 2006, 10). Kafka did not list Richter amongst
his “‘blood relatives,’ namely, Dickens, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Flau-
bert, and Kleist” (Grandin 1987, 15). Nevertheless, Kafka, as mentioned
before, shared Kleist’s Romantic faith in the love of humankind, a faith
that could link Richter to Kafka if we parallel the Richterian lex inversa
to Kafka’s celebration of humility: “Humility provides everyone, even
him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fel-
low man” (1954, 52). Central to his autobiographical allegories like The
Metamorphosis, A Hunger Artist, and The Burrow, humility is realised
in common with the rest of humanity: “You can hold yourself back,”
Kafka (1954) paradoxically wrote, “from the sufferings of the world,
this is something you are free to do . . . , but perhaps precisely this
holding back is the only suffering that you might be able to avoid” (51).
In, say, The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1915), Kafka abases
himself by turning his doppelgänger Gregor Samsa halfway into a gi-
gantic vermin so as to take into custody a mad world where commuters
are estranged by their work from themselves, their families, and their
society. In Kafka’s self-portrayal, as well as in Ishida’s we shall see, the
sentimental grotesque body is a site not of self-pity but of self-mockery
which connects the artist intimately to his fellow human beings.

“I tried to turn my feeble self into something

one could laugh at”
Sentimental humour, albeit not espoused by the Japan Romantic School,
does find its niche in Japanese intellectual discourse in general. From the
1890s onwards, sentimental humour, in tune with Buddhist compassion,
began to figure conspicuously in the formulation of J­ apanese humour
when European ideas of humour—alongside the debate on its ethical
nature—became “a matter of consuming interest in ­Japan” (Wells 1997,
59, 67–68, 110).10 For example, Japan’s leading modern novelist Nat-
sume Sōseki, who taught English literature at T ­ okyo Imperial University
after studying at University College London in 1900–1902, maintained
312  Shun-liang Chao
in 1907 that “derision and abuse are not true humour; and it is the work
that has deep sympathy within its humour that is first rate” (quoted
in Wells 1997, 95) while deploring the dearth of true humour in Meiji
Japan.
Along this line, in A Study of Humour in Literature (1917), the first
major Japanese work on humour, Naruse Mukyoku, a professor of
the Sturm und Drang at Kyoto Imperial University and founder of the
Goethe-Gesellschaft in Japan (1931–), examines Japanese humorous lit-
erature by referring to the ideas of humour and literary works by Shake-
speare, Molière, G. E. Lessing, Goethe, Richter, Keller, amongst others
(Wells 1997, 110–111). While lamenting that “warm, bright laughter”
is barren not only in literature but in daily life in Japan due to the stress
of modern life, Mukyoku hails Keller as “the great humourist [fumori-
suto] since Shakespeare and Goethe” because his laughter “harbours the
laughter of the gods” (quoted in Wells 1997, 112). It seems far-fetched
to ascribe the paucity of warm humour to the ills of modernity, but
Mukyoku cleared the path for subsequent critics and writers to grant hu-
mour an ethical role in cultivating the collective psychology of Japanese
society. For instance, Honda Kenshō, a Shakespearean, advocates what
he calls “deep humour” over satirical and obscene humour in his “Hu-
mour in Contemporary Literature,” one of the 25 essays published in
1938 (one year after the Second Sino-Japanese War started) that accom-
pany the first Japanese translation of Henri Bergon’s Le Rire (Laughter,
1900). Kenshō considers “deep humour” so favourably as to conjure up
Richter’s distinction between the true humourist and the “cold persi-
fleur”; he advocates “deep humour” as “laughing with tears,” “born
of a warm heart,” and “a deep love of human beings” while claiming
that deep humour is scanty in Japanese literature because the Japanese
“are basically lacking” (Wells 1997, 133–135). The call for sentimental
humour became even more vociferous in postwar Japan when “common
humanity seemed more urgent than it had been in times past” (145) and
when society as a whole was inundated with the excessive hunt for eco-
nomic growth (147).
Ishida, I suggest, picked up where the Japan Romantic School had
left off by taking on board this interest in the function of sentimental
humour to reform modern Japan. The self-mockery in his self-portraits
exemplifies the Richterian lex inversa: if Japanese ethics, as Ruth Bene-
dict (2005) notes, is dominated not by (internal) guilt but by (external)
shame (haji), or the fear of “being openly ridiculed” (223), then Ishida
does not shrink at all from ridiculing himself publicly to provide himself
“with the strongest relationship to his fellow man” (in Kafka’s terms).11
Self-mockery or self-humiliation, of course, is not necessarily sentimen-
tal in the Romantic sense unless it drives audiences to derive the general
from the individual, to challenge or, better still, change the absurd life-
world practices they share. This all-embracing quality is what renders
 “The world must be made Romantic”  313
self-mockery sentimental or, as Simon Critchley (2002) might say, “re-
demptive or messianic” (16).
At the age of 26, Ishida (2013) wrote of the rationale for his redemp-
tive self-mockery in his journal as follows:

At first [the paintings] were close to a self-portrait. Through gags

and humour, I tried to turn my feeble self into something one could
laugh at [弱い自分をギャグやユーモアで笑えるものにしようとした]. . . . As
I continued in this process, I myself began to expand as consumers,
urban dwellers, workers, and the social problems that I felt became a
consciousness of them. I could strongly feel the pain, suffering, anx-
iety, and loneliness of other people. I wanted to digest these feelings
inside myself and find a way to express them.
(267)

By expressing the pain of others, Ishida empowered his “feeble self” to

move beyond self-pity and used in his self-portraits the grotesque body
as a sharp instrument to burrow deep into the wreck of modern life in
Japan. Ishida’s grotesque body, as Novalis (1997, 26–27) would say, is
quintessentially Romantic in that it is born of an inward gaze on the self
that opens a window for an active outward gaze on the external world
that in turn penetrates into the internal world of the artist himself.
Strategically, Ishida invited his fellow Japanese to laugh with him at
his incongruous body, whose grotesqueness epitomised the sickness of
modern Japan that also tortured them. The laughter was thus elicited
with tears. Indeed, Ishida intended his self-mockery to be redemptive
and inclusive. For he did not shy away from shaming himself even when
dealing with terrorist incidents like the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas
attack, perpetrated by members of Aum Shinrikyo, that injured nearly
6,000 people. Their mentality, Ishida (2013, 257) noted, quashed the
deeply entrenched belief the Japanese generally had held that they could
understand one another without saying a word. Rather than simply sati-
rising Shoko Asahara, the founder of the doomsday cult, as caricaturists
would do, Ishida in The Visitor of 1999 (Figure 16.3), as Richter would
say, does not recognise individual folly but a mad world by portray-
ing himself as Asahara with lacklustre eyes within a nautilus to make
viewers comically yet painfully aware of a shared everyday practice that
underlies this atrocity: the rupture of the social bond between individ-
uals in Tokyo due to urbanisation. This self-portrait shows a grotesque
creature at the door of a flat typically designed for singles or nuclear
families during the strong economic growth in postwar Japan, a type
of housing that contributed to the isolation of residents from their com-
munity. Recalling early modern European nautilus cups whose motifs
are frequently grotesque, the nautilus here serves as a witty metaphor
for isolation since, as a living creature, it tends to avoid human contact
314  Shun-liang Chao

 etsuya Ishida, The Visitor, 1999. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 45.5 ×
Figure 16.3  T
53.0 cm. Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

(Zuroski 2017). In this self-portrait, as well as others we shall see, Ishida

sacrifices himself to call on Japanese viewers to face and reform the ab-
surd situations in which they find themselves. His self-sacrifice, as Nova-
lis (1997) would say, “is the source of all humiliation, as also on the
contrary it is the foundation of all true exaltation” (27).
To understand better the moral function of the grotesque body in Ishi-
da’s self-portraits to exalt or redeem modern Japan, we have to look into
the nature of the modern grotesque. In his seminal book The Grotesque
in Art and Literature (1957), Wolfgang Kayser (1981) explains that the
grotesque arises from the sudden intrusion of abysmal, infernal forces
into our familiar world such that it “ceases to be reliable, and we feel
that we would be unable to live in this changed world. The grotesque
instils fear of life rather than fear of death” (185). Taking a cue from
Kayser, Bernard Mc Elroy (1989) argues that the source of the modern
grotesque is “internal, not infernal” because the modern grotesque finds
its source in the aberrations of individual psychic life—such as shame,
guilt, fear, and paranoid—which result from the persecution of the self
by an alien, inimical environment (21). In the modern world, wherein
inhuman, amorphous forces on every hand entrap and engulf individ-
uals, the grotesque violation of the body symbolises the unequal battle
between the self and the brutal other. Such a violation is used by artists
to unmask the protagonist’s view of the external world, thereby under-
mining the viewer’s or reader’s “desire to live in such a world, shocking
his sensibility, [and] reversing conventional values” (29). Characteristic
 “The world must be made Romantic”  315
of the modern grotesque are Kafka’s novels such as The Metamorphosis
in which humans are animalistic, not merely to lay bare the fundamental
monstrosity beneath urban life but also to embody Samsa’s paranoiac
fear of being unloved and humiliated by the dominant authority (whose
archetype is his father).
Ishida’s debt to Kafka is prominent in his self-portraits. Specific ref-
erences to Samsa can be found in four of his self-portraits of 1995 and
1996 featuring a lonely young salaryman turning into a half-human,
half-bug creature. Restless Dream of 1996 (Figure 16.4) particularly re-
minds us of the sentimental scene in which Samsa crawls laboriously
through the junk heap his family creates in his room: “after such excur-
sions, he would once again remain motionless for hours, sad and tired

 etsuya Ishida, Restless Dream, 1996. Acrylic on board, 145.6 ×

Figure 16.4  T
103.0 cm. Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).
316  Shun-liang Chao
to death” (Kafka 2009, 64). In Restless Dream, looking aside with a
shameful glance, a young salesman transforms halfway into a gigantic
cockroach wearing a muddy suit; he rummages through a large rubbish
bin with his left hand while holding an opened can of coffee, his comfort
drink, in his right hand. The rubbish bin serves as a witty metaphor for
the crumbling of Japan after its bubble economy burst and its stock mar-
ket slumped in 1991. In Restless Dream, Ishida again openly ridicules
himself, this time by identifying with a cockroach as his doppelgänger to
communicate the weariness and distress of drifting without dignity from
one place to another in order to make a living when the end of night-
marish economic stagnation is nowhere in sight. Ishida’s self-portraits
are Kafkaesque inasmuch as they lay bare the absurdity of modern life
through the surreal distortion of physical integrity by the dehumanising
forces of an atomised and mechanised world.
Economic recession is the first aspect of capitalist modernity Ishida
engaged with in his presentation of Kafkaesque Japan. He frequently
represented his body mixed with rusty and dysfunctional objects or ma-
chines, especially those with mobility, to symbolise the imprisonment or
persecution of individuals by economic meltdown: the loss of job or ca-
reer prospect. After the economic bubble burst, firms and factories had
to slash payrolls to cut costs, a restructuring that hit not only junior staff,
like the salaryman in Restless Dreams, but also core staff and university
graduates. Many middle managers were sacked, and unemployment for
them meant “not only the loss of income, but also social and psycholog-
ical humiliation” (Tipton 2008, 226). In Section Chief’s Chair inside
an Out-of-Commission Building (1996), Ishida expresses the gnawing
shame by creating an ironic contrast between a well-dressed salaryman
and the rundown office that encloses him: Ishida victimises nobody but
himself as a section chief who transforms halfway into a rusty office
chair and sits despairingly in a corner—the rusty chair metonymically
referring to the firm that has gone bankrupt and metaphorically to the
section chief’s loss of dignity.
When the economic environment in Japan was shrouded in stagna-
tion, companies could not afford to hire new blood to replace sacked
middle managers. Full-time permanent jobs were therefore no longer a
norm: university graduates were either unemployed or hired part-time.
Thus began the so-called “employment ice age,” roughly 1993–2005
(the years after 2000 have been called “super ice age”). Graduating
from the university in 1996 and immediately exposed to such dramatic
changes, Ishida embodied on his canvases his empathetic concern for the
younger generation. A great example is Debris of 2004 (Figure 16.5),
whose background are a house under construction and a woman ly-
ing face downwards and foreground seems a car accident where a car
and a couple all turn upside down, a scene that suggests the collapse
of ­middle-class families under the sway of economic depression. At the
 “The world must be made Romantic”  317

 etsuya Ishida, Debris, 2004. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 45.5 ×

Figure 16.5  T
53.0 cm. Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

centre of this painting lies a grotesque figure—a composite of Ishida and

a wheelbarrow—that has a face “whereupon the worm of suffering,” to
quote Richter (1884) on sympathy, “was ploughing its tortuous track”
(158). Once a part-time construction worker, Ishida amalgamated his
dirt-stained body with a heavily weathered wheelbarrow forsaken in a
construction site to incorporate the angst and agony of temporary work-
ers who lived in constant fear of being cast off by their companies.
Economic recession, however traumatic, is only a shallow cut in the
skin of modern Japan, a confined society which, for Ishida, has deeper
wounds inflicted by other brutal forces: institutional violence and in-
tense urbanisation. To begin with, institutional violence often takes the
form of conformity and obedience, qualities that are highly valorised in
Japan. We have seen Ishida’s sentimental reflection on karōshi, a tragic
consequence of Japan’s overwork culture. Drawer of 1996 (Figure 16.6)
is another painting in which Ishida lays bare the debilitating and suffo-
cating working environment. Here Ishida portrays himself as a young
salaryman who, sitting disquietly in his office, seems to be forced to
bury his own self—that appears incomplete in a coffin-like drawer—by
his senior behind him who makes a fist with his left hand. The four
vehicle models in this self-portrait could symbolise career mobility, an
upward movement which would not happen unless the young man sub-
mits to his senior. Likewise, on the desk sits a beverage can branded with
“Peace,” which may intimate that peace in his office would be possible
318  Shun-liang Chao

 etsuya Ishida, Drawer, 1996. Acrylic on canvas, 59.4 × 42.0 cm.

Figure 16.6  T
Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan. ©Tetsuya Ishida
(TETSU Inc.).

only if the young man succumbs to his senior (or that the young man
wishes his own self to rest in peace). Noticeably, Ishida makes the face of
the authority figure invisible to suggest the omnipresence of institutional
violence.
Institutional violence exists, of course, not only in the workplace but
at schools. If modern schooling, as Kafka once stated, is “to erase all
trace of peculiarity” inherent in every human being, then Japanese ed-
ucation, in Ishida’s experience, would be the prime example of intellec-
tual homogenisation. In Awakening of 1998 (Figure 16.7), for example,
Ishida takes on the role of secondary school students who sit in a class-
room with the same poker face and vacant eyes while a teacher whose
face is invisible (as in Drawer) stands autocratically by one of them with
a textbook in his hand. None of these students seems to show interest
 “The world must be made Romantic”  319

Figure 16.7  Tetsuya Ishida, Awakening, 1998. Acrylic on board, 145.6 × 206.0
(103.2 × 2) cm. Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan.
©­Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

in the textbook before them; moreover, two of them metamorphose into

human-size microscopes except for their faces, a witty use of the optical
instrument to expose the failure of Japanese students to see the forest for
the trees. Ishida thereby awakens Japanese viewers to the shared relent-
less agony of the authoritarian educational system that strips students of
grand vision and intellectual autonomy and turns them into exam ma-
chines such as those in the 1997 untitled painting (Figure 16.2). Worse
still, these microscope-men, in Interview of 1998 (Figure 16.8), become
executives in a company interviewing Ishida as a university graduate
who looks very worried and shamed, presumably due to the high pres-
sure of conformity and obedience the microscope-interviewers place on
him. His face appears in concave mirrors, bespeaking that his obedi-
ence to authority will be closely examined once he is admitted into their
company.
Japanese students, the future of the country, are therefore enmeshed
in the vicious circle occasioned by slavish adherence to textbooks and
authority. Prisoner of 1999 (Figure 16.9) shows Ishida’s remitting worry
about Japanese education. This painting presents a gigantic Ishida com-
ically embedded into an elementary school building under a sunlit sky
where ominous clouds are sailing to the centre to dominate the horizon,
an inauspicious scene that forebodes the future afflictions of Japanese
schoolchildren. Here Ishida, the prisoner, looks pensively at the school-
children wearing sports uniforms on the playground as if to warn them
320  Shun-liang Chao

Figure 16.8  Tetsuya Ishida, Interview, 1998. Acrylic on board, 103.0 × 145.6
cm. Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

Figure 16.9  Tetsuya Ishida, Prisoner, 1999. Acrylic on board, 103.0 × 145.6 cm.
Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

of the inhibiting education that is nurturing or indeed imprisoning them.

Even more stifling is the other Prisoner, published in the same year, in
which once again Ishida coalesces himself into a school building, but
 “The world must be made Romantic”  321
this time the prisoner with sadder eyes submerges his mouth into the
building to suggest the absolute compliance with authority while an ele-
mentary school girl (representing lost freedom and innocence?) seems to
try to interact with him.
Boxlike structures, as seen in Drawer and Prisoner, constantly ap-
pear throughout Ishida’s paintings as a symbol of spiritual imprison-
ment (Horikiri 2010, 7). Imprisonment, though, is not just metaphorical
but a persistent lived reality in Japan, one of the world’s most densely
urbanised countries. A prime example is the commuting in Tokyo, which
foments a heightened sense of claustrophobia on a daily basis. Cargo of
1997 (Figure 16.10) stages a familiar everyday scene of contortion in
the Tokyo underground—that which the German photographer Michael
Wolf termed “Tokyo Compression” for his project starting in 1995.
Commuters in Tokyo, known as commuter slaves, have to spend each day
commuting on trains which are so claustrophobic that passengers have
trouble breathing and sometimes faint. Behind the tormenting scene lies
an even more harrowing truth which Ishida requested Japanese viewers
to face through the incisively humorous image of cargo-commuters (red-
olent of Samsa as a nomadic commuter): modern workers are alienated,
becoming ultimately a commodity, a piece of freight transported from
place to place for the benefit of their firms—which may well sack them in
times of financial crisis. People become things, an inhuman phenomenon
which the Romantics would protest against as the grossest violation of
ethics itself.
Urban living could stimulate claustrophobia as well as agoraphobia,
as in the phenomenon of “shakaiteki hikikomori” (“social withdrawal”),

 etsuya Ishida, Cargo, 1997. Acrylic on board, 103.0 × 145.6 cm.

Figure 16.10  T
Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).
322  Shun-liang Chao
or “hikikomori.”12 The term was first coined in 1988 by Saitō Tamaki
(2013, 24), a Japanese psychiatrist, to describe a problematic mental
state “that involves cooping oneself up in one’s own home and not par-
ticipating in society for six months or longer.” This problem, which of-
ten started out as a fear of school, was found most commonly in the
youth back then (but has spread to older generations and other urban
societies since then), and gradually became so worrying that in 2003 the
Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in Japan published a 141-page
white paper on how to respond to hikikomori. As early as 1995, one year
before graduating from university, Ishida was aware of the issue of social
isolation that struck the younger generation (Horikiri 2010, 7–8). The
lonely figure in many of his self-portraits can be regarded as his consis-
tent concern for the issue.
Amongst them, Long Distance of 1999 (Figure 16.11) and Body Flu-
ids of 2004 (Figure 16.12) are arguably most poignantly humorous. The

 etsuya Ishida, Long Distance, 1999. Acrylic on board, 206.0 ×

Figure 16.11  T
145.6 cm. Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).
 “The world must be made Romantic”  323

Figure 16.12  Tetsuya Ishida, Body Fluids, 2004. Acrylic and oil on canvas,
45.5 × 53.0 cm. Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

first painting presents a sad-looking Ishida as a cross between a human

and a seahorse floating inside a pay phone booth in the middle of no-
where at night. This confined floating man-seahorse can be seen as a
hikikomori victim who finds the distance from himself to society far too
long to overcome; or broadly, as a diasporic figure who longs for a sense
of belonging in a megacity so crowded that people are physically close
and yet psychologically distant from one another, an issue Ishida reflects
upon also in The Visitor (Figure 16.3). No less agoraphobic is the figure
in the second painting, published one year before Ishida died, that shows
an enclosure within an enclosure; it depicts a white washbasin by a win-
dow whose tap is the head of Ishida, who is shedding tears to fill up the
basin in which lives some kind of crustacean, a mysterious creature that
perhaps acts as a metaphor for the ambiguous psychology of hikikomori.
In these two self-portraits, Ishida again grotesquely mortifies himself to
take into protection the hikikomori seinen (“withdrawn young men”),
the prey of urbanisation, whose lives are curtained by “shame and con-
flict”: they are ashamed of being unable to have a proper job and torn
between the self that takes pity on their failure to fit into society and the
self that condemns their failure (Hiroshi 2017).
Kafka (1954) once stated in the spirit of Romantic ethics: “We too
must suffer all the suffering around us . . . Just as the child develops
through all the stages of life into old age and to death . . . , so also we
develop (no less deeply bound up with mankind than with ourselves)
324  Shun-liang Chao
through all the sufferings of this world” (51). With his “self-portraits of
others,” Ishida suffers all the suffering around him by fashioning himself
as a salaryman, a student, a labourer, or a hikikomori seinen in order to
develop himself and his Japanese viewers into ethical subjects to Roman-
ticise modern Japan. In so doing, Ishida involves himself in the ethical
legacy of the Japan Romantic School while going one step further by
engaging with Romantic humour. He endows the grotesque body with
sentimental humour in Richter’s sense: he mocks or humiliates him-
self to awaken the sensible soul of the viewer to the depths of human
suffering and unhappiness in modern Japan. In fact, his self-portraits,
albeit highly Japanese, can readily resonate beyond Japanese culture
with viewers of various cultural backgrounds who have been devastated
or dehumanised by the collapse of a bubble economy, the compulsion
of institutional conformity, or the rapid pace of urbanisation. For his
self-portraits give them courage and intelligence to see themselves in his
grotesque body and educate themselves better to perceive and receive
what it means to be human, to be Romantic.

Notes
1 This article results from a research project funded in 2016–2018 by the Minis-
try of Science and Technology in Taiwan. I would like to express my immense
gratitude to James Engell (Harvard), Earl Jackson, Jr (NCTU), John Corrigan
(NCCU), and Johannes Kaminsky (Vienna) for reading various drafts.
2 Ishida’s self-portraits are often considered Surrealist; they do not, however,
aim at a state of cheerful anarchy, the ultimate goal of Surrealism (see Chao
2019).
3 For an account of Schiller’s impact on French Romantic art, see Chapter 5 in
this volume.
4 Charles Larmore (1996, 8) deems this intertwining of imagination and real-
ity as the true nature of what he calls the “creative-responsive imagination”
of Romanticism.
5 Schlegel (1968a) attends to the novel because the genre, debuting in the eigh-
teenth century, is distinctly “modern” and because it synthesises all previ-
ous genres, epic, dramatic, lyrical, philosophical, musical, historical, and so
forth (101–102; see also Firchow 1971, 19–20): his autobiographical roman
à clef, Lucinde (1799), is a playful practice of such a novelistic potpourri,
and so is the early Romantic Ludwig Tieck’s Rue Mountain (Der Runen-
berg, 1804) (see Chapter 10 in this volume).
6 In “The Preface to Cromwell” (“La Préface de Cromwell,” 1827), a manifesto
of French Romanticism, Victor Hugo (1968) considers the grotesque vital to
the creation of drama, “the complete poetry” (“la poésie complète”) (71).
7 Echoing Schlegel, Thomas De Quincey (2000) wrote in 1821 that, second
only to Shakespeare, Richter outperforms Sterne in showing “the interpene-
tration of the humorous and the pathetic” (22).
8 Similarly, Richter (1891) explained in 1807 why the love of (little) animals
functions to educate children into moral beings:
Little animals must be brought nearer to the eye and heart by means of a
magnifying glass. Thus we may become friends of the denizens of a leaf.
 “The world must be made Romantic”  325
The prejudice which values life by the yard—why, then, are not elephants
and whales ranked higher than ourselves?—disappears by the contem-
plation of the infinity which is the same in every living creature.
(345)
9 This quality characterises several humourists in Richter’s novels, the first
of whom is Doctor Fenk in The Invisible Lodge (Die unsichtbare Loge,
1793), who is popular in the novel due to “the quicksilver of humor which
shines out from him side by side with the warmth of his heart” (Richter
1883, 207).
10 As early as the Muromachi period (c. 1336–1573), elements of sentimental
humour could be rarely found in kyōgen, a comic relief performed as part of
nō plays (Wells and Davis 2006, 143–144). Also, self-deprecating jokes con-
tributed peripherally to the humour of the Edo period (1603–1868) (Hibbett
2002, 24, 28).
11 In the history of self-portraiture, Ishida’s self-mockery can be linked to
“mock-heroic self-portraits,” a sub-genre that emerged in sixteenth-century
Europe with a Biblical rationale that “‘he that humbleth himself shall be
exalted’ (Luke 14:11)” (Hall 2014, 107).
1
2 I owe this thread to Yūko Hasagawa (2014).

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