Communication and Violence in the Poetics of Terayama Shūji: From the Poetic to the Theatric

Abstract

This article will focus on the theory of poetics Terayama Shūji develops in Postwar Poetry: The Absence of Ulysses (Sengoshi: yurishīzu no fuzai, 1965) and Language as Violence (Bōryoku toshite no gengo, 1970). Postwar Poetry, his first theoretical writings on prose poetry, can be said to be a book about the poetic communication and “discommunication”—a wasei-eigo coinage of Tsurumi Shunsuke’s that Terayama frequently invokes—that occurs in mass communication, stemming from the conflict with print (katsuji). In this book, Terayama develops not autonomous “monologue”, but a theory of the taiwa/dialogue of poetry. However, Language as Violence contains not only the taiwa (dialogue) of his early poetics but the problem of bōryoku (violence) in his later theatrical works and theory of theater, which becomes an important theme in his body of work. Comparing with Georges Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence that he cited, I would like to examine the description of the book’s titualar violence. As I shed light on Terayama’s poetics and view of language, I will attempt to establish a connection with his plays and theory of theater.

1. Introduction

This essay will focus on the theory of poetics Terayama Shūji develops in Postwar Poetry: The Absence of Ulysses (Sengoshi: yurishīzu no fuzai, 1965) and Language as Violence (Bōryoku toshite no gengo, 1970). As I shed light on Terayama’s poetics and view of language, I will attempt to establish a connection with his plays and theory of theater. I will begin with an overview of how existing research has developed up to this point, spelling out the key questions and issues.

Existing research on Terayama’s poetics has centered on fixed form verse, which Kuji Kimiyo and Kosuge Makiko have positivistically investigated in the tanka and haiku of his early adulthood, beginning in his high school years. Regarding his prose poems, I refer to Horie Hidefumi, editor of Romii no yoben, who connects Terayama’s prose poetry to his photography in Terayama Shūji’s 1960s: An Indivisible Spirit (2020) and considers the poetics laid out in Postwar Poems: The Absence of Ulysses, arguing that the terms “dialogue” (taiwa) that appear in this work constitute an essential piece that can help us understand all of Terayama’s activities (work). According to Horie, through the speech that he enacted through books, things, and the written language during his 1960s “critique period”, Terayama founded Tenjō Sajiki and progressed toward more direct dialogue, transitioning to his “dialogue period” in the 1970s, when he began his theater practice Horie, arguing that the basis for this transition was his “dialogical spirit”.

Horie defines Terayama’s concept of dialogue as follows: “the free use of one’s own heart through all possible means, and express it oneself, adapting to the place one is in. This act of expression brings about a transformation in oneself (artwork is created as a product of this collision)”, pointing out the influence of literary critic Yamamoto Kenkichi’s essay “The art of dhialōgu (dialogue)”.1

However, as of yet, little critical attention has been given to the development of Terayama’s poetics in the wake of Postwar Poetry, or indeed to Terayama’s poetics in their own right—the sole exception being an essay by Ogura Hitoshi, “When the world sleeps, words awaken: The “words” of poet Terayama Shūji” (Hitoshi 2014), which investigates Terayama’s perspective on language but offers only a piecemeal analysis, and it is difficult to say that it genealogically theorizes his poetics. This is because while Postwar Poems, a representative work of Terayama’s poetics, may share commonalities with Language as Violence, there is an “epistemological break” (Althusser) between them. Further, regarding the connection between contemporary poetry and theater, Ogura inspects the “form debate” (yōshiki ronsō) of Ryūichi Hanajiri and Shimaoka Akira, and Terayama’s verse dramas (shigeki) as entry points into Terayama’s theatrical work, but does not touch on the contemporaneous meaning of shigeki as a genre, nor on its poetics.

As an exception, Hida Kozue’s “Terayama Shūji and radio drama: poetry and theater, the possibilities of words” (Kozue 2011) references Terayama’s verse dramas in an outline of his radio drama (broadcast verse drama) activities. Though I will not go into extensive detail here, a literary historical perspective, shigeki, from the 1950s until the end of the 1960s, was a movement in which poets wrote plays (dialogue) that aimed to surpass the poetic drama that existed in shingeki at the time. The first play that Terayama wrote, Wasureta ryōbun (Forgotten domain, a one-act play), was staged at Okuma Hall on 26 May 1956, at the 8th Midori no Shisai (Green Poetry Festival), put on by Waseda Shijinkai (Waseda Poets’ Association). The text of Wasureta ryōbun was collected alongside the verse dramas of Tanikawa Shuntarō, Ōoka Makoto, and Ibaragi Noriko in the Kai Verse Drama Collected Works (Kishida et al. 1957).

Higuchi Yoshizumi, in “‘Poetic image’, street poetry, street theater: From ‘poem’ to ‘play’—50 years since the formation of Tenjō Sajiki,” identifies the repeated appearance of genre-transcending word and image units. Higuchi calls these units shizō (poetic images), an archetypal poetry that traverses genres:

The story emerges when images are set in continuous motion in unidirectional time. Terayama attempted to step from poetry into the world of scriptwriting and radio drama and conceive of time in “poetic image”, but he was not able to create continuity in his images and kept them fractured. In these fractured “poetic images” fused together, Terayama aimed not at creating story, but play.

(Yoshizumi 2017, p. 150)

Thus, Higuchi detects a fusion of poetic image and play in Terayama’s radio drama and verse drama, and theorizes that from this fusion, Terayama leapt into play not when he merely imbued his poetry with image, but when he gave them temporal persistence.

When he was a young man exploring the dynamism of reality and fiction, aiming to find expression [kotobazukai], the measure of introducing time summoned the play into the poem. His plays from that point soon developed into street theater that dramatized the structures of society and history themselves. Nevertheless, before considering these “experiments” by Terayama as theatrical experiments, we must first confirm that that they were experiments with word and image. We now are in a place where we can recreate these experiments with new media technology, where we can see the development toward play and story inherent in his poetry (Yoshizumi 2017, p. 151).

Certainly, as Higuchi notes, it is important to consider the transition from the relationship between poem and image to play, but in thinking about Terayama’s transition from poetry to theater, it is necessary to address the fundamental question of what, in the first place, poetry was to Terayama, and carefully examine the changes in his poetry and poetics.

Considering the above, in this article, I will trace Terayama’s poetics after he began writing his prose poem poetics, through his farewell to haiku in the essay “Carné—(declaration of my severing of relations with haiku)” (December 1956), and his afterword to the poetry collection To die in the country (July 1965) in which he states that “tanka is a lonely literary form”, distancing himself from monologic fixed-form poetry (while acknowledging the importance of “loneliness”), while focusing especially upon the striking emergence of a connection between communication and media, and with attention to the violence (bōryoku) that therein emerges.

2. Communication and Mass Communication in Postwar Poetry

As is well known, Terayama made his striking debut at “Chekhov Festival”, which was announced in Tanka kenkyū, but afterwards, he vigorously dared in his expressive activities to traverse genres by writing radio dramas, movie scripts, and plays, and by producing prose poetry and verse dramas. In 1967, he founded the experimental theater workshop Tenjō Sajiki, marking the culmination of his turn toward theatrical activities. Terayama wrote Postwar Poetry precisely in this transition period from poetry to theater.

Postwar Poetry, Terayama’s first work of poetics, was published by Kinokuniya Shinsho in 1965. It was not a magazine serial printed in book form; rather, it was fashioned as a complete book from start to finish. The book is comprised of five parts: chapter 1: “The action in postwar poetry”; chapter 2: “Disillusionment as the subject of postwar poetry”; chapter 3: “The homing organizational structure of poetry circles”; chapter 4: “The starving children of parents who write poetry”; and chapter 5: “Considerations for catching a whale in the study”, with a section at the end titled “Afterword for the people who read this book in place of a poetry collection”, which collects all of the poems that Terayama cites so that they can be read as a collection of poems.

In Postwar Poetry, Terayama considers the brightness of Tanikawa Shuntarō (“Good morning poem”), described within Ōoka Makoto’s theory of poetic history Libertine Genealogy (Makoto 1969) as a “festival of sensitivity”, and the colloquial expression of the poetry of Langston Hughes, translated by Kijima Hajime, as a reaction against the pessimistic, dark poetry of Arechi poet Ayukawa Nobuo. “Good morning poem” takes an austere stance against selfish impositions and incestuous collusion (a critique of poetry circles’ society magazines and fan magazines, and the journal Kyoku); even as the poet faces the reader with “emptiness that accompanies communication” and “discommunication”—a wasei-eigo coinage of Tsurumi Shunsuke’s that Terayama frequently invokes—there is simultaneously an insistence that the poet must take on a positive, “good morning” attitude. “Discommunication” comes from Tsurumi’s “Two philosophers: The case of Dewey and the case of Kan Sueharu.”2 Tsurumi explains: “Communication has two different characters, communication and discommunication, and should be understood as ‘Communication–discommunication.’ An analysis of communication that does not at once include an analysis of the parts of that communication by which meaning is not conveyed is not complete” (Shunsuke 1991, p. 258), criticizing Dewey’s optimistic view of communication; however, the vantage point of this dual-charactered communication is also distinctive of Terayama Shūji.

When I look at a happy dōjinzasshi3, I come up against the dreadfully simple question of “for whom should I be writing?” So, if it is for “self-help” or merely for a modest camaraderie among artists (sentimental community), what is the point of printing it and distributing it to so many people? […] Is it necessary to proclaim it so? What I call “the problem of the other in dōjinzasshi” is an extremely important subject. Figuratively speaking, we inhabit the deserted island of “modernity”. We chose to be here and so it came to be. And it is our duty to report that there are humans here, alive, alone, to the people across the ocean.4

From here, Terayama develops not autonomous “monologue”, but a theory of the taiwa/dialogue of poetry. As he holds onto an admiration for the rugged flesh (“the poet’s character”) of troubadours like Ulysses, we can see through his notion of “re-presentation”5 that he is vexed by the inability of print text to make present (Terayama writes that poems in print “stand for”, but as he cites the “general semantics” popularized in S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action [1949], it is evident that he was captivated by the “map” as opposed to the “site”).

Postwar Poetry is distinctive not because it theorizes a literary appraisal of poetry; rather, it theorizes poetry from the perspective of its transmission and communication to the reader. It is at once more of a poetics approach, but also contains an aspect of mass communication and media theory. Particularly striking is the fact that Terayama points out the merits and demerits of the invention of Gutenburg’s printing press as he cites the words of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, known for opening City Lights, which published Alan Ginsburg’s Howl:

The printing press standardized “words”, was useful for the development of knowledge, and before long gave birth to “big communication.”6

Printing technologies “enabled words, which played an essential role in emotional transmission, to travel further, to reach more people”, but on the other hand, also contributed to the “standardization of ‘words’” that accompanied hyōjungo. The “big communication” of publishing strips away the nuance of words that are meant to convey the “delicate emotions” that exist within people, and the result is the danger that “everything ends up cast in a lead mold of the same size”, Terayama surmises, searching the possibilities of direct poetry and the vocal quality (nikuseisei) of words. This orientation toward printed text and voice comes through via Orality and Literacy (1982), in which Walter J. Ong identifies the harmful influences of print technologies:

Print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion. This sense affects literary creations and it affects analytic philosophical or scientific work. Before print, writing itself encouraged some sense of noetic closure. By isolating thought on a written surface, detached from any interlocutor, making utterance in this sense autonomous and indifferent to attack, writing presents utterance and thought as uninvolved with all else, somehow self-contained, complete. Print in the same way situates utterance and thought on a surface disengaged from everything else, but it also goes farther in suggesting self-containment. […] The printed text is supposed to represent the words of an author in definitive or ‘final’ form. For print is comfortable only with finality. Once a letterpress form is closed, locked up, or a photolithographic plate is made, and the sheet printed, the text does not accommodate changes (erasures, insertions) so readily as do written texts. By contrast, manuscripts, with their glosses or marginal comments (which often got worked into the text in subsequent copies) were in dialogue with the world outside their own borders. They remained closer to the give-and-take of oral expression. The readers of manuscripts are less closed off from the author, less absent, than are the readers of those writing for print.

(Ong 1982, pp. 129–30)

As is stated in the quotation above, text produced by printing is not only disconnected from dialogue (taiwa); it also creates a sense of being closed off. Terayama was already critically aware of this closed-off quality (heisasei), and the question of how to surmount it is the most prominent theme of Postwar Poetry.

Terayama describes two types of classifications of dialogues in Postwar Poetry: “internal dialogues”, collisions with the self, and “external dialogues”, collisions with the other. In Horie’s analysis of Terayama, “dialogue” does not start and end with simple talking; it is a way of being that actively incorporates questions and provocations with another.

Considering the intentionality of dialogue that exists in language, I would like to draw attention to the way Terayama’s view of language responds to the thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin, who similarly evaluates the dialogic aspect of language and literature; however, what I will highlight is Bakhtin’s critique of poetic language as monologic, and the theory that emerges within “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–1935)7 and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929) that in the novels of Dostoevsky, for the first time written language becomes polyphonic, a quality that leads Bakhtin to see the novel as the superior literary form.

Bakhtin, who believes that “every word is directed toward an answer,”8 offers the following critique of poetry: “In genres that are poetic in the narrow sense, the natural dialogization of the word is not put to artistic use, the word is sufficient unto itself and does not presume alien utterances beyond its own boundaries. Poetic style is by convention suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse, any allusion to alien discourse.”9 As Bakhtin continues, he furthers develops the idea of poetic language as a monologic, and not dialogic, form:

To take responsibility for the language of the work as a whole at all of its points as its language, to assume a full solidarity with each of the work’s aspects, tones, nuances—such is the fundamental prerequisite for poetic style. […] The poet is not able to oppose his own poetic consciousness, his own intentions to the language that he uses, for he is completely within it and therefore cannot turn it into an object to be perceived, reflected upon or related to. Language is present to him only from inside, in the work it does to effect its intention, and not from outside, in its objective specificity and boundedness.10

In his commentary for the Japanese edition, translator Itō Ichirō distills Bakhtin’s thinking on the monologic nature of poetic language; thus:

Bakhtin captures the unitary and monologic nature of poetic language as an embodiment of a centripetal force of language and centralizing thought. These are things that primarily manifest in a formulaic genre that is self-sufficiently bounded. In contrast, Bakhtin finds the embodiment of centrifugal force of language and decentralizing thought in the genre of the novel.11

Bakhtin, who identifies poetry as a bounded form, according to Itō explains the difference between both sides as “the fundamental difference between novelistic discourse and poetic language is that the linguistic consciousness that sustains the novel possesses a pluralistic coexistence of languages capable of destroying solipsism from within.”12

In Incomplete Polyphony: Bakhtin and the Russian Avant-Garde (1990), translator and Bakhtin scholar Kuwano Takashi offers the following insight by contrasting two representative “philosophers of dialogue,” Martin Buber13 and Bakhtin:

for example, in Buber’s case, God, who is “the eternal Thou”, is indispensable, and many dialogues tend to “unity” and “harmony,” while Bakhtin “dialogue” can also mean dispute, conflict, ‘decentralization,’ the negation of the identity of all things. In other words, stable identity is not confirmed through this dialogue as dispute; rather, it guides the way to circumstances of co-creation, the rediscovery of the other within the self. Only then can meaning be created between the other and the self.

(Takashi 1990, p. 13)

Further, Kuwano explains how we might understand the weight Bakhtin places on difference over agreement:

Bakhtin’s dialogue does not ultimately aim for consensus, but rather the acceptance of difference [sai], and celebration of difference, the deliberate exchange of dispute, conflict. That difference exists is essential; only when there is mutual difference—only when an “other” exists—or to be more precise, only when difference and difference come into dialogue can meaning [imi] come to be. […] When two side agree, that is, when the dialogue is over, it is almost as though everything dies. Only within boundless dialogue, only when difference and contradiction are carried on can the character [jinkaku] of a meaningful existence [yūimina sonzai] continue to be. The dialogic philosophy I ought to follow is oriented toward this endeavor of actively finding meaning in contradiction.

(Takashi 1990, pp. 13–14)

There is, however, a likeness to Terayama in the respect that this philosophy is not relativistic, seeing the mere existence of difference as sufficient, but instead finds value in the encounter between differences.

Whereas Bakhtin criticizes poetry as monologic, Terayama specifically seeks out dialogue in the expressive mode of the poem. Following Postwar Poetry, his epic poem Rikōjun14 was serialized in the magazine Gendaishi. In an essay titled “column for Rikōjun” collected in Minna wo okorasero: To offend everyone! (Shūji 1966a), Terayama explains “before I started writing, I had painted a grand image in my mind of an epic like Homer’s Odyssey. But once I actually started to write, what came out was all of this sadness and gloom. […] At first I thought it would be ‘more of an interesting epic than a novel,’ but in that regard the work was a failure.” (Shūji 1966a, p. 196). Though he himself called it a failure, in the sense that he “downgraded” the lofty form of the epic poem by representing the life of a minority figure (the titular Rikōjun, a youth born to a North Korean father and who ends up killing his own mother), this “failure” was at least to a degree by design. Yet, his later novel, Aa, kōya: Ah, Wilderness, (Shūji 1966b), is comparatively the more polyphonic text.

Terayama’s intention to seek out otherness and dialogue in poetry is apparent in the fourth chapter of Postwar Poetry, “Parents who write and their children who die starving”. To begin with, the title of the chapter is in response to a quip from Sartre in an interview published in Le Monde: “The writer must stand on the side of the two billion starving in the world today, even if means he must abandon literature to do so.”15. Having titled an included chapter title that suggests it may answer this question, Terayama writes about German author Erich Kästner’s Doktor Erich Kästners Lyrische Hausapotheke: Doctor Erich Kästner’s Lyrical Medicine Chest (Kästner 1936). About this poetry collection, written on the concept on healing the heart through poetry, Terayama sets up the question “Is poetry useful?” (shi wa yaku ni tatsu ka) and writes:

While Kästner knows that essentially poetry is not something that is useful, he uses terms like “lyrical medicine.” Thus, whatever medicine (poem) one takes out from the chest, what is written there is not something that was meant for treatment, but rather something filled with Kästner’s own sentimentality and contradictions.16

Poems are written to be useful to the person who wrote them, and they exist in order to step into a new world through the experience of writing. Yet, even if there are no “useful poems”, there is such thing as “a heart that makes use of poetry”. This is ultimately a problem for the receiver, something of a social principle meant to pull a function out from behind the poetry.17

We can discern from these descriptions the sense that Terayama opposed viewing poetry as a tool; however, they also suggest that he was conscious of questions of readers’ attitudes of reception (active involvement) and how much language approaches the existence of the reader.

In Postwar Poetry, Terayama’s awareness of the reader’s involvement in the poem is also made apparent by his inclusion of pop song lyrics as poetry (vexing as it may be that it would not be possible without the mediating agent of the singer between the songwriter and the listener). Terayama’s view of language, as we have observed it thus far, emerges amid the backdrop of his publishing a succession of well-known works—Seishun no meigen (Shūji 1968) and its revised edition, Poketto ni meigen o (Shūji 1977), Otoko no shishū (Shūji 1966c), Tabi no shishū (Shūji 1973), and Nihon dōyōshū: “Aoi me no ningyō” kara “Karajishi botan” made (Shūji 1972)—a view of language that attaches importance to the cathartic element of poetry, the language of poetry closing in on existence.

In this way, as Terayama enacted a dialogue with poets of his time through writing his poetics, his poetics intrinsically also contained a critical awareness of media and mass communication and questions of language and the other (the reader). At the same time, there is also a simplicity to Postwar Poetry, likening the back-and-forth of dialogue and communication to a game of catch. In the following section, I will examine how the issues at the heart of Postwar Poetry are taken up more radically as Terayama explores the possibilities of language in Language as Violence.

3. Language as Violence

3.1. In Relation to Sorel’s Reflections on Violence

From 1968–1969, the years that followed experimental theater company Tenjo Sajiki’s founding, “Language as Violence” was serialized in Gendaishi Techō. It was published by Shichōsha in 1970 as Language as Violence: Toward poetics at the speed of 100 kph, and then later reprinted in July 1983. The only previous research conducted about this work consists of playwright Shimizu Kunio’s rather critical review in Gendaishi Techō, “Beyond smashed and shattered plates: Terayama Shūji’s Language as Violence”, and Furuhashi Nobuyoshi’s review of the book in Kokubungaku: Research on interpretation and teaching materials. No other pieces of research can be found that focus solely on this work.

In Anglophone research, Steven C. Ridgely notes that Terayama was influenced by Georges Sorel’s theory of violence (Ridgely 2010). While deciphering the boxing novel Aa, kōya (Ah, wilderness), he states that the communication of violence is represented here. He pointed out that graffiti was incorporated into this novel and Terayama’s 1971 film Sho o suteyo machi edeyō (Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets) because Terayama was aiming for direct words rather than printed characters and evaluated the authors anonymity. Certainly, the openness of graffiti was discussed in the five chapters of Language as Violence. However, it is also important to consider the change from previous poetics and Terayama’s definition of violence, and how its function leads to subsequent theatrical activities.

Whereas the poetics of Postwar Poetry take up the actual conditions of poets contemporary to Terayama and critique (speak to) them, Language as Violence is unique in the way that it voraciously incorporates experimental film and performance, the experimental nature of jazz and methodologies of organizational structure—the actualities of media other than poetry. As such, without restricting himself to poetry as the sole form of expression, the poetics of Language as Violence expand in scope to encompass a diverse range of expressive mediums.

Before drilling down into the contents of each chapter and detailing the transformations in Terayama’s poetics, I would first like to examine the description of the book’s titular violence. The beginning of the foreword to Language as Violence touches on a boxing magazine featuring All-Japan Featherweight Champion Baby Gustillo on the cover, invoking an image of violence, which Terayama describes “the metaphysics of violence”.

As I often flipped through the pages of this magazine, I started to wonder whether I could begin to think about the metaphysics of violence. Because even if it is something underpinned by creative hatred, unmistakably it is considered to be a unique social phenomenon written into history. Of course, the violence I refer to here is not in the vein of Savinkov’s political assassination or Takakura Ken’s Abashiri revenge; nor am I interested at present in what Sorel calls violence—or general strikes. It is instead how much the possibilities of language, and indeed the violence that mediates it, awakens the nature of people. Language can be a murder weapon. But is language no more than an instrument (dōgu)? Or can language as a thing (mono), through the process of being redefined into an concept (koto), turn from a murder weapon into violence?18

In Réflexions sur la violence, Sorel posits two classifications of violence: violence, which is directed upward, and force, which is directed from above to below—in other words, authority. To put language in those terms, it feels as though print text is authority and spoken language is violence.19

These descriptions are a clear continuation of Terayama’s critique of printed text from Postwar Poetry, but this is the first time that he cites Georges Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence.

Sorel separates power into two categories: in opposition to “force” (authority, legal force), which comes down from above, what Sorel calls “violence” is not physical, but in reality “myth” used as a means to exert actual influence, the “organizing of images” (imēji no soshikika) as a strategy.

the object of force is to impose a certain social order in which the minority governs, while violence tends to the destruction of that order. The bourgeoisie have used force since the beginning of modern times, while the proletariat now reacts against the middle class and against the State by violence.20

a distinction should be drawn between the force that aims at authority, endeavouring to bring about an automatic obedience, and the violence that would smash that authority.21

Réflexions sur la violence was received favorably by camps on both extremes of the political left and right.22 If carefully read, it is clear that Sorel’s ideas about seizing authority are opposed to fascism, but it is said that the “abuse” of his ideas stems from his concept of the “sublime”, which will be subsequently discussed.

From the point of view of intellectual history, in Benjamin’s “Questions” (Imamura 1995), Imamura Hitoshi inspects the influence that Sorel’s theory of violence took from Bergson’s “affective life” and the effect that it had on Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”.

It is said that Benjamin takes up the mantle from Sorel’s opposition of force versus violence as he contrasts the “mythic violence” that establishes the law and produces authority with the “divine violence” of justice that extinguishes the violence of nation and of the law. Benjamin, however, overcomes the issue of the sublime, that proved to be a weak point for Sorel, in building his theory of Gewalt that overcomes the law.

Imamura argues that Sorel’s notion of the sublime intended to reconstruct the celibate, a diligent production-oriented ethos of capitalism, while this time charging proletariats and manufacturers as its executors. For that reason, Sorel places an emphasis on transforming the soul and humanity’s interiority, which inadvertently affirms the devotion and self-sacrifice of soldiers and the morale (here, not “moral” but rather something closer to “morale”) that accompanies the fanatic passions in conditions of combat. Without going into a long digression regarding Imamura’s analysis of Benjamin, I will note that Imamura observes in his awareness of a need to “overcome the law” and to ward off nationalism that Benjamin was able to avoid the dangers entrenched in Sorel’s thinking.

Further, according to Imamura’s commentary in the Japanese translation of Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence, “Sorel’s greatest quality lies in his coupling of the class struggle and morale,” summarizing it as follows:

A basic tenet of morale is fervent passion; the class struggle too must be guided by intense emotion. The fervent passion needed for the general strike, the soldier-like discipline that fights the class struggle, for Sorel, was equivalent to the heroic deeds of a Homeric hero in epic poetry. It is precisely the morale of the struggle (encompassing both passion and discipline) that ignites this kind of life that Sorelian violence signifies. Sorel’s concept of violence has nothing to do with ordinary violence—the power of brute force and weapons; his “violence” would be better described as “intense strength of spirit”. The stirring up of human passions, intense excitement that is almost one with heroic action, the élan vital of risking death in order to realize a goal, the excavation of morale from the traditions of heroic acts handed down by the people, and the spiritual activity and uplifting of life that refines it and, in essence, gives birth to myths in the epic sense—this is “violence.” Self-regulation is required for the practitioners of soldier’s actions and class struggle, but that self-regulation itself is another form of morale, and is also violence in the sense that it requires an investment of fervent spirit.

(Sorel 2007, p. 287)

It is quite interesting that Imamura reaches for the image of Homer and epic poetry to explain Sorel’s concept of “violence”. The “metaphysical violence” that Terayama envisages also employs this type of “intense strength of spirit” in the pursuit of the possibilities of language and attempt to appeal to people. Yet, in contrast to how Sorel aimed at the revolution of morals and the human spirit through the general strike and pursued the sublime morale that could lead to the salvation of society, Terayama did not necessarily pursue the sublime of the epic poem. To the contrary, many of the debut performances of the experimental theater workshop Tenjō Sajiki, beginning with Aomori-ken no semushi otoko (The hunchback of Aomori, 1967), which catabolizes elements of the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex and the traditional naniwabushi, features the degradation of the sublime (Bakhtin) (Yōko 2018). In this respect, Terayama sees through Sorel’s shortcoming and applies resistance against it, theorizing a violence of language from the aspect of communication. Regarding print materials as a form of top-down transmission (typeface), he poses “violent” poetry as a different manner of being for language. To return to Language as Violence, Terayama expresses a clear prescription for how he views the attitude of the poet:

In print is somewhat of a nuance of “something that is bestowed”, and there is only a unilateral angle in such a perspective. Indeed, as McLuhan and others have observed, print is pregnant with the possibility that “as a uniform character expands, it prompts the homogenization of diverse territories and is ultimately linked to nationalism”. This possibility is precisely what language affords, through the image of the power of print. I cannot believe that poets hold authority, but in the case that a poet becomes famous, that fame is clearly owed to the power of the printing press to rapidly disseminate information. We all share a media context in which the fact of fame itself is a form of authority, and for precisely that reason, we do not enjoy the same freedom with regard to language as the troubadours in the era before handwritten manuscripts. That uniformity assigns class hierarchy to language and further limits the status of speech.

Borrowing for the moment the term “defense of violence”, I believe that the poet is free to resist this fate for language through the use of language itself. This is a calling out to the very soul of humanity, buried under the ashes to “speak, through violence what will stir up the ashes and let the blaze surge forth” (Georges Sorel, “Letter to Daniel Halévy”). The conditions for violence exist only in spoken language.23

Terayama identifies the oppositional stance of language to resist the authority of print as the poet’s freedom. Still, on the other hand, the poet is naturally placed in a role that is oriented towards a reader (receiver), and in an effort to update the debate surrounding the dialogue in Postwar Poetry, I will discuss a wide range of Terayama’s writings about the relationship between poetry and “the reader”.

Poetry is an experience. There is no difference between poetry and, for instance, smoking a cigarette, chatting, the ding of the cash register when it clacks open, thickly layering Jockey Club Pomade on your head. If the sleeping words aren’t awakened, poetry will not begin. Poetry lies within even in the words written in books, but must wait for the planned adventure of the reader who flips, impromptu, through the pages, before poetry can it become. Any poem that is left inside of a closed book is dead. Poetry cannot be; it can, at any point, become. Isn’t that true, Homer? The poet installs words inside of books, and has no choice but to wait for a reader to pass by and receive them, turning them into poetry.24

Terayama regularly employs the logic that poetry does not “exist” but rather “becomes”25 and employs it as well in the context of ie [the home] and engeki [performance] in Gendai no seishunron kazokutachi/kedamonotachi (A theory of contemporary youth: Families, beasties, 1963, later retitled Iede no susume [In praise of running away from home]). A piece titled “Modern street poetry” [machi no gendaishi] in Postwar Poetry contains a moment in which Terayama states “poetry is not something that ‘is,’ but rather something that ‘becomes.’ Any word, in the state of having ‘become’ poetry, can shake the hearts of people even more than one of A. Rimbaud’s turns of phrase,”26 but this verbiage is all the more pronounced in Language as Violence. What is called “poetry” is realized not only in the poet’s (writer’s) self-righteous value system, but a phenomenon born out of the poet’s relationship with the reader (receiver).

Poetry that is conceived of from the first and completed as writing, outside of the field that establishes “the poem as a relationship,” can contain the writer–reader relationship only within the poet.27

We can understand the above as a critique of the self-containment internal to the poet. This critique also poses what should be considered a prototype of the “fashioning of another world” that is often mentioned within drama theory. Still, it is interesting that in proposing the idea of “poetry as a relationship”, Terayama is greatly influenced by other media and artworks. For instance, immediately following this passage, Terayama mentions Andy Warhol’s experimental film Chelsea Girls (1966). The “split screen” film is experimental in its use of two separate screens, onto which different images are projected; however, the two entirely unrelated videos’ audio streams are decided based upon the projectionist’s whims on the day of the screening. For that reason, this artwork cannot be evaluated based upon its degree of completion; what instead occurs is that “the film comes to be” through “the physiology of the film and the engineer and the conditions for the audience.”28 As Terayama continues, “it’s really become a superstition to say that it all comes down to a film’s production value,”29 and Terayama regards a film’s conditions as not independently determined through the film itself but rather as something that is established through its relationality with the audience.

However, through taking the composite nature of film as sōgōgeijutsu [Gesamtkunstwerk, or a “total work of art”] and giving it a partialized existence, I am intrigued by precisely the “film-like incident” that comes to be between the screen and the audience. For Andy Warhol, film was already not mono [thing], but koto [event].

[…] transforming American art that was no more than mono into koto, in its attempt to play an explosive role in America’s material civilization, I discovered the role of the image as violence.30

Affirming the event (koto) that becomes (naru) rather than the thing (mono) that is (aru), is the negation of the independent nature of poetry. Then, what becomes necessary to break through everydayness that regards things that are as self-evident, is the violence on the part of the reader, evident in the following:

Reading while running—that is to say, in the reader’s engagement with the poem, it is possible for this to be a violent approach.31

Terayama, believing that “a poem cannot just be the ‘private property’ of its writer; a poem can only come to be through the shared experience of it,”32 conceives of “a poem read while running”. Terayama continues that “the issue at the heart of ‘a poem read while running’ is not one of the reader as a substructure; it is rather an idea for the purpose of removing the class structure from the poetic space shared by poet and reader.”33 Extending the freedom of the action of reading, Terayama envisages a way to remove the class structure from the unilateral communication (authority) between the writer and the reader who receives the communication.

“There, after a violent harmony exists between them, is it not nostalgia for epic poems, in their original sense, that emerges as a subject after the damage?”34 Within the collision between the writer, or in fact the poem, and the reader, value exists in the experience that is acquired as a result. Regarding how the poem is symbolically delivered to the reader, Terayama offers the following, tracing through the history before the invention of print:

The problem is, rather, a “theory of readership”. Thinking about how poetry comes to be by means of the reader, I naturally feel a pang of nostalgia for the age of improvising poets [sokkyō shijin].35

Though Terayama writes that a relationality with the reader is born out of the recognition that “there is no independence in modern poetry,”36 it is not something that is limited to poetry. It seems he proposes that all manner of art is born within relationality.

Poetry cannot stand on its own.37 Coltrane’s jazz, Tinguely’s sculpture, Kenneth Anger’s films too cannot stand on their own. Art cannot be stand on its own—only humans can. The wish for “another world” to exist independently within a single book is, in a manner of speaking, the fantasy of a poet. Words demand flesh, books hold the opportunity of a tacit agreement with the eyes. A poem becomes independent not within language, but within the experience that bridges where the poet ends and where the reader begins.38

The poet can speak himself (jibun wo kataru), using every means at our disposal today. As a lifelong friend to words, he can even give them character. But the “means” (shudan) he chooses cannot stand on their own. And when poets, in spite of this, attempt to make poetry walk the path of independence—this is where we can say that the ruin of modern poetry began.39

In this way, whereas Postwar Poetry takes the poet as its subject, we see how Language as Violence adopts a reception theory-type perspective of the poem through its relationship to the reader. In the ensuing section, I will examine Terayama’s relational thinking about “violence” and “action” in the context of the modern poetry of his time.

3.2. The Violence (Bōryoku) and Action (Kōi) of Modern Poetry in Terayama’s Time

Soeda Kaoru, in “Literature as action: The “poetic radicalism” of the 60s, summarizes the state of poetry and poetics over the ten-year period between 1965 and 1974, proposing that it was an era “in which it was an association was theorized that to do literature was equal to taking ‘action’,” (Kaoru 2005) citing Amazawa Taijirō as a poet representative of this idea.40

Amazawa was perhaps strongly influenced by Maurice Blanchot, who wrote that “all language is violence,”41 writing in “Gengo hyōgen wo koete ‘kaku koto’ no bōryoku e” (Transcending linguistic expression, toward the violence of “writing”, 1969) that “In the establishment of writing, expressions in our world are poetry, already transcending expression, and begin to exist as resolute violence” (Amazawa 1970), which Soeda analyzes as follows:

This type of expression is symbolic in two respects. It calls into question the essence of not “what is written” [kakareta mono] but rather the act of “writing” [kaku koto], and at the same time contains the unique ethical perspective that the act of “writing” [kaku] necessarily must transcend “what is written”, or in other words, expression (text). These two points more or less express, quite characteristically, one end of the current of thought that appeared in our country’s contemporary poetry scene from the 1960s.42

Further, Soeda theorizes three reasons behind the actual violence among the poets of this era. The first is that the global influence of existential ideology made it possible for expression to incite of real action. As the second, Soeda points to stylistics (buntairon) that evaluate the actional quality of the novel style through the act of writing, rejecting the value Etō Jun places on real emotion (jikkan), detached from shishōsetsu-like action in Sakka wa kōdō suru (Jun 1959). The third is the publication of Yoshimoto Takaaki’s Gengo ni totte bi to wa nanika (Takaaki 1965).

However, as Soeda critiques Amazawa’s poetics, he cites Amazawa as an “artist who bore the mark of the [60s] era, an expressionist putting his entire existence into his expression,” seeing in Amazawa the limits and the “beginning of the virtual end of ‘literature as action’ [kōi toshite no bungaku],” and outlining the problematics of Amazawa’s approach as follows:

for the violence of writing is not merely a kind of violent expression within the topos of language; in Amazawa, it is also accompanied by a radical expression of thought, clearly entrenched in the extension of political Gewalt. To put it another way, here all of the thought expressed was only something of a nature that, by alienating the experiential basis of writing from itself, attempts to ensure only the live sense of the act of writing. For me, the leap in logic reflects something exceedingly dangerous beyond selection.43

Soeda stated that the concept of “the violence of writing” holds at its root how Amazawa actually positioned himself in the midst of the Tōdai (the University of Tokyo) student struggle, and it is as though, in fact, it sharply resonated with the foundation of his poetic works, or rather, his “work acts”[sakuhin kōi].44 As he points out, the problem with this “work action theory” is that in the vast amount of “non-work action” that follows after the “work action” has ended, it becomes impossible to find any evidence of the expression. This theory naturally could not be created without an anti-quotidian space: the real stage of the university struggle.45

As Soeda states, Amazawa was criticized by Sugaya Kikuo, Kitagawa Tōru, and the other members of Kyōku. Terayama’s violence, in contrast to that of Amazawa, was not limited to the “work act”, an action that occurs on the part of the author; rather, Terayama conceived of poetry comprised of interaction (sōgo kōi). It is due to the versatility of this conception of poetry that led him increasingly toward theatrical work.

4. From “the Poetic” toward “the Theatric”

Henceforth, I would like to examine the ideas of co-creation and collective creation that Terayama develops in chapter two “Shūdan ni yoru shi” (Poetry by Collective) and chapter three “Kijutsu sarenai shi” (Unwritten Poetry) of Language as Violence. In these chapters, Terayama writes of his “idea of ‘a single poem’ assembled by a group”.

For reading den huntsmen, who are set in their thinking that poetic thought must maintain dialogue with the interiority and stand opposed to the logic of a group, dialogue already exists in two different dimensions—“dialogue with the interior” and “dialogue with the exterior”—and it would be an incredibly reckless enterprise to attempt to grasp their simultaneity within the soul. So, for film, as a group artform, even if it leaves the impression that it is underpinned by the distant, large pieces of devotion contributed by single individuals, it doesn’t quite work that way for a poem. The conventional wisdom is that a single poem does not allow for the intervention of group logic—the division of the labor of language and totality of subject, as it were.46

We can recognize in this chapter, which makes reference to bebop jazz (improvisational performance) and beat generation poetry, Terayama’s strong interest in collective creation and improvisation, but as is evident in his suspicion toward the uniqueness and signature-like quality of individual authorship, we can also see his disavowal of poetry’s independence:

“Poetry by collective” has many different circuits. They are overflowing with passages. To capture another in words and write a poem, in other words, should make the reader aware of the definitive answer to the question “What can be done in a poem?”47

From the above, we can discern that at this point in time, Terayama valued language born amid involvement with the other and his “hope that the ‘closed in’ thinking of poetry will bring out an ‘open’ world,” more so than the completeness of the work born of a single author.

I, however, would also like to call attention the following passage by Nakai Masakazu:

In an airplane movie, there is a cut of an engineer hammering—clang claaaang—on the enormous body of a China Clipper. He calls out helloooooo and listens, waiting for the echo. His friendly expression is unforgettable. It was as if a human body had become giant, and he was listening for the sound of blood coursing through it. In this very desire to find a part of himself within the machine rest the hope of the modern human, to impel humankind to even higher heights.

Collective artwork stands on both legs of such a human, atop the emotion the flows through humanity’s depths.

(Masakazu 1981, p. 190)

By today’s standards, this short treatise, in which Nakai describes that “one of the joys of collective art is that, while individuals work devotedly on their own, it nevertheless gives the feeling of a similar species of inquisitiveness, as though are participating in a large, distant part of something greater,”48 is relatively optimistic toward mechanized civilization. Still, even prior to this essay Nakai turned his attention toward collective art in criticism and film beginning with “Iinkai no ronri” (Masakazu 1936), becoming the thinker most commonly known to have reconceptualized the ideas from the perspective of media and communication. Terayama read the collective artwork theory of the previous generation widely and is thought to have used it in formulating his own concept of collectivity.

In a previous study, Horie Hidefumi cites the 1975 conversation between Terayama and Matsuda Osamu, “Kayō/meikyūsekai no kanōsei,” emphasizing that Terayama was against the “collective monologue” of song (Shūji and Osamu 1975), but it is on the other hand his attention to this kind of collectivity and community that was necessary in his transition to theatrical work. In reality, at the end of chapter two, Terayama writes of renku (wordplay in which authors alternate writing lines of poetry in a seven-five format) that the completeness of the poetry notwithstanding, we cannot overlook the possibilities discovered in the process that brings forth one’s own words (poetry) through the medium of the words of another.

Regarding renku and communication, Horikiri Minoru has remarked that “renku are made jointly by members of a group [za], a form of synlogue [shinrōgu] (harmony).49 Speakers and listeners change places. Yet, it is not communication by direct mutual exchange, like a game of catch; rather, the position of communication flows indeterminately, like a volleyball being passed around a circle” (Minoru 2002, p. 12). Further, Hirosue Tamotsu has pointed out the following regarding the coincidence and dialogue-like quality of renku:

in the association formed between the previous line and the next, is coincidence. For the person who adds a line, the previous line is a coincidence, something that cannot be predicted until that moment. And renku is the act of seizing this coincidence as active possibility. Through being mediated by the image of an unforeseeable other, latent possibilities materialize. It resembles the liberatory relationship of being freed from subjective monologue through the form of dialogue. Only, when making use the image of the other and transforming it into a new image of one’s own, it is not an act of subordinating oneself to the other, but finding a passage to the other. Here, a relationship is forged between tensions of discontinuity and continuity that breaks through typical association.

(Tamotsu 1993, p. 198)

It is important to note that in the above, within the dialogue-like creation of renku is something close to the creation process (collective creation) that occurred in the work of Tenjo Sajiki (I will also note, to link this to the previous section, that Bakhtin scholar Kuwano Takashi contributed commentary for the end of Hirosue’s book, praising Hirosue’s theorization of dialogic creation).

In the third chapter of Language as Violence, “Unwritten Poetry”, Terayama uses performance as a reference point in exploring the possibilities of collective poetic creation. He touches on a poetry reading, “The young American poets” (Wakai amerikajin no shijintachi), held in Robert Rauschenberg’s loft on 25 May 1968. Billed as “poetic expression through mixed media” by “poets who refuse the ‘Gutenberg galaxy’”, the event featured objects described as “poem object” placed into buckets and randomly scattered around the room: old beat-up shoes, baseball caps, socks, commuter pass holders. It is said in these objects, Terayama embraced the image of the “missing person.” Though there is nothing truly new in this event, it is interesting that in the act of creating an image from that which is absent, participants become poets.

Subsequently, Terayama describes the poetry as co-creation that occurred in the performances that centered around the members of Anna Halprin’s Dancers’ Workshop. Although this workshop closely approximates the “unwritten poetry” Terayama himself had long conceptualized, Terayama critiques Halprin’s “co-creation” on the grounds that “in the end, rather than giving rise to unwritten poetry as such, it only gives off the feeling that it produces ‘an opportunity for unwritten poetry.’ This is one approach to theater.”50

I have continued to write of “poetry that speaks”, a special characteristic of unwritten poetry that gives temporality to words, but the fluidity of this time sometimes requires ascertaining the intervals between co-creation. This is exactly what I have posited only as an issue in the case of Anna Halprin, but might extend it to poetry, as a temporal issue. […] As long as poetry continues to “speak”, there exists the possibility that it will give rise to new myths. Because all manner of thought, in the end, is dramaturgy.51

Terayama practiced this type of “poetry that speaks” (hanashikakeru shi) with the plays of Tenjo Sajiki during the same period that he was writing this theory of poetics. In Sho o suteyo machi e deyō (Throw out the books, let’s hit the town, which debuted August 1968), Terayama put amateurs on stage and had them recite poetry; this format was designed to put into practice the idea of raw voice as violence. Poems such as “Iede haitein”, “Tōhoku haitein”, “Domori haitein”, and “Misutoruko no kōrasu” were read in a diverse range of voices. According to the notes of Terayama Shūji no Gikyoku 3 (Shūji 1984), the poetry reading scene was based on a poetry collection by high schoolers, Haiteen shishū, which was later recorded in the work of criticism Sho o suteyo machi e deyō (Shūji 1967). However, Terayama believed that the format of the play was overly formal, and specified that the performance should change each time, like an “annual event.” Moriyasu Toshihisa, in “The media-crossing of Sho o suteyo machi e deyō: Citation and collage”, discusses from various angles the media border-crossing practice of “Sho o suteyo machi e deyō”, which refers to a play, film, and book (Toshihisa 2017). The play of citation and collage configured by the “complex linguistic aspect” observed by Moriyasu is evident; however, the communication of poetry described herein responds to the “spiritual rally (assembly of souls)” that surfaces in chapter three of Language as Violence, that is, the mutual sympathy and co-creation between souls that occur via poetic communication.

During resisting the standardization of language, the actors attempted a multi-voiced and mutually creative play to make a “spiritual rally”. For example, it’s evidence can also be found in the unperformed play, “Hair” (Japanese version) (Terayama 1971), written by Terayama and the rock musical “Our Age Comes Riding on a Circus Elephant” (Jidai wa sākasu no zō ni notte) (Eigahyōron 1969).

In chapter four, “Language Engineering”, in contrast to poetry as an event (‘koto’ toshite no shi), Terayama theorizes the materiality of words, stemming from a critique of Niikuni Seiichi’s concrete poetry (gutaishi), and invokes H.D. Lasswell’s Power and Personality (1948) as he seeks a method for escaping the fixed form and instrumentalization of words. Terayama’s opposition to that which restricts language is visible as he states, “When language as authority begins to invade the hearts of lonely people, what it takes to stand up against it is precisely the scheme of conceptualizing ‘language as violence’”52

Finally, chapter five, “Graffitiology”, focuses on graffiti, an écriture for which “the writer is not visible.” Citing graffiti from the Latin Quarter in Paris during the May Revolution of 1968—L’imagination prend le pouvoir (“Imagination takes power!”)—Terayama finds potential in “imagination”, but also alludes to the anonymity of the capitalist and imperialist authorities, stating that “at the same time, authority is also trying to steal back imagination”. In recent years, Hideto Tsuboi has been discussing the idea of treating the street as an open book, which is set forth in Shuji Terayama’s theory of poetry, in relation to “1968” symbolized by the student movement. Of course, he points out that the actuality of the practice of guerrilla-style graffiti is fraught with difficulty in the modern era of sanitized streets. However, as Tsuboi points out, this kind of street thought is not only a practice of objecting to authority but also significantly connected to the essential aspects of Terayama’s activities that seek activism and subjectivity, as embodied in the phrase “Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets.” (Hideto 2021).

As seen in the above, poetry, a form of écriture that in Postwar Poetry brings forth dialogue, in Language as Violence, travels farther beyond the text and turns into something that is discovered in the streets and born of collectives (theatrical work). Also evident is Terayama’s interest in the substructures of media and invisible ideologies (apparatus) that exist in the production of words.

These transformations during the 1970s, in which Tenjo Sajiki was active, are linked with a magical power that transcends dialogue and chance encounters (violence). Of course, for Terayama, poetry and theater were never completely separated things, but indivisible through and through. In regarding poetry as a site of “collective creation” that goes beyond a medium that merely conveys meaning however, Terayama observes a large change in poetry.

This change in Terayama’s view of theater is probably related to two currents of contemporary avant-garde art. The first is the rise of conceptual art represented by Marcel Duchamp. In Japan, the activities of overseas avant-garde artists were actively introduced, such as John Cage’s performance and Robert Rauschenberg’s visit to Japan as art director for Merce Cunningham at the Sōgetsu Kaikan (Kagayake 2002). It goes without saying that Terayama, who was associated with the Sōgetsu culture, greedily assimilated these.

The second is the influence of ‘performance’ in avant-garde theater and the art as action that was established in the course of the revival of actor. So far, we have seen that Terayama aimed to create poetry in groups, but this kind of orientation toward collectivism was found in contemporary avant-garde theater movements by Julian Beck and Judith Marina—most notably in “Paradise Now” (1968) by The Living Theater. According to Tadashi Uchino, the purpose of this theatre company was to involve the audience in the performance process and to make them participate (Tadashi 2005, pp. 74–118). Many of the avant-garde theater companies of this era, including The Living Theater, advocated a “revolution in theater” as a resistance to Broadway’s conscientious theater, which was dominated by “poetic realism”, and created theater that was not a reproduction of the play through the democratic process of collective creation.

It seems that Terayama changed his theory of poetry in a way that was supported by the trend of the contemporary avant-garde movement.

5. Conclusions

The above analysis has focused on Terayama Shūji’s Language as Violence, considering not only the dialogue (taiwa) of his early poetics but the problem of violence (bōryoku) in his later theatrical works and theory of theater, which becomes an important theme in his body of work. Postwar Poetry, his first theoretical writings on prose poetry, can be said to be a book about the poetic communication/discommunication that occurs in mass communication, stemming from the conflict with print (katsuji).

From the context of the poetics of his contemporaries, on the end opposite Amazawa’s theory of poetic action, significant among the theories from the latter half of the 1960s, is Irisawa Yasuo’s declaration that “poetry is not expression” and Shi no kōzō ni tsuite no oboegaki: boku no “shisaku nyūmon” (Yasuo 1968), as well as Sugaya Kikuo’s Shiteki rizumu: onsūritsu ni kansuru nōto (Kikuo 1975). The move towards increasing attention to construction over the expressive content of poetry is evident in the works of this era. Terayama’s Postwar Poetry, in that sense, does not stop only at what the poetry expresses, differentiating between “closed poetry” and “open poetry” based on whether or not their communication is intentional. This kind of evaluation axis not only critiques the obstructions of the champ littéraire (Bordieu) but is a vital perspective even from a contemporary standpoint—in which people live on the “deserted island” of modern society and our shared condition is lost—because it does not silo literature and communication. It is in his awareness of such issues, in his embrace of embracing diverse media experimentation, and in the way he himself practiced poetry across numerous mediums that we find Terayama’s unique qualities.53

Subsequently, Language as Violence further develops the debate over dialogue and communication, working out a new concept of a poetry of violence that differs from authoritarian print. Oriented toward directness and dialogue, improvisation, and the creation of semi-worlds, and approaching the conceptual, momentary nature of collective creation, we can see in these aspects Terayama’s transition from the poetic to the theatric.

Although within the relationship between writer and reader Terayama conceptualized the occurrence of “poetry as phenomenon”, he would carry over this line of thinking into the theater; for instance, in the “imaginative snare”—the dramaturgy—that organized the chance encounters of Meiro to shikai (Labyrinth and Dead Sea), and in the “semi-world creation” of Zōki kōkan josetsu (Introduction to organ trading). Regarding violence, philosopher Imamura Hitoshi, in “Terayama’s theater and violence” (Imamura 1983) and “The violence of theater: The man who anticipated modern thought” (Imamura 1993), identifies the possibilities and violence held by the encounter that is at the core of Terayama’s drama, but there is yet room to investigate the connection of this idea to his poetics.

A discussion of Terayama’s communication in genres other than poetry and play can be found in Daisuke Akiyoshi’s study. He analyzed the communication of physical violence that appears in this boxing novel, Aa, kōya (Ah, wilderness), which was written at the same time as Postwar Poetry (Akiyoshi 2014). He discussed it in relation to the urban space called Shinjuku East Exit (a place that embraces “outsiders”), which has an extremely symbolic meaning. However, for Akiyoshi, as urban land readjustment progressed in the 1970s and street dramas at Tenjo Sajiki became the subject of police investigation, communication as an “act” changed to “violence” that simply conveys “pain”. He pointed out the possibility and the limits of violence in the mass consumer society. Certainly, it is true that Terayama’s plays since the 1970s have been staged mainly in Europe, and “Jashumon” (1971) where the actors touched the audience, was on the one hand highly regarded as the practice of Antonin Artaud’s dramaturgy, while it was accused of being violent on the other. Apart from the communication of physical violence, it should also be noted that the effects of magic developed from Marcel Mauss’s “A General Theory of Magic” and Artaud’s “The Theatre and Its Double” have become the core of Terayama’s theater activities instead of Sorel’s “metaphysical violence” (Shūji 1976, p. 24).

I will reserve analysis of Terayama’s early essay “Kōi to sono hokori = chimata no gendaishi to Action-Poem no mondai” (Action and the pride of it, contemporary poetry of the streets and the problem of the action poem) and critical evaluations of the imagination and violence of the experimental theater company Tenjo Sajiki as topics for a future article.