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the way he describes the peninsula in his essay resembles the way Faulkner describes Yok-
napatawpha in his texts. Nakagami, Kishu: Ki no Kuni, Ne no Kuni Monogatari (Kishu: A Tale
of the Land of Trees, Land of Roots) (Tokyo: Shogakkan-Bunko, 1999), 12. For the impor-
tance of community and rumors for Nakagami, see also Nakagami, Faulkner s Impact (in
Japanese), Nakagami Kenji Essei Senshu: Bungaku, Geino Hen (Tokyo: Kobunsha21, 2002),
214 16.
26. See note 9. Timewise, the liberation of the Burakumin approximately parallels with
that of African Americans in the U.S.A.
27. Karekinada (Tokyo: Kawadeshobo Shinsha, 1985), 106.
28. Misaki in Nakagami Kenji Zenshu 3 (Tokyo: Shueisha, 1995), 167 242. Misaki is trans-
lated into English in The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Getto, trans. with a
preface and afterword by Eve Zimmerman (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 1999).
29. See Michiko Yoshida, Kenji Nakagami as Faulkner s Rebellious Heir, Faulkner, His
Contemporaries, and His Posterity, ed. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz (Tübingen: Francke, 1993),
350 60; Mats Karlsson, Nakagami and Faulkner, The Kumano Saga of Nakagami Kenji
(Edsbruk: Akademitryck AB, 2001), 60 74; Yuji Kato, The Luxuriating South, William
Faulkner, and Gabriel García Márquez: Voices, Narrations, and the Place of Existence, The
Faulkner Journal of Japan (May 1999); 24 August 2006, www.isc.senshu-u.ac.jp/~thb0559/
fjournal.htm; Anne McKnight, Crypticism, or Nakagami Kenji s Transplanted Faulkner:
Plants, Saga and Sabetsu, Kato paradoxically sees the original absence of the Father in the
texts of Faulkner and Nakagami through Sutpen and Ryuzo. His reading can be partly sup-
ported by Nina Cornyetz who points out gendered ambivalences both in Nakagami s Roji
and the male characters. Cornyetz, Dangerous Women, Deadly Words: Phallic Fantasy and
Modernity in Three Japanese Writers (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 219. Also
see Faulkner and Kenji Nakagami, Symposium (in Japanese), Akira Asada, Seiko Ito, Mats
Karlsson, Kojin Karatani, Shuji Takazawa, Fumiaki Noya, and Naomi Watanabe, Waseda
Bungaku 28 (November 2003), 4 39.
30. Chi no Hate, Shijo no Toki (Tokyo: Shincho-Bunko, 2004), 38.
134 takako tanaka
31. Nakagami, Fukei no Muko e, Monogatari no Keifu (Beyond Landscapes: A Genealogy
of the Narrative) (Tokyo: Kodansha Bungei-Bunko, 2004). See Yoshida, 350 51, for a tight,
condensed explication of Nakagami s argument here.
32. Nakagami, Hammo suru Minami, first published in Subaru 7 (August 1985), re-
printed in Nakagami Kenji Essei Senshu: Bungaku, Geino Hen, 203 10; translated into En-
glish as Faulkner: The Luxuriating South, Faulkner: After the Nobel Prize, 326 36. With
an artist s intuition, Nakagami sensed the importance of the dynamic imagery of the South,
which means not only the American South but also the South of any place, and saw the com-
mon background between his hometown Shingu city in the southeast of the Kishu peninsula
and Faulkner s Jefferson.
33. One of Nakagami s novels that deal with nomadic characters, Izoku (The Tribe) (To-
kyo: Shogakkan-Bunko, 1991), is unfinished, though he started writing it in 1984 and con-
tinued publishing parts of the text until 1991.
Artificial Women, the Pygmalion Paradigm,
and Faulkner s Gordon in Mosquitoes
Mario Materassi
The account of a comically ill-fated three-day excursion on Lake Pontchar-
train involving more than a dozen intellectuals, artists, hangers-on, and
members of the New Orleans underworld, Mosquitoes is largely a roman à
clef. Most of the characters are thinly disguised portraits of people whom
Faulkner had come to know during his formative sojourn in New Orleans
from 1925 to 1926. This motley coterie is treated with pervasive irony that
often turns the various likenesses into downright caricatures. Not even
Gordon, the aloof sculptor who stands out from the crowd of futile profes-
sional conversationalists on board the Nausikaa, is spared this treatment.
The present paper, however, is not concerned with the question of Mos-
quitoes as a roman à clef. As a premise to the discussion that will follow,
it is nevertheless important to bear in mind that Gordon is usually under-
stood to be a combination of the writer s self-portrait and a likeness of the
artist William Spratling, Faulkner s friend and roommate in New Orleans
as well as his collaborator in the joint venture of Salmagundi, the slim vol-
ume of graphic and prose caricatures of French Quarter characters.1 At the
beginning of the novel, Gordon is presented as the only real artist, totally
devoted to his work, given to creativity rather than to talking about crea-
tivity, and ready to sacrifice everything to his calling.2 The opening scene,
which focuses on the gruff sculptor besieged by the annoying socialites
who come to visit his studio, forcefully defines this opposition: the stern
upholder of artistic integrity on the one hand and, on the other, the frivo-
lous, sterile representatives of intellectual superficiality. Thus, notwith-
standing his description as the stereotypically unkempt artist lacking in so-
cial grace, Gordon is immediately imprinted in the reader s mind as the
novel s positive pole, in emblematic contrast to the negative pole of mun-
dane, parasitic society.
This paper synthesizes a nearly 100-page chapter focused on Gordon
and the Pygmalion paradigm in my latest book-length study of Faulkner;
the chapter, in turn, is the development of a suggestion I made elsewhere
that Gordon may owe something to Démétrios, the protagonist of Pierre
Louÿs immensely popular novel Aphrodite, moeurs antiques, published in
1896.3 This earlier, passing suggestion was prompted by the observation
135
136 mari o materassi
that, at the beginning of Mosquitoes, Gordon makes a declaration that ap-
pears, strikingly, to encapsulate Démétrios s attitude towards women. That
his words also appear to be an echo of a passage in Maupassant s Notre
coeur further strengthens paradigmatic affinities.4 As Gordon s pronounce-
ment constitutes the starting point of the present discussion, it will be use-
ful to quote it here.
Before his routinely admiring visitors, Gordon thus introduces his marble
torso: This is my feminine ideal: a virgin with no legs to leave me, no arms
to hold me, no head to talk to me. 5 At first these shocking words can be
perceived in the light of the traditional stance of an artist intending to épater
le bourgeois, or, to shock the Yahoos. Progressively, however, they reveal
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