Beyond the Closet: Aesthetic Creativity, Gender Ambivalence, and Queer Desire in Mori Ōgai’s Literary Fiction

Abstract

<p>Does aesthetic creativity derive from sexuality? Can sexuality be transposed into the literary artwork, not only as object of representation but also as its qualitative essence? What role do queer desire and gender ambivalence play in the creative process? These questions, I argue, lie the heart of Mori Ōgai’s (1863–1922) literary fiction, which I explore by discussing his seminal novels <em>Vita sexualis</em> (1910) and <em>Seinen</em> (Youth, 1911). <em>Vita sexualis</em> presents a male first-person narrator’s sexual autobiography, often read as the author’s own. As critics have regularly remarked, this text about desire paradoxically narrates the absence of desire, through a distanced analytical stance that seems to mirror the narrator’s frigidity. I show, for one, how this nexus between absent desire and frigid narration dramatizes representational strategies of the closet, operating through the suppression of queer desire. Ōgai’s next long novel <em>Seinen</em>, however, focuses on the strong desire of its eponymous young artist protagonist, whose feminized masculinity is presented as a sexual perversion. A key interest of the novel lies, I argue, in exploring how the desire inherent in this gender ambivalent sexuality can be transposed into a new type of aesthetic creativity informed by contemporary notions of the unconscious, hypnosis, magic, dreams, and the literary mode of historical legends and fairytales—precisely opposed to <em>Vita sexualis</em>’s frigid narratorial stance. Ōgai’s analytical nexus between sexuality and aesthetics ultimately belongs to his broader exploration of literature as a non-regulated, visceral field of experience within the epistemic context of rationalized and heteronormative modernity.</p>