Winged Visions: James Joyce, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, and the Anti- Künstlerroman

abstract: This article reads the leading Japanese modernist Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s late works of shishōsetsu (or “I-novel,”), and the short story “Cogwheels” ( Haguruma , 1927) in particular, against James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Whereas Portrait chronicles its youthful hero’s initiation into artistic creation, “Cogwheels” records an established writer’s descent into madness. Taking as its point of departure a crisis of representation that underlies both works, albeit in different ways as indicated by their respective employment of the trope of Dedalus/Icarus, I will examine how both Akutagawa’s and Joyce’s protagonists struggle with an excessive symbolism that renders sensible life accessible, as always already “secondhand.”