The Figure of the Fan and Star Persona: Introducing an Autonomous Dynamic in the Relation Between Literature and Film in 1920's Japan

Joseph Murphy

University of Florida

jmurphy@aall.ufl.edu

Though aspects of a mass culture can be detected in the print culture of industrializing nations throughout the 19th century, it is not until the 1920's that urbanization and the emergence of mass electronic media (film and radio) combine to produce mass culture as the formation that sweeps and alters every aspect of cultural production. In Japan's case, this emergence of mass society combined with a steep rise in literacy and the production and consumption of print culture following World War I to produce a most interesting situation in the 1920's, where wholly new mass cultural forms such as as movies and radio were competing with an older established literature itself in sharp transition. Hence, the competition and negotiation of literature with the new mass media forms at this point in the 1920's appears as a good site to explore the stresses and strains the emergence of mass culture brings to bear in the cultural field, whose semiautonomy is defined by Bourdieu through its ability to withstand the heteronomous demands of political and market forces.

As an artifact from that time, an early Showa period journal called Eiga Jidai (in which Kawabata published his script for Kurutta ichipeiji for example), is extremely useful because of its specific policy of serving as a forum for exchange between the literary and film worlds, and the high level of participation by established bundan members. Particularly interesting is a series of taidan between male bundan members and popular film actresses which was a regular feature of the journal. From the perspective of the emergence of mass culture it would be tempting to read the meeting between these writers and actresses at the top of their game as a competition between "stars" to establish star persona, and this aspect does come through strongly in the give-and-take of these lively discussions. But a third, shadowy figure emerges insistently in the margins that I would argue is crucial for understanding the autonomous dynamic mass consumption introduces into the production of culture: the figure of the fan. In the Eiga Jidai taidan, we have fans writing letters, fans thronging public spaces, buying tickets, the writers reveal themselves as fans, and the term used is a new word fuan.

The nascent field of fan research is different from both the discourse of spectator subjectivity and empirical research into fan behavior that have dominated film studies since the 1970's. The "fan" is not the statistically grasped "real spectator," nor an abstract position enclosed in the text or apparatus. It is rather a way to figure the active and sometimes frightening demand the consumer of mass culture brings to bear on the cultural field. By analyzing references to fan (fuan) in the taidan, this study will argue that the new term takes shape in a way that corresponds closely with theorizations of fandom as a symptom for anxiety at mass culture. These particular shapes appear universally in discourse about the fan, not because empirical fans were like this, but because they betray an anxiety at the core of the phenomenon of mass culture, an anxiety toward what Miriam Hansen has called the "autonomous dynamic" introduced by the consumer or fan. To investigate the figure of the fan, then, does not purport to escape the perspective of the producers of culture, the writers, directors, critics and movie stars whose record is left in the pages of Eiga Jidai. By analyzing references to "fan," this study argues that the figure of the fan as it appears in the Eiga Jidai taidan stands in not for the empirical spectator, but for the anxieties of the producers of culture toward the mass consumer.

KEYWORDS: cultural field, mass culture/mass society, Eiga jidai, literature-film relations, agency, star-persona, star-audience relations, fandom