Suicide, desire and jouissance in the literary writing

a psychoanalytic analysis of Yukio Mishima's "Patriotism"

Abstract

This article describes the results of an analysis of a tale written by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, in which questions about suicide, sex, honor, and patriotism are discussed – the former theme gives the work its name. This tale is considered relevant, since it allows interpretation gestures through fields that go beyond literary and text theories, making possible an articulation with proposals from the fields of discourse and psychoanalysis. This last one is the most important in this work because it offers (re)thinking possibilities on the subjective constitution, writing, desire and otherness. In order to conduct the present research, we have used bibliographical review and discursive analysis of linguistic materiality as a methodological choice. With the discursive material as a starting point, it was possible for us to bring about meaning effects that emerge from the text of Mishima and which point to interpretations that link in a complex way the notions of body, sex, jouissance and suicide as a motto for creating. Preliminary results stress out that due to the specificity of Mishima's writing – as well as the complex dimension of the themes he addresses – the interpretation gestures from the reading amplify and subvert meanings of life-death, suicide, desire, while they raise questions on writing as an exercise of reaching sublimation.