Tragedy, Masochism, and Other Worldly Pleasures: Reading Natsume Sōseki's Bungakuron

Introduction

The archives of Meiji fiction are home to a number of distinguished writers whose works are recognized as the founding texts of Japan's literary modernity.¹ These retrospectively ordained works tend to rehearse the liberating possibilities that modernity presents, evoking all the promises of progress and the centralizing achievements of nationhood. Yet a number of them also court rebellion against the homogenizing character of modernity, defying the rules of the archives in such a way that their significance is not finally contained within the categories of "modern" or "Japan." Natsume Sōseki's oeuvre is an example.²

Sōseki has long been considered the iconic figure of the modern novel in Japan, and his fictional works have been reinterpreted from a variety of perspectives.³ One enduring perception is that Sōseki deeply understood the gulf between Meiji Japan and the Western ideals to which it aspired and, accordingly, gave voice to a cultural malaise that mourned the impossibility of overcoming this gap. Nowhere is this sense of cultural belatedness made clearer than in Sōseki's novel Kokoro (1914), in which the protagonist, a Meiji intellectual depicted as a tortured soul, is left behind by the tides of change, alienated from himself and from his social environment.⁴

These novelistic feelings of being out of place and behind the times are, in one sense, a peculiarly Japanese problem related to the Meiji period. Yet, in another sense, they are not. Although critical consensus has identified the "alienated intellectual" (and the "angst" associated with this figure) as the governing metaphor for understanding the writer and his time, my reading of Sōseki will deviate slightly from such an approach. Rather than translating these feelings into a motif of alienation-—an overused but still somewhat elegant metaphysics that appears to contain all that is bad or unhappy about modernity, as though this consciousness would better prepare Sōseki's protagonist for the development of self-consciousness-—I begin with a more modest but decidedly undialectical proposal to consider the role that such feelings might play in Sōseki's theoretical writings on literature, a series of reading and lecture notes produced over a span of three years and collected under the ambitious title Bungakuron (The Theory of Literature, 1906).⁵

Tragic Novels and a Failed Theory of Tragedy

Before Sōseki wrote Japanese novels, he wrote and lectured on such topics as British philosophy, literature, and morality. A few years after graduating from the Tokyo Imperial University and teaching English in the provinces, Sōseki was awarded an opportunity to spend 1900-1902 in England.⁶ As part of the expansion of the Japanese government's study-abroad program, he was asked to study "the English language and to learn the best forms of Western knowledge."⁷ Upon returning to Tokyo, he took a teaching position in English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, where he lectured and wrote extensively on Defoe, Meredith, Swift, and Shakespeare. From 1903 to 1905, he gave a series of lectures on the general concept of literature with materials drawn from the reading notes he had produced in London. These lecture materials were then transcribed and revised into a substantial work titled Bungakuron with the stated intent of proffering an authoritative scientific study of literature.

Though Sōseki's novels have a privileged place in the literary archives of modern Japan, Bungakuron has suffered a rather different fate, perhaps not for unwarranted reasons.⁸ On one level, Bungakuron appears to be a work of science, an austere attempt to describe and categorize scientifically the various effects of a literary work and the emotions it evokes from the reader. The critical language on display bears the promise of clarification, the demystification of a certain style of thought submitted to analysis. It does so by working not only under the logical demands of cause and effect, and the principle of non-contradiction, but also with the force of formulas, graphs, and other totalizing abstractions. Sōseki attempts to forge a critical language with...