Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, and: Reflections in a Glass Door: Memory and Melancholy in the Personal Writings of Natsume Sōseki (review)

Two works of translation and criticism, published in close proximity to one another in 2009, coincided happily with the centennial of Natsume Sōseki's (1867-1916) most productive decade as a novelist, intellectual, and theorist. These two works could not be more different in subject matter, approach, or methodology. Theory of Literature is an abridged translation of Sōseki's Bungakuron (1907), with an introduction that takes more or less at face value Sōseki's claim in the preface of the original work: that its main purpose is to "explain the fundamental vital force of literature from the perspective of the disciplines of psychology and sociology" (p. 46). Reflections in a Glass Door, on the other hand, examines Sōseki's essays, letters, and diary entries to compose, in a belletristic rather than critical mode, a portrait of an artist in his late years plagued by illness and haunted by the specters of death and loneliness. While the translation and interpretation of Bungakuron seeks to establish a scientific and intellectual image of Sōseki, Reflections in a Glass Door reinforces that of Sōseki's dark and tormented side as a man and a writer. Neither reveals a full picture of who Sōseki was, but the two works complement each other in enlarging our understanding of a complex and multitalented author, whose volumes of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism—many of them groundbreaking—produced in a relatively short life have engaged generations of scholars utilizing different theoretical approaches and methodologies.

Preceding the publication of the translation of Bungakuron was a special issue of the journal Japan Forum, guest-edited by the book's editors, that focused on Sōseki's critical writings; the introduction to this volume of translation includes materials from the special issue. Primarily, the editors draw attention to Sōseki's use of ideas about society and natural science in an attempt to construct his own literary theory in the context of those propounded in the West during the early twentieth century. Sōseki's method of analysis (use of the quasi-scientific formula F+f, with F standing for the cognitive factor and f for the emotional factor, to characterize literary substance), his subject matter (largely Western literature), and his references (Spencer, Lombroso, Nordau, William James, Lloyd Morgan, etc.) certainly encourage that approach. In reading Sōseki, however, one needs to be mindful of what he puts before the reader and what he hides. In terms of methodology, Bungakuron presents the seemingly scientific and rational analytical stance of drawing upon sociology and psychology to understand literature, complete with diagrams and charts. But the analytical method Sōseki sets out fails in the end to fully address what he considers to be the foundation of literary art, which is "jōsho," translated in the volume as "emotion" and including, in the context of Bungakuron, the meanings "affect" and "aesthetic feelings" (p. 65). I would suggest that Bungakuron is Sōseki's attempt to respond to the unanswered question that Tsubouchi Shōyō posed in Shōsetsu shinzui (The Essence of the Novel, 1885), an important treatise that the editors did not include in their attempt to situate Bungakuron, despite their conscientious reference to many early twentieth-century Western theories. Shōyō insisted that the main business of the novel is "affect" or "emotion" (shōsetsu no shunō wa ninjō nari), raising this as a central point in his treatise but dealing with it only summarily. Picking up where Shōyō left off, Sōseki attempted a more comprehensive treatment, yet in the end he had to admit that "a dozen treatises...