The New Lifetime Reading Plan

He achieved national celebrity with his first two novйis, I Am a Cat (1905) and Botchan (1906), both of which are still widely read and admired in Japan; both are satirical novйis that puncture the pretenses of Japan's new Westernized urban elite. In my view, however, the first suffers from an excess of cuteness, the second from an excess of sentimentality; neither seems to survive the translation process very well, nor to cross cultural frontiers with any success. Where the tone of these early novйis is one of comic irony, that of Kokoro (1914) is somber and elegiac.

The word "kokoro" means "heart," with overtones of the soul, the center, the authentic. As a book title it is nearly equivalent to Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter. In Natsume^ novel, narrated in the first person, the heart of the matter is precisely what the young protagonist is unable to express. The book deals with his obsessive relationship with "Sensei" (the word means "teacher," but more than that, too— "master" or "mentor"). The narrator is consumed by loneliness and alienation, by feeling poised between the old Japan to which he is sentimentally attached (he admires the suicide of General Nogi upon the death of Emperor Meiji: a vassal fol- lowing his master to the grave) and the new Japan of which he is part but to which he cannot relate. His only salvation seems to lie in explaining himself to Sensei, but as he reveals himself he cannot stand what he sees: "You wished to cut open my heart and see the blood flow. I was then still alive. I did not want to die. . . . Now, I am about to cut open my own heart, and drench your face with my blood. . . ."

Natsume Soseki has been called Japan's first fully modern writer; certainly he is one of a handful of Meiji Period intellec- tuals and writers who helped to create a modern revolution in Japanese art and literature.

J.S.M.

105

MARCEL PROUST

1871-1922

Remembrance of Things Past

This is the longest first-rate novel ever written, at least in a Western language. Its difficulties, like its rewards, are vast. If you respond to it at ali (many do not) you may feel quite justi- fied in spending what time you can spare over the next five or ten years in making it a part of your interior world.

Though it shares some features with Ulysses [110] and in a minor way with Tristram Shandy [58], it is basically unlike any novel we have so far discussed. It has a story, of course, and characters, and a clear setting in time and place—and ali are most interesting indeed. But Proust is less concerned with these matters than with dramatizing a metaphysical system. Metaphysics tries to answer the question, What is the funda­mental nature of reality? Proust devoted his life to answering the question in the form of a work of art. Of course he answers only part of the question. He tells us what reality means to Proust. But the answer has enormous scope and range.

Proust never had to work for a living. His family was mod- erately wealthy, and from an early age the brilliant boy had access to the worlds of fashionable and intellectual Paris, as it was before World War I. His attachment to his Jewish mother, a sensitive woman of fine character, was powerful and neu- rotic. Though Proust loved women as well as men, there is lit­tle doubt that his later homosexuality was caused partly by his relationship to his mother. Her death in 1905, together with his own physical weaknesses (particularly asthma), determined the shape of his life. He withdrew to the seclusion of a dark, vapor-filled cork-lined room. There, sleeping by day, working by night, with occasional sorties into the outer world (with which he also kept in touch through a huge correspondence), he slowly, painfully elaborated his masterpiece.

The hero of Ulysses is a place, Dublin. The hero of Remembrance is Time. To project in art the very "form of Time" was Prousfs passion, his answer to the question, What is it to be? He jettisoned completely the methods of the conven- tional novelist. For him, being is not a chronological succession of events. Being is the complete past, "that past which already extended so far down and which I was bearing so painfully within me."

How shall we grasp this past, this reality? Quantum theory tells us that in a sense reality is unseizable because observation itself changes the thing observed. Proust understood this. He therefore gave us the past as well as he could, by a series of approximations, by presenting it to us in a thousand aspects, by showing it for what it really is—not a smooth flow of discrete events, but an ever-changing continuum. Parts of our past are continually erupting in us. These parts are felt differently at different times, by different people, under different circum- stances. Proust evades none of these difficulties; he triumphs over them.