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.
The past is evocable, we say, by memory. But this memory is not under our control. The taste of a small cake dipped in tea, the outline of some towers against the sky—such small events reawaken in Proust a stream of memories and half-for- gotten experiences, which color his whole life. We cannot understand ourselves at any given moment, nor are we merely the static sum of ali the moments we have lived—because we are continually reliving them, and so the sum is always chang- ing. Only through a complete evocation of the past can the content of any moment be even approximated. Because this is so, reality, as we say, eludes us, and life seems sad, evanescent, and puzzling. Only art, Proust's religion, by imposing on life's mutations an orderly form, can give us consolation.
Proust's method, even the structure of his interminable sentences, flows from this conception of time, from this enthronement of subjectivism. In his book, time turns and twists upon itself like a snake, past and present merge, motifs and themes are recalled and redeveloped and answer each other in echo and counterpoint. Every critic has pointed out that the book is less like a narrative than like a symphony.
But had Proust done nothing more than incorporate a metaphysic he would not be as interesting as he is. In addition to his peculiar, neurotic sensibility and his phenomenal memory, he possessed most of the gifts of any first-rate novelist. His book, for example, is a social panorama of unprecedented depth (though not of range): compare his Vanity Fair with Thackeray^ [76]. He describes the agonies and death of a whole aristocratic and upper-middle-class society. He analyzes, sometimes with intolerable exhaustiveness, the baffling and to
him frustrating nature of love, and particularly of homosexual love. He creates at least a half-dozen characters comparable to the most living in the literature of the novel. And he invents a prose, often opaque, but always, in its slow sinuosities and plangent rhythms, proper to his difficult theme. His realism is unlike that of any novelist we have so far met. It is the realism of the symbolist, not the naturalist. When he wishes, he can describe to perfection. But he omits ali details that do not rein- force his conviction that our only reality is the aspect of things remembered. This partial reality is not ali we need to know, but it is ali we do know; and that limitation is the cause of the tragedy of life.
For some this is the greatest novel in the world. For others it is unreadable. For still others it is, as one good critic wrote, "mammoth but minor." You must pass your own judgment. I will, however, in conclusion quote the considered estimate of the finest American critic of his time, Edmund Wilson: "We must recognize in Proust, it seems to me, one of the great minds and imaginations of our day, absolutely comparable in our own time, by reason both of his powers and his influence, to the Nietzsches [97], the Tolstoys [88], the Wagners and the Ibsens [89] of a previous generation. He has recreated the world of the novel from the point of view of relativity: he has supplied for the first time in literature an equivalent on the full scale for the new theory of modern physics."
C.F.
106
ROBERT FROST
1874-1963 Collected Poems
Though not very near, Frost is probably the nearest thing we have to a national poet. He is constantly anthologized. Schoolchildren are regularly exposed to his simpler work. The