- 著者
-
剣持 武彦
ケンモチ タケヒコ
Takehiko Kenmochi
- 雑誌
- 清泉女子大学紀要
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.44, pp.51-62, 1996-12-25
Why has so little attention been paid to the relationship between Natsume Soseki's Kusamakura (June 1906) and Laurence Stern's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy ? It may well be because Soseki's Wagahai wa neko de aru (I Am a Cat), which had been completed just before his writing Kusamakura, is so clearly established to have been influenced by Tristram Shandy. In Kusamakura, on the other hand, Soseki deliberately changed his setting, style, and technique, and as a consequence, critics ignored any similarity between I am a Cat and Kusamakura in terms of their indebtedness to Tristram Shandy. What do I Am a Cat and Kusamakura have in common ? Both works had been written to destroy the traditional concepts of the novel. Soseki had been studying 18th century British literature with special attention to Tristram Shandy and its powerful influence on the canon of British fictional writing, having written an essay on Tristram Shandy in March 1897, nine years prior to writing Kusamakura. The novel Tristram Shandy demonstrated that a novel could be successfully written without a coherent story line. As is well known, 19th century realism had reached its ultimate limit in France and Russia and had nowhere to go. Then, the 20th century produced the literature of Proust and Joyce, whose works are associated with the technique known as the "stream of consciousness." Might it be said that Soseki wrote Kusamakura using the stream of consciousness technique, seven years before A la recherche du lemps perdu (1913-27) and 16 years before Ulysses (1922) ? The present study explores this possibility.