Abstract

The attitude defined by Sōseki as fundamental to the writing of shaseibun is what Freud calls “humour”. On the other hand, humour qua “sense of the world” should be distinguished from the carnavalesque according to Bakhtin. For Freud, the joke, qua “contribution to the comical by means of the unconscious” must be distinguished from humour, “the contribution of the comical through the superego”. For me, humour may entertain some rapport to psychosis and Sōseki’s shaseibun may be tied to a sort of suffering which cannot be easily cured with the help of jokes or of the tragic catharsis. It is not the suffering of neurosis, but that of psychosis. It is the suffering of the modern person. And yet it cannot wholly be told in the style of the modern novel. According to the norms of modern literature, Sōseki’s long novels are failures. Yet there is no reason for us to see his novels as failures. They constituted, rather, Sōseki’s struggle against the type of fiction through which modern literature sought to resolve and to find a synthesis for such failures.