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Reading Hamlet Upside Down: The Shakespeare Criticism of Natsume Sōseki

2013; Routledge; Volume: 9; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17450918.2013.808694

1745-0926

Todd Andrew Borlik,

Translation Studies and Practices

AbstractIn 1907 Natsume Sōseki resigned from Tokyo University, where he held a prestigious professorship in English literature. This decision to abandon his career as an Occidentalist scholar and instead write the novels that would make him the greatest author and poster-child of Meiji Japan was, this paper suggests, motivated in part by his frustrations with the English cult of Bardolatry. This paper illustrates that Sōseki's negative opinions of Shakespeare crystalized as a result of his contact with W. J. Craig and Lafcadio Hearn. In particular, Sōseki disputes Hearn's dubious claims that Shakespeare's literary genius is simultaneously universal and the result of inherited racial memory. To undercut this cant, Sōseki audaciously attempts to criticize Shakespeare from a "Japanese point of view". In doing so, he reveals how Shakespeare's work reflects a European weltanschauung, and that his rhetorically dense verse, larger-than-life protagonists, and supernatural flourishes grate against the contemporary vogue for naturalism in literature. By insisting that an author's reception is always historically and culturally determined, Sōseki anticipates key aspects of post-colonial theory. Standing Eurocentric hermeneutics on their head, he exposes Shakespeare's much-vaunted universality as a shibboleth.Keywords: Shakespeare and JapanPost-Colonial CriticismBardolatryW. J. CraigLafcadio HearnHamletMacbeth Notes1. On Sōseki and the Anglo-Japanese alliance, see Yiu 149–50. Sōseki has been criticized for failing to denounce the Japanese occupation of Korea and Manchuria in his accounts of his travels on the mainland (Yu 88–90). He did wish, it is true, for Japan to stand up to and earn respect from the Western superpowers. But it is clear that he took a grim view of militarism in general (Yu 166–67). He regarded the carnage of modern technological warfare as a symptom of the barbarism of Western modernity. His abiding love of ancient Chinese culture, meanwhile, would have given him mixed feelings about the occupation of Manchuria. I Am a Cat features hilarious spoofs of the war reimagined as a rat-hunt (1905–07 243–244) and a baseball game (389–91). The Heredity of Taste opens with a searing vision of the Russo-Japanese front as a "massive slaughter-house" (1906b 117). The narrator stumbles upon a triumphant parade for troops returning home, but is unable to shout "Banzai." He even imagines the war as triggered by a mad god crying "Kill men", "Lap blood", and "let loose the hungry dogs" (1906b 117)—the final phrase a subtle homage to Mark Antony's speech in Julius Caesar. In Sanshiro, the Japanese English professor shocks a young pupil by predicting "Japan is going to perish", and declaring, "Even bigger than Japan, surely, is the inside of your head. Don't ever surrender yourself—not to Japan, not to anything" (1908 15).2. Astonishingly, Sōseki has yet to receive the definitive English biography he deserves. Only a handful of book-length studies of the man and his works are available in English: Yu, McClellan, Iijima and Vardman, Yiu, and Marcus. Good general introductions to his life and writing are by Gessel (11–67) and Keene (305–54).3. Sōseki today is remembered more for his creative output than his literary criticism. For Angela Yiu, the fact that Sōseki "teaches more effectively through his literary works than his criticism shows that his critical voice, the one of logic and reason, is constantly overshadowed or subverted by his poetic voice, the one of spontaneity and passion" (82).4. Rather than try to imitate Gertrude's speech Sōseki rewrites it as a poignant tanka (a traditional Japanese short poem consisting of 31-syllables) from the point of view of the drowning Ophelia: Rain dampensAnd the frost chillsAll is dark within the earth.But in spring waters there's no painAfloat on waves … .Sunk beneath the waves … . (1906a 78) 5. Though he downplays Shakespeare's influence on his story, Sōseki's picture of the Princes in the Tower owes much of its detail to a famous painting by Paul Delaroche.6. This unflattering profile of Craig is further fleshed out in some of Sōseki's journal entries from his time in London in which he refers to the professor's "atrocious handwriting, his stinginess, his flights and tangents" (Marcus 161).7. Specifically, Sōseki praises his magisterial edition of Hamlet for the Arden Shakespeare series. Yet even this tribute turns out to be undeserved: Craig was only the general editor; the Arden 1 Hamlet was in fact overseen by Craig's mentor, Edward Dowden. Perhaps Sōseki was so desperate to find something positive to say in this eulogy, composed two years after Craig's death in 1906, he allowed himself to misattribute it to his former mentor.8. Sōseki's decision to pursue a more scientific, inter-disciplinary approach to literary criticism was also triggered by his conversations with Ikeda Kikunae, a Japanese scientist studying in London (Flanagan 11).9. Given his distrust of literary celebrity, one wonders how Sōseki would have reacted to the Japanese government's decision in 1984 to emblazon his face on the 1,000 Yen note.10. One exception is a brief essay on Hearn by Ann Thompson.11. Heredity of Taste contains an extensive commentary on Macbeth. In it Sōseki expands upon his previous attempt to theorize the cognitive experience of reading in terms of a "waveform model of consciousness" (1907a 55) Essentially, he argues that the predominant tone and atmosphere of a literary work suffuse the reader's perception of the individual scenes and sentences. So in the porter scene from Macbeth, the "comedy itself becomes merged into atrocity" (1906b 162) by its abrupt juxtaposition with Duncan's murder: As one who has been sea-sick on a ship, feels after landing that the firm earth is still wallowing, and as a naturally timid sparrow avoids a scarecrow as it would a man, it is inevitable that a reader of Macbeth will himself maintain the sensations of horror and project them into contexts where horror has no natural place. (1906b 164) The debt to DeQuincey's famous reading of the porter scene is evident.12. Taine expounds his theory of race most famously in the introduction to his History of English Literature (1–21). This book is almost certainly one of the 500 or 600 that Sōseki purchased during his time in London.13. The above paragraph is indebted to Bradshaw and Ashizu. Sōseki was not alone in his misgivings about Hamlet. Another Meiji writer by the name Shiga Naoya penned a bold retelling of the play from the point of view of an innocent Claudius. In his diary the King confesses to hating Hamlet, who comes across as a spoiled and mentally unstable royal brat. For more on Claudius's Diary, see Kishi and Bradshaw (105–112).14. In a revealing coincidence, Sōseki's adversary Tsubouchi Shōyō belonged to Inoue's "Mystery Research Society" (Fushigi Kyokai), a Japanese version of the Society for Psychical Research but more committed to debunking old superstitions. For more on the Meiji assault on Japanese folklore, see Figal.15. John Philip Kemble, for instance, had omitted Banquo's ghost on stage, as did Edwin Booth. Sōseki's essay probably grew out of the lectures on Macbeth he delivered during his second year at Tokyo University in 1904; his first round of lectures on Silas Marner flopped with students, who found him dry in comparison with the fiery Hearn (Keene 311).16. Since Kurosawa adapted so many stories from Western authors, it is sometimes forgotten that he deeply admired Japanese writers such as Sōseki. In fact, Kurosawa modeled his late masterpiece, Dreams, on Soseki's Ten Nights of Dream. His final film Madadayo, it has been suggested, contains a playful homage to Sōseki's I Am a Cat (Richie 227). But Sōseki's influence on Kurosawa is far more pervasive than a few cues for plotlines. Kurosawa's cavalier treatment of Shakespeare's text accords with the advice Soseki gave to Japanese translators. As Kishi Tetsuo and Graham Bradshaw observe, "the available translations could not have served Kurosawa's purpose and the decision to start from scratch may have reflected a view that corresponded with Natsume Sōseki's harsh comment on Tsubouchi's Hamlet" (130). Fittingly, Kurosawa also complies with Sōseki by filming the ghost of Miki (the Banquo character) in Throne of Blood, portraying him with the same mask-like visage and eerie inertia of the apparitions in Noh.17. For more on the complex reception of Shakespeare in Ireland, see the monograph by Bates and the collection edited by Clare and O'Neil. Bates' book features an incisive study of Joyce's appropriations of Shakespeare (97–108); Shaw's grievances with Bardolatry are the topic of a fine essay by DiPietro. For more on Yeats' intercultural vision of a "Celtic Orient,"see Lennon (247–89). Cosgrove examines Yeats' attack on Edward Dowden (who was Craig's mentor and like Craig, Anglo-Irish) for championing the imperialist Henry V.18. Hearn's Japanese "Conservative" has an uncanny resemblance to Sōseki himself. If the piece were not written four years before Sōseki's departure for England one might almost suspect Hearn had modeled the protagonist on him. He professes to like the English better than other nations, yet his stint in London inspires only a profound sense of detachment, "as one finding nothing to love while dwelling in its midst" (306) In contrast to the overtures to Shakespeare as an embodiment of Anglo-Saxon genius in Hearn's lecutres, Hearn's disenchanted samurai concludes, The real sublimities of the West were intellectual only, far, steep, cold heights of pure knowledge, below whose perpetual snow-line emotional ideas die. Surely, the old Japanese civilization of benevolence and duty was incomparably better … in its simplicity and unselfishness, its sobriety and contentment. Western superiority was not ethical. It lay in forces of intellect developed through suffering incalculable, and used for the destruction of the weak by the strong. (307)19. Sōseki's memoir makes much of the fact that Craig's flat is on the fourth floor, above the grime and bustle of the mundane world. From a psychological standpoint Sōseki appears to have composed this piece less as a tribute to Craig than as a rationalization of his decision to resign from the university as an English specialist and "startle the Westerners by producing terrific works written in foreign languages" (Keene 307).20. It has been argued that the protagonist of Sōseki's Kōjin represents an attempt to create a modern "Japanese Hamlet" (Yu 120–21). The textual evidence for this, however, is rather slim. Perhaps a more striking parallel occurs in Sanshiro, where a bachelor professor cites Hamlet as proof that some people are unfit to marry and recounts a story that mirrors the author's own bizarre childhood (1908 195). Though Sōseki did marry, he came to regret this decision, believing his unusual upbringing had permanently skewed his vision of domestic life. Sōseki tells the saga himself in his most autobiographical books, Grass on the Wayside [Michikusa] and Within Glass Doors [Garasadu no naka]. Shortly after his birth, his mother and father—who were forty and and fifty-three, respectively, and ashamed of conceiving a child so late in life—decided to give their newborn to a childless couple in the neighborhood. It was only when this couple divorced around the time Sōseki was nine years old that he learned from a housemaid the true identity of his biological parents, whom he had been told were his grandmother and grandfather (Gessel 16–17). Oddly, then, on a personal level Sōseki did identify with Hamlet due to his estrangement from his own parents and his troubles with his step-father, as well as his sometimes precarious mental health. In Kokoro, the Sōseki-like protagonist even finds himself defrauded of his inheritance by a conniving uncle.