1Object of little serious study in Japanese or English, Natsume Sōseki’s Theory of Literature (Bungakuron, 1907),1 with its mathematical formulae and extensive citation of English literature, and weighing in at over 500 pages, seems to be regarded as an eccentric indulgence by a writer who came later to be known through his creative works as Japan’s greatest modem novelist. Yet, opening its pages, one finds a scientifically grounded, fully articulated reader-response theory of literature, drawing on the latest in contemporary cognitive psychology and developed 60 years before the idea gained currency in western literary theory. This paper is concerned with elaborating Sōseki’s model of reading, and establishing a tight link between the Theory of Literature and a contemporary creative work, The Tower of London (London tō, 1905), in order to place the Theory in continuity with the rest of Sōseki’s œuvre. By establishing a link between Sōseki’s magnum theoretical opus and his creative output, it is hoped to reposition this important work not as an optional appendage to Sōseki’s literary œuvre, but as an integral part of an original ten year plan to articulate the fields of science and literature in a general economy.

The Tower of London and the Genre of the Travel Guide

2A glance at the title, publication date, and first few pages of The Tower of London (London tō, 1905), might convince the reader that this early work, published shortly before the author’s career as a popular novelist took off, is an example of the well-known genre of travel miscellany sent back in great numbers by the first generation of Japanese studying abroad in the universities of Europe and America. These short descriptive pieces performed the service of conveying to a Japanese newspaper or journal audience for whom the West was still largely a dream the details of travel, flora and fauna, the manners and customs of people encountered in traversing the globe, and the sights and sounds of the great capital cities at the height of the western imperial project, and Sōseki is recorded to have published in the same year short pieces on entertainments, gardening, and bicycle riding in England, in such venues as the Imperial University Review and Japan Gardener’s Journal (Matsumura 1971, 547). The Tower of London was published in the relatively prestigious literary journal Hototogisu, and one might well imagine the interest and expectation the title reference to this icon of English history at the height of the Victorian era might hold for the contemporary Japanese audience. As we glean from the show of modesty in Mori Ogai’s semi-autobiographical “The Dancing Girl” (“Maihime”, 1890), publication of these miscellany was an established avenue for the flow of up-to-the-minute information about the West, and a way for ambitious young men to make their first mark, even before the fruits of their research became evident.

It is now five years since the hopes I cherished for so long were fulfilled and I received orders to go to Europe. When I arrived here in the port of Saigon, I was struck by the strangeness of everything I saw and heard. I wonder how many thousands of words I wrote every day as I jotted down random thoughts in my travel diary. It was published in a newspaper at the time and highly praised, but now I shudder to think how any sensitive person must have reacted to my childish ideas and my presumptuous rhetoric (Ogai 1994, 8).

3Though identified in the West as novelists, Mori Ogai (1862-1922) and Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) are positioned in Japan more broadly as central figures in the development of modern Japanese thought (Karatani 1993, 11-44, 136-154; Kōsaka 1958, 392-470). Both graduated from the elite Imperial University in the first decade of its consolidation, both spent an extended period of study abroad under government orders, and both cut their teeth as writers sending this kind of work back home. However, Sōseki’s status as a government sponsored study-abroad student, or ryūgakusei was different in many respects from Ogai’s. Unlike the prodigy Ogai, who was ordered to Berlin in 1884 while in his early 20’s, Sōseki was already in his 30’s and well along in a lackluster career when he was ordered to London in 1900.

4Throughout the second and third decades of the Meiji period (1868-1912, i.e., roughly 1878-1897) the Japanese higher educational pyramid remained extremely narrow at the top levels, with a cut on the order of 10,000 to one between mandatory primary school and secondary levels, and a single national university at the top (Roden 1980). In 1894 only 341 students advanced to the university level nationwide, and the number of government sponsored students abroad remained around 20 during this period. Visible in legislation from 1897, though, is a systematic effort to expand the higher education structure, linked to the flow of reparations from the settlement in the Sino-Japanese war (Komori 1995, 59-60). A series of acts provided for the designation of second, third and fourth imperial universities outside of Tokyo and the transfer of primary teaching responsibilities from visiting foreign lecturers to Japanese nationals. In 1897, the number of students promoted to the university level soared to 821, and similar measures doubled the number of ryūgakusei sent abroad by the Ministry of Education in 1900 to 39. It was this administrative expansion of the ryūgakusei system which caught up Natsume Sōseki at the age of 34.

5Hence, when Ogai was ordered to Berlin in 1884 it was as part of an extremely select, top-class elite, sent to participate in cutting-edge research in medicine for a Japan still involved in a genuine struggle to secure its sovereignty against the western powers. In fact, Ogai is credited with coining the Japanese term for research record (gyōseki) while studying in Germany (Sasaki 1996, 16). When Sōseki was ordered to London in 1900, however, it was as part of a major expansion of the ryūgakusei program and watering down of its prestige, with obvious connections to Japan’s aspirations to parity with the imperial powers. Further, Ogai was sent to Germany to study his field of specialization, hygiene and medicine, while Sōseki was sent to England with orders to study not his chosen field of English literature but “methods and practices of English language instruction.” (sz 9: 5-8) Ogai’s efforts abroad in the late 1880’s were part of the good fight, the life and death struggle with the western imperial powers, while Sōseki’s efforts in the early 1900’s were part of the effort to become an imperial power. And though the significance is not immediately apparent, this positioned them differently in relation to the production of knowledge, and both would find their position in Japanese letters secured by what appears in retrospect as an almost unforgivable violation of the disciplinary organization of the university. Ogai was sent to study science and moved by a crisis of conscience to literature and philosophy, while Sōseki was sent to study literature and moved by a crisis of conscience to study science.

6Sōseki was clearly ambivalent about this situation, and the preface to A Theory of Literature records that he tried to refuse his orders halfheartedly, but was directed by his mentors to accept (sz 9: 5). Uncomfortable from the start with his assigned role as a ryūgakusei, Sōseki resisted the constraints of this peripheral duty as travel guide as well. In the final chapter to The Tower of London, Sōseki expresses ironic concern for the disappointment of the reader.

It might perhaps have been more convenient for the reader if I had given a more minute description of things in the Tower and how they were arranged... But this piece of mine isn’t meant to be a traveller’s guide. In any case, it is some years ago that I visited the Tower; so I can’t recreate the scenes very vividly. Consequently my account is somewhat overburdened by the repetition of subjective words. I fear this may give some unpleasant feeling to the reader; but it wasn’t my original intention. I hope the reader will kindly take this situation of mine into account2 (Sōseki 1992, 58-9; sz v. 2; 29).

7Sōseki calls up the genre of which this is a parody. The travel guide is characterized by factual information and concentration on minute description of buildings, places, peoples, historical points of interest, foods and other objects of tourism. This is what constitutes it as a genre, and Sōseki was aware his readers would likely approach the piece with these expectations. The Tower of London, however, departs from this in many ways that can only be labeled impressionistic.

8The Tower of London begins with the narrator fumbling with a map, striding up to successive London street corners only to become completely lost again. At each corner he consults his map, asks passersby or policemen for renewed directions and forges ahead only to become disoriented again at the next corner. After countless iterations, the Tower of London finally comes into view across the Thames, looming in the distance. The narrator feels pulled across the Tower Bridge by a kind of magnetic force, and once inside falls into a pattern of description very like the odyssey in the streets, setting out confidently with a description of the architecture, objects or historical facts concerning the Tower, only to lapse into subjective reveries that are close to hallucination. These passages typically summon up a tableau of historical persons imprisoned in the Tower, of condemned prisoners sitting in the boat bound for Traitor’s Gate, of Sir Walter Raleigh at table in his cell writing his History of the World, of Lady Jane Grey blindfolded and led to the block by a priest. These reveries are pursued with Gothic intensity, accompanied by spilled blood and relentless speculation on problems of history, the irreducibility for the individual of annihilation by death and the possibility of knowing another mind. Each short chapter loses itself in this way for several pages, after which the narrator is literally brought back to his senses by a sudden sound, a breeze, the realization of another person in the room.

9It is typical of Sōseki’s irony that buried in the final apologies for the inadequacy of this kind of presentation is the crux of the problem. It is no idle request that we take this situation of Sōseki’s into account, and inquire into the sense of subjectivity repeatedly produced by the text. We may begin by asking if it is possible to attach some sense to the intuition that the text is “impressionistic.” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms gives: “Impressionism in the literary sense borrowed from French painting, a rather vague term applied to works or passages that concentrate on the description of transitory mental impressions as felt by an observer, rather than their external cause (Baldick 1990, 108). That is to say, it means one is concerned less with the object world, the outside world, real things, than with the flow of impressions they produce on the perceiving mind. Each chapter begins with the eye scanning an aspect in front of it, then makes an ambiguous transition to the narrator’s reverie about the past. For example, chapter 2 begins:

When I first saw the Tower Bridge across the Thames, I was fascinated at the sight. I couldn’t tell if it belonged to the present or the past. It was a quiet day in early winter. The sky was overcast, with a colour like that of liquid detergent in a pail. The Thames seemed to make its way downstream without a wave or a sound... Below the Tower I caught sight of a sailing boat...
As I gazed on the Tower, I found twentieth-century London gradually disappearing from my mind and giving place to a fantastic picture of the past (26-27; sz 2: 6-7).

10Again in chapter 3, one begins with minute description of a visual aspect: “Crossing a moat, in which there was now no water, I saw twin towers ahead of me. They were round and made of stone, like an oil tank. They stood on either side of the path, like gigantic gate-posts” (tl 29; sz 2: 8). The narrator then comes to the Bell Tower:

I wondered how far the sound of the bell could reach. I looked up at the ivy-mantled tower and saw it had retracted all its sounds from past centuries and gathered them together in those of the present” (30; sz 2: 9).

11The bell signals the transition to the first extended reverie, as each successive detail of the Bell Tower suggests to the narrator something of the state of mind of the prisoners pulling up to Traitor’s Gate. The reverie is brought to a close by the footsteps of a soldier on guard standing under the arch in front of him. With this the pattern is established of an ambiguous transition to fantasy, brought back and inserted into reality by the intrusion of a guard or another tourist (see Soseki 1992, 35-36, for further iterations).

12What emerges in the ambiguously marked movement between description of the external reality of the Tower and these elaborately observed fantasies is a consistent attention to the ebb and flow of the narrator’s consciousness. Even in the transition to historiography proper, this is consistently maintained;

Entering the White Tower from the South side, I came to the famous armoury near the spiral stairs. There I found everything bright and shining, as they seem to take good care of each item. I was glad to see and ascertain for myself those objects of which I had only a vague idea from books of history or fiction. But I regret to say, my bliss of learning through such object lessons was of all too short duration, since almost all the knowledge I then acquired has since evaporated (38; sz 2: 15).

13Sōseki’s narrator has already made the ambiguous statement that, “the history of London Tower is the epitome of English history” (26; sz 2; 6). However, what becomes clear from these passages is the instantaneous nature of the impressions, their ebb and flow, and the way Sōseki is constantly collapsing time in The Tower of London to the present of the observer. In the spirit of Berkeley’s exploitation of the gap between mind and matter in a dualist epistemology, what is not present to the narrator’s consciousness really does not exist (Berkeley 1952, esp. 413-414). Within the framework of this consistently maintained impressionism, Sōseki goes on in turn to incorporate the different senses, sound, touch, binocular focus, which come flooding back in their concrete immediacy after each reverie:

A raven alighted near me with wings folded. He stared at me, with his bill ominously pointing at me. The blood shed here over hundreds of years seemed to have congealed and taken the form of this messenger bird. This is, no doubt, why the ravens can’t depart from the site.
With such an impression in my mind, I looked up at the elm trees and felt the wind moving in them (41-2; sz 2-17).

14Sōseki states here simply “one hundred years” (hyakunen). The translation “for hundreds of years” no doubt captures the historical sense more accurately, however following Karatani Kōjin in his extraordinary early essay, “Life as Viewed From the Interior” (1971, collected in Karatani 1991), we must understand the figure “one hundred years” to carry a precise significance in Sōseki’s early works. In pieces like “Phantom Shield” (“Maboroshi no tate”, 1905) and “Ten Nights of Dreams” (“Yume jūya”, 1908), the appearance of the term “one hundred years” signifies neither “a long time ago,” nor a lapse of 100 years in a chronological sense, but a leap outside life to the time before the birth or after the death of the individual, that is to say what is radically beyond the possibility of individual experience. Drawing step-by-step a coherent philosophical position from a seemingly incoherent mix of analepsis and prolepsis scattered over these works, Karatani concludes, “The term ‘one hundred years,’ consequently, indicates the leap to one’s own death, and because this leap is beyond the possibility of experience for the individual (consciousness), it is simply expressed through the symbolic length of time, ‘one hundred years’... [further], ‘a hundred years ago’ does not mean simply ‘a long time in the past,’ nor is it a concrete passage of time, it indicates rather the time before birth... Death and birth are left virtually undistinguished in these ‘dreams.’ The more general philosophical point is that death and birth are indistinguishable when viewed from the ‘interior’ [of life]” (Karatani 1991, 16-21). In this sense the appearance of the enigmatic term “100 years” clearly signals in The Tower of London a departure from the domain of historical time measured in centuries, to the eternal present of consciousness.

In tracing the thread of my thoughts thus far, I felt the cold atmosphere of the room seeping into the pores of my back, and I shuddered. I found it was moist in the room. As I felt the wall with my fingertips, I found it was dewy wet. My fingertips were all red. From the corner of the wall dewy drops were oozing out and dripping to the floor, making irregular red patterns. The blood shed in the sixteenth century seemed to reappear and wet the floor of the twentieth century (47; sz 2: 20).
I felt spellbound in front of [Jane Grey’s] inscription. Try as I may, I am unable to move an inch. I am again in a world of fantasy.
First, the eyesight grows dim and the things around me become invisible. In the darkness a light is lit. It gradually gets lighter, and things take on clear-cut forms, as when one focuses on an object through binoculars. The scene becomes wider, and in the midst, I see a young woman sitting down (52; sz 2: 24).

15That is to say, unlike a travel guide, and unlike a history, what is being recorded here is not the Tower, but impression, the ebb and flow of consciousness occasioned in the perceiver by the Tower. This is the stake of The Tower of London, and what pulls it out of the travel guide genre.

16It would be easy to dismiss Sōseki’s effort as romantic affectation, or to criticize it on grounds of historical accuracy, however, my argument is that this would be to miss the point of The Tower of London. I would argue that, far from being a “rather vague term,” Sōseki’s impressionism is an experimental embodiment of a precise sense developed in the Theory of Literature he was writing at the same time.

Soseki’s Theory of Literature (Bungakuron, 1907)

17Considering the scope of the work, and its status as Sōseki’s magnum theoretical opus, it is one of the puzzles of Sōseki studies how little serious consideration has been given in either Japanese or English to the content of the Theory of Literature (Bungakuron, 1907).3 What reference there is to the work in mainstream criticism seldom gets beyond discussion of the highly personal preface signed with the given name Natsume Kinnosuke (jo, sz 9:5-17), in which Sōseki outlines in rich detail his near breakdown in England, and other unhappy circumstances attending the conception of the project. Even the lengthy commentary appended to the Sōseki Zenshū edition concentrates on the preface and Sōseki’s personal circumstances, and spares less than a page to touch on the content of the theory itself (Komiya 1966).

18As Karatani stresses, though, the Bungakuron as we have received it was originally part of a much more ambitious ten year project to situate the convergence of historically distinct senses of literature in the context of modern civilization (Karatani 1993,11-17). The Bungakuron seems to have been meant as a first step, designed to rescue Sōseki from the disciplinary strictures of “literature” as he encountered it in England.

Over the course of my study abroad I gradually came to dislike literature. Whenever I would read western poetry, etc., I felt nothing. Trying to pretend that I was enjoying this would be like a person pretending to have wings and trying to fly, or a person with no money walking around trying to look prosperous. About that time, Ikeda Kikunae4 came in from Germany and stayed at my lodgings. Ikeda is a scientist, but when I talked to him a bit, I was surprised to find that he’s quite an impressive philosopher. I remember him besting me in arguments on a number of occasions. It was to my great profit that I met him in London. Thanks to him I was able to quit the spectral literature and formed the resolve to pursue a more systematic and substantial line of research (Komiya 1966, 523).

19Letters to his family from the period show the work in genesis and give an eerie sense of a person of preternatural sensitivity before whom something really large has appeared, and he glances around to find no one else has noticed. In a letter to his father-in-law dated March 15, 1902, Sōseki describes himself being seized by a new project, “reading day and night, taking notes and little by little formulating my thoughts and advancing the enterprise. If I put out the usual sort of book it’s going to look like table scraps from the Europeans, so I’m working diligently to produce something I won’t have to be ashamed to show to people” (quoted in Komiya 1966, 527). The preface describes the process of assembling books and materials for the project and the famous decision to “put all my literature books at the bottom of a wicker trunk,” the notion of trying to discern the fundamental nature of literature by reading literature being for the Sōseki of this period akin to “attempting to wash off blood with more blood” (sz 9: 10-11). Sōseki reports achieving a rare level of concentration during this period, though his friends were apparently concerned for his sanity, and he was reprimanded by the Ministry of Education for failing to file necessary interim reports. Though he expected the Bungakuron to take two to three years, the original conception was of a step-by-step triangulation of a number of disciplines to produce a “dissection of the various elements structuring civilization, and discourse on its nature.” “[E]ven I am shocked at the scope of the problem” (Komiya 1966, 526-528).

20Rejecting the methodologies of literary criticism as a way to come to a fundamental understanding of literature, Sōseki resolved to approach the matter using the methods of the sciences, specifically psychology and sociology. He formed the resolve to apply himself to the utterly original question of by what indispensable conditions psychologically literature can be “born into this world, develop and fade away,” and the rather more overdetermined question of by what indispensable conditions sociologically literature “exists, flourishes, and declines” (sz 9: roll). Sōseki’s reading program is recorded in detail in the painstakingly compiled Bungakuron Notes (Muraoka 1975), and there one finds extensive use of Havelock Ellis’The Contemporary Science Series for access to the natural sciences and psychology, and Knight’s University Extension Manuals, given to him by one of his tutors in London. In addition to these well-regarded collections, one finds as well a variety of current works in psychology, history, ethics and aesthetics. Though Sōseki’s cross-disciplinary efforts in psychology accord well with our conception of the scientific discipline today, as Komori Yoichi points out, what Sōseki refers to as “sociology” seems more along the lines of Spencerian history, ethics and aesthetics that formed the fashionable intellectual currents of the day (Komori 1993, 36-38,1995, 94-97). This tends to catch Sōseki up, when he turns to the sociological aspect of his project, in the company of such questionable figures such as Lombroso, Nordau, the more complicated Ribot, in generalizations from the individual to the social, and in social Darwinist themes such as Nordau’s degeneration, and late-19th century anxiety about entropy and decline, closely related to anxieties about the decline of empire (Hayles 1990, 214-5; White 1990, 104-5). The theory itself, elaborated with extraordinary analytical power, had to sit uneasily with the social Darwinism that underwrote it. Sōseki can be said to have exposed himself, in his resolution to acquire the tools of the intellectual center, to a certain internalization of the western gaze, which surfaces in moments of painful self-hatred in writing from the period, such as the famous description of surprise on seeing his own face reflected in the glass of a shop window, and the angry close to the Preface of the Theory (See sz 9: 14-15; Eto 1970, 22, 97-209). Komori Yōichi pinpoints the unavoidable ambivalence of a non-western intellectual who would make a serious intervention into the thought of the center: “Caught up in the embrace of a natural science that had lent the power of its universal logic and evidentiary analysis to presenting the global hegemony of the European white race as historical necessity, and with a discourse of ‘social Darwinism’ that would eject and exclude any existence that does not conform to that order, Sōseki set out to raise the edifice of his literary theory” (Komori 1995, 96).

21Upon his return to Japan in 1903 Sōseki was appointed lecturer in English literature at Tōkyō Imperial University, and the results of his research in London were delivered there as a series of regular classroom lectures between 1903 and 1905. Sōseki had been hired to replace the popular foreign teacher Lafcadio Hearn, and the contrast between Hearns theatrical romanticism and informal classroom style, and Sōseki’s rigorous focus on methodology and first principles caused a near revolt among the students, leading Sōseki to great frustration and doubt about the project (Eto 1970, 241-257). At the same time, the unexpected success of a lengthy serialized novel I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru, 1905) created a public demand for Sōseki’s work. The Theory of Literature as we know it was collated and published in book form in 1907 as an attempt to capitalize on this growing popularity. Lecture notes were compiled and edited over the course of 1906 by his student, Nakagawa Mantarō (Komiya 1966, 538ff), and Sōseki was given the completed package for approval. A harried Sōseki had intended to sign off on the manuscript with a cursory glance, however contrary to expectations he found himself caught up in the task and took a full four and one half months for revision, from November 1906 to March, 1907. During this period, he ended up refusing all manuscript requests, and when he went into negotiations with the Asahi newspaper group to become their house novelist in February, letters to Asahi officials allude continually to a “bit of business” he is clearing up. Sōseki delivered the manuscript on March 27, 1907, and signed with Asahi the same day, refusing overtures from the Imperial University for a highly prestigious full professorship. This is the course of events that resulted in the Theory of Literature in the form we know it today.

22The editors of the annotated edition of the Theory of Literature found in volume 9 of the Sōseki Zenshū state that, though incomplete, the Theory is the single one of Sōseki’s works into which he poured the most effort. It represents the indispensable preparation for his subsequent work as a great creative writer, and indicates the foundation that links his work as a theorist and literary figure. As such, Kadono Kiroku makes the case for Sōseki studies that, “to come to an appreciation of Sōseki’s literary output, and to deepen research on his oeuvre, this stands as the crucial major treatise” (sz 9: 549). Hence the problem remains of why so little serious research on the theory itself exists. Sōseki’s highly rational, cosmopolitan Theory of Literature seems to be a category mismatch for a modern humanities scholarship organized by discipline and national tradition, fitting neither conceptions of Sōseki as a peculiarly Japanese novelist, nor conceptions of literature as a belletristic concern, such that it is difficult to recognize from the positions provided by the academic division of knowledge. There is the problem of the argument’s extensive citation of English literature in the original, calling up competencies outside the purview of the kokubungakusha, or scholars of Japanese literature within whose discipline Sōseki studies usually falls. For the editors, however, this state of affairs is eclipsed by a different sort of cross-disciplinarity, the “uncanny feeling” given by the gesture to mathematics introduced from the opening page. According to Kadono:

What puts readers off is likely this (F+f) notation.... Even a reader who picks up the Bungakuron with some anticipation is going to be repelled when [immediately after the Preface] they encounter: ‘We can posit that the form of literary content is expressed as (F+f)....’, and the few lines that follow. As soon as someone sees that, they’re likely to want to throw the book out (sz 9: 550).

23That is to say, for most workers in the humanities, there is the visceral sense that nothing fertile can come from a formula. Hence the reading stops right there. The question then becomes, why it was necessary for Sōseki to discard literature in coming to an understanding of literature, and embark on an interdisciplinary project of this scope, and how seriously we are intended to take the formulas, charts and graphs, and claim to scientificity announced in the preface, and sustained throughout the entire 500 pages of the theory proper.

24And to do that, one must discuss the Theory.

25When Sōseki first arrived for his study abroad in London, he conceived his task to be to learn what methodologies must be acquired, and with which fields one must be acquainted in order to do first-rate research in literature. However, faced with an academic literary establishment in England that could not acknowledge as valid his own broad, situated understanding of literature, absorbed at the level of the body through the recitation of classical Chinese rhetoric as a child, and which posited its own romantic notions of fiction and poetry as universally valid, Sōseki faced the crisis of consciousness alluded to in the earlier quotation. At this point, stimulated like Kant by the example of the natural sciences, he backtracked to first principles, and while professing embarrassment in the Preface for “going all the way to London to pursue such a childish problem,” he formed the resolve to come to a precise understanding of “just what, at the most fundamental level, this literature is” (konponteki ni bungaku to wa ikanaru mono zo, sz 9: 10). In Komori Yōichi’s concise formulation, Sōseki makes the risk-filled turn to science as the mediation in which to adjudicate the competing claims “circulating within the head of a single Japanese exchange student” (Komori 1995, 94).

26The first task for a scientific approach is to delineate the object, and in this Sōseki makes a surprising move. In attempting to grasp what, “at the most fundamental level,” literature might be, he locates his object neither in the formal properties of the work itself, as in the Russian Formalists, nor in the activities of the writer as individual creative genius, but in the experience of the reader. Sōseki is concerned not with the thing, but with the person looking at the thing, hence the Theory of Literature is in the most rigorous sense a reader response theory. He wants to develop a more general definition of literature because what he is being told is literature in England doesn’t accord with his experience of Chinese literature, and he begins by building a model that will allow for a minute, moment by moment analysis of the experience of literature. The first chapter incorporates contemporary experimental psychological accounts of consciousness from Morgan’s An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (1896) and E. W. Scripture’s The New Psychology (1897) as a wave-like movement where the top of the wave is what the mind is focused on at a given point. Falling off in front and behind are both anticipation of future points and attenuated past points. This was a judicious choice by Sōseki as it does not appear that the basic model he borrows has been superseded today. The metaphor in use now by neuroscientists is of the conscious mind as a partially colorized movie, where what one is attending to at the moment is the part in color, but the rest is in black and white (Calvin 1999). Sōseki then brings forward a formula, the famous (F+f), incorporating concepts, impressions and emotions, and combines it with the model of consciousness to generate a model of reading replete with charts and graphs, that distinguishes the experience of literature from other types of conscious experience. The remaining 450 pages of the work then, is a thorough elaboration of all aspects of the model of reading he has put in place, even to the extent of dealing with “quantity of literary content,” with reference to English literature.

27Reading through the Theory of Literature as it stands is so deflationary to the pretensions of literature that one has to wonder if subjecting his chosen subject to this kind of unrelenting dissection is not a performance of sustained irony. In his discussion of the turmoil caused by Sōseki’s succession to the lectureship in English literature at the Imperial University, in which a number of senior students stopped coming to class, Eto Jun writes:

Sōseki’s cold, penetrating analysis must have seemed to [Hearn’s] students like a scalpel stripping the skin off the English literature that was like a lover to them. At any rate it did some damage to their pride....
It would be difficult to deny that in Sōseki was concealed an impulse to destroy illusion that bordered on revenge. He felt challenged by the legacy of Hearn, and the students who blindly followed him imagining themselves geniuses, but there was also the desire for a thoroughgoing counterattack against the Englishmen and the England that had caused him such pain over the last two years (Eto 1970, 250).

28That Sōseki was traumatized by the rejection of his lived relation to literature, absorbed as a child in the study of the classics of Chinese rhetoric undoubtedly stands as a motivation for study, and there is no gainsaying Eto Jun’s insight into the matter. However, this in no way obviates the need to press on to an analysis of the theory itself, which needs to be judged in terms of its coherence, and significance in the context of modern thought.

29Terry Eagleton characterizes the development of modern literary theory as involving a major shift from a late 19th century “preoccupation with the author,” to an “exclusive concern with the text” in the early 20th century with the Russian Formalists and New Critics. Examination of the reader’s role in literature is understood as “a fairly novel development” occurring only since the 1960’s with the advent of reception theory in Germany and the United States. “The reader has always been the most underprivileged of this trio” (Eagleton 1983, 74). Eagleton, of course, knows nothing of Sōseki’s Theory of Literature. In trying to grasp, “at the most fundamental level,” what literature might be, the most obvious move for Sōseki in the first decade of the 20th century would have been to seek the essence of literature in terms of the expression of the writer as individual creative genius. This would have been entirely comprehensible to the cadre of professors he faced in England in 1900. To have sought the object in the work itself as a self-contained formal object would have been ahead of his time, and made him a contemporary of the Russian Formalists. The Theory of Literature, though, is a reader-response theory, fully articulated and drawing on models of modern, experimental cognitive psychology that are still current, a full 60 years before the idea occurred to literary theory.

30Taking a closer look at the model of consciousness Sōseki is adapting to the act of reading, we find the following charts and diagrams with the following explanations. The page will be translated in full to give a feeling for the style of argumentation.

The moment by moment activity of consciousness takes the form of a waveform, and if represented by a graph would look like the above. As you can see, the summit of the waveform, that is to say the focal point, is the most clear portion of consciousness, and before and after this point one finds the so-called peripheries of consciousness. However, what we call our conscious experience typically takes the form of a continuous series of these psychological waveforms.

31Following Morgan, we can represent this series as follows:

That is to say, when conscious focal point [A] migrates to [B], [A] is attenuated to peripheral consciousness [a’], and when [B] transfers further to [C], [a] and [b] take an additional step toward the periphery of consciousness...
...This is not merely something we feel as part of our everyday conscious experience, it has been demonstrated through precise scientific experimentation (I refer you to Scripture’s The New Psychology for detailed explanation).

32It would be easy to assume that Sōseki’s reliance on late 19th century sources vitiates the Theory of Literature beyond consideration today. However, the cross-disciplinary efforts in psychology are quite solid and surprisingly current today. Sōseki was drawn to a materialist, cognitive psychology that sought to locate conscious processes in the experiences and stimulation of the body. The work was experimental, consistently critical of a dualist conception of mind and body, and the basic model Sōseki comes away with has been superseded in no important details in contemporary neuroscience. The soundness of Sōseki s intuition that the phenomenon of literature could be located in the second by second analysis of the waveform of consciousness is echoed by neurophysiologist William Calvin, who writes, “[o]ne technological metaphor neuroscientists use for the enhancement of some images over others, so essential to our sense of self, is a black & white movie scene in which one actor becomes colorized, gradually standing out, until another actor develops color, and the first fades back to grayscale” (Calvin 1999), a conception entirely compatible with Sōseki’s.

33Sōseki illustrates the model of consciousness by the following example:

Let’s say there’s a person, and they’re standing before St. Paul’s Cathedral. Suppose that as they gaze upon that splendid architecture, their eyes move gradually from the pillars at the bottom section, to the balustrade at the upper portion, and finally reach the highest point at the tip of the cupola. While they are first gazing on the pillars, that portion of the structure is the only part perceived clearly and distinctly, and the rest only enters the field of vision indistinctly. However, in the instant the eyes move from the pillars to the balustrade, the perception of the pillars begins to attenuate, and simultaneously the perception of the balustrade gains in clarity and distinctness. The same phenomenon is observed in the movement from the balustrade to the cupola. When one recites a familiar poem, or listens to a familiar piece of music, it is the same. That is to say, when one separates off for observation a moment of consciousness from the continuity of a particular conscious state, one can see that the preceding psychological state begins to attenuate, and the portion to follow by contrast is gradually raised in distinctness through anticipation (sz 9:30).

34Let us return now to The Tower of London to strengthen the argument that the impressionism of this fictional piece is not a “rather vague” stylistic choice, but a precise embodiment of the model of consciousness developed for the Theory of Literature, and by implication for the coherence of Sōseki’s project beyond the confines of the Theory of Literature itself.

FIGURE 1

35One must first observe the similarity of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London as tourist destinations admired both for their architecture and relation to English history. Sōseki could have used a painting, a piece of music, the contents of his study, an apple, or a human face as the first object through which to illustrate the raw material of the model of consciousness he is developing, but instead selects an object that exceeds the perceiver by an order of magnitude in both size and longevity. The Tower of London begins in the same way with its narrator standing before a piece of monumental stone architecture. The first paragraph of The Tower of London opens as follows:

Once while studying in England, I went and saw the Tower of London. Afterwards I sometimes thought I might go and see it again, but I gave up the idea. I was once asked by a friend to visit it with him, but I was unable to accept his offer. First impressions are too precious to be destroyed by the second. It is best to visit the Tower only once (tl 23; sz 2: 5).

36The meaning of this recommendation, and the source of the narrator’s puzzling confidence is a point much remarked on in commentary, and a riddle of almost unbearable obscurity to the translators of the English edition. In the Appendix to The Tower of London, Peter Milward gives an unguarded report of this consternation. “The first thing that catches the eye is, I would say, [Sōseki’s] obstinate refusal to visit the Tower more than once. ‘What an odd fellow!’ is our instinctive reaction. ‘Why won’t he go a second time? Surely, what’s worth doing once is worth doing twice, or three times. The more, the merrier! Chesterton even remarks that not until you’ve seen something a hundred times do you really see it for the first time.’ But no! That is not Sōseki’s idea. For him, ‘first impressions are too precious to be destroyed by the second’” (62-63). In fact, the translators of the English edition have done some work on this passage. The original passage reads as follows:

First impressions are too precious to be destroyed by the second. [And to sweep that away with a third is even worse.] It is best to visit the Tower only once.5

37I have placed in brackets the sentence omitted by a translation otherwise characterized by a sensitive and conscientious adherence to the details of the original. Omitting dates, place names, description deemed repetitious is a liberty many translators of Japanese literature have felt justified in taking. However the omission stands out in this careful and stylistically superb translation. Like the good Englishman Sōseki parodies scrubbing a beautiful patina of moss off the rocks in his garden path, the translators dispense with the third iteration. ‘Clear away that excess verbiage!’ one might imagine the ‘instinctive reaction to be. But this point is crucial, as Sōseki is expressing here, in the first words of The Tower of London the diagram of successive moments of consciousness on page 31 of the Bungakuron.

38“First impressions are too precious to be destroyed by the second” corresponds to the attenuation of impression [A] to [a’] in the movement from focal point [A] to [B], and “to sweep that away with a third” demands to be read as the further attenuation to [a”]. The triple iteration, the successive movement of impressions, and the problem of attenuation clearly refer this to the diagrams of consciousness Sōseki is working on at the same time,6 and the enigmatic insistence that one only visit the Tower once becomes, not a perverse restriction of the freedom of tourism, but a clear indication that he wants to keep this impression at the top, at the focal point.

39Passage after passage, enigmatic on first reading, fall into place when the basis of the impressionism of The Tower of London is sought in the model of consciousness in the Theory.

It is only the scene of the Tower that stands out vividly in my mind’s eye. When I am asked what I saw before that, I am quite at a loss. Nor can I say what I saw afterwards. In between those two spaces, where my memory is a blank, everything is bright. It is as if the darkness surrounding me was split with lightning under my very nose. Then the darkness returned. So the Tower becomes for me the focus of my worldly dream (25; sz 2:6).

40The narrator wants to retain a blank white space on either side of this vivid impression. Within the model of consciousness this indicates the preservation of the impression at the focal point as a singularity, hence the imagery strains through the metaphor of the lightning flash or snapshot to eliminate the attenuated memory of past impressions and anticipation of future impressions. The Tower itself, the epitome of English history, is produced by the model as a singularity.

FIGURE 2

41Earlier quotations show description inside the Tower maintaining constant attention to the flow of consciousness, to the narrator’s mind as a desktop with limited space, such that the succession of impressions while strolling through the Tower crowds out prior impressions, concepts and emotions, which trail away. Impressions and reveries flow and ebb, they “evaporate” and are replaced by new ones.

42As I gazed on the Tower, I found twentieth-century London gradually disappearing from my mind and giving place to a fantastic picture of the past (27).

43Hence I would argue that far from being a “rather vague” romantic performance, or a flawed presentation of English history, The Tower of London delivers a consistently maintained impressionism, describing not the Tower, nor the history of the Tower, but the transient mental states of the perceiving subject walking through it. It is an experimental work of precise design meant to embody in fictional form the model of consciousness Sōseki was working out simultaneously in his research on the Theory of Literature. I have spent considerable time establishing this point in order to link the Theory to the rest of Sōseki’s œuvre. In this way I hope to reopen the question of Sōseki’s original ten year plan.

FIGURE 3

History, Memory, Impression

44The central problem of The Tower of London then, indicated over and over by the collapsing of centuries into a single moment, and cued in the context of Sōseki’s early work by the appearance of the cryptic signifier “one hundred years,” becomes why Sōseki goes to such a historically saturated site to thematize a model of individual consciousness. Because of the need to bracket the socially and historically contingent, phenomenological accounts of conscious experience tend to take as their object of contemplation the ahistorical space of the philosopher’s study, a desk, apple, cigarettes, pen and paper, the back of one’s own hand, and one could easily imagine Sōseki initially testing his model of conscious experience on something similarly close to hand as he wrote. By going immediately to a site densely permeated with social and historical associations, there are a number of points where, far from generating the figure of the contemplative intellectual, Sōseki sets up a position for his narrator very close to the one created for the Angel of History in Benjamin’s mystical 1935 “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” and the comparison is irresistible because Sōseki is ahead of Benjamin. And my argument is that Sōseki is ahead of the West.

45The central point of the famous Thesis ix is the simultaneity of past and present for the angel, and the storm called progress. History appears to the angel as a single event, not a series of events, just as the Tower appears not as an object with a history but as a series of impressions in the present. The Thesis depicts the angel “staring, his mouth is open, his wings spread,” and where we perceive a chain of events, “he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The angel would like to stay and do something, or at least inform and awaken someone, but a storm has got caught in his wings such that he can no longer close them. “This storm irresistibly propels him into the future... while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress” (Benjamin 1968, 257-258). This may be compared to the opening of the mystical 2nd chapter by Sōseki:

The history of the Tower of London is the epitome of English history. The curtain hiding the mystery of the past is torn down, and a beam of light comes through from beside the altar. Amid the gloom of the twentieth century it is the Tower which projects light. Time, which buries all in oblivion, flows back and comes to the present with the accidental wreckage of the past. The wreckage is what we call the Tower (26; sz 2:6).

46History is a wreckage. And both observers are horrified, but resigned with no possibility of intervening. The storm is what we call progress. The wreckage is what we call the Tower. And through a series of substitutions: the wreckage is what we call [the Tower]; which is the epitome of English History; which stands in for the modern West at the height of the imperial adventure. The angel is blown back by an irresistible force, while for Sōseki time, which buries all in oblivion, “flows back and comes to the present” in the figure of the Tower, an irresistible force which draws one in like a gigantic magnet. That is to say, what European intellectuals could not perceive about modernity until the wreckage of the 1930’s, Sōseki grasped immediately, in reflecting on England at the endgame of its empire in 1900.

47The meaning of the irresistible force called the Tower, figured as a gigantic magnet drawing the narrator across the bridge, is crucial to understanding the citation of Dante which closes the chapter: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here... [to the Tower]... which is the wreckage of history... which for Benjamin is “the storm we call progress.” The allegory is quite clear for Sōseki, writing in 1904 during increasingly excited preparations for the war with Russia which would bring Japan to parity with the western powers: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter this history.”.

48Yet, enter this history Japan did, and Sōseki’s seemingly off-hand later lectures such as “The Civilization of Modern-Day Japan” and “My Individualism” are concerned almost exclusively with the mechanism driving this history, and the possible positions one might take to avoid getting swept up in the wreckage (collected in Natsume 1992). Here is where we begin to perceive the necessity for Sōseki to elaborate his scientific and putatively universal model of consciousness at the historically saturated sites of empire, and how tightly this fits with the larger ten year project to produce “a dissection of the various elements structuring civilization, and discourse on its nature” (from letter dated 15 March 1902). And we can also begin to perceive the connection of Sōseki’s project to contemporary European thought, for the question Sōseki is posing through his scientific scrutiny of literature, far from being an annexation of literature by science, is precisely that of what drops out when literature is sequestered as a trivial discipline in the modern university, and science taken as the only valid form of knowledge.

49(F+f)

50The question now comes up of the famous formula, by which Sōseki articulates his model of consciousness with the experience of reading. The Theory of Literature opens with the assertion that the form of literary content takes the form (F+f), where F=impressions or concepts, and f= accompanying emotions.

Let us represent the form of literary content by (F+f). ‘F’ here designates focal impressions, or concepts, while small ‘f’ designates accompanying emotions. Hence the above formula represents the combination of the dual aspects of impression and concept in the cognitive factor ‘F’, with the emotional factor small ‘f’ (sz 9: 27).

51Komori makes a great deal of the collection of the typically opposed categories of concept and impression under the single factor ‘F’, arguing that this introduces from the start a recursive instability in the formula with the factor ‘F’ wavering between two “utterly opposed poles” (Komori 1995,96-99). However this is a misreading of what I take to be an essentially Berkeleyan frame for the Theory. Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge opens:

It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses; or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind; or lastly, ideas formed by help of memory and imagination – either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways (Berkeley 1952, 413, italics in original).

52An apple, stones, trees, a book and other sensible things usually understood to have a distinct external existence are defined in this way as “collections of ideas,” which insofar as they are pleasing or disagreeable, “excite the passions of love, hatred, joy, grief, and so forth” (ibid.). This is precisely Sōseki’s setup, and it can be seen that the surprise Komori professes at seeing Sōseki’s union of concept and impression under the cognitive factor F is rather premised on stereotypes of western thought as ruled by a Cartesian dualism. Whether or how Sōseki might have come in contact with Berkeley’s writings is not known. However unlike Locke who is more typically read as an antecedent for Sōseki’s thought but hedges on this score, Berkeley rigorously exploits the gap opened up between interior and exterior by the separation of mind and body in the Cartesian system. Berkeley takes the central problem of a dualist epistemology: If mind and matter are truly separate, how does one act on the other? That is to say, how can one know an inert external world, and answers in the most rigorous fashion, one can’t.7 The idealist problematic of an unknowable exterior comes out centrally in The Tower of London, Ten Nights of Dreams and other stories from the period, and the psychology Sōseki is borrowing is resolutely materialist, exploring a monistic system from the other side of the coin.

53Clearly the system Sōseki elaborates is consistently critical of a dualist split between mind and body, however I would like to read the stakes rather in the elaboration of the formula itself. Sōseki provides three possible permutations for the formula (F+f):

1. [F] but not [f] i.e. pure concept or impression with no accompany-ing emotion
2. [F] and [f] i.e. concept or impression accompanied by emotion
3. not [F] but [f] i.e. pure emotion with no object (sz 9: 27).

54To which he assigns the three most convenient possible illustrations:

1. [F] but-[f] the concept of a triangle, a pure concept
2. [F] and [f] a flower, or the stars, concept/impression w/associated emotion
3. ~ [F] but [f] dread, i.e. fear without an object (sz 9:27).

55Literature, Sōseki says, falls under case #2, i.e. concepts or impressions, accompanied by emotion, (F+f). He will spend the rest of the Bungakuron working out more ambiguous examples from the canon of English literature with the help of his students.

56Sōseki, then, has developed a formula incorporating concepts, impressions and emotions, and combined it with the model of consciousness to generate a model of reading that distinguishes the experience of literature from other types of conscious experience. The architectonic symmetry and fine attention to detail with which he elaborates the various quantitative and qualitative aspects of the experience of literature in relation to the formula (F+f) over the next 450 pages is breathtaking, and one must agree with Tsukamoto Toshiaki estimation that, “[i]n comparison with contemporary English books on rhetoric, The Theory of Literature is probably far above the average in its consistent logic, its fine argument, its rich sources and its concentration upon literature” (quoted in Matsui 1975,111). Sōseki, however, has been strangely silent on a fourth logical possibility for combining F and f, the negation of both factors:

4. ~ [F] and ~ [f] (neither [F] nor [f]); no concept or impression, no accompanying emotion.

57Any combination of two elements has a total of four possible permutations, and it is strange that Sōseki neglected this fourth possibility for two reasons: First, his theory demands it, and the mathematical character of the exposition leads one to it. That is the purpose of theory, to lead one’s speculation somewhere unexpected. Second, Sōseki seems to have spent a great deal of his creative oeuvre trying to approach exactly this fourth possibility. There are first the “others to life” (death, the time before birth) that Karatani sees obsessing Sōseki in his early stories and sketches, where terms like “one hundred years,” or “the other shore” function not as chronological or spatial quantities, but as signifiers for life as the gap between two voids (Karatani 1991). Cases 1, 2, and 3, involving some positive combination of cognitive and emotional states, hence obtain in the span of life (sei), in the small gap of consciousness between two voids, in the “hundred years.” Case 4 obtains in death (shi) and the time before birth (tanjō izen), in the realm beyond the possibility of individual experience. The periodic interest of his otherwise thoroughly modern and alienated characters in the experience of zazen or seated meditation, as in Mon and the 2nd Night in Ten Nights of Dreams, again points to a grasping toward this utterly negative fourth possibility.8

58When you look at the Bungakuron, this fourth possibility fairly leaps off the page, because of the mathematical setup. That is what theory is designed to do. However, Sōseki avoids this fourth permutation within the Theory by the qualifier that he is dealing with the experience of everyday life. “The impressions and conceptions we experience everyday can be classified into three broad categories” (sz 9: 27, italics added). Sōseki makes this qualification because he is developing a science, and the principle of all scientific knowledge, the definition almost is that it must be tested by experiment.9 Sōseki’s stated ambition was to produce a scientific account of literature, and he was in continual contact with colleagues in the sciences during the production of the Theory, and one of his most famous pupils was a physicist. Hence it is not likely that he took the label “scientific” lightly. The model is rigorous, and the elaboration with reference to English literature systematic and comprehensive. As far as the stage of testing by experiment, Sōseki seems to have regarded the lecture hall as a quasi-laboratory, and he would continually propose various ways of accounting for, quantifying and analyzing the experience of literature to his students, and then ask them to consult the fact of their own experience to see if it does, or does not agree with the model. Though this does not constitute empirical inquiry, it does involve a degree of methodological formalization along the lines of phenomenological inquiry’s reliance on a community of trained professionals to verify insights achieved in the course of solitary reflection.

59Hence, though Sōseki’s theory insistently suggests consideration of a fourth permutation, the definition of his project restricts his analysis to those permutations of his theory which can be tested by reference to the experience of reading. Because his project is scientific, and the fourth possibility leads one to questions that cannot be posed scientifically, he would explore the fourth possibility in a newly configured literature.

Conclusion

60Considered in itself, Natsume Sōseki’s Bungakuron is an extremely impressive achievement, a fully elaborated reader-response theory a full 60 years ahead of its time. However, it is only in its place as part of Sōseki’s larger ten year project that it can be grasped in its true ambition, for Sōseki seemed to be aiming to elaborate, through parallel prosecution in fiction and theory, a domain of thought heterogeneous to the instrumental knowledge to which he reduces the entire western technological, political and military adventure. This reduction occurs in a lecture entitled, “The Civilization of Modern-Day Japan” (1911), delivered ten years after he conceived in a fever in London the ambition to produce a “dissection of the various elements structuring civilization, and discourse on its nature.” In this later lecture the progress of modern civilization is defined as an interpenetration of energy-saving and energy-dissipating modes that is both pointless and always produces an excess. The model may be called thermodynamic in terms of its concern with transformations of energy within a system, but because the reservoir is never threatened with exhaustion by the irreversible process, this represents a clear break from the anxieties about entropy which consumed him during his time in London.

61Elaborated with ironic simplicity in the 1911 lecture, Sōseki comes up, as the definition of civilization for which he makes his audience wait, with nothing less than an economy, necessarily productive of excess, relentlessly progressive, but with no brakes to the process or criteria to judge whether the relentless change is good or bad. In Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, Edward Tenner warns amid the current climate of science boosterism that the long history of efforts to think the future consistently misses something obvious about the notion of progress. “It is obvious that technology makes things better. By technology I mean humankind’s modification of its biological and physical surroundings. It is also obvious that we are still unhappy with those surroundings, more discontented than when they were inferior” (Teller 1996, xi). Sōseki clearly discerned at the turn of the century this dialectic between excess and discontent as the essential, defining quality of modernity. The strength of a scientific model lies in its capacity to account for new circumstances which couldn’t be foreseen by its author, and it is testimony to Sōseki’s prescience that he could be transported to present day Japan or North America and would not have to be surprised by anything he saw. His homely thermodynamic system of an ungoverned process of technological innovation, and a population driven to ever more frenzied activity by its labor-saving contrivances is predictive of the ability of faxes, e-mail, the internet and other aspects of the current telecommunications revolution to divide our time into ever-decreasing units for more effective exploitation, and recent warnings from the New Economy about the alarming direction this inevitable progress is taking bring Sōseki’s formulation from the beginning of the century to its endgame (Joy 2000). Sōseki could not have foreseen the content of the impending revolution in genetics, nanotechnology and robotics, but he grasped its mechanism precisely.

62The possibility that behind Sōseki’s ironic self-denial he grasped something essential about the process of modernity, and figured in his ten year project an escape across the boundary between literature and science as heterogeneous domains poses interesting questions of the homology with the other great early 20th century theorists of heterogeneity, Bataille and Bohr. The economy Sōseki produces in the context of a definition of civilization is uncannily close to Batailles characterization of his collaboration with the physicist Georges Ambrosino as research in a general economy that would study “the movements of energy on the surface of the globe” (Bataille, 191). In relating Bataille to Neils Bohr’s complementarity, another point in the early 20th century in which the interaction between the scientific inside and outside produced an irreducible heterogeneity, Arkady Plotnitsky writes:

According to Bataille, the general economy is a “science” – a theoretical framework and a textual practice – by means of which one can relate the production, material or intellectual, of excesses that cannot be utilized (Plotnitsky 1994, 19).

63The question needs to be carefully posed, in the context of careful scrutiny of these early 20th century explorations of the frontiers of knowledge, of whether Sōseki in his negotiation of the boundary between literature and science and questioning of the problem of civilization was aiming at a restricted, thermodynamic system based on notions of entropy, that is to say a restricted economy, or whether he was aspiring to the heterogeneous systems of a general economy. As an initial sounding of this question, this paper has been concerned to displace the properly scientific Theory of Literature from its current position as an optional appendage to his literary oeuvre, and to articulate it as the first step in a larger project of which Sōseki never lost sight.