ジェイムズ・ジョイスと日本近代小説(一) : ジェイムズ・ジョイスと伊藤整の「新心理主義」

As we know from the article by Prof. Saburo Ota, James Joyce was introduced to Japanese readers fairly early, in the 1920\u27s. The more enthusiastic attempts to assimilate his work, however, took place between 1930 and 1932, when biographical and critical essays on Joyce, and translations both of his novels and of articles about them by English and American critics and authors appeared in almost every number of those Japanese quarterly magazines which were interested in the trends of European literature. Among the young novelists and critics who engaged themselves in the introduction of Joyce, Sei Itoh was the most energetic and, perhaps, the most gifted. In this article, I try to explain, on the basis of such articles and translations of this period, what aspect of Joyce\u27s work, especially of Ulysses, attracted Sei Itoh the most and the reason for the attraction, surveying at the same time the reactions among Japanese writers to Sei Itoh\u27s response to Joyce. My conclusions are as follows: 1. To Sei Itoh, as well as to many other Japanese authors, the significance of Ulysses lay almost exclusively in the method of \u27stream of consciousness\u27 or \u27monologue interior. \u27 Sei Itoh thought that this method was the only means to liberate the novel from plot, to which the \u27old\u27 psychological novel had got itself tied, and to enable it to explore the depths of psychology. In trying to use the method, however, he was faced with the problem of how to relate the stream of consciousness of a character to the occurrences of the outer world around him the problem, in short, of how to give form to a novel. Strangely enough, Sei ITOH as well as many other Japanese authors paid little attention to the elaborate mythological structure of Ulysses, or to Joyce\u27s aspiration for universality underlying such a structure. 2. Sei Itoh\u27s attitude towards Joyce was criticized by other writers as being too technique-oriented. Yet the fact was that his interest in the technique of stream of consciousness was inseparably bound up with his thematic interest; the technique provided him with a valid means of presenting the dark, irresistible force of sex which lurks behind the masks of men as social beings, and which, he thought, eventually controls them. 3. Although some Marxist writers showed much interest in Ulysses, and thought of adapting the technique of stream of consciousness to their own purposes, Sei Itoh was sceptic of and defensive toward the Marxist conception of men. At the time when Marxist literature was dominant among Japanese authors, it is possible that Itoh\u27s interest in Joyce was reinforced by his desire to justify his own opposition to Marxist literature. 4. Sei Itoh\u27s thematic interest, however, seems gradually to have dominated his technical interest. This might have been partly because he realized that there did not really exist in the Japanese novel of that time the kind of necessity that compelled Joyce to abandon the traditional methods of the novel and resort to a more experimental technique. In 1932, we find Sei Itoh writing short stories accoding to the more traditional conception of the novel