The Miner

by Sōseki Natsume

  Some commentators, however, have recognized the experimental value of The Miner. One writer has labeled it a “prophetic” stream-of-consciousness novel, and Sōseki’s indebtedness to William James has often been pointed out.30 Donald Keene is the first to have provided a balanced account in English of the novel’s reception and pioneering significance (questioning the accuracy of the “stream-of-consciousness” label, for example), but there is little in his commentary to contradict Beongcheon Yu’s earlier assertion that The Miner has “no thematic relationship to the rest of [Sōseki’s] works.”31 It is important to recognize, however, that The Miner was not merely an experiment in technique but a turning point in Sōseki’s own grasp of the human condition. For in The Miner, Sōseki’s “ordinary human being” ceases to be an evil “other” and becomes instead an untrustworthy “self.” Sōseki may have obtained the story material for The Miner from an informant, but the novel was the direct result of his continuing exploration of his own internal landscape, and it marked a new depth of psychological observation in his fiction.32 In The Miner, the narrator-hero’s haphazard descent into the dark bowels of the earth parallels his descent into himself. The experience leads him to the familiar Sōseki conclusion that “there is nothing so unreliable as man” (p. 45), but this he supports by spelling out at great length what he calls at one point “my theory of the non-existence of character” (p. 185).33 What we mistakenly call personality is “nothing but memory fragments,” he insists (p. 45). “In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don’t know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel” (p. 33).

  Not only with regard to style, as mentioned earlier, but here, at the book’s philosophical core, Sōseki was no doubt reacting to the weaknesses of his own just-completed melodrama, The Poppy, with its all-too-clearly defined characters and its unambiguous moral center. Kumasaka Atsuko has noted that the character Kōno in The Poppy, a philosopher, is presented as a man who understands life and humankind and who knows how one should live. He can distinguish the moral from the immoral; he can see inside people and sense their fates; and he can criticize the schemers in life without implicating himself. Senuma Shigeki has pointed out that the death of the head schemer in The Poppy is not an inevitable development of a tragic plot but merely a punishment dealt out to her by the author from an elevated moral plane. In its critique of modern egoism, Kumasaka concludes, the novel is as self-righteous as any didactic piece written under the Tokugawa shoguns with their officially enforced moralism.34 Shortly before he began serializing The Poppy in the Asahi, Sōseki delivered a lecture in which he defined the novelist as one who must “provide an interpretation of how we ought to live and teach the common people the meaning of existence.”35 The tone of voice that Sōseki adopted here was reminiscent of the confident, self-righteous preaching that readers had heard from Dōya Sensei in Autumn Wind, and clearly, when Sōseki launched into The Poppy, he still saw himself as standing on a lectern several steps above the ordinary man. In The Miner, however, all such certitude crumbled away. Not only is there no center of righteousness in the book, the very form of the novel is lost. The two developments are inseparable. When, nearly halfway through the work, two such seemingly important characters as the boy and the red blanket disappear, never to reenter the action, the narrator observes, “At this rate, my book will never turn into a novel” (p. 116). The Miner contains many such passages in which the novelist thinks out loud to inform the reader that the view of human changeability set forth in the book—the view that, six years later, would cause Kokoro’s Sensei to withdraw from the world entirely—is responsible for the novel’s odd shapelessness. Through his narrator’s mouth, the author has the last word concerning his literary experiment: “That’s all there is to my experience as a miner. And every bit of it is true, which you can tell from the fact that this book never did turn into a novel” (p. 239).

  Not only does The Miner reject novelistic form but it even sacrifices narrative certainty. Observing his own inconsistencies, the ease with which he has changed, the narrator concludes with comical scrupulousness that he can only speculate (he must use “probably”) on what his past motives might have been (p. 36).

  Most of the passages that spell out the “theory of the non-existence of character” appear in the first two-fifths of the book, which derive their story material from only the first half-page of the twelve pages of notes that Sōseki took from his young informant. The “story” in question is the description of the protagonist’s trip to the mine. The rest of the novel, set in the mine and its environs, draws heavily—and faithfully—on the factual information that Sōseki recorded in his notes, and it is in every way more conventionally realistic.36 Tamai Takayuki speaks of a “dislocation between the first and second halves of the book which many people have noted,” and he agrees with still more commentators that Sōseki became overly “dependent on his materials” in the latter part of the book.37 Donald Keene echoes other scholars in suggesting that in this novel Sōseki “undoubtedly also wished to call attention to the inhuman conditions under which the miners worked.”38

  Virtually no one sees any continuity of purpose in Sōseki’s approach, for the author himself seems to have forgotten his spirited remarks about the collapse of the novel. The distancing humor all but disappears. The descriptions of the various shafts and caves and pits within the mine are far more lengthy and detailed than called for in a book that was “never” supposed to “turn into a novel.” Perhaps Sōseki the new professional writer became fascinated with the process of creating from notes a place he had never seen before. Whether intended as local color or as a symbolic journey through the frightening chaos of the psyche, there is more of this descriptive material than is thematically necessary—until the protagonist confronts both death and his own social conditioning in the dark “Hell” (p. 162) of the mine.

  Alone in the depths, the young protagonist seems ready to surrender himself to nothingness when he is momentarily saved by his instinct for survival and—perhaps more importantly—by his bourgeois preconceptions. “As long as I was going to die anyway,” he thinks, “I could do better than to die in this place. A command … echoed in my head: ‘Wait! Wait! Get out of here and go to Kegon Falls!’” He does not want his death to be “pointless.” He wants to die in the conventionally romantic manner and not be “reviled by those half-beast-half-human miners” (p. 203). Suddenly arrogant, he is abandoned by his guide and he refuses to put himself in the inferior position of asking directions of the next man he meets, a particularly extreme example of a pasty-faced miner. He then encounters a more appealing miner called Yasu, an educated individual like himself who has been hiding in the mine to escape the consequences of a disastrous love affair. Yasu urges him to go back to the city, to get a decent job, to work for the sake of the family and the nation. This warmly compassionate Japanese superego even offers to pay his fare if need be (p. 214).

  Overcome with emotion, the boy vows to live up to the example of Yasu’s admirable character. He is “saved”—or so it has seemed to many scholars who have overlooked the one unequivocal clue that Sōseki is by no means playing it straight here. Meeting Yasu by chance down in Hell among the thousands of animalistic miners, says the narrator, is “something right out of a novel” (p. 214). Sōseki did not spend a hundred pages denouncing the “lies” of conventional novels to let a line like this slip in by accident. Here, in the climactic scene of the most conventionally novelistic part of The Miner, the protagonist has been deflected from the earlier-discovered truth of his own amorphousness by the socially conditioned illusions that hold novels together and keep individuals in their place. Yasu is none other than the young man’s socialized self. After this meeting, with its rush of patriotic and familial fervor, he emerges from the mine with all his conventional values reconfirmed. The miners are ugly and disgusting savages; the “lovely color” of a flower
he sees is “almost wasted here” (p. 231). In the clinic where he must go for an examination, however, a whiff of medicine reminds him of death and the vulnerability of humans to their fate, and once more he begins to see the world as alien, a meaningless succession of form and color. He passes the flower again, and it no longer seems beautiful to him (p. 235). The encounter with Yasu has had no more permanent effect on him than any other experience in the flow of consciousness.

  Of all the studies I consulted in preparing this essay, only one, by Sasaki Masanobu, recognizes the significance of the Yasu episode as “something right out of a novel” and duly notes the subsequent return of the protagonist to his “characterless” state. Indeed, Sasaki goes so far as to assert that Sōseki constructed the entire episode for the sole purpose of demolishing it.39 This directly contradicts earlier commentators, who invariably conclude that the protagonist has been “saved,” but who do so only at the cost of ignoring the conclusion of the book, in which the narrator has come to accept his inconsistencies and his ordinariness as part of the meaningless succession of images. When the flower ceases to be beautiful, the miners’ faces cease to be ugly: “They were just faces, as the face of the most beautiful woman in Japan is just a face. And I was exactly like these men, a human being of flesh and bone, entirely ordinary and entirely meaningless” (p. 236).

  I can only marvel at how so many scholars could have read through such lines and still concluded that the narrator had been saved from his alienation. And all—including Sasaki—seem to have missed the simple fact that the protagonist could not possibly have been saved or cured (as one psychiatrist/critic would have it) because the protagonist is the narrator and his entire theory of characterlessness has been formulated in retrospect, “years” after his presumed salvation should have taken place (p. 86). Perhaps Sasaki’s skeptical view of Yasu’s patriotic ardor is a function of age. Having been born in 1940, he was spared the propaganda of the Japanese Empire, as most of the other scholars I read were not.40

  In any case, it is important to recognize that Sōseki is being consistent to the very end of his book. His protagonist has discovered that he “was exactly like these men … entirely ordinary and entirely meaningless.” Without this awareness of a shared, undependable humanity, the mature Sōseki might have continued to be a penetrating critic of his times, but he would never have attained the stature that certifies him as a major voice of the twentieth century.

  Sōseki was, of course, not alone in his questioning of the validity of “character” in literature. To a theorist like Robbe-Grillet, writing in 1957, character is simply one of “several obsolete notions” hanging on from traditional criticism, despite its “fifty years of disease, the death notice signed many times over by the most serious essayists.”41

  But the death knell began sounding even earlier than he suggests. Dostoevsky was already tearing at the solidity of the ego in The Double of 1846. In 1888, August Strindberg prefaced his play Miss Julie with these remarks: “[A]n event in real life—and this discovery is quite recent—springs generally from a whole series of more or less deep-lying motives.” In attempting to account for the “multiplicity of motives” behind his characters’ actions, Strindberg says, “I have tried to make my figures rather ‘characterless’ … My souls (or characters) are conglomerates, made up of past and present stages of civilization, scraps of humanity, torn-off patches of Sunday clothing turned into rags—all patched together as is the human soul itself.”42

  The parallel between these observations and Sōseki’s, both in and about The Miner, is remarkable.43 Strindberg sounds even more like Sōseki when he discusses the small cast of characters he has presented in his play (a parallel to the simplicity of The Miner’s plot and small cast): “I have done this because I believe I have noticed that the psychological processes are what interest people of our own day more than anything else. Our souls, so eager for knowledge, cannot rest satisfied with seeing what happens, but must also learn how it comes to happen.”44

  In practice, however, Strindberg’s characters are primarily symbols of social class and evidence none of the amorphous quality suggested by his theory, the mature fruits of which are probably to be found in Robbe-Grillet’s time and the theater of the absurd. Here we find Ionesco’s “Pseudo-Drama” (as he called it) Victims of Duty (1952), and here, too, we find a world congruent with The Miner. The protagonist Choubert is urged to burrow down “deeper, my love, deeper” into his own psyche, where “it’s so dark,” until the darkened stage itself seems to encompass the chaotic interior of a mind, one full of infantile drives and snatches of trivia. Toward the end, the poet (and drama theorist) Nicolas enters to explain what has been going on. Rejecting Aristotelian theater, he says, “We’ll get rid of the principle of the identity and unity of character … personality doesn’t exist. Within us there are only forces that are contradictory or not contradictory.” The Detective, a walking superego (much as detectives are for Sōseki, in whose works they lurk as representatives of state and social repressiveness), declares, “as for me, I remain Aristotelically logical, true to myself, faithful to my duty and full of respect for my bosses. I don’t believe in the absurd, everything hangs together, everything can be comprehended in time.”45 Nicolas kills this rationalist, but soon he is behaving just like him in spite of himself, becoming another “victim of duty.” Likewise, the protagonist of The Miner insists that the fragmented nature of personality absolves individuals from responsibility but admits that he has never been able to free himself from a need to live up to commitments, concluding that “people are put together in a tremendously convenient way so as to become victims of society” (p. 44). A victim of society is precisely what Yasu, in the mine-hell, urges the young man to become—apparently without success. All we know of the narrator’s later life is that he has been “wandering all over the country for years now” (p. 84).

  Without an exacting comparative study of style and narrative technique, it would be difficult to place Sōseki precisely among those writers who, “from the end of the nineteenth century on, … produced narrative works which on the whole undertook to give us an extremely subjective, individualistic, and often eccentrically aberrant impression of reality, and which neither sought nor were able to ascertain anything objective or generally valid in regard to it.”46 Nakamura Shin’ichirō, the longtime proponent of The Miner as stream-of-consciousness fiction, suggests parallels to Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce, Camus, and Faulkner.47 But Sōseki is rarely attempting to convince the reader of the immediate reality of what passes through the protagonist’s mind. By the sixth paragraph, it becomes clear that the narrator is writing, commenting on his own thought processes in retrospect, and we are reading his pages, not floating somewhere inside his brain.48 There is an eccentric consciousness of consciousness here that is more reminiscent of Beckett’s bedridden writer/narrators Molloy and Malone (“There’s this man who comes every week …. He gives me money and takes away the pages. So many pages, so much money”).49 Hugh Kenner speaks of “Beckett’s invincibly comic method, which locates comedy in the very movements of the human mind” in such works as The Unnameable, “from which Beckett has succeeded in abolishing all content save the gestures of the intellect: immaculate solipsism compelled (this is the comic twist) to talk, talk, talk,”50 or in the case of the crippled Malone, who can do little more than move his pencil, to write, write, write:

  Ah yes, I have my little pastimes and they What a misfortune, the pencil must have slipped from my fingers, for I have only just succeeded in recovering it after forty-eight hours … of intermittent efforts.51

  The same niggling precision of self-observation is at work when Sōseki’s unnamed narrator recalls that he fell asleep and “What happened to me after that, not even I can write” (p. 153). Donald Keene has noted that Sōseki, in following The Poppy with The Miner, “had moved from the world of George Meredith to that of modern literature.”52 Indeed, so far had Sōseki moved into the world of modern li
terature that The Miner remains to this day one of Japan’s most innovative contributions to contemporary fiction.

  In a lecture he delivered in 1911, Sōseki declared that if an artist cannot derive an income directly from the public, “then all he can do is starve to death,” and that is probably what would have happened to Sōseki if he had continued writing novels like The Miner.53 With his next novel, Sanshirō (serialized from September to December 1908), Sōseki returned to working with a more conventional cast of characters. Gone, however, were the moralistic certainties of the early works, and Sanshirō’s own shifting, vacillating character shared much with that of the young miner. “Contradiction” is a key word of the book, and the otherworldly Hirota Sensei has given up Dōya Sensei’s self-righteous ranting to deliver speeches like this: “There is one thing we ought to keep in mind in the study of man. Namely, that a human being placed in particular circumstances has the ability and the right to do just the opposite of what the circumstances dictate.”54

  As Edwin McClellan has noted, “Just as Sanshirō is only potentially a tragic figure, so is Sōseki at this point only potentially a tragic writer.”55 This is because he was still holding the insights of The Miner at arm’s length, keeping the shadows at a distance with laughter. He finally let his guard down in And Then, after which Sōseki developed into an authentic modern tragedian, portraying man struggling hopelessly with “all those things in this world which make it unworthy of trust”—most notably, his own nature.