사생문(写生文)과 헛글(無駄) -자연주의 소설과 사생문 소설의 이해-

Abstract

In 1894, Masaoka Shiki was first introduced to western style of sketch through European painters which led him to apply such method in writing Japanese prose. By applying what Europeans called “sketching” to his writing, he became a trailblazer in modernization of Haiku ashemade it in to a theory and publishedhis work, The Narrative in 1900. What Shiki truly meant by ‘sketching’ in The Narrative was for a writer to choose a site which one actually visits and to describe the experience and tell a story just as he saw it. In addition, he argued that “fruitless sentences” were necessary for a writer to make readers feel the same as he felt at the site. In The Narrative, Shiki emphasized the importance of ‘fruitless sentence’ by showing various examples and in result, by observing Shiki’s work closely, I came to realize following facts. First, Shiki’s method of Haiku writing had influenced Natsume Sōseki who used to be one of his classmates at Tokyo Imperial University. Like Shiki, Natsume Sōseki also recognized the importance of ‘fruitless sentences’ in writing novels, as he used them in writing his masterpiece, I am a Cat and Essay on Modern Novels and Sentences. Second, unlike Japanese naturalist writers who insisted that describing natural scenery was a waste of paper and that a novel should center on human’s inner struggle and his psychology, writers of ‘literary sketch’ argued that humans are also one of staffages and so descriptions of one’s psychological state should come after a description of the surrounding. This shows that there was a literary polarity between two types of writers at Sōseki and Shiki’s time. However, I came to a conclusion that it is necessary for novels to have ‘fruitless sentences’ by comparing Sōseki’s two contrary novels Blanket (naturalist) and Grass Pillow (literary sketch).