"Haiku and the 'Desire to Write': on Masaoka Shiki and Marcel Proust"

J. Keith Vincent, Associate Professor of Japanese & Comparative Literature, and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Boston University

Masaoka Shiki and Marcel Proust spent the final years of their lives confined to their sick rooms with tuberculosis and asthma. Each was painfully aware of the shortness of his own life and the great stretches of time it would take to finish the work he had set out to do. As death approached, Shiki wrote thousands of haiku, the shortest of all poetic genres, while Proust completed a novel of three thousand pages. In this talk, Professor Vincent juxtaposes Shiki and Proust; short and long. Professor Vincent discusses the haiku-like quality of some of Proust's longest sentences, how Shiki used haiku to remember and relive his past, and how both showed in writing how, as Proust put it, “A change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and ourselves anew.” Finally, he explores the meaning of what Roland Barthes, writing about Proust and Shiki, called a "desire to write" that drove these writers breathlessly on to translate their short lives into something that would last.