Life-Worlds and the Problem of Subjectivity: A Comparison Between Albert Camus’s L’Étranger and Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country Tobias Cheung In comparing Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country (1937 /1948) and Camus’s L’Étranger (1942), the main points of my analysis in this essay are the critique of the modern rational subject and the structure of the life-worlds of the two main characters of the novels (Shimamura and Meursault). Further themes are the overwhelming forces of nature (the snow in Snow Country and the sun in L’Étranger) and the protocol-like1 descriptions of reality. Finally, the problematic setting of each novel is discussed in its specific cultural context.
This essay focuses on a comparative study of the notion of “lifeworld” in Camus’s L’Étranger and Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country.2 The notion of “life-world” is based on a problematic setting which structures both novels. The setting represents a narrative oscillation between a radical subjectivism, for which human individuals are strangers in the contexts in which they (have to) live, and a naturalized individualism, for which humans are adapted to a specific environment. This adaptation relies on (human) senses and on habits and traditions in places where socio-cultural practices and nature are closely interwoven. Meursault loves the sea, the beaches and the intimate atmosphere of his suburb in Algiers, while Shimamura, the main character of Snow Country, loves the snow, the mountains and the everyday life of a small mountain village.3 In both novels, each main character leaves 1
By this I mean perceptual data that are lined up in a list according to appearance, without any other logical order. 2 References to Kawabata’s Snow Country (yukiguni) are taken from the translation by Edward G. Seidensticker (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1994). Further references will be abbreviated as SC and incorporated into the text. 3 There is ongoing debate as to the identity of the main character of Snow Country. See, for example, J. Thomas Rimer, Modern Japanese Fiction and its Traditions: An