著者

森本 真一 Shin-ichi Morimoto

出版者

昭和女子大学近代文化研究所

雑誌

学苑 (ISSN:13480103)

巻号頁・発行日

no.798, pp.107-123, 2007-04

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Oscar Wilde observes in "The Decay of Lying" that life imitates art rather than art imitates life. Akutagawa Ryunosuke was interested in Wilde. He made the protagonist of an autobiographical work wish to catch an aerial spark even at the risk of his life. Wilde and Akutagawa tended to attach more importance to fictitious worlds than the reality. William Faulkner was influenced by Wilde. A character in his novel named Faulkner declares that he is a liar by profession. Joe Christmas in Faulkner's Light in August finishes his life feeling unsure of his relationship to white and black people as he thinks he may be part Negro. He is lynched after many years of violent disobedience. According to Akutagawa, Christ is likely to be bound by the Holy Spirit as an eternal seeker of transcendence. Joe seems to be a powerless Christ vainly striving to get over something. Akutagawa compared artists to climbers and confessed his yearning for the foot of the mountain he was ascending. He called Christ an ultra idiot who kept fighting for poetic justice. This is presumably Akutagawa's reflection on his own fantastic mentality. Wilde was also conscious of a connection between Christ and artists. It may be that artists' passion leads them to ordeals just as Christ's life led him to be crucified. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Wilde is a story of a man who kills himself by means of stabbing his portrait. Likewise Akutagawa was distressed by his shadow and feared that his death might come to his second self. After he committed suicide, a writer lamented that he made a short romance of his life. Sherwood Anderson, who found an excess of talent in Faulkner, warned that he might not write anything because he could write in too many ways. He advised Faulkner to have somewhere to start from and Faulkner wrote a magnificent series of novels with his birthplace as its model. Wilde spent two years in jail on the charge of his homosexual love. Wilde and Akutagawa were tremendously talented. Readers must grieve that Akutagawa did not try to live and write further. As for Wilde, they may ask if he could show his uniqueness only through his fiction. Wilde and Akutagawa, in a sense, never attained their proper starting points from which they could set to work and fully demonstrate their abilities.