著者

大橋 健三郎

出版者

一般財団法人日本英文学会

雑誌

英文學研究 (ISSN:00393649)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.40, no.1, pp.55-76, 1964-02-25

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Examining closely some of those modern American novels or stories in which worlds of nature play somewhat dominant parts one way or another, we find that there is a curiously similar attitude more or less common to the authors in their treatments of natural objects or phenomena. There are, it seems, three distinct levels or orders, for example, of which these stories or novels are made, including: first, the world of the actual society in which modern civilization is more or less dominant; second, the natural world where man, who has got out from the actual human society, struggles with some powerful natural object or phenomenon and, in the very struggling, finds some high value or glory which he cannot find in the actual civilized world; and, third, the world of some transcendental order, which is usually suggested by the eternal return of natural phenomena, such as seasons, procreation, celestial movement, or the flowing river, and which seems ultimately to sustain the whole moral of the work of art itself. Take, for example, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, or Faulkner's "The Bear", or even Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. In these novels and stories, the world of the actual society is, almost without exception, something portent, or at least sordid and trivial, from which heroes or heroines get out early or are forced to do so, and they immediately seek something of much higher value and much more glorious (or fertile, in the case of The Grapes of Wrath) in the world of, if we borrow from Faulkner, "the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter." Thus Hemingway's hero fights the 'marlin', Faulkner's Issac seeks to be spiritually equal to Old Ben (these two being nothing but natural objects) and Steinbeck's Joads struggle against injustice, the endless highway and, above all, the dust storm and the flood (natural phenomena). But at the same time, in their struggles, although defeated and vain at the last in physical aspects, they seem to draw their ultimate strength (and embody it in themselves) from some conscious or unconscious cognizance of such transcendental order of nature as is represented by the celestial motion (The Old Man and the Sea, although the old man himself seems scarcely conscious of it), or the "leaf and twig and particle, air and sun and dew and night, acorn oak and leaf and acorn again, ... " ("The Bear"), or the mysterious ever-flow of water and blood and seasons (The Grapes of Wrath). It seems as if these authors, including many more, were trying once more (and, perhaps, once for all) to fall back on the dark power of the transcendental nature, in order to fight back the actual world of the civilization-strained society.