著者

塩田 弘

出版者

広島大学大学院社会科学研究科国際社会論専攻

雑誌

欧米文化研究

巻号頁・発行日

no.6, pp.139-150, 1999

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The objective of this paper is to examine Gary Snyder's views on love in Regarding Wave with special attention to his attitudes toward nature and his scientific thinking.In Regarding Wave, Snyder tries to locate the element of love within the conversion of energy through biological imagination. He observes the behavior of the human race, and he holds females, in great esteem as the source of the energy. Snyder's idea of love is not based on the traditional concept of love in the Western world, but it is an extension of the act of eating. For him, his partner and family are an energy network that supplies him with vitality. Love is the most important process of exchanging energy which is not privileged to humankind. Accordingly, Snyder extends the identity of human beings into the roles of other life forms on earth.This idea is supported by his detailed understanding of the-natural world. There are some scientific theories behind his literary imagination; the first is quantum mechanics, the fundamental theory used by 20th-century physicists to describe atomic and subatomic phenomena. According to the quantum theory, the conversion of energy is caused by wave patterns in the natural world, so on many occasions, Snyder uses waves metaphorically in the poems both in their contents and in their forms. Even more important is thermodynamics, the branch of physics that studies the transfer of heat and the interconversion of heat and work in various physical processes. Snyder's imagination is also transferred from the external energy according to the first law of thermodynamics. Therefore, his creative activities are located in the working of nature, and his poems store wave like energy which is transmitted to his readers.Love is an essential part of the flow of his scientific energy and the idea that one organism is linked to another, and then another is the most important part of his thought project. Snyder locates human beings as merely a part of the totality of the environment rather than at the center of the world.