2 0 0 0 OA アメリカ文学におけるエスニシティ(ethnicity)の地政学的研究
- 著者
- 田中 久男
- 出版者
- アメリカ学会
- 雑誌
- アメリカ研究 (ISSN:03872815)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- no.40, pp.39-56, 2006
This article is an attempt to explore the structured violence in the South as a form of culture, focusing on such an actual outburst of violence as the Emmett Till case and on William Faulkner's "Dry September" (1931) as a fictional rendering of it. In The American Way of Violence (1972) Alphonso Pinkney detects the strong connection between American Calvinism and the Social Darwinism which helped to advance the tendency of American society to dichotomize human society into two groups such as the saved and the damned, the superior and the inferior, or the good and the evil—a dichotomization which was taken advantage of to justify black slavery and the massacre of Native Americans. William Styron presents in his masterpiece, Sophie's Choice (1979), the idea of the two greatest absolute evils in human history, which, in his view, were materialized in black slavery and theholocaust: the slavery as a collective social enforcement of white supremacy and the holocaust as an outcome of the 'overdetermination' of many social influences, that is, a composite agency of anti-Semitism and other factors such as religion, economics, politics, or nationalism.This article first highlights an episode in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) in which Robert Cohn was awakened to his Jewish identity and the latent habitus of anti-Semitism at Princeton. We see the same kind of awakening in the Jewish character Nathan Landau in Sophie's Choice, who seems in the end to be crushed by the huge dogma of anti-Semitism. We can recognize the tremendous violence of anti-Semitism in society from the ordeal which the young Lionel Trilling experienced as a Jew at Princeton. In the same vein, we can see the agony of Franz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1967), a work that makes a splendid analysis of the great bias of European Christian culture towards regarding the color black as a stigma, as it is closely connected with Satan, evil, immorality, or darkness—a bias which, in association with the concept of the great chain of being, seems greatly responsible for the view of black people as racially inferior in the human scale. Toni Morrison also draws our attention to such problems as "the pain of being black" in tightly racialized American society which had been shaped not only by the prevalence of Social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century but also by the enforcement of the Jim Crow laws and the twisted interpretation of the Bible endorsed by the idea of white supremacy.The murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago, by two white supremacists, which took place in Money, Mississippi, in the summer of 1955, is symbolic of the structured violence, which resembles a Southern version of Louis Althusser's idea of "Ideological State Apparatuses" and which is based on the racial fanaticism peculiar to the Deep South. Morrison wrote a play entitled Dreaming Emmett, with the hope that the white and the black could make the nightmare their common memory. William Faulkner wrote a letter of grief and lamentation about this case to a newspaper, deploring the irredeemable violent bigotry of his native soil. In "Dry September" Faulkner describes such bigotry in a Southern small town as revealed in the ex-soldier's effort to maintain "the power structure in which they 'protect' women and terrorize blacks." Nevertheless, we should feel the shock of recognition, as if we were dazzled by the deep chasm between actuality and fiction, when we read his mysterious 1931 letter published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, a letter saying that lynch mobs "have a way of being right."
1 0 0 0 IR Sophie′s Choice試論--選択と罪悪と運命
- 著者
- 田中 久男
- 出版者
- 広島大学文学部
- 雑誌
- 広島大学文学部紀要 (ISSN:04375564)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.44, pp.p153-175, 1984-12
Sophie's Choice (1979), William Styron's autobiographical novel, deals, like his other works, with the nature of evil in all mankind: "our proclivity toward hatred and toward massive domination," the grievous proclivity which was embodied on the largest scale in the despotic institutions of slavery and the concentration camps. This paper, though analyzing the obsessions of three main characters, as well as exploring the issue of the form of the first-person narration employed in this book, is primarily a study of its themes: the main characters' choices involving evil, their consequent ordeal of guilt, and the tricks or irony of fate coloring the whole of this novel.Structurally similar to Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, and All the King's Men, Styron's Sophie's Choice comprises two stories—the initiation of a young novelist and Southern WASP, Stingo, and the ordeal of a Polish Catholic woman, Sophie, who suffers from her painful memory of "the Auschwitz experience"—though the story of Nathan, a paranoid schizophrenic New York Jewish liberal, is splendidly entangled with the stories of Sophie and Stingo.Thematically, the novel is intended to "radiate outwards" by using the awful moment of Sophie's choice in Auschwitz as a "metaphor": the ordeal of her self-hatred and sense of guilt echoes not only the ordeal of Stingo's guilt about his abandonmment of his mother and of Sophie and Nathan at the final moment, but the ordeal of Dr. Blackstock's grief and guilt toward his wife's death and that of Stingo's great-grandfather who chose to sell his black boy, Artiste, to a trader. The subject of the tricks or irony of fate is also meant to reverberate in the same way: Stingo, a descendant of the slave owners, receives his share of Artiste's sale, the tainted money which enables him to concentrate on his literary apprenticeship; Sophie's skill in typing and shorthand which she was compelled to learn by her tyrannical father helps her survive Auschwitz among a small elite; while her father, in spite of his idea of the extermination of Jews, becomes a victim of Nazi totalitarianism. Stingo has survived World War II, while Edward Farrell, also wanting to be a novelist, has died in the War, though both were almost simultaneously in Okinawa.At the end of the novel, Stingo (Styron) has become aware of "death, and pain, and loss, and the appalling enigma of human existence" universally inherent in the human condition, and is still aware of the glory of continuing a painful effort to plumb the depths of that enigma. Sophie's Choice is a splendid product of such an effort on the part of the author.
1 0 0 0 IR Soldiers's Pay の世界 : 荒地からの出発
- 著者
- 田中 久男
- 出版者
- 中・四国アメリカ文学会
- 雑誌
- 中・四国アメリカ文学研究 (ISSN:03880176)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- no.28, pp.21-31, 1992-06-01
Landing in Luck (1919), William Faulkner's first short story, is rendered so humorously that he seems to have been far less affected by World War I than his contemporaries, Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, and Hemingway. Yet, if we pay attention to the fact that "The Lilacs," Soldiers' Pay, and the return of Bayard Sartoris in Flags in the Dust are all set in the spring of 1919, the year following the armistice, we know the author himself was well aware of "the post-war malaise and sense of paralysis." Therefore, we must read Soldiers' Pay, his first novel, as a work of one of the "wastelanders."Donald Mahon, a maimed war hero, returns to Georgia in April, the month which reminds us of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The month, far from promising regeneration, turns out to be the cruellest one not only for the returning soldier but for the people around him—his father, the Reverend Mahon, his fiancee, Cecily Saunders, and his previous girl friend, Emmy. Donald, who lives in "nothingness" just like Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, is used as a mirror, "a moral touchstone" by which the community of Charlestown may be judged. If he is one of those who have taken "soldiers' pay," Margaret and Gilligan, who take him home, also share, more or less, the nihilism and disillusionment of those post-war years. Margaret, suffering from the sense of infidelity toward her late three-day husband, masochistically seeks both atonement and punishment in her affection for and marriage to Donald, her husband's surrogate; homeless and rootless, Gilligan seems unable to find any firm meaning to his life.More than any other character, the Reverend is spiritually "half dead"with his unstable faith in God, the spiritual disability which may be the cause for his strange lack of reference to Easter. Januarius Jones, a fellow of Latin in college, pursues the women around Donald and therefore is intended to be a parody of the sexless and amnesiac Donald who, like the marble faun, is bound in passive, impersonal observation.It is true that some modernistic experiments are attempted in this novel: the use of rather simple forms of interior monologue, the voices of the town, and the letters addressed by Julian Lowe, a young cadet, to Margaret, letters which change from a passionate note to a cold brief message. Their introduction in the course of the story effectively conveys the sense of the inexorable passage of time, as well as the temporariness and waste of love.In spite of these artistic devices, Soldiers' Pay still lacks the Southern milieu, inner and outer, which becomes obvious in Flags in the Dust (completed in 1927), because the author was not deeply aware of the important function of the milieu to present characters with their background. So, there are unnecessary ambiguities, such as Januarius's insipient relation with the Reverend, or Gilligan's intention to remain in the town after his separation from Margaret. To grow maturer as a writer, Faulkner needs what T. S. Eliot calls "the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year," though Faulkner calls himself "a failed poet."
1 0 0 0 OA ミシシッピのEmmett Till事件と 「乾燥の九月」
- 著者
- 田中 久男
- 出版者
- アメリカ学会
- 雑誌
- アメリカ研究 (ISSN:03872815)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.2006, no.40, pp.39-56, 2006-03-25 (Released:2010-11-26)
- 参考文献数
- 59
本研究は、アメリカ文学を地方主義(regionalism)という観点から究明しようと試みたものである。東部、南部、中西部、西部という従来の合衆国の地域分けを本研究も踏襲した。しかし、E.エリオット編『コロンビア米文学史』(1988)で地方主義を担当したJ.M.コックスも、「西部は未来と移動性そのもの--つまりアメリカなのだ」と、西部を扱うことの難しさを歎いているが、本研究でも、西部の研究は言及程度に留まった。とはいえ、従来の地域分けにつきまとっていた、ニューイングランドを含む東部を合衆国文化の中心とする政治的、経済的力学と連動した地域文化観の偏りを意識して、4地域を平等の力学の中で捉えようと努めた。もっとも本研究者の関心が、W.フォークナー研究にあり、当然、南部に比重が大きく傾くことは避けがたかった。が、それでも、現今の批評の柱であるジェンダー、階級、人種という3視点に注意を払い、宗教やエスニシティや時代の要素にも目配りしながら、各地域のアイデンティティやイメージ、すなわち、その地方が意識し内面化しているアイデンティティと、文学や映画や写真などの外部のメディアや部外者が提供するイメージとが、どのように絡まって重層的に地方の特質を築きあげていくのかを考察しようとした。その際、F・ジェイムソンの『地政学の美学』(1995)やH.K.バーバの『文化の位置づけ』(1994)という文化唯物論的なポストコロニアリズムの視点に立つ研究書を参照することにより、場所の間にも歴史的に構築されたヒエラルキーが存在することを認識し、文学における地方主義の表象解釈が依拠していた審美的な要素に、彼らの先鋭なイデオロギー的な視線を呼び込むことにより、少しは新しい解釈を提供できたのではないかと自負している。