- 著者
-
藤平 育子
Fujihira Ikuko
- 出版者
- 名古屋大学英文学会
- 雑誌
- IVY (ISSN:09142266)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- no.44, pp.83-105, 2011-11-30
Édouard Glissant, notes that "Faulkner's oeuvre will be complete when it is revisited and made vital by African-Americans" (Glissant, Faulkner 55), and highly appreciates the efforts of Toni Morrison. In 1944, in his letter to Malcolm Cowley, Faulkner confessed his ambitious dream as a writer to go beyond his predecessor, Thomas Wolfe, who "was trying to say everything, get everything, the world plus 'I' or filtered through 'I' or the effort of 'I' to embrace the world in which he was born ... into one volume" (Blotner, Selected Letters 185). It was quite fortunate for Faulkner's ambition to capture the world filtered through "I" that Glissant recognized Faulkner's work as "écho-monde" just like "Bob Marley's song ... the architecture of Chicago ... the shantytowns of Rio or Caracas; Ezra Pound's Cantos" or "the marching of schoolchildren in Soweto." (Glissant, Poetics of Relation 93). This paper attempts to trace what Glissant calls the "écho-monde" in Faulkner and Morrison's novels, while we pursue the imaginary space of "creole," errantry, borders, sea and home, represented in their novels. In Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha argues the modern literature as "the literature of recognition," by developing Franz Fanon's desire for "a world of reciprocal recognitions" (quoted in Bhabha 8). Bhabha admires Toni Morrison's Beloved just because the novel illustrates the writer's "ethical and aesthetic project of 'seeing inwardness from the outside' furthest or deepest" and Morrison writes about a ghost "who should want to be realized" (Ibid., 16). Sethe, the former slave woman, has to recognize the phantom shape of her dead daughter, when the ghost of Beloved comes back to the real world eighteen years after the mother killed her. In this context, we can begin to consider the reason why Joe Christmas, in Faulkner's Light in August, comes back to Jefferson, Mississippi, fifteen years after he leaves his foster home in the same state. Christmas, with his "parchment-colored" skin, can live as white in the North, or at least he passes as "white" even in other Southern cities, but he comes back to the small Mississippi city, as though he had known all those fifteen years that he was destined to be lynched there recognized as a black rapist. In fact, Christmas keeps running the street for fifteen years to be "recognized" as someone, either white or black: "The street ran into Oklahoma and Missouri and as far south as Mexico and then back north to Chicago and Detroit and back south again and at last to Mississippi" (Faulkner, Light in August 224). Christmas "enlisted in the army, served four months and deserted and was never caught" (Ibid.). It seems to me that he simply wished to be recognized as somebody when he enlisted in the army and deserted, but nobody recognizes him even as a deserter. After his murder of Joanna Burden in Jefferson, Christmas attacks a black church and assaults a man, apparently to be recognized as a black criminal. Back in Mottstown, Mississippi, in his flight from the posse of Joanna Burden's murder case, Christmas knows that the townspeople "recognized" (Ibid., 337) him, but at the same time he notices that they would not capture him until the time comes "like the rule says" (Ibid.). When he is captured, Mrs. Hines recognizes him as her lost grandson, and the white supremacist Percy Grimm lynches him as a black man who raped and killed a white lady. As a consequence, we can safely assume that Christmas finally comes back home to be recognized as a black son of the Jim Crow South in early 1930s. Consolata Sosa, in Morrison's Paradise, stolen and lost from a dingy city in South America, is found by her twin brother from Brazil, when she was killed at the Convent in Oklahoma. Dislocated from home for a long time, she had lost her language and culture from her native land, but the brother in his ethnic costume comfortably envelopes her in their common language and culture. Miraculously, she is peacefully embraced by the black pieta, Piedade, on the shore of her home land. Beloved probably comes back home from the bottom of the Caribbean Sea, where millions of the Africans lie down, unnoticed and unrecognized by anybody for hundreds of years. When Glissant uses Derek Walcott's famous line, "Sea is History," as epigraph to his Poetics of Relation, the sea means the bottom of the Caribbean Sea where the homeless children join their slave mothers, their sisters and brothers. In Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin Compson's grandfather, in talking about Haiti where Thomas Sutpen goes to be rich, refers to the victimized mothers and children from Africa on the slave ships: "the doomed ships had fled in vain, out of which the last tatter of sail had sunk into the blue sea, along which the last vain despairing cry of woman or child had blown away" (Faulkner, Absalom 202). As argued above, both Faulkner and Morrison represent the solitude and pain of the individual unhomed children as they journey back to their home, while displaying errantry, displacement, or dislocation in the modern world. Further, both writers see the ocean as a signified home for the lost children and mothers; the sea, locus of the crime of slavery and American history, becomes the topos of the writers' memory and conscience, eventually enabling their works to be the "écho-monde."本稿は,2010年度名古屋大学英文学会サマーセミナー(2010年7月16日)における講演に基づき、改稿したものである。