著者

Clark Steven

出版者

国文学研究資料館

雑誌

国際日本文学研究集会会議録 = PROCEEDINGS OF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON JAPANESE LITERATURE (ISSN:03877280)

巻号頁・発行日

no.27, pp.145-153, 2004-03-01

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This year marks the 20th anniversary of Terayama Shûji's death as well as the 20th anniversary of the opening of Tokyo Disneyland. Overreading the possible causality (as Terayama might have) we might wonder if Terayama had been reincarnated as Mickey or if the Tokyo Mickey killed Terayama Shûji. And yet, the two may be linked together by copyright more than is usually recognized. Mickey Mouse is known to be source of extending the term of copyright whereas Terayama has been thought of as a leader in the struggle against it. And yet, with Terayama also famous for his unrestrained creativity, he was a very paradoxical figure. Taking up this contradiction as a theme I will examine the plagiarism controversy following Terayama's tanka debut, "Chiehofusai"(The Chekhov Festival); his quotation of his own work in the film, Den’en ni shisu (I Shall Die in the Country); and the play Aohigekô no shiro (Duke Bluebeard's Castle) which was performed again this year. The main problem will be examining how copyright would operate if it is understood to cover both content and method in the case of an artist whose method involves making a collage of other peoples work. If Terayama willfully set up this antimony, what was his point?Aohigekô no shiro is a particularly interesting text in this regard. By 1977 when the Tenjô Sajiki first performed the play at the Seibu Theater they had already done another play called Aohige as well as another Bartok opera called Chugoku no fushigi na yakunin (The Strange Chinese Official). The play, then, was both a revision and a sequel. Add that to the longstanding discourse on Bluebeard which includes Perrault's fairytale, others by the Grimm Brothers, and English translations by Andrew Lang, whose life bears a striking resemblance to that of Walt Disney. In the 1960s Bataille's essay on Gilles de Rais shifted the mythical Bluebeard toward a historical personage, and Shibusawa Tatsuhiko and George Steiner also contributed essays on the subject. Terayama, in the 1977 play, aimed to rewrite the myths that would uphold the historical existence of the historicized Bluebeard and Jeanne d'Ark. In this presentation I will look at how these processes of transferring history into myth and copyright into public property cohere.