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

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.
著者
志村 正雄
出版者
一般財団法人 日本英文学会
雑誌
英文学研究 (ISSN:00393649)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.44, no.1, pp.41-48, 1967

<p>This paper is an attempt to examine some affinity between Melville's "The Encantadas" and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. This idea in germ lies in Richard Chase's introduction to Selected Tales and Poems by Herman Melville, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1950. There, in regard to "The Encantadas," Chase says, "There is a certain Dantean quality in this picture of an enchanted Hell," and also "The Encantadas is Melville's wasteland, in which as T. S. Eliot says in his famous poem, there is rock and no water." The former view to see the story as Melville's version of the Inferno was taken up for further consideration in I. Newberry's "'The Encantadas': Melville's Inferno" (American Literature, Vol. 38, No. 1, March 1966). The latter, the idea of "The Encantadas" as Melville's The Waste Land, has not been examined so far. The paper does not propose to investigate the influence of Melville on Eliot. It does check similarities, obvious and implied, between the two, but, at the same time, tries to see them through the perspective of American literature as a whole so that one may, hopefully, find a clue to the structure of the American imagination. Similarities, indeed, abound in the two works. Both present the sterile paysage moralise where "there is rock and no water," and when there is water, there is "death by water." The reigning color in both is black, with occasional fire of red. Both are often humorous in tone, contrary to the dark subject they are dealing with. When Melville says, "Here at the summit [of Rock Rodondo] you and I stand," one can almost hear Eliot saying, "Let us go then, you and I," and this "you" is close to the "you" in "You! hypocrite lecteur!-mon semblable,-mon frere!" in The Waste Land. The dog in Eliot's ambiguous line, "Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men," is, if one follows Elizabeth Drew's interpretation, close to that found in "Sketch Seventh" and "Sketch Eighth" (an enemy to men under the Dog-King, a friend under the Chola widow). The style of each sometimes goes out of the boundary of the proper genre (prose and verse). Above all the following three points should be emphasized. First, their allusion to, or reliance on, the heritage of literature, which, typically, will be seen in their quotations and choice of names. A quotation without giving its source (a means to set up a close and closed relation between the author and the reader who identifies it) as in case of the first quotation of each work was to be skillfully used by other American writers too (Hemingway for example). The choice of names like Melville's "Sycorax" or Eliot's "Tiresias," as effective as a quotation, is a technique utilized widely from Cooper ("Ishmael Bush" in The Prairie) to Salinger ("Sybil Carpenter" in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish"). Related to this, one cannot ignore American writers' general concern with names which may go back to the Puritan psychology in the seventeenth century when "the Puritan elegist might well believe that in a man's name God had inserted evidence of his nature and his fate" (Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry, Princeton University Press, 1961, Chapt. II, "Origins: Poetry and the Puritan Imagination"). Secondly, they share the device of anticipating what comes later in the work. Eliot uses this device in the famous Tarot cards in Madame Sosotoris's hand. In Melville's case, it is to be found in the description of the creatures at Rock Rodondo. The penguin, "grotesquely misshapen," "pertaining neither to Carnival nor Lent," anticipates "Fatherless Oberlus."</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>
著者
阪田 勝三
出版者
一般財団法人 日本英文学会
雑誌
英文学研究 (ISSN:00393649)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.45, no.1, pp.39-48, 1968

<p>The Janus-like imagination of Keats seems to show a kind of dilemma of romanticism itself, for, more than any others, romantic artists almost deify their personal imagination as universal truth. Though Keats affirmed the truth of imagination as strong as other romantic poets, he was, on the other hand, so much afraid of "sickly imagination", the arbitrariness of imagination, that he always tried to judge his inner vision by opposing objective reality. The Janus-faced attitude was inevitable for him as imagination's stepping toward truth. Poetry for Keats, therefore, may be said to be the relation between two contrasting images. When these two images were fused into one, his personal imagination would be identified with universal reality. Though he knew well that "it is impossible to prove that black is white," he never stopped his imagination flying, though promised failure, for this impossible aim. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever" was the deepest, immutable longing through his life. It was not because of his dreaming Elysium, but of his actual feeling of life's brevity. His longing for the eternal joy never means his escape from time and reality, but, on the contrary, it shows that he was confronted with the fugitiveness and uncertainty of life. The relation between two contrasting images is, in this regard, the relation between time and eternity. The nightingale, which is called "immortal bird" in the Ode, is, seen objectively, nothing but a helpless bird no less than human beings. This transformation from a mortal bird to an immortal one, from a bird within time to the one beyond time, is the essence of his vision and the heart-ache and pain of the beginning symbolize the violent struggle of time with eternity, like Lamia's brilliant anguish in her transfiguration from a serpent to a fair lady. In the nightingale's earthly paradise, "embalmed darkness," he feels the eternal joy of the nightingale as his own and is "half in love with easeful Death." From his earlier poems Keats has been interested in the Eternal Present of the natural scenes, as Perkins ingeniously researched in The Quest for Permanence. But the very fact that Eternal Present prevails in his poetry indicates that beauty and joy was always ephemeral for him. But in the pastoral scenes it does not stir the tragic sense of life. With his bitter recognition of "an eternal fierce destruction" dominant in the world, his innocent joy in the Eternal Present was mercilessly destroyed and he had to seek desperately for the eternal joy by his imagination. He was convinced that Negative Capability and "intensity" were the ways to unite imagination with truth, time with eternity. In the Pleasure Thermometer passage of Endymion the chief intensity, the crown, of "enthralments far more self-destroying" is made of love and friendship. Love and imagination are the same for Keats, or at least two different aspects of the same thing. In this famous passage Keats mentions the nightingale's "passionate breath" as an example of earthly love's magical power, "making men's being mortal, immortal". As in the love letter of Hawthorne, the nightingale's affection (and in Keats imagination, too) "diffuses round us eternity". "Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem of imagination making us "feel that we live above time and apart from time". But this feeling of happiness was too short-lived as it was in almost all the poems of later years, for Death, one of two luxuries to brood over for him beside his sweet-heart's Loveliness, was realized in a moment to be "nothing" worse than those pains of life. The longing for eternity in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is not a vain dreaming like "one eternal pant" in "To J.R.", nor an</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>
著者
川崎 寿彦
出版者
一般財団法人 日本英文学会
雑誌
英文学研究 (ISSN:00393649)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.43, no.1, pp.57-71, 1966

17世紀の形而上詩の本質を把握するためには、いわゆるBen's TribeとDonne's Schoolとの区別がたてられねばならず、そのためにはBen JonsonとJohn Donneの対照が明確でなければならない。本稿は詩的比喩に対する両者の態度を考察するが、とくに当時(16世紀末から17世紀初頭)の英国で、やや時期はずれの復活を見せていた錬金術というものに対して、二人が対照的な態度をとったという事実を足がかりにして、問題の核心に迫ろうとこころみるものである。