ゴシック小説とは何か MIYAKAWA May 9, 2005
１． “gothic” の connotations*
medieval
supernatural
barbarous
*Brendan
Hennessy, The Gothic Novel (1978), p. 7.
○１８世紀中頃、中世趣味の流行の中で建築・美術の意味合いが強かったのを、Walpole
が文学に適用した(中
世の城や寺院を舞台にした幻想的・超自然的事件の効果に移行させた)（The
Castle of Otranto の再版の副題: “A Gothic Story”）。その序文： “It was an attempt to
blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former all was imagination and
improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes
has been, copied with success. Invention
has not been wanting; but the great resources of fancy have been damned up, by
a strict adherence to common life.”
(Preface to the Second Edition).
Miracles,
visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events, are exploded now
even from romances. That was not the
case when our author wrote; much less when the story itself is supposed to have
happened. Belief in every kind of
prodigy was so established in those dark ages, that an author would not be
faithful to the manners of the times who should omit all mention of
them. He is not bound to believe them
himself, but he must represent his actors as believing them. If this air of the miraculous is excused, the
reader will find nothing else unworthy of his perusal. . . . Terror, the author’s principle engine,
prevents the story from ever languishing . . . . (Preface to the First Edition)
○建築的には垂直性の強調 Cf.
ルネサンス建築の水平性の強調 Cf. 垂直倫理(good or evil)、水平倫理(right
or wrong)(Angus Wilson, “The Evil in the English Novel”)
２．ロマンス vs. ノヴェル
the
ancient romance, the verse romance
romance the
modern romance, the prose romance
novel
“romance-novel”
(Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition [1957])
○Cf. 平石貴樹「『明暗』とアメリカ文学」（『英語青年』2003年5月号）における小説（ノヴェル）の発生する人の生活の３様態:
①現状と所与を受けいれ、冒険も希望もしない生活――おとなしい人生とはこういうものだろうが、このままではなかなか小説にはならない。②現状と所与を受けいれず、目的や希望をもって冒険する生活――これが「近代的自我」のもたらした人生の可能性であり、アメリカ文学はしばしばこの境地に開かれている。ただしいくらアメリカ文学でも、目的や希望そのものが小説的興味をささえるわけではなく、それらの追求の困難こそが強調されなければならない。③現状と所与の受容と拒絶のあいだで揺れうごく生活、あるいは目的や希望を持ちながら冒険できないでいる生活――小説にふさわしい生活様態はこれである。(74)
○イギリスのnovel
＝
novel of manners. 社会における水平的な倫理にかかわる。
○Nathaniel
Hawthorne の自覚的選択:
When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need not hardly be
observed that he wishes to claim a certain
latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt
himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to
aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable
and ordinary course of man’s experience.
The former . . . while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself
to laws, and while it sins unpardonably, so far as it may swerve aside from the
truth of the human heart―has fairly a right to present that truth under
circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation. . .
. He would be glad, therefore,
if―especially in the quarter to which he alludes―the book may be read strictly
as a Romance, having a great deal more to do with the clouds overhead, than
with any portion of the actual soil of the County of Essex. (Preface, The House of the Seven Gables
[1851])
○Samuel
and those I did, gave me no great pleasure; for
either they dealt so much in the marvelous and improbable, or
were so unnaturally inflaming to the passions, and so full of love
and intrigue, that most of them seemed calculated to fire the imagination,
rather than to inform the judgment. Titles and tournaments, breaking of spears in
honour of a mistress, engaging with monsters, rambling in search of adventures,
making unnatural difficulties, in order to shew the knight-errant’s prowess in
overcoming them, is all that is required to constitute the hero in such
pieces. And what principally
distinguishes the character of the heroine is, when she is taught to
consider her father’s house as an enchanted castle, and her lover as the hero
who is to dissolve the charm . . . . (Pamela,
or Virtue Rewarded [1740], Part II, Letter cii)
３．ゴシックの美学的背景
the beautiful 真・善・美の一致 pleasure
the sublime 倫理と審美の乖離 / 恐怖 awe→terror
the picturesque 遊び、異質の要素の混交、 interest
崩壊感覚、未完性 cf. “gothic burlesque,”
“gothic fragments”
○Edmund
Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and the Beautiful
(1757): 「苦痛と危険の観念を刺激するにふさわしいものは何であれ、つまり、ともかく、恐ろしいもの、恐ろしい対象と関係するもの、ある点で恐怖に類するものは何であれ、ザ・サブライムの源泉である。」
種族保存の本能――pleasure――(→love)――small,
smoothness, gradual variation, delicacy, etc. ＝ the beautiful
自己保存の本能――pain――（→terror,
surprise）――
obscurity, vastness, darkness, etc. ＝ the sublime
○
Uvedale Price のピクチャレスク：
Objects had intrinsic qualities that made them
picturesque, as distinct as those that made other objects sublime or
beautiful. Moreover, the picturesque was
equally extended in its appeal to the sense.
There was picturesque music.
While a chorus of Handel was generally acknowledged sublime, and
“Corelli’s famous pastorale” beautiful, a “capricious movement of Scarlatti or
Haydn” was essentially picturesque. Thus
“picturesque” for Price meant far more than “suitable for painting”―the
definition that Gilpin had favoured.
While the outstanding qualities of the sublime were vastness and
obscurity, and those of the picturesque were “roughness and sudden variation
joined to irregularity,” of form, colour, lighting, and even sound. When an uninitiated person was shown a
picture made up of objects in which these qualities predominated, he would,
Price considered, at first be amazed by their ugliness. But gradually he might notice that they were
selected for some quality or character; for the variety produced by sudden and
irregular deviation, the strongly marked peculiarity of their appearance, the
manner in which the rugged and broken parts caught the light, and the contrast
that such lights presented with deep shadows, or for the rich and mellow tints
produced by various stages of decay.
Such objects in real life that the person had previously passed by
without observing, he might now begin to look at with increasing interest . . .
. (Christopher Hussey, The
Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View [1925], p. 14)
the
beautiful――smoothness, gentleness
the
sublime――vastness, obscurity
the
picturesque――roughness and sudden variation joined to irregularity
４．１８世紀末のゴシックの４タイプ*
providential――Walpole,
Reeve
irrational
diabolical――Lewis
psychological
(internal)――Radcliffe, Smith
rational
social
(external)――German
*Donald
A. Ringe, American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century
Fiction (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1982), 13-35. “To analyze in this way the Gothic fiction in
English available to Americans in the closing years of the eighteenth century
is to present a more orderly picture than the contemporary reader is likely to
have perceived. A large number of
romances were competing for his attention, and examples of all four types of
the Gothic mode were simultaneously available in the bookstores and lending
libraries, all arranged in the categories, with other novels and romances,
alphabetically by title. Despite the
apparent confusion, however, certain patterns do emerge, and even in that day
an intelligent young man like Charles Brockden Brown, eager to launch his own
career as a novelist, must surely have perceived them. An avid reader himself, he was undoubtedly
well aware of the literary taste of his contemporaries―as, indeed, his use of
the Gothic mode in most of his major romances so clearly indicates. Within that mode, however, he sought his
models, not among the supernatural tales of a Walpole or Lewis, but among the
rationalistic ones of the German romancers and of the Radcliffe school―a
decision made necessary perhaps by the intellectual climate of the time, and
one of considerable consequence to the subsequent development of American
fiction.” (35)
５． 一般的なゴシックの区分と幻想
the supernatural gothic cf.
the marvelous
the ambiguous gothic ―― cf. the fantastic (Tzvetan Todorov)*
the explained gothic cf.
the uncanny
*Tzvetan
Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre,
trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975) [Introduction a la
literature fantastique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970) ]:.
The
fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to
consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to
hesitate between the natural and a supernatural explanation of the events
described. Second, this hesitation may
also be experienced by a character; thus the reader’s role is so to speak
entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented,
it becomes one of the themes of the work ? in the case of naive reading, the
actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain
attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as “poetic”
interpretations. (33)
The
fantastic . . . lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common
to reader and character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive
derives from “reality” as it exists in the common opinion. At the story’s end, the reader makes a
decision even if the character does not; he opts for one solution or the other,
and thereby emerges from the fantastic.
If he decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an
explanation of the phenomena described, we say that the work belongs to another
genre: the uncanny. If, on the contrary,
he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the
phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous.
(41)
６. ゴシックの思想史的位置
a) キリスト教の衰退 → 「自然崇拝」(Kenneth Clark)
b) 近代的自我の不安、孤独、恐怖
c) 人間神化、ロマン主義、オカルティズム
７．なぜゴシックが流行したか？
① ゴシックは反合理主義の表明である。
②
ゴシックは近代人の孤独と恐怖の表現である。
③
ゴシックは中世の宗教的態度を少なくとも廃墟として、幻として持っている。
④
ゴシックは美学や神秘主義、広く形而上学的主題を盛る器として作家に利用されうる