"肖像"の振る舞い(パフォーマンス) : William Faulknerの"Portrait"

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"Portrait," a work of poetry which William Faulkner wrote in 1921, is regarded as a love poem by many scholars. They believe that in it, the narrator, with Faulkner under the mask of a clown, invites a young woman as a portrait to speak of careful trivialities together with him. But the following two points force us to consider a crucial question ; who is the true subject of the portrait in the poem? First, a portrait is generally defined as a figure of someone, especially of his or her face, in which we can recognize him or her. In "Portrait," however, we can not do this at all : the woman keeps hanging her head and hiding her eyes. Second, "Portrait" shows us that the woman's voice brings the narrator into view, and then that the author and the text in itself come into existence. It is not that the author Faulkner produces a mask and under it gives the description of the woman's voice, but that the voice produces the mask, or the narrator of the poem, and it produces the subject of the author. The best account for these facts can be found in Jean-Luc Nancy's discussion of a self-portrait. He says that a self-portrait is the subject in itself of a person as presence of absence. We can never see our own face with our own eyes. A person, hence, paints a self-portrait on the canvas, expecting others' look or voice to himself or herself. The same is true of our mask which we wear in everyday life. The mask is, thus, also the subject of a person, but not any signed representation of such tendencies, actual or imaginary, as are perceived by the subject as being part and parcel of his or her psychological, mental or physical makeup. There is agreement that Faulkner wore the mask of an artist and dandy in everyday life. And one of the masks into which they were integrated was the mask of a clown, the narrator of "Portrait." The writer said that "I read and employed verse, firstly, for the purpose of furthering various philanderings in which I was engaged, secondly, to complete a youthful gesture I was then making, of being 'different' in a small town." It demands him to write poetry, expecting the look or the voices of young women who are his contemporaries. In short, their voices produce his mask of an artist and a dandy, or Faulkner himself. This is fully expressed in "Portrait." We, therefore, can reasonably conclude that "Portrait" is a performance of Faulkner as a "portrait" and a kind of meta-poem of his poetry.
2005-06-30

"肖像"の振る舞い(パフォーマンス) : William Faulknerの"Portrait"

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