「私」を探して : John Berrymanの77 Dream Songs

概要

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While T. S. Eliot was the poet of "impersonality," John Berryman was one of the so-called "confessional" poets. Berryman's works began to be rated highly in the middle of the 20th century. After going through Sigmund Freud's theory of consciousness/unconsciousness, it was a time when people came to doubt the unity of their own identities. In his early short novel, "The Imaginary Jew" (1945), Berryman describes how easily the speaker's identity is changed or created by the influence of others. The speaker of this novel was unjustly declared by an Irishman that he was a Jew. He tried to prove himself that he wasn't one, but he couldn't. Through the experience, he learned that his identity was neither firm nor integrated, but changeable and split. Berryman's most important work, a sequence of 385 poems called the "Dream Songs" (1964; 1968), is based on the notion which he found in "The Imaginary Jew"; there is no unified "identity" in him, but only fragmentary voices. He knew that he had several split voices in his mind. Sometimes they sounded strange to him and were uncontrollable. Using dream and the minstrel show as the framework, he skillfully and ludicrously described his scattered mind. This paper tries to examine how the speaker's identity is changed with "The Imaginary Jew," and then to study how Berryman transformed such unstable voices into poetry, the "Dream Songs."
英米文化学会の論文
2006-03-31