牢獄の生 : タウフィーク・アルハキームの戯曲にみる人間像
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概要
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In 1933, five years after his return from Paris without attaining the coveted degree in law, Tawfiq al-Hakim(1898〜1987) published The Cavemen. This play is based on the Christian legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, which is also well known to the Muslims through Sura 18 of the Qur'an. The work makes him the first Arab playwright to use Qur'anic material as a basis for dramatic writing. Moreover, it enables him to achieve his aim of creating dramatic Arabic literature comparable to that of the Westerners. This was the true result of his stay in France for three years. In any country, dramatic literature requires a certain cultural environment where people in general have fully developed to relish it, along with the development of the language. But unfortunately, the modern Arabic theater was not blessed with the suitable situation for it. Dramatic plays were regarded as a sub-culture, that is, mere pastime, and playwrights were sometimes looked upon with contempt, and the discrepancy between literary and colloquial language was striking. Under these circumstances, al-Hakim tried to write a literary dialogue for reading only. Indeed, most of his plays are often said to be better read than acted, and The Cavemen holds this hallmark. In fact, when this play was first put on the stage in 1935, few appreciated it, and the poor attendance intensified his tendency toward writing plays exclusively for readers. Then a year later, in 1934, Shahrazad was published. The play begins after thousand and one nights are over, and King Shahriyar, entirely disgusted with his former days of lust and brutality, comes to ponder his identity as a human being. So the king sets out on a journey seeking knowledge about himself. The theme of both plays is knowledge; The Cavemen is concerned with the knowledge about Time, and Shahrazad with the one about Space. So the two plays are considered to be the precursors of his intellectual, or philosophical, plays. Time and space fundamentally condition our human existence, so al-Hakim's basic concept of man is expected to be extracted from these intellectual plays. As the title suggests, the cave plays an important role in The Cavemen. The sleepers once abandon the cave into a new world, but soon find themselves unable to adapt to it, and are forced to return to the cave one by one, to resume their sleep, or to put an end to their lives. The cave here represents their identity, and emergence from it results in an identity crisis. There is no other way for them than to return to it to resurrect the past. In this sense, the cave is a prison and the three men are prisoners of time. In Shahrazad, King Shahriyar goes on a journey searching for knowledge, but soon returns to the starting point without attaining any clue to it. So he sets out again to find truth only to return with no results. This is al-Hakim's image of man; man is an eternal traveller seeking knowledge, but tied to the earth like a prisoner. No matter how far he travels, he must return to where he starts. In this essay, al-Hakim's image of man shown in his plays will be examined, and what makes him hold such an image will also be considered.
- 1995-03-31