MELVILLEに於ける「悪」の問題 : AMBIGUITYについて
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概要
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When we try to examine the problem of evil in Melville, we must go into the Puritan mind. The Puritans of the 17th century saw the phenomenal world as the battle ground where the angelic force fought the Satanic. They believed in God's final victory. But to their mind, Satan's power appeared to be so overwhelming that they often saw prevailing evil over the world. Melville rejected the fearful Almighty who ruled the Puritan mind, but he was as obsessed by the problem of evil as was the Puritans. Just as Transcendentalists read the symbolic meanings in nature, Melville in his works often gave a symbolic value to the visible world. But Emerson's Transcendentalism was not Melville's lodestar. To Transcendentalists, the creator and the created are in perfect harmony. Melville, who sees the world as the evil infested place, flatly turns down the optimistic transcendentalism and the 19th-century protestantism that almost deified man. Moby Dick's oceanic world appears to be evil-infested, but it also shows a benign smile. In Moby-Dick and in Pierre we see evil as it co-exists with good; or rather, we see evil and good as two aspects of one entity. Northrop Frye maintains that the leviathan is an archetypal image of Satan. Melville's White Whale is indeed an evil monster as Ahab sees it to be. But it also represents such qualities that suggest the good. A careful examination into the fire image in the book also helps us here. The eery St. Elmo's fire that burns silently on top of the three masts of the Pequod seems devilish enough to the frightened crew. It, however, can be looked at as an serious warning given to Ahab from above as he tries to satisfy his monomaniac and indeed Satanic desire. Thus, the fire image in this book shows Melville's conscious effort to produce ambivalence. Dark-haired Isabel in Pierre also represents ambiguity of good and evil. And Plotinus Plinlimmon's double-perspective, ("Chronometricals" and "Horologicals") is what Pierre lacks as he tries to right the wrong of the world. Plinlimmon's pamphlet suggests the ambiguous condition on which man has to maintain his moral balance. The tragic view of life appears to be almost identical with the biblical on the basis that they both acknowledge the existence and the power of evil. But the biblical view of life does not see good and evil in the sense of ambiguity. According to the Bible they are two different and individual entities, though they seem to co-exist and are inseparably entangled with each other. This is where the biblical view turns sharply away from the Melvillian concept of tragic ambiguity. Melville's The Confidence-Man, a satire on the sinfulness and the folly of human nature, is closer to the biblical view than any of the previous works of this author, for Melville's satire can be taken as a warning against the credulity of man. No tragic hero appears in this book, nor does evil show itself as an ambiguous being. Evil is clearly personified in this work as a Protean swindler.
- 財団法人日本英文学会の論文
- 1968-03-30
財団法人日本英文学会 | 論文
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