参与観察者の視点から : 『カタロニア讃歌』における語り手の位置

概要

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'Only a participant can be a profound observer,' Trotsky once said. It became George Orwell's task to live with (and as nearly as possible like) the 'others' he decided to describe. His life in the 1930s was essentially a series of anthropological field-trips, and his chosen mode, whether in fiction or in what came to be called 'reportage,' was the documentary. How did it feel to be a Paris dishwasher, a London tramp, a hop-picker, an unemployed worker living on the dole, a seedy bookseller's assistant, a Spanish Republican during the Civil War? He would go and find out, and report in detail. His third documentary, Homage to Catalonia (1938), records his experiences as an 'participant-observer' in the Spanish Civil War and represents the apex of his documentary writing. He witnessed an actual classless society and this experience led him to believe in 'democratic socialism'. In order to make this particular experience generic, he created the 'ordinary narrator' in Homage. In this paper we shall discuss the function of the 'ordinary' narrator, 'queerness', 'stance' and 'typification' as his rhetorical devices and Orwell's perspective on 'others'. Moreover, his using this strategy in part in this 'field-work' allowed him to challenge the documentary attitude to the question of 'truth' in the decade.
2011-03-31