頭を突き出した蛇のような疑念 : ホーソーンのSeptimius Feltonにおける歴史のディレンマ
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概要
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This essay explores how the dilemma of the understanding and representation of history challenged Hawthorne in writing Septimius Felton (or Septimius Norton). Hawthorne's posthumous work Septimius Felton has long been considered an artistic failure. But the unfinished work-which deals with the time around the outbreak of the American Revolution and was written during the period of the beginning of the Civil War-is critically important when we consider Hawthorne's complex view of history. In the face of the Battle of Concord, Septimius, the protagonist of the story, says, " [I]t is the snake-like doubt that thrusts out its head, which gives us a glimpse of reality." His desire to see the "real" behind "the shallow covering" is indeed not far from the modern (or post-modern) aporia of history. As is encapsulated in Walter Benjamin's well-known premise that "there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism," the problem of how to reach the "real" history free from the dominant ideology of a time and place-and of how to represent it-has troubled many historians, philosophers, and literary scholars to this day. Hawthorne was skeptical of the romantic concepts of history prevailing in nineteenth-century America. Indeed, the text of Septimius Felton and other documents surrounding it show how Hawthorne revised and resisted the romantic theories and practices of history of his era, such as popularly promulgated by George Bancroft and theoretically buttressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Hawthorne criticized romantic historicism for its tendencies to minimize the negative effects of historical events, such as violence and murder, and to justify and glorify barbarous acts of human beings in war-times. In Septimius Felton, by dramatizing the warlike atmosphere in Concord during the Revolutionary War, Hawthorne attempted to represent the same sort of war-craze that he saw pervading the town during the Civil War. But his rejection of the teleological description of events-which marks romantic historiographies-inevitably led to the collapse of the plot itself. The failure of the narrative, however, does not mean that Hawthorne failed in representing the "real" history of his time and place. What Hawthorne almost unintentionally accomplished in writing this "failed" work is the description of his story of barbarism. Confronted with the greatest political and social turmoil in his life and in the history of the United States, Hawthorne kept recording the barbarity (and timidity) of his own as "a" history irreducible to "the" history. By dint of this effort, Hawthorne barely managed to present a miniscule history against the grain, which Benjamin would call the very task of historical materialist.
- 日本アメリカ文学会の論文
- 2010-03-31