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タイトル別名
  • "THE ENCANTADAS": MELVILLE'S : The Waste Land
  • メルヴィル ノ アレチ

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<p>This paper is an attempt to examine some affinity between Melville's "The Encantadas" and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. This idea in germ lies in Richard Chase's introduction to Selected Tales and Poems by Herman Melville, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1950. There, in regard to "The Encantadas," Chase says, "There is a certain Dantean quality in this picture of an enchanted Hell," and also "The Encantadas is Melville's wasteland, in which as T. S. Eliot says in his famous poem, there is rock and no water." The former view to see the story as Melville's version of the Inferno was taken up for further consideration in I. Newberry's "'The Encantadas': Melville's Inferno" (American Literature, Vol. 38, No. 1, March 1966). The latter, the idea of "The Encantadas" as Melville's The Waste Land, has not been examined so far. The paper does not propose to investigate the influence of Melville on Eliot. It does check similarities, obvious and implied, between the two, but, at the same time, tries to see them through the perspective of American literature as a whole so that one may, hopefully, find a clue to the structure of the American imagination. Similarities, indeed, abound in the two works. Both present the sterile paysage moralise where "there is rock and no water," and when there is water, there is "death by water." The reigning color in both is black, with occasional fire of red. Both are often humorous in tone, contrary to the dark subject they are dealing with. When Melville says, "Here at the summit [of Rock Rodondo] you and I stand," one can almost hear Eliot saying, "Let us go then, you and I," and this "you" is close to the "you" in "You! hypocrite lecteur!-mon semblable,-mon frere!" in The Waste Land. The dog in Eliot's ambiguous line, "Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men," is, if one follows Elizabeth Drew's interpretation, close to that found in "Sketch Seventh" and "Sketch Eighth" (an enemy to men under the Dog-King, a friend under the Chola widow). The style of each sometimes goes out of the boundary of the proper genre (prose and verse). Above all the following three points should be emphasized. First, their allusion to, or reliance on, the heritage of literature, which, typically, will be seen in their quotations and choice of names. A quotation without giving its source (a means to set up a close and closed relation between the author and the reader who identifies it) as in case of the first quotation of each work was to be skillfully used by other American writers too (Hemingway for example). The choice of names like Melville's "Sycorax" or Eliot's "Tiresias," as effective as a quotation, is a technique utilized widely from Cooper ("Ishmael Bush" in The Prairie) to Salinger ("Sybil Carpenter" in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish"). Related to this, one cannot ignore American writers' general concern with names which may go back to the Puritan psychology in the seventeenth century when "the Puritan elegist might well believe that in a man's name God had inserted evidence of his nature and his fate" (Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry, Princeton University Press, 1961, Chapt. II, "Origins: Poetry and the Puritan Imagination"). Secondly, they share the device of anticipating what comes later in the work. Eliot uses this device in the famous Tarot cards in Madame Sosotoris's hand. In Melville's case, it is to be found in the description of the creatures at Rock Rodondo. The penguin, "grotesquely misshapen," "pertaining neither to Carnival nor Lent," anticipates "Fatherless Oberlus."</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>

収録刊行物

  • 英文学研究

    英文学研究 44 (1), 41-48, 1967

    一般財団法人 日本英文学会

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