Sue Matheson氏の"Psychic Transformation and Regeneration of Language in Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn"の内容を解説します。最初はこの論文を紹介した「要約」(abstract)の部分です。
Abstract (Document Summary) Matheson explores Peter S. Beagle's cult fantasy novel The Last Unicorn as a self-reflexive symbolic narrative that is concerned with the regeneration of language as well as the process of psychic transformation. Beagle's treatment of what is real is highly unorthodox, and involves an inversion of the Platonic scheme. One finds the principal character, the Unicorn, involved in a descent, rather than an ascent of the ladder of being.
マシーソン氏のThe Last Unicornに対する読みの視点は的確で、彼女の論文の内容に対するこのアブストラクトの理解も妥当です。
こんなことを何故わざわざ断らなければならないかというと、学者の書く研究論文等は結構的外れの、場違いな議論が多いからです。
The Last Unicornが未だに「cult novel」と記されていることがむしろ、言外の情報を雄弁に語っています。ことにこの作品がUrsula le Guinの「影との戦い」(A Wizard of Earthsea)の1年前に出版されたものであることを考えれば、アメリカにおける両者に対する評価と受容のあり方の差には、驚くべきものがあります。
At first reading, Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn (1968) appears to be a conventional bedtime tale for children about a legendary creature. Discovering that she is the only unicorn living in the world, Beagle's mythical animal begins a journey in search of other unicorns. During her quest, she is befriended by a magician and a cook and then transformed into a princess who falls in love; in the end, she is restored to her original form. Although her quest is successful-the missing unicorns are found and restored to the world, the conclusion is puzzling: the prince does not marry the princess, as would be the case in a usual fairy tale.
Rather, the land itself is transformed and improved, rather than the people who live there. Nevertheless, The Last Unicorn examines shifting patterns of the human psyche. What appears to be a simple story is a complex revisioning of the fairy tale. It is a self-reflexive narrative that is as much concerned with the regeneration of meaningful language as with the process of psychic transformation.
In spite of current critical preoccupations with metafiction and the meaningfulness, or lack thereof, in language, The Last Unicorn has not elicited much critical response since 1989. To date, the critical debate about this text is divided: those who deem the work a minor masterpiece and those who find it simplistic and severely flawed.
Whatever the critical reaction to this text, readers' response to The Last Unicorn continues to be overwhelmingly positive. John Pennington, in "Innocence and Experience in the World of Peter S. Beagle," believes the narrative's bestselling success lies in the author's ability to recombine "the archetypal patterns of fairy tales into a vision that is specifically modern, and "American" (58). Beagle's appeal to the modern American market may account, in part, for the novel's popularity. The Last Unicorn has been printed more than forty times since it was first published in 1968, in the United States as well as Canada. Clearly, this story owes its popularity to something older and more universal than national preoccupations.
As Carl Jung points out in Man and His Symbols, archetypes, which are primordial psychological structures located deep in the collective unconscious of the human psyche, are common to all people. They have appeared and reappeared "in any time or in any part of the world--even where transmission by direct descent or 'cross fertilization' through migration must be ruled out" (69). As "collective representations" emanating from primeval dreams and creative fantasies (55), archetypes are recognizable because of the powerful emotional reactions that they evoke, irregardless of their audience's age, gender, or race. Often bewildering and astonishing, these psychic structures are manifested in symbolic images, myths, and mythopoeic literature.
カール・ユングが「Man and His Symbols」において語っているように、人間の霊魂の集合的無意識の中に深く根ざした原初的な心理的構造である“原型”(archetype)は、全ての人間に共通して存在するものである。この原型は幾度となく「いかなる時代においても、世界のいかなる地域においても、血統の直接の伝播や相互交流による知的促進が除外されている筈の地域においても」繰り返し姿を現して来たのである。原始的な夢想や想像的な幻想から流出した集合的表象として、「原型」は人々の年齢や性や民族性に関わりなく喚起する強力な情動的反応のおかげで識別可能なものとなっている。しばしば驚くべき常道を外れた形を取ることもありながら、これらの霊的構造は象徴的な図像や神話や神話形成的文学作品の中に現出しているのである。
In "Three Ways of Writing for Children," C. S. Lewis notes that fairy stories are still popular, because they "liberate the Archetypes that dwell in the collective unconscious" (36). As a modern fairy tale, The Last Unicorn also frees these archetypes, thereby evoking powerful emotional responses from its readers.
Symbols, which reveal the nature of archetypes at work and the inborn structures of the psyche, have an autonomous quality in The Last Unicorn. Celano the Harpy, Robin Hood, and, of course, the Unicorn herself are just three of its mythological figures. Evidence of their archetypal qualities may be found not only in the emotional responses that they evoke but also in the reactions of characters who meet them. During her stint in Mommy Fortuna's Traveling Circus, for example, the Unicorn hears "hearts bounce, tears brewing and breath going backward" when Rukh brings the crowd to her cage. "By the sorrow and loss and sweetness in their faces," she knows that the crowd has recognized her (27). Even King Haggard reacts in the same manner when seeing unicorns. Looking at the sea where he has imprisoned them, "delight" changes his face "beyond believing": "they fill me with joy," he says, "I am sure it is joy. The first time I felt it, I thought I was going to die" (186).
Like the Unicorn, Celano the Harpy also evokes an emotional response from those who encounter her. This response, however, is not delight, but bone-chilling terror. Even the Unicorn trembles at the "horror of the harpy" (26) and the "breath in her body turn[s] to cold iron" (25).
Culture-heroes are also part of Beagle's metaphysics, and like the Unicorn and the Harpy, the presence of Robin Hood contributes to the complex system of affirmations about the reality of things in this novel. When Schmendrick conjures up Robin Hood, the response of Cully's outlaws suggests the numinosity of the folk hero: Willie Gentle's voice is "as naked as a baby bird" (75). In this particular instance, the archetype manifests itself as the human condition before the Fall: Robin and Marian's "faces [are] beautiful, as though they [have] never known fear" (75). Not surprisingly, Cully's men prefer the reality that Robin and his band posit to their own seedy and sordid existence in the forest. More importantly, as Molly Grue points out to Cully, in the presence of this archetype "there is no such person as you, or me, or any of us. Robin and Marian are real, and we are the legend" (76).
In this novel, Beagle's treatment of what is real is highly unorthodox, and involves an inversion of the Platonic scheme. One finds the principal character, the Unicorn, involved in a descent, rather than an ascent of the ladder of being. As she travels through the mundane world searching for her fellows, she becomes a manifestation of the Ideal visiting the world of shadows. As such, the Unicorn functions as an archetype that has emerged from the collective unconscious. The realistic setting through which she travels, however, is, in itself, symbolic, as is the forest that she leaves behind.
According to J. E. Cirlot in The Dictionary of Symbols, forest symbolism is complex and connected at all levels with nature and the Great Mother. The forest is a place where vegetable life thrives and luxuriates, free from any control or cultivation; since its foliage obscures the light of the sun, the forest is often regarded as being opposed to the sun's power and recognized as a symbol of the earth (Cirlot 112). At the outset of the story, the "lilac wood," which the Unicorn inhabits, suggests the regenerative archetype that she embodies. Like the Unicorn's horn, which has the power to heal wounds and restore life to the dead, the wood is a place in which decay and death are unknown. It is a place that is unaffected by the changing seasons; "the leaves never fall" in the Unicorn's forest and winter never arrives.
「象徴辞典」におけるJ. E. サーロットによれば、森の象徴するものは複雑であり、全ての界面において自然と地母神に関わりを持つものである。森は、植物が農耕のいかなる支配を受けることもなく、豊かに繁茂する場所である。木々が陽の光を遮るので、森はしばしば太陽の力に反発する存在と見なされ、大地の象徴として理解される。「最後のユニコーン」の出だしでは、ユニコーンの住む“ライラックの森”が、彼女の体現する再生的な原型を暗示している。傷を癒し、死者を蘇らせる力を持つユニコーンの角と同様に、森は衰亡と死から無縁の場所である。彼女の森は、季節の変化の影響を受けることのない場所である。ユニコーンの住む森には「決して木の葉が散ることはなく」、冬が訪れることもない。
In short, this forest also functions as a locus in which the feminine principle that the Unicorn embodies thrives: "it [is] always spring in the forest, because she [lives] there, and she [wanders] all day among the great beech trees, keeping watch over the animals that [live] in the ground, in nests and caves, earths and treetops" (Beagle 2). As this passage indicates, the Unicorn's forest is also a pre-lapsarian place. When the Unicorn steps away from the trees, which are themselves symbols of "inexhaustible life" and "immortality" (Cirlot 347), she experiences a "fall" into Time. As Beagle's narrator notes, "time had always passed her by in her forest, but now it was she who passed through time as she traveled" (7).
The lapsarian world, into which the Unicorn steps, is made up of "flat country and mountains, stony barrens and meadows springing out of stones" (Beagle 7): the terrain of Time is infertile. Every place that the Unicorn visits reflects this infertility to some degree; the prime example is the "place where Haggard is King." Here, "all the hills are lean as knives, and nothing grows, not leaves nor trees" (49). As Haggard's hostile knife-like hills suggest, his is a kingdom in which things are not born, but die.
While the Unicorn's forest is allied with the feminine, the barren fields and unhappy, hostile villages of Haggard's kingdom are associated with the masculine. At first, images of a fecund wilderness allied with the emotional "feminine" and an arid logocentric "masculine" civilization appear to reduce the Unicorn's journey to being just one more example of the traditional Western binary at work. As Jung points out, the interpretation of symbols cannot be turned into a mechanical system (92). It becomes evident as the narrative unfolds that the signifiers awarded to the feminine and masculine are extremely playful. Such playfulness is not unusual since symbols, being at once particular and universal, do not fix meaning because of their own multiplicity and therefore must suggest a number of possibilities to the reader.
In The Visionary Landscape, Paul Piehler notes that in ancient literature the hostility of the wilderness, often represented by the forest, is what the founders of cities traditionally must overcome. After all, heroic literature is frequently concerned with the recording of the victories by which the frontiers of the rational intellect have been extended (73-74). In The Last Unicorn, the wilderness functions in a similar fashion, but its symbolic nature allows for an important and playful difference: it is simultaneously a signature of civilization. Ironically, the wilderness, traditionally a symbol of femininity and the irrational, embodies the terrain of the rational intellect. Having conquered nature, Haggard has clearly imposed his own ordering principles upon it. In the fashion of the ancient Greeks, the land reflects the nature of its king. Devoid of the nurturing fecundity of the feminine which one finds in the Unicorn's forest, Haggard's kingdom is a wilderness, a "barren land by the sea" (Beagle 49); and Haggard himself is unable to produce a son for the kingdom. If infertility is the result of an excessive patriarchal order, here it is also the end product of rational thought generally associated with the masculine. Beagle leaves little doubt that rational thinking, when carried to an extreme, manifests itself as a kind of madness. Behaving rationally, Haggard's Hagsgateans, cursed with the prospect of one of their own children destroying the town, have irrationally abstained from sex for more than twenty years.
In The Last Unicorn, landscapes are often more than collections of trees and rocks: they are mindscapes, portraits of the psyche. In Haggard's kingdom, the effect of excessive masculinity unbalances the order of the collective psyche, and this imbalance is reflected in an imbalance in the natural order. For example, Schmendrick tells Molly that "some say the land was 'green and soft' before Haggard conquered it" and that when Haggard touched the land, it "withered" (Beagle 49).
Beagle also uses natural images to delineate the psychic condition of individual characters. Under the Unicorn's influence, Molly's psyche is transformed: she becomes like "a softer country, full of pools and caves, where old flowers [come] burning out of the ground . . . her rough hair [blooms], her skin [quickens] ... the eyes . . . [have] wakened in the earth: (Beagle 9). In contrast, Schmendrick, whom the Unicorn cannot help, is not renewed by the rain that renews Molly. He seems "ever more parched and deserted, like the land itself (91).
Not related to the natural world, another seminal image informs the nature of the psyche here. An example of the symbolic architectonic tradition that uses buildings to reflect the nature of the mind, the everchanging stone maze, that houses Haggard mirrors the uncertain, chilly, logical labyrinth that is the king's inward-turning consciousness. Similarly, the dank dungeon, which houses the Red Bull, expresses the murky depths of Haggard's psyche, in which the archetype lurks. Caught between his extreme greed and his overwhelming need, Haggard himself does not know whether he is the slave of the Bull or whether the Bull is his servant. One may argue that the Red Bull, which inhabits the castle, actually possesses Haggard's psyche; the Bull is "no shape at all, but a swirling darkness, the red darkness you see when you close your eyes in pain" (Beagle 121).
Once inside Haggard's castle, Molly and Schmendrick find themselves lost in a stone labyrinth: "after the great hall, there came another door and then a thin stair. There were few windows and no lights. The stair coiled tighter and tighter as it ascended, until it seemed that every step turned round on itself, and that the tower was closing in on them like a sweaty fist" (Beagle 134-35). Read allegorically, this passage indicates that Haggard's consciousness has turned in on itself in the Gothic manner. The tower's coiling claustrophobia reflects Haggard's egocentric, miserly, and anal-retentive existence. Read symbolically, however, this passage suggests possibilities quite different from the Gothic reading just put forward.
According to Cirlot's Dictionary of Symbols, the image of a maze or labyrinth alludes, among other things, to "the Fall" in the neoplatonic sense; read out of this context, the labyrinth points to the loss of the spirit in the process of creation and the subsequent need to seek the way out through the "center" back to the spirit (173). Throughout her quest, the Unicorn finds herself in the fallen world. One might even say that this fallen world represents fallen consciousness itself; for surely no character is closer to the lowest rung in the ladder of transcendence than Haggard, who is a murderer, a baby-snatcher, and an abusive parent. Like Haggard's psyche, the castle houses the Red Bull, and ironically, it is in the Bull's lair that the "Center" exists.
As Mircea Eliade points out in The Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History, the "Center" may be defined as preeminently the zone of the sacred, the zone of absolute reality. The road leading to this "Center" is difficult; its difficulties are verified at every level of reality: in the "convolutions of a temple; in pilgrimages to sacred places; in danger-ridden voyages; and in wanderings in labyrinths" (Cosmos 18). The Unicorn's wanderings that lead to Haggard's castle, therefore, may be read as a metaphysical version of a rite of passage that involves the movement of an archetype from a Platonic realm into the profane. Ultimately, the archetype's descent to the profane is a humanizing process. Appropriately, toward the end of her quest, the Unicorn becomes a human in order to "unravel her own riddle." It seems that to satisfy the requirements of such a quest one must after all be a human; ultimately, the sacred center is found in the human psyche itself.
As a series of psychic events, the quest is designed to enable the quester to individuate by attaining the "Center" and learning the answer to his or her riddle. According to Eliade, the function of the maze is to defend the "Center." A journey through a labyrinth is, on one level, an initiatory process (Cosmos 18). Haggard's castle does not yield the king's secrets easily. As the skull of Haggard's henchman "set to guard the way to the Bull" remarks, one must understand the secrets of the sacred, traditionally the property of the dead, before one can find the center of the labyrinth. As the skull tells Schmendrick, "When I was alive, I believed -- as you do -- that time was at least as real and solid as myself. . . Now I know that I could have walked through walls" (Beagle 199).
Learning the secrets of the dead involves a descent to the underworld. Having learned this, Molly, Schmendrick, and the Unicorn find themselves under ground at the "Center" of the castle; they end up in a dark cavern whose walls burn "gullet-red" (217). Attaining the "Center," even a hellish one like the Bull's, is equivalent to the initiation itself. As Eliade points out, when the "Center" is attained, "yesterday's profane and illusory existence gives way to . . . a life that is real, enduring and effective" (Cosmos 101). It is not surprising that in the cavern Lady Amalthea again turns into the Unicorn or that the castle itself dissolves into thin air once Haggard dies. Rediscovering the reality that the Unicorn represents is a psychic event. When the unicorns burst from the sea, they are described in terms generally reserved for epiphanies. All around Molly, the narrator says, "there flowed and flowered a light as impossible as snow set afire, while thousands of cloven hoofs sang by like cymbals" (Beagle 227). Molly experiences delight so intense that she cannot express it. She stands "very still, neither weeping nor laughing, for her joy [is] too great for her body to understand" (227).
More importantly, when the quest is completed, the land itself changes. The "sign of unicorns" is everywhere. Signified by the arrival of spring, the renewal of the land also involves the renewal of its inhabitants; even the "small creatures [call] to one another" (235). As before, Beagle carefully underlines the symbolic meaning of a natural event. Molly realizes that "spring" has also come to her, "late but lasting" (235).
In Beagle's text, psychic renewal is not a straightforward process; it rests on the symbol's ability to evoke powerful and contradictory emotional responses. When one encounters archetypal figures such as the Red Bull, it soon becomes apparent that one is reading what D. H. Lawrence terms "a compound work." The Red Bull is certainly not limited to one meaning; it has what Lawrence would call "meanings. Not meaning within meaning: but rather meaning against meaning" (295). Traditionally the figure of a bull represents the masculine principle, heaven and the father. A lunar and a solar animal, however, the bull is linked not just with death, sacrifice, self-denial, and chastity, but also with rebirth and fecundity. In all palaeo-oriented cultures, a bull expresses the idea of power (Cirlot 33-36). Not surprisingly, in The Last Unicorn, the Red Bull is also many things: "the Bull is real ... a ghost . . . Haggard himself ... It is the devil, to whom Haggard has sold his soul. It is the thing he sold his soul to possess" (Beagle 50). Living beneath Haggard's castle, the Bull evokes the legend of the monster in the labyrinth of Knossos; leaving the castle, his humped shoulders and sloping back in the ocean recall Zeus's rape of Europa.
さらに重要なことは、探求の冒険が完遂された時、大地そのものが変化を遂げることである。“ユニコーン達の徴”はあらゆるところに見出される。春の到来によって象徴されるように、大地の再生はその住民達の再生をも意味している。「微小な生き物達もが互いを呼び交す。」これまでと同様に、ビーグルは細心に自然の情景の象徴的な意味性を印象づけている。モリーは“春”が自分自身にも訪れたことに気付く。その春は到来が遅れた分だけ、永続するのである。
ビーグルのテキストにおいては、心霊的な再生は単純な作用としては描かれない。この主題は象徴の、強力でありながらしかも相反した情動的反応を喚起する能力に深く関わるものである。レッド・ブルのような原型的存在を目にする時、D. H. ロレンスが“複合的効果”と呼ぶものが描かれていることにまもなく気付くことになる。明らかに、レッド・ブルはただ一つのもののみを意味している訳ではない。それはロレンスの呼ぶところの“ミーニングズ(多層的意味)”である。つまり「意味の中にある意味ではない、意味に反する意味である。」伝統的には牡牛という存在は、天や父親などの男性原理をあらわすものであった。しかしながら、月とも太陽とも関連を持つ動物として、牡牛は死と犠牲と自制と貞節のみではなく、再生と多産性とも結び付けられるものである。あらゆる原始指向的文化において、牡牛は権力という概念をあらわしている。『最後のユニコーン』においても当然ながら、レッド・ブルは多様なものであり得る。「レッド・ブルは実在する、ー幽霊に過ぎない、ー正体はハガードである、ー実は悪魔で、ハガードは魂をこれに売ったのだ、ーハガードはこれを手に入れるために魂を売ったのだ。」ハガードの城の地下に潜んでいることから、レッド・ブルはクノッソスの迷宮に住む怪物の伝説を思い起こさせる。城から出た後の、海に身体を没する時の盛り上がった肩と傾斜した背中は、ゼウスによるヨーロペの陵辱を思い起こさせる。
Evoking contradictory responses, texts that contain archetypal figures and settings express the constantly changing structure of the psyche itself. Because it expresses the shifting nature of the psyche, the novel is constructed like a labyrinth. One might even say that The Last Unicorn, concerned with the autonomy of symbols, is a labyrinth of language when one considers its juxtapositions of meaning against meaning. Fantasy, according to Jacques Lacan, is conceived as a construct that allows the subject to come to terms with the lack of meaningfulness in language produced by the modem rupture between signifier, the spoken or written word, and signified, the concept which the word represents (Sarup 58). The Last Unicorn, however, proves to be an exception. Because of their ability to generate emotion and hence understanding, symbols and archetypes in this text make language a meaningful activity, thereby challenging Lacan 's theory that the symbolic order has a traumatic element -- the separation of the signifier from the signified -- at its very heart. Throughout, Beagle places a great deal of importance on the nature of language. At the beginning, the Unicorn supposes language to be meaningful and the function of language to join signifier and signified. At the beginning of the narrative, this function appears to have broken down. As the Unicorn searches for "her people . . . she [finds] no trace of them" and "in all the tongues she [hears] spoken . . . there [is] not even a word for them anymore" (Beagle 7). Because words link the natural world and that which transcends it, the Unicorn knows "beyond both hope and vanity that men [have] changed and the world with them, because the unicorns [are] gone" (9).
When the sacred cannot be expressed directly, metaphors become the means by which such an experience is made meaningful. By their very nature, metaphors join signifier with signified, thereby concretizing the abstract. Thus, the Unicorn finds herself mistaken for a white mare when it is clear that she does not resemble one. Such a description, while not accurate, succeeds in conveying her essence. She is "beautiful" (7).
In The Last Unicorn, language is not only metaphoric, it is also metonymic. Beagle's introduction of metonymic nonsense acts as a foil to his use of metaphor. In The Last Unicorn, the fragmented, transitory nature of the profane is best illustrated in the speech of the butterfly that the Unicorn meets early in her travels. His conversation consists of bits of old songs and scraps of popular culture. Recognizing the limited condition of the butterfly's consciousness, the Unicorn remarks to herself, "You know better than to expect a butterfly to know your name . . . they mean well, but they can't keep things straight. And why should they? They die so soon" (Beagle 11).
While Mommy Fortuna's death at the claws of an actual Harpy may be read as Beagle's wry examination of the Lacanian notion that human beings are seized by the image rather than vice versa, one should note that throughout The Last Unicorn, the archetypal quest, which the Unicorn and her companions undertake, is a Saussurean exercise. Just as Ferdinand de Saussure made his classic semiotic argument that language results from the union of signifier and signified, so the purpose of the Unicorn's journey is to connect language and experience. This is accomplished at the end. Metaphor is the means by which Beagle describes the unicorns' return to dry land. They are described as "a light as impossible as snow set afire" (Beagle 227).
Plot structure also reinforces the notion that language reflects reality. At first, the Unicorn's journey seems to be a random process. Since she does not know where she is going, the text itself wanders. Events are controlled by chance. Mommy Fortuna happens to find the unicorn asleep. The butterfly happens to travel with her. Schmendrick happens to be her companion. The Unicorn's journey can be read as a trip into the profane as a haphazard associative process. When Schmendrick learns of Prince Lir, he says, "It's a great relief. . . I've been waiting for this tale to turn up a leading man" (Beagle 109). As Schmendrick points out, the Unicorn's quest does not become meaningful until its nature can be identified.
The Unicorn's journey may also be read as an action that serves to change reality by joining the signified (the sacred) with the signifier (the profane). The plot of Beagle's text does not involve merely the discovery of the sacred in the form of the Unicorn. Rather, as the Unicorn travels throughout the world, the reader rediscovers the sacred nature of the world itself. As Eliade remarks, the world itself is sacred, but paradoxically, one cannot see the sacredness of the world until one discovers that the world is a divine play (Myths 242). One needs to see that the profane is a metaphor of the sacred. To do so, one must give up fixed notions about the nature of the world. Haggard's henchman's skull points this out to Schmendrick when they discuss the nature of Time. He says "the important thing is for you to understand that it doesn't matter whether the clock strikes ten next, or seven or fifteen o'clock. You can strike your own time and start the count anywhere" (Beagle 199).
Beagle also persuades readers to abandon fixed notions about the nature of reality by undermining intellectual responses to his novel. In The Last Unicorn, neither logic nor cause and effect control the action of the plot. Unable to rely on intellect, the reader learns to depend on emotional reactions to understand the text's coherence. Characters who take on choral functions support these reactions. It is natural that one falls in love with the Unicorn and is horrified by the Harpy. The symbolic language of the text, which demands that one function on a visceral level while reading it, elicits these responses.
In final analysis, despite their multiplicity of meanings, the effect of these symbols is not ambiguity, chaos, and meaninglessness. If one relies on one's emotional responses when reading The Last Unicorn, understanding this story becomes a satisfying and relatively straightforward affair. As C. S. Lewis notes in "On Three Ways of Writing for Children," "when we read a good fairy tale we are obeying the old precept 'Know thyself " (36). When we read The Last Unicorn, we do precisely that by visiting a carnival of the unconscious, a labyrinth of language, in which the creatures of the night that dwell within us all are brought to light.