【テーマ・目標】講座題目として”意味消失による意味性賦与の試みー『最後のユニコーン』における夢と魔法と矛盾撞着と曖昧性”を掲げ、『最後のユニコーン』(The Last Unicorn, 1968)を対象に、作品世界記述に意図的に導入された“矛盾撞着”と“曖昧性”の効果 に関する論考を展開しながら、このお話の基幹的主題である一意性を超出する多義性の存在論獲得のモチーフを読み解いていく。
“...Even when I wake, I cannot tell what is real, and what I am dreaming as I move and speak and eat my dinner. I remember what cannot have happened, and forget something that is happening to me now. People look at me as though I should know them, and I do know them in the dream,...”
p. 157
The fourth man, who was the youngest, leaned toward Molly Grue, his pink, wet eyes suddenly eager. He said, “The Red Bull is a demon, and its reckoning for attending Haggard will one day be Haggard himself.” Another man interrupted him, insisting that the clearest evidence showed that the Bull was King Haggard’s enchanted slave, and would be until it broke thebewitchment that held it and destroyed its former lord.
p. 147
“As for the Red Bull, I know less than I have heard, for I have heard too many tales and each argues with another. The Bull is real, the Bull is a ghost, the Bull is Haggard himself when the sun goes down. The Bull was in the land before Haggard, or it came with him, or it came to him. It protects him from raids and revolutions, and saves him the expense of arming his men. It keeps him a prisoner in his own castle. It is the devil, to whom Haggard has sold his soul. It is the thing he sold his soul to possess. The Bull belongs to Haggard. Haggard belongs to the Bull.”
pp. 54-5
例えば『ピーターとウェンディ』の本当の主人公はキャプテン・フックです。ピーターの正体はフックの影です。詳細は以下のブログを参考にして下さい。
Fantasy as Antifantasy Daily Lecture, 2005_12_16
(http://antifantasy2.blog01.linkclub.jp/index.php?blogid=1214&archive=2005-12-16)
THE SHADOW
Mrs. Darling screamed, and, as if in answer to a bell, the door opened, and Nana entered, returned from her evening out. She growled and sprang at the boy, who leapt lightly through the window. Again Mrs. Darling screamed, this time in distress for him, for she thought he was killed, and she ran down into the street to look for his little body, but it was not there; and she looked up, and in the black night she could see nothing but what she thought was a shooting star.
She returned to the nursery, and found Nana with something in her mouth, which proved to be the boy’s shadow. As he leapt at the window Nana had closed it quickly, too late to catch him, but his shadow had not had time to get out; slam went the window and snapped it off.
“But 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. When you understand that─then any time at all will be the right time for you.”
p. 175
But its course was the impossible way of a dream: pitched and skewed, rounding on itself; now dropping almost sheer, now seeming to rise a little; now working out and slowly down, and now wandering back to take them, perhaps, once again below the great hall where old King Haggard must still be raging over a toppled clock and a shivered skull.
p. 181