日本英文学会第 83 回大会
5/22/2011@北九州市立大学北方キャンパス
シンポジウム第七部門「ポストヒューマンの文学表象――動物・近代・テクノロジー」

小説の非人間化――あるいはポストヒューマン的読書

大阪大学

石割 隆喜

◆〈小説〉と〈人間〉

1. Thus the first great novel of world literature stands at the beginning of the time when
the Christian God began to forsake the world; when man became lonely and could findmeaning and substance only in his own soul, whose home was nowhere; when the world,
released from its paradoxical anchorage in a beyond that is truly present, was abandoned
to its immanent meaninglessness. . . . (Lukács 103)
2. The outward form of the novel is essentially biographical. The fluctuation between aconceptual system which can never completely capture life and a life complex which cannever attain completeness because completeness is immanently utopian, can beobjectivized only in that organic quality which is the aim of biography. (Lukács 77)
3. The nature of the character in a novel cannot be presented any better than is done in thisstatement, which says that the “meaning” of his life is revealed only in his death. But thereader of a novel actually does look for human beings from whom he derives the“meaning of life.”. . . What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his
shivering life with a death he reads about. (Benjamin 100–01).

◆「鍵穴」

4. Clarissa is an extreme example of this. Richardson’s impersonal and anonymous role
allowed him to project his own secret fantasies into a mysterious next room: and theprivacy and anonymity of print placed the reader behind a keyhole where he, too, could
peep in unobserved and witness rape being prepared, attempted and eventually carriedout. (Watt 199)
5. For although much has been said about Richardson’s “keyhole view of life,” which heundoubtedly used on occasion for unwholesome ends, it is also the essential basis of his
remarkable opening up of the new domain of private experience for literary exploration.
We must, after all, remember that the term itself is merely the pejorative form of themetaphor by which another great and dedicated student of the inner life, Henry James,
expressed his belief in the necessity for the author’s objectivity and detachment: for him
the role of the novelist in the house of fiction is, if not that of the peeper through keyholes,
at least that of “the watcher at the window.” (Watt 200)

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6. Most particularly, keyholes relate to voyeuristic sexual pleasure in Clarissa, both
Lovelace’s and the reader’s. . . . Peeping is the theme of Laura Mulvey’s analysis of
scopophilia in which she takes up Freud’s theory of sexual perversion to isolate theobjectifying gaze of desire in the context of film. For Mulvey, the eye of the movie
producer and viewer is a male one, possessing agency, whereas the female is represented
in fragmented body parts as passive. This dichotomy between gaze and object, activity
and passivity, has deep roots in Western culture. . . . Similarly, we find the phenomenon of
scopism in eighteenth-century texts in which sex and visual desire often provide theimpulse to move the plot along.
The reader experiences scopic pleasure with Lovelace in proxy. Lovelace’s will todominate over Clarissa and revenge himself on her family translates into his visual desire
for her. (Olson 156)◆「窓」

7. The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible
windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still
pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of theindividual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, overthe human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report than
we find. . . . But they have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure witha pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation,a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct fromevery other. He and his neighbours are watching the same show, but one seeing more
where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white. . . . The spreading
field, the human scene, is the “choice of subject”; the pierced aperture, either broad or
balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the “literary form”; but they are, singly or
together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher—without, in other words,
the consciousness of the artist. (James 46)◆「覗き」の形あれこれ

8. [T]he supreme culmination of the formal trend that Richardson initiated [is to be foundin] James Joyce’s Ulysses. No book has gone beyond it in the literal transcription of all thestates of consciousness, and no book in doing so has depended more completely on themedium of print. (Watt 206)
9. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its
figures so distinctly,—making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or
noontide visibility,—is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted
with his illusive guests. (Hawthorne 65)210. Now, to return to the novel, we can easily see that the novelist is equally an observer
and an experimentalist. The observer in him gives the facts as he has observed them,suggests the point of departure, displays the solid earth on which his characters are totread and the phenomena to develop. Then the experimentalist appears and introduces anexperiment, that is to say, sets his characters going in a certain story so as to show that thesuccession of facts will be such as the requirements of the determinism of the phenomena
under examination call for. Here it is nearly always an experiment “pour voir,” as Claude
Bernard calls it. (Zola 8)◆リアリズム、「対応」、認識論

11. Look here, sit, a novel is a mirror moving along a highway. One minute you see itreflect the azure skies, next minute the mud and puddles of the road. And the man who
carries the mirror in his pack will be accused by you of immorality! His mirror shows the
mud and you accuse the mirror! Rather you should accuse the road in which the puddle
lies, or, even better, the inspector of roads who lets the water collect and the puddle form.
(Stendhal 297)
12. It is far from clear that this ideal of scientific objectivity is desirable, and it certainly
cannot be realized in practice: nevertheless it is very significant that, in the first sustained
effort of the new genre to become critically aware of its aims and methods, the French
Realists should have drawn attention to an issue which the novel raises more sharply thanany other literary form—the problem of the correspondence between the literary work andthe reality which it imitates. This is essentially an epistemological problem, and it therefore
seems likely that the nature of the novel’s realism, whether in the early eighteenth century
or later, can best be clarified by the help of those professionally concerned with theanalysis of concepts, the philosophers. (Watt 11)
13. The novel’s mode of imitating reality may therefore be equally well summarized interms of the procedures of another group of specialists in epistemology, the jury in a courtof law. Their expectations, and those of the novel reader coincide in many ways: both wantto know “all the particulars” of a given case. . . . (Watt 31)◆「探偵」

14. I think there can be no doubt that Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, for example, has been
designed to raise just such epistemological questions. Its logic is that of a detective story,
the epistemological genre par excellence. Faulkner’s protagonists, like characters in many
classic modernist texts—Henry James’s and Joseph Conrad’s, for instance—sift throughthe evidence of witnesses of different degrees of reliability in order to reconstruct andsolve a “crime”. . . . (McHale 9)3

15. I was not particularly attentive to what you did; but observation has become with me,of late, a species of necessity. (Poe 245)

◆ポスト〈小説〉的ヒューマン

16. Private eye. The term held a triple meaning for Quinn. Not only was it the letter “i,”standing for “investigator,” it was “I” in the upper case, the tiny life-bud buried in the
body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was also the physical eye of the writer, theeye of the man who looks out from himself into the world and demands that the world
reveal itself to him. For five years now, Quinn had been living in the grip of this pun.
(Auster 9–10)
17. At 84th Street he paused momentarily in front of a shop. There was a mirror on the
façade, and for the first time since he had begun his vigil, Quinn saw himself. . . . Now, as
he looked at himself in the shop mirror, he was neither shocked nor disappointed. He had
no feeling about it at all, for the fact was that he did not recognize the person he saw there
as himself. He thought that he had spotted a stranger in the mirror, and in that first
moment he turned around sharply to see who it was. But there was no one near him. Thenhe turned back to examine the mirror more carefully. Feature by feature, he studied theface in front of him and slowly began to notice that this person bore a certain resemblance
to the man he had always thought of as himself. Yes, it seemed more than likely that thiswas Quinn. Even now, however, he was not upset. The transformation in his appearance
had been so drastic that he could not help but be fascinated by it. He had turned into abum. . . . He tried to remember himself as he had been before, but he found it difficult. He
looked at this new Quinn and shrugged. It did not really matter. He had been one thing
before, and now he was another. It was neither better nor worse. It was different, and that
was all. (Auster 142–43)
18. [H]e was never quite sure about good modern art or about the flies Orr saw inAppleby’s eyes. He had Orr’s word to take for the flies in Appleby’s eyes.
“Oh, they’re there, all right,” Orr had assured him about the flies in Appleby’s eyes
after Yossarian’s fist fight with Appleby in the officers’ club, “although he probably doesn’t
even know it. That’s why he can’t see things as they really are.”“How come he doesn’t know it?” inquired Yossarian.
“Because he’s got flies in his eyes,” Orr explained with exaggerated patience. “How canhe see he’s got flies in his eyes if he’s got flies in his eyes?” (Heller 46)
19. It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say
about a massacre. (Vonnegut 19)
20. “Yeah, PIs should really stay away from drugs, all ’em alternate universes just makethe job that much more complicated.” (Pynchon, Inherent 96)

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Fig. 1. Paul Auster, City of Glass, Adapt. Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli.

5◆『逆光』――“observation” から “relation” へ

21.
He had brought with him a dime novel, one of the Chums of Chance series, The Chumsof Chance at the Ends of the Earth, and for a while each night he sat in the firelight and readto himself but soon found he was reading out loud to his father’s corpse, like a bedtime
story, something to ease Webb’s passage into the dreamland of his death. . . .
At odd moments, now, he found himself looking at the sky, as if trying to locate
somewhere in it the great airship. As if those boys might be agents of a kind of extrahumanjustice, who could shepherd Webb through whatever waited for him, even pass on to Reef
wise advice, though he might not always be able to make sense of it. And sometimes in thesky, when the light was funny enough, he thought he saw something familiar. Neverlasting more than a couple of watch ticks, but persistent. “It’s them, Pa,” he nodded backover his shoulder. “They’re watching us, all right. And tonight I’ll read you some more ofthat story. You’ll see.” (Pynchon, Against 214–15)
22. At one end of the gondola, largely oblivious to the coming and going on deck, with his
tail thumping expressively now and then against the planking, and his nose among thepages of a volume by Mr. Henry James, lay a dog of no particular breed, to all appearancesabsorbed by the text before him. (Pynchon, Against 5)
23. Over and above a growing awareness that these waves of story are indeed heading
somewhere, what saves one’s readerly sanity in the middle of these 450,000 words may be
the fact that every figure in the book is immediately recognizeable [sic]; I think that without
exception every single one can be initially identified as having been configured in terms ofsome genre or other of popular fiction, as it was written before the end of World War One.
These genres include the Western, from Edward S Ellis to Bret Harte to Jack London; boy’s
adventure fiction, form the Airship Boys tale to Horatio Alger; the Dime Novel in general;
the British school story in general and the Zuleika Dobson British-school-story-for-olderboys femme-fatale tale in particular; the future war novel; the Lost Race novel; theSymmesian Hollow Earth tale; the Tibetan Llama or Shangri-La thriller; the Vernean
Extraordinary Journey; the Wellsian scientific romance; the Invention tale and its close
cousin the Edisonade; the European spy romance thriller á la E Phillips Oppenheim; theWorld-Island spy thriller á la John Buchan; the mildly sadomasochistic soft porn tale as
published by the likes of Charles Carrington in Paris around the turn of the century. Not tomention the large number of utopias influenced by Edward Bellamy and William Morris,
both of whom ghost the book. (Clute 285)
24. It is here that Mr. Joyce’s parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance. It has theimportance of a scientific discovery. No one else has built a novel upon such a foundation
before: it has never before been necessary. I am not begging the question in calling Ulysses
a “novel”; and if you call it an epic it will not matter. If it is not a novel, that is simply
because the novel is a form which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead ofbeing a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form
to feel the need of something stricter. Mr. Joyce has written one novel—the Portrait; Mr.
Wyndham Lewis has written one novel—Tarr. I do not suppose that either of them will

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ever write another “novel.” The novel ended with Flaubert and with James. It is, I think,because Mr. Joyce and Mr. Lewis, being “in advance” of their time, felt a conscious orprobably unconscious dissatisfaction with the form, that their novels are more formlessthan those of a dozen clever writers who are unaware of its obsolescence. (Eliot 177)◆『ニューロマンサー』における「ポストヒューマン」と「窓」
25. For James, the observer is an embodied creature. . . . Instead of an embodied
consciousness looking through the window at a scene, consciousness moves through thescreen to become the pov, leaving behind the body as an unoccupied shell. In cyberspace,point of view does not emanate from the character; rather, the pov literally is thecharacter. . . . The effect is not primarily metafictional, however, but is in a literal sense
metaphysical, above and beyond physicality. The crucial difference between the Jamesianpoint of view and the cyberspace pov is that the former implies physical presence, whereas
the latter does not. (Hayles 37–38)

26.
Then he keyed the new switch.
The abrupt jolt into other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of sound and color. . . . She wasmoving through a crowded street, past stalls vending discount software. . . . For a few
frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into
passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes. . . .
He found himself wondering about the mind he shared these sensations with. What did
he know about her? That she was another professional; that she said her being, like his,
was the thing she did to make a living. He knew the way she’d moved against him, earlier,when she woke, their mutual grunt of unity when he’d entered her, and that she liked hercoffee black, afterward. . . . (Gibson 56; 1st and last ellipses in orig.)◆「器官」の出現、あるいは「不透明な眼球」

27. We enjoy seeing those people before us and being admitted to their inner life,
understanding them, and living immersed in their world or atmosphere. From being
narrative and indirect the novel has become direct and descriptive. The best word would
be “presentative.” The imperative of the novel is autopsy. No good telling us what aperson is, we want to see with our own eyes. (Ortega 61–62)
28. “From a sociological point of view” the characteristic feature of the new art is, in myjudgment, that it divides the public into the two classes of those who understand it andthose who do not. This implies that one group possesses an organ of comprehension
denied to the other—that they are two different varieties of the human species. (Ortega 6)
29. [T]he art of which we speak is inhuman not only because it contains no things human,
but also because it is an explicit act of dehumanization. In his escape from the humanworld the young artist cares less for the “terminus ad quem,” the startling fauna at which hearrives, than for the “terminus a quo,” the human aspect which he destroys. (Ortega 22)*引用文中の下線はすべて発表者による。

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