@article{oai:nagoya.repo.nii.ac.jp:00028120, author = {舌津, 智之 and Zettu, Tomoyuki}, journal = {IVY}, month = {Nov}, note = {It is generally agreed that the gist of Tennessee Williams's plays resides in their lyrical/ poetical qualities. However, few attempts have been made so far to elucidate the playwright's intertextual transactions with English and American poetry. Significantly, Williams was deeply influenced by E. E. Cummings while (and before) writing his first Broadway hit, The Glass Menagerie (1945). In fact, the crucial influence of Cummings on Williams is established beyond doubt by the epigraph attached to the text of Menagelie: "nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands." This line, taken from a lyric poem by Cummings, recalls the delicate gesture of Laura's hand in Williams's memory play, a play focusing on the shy girl's fragility, notably when she touches the pieces of her glass ani1nal collection. In other words, the image of Laura becomes a central source of the play's poetic imagination, although the sweet memory of the girl is something that her brother tries to erase so that he may pursue his own ambition. The ultimate question of Menagerie, then, inheres in Tom the narrator's attempt to go beyond his sister, that is, to go beyond the arrested mode of lyric poetry. Poems are close to plays in that both are meant, at least potentially, to be spoken aloud. However, the fact that Williams admired Cummings makes the matter more complicated than it first appears. No one could gainsay that Cummings's poetic essence consists in his idiosyncratic typography. In order to appreciate the poet's true gift, one must see his poems as a written entity. In much the same frame of reference, Menagerie is obsessed with the written text as well as with the act of writing. Williams's quest for economic and lyrical writing in the play culminates in his attempt to put a screen on the stage to show some legends or images. (It is interesting to note that the early manuscripts of the play suggest the employment of a blackboard instead of the screen, so that Tom can write some brief phrases or sentences in chalk on the board.) A good case in point is the legend which appears shortly after the opening of scene 6: "The accent of a coming foot" The phrase opens up an intricate textual network by directly pointing to "The Accent of a Coming Foot," one of Williams's own short stories written in the mid-1930s and first published in Collected Stories (1985), whose helpful bibliographical notes identify the story's title as a quote from Emily Dickinson. At the end of this story, the rain speaks of its "hands," but the idea that the rain has its own "hands" is unusual. Williams's associative link between the rain and hands makes sense if one recalls Cummings's line that provides the epigraph to Menagelie: "nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands." In this light, the question of intertextuality in Willliams figures largely. Generally speaking, intertextuality is not a kind of notion that matters in dramatic pieces. A play usually wishes to transcend its own textuality, which means to regard itself as a spoken entity. The stage is meant to show the immediate presence, rather than traces, of living bodies that cannot inhabit the printed page. Drama, then, brings its possibilities into full play when it succeeds in getting closer to life, not to literature. But Williams, far from erasing the textuality of his play, persists in refiguring literary texts. Despite his desperate attempt to break away from Laura's memory, Tom in Menagerie remains under the poetic spell of his sister, just as his mother cannot escape the romantic burden of her beautiful past when she says: "Gone, gone, gone. All vestige of gracious living! Gone completely!" Combined with her earlier reference to Gone with the Wind, Amanda's lyrical lament resonates with a similarly painful cry in Ernest Dowson's "Cynara," one of Williams's favorite poems, from which Margaret Mitchell's fiction borrows its title phrase. In Dowson's poem, the tortured poet recounts his vain effort to forget his love, although he is "hungry for the lips of [his] desire." In fact, the poet's "faithful" musing about Cynara provides a subtext for Menagerie's closing speech that reveals the narrator's "faithful" feeling toward his sister. To see Williams's play in light of Dowson's poetic lines is to recognize that Laura could be conceived as her brother's "desire," an idea that illuminates the playwright's own incestuous devotion to his beloved sister, who constitutes the chief source of his poetic inspiration. In other words, if incest is implied in Menagerie, it is not so much between sister and brother as between poetry and play. Williams's play therefore tries to break and outgrow the poetic imagination to which it is irresistibly drawn--to create a hybrid mode of dramatic lyricism in a broader context of American literature., 本稿は,2011年度名古屋大学英文学会クリスマス・セミナー(2011年12月9日)の講演に基づき,加筆修正を施したものである。}, pages = {55--73}, title = {テネシー・ウィリアムズと英米詩 : 『ガラスの動物園』再考}, volume = {45}, year = {2012} }