『龍山に戻る』

Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man

Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man


Jonathan SpenceのReturn to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man*1を暫く前に読了する。


Acknowledgments
The Zhang Family Tree
Zhang Dai's China


Prologue
1 Circle of Pleasure
2 Charting the way
3 On Home Ground
4 The World Beyond
5 Levels of Service
6 Over the Edge
7 Court on the Run
8 Living the Fall
9 Reclaiming the Past


Notes
Bibliography
Index

明末の文人、張岱*2の伝記というか、彼のエクリチュールを通して、明末の中国を紹興一帯というローカルなレヴェルにおいて再構成しようとする趣の本といえる。
先ず、”Prologue”から 張岱の生涯を要約しているパッセージを引用する;

Until Zhang Dai was in his forties, his life had revolved around the twin poles of scholarship and pleasure, though to Zhang Dai that might have been the wrong way to phrase it, since so much of scholarship was pleasure to him. Not, it is true, the daily grind of examination preparations, at which he labored unsuccessfully for so many years, but rather idea and reality of reading, cogitating and remembering, the glorious and inescapable fact of knowing that he could walk with the acknowledged masters of the past. For Zhang, the great historians, poets and essayists of the Chinese past were never far away, and though the standards they had set were often utterly unatainable, the mere act of reaching out toward them was thrilling in its own right.(pp.9-10)

The year 1644 thus marked a seismic shift in Zhang Dai's life: his earlier dream of writing a history of the Ming had to be replaced by the bleaker reality of explaining the reason behind the dynasty's fall. He claimed that in the years of his flight from the civil wars and chaos that accompanied the Manchu invasion of China, when he moved secretly from temple to temple in the southern mountains, sheltered by monks, he always carried with him the bulky draft manuscript of his Ming history. That may well be so, and he completed the huge work sometimes in the 1670s. Yet, though the surviving copy of that draft shows evidence that it was being readied for printing, the whole work only became available in China during the 1990s. Instead of achieving his major fame from his historical works, Zhang became best known for a very different kind of writing, the creation of brief aphoristic essays. (pp.10-11)
“Circle of Pleasure”では、 張岱の人生の前半部が再構成される。(関西の言葉でいうところの)ええしのぼんぼんで、バンドや劇団を結成し、燈籠をデザインし、月や菊を賞で、茶を嗜み、蟹を食らう。また、女郎を買いまくる*3。張岱の歴史家としての才能は先ず一族の人々の伝記的記述に現われている。”Charting the way”は張岱の玄祖父である張天復以来の一族の男たちの主に学問的業績を張岱のエクリチュールから再構成する。”On Home Ground”で再構成されるのは張氏を巡る女たちのポートレイト。”Levels of Service”や”Over the Edge”では張岱の1世代上、或いは同世代の親戚たち。”The World Beyond”で焦点が当てられるのは、トラヴェローグ作者としての張岱。張岱の視点から見た当時の泰山や普陀山。また、マテオ・リッチなどのカトリック宣教師たち。
”Court on the Run”以降は張岱の人生の後半部の記述となる。北京で明が滅び、清軍が江南に迫ってくる中、一時は魯王による明朝復興運動にコミットするが、やがて山中に逃亡し、10数年の後に自らの生地である紹興の龍山の麓に戻ってくる。因みに、明朝滅亡のどさくさで張岱の書物や美術品のコレクションは散逸してしまうが、これは清軍ではなく民の遺臣たちによる略奪によってであった。張岱の長い(人生の半分にも及ぶ)余生を支えたパッションは(スペンス氏によれば)、歴史を書くパッションであった――”The possibility of suicide was often with him—but he pushed it away with the thought that his greatest task, the history of the Ming, was still uncompleted.”(p.222)。
なお、”Living the Fall”には張岱の陶淵明への傾倒についての叙述があり(pp.224-228)、また最終章の”Reclaiming the Past”には陶淵明に倣って1665年に書かれた「自為墓誌銘(Self-written Obituary”)」への言及あり(pp.271-275)――”Zhang's concept of how to present his shortcomings was lyrical and imaginative, though initially given a touch of restraint by his use of the third-person mode to describe himself, just as he had done in many of his other most personal writings.”(p.272)

*1:Cf. http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20071011/1192121439 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080111/1200074839

*2:Cf. http://baike.baidu.com/view/34301.htm

*3:実際には、同時代の多くの中国人や日本人と同じく、バイセクシュアルであったようだ。