Victor Segalen(memo)

The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds (Allen Lane History S.)

Jonathan Spence The Chan’s Great Continent*1から。
スペンスは、第８章”The French Exotic”において、

Looking back from our present vantage, we can see that by the mid-nineteenth century the emerging cult of the Chinese exotic in France had come to combine four main realms or elements. One was an appreciation of Chinese grace and delicacy, a sensitivity to timbre and texture, that spread from the initial stimuli of silk and porcelain and temple architecture to become the basis of an entire aesthetic. One was an awareness of Chinese sensuality, initially tied to this new aesthetic, but rapidly moving out to embrace something harsher and ranker, something unknowable, dangerous, and intoxicating, composed of scent and sweat, of waves of heat and festering night air. Separate from this, though inescapably linked to it, was the sense of a realm of Chinese violence and barbarism, of hidden cruelties, threats of ravishment, uncontrollable impulses. And lastly was the idea of China as the realm of melancholy, as a land that stood for something forever lost—lost to the West through uncaring materialism, lost to China through the weight of its own past, compounded by its weakness and its poverty. Opium was the natural accomplishment to this fourth realm, the narcotic of langor and of longing. (p.146)

と書く。
そして、19世紀以降の仏蘭西における中国表象の系譜を、太平天国制圧に参加した軍人のProsper Giquelから始めて（pp.146-147）、フローベールの『感情教育』における中国イメージ（pp.147-148）を挟んで、Pierre Loti（pp. 148-153）、Paul Claudel（pp.153-156）を紹介し、漢学者Edouard Chavannes*2の弟子でもある、”the greatest French interpreter of the China exotic”（p.156）であるVictor Segalenで締めくくられる。Victor Segalenの代表作はPaul Claudelに捧げられた詩集Steles；

Drawing inspiration from the fact that Chinese often placed giant stone steles, bearing incised texts and poems, along their roadways, or near ancestral temples, Segalen determined to create his own offerings in the same genre. He constructed a convincing and emotionally satisfying fiction that Chinese steles always bore a different type of message according to the direction in which they were facing: thus steles of love face toward the east; steles of friendship face toward the north; the emperor’s instructions are pointed toward the south; and the steles of war and death will face the “blood-soaked west, the palace of red” and the setting sun. One other group face downward into the earth. These are the steles of the center; without direction yet full of meaning, they press the seals of their messages into the soil itself. “They are the decrees of another—singular—empire.” (p.157)

また、セガレンは北京にて清朝の崩壊に立ち会った人でもある；

Segalen was in Peking during 1911 and 1912 when China’s last dynasty, the Qing, was brought down by its own incompetence, the ceaseless pressures and wars of the foreign powers, and the recurrent assaults of its own revolutionaries seeking to establish a republic. Segalen’s vision of China, like that of every Westerner up to 1912, had been an imperial one, colored by spectacle and glamorous memories that spanned over two millennia. But now, once penetrated, the Forbidden City lost its mystery. Loti had been a precursor to this process, Claudel mourned it, but both had now departed, Loti to France (and New York), Claudel to continued diplomatic work in Frankfurt. So it was left to Segalen to record the final disintegration of the last dynasty, the shocking image of the president of the new republic arriving by train to dispossess the Manchu regents and their child emperor `Pu-yi. (p. 160)

感情教育〈上〉 (岩波文庫)

感情教育〈下〉 (岩波文庫)

ヴィクトール・セガレンについては、守中高明氏の論攷が思潮社版の『守中高明詩集』に再録されていると思ったが、今手許にない。

守中高明詩集 (現代詩文庫)

この章でスペンス先生が採り上げているピエール・ロティにしてもポール・クローデルにしても、中国だけでなく日本表象にも大きく関わっている。特に、ロティは『マダム・バタフライ』が長崎から船に乗って神戸じゃなくてサイゴンについて『ミス・サイゴン』になったように、現代世界における亜細亜表象の大元であるといっても過言ではないだろう（See Sheridan Prasso The Asian Mystique*3）。

The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, and Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient

スペンス先生が挙げている参考文献から少しメモ。
ピエール・ロティについて；

Lesley Blanch Pierre Loti, The Legendary Romantic, 1983
FUNAOKA Suetoshi Pierre Loti et l’extreme-orient: du journal a l’oeuvre, 1988

Paul Claudelについて；

Bernard Hue Litteratures et arts de l’orient dans l’oeuvre de Claudel, 1978
Eugene Roberto “Le theatre chinois de New York en 1893” Cahiers Paul Claudel, no. 5, 1967, pp.109-133
Gilbert Gadoffre “Claudel et l’univers chinois” Cahiers Paul Claudel, no. 8, 1968

Victor Segalenについて；

Yvonne Hsieh Victor Segalen’s Literary Encounter with China: Chinese Moulds, Western Thoughts, 1988
Marc Gontard Victor Segalen, une esthetique de la difference, 1990

*1:See also http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20060509/1147142249

*2:エドゥアール・シャヴァンヌについては、山田利明『中国学の歩み』、pp.125-126も参照されたい。

中国学の歩み―二十世紀のシノロジー (あじあブックス)

*3:See http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20070221/1172033443