오에 겐자부로와 예이츠

Abstract

Quotations from foreign literatures are significant in Oe Kenzaburo’s novels. His strategy of quotations is related to his idea of intellectuals. This paper explore how Oe’s notion of the relations between ‘intellectuals’ and mass by investigating how he quotes from others’ writings. In the 1960s, debates about intellectuals were prompted by Takaaki Yoshimoto, who problematized the idea that ‘intellectuals’ were able to represent andenlighten mass. His early works like The Sexual Man (1963) depicts theintellect taking oneself away from mass. But, Oe afterwards began to write about as a family through he was tried to accommodate the society and mass. As the society loomed large in Oe’s writing, quotations from foreign literatures increased their presences. Those quotations serve as written language (language of intellectuals) that defamiliarizes conversations(spoken language) between characters, and makes a multilayered structure. In The Flaming Green Tree Trilogy (1993-95), quotations from W. B. Yeats’s poems have important implication sand perform key functions. Setwithin a background of the period when the cold war structure wasreplaced with religious preoccupation. The Flaming Green Tree Trilogyexplores the mode of praying without faith or any religious orthodoxy. Oe’s depiction of an intellectual who is finding ways to live with otherindividuals without assuming a role of a savior, and his way of organizinga decentralized system of church reflect Oe’s interests in Structuralism and Semiology. When the church winds up in a breakup, it thus reveals thelimits of Structuralism. Oe turns to Yeats for the possibility of overcomingthe limits. This article aims to analyze how Yeats’s quotations provide aclue as to such a problem.