芥川テクストとメタ言語 －芥川の初期小説スタイルについての考察－

Abstract

This paper studies metalanguage in the texts of Akutagawa. Metalanguage refers to “language about language.” Metalanguage is not language that indicates things directly, rather it is the language whose subject is another language. Akutagawa’s texts do not talk about the physical world directly, but while citing the stories of others–such as old records, traditions, and hearsay–they take the form of indirect reproduction, and primarily narrate stories in metalanguage. Similar to how metalanguage has the quality of being “‘language’ about ‘language’ about ‘language’” and so on, thus duplicating language endlessly, in the texts of Akutagawa, “I talk about the ‘hero’ who is ‘I,’ who talks about ‘I,’ who talks about…” and so on; the texts thus duplicate “I” countless number of times. In this manner, metalanguage and Akutagawa’s texts can be seen to be structurally similar. What then, is the background to this meta-type duplicate structure? This question is related to the skepticism in the texts of Akutagawa. In other words, he is skeptical of his own words. For instance, “‘The author wrote this a little while ago.’ But is this really true?” But, is this really true?” But, is this…” and so on. Such repeated duplication of language might have given rise to the similarity in structure. This paper investigates this issue of skepticism within a specific text analysis.