T. ウィリアムズの劇における真実と幻影

抄録

Tennessee Williams is a playwright who has persistently tried to represent on the stage what is true of human beings. When he made his debut on Broadway with The Glass Menagerie, he declared in it that he would show "truth" to the audience. He thought the realistic plays of the past gave the audience only illusion that had the appearance of truth, and he determined to give the audience truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion. "Disguise" used here also means "transformation" in his plays. He realized that truth is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through changing into other forms than those which are merely present in appearance. Accordingly he has devised and used various kinds of symbolic technique to represent truth on the stage. Then what approach has he actually made to truth? His approach is rather paradoxical. He has tried to represent truth through writing about "illusion" or "mendacity" of human beings. Williams' conception of human beings is that they are more or less losers, though there seem to be both losers and winners in life. Human beings are, in essence, weak, defenceless and lonely. They struggle very hard to live through life controlled by the merciless power of reality. Williams thinks God is here, it is true, but He is never a merciful being we expect Him to be. He is like a senile delinquent, and gets furious and shouts some fierce things at human beings. God is here just behind the merciless power of reality, ready to denounce any errors of human beings. So they, weak and defenceless, are destined to be defeated by reality. In order to live on and survive against this destiny, they have to hold on to "illusion" or "mendacity" as their shield. This shield is too fragile to protect them from reality, but they have nothing else to hold on to. However hard they may hold on to it, illusion or mendacity is, from the start, quite helpless against reality. So defeat is the human destiny, but human beings have to struggle on against this fate with the vain shield of illusion. Thus the main characters Williams has created on the stage have great difficulty in living through life. Theatrically speaking, the greater their difficulty is, the greater becomes the compassion of the audience upon their defeat. So to make life more difficult and also to make illusion or mendacity more convincing to the audience, Williams chooses for the characters those who are bound up with something in the past. Some of them have a sad personal experience which took place in their past and still hovers over their mind, while others are fettered by a social tradition-"genteel tradition" of the Southern aristocracy. They cannot face what actually happened, and to escape from this reality, they live in the world of illusion. They cannot face what is now taking place in the world, as they hold on to the old "genteel tradition." So they have to create the world of mendacity to run into for shelter. These characters are typical losers of our age, but Tennessee Williams sees truth in their pathetic course of defeat. Through writing about them, I believe, he is telling us, "Life with illusion or mendacity is a true life to them, and even to us."