ボルヘスの短歌と中島敦の「山月記」？

「影響」＝無形のもの、妄想―諸橋轍次『大漢和辞典』

抄録

　 Creative reading and writing should be, in a sense, understood as a kind of citation, which summons words, not into court but into a ‘literary space.’

　The fourth piece in Borges’“Tankas” (1972) will certainty remind many readers of Atsushi Nakajima’s short story “Sangetsu-ki” (1942). The resemblances between the two works, in fact, will make a strong impression on almost everyone, their dates of publication enhancing and deepening that impression.

　 A number of cogent analogies between the two writers can be found without the least difficulty; their erudition, favourite authors (F. Kafka and R. L. Stevenson), family situations, metafiction, etc. But simplistic comparisons are not enough to constitute meaningful literary scholarship. As for transtextual theory, comparative study is still in embryo; positivism is liable to depend too readily on ‘influence’, and parallelism does not have appropriate criteria for «poétique» (Genette’s term).

　The aim in this paper is to point out one author’s influence upon another, the relationship which should be always in the foreground of comparative studies. If influence is over-emphasised, the originality of the given text or author will be buried out of sight. If subjected to too hard an inquisition, the influence will soon vanish into thin air. The Japanese word for ‘influence’ ei-kyo appropriately means ‘影 shadow and 響 echo.’

　We must read or write not only with a positive, paternal productivity, but with a passive, maternal one that I would call poetic situation, which is something more comprehensive, more environmental, more deep-rooted in readers’ or writers’ literary entity, and which gives birth to valid and meaningful transtextual relationships.