象形文字の精霊の崇高美

―日夏耿之介のゴスィック・ローマン詩体―

抄録

　In this essay, I have tried to show how Hinatsu Kōnosuke came to form his poetic style. He called it “the Gothic-Roman style,” and I think its roots can be found in the tradition of Western cultural history, specifically, in the aesthetic of the sublime. “The sublime” is an idea that appeared at the end of seventeenth century in England. It changed remarkably the way mountains have been viewed in Europe. Since then mountains that had been regarded as horrible have become places whose desolation people find pleasing. This new sensibility was named “the sublime” by Edmund Burke. I think “the sublime” was a counter current against scientific rationalism. The medieval hierarchical universe, which is the setting of Dante's Divine Comedy, was destroyed by the scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Newton, etc., and God was replaced by nature. The result was the loss of “the sacred.” I think “the sublime,” was compensation for this loss.

　This taste for “the sublime” was introduced in Japan in the Meiji period, and brought about a new taste for mountains. Hinatsu Kōnosuke’s Gothic-Roman style can be interpreted as a literary expression of this Japanese “sublime.” It is characterized by the frequent use of dificult and obsolete Chinese characters, which impress the reader by their strange appearance. He called this effect “the spirit of Chinese characters.” He had an innate taste for negative things, so it is only natural for him to have had an affinity for the aesthetic of the sublime Moreover, the pleasure he got from such negative beauty was compensation for his miserable life, and his literary expressions of it were, for him, a kind of salvation. He crystalized his highly-sophisticated symbolic 190 poems with the help of alchemic symbolism. In forming his style, he was greatly influenced by E. A. Poe. He assimilated Poe’s Gothicism, but changed the emphasis from rhythm to the visual effects of Chinese characters. It is here that we can see evidence of Kōnosuke’ originality.