指先の詩学──『ガラスの動物園』における書くこと／描くことの戦略

抄録

In Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, gestures using the fingers/hands and the sense of touch are richly depicted. Examining the effect of these tactile depictions seems important when we consider that the final line from a lyric poem by E. E. Cummings, in which words such as “fingers,” “touch,” and “texture” are utilized as key terms, is attached to an edition of Menagerie as an epigraph: “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.” However, critics have tended to focus on visual effects/sensations, mainly because they pay attention to the cinematic techniques Williams employs in the play. In this paper, I will discuss the use of hand/finger gestures and the depiction of tactility in a wider sense, and will consider their relationship to the playwright’s consistent interest in painting.
Several studies on art in the 1930s set forth the opinion that “touch,” or the role played by hands in the process of creating art like paintings, had disappeared as a result of the rise of reproductive techniques like photography. They considered how the roles of hands had been replaced by those of eyes. Similarly, in Menagerie, which is explicitly set in the 1930s, the depictions of hands/fingers and tactile effects/sensations are, in many cases, contraposed to those of eyes and visual effects/sensations, and such contrasts seem to characterize the confrontation between painting and photography.
First, in Menagerie, the playwright explains his notion of “plastic theatre,” a new theatrical concept, and compares the conventional realistic play to photography. According to him, a photographic likeness, ostensibly depicting things objectively, is unimportant; instead, he considers “atmospheric touches” to be particularly important in the plastic theatre. Memory, which “takes a lot of poetic license,” can change the form of things it touches and transform them to represent the truth. It is noteworthy in this context that recent critics recognize a parallel between German painter Hans Hofmann’s notion of “plasticity” and the plastic theatre. Thus, the word “touch(es),” which the playwright uses to explain his new concept, becomes associated with the artistic term “touch,” merging the acts of writing and painting intimately.
Second, Laura, who is compared to a religious painting and who is similar to an artistic work in that she has what Walter Benjamin calls an “aura,” is described with rich reference to the gestures of her hands/fingers, in contrast to other characters, who are notably compared to photography and other reproductive works. Furthermore, the conflict between the two senses of touch and sight illuminates Laura’s relationship with her tiny glass animals: she usually cures herself by touching them, but in her most tragic scene, we notice that they have lost their power to cure her and have become mere objects, sadly reflected in her eyes. Nonetheless, Williams impressively describes the revivification of tactility when Laura takes Jim’s hand and places the broken glass unicorn in his palm. Here, in a sense, she bravely opens herself to a dialogic relationship with others through the tactile sense. It is due to her bravery that Tom decides to tell his sister’s story not as a poem but as a play, a dialogic form that always expects the existence of an audience; the intertextual analysis of related short fictions by the playwright enables us to see the fingers/hands as a sort of “point of origin” where Tom and Laura overlap beyond time and space, clarifying at once the poetic and political strategy of writing/painting in The Glass Menagerie.