「スフィンクスの上の黒人 ―Tom Sawyer Abroadを読み解く」
辻 和彦
中・四国アメリカ文学会『中・四国アメリカ文学研究』 35 31 - 41 1999年
[査読有り] Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain's novel, is well known not only to the American literary critics, but also to the people all over the world. Most of the readers of Huckleberry Finn, however, don't know the fact that Twain had written the series after the publication of Huckleberry Finn. He tried to write the continuances again and again, but he couldn't succeed in completing most of the works well after all. Tom Sawyer Abroad is one of such novels that Twain published as the series of Huckleberry Finn. In this paper, I studied about the imperial logic in this novel from three standpoints.
In the first place, I discussed the critical history of Tom Sawyer Abroad, and made it clear that this story was not unpopular and was not neglected in the early twentieth century, in contrast with the situation of today. A few critics, nowadays, refers to Tom Sawyer Abroad, but they don't think that the novel is as an excellent canon as Huckleberry Finn is. Although Tom Sawyer Abroad has many irregular points and cannot be said to be one of best Twain's novels, the story tells us about some interesting aspects of Twain's unconsciousness.
Secondly, I took up the code of the depressed structure of this story, by way of remarking on the birth of the balloon narratives and Twain's difficulty with completing this novel. There were many obstacles in way of the publication of this book; for example, Twain's mental anxieties for some reasons, his financial failure, the publisher's bankruptcy, and the editor's alterations. These situations filled the story with the strange atmosphere in which Tom is urged and pessimistic. His defeats in the several discussion with Jim make it clear that the order of this discourse is on the edge of the collapsed condition.
Finally, I explained the plot of Tom Sawyer Abroad, and interpreted it as the story of the Tom's ambition to expand into all over the world. In this story, Tom's desire to be a hero is still unsolved, and his connection with Huck is no longer a mere boys' friendship, but a part of the grotesque feudalism. Jim reappears but has no autonomy. He is completely displaced from the status in which he had the role of Huck's reliable father, and comes back to the position of a servant or a slave in the South.
What I have mainly argued in this paper is that the singularity of Tom Sawyer Abroad was well coincided with that of American attitude toward the developing countries in those days. Tom's reasoning and interpreting in this novel are strongly connected with the growth of the early capitalism and American “innocent” imperialism. Of course, his plays and tricks filled the role of overturning the worth-order of the community in Huckleberry Finn, but his logic in Tom Sawyer Abroad establishes his superiority over not only the persons around him, but also the powerless people in the other countries in the late nineteenth century. Here, we can see Twain's difficulty in story-telling and his severe surrounding that mastered American society at the same time, and understand what made Twain write his anti-imperial writings in his later years after all.