佐倉セミナーハウス公開講座　３週目のテキストです

Two Hearts

… “No, we couldn’t. We don’t know how things are.” She looked sad about it, but she looked firm, too. She said, “Girl, it’s not you worries me. The king is a good man, and an old friend, but it has been a long time, and kings change. Even more than other people, kings change.”

His name was Schmendrick, which I still think is the funniest name I’ve heard in my life. The woman’s name was Molly Grue. We didn’t leave right away, because of the horses, but made camp where we were instead. I was waiting for the man, Schmendrick, to do it by magic, but he only built a fire, set out their blankets, and drew water from the stream like anyone else, while she hobbled the horses and put them to graze. I gathered firewood.
The woman, Molly, told me that the king’s name was Lir, and that they had known him when he was a very young man, before he became king. “He is a true hero,” she said, “a dragon slayer, a giant-killer, a rescuer of maidens, a solver of impossible riddles. He may be the greatest hero of all, because he’s a good man as well. They aren’t always.”

“But you didn’t want me to meet him,” I said. “Why was that?”
Molly sighed. We were sitting under a tree, watching the sun go down, and she was brushing things out of my hair. She said, “He’s old now. Schmendrick has trouble with time – I’ll tell you why one day, it’s a long story – and he doesn’t understand that Lir may no longer be the man he was. It could be a sad reunion.”

I twisted my neck around to look up at him. “Do you think King Lir will come back with me and kill that griffin? I think Molly thinks he won’t, because he’s so old.” I hadn’t known I was worried about that until I actually said it.
“Why, of course he will, girl.” Schmendrick winked at me again. “He never could resist the plea of a maiden in distress, the more difficult and dangerous the deed, the better. If he did not spur to your village’s aid himself at the first call, it was surely because he was engaged on some other heroic venture. I’m as certain as I can be that as soon as you make your request – remember to curtsey properly – he’ll snatch up his great sword and spear, whisk you up to his saddlebow, and be off after your griffin with the road smoking behind him. Young or old, that’s always been his way.”

“And who may this princess be?” he asked, looking straight at me. He had the proper voice for a king, deep and strong, but not frightening, not mean. I tried to tell him my name, but I couldn’t make a sound, so he actually knelt on one knee in front of me, and he took my hand. He said, “I have often been of some use to princesses in distress. Command me.”

…and he said, “Lisene? Lisene, I should have a bath, shouldn’t I?”
I didn’t cry. Molly didn’t cry. Schmendrick did. He said, “No, Majesty. No, you do not need bathing, truly.”
King Lir looked puzzled. “But I smell bad, Lisene. I think I must have wet myself.” He reached for my hand and held it so hard. “Little one,” he said. “Little one, I know you. Do not be ashamed of me because I am old.”

I didn’t notice the unicorn. Molly must have, but she didn’t say anything. I went on petting Malka, and I didn’t look up until the horn came slanting over my shoulder. Close to, you could see blood drying in the shining spiral, but I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t anything. Then the horn touched Malka, very lightly, right where I was stroking her, and Malka opened her eyes.

…It looked at me for the first time, past the horn and the hooves and the magical whiteness, all the way into those endless eyes. And what they did, somehow, the unicorn’s eyes, was to free me from the griffin’s eyes. Because the awfulness of what I’d seen there didn’t go away when the griffin died, not even when Malka came alive again.

２週目 "Lila the Werewolf" メモ

"Lila the Werewolf"メモ

ゲシュタルト崩壊あるいは人間原理の限界からの離脱

夢の世界――アクチュアリティの直覚
　意味性破壊あるいは復活した多重の意味の場
　重ね合わせの矛盾を容認する多元世界
　因果関係が破綻し、時間と空間と経験が混濁した意識の場

順列組み合わせのすべての可能性をたどる、重複したストーリーの世界
　『ひぐらしの鳴く頃に』
　『うみねこの鳴く頃に』

怪異が人間性の一断面として理解される世界構造
　『化物語』

アクチュアリティの観照者
　人間の身でありながら、ともすれば人間の限界を越えようとしてしまうもの
　ネヴィル夫人、ハガード、蝶、ファレル
作者の分身あるいは自画像
絶えず姿を変え続けるものたち

リベラル、自由、先進的、進歩的という概念の範疇を越えた反射的思考
常に全方位的理解を行う傍観者― 行為者の極北に位置するもの
　単一の価値観に基づいて迷いない行動を取ることができない
　“強い男”の対極的存在、アンチ・ヒーロー

佐倉セミナーハウス公開講座　２日目のテキストです

Lila Braun had been living with Farrell for three weeks before he found out she was a werewolf. They had met at a party when the moon was a few nights past the full, and by the time it had withered to the shape of a lemon Lila had moved her suitcase, her guitar, and her Ewan MacColl records two blocks north and four blocks west to Farrell’s apartment on Ninety-Eighth Street. Girls sometimes happened to Farrell like that.

He was lying on his back, watching a chair with his clothes on it becoming a chair again, when the wolf came in through the open window. It landed lightly in the middle of the room and stood there for a moment, breathing quickly, with its ears back. There was blood on the wolf’s teeth and tongue, and blood on its chest.
Farrell, whose true gift was for acceptance, especially in the morning, accepted the idea that there was a wolf in his bedroom and lay quite still, closing his eyes as the grim, black-lipped head swung toward him. Having once worked at a zoo, he was able to recognize the beast as a Central European subspecies: smaller and lighter-boned than the northern timber wolf variety, lacking the thick, ruffy mane at the shoulders and having a more pointed nose and ears. His own pedantry always delighted him, even at the worst moments.
Blunt claws clicking on the linoleum, then silent on the throw rug by the bed. Something warm and slow splashed down on his shoulder, but he never moved. The wild smell of the wolf was over him, and that did frighten him at last – to be in the same room with that smell and the Miro prints on the walls. Then he felt the sunlight on his eyelids, and at the same moment he heard the wolf moan softly and deeply. The sound was not repeated, but the breath on his face was suddenly sweet and smoky, dizzyingly familiar after the other. He opened his eyes and saw Lila. She was sitting naked on the edge of the bed, smiling, with her hair down.
“Hello, baby,” she said. “Move over, baby. I came home.”
Farrell’s gift was for acceptance. He was perfectly willing to believe that he had dreamed the wolf; to believe Lila’s story of boiled chicken and bitter arguments and sleeplessness on Tremont Avenue; and to forget that her first caress had been to bite him on the shoulder, hard enough so that the blood crusting there as he got up and made breakfast might very well be his own. But then he left the coffee perking and went up to the roof to get Grunewald. He found the dog sprawled in grove of TV antennas, looking more like a goat than ever, with his throat torn out. Farrell had never actually seen an animal with its throat torn out.
The coffeepot was still chuckling when he came back into the apartment, which struck him as very odd. You could have either werewolves or Pyrex nine-up percolators in the world, but not both, surely. He told Lila, watching her face. She was a small girl, not really pretty, but with good eyes and a lovely mouth, and with a curious sullen gracefulness that had been the first thing to speak to Farrell at the party. When he told her how Grunewald had looked, she shivered all over, once.

The tip of Lila’s tongue appeared between her lips, in the unknowing reflex of a fondled cat. As evidence, it wouldn’t have stood up even in old Salem; but Farrell knew the truth then, beyond laziness or rationalization, and went on buttering toast for Lila. Farrell had nothing against werewolves, and he had never liked Grunewald.

“Not as though nothing had happened,” Farrell said lamely. “The thing is, it’s still only Lila, not Lon Chaney or somebody. Look, she goes to her psychiatrist three afternoons a week, and she’s got her guitar lesson one night a week, and her pottery class one night, and she cooks eggplant maybe twice a week. She calls her mother every Friday night, and one night a month she turns into a wolf. You see what I’m getting at? It’s still Lila, whatever she does, and I just can’t get terribly shook about it. A little bit, sure, because what the hell. But I don’t know. Anyway, there’s no mad rush about it. I’ll talk to her when the thing comes up in the conversation, just naturally. It’s okay.
“Well, it’s that too,” Farrell agreed, a little embarrassed. “I hate confrontations. If I break up with her now, she’ll think I’m doing it because she’s a werewolf. It’s awkward, it feels nasty and middle-class, I should have broken up with her the first time I met her mother, or the second time she served the eggplant. Her mother, boy, there’s the real werewolf, there’s somebody I’d wear wolf bane against, that woman. Damn, I wish I hadn’t found out. I don’t think I’ve ever found out anything about people that I was the better for knowing.”

“I’m not laughing at you,” Farrell said, but he was still grinning. “Lila’s shrink says she has a rejection thing, very deep-seated, takes us years to break through all that scar tissue. Now if I start walking around wearing amulets and mumbling in Latin every time she looks at me, who knows how far it’ll set her back? Listen, I’ve done some things I’m not proud of, but I don’t want to mess up anyone’s analysis. That’s the sin against God.” He sighed and slapped Ben lightly on the arm. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll work it out, I’ll talk to her.”
But between that night and the next full moon, he found no good, casual way of bringing the subject up. Admittedly, he did not try as hard as he might have: it was true that he feared confrontations more than he feared werewolves, and he would have found it almost as difficult to talk to Lila about her guitar playing, or her pots, or the political arguments she got into at her parties. “The thing is,” he said to Ben, “it’s sort of one more little weakness not to take advantage of. In a way.”

Farrell was suddenly dry-mouthed and shivering with fury. It was her choice of words that did it. “Well, I have reason to believe you’re a suffocating old bitch and a bourgeois Stalinist. How do you like them apples, Mrs. B?” As though his anger had summoned her, the wolf was standing two feet away from him. Her coat was dark and lank with sweat, and yellow saliva was mixed with the blood that strung from her jaws. She looked at Farrell and growled far away in her throat.
“Just a minute,” he said. He covered the receiver with his palm. “It’s for you,” he said to the wolf. “It’s your mother.”

Farrell understood quite clearly that the superintendent was hunting Lila underground, using the keys that only superintendents have to take elevators down to the black sub-sub-basements, far below the bicycle rooms and the wet, shaking laundry rooms, and below the furnace rooms, below the passages walled with electricity meters and roofed with burly steam pipes; down to the realms where the great dim water mains roll like whales, and the gas lines hump and preen, down where the roots of the apartment houses fade together; and so along under the city, scrabbling through secret ways with silver bullets, and his keys rapping against the piece of wood.

ファレルには管理人の男が地下の通路を用いてライラの後を追い続けていることが、しっかりと分っていた。彼は管理人達だけが持っているエレベーターの鍵を使って、建物の地階のもっとずっと下の階のあたりまで降りているのだった。彼等はこうして自転車置き場やじっとりとして振動し続ける洗濯室や、ボイラー室のさらに下方、電気メーターの列が壁を這い、ずっしりとした蒸気パイプが天井を覆っている通路のさらに下方、巨大な水道管が鯨のように身をくねらせ、ガス管の群れが並んで背を丸め、嘴で毛づくろいをしているあたりのさらに下方、ビルの根っこが地中にかすんでいくあたりにまで降りて行くのだ。そうして銀の弾丸を詰めたピストルを手に、板きれに鍵の束をぶら下げたまま、管理人は町の下にめぐらされた秘密の通路を駈けめぐっているのだ。

佐倉セミナーハウス公開講座　１日目のテキストです

This all happened in England a long time ago, when that George who spoke English with a heavy German accent and hated his sons was King. At that time there lived in London a lady who had nothing to do but give parties. Her name was Flora, Lady Neville, and she was a widow and very old. She lived in a great house not far from Buckingham Palace, and she had so many servants that she could not possibly remember all their names; indeed, there were some she had never even seen. She had more food than she could eat, more gowns than she could ever wear; she had wine in her cellars that no one would drink in her lifetime, and her private vaults were filled with great works of art that she did not know she owned. She spent the last years of her life giving parties and balls to which the greatest lords of England; and sometimes the King himself; came, and she was known as the wisest and wittiest woman in all London.
But in time her own parties began to bore her, and though she invited the most famous people in the land and hired the greatest jugglers and acrobats and dancers and magicians to entertain them, still she found her parties duller and duller. Listening to court gossip, which she had always loved, made her yawn. The most marvelous music, the most exciting feats of magic put her to sleep. Watching a beautiful young couple dance by her made her feel sad, and she hated to feel sad.
And so, one summer afternoon she called her closest friends around her and said to them, “More and more I find that my parties entertain everyone but me. The secret pf my long life is that nothing has ever been dull for me. For all my life, I have been interested in everything I saw and been anxious to see more. But I cannot stand to be bored, especially if they are my own. Therefore, to my next ball I shall invite the one guest I am sure no one, not even myself, could possibly find boring. My friends, the guest of honor at my next party shall be Death himself!
A young poet thought that this was a wonderful idea, but the rest of her friends were terrified and drew back from her. They did not want to die, they pleaded with her. Death would come for them when he was ready; why should she invite him before the appointed hour, which would arrive soon enough? But Lady Neville said, “Precisely. If Death has planned to take any of us on the night of my party, he will come whether he is invited or not. But if none of us are to die, then I think it would be charming to have death among us; perhaps even to perform some little trick if he is in a good humor. And think of being able to say that we had been to a party with Death! All of London will envy us, all of England!”
The idea began to please her friends, but a young lord, very new to London, suggested timidly, “Death is so busy. Suppose he has work to do and cannot accept your invitation?”
“No one has ever refused an invitation of mine,” said Lady Neville, “Not even the King.” And the young lord was not invited to her party.

She sat down then and there and wrote out the invitation. There was some dispute among her friends as to how they should address Death. “His Lordship Death” seemed to place him only on the level of a viscount or a baron. “His Grace Death" met with more acceptance, but Lady Neville said it sounded hypocritical. And to refer to Death as “His Majesty” was to make him the equal of the King of England, which even Lady Neville would not, dare to do. It was finally decided that all should speak of him as “His Eminence Death,” which pleased nearly everyone.
Captain Compson, known both as England’s most dashing cavalry officer and most elegant rake, remarked next, “That’s all very well, but how is the invitation to reach Death? Does anyone here know where he lives?”
“Death undoubtedly lives in London,” said Lady Neville, “like everyone else of any importance, though he probably goes to Deauville for the summer. Actually, Death must live fairly near my own house. This is much the best section of London, and you could hardly expect a person of Death’s importance to live anywhere else. When I stop to think of it, it’s really rather strange that we haven’t met before now, on the street.”
Most of her friends agreed with her, but the poet, whose name was David Lorimond, cried out, “No, my lady, you are wrong! Death lives among the poor. Death lives in the foulest, darkest alleys of this city, in some vile, rat-ridden hovel that smell of ;” He stopped here, partly because he had never been inside such a hut or thought of wondering what it smelled like. “Death lives among the poor,” he went on, “and comes to visit them every day, for he is their only friend.”

--
Then an idea came to her. “My hairdresser has a sick child, I understand,” She said. “He was telling me about it yesterday, sounding most dull and hopeless. I will send for him and give him the invitation, and he in his turn can give it to Death when he comes to take the brat. A bit unconventional, I admit, but I see no other way.”

It was Captain Compson, however, who pointed out the one thing that no one else had noticed. “Look at the handwriting itself,” he said. “Have you ever seen anything more graceful? The letters seem as light as birds. I think we have wasted our time speaking of Death as His This and His That. A woman wrote this note.”

But the hairdresser refused to speak, though they gathered around him and begged him to say who had given him the note. At first they promised him all sorts of rewards, and later they threatened to do terrible things to him. “Did you write this card?” he was asked, and “Who wrote it, then? Was it a living woman? Was it really Death? Did Death say anything to you? How did you know it was Death? Is Death a woman? Are you trying to make fools of us all?”
Not a word from the hairdresser, not one word, and finally Lady Neville called her servants to have him whipped and thrown into the street. He did not look at her as they took him away, or uttered a sound.

　けれども髪結い師は、何も話そうとはしなかった。皆で彼を取り囲み、誰が彼に手紙を渡したのか、話すように頼み込んだのだがだめだった。最初は何でも望みのものを褒美に取らせよう、と約束してみた。次には酷い目に遭わせると脅しつけてみた。「自分で書いたのではないのか？」彼は問いただされた。「では、書いたのは誰なんだ。それは生きた人間の女だったのか？本当に死神が書いたというのか？死神は何かお前に語ったのか？どうしてそれが死神だと分かった？死神というのは女なのか？私たちを騙そうとしているのではあるまいな。」
　髪結い師からは何も聞き出すことはできなかった。一言も、彼は語ることはなかった。とうとうネヴィル夫人は召使い達を呼んで、彼を打ちのめして、通りに放り出すように命じた。召使い達に引き出されていく時も、髪結い師はネヴィル夫人の方に目を向けることもせず、一言さえも口からもらすことはなかった。


She could not have been more than nineteen. Her hair was yellow, and she wore it long. It fell thickly upon her bare shoulders that gleamed warmly through it, two limestone islands rising out of a dark golden sea. Her face was wide at the forehead and cheekbones, and narrow at the chin, and her skin was so clear that many of the ladies there; Lady Neville among them ; touched their own faces as though their own skin had rasped their fingers. Her mouth was pale, where the mouths of the other women were red, and orange and even purple. Her eyebrows, thicker and straighter than was fashionable, met over dark, calm eyes that were set so deep in her young face and were so black, so uncompromisingly black, that the middle-aged wife of a middle-aged lord murmured, “Touch of the gypsy there, I think.”
“Or something worse,” suggested her husband’s mistress.

“--- Do all of you want me to stay? For if one of you says to me, no, go away, then I must leave at once and never return. Be sure. Do you all want me?”
And everyone there cried with one voice, “Yes! Yes, you must stay with us. You are so beautiful that we cannot let you go.”
“We are tired,” said Captain Compson.
“We are blind,” said Lorimond, adding, “especially to poetry.”
“We are afraid,” said Lord Torrance quietly, and his wife took his arm and said, “Both of us.”
“We are dull and stupid,” said Lady Neville, “and growing old uselessly. Stay with us, Lady Death.”
And then Death smiled sweetly and radiantly and took a step forward, and it was as though she had come down among them from a great height. “Very well,” she said. “I will stay with you. I will be Death no more. I will be a woman.”

“Not one,” said Death. “There is no one quite so weary of being human, no one who knows better how meaningless it is to be alive. And there is no one else here with the power to treat life” ; and she smiled sweetly and cruelly – “the life of your hairdresser’s child, for instance, as the meaningless thing it is. Death has a heart, but it is forever an empty heart, and I think, Lady Neville, that your heart is like a dry riverbed, like a seashell. You will be very content as Death, more so than I, for I was very young when I became Death.”

２００９佐倉セミナーハウス公開講座　資料

２００９佐倉セミナーハウス公開講座１日目

ビーグル・メモ

　ビーグルが１４歳か１５歳の頃、雑誌Seventeenに短編小説を応募。掲載はされなかったが、原稿が編集者のBryna Ivensの目に留まり、サポートを受けるようになる。
　原稿の入った封筒に住所が記載されていなかったため、Brynaは封筒の送り先の郵便局の住所を調べ、市内の電話番号一覧からビーグルの家を探し出してくれた。当時市内のBeagle姓の人々は全員親戚同士だったため、たやすく見つけ出すことができたという。BrynaはビーグルをNorman MailerやArthur Miller等の著名な作家に引き合わせてくれるなど、手厚く面倒を見てくれた。Brynaの紹介で、John SteinbeckのエージェントをしていたElizabeth Otisが、１７歳のビーグルをクライアントとして迎え入れてくれた。Elizabethは、ビーグルが１９歳の時に書いた処女作A Fine and Private Placeを、Viking社から出版してくれる。（１９６０年）
　Elizabethの推薦で、Wallace Stegner奨学生として、Stanford大学で学ぶことになる。期間は１年間で、前期の客員教授はJack Kerouacを育て、William Faulknerの評価を確立した文芸評論家Malcolm Cowleyであった。後期の客員教授は、短編小説家Frank O’Connorであった。同期で学んだ人々には、One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nestを書いたKen Keseyなどがいた。
　Stanfordの在学中に、Frank O’Connorのwriting class の提出レポートとして、短編 “Come, Lady Death”を書いた（１９６１年）。この時のエピソードをビーグルは何度か振り返って語っている。「オコナーはアビー・シアター風の美声でこの短編を朗読し、“とても良くできたファンタシーだ。ファンタシーは大嫌いだ。”と語った。」(preface to The Fantasy Worlds of Peter S. Beagle, 1978)
　 “Come, Lady Death”はその後１９６３年に、The Atlantic Monthlyに掲載された。

The Last Unicorn (1968)
“Lila the Werewolf” (1971)
“Two Hearts” (2005)