英文摘要 |
Taking sleeping pills to end his life at his home in Tabata, Tokyo in Year Two of Showa (July 24, 1927), Ryunosuke Akutagawa could be said to be practicing "the art of self destruction." His suicide was considered a conceptual one symbolic of the angst of his time. His posthumous work, "A Cogwheel," revealed two key messages, the uncertainty about self identity and the problem of self expression. The question of "Who am I?" and horrors permeated the whole piece. Instances of illusion, uneasiness, doubt, and mental disability occurred throughout in the interweaving of "peeping" and "being peeped at" by the "other." Was that because the writer had seen too much and too clearly with the "final gaze from the deathbed"? How can "I" define my distance and relationship to the "other"? This article investigates how the self in Akutagawa Ryunosuke's late works acquired its "objective" expression and practical recognition amidst the fixation of self consciousness and images of the "other"; as well as how the odd "subtle uneasiness" (ぼんやりとした不安) came about during the process. Through these, I try to explain the phenomena of the loss of vision and acousma in "A Cogwheel" and the entanglement of the lines of vision between self and other. |