英雄神話としてのThe Seed and the Sower : Laurens van der Postの戦争小説を読む

type:text

The Seed and the Sower, which was written on the basis of the author's experience during the Second World War, was completed eighteen years after the conflict. It consists of three stories told by Lawrence and the narrator from Christmas Eve through Christmas Morning until Christmas Night. Originally these stories were written separately and integrated later into a comprehensive whole. In this paper, with its focus on the first two stories, I considered the process by which the two characters in each story establish the personal relationship through verbal dialogue or physical contact. What at first is the issue between "the individual" and "the collective" changes into one between the individuals, and from there finally emerges a new mythic hero. In the first story, which is about Hara and Lawrence, Hara is portrayed as one of the typical Japanese people of old times who are "deeply submerged" in "the corporate whole" and "incapable of experiencing anything individually". After the war ended, Lawrence met Hara at a prison awaiting sentence of death as a war criminal. It was only then that real communication was achieved between the two individuals. After he said farewell to Hara, he "wanted to go back, clasp Hara in his arms, kiss him good-bye on the forehead and say" that first of all they had to "cancel out all private and personal evil" between them in order to "prevent specifically the general incomprehension and misunderstanding". But he failed to utter these words. What Lawrence has never expressed in his words, however, is realized by Celliers's deed in the second story. In the scene in which the Japanese and the prisoners confront each other on the parade ground of the prison camp, Celliers takes the unexpected action to find a way out of a critical situation. He steps out of the ranks, advances on Yonoi, the commander of the camp, and embraces him on both cheeks. While this implies an insult to Yonoi, it is also certain that it has liberated both sides from the deadlock. The issue is no longer between races but between two individual men, and this physical contact forces Yonoi to face up to his identification with Celliers, of which he has never been aware. As a result of his behaviour, Celliers is killed in an interesting way; he is buried alive and upright by two Japanese guards in a hole dug in the centre of the parade ground. But this fact suggests that a new life will be born from the Javanese earth in which Celliers is buried, because they have planted Celliers "like two foresters transplanting a sapling". Yonoi, who appears again on the parade ground on a moonlit night, takes Celliers's long hair in his hand and cuts "a strand of yellow hair" from his dead head. The yellow hair, reminiscent of a sheaf of rice ears by its colour, is dedicated to the shrine in accordance with the ways of his ancestors. Thus Celliers, who is planted as a seed in the prison in Java, is "planted again by Yonoi on the hills and spirit of his native country". "The tiny seed" that has been cherished in Lawrence's heart with a memory of Hara is sown in many places by Yonoi and Celliers himself. These four characters, connected together with one another, form an image of the single hero in the end of the second story. It is true that The Seed and the Sower is a war novel. But it cannot be denied that it is a modern heroic myth, what David Leeming has called a "monomyth" in that Celliers like many other culture heroes dies and emerges as a new hero to produce a "golden and great" harvest for "many places" and many people.