ウィリアム・カーロス・ウィリアムズの即興における自己の変容 : "Rome"およびA Voyage to Paganyを中心として

During his stay in Europe in 1924, William Carlos Williams composed an unfinished manuscript titled “Rome.” In this work, he bridges the gap between the spontaneity of improvisational prose and the clarity of his objective verse. To illuminate both the work itself and the role of Williams’s improvisations in the development of his materialist poetics, this essay examines“ Rome” alongside A Voyage to Pagany, a closely related novel, from the perspective of self-transformation. In “Rome,” Williams links the purification of words through improvisation with the dissipation of the habitual self into transparent clarity. A notable section in “Rome” illustrates the author’s deconstruction of self, which can also be interpreted as a precursor to his objective poetry. Drawing a parallel between the essential elements of self and disassembled, polished components of a machine, this passage reveals how Williams nurtured the concept of a poem, resembling a machine, as an autonomous work of art rooted in the dissipation of the author’s self to subordinate it to the“ will” of language. A Voyage to Pagany reinforces this perspective by depicting a scene in which an artist imaginatively morphs into “a steam engine with eyes” and prepares to appreciate the pluralistic beauty of the world, a central ideal in Williams’s poetry. The essay then analyzes a passage from Williams’s collaborative improvisation, “Man Orchid,” to highlight the limitations of the author’s pluralist poetics within the context of self-transformation. Although the poet’s transformation of self as a pure medium of language allows him to embrace the beauty of a pluralistic universe, this approach inadvertently manifests as a form of whiteness, as it objectifies the complex realities experienced by people of other races and reduces them to mere subjects for artistic appreciation.