「哀江南賦」論 : 鋪陳に於ける時間

Abstract

It is generally believed that Yu Xin's 庾信 "Ai Jiang-nan fu", which is one of his most important works, is both a bitter lament about his own life, and a detailed account of the rise and fall of the Liang Dynasty 梁朝. Therefore we can regard this fu not only as an historical epic poem but also as a memoir. An important factor of this fu is that it is like a compilation of many literary elements concerned with the matter of the birth and decline of nations. In this study, I mostly focus on the construction of the plot of this fu. In this fu, the most distinctive and narrative technique is "time". Here, the term "time" means the process of time from the establishment of the Southern Dynasty 南朝 to the downfall of the Liang Dynasty. According to this "time", Yu describes step by step the circumstances of the Liang Dynasty (public affairs) and his own background (private matters). Moreover every word and phrase which alludes to these matters are rich with nuance about the national vicissitudes. For example, there is a reference to a time when a dynasty prospers, anothor one refers to a succession of struggles for political power, while another one refers to the pain of a people without a country, and so on. Those various motifs have been connected in order, and we can notice a process bringing about the lament for the South in this context. It may be said that it is an expression of the process of time. Then, on the subject of the plot which describes the process of a dynasty, we can find out an interesting similarity between Ai Jiang-nan fu and Lu Ji's 陸機 "Treatise on the Destruction of a State" (Bian wang lun 辨亡論). It is well known that Lu had experienced the destruction of the Wu Dynasty 呉朝 and his Bian wang lun is a description of this. The fu and lun, though separate genres, show similarity as a style of pu chen 鋪陳. If we ignore our rigid genre consciousness, we can recognise pu chen as a literary style which expresses one's own lament for a lost period and one's own lost world.