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''Pierrot lunaire: rondels bergamasques'' (''Moonstruck Pierrot: bergamask rondels'') is a collection of fifty poems published in 1884 by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud (born Emile Albert Kayenburgh), who is usually associated with the Symbolist Movement. The protagonist of the cycle is Pierrot, the comic servant of the French Commedia dell'Arte and, later, of Parisian boulevard pantomime.〔For Pierrot's general history, see Storey (1978).〕 The early 19th-century Romantics, Théophile Gautier most notably, had been drawn to the figure by his Chaplinesque pluckiness and pathos,〔Storey (1978), pp. 93–110.〕 and by the end of the century, especially in the hands of the Symbolists and Decadents, Pierrot had evolved into an alter-ego of the artist, particularly of the so-called poète maudit.〔Lehmann; Palacio; Storey (1985), pp. 297–304.〕 He became the subject of numerous compositions, theatrical, literary, musical, and graphic. Giraud's collection is remarkable in several respects. It is among the most dense and imaginatively sustained works in the Pierrot canon, eclipsing by the sheer number of its poems Jules Laforgue's celebrated ''Imitation of Our Lady the Moon'' (1886).〔On Laforgue, see Lehmann; Palacio; Storey (1978), pp. 139–55.〕 Its poems have been set to music by an unusually high number of composers (see Settings in various media below), including one, Arnold Schoenberg, who derived from it one of the landmark masterpieces of the 20th century. Finally, it is noteworthy for the number of themes of the fin-de-siècle—which is to say, of Symbolism, the Decadence, and early Modernism—that it elaborates within the tight confines of Giraud's verse form:〔For a full discussion of these themes, see Jean Pierrot.〕 *the growing materialism and vulgarity of late-19th-century life, and the artist's flight into an interior world; *the quest of that artist for a purity and untrammeled freedom of the soul, often through a derangement of the senses (advocated most famously by Arthur Rimbaud) via the ecstasy of music or drugs like alcohol; *the deconstruction of romantic love, inspired in part by a skepticism ''a là'' Arthur Schopenhauer and a growing scientific candor (which will result in Krafft-Ebing's ''Psychopathia Sexualis'' of 1886) about sex; *the dogging of young genius by disease, especially consumption, leading to the facile equation (elaborated notoriously in the ''Degeneration'' of Max Nordau) of modern art with degeneracy; *the assumption of a religious burden by the modern artist, and his or her consequent ascension as prophet; *the transmutation of art into a hermeticism (''vide'' Stéphane Mallarmé, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce) through which it can be enriched with sacred value, spared the gaze of the philistine, and engaged with the dissonant incongruities of modern life: Giraud's poems are non-linear fragments shored against Pierrot's ruins; *and yet finally: an undermining of the whole enterprise by self-mockery and irony, calling the high creative project (and the motives of the artist indulging in it) in doubt. ==Verse form, style, and structure== Each of Giraud's poems is a rondel, a form he admired in the work of the Parnassians, especially of Théodore de Banville.〔Kreuiter, p. 59.〕 (It is a "bergamask" rondel, not only because the jagged progress of the poems recalls the eponymous rustic dance, but also because 19th-century admirers of the Commedia dell'Arte characters ("masks" ) often associated them with the Italian town of Bergamo,〔As Giraud himself does, throughout the poems: see "To my Bergamask Cousin" (#13), "Spleen" (#15), "Perfumes of Bergamo" (#35), and "Pierrot's Departure" (#36).〕 from which Harlequin is said to have hailed.) Unlike many of the Symbolist poets (though certainly not all: Verlaine, Mallarmé, even the early Rimbaud and Laforgue, worked comfortably within strict forms), Giraud was committed to traditional techniques and structures as opposed to the comparatively amorphous constraints of free verse. He exclaimed to his friend Emile Verhaeren, after reading the latter's ''Les Moines'' (The Monks), "What I disapprove of with horror, what angers and irritates me is your improvising disdain for verse form, your profound and vertiginous ignorance of prosody and language."〔Cited in Kreuiter, p. 61, n. 34.〕 Such an attitude leads the critic Robert Vilain to conclude that, while Giraud shared "the Symbolists' concern for the careful, suggestive use of language and the power of the imagination to penetrate beyond the surface tension of the here-and-now", he was equally committed to a Parnassian aesthetic.〔"''Pierrot lunaire'': Cyclic Coherence in Giraud and Schoenberg", in Delaere and Herman, p. 130.〕 He adheres to the sparer of the rondel forms, concluding each poem with a quintet rather than a sestet and working within rather strictly observed eight-syllable lines. As is customary, each poem is restricted to two rhymes alone, one masculine, the other feminine, resulting in a scheme of ABba abAB abbaA, in which the capital letters represent the refrains, or repeated lines. Within this austere structure, however, the language is—to use Vilain's words—"suggestive" and the imaginative penetration beneath the "here-and-now" daring and provocative. Like Laforgue after him, Giraud uses neologisms ("Bourrèle!" (or "Torturer!" )),〔Not found with this spelling in any dictionary, the word is apparently, as Kreuiter notes (p. 100), a fusion of the verb "bourreler" (to torment or torture) and the noun "bourreau" (executioner or torturer).〕 unusual word choices ("patte" (usually means "paw" ) for Pierrot's foot), and ambiguities ("Arlequin porte un arc-en-ciel", meaning "Harlequin bears (''carries'' or ''wears'' ) a rainbow")〔These last two examples are also discussed by Kreuiter, pp. 104, 76.〕 to enrich the fantastic atmosphere of the poems. His syntax is sometimes elliptical or fractured, as in the first line of the cycle: "Je rêve un théâtre de chambre" ("I dream a chamber theater"), instead of the usual "Je rêve ''d'un'' théâtre de chambre".〔Noted by Kreuiter, p. 69.〕 And the imagery, especially in the similes, traffics often in the jarringly unexpected. Sometimes it is lyrically tender (clouds are "like splendid fins/Of chameleonic fish of the sky" ("The Clouds" ));〔Henceforth all titles in parentheses (or, as here, brackets) refer to the poems in Giraud (1884); numbers that precede them indicate their placement in the cycle.〕 sometimes it is shockingly brutal (Pierrot's thought of his "last mistress", the gallows, "is like a nail/That drunkenness drives into his head" ("The Gallows' Song" )). At its most dreamlike, it has a disturbing obscurity of reference ("sinister"—and unexplained—"black butterflies" swarm in the sky and blot out the sun ("Black Butterflies" )); at times it suspends all laws of materiality (a moonbeam penetrates the "varnished case" of a violin to caress its "soul" with its "irony"—"like a luminous white bow" ("Lunar Violin" )). The result is Dalí-esque: a series of sharply etched transcriptions of proto-Surreal visions.〔The composer Roger Marsh (2007b) writes that, "Reading poems about heads being drilled with cranium drillers ("Cruel Pierrot" ) and omelettes being thrown into the night sky ("Lyrical Cuisine" ), one could be forgiven for assuming that Giraud was associated with the Dadaists or Surrealists, but they were not to emerge for another thirty years" (p. 6).〕 "With its Baroque intensity of detail and its fin de siècle aura," as Giraud's American translator writes, "''Pierrot Lunaire'' is a work not to be forgotten."〔Richter, pp. xxix–xxx.〕 Because the rondel is such a tightly "closed" form, each poem seems to stand as an independent unit, isolated from the other poems around it. Giraud heightens this sense of disconnection by eschewing sustained narrative, presenting Pierrot's situation as a series of stark vignettes. Sometimes these vignettes are clustered rather coherently (as in those dealing with Pierrot-as-modern-Christ—27: "The Church", 28: "Evocation", 29: "Red Mass", and 30: "The Crosses"),〔As Marsh (2007a) puts it, "There is no single narrative, but rather...a number of mini-narratives..." (p. 110). But to go on to say, as he does, that the poems within these "mini-narratives" form "a logical sequence" (p. 110) seems to strain the meaning of "logical".〕 but, more often than not, they seem random in their placement (and thus may be explained, at least in part, Schoenberg's not scrupling to change their order in his song-cycle).〔Marsh (2007a) is in complete disagreement on this point. "As poetic cycles go," he writes, "''Pierrot Lunaire'' has more coherence and narrative structure than most" (p. 110). But the narrative structure that he proceeds to trace (pp. 110–116) seems often to be imposed on the poems (see note 18 below).〕 The effect of all these structural and stylistic techniques is both comic and unsettling, as the poem "Disappointment" (4: "Déconvenue") suggests: Les convives, fourchette au poing, Des Gilles, cachés dans un coin, Pour souligner le désappoint, (The guests, their forks in their fists, A few Gilles, hidden in a corner, To underscore the disappointment, The scene is completely without context: the poem that precedes it, 3: "Pierrot-Dandy", is about Pierrot's making up his face with moonlight;〔But he is not said to be doing so in readiness "to meet his guests", as Marsh has it (2007a), p. 110; he is not given any motive for painting his face. This is one example of many that could be cited of Marsh's tendency to generate narrative where Giraud provides none—and even may be said to be actively suppressing it.〕 the poem that follows it, 5: "Moon over the Wash-House", identifies the moon as a washerwoman. Nowhere else in the cycle is this party revisited; it is impossible, therefore, to understand the import of the gathering or the identity of the guests. (Are the "Gilles" among the guests? or are they part of the entertainment? Is it Pierrot who has whimsically stolen away the viands? or is it stingy Cassander?) The frozen gestures ("their forks in their fists"), the air of blank incomprehension (shared as much by the reader as by the guests), the finicking nicety of the language ("elytra" (of "elytron" = "wing-case" )) all contribute to the ambiguous black comedy of the poem. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Pierrot lunaire (book)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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