Victor Segalen; Literary Globalization; Theatre History; Orientalism; Life of the Buddha; Modern Buddhism; Literary Geography
摘要
Colombo, November 1904. Returning from Tahiti to France after an almost two-year trip, a dispatch boat made an unforeseen six-week stop-over. Victor Segalen (1878–1919), the French famous post-Symbolist poet, had been appointed as the shipboard physician. During this unplanned stay, Segalen encountered Theravādin Buddhism and was inspired to write a play not on the Buddha as god, idol, or myth, but on the human life of Siddhārtha Gautama, the historical Buddha. Segalen did not fully know at the time that similar dramatic projects had already been attempted by other European writers and artists. Furthermore, he soon discovered that his own encounter with Buddhism took place at a crucial point of world history. By writing a play on the Buddha, Segalen actually testified to an era of unsettlement in which Buddhism, Empire and Modernism met. I argue here that a contextualized analysis of Segalen’s drama helps delineate important and underestimated transnational and cross-cultural issues of the early twentieth century.
目次
To Claude Reichler 193 I. Theatre going global in the late nineteenth century 195 II. The ‘Buddhist culture’ in France and the life of the Buddha in the arts 196 III. Re-reading Siddhârtha or the drama of the unsettlement of space 198 IV. An exotic setting and a static character: a distance away from set patterns 202 V. Siddhârtha and the aesthetics of Diversity in the wake of the global world 204 VI. Segalen’s encounter with Buddhism: a crisis of values 205 VII. On the edge of two cultural worlds: from the biography to the play 207 VIII. From exotic setting to symbolic geography: a cross-cultural dramatic space 209 IX. Achieving Realization: Buddhahood as a self-experienced spatial reordering 212 Conclusion: Segalen’s exoticism and the intercultural dawn of the global theatre 215 Acknowledgements 219
