再現死亡:福克納《我彌留之際》的存有與敘述

本文主要探討《我彌留之際》一書中所呈現的存在、死亡與敘述等問題。在本部小說中，死亡並非相對於生命的超驗實體或是生命的最終歸宿；相反的，透過死亡的再現，福克納批判生死二元對立觀念的謬誤，揭露出死亡在生命間隙?靜默的存在，並描繪出播散在生死之「際」的無窮盡交換與延異的可能性。福克納對「生死之間」此一母題的執著在本書中產生出各種不同面貌的曖昧與混沌；就書寫本身而論，本書欠缺文體的統一性，而任由各種文類與文體拼湊雜交；就整體情節而言，小說中主要事件皆發生在陰陽交錯之際或在自日與夜晚重疊之間；書寫行為宛如在陰陽兩極間徘徊梭巡的孤墳野鬼般無法駐足卻又不忍離去。如此，在再現死亡的過程中，本部小說反而深陷於死亡過程的流沙中，完全延異力所宰制，而擺盪在生死兩極的敘述聲音(如阿荻、達爾、瓦德門等第一人稱敘述)重覆敘述阿荻垂死的故事，但他們的聲音所重覆的卻是(再現)死亡的不可能性。As I Lay Dying deals with an almost endless agony, a prolonged suspension between life and death. What it is concerned with is not so much death as the process of dying, not so much death as a brute fact as its mute presence in the heart of life. The novel works from the start with the double paradox of a dying life and an active death. Life and death are not opposed here as being and nothingness, but combine in a relationship of exchange and difference, communicating in the blurred zone of their common frontier. This central ambiguity is reverberated by the motif, perceptible at various levels, of the in-between. First, the work itself reveals the in-between nature, hesitating among several genres and various styles without ever settling for one. Second, the scene of the action similarly unfolds between two worlds, in a space both moving and immobile, animated and inert, infernal and earthly, whose beginning and end are confused; a space between day and night, at the uncertain hour of twilight: the dying of the day by making its heroine’s (Addie Bundren’s) last moment coincide with nightfall. In the chiaroscuro of this ambiguous world, things and beings are in a state of constant flux; there is nothing one can be sure of , and even death itself becomes uncertain. In representing death as a transcendental object, the novel entraps itself in the gray area of dying process, which differs from and defers the ultimate presence of death-in-itself. Vacillating between life and death, the voices that actually constitute the words written down are failures to tell of death: the voices of the “I” of Addie, Darly, Vardaman, Dewy Dell, and others, repeating-as-loss the center of their discourse that fails to materialize-like Faulkner the writer perpetually in quest of the image of death that had inspired his creative power beyond the sufficiency to articulate it

From Restricted to Unrestricted Expenditure: Body Economy in James's the Sacred Fount

詹姆士《聖泉》一書中匿名敘述者所建構的聖泉理論一直困惑著讀者，而評論家通常將它簡化成敘述者個人情色想像的創造物。相對於這種看法，本文將聖泉理論視為後維多利亞時期性意識形態的產物，並藉由探討文本中個體慾望與意識形態間的辯證關係而嘗試提出下列結論：《聖泉》一書再現、同時亦解構後維多利亞時期的性意識形態，並?個體慾望標定出逃離其監控的（不）可能路線。The theory of the sacred fount constructed by the unnamed first-person narrator in The Sacred Fount has baffled its readers since its publication in 1902. For most Jamesian critics, this theory is merely a whimsical and prurient fantasy of the narrator. However, this article argues that, more than a private fantasy of the narrator, the theory of the fount is inscribed within the sexual ideology of the late-Victorian age. This approach allows us to see the theory not simply as the outcome of the narrator's solipsistic idealism as many illustrious scholars hold it to be: it is a logical consequence of his belief in the late-Victorian sexual ideology. This article examines the complex interchanges whereby the ideological structure of beliefs is translated into a narrative structure that encodes and perpetuates those beliefs. However, as this article also attempts to show, the very act of deciphering the plot and characterization uncovers a simultaneous counter-narrative: the persistent undermining of the dominant sexual ideology by the contradictions concealed within the specific form that its representation has assumed. Therefore, the aggressivity of the novel is not, as some critics have asserted, aimed at its reader, so much as it is targeted at the sexual ideology itself: embedded and inscribed within the repressive sexual ideology, The Sacred Fount simultaneously represents and undermines that ideology by locating its inherent fissures and gaps and thus maps out, for the individual's desires, a(n) (im-)possible route of escape from the surveillance of that ideology