（英语语言文学专业论文）对小说《宠儿》的巴赫金式解读.pdf

i 摘摘 要要 依托美国黑人传统文化和民间传说，托妮莫里森 1986 年的小说宠儿成功地重建了 一部属于美国黑人的历史， 以历史的真实性再现了残酷的奴隶制。 与以前男性主导的黑人小 说不同的是， 宠儿超越历史小说的局限，深入地探讨了深藏于美国黑人，特别是美国黑 人女性心中那些难以言述的历史记忆， 生动地反映了奴隶制下美国黑人女性生活。 正因如此， 这部小说引发出大量的理论思考，并吸引评论家们从人物心理分析、女性主义、后现代和后 殖民主义等多个方面对其进行理论分析和探讨。 这些探讨也在多个层面上加深了我们对这部 小说的理解和感悟。 但需要注意的是，这些对宠儿的现代解读都没有或者无法完全涵盖对这部小说的学 术和文化关注。 小说中仍有很多未探讨的领域允许我们从其他角度对其进行理论探索， 其中 一个重要的方面是：小说巧妙地将人物对话与人物间的紧密关系结合在一起，以一种“话语 多声”的叙述取代了“信用缺失”的作者或传统叙述者所谓的“大叙事” 。小说的这一特点 使小说人物能够通过他们的对话展现小说的事件，从而使作者的声音减少到必要的最低水 平。另外，小说宠儿的非连续性的情景发展在一定程度上造成了小说结构的分散和不连 贯， 但小说中时间和空间的内在联系如蓝石路 124 号和发生在那里的事件， 不仅确保了小说 拥有明晰故事结构， 促进了事件的再现， 还使事件与小说中时间和空间的变化保持紧密地联 系。 鉴于宠儿这几方面与传统的小说的写作模式有明显的不同，本文将尝试以俄罗斯学 者巴赫金的对话论，复调以及时空型理论对小说宠儿进行一次巴赫金式的解读。本文的 第二章将简要地提出巴赫金对话论中“双声言说”即其理论基石超语言学的理论框架，复调 和时空型理论的要点。第三章将具体从宠儿中作者新的地位，独立的人物思想意识，人 物的未完成性来分析宠儿中的复调特点；然后就宠儿中的对话的“双声言说”和微 型对话两个方面来展开小说的对话关系的特点。最后本文将着重于宠儿当中时空型和多 个时空型对话的结构特点来进行分析。通过以上的探讨，本文认为宠儿是一部拥有独特 的时空型结构，具有丰富复调特色的小说。 关键字：关键字： 宠儿 ； 巴赫金； 对话论； 复调； 时空型 ii abstract in her 1987 novel beloved, toni morrison successfully reconstructs a history of black people through black culture and folk tales, and brings to life the horrible experience of slavery as a concrete historical account. unlike previous black literary work tinted with heavy black masculinity, morrison explores vividly the historicity of those unspeakable thoughts concealed in afro-americans, particularly black womens mentality, which in turn makes this novel not only a novel of historicity, but also a remarkable fictional recount of black womens life under the system of slavery. thats why the novel itself has evoked much of theoretic contemplations and encourages informed critics to approach the novel from various critical perspectives, such as psychoanalysis, feminism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, all of which have immeasurably deepened our understanding of the novel in all its multi-sentient palpability. however, neither those contemporary commentaries intend nor are they capable of exploring the entire academic and cultural concerns indicated above; therefore, many aspects of this novel are still open for further exploration. one of the most striking aspects is that the authors skillful combination of the characters discourse with their interlocking and interactive relationships contributes to the “heteroglossic” story telling in place of discredited “grand narrative” by the narrator. this distinctive feature has helped the novels characters to present events through their dialogic interactions in the novel; as a result, the authorial intonation in the novels narrative is reduced to the minimum but necessary level. in addition, the presentation of the plot in beloved are discontinued by many interruptions, which, to a certain extent, may engender a sense of disconnectedness and fragmentation; however, the intrinsic connection between the novels temporal and spatial relations does ensure an artistic entity of the novels structure, which in turn helps the events in the novel to be clearly presented and highly linked to one another. consequently, this striking aspect greatly distinguishes this novel from the traditional paragons of fictional writing, and the following thesis will try to explore into this aspect by drawing upon the theoretical concepts proposed by russian scholar mikhail mikhailovich bakhtin, in an attempt to deepen the readers understanding of this epic work. to better account those features, the early part of the thesis will make an introduction on bakhtinian double-voiced discourse and its theoretical basis metalinguistics, the concepts of polyphony and chronotope. then, the third chapter will employ those concepts and analyze the polyphonic features of beloved in terms of the new authorial position, independent consciousness and heros unfinalizability in the novel. then it will dwell on the novels double-voiced discourse, micro-dialogue as well as the dialogic chronotopes respectively. finally, the thesis comes to the conclusion that beloved is a novel with profuse polyphonic features and a unique chronotopic structure. keywords: beloved; bakhtin; dialogics; polyphony; chronotope 上海交通大学上海交通大学 学位论文原创性声明学位论文原创性声明 本人郑重声明：所呈交的学位论文，是本人在导师的指导下， 独立进行研究工作所取得的成果。除文中已经注明引用的内容外，本 论文不包含任何其他个人或集体已经发表或撰写过的作品成果。 对本 文的研究做出重要贡献的个人和集体，均已在文中以明确方式标明。 本人完全意识到本声明的法律结果由本人承担。 学位论文作者签名：张 军 日期： 2008 年 1 月 17 日 上海交通大学上海交通大学 学位论文版权使用授权书学位论文版权使用授权书 本学位论文作者完全了解学校有关保留、使用学位论文的规定， 同意学校保留并向国家有关部门或机构送交论文的复印件和电子版， 允许论文被查阅和借阅。 本人授权上海交通大学可以将本学位论文的 全部或部分内容编入有关数据库进行检索，可以采用影印、缩印或扫 描等复制手段保存和汇编本学位论文。 保密保密，在 年解密后适用本授权书。 本学位论文属于 不保密 不保密。 （请在以上方框内打“”） 学位论文作者签名： 张 军 指导教师签名：魏啸飞 日期：2008 年 1 月 17 日 日期： 2008 年 1 月 17 日 acknowledgements upon the completion of this thesis, i would like to express my heart-felt thanks to all the people who have, directly or indirectly, contributed to the completion of my thesis. first of all, i would like express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor professor wei xiao-fei to whom i am deeply indebted. without his conscientious guidance and insightful instruction, i wouldnt be able to fulfill my graduate study with this success. and his inspirational ideas and constructive advice all played such an instrumental role during my writing and revision of this thesis that, without them, the current thesis would not have been possible. i would also like to extend my hearty thanks to professor hu quan-sheng, professor hu kai-bao, professor shen yan, professor so yu-huan, professor zuo xiao-lan and many other faculty members of sfl, who have contributed a lot to my academic growth and made my study here more meaningful and worthwhile. my special thanks also go to my close friends, story, lu xiao-jun and other classmates, with whom i have enjoyed such sincere and cordial friendship during my academic pursuit in sjtu. finally, i would love to thank my dearest parents for all their deep hearty devotion to me. 1 chapter 1 introduction toni morrison is the robert f. goheen professor in the council of humanities at princeton university, but is better known for her authorship of many highly regarded novels such as the bluest eye, sula, and song of solomon which won her the 1978 national book critics circle award of fiction. right after that, she continued her creative writing and produced a body of exciting and exquisite works, such as tar baby (1981), jazz (1992), paradise (1998). in 1993, toni morrison received the nobel prize for literature, which was a more solemn appraisal of her literary talents and contribution, and she became the first african-american woman laureate of this grand award. the principal contributory for her wining of this prize, as is generally believed, was her beloved (1987), a novel that had already won her the pulitzer prize in 1988 and widely acclaimed by critics as her best. in this novel, toni morrison explores into what we might call the historicity of those unspeakable thoughts concealed in the deepest recess of the afro-americans mentality. for most african americans, particularly those former slaves, such thoughts, left by the system of slavery, have become a heavy burden they desperately and willfully try to forget. but, like those characters in beloved, the memory of the past is inescapable. the process of “rememorying”1 the experience of slavery constantly reminds people of the presence of that tormenting past, recuperating peoples understanding of its physical, emotional, and spiritual devastation to the afro-american as a whole entity of a race. and this import has been laid down and clarified in her novels epigraph, as toni morrison points out that the novel is dedicated to “sixty million and more” of those people who have made it to america as slaves or failed to get cross the trans-atlantic route of slave trade. set during the reconstruction era in 1873, the novel of beloved centers on a child murder case committed by a slave mother in cincinnati, ohio. in the story, sethe, the protagonist of the novel, the infanticide, has been living together with her little 1a neological term created by toni morrison in the novel. it is used to refer the memory or recounting of the past by the characters in the novel. 2 daughter denver in the suburb of cincinnati. for the 18 long years, sethe has been haunted by many scarring events of her past and particularly, the infanticidal case, in which she kills her “crawling already” baby girl in an act of motherly love and protection. she has been willfully repressing those traumatic memories, but the unexpected arrival of paul d, her former fellow slave at sweet home plantation, unlocks her memory about that past. later, in the spirit of her deceased daughter she killed 18 years ago, a mysterious young woman named beloved intrudes into her house, and gradually propels sethe, together with paul d, denver and other characters，into their concerted efforts of rememory, through which a complete spectrum of their tormenting past is reconstructed. during this process of “rememory”, sethe has to address the “unspeakable” stories hidden deep in her heart, and paul d has to reopen his “tobacco tin” containing his repressed manhood, while denver struggles to learn those truths and is later forced to reintegrate herself with the rest of her community. but this process of “rememory” also results in an externalization of the emotional pains originally concealed in those characters hearts. in the novel, sethe is guilt-ridden by her act of killing the baby, and this guilt prompts her to believe that beloveds appearance is a good opportunity to explain and redeem her act. she keeps feeding beloved with her past memories and food, which she believes could exonerate her from the sense of guilt and self-condemnation that has crippled her life all along. beloved, however, seems very responsive to her mothers vindication in the beginning but later becomes growingly destructive and parasitic: she keeps following sethe around, driving paul d away from 124, harassing sethe with disturbing questions, making incessant and exclusive demands for her love, and accusing her of abandoning her own child (chang yao-xin 544). in the end, beloveds violent and obsessive attachment to sethe almost drives her to the brink of physical and emotional paralysis. seeing her mother is wasting away, denver is forced to step out of her self-enclosed world in 124 and seeks help from the rest of the community which respond to her call for help and provide food to them and eventually help to exorcize beloved from 124 by singing songs. during this dramatic confusion involving sethe and other community women, beloved disappears and never returns. 3 afterward, lamenting over the loss of beloved, sethe feels completely disintegrated, but paul d, with a sense of duty comes back to inject the desire for life in sethe. here, a transformed paul d becomes more conscious of the importance of confronting their dark past so as to escape its grip. he consoles sethe by telling her that she, instead of her children，is her own “best thing” and assures her that, by confronting their past, they could have some kind of future together. the novel finally ends with a recounting of mysteries surrounding beloveds identity: she could be the reincarnation of sethes dead daughter, or a girl escaping from the enslavement of her white master, even the embodied spirit of all female slaves. though she vanishes in the eyes of people, but she is never really gone-her dress, her story still lingers on in the deep heart of the people. thats why the novel would signal the warning that “this is not a story to pass on”(morrison 275), and reminds people that they have to confront and understand the “ghost” of the past before the peace is restored and a stable future could be laid out. concluded with this thematic reiteration, beloved has succeeded in recuperating a history which has been lost to the ravages of forced silence and willed forgetfulness. in this sense, beloved is a historical novel. it reconstructs history through black culture and folk tales, and brings to life the horrible experience of slavery as a concrete historical account. at the same time, the novel is also a remarkable fictional recount of that dark past: morrison borrows the event from the real story of a slave mother, margaret garner, who, like sethe, killed her own children just for them to avoid slavery. beloved is also tantamount to a powerful commentary on the physical, psychological devastation to slaves wrought by the historical legacy of slavery, which not only makes african americans remember but also compels the white segment of the society think. the general public today still needs to face those insidious effects of this institution, because the negative consequences of slavery are not limited to the black victims, the whites also suffer from the history of loss of humanity and compassion. in this sense, beloved is the novel which straddles the line between the history of slavery and the fiction reflecting the shattered black family life under such a system. 4 for this reason, the novel attracts much of critical attention from readers and critics alike. some observations are focused upon the novels extraordinary, experimental style and its highly sophisticated narrative strategy; others are directed toward the intensity of its subject matter, such as the loss or recovery of history, the ambivalence of a condition of marginality, the transgression of textual, social or ethnic boundaries and so on (brooker and widdowson 391). whatever else, the novel itself clearly evokes much of theoretic contemplations or, perhaps more to the point, encourages informed critics to approach the novel from various critical perspectives, such as psychoanalysis, feminism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, which has greatly deepened our understanding of the novel in all its multi-sentient palpability (brooker and widdowson 391). however, neither those contemporary commentaries intend nor are they capable of exploring the entire academic and cultural concerns indicated above; therefore, many aspects of this novel are still open for further exploration. one of the most striking aspects is that, the authors skillful combination of the characters discourse with their interlocking and interactive relationships contributes to the “heteroglossic” story telling in place of discredited “grand narrative” by the narrator. this distinctive feature has helped the novels characters to present events through their dialogic interactions in the novel; as a result, the authorial intonation in the novels narrative is reduced to the minimum but necessary level: in beloved, the narrator is not the exclusive narrative agent; voices from different characters also provide the eligible and valid narration about the events. those voices are artistically articulated with different intonations, but only get released via the interactions among those characters. for instance, the facts related to the infanticide, the painful rememory of their life at sweet home, the escape were revealed through characters like sethe, paul d and denver, who are set within a series of dialogical contexts. thus the views or consciousnesses behind those voices are retained in constructing the novels ideological framework. as a result, the views or consciousnesses behind those voices are intensely engaged in the construction of the novels ideological framework in which they are counterposed in the presentation or understanding of the event (a case 5 in point is the revelation of the infanticide). there is a notable “muteness” or reduction in narrators or authors narrative power in beloved; in stead, the surge in the narration by the multiple and various voices (consciousnesses) of the characters is so impressive that almost all the events and ideas in the novel are presented in this fashion. on the other hand, there are many interruptions in the development of the plot in beloved. for instance, the temporal sequence of the story is set out by the arrival of paul d in 1873, but the story time does not move smoothly and progress in a unidirectional manner: there are frequent retrospective interruptions in the story which pushes the story time to move back and forth. this may engender a sense of disconnectedness and fragmentation in the novel. but such seemingly “discontinuity” does not conceal the intrinsic connection between the novels temporal and spatial relations. the connectedness between 124 bluestone road and the events that happened there in different time is just one of the typical cases widely dispersed throughout the novel. thats why the story is still artistically visible in spite of those disjunctions-the events resume their distinctive shapes and become visible and responsive to the links between the space and the movement of the time. therefore, those features of the novel, clearly distinguished from the traditional paragons of fictional writing, are very distinctive and intriguingly attractive; they are also the reasons that encourage the efforts of this thesis to approach this novel from a particular perspective drawing on the concepts of polyphony, dialogics and chronotope proposed by russian scholar mikhail mikhailovich bakhtin. 6 chapter 2 bakhtinian concepts of dialogics, polyphony