（英语语言文学专业论文）从爱伦·坡杜宾侦探小说的浪漫主义观看其后现代倾向.pdf

从爱伦坡杜宾侦探小说的浪漫主义观看其后现代倾向 ii 摘 要 摘 要 爱伦坡是一位终其一生孜孜追求真理的美国浪漫主义作家，这当然包括他在十 九世纪四十年代所创作的背景设在法国的三篇杜宾侦探小说。爱伦坡也因此被推崇为 侦探小说的鼻祖，他为后来英国作家柯南道尔创作的风靡全球的福尔摩斯探案集以及 整个侦探小说的发展铺平了道路。在经典侦探小说家看来，爱伦坡是一个理性主义者 而不是一个浪漫主义者。 但是爱伦坡生活在美国的浪漫主义文学时期，他和爱默生、霍桑、麦尔维尔和 惠特曼等名家的作品都是带有这一时期烙印的文坛奇葩。作为一个浪漫主义作家，爱 伦坡对十八世纪的启蒙主义运动持批评态度。启蒙主义者对理性的崇拜可以一直追溯 到欧洲的十六世纪，这一运动也由此催生了我们现代的整个科学思想体系，我们一般称 之为西方思想体系。 本论文通过对毛格街血案 、 玛丽罗热疑案和窃信案三篇爱伦坡的 杜宾侦探小说的详细文本分析，并结合浪漫主义的二元论视角，试图阐释爱伦坡在寻 求真理的方法和真理的存在形式两个方面所表现出来的似是而非的态度以及其与我们 的后现代主义思想的契合之处。在探求真理的方法方面，以理性为中心的科学实证精神 和以诗意灵韵及个人意志为中心的非理智因素对解决谜案都有举足轻重的作用。 而且和 他在诗歌创作中企图构建艺术真理不同，爱伦坡通过科学和诗意两种途径在他的侦探 小说中似乎在探寻客观真理的存在。 然而爱伦坡却打破了我们仅仅把他限制在浪漫主义时代的企图。 他对浪漫主义 似是而非的态度解构了西方思想体系中的二元对立状态， 从而使他的杜宾侦探小说文本 呈现出“非中心化”的特征和对真理的怀疑倾向，而这也正是后现代主义思想中其中两 个最为明显的特点。爱伦坡杜宾侦探小说和后现代主义的契合是他文学创作中的独特 性和超越时代性的一个突出表现，这也有力地解释了为什么爱伦坡能够一直活跃在我 们现代人的艺术创作和美学研究中。 关键词：杜宾侦探小说；关键词：杜宾侦探小说； 浪漫主义；二元论；似是而非；后现代主义；非中心化浪漫主义；二元论；似是而非；后现代主义；非中心化 硕士学位论文 iii abstract edgar allan poe was involved in an endless search for truth in all his works, and there was no exception when he wrote his three dupin detective stories set in france. poe thus became the father of the detective story, which anticipated both the great british detective writer sir arthur conan doyle and the genre of detective fiction as a whole. from the perspective of the classical detective story, poe can be made to look like a rationalist rather than a romantic. yet poe lived in the romantic period of american culture with the incredible flowering of many masterpieces by emerson, hawthorne, melville, whitman and some other great romantic writers. being a romanticist himself, he was a critic of the enlightenment, the influential system of rational thought that had developed in europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. from this enlightenment arose all the modern sciences, and the whole system is sometimes referred to as western thought. this thesis is based on the detailed textual analysis of poes three dupin detective stories, the murders in the rue morgue, the mystery of marie roget and the purloined letter. by taking the romantic view of duality into consideration, the thesis aims to illustrate poes ambivalent attitude towards romanticism regarding both the search for truth and the existence of truth itself, while also seeing how it strikes an affinity with recent postmodern thinking. from the perspective of the search for truth, both the rational and the irrational play important roles in solving the mysteries, as does the crucial ingredient of the will as the partner of the imagination. furthermore, unlike the construction of truth in writing poetry, it seems that poe attempts to use both the scientific and the poetic method to build objective truth in his dupin stories. however, poe goes far beyond the confines of our limited understanding of him as a romantic writer. his ambivalence toward the romantic ideology leads us to discover the decenteredness of his dupin texts and his skeptical attitude towards truth, two of the most striking characteristics of postmodernism. the correspondence of poes dupin stories with the postmodernist theory constitutes one of the most unique and timeless qualities of poes literary creation, which in turn has enabled him to constantly revisit our modern art and 从爱伦坡杜宾侦探小说的浪漫主义观看其后现代倾向 iv aesthetics. key words: dupin detective stories; romanticism; duality; ambivalence; postmodernism; decenteredness 硕士学位论文 i 湖湖 南南 大大 学学 学位论文原创性声明学位论文原创性声明 本人郑重声明：所呈交的论文是本人在导师的指导下独立进行研究所取得的 研究成果。除了文中特别加以标注引用的内容外，本论文不包含任何其他个人或 集体已经发表或撰写的成果作品。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后果由本人承担。 作者签名： 郝瑞娟 日期：2007 年 5 月 31 日 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。 本人授权湖南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。 本学位论文属于 1、保密，在_年解密后适用本授权书。 2、不保密。 （请在以上相应方框内打“” ） 作者签名： 郝瑞娟 日期：2007 年 5 月 31 日 导师签名： 王敏琴 日期：2007 年 5 月 31 日 硕士学位论文 1 chapter 1 introduction 1.1 literature review and research questions edgar allan poe (18091849) was one of the most gifted american poets, a master of horror stories and the father of the detective story. he was also the first major american writer whose personal reputation greatly damaged the reception of his work. upon his death, rufus griswold, poes editor and literary executor, fabricating certain incidents and exaggerating some of poes character defects, characterized his life as thoroughly depraved. yet poe soon found his supporters in france and england. charles baudelaire, the acclaimed french poet and critic, translated poes works and followed his aesthetic beliefs with great enthusiasm. poe also inspired the symbolist poetry in france, which highlights the psychological depth of most of poes works. in england, john henry ingram wrote a two-volume biography of poe in 1880 which cleared many of griswolds lies. poes thought and literary creations have heavily influenced oscar wildes aesthetic doctrine of art for arts sake, conan doyles popular holmes series, and the works of many modern british writers such as joseph conrad and james joyce in contrast, it took about one century for poe to establish his artistic reputation in america. among poes contemporary writers in the nineteenth century, only hawthorne recognized his talent and praised the force and originality in his works. other writers like emerson, whitman, and henry james were misguided by griswolds memoir and tended to ignore the significance of poes works in one way or another. for example, emerson disdainfully characterized poe as the jingle man when talking about his poems. even in the twentieth century, it look a long time for t. s. eliot to recognize poes intellectual gifts, as he commented that poes tales are woven out of morbid psychology and the symbolism of nightmare has its reference in the psychological ailment of poe, which is itself a serious matter1 (eliot, 1948:277). poes works attracted few american readers in the first hundred years after his death; nonetheless, he has exerted a far-reaching influence on american literature. in poes seductive influence on great writers, burton r. pollin did an exhaustive study on the lasting 从爱伦坡杜宾侦探小说的浪漫主义观看其后现代倾向 2 effect poe exercised on a list of american writers like herman melville, henry james, ernest hemingway, and saul bellow. as jeffrey meyers concludes in edgar allan poe: his life and legacy, poes extensive influence on later writers has been quite out of proportion to the extremely uneven quality of his hundred poems and seventy stories. though poe has always appealed to popular taste, his originality and imagination have also had a considerable impact on the most advanced thinkers and most serious writers2 (meyers, 1992:304). edgar allan poe is acclaimed as a dark romantic in american literature alongside herman melville and nathaniel hawthorne. poe is especially a master of the psychological thriller and his tales and poetry have been incorporated into american romantic literature complete with all of the grotesque, gloomy, morbid, and illogical elements. in his short lifetime, poe wrote such horror tales as berenice (1835),ligeia (1838),the fall of the house of usher (1839), the pit and the pendulum (1842), the masque of the red death (1842), the oval portrait (1842), the tell-tale heart (1843), the black cat (1843),the premature burial (1844), and the cask of amontillado (1846). unlike the american transcendentalists who believe that one should transcend societys code of ethics and rely on personal intuition in order to reach absolute goodness or absolute truth, the dark romantics fear that men must face the perils of their existence alone, with no hope of salvation or regeneration. dark romantic writers consistently articulate a pessimistic, sometimes nihilistic, vision that challenges the more positive vision that characterizes transcendentalism. they perceive an alienated psyche of the individual that cannot be reintegrated and are driven to explore the eschatological subjects of doom, judgment, heaven, and hell. poe is the most gothic writer in the school of dark romanticism in american literature. the protagonists in most of his horror tales fall into two categories, the idealized, dead or dying female, and the first-person male narrator who has either witnessed a supernatural occurrence or has recently participated in a heinous crime. in either case, whether passive maiden or disturbed sociopath, the universe in which these characters operate is anything but rational. prematurely buried women rise bloodied and clotted with gore from their sealed crypts, while madmen feel an overwhelming compulsion to reveal criminal acts they have committed in their fury.3 (magistrate, 2001:103) 硕士学位论文 3 both the poetical dreamers and hypersensitive protagonists of poes fiction are generally read as the extremely emotional side of poes romanic psyche, which prioritizes imagination so highly over reason that it even comes close to madness. poe was obsessed with madness his entire life and once defended himself in eleonora, men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence, whether much that is glorious, whether all that is profound does not spring from disease of thought, from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect4 (cw, 638). however, poes meaning was deliberately misconstrued by rufus griswold, the man whom poe had ironically designated as his literary executor. confusing poes works with poe the writer, griswold argued that the creator of horror tales must himself have been evil because he possessed such an evil imagination. his claim that poe walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses5 (walker, 1986:299) damaged the writers reputation so severely that it took nearly a century for poe to reestablish his literary standing in america. in the west, many critics held that it was not until poes creation of the detective stories in the early 1840s that the extremely rational side emerged from his psyche. why did poe suddenly walk away from his usual tales of horror and imagination and start to write detective stories or tales of ratiocination as he called them? joseph wood krutch once gave a brilliantly simple answer to this question: poe invented the detective story in order that he might not go mad6 (krutch, 1968:9). since the 1950s, many critics have engaged in more complicated debates on this subject. in murder for pleasure, for example, howard haycraft attributes this new development to poes turning to absolute reason, and so he remarks that poe has become the perfect reasoner, the embodiment of logic, the champion of mind over matter. instead of bathing insanely in hideous crime, the new protagonist poe himself crisply hunts it down 7 (haycraft, 1968:9). edward h. davidson contends that the central bifurcation in poe is caused by the division of the two sides of self, between emotion and intellect, feeling and mind 8 (davidson, 1957:259). harry levin argues that the protagonist in poes detective stories is an underground man in nature who embodies reason in madness 9 (levin, 1958:164). daniel hoffman observes in poe poe poe poe poe poe poe that one of the chief themes of poes works is the duplicity or doubleness of experience 10 从爱伦坡杜宾侦探小说的浪漫主义观看其后现代倾向 4 (hoffman, 1972:210). based on his argument in these previous criticisms, j. gerald kennedy makes a more comprehensive study in the limits of reason: poes deluded detectives, in which he attempts to find out how poe initially became interested in the detective story and why, after the technical achievement of the purloined letter, he abandoned the genre and returned to the familiar materials of horror and the grotesque. kennedy concludes that ratiocination answers no questions of genuine importance and clarifies nothing about the hopes and fears of humankind 11 (kennedy, 1975:184-96). in china, about 250 articles and three masters theses have been written on poe from 1995 to 2006. however, a large proportion of the criticisms focus on poes poetry and tales of horror. the most frequently discussed topics are poes obsession with death, his psychological depth in his tales and his writing aesthetics. in addition, a small number of articles are devoted to comparing poes works with those written by some of the chinese writers, such as su shi, pu songling and lu xun. in contrast to the large scholarship on poes poetry and horror tales, only 10 articles from that period are committed to the study of poes detective stories. among them, the article written by shen xinghua is the most relevant and representative discussion of poes attitude toward romanticism in his dupin detective stories. “the psychoanalytical criticism on the murders in the rue morgue” is based on shens detailed study of three pairs of characters from the perspective of psychoanalysis, shen holds that a society ruled by reason is imperfect, which also needs the existence of emotion. then he further stresses that human beings should identify themselves as the harmonious combination of mind and body, a unity of the reasoning ability and the imaginative power12 (shen, 1996: 32-6). living and writing in the heyday of the american romantic era, poe was at the center of the romantic literary circle, and as edmund clarence stedman remarks, poe was the bantering monitor of his own generation 13(stedman, 1991:86). henry steele commager once made an influential claim that the united states is the land of the enlightenment experiment rather than the embodiment of romantic ideals 14(commager, 1977:xi); however, it is still quite true for david morse to state that of all societies, the united states has been most influenced by the impact of romanticism15(morse, 1987:25). therefore it is of great significance to study poes attitude towards romanticism when suddenly we discover some 硕士学位论文 5 seemingly rational detective stories among his dark romantic tales. does it mean that poe has suddenly converted into a neoclassicist who believes in the absolute power of reason? or that he is still a romantic in nature but has simultaneously begun to doubt its validity in the prioritization of imagination over reason? both the enlightenment and the romantic movement share the same purpose, namely, to discover the truth of the world, though by chance they may employ different methodologies, the one reason and the other imagination. the main activity of the sleuth in detective stories is to uncover the truth; so, is poe, a truth-seeker all of his life in the act of writing his dupin stories reconsidering the question: what is it that leads to ultimate truth, science or poetry? or does truth never exist at all and it is but only an illusion? previous accounts of poes struggle between reason and imagination in his creation of detective stories have been limited to a single work or incomplete explications. this study synthesizes these past investigations, and re-envisions them in the context of the clashes between neoclassicism and romanticism when poe initiated his three dupin stories. by in asking these questions about poes seeking of truth, we may be forced to concede that he is not merely a romantic writer who writes detective stories. the doubts of western philosophy regarding the existence of universal truth began with the great german philosopher immanuel kant, who inspired the romantic movement in the nineteenth century. kant maintains that we cannot know things in themselves and the objects of knowledge must conform to our faculties of representation. this romantic assumption has been seen as the starting point for the literary movement of post-modernism, a term which first came into the english lexicon in 1979, with the publication of the postmodern condition by jean-francois lyotard. postmodernism is notoriously indefinable because of its broad and various implications; however, whatever else the term may mean, it certainly means a repudiation of the rationalistic and universalistic claims of modernism 16 (foust, 2003:14). in this sense, postmodernism is routinely associated with jacques derrida and deconstruction, a method of criticism which questions the attempt of western thinkers to find an ultimate foundation or source of meaning and truth. in his 1957 seminar on the the purloined letter, which was not translated into english until 1972, jacques lacan explored the relationships between characters and the letter 从爱伦坡杜宾侦探小说的浪漫主义观看其后现代倾向 6 in poes third dupin detective story and used them to illustrate his own language theory. lacans structural reading was replaced by derrida and many other contemporary critics with a post-structural (or deconstructive) reading, which intends to explore the slipperiness of language in order to undermine the authority of language, and to question the very notion of stable, knowable truths 17(peeples, 2001:209). in more recent studies, poes detective stories are popularly read together with the works of many postmodern writers. for example, in the mystery to a solution: poe, borges, and the analytic detective story, john t. irwin traces the derivation from poes dupin stories of the metaphysical variants as seen in three of borges tales, the garden of forking paths (1941), death and the compass (1942), and “ibn hakkan al-bokhari, dead in his labyrinth (1951). irwins book is a marvel of the comparative method, and a long overdue tribute to poe as the online beget