亨利‧詹姆斯的詩學空間：巴希拉赫式閱讀

Abstract

中文摘要 本論文以加司東‧巴希拉赫 (Gaston Bachelard) 所提出想像力理論中的物質動能來閱讀亨利‧詹姆斯 (Henry James) 的小說。透過討論其早期、中期及晚期的作品來勾勒出此小說家的詩學空間。此空間是由主體的個人意識及所感知的客體兩界，經由對話式的互動所建構的一個詩性的，有意識的想像空間。並藉由巴希拉赫所提出的現象界四大元素中「質」的能量─火、水、空氣、土─分析詹姆斯文本中的動能。小說中角色對「物」的迷戀與佔有慾往往導致負面的結局，而此想像/詩性的能量具有扭轉情勢或掙脫束縛的解放力，因為它能不斷的將過去所給予的固定觀念或價值去形式化、轉型、及再形塑。巴希拉赫式的閱讀可以為詹姆斯所建構的「小說之屋」開啟一新的視界，從中人們追索「真」的意志可以經由想像力成為可能。

Abstract

This dissertation will explore Henry James’s narrative fiction in the light of Gaston Bachelard’s theory of an imagination both material and dynamic. Discussing a selection of James’s works from his early, middle and last periods, I will try to delineate a Jamesian “poetics of space.” This consciously-imagined space is a “poetic” space constituted through the dialogical interaction of/between the subjective and the objective poles, the individual consciousness and the world of perceived objects. I will be especially interested in the dynamic “energy” of objects in James’s texts, which I shall explore via Bachelard’s notion of the transformative force of the four natural elements (fire, water, air and earth). A key issue in James’s work that I will investigate is then that of the liberating imaginative-poetic transformation or “expansion” of those objects whose excessive reification leads to a destructive possessiveness on the part of certain characters. More generally I will argue that the space created through the dynamic “imagining” of Jamesian characters is liberating due to its power to deform, transform and reform predetermined concepts and values as well as pre-constituted material objects. A Bachelardian reading thus provides, I feel, another perspective from which to approach James’s house of fiction, where human imagination makes possible the working out of a kind of human will to truth.