詩意轉化: 愛倫坡恐怖故事中的讀者意識與自我存在

Abstract

摘 要

本研究的目的是探索愛倫坡在短篇故事的文本中置入另一詩文的文體設計， 以此探討他如何強調敘事者的真實閱讀經驗，以及敘事者對那些詩文的讀者回應如何變成了他們精神生活的本質並且逐漸侵蝕他們的自我存在感。這些詩文描繪了一個人類意識的極盡狀態，不僅預言了詩人-主角的沉落、死亡及瘋狂，經由更延伸的閱讀，也變成了閱讀或傾聽這些詩文的敘事者的絕望狀態。敘事者-讀者的連結事實上重複了這些詩文本身, 其內在縮影無止盡的夢靨，並且暗示著敘事者已然完全捨棄了外在的理性世界而進入了一個奇異、文學性的世界—也就是進入一種在生命與死亡，理性與瘋狂間懸浮、不確定、未決的狀態。因此, 敘事者的讀者自我意識，經由一種詩意性的轉化，可以說是擁有著、甚至是吸取，如同被詛咒的詩人—主角一般，一個相同詩意性的絕望扭曲的靈魂。因而在故事的發展中，我們看到他們無止盡且激烈地被他們閱讀的行為所影響，也因此必然使得這樣的詩意表演無法與他們現實經驗有所區隔。 一開始, 第一章是對 [亞夏家的沉沒] 及它的內藏詩文 [鬼魅宮殿] 及另一冒險故事的分析，試圖展現兩者皆成為一種敘事者 “已然投入” 的生命文絡—雖然他試圖以一種理性 ”抵抗,”來 “抑制包含” 它令人恐懼,潛在的死亡力量。他最後逃離正在崩解中的亞夏家可被解讀為他避免陷入羅德里克閱讀遊戲的企圖。 然而，在那些對他而言歷歷在目的崩毀碎片下，他也許仍將永久地懸浮在作者詩人的閱讀遊戲中。第二章集中探討 [萊吉雅] 及它的內在詩文，[征服者-蟲], 來表現，如何，隨著死亡意象的高升，敘事者因無法完全駕馭萊吉雅詩句而發狂。 “死亡，” 以”蟲”的意象表現，不斷蛀蝕他的內在意識；而這樣的腐壞意義也使的他懸宕在萊吉雅遊蕩於生命與死亡之間的一幕，以致於在最後他病態想像了另一個復活的可怕劇碼：在將死/以死的蘿溫娜身上看見了復活的萊吉雅。然而這樣的復活情節不過是另一個不可回復死亡的重演與暗示而已。第三章處理在 [貝若妮絲] 中敘事者在圖書館及其書籍中的一種禁閉性的存在，這樣的偏執閱讀書籍的習慣如何影響他的心理狀態，以及原本單純的文本意義如何開始與物質現實產生混淆。而他對被貝若妮絲牙齒的知覺力量，及它們所代表的可怕現實的恐懼， 驅使他將它們從貝若妮絲口中移除。然而當這些牙齒從他原本有力的掌控中掉落一地時，他終究發現自己不能控制這些牙齒的非人性的恐怖力量。Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore Poe’s stylistic devise of integrating verses or books in the center of the story-texts in terms that how it emphasizes the narrators’ actual experience of reading and how their attention or attunement as readers to those rhapsodic verses and books radically undermine their self-presence and become the essence of their mental life. The poems/books, which literally describe an extreme state of human consciousness, prophesy the downfall, death, madness of the poet-protagonists, and also, I will suggest, by extension, of the narrators who read or hear them. The narrators as readers-auditors in fact repeat the poems/books, the hermeneutical horror epitomized in them, suggesting that they are surrendering the outside world to enter fully the fantastic, “literary” world of the poem, thus into a state of suspension, ambivalence, undecidability, in-betweenness, ultimately that of life and death, madness and sanity. Thus, the narrators’ readerly self-awareness can be said to partake of the same poetically entombed soul and even absorb it, as the doomed poet-protagonists, through a sort of poetic transformation. And they are therefore seen to be perpetually and violently affected by their own act of reading, which invariably makes this poetic performance indistinguishable from their actual lived experience. To begin with, Chapter One is an analysis of “The Fall of the House of Usher” and its embedded texts, “The Haunted Palace” and the “Mad Trist,” intended to demonstrate that both of them serve as a “life-context” in which the narrator is “already engaged” or already embedded, though he attempts to “contain” its horrifying and potentially dead force, through a kind of “resistance,” a force of reason. His final escape from Roderick’s House of Usher is read as a portrayal of his attempt to avoid being trapped in Roderick’s reading game despite that he may after all be permanently suspended in the author’s reading game within the fragments of the Usher House vividly to his mental eyes. Chapter Two focuses on “Ligeia” and its embedded poem, “The Conqueror Worm,” intended to show how, with the escalation of death images, the narrator is maddened by his failure to fully master Ligeia’s irreducible poem. The death, imaged as the “worm,” feeds on his inherent unconsciousness in its sense of decay, and keeps him suspended in Ligeia’s own life-in-death scene so that he enacts his own “hideous drama of revivification” at the end to see the dying (dead) Rowena as the living Ligeia—whose revivification is but another reminder of “the irredeemable death.” Chapter Three explores Egaeus’s confined existence to a library and to its volumes in “Berenice” in terms that how his obsessive reading of those curious books affects his state of mind, and how the literal meaning of the text becomes confused with the physical reality around him. His fear for the sentient power of Berenice’s teeth, for the horrifying reality they represent, drives him to detach them from Berenice; however, he ultimately finds himself unable to control their dehumanizing forces as they spill out onto the floor from the box in his forceful grasp.