论阿特伍德《疯癫亚当》三部曲中的瘟疫隐喻

The Metaphorization of Plaguein Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

在《疯癫亚当》三部曲中,加拿大作家玛格丽特·阿特伍德创造性地使用了隐喻手法书写瘟疫。作品以《圣经》为叙事原型将瘟疫比喻为洪水,通过绿色宗教“伊甸崖”的创始人亚当一号诠释了人性之恶和遭受天罚的末日想象。瘟疫病毒的载体——“喜福多”药丸在人类的狂欢中变化为蒙着面具的“红死魔”,这种通往所谓极乐天堂的良药实质上是将人类投入地狱的毒药,而极乐的背后又隐藏着社会痼疾给研发者和传播者带来的心灵创伤。瘟疫种子承载了病毒研发者终结人类之恶的幻想,但是这不仅遮掩了灭绝人类的血腥,也质疑了当下科技发展至上的理念,其所开启的后人类世界也充满了诸多不确定性。

In her MaddAddam trilogy,the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood engages the metaphorization to represent a plague creatively.The comparison of the plague to the Waterless Flood,as a rewriting of the archetypal Bible,exposes the Evil in humanity and becomes the embodiment of divine punishment in accordance with the interpretation from the founder of the green religion,Adam One.The BlyssPluss,a vector of the virus,becomes the masque of the Red Death when human beings lose themselves in the bliss of sexual promiscuity.So the supposed blissful paradise is reduced to a hell,while behind the masque lies also the trauma of the plague’s creator and its pollinator caused by the social ills.In the novel,the plague is specifically compared to the seeds to unfold the termination of humanity and the beginning of the posthuman age,and provoke a reflection on the current social ills through the imagined apocalypse.In the process,Atwood has succeeded in overcoming the language difficulties of representing the invisible and complex plague by creatively manipulating the metaphorization of the plague in the domains of religion,science,and ethics,etc.