帷幕之后——崇高美的临界体验与拉德克利夫的哥特传奇

Beyond the Veil:Experience of the Sublime and Radcliffean Gothic Romance

本文将拉德克利夫哥特传奇中"穿透帷幕"的崇高情感描写与18世纪以来关于崇高美的主要理论反复重申的"临界体验"进行对照。通过分析拉氏哥特传奇中制造恐惧和崇高的套路,本文认为,尽管拉德克利夫的崇高描述与18世纪的自然神论观点常有相似之处,她笔下的主人公不时被崇高自然所震慑,似乎要穿越一层肃穆的帷幕去企及隐藏在幕后的上帝,然而小说中帷幕之后的这个终极存在的面目却始终十分含混,所谓上帝只是在不断重复、不断被声张却又不断后退的帷幕中逐渐隐去。拉德克利夫的上帝转而变成一种文本功能,使哥特小说的情节片断化、无限化、哥特化。这一矛盾或许正是崇高作为一种哲学诉求与哥特传奇体裁要求之间的矛盾。

This paper focuses on the beyond-the-veil sensations that frequently appear in Ann Radcliffe＇s Gothic romance, and relates her Gothic appropriation of this religious trespassing experience to the emphasis put on transgression, boundary-crossing, and borderline experience in the theories about the sublime since the 18th century. A close look at the ＂fear/sublime-mongering＂ conventions of Radcliffean Gothic romance shows that, although Radcliffe consciously subscribes to the contemporary Deist belief, and her characters are often described as aspiring ＂beyond the awful veil that obscures the features of the Deity＂, this Deity is indeed obscured in her Gothic text. The mysterious Supreme Being is forever fading away in the repeated assertion and regression of the veil. God is rather transformed into a textual function, which helps to episodize, infinitize, and Gothicize the plot. This discrepancy might bespeak the very incongruity between sublimity as a philosophical pursuit and the demand of the Gothic genre.