福克纳的五维文学空间及其显现方式——评《福克纳:破裂之屋》

Faulkner’s Five-Dimensional Literary Space and Its Manifestations: A Review of Faulkner: The House Divided

美国文评家埃里克·桑德奎斯特在专著《福克纳:破裂之屋》中讨论了威廉·福克纳的六部小说代表作,阐释了其中的道德意义、伦理意义、历史意义、哲学意义和心理意义。本文归纳了桑德奎斯特书中的真知灼见,并以此为基础,提出了一个假设:福克纳的多篇小说构建出一个五维文学空间,其间不但有长、宽、高和时间的维度,而且有超越时间的维度,即:永恒的维度。如桑德奎斯特专著所示,福克纳小说中的种族矛盾、道德冲突、社会变革、历史演化、个人命运、特别是人性的永恒的复杂性等重要内容主要是借助以下方式来显现的——关联、转化、戏剧化、个人化、模糊化。

In his book Faulkner： The House Divided,Eric J.Sundquist,an American critic,discusses six of William Faulkner’s major novels,and articulates their moral,ethical,historical,philosophical and psychological implications.Based on a systematized induction to Sundquist’s insightful critiques,this review proposes a hypothesis that Faulkner’s fiction functions to construct a five-dimensional literary space,which reveals its own existence,not only in terms of length,width,height and time,but also in terms of timelessness.As emphasized in Sundquist’s book,such issues as racial tensions,moral conflicts,social changes,historical evolutions,personal destinies,and above all,timeless multiplicities of human nature in Faulkner’s fiction,are manifested mainly in the following ways—correlation,translation,dramatization,individualization and ambiguation.