波德莱尔“黑维纳斯”的历史形塑

The Historical Fashioning of Baudelaire's “Black Venus”

传统批评认为经典文学形象是'超历史的个人',具有原型价值,而新历史主义批评家则研究经典形象及其所代表的问题在多大程度上是社会价值观和文化习俗的产物。斯蒂芬·格林布拉特进一步提出了'主体形塑'概念,指出文学形象是不同话语对人物及其文化环境的关系反复进行阐释的结果,且阐释非一次性完结,而是一个没有止境的变化过程。'黑维纳斯'是波德莱尔在《恶之花》中以其黑白混血情妇让娜·杜瓦尔为原型塑造的经典文学形象。从19世纪中期至今,这一形象在波德莱尔的作品及早期批评和传记中,在T·S·艾略特、本雅明和萨特等人的文学批评著作中,在当代英国作家安吉拉·卡特的改写小说中被不断形塑,先后经历了'致命女性'原型、波德莱尔多维度的他者和具有自主意识的女性主体等几个阶段的变化。形塑的核心是种族和性别视域下的身体。不同话语不断围绕'黑维纳斯'的身体意义进行对话、商讨和争论,塑造了一个承载着复杂历史信息的含混意象。形塑的新变化也揭示了当代话语重构边缘主体、重书庶民历史、质疑经典,瓦解真理的转向。

Traditional criticism believes that a classic image is a ＂transhistorical individual＂ with archetypal value while New Historicists study to what degree the image and the questions it represents are molded by social values and cultural customs. Stephen Greenblatt further puts forward the notion of ＂self-fashioning＂ to refer to a never-ending process, in which different discourses circulate and fashion an image by constantly interpreting the relationship between an image and its cultural background. ＂Black Venus＂（＂Venus Noire＂） is a classic image created by Charles Baudelaire in The Flowers of Evil based on his Creole mistress Jeanne Duval. Since the middle 19 th century, ＂Black Venus＂ has been constantly fashioned in Baudelaire’s works, the early criticism and biographies of him, in the critical works on the poet by T. S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin and Jean-Paul Sartre, and in the parodic short story by the contemporary British writer Angela Carter. The image has experienced three major transformations—an archetype of ＂femme fatale＂, Baudelaire’s ＂other＂ from multiple perspectives, and a female subject struggling for autonomy in unfavorable power relations. And the core of the fashioning is the body highlighting its gender and racial meanings. Discourses constantly discuss, negotiate and argue about the meaning of the body and leave the image ambiguous with complex historical information. And the recent change in the fashioning of the image reveals the turn of the contemporary discourse to reconstructing marginalized subjects, rewriting subaltern history, questioning classics and dissolving ＂Truth＂.