他者身份的真相:奈保尔的《抵达之谜》及其认知模式

Truth About the Identity of the Other: Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and Its Cognitive Mode

《抵达之谜》展现了奈保尔在英国多元文化主义时期对“他者”身份真相的探求。小说引导读者体认两种真相:一方面,通过移民主人公对英格兰反复的错误认知行为,奈保尔暗示殖民主义施加于被殖民者的认知暴力;另一方面,通过主人公对英国人的渐进式认知,小说揭示了撒切尔政府在20世纪80年代重振英国国民身份这一政策的意识形态性,展示了白人“自我”与移民“他者”之间的身份联结,借此打破了后殖民解读中常见的“自我/他者”的二元对立逻辑。

The Enigma of Arrival showcases Naipaul s persistent seeking for truth about human identity at a specific historical juncture of English multiculturalism.Through the migrant protagonist s cognitive acts toward England and its people,the novel reveals to us two kinds of truth.On the one hand,the novel suggests that the epistemic violence inflicted through the British colonial discourse leads to his continual misjudgment of England and its people;on the other,it breaks away from the commonplace“self vs.other”dichotomy inherent in a typical postcolonial reading by deploying the protagonist s heuristic cognition of local British personages,thereby laying bare the ideology in the notion of a unified national identity promoted by the Thatcher government in the early 1980s.