古典文本中的叙事风景与维吉尔的冥界地形

Narrative Landscapes in Classical Texts and the Topography of Virgil’s Underworld

叙事基本的维度显然是时间,尽管除了时间,每个行为都需要在空间中演化。要估量时间,需要某种运动,而这种运动理论上讲只能发生在空间里。然而,叙事学总是忽视空间。心理映射被认为是人类思维基本的认知策略,它与空间相联系,对以时间为本质的叙事来说是另外一种选择。文章首先重新阐释了弗里德里希·默莫尔对维吉尔和克劳狄安·克劳第乌斯再现“西西里”的空间比较,把重心从近古的孤立图像技巧转向具有地理实体概念的大视野,从而与以人物视角描述空间的经典表达相对照。为了达到这个目的,文章以克劳第乌斯的另一首史诗《哥特战争》为例进行阐释。文章第二部分讨论维吉尔《埃涅伊德》第六卷中的冥界——它是文学映射研究中的经久不衰的热门话题。论文的观点是,实际上诗歌文本对于重构虚构地理点之间的地形关系所能提供的信息是很少的,这是因为,要么是隐喻性话语使得空间参照关系不确定,要么是由于象征性的解释使得所表现的空间无关紧要。

The basic dimension of narrative is obviously the time,although every action except time need to evolve in space.To measure time,one need some kind of movement,which can only happen in space in theory.Narratology,however,tends to neglect space.The mental mapping is regarded as a basic cognitive strategy of the human mind,which is connected to space and is an alternative for the time-based narrative.The paper first reinterprets Friedrich Mehmel’s comparing Virgil and Claudius Claudianus’s representations of Sicily,transposing the emphasis from the technique of isolated image in the Late Antiquity to the big scale view with province-sized geographical entities,in this way,it is compared with the classical expression of describing space from the perspective of characters.For this purpose,the paper uses the example of another epic poem by Claudianus,The Gothic War,as an example.In the second part,the paper discusses Virgil’s underworld from Aeneid volume VI,an evergreen favorite for literary mapping.The thesis here is that a poetic text actually provides little information to reconstruct topographic relationships between the spots of an imaginary geography,either because metaphorical discourse destabilizes spatial references,or because symbolic interpretations make the represented space insignificant.