伊甸园的幻灭:石黑一雄《长日留痕》的创伤叙事

Disillusionment in the Garden of Eden:Traumatic Narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

石黑一雄的小说《长日留痕》围绕主人公的个人创伤经历展开,展现了男管家史蒂文斯通过不可靠的回忆叙事为自己的过去辩护并与之达成妥协的过程,探讨了尊严与服从、职业伦理与个人判断等一系列具有共同性的人类生存悖论。史蒂文斯以职业精神、道德境界等为象征性的文化符号,面对自身的创伤历史采取压抑、否定、寻找替罪羊等逃避现实的策略,以减轻个体伤痛和罪责的重负。与史蒂文斯个体创伤经历相交织的则是集体从大英帝国衰落的现实中遭受的集体创伤,以及由此导致的对集体身份的重新建构。

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day focuses on the protagonist’s personal traumatic experience,showing the housekeeper Stevens’s process of defending his past through unreliable memory narration and reaching a compromise with it,and exploring a series of common paradoxes of human existence,such as dignity and obedience,professional ethics and individual judgment.Stevens uses professional spirit and moral realm as symbolic cultural symbols.In face of his own traumatic history,he adopts such escapist strategies as repression,negation and looking for scapegoats to alleviate the individual pain and the burden of guilt.What interweaves with Stevens’individual traumatic experience is the collective trauma suffered from the decline of the British Empire,and the resulting reconstruction of collective identity.