异变的身体与入侵的机器——论品钦小说《V.》中的后人类想象

Mutating Body and Invading Machine:Posthuman Imagination in Thomas Pynchon’s V.

托马斯·品钦的首部长篇小说《V.》聚焦于19世纪末以来人与技术物之间的界线不断发生松动与游移的状况,以双重时空体的叙事架构拼合起一幅西方社会里人类身体不断被无生命物侵蚀的末世论图景。本文分析该小说中身体与技术的交互界面,指出技术对身体的重构存在着双重逻辑:它一方面增补身体的功能,促进人体的自我延伸,另一方面又暴力地肢解身体,实现技术物对身体的解构。小说人物积极寻求技术介入身体的行为隐含着技术权力意志的内在控制欲望,不仅是后现代种种复杂关系的具体体现,也与法西斯主义意识形态存在着隐秘的亲缘性,技术改造身体的操作实践最终指向了后人类时代里身体的终结与技术的统治,展现了品钦对当代技术文化发展的深刻反思。

Thomas Pynchon’s first novel V.focuses on the shaky boundary between man and machine from the late nineteenth century onwards and depicts an apocalyptic picture of inanimateness eroding humanity in Western society within the narrative framework of double chronotope.Using as its foundations the question of the body in the cybernetic era,this paper focuses on the interfaces between the human body and technology in the novel and examines the double logic of technology’s reconstitution of the body:on the one hand,it supplements and extends the body;one the other,it violently dismembers the body,fostering techno-artefacts’deconstruction of the body.Therefore,technology’s modification of the body not only embodies various complex postmodern relations,but also reflects the affinity between soma-technology and fascism,thus bringing to light the inherent domination of a technological will to power.The practice of technology rewriting the body in the novel finally points to the end of the body and the ultimate technopoly in the posthuman era,which reveals Pynchon’s profound reflections on the contemporary techno-culture.