晚期现代性与《纠正》中男性的抑郁症

Male Depression as a Disease of Late Modernity in The Corrections

美国作家乔纳森·弗兰岑在小说《纠正》中书写了抑郁症这一当代流行的精神疾病,受其困扰的主要是书中的男性角色。兰伯特父子三人的症状,不仅符合医学实证研究对男性抑郁的结论,更折射出社会环境对人们精神状态的影响。以吉登斯等社会学家关于晚期现代性与心理健康的关系的论述分析该小说,可见晚期现代性的环境催生了男性角色的抑郁症,但同样赋予其从这一疾病中突围的机遇。小说家以对人物心理的书写,反映了外部世界亲密关系与家庭结构的变化与反思个体的生活选择,以抑郁症这一话题在医学与文学之间建立了联系,体现了现实主义文学对社会的“纠正”。

American novelist Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections features depression, an increasingly popular mental disorder in our time. The disease haunts the male members of the Lambert family whose symptoms not only support medical findings of male depression, but also reflects the influence of late modernity on mental health. The sociological perspectives from Anthony Giddens and other theorists help to reveal that late modernity fosters the male characters’ vulnerability to depression in the novel, but nevertheless offers them opportunities for recovery. Franzen, in writing about the human psyche, reveals the transformation of intimacy and family structure, as well as the life choices of the reflexive subjects in late modernity. The motif of depression in the novel thus connects medicine and literature, and demonstrates Franzen’s “correction” of society with realist literature.