典型德里罗的非典型“末日叙事”:《沉寂》中的“末日”后现代化

A Classic DeLillo's Non-classic“Apocalyptic Narrative”:His Postmodernization of the“Apocalypse”in The Silence

在成书于新冠疫情前但出版于2020年10月的新作《沉寂》中,唐·德里罗通过细绘两对美国夫妇的应激反应和行为模式,预见了一个处于未来末日级大危机之下的美国。在提示书中危机的典型末日特征后,德里罗尽遣后现代叙事之能,扫除了起因、经过与结果等叙事三阶段的全部“宏大叙事”痕迹。凭借对由此而生的非事件化、非典型性“末日”的后现代化呈现,德里罗将读者关注焦点成功引至其倾力打造的美国式“内向性末日”,从而又一次成功传达了针对后现代美国的典型德里罗式关切。《沉寂》也因此为美国在抗疫方面的持续疲软表现提供了某种令人信服的非官方解释。

Completed before the COVID-19 pandemic hit America,The Silence was published in October,2020,in which Don DeLillo prophesies and delineates an America plunged into an apocalypse-class crisis by focusing on how two American couples respond and behave under dire stress.Having hinted at typical apocalyptic features of the crisis narrated in the novel,DeLillo gives full play to his masterly command of postmodernist narrative skills so as to remove the traces of a"grand narrative"from all the three story-telling stages of beginning,development and outcome.By his postmodernized representation of an uneventful and thus non-classic apocalypse,DeLillo shifts his readers'focus of attention onto an American-style"apocalypse of mentality"on which he has been working so hard,so that DeLillo once again successfully conveys his DeLilloesque thematic concerns oriented towards America in postmodern conditions.Therefore,The Silence can also be read as an unofficial but convincing explanation for USA's consistently weak performance in its handling the COVID-19 crisis.