暮年帝国的认知症:石黑一雄小说《被掩埋的巨人》中的疾病隐喻

Illness as Metaphor in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant

石黑一雄的长篇小说《被掩埋的巨人》(2015)中由魔法造成的集体遗忘现象表现出典型的认知症特征:村民们吸入母龙呼出的迷雾之后,其长期与短期记忆均受到严重破坏,同时出现情绪失控和思维能力受损等症状。酷似认知症症状的集体遗忘喻示着国家的衰亡与秩序的崩溃;迷雾意象作为遗忘的传播媒介,也与瘴气和瘟疫的隐喻密切相关,揭示了掩盖大屠杀历史真相这一行为的非正义本质。作者运用多种疾病相关的意象与隐喻,来表现暴力与仇恨的记忆所带来的社会危机以及遗忘创伤历史所造成的危害,小说中的疾病隐喻不仅表达了作者对于社会失序的焦虑,也承载着作者对于记忆和遗忘的辩证思考:极端的仇恨记忆可能发展为危害和平与秩序的“恶疾”,使社会陷于同态复仇的恶性循环,但对于历史创伤的全盘遗忘同样是一种病态的表现。

The mass forgetting induced by magic in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Buried Giant shows the typical symptoms of dementia:after the villagers inhale mist produced by the dragon,their long-term and short-term memories are severely damaged,and they lose control of their emotions and become incapable of logical thinking.This collective forgetting demonstrates the decline of the nation and the collapse of the social order.As a transmitter of collective forgetting,the magical mist in the novel is also closely associated with miasma and plague,which reveals the injustice of concealing the massacre.The author applies a wide range of illness-related images and metaphors to represent the social crises caused by memories of violence and hatred,as well as the harms caused by forgetting historical trauma.The metaphors of illness in the novel not only demonstrate Ishiguro's concern for social disorder but also carry his dialectical reflections on memory and forgetting.The novel suggests that memories of extreme hatred may develop into a serious“illness”that threatens the peace and order of a community and trap it inside a vicious circle of retaliation.On the other hand,however,completely forgetting historical trauma can also lead to a pathological state.