超越善恶二元对立:《瓦斯冈萨雷斯》中的价值观对话

Transcending the Binary Opposition of Good and Evil:The Dialogue of Values in Vasconselos

《瓦斯冈萨雷斯》是美国南方作家威廉·吉尔摩·西姆斯创作的殖民冒险罗曼司,也是一部具有反殖民主义倾向的小说。从小说含混的善恶二元对立结构与人物塑造入手,借用尼采对伦理道德的重写,不难发现,作者将主人公菲利普及其对头德·索托之间的立场冲突,呈现为被殖民者及殖民者之间的价值观对话;其善恶性质,则可以视为主体与他者之间权力运作机制的符码。在詹姆逊“政治无意识”理论观照下,这种善恶对立以具体历史语境中的价值体系即意识形态素的矛盾对立方式呈现,形成伦理学意义上的道德两难与含混性,并成为作者含蓄地为印第安人辩护发声的有力武器。

Vasconselos,a colonial expedition romance published by the American Southern writer William Gilmore Simms in 1853,is a book with postcolonial orientations.By probing into the ambiguous binary opposition of good and evil and the characterization in the book and applying the reinterpretation of ethics and morality by Nietzsche,the conflicts of the stances between the protagonist Philip and the antagonist De Soto,represented as the dialogue of values between the colonized and colonizer,can be interpreted as a cultural code of the mechanism of the power manipulation between the subject and the other.In the light of Fredric Jameson’s“political unconscious”,this binary opposition between and evil is also represented as the contradiction of ideologemes,or value systems in a concrete historical context and in the form of moral dilemma with ambiguities.Thus,it becomes a code for the author to conceal his postcolonial impulses and a powerful instrument to polemicize implicitly for the American Indians.