摘要
缪丽尔·斯帕克的“新小说”《公众形象》在探讨形象与名誉的表面下隐藏着一个易被忽视的现实语境,即后现代拟像社会的情感劳动。随着物质生产过剩,服务业逐渐取代制造业,娱乐行业的造星运动促使表演从艺术领域走向商业领域,与服务业共享相似的情感劳动逻辑。基于霍克希尔德等人的情感劳动理论视角可以发现,斯帕克通过“无情”的写作方式与人物塑造,讽刺性地揭示了造星运动中情感劳动对个体控制情感、改写情感、利用情感的要求,以及情感劳动在推动情感商品化、构建及瓦解主体性、巩固及改写公私领域情感规则的作用。通过“无情”的情感结构,斯帕克在《公众形象》中展现了其“新小说”写作的现实主义维度。
Compared to the exploration of image and reputation,Muriel Spark's postmodernist nouveau roman,The Public Image,is rarely read within a crucial social context:the emotional labor of postmodern society.This context emerges from an excess of material production,leading to the gradual shift from manufacturing to the dominance of the service industry.The entertainment sector,propelled by star-making movements,transposes performance from the realm of art to commerce,sharing a comparable emotional labor logic with the service industry.This article,in light of the theory of emotional labor by Hochschild and others,argues that Spark unravels through the writing style and characterization of“apathy”the ways in which emotional labor on the one hand regulates,revises and exploits individual affects,and on the other facilitates the commercialization of human feelings,shapes and dismantles subjectivity,and reinforces and revises feeling rules in both public and private domains.Disclosing“apathy”as a structure of feeling,Spark reveals in The Public Image a realistic dimension of her nouveau roman writing.
