《伤心咖啡馆之歌》中的怪胎秀与现代性反思  

Freak Show Writing and Reflection on Modernity in The Ballad of the Sad Café

作　　者：张申华 ZHANG Shenhua

机构地区：[1]山东大学外国语学院

出　　处：《国外文学》2022年第4期109-117,共9页Foreign Literatures

基　　金：国家社科基金一般项目“美国当代少数族裔传记文学中的生命政治研究”(项目编号:20BWW062);教育部人文社科青年项目“当代美国非裔小说中的生命政治书写研究”(项目编号:20YJC752008)的阶段性成果。

摘　　要：卡森·麦卡勒斯的代表作《伤心咖啡馆之歌》以现代化转型时期沉闷的南方小镇为背景,以咖啡馆的兴衰为主线,刻画了三个身体和行为怪异的人物,描写了他们之间荒谬、复杂的关系。小说戏仿盛极一时的怪胎展览,在寓言式的外表下再现了美国怪胎话语生成的现代历史语境。通过书写已经消逝的怪胎展览惯例,小说将怪异身体打造成怪胎,凸显了怪胎的社会建构性及其以欺骗性为本质特征的安慰性。小说呈现的将非正常身体景观化的戏剧性场景,揭示了怪胎秀作为一项现代性实践所特有的悖反性,表达了对南方现代性的矛盾态度以及对现代边缘身份建构方式的反思。Carson McCullers’ s The Ballad of the Sad Café delineates the ridiculous and complicated relationships among three characters with grotesque bodies and behaviors, with the transitional dreary town of American South as the background and the rise and fall of the café as the main line. By parodying the once prosperous freak show, the novel represents the modern context that has generated the American freak discourse and portrays the abnormal body as freak, thus highlighting the freak as a social construction and its characteristic of comfort rooted in deception. The dramatic scenes presenting the abnormal bodies as spectacles reveal the contradictory nature of the freak show as a modern practice, expressing an ambivalent attitude to American Southern modernity and the way of modern marginal identity construction.

关 键 词：麦卡勒斯 非正常身体 怪胎 现代性 

分 类 号：I712.074[文学—其他各国文学]