“The Mysterious Other”: Carter’s Japanese Reflections
“The Mysterious Other”: Carter’s Japanese Reflections
复制标题
“神秘的他者”：卡特的日本反思
DOI：
10.13130/2035-7680/2558
复制
发表时间：
2012
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
A. Pasolini
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
A. Pasolini
安吉拉·卡特的日本经历(1970-1971)对这位作家产生了深远的影响，也影响了她后来的所有作品。《一无所有的神圣》(1982)和《烟火：九件亵渎的作品》(1974)分别收集了新闻作品和短篇小说，展示了日本岁月如何促使她加强对西方父权传统的批评，并编纂了一种新的范式来表现和实施表演性的女性身份。正如有人所说，卡特的视角是一个西方游客的视角，以帝国的眼光俯瞰日本文化和社会。然而，事实证明，这种观点既有问题，又有成效，因为她是一个西方外国人(帝国之眼)，结合了她作为一个女人的身份，一个以不享有特权的地位说话的主体，一个在她的祖国处于从属地位的他人。此外，正如卡特所说，她既不知道也不能学习日语，因此被迫--也愿意--用敏锐的感官观察现实，以便重新命名一切，从她对作为一个女人意味着什么和作为一个女人的自我认知开始。因此，作者用全新的意义填充日语空白语，并开始从一个外国女人的矛盾角度建立一个新的能指系统，因为她是英国人，在其他方面处于弱势地位。她对日本世界的印象和她对性别身份的思考，然后通过强大的、无处不在的镜子形象传达出来。在卡特的作品中，镜子和倒影同时是使颠覆性和原创性的模式和表演成为可能的手段和有效的表现方式，因为正是通过日本文化在西方文化中的反思/投射和通过女性主体在另一个人眼中的镜像，女性主体被赋予了新的颠覆潜力。
Angela Carter’s Japanese experience (1970-1971) profoundly affected the writer, influencing all her following works. The collections Nothing Sacred (1982) and Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), gathering respectively journalistic writings and short stories, show how the Japanese years prompted to strengthen her criticism towards the Western patriarchal tradition and to codify a new paradigm for the representation and enactment of performative female identity(-ies). As it has been argued, Carter’s perspective is that of a Western tourist, looking down on Japanese culture and society with an imperial gaze. However, this very point of view proves to be both problematic and productive, for her being a Western foreigner (the imperial Eye), combines with her being a woman, a subject who speaks from an unprivileged position, the subordinated Other in her homeland. Moreover, as Carter declared, she did not know nor was able to learn the Japanese language, thus being forced –and willing- to observe reality with sharpened senses in order to name everything anew, starting from her self-perception of what it means to be a woman and to act as one. Thus, the author fills in Japanese empty signs with brand new meanings and begins to build up a new system of signification from the ambivalent perspective of a foreign woman, whose otherwise underprivileged position is empowered by the fact of being British. Her impressions of the Japanese world and her reasonings about gendered identities are then conveyed though the powerful, omnipresent image of the mirror. In Carter’s wor(-ds)k mirrors and reflections are at the same time both the means which make disruptive and original models and performances possible and effective ways to represent them, since it is through the reflection/projection of Japanese culture into the Western one and through the mirroring of the female subject in the other’s eyes, that female subjectivity is endowed with a new –subversive- potential.