George Eliot, Presentism, and Generational Thinking
George Eliot, Presentism, and Generational Thinking
复制标题
乔治·艾略特、当下主义和代际思维
DOI：
10.1093/jvcult/vcz023
复制
发表时间：
2019
影响因子：
0.3
通讯作者：
Livesey R
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Livesey R
“我的自我意识被提升到了一种强烈的程度，在这种程度上，我们自己的情感采取了一种戏剧的形式，这种戏剧迫使我们沉思，我们开始哭泣，与其说是在我们痛苦的感觉下，不如说是在想到它的时候。”[1]用乔治艾略特为数不多的几篇以当下为主题的文章中的一句题词来开始讨论她的代际思想，似乎有些奇怪。毕竟，《掀开的面纱》（1859）不仅在其预言性的故事情节中是罕见的，在故事情节中，叙述者拉蒂默进入了一个他已经设想到的未来，这要归功于一种神秘的千里眼天赋;它在第一人称叙述的实验中也是不寻常的。但是，艾略特故事的这些方面揭示了她小说中更为传统的经典是如何以及为什么使用世代思想的，这些经典是在一个无所不知的叙述者的框架下设定在最近的过去。意识到现在--充分警觉和意识到所有的感觉流--冒着使自我意识瘫痪的风险;主体间的经验被一场抽象的戏剧所取代，在这场戏剧中，自我永远是舞台的中心。拉蒂默对他同时代人思想的洞察力“就像一种超自然的听觉增强，使一个人听到一声咆哮，而其他人则找到完美的宁静”（18）。拉蒂默被他周围的利己主义和邪恶的“发酵堆”弄得精疲力竭，他的心脏衰竭了，他在绝对的孤独中死去，期待着艾略特后来对那些听到“沉默另一边的咆哮”的人会发生什么的预测。2
‘My self-consciousness was heightened to that pitch of intensity in which our own emotions take the form of a drama which urges itself imperatively on our contemplation, and we begin to weep, less under the sense of our suffering than at the thought of it’. 1It may seem odd to open a discussion of George Eliot’s generational thinking with an epigraph from one of her very few texts set in, and about, the presence of the present.‘The Lifted Veil’(1859), after all, is not only rare in its proleptic storyline, in which its narrator, Latimer, moves into a future he has already envisioned thanks to an uncanny gift of clairvoyance; it is also unusual in its experiment with first person narration. But these aspects of Eliot’s story throw into relief how and why the more conventional canon of her novels, set in a recent past framed by an omniscient narrator, use generational thought. To be conscious of the present–fully alert and aware of all the currents of feeling–risks nothing less than paralysing self-consciousness; inter-subjective experience is displaced by an abstracted drama in which the self is always centre stage. Latimer’s insight into the thoughts of his contemporaries is ‘like a preternaturally heightened sense of hearing, making audible to one a roar of sound where others find perfect stillness’(18). Exhausted by the ‘fermenting heap’of egoism and frivolities he hears all around him, Latimer’s heart gives out and he dies in absolute isolation, anticipating Eliot’s later prediction of what happens to those who hear ‘the roar on the other side of silence’. 2