Poe's "The Black Cat" as Psychobiography: Some Reflections on the Narratological Dynamics
Poe's "The Black Cat" as Psychobiography: Some Reflections on the Narratological Dynamics
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作为心理传记的爱伦·坡的《黑猫》：对叙事动力学的一些思考
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发表时间：
1998
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通讯作者：
E. Piacentino
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作者：
E. Piacentino
埃德加·爱伦·坡的《黑猫》最初于1843年8月19日在美国《星期六邮报》上发表，至今仍是他最神秘和最可怕的故事之一。正如人们所料，叙述者谋杀妻子的动机引起了许多评论家的评论和猜测。很少有评论家认真接受叙述者自己对残忍谋杀他的宠物猫或妻子的可疑理由，他承认，他所做的一切，他将其归因于“变态的精神……，人类内心的原始冲动之一……为了错误的原因而做错事”(坡852)；或者他在故事结尾声称猫，他称之为“一只可怕的野兽引诱[他]谋杀”(859)。简而言之，追溯叙述者，实际上是两个人--杀害妻子的男人和故事的追溯讲述者--是一个不值得信任和不可靠的权威。J.Rea对《阿蒙蒂拉多的木桶》的叙述者蒙特雷索尔的观察似乎也适用于《黑猫》中未具名的叙述者：蒙特雷索尔向读者透露了某些事情，Rea说，是为了转移人们对犯罪真正原因的注意力(57)。肯尼斯·西尔弗曼也提供了类似的观察，但有更多的心理暗示，指出像《黑猫》这样的故事“戏剧化地表现了各种防御的失败，主人公徒劳地试图向自己和他人隐瞒他们的感受”(209)。叙述者谋杀妻子的动机似乎是潜意识的，因此，犯罪并不是有意识的预谋。叙述者也不能理性地理解或令人信服地解释他为什么做了这件可怕的事情，尽管他一再为他以前的行为提供解释--实际上是站不住脚的合理化。詹姆斯·W·加加诺(James W.Gargano)在许多爱伦·坡评论家眼中的《黑猫》(The Black Cat)一文中，可能是第一个提供了令人信服的有力解释的评论家，他的解释表明，叙述者赋予《反常精神》和《恶魔的无度》(PoE 851)的东西，实际上可能“被简化为普通的心理和道德法则”(《Perverseness》172)。加尔加诺将叙述者视为一个具有反常人格的案例研究，他认为叙述者“多愁善感的过度行为，他在喂养和抚摸他的宠物时的极度快乐”，是“他本性中不健康的过度发展”的标志(“变态”173)。而坡的叙述者确实用这种行为方式取代了与人类的正常关系。后来对《黑猫》的许多批评观点都试图在心理学或精神分析的框架内解释叙述者的怪异行为，特别是他对妻子的谋杀。(1)虽然坡的生活细节为考察《黑猫》可能的自传来源提供了一些肥沃的土壤，但我们将听取詹姆斯·W·加尔加诺的警告，他谨慎地建议故事读者避免将坡和《黑猫》的第一人称叙述者视为“同一对文学双胞胎”的传记陷阱(“问题”165)。(2)相反，这里的重点将集中在《黑猫》的叙事动力学上，并采用法国评论家杰拉德·热内特的精选方法论，他的著作《叙事话语》对叙事理论进行了引人入胜的系统研究。(3)在继续讨论《黑猫》的叙事动力学之前，我想做一个简要的概述，描述杰内特的一些概念，这些概念将成为我研究叙事学的基础，因为它与坡的故事叙述者的心理传记有关。根据韦恩·布斯最初在《小说修辞学》中提出的一个概念，与戏剧描述相比，叙事是虚幻的，因为“没有任何叙事可以‘展示’或‘模仿’它所讲述的故事”，杰内特将叙事称为“模仿的幻觉”(164)。…
Published initially in the United States Saturday Post on 19 August 1843, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" remains one of his most mystifying and horrifying tales. The narrator's motive for murdering his wife, as one might expect, has elicited much commentary and speculation from critics. Few critics seriously accept the narrator's own dubious rationalizations for the cruel murder either of his pet cat or of his wife, that being what he has done, so he confesses, he attributes to the "spirit of PERVERSENESS ..., one of the primitive impulses of the human heart ..., to do wrong for wrong's sake" (Poe 852); or his claim at the end of the tale that the cat, which he calls "a hideous beast had seduced [him] into murder" (859). In short, the retrospective narrator, who is actually two personsaethe man who killed his wife and the retrospective teller of the taleae is an untrustworthy and unreliable authority. What J. Rea has observed about Montresor, the narrator of "The Cask of Amontillado," also seems applicable to the unnamed narrator of "The Black Cat": Montresor reveals certain things to the reader, Rea states, "in order to divert attention from the real reason for the crime" (57). Kenneth Silverman has offered a similar observation, but with more psychological suggestiveness, indicating that tales like "The Black Cat" "dramatize failures of various defenses, the protagonists' futile attempts to conceal from themselves and others what they feel" (209). The narrator's motive for murdering his wife seems to be subconscious and, therefore, the crime is not consciously premeditated. Nor is the narrator able to understand rationally or to persuade convincingly why he has done this terrible deed, though he repeatedly offers explanations--actually untenable rationalizations--for his former actions. James W. Gargano, in what many Poe critics regard as the premier essay on "The Black Cat," may have been the first commentator to offer a cogently and logically convincing explanation to show that what the narrator "assigns" to the "spirit of perverseness" and the "Fiend Intemperance" (Poe 851) may, in fact, "be reduced to ordinary psychological and moral laws" ("Perverseness" 172). Viewing the narrator as a case study with an abnormal personality, Gargano perceives what he calls the narrator's "sentimental excesses, his extreme happiness in feeding and caressing his pets," as an indication of "an unhealthy overdevelopment of the voluptuary side of his nature" ("Perverseness" 173). And Poe's narrator does substitute this manner of behavior for normal relationships with human beings. Many of the subsequent critical views of "The Black Cat" have attempted to explain the narrator's bizarre behavior, especially his murder of his wife, within a psychological or psychoanalytical framework. (1) While details of Poe's life offer some fertile ground for examining probable autobiographical sources for "The Black Cat," we will heed the warning of James W. Gargano, who has cautiously advised the tale's readers to avoid the biographical pitfall of seeing Poe and the first-person narrator of "The Black Cat" as "identical literary twins" ("The Question" 165). (2) Instead, the emphasis here will be to focus on the narratological dynamics of "The Black Cat" and to apply selected methodology of French critic Gerard Genette, whose book Narrative Discourse provides an engaging systematic study of narrative theory. (3) Before proceeding to the narratological dynamics of "The Black Cat," I would like to give a brief overview, describing some of Genette's concepts that will form the basis for my examination of the narratology as it relates to the psychobiography of the narrator of Poe's tale. Drawing on a notion addressed initially by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction, that narrative, in contrast to dramatic depiction, is illusory because "no narrative can `show' or `imitate' the story it tells," Genette calls narrative the "illusion of mimesis" (164). …