混血荒原：《至銳目光》中的通俗與經典

Mixedblood Wasteland: The Popular and the Canonical in The Sharpest Sight

本文旨在闡述北美混血原住民作家歐溫斯（Louis Owens）混用偵探小說通俗文類、原住民神話與現代主義經典，經由三者的交織對話，不但顛覆純種原住民迷思，新創混血文本（mixedblood texts），且進而翻轉艾略特的荒原意象。文分五部。第一部份整理文獻，說明當代北美原住民文學理論將混血身份視為原住民文學的出發點。第二部份以第一本北美原住民小說《禾阿進歷險記》（The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, 1854）為例，說明北美原住民作家因為帝國殖民，混用白人文化的廉價小說通俗文類，進而析論北美原住民文學的混血（寫）屬性。第三部份轉向歐溫斯小說《至銳目光》（The Sharpest Sight, 1992），探討原住民偵探小說的文類混雜。第四部份分析《至銳目光》對現代主義經典荒原意象的運用。第五部份結論，指出歐溫斯身為混血原住民作家，不但將原住民神話、通俗文類、現代主義接枝混寫，並且以混血原住民身份重訪荒原，對艾略特的荒原意象有所新解，本文因稱「混血荒原」。

Instead of fundamentalist insistence on species purity, mixedblood Native American writer Louis Owens adopts the Bukhtinian notion of polyphonic dialogism and contends that Native American literatures, as a result of the encounter between European settlers and indigenous peoples, are bound to be “mixedblood texts,” a heterogeneous mixture of “crosswritings.” I argue that Owens in the thriller novel, The Sharpest Sight (1992), not only searches for the meaning of the Indian, but also revises the modernist canon of The Waste Land (1922) by blending the popular genre of the detective fiction, the indigenous mythology, and the modernist imagery of the wasteland. This paper is divided into five parts. Part one provides a literature review of the Indian blood discourse by incorporating the works of Cook-lyn, Pulitano, Erkkila, Allen, Krupat, and Owens. Part two discusses the dialogism between Native American literatures and the popular genre of the dime novel by focusing on the first Native American novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854). Part three concerns the generic impurity of the Native American detective fiction by paying attention to the textual features of The Sharpest Sight. Part four analyzes Owens’ revision of Eliot’s canonical imagery in the novel. Part five makes the conclusion that Owens not only mixes the dialogic inheritances of the indigenous cultures and the Euro- American canon, but also revisits the modernist wasteland in the American west, which is hence reclaimed as “the mixedblood wasteland” in this paper.