英文摘要 |
Blending the sensual, the natural, and the spiritual, W. S. Merwin’s love poetry successfully conjures up what Jacques Lacan terms the “Other jouissance” in order to circumscribe the paternal function and its limitation of the loving subject. This essay traces Merwin’s erotic mode back to The Dancing Bears (1954) and then reads its full outburst in The Compass Flower (1977) and Finding the Islands (1982) in light of psychoanalytical and philosophical formulations of alterity. Merwin’s love poetry follows the tradition of the troubadours in the Middle Ages in its conventional portrait of the female Other as elusive and enigmatic. In the fantasy of love, the male speaker seems able to enjoy union with the beloved woman, although in most cases she appears distant and heterogeneous, sublimated as the Lacanian object or the Levinasian Stranger. Merwin’s later works are increasingly characterized by the problematic combination of nature and Eros and the subsequent eroticization of flora in The Rain in the Trees (1988) and Travels (1993): the poet fantasizes about nature and women, confusing them so as to diffuse Eros into infinite cosmos. In a counter-ecological reading, Merwin’s love/nature poetry is revealed as a testimony of the structural difference or non-adequation between man and nature rather than their harmonious co-existence. |