英文摘要 |
With a 1990s context of postfeminism, on the one hand, and Lacan's psychoanalysis of an impossible love, on the other, this paper explores Hanif Kureishi's representations of crossed love and its ethics in Love in a Blue Time and Midnight All Day. In comparison to Kureishi's early works regarding ethnic, gender and class dissidence, these two collections of short stories are not eye-catching because of the middle-aged male protagonists without ethnic specificity. Many critics believed that after Kureishi's early success allowed him a socio-economic superiority, he became steeped in abjection, narcissism and desire and began to express such moods in his middle works. Readings of this sort ignore Kureishi's endeavor to expose love as a relation interwined with orthodoxic modes of sex and desire, which reflect Lacan's symbolic order and an ethic problematic of self-other relationships. This paper first reviews different viewpoints on these two books, examining their lack of interest in fathoming interrelations among postfeminism, new masculinities, mid-life crisis, an oppressive regime of love and a possible love ethics. Second, I historicize Lacan's symbolic order with postfeminism and refer to Lacan and Irigaray's discourses on what love is and should be, so as to illuminate breaks of long-term relations in these stories. In contrast to some negative responses to Kureishi's male protagonists, I argue the crossed loves-love failing to match the other's anticipation-exemplifies Lacan's definition of love as narcissism or a desire to merge with the loved object. While an ideology of eternal and exclusive love becomes more and more unviable in the privileged postmodern context, Kureishi's crossed relations of love exposes heterogeneity of the self and other, perhaps thus reimagining an open ethics of love. |