英文摘要 |
Although twentieth-century North American modernist poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was not a prolific borrower of classical myth and preferred instead to stick to local facts and avoid grand, overarching narratives, classical themes and subject matter do appear in his writings. An important figure is the nature deity Pan, a god of woodlands, vegetation, and forests, a protector of gardens, and a figure that often is associated with satyrs or depicted as a satyr. Pan makes a conspicuous appearance in Williams’s magnum opus, the long poem Paterson (1946-c.1961). This text, a satire on the subject of divorce between the human and environment, places side by side, on equal footing and in inseparable terms, human and nonhuman language and identity. Pan, a half-natural and half-unnatural, “unregenerate, potent” spokespiece for the nonhuman ecogenic world, lurks behind the text’s juxtaposition of poetry and prose, natural history and human history, and characters that are a mixture-an “interpenetration, both ways” (Paterson 4)-of the nonhuman and the human. The argument of the paper that follows is Williams’s allusions to Pan and his implicit critique in Paterson of the environmental history of a small area of North America in the period between 1790 and 1940 look forward to the arguments of deep ecology, a late twentieth-century radical environmental theory that holds that the nonhuman being has as much right as the human being to exist independent of the nonhuman’s use to the human. |