英文摘要 |
The paper aims to explore how Don DeLillo foregrounds language as the ethical Other in The Names. Prominently, DeLillo construes the notion of language with the perception of the spatial and the recognition of the temporal, instead of focusing on the generally-recognized dialects or words. The spatial dimension of language as presented in this landscape-featured novel corresponds to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of perception, taking the world as the first language that addresses people. The first language comprises the visible, the audible and even the perceivable. However, what is empirically experienced or perceived in the space is not necessarily nameable or speakable, going beyond what words could subsume. The perceivable but unnameable in The Names could be understood in terms of Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the saying in language. The saying, different from the said (language as actual facts), is marked by diachrony. It designates the incommensurable temporal planes, defying the meaning-reducing thematization and signification. It refers to the irreducible and non-thematizable. Levinas’s notion of diachrony helps shed light on DeLillo’s spatial-temporal loop in language. And it is the temporal dimension that initiates the ethical relation with language as the Other. Nevertheless, the self in confrontation with language is passive, vulnerable and de-throned, being obliged to answer the call of the Other. Hence, with the visible and audible landscape featuring The Names, DeLillo’s presentation of the wor(l)dly perception implicates the incomprehensible abyss underlying language. It is DeLillo’s premier observationlanguage as an unknown and unbridgeable Other marked by the geological diversity and the perpetual temporal lapse. That is, language is neither instrumental nor self-referential but the ethical Other, which talk in a way that the self with absolute passivity is obliged to respond. |