歷史的珠質：湯瑪斯•品瓊《抵抗白晝》的諾斯替喜劇式解讀

The Nacre of History: Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day as Gnostic Comedy

湯瑪斯‧品瓊的非線性長篇歷史小說《抵抗白晝》參用了許多十九世紀通俗文學的修辭及特殊風格。它除了具有後現代流浪漢冒險小說的諸多特徵外，本論文主張此作品回頭運用早期批評家形容之「不可知論的品瓊」風格，因為在這本小說中種種關於飛船、無政府主義者及數學崇拜等等的敘述裡，重現了早期作品《V.》、《第四十九號拍賣物》和《萬有引力之虹》裡的摩尼教式、二元式的衝突，例如受揀選者與被遺棄者、物質（科技）與精神（藝術）、悲劇（反烏托邦）與喜劇（烏托邦）等等的衝突。不過，儘管早期批評家發現這些作品裏有種「不可知論的宿命論」，本文認為《抵抗白晝》確是應被視為不可知論的喜劇。依詹明信《時間的種子》所描述的後現代狀況來看，我主張當代「受壓抑靜止的辯證」（Jameson 1994）及「歷史的終結」（Kojeve 1934, Fukuyama 1992）等議題也出現於品瓊的小說歷史再現的討論中。在當今後歷史的情境中，該小說藉由「文類挪用」（McHale 2011）、千禧烏托邦主義（Hume 2007）及地理政治歷史美學的探索（Cowart 2012）等方式，使得十九世紀的社會及文學史顯得栩栩如生。《抵抗白晝》屢見十九世紀冒險和科幻小說修辭的「挪用」。其實最早品瓊第一本小說《V.》中就挪用1900 年Henry Adams 的著作《發電機與處女》中的牡蠣珍珠暗喻來表徵自戀的問題，藉此對歷史再現中唯我主義議題多所探問。於《抵抗白晝》中這個牡蠣珍珠的譬喻重現，並且成為一個繁複摩尼教式修辭系統裡的關鍵符號。此珠封閉、私密、斑斕的內在核心直指品瓊借用、折射十九世紀文學史而表達的烏托邦科幻喜劇的準則。

Thomas Pynchon’s sprawling, non-linear historical novel Against the Day incorporates a plethora of literary tropes, mannerisms, and styles borrowed from 19th-century popular fiction. In many ways a postmodernist picaresque novel, it is also, I argue, a return to “the Gnostic Pynchon” described by early critics of the author’s work. For in this novel about mathematical cults, anarchist undergrounds, and flying ships, we again see the familiar Manichaean conflicts between Elect and Preterite, between material progress (technology) and spiritual (art) culture, and between Tragedy (dystopia) and Comedy (utopia) found in earlier works like V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow. Whereas earlier critics discovered in those texts a kind of “Gnostic fatalism” (Bloom 1982, Eddins 1990), this paper basically argues that Against the Day can instead be read as a kind of Gnostic comedy. Drawing on the postmodern situation described by Fredric Jameson in his book The Seeds of Time, it argues that problems associated with the “arrested dialectic” of postmodernity and the “end of history” thesis (Kojève 1934, Fukuyama 1992) are closely aligned with the problem of historical representation we find in writers like Pynchon. Finding ourselves in a post-historical world, 19th-century social and literary history comes alive in a practice of “genre-poaching” (McHale 2011) and millenarian utopianism (Hume 2011) that is directed at exploring a geopolitical historical aesthetic (Cowart 2012). Against the Day’s “poaching” in the adventure and science fiction tropes of the 19th-century returns us to Pynchon’s interest in the issue of solipsism in historical representation in his earliest work. In his first novel, V., this problematic is epitomized in the pearl oyster metaphor which Pynchon borrows from Henry Adams’ “The Dynamo and the Virgin” (1900), but here returns as the key symbol of the Manichaean tropic system in Against the Day. Enclosed, secreted, and polysemous, this “nacreous” essence represents the techno-utopian Comic principle in Pynchon’s refracted vision of 19th-century literary history.