英文摘要 |
Doris Lessing's writing has always concerned itself with human rights and the question of what it truly is to be human. One of her major perspectives is that in the process of human evolution, culture mostly requires people to stifle their instinct and primary nature. Her idea that the human body is constructed by the systemic power in relation to civilisation is, moreover, remarkably close to that of Michel Foucault.In ”Ben, in the World” (2000), the protagonist Ben is in search of a position in the world where his difference could be accepted through the performance of his body. Ben being an outsider, his body is often deemed as an objectified otherness. However, this body on move, no matter reluctantly or not, is in the act of changing its appearance in order to cross the boundaries between itself and other subjects and is full of flexibility and mobility. Ben's body reminds readers of Bakhtin's interpretation of a grotesque body, which is full of possibilities for its deviation. Meanwhile, pretty similar to what Elizabeth Grosz's description of body, it also represents a kind of medium: the appearance is constructed by the subject's inner psychology and also by the outer social inscription on the body's exterior influences over the psychical interior. The human body is seen to be entwined with acculturation and the civilian life. Nevertheless, as in Foucault's analysis, selfhood and subjectivity are more profoundly maintained through individual self-surveillance rather than by physical constraint. Ben's body, which needs to be ”accepted” and ”cared for,” opens up for himself the way to those who have the same wishes. Ben's distinctive body figure is like a mirror which reflects everyone's hidden desire of goodness or malice. It therefore develops relational positions with different people. In this paper, I will examine how the binaries of culture/nature and body/civilisation are represented by Lessing in a mode that opens up the possibility of recognising their fundamental interrelationship. Ben in the world is a representation of and meditation on being in the world: the perception of the body as object and the subjective constitution of identity and selfhood through that gaze and its power to shape the fundamental experience of be(i)n(g) a bodily self. |