英文摘要 |
Edgar Allan Poe’s works pose the question how an inventive artist can arise fromthe whirlpool of fear and madness. This paper seeks to respond to this questionthrough a reading of “The Fall of the House of Usher” informed by Gilles Deleuze’sand Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s conception of literature as an enterprise which carrieslanguage to its outside, and in the process produces the effect of pulling the “self”as defined by its identity outside itself. Roderick Usher is characterized as a Romanticartist as well as a tormented soul. His avid engagement in artistic and intellectual activitiesseems to lead to nowhere other than irrevocable madness and destruction.Such a split and tension posited between the image of an artist and that of a madmanare explored via the multitude of doubles in the story. The way these doubling patternsaccumulate makes the predicament of Roderick an especially fitting instance to bescrutinized in the logic of the relation or non-relation between art-making andself-division. Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s reflections on the “schizophrenicvocation” of literature will be drawn on to provide a new approach to examining thevariegated meanings of the doubles in “Usher.” It will then be found that instead ofsimply embodying a certain will to destruction, the doubling patterns reveal a certaincomplicated relationship between literature and madness. What has been read as theutter disintegration of Roderick’s mental condition actually reveals certain powers ofschizophrenia which open the “self” to a series of permutations, a process designatedby Deleuze as “counter-actualization.” Read in this light, both Roderick and the mansionthat bears his family name move towards destruction, unveiling the dynamicprocess of how to bring about a schizophrenic effect with art and literature withoutproducing a schizophrenic. The first-person narrator’s narrow escape at the end of thestory furthermore points to the possibility of reading the doubles as forces which playdivergent roles in selecting the event of writing in the erosion of reason. As a double of Roderick that emerges as the effect of writing and is therefore read as the duplicatedimage of Roderick, the narrator’s eventful journey into the house of Usher bringsattention to the writer’s problems of surviving the whirlpool of madness and revivingthe process of writing. |