愛在病痛蔓延時：論《星期六》的病痛書寫與疾病隱喻

Love in the Time of Illness: Writing of Pain and Metaphor of Illness in Saturday

當代英國作家伊恩．麥克伊旺在2005年出版的作品《星期六》，是一本受到九一一事件啟發的小說。故事由恐怖攻擊引發的想像開始，透過疾病的隱喻與呈現，探討人類在集體面臨創痛之後，對於生命、政治、倫理等議題產生的省思。本文討論宋塔所言去除隱喻、中性化看待疾病的空間是否存在，並試圖藉由檢視宋塔的理論，探究透過閱讀病理症候產生的社會寓意是否開啟反轉平等公義的契機？本文也試圖檢視康居翰的標準論，討論何以醫學界定正常與異常的標竿轉化為截然切割自我與他者的認知模式？何以健康的常態被稱為生理常態且被賦予正面良好的意涵，而不符合常態標準的生理表現就被視為病理症候，成為排除、壓抑或是同化的治療對象？麥克伊旺筆下描述的阿茲海默症與杭庭頓氏症都屬於遺傳神經退化疾病，兩者皆可視為恐怖攻擊陰影下人類行為失調的隱喻，也都提供串連過往記憶與罹病恐懼的連結。本文檢視《星期六》呈現恐怖主義攻擊陰影下人類文明面臨的失序景象，帶入德希達的悅納異己概念用以深化在國際恐怖主義陰影下對待異己與關照自我的思考，企圖論述後九一一時代在恐怖攻擊陰影下蘊藏的調解、溝通、寬恕與愛的可能。

This paper addresses to a deeply felt anxiety of paralysis and destruction accomplished in Ian McEwan's Saturday. The twofold anxiety in this novel not only indicates an individual experience but also amplifies a collective sense of insecurity in a wider cultural-social context. Such an anxiety is created with McEwan's use of metaphor of illness. Diseases in Saturday, demonstrating symptoms projected from the personal to the collective anxiety level, reveal a world of discordance in the post-9/11 era. With a pathological reading of the neurodegenerative diseases crucial to the development of this novel, the Huntington's Disease and the Alzheimer's Disease, this paper analyzes why medicine performs as an evaluative norm in measuring violence and trauma and how it suggests a possibility of reconciliation and compensation for the individual and collective loss. In light of Susan Sontag, this paper justifies the possibility of a neutral and value-free strategy in reading illness and its metaphors. By ascribing the brutality and injustice of pathological symptoms to the illness/health binary opposition, this paper seeks to find a way to do justice to a neutral reading of diseases. After Georges Canguilhem's notion of normatism, the reason why health bears positive social and cultural inference and illness carries negative one is examined. By resorting to Jacque Derrida's discussion of hospitality, this paper concludes that medicine, in presenting the practices of hospitality in the time of terror and in the face of disease, forecasts the possibility of compassion and consolidation. By reading the clustered symptoms of clinical implications and social influences, this paper argues that this novel is both about how we see ourselves and how we are about to see the world under the shadow of terrorism, disease, and trauma.