維吉妮亞．吳爾芙〈保母路可頓的窗簾〉中的看見／遇見想像力

Seeing/Scene-ing Imagination in Virginia Woolf’s“Nurse Lugton’s Curtain”

本文認為，布朗爵士在他的《醫生的信仰》（Religio Medici）與《甕葬》（Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial）中，對生與死、清醒與睡眠之間的辯證思考可能影響了吳爾芙撰寫〈保母路可頓的窗簾〉（“Nurse Lugton’s Curtain”）。這個短篇故事並不如表面上讀起來的童趣和歡愉。若我們仔細觀察，可以發現這個故事擺盪在生與死、清醒與睡眠之間，並提醒我們，在故事中化身為動物的想像力是多麼地罕見，因為大多數的時候，人類要麼對它視而不見，要麼──如同保母路可頓一般──早就已經殺死了它。路可頓可能對她的想像力視而不見，但吳爾芙的寫作技巧──自由間接話語和她的場景製作能力，卻透過在故事中安排一個不以任何人為中心的視角，以及讀者可以感知動物移動路線的場景，將想像力呈現於讀者眼前。沒有任何引號鞏固說話的主體，讀者可以沉浸在文本的意識中（因此是自由的），但場景仍然透過吳爾芙嵌入故事中的文本視角呈現（因此是間接的）。她對不同寫作技巧的運用不斷提醒我們想像力是多麼難以捕捉，而藝術家的作品，例如〈保母路可頓的窗簾〉和保母路可頓的窗簾，都是人類試圖捕捉它、卻可能徒勞無功的努力。

This paper argues that Sir Thomas Browne’s ruminations on the dialectics between life and death, wakefulness and sleep in his books might have influenced Virginia Woolf when she wrote the“Nurse Lugton’s Curtain.”This short story might not be as playful and hedonistic as it seems. On closer scrutiny, it oscillates between life and death, wakefulness and sleep, and reminds us how rare it is when imagination, incarnated as animals in the story, is present, since most of the time humans are either blind to it or have killed it already. Lugton might be blind to her imagination, but Woolf’s writing skill, free indirect discourse and her capacity for scene-making, render her imagination vivid by concealing any human-centered perspectives in the text and by presenting scenes in which the reader can perceive the route that the animals take, which is also the trail that the imagination treads. Without any quotation marks to solidify the speaking subject, the reader can immerse themselves into the consciousness of the text (hence free), but the scenes are still made present through a textual perspective that Woolf embeds in the story (hence indirect). Her engagement with different writing techniques unremittingly reminds us how elusive and slippery imagination is, and artists’works, e.g.,“Nurse Lugton’s Curtain”and Nurse Lugton’s curtain, are (futile) human endeavors to capture it.