Time of the Crystal, Time of Becoming: A Deleuzian Reading of David Foster Wallace's ＂The Soul Is Not a Smithy＂

晶體時間、生成時間：大衛‧福斯特‧華萊士〈靈魂不是個鐵工坊〉的德勒茲式讀法

10.6153/NTUSLL.201806_(39).0002

李書雨(Shu-yu Lee)

David Foster Wallace ； ＂The Soul Is Not a Smithy＂ ； Oblivion ； Gilles Deleuze ； Cinema 2: The Time-Image ； crystalline narration ； time ； 大衛‧福斯特‧華萊士 ； 〈靈魂不是個鐵工坊〉 ； 《遺忘》 ； 德勒茲 ； 《電影2：時間－影像》 ； 晶體敘事 ； 時間

NTU Studies in Language and Literature

39期（2018 / 06 / 01）

29 - 51

英文

＂The Soul Is Not a Smithy,＂ one of the stories in David Foster Wallace's Oblivion, is a first-person narrative that opens with the promise to recount a classroom hostage situation he went through as a nine-year-old child but immediately disintegrates into multiple, seemingly irrelevant narrative threads. Upon its publication, the story baffled many reviewers, who are left wondering ＂who is telling this story? Where are we? What exactly is happening?＂ (Mason). Although recent criticism has suggested various explanations for the obfuscating narration, a detailed analysis of the organization of the story is still lacking. This essay aims to tease out the underlying structure of Wallace's short story from the perspective of Gilles Deleuze's concept of the ＂crystalline narration.＂ In this Deleuzian reading, ＂Smithy＂ expresses an anti-representational aesthetics that, instead of representing the hostage crisis as a pre-exisitng, self-identical referent independent of its representation, creates it as a virtual-actual becoming, an ongoing process rather than a fully-formed object. This essay will first present a brief introduction to the Deleuzian crystalline narration and two concepts that it presupposes: time as duration and the ontology of becoming. I will then discuss the cinematographicity of ＂Smithy,＂ which will provide a mandate for interpreting Wallace's short story from the perspective of film theory. The bulk of the paper will be devoted to interpreting ＂Smithy＂ as a crystalline narration and analyzing how its reconceptualization of time creates the hostage event as a becoming.

大衛‧福斯特‧華萊士短篇小說集《遺忘》中的〈靈魂不是個鐵工坊〉第一人稱敘述者開場便宣稱要陳述九歲時經歷的一場教室人質危機，但隨即故事便分裂成多個、幾乎不相關的故事線。因此，〈靈魂〉在出版之初讓許多評論者極為困惑，認為其並未遵守基本的敘事原則。晚近的研究雖然對華萊士刻意製造的混亂提出解釋，但還未能細究這篇故事深層的組織架構。本文試圖從德勒茲「晶體敘事」（crystalline narration）的觀點來分析〈靈魂〉的敘事結構，認為此小說並非既存、自我同一的人質事件的再現，而是將人質事件創造為一不斷「生成」（becoming）的過程。本文首先說明德勒茲的晶體敘事理論，為其基礎的「綿延」（duration）時間概念，以及「生成」的本體論，接著討論〈靈魂〉的電影影像性，為從德勒茲電影理論角度來解讀華萊士的小說建立合理性。本文主要部分將探討〈靈魂〉如何可說是一反再現的晶體敘事，以及此小說的時間觀如何促使人質事件的生成。

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