"The Time is Out of Joint": A Derridian Reading of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

「時間是脫離連接的」－伍爾芙《戴洛維夫人》中的德希達解構思想

陳慧琴(Fay Chen)；賴俊雄(Chung-Hsiung Lai)

Virginia Woolf ； Jacques Derrida ； time ； deconstruction ； 伍爾芙 ； 德希達 ； 時間 ； 解構思想

歐美研究

37卷2期（2007 / 06 / 01）

227 - 254

英文

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, originally titled The Hours, examines time as a critical force in shaping one's life. In the fiction, time, like a guiding thread, weaves each character's life, creating an ever growing, gigantic web that connects the conscious and unconscious, individual bodies and collective souls. More than sixty years after the publication of Mrs. Dalloway, Jacques Derrida, in his paper 〞The Time is Out of Joint〞 (1995b), also commented on the otherness-oriented nature of time, with specific regard to Hamlet. Time is, as the title of his paper suggests, 〞out of joint,〞 and it is this disjuncture of time that causes Hamlet's madness. The present paper, therefore, attempts to examine how Woolf's novel encapsulates Derrida's idea of deconstruction with respect to time while discussing a new framework by integrating Derrida's theory and reading of Mrs. Dalloway. We will first explore the madness of time, expressed by Woolf and Derrida, and then discuss how the fragmentation of time renders man incapable of action. Finally, we will raise a possible solution arrived at by Woolf and Derrida: art-life theory as a positive pharmakon which can help us heal the wound of time and, more importantly, learn to live when time is out of joint. This paper will conclude by discussing how the continuum of the repetitive joint-disjoint-joint of time constitutes the impact of time on man.

伍爾芙的《戴洛維夫人》，如其原名《時時刻刻》，探討時間如何透過書中人物及其生活，編織成一張連結意識及潛意識、個人身體及群體靈魂、縱貫時空的網。此小說出版六十年後，德希達在其論文〈時間是脫離連接的〉（1995b），藉由閱讀莎翁的《哈姆雷特》，也討論他者導向時間的解構本質。德希達指出，時間的確是脫離連接的，而時間的不斷分割則是導致哈姆雷特發瘋的原因。本文嘗試以德希達的觀點來閱讀《戴洛維夫人》，以探討伍爾芙的小說如何孕懷著德希達的解構思想，並結合德希達理論及《戴洛維夫人》來架構一個時間的新概念。

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