A World without a Hero: Indeterminacy and Unfinalizability in the Characterization of Thackeray's Vanity Fair

世界無英雄：論薩克萊《浮華世界》小說中角色刻劃的不確定性與其開放觀

徐慶鐘(Ching-Chung Hsu)

Unfinalizability ； Bakhtin ； Vanity Fair ； 未定特徵 ； 巴赫汀 ； 浮華世界

高雄師大學報：人文與藝術類

53期（2022 / 12 / 01）

135 - 152

英文

William Makepeace Thackeray has garnered his reputation as a novelist who refused to be finalized in novel writing. His fiction, in many aspects though, possessed diverse and mixed characteristics of Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-century novels, yet his virtuosity in effect allowed him to defya gradual fixation and finalization that were shown in novels before his time. While Victorian novelists, for instance, oftentimes ended their characterization in a well-rounded depiction about how characters reached their Bildungsroman in their closure, his Vanity Fair gave us a strong sense of his discontentedness with idealized closing she had found in the hands of previous writers. Sucha pungent sense of either restlessness or angst for the danger of finalizationin effect urged Thackeray on his quest for the novelization of the novelas a genre, a processfully and fluently expressed in Vanity Fair. With the help of a Bakhtinean concept, unfinalizability, this present paper is to explore how Thackeray achieves his uniqueness and unfinalizable characterization of Vanity Fair, ＂a Novel without a Hero,＂ where the novelist shuns away from fixation and finalization, and where there is no ultimate, determinate presence of idealized characters, and where all important personas have to mature in the world without God, and even to grow out of the fictionality, yet into the disclosure of the reality they all face.

在十九世紀英國小說家薩克萊的寫實小說世界裏，常可見其獨特的開放性（open-endedness）及未定特徵（unfinalizability）。薩克萊的小說，除了夾雜十八、十九世紀英國小說常現文體的特徵外，亦常以戲謔的口吻（parody），嘲諷當代小說的固化的敘述手法，乃至設置不同於當代作品的「開放性」結局（open-endedness）等等。這類寫作特徵，在其代表作《浮華世界》中更是明顯。例如，維多利亞時期，成長小說當道之時，小說篇末主角的成長，在在預示一切故事的結局，然而薩克萊小說中，篇末角色收尾，更常透露出他不滿於當時其他同代作品的處理方式，這也讓他的小說迥異於當代，獨樹一格。依巴赫汀的小說體制內更新理論（novelization）原理，薩克萊小說可視為驅動十九世紀英國小說文類改革的一股莫大力量。此篇文章探討的是薩克萊如何在其代表作《浮華世界》中，推進小說文類的更新，並從中確立他獨特的貢獻；並論述在這本「沒有英雄」的世界中，不只完美的角色、完美的結局、固定的成長等等，不曾在現實中存在，也讓我們見證寫實小說的角色，或許不單是活在虛擬的文學世界，也可以在從書中走出，活出作者的五指山。

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