ABSTRACT

This essay argues that Colm Tóibín’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Blackwater Lightship (1999) juxtaposes the AIDS crisis with our currently-unfolding and similarly life-destroying environmental crisis. Both AIDS and climate change wreak their havoc largely on marginalized groups, both are murderous “pandemics” to which the first-world elite (at least initially) turns a blind eye and the “cure” for both was/is a long time in the making. AIDS – like climate change today – once betokened veritable apocalypse. Formerly misunderstood as an unknowable plague producing a proliferation of zombified bodies, HIV is now recognized as treatable. For Tóibín’s Declan, an AIDS-related condition thins his body, the description of which shares a vocabulary with Tóibín’s similarly-eroding Irish coastline, made so by rising sea levels. In making him a double for the Irish coast, Tóibín mobilizes Declan’s illness to respond hopefully to the environmental crisis currently upon us.

摘要

这篇文章认为，科尔姆·托宾 (Colm Tóibín) 的布克奖入围小说《黑水灯船》( The Blackwater Lightship)(1999) 将 AIDS 危机与我们目前正在展开的、同样摧毁生命的环境危机并列。艾滋病和气候变化都在很大程度上对边缘化群体造成严重破坏，两者都是第一世界精英（至少在最初）对此视而不见的凶残“大流行病”，而这两者的“治愈”在制作。艾滋病——就像今天的气候变化一样——曾经预示着名副其实的世界末日。以前被误解为一种不可知的瘟疫，会导致僵尸身体的扩散，而现在人们认为 HIV 是可以治疗的。对于 Tóibín 的 Declan 来说，与艾滋病相关的疾病使他的身体变瘦，这种描述与 Tóibín 因海平面上升而受到同样侵蚀的爱尔兰海岸线共享一个词汇。让他成为爱尔兰海岸的替补，