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THE HYDE WE LIVE IN: STEVENSON, EVOLUTION, AND THE ANTHROPOGENIC FOG
Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2018-03-26 , DOI: 10.1017/s1060150317000389
Pascale McCullough Manning

In multiple entries in his notebooks, Robert Louis Stevenson pauses to consider the failure of scientific language to communicate the abstractions that undergird its theoretical models of natural processes. In failing to make the operations of the physical world speak, materialist discourse suffers from a terminological disorder. His diagnosis is sweeping and acerbic: “Scientific language like most other language is extremely unsatisfactory” (“Note Book” 300). In what follows I will argue that over the course of several key essays of the 1880s and his most famous work of fiction, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Stevenson aims to redress the fundamental abstraction of the most prominent materialist doctrine of his day, Darwinian evolutionary theory, rendering it viscerally communicable in the figure of Hyde, who represents both the individual organism subject to the pervasive modifying forces of speciation and the embodiment, in a single yet fluctuating corporeal entity, of those very forces. Further to this, I will propose that in imagining Hyde's genesis at the laboratory table (the result of Jekyll's incursions into nature) and in placing Hyde in symbiosis with the London fog (the admixture of natural forces and human intervention in the form of the burning of fossil fuels), Strange Case can be added to the body of literature that hails the dawning of the Anthropocene, famously defined by Paul Crutzen as the “human-dominated geological epoch supplementing the Holocene” in which the human has become “a major environmental force” (23). The figure of Hyde thus manifests evolutionary forces in all their teeming presence while also harkening the new forms of subjectivity emerging from our catastrophic agency in the present era – one in which the human has become, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, a “geophysical force” (13).

中文翻译:

我们生活的海德:史蒂文森、进化和人为雾

在他的多个条目中在笔记本中,罗伯特路易斯史蒂文森停下来思考科学语言未能传达支撑其自然过程理论模型的抽象概念。唯物主义话语未能使物理世界的运作说话,因此遭受了术语混乱的困扰。他的诊断是全面而尖刻的:“像大多数其他语言一样,科学语言极其不令人满意”(“笔记本”300)。在接下来的内容中,我将论证在 1880 年代的几篇关键论文和他最著名的小说作品中,杰基尔博士和海德先生的奇怪案例(1886 年),史蒂文森旨在纠正他那个时代最突出的唯物主义学说的基本抽象,即达尔文进化论,使其在海德的形象中具有内在的交流性,他既代表个体有机体,又代表受物种形成的普遍改变力量和这些力量的体现,在一个单一但波动的有形实体中。除此之外,我将建议在实验室餐桌上想象海德的起源(杰基尔入侵自然的结果)并将海德与伦敦雾共生(自然力量和人类干预以燃烧形式的混合)化石燃料),奇案可以添加到欢呼人类世曙光的文献中,著名的保罗克鲁岑将其定义为“补充全新世的人类主导的地质时代”,其中人类已成为“主要的环境力量”(23)。因此,海德的形象在其大量存在中体现了进化力量,同时也捕捉到了当今时代从我们的灾难性机构中出现的新形式的主体性——用迪佩什·查克拉巴蒂的话来说,人类已经成为一种“地球物理力量” ”(13)。
更新日期:2018-03-26
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