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“DREAMING TRUE”: EMBODIED MEMORY, TRANSUBJECTIVITY, AND NOVELTY IN GEORGE DU MAURIER'SPETER IBBETSON
Victorian Literature and Culture ( IF 0.6 ) Pub Date : 2018-05-16 , DOI: 10.1017/s1060150318000050
Matthew Trammell

InConfessions of an EnglishOpium Eater(1821), Thomas De Quincey famously describes the mind as a palimpsest upon which inscribed memories are never truly lost to the passage of time. These memories, especially of childhood, lurk under the conscious surface of the mind, waiting to be rediscovered during intervals of intensified desultory memory that are made possible for De Quincey by opium-induced dreaming. Opium is utilized during these dreams as a perception-altering technology; memories of childhood are not only recalled while under the influence of the drug, but are revivified in a way that extends beyond the dreamer's normal mental capacity. The formulation of dreaming as a state in which memories buried under the palimpsest of time were retrieved and “relived” was important to a wide array of philosophers, medical doctors, and psychologists over the course of the long nineteenth century, culminating in Freud's seminalThe Interpretation of Dreamsin 1899. Alongside the theorization of ‘dream science’ in psychological and medical contexts, the Victorian literati provided their own contributions in both sensation novels and realist fiction. Reciprocally, as has been discussed in much recent work within Victorian studies, well-known characters and scenes from contemporary literature were often used to illustrate dream theories, neurological conditions, and philosophical conceptions of the self in scholarly journals and medical textbooks. The most fantastical literary treatment of dream space as a wholly separate realm within which the dreaming subject can fully recover and even surpass the sensations associated with earlier memories occurs in George Du Maurier's oft-overlookedPeter Ibbetson(1891). Over the course of the novel, the titular narrator reveals (inconsistently and in sometimes contradictory ways) dream space to be a world in which the habitual reliving of childhood events is an endlessly satisfying, novel, and strangely embodied experience for the protagonist and his lover, while also possessing connections to human evolutionary precursors and the afterlife. InPeter Ibbetson, habit is not the deadening enemy of novelty and experience that is so often portrayed in contemporary interpretations of Victorian literature. Rather, habit qua the mental technology of “dreaming true,” a form of intense, consciously-directed dreaming practiced by the novel's central characters, is paradoxically portrayed as a method by which the freshness of sensation associated with an original event can be endlessly recreated and even surpassed within a dream of that event. Contrary to twenty-first century depictions of dreams as events that help the subject to become habituated to emotional stresses, Du Maurier presents dreaming true as a practice that intensifies rather than inures the dreaming subject's emotional relationship to vivid or traumatic childhood events (Hartmann 2). Inherent in this reading is a radical formulation of the relationship between habit and novelty as understood in the late Victorian novel, revealing the generative power of habit that is disclosed within dream space.

中文翻译:

“梦想成真”:在乔治·杜莫里埃的《SPETER IBBETSON》​​中体现的记忆、超主观性和新颖性

一个英语的自白鸦片食者(1821 年),托马斯·德·昆西(Thomas De Quincey)着名地把心灵描述为一个写在上面的记忆永远不会真正随着时间流逝而消失的重写本。这些记忆,尤其是童年的记忆,潜伏在意识的表层之下,等待在鸦片诱发的梦境对德昆西来说变得可能的强化的断断续续记忆的间歇中被重新发现。在这些梦境中,鸦片被用作一种改变感知的技术。童年的记忆不仅在药物的影响下被回忆起来,而且以超出做梦者正常心理能力的方式被唤醒。梦的表述是一种状态,在这种状态下,埋藏在最简单的时间之下的记忆被检索和“重温”,这对许多哲学家、医生、梦的诠释1899 年。除了在心理和医学背景下将“梦想科学”理论化,维多利亚时代的文人在感觉小说和现实主义小说中都做出了自己的贡献。反过来,正如在维多利亚时代研究中的许多近期工作中所讨论的那样,当代文学中的著名人物和场景经常被用来说明学术期刊和医学教科书中的梦理论、神经系统疾病和自我的哲学概念。将梦空间作为一个完全独立的领域进行的最奇幻文学处理,在乔治杜莫里埃经常被忽视的作品中,做梦的主体可以完全恢复甚至超越与早期记忆相关的感觉。彼得·伊贝森(1891 年)。在小说的整个过程中,有名无实的叙述者揭示了(不一致,有时甚至是矛盾的方式)梦想空间是一个世界,在这个世界中,对童年事件的习惯性重温对于主人公和他的爱人来说是一种无尽的满足、新奇和奇异的体验。 ,同时还拥有与人类进化前身和来世的联系。在彼得·伊贝森, 习惯并不是维多利亚时代文学的当代诠释中经常描绘的新颖性和经验的死敌。相反,作为“梦想真实”的心理技术的习惯,一种由小说中心人物实践的强烈的、有意识的做梦形式,自相矛盾地被描述为一种方法,通过这种方法,与原始事件相关的新鲜感觉可以无休止地再现。甚至超越了梦寐以求的那件事。与 21 世纪将梦描述为帮助主体习惯于情绪压力的事件相反,Du Maurier 将梦境描述为一种实践,它强化而不是使做梦主体与生动或创伤性童年事件的情感关系变得牢固(Hartmann 2) .
更新日期:2018-05-16
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