Bolens Guillemette
Département de langue et littérature anglaises, Faculté des Lettres, Université de Genève, 5, rue De-Candolle, CH-1211 Genève 4.
Gesnerus. 2011;68(2):157-79.
This article grapples with the question of the corpse through two particular literary texts. Rather than an elucidation of the physiological principle of the human body by means of dissection, the play Mactatio Abel, written in England in the 15th century, stages the difficulty of the relation to the corpse, via an amplification of the biblical narrative of Abel's murder by Cain. As for Chaucer's work, The Book of the Duchess, it rewrites Ovid's and Machaut's texts featuring the figure of Morpheus in a way that distinguishes between an imitation of the living and its simulacrum in the sense Wolfgang Iser gives this concept. Chaucer's Morpheus, instead of promoting verisimilitude, forbids it. Indeed, he animates a corpse from within instead of simulating an apparition of the deceased. The simulacrum, rather than a mimetic copy of the real, blocks all representational illusion, in order to formulate absence. The readability of the corpse in both works is relational. Both literary texts express the corpse as being always already grounded in a relational and narratorial space.
本文通过两部特定的文学作品探讨了尸体的问题。15世纪在英国创作的戏剧《亚伯之杀》，并非通过解剖来阐释人体的生理原理，而是通过放大该隐谋杀亚伯的圣经叙事，展现了与尸体关系的难点。至于乔叟的作品《公爵夫人之书》，它以一种在沃尔夫冈·伊瑟尔赋予该概念的意义上区分活人的模仿与其幻影的方式，重写了奥维德和马肖特以梦神墨菲斯形象为特色的文本。乔叟笔下的墨菲斯并非促进逼真性，而是禁止它。事实上，他从内部赋予一具尸体以生气，而非模拟死者的幽灵。幻影并非对真实的模仿性复制，而是阻断了所有的表象幻觉，以便呈现缺失。这两部作品中尸体的可读性都是关联性的。这两部文学作品都将尸体表达为始终已然扎根于一个关联的叙事空间之中。
