对《爱的痛苦》的叙事研究

Abstract：Space is marginalized for a long time in the study of literature when it is treated as insignificant background information. This paper argues that space not only construct the general background of the story, but also participates in shaping the characters, promoting the progress of narration, and revealing the theme in “Pangs of love”. The four spaces described in the short story will be analyzed one by one from a narratological perspective, and may provide a new way to look at the narration of the story of “Pangs of Love”.

Key words：space；disillusion；American dream

Literature narration was long regarded as an art of time, and many types of literature such as sagas, legends and epics areoften constructed in a chronological order. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing separated narrative literature, which he defined as "temporal" art, from "spatial" art like painting and sculpture. Moreover, in pre-modern literatures, space only functions as a general background setting, which requires little attention.

This imbalance of space and time in narrative is not challenged until the "spatial turn" in literature and social science since the 1940s. The "spatial turn" is not a sudden revolution but a gradual emphasis on the constructive function of space in narrative and human life. Some famous modern fictionists, of which the most prominent is Henry James, employed the images of spatial art in their works, and called attention to space’s function in constructing a plot.

Today, space is well-recognized as an important technique for both writers and critics. Space contains the story space where the story-internal characters live and move, the discourse space where the narrator tells the story, and the imaginary space of memories and expectations. These spaces intertwine in a thematic order to construct characters, promote the narrative process and reveal the theme.

The narration of "Pangs of Love" bounces from present to past, therefore it’s pointless trying to categorize the events in a chronological order. However the story is connected by the narrator’s movement from one place to another, in which the physical spaces triggers the mental spaces.

The narration starts in the apartment the narrator shares with his mother. It is centered on the TV set and the couch, the rest of the apartment is not mentioned. This suggests the core of their mother-son relationship is the time they spend together on the couch. However, when the mother and the son sit on the same couch, their minds cannot be more separated. They have different sources of information and therefore different understanding of the world. The narrator thinks“the prattle that fills the airwaves”(Louie, 1992：248) will wither the brains of people who watch them, and the news contains the horrible truth of the world. The binary opposition of TV and newspaper suggests the conflict of illusion and reality, so narrator wavers from scattering his mother’s false happiness and protecting her from the real world. The narrator’s ambivalence is shown in the bouncing of his sight from TV to the couch.

The next day the narrator goes to work and the office constructs the second physical space. The Japanese boss and his command to change a musk, which the narrator takes as a symbol of he and Mandy’s love, make the office a living hell. The narrator is desperate to run away, so he indulges himself in a mental space full of reminiscence, where he and Mandy are happily in love. The juxtaposition of mental spaces and the physical spaces creates a contrast between fantasy and reality, intensifies the conflict of illusion and reality. It shows how difficult it is for the narrator to identify with the real life. At the end, when the fantasy fades away, the narrator plaints：“It is a sad day for love, Mandy, everywhere.” (Louie, 1992：255)

After work, the narrator takes on a road trip to visit his brother Billy with Mrs. Ping and his rebound girlfriend Deborah. Mrs. Ping“seems out of place in a car, near machines, a woman from another culture, of another time,”(Louie, 1992：259) because the commercial, mechanical America is not the natural habitant for her. This triggers the mental space of the narrator having a rebound sex with Deborah and Mrs. Ping walks in the room. Mrs.Ping wants a daughter-in-law who is somewhat Chinese-like, and the relationship between the narrator and Deborah threatens her expectations, thus intensifies the conflict of illusion and reality.

When they arrived at Billy’s house, they are overwhelmed by the whiteness of the house, a symbol of Billy’s painstaking effort to bleach his yellowness and assimilate in the white world. In the living room, the characters formed into two groups： Mrs. Ping on the easy chair and the rest on the sofa. They exclude Mrs. Ping the way American society excludes minority groups―they think she is inferior. Then the narrator and Mrs. Ping move to Billy’s bedroom, where they watch a wrestle game. Here again is they are in front of a TV, and the narrator finally tells Mrs. Ping that her hope Mandy will come back is impossible and crushes this crushes her illusion of happiness.“I’ve robbed my mother of her pleasure,or her flimsy faith in Americans, in America, and in me.” (Louie, 1992：270) The conflict of illusion and reality is solved with the triumphant of reality, making American dream a nightmare.

The construction of multidimensional spaces in“Pangs of Love”is part of the structure of the narration and it provides a new perspective to understand the characters and the theme of the story.

参考文献：

［1］ 龙迪勇.空间叙事学［D］.上海师范大学博士学位论文，2008.

［2］ 申丹，王亚丽.西方叙事学：经典与后经典［M］.北京：北京大学出版社，2010.

作者简介：罗姒妤(1990―)，云南大学外国语学院英语语言文学专业硕士研究生在读，研究方向：美国二战后小说。