都市意識的繪製：論《卡薩瑪斯瑪公主》中的印象與景觀

Abstract

亨利•詹姆斯的城市書寫同時蘊含可讀性與不可讀性：可讀的是脈絡清晰的街景，而隱藏於如圖畫似的街景之下的心理意識總是難以梳理。《卡薩瑪斯瑪公主》是詹姆斯呈現倫敦全貌最為詳盡的一部著作。詹姆斯以憐憫的眼光觀看倫敦，他筆下的街景主題往往同時記錄了愉悅與焦慮，富裕與貧窮，以及都市中潛在的可能性與不可能性。透過都市意識與心理痕跡的描寫，詹姆斯的角色塑造消弭了可讀性與不可讀性的矛盾與衝突，也反映了城市觀看者的多元意識。《卡薩瑪斯瑪公主》中的海辛斯與米莉森，即是詹姆斯對於現代倫敦的縈心之念：經由不同的觀看視角，不同的內在意識，詹姆斯在倫敦觀看者身上刻劃出「印象」與「景觀」兩種都市再現方式，既相異卻又彼此糾纏，更深切顯露出都市空間繪製主體意識的複雜與細膩。

Henry James’s writings of city register a blueprint of precise cityscapes as the effable and generate a production of psychological mediations within large picture-sque appearances as the ineffable. These two expressions find no contradiction in each other since they have been incorporated in James’s specific characters whose urban consciousness and mental investments are concerned with such a labyrinthine-metropolis. The Princess Casamassima is James’s most comprehensive, most sensitive and most encompassing pictures of London. Hardly giving a totalizing recognition of urban landscapes, James renders London primarily as “an origin of consciousness,” in reflection of both the underlying social and psychological preoccupations of its spectators. With a sympathetic eye, James addresses essential themes and scenes of pleasure and anxiety, wealth and poverty, possibilities and impossibilities for a way to encounter a spatial expression of social relationships. In The Princess Casamassima, there are two kinds of spectatorship: impression and spectacle. The male protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, experiences bewilderment as part of becoming fascinated by a modern world since his consciousness is greatly impressed as receptive to the unfathomable material culture. The modern girl, Millicent Henning, distinctively acquaints herself with those disquieting yet intoxicating images in regard to discontinuities of commodity spectacles while appropriating interpersonal relationships. Highlighting these two characters and their particular spectatorship, this paper aims to investigate that how James’s two modes of urban visions, impression and spectacle, are intertwined and scrutinized to reveal distinguished consciousnesses profoundly possessed by and simultaneously reflecting the urban space.