Empson the Space Man: Literary Modernism Makes the Scalar Turn

摘要

In my essay, I document how the literary modernist critic and poet, William Empson (1906–1984), modeled his theoretical positions in the decades following the Second World War upon precedents found in the English Renaissance poetry of John Donne. After 1955, Empson emerged as a leading skeptic of literary “high” modernism by means of the novel analogy argued in his essay, “Donne the Space Man” (1957): namely, that literary depictions of space in Donne’s early poetry, athwart high Church doctrine, paralleled contemporary skepticism, in Empson’s own time, about interpretive orthodoxies within Eliotic criticism and among the American New Critics. With its focus upon what he calls “space travel,” Empson’s exegesis in “Donne the Space Man” (1957) pioneered what today one may call the scalar turn in literary modernist criticism. In Empson’s case, a scalar criticism endorsed Donne’s search for a more generous plurality of critical worlds and embraced cosmological scale irreducible to the more dogmatic worldview of Christian-inspired theorizations then prevailing. Re-reading the “Donne the Space Man” essay today – and when applying approaches inspired by the phenomenology of the contemporary built environment, object-oriented ontology, and unseen “lifeworlds” – allows for a more meaningful treatment of Empson’s criticism in its historical context, and when using scale as an heuristic to broaden our understandings of cosmologies, near and far, vastly different from our own.中文摘要本文记载了二战后的几十年中，文学现代主义评论家及诗人威廉·燕卜蓀（1906-1984）如何基于约翰·唐璜文艺复兴诗中所载先例构建自身的理论立场。1955年后，燕卜蓀通过其论文“太空人唐璜”（1957）中的新颖对比，以文学高度现代主义的怀疑者姿态出现：即尽管受到教堂教条的高压阻扰，唐璜早期诗歌中太空的文学化描写与燕卜蓀所处时代的怀疑论相似，两者都对艾略特似批评内部及美国新批评主义中的阐释正统心存疑虑。其论文“太空人唐璜”（1957）集中探讨其所谓的“太空旅行”，由此开辟了我们现今所谓的文学现代主义批评标量化转向的先锋。在燕卜蓀的讨论中，一种标量化批评支撑着唐璜寻找一种更为广阔多样化批评世界的动力，并且采用了一种宇宙标量化模式。此模式无法还原更为教条化的基督教式理论化的世界观，虽然后者在当时很流行。现今重读此文，并结合当代建筑环境现象学、以目标为导向的本体论及不可见的“生命世界”等启发下的方式，让我们得以更有意义地理解当时历史语境下燕卜蓀的批评。再者，亦可以借助标量来拓宽我们理解宇宙的探索，不管这样的世界是远还是近，是否与我们自己的相同。