不知道

可能还有，鬼知道

Haze’s unknown name and truth, which pertains to emotional feelings, has its essences in his body. His “theorization” of truth as mere words and nothingness is evidently in conflict with that truth’s corporeal origin. Consequently, his attempted representation and naming of the Thing becomes repetitive rhetoric exercises masquerading real melancholic pain. In Haze’s preaching, truth was first associated with the name of blasphemy, then it denotes the nonexistence of Jesus, and finally it is named “nothingness.” By so doing, Haze denies the substantiality of emotions and feelings. He moreover performs a suicidal act to erase his own name through transferring his body and life to the “unfeeling” car he owns and with which he kills Solace Layfield.

In his adventures in Taulkinham, Haze encounters various people and things that he thinks can replace the name of his Jesus/mother combination, and ultimately, the Thing itself. For example, on the train to Taulkinham, the black porter triggers Haze’s nostalgia for the old and familiar, but his naming problem becomes evident. Whereas the porter tells Haze that he is from Chicago, Haze insists that he is a “Parrum nigger from Eastrod” (CW5): “I remember you. Your father was a nigger named Cash Parrum. You can’t go back there neither, nor anybody else, not if they wanted to.” (CW9) The northern porter’s cold response to him provokes him to withdraw back into memories of Eastrod. Haze also sourly tells his fellow passenger Mrs. Hitchcock, “I am going to do some things I never had done before” (CW5). However, Haze’s self-proclaimed desire to invent an absolute name as his truth is superficial. Hedesires to do nothing of a constructive nature but to re-experience familiar and safe names and meanings in an unfamiliar surroundings.

The first naming practice Haze does in Taulkinham concerns the prostitute Mrs. Watt. Mrs. Watts is a maternal figure with some mock similarities to Jesus. Haze sees her name and address in a public toilet saying that her place is “the friendliest bed in town” (CW16), and the description suits his craving for “a private place to go to.” (CW15) Mrs. Watts transiently triggers his good emotional memories of his mother and Eastrod, and the narrator underscores her affinity with Haze’s mother: “She seemed just as glad to see him as if he had been an old friend but she didn’t say anything.” (CW18) Mrs. Watts also perceives Haze’s vain pursuit for a name. She frightens him with her question- “You huntin’ something”, indicating that he is emotionally disturbed. Moreover, Haze even attempts to replace Jesus/mother with Mrs. Watts. After being irritated by Asa Hawks, he for the first time proclaims in the open public that he peaches the truth which has nothing to do with Jesus; he says to the curious people gathering around him that “I don’t need Jesus…What do I need with Jesus? I got Leora Watts.” (CW31)

The second person Haze tries to substitute Jesus with is the charlatan blind preacher Asa Hawks. Haze is obsessed with Hawks because he evokes a combination of his grandfather and the familiar terrifying Jesus the old man preached. Sensing their kinship, Haze expects some emotional connection with him, even in ways that he assumes would irritate him. Hawks also provides a prospect of renaming the lost Thing. Haze therefore covertly desires to receive instructions from him about the ultimate name he thinks they are both after. In order to approach Hawks, he moves into the house where Hawks lives and knocks on his door daily. He assumes that he could receive certain enlightenment through looking into Hawks’ eyes behind his dark glasses. Haze’s need for Hawks is so dramatic that when he dreams of being alive in his car, “He kept expecting Hawks to appear at the oval window with a wrench” (CW92).

Like Mrs. Watts, Hawks also perceives Haze’s craze for Jesus. And Hawks rightly conjectures that Haze is oscillating between finding a new name for his Thing and sticking to old nameless emotional pain. He says that some “preacher has left his mark on” Haze, and asks him, “Did you follow for me to take it off or give you another one?” (CW28). When the old man claims that he has committed “fornication and blasphemy”, Haze replies that “There ain’t nothing but words” (CW29). Despite his real belief otherwise, Haze suggests to Hawks that names are just empty signifiers.

The fake prophet Hawks is perceptive again in pointing out Haze’s lack of affectivity, and outwits him in attributing inaccessible meaning to his blindness. He says, “I can see more than you…You got eyes and see not, ears and hear not, but you’ll have to see some time.” (CW30) As such, blindness becomes for Haze the ultimate truth that can take the place of Jesus. Haze begins to see blindness as the very name and substance of the meaning awaiting him. Although he is incapable of inferring how blindness could enhance his sensory perceptions and help him approach truth, he passively concludes that blindness is the lost Thing. Finally Haze steals into Hawks’ room, only to discover that the latter’s blindness is feigned. As Hawks’ religious facade is shattered, he can no more represent the ideal name Haze imagines. So, Haze’s pursuit of naming is again thwarted.

Haze’s car, the Essex, is another substitute of the Jesus/mother combination. The car supposedly embodies an idealized state of peace free of anxiety and guilt for Haze. It enables Haze to emulate Hawks’ life style as a wandering preacher possessing considerable religious authority yet needing to submit to little sociality. He unconsciously regards the Essex to be the name for his ideal good Thing; and its speed assumedly facilitates the quest for meanings. The car is remindful of symbiosis with the good maternal object because of its demand for no reparation from the child for any moral lapse. It creates an illusion of infantile narcissistic omnipotence, which allows for anarchistic freedom and disregard for law. Therefore, after crushing Solace Layfield with his car, despite its weak condition, Haze says to the boy at the filling station that “the car is just beginning its life” (CW116).

Haze purchases the Essex to bury himself in its empty shelterin the name of freedom and individuality. The Essex is temporarily regarded by him as the incarnation of the body of his Jesus/mother combination. Nevertheless, Haze’s attachment to the car reflects a central contradiction in his pursuit of names and meanings, namely, the car simultaneously symbolizes meaning and non-meaning. Despite its fixed name, the Essex suggests instability and fragmentation of meanings. For example, when Haze drives the car, he senses the fragmentation of his familiar emotional meanings: “He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.” (CW42)

Whereas Haze is abnormally keen on locating an absolute meaning for the name he thinks he is after, he is afraid of the name and meaning’s potential fixation and immobility once they are pinpointed. O’Connor writes, “The car is a kind of death-in-life in life symbol” for Haze (MM72). The mode of death she refers to can be understood to be emotional death, or loss of self-affectivity experienced by severe depressed persons. Since the potential establishment of a stabilized name would reveal important contents of Haze’s depressed background feelings to himself, as well as a host of emotional memories screened by the mind’s defensive mechanism, Haze unconsciously desires to evade any names that can signify his Thing.

He does not dare to confront the real traumatic memories of his mother and the demonic Jesus, nor can he endure the massive anxiety following every discovery of his dormant guilt, grief and fear. Haze yearns for perpetualized indeterminacy of names, which naturally eliminates any emotional self-discoveries. By so doing, he expects to be forever insulated from his emotional reality and new negative emotional arousal, which would remind him of his “abnormality.”

Indeed, Haze almost longs for emotional death in spite of what he thinks he intends to do. After all, manic-depression and its pathological implications may be the forbidden name and meanings that Haze denies to himself, and to the few people he meets. Hence, Haze’s apparently ambitious journey is built upon an unbridgeable conflict: accompanied by every endeavor on Haze’s part to construct a name capable of signifying his disordered background feelings, there is a counter-endeavor to deconstruct such a name and its possible meanings.

The Essex precisely offers a medium of deconstructing names and meanings.The car’s machine quality offers him a strong defensive mechanism against external emotional assaults deemed to be the revenge of the demonic Jesus and depressed mother in his childhood memories, and it serves as a shell that hampers guilty feelings to be outwardly displaced. The car is therefore a vessel of affective death beneath the veneer of autonomy. Like an artificial body of blindness which is always ready for departure and deviation, the weapon-like car muffles Haze’s sensitivity to external temporality and spaciality, thereby satisfying his desire to be fixed in no place, but in eternal exile. Ultimately, Haze’s possibility of translating depressed emotions into language is also aborted.

However, the Essex’s easy destruction by the enigmatic policeman breaks Haze’s “deconstructive” effort. Its mechanic defense is revealed to be extremely vulnerable to external intrusion, and it even reminds one of dismembered bodies:

The patrolman got behind the Essex and pushed it over the embankment and the cow stumbled up and galloped across the field and into the woods; the buzzard flapped off to a tree at the edge of the clearing. The car landed on its top, with the three wheels that stayed on spinning. The motor bounced out and rolled some distance away and various odd pieces scattered this way and that. (CW118)

Destroying the car using violence, the policeman annuls the car’s empty name and reduces it to mechanical carcass. He radically mocks Haze’s doctrines for his new Church that everything is insubstantial and merely fluid words. As such, the Essex ceases to be a sanctuary for painless emotional death embraced by the depressed Haze. Its fragmentation bears striking resemblance to the emotional body fatally ruined by unexpected affective disturbance, and its consequence is incurable emotional chaos, and utter mental breakdown.

The maimed car is an exemplar of human body’s frailties, and more specifically, the frailties of human emotions. Just as Haze cannot deny his corporeal reality, he can neither resist his own emotions, which causes him irrefutably real pain as long as he is alive. The policeman, as O’Connor’s typical demonic messenger, literally “deconstructs” the Essex’s dual functions for Haze: to weave out a part of his emotional life and then disentangle it. By transforming the car from a thing into a body, the policeman shows Haze the fallacy of the nihilism he preaches.

Moreover, the Essex’s destruction attests to the devastating consequence of the refusal to transpose affects into symbolic signs. It is not surprising that accompanied by every endeavor on Haze’s part to construct a narrative medication, there is a counter-endeavor to deconstruct such a potential narrative solution. Haze is unable to express the malady that plagues him. In the night on the train to Taulkinham, Haze feels undistinguished from his similarly depressed mother. Then he blurts out to the indifferent porter: “I’m sick!...I can’t be closed up in this thing. Get me out!” (8) Although Haze fails to name the berth that resembles a coffin in his hallucination, this enigmatic “thing” is in effect equivalent to his melancholic black sun. He tries to replace the “thing” with prayer, but later rejects his belief in Jesus to the driver and Mrs. Watts. As such, Haze’s statements endeavoring at conceptual replacement is even less consistent than his most impulsive words—“I’m sick!”, which, of course, is not effective neither.

Haze’s philosophical contemplation, heavily marked by deconstruction, is rebuked by the policeman who destroys the car and says, ‘Them that don’t have a car, don’t need a license’ (118). The visual and verbal “medicine” the policeman as psychiatrist offers is a simple concept wrapped up in a hermeneutic maze. He implies that whereas language is not necessary for the body without feelings, it is crucial for the feeling human. But the deliverance of this knowledge, for all its dramatic appearance, backfires in its own self-gratifying violence.

Haze’s linguistic transposition in terms of his Thing always ceases to progress at the threshold of the name of Jesus/mother. No linguistic symbols can be further translated beyond this name. Even this name, as we can see from Haze’s various attempts to evade Jesus and confine his mother and her different embodiments, is highly subjected to affective impoverishment. And more than once, the name is almost equated by Haze with different objects, and the mother is especially imagined to be concrete objects and animals; as a result, the name of Jesus/mother does not possess symbolic functions, but merely serves an imaginary purpose.

Being imaginary means that the Jesus/mother combination can be associated with anything Haze desires as long as it does not reach his real source of melancholy. So, Haze assumes that he can indulge in emotional invulnerability while toying with volatile names and meanings that appears and disappears at will. The destruction of the car exactly presents us with the peril of pure imagination: without a symbolically stabilized reference, imagination alone is deceptive.

懒得加了~~