抵抗強制表述：蕾切爾·卡斯克《輪廓》中的策略性 不透明與敘事裝配

Abstract

本論文主張，蕾切爾・卡斯克的《輪廓》形塑了一種創傷後的敘事形式，以抵抗我所謂的「強制表述」：亦即一種文化邏輯，將主體能否被承認，繫於其是否能以特定方式成為可敘事之存在，尤其是能否產出及時、連貫且源於自我的經驗敘述。這部小說並未描繪從無法言說的經驗走向救贖性自我陳述的發展軌跡，而是追問：當經驗尚未能為自我所聽見，更遑論能夠進入公共表述時，敘事能動性還能呈現為何種形式？在整部小說中，法伊並未以「強制表述」所要求的方式「找到自己的聲音」。相反地，她逐漸將離婚後非自願的失語狀態，轉化為「策略性不透明」：這是一種創作實踐，透過維持不透明性，並將他人的故事、物質表述、反覆出現的問題與省略編排成具備意義的形式，使法伊得以重新獲得自我可聽性。 本論文的核心貢獻在於指出，「強制表述」運作於兩個層面：首先是在「自我可聽性」的層面，創傷破壞了主體將自身遭遇登記為可敘事經驗的能力；其次是在「社會可讀性」的層面，延遲或隱晦的表達往往被病理化或抹除。為了理論化卡斯克所提供的替代形式，本論文將敘事學與簡・本內特的「活力唯物主義」以及愛德華・葛里桑的「不透明性」進行對話。我主張，《輪廓》以一位「可分體」敘事者取代了告白式主體；其能動性透過接收、調節與編排而浮現，其敘事實踐也更適合被理解為「敘事裝配」，而非自我揭露。 在此基礎上，本論文從句子、場景與整部小說的構成三個層面，追蹤此一敘事裝配的運作。在句子層面，卡斯克的自由間接引語作為一種「可分體句法」，使法伊得以進入、轉向並延伸他人的表述，讓借來的語言成為暫時支撐自我可聽性的鷹架。在場景層面，船隻、玻璃、高溫、室內空間與氛圍等物質元素，並不僅僅象徵內在狀態；它們也形塑了經驗得以變得可感、可聞的條件。在整部小說的結構層面，重複、省略與回顧性的構成，將分散的相遇聚合成一個輪廓，卻不填滿其中心。最終，本論文透過主張創傷後的能動性可能並非存在於告白之中，而是存在於聲音、事物與不透明性的模式化編排中——而這些是「強制表述」難以輕易聽見的——藉此對敘事學、創傷研究以及新唯物主義文學批評做出貢獻。

This thesis argues that Rachel Cusk’s Outline (2014) models an after-trauma narrative form that resists what I call compulsory articulation: the cultural logic that makes recognition depend on becoming narratable in particular ways, especially through timely, coherent, self-originating accounts of experience. Rather than charting a movement from unspeakable experience to redemptive self-account, the novel asks what narrative agency can look like when experience is not yet fully hearable to the self, let alone available for public articulation. Across the novel, Faye does not “find her voice” in the sense demanded by compulsory articulation. Instead, she gradually reworks unwilled post-trauma muteness into strategic opacity: a compositional practice through which Faye recovers self-audibility while maintaining opacity and arranging other people’s stories, material articulations, recurring questions, and omissions into meaningful form. A central contribution of the thesis is to show that compulsory articulation operates at two levels: first, at the level of self-audibility, where trauma disrupts one’s capacity to register what has happened to her; and second, at the level of social legibility, where delayed or oblique expression is either pathologized or erased. To theorise Cusk’s alternative, the thesis brings narratology into conversation with Jane Bennett’s vital materialism and Édouard Glissant’s opacity. I argue that Outline replaces the confessional subject with a dividual narrator whose agency emerges through receptivity, modulation, and arrangement, and whose narrative practice is better understood as narrative assemblage than as self-disclosure. In doing so, this thesis traces the narrative assemblage at the level of sentence, scene, and whole-novel composition. At the sentence level, Cusk’s free indirect discourse functions as a form of dividual syntax through which Faye enters, redirects, and extends the formulations of others, allowing borrowed language to become a provisional scaffold for self-audibility. At the scene level, material elements such as boats, glass, heat, interiors, and atmosphere help shape the conditions under which experience becomes perceptible. At the level of the whole novel, repetition, omission, and retrospective composition gather dispersed encounters into an outline without filling in its centre. Ultimately, the thesis contributes to narratology, trauma studies, and new materialist literary criticism by demonstrating how meaning and some form of survival can emerge from opacity and narrative assemblage, and that agency after trauma may reside not only in confession but also in the patterned arrangement of voices, things, and opacity that compulsory articulation cannot readily hear.