從吳爾芙的《燈塔行》看自我追尋之旅

Virginia Woolf is obsessed with the concept of the self. Woolf is always struggling between the impossibility of picturing the self and the infinite possibilities of doing so. In To the Lighthouse, such an obsession of Woolf's is materialized by Lily Briscoe in the form of quest. The quest at heart is about how to balance the opposite elements in lived experience. As an artist, Lily begins her quest for subjectivity with the contemplation on Mrs. Ramsay, who represents beauty, eternity, and authority. In the process of the quest, Lily goes through a series of negotiation between paternal and maternal influences, through which she learns how to mark a position of her own in the web of human relationships. Woolf's concern with the self recalls Julia Kristeva's emphasis on the subjectivity. Subjectivity is a controlling idea in Kristeva's theories. Her signification is the theory of subjectivity, which explores the interrelation between a speaking being, language, and reality. For Kristeva, the formation of a subject is forever carried out in a never-ending dialectical oscillation between the two signifying elements: the semiotic and the symbolic. Kristeva's theory highlights the necessity of crisis in the process of subject enunciation, for crisis opens up unlimited possibilities of looking at the self, at reality. Similarly, Lily's search for who I am is a literary reminder of Kristeva's concept of subject-in-process. Lily's portrait of Mrs. Ramsay is ultimately the medium of self-fashioning, a form of self-expression. As Kristeva's signification reminds us, Lily is bound to encounter psychological crisis in the process of asserting herself in life, in profession, but all the contradictory aspects of the lived moments would be reshuffled and organized into a new totality, waiting for the next critical moment to arise.