摘 要：戈尔丁的作品多以揭示人性恶为主题。他在几部作品中都曾赋予主题人物以伴有幻象的癫痫症状。本文以其争议作品《黑暗昭昭》中邪恶代表苏菲的癫痫表现为研究对象，试图探讨这种伴有幻象的癫痫症状与主题揭示之间的关系。
关键词：人性恶主题；伴有幻象的癫痫症状；主题揭示；苏菲
Theory of Hysteria
In his Studies on Hysteria, Freud elaborates it that many neuroses have their origins in deeply traumatic experiences which have occurred in the past experience of the patient which are now forgotten, omitted from consciousness. Hysteria is the unconscious operation of the memories that causes the trauma. Only when the incidents are repressed can they recur in the form of hysterical signs. In his theory the event that stimulates the symptoms itself is not the original cause, but just a reference to a deeper root. While for Freud what this “trigger” activates is not a hereditary predisposition, but rather the infantile experience. Based on this sense, Freud writes in The Aetiology of Hysteria, “The aetiology of hysteria is situational instead of genetic or physical.” He lead the research of hysteria from a physiological one toward broaching the possibility that is a social disease.
In Darkness Visible, Sophy’s hysteria is different from the ones in the clinical sense. It has hallucination with the fit of hysteria. Their hallucination intertwines with symptoms of hysteria and speak directly for the root of hysteria— evil nature of man. Hysteria and hallucination were highly interwoven in the Sophy’s experiences and explain for each other.
Sophy’s Manifestation of Hysterical Hallucination
Similar to Simon in Lord of the Flies, Sophy suffers from hysteria from time to time, meanwhile, her hysteria breaks out simultaneously with hallucination. The symptoms grow step by step with her strengthening desire for evil.
Sophy’s performance of hysterical hallucination is in her waiting for the kidnapped boy in the excitement of triumph. Then and there she sees the fire of explosion. Before she sees the boy, she falls into her own hysterical hallucination. She fulfilled her desire to hurt through the sadistic abuse on the little boy.
She laid the point of the knife on his skin and finding it to be the right place, pushed it a bit so that it pricked…So she thrust more still and felt it touch the leaping thing or be touched by it again and again while the body exploded with convulsions and a high humming came out of the nose. She thrust with all the power there was, deliriously; and the leaping thing inside seized the knife so that the haft beat in her hand, and there was a black sun…She was trembling with the passion of the mock murder (252). What she desires is not money or sex, but the pure feeling of “the deep, fierce, hurting need, desire” through sadistic actions.
Repression from Counterpart—The Reason of Sophy’s Hysteria
According to Freud’s theory of hysteria, the necessary condition for hysteria is repression. In this intensively symbolic story, Sophy is not repressed literally but in a highly symbolic way. The repression from Sophy’s counterpart could be the explanation for her symptoms of hysteria. This thesis maintains that Sophy, as the avatar of darkness and evil, is repressed in the structure of binary opposition by the incarnation of “light”—Matty. Both of Sophy’s repression and hysteria are highly symbolized in her binary relationship with Matty.
Taking into account of the structure of this novel, Golding portrays two characters who live primarily in a spiritual dimension and at opposite poles from each other. The first section is called “Matty”, the second section “Sophy” and the last part “One is One”. This structure lays the binary opposition between Sophy and Matty. Sophy’s development strikingly parallels Matty’s in several particular episodes. Their parallelism starts from their first killing. Just as Matty shows spiritual powers and causes Henderson’s death by throwing a shoe, Sophy’s spiritual powers are evident in her throwing the stone that kills the dabchick. The incident presents itself to her “as if it were a possibility chosen out of two, both presented, both fore-ordained from the beginning” (Golding 108), involving “a sort of silent do as I tell you” (ibid.). Besides, Matty has a two-toned face, and there are two Sophys, one presenting a fair face to the world while the other sitting at a black tunnel inside her own head. Their parallelism is also reflected in their directions of pursuit. As she grows up, Sophy, like Matty, learns to understand that the pursuit of purity and simplicity, whether it to be good or evil, makes enormous demands. “Slight violation of the rule is not enough” (Dick 134). Sophy realizes that one must “hunger and thirst after weirdness” (137). The inversion of the biblical injunction marks a turning point in Sophy’s pursuit of weirdness. At the same time, Matty receives the decisive call to start his mission when he contemplates the scrying glass. In old English, “weirdness” means “fate”. Both Sophy and Matty see the future in a similar way, even being able to shape it to some extent. As Don Crompton points out, “［i］f Matty’s element is fire, Sophy’s is water” (129), they form the binary structure in the spiritual sphere In a section drawing heavily on the Apocalypse of St John, the two parallels converged. When Sophy lies to people in Wandicott School, Matty recognizes that Sophy is to be identified with the Whore of Babylon—provocative, tempting, and very much to be feared. The book comes full circle when Matty rushes from the burning school ablazed all through to rescue the child abducted by Sophy’s band. Sophy, on the other hand, is seized by her climax of sadistic killing of the boy in her hysterical hallucination. At the end of their parallelism, Matty destroys Sophy’s plan and dies as a burning offering in the fire, while Sophy is gripped by an uncontrollable fit of hysteria in which she bitterly recognizes that not only she has been thwarted of her prey, but also deserted by her lover for her sister Toni. Conclusion
What is significant is that, even at the end of Matty’s life, he does not know who is behind the scheme. He just knows that he has to rescue the boy. Likewise, Sophy knows that her plan is interrupted without knowing who does it. Their fight is unworldly and elemental instead of personal. Thus it is clear that in this binary structure, Sophy, a highly spiritualized and elementalized darkness, is under the repression from the light — Matty.
Golding illuminates his theme of evil by utilizing Freud’s theory of hysteria metaphysically and symbolically. That is to say, Sophy’s source for hysterical symptoms is from the repression of goodness and light in her binary opposition to Matty. The spiritual repression from the binary opposition must find a vent to release itself in the physical hysteria. The black stains on the book and ideas about black tunnel function as the psychological incentive factors or “trigger” (Freud 109) to let out the real and dark nature of Sophy. Once the evil Sophy, also called “This” by the girl, releases itself from the back of her head in hysterical hallucination, she appears as the sheer incarnation of evil full of hatred, violence and malice. She acquires a sense of gratification through the anguished responses when the boy is tortured to death. Thus in Darkness Visible, it is clear that Golding endows the evil of man’s nature a shape of dark Sophy and releases it in Sophy’s hysterical hallucination.
［Works cited］
［1］Freud, Sigmund. “Aetiology of Hysteria”. Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. New York: Hogarth Press Ltd, 1962.
［2］Golding, William. Darkness Visible, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007.
［3］Gregor, Ian and Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. “The Later Golding”, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol.28, No.2, William Golding Issue, Hofstra University, 1982.