Abstract:

This essay reads Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) against the background of negative or apophatic theology and argues that it is unique among Johnson’s works in expressing a sense of life as an enigma. The silent or hidden symbol of the story is the Giza Sphinx, one of the foundational symbols of such theology: the second-century Church Father Clement of Alexandria, whose works Johnson owned, associated the enigmas of the Hebrew Bible with the mystery of the Egyptian sphinxes. More widely, Rasselas contains absent objects and symbols, enigmatic silences and responses, hidden images and paradoxes, self-defeating dualisms and habits of style, apophatic philosophy (“philosophy can tell no more”), and an enigmatic conclusion (“nothing”). The apophatic quality is embodied in the text through what Jorge Luis Borges refers to as Rasselas’s “agile music,” the subtle, flexible management of narrative voices, which generates a distinctive kind of attention in the reader.

摘要：

本文在否定或否认神学的背景下阅读塞缪尔·约翰逊的《拉塞拉斯》（Rasselas，1759），并认为它在约翰逊的作品中表达了一种神秘的生命感，这是独一无二的。这个故事的沉默或隐藏的象征是吉萨狮身人面像，它是这种神学的基本象征之一：二世纪的亚历山大教会神父克莱门特（约翰逊拥有他的著作）将希伯来圣经的谜团与埃及圣经的奥秘联系起来。狮身人面像。更广泛地说，拉塞拉斯包含了缺席的物体和符号、神秘的沉默和反应、隐藏的图像和悖论、弄巧成拙的二元论和风格习惯、冷漠的哲学（“哲学不能再说更多”）和一个神秘的结论（“什么都没有”） 。这种冷漠的品质通过豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯所说的拉塞拉斯的“敏捷音乐”体现在文本中，即对叙事声音的微妙、灵活的管理，这在读者中产生了一种独特的注意力。