واكاوي مفهوم «كازموپسيس» با رويكرد پيرونيستي در رمان پايان راه اثر جان بارت

جان بارت را مي­توان احيا گر فلسفه پيرونيسم در حيطه ادبيات پسامدرن آمريكا در قرن بيستم دانست. او با خلق شخصيت­هاي پيرونيستي به انتقاد از نظام ارزشي در آمريكا پرداخته و اساسا زندگي بي مايه و پوچ انسان را در قرن بيستم دست مايه اثر خويش قرار مي­ دهد. پايان راه نمونه اي است موفق از استحاله مفهوم قهرمان به ضد قهرمان كه در آن شخصيت­ها در جدال با واقعيات شكننده زندگي از نوعي اختلال رواني بنام «كازموپسيس» رنج مي ­برند. دسيدوفوبيا يا ترس از تصميم گيري كه ناشي از تغيير جهان بيني اين افراد است موجب شده آنها به نوعي جعل هويت تحت عنوان «اسطوره درماني» پناه ببرند. از ديگر سو توصيف بارت از سرگشتگي چنين انساني منطبق با تعريف عقلانيت در فلسفه پيرونيسم است. از اينرو، پرسش اصلي تحقيق اينگونه تبيين مي­ شود كه انديشه بارت با وجود همسو بودن با پسامدرنيسم ادبي و گرايش­هاي فلسفۀ جديد كه از سوي دكارت و هيوم مطرح شد در حقيقت تجسمي است از شكاكيت پيرونيستي كه در اعصار و قرون مختلف به صور گوناگون جلوه گر شده و شكلي تكاملي به خود گرفته است. نويسندگان ضمن بررسي ريشه­ هاي تاريخي ترديدگرايي و سير تحول آن تا پيداش فلسفه پسامدرن بر­­آنند تا دغدغه ­هاي بارت را نيز در باب بحران هويت و اصالت معني تشريح نمايند. اين پژوهش با تمركز بر رمان پايان راه در نهايت نشان مي ­دهد كه بارت بشر را بگونه اي تصويرسازي مي­ كند كه در تصميمات خويش بيشتر از آنكه تابع دلايل عقلي باشد از عواطف و احساسات پيروي كرده و عقلانيت او نيز در عمل راه به جايي نمي ­برد.

John Barth is an American practitioner and theoretician of pos tmodernis t fiction, who defines himself as a “concocter of comic novels.” His writings are full of puns, literary jokes, and labyrinthine plots, reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges, which “call into ques tion all sys tems of ethics and philosophy” (Walkiewicz 1). Barth’s complex and demanding fiction has been the subject of numerous scholarly s tudies, but general readers find out, “in his fascinated commitment to the art—and to the criticism—of s torytelling, he has no rival”, declares William Pritchard (1932) in the New York Times Book Review (Locher and Evory). In The End of the Road, his second novel, Barth ques tions many of the values by which people live and boas t of. The novel also provides a platform to raise plenty of dis turbing doubts about human social and psychological motives, which can be traced back to the idea of Pyrrhonism arising from ancient Greek philosophy. Background of S tudy: Praising Barth’s “coherence of . . . allegory,” “depth of . . . feeling for ideology,” and “excellence of intention,” David Kerner called The End of the Road an “ideological farce,” a genre he considered a “special type” (Kerner 59-60). Barth’s concern for ideology and his use of allegory in this work is commendable, dis tinguishing it in many ways from other examples, such as Dennis Nigel’s Cards of Identity (1955). Characterization at this novel is such that the audience is presented with a real picture of social relations in the form of comedy, and therefore it is not much different from a serious genre; George Blues tone used the term “serious comedy” to describe the work (Blues tone 588). The End of the Road is also a successful example in terms of subject matter in which the critique of ideology is considered as one of the main themes of the s tory. LeClair, author, and literary critic, believes that this work is an embodiment of the pures t abs tract idea in the form of comedy, which well describes the author’s concern about ideology (LeClair 724). Jac Tharpe, who has conducted a full-length s tudy on Barth, assumes that his novels “are all philosophical, and as a group, they comprise a his tory of philosophy.” In his opinion, the fundamental ques tion posed in The End of the Road is how to access the truth in the epis temological dimension when there is no basis for proving it, or how to define moral commands while one cannot be completely sure of any truth. In this way, he argues, Barth engages the reader with these kinds of philosophical challenges and makes it clear that there may be no answer to such ques tions at all, or if there is, he has not found them. Tharpe concludes that “since man does not have access to the truth, he creates it as a myth or an ideology” (Tharpe 116). Methodology: Given that Barth’s views seem to be an embodiment of Pyrrhonian skepticism, proposed by a pre-Socrates Greek philosopher, a his torical methodology has been selected for this s tudy to explicate building blocks of skeptical theory from the pas t to the present. It is obvious that the research method will also be philosophical and textual, as content analysis, on the one hand, relies on philosophical theories, and on the other hand emphasizes the text where the impact of these theories is visible on the behavior and decisions of the fictional characters. Conclusion: The End of the Road is an artis tic narrative of overt and covert nihilism in the values of today’s society in which Barth uses comedy to provide a symbolic picture of the contras t between “doubt and certainty.” The denial of meaning and value by the characters in this work is a reflection of Barth’s opposition to any kind of irrational dogmatism, jus t as Morgan and Jacob’s abnormal behavior with Rennie and her abortion is a sign of human illusions and inability to govern the world. By creating such characters, Barth shows how human beings ultimately resort to “myth-making” to find a cure for a psychological complication called “Cosmopsis” that s tems from their lack of identity. . Focusing on the novel, the s tudy concludes that human beings, as portrayed by Barth, are more dependent on emotion in their decisions than on reason and their rationality has no effect in practice.