| Abstract: | Mental illnesses often inspire artists and writers and are omnipresent in various works, yet the moral adequacy of portraying their images remained controversial: Goffman (2010) had described the challenges the “discreditables” might have faced and the privileges they might get once being uncovered in his essay. However, Susan Sontag believed that wrapping disease in metaphors discouraged, silenced, and shamed patients in her Illness as Metaphor. Intriguingly, other social studies have proven that the audiences’ orientation in interpersonal distances, cultural values, the symptoms, and even the lexical choices will all be the determinants that vary the image and the signified of the mental health label (Wong et al.; Perry). This research aims to center the discussion on what the diseases and the patients will represent and the privileges be demonstrated in these texts from a rhetorical aspect? Hence, is the medical metaphor necessary? Further, what may be the function of different symptoms? By applying principally the theories of uncanny, abjection, and stigma, this research has built a theory on presuming Meursault in Camus’s The Stranger has Asperger, then analyze the audiences’ fear and power of stigma in two recent works: the episode “ADHD Is Necessary” in Taiwanese TV drama: On Children, and a French novel: Nothing Holds Back the Night. The results showed that the mental illness can be an advantageous metaphor, just as an endowing “Mark of Cain”, threatening yet defensive. The presence of the label seems to be necessary since it could clandestinely convey some clues of the unnamable, taboo, or unconsciously-existed private standpoint, and even allow it to be staged in a verbal form. Meanwhile, this research suggests that the mental illnesses as metaphors can be a rhetorical trigger, launching another kind of codified discourses.
精神疾病時常啟發作家與藝術家們，並且充斥於各式各樣的作品中。然而，就倫理上而言，刻劃精神疾病的形象及其行為是否恰當仍是有爭議的：高夫曼(2010)曾敘述過一些身為「可貶者」們可能會遇到的挑戰，與他們在表明身份後所可能得到的特權。但蘇珊˙桑塔格在她的《疾病與隱喻》中表示，用隱喻來包裝疾病會使病人變得畏縮、沉默，並感到羞恥。有趣的是，其他社會研究證實了不論是聽眾們在人際距離上的定位，或是一個文化的價值觀、一種疾病的病徵，甚至是字詞上的選用，都有可能成為能改變精神健康標籤的形象與其「所指」的決定因素(Wong et al.;Perry)。本篇研究著重討論的問題有：「疾病與病人之修辭形象」在文本中代表什麼？文本中的特權又將如何在修辭背景中呈現？因而，醫療隱喻的使用是否有其必要性？此外，不同病徵的「功能」可能會有哪些？本篇研究應用「詭異」、「賤斥」、與「汙名」等理論為中心理論來架構一個理論，其方式是：在假設《異鄉人》的主角莫梭有亞斯伯格症的基礎上，另外分析兩部近代作品中的「聽眾們的恐懼」與「汙名的力量」；這兩篇作品分別為台灣電視劇集《你的孩子不是你的孩子》中的《必須過動》篇，與法國小說《無以阻擋黑夜》。分析結果顯示，精神疾病可以是一種有益的隱喻，就像是一種天賜的「該隱的印記」，在令人害怕的同時卻又提供保護。而標籤是有必要出現的，因為它能私下偷渡一些關於那些不可言說的、禁忌話題的線索；或是一些關於存在於淺意識中的，那些私人的立場的線索；甚至能讓那些線索以言語的形式出現。同時，本篇論文認為精神疾病做為隱喻時，也能是一種觸發修辭，啟動另一種加密的話語。 |
