海勒的元小说写作——以《老年艺术家画像》为例

Heller’s Metafictional Writing as Exemplified by Portrait of an Artist,as an Old Man

美国后现代派代表作家约瑟夫.海勒的最后一部小说《老年艺术家画像》集中体现了海勒小说中元小说的写作手法,在内容上、形式上和语言上解构和颠覆了传统小说的叙述方式,在创作小说的同时对小说创作本身进行评述,打破了"创作"与"批评"的界限,是一部典型的"关于小说的小说",即:元小说。本文从解析该小说"阐释"和"分解"的概念入手,重点讨论戏仿和互文性的运用,使受众更好地理解文本的意义不再是对现实的"反映",而是对虚构现实的折射,即文本本身就是一个现实这一概念。

Portrait of an Artist,as an Old Man (2000) is the last novel by Joseph Heller,one of the representative postmodernist American writers.It is a work perfectly embodying his metafictinal writing technique.Portrait of an Artist,as an Old Man is a subversion and destruction of the traditional novel and narrative form in all its content,form and language.In Portrait of an Artist,as an Old Man,comments are made on fiction writing itself in the very process of writing the fiction.Breaking the obvious dividing line between 'writing' and 'criticism' and blending them in form,Portrait of an Artist,as an Old Man thus makes a typical 'fiction about fiction' i.e.metafiction.By analyzing the concept of 'interpretation' and 'decomposition',parody and intertextuality in Heller’s fictional writing,the reader can obtain a more appropriate understanding of how Heller concretizes in such a typical metafiction his metaphysical musings on the fictional nature of literature.