李永平的原乡想像与文字修行

The Imagination of Motherland and Literary Asceticism of LI Yong-ping

李永平是早期马来西亚华文作家中独具风格的一位 ,他的写作指向个体、民族和国家 ,也指向了语言审美世界的终极。中国原乡、中国母亲、中国文字形成了他的文学世界里三位一体的主题 ,三者之间的互为代换指涉 ,既坐实了李永平的文学意识形态 ,也生出无限空虚怅惘。李永平在其作品中寻找自我认同的同时 ,也是借“再造语言”来再造中国文化的幻象。在一片后殖民、后现代的论述风潮中 ,李永平的“文字花园”无异于一场文化身份焦虑症的语言大发作 。

Malaysian writer in Chinese has already formed a vast and mighty brigade. Li Yong-ping is considered to be one of the early Malaysian writers in Chinese who has a particular style. Having settled in Taiwan for 30 years, though it was his own initiative to give up his birthplace Malaysia and choose Taiwan, there is still a strong sense of wandering deep in his heart. In the eyes of the elder of the literary circle, QI Bang-yuan, he has drifted ″from one island to another island, and from one margin to another margin″.Hence, he can only look for his motherland through literary works. ″What I yearn for is the cultural and spiritual China. It is my motherland.″ ″Chinese character is very special. To me, it is not only a linguistic symbol, but a totem.″ Li Yong-ping chooses to write his literature in Chinese, and hopes to express his feelings about life through this totem. Also because the words in use are the sacred totem of the nation, he especially pays attention to the choice of words.″The succinctness and vigour of the Chinese language″ gave Li Yong-ping ″an extremely great joy and astonishment″, so that since then he wrote ″intermittently, painstakingly, in order to refine and create a pure Chinese literary form″. The rejection of ″malignant Westernisation″ of Taiwan Residents literature and language and the national conscience to defend the purity and dignity of the Chinese language, pushes Li Yong-ping to embark on his journey of cultural root-searching. To be precise, root-searching may be exactly his aim in the pursuit of language.In the works of Li Yong-ping, words are music, are dances, and are aesthetic elements. But through words, not only a paradise of language can be constructed to be self-contained, asceticism of words is practised also for the sake of the construction of an extremely ambitious Utopia. If it is said that Li Yong-ping is trying to escape from reality through the alchemy of language, it is better to say that with the help of the magic mirror of language, he sees through the bizarre history and iniquitous politics.The major artistic techniques of Li Yong-ping can be discovered in his many novels. A person who Years for his homeland, located among South-east Asia, Taiwan and ancient China, he must be bearing in his heart dilemmas and conflicts that is difficult to express in words. With respect to his homeland in South-east Asia, Li Yong-ping considers himself a sojourner; with respect to Taiwan and even China's Mainland—— with respect to China in both the geographical sense and the cultural sense, he is still in the shadow of a broken motherland, and he is unable to change his cultural admiration, ″to be more Chinese than a Chinese″. Geographical separation and political division makes his Chinese identity fall into an embarrassment of ambiguity and uncertainty.