历史与叙述——对奈保尔《世间之路》的后现代解读

History and Narration—A Postmodern Reading of Naipaul's A Way in the World

奈保尔《世间之路》凡九篇,看似相互独立,但确又构成了一个所谓的“序列”或“一部小说”。在表面上碎片化的叙述与内在主题的一气呵成的张力场中,通过把曾经写过的故事冠以“未曾写过的故事”进行重新书写,奈保尔使我们看到,对历史的重演并不是要与过去进行比较以突出当前的优越性,表现时代的进步;相反,历史作为叙述,并没有真正开始和结束。以不同的视角接近历史,我们会看到不同的历史之路,作者在此记录的只是世间历史的一种道路。而对于作为历史主体的个人,则总是随历史的大潮时起时落。奈保尔在《世间之路》中为我们讲述的,正是后殖民时代“新大陆”历史道路的寓言。

Made up of nine seemingly independent narratives, Naipaul's A Way in the World constitutes a 'sequence', or a 'novel'. The apparent fragmented narration and the thematic cohesion form a field full of tension, in which Naipaul rewrites some of his earlier materials under the title of 'unwritten stories', displaying that the rewriting of history is not to show the superiority of the contemporary and the progressiveness of times. On the contrary, history as narration has no real beginnings or endings. We will view different roads of history from different perspectives. What Naipaul narrates in A Way in the World is an allegory of the road of history of the New World in the postcolonial era.