《剑桥》:帝国叙事中的超越与共谋

Cambridge:Transgression and Complicity in Imperial Narratives

《剑桥》是英国当代作家卡利尔.菲利普斯最具代表性的作品之一。这部小说采取多元视角的叙事方式,通过三个迥异的声音,分别讲述其对同一历史事件的"共同记忆"。通过这种"众声喧哗",作者试图呈现一幅更多元、真实和完整的殖民历史图景。但本文认为,细读文本会发现在这部小说中的叙事始终并没有真正超越帝国的视野,不同的声调合奏出的仍然是帝国的凯歌,表面上的超越是在更深层次上对殖民话语的宣扬。因而这部小说不仅不是对帝国主导叙事的颠覆,而是与之形成共谋。

Cambridge, one of the most representative novels of Caryl Phillips, attempts to record the 'common memory' of the same historical event of several different 'voices' through multiple perspective narrative. Differing from traditional colonial writing, among the two principal narrators, one is a black slave named Cambridge who poses as a subaltern in Spivak's sense, while the other being a white female coming from the empire. Together they constitute two intertwined but also contradictory narratives. Then a news report, carrying still another version of the same story, appears near the end of the novel. Through this kind of heteroglossia, this novel tries to present a more diverse, truthful and holistic picture of colonial history. But the author of this paper holds that the narratives in this novel neither transcend the imperial discourse, nor subvert them. On the contrary, they reconfirm the colonial discourse in a deeper sense, thus in complicity with the imperial dominant narrative.