“所有的故事都是一个故事”——论麦卡锡《穿越》中分形的空间构型

“All Tales are One”: Fractals in The Crossing

当代美国作家科麦克·麦卡锡(1933—)的小说《穿越》最突出的叙事形式在于运用了混沌理论重要空间模型之一的分形。"分形"通常指的就是"自相似",表明不同度量标准下重复的对称性以及多维的映射性。作为空间形式,分形构建了小说《穿越》的动态空间性,具体表现在叙事内容和叙事结构双重层面上。《穿越》把主要叙事部分和叙事结构下的镶嵌故事以及其他主要故事下的小故事复杂地结合起来,使得其叙事文本有了多个分形的空间构型,呈现出多层面和多维度的自相似。

The Crossing,by contemporary American writer Cormac Mc Carthy,stands out in Mc Carthy's corpus for its use of fractals as its narrative configuration,which is made on the planes of narrative content and structure. According to chaos theory, fractals refer to self-similarity, indicating the across-scaling symmetry. As one of the spatial patterns to map the phase space of nonlinear dynamic systems,fractals have their specific aesthetic appeal. By means of the organic combination of the major part of the narrative with the interpolated tales and some other minor tales underlying the major tale,Mc Carthy makes his text into fractals with a multitude of self-similarities,indicating the recursive symmetry across the scale and reflexivity in multiple dimensions.