异质文化间对话:论徐訏海洋小说《阿喇伯海的女神》

A Heterogeneous Dialogue: On Goddess of the Arabian Sea, a Novel of Ocean by Xu Xu

《阿喇伯海的女神》创作与徐留学经历有关,小说以文化间对话的形式处理人物交往,这与作家海洋文化的包容心态密不可分。小说叙述阿喇伯海航船上中国留学生与阿喇伯母女的七场对话,从文化间性理论看,人物有效地实践了异质文化间对话。文化间对话作为一种文学形式,它在小说中起到多种作用:情节在对话中发展、故事在对话中讲完、场景在对话中描述、人物在对话中刻画。因此,对话不仅有文化上的意义,也是文本完成的一种途径,小说有一定的创新价值。

Goddess of the Arabian Sea is a novel about Xu Xu’s experience overseas as a student and it deals with the characters’communications through dialogue, which is closely related to the author’s embracive mentality as part of an oceanic culture. The novel is a narration of seven dialogues between Chinese overseas students and an Arab mother and her daughter, all on board a ship in the Arabian Sea. Looked at from the theory of cultural interactivity, the characters have effectively practiced a heterogeneous dialogue. Dialogue between cultures, as a literary form, can play a variety of roles in fiction as plot develops in the dialogue, story is told in it and characters are portrayed in it, too. For this reason, dialogue not only has a cultural significance but is also a way by which text completes itself. And, in that sense, the novel has a certain creative value.