元虚构与当代中国文学先锋

Metafiction and Contemporary Chinese Literary Avant-garde

元虚构是一种始发于上世纪60年代的西方实验叙事意识,自上世纪80年代中期引入中国大陆之后,被众多作家或有意或无意地应用至后"文革"时期的小说创作中,俨然构成了一次中国的元虚构事件。仅仅从形式审美的特殊性来判断此次事件是对学术历史责任的背弃;将这次事件投掷入"80年代"这个想象历史共同体中,则使中国元虚构的文化身份得以显现:它并没有逃离自"五四"以降,中国知识分子通过仰望西方,求索文化现代性的身份建构轨迹。只不过,它采取了一种极端的否定进路,这一进路赋予了80年代元小说一定的意识形态批判锐度,但也正由于缺少与主流意识形态进行对话的意愿,它最终或沦为历史文物,或在文化工业语境中发生异化。

As an experimental narrative consciousness prevalent in the 1960s Western world, metafiction was transplanted into China's Mainland during the mid-1980s. Ever since then, numerous writers have, either consciously or unconsciously, applied this consciousness into post-cultural-revolution literary production, which, in effect, constitutes a Chinese metafiction event. Instead of evaluating it in terms of formal-aesthetic particularity, the event should be thrown into the imagined historical community that is known as ＂the 1980s＂, thereby revealing its cultural identity-structuration as following the same old path taken by Chinese intellectuals since the May 4th Movement. What sets metafiction apart from other contemporary Chinese literary traditions is its radical negativity, which, while rendered it temporarily critical of former ideology, has eventually subjected it to historical objectification or alienation in culture industry.