小小说的大节奏:《早秋》的叙事策略与作者的意图

Great Pace of a Short Short Story: The Narrative Strategies and the Authorial Intention of “Early Autumn”

正如"(诗歌中的)声音听起来应该是意义的回响",小说中的叙事策略也必须为烘托主题而设置。因此,叙事策略的运用精妙与否往往取决于其对小说主题的呼应程度,而确立小说的主题也就成为了分析小说叙事策略功用的前提;反过来,从对叙事策略的选择和运用来判断叙事的"政治取向"的做法多半会成为"过度解读"。兰斯顿·休斯的小小说《早秋》以其"时空一体"的节奏、"有限的"全知视角和"无情节"的叙事结构等匠心独运的叙事策略赢得了无数批评者的青睐,充分展示了小说作者"戏剧性"还原生活原貌的功力。素有"黑人桂冠诗人"之称的兰斯顿·休斯在这篇小说里未触及任何种族政治的因素,对绝大多数读者而言,他只是以精妙的叙事手段讲述了一个凄婉的爱情故事,并没有那些习惯于"政治性批判"的批评者所强加给文本的其它叙事企图。

While(in poetry) 'the sound must seem an echo to the sense', the narrative strategy in fiction must be made to reinforce the theme. Therefore, the delicacy of such a strategy more than often depends on how much it acts in cooperation with the theme, which means that the interpretation of the theme has to go before the evaluation of the narrative strategy's function. However, this understanding of the relationship between the theme and the narrative strategy does not lead to the inverse proposition that the'political orientation'of the fiction can be determined by the selection and application of certain narrative means(such proposition is then often rendered as'over-reading'). The short short story'Early Autumn'by Langston Hughes demonstrates the author's art in dramatically revealing the everyday life with its'plotless'structure,'limited'omniscient perspective, and temporality that integrates time and space, thus appealing to innumerable critics. Langston Hughes, though widely recognized as'the black laureate poet', does not refer to any racial political element in the story, leaving most readers the impression that'it is a pathetic love story told from a special perspective,'a story that yields excellent responses to its most effective strategies without any implication of the groundless authorial intentions suggested by some habitually leftish critics.