文化错位下的书写——晚清首部域外游记《西海纪游草》分析

Writing in a Dislocated Culture: An Analysis of An Account of a Trip to the Western Seas, the First Travelogue of the Foreign Countries in the Qing Dynasty

作为晚清首部域外游记,林的《西海纪游草》依据亲历经验,实录西方现代社会形态,打破了"西洋人介绍西洋,借助洋人看西洋"的视域局限,扩充了晚清士人的认知视野,不仅恢复了西方作为地理指称的中性形象,而且俨然构建了一个堪与中土相媲美的文明实体;与此同时,跨文化视域下的文本书写不啻为一枚有效的文化心理的放大镜,再现了普罗民众初临西方文化冲击时复杂的文化心理图式,置身于西方现代文明情境中的林,虽被现代西方所震撼,但其心理结构仍深陷于传统意识形态之中,袭用凝滞的认知图式来归纳此次异域之行,行文间不免交织着传统与现代、认知与想象之间的错位,可堪为我们梳理晚清民众的文化心理嬗变提供重要样本。

An Account of a Trip to the Western Seas, by Lin Zhen, the first travelogue of the foreign countries in the Qing dynasty, breaks the visual limitations of ＇ reading about the West through the Westerners written about by the Westerners＇ by recording the social patterns of Western society, based on his own physical experience, so that the scope of knowledge was expanded for the intellectuals of the late Qing. As a result, the West was not only recovered as a neutral image referred to in geographical terms but a civilized entity was also built that could match that of China. Meanwhile, the textual writing in a cross-cultural context serves as an effective magnifying class for cultural mentality, once again revealing the complex cultural and psychological patterns when the populace experienced their first shocks from the Western cultures. Lin Zhen, shocked, too, by the modern West, remained, in terms of his psychological structure, deeply stuck in the traditional ideology as he had to summarize his trip in rigid cognitive formulas, his writings interwoven with displacements between the traditional and the modern, and between cognition and imagination, that could serve for us as an important sample of the transmutation, cultural and psychological, amongst the late Qing people.