“夜”视角与《海上花列传》的“颓废”叙事——兼及其对现代海派小说“颓废”审美的影响

“Night" Perspective and Decadent Narration in The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai——and its influence on modern Shanghai-style novel’s "decadence" aesthetic

清末民初,以《海上花列传》为代表的形成期海派小说率先探索中国小说叙事时空的近代建构,'夜'视角就是通过近代照明技术和新的消费伦理重构了近代小说的都市场景。这批小说不仅以'夜'作为主要叙事时空来生成审美价值,同时也因为人物主体与都市客体的错位而生成以'欲望'、'颓废'为基调的近代叙事伦理。在'夜'化叙事语境下,古今小说过渡期的《海上花列传》呈现出传统特质与近代心态杂揉、'末世'与'新世'情绪交织的精神面向,应'夜'化叙事而起的'颓废'气在中国都市小说兴起之初便成为其基本的审美情绪。这种审美情绪影响了现代都市小说的叙事趣味,构成了现代海派小说'颓废'叙事的中国文学内源性传统。

In the late Qing and Early Republican China time,the formative periods’Shanghai-style novel,represented by The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai,was the first to explore the modern construction of the Chinese novel’s narrative time and space.By applying'night'perspective,the Shanghai-style novel reconstructed the urban scenes of the modern novels through modern lighting technology and the new consumer ethics.These early Shanghai-style novel did not only use the'night'as the main narrative time and space to generate aesthetic values,but also produced modern narrative ethics based on'desire'and'decadence'that were originated from the dislocation between the human subject and the urban object.Under the'night'narrative context,The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai showed the hybridity of the traditional characteristics and modern state of mind,the spiritual intertwinement between the end of Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republican time,and its'decadence'became the basic aesthetic mood of Chinese urban novels at the beginning of its rise.This aesthetic sentiment affected the narrative taste of modern metropolitan fiction and constituted the modern Shanghai-style novel’s decadent narrative,which became the endogenous tradition of Chinese literature.