小说《巴格达的弗兰肯斯坦》的魔幻叙事

the Magical Narrative Style of the Novel“Frankenstein in Baghdad”

当代伊拉克作家艾哈迈德·赛阿达维的小说《巴格达的弗兰肯斯坦》,是2014年第七届“阿拉伯布克奖”的获奖作品。在小说中,赛阿达维以伊拉克战争之后的巴格达为背景,塑造了一个亦真亦幻的世界,整部小说带有浓厚的魔幻现实主义色彩。为彰显小说的魔幻现实主义色彩,赛阿达维灵活运用现代小说的叙事技巧,形成独特的魔幻叙事。他在多条叙事线索下,借助大量的内聚焦叙事来表现现实世界近于荒诞的错综复杂,在某些章节借助第一人称的叙事来达到让荒诞合理化的效果,并在叙事的时空机制上展现出频繁的跳跃性,服务于小说的魔幻现实主义特色。

Frankenstein in Baghdad,a novel by the contemporary Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi,won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction.Taking Baghdad after the Iraq War as background,the novel describes a half-genuine and half-sham world,making itself a magical realism novel.Saadawi flexibly utilizes the narrative techniques of modern novels to serve the magical realism in the novel.In his “magical way to narrate”,he constructs several narrative tracts that make the stories intricate and complicated and even unbelievable.In some sections of the novel,the first-person mechanism is used to rationalize the absurdity in the magical world.And the nonlinear narrative which jumps around in different spaces and times helps to create a halfgenuine and half-sham world in this magical realism novel.