突破与继承:论《红楼梦》的梦幻叙事

Breakthrough and Inheritance:On the Dreaming and Fantastic Narrative in Dream of the Red Chamber

《红楼梦》叙事采用了大量梦幻情节,其中梦幻描写共有32处。从功能看,最为典型和重要的梦幻情节是预言和警戒之梦,共15处;此外还有17处梦境描写没有包含特殊寓意,在文本中不执行特别的叙事功能,它们多出现于后四十回中,基本是回应之前的情节。梦幻描写使《红楼梦》的叙事具备了一定的现代特征:它使小说摆脱了真实人事的拘牵,形成虚构的艺术世界;叙述者的一些评价反思得以暗藏在梦幻叙述中,使小说在叙事视角上超脱了传统话本小说中说书人的介入,也减弱了道德说教色彩。当然,《红楼梦》也没有完全超脱以往的叙事惯例,比如它仍然用梦幻来隐喻人生无常。总之,《红楼梦》以梦幻介入叙事,真实与虚构并存,增加了文本叙事的张力和复杂内涵。

The narrative in Dream of the Red Chamber employs a lot of dreaming and fantasy plots,with 32dreams described in total.Functionally,the most typical and important dreaming and fantasy plots are those predicting and warning dreams,altogether 15in number.Besides,there are also 17description of dreams without specific implied meaning and thus being of no narrative function in the text.And they majorly appear in the later 40chapters of the novel,basically responding to the earlier episodes.The description of dreams makes the narrative of Dream of the Red Chamber take certain modern characteristics:it frees the novel from the constraints of real people and creates a fictional artistic world;some of the narrator's evaluations and reflections are hidden in the dreaming and fantastic narrative,making the novel transcend the intervention of the storyteller as in the traditional novels in terms of nar-rative perspective,and thus having reduced the color of morality preaching.Of course,Dream of the Red Chamber does not completely break away from the narrative conventions of the past,for example,it still uses the dream as a metaphor for the impermanence of life.In short,Dream of the Red Chamber uses fantasy to intervene in the narra-tive,makes truth and fiction co-exist,adding tension and complexity to the text of narrative.