“时与光”:徐訏小说时空论

Time and Timed:On Time and Space in Xu Xu’s Fiction

自五四新变以来,中国现代小说因受写实主义的局限而在时空结构上往往过于简单,多数只呈现为单一的现实时空。但徐訏是个例外,其小说时空造境复杂而深邃,殊异于其同时代作品,近来,这已引起研究界的瞩目。王璞曾将《荒谬的英法海峡》与《枕中记》的"时空"进行比较,可惜只在注释中一笔带过。而从其认为《荒谬的英法海峡》犯了写梦小说两条大忌的观点来看,她并未真正注意到《荒谬的英法海峡》在将中国古典小说时空结构进行现代转化的艺术成就。另一个注意到徐訏小说在时空结构上力辟蹊径的是陈旋波,他用柏格森的心理时间分析《荒谬的英法海峡》,这虽凸显出徐訏小说的现代主义成分,但也忽视了徐訏对中国古典小说时空艺术的借鉴。显然,厘清这些研究角度,对建构中国本土批评理论有很大意义。

After the new change in May Fourth,modern Chinese fiction tended to be rather simplistic in its structure of time and space as limited by realism,much of it only one-dimensional,to which Xu Xu is an exception whose fiction is complex and profound in its construction of time and space in a way that is vastly different from his contemporaries.This has caught attention in the research world.Although Wang Pu compared time and space in his The Absurd English Channel and The Story in a Pillow,she only provided glancing annotations.And from her view that The Absurd English Channel has committed the mistake of violating two taboos in terms of dream fiction,she didn’t really take note of the artistic achievement in the novel as it involves a modern transformation of time and space in classical Chinese fiction.Another person who noticed the way Xu Xu tried to open up a unique new path in his fiction is Chen Xuanbo who used Bergson’s psychological time to analyse The Absurd English Channel.Although that accentuated the modernist elements of Xu Xu’s fiction,it ignored his borrowing from the art of time and space in classical Chinese fiction.It is then obvious that to sort out these angles is of significance in the construction of China-based critical theory.