《狄公探案》:早期“重访历史”类后现代小说

Revisiting History: Robert Van Gulik’s Judge Dee Mysteries,A Harbinger of Postmodern Fiction

高罗佩系列小说《狄公探案》并非西人所撰公案小说,而是一种杂糅式侦探小说,亦是启迪众多后辈作家的早期后现代小说。高罗佩以现代英美侦探小说的笔法,博采众家之长,重新演绎《武则天四大奇案》等"前文本"公案小说中的情节,淡化断案,突出探案。文本中各种"混仿"与"戏仿"技巧繁衍作为"互文"的母本中反复出现的犯罪素材,文史互证,亦虚亦实。在文本的迁徙中,以"重访历史"为指归的品格得以充分展示。这些作品以遥远时空背景中的陌生化情节迎合英文读者的猎奇心态,将前现代叙事重置于读者熟悉的当代语境中,是此后付梓的《法国中尉的女人》《玫瑰之名》等以"重访"并重塑历史为宗旨的后现代小说之预兆。

The study, first of all, clarifies respectively in their delineation, the two subgenres of fiction that are remotely apart in time and space, that instead of court case novels by a modern Western author, Robert Van Gulik’s Judge Dee Mysteries is to be reasonably pigeonholed detective novels. They further argue that,basically following the Anglo-American tradition of detective fiction established nearly 200 years ago, Van Gulik rewrites pretexts such as Dee Gooan An: Three Murder Cases Solved by Judge Dee in Judge Dee Mysteries, focusing on detection and solution of crimes in question rather than trials and punishments of criminals. Prototypes of Chinese crime stories, either from historical or literary sources, are intertextually pastiched and parodied. Eventually, the co-authors draw the conclusion that in the migration of texts, Van Gulik, foregrounding his stories in exotic settings of the remote past to cater to the implied modern reader of the English texts while adhering to the paradigm of detective fiction, harbingers those postmodernist novels,from The French Lieutenant’s Woman to The Name of the Rose, which painstakingly“revisit”and reshape history.