毛姆《彩色的面纱》的跨国现代主义解读

Transnational Modernism in Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil

《彩色的面纱》是毛姆中国题材三部曲中最有创意和争议的一部作品。国内评论界大多从种族主义和殖民主义视角解读这部小说中毛姆的“东方主义”中国观。本文通过深入分析女主人公凯蒂·加斯汀在中国梅潭府的觉醒和救赎之旅,提出毛姆并非真正地丑化中国,而是借用中国叙事批判启蒙现代性,是审美现代性的一种跨文化再现策略和认知模式,即跨国现代主义,以此批判启蒙现代性以来中产阶级的庸俗婚姻观、技术理性和清教伦理,体现了向异域“他者”文化寻求改变欧洲衰败倒退之方的人道主义情怀。

The Painted Veil, one of the most creative and controversial works in Maugham’s trilogy of narrating China, reveals the experience of a fallen woman being taken to a plague-ridden Chinese town by her husband. Among the criticism on this works in Chinese academia for the last decade, great attention has been paid to Maugham’s racism and colonialist tendency and his orientalist view on China. This thesis analyzes the modern British female protagonist Kitty Garstin’s journey to rebirth in China in an attempt to address that Maugham is not intentionally degrading China in representation, but is actually using a transcultural strategy or a cognitive mode of aesthetic modernity, which in effect constitutes a modernist tempo-spatial perspective of criticizing bourgeois philistinism on marriage, technical rationalism and puritan ethic advocated by enlightenment modernity. It is an alternative of classical modernism, called transnational modernism. In essence it embodies the writer’s humanist spirit of employing the exotic Chinese culture to save the declining European civilization.