殖民乌托邦抑或孤岛隐喻——徐《荒谬的英法海峡》的多重解读

Colonial Utopia or Isolated Island Metaphor:The Multiple Interpretations of Xu Xu’s“The Absurd English-French Channel”

给徐的创作贴上浪漫奇幻的标签,拘囿了对徐作品的阐释向度,进而影响了对“孤岛”时期徐创作的价值判断和文学史定位。实际上,《荒谬的英法海峡》既构设了理想的乌托邦社会,又不断解构这个乌托邦,揭示了乌托邦与殖民的连带关系,形成了对“殖民乌托邦”的深刻透视。叙述中难以妥帖安置的裂隙矛盾和逸出的观念情感,引导我们把小说的故事视为上海“孤岛”的隐喻。无论是空间围困、观念悖论,还是人物组合、爱情关系,在隐喻中都实现了意义指涉的迁移。揭开乌托邦和浪漫爱情叙事的乔装外表,才能发掘小说中的上海“孤岛”体验和战时国家情怀的潜在表意。徐创作对潜文本的精心构设,为我们研究孤岛文学乃至半殖地写作提供了诸多启示。

Labeling Xu Xu’s creation as romantic and fantastical restricts the directions of its interpretation,which affects the value judgment and literary history positioning of Xu Xu’s works in the Isolated-Island Period.In fact,The Absurd English-French Channel not only constructs an ideal Utopian society,but also constantly deconstructs it,revealing the connection between utopia and colonization,and achieving a profound perspective on the“colonial utopia”.The overflowing of emotions and fractured contradictions in the narrative which are difficult to place properly leads us to view the novel’s story as a metaphor for the isolated Shanghai.Whether it is spatial siege,conceptual paradoxes,character combinations,or love relationships,they all achieve the transferring of semantic reference in the metaphor.Only by uncovering disguises of Utopian and romantic love narratives can we see the latent representations of the novel’s Shanghai island experience and wartime national sentiment.Xu Xu’s elaborate construction of the subtext provides us with many insights for the study of insular literature and even semi-colonial writing.