想象的流变:来华传教士“中国园林”话语体系的构建与解构

Imagination in Flux:The Construction and Deconstruction of the“Chinese Garden”Discourse System of Missionaries to China

自16世纪起,欧洲传教士团体带着传教使命来华,由此开启了中西文化的第一次广泛接触.以传教士为纽带的中西文化交流至18世纪末期经历了由盛转衰的历程.在此历程中,耶稣会士对园林的记录与评述逐步构建了关于中国园林的独特话语体系,浸润了17—18世纪“中国风”热潮下西方人关于“中国园林”的集体想象.基于互为“异域”的文化背景,传教士对中国园林的呈现经历了不断深化的过程:从最初对景观要素的描述发展到对园林艺术的审美认知.其中始终伴随着对中国园林“他者”身份的觉察以及中西对比的叙述方式,并构建了以假山要素、“自然的”特征、“乡村的”氛围为表征的话语体系.至18世纪末,传教士之外的西方话语对植物要素的关注以及有关“自然”评述的负面转向预示着该话语体系的解构.中国园林的想象流变过程交织着不同情境的影响,在园林风格层面,除了欧洲园林风格演变的主观因素之外,中国本土园林风格的发展也是不可忽视的客观因素.

Since the 16th century,European missionary groups came to China with missionary missions,thus starting the first extensive contact between Chinese and Western cultures.The cultural exchange between China and the West,with missionaries as the link,went through a process from prosperity to decline by the end of the 18th century.During this process,the Jesuits’records and commentaries gradually built a unique discourse on Chinese gardens,infusing the collective imagination of Westerners about the“Chinese garden”under the“Chinoiserie”craze in the 17th and 18th centuries.Based on the reciprocal“foreign land”cultural background,the missionaries’presentation of Chinese gardens had undergone a continuous process of deepening from the description of landscape elements to the aesthetic perception of garden art.This was always accompanied by an awareness of the identity of“the other”of the Chinese garden and a contrastive narrative mode between China and the West,thus a discourse system characterized by the elements of rockery,“natural”features,and“rural”atmosphere was constructed.By the end of the 18th century,the focus on plants and the negative shift in the comments on“nature”in Western discourse outside the missionary group heralded the deconstruction of the discourse on Chinese gardens.The evolution process of this imagination process was interwoven with different contexts.Besides the evolution of the European garden style,the development of indigenous Chinese garden styles was an objective factor that could not be ignored.