科技困境中的文学突围:刘慈欣《诗云》中的科幻诗人

Making Way Out via Literature:Re-reading Liu Cixin’s“The Poetry Cloud”in Dilemmas of Technology Overkill

刘慈欣短篇科幻小说《诗云》中的“李白”与历史上真实的李白之间,存在着一种依托科幻乌托邦小说语境的、虚构的亲和关系。一方面,《诗云》中的克隆诗人“李白”肆意破坏人类文明,却又试图以现代高科技手段留驻古典诗艺的矛盾行为,揭示了这一特殊文学意象的辩证本质。另一方面,刘慈欣借“李白”之手掀起的一场“造诗(史)运动”,与《拱廊街计划》中本雅明经由辩证意象概念对历史—救赎关系所进行的历史性哲学考察,于本质上展现出异曲同工之妙。两者均聚焦现代性对个体经历与记忆的异化,并指出“诗性历史”是突围的唯一途径和必然结局。因此,《诗云》塑造的科幻诗人“李白”并非作为传统文化符号的盛唐诗人李白的转生,而是刘慈欣借中国古典文史原型人物之名创造的一个颇具后现代意味的反乌托邦意象。这一写作策略在经典化底色下探索了诗人对传统的眷恋与重造,质疑了科学技术允诺人类的浪漫未来,打破了这一虚幻泡影,进而引导读者对当下社会盛行的理智祛魅进行复魅思考。李白的诗人形象不再与西方对中国固化的现代想象密不可分,而是成为观照文学现代性、解构机械复制时代文艺危机与诗史焦虑的新契机。

The contradistinction between a romanticized Li Bai(701-762)that transcends our literary past and the poet as a historical figure registered in purified native Chinese critical terms has long been debated since the modernization of Chinese liter⁃ary criticism.But this does not impede the poet from being turned into an icon that fulfills modern sci-fi writers’imaginations.In Liu Cixin’s sci-fi short story“The Poetry Cloud”(1997,2003,2014,2018),“Li Bai”is no longer the center of debate in mod⁃ern literary discussions but a new point of departure to understand the notion of modernism not as inextricably bound up with West⁃ern modernist imaginings of China,but as an invertible paradigm based on the aforesaid imaginings being reimagined by contem⁃porary Chinese writers.By contextualizing the fictive affinity between human intelligentsia and the post-human future of mankind in the current COVID-19 pandemic and a Chinese utopian fiction tradition that dates back to the late Qing period,which tends to retrofit China’s past in order to anticipate future in the discursive space of artistic imagination,this article seeks to unpack the ap⁃propriated image of Li Bai in Liu’s short narrative as dialectical:a witness of the inexplicable charm of poetic thinking that magi⁃cally curbs the ongoing erasure of humanity being carried out by interstellar colonizers,Liu Cixin’s extraterrestrial intelligenceimpersonated“Li Bai”functions both as a dystopian trope that undoes our rosy prospect of future as promised by science and tech⁃nology,and a Heideggerian antidote for the disturbing side effects of the modern progress of human society.