反向殖民想象:《德鲁德》中的底层空间与异族书写

Reverse colonization fantasy:The underclass space and the racial other in Drood

随着20世纪80年代后殖民批评的兴起,狄更斯小说中的种族与帝国观日益成为学界关注焦点,其遗作《德鲁德疑案》更是引发了关于狄更斯究竟是帝国支持者亦或是帝国批判者的论争。丹·西蒙斯于2009年出版的《德鲁德》是一部以狄更斯及其好友柯林斯为故事主人公的新维多利亚小说。在重现狄更斯式伦敦的同时,小说通过虚构狄更斯与柯林斯对异族他者德鲁德以及他所统治的“地底城”的想象,凸显了19世纪下半叶由海外殖民地动荡、国内社会矛盾尖锐等问题引发的关于帝国正当性的道德焦虑与反噬恐惧。本文借用后殖民语境下有关反向殖民想象的讨论,探究《德鲁德》中的底层空间与异族书写,揭示当代文化对维多利亚中产阶级帝国意识悖论的后现代重构。

With the rise of postcolonial criticism in the 1980s,scholarship has increasingly focused on Charles Dickens's views on race and empire in his novels.His unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood has sparked a debate over whether Dickens was an imperialist or an anti-imperialist.Dan Simmons'neo-Victorian novel Drood,which presents Dickens and Collins as the protagonists and reconstructs a Dickensian portrayal of London,fictionalizes their imagination of the racial other Drood and the undertown which he ruled,highlighting the moral anxiety over the legitimacy of empire and the fear of retaliation from the colonized,triggered by the turmoil of the overseas colonies and the sharp social contradictions at home in the second half of the 19th century.This paper attempts to offer an analysis of the underclass space and racial other in Drood drawing on discussions of reverse colonization fantasy in a postcolonial context so as to reveal the postmodern reconstruction of the Victorian middle-class's paradoxical imperial consciousness in contemporary cultural critical discourse.