彭吉蒂 香港城市大学
Linder, Birgit, City University of Hong Kong
原文Original
Void and Violence: Some Thoughts on the Value of Active Pessimism in Yu Hua’s (余华) Early Fiction
“Storytelling is always after the fact, and it is always constructed over a loss.”
——J. Hillis Miller
According to most critical scholarship, Yu Hua’s prolific ouvre is divided into two phases, his rather short-lived early period of so-called avant-garde fiction during the 1980s, and his later period of narrative realism and the novel. Most critics welcomed his turn to storytelling in the 1990s, not the least because Yu Hua’s early fiction is marked by uncomfortable representations of void and violence. Yet there is a particular merit in his early writing that reflects a paradigm shift (范式转变) in literary history and highlights a sensitivity common to most post-totalitarian (后极权主义) experience. While many readers might consider the callous and detached description of inhumanness in Yu Hua’s and other avant-garde fiction of the 1980s “language harassment” (语言骚扰) (Lyotard利奥塔), it is exactly this symbolism of violence, fragmentation (分裂), and void (空虚) that allows the author to represent a depth of human alienation (异化) that would otherwise remain unrepresentable (不可表现的). If such writing is really “constructed over a loss,” (由损失产生的小说) it also embodies the voice that articulates this loss and opens it to further dialogue.
Part one of this presentation addresses the reception of Yu Hua’s early fiction in China and abroad and considers whether literary critics might be guilty of “small-context terrorism” (Kundera 昆德拉) that relegates some writings to a certain historical period without considering its wider literary merit. Part two gives an overview of Wertheimer’s notion of an aesthetic of violence and Nieraad’s categorization of violence in literature as “body sacrifice,” (肉体牺牲) “body cry,” (肉体呼唤） and “body symbol,” (肉体象征)，and relates those to examples drawn from Western and Chinese literary history. Part three interprets Yu Hua’s writing as “body symbol” and offers some perspectives from Western scholarship that validate such writing as meaning construction that is especially needed when dealing with trauma and memory and the vicissitudes of our postmodern existence.
The analysis comes to two main conclusions: 1) that the themes of void and violence are not mere reflections of blissful destructiveness, but rather a manifestation of an ‘active pessimism’ (主动的悲观主义) that puts important human dilemmas at issue; and 2) that the themes of void and violence are at the heart of the modernist mission of literature, namely that it should expose a certain Zeitschmerz (anguish of the times 时代之苦闷) and refuse to make things easy for ourselves.
译文Translation
空虚和暴力：对余华早期小说主动悲观主义的价值思考
故事总是在事实之后，并且总是由损失产生。
——J.希利斯.米勒
从最具批判性的学术研究眼光来看，多产作家余华的作品可以分为两个时期：1980年代相当短暂的早期“先锋派”小说，以及后期的叙事现实主义和长篇小说。大多数评论家欣赏九十年代余华写作风格的转变（回到讲故事），部分原因是因为余华的早期小说表现了令人不安的空虚和暴力。但是，其早期作品独具价值，它们反映了文学史的一种范式转变，同时突出表现了对后极权主义普遍体验的一种极度敏感。
许多读者可能把余华以及其他先锋派作家在八十年代作品中对不人道的冷酷和超然描写视为一种“语言骚扰”（利奥塔），但正是通过这种暴力、分裂和空虚的象征主义，作家才得以表现出人类异化的深度。如果这类作品真的是由损失产生的小说，那么其中也包含了表述这种损失的声音，并且敞开这种声音，促成更多的对话。
本文第一部分针对余华早期小说在中国内外的接受性问题，并讨论文学评论家们是否有“狭小处境恐怖主义”（small-context terrorism，昆德拉）之罪，因为他们将某些作品归入某一历史阶段而不考虑其更广大的文学价值。
第二部分概述了韦特海默（Wertheimer）的暴力美学概念，以及尼哈德（Nieraad）将文学作品中的暴力分类为“肉体牺牲”、“肉体呼唤”和“肉体象征”观点，并将这些分类与中西文学史中的范例联系在一起讨论。
第三部分将余华的作品阐释为“肉体象征”，并提供一些西方研究的视角，以证明这类作品的意义建构有效，而且在面对创伤、回忆和后现代存在的变迁时不可或缺。
通过上述分析可得出两个主要结论：1）空虚和暴力主题并不仅反映了“极乐的毁灭”，同时更展现了一种主动的悲观主义，它让人们关注人类两难窘境。2）空虚和暴力主题是现代主义文学使命的核心，换言之，它应该揭示一种时代之苦闷，并且拒绝让生活过于轻松。