加尔各特的布克奖小说《承诺》与全知叙事者的"归来"
Damon Galgut's Booker Prize-Winning Novel The Promise and the "Return" of the Omniscient Narrator
徐蕾1
作者信息
摘要
当代南非作家达蒙·加尔各特2021年布克奖小说《承诺》的叙事者充分发挥了 19世纪现实主义小说中全知叙事者作为"鉴史人"的经典作用,既能基于外叙事层-异叙事者的立场探究南非从种族隔离时代向"彩虹之国"转型的历史变迁,又可以借助自由间接引语切入人物或施事者的内心世界.更具鲜明特色的是,小说的叙事者在挪用传统全知叙事的认知与叙事权威之时,也在暗中挑战与颠覆这种权威,即一面摹仿维多利亚小说全知叙事对中产阶级群体意识的表征,一面借助文本内部的"沉默"或"空白"以召唤读者对南非白人的种族主义无意识进行反动与解构.因此,这一具有高度自反性的全知叙事者在《承诺》中的"归来"可以视为加尔各特面对当代南非文学在现实主义与(后)现代主义之间该何去何从的独特回答.
Abstract
Contemporary South African writer Damon Galgut's Booker Prize-winning nov-el The Promise fully taps into the nineteenth-century realist convention of omniscience and creates an extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator as a histor to investigate the transformation of South Africa from Apartheid to the Rainbow Nation as well as to penetrate the inner worlds of characters and agents mainly via free indirect discourse.What is stylistically striking about Galgut's employment or appropriation of omniscience is that the epistemic and narrative au-thority rendered by conventional omniscience is posed as a central target for challenge and subversion.On one hand,it sets out to imitate the collective mind of the white South Africans in the typical vein of the Victorian novel,while on the other hand,it calls upon the reader to react to and deconstruct the racist unconscious laid bare by way of a purposeful silence or blank within the text.Therefore,the highly self-reflexive narrator in The Promise can be seen as the author's individualistic response to the call of contemporary South African literature at the crossroads of realism and(post)modernism.
关键词
加尔各特/《承诺》/全知叙事者/鉴史人/19世纪现实主义Key words
Damon Galgut/The Promise/Omniscient Narrator/Histor/the Nineteenth-Cen-tury Realism引用本文复制引用
基金项目
国家社会科学基金一般项目(19BWW044)
出版年
2024
NETL
NSTL
万方数据