括號的詩學－－從吳爾芙的「戴洛維夫人」看白先勇的〈遊園驚夢〉

Towards a Poetics of Parentheses: A Reading of Pai Hsien-yung's 'Youyuan jingmeng' in Light of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

本文旨在比較白先勇的〈遊園驚夢〉與英國小說家吳爾芙的《戴洛維夫人》。我之所以展開此一研究，緣於二○○三年白先勇在中央研究院中國文哲研究所的一場演講。當時白氏曾應我之請，答以所撰〈遊園驚夢〉的意識流技巧部分乃源自吳爾芙的《戴洛維夫人》。這一點，前此白氏罕見聲明，而當代文學的論者也不見討論。本文因此遂由〈遊園驚夢〉與《戴洛維夫人》的異同論起，重點擺在《戴洛維生人》中的意識流如何影響及〈遊園驚夢〉的創作技巧。在討論的過程中，我同時提出一個問題：〈遊園驚夢〉中「括號」的使用是否和吳爾芙也有關聯，而這些「括號」因係〈遊園驚夢〉的意識流所以令人驚懾之故，可以讓小說的敘述者深入主角藍田玉的內心，所以白先勇使用時是否也有一套自己的「詩學」？本文嘗試回答此一問題，繼而再將論點踅回白先勇所了解的「心理寫實」，希望藉此再為二十世紀六○年代的臺灣小說開闢一條研究新途。This paper is a humble attempt to interpret Pai Hsien-yung's 'Youyuan Jingmeng'(Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream), a story in the collection Taibeiren (Taipei People), in light of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. I was motivated to write the present paper when I heard Pai's response to a question I asked at a talk he gave in 2003 at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica: When he wrote 'Youyuan jingmeng,' his most famous and technically successful story When he wrote 'Youyuan jingmeng,' his most famous and technically influenced, he said, characterized by 'the stream of consciousness,' he was partially influenced, he said, by Virginia Woolf, who employs the same technique throughout her Mrs. Dalloway. In this paper, I discuss the similarities and disparities between Pai's and Woolf's texts in terms of plot development, symbolism, and characterization. I also advance the view that, to a certain degree, Pai's use of 'parentheses' in his story as one of the means by which his narrator penetrates the psychology of the main character, Mrs. Qian, parallels and draws upon Woolf's use of a similar technique. Having analyzed the formation of this 'poetics' under the lens of literary scrutiny, I close the paper with a short discussion of Pai's understanding of, in his own words, 'psychological realism.' I hope that this discussion can pave the way to a better understanding of the development of prose fiction in Taiwan in the 1960s.