吳蘭徵之《絳蘅秋》

Wu Lanzheng’s Jiang Heng Qiu

吳蘭徵的《絳蘅秋》是唯一一部由女性作家書寫的《紅樓夢》續集。在吳蘭徵三十歲逝世時，該劇並沒有完成。她的丈夫俞用濟（字遙帆）將該劇編入《零香集》，該集包含有吳蘭徵的悼念詩、祭文、俞用濟和朋友書寫的吳的傳記，並且將其出版。吳蘭徵的筆名明確地證實了她將自己視為後來的林黛玉。在這篇文章中，我將探討《紅樓夢》以何種方式參與進後來林黛玉形象的化身過程。我將提出吳蘭徵在《絳蘅秋》中對林黛玉的描述如何以作者自比黛玉的身份被解讀，以及提出她的寫作是反對「感情傳遞」這種典型《紅樓夢》女性讀者性格，而且以另一種「情之正」來控制悲痛的觀點。最後，我認為《紅樓夢》創造了一種參與指涉。以《零香集》為背景閱讀《絳蘅秋》，我們看到文學指涉是如何具有參與性的，即文學指涉將如何描述一個尚未被意識到的，在書中世界被勾畫的存在實例。

Wu Lanzheng's (1776-1806) Jiang Heng Qiu is the only dramatic sequel to Honglou meng (Story of the Stone) to have been written by a woman. Unfinished at the time of Wu Lanzheng’s death at the age of 30, the play was published by her husband Yu Yongji soon afterward, in a collection entitled the Lingxiang ji (Collection of Fallen Petals [or Scattered Fragrance]) that included poems of mourning for Wu Lanzheng as well as requiems (jiwen) and biographies written by Yu and his friends. Wu Lanzheng’s literary pseudonyms clearly testify that she envisioned herself as a latter-day Lin Daiyu. In this essay, I examine the ways in which Honglou meng anticipates such later incarnations of Lin Daiyu. I ask how Wu Lanzheng’s depiction of Lin Daiyu in Jiang Heng Qiu can be read in the context of her own identification with Daiyu, and argue that she writes against the notion of affective contagion that typically characterizes female readers of Honglou meng, envisioning as an alternative an orthodox qing (qing zhi zheng) that helps to modulate grief. Finally, I suggest that Honglou meng creates an anticipatory referentiality. Reading Jiang Heng Qiu in the context of the Lingxiang ji, we see how literary reference might be anticipatory, that is, how it might describe an as yet unrealized instantiation of the presences described in the world of the book.