駱以軍《明朝》中的科幻敘事與美學想像

The Science Fiction Narrative and Aesthetic (Re)imagination in Luo Yijun’s Ming Dynasty

駱以軍的長篇小說《明朝》，以科幻小說的框架，描述一個試圖將明朝文明壓縮保存至機器人的腦中，再投擲到宇宙某行星進行重建的故事。此外，小說以時空錯置的手法，夾雜著可「對號入座」的現實人物與新聞事件，「（中國）明朝的歷史」與「由未來回望的臺灣」遂交錯勾勒出小說家對文明的種種反思。小說出版後，引發了一連串關於國族認同與意識型態的論爭，但回歸文本本身，《明朝》包裹在科幻敘事手法之中的小說內涵以及核心議題究竟為何？又該如何看待其「私小說」形式引發的種種爭議？是本文試圖梳理的問題。藉由批判性的閱讀視角，本文認為《明朝》真正處理的議題，與其說是國族認同，不如說是藉由明朝美學來凸顯自身對文學創作的美學想像。

 

Written in the genre of science fiction, Luo Yijun depicts a story of how the civilization of the Ming Dynasty was compressed into a robot’s brain and launched into a planet in outer space in his novel Ming Dynasty. Luo reveals his reflections on civilization by anachronistically interweaving real people, news and current events that readers can relate to with historical vignettes of Chinese Ming Dynasty and an imaginary Taiwan as seen from the future. As soon as it was published, the novel provoked heated debates over national identity. Instead of looking at the much-talked-about political ideologies, this paper provides a close reading of the novel to grasp what Luo seeks to convey through the science fiction narrative and the ethics and aesthetics issues thus entailed so as to further tease out the tension brought forth by the form of the private novel. This critical reading of Ming Dynasty contends that Ming Dynasty is not so much a novel about national identity as a manifestation of the author’s personal (re)imagination of literary creation through Ming Dynasty aesthetics.