敘述一個國家的存在：論麥可．翁達傑在《世代相傳》中的特異敘事策略

Narrating a Nation into Being: On Michael Ondaatje’s Deviant Narrative Strategy in Running in the Family

麥可．翁達傑（Michael Ondaatje）的《世代相傳》（Running in the Family, 1982）通常被認為是一部虛構的回憶錄或自／傳體小說，它突破了傳統的文類界限，並以其敘事手法挑戰了讀者在翁達傑的錫蘭／斯里蘭卡家庭成員的不同故事當中穿梭的體驗。這本書既關注翁達傑對人民的生活記錄（“bios”），也著重在呈現他碎片化的寫作姿態（“graphy”）。正如文章中所論證的，翁達傑在後者的這一努力，體現在他採用了偶發的、時而不完整的敘述方式，以再現他自己和他人回憶的短暫和蜿蜒的本質。與此同時，此般敘事姿態亦質疑了一個移民作家在文本中突出顯性歷史敘述的必要性。英國在錫蘭殖民地的分而治之政策和1971年後殖民時期斯里蘭卡的起義，就是翁達傑所質疑的大寫歷史之顯著例子。因此，翁達傑呼籲進行集體的自我敘事，以協調個人和政治的分叉。他將醜聞、流言蜚語、家庭檔案和敘述者的夢境記述融合起來，執行一種對話式的操演；在這個意義上，翁達傑從一開始就表達了真相的無法觸及，並努力將此書展現為伯格人的共同成就，以期抵消由僧伽羅人和泰米爾人主導的民族主義歷史敘述。本文借鑒霍米．巴巴（Homi Bhabha）關於民族和敘事的討論，提供了一種閱讀該書的可能性：將此回憶錄視為作家以其特異的敘述過程，在他的想像家園裡對多元民族的歷史進行的美學創造。

Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982) is often regarded as a fictionalized memoir or auto/biographical fiction that transcends generic conventions. The narrative voice in the book engages the reader by weaving together diverse stories related to Ondaatje’s family history in Ceylon/Sri Lanka. The book records the life (“bios”) of his people as much as it is invested in his gesture of fragmentary writing (“graphy”). As argued in the article, this latter effort by Ondaatje, embodied in his employment of episodic and sometimes incomplete narrative to reproduce the transient and meandering nature of recollection on both parts of himself and the others, questions the imperative of foregrounding manifest historical accounts in an immigrant writer’s text, such as the British divide-and-rule policy in colonial Ceylon and the 1971 insurrection in postcolonial Sri Lanka. Ondaatje calls for a collective selfstorytelling that coordinates the seemingly bifurcated personal and political aspects in such a way that the convergence of scandals, gossips, familial archives, and oneiric accounts enacts a dialogic performance. Ondaatje is both conscious of the unreachability of the truth from the outset and is conscientious about presenting the book as expressive of the Burgher people’s communal achievement, which counterbalances the nationalist narrative of history dominated by the Sinhalese and the Tamil. Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s discussion of nation and narration, this article suggests reading the memoir as inscribing an aesthetic creation of the narrative process on the histories of the multi-ethnic people in the writer’s imaginary homeland.