翻译练习 | C. T. Hsia . A Critique:Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber(1979)
本文是夏志清（C.T.Hsia）对于浦安迪（Andrew H.Plaks）的《〈红楼梦〉的原型和寓意》（《Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber》）一文的评论，由笔者试作翻译，不当之处，望请指正，原文附于末尾。
《<红楼梦>中的原型和寓意》
评论（1979）
作者：夏志清
在近年来研究中国传统小说的年轻美国学者中，普林斯顿大学的浦安迪教授无疑受过最好的比较文学训练，同时也是最有野心的理论家。只要读过这本有待评论的书籍（普林斯顿大学出版社，1976年），和他主编的专题研讨会论文集（《中国叙事学：批评与理论文章》，普林斯顿大学出版社，1977）中的两篇长文（《<西游记>与<红楼梦>中的寓言》和《走向中国叙事学的批评理论》），都会让人由衷感叹于他认真的学术研究和广泛的文学与批评知识。为了给他对《红楼梦》的理解提供一个比较的框架，浦安迪教授阅读了欧洲中世纪和文艺复兴时期的主要诗歌原作，并掌握了大量关于这一主题的现代批评。但对于一个专门研究小说的年轻汉学家而言，更难能可贵的是他对自己领域之外的大量中国文献的第一手了解，包括先秦典籍，唐宋散文名家以及各种明清文言作品。作为一个英语作家，他确实有一种过于不近人情的风格，而且喜欢使用大量拉丁文术语，这并没有让所有评论家满意，我作为他们中的一个就觉得他对第一人称代词的刻意回避特别令人不快。（他习惯性地使用“本文认为”这样的套话，而在那种语境下更直率的“我认为”绝对是首选）然而，尽管他的词汇很抽象，文风偶尔也很艰涩，但我必须指出浦安迪很少模棱两可，相反，他在思想的世界里展现出如鱼得水的卓越心智。
然而，尽管浦安迪具有鉴别力的心智确有成效，并且他对中国和西方文学的博识令人艳羡，但《<红楼梦>中的原型和寓意》仍不是一本我可以毫无保留地推荐的书。它无疑是一部令人印象深刻的作品，但无论是作为一篇比较美学的论文，还是作为对有关小说的研究，它都不完全令人满意，尽管如此，每一位读者还是应该感谢作者，因为他在与小说有关的讨论中贡献了为数众多的主题：中国神话学和宇宙学，中国园林美学，人类学，寓言诗的西方传统。浦安迪将《红楼梦》视为中国叙事传统的最高成就，他以此着手在他的书中展示了这部作品在叙事逻辑，原型和寓言主题的使用方面是多么的中国化，以及在所有这些方面它与西方文学的代表作品根本上多么不同。然而在追求这一双重任务的过程中，浦安迪似乎与小说中通常吸引读者的人类事件完全脱离。在他上述两篇文章中，他对《红楼梦》以及所讨论的其他小说中的人性层面缺乏兴趣，这可以视作为他在理论方面野心的结果，如果这种野心不是指向整个中国文学的传统的话，那么他想要做的便是定义中国的叙事传统。一个中国美学原则的制定者，在面对小说中的人物时，不可能对具体的人的问题有多大关注。但更严重的是，浦安迪的奥林匹亚式的疏离感反映了他对中国文明过度简化的看法，他从变化无常和循环往复的角度看待所有的人类现象。如果一切都像是黑夜与白昼一样此消彼长，那么我们为什么要认真对待快乐或悲伤呢？恐怕浦安迪本人也受到这种思维模式的制约，以致于他在研究过程中一再贬低这部小说在模仿模式下哲理层面的缺陷，尽管《红楼梦》总体上采用的是现实主义叙事。
评论者的工作本不该去猜测，作者是否因为对中国文明持有特殊的看法，而倾向于将《红楼梦》当作寓言来审查，或者说他是否通过对小说的深入研究而得出这种观点。考虑到牟复礼教授不可否认的影响，前一种假设似乎更有可能，牟在前言中收到了这样的感谢：“感谢他对稿件深思熟虑的阅读和宝贵的意见与更正。”（viii）同时也是从他那边，浦安迪借用了“有机体”这一术语来描述中国人的宇宙观。在他的著作《中国思想之渊源》（纽约：克诺夫出版社，1971）中，牟复礼将《易经》视作“中国人最早的思想结晶之一”和“中国特性的一块试金石”。在那部经典中包含了“真正的中国宇宙观”，如其所示，它是“有机的过程，意味着整个宇宙的所有部分都属于一个有机的整体，它们都作为参与者而相互作用，在各自的一段自然发生并自我生成的生命进程当中”（19）。浦安迪也将《易经》视作最万无一失的中国思想指南，他引用《易经》的次数比任何其他的先秦典籍都要多。他对老子、庄子、董仲舒、周敦颐的引用，甚至是对园林建筑书籍的引用，都充分支持了这种世界观。我们的确可以将浦安迪的研究视作一本应用美学的书，他假托《红楼梦》的话题，但真正的目标却是将大部分中国文学（也很可能是它的整个叙事传统）归因于《易经》的世界观。因此浦安迪花了大量篇幅介绍了阴阳和五行（五种元素），并从“两极互补”和“多重周期”的角度解释了他们的运作机制。在理解中国文明的其他可能入径中，这些术语对浦安迪来说是一把万能钥匙，它可以用来打开“持久的审美形式，从而使得中国的文学体系具有一致性和连续性”（53）。
在我们考察浦安迪如何使用这两个术语来揭示《红楼梦》的叙事结构之前，毋庸置疑，我们应该先考虑“两极互补”（欢乐与悲伤、运动与静止等对比性经验状态的互补性）和“多重周期”（参照“五行”的宇宙观来理解更为复杂的经验模式的无休往复）是否确实是中国文学特有的“持久的审美形式”。在我所看过的两位学者的评论中，白保罗教授对浦安迪的理论事业印象较深，但即使是他也质疑是否“他确认的模式不仅能解释曹雪芹小说的美学，而且对所有传统中国文学都具有确定性”（556）。
黄教授对此持有更为怀疑的态度，他论及浦安迪对大观园中的生活所作的寓言式处理，并作了如下摘引：“空间化的整体中平衡的二元性和无休止的交替，根本无法与具有明晰可辨的开头、中间和结尾并存的单线时间流变相协调”（409）。事实上，我们可以这样说，尽管中国和西方美学之间存在着所谓的根本差异，但对于每一个叙述者来说，如果他想要吸引读者的兴趣，他就必须讲述一个有开头、中间和结尾的故事。尽管曹雪芹和高鹗可能以其他独特的方式展现了中国美学，但他们首先是有一个长故事要讲的叙述者，如果他们没有周密地注意到影响贾家的事件的“单线时间流变”，就不可能在两个世纪以来一直感动着读者。
然而，浦安迪不相信这种将《红楼梦》视为有始有终的叙事的明显观点，因为他的主要目的之一是利用小说来证明中国人的思想在审美领域的运作方式与西方人不同。如果我们暂时不考虑“多重周期”这一逻辑概念（它只是使浦安迪关于“两极互补”这一更容易掌握的术语的阐释变得复杂），我们就可以将他关于西方文学和中国文学的本质区别的理论简化为相当简单的术语：西方作家是二元论和辩证性的，因为他的世界中所有的两极对立面（善与恶，真与假等）都在一个时间框架内相互争夺，而中国作家既不是二元论的，也不是辩证性的，因为他超越时间，并以此设想一种“整体性的空间观”，其中所有的二元性都被视为互相补充的。作为一种时间性艺术的表现，西方文学是面向终极的；作为一种空间性视野的投射，中国文学则并不如此。
浦安迪的阐述方式当然很巧妙，但它们符合事实吗？自从莱辛的《拉奥孔》以来，毫无疑问，西方的文学和艺术批评家一直非常关注时间和空间的概念，而浦安迪也不是第一个强调文学作品或文学团体的空间特征的人。早在约瑟夫·弗兰克教授的著名论文《现代文学中的空间形式》中，他就已经证明，像艾略特、庞德、普鲁斯特和乔伊斯这样的现代西方作家 “完美地意指读者在空间上，在一个时间点上来理解他们的作品，而不是作为一连串的序列来理解”（《星云》 9）。他的论点赢得了学者普遍的接受，而我们必须体谅这些学者未能吸收中国宇宙论的遗憾，尽管如此，我们还是可以把《荒原》和《尤利西斯》这样的作品看作是实验性作家在空间方面捕捉某种整体性视野的勇敢尝试。尽管浦安迪可能没有为中国或西方的现代文学设计他的比较美学理论，但他在第一章中特意将《红楼梦》与《尤利西斯》和《追忆似水年华》联系起来，认为这几部作品 "都是整个传统的百科全书式的汇编，其形式本身就可以作为一个典范，以此来评判那些气势稍逊的作品"（II）。不管他是否同意约瑟夫·弗兰克的观点，恐怕他关于西方文学是对时间现实的二元和辩证表述的理论将不得不进行修改，以适应于《尤利西斯》和《追忆逝水年华》这样复杂的现代叙事艺术的例子。
但在中国传统文学方面，浦安迪的理论遇了更糟糕的麻烦。一方面，他坚持认为“两极互补”和“多重周期”普遍适用于中国体系；但另一方面，他却又承认在有意识的寓言构思的中国作品里，在规模上能与《红楼梦》和《西游记》相媲美的极少。如果情况确实如此，那么他又怎么能把大部分中国文学看作是一种非辩证法则和非面向终极的艺术，它真的包含了一种 “整体性的空间观”吗？几乎所有的中国抒情诗人都痴迷于时间，满足于从死亡的角度来看待人类的处境，而无需一个明显的宗教或寓言式的概观。我们可以同意浦安迪的观点，即保存在古代著作里的中国神话 “本质上是脱离时间的视觉形式”(25)，因为它们的叙述缺乏兴致，也没有周密的细节。但是，我们必须记住，正是因为他们的古代神话处于零散状态，中国人长期以来一直赋予历史一个类似于西方史诗的角色。因此，他们真实历史中的民族英雄在地位上可以与西方神话中的英雄相媲美，西方人口中的阿克琉斯和奥德修斯在中国人眼中类似的形象一直是项羽、刘邦、关羽、诸葛亮，以及《史记》或《三国演义》中其他深受喜爱的人物，并不是像女娲和伏羲这样鲜为人知的角色，而浦安迪却用了一章来描述他们。如果他不是把希伯来和希腊神话中的英雄与这些远古时代的造物主相提，而是与历史和小说中大量记载的名人并论，他就不会如此轻易地想要得出结论：因为中国人对 "叙事行动 "基本漠不关心，所以他们与其他民族不同。
附原文如下：
Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber
A Critique (1979）
by C.T.Hsia
Of the younger American scholars who have written on traditional Chinese fiction in recent years,Professor Andrew H. Plaks of Princeton University is clearly the best trained in comparative literature and the most ambitious as a theoretician. On the evidence of the book under review (Princeton University Press, 1976) and the two long essays in the symposium volume under his editorship (Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays, Princeton University Press, 1977), “Allegory in Hsi-yu Chi and Hung-lou Meng” and “Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative,” one cannot but be impressed by his earnest scholarship and his wide-ranging knowledge of literature and criticism. To provide a comparative framework for his understanding of Dream of the Red Chamber, Professor Plaks has read the major poetry of medieval and Renaissance Europe in the original and mastered a considerable body of modern criticism on the subject. But for a young sinologist specializing in fiction, what is perhaps even more remarkable is his firsthand knowledge of a large variety of Chinese writing outside his own field, including the pre-Ch'in classics, T'ang-Sung prose masters, and an assortment of Ming-Ch'ing works in the literary language. As a writer of English, it is true, he has an overly impersonal style and fondness for big Latinate terms that have not pleased all reviewers, and I for one find his studied avoidance of the first-person pronoun particularly irksome. (He habitually employs such formulas as “it is maintained” when the more forthright “I maintain” is definitely to be preferred.) Yet despite his abstract vocabulary and occasionally dense style, I must say that Plaks is rarely ambiguous and shows on the contrary a remarkable mind thoroughly at home in the world of ideas.
Yet with all the evidence in its favor of a discriminating mind at work and of enviable erudition covering both Chinese and western literature, Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber is not a book I can recommend without serious reservations. It is assuredly a most impressive piece of work, but neither as an essay in comparative aesthetics nor as a study of the novel in question is it entirely satisfactory, even though every reader should be grateful to the author for the sheer number of subjects he discusses in connection with the novel: Chinese mythology and cosmology, Chinese garden aesthetics, anthropology, the western tradition of allegorical poetry. Regarding Dream of the Red Chamber as the crowning achievement of the Chinese narrative tradition, Plaks proceeds to show in his book how very Chinese the work is in its narrative logic and in its employment of archetypal and allegorical motives and how in all these respects it is radically different from the representative works of western literature. In pursuing this dual task, however, Plaks appears altogether detached from the human events in the novel that normally engage the reader. His lack of interest in the human dimension of Dream, and of the other novels discussed in his two aforementioned essays, may be seen as a consequence of his theoretical ambition to define the Chinese narrative tradition, if not the whole tradition of Chinese literature. A formula- tor of the principles of Chinese aesthetics cannot be much concerned with the concrete human problems facing the characters in a novel. But more seriously, Plaks's Olympian detachment reflects his oversimplified view of Chinese civilization as one that sees all human phenomena in the aspect of endless change and cyclic recurrence. Why take joy or sorrow seriously if one follows the other as surely as night follows day? I am afraid Plaks himself is conditioned by this mode of thought so that in the course of his study he repeatedly makes disparaging remarks about the philosophic inadequacy of the novel in its mimetic mode even though Dream is by and large a realistic narrative.
It is not the reviewer's job to speculate whether the author is predisposed to examine Dream as allegory because he holds a particular view of Chinese civilization or whether he arrives at this view through his intensive study of the novel. The former hypothesis would seem more likely in view of the undeniable influence of Professor F. W. Mote, who receives thanks in the preface “for his thoughtful reading of the manuscript and invaluable comments and corrections” (viii) and from whom the author borrows the term “organismic” to describe the Chinese view of the cosmos. In his book Intellectual Foundations of China (New York: Knopf, 1971), Mote regards the Book of Changes as “one of the earliest crystallizations of the Chinese mind” and the “one touchstone of what is peculiarly Chinese.” “The genuine Chinese cosmogony” as seen in that classic is “that of organismic process, meaning that all the parts of the entire cosmos belong to one organic whole and that they all interact as participants in one spontaneously self-generating life process” (19).1 Plaks, too, regards the Book of Changes as the most infallible guide to the Chinese mind, and cites it more often than any other pre-Ch'in classic. The quotations from Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Tung Chung-shu, Chou Tun-i, and even from books on garden architecture are all fully in support of its worldview. We may indeed regard Plaks's study as a book of applied aesthetics whose ostensible topic is Dream but whose real object is to ascribe to much of Chinese literature, and presumably its entire narrative tradition, the worldview of the Book of Changes. Thus Plaks devotes much space to the concepts of yin-yang and wu-hsing (the five elements) and explains their working in terms of “complementary bipolarity” and “multiple periodicity.” Among other possible uses toward an understanding of Chinese civilization, these terms serve for Plaks as a master key with which to unlock the “abiding aesthetic forms that lend consistency and continuity to the system of Chinese literature” (53).
Before we examine Plaks's use of these two terms to disclose the narrative structure of Dream, it is surely pertinent to consider whether the complementarity of such contrastive states of experience as joy and sorrow, movement and stillness (“complementary bipolarity”), and the ceaseless recurrence of the even more intricate patterns of experience to be understood with reference to wu-hsing cosmology (“multiple periodicity”) are indeed “abiding aesthetic forms” characteristic of Chinese literature. Of the two scholars whose reviews I have seen (Frederick P. Brandauer's in Journal of Asian Studies 36 [1977]： 554-557； Timothy C. Wong's in Literature East & West 18 [1974]: 402-410), Professor Brandauer is the more impressed by Plaks's theoretical enterprise, but even he questions whether “the patterns he identifies not only account for the aesthetics of Ts'ao's novel but are definitive for all traditional Chinese literature” (556). Professor Wong is more skeptical and argues with reference to Plaks's allegoric treatment of life in the Ta-kuan Yuan that “balanced duality and ceaseless alternation in a spatialized totality are simply not reconciled with a concurrent unilinear temporal flux with a clearly discernible beginning, middle, and end” (409). Indeed we may say that, despite the allegedly radical differences between Chinese and western aesthetics, every narrator, if he is to engage the reader's interest, tells a story that has a beginning, middie, and end. Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in and Kao E, though they may have exemplified Chinese aesthetics in other distinctive ways, are above all narrators with a long story to tell and could not have moved readers for two centuries without paying strict attention to the “unilinear temporal flux” of events affecting the Chia family.
Plaks, however, distrusts this obvious view of Dream as a narrative with a beginning and an ending because one of his principal aims is to use the novel to prove that the Chinese mind functions differently from the western mind in the aesthetic realm. If we ignore for the present the logical concept of “multiple periodicity,” which merely complicates what Plaks has to say about the more easily grasped term “complementary bipolarity,” we may reduce his theory regarding the essential differences between western and Chinese literature to rather simple terms. Whereas the western writer is dualistic and dialectical because all bipolar opposites in his world (good and evil, truth and falsehood, etc.) contend with each other in a temporal framework, the Chinese writer is neither dualistic nor dialectical because he transcends time to posit “a spatial vision of totality” in which all dualities are seen as complementary. As a form of temporal art, western literature is end-oriented; as a projection of spatial vision, Chinese literature is not.
Plaks's formulations are certainly neat, but are they true? Ever since Lessing's Laokoon, of course, western critics of literature and the arts have been much concerned with the concepts of time and space, and Plaks has not been the first to stress the spatial qualities of a literary work or a body of literature. Thus in his famous essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945; revised version in The Widening Gyre [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963], Professor Joseph Frank has demonstrated that modern western writers like Eliot, Pound, Proust, and Joyce “ideally intend the reader to apprehend their work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence” (Gyre 9). His thesis has won general acceptance, and making due allowance for their failure to incorporate Chinese cosmology, we may nevertheless regard works like The Waste Land and Ulysses as valiant attempts by experimental writers to capture some vision of totality in spatial terms. Although Plaks may not have designed his theory of comparative aesthetics for modern literature, Chinese or western, he specifically links Dream with Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past in his first chapter, seeing each work “as an encyclopedic compendium of an entire tradition in a form that itself serves as a model against which to judge works of less imposing stature” (11). Whether he agrees with Joseph Frank or not, I am afraid his theory of western literature as dualistic and dialectical representation of temporal reality will have to be revised in order to accommodate such complex examples of modern narrative art as Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past.
But Plaks's theory is in far worse trouble with regard to traditional Chinese literature. He maintains, on the one hand, the universal applicability of “complementary bipolarity” and “multiple periodicity” to the Chinese system; on the other hand, however, he admits that there are very few Chinese works of conscious allegoric design comparable in magnitude to Dream and Hsi-yu chi. If this is indeed the case, then how can he see the bulk of Chinese literature as a species of nondialectical and non-end oriented art embracing the “spatial vision of totality”? Nearly all Chinese lyrical poets are obsessed with time, content to view the human situation in the perspective of mortality, without much need of an overtly religious or allegorical overview. We may agree with Plaks that Chinese myths as preserved in ancient writings are “essentially detemporalized forms of vision” (25) since they are narrated without gusto or circumstantial detail. But one must remember that, precisely because of the fragmentary state of their ancient myths, the Chinese had long assigned history a role comparable to that enjoyed by epic poetry in the West. Thus their true heroes of national stature comparable in mythological status to such western heroes as Achilles and Odysseus have always been Hsiang Yu, Liu Pang, Kuan Yu, Chu-ko Liang, and other beloved figures from the Shih chi or San-kuo yen-i rather than such shadowy figures as Nu-kua and Fu-hsi, to whom Plaks devotes a chapter. Had he compared the heroes of Hebrew and Greek mythology not with these demiurges of primordial antiquity but with personages whose deeds are abundantly recorded in history and fiction, he would not have been so easily tempted to conclude that the Chinese are different from the other peoples for their essential indifference to “narrative action.”
