Coming to Terms-Literary Configurations of the Past in Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World and Timothy Mo's An Insular Possession

Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and Timothy Mo's An Insular Possession (1986) are fictional works with a combined structural and thematic emphasis on dynamics of the past, one in terms of the personal memory, in the other in terms of colonial history. Ishiguro's fiction foregrounds the main character's reluctance to face and be held morally responsible for earlier acts-or lack of acts-with publicly momentous consequences. In Ishiguro's case the past assumes threatening proportions and must be held at bay by enforced memory-failure and displacement. If there is understatement in relation to the past in Ishiguro's fictional universe, the opposite is the case in Mo's An Insular Possession. This is a text pressing on its reader a discourse saturated with factual details, with the apparent aim of rendering the past as accurate and authentic as possible, but with a disrupting ironic lightness. In both works the past appears hazy, in one through the lack of certainty, in the other by a saturation of detail. Both works make clear the sifting, ordering, and fictionalizing negotiations that constitute private as well as public recuperations of the past.

關鍵字

Kazuo Ishiguro ； Timothy Mo ； fictional construction ； fiction and historiography ； metafiction

並列摘要

石黑一雄的《浮世畫家》（1986）與毛翔青的《島民所有權》（1986）是虛構的作品，其結構與主題強調描繪往昔變遷的動力，其中一部作品訴諸個人記憶，另一部作品則引用殖民歷史。石黑一雄的小說凸顯主要角色不願意面對公開、嚴重後果的過去的行為－或匱乏的行動－也不願意被認為須負道義上的責任。在石黑一雄的案例中，往昔具有威脅的意涵，必須以強制性的失憶與替換心理遏止。假如石黑一雄的小說世界中關於過去皆輕描淡寫，毛翔青的《島民所有權》則是不同的案例。在此文本中逼迫讀者的是：充滿事實細節的論述，其目的在於儘量精確並真實地摹繪過去，卻有斷裂與反諷式的優雅。在這兩部作品中，過去的形貌顯得模糊不清，其中一部作品欠缺確定感，另一部作品則浸潤於細節中。這兩部作品清楚地顯示，虛構化、與時俱變的協商，以及持續的整理，是構成恢復私密與公共領域失落的時間的途徑。