- 期刊
《草房子》的童年想像－一部小說，一部電影，以及一段民族記憶的塑造
Imagining Childhood in Thatched Memories: a Fiction, a Film, and a Figuration of People's Memory
摘要
本文以德里達的「延異」理論為基礎，檢視小說《草房子》的社會傳播現象，探索作者曹文軒對童年經驗的轉化、存在於電影改編版本中的變異以及社會大眾對它們的重構性解讀。根據曹文軒的説法，《草房子》旨在表現人性價值與永恆的感動，但在電影及社會大眾的理解過程裡，它卻被讀成是一段美好現實的反映。許多兒童甚至羨慕起小說中那些兒童在那個年代的生活。事實上，在《草房子》中標誌的1962年，中國大陸剛歷經了「大躍進」運動，又遭逢三年自然災害（大旱災），生活是不是美好，猶有可說。很明顯地，小說將過去給理想化了，然而這卻不是本文評論的重點。本文所要強調的，乃在於個人的童年想像一旦經過了社會的解讀，被讀成了民族的集體記憶，這其間總會存在著許多的誤差－特別是主流意識的介入，又使情況變得更為複雜。為了突顯作者自我定位與他者解讀的對比，本文討論了曹文軒文學理論的幾個關鍵性概念：追求永恆性大於追求民族性，關懷形而上本體大於關懷形而下器用……並且指出其中的一些理念糾葛。結論是：集體記憶的形塑總離不開真實與虛構的交互關係；他者對《草房子》的「誤讀」，其實根源於作者本人在小說中的某種表現「企圖」，例如「有為」的永恆「有為」的感動以及確定時地在小說裡的標舉，著眼於《草房子》對童年的美化想像，本文提供另一種有趣的讀法，就是把它讀成「童話」，而不是把它讀成「歷史」。
並列摘要
This essay examines the social transmission phenomena of the fiction Thatched Memories on the base of the 'différance' theory of Jacques Derrida. It explores the writer Cao Wenxuan's transformation of his childhood experience, the difference between the film and the fiction, and the re-constructively decoding of social mass to them. According to the writer, the fiction Thatched Memories aims to express the human values and the eternal moving, but the film and the social mass understand it as the reflection of a period of good time. Many boys and girls even envy those fictional children for their living at that time. In fact, the year of 1962 set in Thatched Memories is just when the mainland of China experienced The Great Leaps Forward' and suffered three-year calamities (drought) so it is hard to say that the life was nice at that time. Obviously, the fiction has idealized the past: however, this is not a critical point in this essay. What the essay stresses, is that there always exists a lot of error in it when the imagining childhood of the individual go through the social decoding and is regarded as a people's collective memory-especially the intervening of dominant conscious-ness, which makes the matter more complex. In order to emphasize the comparison between the writer's self-orientation and others' decoding on the text, here discusses some critical concepts of Cao's literary theory: pursuing much more eternity than nationality, concerning about much more meta physical essence than pragmatism… and indicates some con-ccptual entanglement in them. The conclusion: the shaping of collective memory can't escape the interrelation of truth and fiction; others' 'misreading' to Thatched Memories originates exactly from some kind of the 'attempt' the writer presents in the fiction, such as 'teleological' eternity 'teleological' moving and the setting of certain time and place. Focusing on the prettified imagination of childhood, this essay provides an interesting reading of Thatched Memories, which is to regard it as ＂a fairy tale' rather than 'a history'.