李昂於1984年發表情書系列四篇,乃因極具爭議的《殺夫》獲獎而屢遭人身攻擊後,有意為之的實驗之作。由於傳統讀者的閱讀思維,總將小說主角的行徑等同於作者自我經驗的表露,故將對主角的不滿直接投射在作者李昂身上。據此激發李昂挑戰傳統的嘗新創作意識,企圖藉由符號遊戲與後設技巧以鬆動讀者對號入座慣性的合理性;也啟動真實與虛構的辯證關係。而此一情書系列的後設風格是李昂創作的重要轉折,同時也意外引發楊青矗的「回信」。本文主要析論李昂於1984年的情書系列採取「後設單音書信體」的書寫策略,及其開啟的真實與虛構的辯證對話。另一方面,本文將1984李昂、1986楊青矗、1990李昂這三波情書小說視為一個情書系列,認為其足以作為窺見台灣後設小說發展脈絡的一切片,呈現出台灣後設小說自七○年代寫實風潮後,從摸索實驗到成熟,最後喪失其前衛意義的文學面向。
Li Ang was frequently attacked ad hominem after the controversial "The Butcher's Wife" won an award. She published the four "Love Letters" series in 1984, which served as an intentional experimental work. The traditional readership sees the characters in the novels as the revelation of the author's self-experience, and hence, projects the resentment on Li Ang. Consequently, Li Ang's awareness of challenging the tradition was raised. With the games of symbols and the techniques of metafiction, she aimed to shake the legitimacy of readers' habit of taking everything personally. At the same, she started revealing the dialectical relations of reality and fiction. This metafictional style is an important turn in Li Ang's writing, and she accidentally received Yang Ching-chu's "response letter". On the one hand, this essay mainly examines the writing strategy "metafictional monophonic epistolary" Li Ang used in the 1984 "Love Letters" series and the dialectics it triggered. On the other hand, this essay sees Li Ang's (1984), Yang Ching-chu's (1986), and Li Ang's (1990) three waves of Love Letters series as a whole, and further argues that this series is enough to serve as a diagram of Taiwanese metafiction development. This series represents the literary facet of how Taiwanese metafiction was experimented and explored, how it fledged, and how it lost its avant-garde significance after the fad of Taiwanese Realism in the 1970s.