中国作家王小波的“西方资源”

作家王小波(1952-1997)其人其文在中国当代文坛似属“异类”。所以成为“异类”,因素诸多,但拥有丰富的“西方资源”(以欧美文学为主兼及哲学、历史、自然科学等在内的西方文化)并广泛汲纳乃一重要原因。从其经历可以发现:王小波分别从“家庭”、“学校教育”、自修式的“阅读”三途径接获了这一资源,而广泛的个人阅读对作家身份的王小波影响最大也最为重要。丰富的“西方资源”不同层面、不同程度地影响了王小波,使王小波有了科学的思维方式、相应的思想观念、“文理兼修”的知识结构和个人化的“文学观”———“小说家(应)是知识分子”、“文学是永恒的事业”、“做艺术上的完美主义者”、“小说应深得虚构之美”。检视其“文学观”,我们可以发现其以欧美现当代文学为主、以欧美现当代小说为要的西方文学“来路”:从杜拉斯处,他汲纳了小说艺术应“感性化”与“完美化”的艺术追求;从卡尔维诺处,他汲纳了“小说有无限的可能性”的乐观精神,释放了“想象”的双翅,高翔于虚构世界,将经典小说沉重的文体羽化为“轻”;从马克·吐温与萧伯纳处,他汲纳了入世、问世、讥世的精神与幽默、讽刺的艺术个性,成就了黑色幽默的个人风格;从奥威尔与昆德拉处,他汲纳了知识分子作家清醒自觉的社会批判意识与高度的责任感,对中国当代社会人之生存状况给予了深度关注与尖锐揭示。“西方资源”的拥有与博取,使王小波成为今日之王小波。

The Western Resources of the Chinese Writer Wang Xiao-bo

Wang Xiaobo(1952-1997), a writer——both his works and himself are unique in contemporary literary world in China. Many factors are involved in his uniqueness, but the important factor is that he not only had ri ch western resources, but also made a good use of the resources. From his experi ences we can easily find that family education,school education and self-taugh t reading are the three main channels through which he had access to this resour ces. Moreover, his extensive reading had the greatest and most important impact on him as a writer. The influence of the western resources on him in different r espects and to various extent made him cultivate his way of scientific thinking and his ideology, it also made him acquire his all-round knowledge and his indi vidualized concept of literature——that is a novelist must be an intellectual, literature is eternal, novels should have the beauty of made-up plots and what is more he wanted to be a perfectionist. If we examine his concept of literature closely, we can see that in his novels, the trace of western literature whose m ain part is modern and contemporary European literature and American literature and modern and contemporary European novels and American novels. He learnt the a rtistic pursuit of perceptualization and perfectionation of novels from Margueri t Duras. He assimilated Italo Calvino’s optimistic spirit of infinite possibili ties of novels, this greatly stimulated and energized his imagination in the mad e-up world and thus he made the heavy style of writing of classical novels ligh t as a feather. He learnt the spirit of satirizing the world and looking at it c ritically and the humorous,sarcastic and artistic individuality from Mark Twin a nd George Bernard Shaw ,therefore he developed his own style of black humor. And he also learnt the clear consciousness of social criticism and strong sense of duty of intellectual writers from George Orwell and Milan Kundera. He not only p aid great attention to the living conditions of the Chinese people today but als o exposed it sharply. It is his rich western resources of culture,literature,his tory,philosophy and so on and his good use of the resources that makes what Wang Xiao-bo is today.