世界文学史的轴心时刻？——《哈姆雷特》、《堂吉诃德》与《西游记》中的“故事套故事”

本文在比较几部无共源关联的文本的框架下,讨论其所包含的一个基本问题,即文学,或者讲故事的艺术本身,是否在其本性中有某种难以抑制的企图,企图在讲故事或文学创作的过程中复制讲故事这一叙事行为？我希望通过考察三部重要文学经典的一个关键的共同点来考察这一问题,其中的一部出自中国,另两部出自欧洲。它们产生的年代虽可追溯至前后二十年间,却是在彼此文化隔绝的状态下出现的。第一部是中国四大古典小说之一《西游记》,刊印于1592年。第二部是莎士比亚的悲剧《哈姆雷特》,一般认为作于1599~1601年,该剧两种不同的四开本出版于1603~1604年。第三部是塞万提斯的讽刺小说《堂吉诃德》,该书两部分分别于1605年和1615年面世。通过比较考察这三部作品中故事套故事(或叙事内镜)和经书化的现象,本文认为它们代表了中西文学中的一个轴心时刻,即自十六世纪最后十年至十七世纪开始的几十年,它们通过自身内部的自我复制来炫耀其文学性:《哈姆雷特》里的戏中戏,《堂吉诃德》中的小说里的小说,以及《西游记》里的经书中的经书。我在本文结论中表明,文本套文本这一现象与这些作品根植其中的佛教和基督教传统有关,是具体的宗教传统为文学作品提供了概念层面的先驱。
Abstract：This essay broaches a basic question within the framework of a comparison of several “genetically” unrelated literary texts: might not literature, or the art of storytelling itself, have ingrained in its very nature an irrepressible need to call attention to itself by replicating within itself the very narrative act it is engaging in as storytelling or as literature? The essay pursues this question by considering a crucial shared aspect of three pivotal literary classics, one of them Chinese, the other two, European. All three of them date from within two decades of each other, yet came into existence in cultural isolation from one another. The first work is one of China's Four Great Classical Novels, The Journey to the West (Xiyouji), published in 1592. The second is Shakespeare's tragic drama Hamlet, composed putatively in 15991601, and published in two quartos in 16034. The third is Cervantes's satirical novel Don Quixote of La Mancha (Don Quijote de la Mancha), whose two parts appeared successively in 1605 and 1615. Through a comparative examination of the phenomena of scripturality and the tale within a tale (mise en abyme) in all three works, the lecture considers them as representing an axial moment in Chinese and Western literature, spanning the last decade of the sixteenth century and the opening of the seventeenth, as they flaunt their own literary substance by replicating it within themselves: the play within a play (Hamlet), the novel within a novel (the Quixote), and the scriptures within a scripture (Journey to the West). As I show in conclusion, this phenomenon, the text within a text, finds suggestive conceptual precedents deeply ingrained in the Buddhist and Christian traditions from which the three works emerged.