流動與靜止

很榮幸能夠受邀參加中澳文學論壇并發(fā)言。

在發(fā)言中，我會用一些比喻來和大家分享感悟。

1.北方/西北方

最近我一直在思考羅盤的設(shè)計。羅盤上有東、南、西、北四個方位基點，還有中間方位基點等更小單位的劃分，用來表示風向。有些羅盤非常華麗，以兩個并不重合的北方，即真北（測地學）和磁北為中心，分布著錯綜復(fù)雜的各種劃分和方位。

羅盤既表示方向，也表示矢量，即它表示風、電流、以及隱形的流動性。在我看來這是對想象力的一種比喻，探索思考和寫作是如何通過超自然的力量為我們打開新的視野，將我們帶到新的空間。

我對中國文化的想象始于西澳大利亞州西北部，小時候我在布魯姆小城附近生活過幾年。那里最初以采珠業(yè)為經(jīng)濟基礎(chǔ)，曾是一個亞裔原住民小鎮(zhèn)。當時亞裔采珠工人已經(jīng)不再受所謂的“白澳政策”的限制，因此小鎮(zhèn)上的大部分居民都來自中國、日本、馬來西亞和菲律賓，還有一些是當?shù)氐脑∶瘛ugun和亞伍如部落則歷來是這片區(qū)域的守護者 。當我還小的時候，這個小鎮(zhèn)幾乎與世隔絕，十分貧窮，并且在逐步走向衰敗。當時人口只有大約1200人，其中有400人，包括兒童在內(nèi)，是白人或歐裔澳人。在這里，我目睹并體驗了不同的語言、食物和風俗，并且長久以來一直被亞洲本土多元的文化深深吸引著。以至于我覺得自己的“白人身份”反倒是一種異常，在文化上也很無趣。

“唐人街”位于布魯姆市中心。盡管這里也有一些殖民時期風格的建筑和白人經(jīng)營的商鋪，但是只有掛著唐記、榮記和方記這類招牌的中國商店才最吸引我。除此之外，陽光電影院也是一個充滿了想象的地方。孩子們在這里無憂無慮，天真爛漫：他們生性自由，珍愛這些獨特的異國風情，還追求不同體驗帶來的快樂。我并不是想感傷童年時代或者描述那段時光，我感興趣的是流動而富有活力的想象力為何能夠在這里產(chǎn)生；以及這些想象力又是如何在與其他事物的種種邂逅中形成。中國面條、中文、煙火、以及中國人的面容等中國元素，在成人的生活或?qū)懽髦幸苍S早已司空見慣，但對于我這個小孩子來說，卻對我對文化的理解產(chǎn)生了深遠的影響。我時常想，這 樣復(fù)雜的文化環(huán)境或許正是我成為一名作家的基礎(chǔ)，這樣想來也是件浪漫的事。當然我們都知道，在寫作時我們作者的身份似乎是固定的，但實際上卻是臨時的，隨意的，不斷變化的；而語言本身則像陣陣清風不時地吹打著我們。

2.南方和南風

有一天我和哥哥來到唐記商店。我在食品貨架之間走來走去，我喜歡堆起來的米粉、罐頭和包裝上印著的紅色的鶴和龍，棕色和深紅色的神秘醬料；我還喜歡新加坡的蚊香和廣州絲綢做的手提包。我還沒想好要買什么，哥哥彼得就買了一個袖珍羅盤。他小心翼翼地打開羅盤的圓蓋子，仿佛是要打開一個神秘的箱子，然后他指著羅盤上的南方說：“我們在這兒。”我當時完全不懂他在說什么。我根本不知道我們生活的南方是指哪里（雖然我父母后來提到過“北上”，但我仍然不明白），羅盤對我來說也是一件完全陌生的物品。寫作，或是對造成自然界這些劃分的力量提出疑問，或是思考對于其他人來說，我們所處的東南西北種種方位。經(jīng)過這樣的思考，哥哥當時說的這些奇怪的話后來似乎給了我啟示：再錯綜復(fù)雜的羅盤也是遵循著各種動態(tài)的關(guān)系來分割布局的。哲學家阿多諾曾寫道：

“距離不是安全區(qū)，而是張力場。保持距離不是放松對真理的追求，而是進行細致入微的思考。” 

這對我而言是一種明智的構(gòu)想。要想真正了解不同的文化和跨文化間的關(guān)系，靠的不是主觀斷言，而是靠人們對自己的假設(shè)做出細致微小的改變，這需要謙虛地學習，并且保有對新事物感到驚奇的能力。

3.東方/西方

“東方”和“西方”這兩個概念對我們的思想造成了多大的壓抑啊。 周蕾把西方和中國這兩個概念的對立稱為“認識論的負擔”：這是源于西方傲慢無知時期的一種意識形態(tài)模型，這種意識形態(tài)以政治的戰(zhàn)略規(guī)劃，和西方自己提出的所謂的“東方主義”為基礎(chǔ)。這與兒童時期對異域文化的好奇、包容和欣賞完全不同。

大家都知道羅盤是中國發(fā)明的。它始于漢代（約公元前200年），最初用于占卜。到了宋代（11世紀），羅盤被用于航海。直到13世紀初期，歐洲人和阿拉伯人也開始在旅行中使用羅盤。大家都非常了解中國思想的中心內(nèi)容，即文體。 那么流動性、方向和想象，這些簡單的聯(lián)系在我們考慮兩國文學友好交流的時候又發(fā)揮了怎樣的助力？馬來西亞華裔理論家桂偉新提到了“世界主義”文學，并支持“批判性民族” 文化流動模式。民族與國家是不同的概念，我們文學工作者應(yīng)該承認，任何民族的文化都是有待補充的，是復(fù)雜的。

這也讓我們再次思考文學作品：小說究竟是什么？它像一個羅盤，包含能量和矢量，還包括如風一樣陣陣吹拂的想象力，在變與不變，本土與外界，以及多元的世界間反復(fù)協(xié)商，最終形成文字。它就像羅盤上的中間方位基點，不同的語言表達方式則像氣象標識，表示不斷變化的文化“氣壓”和運動。我們終究都是自然的產(chǎn)物。我們對美的感受無需遵從任何派系或陳詞濫調(diào)，又或是民族寓言和神話，而應(yīng)當最終形成新的理解。

關(guān)于該地區(qū)原住民守護者的更多描述，見芭芭拉?格羅辛斯基《“一”在西澳大利亞州布魯姆的含義，：從亞伍如部落到魯比比公司》，《原住民歷史》，1998年，第22卷，203-221頁。

西奧多?阿多諾，《最低限度的道德》（《最低限度的道德：對毀掉了的人生的思索》E.F.N.杰夫考特譯，倫敦：沃索出版社，2005）127頁。

周蕾，《中國性：作為一個理論問題》，周蕾編，《理論時代的中國現(xiàn)代文學文化研究》（美國北卡羅萊那州達勒姆：杜克大學）2-25頁。

即英語母語者所說的style（文體），如《詩經(jīng)?國風》。

桂偉新，《民族意識和世界主義文學：全球時代下的后殖民文學》俄亥俄州立大學，2013。

Mobility and Place 

Gail Jones

It’s a great honour to speak at the CALF forum: thank you for inviting me.

My method in this short talk will be metaphoric.

I. North/ Northwest

I’ve been thinking recently of the design of the compass rose: there are the four cardinal points - North, South, East and West - and there are the smaller divisions (the inter-cardinal) that suggest, among other things, the direction of the winds. Some compasses are very ornate, with intricately drawn partitions and directions, and all centre on the odd contradiction of two norths, the so-called true (geodetic) and the magnetic north. 

The compass indicates both direction and vector: so it references wind, currents and invisible mobility. This seems to me metaphoric of imagination itself - and how the business of thinking and writing moves us metaphysically to new visions and spaces. 

My own Chinese imaginary began in north-west Western Australia, where as a child I lived for several years near the small town of Broome. Based initially on a pearling industry, this was an Asian-Aboriginal town, (Asian pearl workers had been exempted from the so-called White Australia Policy) with a majority population of Chinese, Japanese, Malay, Filipino and Aboriginal people. The Jugun and Yaruwu tribes were the traditional custodians of this land . When I was a child, the town was isolated, impoverished and sadly diminished and had a population of only about 1200 people of whom 400, including the children, were considered ‘white’ or European. In this place I saw and experienced other languages, foods and customs, and the deep abiding appeal of an Asian-indigenous multi-culture. I felt my own ‘whiteness’ to be an aberration and culturally dull. 

‘Chinatown’ was then the very centre of Broome, and although there were colonial style buildings and white owned businesses and stores, it was the Chinese shops – Tangs, Wings and Fongs – that were for me the most attractive. The movie house, Sun Picture Gardens, was also a location of extravagant imagining. Children are blithely unaware of their ignorance: they cherish idiosyncratic exoticisms, they seek the pleasure of difference, they are instinctively excursive. Without wishing to sentimentalize or essentialize childhood, I am interested in how the mobile and energized

capacities of imagining begin here; and how too they are constituted by their encounters with otherness. Chinese noodles, Chinese language, fireworks, faces - elements that might in adult life or writing seem a clichéd repertoire of obvious images, were for my child-self profoundly relativizing of my own cultural understanding. I like to think - and this may be romantic - that this complicated cultural space was the foundation 蓋爾?瓊斯of my vocation as a writer. Certainly we all know when we write how emplaced identity seems, but also how provisional, wayward and displaced we in fact are; how language itself is a kind of wind that constantly moves and buffets us.

2. South and the Southerly

I went one day into Tang’s store with my older brother. While I roamed among the food-stuffs - I loved the nests of rice noodles, the red stamped cranes and dragons on tins and packages, the mysterious brown and crimson sauces; while I considered and Singaporean mosquito coils and purses of Guangzhou silk, my brother Peter bought a small pocket compass. He opened its circular lid with solemnity, as if opening a secret casket, pointed to the South and said, “we are here”. It was a meaningless moment. I had no idea what South we lived in (since my parents talked of being “up North”) and the compass was an entirely alien object. One aspect of writing is surely to question the power of these categories, or to consider how we are all north, south, east and west to someone else. In this way my brother’s strange words later seemed a revelation: even the glorious compass rose was contingent in terms of dynamic systems of relations. The philosopher Adorno once wrote: 

“Distance is not a safety zone but a field of tension. It is manifested not in relaxing the claim of ideas to truth, but in delicacy and fragility of thinking.”   

This seems to me a wise formulation. True understanding of the intercultural and cross-cultural is surely premised not on assertion but on delicate and fragile revision of one’s own assumptions, on the modesty of learning, and on the ability to be surprised.

3. East/West

How oppressed we are by “East” and “West”.  Rey Chow calls West/China an “epistemological burden”: it is an ideological model born of centuries of Western condescension and ignorance; not a childhood ‘exotic’, which is a generous and wondering admiration, but one founded on and contaminated by strategic projection and its own kind of ‘orientalism’. 

Everyone here will know that the compass is a Chinese discovery: it was a device for divination in the Han dynasty (around 200BC) and adopted for navigation in the 11th century by the Song Dynasty. Only later, in the early 13th century, did Europeans and the Arab world understand the use of the compass for travel. Everyone here will know too of the centrality of wind to Chinese thinking, the pathological or curative feng.  So how might these simple connections - mobility, directions, imagining as a spirited drift or ambient presence - work to help us consider literary rapprochement between nations? The Malaysian-Chinese theorist Weihsin Gui speaks of a literary “cosmopolitics” and argues for a model of cultural flows that engages a project of “critical nationality” . The nation is not the same as the state, and there are ways in which those of us engaged with literature can acknowledge the unfinished status and complexity of any nation’s culture.  

This might also oblige us to think again of literary texts: What is a novel? It is a container of energies, and vectors, and the gusty waft of imaginings. It is in relentless negotiation with place and displacement, with the local and the other, and with the multi-directionality of worlds that are made of words. It is inter-cardinal; its routes of expression are often the atmospheric sign of shifting cultural pressures and movements. We are all finally creatures of the wind, the wind of breath, and our aesthetic sympathies do not need to conform to factions or truisms, national allegories or mythologies, but might, in the end be the crafting of a new comprehension.

For a description of the complexity of Indigenous land custodianship in the area, see Barbara Glowczewsk “The meaning of ‘One’ in Broome, Western Australia: From Yawuru tribe to Rubibi Corporation” Aboriginal History 1998 vol 22 pp203-221

Theodore Adorno Minima Moralia (Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London:Verso 2005) p127

Rey Chow, ‘On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem’, in Rey Chow, ed., Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000), pp. 2-25. 

I am thinking of the way this might also indicate what English speakers call a style, as in 國風, the Book of Songs.

Weihsin Gui, National Consciousness and Literary Cosmopolitics: Postcolonial Literature in a Global Moment Ohio State University 2013