作为方法的“时间” : 论中国现代小说的发生

Abstract

It is very meaningful for us to put the novels of late Qing Dynasty and May 4th together and examine “the occurrence of modern Chinese novels” around the “time” of the novels. Modernity is a problem of time. Thinking around “time” is a return to the problem itself, which should expand and extend the topic of “the occurrence of modern Chinese novels”. The occurrence of modern Chinese novels is closely related to the narrative time and modernity time of novels. From the perspective of narrative time, whether it is from “full time” to “cross section”, or from “pause” to “omission”, or the psychological presentation of narrative time, all play an important role in the occurrence of modern Chinese novels, and the psychological presentation of narrative time in novels is also very important. With the emergence of psychological impression novels, the plot timeline of novels has almost completely collapsed, the structure of novels has shifted from plot time to psychological space, from the outside to the inside, and the novels have completed the modern transformation from writing stories to writing people, from the outside to the inside. From the perspective of modernity time, compared with the time-space form of novels, the changes of modernity time in novels are more lively and rapid. The growth process of human beings and the evolution process of events are put into concrete time-space and into a linear development time-space. The character changes of characters and the causal development of events all exist in the time process. Therefore, the characters in novels have real psychological and life activity tracks, which is fundamental to the promotion of the modern transformation of Chinese novels.