重要的/The Important Thing
芭比丽娜伯爵小姐/Lady Barberina
乌苏拉勒奎因的《黑暗的左手》是我长久以来一直想读的,已经记不起来头一回叫嚣着要读它是什么时候了。我熟知它的情节,我揣测它的意义,我掌握了它的译本情况----那两种译本都是不易得到的----不易得到但确实存在,对于一本可能的爱书来说,再没有更好的状态了,我计划,我按照无形的日程表一步步接近终将属于我的那本书,我能够看到它在未来的那个确定的日子里和我相遇了,它从遥远的并不欣赏它的人手里来到我的手里,在那确定的一秒钟第一次被我翻开,我听熟了的传说终于与讲述传说的白纸黑字相遇----日程表上并非确定的普通一天里,一切都被打断了----在上海的一家书店,我一不留神就从书架上抽出了新近出版的《黑暗的左手》简体中文单行本。
我揣着《黑暗的左手》离开上海,又读着它回来,读得挺快挺顺,算是出神,可很难说是神往,算是被吸引了,可很难说是被鼓动了,不好说这本书无力,可总觉得它吃不上劲儿。也许是科幻小说作者的通病?追求是很多的,可在每一条追求的道路上都浅尝辄止;提出了很多有趣的话题,可每一项的讨论都搔不到痒处。就算是这部哈罗德布鲁姆列出的西方正典中美国科幻小说界难得的入选之作也不能幸免。再有就是作者所固守的东方哲思(阴阳调和…)和在本作中拥抱的女性主义观点(去性别评价…)都叫我大打哈欠。我信手乱翻被我扔在上海的那些书,居然在早已停刊的译文杂志《外国小说》和柳鸣九编纂的世界心理小说名著合集中拣着了两颗遗珠,田纳西威廉斯和亨利詹姆斯----这两盏美国男同性恋作家界不熄的明灯----结果还是老朋友靠得住,他们赢回了我在这个冬天读小说的信心。
《重要的》是我读到的第一篇非剧本田纳西作品,一如他的剧作,这个小短篇也带有很重的私人色彩,文中人物劳拉甚至道出了田纳西自己的创作观:我不在乎形式,关键在于尽可能真实的表达自我。不过,不要被这句口号唬住了,田纳西是个天生具有形式感的人。这篇短文写的是爱情关系中的性定式,这显然是田纳西本人对性的蒙昧、强横和破坏力的恐惧的袒露,然而其表达形式却是一连串的谜语,读者获得的美感同时来自于诚实和掩饰两方面,善于编码的田纳西总能在清晰和模糊之间找到最佳的位置。只寥寥几页的田纳西就比半本书的乌苏拉讲出了更多我想讲但又讲不好的话,掩卷,会有那么一种冲动:让这几页纸替我去向不解的他们解释我。
《芭比丽娜伯爵小姐》这个中篇作品比起其它亨利詹姆斯的名作来几乎可说是已经被人遗忘,可其品质却不依名气而显得逊色,特别是在刚读完《黑暗的左手》,兴致被挑了起来却得不到满足的时刻,来上一小篇詹姆斯,简直是久旱逢甘露。亨利詹姆斯并不是在任何评价标准下都能胜出的那种作者,但如果紧跟勒奎因出现的话,他却足以把这位女士弹飞到无影无踪处。如出一辙的詹姆斯式故事,不断复现的詹姆斯式主题,大同小异的詹姆斯式人物,这不是换汤不换药,而是汤药都懒换,为什么仍然能让人读得称心满意?詹姆斯的写法示范了:小说家的作为应该在于汤与药之间,在于情节和意义之间,对于他来说,就是在狭小且固定的格局里开掘出人际交往中无限的暧昧的隐秘的难于把握而稍纵即逝的可能性,不满足于像抖包袱那样摊开意义的计划,而在每一个可挖的地方开掘意义的新层次,使其向深度方向持续前进----这甚至无关于天赋的敏感和超常的好奇,而有关于创作观和恒心。恰恰就是在这个方面,勒奎因表现得像个小学生。
附上一段戴维洛奇(《小世界》的作者)大人的文评,题目是:Innocent abroad,编辑给出的副标是David Lodge considers three lesser known short stories by Henry James which, with their preoccupation with passion, shed light on the much debated question of James's sexuality。只选出了其中有关《芭比丽娜伯爵小姐》的段落。
"Lady Barberina" was consciously conceived by James as a reversal of the usual drift of his "international" stories, the narrative Gulf Stream that carried his American characters, often rich young women, to find their marital destiny in Europe. In this case it is a rich American man who takes his English bride back to America - with unhappy consequences. It is a comedy of manners, peopled with characters who have almost farcical names, but its conclusion has a sour flavour, especially for the hero, Jackson Lemon. He is a New York doctor who continues to practise medicine and engage in research although he possesses vast inherited wealth. This makes him a puzzle and a paradox to the English Lord and Lady Canterville, with whose daughter Barberina he falls in love. There are other cultural differences which complicate his courtship. In America young people in good society are trusted to be alone together and thus able to get to know each other well before committing to marriage; Lady Barb (as she is familiarly, and rather ominously known) is hedged about with rules of decorum that practically forbid any intimacy until he has asked her father for her hand. Nevertheless, in spite of these obstacles, in spite of the warnings of his compatriotic friends that Lady Barb will not adjust happily to life in America, and his own occasional misgivings, he accepts all conditions, determined to possess this physically perfect English rose.
The beginning of Chapter V, set in New York, gives us an instant measure of the seriousness of his mistake:
"On Sundays, now, you might be at home," Jackson Lemon said to his wife in the following month of March, more than six months after his marriage.
"Are the people any nicer on Sundays than they are on other days?" Lady Barberina replied, from the depths of her chair, without looking up from a stiff little book.
The tale opens with a picture - actually more like a motion-picture, avant la lettre - of society equestrians taking their exercise in London's Hyde Park, watched and admired by humbler and less athletic folk.
This chapter was particularly admired by James's friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, and deservedly. As close readers of the story have observed, its language is saturated with allusions to, and metaphors drawn from, horses. Lady Barberina's nickname denotes, as well as a sharply pointed object that is difficult to extract without pain, a breed of horse. The upper-class marriage market is likened to a cattle market, and Jackson Lemon, who, small of stature himself, hopes for finely proportioned offspring from his thoroughbred wife, is just as implicated as the English aristocrats in its distortion of relations between the sexes.
Sex itself is an aspect of marriage that James does not deal with directly in these stories, or elsewhere in his work; he was prohibited from doing so by the reticence required of English and American writers in his time, as well as by the limitations of his experience. But he turned his own sexual ambivalence into an advantage, representing this aspect of life from both sides of the gender divide. Although Edel and most other biographers believe he was a repressed and celibate homosexual by nature and choice, he understood the force that drew men and women together in love, and no novelist has surpassed him in describing the behaviour of married couples - their conversational strategies and body-language and mind games - this side of the bedroom door. |