評論
打印
Culture
文藝版塊
Book review
書評
The past and future of literature
文學的過去與未來
Full of sound and fury
充滿喧嘩與騷動
The novel was a dominant art form in the last century. What does this one portend?
小說是上世紀的主流藝術形式，本世紀的小說預示著什么？
Stranger Than Fiction. By Edwin Frank.
《比虛構更離奇》，埃德溫·弗蘭克著。
The novel is dead; the novel is dying; prestige television has killed it.
小說已死，小說正在死去，大制作電視劇已經殺死了小說。
These familiar complaints are oddly comforting, both because hand-wringing over the state of the novel is a time-honoured pursuit, and readers who pick up the remote instead of a book after dinner—as your correspondent does more often than he should—can feel they are engaging with culture’s dominant narrative form rather than just relaxing on the couch.
這些熟悉的抱怨奇怪地令人感到安慰，這既是因為對小說現狀感到憂心忡忡是一項歷史悠久的事業，也是因為那些晚飯后拿起遙控器而不是書的讀者（本文記者也經常這樣）可以感覺自己正在參與文化的主流敘事形式，而不僅僅是坐在沙發上放松。
Novels are not, in fact, dying: bookstores flog ever-changing stacks of new ones.
事實上小說并沒有死去：書店還在售賣日新月異的各種新書。
But neither are they as culturally central as they were in the 1900s, when they were “the literary form of the time, prestigious, popular, taken as both mainstay of cultured conversation and of democratic culture”, argues Edwin Frank of the New York Review of Books Classics Series.
但小說也不再像20世紀那樣具有文化中心地位，《紐約書評》經典系列的編輯埃德溫·弗蘭克認為，小說是“那個時代的主要文學形式，既受尊敬又流行，被視為文化對話和大眾文化的支柱”。
The novel achieved that status by changing its focus.
小說通過改變其焦點而獲得了這種地位。
In the 19th century novels were principally concerned with illuminating social mores and characters’ inner lives: think of George Eliot, Henry James and Anthony Trollope.
在19世紀，小說的主要關注點是闡明社會風俗和人物的內心世界：想想喬治·艾略特、亨利·詹姆斯、安東尼·特羅洛普。
But over the course of the next century the novel matured, as writers responded to a rapidly changing world by experimenting with form, structure and subject.
但在接下來的一個世紀里，小說逐漸成熟，作家們通過對寫作形式、結構、主題進行實驗來回應這個迅速變化的世界。
“Stranger Than Fiction” weaves historical overview and close reading into a biography of the form.
《比虛構更離奇》一書將歷史回顧和文本細讀交織，從而為小說立傳。
Mercifully, the author does not plod through the years, directly tying books to events.
所幸作者沒有冗長地逐年寫過去，直接把小說著作與歷史事件連起來。
Artistic creation is subtler than that, and books that an author intends for one purpose often serve another.
藝術創作比這更微妙，作者出于某種目的而寫的書往往會服務于另一個目的。
Novels can also inspire each other.
小說也可以相互啟發。
“Mrs Dalloway”, for example, was shaped by Virginia Woolf’s loathing of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”.
例如，《達洛維夫人》是弗吉尼亞·伍爾夫因為厭惡詹姆斯·喬伊斯的《尤利西斯》而寫成的。
Mr Frank deftly captures how novelists translate, react to and sometimes shut out turbulent global events.
弗蘭克巧妙地捕捉到了小說家們如何翻譯、回應，有時甚至是回避動蕩的全球事件。
(Returning to Trieste after the first world war, Joyce told an acquaintance, “Oh yes, I was told there was a war going on.”)
（一戰結束后喬伊斯回到意大利的里雅斯特，對一個熟人說：“哦，是的，我聽說正在打仗。”）
The first landmark 20th-century novel, Mr Frank argues, was “Notes from the Underground”, published in 1864 by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
弗蘭克認為，20世紀第一部具有里程碑意義的小說是費奧多爾·陀思妥耶夫斯基于1864年出版的《地下室手記》。
The narrator whines, hectors and obsesses; he is both emotionally honest and thoroughly unreliable.
書中的敘述者哀怨、威嚇、瘋魔，他在情感上是誠實的，但又完全不可靠。
The plotless book tries to make sense of and to embody a frenzied world, offering none of the safety or resolution readers typically found in novels from the 19th century, which deployed “character and situation, expressed and explored through a reliable interplay of dialogue and description conducted under narrative oversight”.
這本沒有情節的書試圖理解并體現一個瘋狂的世界，它不像19世紀小說那樣為讀者提供安全感或解決方案，19世紀小說部署“人物和情境，在敘事的監督下，通過真實可信的對話和描寫的相互作用去表達和探索”。
Though plenty of contemporary novels still fit this description, Dostoyevsky was early to show they did not have to.
雖然許多當代小說仍然符合這種描述，但陀思妥耶夫斯基很早就表明小說不一定非得這樣寫。
The ghost of the unnamed narrator flickers at the edges of works written throughout the next century.
這個無名敘述者的幽靈在接下來一個世紀的各部小說中閃爍出沒。
His lunatic babbling prefigures stream-of-consciousness works from Joyce and William Faulkner.
他的瘋言瘋語預現了從喬伊斯到威廉·福克納的意識流作品。
It is no accident that this voice and disordered, confessional work emerged from Russia, rather than western Europe, in the late 19th century.
這種聲音和這種混亂無序、懺悔式的作品在19世紀后期出現在俄羅斯而不是西歐，這并非偶然。
Until the first world war western Europe was largely peaceful, prosperous and bound by class and social conventions.
直到第一次世界大戰之前，西歐大體上是和平繁榮的，并受到階級和社會傳統的約束。
The solid, reliable real world birthed the solid, reliable worlds of the social novel.
這種堅實可靠的現實世界孕育了堅實可靠的社會小說。
Russia had its hierarchies and conventions but was wilder; its authors could borrow from European tradition while living in a world beyond it.
俄羅斯也有其等級制度和傳統，但俄羅斯更加狂野不馴，俄羅斯作家們可以借鑒歐洲傳統，并同時生活在一個超越歐洲的世界里。
