這次讀的是Michael Henry Heim的譯本,前頭有Michael Cunningham的推薦,封面上的一句話是" A haunting new translation"。果然沒讀兩頁就有haunting的感覺,主人公散步途中,看到殯儀館(?)出現(xiàn)的古怪男子,思想來了個an entirely new turn,他眼前出現(xiàn)幻像,manifold wonders and horrors,熱帶的沼澤,荒島,沖積的溝渠,蒸汽彌漫的天空,怪異的植被,破碎的樹木,有著畸形的喙的鳥,還有躲在竹林深處,老虎窺伺的眼睛。(后面我們知道威尼斯的瘟疫正是從印度人跡罕至的沼澤,有著竹叢中的老虎的地方發(fā)源出來的)他開始想去旅行。他去了威尼斯。
在威尼斯,剛登上剛朵拉,他就覺得像是通向地獄。載他的船夫,最終沒收他錢(因?yàn)闆]有執(zhí)照),但是船夫在途中留下的那句 you will pay,整個地成了一句讖語!
我以前很愚蠢地以為這本書很悶,很平淡,——很無聊?,F(xiàn)在才知道大錯特錯,先不去說象征,主題什么的,我也說不好。就說這個故事的外殼,看它是怎么發(fā)展的,就有無限的趣味。書里有五個章節(jié)。第一章寫主人公的覺醒,既突如其來,又神秘蠱惑。第二章是補(bǔ)筆,概述這個人的一輩子。端莊自持的壓抑大叔。第三章寫到達(dá)威尼斯,邂逅美少年,覺出空氣異常,決心離開,結(jié)果行李出現(xiàn)差錯,不得已回到賓館,才明白心中所愿是留下。第四章主人公開始窺伺觀察美少年,明白美的真諦,確定心意"i love you"。第五章瘟疫來襲,大限將至。人心思去的情況下,主人公也不再只滿足于守株待兔。他開始明目張膽地跟蹤少年,在迷宮也似的威尼斯。
一年四季里,我最害怕也最期待的季節(jié)是秋季?;蛟S是因?yàn)橄娜盏矫C秋的蒼涼會一下子讓人不知所措,所以近兩年每當(dāng)九月結(jié)束的時候我一定會找出“wake me up when September ends”來聽一聽,這種緩緩的“吸毒”方式很受用。在平行的世界里,我們在托馬斯.曼的筆下看到這樣一個威尼斯,像 “一個逢人討好而猜疑多端的美女”又是“一半是神話,一半是陷阱,在它污濁的空氣里,曾一度開出藝術(shù)之花,而音樂家也曾在這兒奏出令人銷魂的和弦” 的矛盾城市,我們或許不都在威尼斯,也就當(dāng)然不會再威尼斯遇見你的塔齊奧,但是每一個國家或許都有一個威尼斯,在這個焦躁,炎熱,矛盾的城市里,用你的雙眼去尋找你的塔齊奧,去靜靜的窺探死亡之夜和她甜蜜的奧秘。
陌生人的春藥是一種陌生的慰藉。對。The Comfort of Strangers。我還想說的是一部致敬《死于威尼斯》的故事,就是《只愛陌生人》。同樣,這也是一個春藥的故事,只不過口味稍重。麥克尤恩所寫的威尼斯空曠蒼白,是一種盛極而衰的感覺,和托馬斯·曼,倒是神似。只是,這一場情欲的試探,完全是一個被架空的故事。作者試圖將一個sm驚悚故事寫成一個寓言,所以抹去了時間地點(diǎn)和正常的心理活動。實(shí)際上,關(guān)于那個亂糟糟的有奸尸狂的旅游勝地就是威尼斯,還是譯者而不是作者告訴我的。行文自然不受影響,只要你有足夠的耐心完全跟著作者兜圈子。而當(dāng)中人物在尋找咖啡館時的茫然和低效率,直男被強(qiáng)攻調(diào)戲時不合時宜的小受姿態(tài),主角反復(fù)念叨的“我們是在度假”,似乎只有當(dāng)做寓言去分析其暗示作用時 ,才有意義。
從這個角度來說,這個故事就有些做作。但是這注定是個四面討好的作品,因?yàn)槠渲械碾[喻指向了性政治、父權(quán)社會、女權(quán)主義、婚姻危機(jī)。其實(shí)說的并不深入,最終指向的似乎隱隱還是反女權(quán)的立場?;蛟S,sm游戲中掌鞭的若是妻子,女權(quán)主義就得以彰顯了吧。不過,較之于《死于威尼斯》,《只》的故事被虛化了,春藥的概念卻更突顯出來。前者的春藥,是老人的自慰(雖然少年也有所表示),而后者則是兩對陌生人的相互愛撫,共同高潮。當(dāng)然,極致的高潮帶來的也是死亡,混雜鮮血和劇痛的快感,是這春藥的神奇療效。
以我之愚笨,讀到后來才漸漸明白,之前連篇累牘的細(xì)節(jié)描寫啊景物描寫也是情節(jié)的一部分。貌合神離,同床異夢,就是作者想通過在小巷里不停迷路胡亂游蕩告訴我的、那對情人的精神狀態(tài)。而他們連在做愛時也感到厭煩了。他們急需強(qiáng)大的春藥。否則,他們怎么能第二次走進(jìn)那座宅邸呢,它實(shí)在讓我想起薩德侯爵。就是因?yàn)?,他們第一次被騙進(jìn)去后,在做愛時他們感受到了久違的激情。而騙他們?nèi)刖值姆驄D,把偷拍的男主角的照片貼滿床頭,這對連重口味sm都玩膩了的二人,也重新找到了性的目標(biāo)。
莫名的劇烈高潮和街頭偷拍技術(shù)性,都是寓言故事不需要解釋的問題。就像對于男二號從小在極度父權(quán)下度男性力量產(chǎn)生迷戀卻莫名的被女性力量所戕害的事實(shí),到底在他的性變態(tài)和強(qiáng)攻身份的形成中扮演了怎演的角色,作者也未加解釋。筆意隱晦,固然帶來了猜謎的快感,但是我這種讀者就得失望了。在慘絕人寰的虐殺和奸尸的刺激當(dāng)口,作者讓作為視角的女主角昏了過去???,褲子一脫,馬賽克比褲子還大。
Here was the old plane tree, not far from walls of Athens—a holy, shadowy place filled with the smell of agnus castus (cherry) trees. Clear and pure, the brook fell across the smooth pebbles. On the grass, two people were stretched out: an elder man and a youth, one ugly and one beautiful, wisdom next to loveliness. Socrates was instructing Ph?drus. He spoke to him of the hot terror which the initiate suffer when their eyes light on an image of eternal beauty. But the greed and the wicked cannot think of beauty when they see it.
“The noble-minded feel the holy distress when a god-like countenance, a perfect body appears before them. They will, if not afraid of being thought downright madmen, sacrifice to the beloved as to the image of God.”
He is the just-perfect noble mind. Gustav von Aschenbach, son of higher officials, magistrates, government functionaries who had led severe, steady lives, is “the author of that lucid and powerful prose epic of Frederick of Prussia, the creator of the stark tale called The Wretch, and the passionate treatise on “Art and the Spirit”, which had been placed by the cautious judges along with Schiller’s conclusion on na?ve and sentimental poetry”. The great artist, from his early age, has put discipline on top of his life—much the same as his forebears, and quite similar to the monotonous, boring life of the unartistic mass population. He has made every aspect of his life a model—for those youth he felt in his serious artist attitude to have responsibilities to guide.
And he is absolutely the beloved. Tadzio, a 14-year-old boy from a upper-class family, has a “face pale and reserved, framed with honey-colored hair, the straight sloping nose, the lovely mouth, the expression of sweet and godlike seriousness recalled Greek sculpture of the noblest period.”His “approach—the way he held the upper part of his body, and bent his knees, the movement of his white-shod feet—had an extraordinary charm.”
It’s no wonder Aschenbach fell in love with him, as a deliberate expert, a great artist who had devoted his life to the creation of beauty. This is not love, but extreme affection. The aging artist appreciated him after their first meet in Venice—that city, flatteringly and suspiciously beautiful, half legend, half snare for strangers.
People chase for the beauty, praise it, and remember it. We now still sing songs for the four beauties in our history, so do people in other nations. Apart from beauty, our human race admires truth, kindness, courage and knowledge. Interestingly, among these common values, beauty is the only one which has been criticized and praised as well throughout the history of human kind. Let’s think about the ancient saying: “beauties, disasters.” We intend to show pure respect to the inner virtue, those have to be acquired through efforts—public intend to believe mainly those are mainly owned by the ugly. Beauty, on one hand, is pursued by every means; on the other, is criticized—or envied, by the commons. Maybe we should first tell apart the beauty as an eternal goal which is praised and the objects that possess beauty which are often treated in two extremes. A prevailing phenomenon is, if we think outer beauty is controversial, in human’s long-time pursuit of inner beauty, sun diverts our attention from intellectual to appearance, from the spiritual to the sensual.
Reason and understanding, and professional poise, as time goes by, become so numbed and enchanted that the soul forgets everything out of delight, in astonishment becomes attached to the most beautiful object shined upon by the sun.
It was soon that Aschenbach, in pure pursuit of Tadzio, the “statue and mirror” of young god, found laws of morality were dropping away. The atrocious seemed to b rich in possibilities. He, like most noble mind, most people who used to lead a reserved life and have discipline for himself, recognized the danger immediately. After struggling in his mind, he, like most common public, delightedly found enough reasons for justifying the changing situation. Even when in Venice fell into the nightmare of fatal plague, he stalked him in every corner of this sick, dying city.
Some days later, the aging great master in literature circle, who was entitled Lord from German emperor in his fiftieth birthday, died of plague on the beach in a gloomy morning, watching Tazio walking towards him.
“For beauty, my Phaedrus, beauty alone is both lovely and visible. It is, mark me, the only form of spiritual which we can receive through the senses. Else, what could become of us if the divine, if reason and virtue and truth, should appear to us through the senses? Should we perish and consumed with love?..Thus, beauty is the sensitive man’s access to the spirit-but only a means simply.”
If what Socrates told Phaedrus is the principle Aschenbach had broken, which led to his death, Socrates denied himself in his following instruction.
“Beauty alone is both divine and visible at once. And thus it is the road of sensuous, it is, the road of the artist to the spiritual. But do you now believe, that they can ever attain wisdom and true human dignity for whom the road to the spiritual leads through the senses? Or do you believe that this is a pleasant but perilous road, the really wrong and sinful road, which necessarily leads astray?”
Senses, beauty, spiritual, art, love, emotion and reason are Socrates’ center topics. It seemed to him senses was the forever enemy of the spiritual. Emotion was the precipice of senses, while reason was the peak of spirit. Beauty, in both senses of the word, led to either spirit or senses. Art, very much like beauty the controversial, ended in either emotion or reason. But he also admitted human have to reach the spiritual by the means of beauty.
“Our poets cannot take the road of beauty without having Eros join us and set himself up as our leader. Indeed, we may even be heroes after our fashion, and hardened warriors, though we are like women, for passion is our exaltation, and our desire must remain love—that is our pleasure and our disgrace.”
We can think Aschenbach is a defeated warrior according to Socrates’ definition. He, under the guidance of Tadzio the Eros, the statue of beauty and love, ended up in the precipice. But this is not the whole truth.
In Socrates’ ideal concept, art and artist should be high in spirit, keep far away the devil of emotion, and create the pure fruit of sacred knowledge (though he admitted the dilemma of the situation). Then, was the level of art Aschenbach had reached before he met Tadzio really a level of art? A self-behaved, dedicated artist, through his can-not-fault life, successfully escaped the deterioration of ordinary youth and smoothly reached the unprecedented level of his field. Was his expiration doomed? Did his early success have congenital defect due to the lack of temptation and distress from love? Aschenbach thought at his first sight of Tadzio that he was the eternal goal of art, but it turned out that he was also the starting point towards emotion. So Aschenbach, though he had “reached the peak of literature”(spirit), still long for emotion.
The only answer is, Socrates fell into a deliciously self-made intolerance. The pleasure of art comes to both emotion and reason, and further both sense and spirit. But the latter, obviously cannot have equal appeal to the former towards human nature. Aschenbach’s art reached a very high level in its spiritual part, thus was still vulnerable when he met Tadzio. Socrates’ hatred, or intolerance towards emotion may came from the common psychological condition of most educated men—feud against completely animal nature. But sadly, however strong human mind is, facing the temptation from knowledge and emotion, most of us chose the latter. And the reason for the rest is only that the temptation is not big enough. Our deepest need for satisfaction and sense of security, finally have to be met in our nature as human species.
And art is only a means to realize the whole picture.
“Let us renounce the dissolvent of knowledge, since knowledge has no dignity or strength. It is aware, it understands and pardons, but without reserve and form. From now on our efforts matter only by their yield of beauty, or simplicity, greatness and new rigour, a second type of openness. But form and openness lead to intoxication and desire, lead the noble into sinister revels of emotion, they too lead to precipice. Now I am going, Phaedrus. When you no longer see me, then you go too.”