阅读本痴狂

Reading as Schwärmerei

阅读本痴狂

Joseph Hillis Miller

约瑟夫.希利斯.米勒

作者简介

约瑟夫.希利斯.米勒（Joseph Hillis Miller，1928—），美国著名文学批评家，解构主义批评的代表人物，也是欧美文学及比较文学研究的杰出学者。他是哈佛大学博士，曾任教于霍普金斯大学、耶鲁大学，现为加州大学欧文分校英语与比较文学系教授。米勒的著作包括《理论今昔》（Theory Now and Then）、《阅读的伦理》（The Ethics of Reading）、《他者》（Others）等。米勒曾在中国发表演讲，讲稿汇编为《土著与数码冲浪者——米勒中国演讲集》（The Indigene and the Cybersurfer）。

本文节选自2002年出版的《文学死了吗？》（On Literature）。作者在文中强调，阅读须像天真孩童一样全身心投入；阅读过程中顺其自然，书里精华自能融会贯通。

If it is really the case, as I have argued, that each literary work opens up a singular world, attainable in no other way than by reading that work, then reading should be a matter of giving one’s whole mind, heart, feelings, and imagination, without reservation, to recreating that world within oneself, on the basis of the words. This would be a species of that fanaticism, or rapture, or even revelry that Immanuel Kant calls Schwärmerei. The work comes alive as a kind of internal theater that seems in a strange way independent of the words on the page. That was what happened to me when I first read The Swiss Family Robinson. The ability to do that is probably more or less universal, once you have learned to read, once you have learned, that is, to turn those mute and objectively meaningless shapes into letters, words, and sentences that correspond to spoken language.

I suspect that my interior theater or revelry is not by any means the same as another person’s. Even so, each reader’s imaginary world, generated by a given work, seems to that reader to have unquestionable authority. One empirical test of this is the reaction many people have when they see a film made from a novel they have read: “No, No! It’s not at all like that! They’ve got it all wrong.”

如果确实如我所说，每部文学作品都会开启一个独特的世界，而且只有通过阅读该作品才能走进这个世界，那么，人们阅读时就该全心全意地感受和想象，毫无保留地以文字为基础在脑中创造新世界。阅读将成为一种狂热、狂喜，甚至成为被康德[1]称为“痴狂”的狂欢。作品会以一种奇怪的方式独立于文字，如脑内剧场一般鲜活呈现。我初读《瑞士人的鲁宾逊故事》[2]时就是如此。一旦你学会阅读，学会将无声且无意义的字形变成有声的字母、词语、句子，便会发现这种能力可能或多或少是普遍存在的。

我怀疑自己脑内的剧场或狂欢和其他人的迥然不同。即便如此，阅读某部特定作品时，每位读者似乎都对自己想象的世界深信不疑。最典型的例子是，观看根据自己读过的小说改编的电影时，很多人会说：“不，不！根本不是那回事！他们全搞错了。”

The illustrations, particularly of children’s books, play an important role in shaping that imaginary theater. The original Sir John Tenniel illustrations for the Alice books told me how to imagine Alice, the White Rabbit, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and the rest. Still, my imaginary world behind the looking-glass exceeded even the Tenniel pictures. Henry James, in A Small Boy and Others, paid homage to the power of George Cruikshank’s illustrations for Oliver Twist to determine the way that imaginary world seemed to him:

It perhaps even seemed to me more Cruikshank’s than Dickens’s; it was a thing of such vividly terrible images, and all marked with that peculiarity of Cruikshank that the offered flowers or goodnesses, the scenes and figures intended to comfort and cheer, present themselves under his hand as but more subtly sinister, or more suggestively queer, than the frank badnesses and horrors.

插图，特别是童书插图，对于构筑想象的剧场至关重要。约翰•坦尼尔爵士[3]为爱丽丝系列[4]画的原版插图，教我如何想象爱丽丝、白兔、胖墩双胞胎兄弟[5]等人。不过，我想象里的镜中世界，远远超出了泰尼尔的插图。亨利•詹姆斯[6]在《小男孩和其他人》这本书里，向乔治•克鲁克香克[7]为《雾都孤儿》画的插图致敬，因为它们决定了他想象中的世界：

在我看来，这本书与其说是狄更斯的，不如说是克鲁克香克的。书中充满了栩栩如生的可怕形象，都带着克鲁克香克的特殊印记。无论是献上的鲜花还是施舍的善意，甚至本应给人安慰和鼓舞的场景和人物，在他笔下都透露出微妙的不详或隐约的诡异，远远超越普通的邪恶和恐怖。

What reader, who has happened to see them, to give two other examples, has not had his or her imagination shaped by the wonderful photographs by Coburn that are used as frontispieces for the New York Edition of James’s works or by the frontispiece photographs for the Wessex or Anniversary Editions of Thomas Hardy’s work?

I am advocating, as the first side of the aporia of reading, an innocent, childlike abandonment to the act of reading, without suspicion, reservation, or interrogation. Such a reading makes a willing suspension of disbelief, in Coleridge’s famous phrase. It is a suspension, however, that does not even know anymore that disbelief might be possible. The suspension then becomes no longer the result of a conscious effort of will. It becomes spontaneous, without forethought. My analogy with reciprocal assertions of “I love you” by two persons is more than casual. As Michel Deguy says, La poésie comme l’amour risque tout sur des signes. (Poetry, like love, risks everything on signs.) The relation between reader and story read is like a love affair. In both cases, it is a matter of giving yourself without reservation to the other. A book in my hands or on the shelf utters a powerful command: “Read me!” To do so is as risky, precarious, or even dangerous as to respond to another person’s “I love you” with an “I love you too.” You never know where saying that might lead you, just as you never know where reading a given book might lead you. In my own case, reading certain books has been decisive for my life. Each such book has been a turning point, the marker of a new epoch.

再举两个例子：如果读者偶然看过詹姆斯作品纽约版的卷首插图，即科伯恩[8]拍摄的绝妙照片，或是看过托马斯•哈代的《威塞克斯小说》[9]或其作品周年纪念版的卷首插图，他们的想象怎能不被这些图片左右？

我主张的阅读困境的第一个方面[10]，就是像天真孩童一样阅读，不怀疑，不保留，不探究。正如柯勒律治[11]的名言所说，这种阅读是“自愿搁置怀疑”。然而，它甚至会让人忘记能对书提出怀疑。久而久之，这种搁置不再需要有意识的努力，而是不假思索便能自发产生，这和两个人互相说出“我爱你”相似。我并不是随随便便打这个比方。正如米歇尔•德吉[12]所说：“诗歌像爱情一样，把一切押在暗示上。 ”读者与所读故事的关系，就像恋爱关系。这两种关系都要将自己毫无保留地献给对方。手中和架上的书发出强有力的命令：“读我！”但这么做就像用“我也爱你”回应别人说的“我爱你”一样冒险，充满了不确定性，甚至可能有危险。你永远不知道这么说会有什么后果，正如不知道阅读某本书会将你引向何方。对我来说，读某些书对我的一生有决定性的影响。那些书，每本都是一个转折点，每本都是新时代的里程碑。

Reading, like being in love, is by no means a passive act. It takes much mental, emotional, and even physical energy. Reading requires a positive effort. One must give all one’s faculties to re-creating the work’s imaginary world as fully and as vividly as possible within oneself. For those who are no longer children, or childlike, a different kind of effort is necessary too. This is the attempt, an attempt that may well not succeed, to suspend ingrained habits of “critical” or suspicious reading.

...

A certain speed in reading is necessary to accomplish this actualization, just as is the case with music. If you linger too long over the words, they lose their power as windows on the hitherto unknown. If you play a Mozart piano sonata or one of Bach’s Goldberg Variations too slowly it does not sound like music. A proper tempo is required. The same thing is true for reading considered as the generation of a virtual reality. One must read rapidly, allegro, in a dance of the eyes across the page.

阅读像恋爱一样，绝非被动的行为，而须投入心理、情感甚至是身体的活力。阅读需要积极的努力。读者必须倾尽全力，在脑中重建像书里一样完整、生动的想象世界。对于不再是孩子、不再有童真的人来说，还需要另外一种努力，即努力摒弃批判式阅读、质疑式阅读的习惯，尽管这未必能成功。

……

为了实现上述目标，阅读必须以特定的速度进行，就像音乐一样。如果你太过字斟句酌，词语便会丧失力量，无法带你通往未知。如果你演奏莫扎特的钢琴奏鸣曲或巴赫的《哥德堡变奏曲》时速度太慢，它们听起来就不像音乐了。奏乐需要适当的速度，阅读也是一样。为了创造出虚拟的世界，读者必须快速阅读，以“快板”的节奏让视线在书页上舞动。

[1] 伊曼努尔.康德（Immanuel Kant，1724—1804），德国著名哲学家，其代表作《纯粹理性批判》《实践理性批判》《判断力批判》合称“三大理性批判”。

[2] 《瑞士人的鲁宾逊故事》（The Swiss Family Robinson），瑞士牧师约翰.戴维.维斯（Johann David Wyss）基于《鲁宾逊漂流记》写的冒险小说，目的是教育孩子自力更生。

[3]约翰.坦尼尔（John Tenniel，1820—1914），英国插图画家和讽刺画家。

[4]爱丽丝系列是牛津大学数学家刘易斯.卡罗尔（Lewis Carroll）的著名童话作品，包括《爱丽丝梦游仙境》和其姐妹篇《爱丽丝镜中奇遇记》。

[5]爱丽丝、白兔、胖墩双胞胎兄弟都是《爱丽丝梦游仙境》中的著名形象。后来，双胞兄弟的名字Tweedledum和Tweedledee逐渐演变为“难以分辨的两个人或两个事物”的意思，也用来形容“半斤八两”。

[6]亨利.詹姆斯（Henry James，1843—1916），出生于美国，小说家，其代表作品包括长篇小说《贵妇的画像》等。自传《一个小男孩及其他人》（A Small Boy and Others）讲述了他童年的经历。

[7]乔治.克鲁克香克（George Cruikshank，1792—1878），英国插图画家，他为狄更斯（Charles Dickens）作品创作的插画广受欢迎。

[8] 阿尔文.兰登.科伯恩（Alvin Langdon Coburn，1882—1966），美国画意主义（pictorialism）摄影家，代表作有《马肯岛》等。

[9] 托马斯.哈代（Thomas Hardy，1840—1928），英国诗人和小说家，前中期创作以小说为主，晚年以诗歌成就最为突出。《威塞克斯小说》是哈代的系列小说总题名，包括14部小说。威塞克斯是哈代家乡的古地名，作者用同一背景把多部小说联成一体，展示了19世纪后半期英国农村的恬静景象，其中的代表作为《德伯家的苔丝》。

[10]本文为节选，作者在前文提出了两种阅读方式，一种是天真无邪的阅读，一种是去神秘化的阅读。两者彼此相悖。作者将此称为“阅读的困境”。

[11]塞缪尔.泰勒.柯勒律治（Samuel Taylor Coleridge，1772—1834），英国桂冠诗人和评论家，“湖畔派”代表人物，代表作有长诗《古舟子咏》《忽必烈汗》等。本句出自柯勒律治《文学传记》第14章。

[12]米歇尔.德吉（Michel Deguy，1930—），法国诗人，作品多为艰深晦涩的哲理诗，在当今法国诗坛有举足轻重的地位。