Politics and S/M--政治与性变态

王小波，《革命时期的爱情》。

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我像一切生在革命时期的人一样，有一半是虐待狂，还有一半是受虐狂，全看碰见的是谁。

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后来我到美国去，看过像《九周半》之类的书，又通读了弗洛伊德的著作。前者提供了一些感性的知识，后者提供了一种理论上的说法。这些知识和我们大有关系，因为在中国人与人的距离太近，在世界其它地方，除了性爱的伙伴不会有这么近，故而各种思想无不带有性爱的痕迹。弗洛伊德说，受虐狂是这样形成的：假如人处于一种不能克服的痛苦之中，就会爱上这种痛苦，把它看成幸福。从我个人的经历来看，这种说法有一定道理。但是有关虐待狂形成的原因，他说得就不全对。除了先天的虐待狂之外，还有一种虐待狂是受虐狂招出来的。在这方面，可以举出好多例子。以下例子是从一本讲一九零五年日俄海战的书里摘出来的，当时日本人没有宣战，就把停在旅顺口外的俄国战舰干掉了好几条：

“帝俄海军将战舰泊于外海，且又不加防护，招人袭击。我帝国海军应招前往，赢得莫大光荣。”

按照这种说法，俄国人把军舰泊于外海不加防护，就好像是撅起了屁股。日本人的鱼雷艇是一队穿黑皮衣服的应招女郎，挥舞皮鞭赶去打他们的屁股，乃是提供一种性服务。这段叙述背后，有一种被人招了出来，无可奈何的心境。还有个例子是前纳粹分子写的书里说，看到犹太人被剃了大秃瓢，胸口戴着黄三角，乖乖的走路，心里就痒痒，觉得不能不过去在那些秃头顶上敲几个大包。假如这些例子还不够，你就去问问文化革命里的红卫兵干嘛要给“牛鬼蛇神”剃阴阳头，把他们的脸画得花花绿绿的——假如他们不是低头认罪的话，那些红卫兵心里怎会有这些妙不可言的念头？另一些例子是我们国家的一些知识分子，原本迂头迂脑，傻呼呼的，可爱极了。打了他一回，还说感觉好极了，巴不得什么时候再挨一下。领导上怎能抗拒这种诱惑呢？所以就把他们打成右派了。我看到毡巴白白净净，手无缚鸡之力，也觉得他可爱极了，不打他一下就对不起他。而我在X海鹰那里受帮教时，因为内心紧张，所以木木痴痴，呆呆傻傻，也就难怪她要虐待我了。这些解释其实可以概括为一句：假如某人总中负彩，他就会变成受虐狂。假如某人总中正彩，他就会变成虐待狂。其它解释纯属多余。

The Eloquent Monster/ 怪物的口才

Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 201-202.

Frankenstein’s immediate reaction to the appearance of the Monster is to tell it to go away. When the Monster persists in his claim that he has the right to a hearing from his creator, Frankenstein curses the day of the Monster’s creation, and reiterates: “Begone! Relive me from the sight of your detested form” (97). To this the Monster, in a touching gesture, responds by placing his huge hands over Frankenstein’s eyes: “Thus I relieve thee, my creator… thus I take from thee a sight which you abhor. Still thou canst listen to me, and grant me thy compassion.” The Monster understands that it is not visual relation that favors him—indeed, as we will discover when he tells his own story, his only favorable reception from a human being thus far has come from the blind de Lacey—but rather the auditory or interlocutionary, the relation of language. Thus, this first meeting of Frankenstein and his Monster since the day of his creation presents a crucial issue of the novel in the opposition of sight and language, of the hideous body and the persuasive tongue.

For the Monster is eloquent. From the first words he speaks, he shows himself to be a supreme rhetorician, who controls the antitheses and oxymorons that express the pathos of his existence: “Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous” (95-96) When we learn of the Monster’s self-education—and particularly his three master-texts, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and Goethe’s Werther—we will understand the prime sources of his eloquence and of the conception of the just order of things that animates his plea to his creator. But beyond the motives of eloquence, it is important to register the simple fact of shelley’s decision to make the Monster the most eloquent creature in the novel. This hideous and deformed creature, far from expressing himself in grunts and gestures, speaks and reasons with the highest elegance, logic, and persuasiveness. As a verbal creation, he is the very opposite of the monstrous: he is a sympathetic and persuasive participant in Western culture. All of the Monster’s interlocutors—including, finally, the reader—must come to terms with this contradiction between the verbal and the visual.

© Copyright by Dun Wang (王敦). All rights reserved. 著作权拥有者：Dun Wang (王敦)。

丰子恺的画（七）：“一样大”

Rushdie’s Invention of Modern India/ 拉什迪“创作”的印度现代史

Ralph J. Crane, Inventing India: A History of India in English-Language Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 172.

The sense of timelessness which was so evident in the opening paragraphs of The Siege of Krishnapur and A Passage to India is noticeably absent in Midnight’s Children:

I was born in the city of Bombay… once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15^th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more… On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. (p. 9)

The fairy-tale opening ‘once upon a time…’ is rejected, and in these opening lines Saleem Sinai’s fate is tied to the fate of India, as Nehru forecasts in his congratulatory letter which defines Saleem’s own tryst with destiny:

Dear Baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy accident of your moment of birth! You are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young. We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own. (p. 122)

* Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, (1981; rpt, London: Picador, 1982)/ 拉什迪，《午夜的孩子》

© Copyright by Dun Wang (王敦). All rights reserved. 著作权拥有者：Dun Wang (王敦)。

The Golden Tahitian Body and The Cold English Iron/殖民地的肉体

Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 170-171.

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The nails of the Dolphin represent a version of sexual commerce between Europeans and Tahitians somberly at odds with the Arcadian tropes of Bougainville. The Tahitians seem to have responded eagerly to the introduction of iron into their society—they had none before the arrival of the Europeans, and it must have appeared an exotic and marvelous substance, immediately suitable for making fishhooks and other tools and weapons. Bougainville reports that the Tahitians already have knowledge of the European metal and a word for it, aouri, which puzzles him until he eventually learns of Wallis’s visit, about ten months before his own, and reasonably surmises that aouri is a Tahitian rendition of the English iron. It may then be that the apparent facility of sexual commerce with the Tahitians derived from their immediate, and intelligent, perception of the utility of this new substance introduced among them—as if their granting of sexual favors really meant: iron at any price. If this were the case, they would be behaving in the manner imposed upon many colonized peoples, offering their natural resources in exchange for modernization. Gauguin will regularly describe the bodies of Tahitians as “golden”—Et l’or de leur corps (And the gold of their bodies), he lyrically entitled one of his paintings. In the commerce of the Dolphin, the golden body of pleasure is the natural resource exchanged—at bargain rates—for grim, utilitarian English iron. Complicit with the commercial exchange is a tropology: the precious but primitive “found” resource, belonging to an economy of abundance, enjoyment, and waste, set against the manufactured commodity, belonging to an economy of scarcity, capitalization, and repression. The Golden Age perceived by the French captain and crew was already, thanks to the English, on the way to its degradation into an Iron Age.

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I have not seen this interpretation suggested in the literature on the discovery of Tahiti, but it has a certain force of logic: once you discover that your stones are no match for their cannon and musket balls, you try to seduce them. Make love, not war. If this were the case, the myth of Tahitian sexual freedom would be the direct product of the European armed intrusion, and rather than an indication of a Golden Age, a tactical reaction to superior force.

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© Copyright by Dun Wang (王敦). All rights reserved. 著作权拥有者：Dun Wang (王敦)。

文学是如何“再现”“现实”的？

文学是如何“再 现”“现实”的？

五十多年前，古典学者奥尔巴赫从纳粹德国逃命到了土耳其，以“历史”为纲写了本大书，回顾和分析自古希腊以来人们如何用文学 来再现现实，把这个事儿在西方的情形说了个透。从此以后，西方再没有人觉得有能力（一开始是这样）或者“屑于”（后来是这样）干这种吃力的事儿了。

五十多年过去了，在两代人的时间里，西方的文科平添了不少精致的淘气。“文化大革命”在西方的遗毒尚未清除，物欲横流的“后现代”社会已经把学问一门一门地给玩儿了。现在是姿态越激进，就越显得有学问，应聘的钱就越多。拿那么多钱，再不骂骂资本主义，就会有资本主义的走狗之嫌。

如同高尔泰回忆文革里的批斗，说是“知识分子打人，胳膊细，道理多”。西方的文科忽悠到了那么超前的地步，“胳膊”又那么“细”，真不愧是发达资本主义超“酷”的上层建筑。

文学是如何“再现”“现实”的？文学就是这样“再现”“现实”的。

Terry Eagleton/ Pork Chops and Pineapples

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach · Princeton, 579 pp, £13.95

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Isn't it bad enough that everyday existence is bounded by laws and conventions, without art feeling that it has to follow suit? Isn't part of the point of art to give those tiresome restrictions the slip, creating things such as the Gorgon, or a grin without a cat, which do not exist in nature? Realism is meant to be a riposte to magic and mystery, but it may well be a prime example of them. Perhaps the roots of our admiration for resemblance, mirroring and doubling lie in some very early ceremony of correspondence between human beings and their recalcitrant surroundings. In that case, what Erich Auerbach takes in his great study Mimesis to be the most mature form of art may actually be the most regressive.

To describe something as realist is to acknowledge that it is not the real thing. We call false teeth realistic, but not the Foreign Office. If a representation were to be wholly at one with what it depicts, it would cease to be a representation. A poet who managed to make his or her words 'become' the fruit they describe would be a greengrocer. No representation, one might say, without separation. Words are certainly as real as pineapples, but this is precisely the reason they cannot be pineapples. The most they can do is create what Henry James called the 'air of reality' of pineapples. In this sense, all realist art is a kind of con trick - a fact that is most obvious when the artist includes details that are redundant to the narrative (the precise tint and curve of a moustache, let us say) simply to signal: 'This is realism.' In such art, no waistcoat is colourless, no way of walking is without its idiosyncrasy, no visage without its memorable features. Realism is calculated contingency.

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Auerbach's Mimesis, one of the great works of literary scholarship, was written between 1942 and 1945 in Istanbul, where Auerbach, a Berlin Jew, had taken refuge from the Nazis. The book was published in 1946, and this new edition, with an introduction by Edward Said, marks the 50th anniversary of its first appearance in the United States. Auerbach ranges through some of the mighty monuments of Western literature, from Homer, medieval romance, Dante and Rabelais to Montaigne, Cervantes, Goethe, Stendhal and a good many authors besides, scanning their work for symptoms of realism. His criterion for selection, however, is more political than formal or epistemological. The question is whether we can find secreted in the language of a particular text the bustling, workaday life of the common people. For Auerbach as for Mikhail Bakhtin, who was writing his classic work on Rabelais and realism at much the same time that Auerbach was holed up almost bereft of books in Istanbul, realism is in the broadest sense a matter of the vernacular. It is the artistic word for a warm-hearted populist humanism. It is thus an anti-Fascist poetics, rather as for Bakhtin it was an anti-Stalinist one. Mimesis is among other things its author's response to those who drove him into exile, even if they were unlikely to have heard of Farinata and Cavalcante or Frate Alberto.

For all its formidable erudition, then, there is a fairly simple opposition at work in Mimesis, one more class-based and militant than the universal respect paid to Auerbach by conservative scholars would intimate. Realism is the artistic form that takes the life of the common people with supreme seriousness, in contrast to an ancient or neoclassical art which is static, hierarchical, dehistoricised, elevated, idealist and socially exclusive. In Walter Benjamin's terms, it is an art which destroys the aura. There is an implied continuity in this respect between Homeric epic and the Third Reich, with its heroic myths, tragic posturing and spurious sublimity. If all this had been argued by a Trotskyist English lecturer at a redbrick English university, rather than by one of the 20th century's most eminent Romance philologists, it would almost certainly have provoked a clutch of dyspeptic reviews in the learned journals. If you can make such claims in a dozen or so different languages, however, as Auerbach doubtless could, and if like him you know your French heroic epic from your Middle High German one, you are likely to win a more sympathetic hearing.

Like Lukács, then, Auerbach uses 'realism' as a value term. Like Lukács, too, he is a Hegelian historicist for whom the art that matters is one flushed with the dynamic forces of its age. Neither critic can find much value in Modernism: Mimesis ends by rapping Virginia Woolf sternly over the knuckles, while Lukács can see little but decadence in Musil and Joyce. The upbeat humanism of both men is affronted by the downbeat outlook of the Modernists. Both are doctrinal life-affirmers, high European humanists dismayed by the flaccid melancholia of the late bourgeois world. Unlike the austerely disembodied Hungarian, however, Auerbach is a radical populist who celebrates the fleshly and mundane, a man for whom authentic art has its roots 'in the depths of the workaday world and its men and women'. If realism is bourgeois for Lukács, it is plebeian for Auerbach. In this respect, Auerbach is a curious cross between Lukács and Bakhtin, blending the historicism of the former with the iconoclasm of the latter.

copyright © LRB Ltd, 1997-2007

© Copyright by Dun Wang (王敦). All rights reserved. 著作权拥有者：Dun Wang (王敦)。

“奉旨放脚”与“圆颅方趾”

方趾

今之論說家。往往有口頭禪曰。吾四萬萬同胞。同是圓顱方趾之儔云云。吾讀其論。吾嘗疑其言。以為吾頭果其圓。吾足何嘗方。豈如儔人家所謂長方。而非平方立方耶。

賓髻盤雲。纖腰學楚。談笑風生。不解羞澀。和氣迎人。進退活潑。舉止大方。令人可愛而可敬者。非彼歐美之女嬌娥耶。

淺笑輕盈。嬝娜娉婷。蓮鉤消瘦。貼地無聲。可愛哉。吾中國舊社會之同胞姊妹也。

額髮鬖鬖。幾逾五寸。窄袖緊衣。長不及膝。單叉小褲。薄如蟬翼。百幅羅裙。從此捐棄。可厭哉。此何人斯。豈非吾中國過渡時代之怪物耶。雖然其猶未也。

中國女界。自奉旨放腳。實行解縛而後。向之纖細如筍。不盈一掬者。今也直量三寸者。橫量亦三寸矣。蓋向束之縛不能自由者。一旦脫去羈絆。有不蓬蓬然勃勃然。橫求發洩者乎。然而骨之折者。卒不能復伸矣。故其橫決也。亦勢所必至。理有固然者也。吾見其狀。而不覺恍然有悟曰。向之所謂方趾者。其殆指此。其殆指此。


这是从1896年上海报章上抄录下来的一篇“讥弹”小文。文中已经在讨论当时相当“后现代”的问题了：放了脚以后又怎么样？南方的“前卫”与北方的封闭形成鲜明的对比。天津也得等到1900庚子国变之后才初具“国际化大都市”的规模。

不说庚子国变有多么惨烈！不说北方让洋鬼子欺凌得有多惨。只说我们北方人那会儿太土了，能不吃亏么？

庚子年的军机大臣刚毅给部队起名叫“虎神营”，取老虎吃“羊”，神能镇“鬼”之意，“真是太有才了”。

© Copyright by Dun Wang (王敦). All rights reserved. 著作权拥有者：Dun Wang (王敦)。