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

…

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.

…

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)。

Terry Eagleton's talk of Spivak/ 大唐与后殖民主义

大唐那会儿，怎么没有扶桑、新罗或安南的文人写一篇类似的文章来解气呢？

在中华帝国文武鼎盛的时候，“白环西献，楛矢东来，夜郎滇池，解辫请职，朝鲜昌海，蹶角受化”，有许多扶桑、新罗、安南人留学长安。就如同当今来自天竺的 Spivak 是先留学再执教美利坚一样，历史上的他们虽然与大汉不同文不同种，却都想在长安讨口饭吃。虽然是“长安居，大不易”，那些来自扶桑、新罗、安南的留学生到底是舍不得长安的，况且日子久了，也有成“腕儿”的可能。

Eagleton 这篇文章，快人快语，对美利坚这座“长安”城和里面的外来腕儿们并不另眼相看。不过 Eagleton 有这样做的本钱：他是“大”英帝国的人，与大美利坚同文同种，却又偏隔着海。

Terry Eagleton/ In the Gaudy Supermarket

A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak · Harvard, 448 pp, £30.95

...

It might just be, of course, that the point of a wretched sentence like 'the in-choate in-fans ab-original para-subject cannot be theorised as functionally completely frozen in a world where teleology is schematised into geo-graphy' is to subvert the bogus transparency of Western Reason. Or it might be that discussing public matters in this hermetically private idiom is more a symptom of that Reason than a solution to it. Like most questions of style, Spivak's obscurantism is not just a question of style. Its duff ear for tone and rhythm, its careless way with verbal texture, its theoretical soundbites ('Derrida has staged the homo-eroticity of European philosophy in the left-hand column of Glas'), spring quite as much from the commodified language of the US as they do from some devious attempt to undermine it. A sentence which begins 'At 26, graphing himself into the seat of Aufhebung, Marx sees the necessity for this critical enterprise' combines the vocabulary of Hegel with the syntax of Hello! Spivak's language, lurching as it does from the high-toned to the streetwise, belongs to a culture where there is less and less middle ground between the portentous and the homespun, the rhetorical and the racy. One whiff of irony or humour would prove fatal to its self-regarding solemnity. In the course of this book, Spivak writes with great theoretical brilliance on Charlotte Brontë and Mary Shelley, Jean Rhys and Mahasweta Devi; but she pays almost no attention to their language, form or style. Like the old-fashioned literary scholarship it despises, the most avant-garde literary theory turns out to be a form of good old-fashioned content analysis.

...

What some might call dialectical thinking is for others a pathological inability to stick to the point. The line between post-colonial hybridity and Post-Modern anything-goes-ism is embarrassingly thin. As feminist, deconstructionist, post-Marxist and post-colonialist together, Spivak seems reluctant to be left out of any theoretical game in town. Multiplying one's options is an admirable theoretical posture, as well as a familiar bit of US market philosophy. For Spivak to impose a coherent narrative on her materials, even if her title spuriously suggests one, would be the sin of teleology, which banishes certain topics just as imperialism sidelines certain peoples. But if cultural theorists these days can bound briskly from allegory to the Internet, in a kind of intellectual version of Attention Deficit Disorder, it is partly because they are free from the inevitably constricting claims of a major political project. Lateral thinking is thus not altogether easy to distinguish from loss of political purpose.

...

If she rightly distinguishes between ethnic minority and colonised nation, she fails to drive home the point that a good deal of post-colonialism has been a kind of 'exported' version of the US's own grievous ethnic problems, and thus yet another instance of God's Own Country, one of the most insular on earth, defining the rest of the world in terms of itself. For this exportation to get under way, certain imports known as Third World intellectuals are necessary to act as its agents; yet though Spivak has reason to know this better than most, she never pauses long enough in this book to unpack its implications. To do so would require some systematic critique; but systematic critique is for her more part of the problem than the solution, as it is for all those privileged enough not to stand in need of rigorous knowledge. These individuals used to be known as the gentry, and are nowadays known as post-structuralists. If she can be splendidly scathing about 'white boys talking post-coloniality', or the alliance between cultural studies, liberal multiculturalism and transnational capitalism, these wholesome morsels surface only to vanish again into the thick stew of her text.

...

There are some kinds of criticism - Orwell's would do as an example - which are a good deal more politically radical than their bluffly commonsensical style would suggest. For all his dyspepsia about shockheaded Marxists, not to speak of his apparent willingness to shop Communists to the state, Orwell's politics are much more far-reaching than his conventionally-minded prose would suggest. With much post-colonial writing, the situation is just the reverse. Its flamboyant theoretical avant-gardism conceals a rather modest political agenda. Where it ventures political proposals at all, which is rare enough, they hardly have the revolutionary élan of its scandalous speculations on desire or the death of Man or the end of History. This is a feature shared by Derrida, Foucault and others like them, who veer between a cult of theoretical 'madness' or 'monstrosity' and a more restrained, reformist sort of politics, retreating from the one front to the other depending on the direction of the critical fire.

...

Deconstruction can indeed be a politically destabilising manoeuvre, but devotees like Gayatri Spivak ought to acknowledge its displacing effect, too. Like much cultural theory, it can allow one to speak darkly of subversion while leaving one's actual politics only slightly to the left of Edward Kennedy's. For some post-colonial theorists, for example, the concept of emancipation is embarrassingly old-hat. For some American feminists, socialism is as alien a territory as Alpha Centauri.

...

Marxism, for Spivak if not for its founder, is a speculation rather than a programme, and can only have violent consequences if used for 'predictive social engineering'. Like the thought of strangling your flat-mate, in other words, it is all very well as long as you don't act on it. The current system of power can be ceaselessly 'interrupted', deferred or 'pushed away', but to try to get beyond it altogether is the most credulous form of utopianism.

...

copyright © LRB Ltd, 1997-2007

Eagleton on Jeorge Orwell/ 伊格尔顿评乔治·奥威尔

Terry Eagleton/ Reach-Me-Down Romantic

George Orwell by Gordon Bowker · Little, Brown, 495 pp, £20.00

Orwell: The Life by D.J. Taylor · Chatto, 448 pp, £20.00

Orwell: Life and Times by Scott Lucas · Haus, 180 pp, £8.99

…

Like any self-transformation, this one was imperfect. Orwell may have castigated Britain's class-ridden education system, but he put his adopted son down for Wellington and kept up his Etonian contacts to the end. Some Old Etonians have even claimed that they could identify him as one of their own from his writings, a hard case to credit unless Eton was stuffed with budding critics of saucy postcards and analysts of dirigiste economics. Like most of us, however, he loved Big Brother more than he admitted. He portrayed his prep school, run by a couple named Wilkes, as a brutal place, but D.J. Taylor thinks this is typical of his self-pitying image as the victimised outsider. (A sentence of Taylor's beginning 'Though presumably touched up by the Wilkeses' turns out to concern Orwell's letters home rather than his person.) One friend considered him conservative in everything but politics. This is not entirely paradoxical, since Orwell saw socialism as all about preserving traditional decencies. He knew a strange amount about ecclesiastical affairs, preferred Housman and Kipling to Yeats and Pound, and fretted about the quality of tea he would get in Spain. After resigning from the colonial service in Burma, where he had been in charge of 200,000 people at the age of 20, he described imperialism as 'that evil despotism'; but he also admired empire-builders for their practicality, and thought that a clip around the ear might do the natives no harm at all. In Burma he had used the left-wing Adelphi magazine for target practice.

…

copyright © LRB Ltd, 1997-2007

Eagleton's Diatribe on American Academia/ 伊格尔顿抨击美国学术

这篇书评里，伊格尔顿骂人的厉害劲儿不弱于鲁迅先生。

Terry Eagleton/ The Estate Agent

The Trouble with Principle by Stanley Fish · Harvard, 328 pp, £15.50

...

Like most of his compatriots, Fish is not the most cosmopolitan of creatures. The essays in The Trouble with Principle deal with racism, pornography, abortion, free speech, religion, sexual discrimination, in fact most of the stock-in-trade of enlightened US academia. This, on any estimate, is a pressing agenda; but it does not betray the slightest sense that there is anything else in the political universe worth discussing. With typical American parochialism and self-obsession, Fish's book is silent about famine, forced migration, revolutionary nationalism, military aggression, the depredations of capital, the inequities of world trade, the disintegration of whole communities. Yet these have been the consequences of the system of which the United States is the linchpin for many perched on the unmetaphysical outside of it. Being unable to leap out of your own cultural skin seems to mean in Fish's case having no grasp of how your country is helping to wreak havoc in that inscrutable place known as abroad. One has the indelible impression that Fish does not think a great deal of abroad, and would be quite happy to see it abolished. He is strenuously opposed to hate speech, but appears utterly ignorant of the structural conditions in his own backyard which give rise to such ethnic conflict. Indeed, he champions the social and economic order which helps to breed the effects he deplores. He is rightly concerned about anti-abortion fanatics, but not, as far as one can judge, about the military, ecological and economic threat which his country represents for so much of the world. For him as for many of his 'leftist' colleagues, a good deal of morality seems to come down to sex, just as it always has for the puritanical Right.

...

To refer to Fish the Dean, however, is to reveal the fact that there are two Fishes, Little and Big. Little Fish is a sabre-rattling polemicist given to scandalously provocative pronouncements: truth is rhetoric, free speech is an illusion, unprincipled behaviour is best. Big Fish is the respectable academic who will instantly undercut the force of these utterances by insisting that they are descriptive rather than normative. Far from being radical recommendations, they simply describe what we do anyway without always knowing it, and 'theory', the Trumps of this world will be relieved to learn, thus has no effect whatsoever on practice. Anti-foundationalism is therefore unlikely to alienate the New York foundations, and Fish can buy his reputation as an iconoclast on the cheap.

Little Fish is in hot pursuit of a case which will succeed in alienating absolutely everyone; he is the cross-grained outsider who speaks up for minorities, and himself Jewish, comes from one such cultural margin. Big Fish, by contrast, has a consensual, good-boy disdain for rebels, whose behaviour is in his eyes just as convention-bound as those they lambast. It is fortunate for this schizoid character that there is a place where aggression and consensus go together. It is known as the US corporation, of which the campus is a microcosm. In academia, you can hammer your colleagues, safe in the knowledge that, since you all subscribe to the same professional rules, it doesn't really mean a thing.

...

copyright © LRB Ltd, 1997-2007

Edward Said the optimist/ 爱德华 · 萨义德：乐观主义者

...

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Edward liked to quote Gramsci's aphorism, and with good reason. But he wasn't a pessimist of any kind, either of the intellect or the will. He was the deepest, most devoted, most unalterable kind of optimist, the optimist who can look despair in the face and keep on hoping. I remember a long argument we had at the time of the signing of the Oslo Accords. The thing went on for about four hours, Edward pacing up and down in his apartment drinking glass after glass of orange juice. I was looking for hope but looking in the wrong place. In the end, I said: 'But Edward, you've got to believe that some day, somehow, things are going to get better.' He looked at me as if I was mad, and said: 'Of course I believe that. If I didn't believe that I wouldn't be doing any of this.'

...

Michael Wood, "On Edward Said."