这次读的是Michael Henry Heim的译本,前头有Michael Cunningham的推荐,封面上的一句话是" A haunting new translation"。果然没读两页就有haunting的感觉,主人公散步途中,看到殡仪馆(?)出现的古怪男子,思想来了个an entirely new turn,他眼前出现幻像,manifold wonders and horrors,热带的沼泽,荒岛,冲积的沟渠,蒸汽弥漫的天空,怪异的植被,破碎的树木,有着畸形的喙的鸟,还有躲在竹林深处,老虎窥伺的眼睛。(后面我们知道威尼斯的瘟疫正是从印度人迹罕至的沼泽,有着竹丛中的老虎的地方发源出来的)他开始想去旅行。他去了威尼斯。
在威尼斯,刚登上刚朵拉,他就觉得像是通向地狱。载他的船夫,最终没收他钱(因为没有执照),但是船夫在途中留下的那句 you will pay,整个地成了一句谶语!
我以前很愚蠢地以为这本书很闷,很平淡,——很无聊。现在才知道大错特错,先不去说象征,主题什么的,我也说不好。就说这个故事的外壳,看它是怎么发展的,就有无限的趣味。书里有五个章节。第一章写主人公的觉醒,既突如其来,又神秘蛊惑。第二章是补笔,概述这个人的一辈子。端庄自持的压抑大叔。第三章写到达威尼斯,邂逅美少年,觉出空气异常,决心离开,结果行李出现差错,不得已回到宾馆,才明白心中所愿是留下。第四章主人公开始窥伺观察美少年,明白美的真谛,确定心意"i love you"。第五章瘟疫来袭,大限将至。人心思去的情况下,主人公也不再只满足于守株待兔。他开始明目张胆地跟踪少年,在迷宫也似的威尼斯。
一年四季里,我最害怕也最期待的季节是秋季。或许是因为夏日到肃秋的苍凉会一下子让人不知所措,所以近两年每当九月结束的时候我一定会找出“wake me up when September ends”来听一听,这种缓缓的“吸毒”方式很受用。在平行的世界里,我们在托马斯.曼的笔下看到这样一个威尼斯,像 “一个逢人讨好而猜疑多端的美女”又是“一半是神话,一半是陷阱,在它污浊的空气里,曾一度开出艺术之花,而音乐家也曾在这儿奏出令人销魂的和弦” 的矛盾城市,我们或许不都在威尼斯,也就当然不会再威尼斯遇见你的塔齐奥,但是每一个国家或许都有一个威尼斯,在这个焦躁,炎热,矛盾的城市里,用你的双眼去寻找你的塔齐奥,去静静的窥探死亡之夜和她甜蜜的奥秘。
陌生人的春药是一种陌生的慰藉。对。The Comfort of Strangers。我还想说的是一部致敬《死于威尼斯》的故事,就是《只爱陌生人》。同样,这也是一个春药的故事,只不过口味稍重。麦克尤恩所写的威尼斯空旷苍白,是一种盛极而衰的感觉,和托马斯·曼,倒是神似。只是,这一场情欲的试探,完全是一个被架空的故事。作者试图将一个sm惊悚故事写成一个寓言,所以抹去了时间地点和正常的心理活动。实际上,关于那个乱糟糟的有奸尸狂的旅游胜地就是威尼斯,还是译者而不是作者告诉我的。行文自然不受影响,只要你有足够的耐心完全跟着作者兜圈子。而当中人物在寻找咖啡馆时的茫然和低效率,直男被强攻调戏时不合时宜的小受姿态,主角反复念叨的“我们是在度假”,似乎只有当做寓言去分析其暗示作用时 ,才有意义。
从这个角度来说,这个故事就有些做作。但是这注定是个四面讨好的作品,因为其中的隐喻指向了性政治、父权社会、女权主义、婚姻危机。其实说的并不深入,最终指向的似乎隐隐还是反女权的立场。或许,sm游戏中掌鞭的若是妻子,女权主义就得以彰显了吧。不过,较之于《死于威尼斯》,《只》的故事被虚化了,春药的概念却更突显出来。前者的春药,是老人的自慰(虽然少年也有所表示),而后者则是两对陌生人的相互爱抚,共同高潮。当然,极致的高潮带来的也是死亡,混杂鲜血和剧痛的快感,是这春药的神奇疗效。
以我之愚笨,读到后来才渐渐明白,之前连篇累牍的细节描写啊景物描写也是情节的一部分。貌合神离,同床异梦,就是作者想通过在小巷里不停迷路胡乱游荡告诉我的、那对情人的精神状态。而他们连在做爱时也感到厌烦了。他们急需强大的春药。否则,他们怎么能第二次走进那座宅邸呢,它实在让我想起萨德侯爵。就是因为,他们第一次被骗进去后,在做爱时他们感受到了久违的激情。而骗他们入局的夫妇,把偷拍的男主角的照片贴满床头,这对连重口味sm都玩腻了的二人,也重新找到了性的目标。
莫名的剧烈高潮和街头偷拍技术性,都是寓言故事不需要解释的问题。就像对于男二号从小在极度父权下度男性力量产生迷恋却莫名的被女性力量所戕害的事实,到底在他的性变态和强攻身份的形成中扮演了怎演的角色,作者也未加解释。笔意隐晦,固然带来了猜谜的快感,但是我这种读者就得失望了。在惨绝人寰的虐杀和奸尸的刺激当口,作者让作为视角的女主角昏了过去。靠,裤子一脱,马赛克比裤子还大。
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 Phǽdrus. 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 naïve 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.”