书评 | 当简·奥斯汀遇到“高鹗”
Mary Bennet sequels? Jane Austen's minor characters are neglected for a reason
Great marketing sense or mawkish sensibility? Take your pick: a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, to be published next summer to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death.
这是伟大的营销观念，还是造作感伤？随你怎么说，猎户座出版社刚刚宣布明年夏天出版《傲慢与偏见》续本，时值简·奥斯汀逝世200周年。
Perception by Terri Fleming will be set a few years after the events set forth in the original novel and follows Mary and Kitty, the two sisters left unmarried by Austen. That book , in 2018, by The Other Bennet Girl by Janice Hadlow, which similarly promises to show a hidden side to Mary.
特丽·弗莱明的叙事从原作发生几年后展开，奥斯汀的作品中，两个妹妹玛丽和凯蒂尚未嫁人。作品将另有续本，2018年，詹妮思·哈德罗将出版《另一个贝内特女孩》，也声称要揭示玛丽不为人知的一面。
Austen re-imaginings are nothing new: in the last couple of years alone we’ve had Jo Baker’s Longbourn and the execrable Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, not to mention Bridget Jones’s Diary and Death Comes to Pemberley.
再造奥斯汀并不新鲜：过去几年里我们读过乔·贝克的《朗伯恩》以及令人作呕的《傲慢与偏见与僵尸》——更有甚者——《布里吉特·琼斯的日记》以及《彭伯里谋杀案》。
Now it seems There’s Something About Mary, to cite another spinoff by Sebastian Di Mattia. How many books are there already out there about Mary Bennet? I must admit I stopped counting.
如此看来，借用塞巴斯蒂安·迪·马蒂亚的一部改编小说名说，“玛丽还真是有故事”。已经出版了多少关于玛丽·贝内特的书，让我来数数看。
The Forgotten Sister, The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet, Becoming Mary, Mary Bennet’s Chance, The Pursuit of Mary Bennet (subtitled “A Pride and Prejudice Novel”, which slightly wrongfooted me: isn’t Pride and Prejudice already a novel, not a franchise?) … Mary Bennett and the Bloomsbury Coven promises much excitement but anyone expecting a time-travelling sorcery mashup with Virginia Woolf and company will be disappointed.
《被遗忘的妹妹》、《玛丽·贝内特小姐的独立》、《成为玛丽》、《玛丽·贝内特的机会》。还有《玛丽·贝内特的追求》，其副标题是《一部傲慢与偏见小说》，这让我乱了阵脚，难道《傲慢与偏见》不是一部小说而是经销权吗？还有《玛丽·贝内特和布鲁姆伯里·考文》，这更令人兴奋，可如果有人以为这是一部与弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫穿越时空的魔法混搭，可能要失望了。
To recap, in case you now know more about the Mary Bennet industry than the character herself, Mary is the plain, bookish, subdued sister to Elizabeth, Jane, Lydia and Kitty.
简而言之，除非你现在更了解玛丽·贝内特的作品产业而不是人物本身，玛丽相比于伊丽莎白、莉迪亚和凯蒂而言，不过是个有点书呆子气、沉默寡言的普通女孩。
Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached.
玛丽既无天分，又无品味，尽管虚荣让她勤奋，可这也让她显得迂腐和自负，没法更好地自我实现。
Austen does not even grant her the intelligence or ambition that redeems the novel’s other unprepossessing spinster, Charlotte Lucas. Mary’s high (or low, depending on your point of view) moment comes at the Netherfield ball, when she takes centre stage and embarrasses the family by playing and singing appallingly badly. Mary is, then, very much the “forgotten” sister, while everyone else goes off and gets married.
奥斯汀甚至没赋予她补偿给夏洛特·卢卡斯的智力和野心，卢卡斯是另一个其貌不扬的老姑娘。玛丽出彩（或者说出丑）的机会出现在内瑟菲尔德舞会，她走上舞台中央，弹唱了一首歌，那简直糟糕透顶，让家人颇为尴尬。后来，别人都结婚了，玛丽却成了“被遗忘”的妹妹。
Re-imagining classic novels from the point of view of minor characters can produce fascinating new insights: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, JM Coetzee’s Foe, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead are just a few that spring to mind.
从小人物的视角对经典小说进行再想象，可以产生出色且全新的洞见，浮现在我脑海的有简·里斯的《藻海无边》、库切的《福》、简·斯迈利的《陌上伊人》、赛纳·杰特·纳斯拉德的《亚哈的妻子》，以及汤姆·斯托帕德的《君臣人子小命呜呼》。
译注：《藻海无边》改写自《简爱》；《福》改写自《鲁宾逊漂流记》；《陌上伊人》改写自《李尔王》；《亚哈的妻子》改写自《白鲸》；《君臣人子小命呜呼》改编自《哈姆莱特》。
They reflect a broader cultural revisionist tendency, which seems to be accelerating, to re-inscribe the voices of the marginalised, reassert the value of “minor” figures. It’s no coincidence that, excepting Stoppard’s play, these stories are all retold from the perspective of women.
这表现出更为广阔潮流，即文化改编主义，这一潮流愈演愈烈，重新表达边缘化人物的声音，重申“小”人物的价值。绝非巧合，除了斯托帕德的喜剧外，这些故事都从女性视角进行了重述。
But this interest in fleshing out the stories of minor characters – thinking about “what happens next” as though they are real people unfairly sidelined – raises an interesting point about the processes of characterisation.
充实小人物的故事，思考“后来如何”，好像她们真真切切地被冷落，这对于塑造人物而言很有意思。
How do novels make us accept the differences between major and minor characters? How do authors make their heroes and heroines complex and credible while relying on a cast of supporting characters who lack interiority? It’s an asymmetry on which the realist novel, in particular, relies – what Alex Woloch calls the conundrum of “”.
小说是如何让我们接受主要人物和次要人物间的区别的呢？作者如何通过一干空洞的配角让男女主人公复杂且可信呢？小说正依赖这种不对称性，尤其现实主义小说，Alex Woloch将之称为“一对多”的难解之谜。
The singularity of Elizabeth Bennett, after all – the reason she so often features in lists of our favourite literary characters – relies solely upon the relief cast by her dull sisters.
说到底，伊丽莎白·贝内特之所以脱颖而出——她总能上榜我们最喜欢的文学人物——这完全依赖于她的蠢妹妹们来陪衬。
Lizzie only has space in the book for a remarkable interior life because her sisters do not. Even beautiful Jane is a bit insipid – a fact Austen knowingly plays with, as her eventual engagement to Bingley is briefly threatened by Jane’s reticence.
书中的伊丽莎白内心丰富，因为妹妹们内心空洞，就算漂亮的简也有点无趣，奥斯汀有意借用了这一事实，她险些因为沉默寡言，没与宾格莱订婚。
We instinctively think of characterisation in terms of whether characters are believable, vividly imagined, likable or not. So I can understand why there’s such a slew of books seeking to reconstruct the innermost emotions, hopes and aspirations of outwardly unremarkable characters whose function just seems to be to act as props in the story of somebody else. It reminds me of a moment in Middlemarch:
想到人物塑造，我们本能地想到人物是否可信，塑造是否生动，可爱与否。所以我不理解为什么有这么多书去重塑相貌平平的人物，塑造她们的内心情感、希望和渴求，她们看起来不过是别人故事里的道具。这让我想到《米德尔马契》中的描写：
One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea – but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage?
在多萝西娅来到洛伊克后数周的一天早晨，多萝西娅——为什么总是她？难道她的视角是这段婚姻唯一可能的视角？
Dorothea’s misery in her marriage is convincing because we only see one side of it, Eliot chides us.
多萝西娅婚姻不幸令人幸福，因为我们只从一个侧面看，艾略特因此责斥了我们。
Austen isn’t Eliot, though – if she were, we might find out why Mr Collins is as paradoxically pompous and servile as he is. Austen does flatten and simplify many of her minor characters, because she’s ultimately most interested in her heroine. She even wrote a whole book about that kind of solipsism in Emma.
可奥斯汀并非艾略特，如果她是，我们可能会知道为什么柯林斯先生既浮夸又卑屈。奥斯汀的确偏平化和略写了许多小人物，因为她说到底对女主人公最感兴趣。她甚至在《爱玛》中用整整用一本书表现那种唯我论。
But her minor characters (Miss Bates, Mrs Elton, Lady Catherine de Bourgh and her anaemic daughter Anne) are equally as memorable to me as her protagonists precisely because of the distortions they undergo.
其实对我而言，奥斯汀的小人物和主人公一样令人难忘，贝茨小姐、埃尔顿夫人、凯瑟琳女士和她瘦弱的女儿安妮……因为失真，所以难忘。
They transcend their significance as individuals. The poignancy of Mary’s situation, for example, resides precisely in her effacement: neglected by her parents and unmarriageable, her silent and futile presence haunting the shadows of Pride and Prejudice is to me the best testament possible to the ranks of unremarkable women she stands for.
她们并非因为个体而存在，比方说，玛丽处境心酸正是因为她羞怯：被父母漠视，嫁不出去，她沉默无助，让《傲慢与偏见》蒙上阴影，完美代表了像她一样的平庸女性。
With characters like Mary, Austen’s realism looks outwards, to subtly observe and comment on her social world, while those such as Lizzie provide a vehicle for her extraordinarily sensitive explorations of individual consciousness.
正因为有了玛丽这样的人物，奥斯汀的现实主义才得以细致地观察和评论她生活的社交界，而伊丽莎白这样的人提供了一种载体，让她以与众不同的敏感发掘个人的内心世界。
It’s Austen’s uncanny ability to sustain the two perspectives that makes her one of the greatest realist novelists, and I can’t help but feel that dimension of her writing will be lost as unremarkable Mary is made, after all this time, remarkable.
奥斯汀具有不同寻常的能力，同时运用两种视角，这让她成为最伟大的现实主义小说家。我忍不住想，如果平庸的玛丽从此不凡，奥斯汀作品的意义就不复存在了。
词汇
mawkish
Mawkish means excessively sentimental or so sappy it's sickening. 过分感伤而令人作呕。
例句：While unbearably sad — but also beautiful — at times, the show is not mawkish or manipulative. （《纽约时报》8月1日）
尽管悲痛欲绝，时而颇具美感，表演既不感伤，也不做作。