城市，星光下的帐篷马戏团（上）

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©️ 法国艺术家西里尔·韦纳（Cyrille Weiner）眼中瞬息万变的游乐场

2016 年《节日》系列摄影作品

托马斯 · B · 雷弗迪

Thomas B. Reverdy

法国作家托马斯·B·雷弗迪（Thomas B. Reverdy） 总是以城市作为其小说的场景。他认为，在缺少人性温暖的城市中，人人都是“痛苦不已的缺席之存在”，他为此而困扰，并想象有人会作出些许的抵抗。

The French writer Thomas B. Reverdy has almost always chosen urban spaces as the setting for his novels. Obsessed by the “unbearable presence of absence” in our dehumanized cities, he imagines the emergence of tiny resistances.

“它们是城市！”这行著名诗句出自兰波（Rimbaud）之手。它是《彩饰集》中一首诗的开篇之句，但诗人描写的并非城市，而是马戏团的帐篷、里面的器械和杂技演员，以及各种各样的空间、节目、通道和充斥其间的嘈音。所有事物都杂乱无章、各行其道，但又像一篇乐谱那样井然有序。1872 年，波德莱尔（Baudelaire）生前未能发表的散文诗集《巴黎的忧郁》已经面世三年，在此书的影响下，城市成为一种意象。人们可以把它当作比喻，但这个比喻并不关乎城市本身——一个生产业和商业都十分发达的地方，而是描绘城市带来的一切后果——是背井离乡，是不知名姓，是已经消失的行当，还有纸醉金迷背后那触目惊心的贫穷。自从乌托邦岛在托马斯·摩尔（Thomas More）笔下诞生，城市便成了大多数乌托邦的所在地。而所有的反乌托邦也都离不开城市。城市是一个幻境，是一场演出，是一个马戏团。

“These are cities!” The words, famous, are from Rimbaud. This is the sentence that opens one of the Illuminations, in which the poet describes not a city, but a circus tent, its machines and its inhabitants-acrobats, the myriad spaces, acts, routes and noises that populate it, chaotic, blind to each other, and yet regulated like a music score. Around 1872, three years after the posthumous publication of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris [Paris Spleen], the city had thus become an image. It could be used as a metaphor, and this metaphor did not say what a city is, but what it evokes. Not the production, the commerce, but already the displacements, the anonymity, the trades being lost and the poverty that is suddenly noticeable in the cracks of apparent wealth. Since the island of Thomas More, most utopias are urban. All dystopias are. The city is an imaginary place. A show. A circus.

到处游历

Travelling places

我总是把场景设在城市。应该说，我把场景搬到了城市。在城市里，故事可以在任何地方发生，国内也好，国外也好，这种场景转换是我写作的根本所在。城市可以是侧面的台阶、倾斜的视线，也可以是现实中的差距、随时随地为小说的展开创造空间的场景转换。在第二部小说中，我把场景搬到了曼哈顿对面的布鲁克林，这是为了让故事尽量远离我这个主体。我两次把场景搬离法国：第一次是搬到纽约——我经常去纽约，对那里很熟悉，但我不住在那里；第二次是布鲁克林——那不是我们想象中的纽约。当然，这种去中心化的做法对我来说十分必要，它让我慢慢地向小说靠拢。在此之前，我的第一个故事具有相当程度的自传性质。

I have almost always placed the setting of my plots in the city. I should say I have moved it to the city. Cities make it possible to be everywhere, both at home and abroad, and this displacement is fundamental. It is the step sideways, the oblique vision, it is the gap in reality, the displacement that suddenly creates space for the deployment of fiction. When, in my second novel, I moved part of my plot to Brooklyn, opposite Manhattan, I was obeying this need to ward off my subject. I distanced it twice: first to New York, which I knew well from going there frequently, but where I did not live; and then to Brooklyn, which is not the New York we imagine, from France. This decentring was certainly fundamental for me, it gradually tipped me towards the novel – before that, my first story was very autobiographical.

但这种转换带来了意想不到的效果：它给了我思考的空间。由于刻意远离我熟悉的地方，我顿时不得不增加阅读量、核实各种细节并验证图像与现实的差别。我发现，在小说的核心、在故事情节的核心， 现实与文字有着复杂的纠葛：我需要国外城市带来的场景转换，而一旦把故事放在那个环境里，我又需要现实来填充它。这种现实不是原原本本的现实——要不然我就留在巴黎、待在家里了，而是经过调和的现实、图像、符号、碎片和字句。它源于脑海中的记忆，同时也来自各种证据、照片、故事、小说和电影，还有地图。我不得不重新构造一个空间，使它变得“真实”，将城市还原成马戏团的面貌。

But this shift had an unexpected effect: it imposed a space on me. As I intentionally moved away from more familiar territories, I suddenly had to increase my documentation, verifying details, the effects of reality, images. I discovered, at the heart of fiction, at the heart of its fabrication, a complex entanglement of reality and words: I needed the displacement that the foreign city offered me, but as soon as the story was situated, I needed reality to feed it. Not brute reality – otherwise I would have remained in Paris, at home – but mediatized reality, images, symbols, fragments, words. Starting from memories, but also from testimonies, photos, stories, novels and films, maps, I had to recompose a space, make it “real”, give back this city its circus life.

视而不见

Blind to each other

我很钦佩像戈马克· 麦卡锡（Cormac McCarthy）那样能在大自然中展开想象的作家。我更愿以城市为小说背景还有其他原因——我认为现代小说必须描写我们盲目的旅程，和互不知名的状况。在我巴黎寓所的楼里，人们在电梯里相遇时仅点头致意。在地铁里，人们几乎不敢直视别人的脸。

I have the greatest admiration for writers whose imaginations unfold in the great natural spaces, like Cormac McCarthy, but I had other reasons, for myself, to prefer the space of the city to move my novels in. This is because I also had the idea that modern fiction must account for our blind journeys and our anonymity. Today in Paris, I live in a building where people greet each other by lowering their heads when they meet in the elevator. In the Metro, most of the time, they scarcely dare to look each other in the face.

在城市里兜上一圈，你难免会遇见不止一个人在不安地自言自语，他们之中，可能有一两个乞丐、一个看上去就戾气深重甚至说不定精神错乱的人，以及一个在某些车站站台的尽头吸毒的瘾君子。有时候，你看到一个曾经见过面的人，比如你们先是在家附近擦肩而过，然后又在车站再次相遇了，但那个人叫什么名字、做什么工作、为什么那天她看起来很开心，都是你永远无从得知的。那个稍带些外国口音、大声说话但又小心措辞的乞丐，他从哪里来，又是怎么来到这里的？那些看起来乔装打扮过的年轻人，是要去参加聚会，还是要去演唱会？他们是学什么的？他们想成为什么样的人，又能否实现梦想？这就是现代小说。

It is rare to be able to make an entire trip around the city without coming across at least one person who is talking to himself in a disturbing way, one or two beggars, a visibly sociopathic and perhaps psychotic individual, and at some stations, a drug addict at the end of the platform, smoking crack. Sometimes, someone you’ve seen before. A person we may have come across in the neighbourhood or on the Metro at the same time. But we’ll never know what her name is, or what she does for a living, or why she looks happy that day. This beggar who speaks loudly and chooses his words, with his slight foreign accent, where does he come from and how did he find his way here? These young people who appear disguised, are they going to a party? To a concert? What are they studying? Who do they dream of becoming and will they make it? These are the modern fictions.

我们是无名之辈，过着微不足道的生活，彼此视而不见。我们的生活围绕着郊区火车时刻表来安排，我们内心深处依然对城市机器有着些许抗拒，但我们必须承认，一次简单的相遇就已是奇迹。今天，我们再也无法描绘于连·索海尔（Julien Sorel）、弗雷德里克·莫罗（Frédéric Moreau）或者“漂亮朋友”*所经历的那种生活了 。

We are an anonymous people, advancing in our miniscule lives, blind to each other. Our existences timed by the schedules of the suburban trains, still resist a little, deep in our hearts, the city-machine, but we must admit that a simple encounter has become a miracle. We can no longer write the lives of Julien Sorel, Frédéric Moreau or Bel-Ami today.

此外，还有恐怖主义袭击。也许正因如此，才出现了现在的状况。“9·11”事件**发生后，所有名字都被刻在了黑色墓碑上，于是无名者们不再无名。如今的英雄都是没有姓名的。

There were the terrorist attacks, too. It may perhaps be because of that. September 11. All the names engraved since in black stone, to give a name to the nameless. Today’s heroes are anonymous.

* 法国小说主人公的名字：司汤达（Stendhal）所著《红与黑》（1830 年）的主人公于连·索海尔；古斯塔夫·福楼拜（Gustave Flaubert）所著《情感教育》（1869 年）的主人公弗雷德里克·莫罗；“漂亮朋友”是居伊·德·莫泊桑（Guy de Maupassant）所著同名小说《漂亮朋友》（1885 年）中主人公的昵称。

* Names of the protagonists of French novels: Julien Sorel in The Red and the Black (1830) by Stendhal;  Frédéric Moreau in Sentimental Education (1869) by Gustave Flaubert; Bel-Ami is the nickname of the main character of Guy de Maupassant’s novel of the same name (1885).

** 指的是2001 年9 月11 日以美国标志性建筑为目标的恐怖主义袭击。

** Reference to the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 that targeted symbolic buildings in the United States.

作者简介：

 托马斯·B· 雷弗迪（法国） 作家，生于1974 年，所著小说曾获得无数奖项。他的小说主要有《最后的火焰》（2008 年）、《走向世界》（2010 年）、《人间蒸发》（2013 年）、《曾经有座城》（2015 年）和《不满的冬天》（2018 年）。

French author Thomas B. Reverdy has received numerous awards for his novels, notably for Les Derniers Feux (The Last Fires, 2008), L’Envers du monde (Towards the World, 2010), Les Évaporés (The Evaporated, 2013), Il était une ville (There was a City, 2015) and L’Hiver du mécontentement (The Winter of Discontent, 2018).

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