我们一起读名著（三）《Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage》

冰问

《Family Furnishing》：

       看这篇的整体感觉：本来以为会是人物特写，看到篇末忽然出现了反转。而且结尾该是出乎大多读者意料的，很大程度上脱离出了故事本身，文中的“我”，从叙述者回到了“作者”的身份，为全篇画上句号，虽然似乎并未终结。

       故事大部分用以描写Alfrida，“我”的姑姑，一个专栏作家——与他人有很大不同，性情、行为都在一定程度上可以用古怪形容。全文以“我”的视角写Alfrida：与家人（尤其“我”的父亲）的相处，家庭，儿时经历……最终，在父亲的葬礼上，“我”遇到一个女孩——最初“我”认为她是Alfrida的妹妹——Alfrida的亲生女儿，从她口中得知了更多关于Alfrida的过往，以及一个似乎惊天的秘密：女孩的父亲，也即“我”的父亲。

       记忆重回故事开篇Alfrida与父亲的相处与对话：生活似乎就是这样，时时刻刻充满着“想不到”与“意料之外”。

 

       整篇读下来我一直忽视了另外一个主题，在结尾为作者重申：

       I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida – not of that in particular – but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories. The cries of the crowd came to me like big heartbeat, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation.

       This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.

       重回写作者的身份，谈及作者在创作中多多少少将身边的人卷入其中，甚至将自己的原型建立在他人的牺牲之上。这里忽然想到曾经看到论坛上转过的那篇《张爱玲与傅雷恩怨始末》（http://www.ishuiyunjian.com/viewthread.php?tid=4414&highlight=%D5%C5%B0%AE%C1%E1%D3%EB%B8%B5%C0%D7），其中有一小段也曾提及张爱玲的创作对成为其作品原型的人来说似乎是“残忍”的。

       我想这于作家来说似乎是不可避免的，读罢作品，总有读者（且多数读者）会想探寻其原型，创作很大程度上都有着生活的影子，于是多多少少有些蛛丝马迹可循，越是复杂的角色，越是知名的作家，读者在这方面的好奇心愈发明显。

 

       看到一篇关于Munro的访问就有这样一段问答：

In "Family Furnishings," a story from your new collection, you write about a girl discovering her passion for writing, and her aunt's dismay when she finds herself as a character in one of her niece's published stories. Did this story come from your own experience?

       No—none of that actually happened, but it's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it. And sacrificing somebody like a cousin was not a big problem. Because I thought of the world in which I wrote—the world I created—as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in. And I think many writers do that. As you get older your rampaging need to write diminishes a bit. You have to face the amazing fact that you're probably going to die, at some time, anyway. So everything you do in your life then seems more relative because it's just part of your life.

       （Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/12/bringing-life-to-life/303056/）

木耳

好多没看懂，我说过的话要算数，这本一定得读完。