正文
Hidden Within Technology’s Empire, a Republic of Letters
By Saul Bellow
When I was a boy “discovering literature”, I used to think how wonderful it would be if every other person on the street were familiar with Proust and Joyce or T. E. Lawrence or Pasternak and Kafka. Later I learned how refractory to high culture the democratic masses were. Lincoln as a young frontiersman read Plutarch, Shakespeare and the Bible. But then he was Lincoln.
Later when I was traveling in the Midwest by car, bus and train, I regularly visited small-town libraries and found that readers in Keokuk, Iowa, or Benton Harbor, Mich., were checking out Proust and Joyce and even Svevo and Andrei Biely. D. H. Lawrence was also a favorite. And sometimes I remembered that God was willing to spare Sodom for the sake of 10 of the righteous. Not that Keokuk was anything like wicked Sodom, or that Proust’s Charlus would have been tempted to settle in Benton Harbor, Mich. I seem to have had a persistent democratic desire to find evidences of high culture in the most unlikely places.
For many decades now I have been a fiction writer, and from the first I was aware that mine was a questionable occupation. In the 1930’s an elderly neighbor in Chicago told me that he wrote fiction for the pulps. “The people on the block wonder why I don’t go to a job, and I’m seen puttering around, trimming the bushes or painting a fence instead of working in a factory. But I’m a writer. I to Argosy and Doc Savage,” he said with a certain gloom. “They wouldn’t call that a trade.” Probably he noticed that I was a bookish boy, likely to sympathize with him, and perhaps he was trying to warn me to avoid being unlike others. But it was too late for that.
From the first, too, I had been warned that the novel was at the point of death, that like the walled city or the crossbow, it was a thing of the past. And no one likes to be at odds with history. Oswald Spengler, one of the most widely read authors of the early 30’s, taught that our tired old civilization was very nearly finished. His advice to the young was to avoid literature and the arts and to embrace mechanization and become engineers.
In refusing to be obsolete, you challenged and defied the evolutionist historians. I had great respect for Spengler in my youth, but even then I couldn’t accept his conclusions, and (with respect and admiration) I mentally told him to get lost.
Sixty years later, in a recent issue of The Wall Street Journal, I come upon the old Spenglerian argument in a contemporary form. Terry Teachout, unlike Spengler, does not dump paralyzing mountains of historical theory upon us, but there are signs that he has weighed, sifted and pondered the evidence.
He speaks of our “atomized culture,” and his is a responsible, up-to-date and carefully considered opinion. He speaks of “art forms as technologies.” He tells us that movies will soon be “downloadable”—that is, transferable from one computer to the memory of another device—and predicts that films will soon be marketed like books. He predicts that the near-magical powers of technology are bringing us to the threshold of a new age and concludes, “Once this happens, my guess is that the independent movie will replace the novel as the principal vehicle for serious storytelling in the 21st century.”
In support of this argument, Mr. Teachout cites the ominous drop in the volume of book sales and the great increase in movie attendance: “For Americans under the age of 30, film has replaced the novel as the dominant mode of artistic expression.” To this Mr. Teachout adds that popular novelists like Tom Clancy and Stephen King “top out at around a million copies per book,” and notes, “The final episode of NBC’s ‘Cheers,’ by contrast, was seen by 42 million people.”
On majoritarian grounds, the movies win. “The power of novels to shape the national conversation has declined,” says Mr. Teachout. But I am not at all certain that in their day “Moby-Dick” or “The Scarlet Letter” had any considerable influence on “the national conversation.” In the mid-19th century it was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” that impressed the great public. “Moby-Dick” was a small-public novel.
The literary masterpieces of the 20th century were for the most part the work of novelists who had no large public in mind. The novels of Proust and Joyce were written in a cultural twilight and were not intended to be read under the blaze and dazzle of popularity.
Mr. Teachout’s article in The Journal follows the path generally taken by observers whose aim is to discover a trend. “According to one recent study 55 percent of Americans spend less than 30 minutes reading anything at all…. It may even be that movies have superseded novels not because Americans have grown dumber but because the novel is an obsolete artistic technology.”
“We are not accustomed to thinking of art forms as technologies,” he says, “but that is what they are, which means they have been rendered moribund by new technical developments.”
Together with this emphasis on technics that attracts the scientific-minded young, there are other preferences discernible: It is better to do as a majority of your contemporaries are doing, better to be one of millions viewing a film than one of mere thousands reading a book. Moreover, the reader reads in solitude, whereas the viewer belongs to a great majority; he has powers of numerosity as well as the powers of mechanization. Add to this the importance of avoiding technological obsolescence and the attraction of feeling that technics will decide questions for us more dependably than the thinking of an individual, no matter how distinctive he may be.
John Cheever told me long ago that it was his readers who kept him going, people from every part of the country who had written to him. When he was at work, he was aware of these readers and correspondents in the woods beyond the lawn. “If I couldn’t picture them, I’d be sunk,” he said. And the novelist Wright Morris, urging me to get an electric typewriter, said that he seldom turned his machine off. “When I’m not writing, I listen to the electricity,” he said. “It keeps me company. We have conversations.”
I wonder how Mr. Teachout might square such idiosyncrasies with his “art forms as technologies.” Perhaps he would argue that these two writers had somehow isolated themselves from “broad-based cultural influence.” Mr. Teachout has at least one laudable purpose: He thinks that he sees a way to bring together the Great Public of the movies with the Small Public of the highbrows. He is, however, interested in millions: millions of dollars, millions of readers, millions of viewers.
The one thing “everybody” does is go to the movies, Mr. Teachout says. How right he is.
Back in the 20’s children between the ages of 8 and 12 lined up on Saturdays to buy their nickel tickets to see the crisis of last Saturday resolved. The heroine was untied in a matter of seconds just before the locomotive would have crushed her. Then came a new episode; and after that the newsreel and “Our Gang.” Finally there was a western with Tom Mix, or a Janet Gaynor picture about a young bride and her husband blissful in the attic, or Gloria Swanson and Theda Bara or Wallace Beery or Adolphe Menjou or Marie Dressler. And of course there was Charlie Chaplin in “The Gold Rush,” and from “The Gold Rush” it was only one step to the stories of Jack London.
There was no rivalry then between the viewer and the reader. Nobody supervised our reading. We were on our own. We civilized ourselves. We found or made a mental and imaginative life. Because we could read, we learned also to write. It did not confuse me to see “Treasure Island” in the movies and then read the book. There was no competition for our attention.
[ Last edited by kittylinda at 2010-12-10 10:47 AM ]
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Post time 2010-7-6 16:13:36 |View the author only
One of the more attractive oddities of the United States is that our minorities are so numerous, so huge. A minority of millions is not at all unusual. But there are in fact millions of literate Americans in a state of separation from others of their kind. They are, if you like, the readers of Cheever, a crowd of them too large to be hidden in the woods. Departments of literature across the country have not succeeded in alienating them from books, works old and new. My friend Keith Botsford and I felt strongly that if the woods were filled with readers gone astray, among those readers there were probably writers as well.
To learn in detail of their existence you have only to publish a magazine like The Republic of Letters. Given encouragement, unknown writers, formerly without hope, materialize. One early reader wrote that our paper, “with its contents so fresh, person-to-person,” was “real, non-synthetic, undistracting.” Noting that there were no ads, she asked, “Is it possible, can it last?” and called it “an antidote to the shrinking of the human being in every one of us.” And toward the end of her letter our correspondent added, “It behooves the elder generation to come up with reminders of who we used to be and need to be.”
This is what Keith Botsford and I had hoped that our “tabloid for literates” would be. And for two years it has been just that. We are a pair of utopian codgers who feel we have a duty to literature. I hope we are not like those humane do-gooders who, when the horse was vanishing, still donated troughs in City Hall Square for thirsty nags.
We have no way of guessing how many independent, self-initiated connoisseurs and lovers of literature have survived in remote corners of the country. The little evidence we have suggests that they are glad to find us, they are grateful. They want more than they are getting. Ingenious technology has failed to give them what they so badly need.
隐于技术帝国背后的文学世界 BY csuer
还是一个刚刚踏上文学探究之路的小孩子时，我时常会想：如果每一个人都熟谙普鲁斯特、乔伊斯、托马斯•爱德华•劳伦斯、帕斯捷尔纳克或者卡夫卡 ，该是一件多么美好的事情啊！后来我才明白，普罗大众对于阳春白雪的高雅文化是多么地抗拒与排斥。林肯年少时居住在美国西部边陲之地，但那时他就读过了圣经、以及普鲁塔克与莎士比亚的著作 。然而他毕竟是林肯。
后来，我到美国的中西部地区旅游，不论是自己开车，还是坐汽车或火车，我都经常去小镇子上的图书馆看一看。在爱荷华州的基奥卡克，或者密歇根州的本顿港这样的地方，我翻阅了图书馆的借阅记录，发现普鲁斯特、乔伊斯甚至斯韦沃与安德烈•别雷 的作品都很受欢迎。戴维•赫伯特•劳伦斯 的作品也颇受青睐。这让我有时会想起上帝愿为十个义人而饶恕所多玛城里众人的故事 。我倒不是说基奥卡克与传说中的罪恶之城所多玛有任何的相似之处，或者说夏吕斯 男爵会觉得本顿港是他的安居之地。只是我有一份难以割舍的平民情结，执着地在最不可能之处寻觅高雅文化的蛛丝马迹。
现如今，我写小说也已经有几十年了。其实，从一开始，我就知道以此为业不怎么靠谱。三十年代我住在芝加哥的时候，一位年长的邻居告诉我说，他为一些不入流的廉价杂志写小说。“邻居们见我每天总是东游西荡、无所事事，不是修剪草坪就是粉刷篱笆，就是不去上班，都感到很纳闷：这个人怎么也不找个工作呢？但其实我是一个作家。我以卖文为生，一般向《商船队》和《萨维齐博士》这些杂志投稿 ”，他郁郁地说。“他们觉得这可算不得什么正当营生。”他对我说这番话可能是因为看出我这个人颇有些书生气，因而也许会产生共鸣，抑或他是想提醒我不要特立独行、标新立异。可惜他的劝告已然来得迟了。
同样，也是从一开始就有人警告过我小说已经到了弥留之际，如同城墙与弓弩，早已是明日黄花。没有人愿与历史潮流相悖而行。奥斯瓦尔德•斯宾格勒是二十世纪三十年代初期最受欢迎的作家之一，他就曾教诲我们说，腐朽陈旧的古老文明已经死气沉沉、行将就木。他建议年轻人应该丢掉文学和艺术，拥抱机械化时代，去做工程师。
倘若拒不承认文学已经过时的话，你就是在挑战和藐视社会进化论历史学家的权威。年轻时我对斯宾格勒一度极为推崇，即便如此，我也不能苟同他的观点。因此我只有满怀尊重与钦佩之情暗暗腹诽：请您还是一边待着去吧。
时隔六十年，我在最近的一期《华尔街日报》上又看到了斯宾格勒式论点的老调重弹。不过是新瓶装旧酒，换汤未换药。这次是泰瑞•蒂侨特。他倒未像斯宾格勒般旁征博引，抛出铺天盖地、堆砌如山的历史理论，而是对例证权衡轻重、精挑细选、再三斟酌。
他谈到了我们的“散沙文化 ”， 其观点倒也有理有据、新颖应时、细密周详。他提出 “艺术即技术”。他说，电影很快就可以“自由下载”，即在电脑之间通过内存自由传输——而且，他还预言，电影很快就会将像书籍一样，走进市场，摆上货架销售。他还断言科技的神奇魔力将引领我们跨入一个崭新的时代。“到那时候，我想独立制片电影 将会取代小说，成为二十一世纪严肃故事叙述的主要形式”。
为了佐证他的观点，蒂侨特先生还援引了一些数据，来说明书籍销售量锐减，而电影观众数激增：“对30岁以下的美国人来说，电影已取代小说，成为最主要的艺术表现形式。”他补充道，就算是汤姆•克兰西和史蒂芬•金 这样的顶级畅销小说家，“他们作品的最高销量也不过一百万册左右，相比之下，收看美国国家广播公司投拍的《欢乐酒店》大结局的观众则多达四千两百万”。
仅以受众的多寡论，电影大获全胜。 “现在小说再也不能像原来那样成为全民热议的话题了”，蒂侨特先生如是说。但是我却不记得《白鲸》与《红字》在其面世之时是否是什么“全民热议的话题”。十九世纪中叶对大众产生了重大影响的小说应该是《汤姆叔叔的小屋》。而《白鲸》则是一部小众小说。
二十世纪的文学巨著的作者们大都不是为了迎合大众而创作的。普鲁斯特和乔伊斯创作小说时，正值文化式微，他们压根没有想过作品会受到大众的赞许与追捧。
蒂侨特先生在《华尔街日报》发表的这篇文章采用了观察家们常用的套路，意在指出大势何趋。“最新研究表明，55%的美国人每天阅读少于30分钟……我们甚至可以说电影之所以取代小说，不是因为美国人日渐愚钝，而是由于小说这种艺术技术已经过时了” 。
“我们还不太习惯把艺术形式当作技术来看待，”他说，“但事实上它们就是技术。也就是说随着科技的日新月异，这种陈腐的技术已经奄奄一息。”
除了强调科技至上之外，我们还隐约可见蒂侨特的另一个重点：即最好做到随大流，周围的人干什么你就干什么，做寥寥数千读书人中的一员不如加入电影观众的百万大军。 况且，读书时独处一室、孑然一人，而看电影的人则济济一堂、人多势众、并坐拥现代设备之利。除此之外，他还告诉我们：避免技术的过时是非常重要的；另外，无论一个人是多么地卓尔不群，他做出的抉择都不如技术可靠。
很久以前，约翰•契弗 告诉我，正是全国各地的读者的来信激励着他一直笔耕不辍。 写作的时候，他能感受到读者的存在。他们在偏远的森林里，在都市的草坪前，在美国的每一个地方。“要是哪天我感受不到他们，那我就完了”，他说。赖特•莫里斯 则一直催着我买个电动打字机。他说他的打字机基本都是开着的，“要是我不写东西，我就听听电流的声音”，他说，“他给我做伴，我们经常说说话”。
我很想知道蒂侨特先生如何用他的“艺术即技术”理论来解释这两位作家的癖好。也许他会辩解说这两位作家离群索居，多少有点缺乏“广泛的文化影响”。不过蒂侨特先生至少有一点意图值得称道：他认为他在寻找一条将广大的电影观众与小众的读书人联合在一起的道路。然而，他其实是对“百万”这个数字感兴趣而已：数以百万计的美元，数以百万计的读者，数以百万计的观众，如此而已。
蒂侨特先生说“每个人”都做过的事就是看电影。一点不假。
记得二十年代的时候，8到12岁的小孩们一到周六就会排队去买五分钱一张的儿童票，等着看上周电影中的惊险场面结局如何。女主角被绑在铁轨上，火车头呼啸而来，眼看就要粉身碎骨，就在这千钧一发之刻，她终于挣脱了绳索，逃出生天。然后接着播放下一集。接下来会播一段新闻片和一集《小顽童》 。压轴的是汤姆•米克斯主演的西部片，或者是珍妮•盖诺演绎的年轻的新娘与新郎在阁楼上的幸福生活，要么就是葛罗莉亚•史璜生、希妲•芭拉、华莱士•比里、阿道夫•门吉欧、玛丽•德雷斯勒这些演员主演的电影。噢，当然还少不了查理•卓别林主演的《淘金热》。而这部电影让我们很容易想起杰克•伦敦 的小说。
其实，看电影与读书之间并不冲突。没有人左右我们如何读书。我们自己选择，自己提高修养，自己寻找或者创造充满想象的精神家园。因为我们可以读书，也可以学着写作。我可以先看《金银岛》的电影，然后再看原著，也没有迷惑不解。我们完全可以一心二用，因为两者并无竞争。
美国有一个颇为引人关注的奇怪现象，即就算是少数派也人数众多。即便是人数达到数百万的少数派团体也屡见不鲜。然而，事实上美国有着数以百万通文达艺的人，他们彼此却很少沟通。比如说契弗的读者群就十分庞大，人数多到无法忽视。美国大学的文学院系也无法脱离书本，脱离经典著作或最新力作。我与老友基思• 博茨福德都深信如果大量的读者迷失在森林里，那么迷失其中的肯定也不乏作家 。
只有创办《文学世界》这样的杂志，我们才能了解他们到底散落何处。如果我们给予鼓励，那些原本籍籍无名、无甚希望的作者将会实现他们的梦想。早期有位读者在给我们的来信中评价道：“（杂志）内容新颖、直指人心，真实可信而非矫揉造作，引人入胜”。 她注意到我们的杂志没有刊登任何广告，所以问道“这样行吗？能维持下去吗？”，并称之为“解决我们人文精神萎缩的一剂良方”。在信的末尾，这位读者补充到：“老一辈的人理应提醒年轻人，我们过去如何，以后应该如何。”
这也正是我和基思•博茨福德对这份“文学小报 ”所寄托的期望。过去的两年我们也的确做到了这一点。我们俩是有着乌托邦式理想的怪老头。为文学做点事情，我们觉得义不容辞、责无旁贷。我希望我们不会像掌管人文科学的衮衮诸公那样，等马儿都要渴死了，还在市政厅广场大肆募捐，口口声声要为马购置水槽。
在这个国家广袤的土地上，还有多少自学成才、独立思考的文学专家和爱好者我们无从得知。从我们掌握的一点情况看我们只知道我们的出现使他们欢呼雀跃、心存感激。他们需要更多的机会，更大的平台。而无所不能的科技却无法给予他们最需要的东西。
注：1. 普鲁斯特，法国20世纪最伟大的小说家，代表作为《追忆似水年华》。乔伊斯，爱尔兰作家，诗人，代表作为《尤利西斯》。托马斯•爱德华•劳伦斯，以阿拉伯的劳伦斯而闻名，著有《智慧的七柱》等。帕斯捷尔纳克，苏联作家、诗人，凭其长篇小说《日瓦戈医生》于1958年获诺贝尔文学奖。卡夫卡，20世纪德文小说家，对后世文学影响极为深远，最著名的作品为《变形记》。
2. 普鲁塔克，希腊高产作家，著有《传记集》等。莎士比亚，英国文艺复兴代表人物，历史上最伟大的英语作家，著有37部戏剧，154首十四行诗。
3. 斯韦沃，意大利小说家，被誉为20世纪最出色小说家之一。安德烈•别雷是俄罗斯象征主义的主要代表者之一，著有《莫斯科》等。
4. 即D H劳伦斯，英国文学家，诗人，著有《查泰莱夫人的情人》（1928），《儿子与情人》，《虹》等。
5. 所多玛是《圣经》中记载的城市，因罪孽深重招致上帝降下硫磺火而毁灭。原文见圣经《创世纪》第十八章。
6. 夏吕斯男爵是小说《追忆逝水年华》中的人物，被认为是腐朽贵族的代表人物。
7. 《商船队》和《萨维齐博士》是美国著名的畅销廉价杂志，其中《商船队》被认为是美国廉价杂志的鼻祖，而《萨维齐博士》则以刊登与刊物同名的故事连载闻名。
8. 美国一些学者认为当今社会人与人之间缺乏沟通，个人的追求和观点很难形成互动。人与人之间的关系就像沙粒一样没有融合。
9. 独立制片电影是指非主流或非商业目的低成本电影。相对于更注重票房的大电影制片公司的商业电影，独立制片电影更注重影片的艺术品位。
10. 汤姆•克兰西，美国军事作家，当今世界最畅销的反恐惊悚小说大师，代表作《猎杀“红十月”号》、《爱国者游戏》、《燃眉追击》和《惊天核网》先后被搬上银幕。斯蒂芬•金，美国畅销书作家，其作品销售超过3亿5000万册，以恐怖小说著称，其作品《肖申克的救赎》，《闪灵》等被拍成电影，颇受好评。
11. 约翰•契弗，美国当代作家，被誉为纽约郊区的契诃夫，获1979年“普利策小说奖。”
12. .赖特•莫里斯，美国心理现实主义小说代表人物之一，著有《我的达得利叔叔》等。
13. 《小顽童》是美国二三十年代热播的儿童系列喜剧，由米高梅公司出品，讲的是一群顽皮的小孩子以及他们让人啼笑皆非的故事。
14. 杰克•伦敦本人曾加入“淘金热”大军，却空手而归。归来后，他根据自己积累的素材埋首写作，写出了大量反映淘金者艰苦生活的作品，如《野性的呼唤》等。
15. 基思•博茨福德曾经谈到，美国大学里的文学老师只愿意讲解卡夫卡、乔伊斯等作品“较晦涩”的作家，而不愿意涉猎自己研究范围之外的作家，因循守旧。博茨福德甚至尖锐地把他们称为“寄生虫”。另外，博茨福德与贝娄认为美国缺少严肃对待纯文学的杂志，使得文学爱好者如同迷失在茫茫森林，因此，他们决定创办这一杂志。
维基百科上面关于 阳春白雪的解释
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_culture
By Saul Bellow
When I was a boy “discovering literature”, I used to think how wonderful it would be if every other person on the street were familiar with Proust and Joyce or T. E. Lawrence or Pasternak and Kafka. Later I learned how refractory to high culture the democratic masses were. Lincoln as a young frontiersman read Plutarch, Shakespeare and the Bible. But then he was Lincoln.
Later when I was traveling in the Midwest by car, bus and train, I regularly visited small-town libraries and found that readers in Keokuk, Iowa, or Benton Harbor, Mich., were checking out Proust and Joyce and even Svevo and Andrei Biely. D. H. Lawrence was also a favorite. And sometimes I remembered that God was willing to spare Sodom for the sake of 10 of the righteous. Not that Keokuk was anything like wicked Sodom, or that Proust’s Charlus would have been tempted to settle in Benton Harbor, Mich. I seem to have had a persistent democratic desire to find evidences of high culture in the most unlikely places.
For many decades now I have been a fiction writer, and from the first I was aware that mine was a questionable occupation. In the 1930’s an elderly neighbor in Chicago told me that he wrote fiction for the pulps. “The people on the block wonder why I don’t go to a job, and I’m seen puttering around, trimming the bushes or painting a fence instead of working in a factory. But I’m a writer. I to Argosy and Doc Savage,” he said with a certain gloom. “They wouldn’t call that a trade.” Probably he noticed that I was a bookish boy, likely to sympathize with him, and perhaps he was trying to warn me to avoid being unlike others. But it was too late for that.
From the first, too, I had been warned that the novel was at the point of death, that like the walled city or the crossbow, it was a thing of the past. And no one likes to be at odds with history. Oswald Spengler, one of the most widely read authors of the early 30’s, taught that our tired old civilization was very nearly finished. His advice to the young was to avoid literature and the arts and to embrace mechanization and become engineers.
In refusing to be obsolete, you challenged and defied the evolutionist historians. I had great respect for Spengler in my youth, but even then I couldn’t accept his conclusions, and (with respect and admiration) I mentally told him to get lost.
Sixty years later, in a recent issue of The Wall Street Journal, I come upon the old Spenglerian argument in a contemporary form. Terry Teachout, unlike Spengler, does not dump paralyzing mountains of historical theory upon us, but there are signs that he has weighed, sifted and pondered the evidence.
He speaks of our “atomized culture,” and his is a responsible, up-to-date and carefully considered opinion. He speaks of “art forms as technologies.” He tells us that movies will soon be “downloadable”—that is, transferable from one computer to the memory of another device—and predicts that films will soon be marketed like books. He predicts that the near-magical powers of technology are bringing us to the threshold of a new age and concludes, “Once this happens, my guess is that the independent movie will replace the novel as the principal vehicle for serious storytelling in the 21st century.”
In support of this argument, Mr. Teachout cites the ominous drop in the volume of book sales and the great increase in movie attendance: “For Americans under the age of 30, film has replaced the novel as the dominant mode of artistic expression.” To this Mr. Teachout adds that popular novelists like Tom Clancy and Stephen King “top out at around a million copies per book,” and notes, “The final episode of NBC’s ‘Cheers,’ by contrast, was seen by 42 million people.”
On majoritarian grounds, the movies win. “The power of novels to shape the national conversation has declined,” says Mr. Teachout. But I am not at all certain that in their day “Moby-Dick” or “The Scarlet Letter” had any considerable influence on “the national conversation.” In the mid-19th century it was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” that impressed the great public. “Moby-Dick” was a small-public novel.
The literary masterpieces of the 20th century were for the most part the work of novelists who had no large public in mind. The novels of Proust and Joyce were written in a cultural twilight and were not intended to be read under the blaze and dazzle of popularity.
Mr. Teachout’s article in The Journal follows the path generally taken by observers whose aim is to discover a trend. “According to one recent study 55 percent of Americans spend less than 30 minutes reading anything at all…. It may even be that movies have superseded novels not because Americans have grown dumber but because the novel is an obsolete artistic technology.”
“We are not accustomed to thinking of art forms as technologies,” he says, “but that is what they are, which means they have been rendered moribund by new technical developments.”
Together with this emphasis on technics that attracts the scientific-minded young, there are other preferences discernible: It is better to do as a majority of your contemporaries are doing, better to be one of millions viewing a film than one of mere thousands reading a book. Moreover, the reader reads in solitude, whereas the viewer belongs to a great majority; he has powers of numerosity as well as the powers of mechanization. Add to this the importance of avoiding technological obsolescence and the attraction of feeling that technics will decide questions for us more dependably than the thinking of an individual, no matter how distinctive he may be.
John Cheever told me long ago that it was his readers who kept him going, people from every part of the country who had written to him. When he was at work, he was aware of these readers and correspondents in the woods beyond the lawn. “If I couldn’t picture them, I’d be sunk,” he said. And the novelist Wright Morris, urging me to get an electric typewriter, said that he seldom turned his machine off. “When I’m not writing, I listen to the electricity,” he said. “It keeps me company. We have conversations.”
I wonder how Mr. Teachout might square such idiosyncrasies with his “art forms as technologies.” Perhaps he would argue that these two writers had somehow isolated themselves from “broad-based cultural influence.” Mr. Teachout has at least one laudable purpose: He thinks that he sees a way to bring together the Great Public of the movies with the Small Public of the highbrows. He is, however, interested in millions: millions of dollars, millions of readers, millions of viewers.
The one thing “everybody” does is go to the movies, Mr. Teachout says. How right he is.
Back in the 20’s children between the ages of 8 and 12 lined up on Saturdays to buy their nickel tickets to see the crisis of last Saturday resolved. The heroine was untied in a matter of seconds just before the locomotive would have crushed her. Then came a new episode; and after that the newsreel and “Our Gang.” Finally there was a western with Tom Mix, or a Janet Gaynor picture about a young bride and her husband blissful in the attic, or Gloria Swanson and Theda Bara or Wallace Beery or Adolphe Menjou or Marie Dressler. And of course there was Charlie Chaplin in “The Gold Rush,” and from “The Gold Rush” it was only one step to the stories of Jack London.
There was no rivalry then between the viewer and the reader. Nobody supervised our reading. We were on our own. We civilized ourselves. We found or made a mental and imaginative life. Because we could read, we learned also to write. It did not confuse me to see “Treasure Island” in the movies and then read the book. There was no competition for our attention.
[ Last edited by kittylinda at 2010-12-10 10:47 AM ]
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Post time 2010-7-6 16:13:36 |View the author only
One of the more attractive oddities of the United States is that our minorities are so numerous, so huge. A minority of millions is not at all unusual. But there are in fact millions of literate Americans in a state of separation from others of their kind. They are, if you like, the readers of Cheever, a crowd of them too large to be hidden in the woods. Departments of literature across the country have not succeeded in alienating them from books, works old and new. My friend Keith Botsford and I felt strongly that if the woods were filled with readers gone astray, among those readers there were probably writers as well.
To learn in detail of their existence you have only to publish a magazine like The Republic of Letters. Given encouragement, unknown writers, formerly without hope, materialize. One early reader wrote that our paper, “with its contents so fresh, person-to-person,” was “real, non-synthetic, undistracting.” Noting that there were no ads, she asked, “Is it possible, can it last?” and called it “an antidote to the shrinking of the human being in every one of us.” And toward the end of her letter our correspondent added, “It behooves the elder generation to come up with reminders of who we used to be and need to be.”
This is what Keith Botsford and I had hoped that our “tabloid for literates” would be. And for two years it has been just that. We are a pair of utopian codgers who feel we have a duty to literature. I hope we are not like those humane do-gooders who, when the horse was vanishing, still donated troughs in City Hall Square for thirsty nags.
We have no way of guessing how many independent, self-initiated connoisseurs and lovers of literature have survived in remote corners of the country. The little evidence we have suggests that they are glad to find us, they are grateful. They want more than they are getting. Ingenious technology has failed to give them what they so badly need.
隐于技术帝国背后的文学世界 BY csuer
还是一个刚刚踏上文学探究之路的小孩子时，我时常会想：如果每一个人都熟谙普鲁斯特、乔伊斯、托马斯•爱德华•劳伦斯、帕斯捷尔纳克或者卡夫卡 ，该是一件多么美好的事情啊！后来我才明白，普罗大众对于阳春白雪的高雅文化是多么地抗拒与排斥。林肯年少时居住在美国西部边陲之地，但那时他就读过了圣经、以及普鲁塔克与莎士比亚的著作 。然而他毕竟是林肯。
后来，我到美国的中西部地区旅游，不论是自己开车，还是坐汽车或火车，我都经常去小镇子上的图书馆看一看。在爱荷华州的基奥卡克，或者密歇根州的本顿港这样的地方，我翻阅了图书馆的借阅记录，发现普鲁斯特、乔伊斯甚至斯韦沃与安德烈•别雷 的作品都很受欢迎。戴维•赫伯特•劳伦斯 的作品也颇受青睐。这让我有时会想起上帝愿为十个义人而饶恕所多玛城里众人的故事 。我倒不是说基奥卡克与传说中的罪恶之城所多玛有任何的相似之处，或者说夏吕斯 男爵会觉得本顿港是他的安居之地。只是我有一份难以割舍的平民情结，执着地在最不可能之处寻觅高雅文化的蛛丝马迹。
现如今，我写小说也已经有几十年了。其实，从一开始，我就知道以此为业不怎么靠谱。三十年代我住在芝加哥的时候，一位年长的邻居告诉我说，他为一些不入流的廉价杂志写小说。“邻居们见我每天总是东游西荡、无所事事，不是修剪草坪就是粉刷篱笆，就是不去上班，都感到很纳闷：这个人怎么也不找个工作呢？但其实我是一个作家。我以卖文为生，一般向《商船队》和《萨维齐博士》这些杂志投稿 ”，他郁郁地说。“他们觉得这可算不得什么正当营生。”他对我说这番话可能是因为看出我这个人颇有些书生气，因而也许会产生共鸣，抑或他是想提醒我不要特立独行、标新立异。可惜他的劝告已然来得迟了。
同样，也是从一开始就有人警告过我小说已经到了弥留之际，如同城墙与弓弩，早已是明日黄花。没有人愿与历史潮流相悖而行。奥斯瓦尔德•斯宾格勒是二十世纪三十年代初期最受欢迎的作家之一，他就曾教诲我们说，腐朽陈旧的古老文明已经死气沉沉、行将就木。他建议年轻人应该丢掉文学和艺术，拥抱机械化时代，去做工程师。
倘若拒不承认文学已经过时的话，你就是在挑战和藐视社会进化论历史学家的权威。年轻时我对斯宾格勒一度极为推崇，即便如此，我也不能苟同他的观点。因此我只有满怀尊重与钦佩之情暗暗腹诽：请您还是一边待着去吧。
时隔六十年，我在最近的一期《华尔街日报》上又看到了斯宾格勒式论点的老调重弹。不过是新瓶装旧酒，换汤未换药。这次是泰瑞•蒂侨特。他倒未像斯宾格勒般旁征博引，抛出铺天盖地、堆砌如山的历史理论，而是对例证权衡轻重、精挑细选、再三斟酌。
他谈到了我们的“散沙文化 ”， 其观点倒也有理有据、新颖应时、细密周详。他提出 “艺术即技术”。他说，电影很快就可以“自由下载”，即在电脑之间通过内存自由传输——而且，他还预言，电影很快就会将像书籍一样，走进市场，摆上货架销售。他还断言科技的神奇魔力将引领我们跨入一个崭新的时代。“到那时候，我想独立制片电影 将会取代小说，成为二十一世纪严肃故事叙述的主要形式”。
为了佐证他的观点，蒂侨特先生还援引了一些数据，来说明书籍销售量锐减，而电影观众数激增：“对30岁以下的美国人来说，电影已取代小说，成为最主要的艺术表现形式。”他补充道，就算是汤姆•克兰西和史蒂芬•金 这样的顶级畅销小说家，“他们作品的最高销量也不过一百万册左右，相比之下，收看美国国家广播公司投拍的《欢乐酒店》大结局的观众则多达四千两百万”。
仅以受众的多寡论，电影大获全胜。 “现在小说再也不能像原来那样成为全民热议的话题了”，蒂侨特先生如是说。但是我却不记得《白鲸》与《红字》在其面世之时是否是什么“全民热议的话题”。十九世纪中叶对大众产生了重大影响的小说应该是《汤姆叔叔的小屋》。而《白鲸》则是一部小众小说。
二十世纪的文学巨著的作者们大都不是为了迎合大众而创作的。普鲁斯特和乔伊斯创作小说时，正值文化式微，他们压根没有想过作品会受到大众的赞许与追捧。
蒂侨特先生在《华尔街日报》发表的这篇文章采用了观察家们常用的套路，意在指出大势何趋。“最新研究表明，55%的美国人每天阅读少于30分钟……我们甚至可以说电影之所以取代小说，不是因为美国人日渐愚钝，而是由于小说这种艺术技术已经过时了” 。
“我们还不太习惯把艺术形式当作技术来看待，”他说，“但事实上它们就是技术。也就是说随着科技的日新月异，这种陈腐的技术已经奄奄一息。”
除了强调科技至上之外，我们还隐约可见蒂侨特的另一个重点：即最好做到随大流，周围的人干什么你就干什么，做寥寥数千读书人中的一员不如加入电影观众的百万大军。 况且，读书时独处一室、孑然一人，而看电影的人则济济一堂、人多势众、并坐拥现代设备之利。除此之外，他还告诉我们：避免技术的过时是非常重要的；另外，无论一个人是多么地卓尔不群，他做出的抉择都不如技术可靠。
很久以前，约翰•契弗 告诉我，正是全国各地的读者的来信激励着他一直笔耕不辍。 写作的时候，他能感受到读者的存在。他们在偏远的森林里，在都市的草坪前，在美国的每一个地方。“要是哪天我感受不到他们，那我就完了”，他说。赖特•莫里斯 则一直催着我买个电动打字机。他说他的打字机基本都是开着的，“要是我不写东西，我就听听电流的声音”，他说，“他给我做伴，我们经常说说话”。
我很想知道蒂侨特先生如何用他的“艺术即技术”理论来解释这两位作家的癖好。也许他会辩解说这两位作家离群索居，多少有点缺乏“广泛的文化影响”。不过蒂侨特先生至少有一点意图值得称道：他认为他在寻找一条将广大的电影观众与小众的读书人联合在一起的道路。然而，他其实是对“百万”这个数字感兴趣而已：数以百万计的美元，数以百万计的读者，数以百万计的观众，如此而已。
蒂侨特先生说“每个人”都做过的事就是看电影。一点不假。
记得二十年代的时候，8到12岁的小孩们一到周六就会排队去买五分钱一张的儿童票，等着看上周电影中的惊险场面结局如何。女主角被绑在铁轨上，火车头呼啸而来，眼看就要粉身碎骨，就在这千钧一发之刻，她终于挣脱了绳索，逃出生天。然后接着播放下一集。接下来会播一段新闻片和一集《小顽童》 。压轴的是汤姆•米克斯主演的西部片，或者是珍妮•盖诺演绎的年轻的新娘与新郎在阁楼上的幸福生活，要么就是葛罗莉亚•史璜生、希妲•芭拉、华莱士•比里、阿道夫•门吉欧、玛丽•德雷斯勒这些演员主演的电影。噢，当然还少不了查理•卓别林主演的《淘金热》。而这部电影让我们很容易想起杰克•伦敦 的小说。
其实，看电影与读书之间并不冲突。没有人左右我们如何读书。我们自己选择，自己提高修养，自己寻找或者创造充满想象的精神家园。因为我们可以读书，也可以学着写作。我可以先看《金银岛》的电影，然后再看原著，也没有迷惑不解。我们完全可以一心二用，因为两者并无竞争。
美国有一个颇为引人关注的奇怪现象，即就算是少数派也人数众多。即便是人数达到数百万的少数派团体也屡见不鲜。然而，事实上美国有着数以百万通文达艺的人，他们彼此却很少沟通。比如说契弗的读者群就十分庞大，人数多到无法忽视。美国大学的文学院系也无法脱离书本，脱离经典著作或最新力作。我与老友基思• 博茨福德都深信如果大量的读者迷失在森林里，那么迷失其中的肯定也不乏作家 。
只有创办《文学世界》这样的杂志，我们才能了解他们到底散落何处。如果我们给予鼓励，那些原本籍籍无名、无甚希望的作者将会实现他们的梦想。早期有位读者在给我们的来信中评价道：“（杂志）内容新颖、直指人心，真实可信而非矫揉造作，引人入胜”。 她注意到我们的杂志没有刊登任何广告，所以问道“这样行吗？能维持下去吗？”，并称之为“解决我们人文精神萎缩的一剂良方”。在信的末尾，这位读者补充到：“老一辈的人理应提醒年轻人，我们过去如何，以后应该如何。”
这也正是我和基思•博茨福德对这份“文学小报 ”所寄托的期望。过去的两年我们也的确做到了这一点。我们俩是有着乌托邦式理想的怪老头。为文学做点事情，我们觉得义不容辞、责无旁贷。我希望我们不会像掌管人文科学的衮衮诸公那样，等马儿都要渴死了，还在市政厅广场大肆募捐，口口声声要为马购置水槽。
在这个国家广袤的土地上，还有多少自学成才、独立思考的文学专家和爱好者我们无从得知。从我们掌握的一点情况看我们只知道我们的出现使他们欢呼雀跃、心存感激。他们需要更多的机会，更大的平台。而无所不能的科技却无法给予他们最需要的东西。
注：1. 普鲁斯特，法国20世纪最伟大的小说家，代表作为《追忆似水年华》。乔伊斯，爱尔兰作家，诗人，代表作为《尤利西斯》。托马斯•爱德华•劳伦斯，以阿拉伯的劳伦斯而闻名，著有《智慧的七柱》等。帕斯捷尔纳克，苏联作家、诗人，凭其长篇小说《日瓦戈医生》于1958年获诺贝尔文学奖。卡夫卡，20世纪德文小说家，对后世文学影响极为深远，最著名的作品为《变形记》。
2. 普鲁塔克，希腊高产作家，著有《传记集》等。莎士比亚，英国文艺复兴代表人物，历史上最伟大的英语作家，著有37部戏剧，154首十四行诗。
3. 斯韦沃，意大利小说家，被誉为20世纪最出色小说家之一。安德烈•别雷是俄罗斯象征主义的主要代表者之一，著有《莫斯科》等。
4. 即D H劳伦斯，英国文学家，诗人，著有《查泰莱夫人的情人》（1928），《儿子与情人》，《虹》等。
5. 所多玛是《圣经》中记载的城市，因罪孽深重招致上帝降下硫磺火而毁灭。原文见圣经《创世纪》第十八章。
6. 夏吕斯男爵是小说《追忆逝水年华》中的人物，被认为是腐朽贵族的代表人物。
7. 《商船队》和《萨维齐博士》是美国著名的畅销廉价杂志，其中《商船队》被认为是美国廉价杂志的鼻祖，而《萨维齐博士》则以刊登与刊物同名的故事连载闻名。
8. 美国一些学者认为当今社会人与人之间缺乏沟通，个人的追求和观点很难形成互动。人与人之间的关系就像沙粒一样没有融合。
9. 独立制片电影是指非主流或非商业目的低成本电影。相对于更注重票房的大电影制片公司的商业电影，独立制片电影更注重影片的艺术品位。
10. 汤姆•克兰西，美国军事作家，当今世界最畅销的反恐惊悚小说大师，代表作《猎杀“红十月”号》、《爱国者游戏》、《燃眉追击》和《惊天核网》先后被搬上银幕。斯蒂芬•金，美国畅销书作家，其作品销售超过3亿5000万册，以恐怖小说著称，其作品《肖申克的救赎》，《闪灵》等被拍成电影，颇受好评。
11. 约翰•契弗，美国当代作家，被誉为纽约郊区的契诃夫，获1979年“普利策小说奖。”
12. .赖特•莫里斯，美国心理现实主义小说代表人物之一，著有《我的达得利叔叔》等。
13. 《小顽童》是美国二三十年代热播的儿童系列喜剧，由米高梅公司出品，讲的是一群顽皮的小孩子以及他们让人啼笑皆非的故事。
14. 杰克•伦敦本人曾加入“淘金热”大军，却空手而归。归来后，他根据自己积累的素材埋首写作，写出了大量反映淘金者艰苦生活的作品，如《野性的呼唤》等。
15. 基思•博茨福德曾经谈到，美国大学里的文学老师只愿意讲解卡夫卡、乔伊斯等作品“较晦涩”的作家，而不愿意涉猎自己研究范围之外的作家，因循守旧。博茨福德甚至尖锐地把他们称为“寄生虫”。另外，博茨福德与贝娄认为美国缺少严肃对待纯文学的杂志，使得文学爱好者如同迷失在茫茫森林，因此，他们决定创办这一杂志。
维基百科上面关于 阳春白雪的解释
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_culture
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