The Aporia of Reading　阅读的困境

The Aporia of Reading

阅读的困境

Joseph Hillis Miller

约瑟夫·希利斯·米勒

作者简介

约瑟夫·希利斯·米勒（Joseph Hillis Miller，1928—），美国著名文学评论家，也是欧美文学及比较文学研究的杰出学者。他毕业于哈佛大学，曾任教于霍普金斯大学、耶鲁大学，现为加州大学欧文分校的英语和比较文学教授。他的著作包括《理论今昔》（Theory Now and Then）、《阅读的伦理》（The Ethics of Reading）等。米勒曾在中国发表演讲，讲稿汇编为《土著与数码冲浪者——米勒中国演讲集》（The Indigene and the Cybersurfer）。

本文节选自2002年出版的《文学死了吗？》（On Literature）。在本文中，作者提出了两种大相径庭的阅读方式，表示“去神秘化”可能使文学走向消亡。与此同时，米勒也承认文学具有神奇的魔力，让人们前赴后继、身陷其中。

The two ways of reading I am advocating, the innocent way and the demystified way, go counter to one another. Each prevents the other from working—hence the aporia of reading. Combining these two modes of reading in one act of reading is difficult, perhaps impossible, since each inhibits and forbids the other. How can you give yourself wholeheartedly to a literary work, let the work do its work, and at the same time distance yourself from it, regard it with suspicion, and take it apart to see what makes it tick? How can one read allegro and at the same time lento, combining the two tempos in an impossible dance of reading that is fast and slow at once?

Why, in any case, would anyone want to deprive literature of its amazing power to open alternative worlds, innumerable virtual realities? It seems like a nasty and destructive thing to do. This chapter you are now reading, alas, is an exemplification of this destructiveness. Even in its celebration of literature's magic, it suspends that magic by bringing it into the open.

Two motives may be identified for this effort of demystification. One is the way literary study, for the most part institutionalized in schools and universities, to a lesser degree in journalism, is part of the general penchant of our culture toward getting knowledge for its own sake. Western universities are dedicated to finding out the truth about everything, as in the motto of Harvard University: “Veritas.”This includes the truth about literature. In my own case, a vocation for literary study was a displacement of a vocation for science. I shifted from physics to literature in the middle of my undergraduate study. My motive was a quasi-scientific curiosity about what seemed to me at that point (and still does) the radical strangeness of literary works, their difference from one another and from ordinary everyday uses of language. What in the world, I asked myself, could have led Tennyson, presumably a sane man, to use language in such an exceedingly peculiar way? Why did he do that? What conceivable use did such language use have when it was written, or could it have today? I wanted, and still want, to account for literature in the same way as physicists want to account for anomalous “signals”coming from around a black hole or from a quasar. I am still trying, and still puzzled.

The other motive is apotropaic. This is a noble or ignoble motive, depending on how you look at it. People have a healthy fear of the power literary works have to instill what may be dangerous or unjust assumptions about race, gender, or class. Both cultural studies and rhetorical reading, the latter especially in its “deconstructive”mode, have this hygienic or defensive purpose. By the time a rhetorical reading, or a “slow reading,”has shown the mechanism by which literary magic works, that magic no longer works. It is seen as a kind of hocus-pocus. By the time a feminist reading of Paradise Lost has been performed, Milton's sexist assumptions (“Hee for God only, shee for God in him”) have been shown for what they are. The poem, however, has also lost its marvelous ability to present to the reader an imaginary Eden inhabited by two beautiful and eroticized people: “So hand in hand they passed, the loveliest pair / That ever since in loves embraces met.”The demystified reader may also have been reminded by the implacable critic that this Edenic vision is presented through the eyes of a resentful and envious witness, Satan. “O Hell!”says Satan, “what do mine eyes with grief behold!”

Milton's Satan might be called the prototypical demystifier, or suspicious reader, the critic as sceptic or disbeliever. Or the prototype of the modern critical reader might be Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was trained as a professor of ancient rhetoric. His The Genealogy of Morals, along with much other writing by him, is a work of cultural criticism before the fact. In a famous statement in On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, Nietzsche defines truth, “veritas,”not as a statement or representation of things as they are, but as a tropological fabrication, in short, as literature. “Truth,”says Nietzsche, “is a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms.”

…

No doubt about it, these two forms of critical reading, rhetorical reading and cultural studies, have contributed to the death of literature.

我提倡两种阅读方式，一种是天真无邪的阅读，一种是去神秘化的阅读。两者相互矛盾，一种方式阻止另一种方式发挥作用，阅读的困境由此产生。要在一次阅读中融合上述两种阅读方式，这很难做到，或许根本不可能做到，因为两者相互限制、相互妨碍。你怎么可能既全身心投入一部文学作品，让它发挥自己的作用，又和它保持距离，带着怀疑的态度审视它，拆卸开来看它如何发挥作用？你怎么可能在阅读中同时依照快慢两种节奏，在阅读之舞中同时踩着快慢两种节拍？

文学能为我们打开异界之门，展现无数幻象。为什么会有人想剥夺这种神奇的力量？这看上去就是卑鄙的毁灭之举。很遗憾，你现在所读的这个章节，正是这种毁灭之举的例证。本章既颂扬了文学的魔力，又通过公之于众使其魔力尽失。

这种去神秘化的努力有两个动机。第一个动机是文学研究。文学研究大部分在院校内被体制化，少数在新闻报纸中被体制化。它是我们文化中的普遍信条，即为求知而求知。如哈佛大学的校训“察验真理”所言，西方大学致力于寻找一切事物的真理。这包含关于文学的真理。对我来说，对文学的研究取代了我对科学的探索。我本科读到一半时将研究方向从物理转向文学。我的动机是一种类似科学研究的好奇。我当时对文学作品本身、每部作品之间的区别、书面语和日常用语的区别怀着强烈的好奇，现在依然如此。我问自己，究竟是什么使得丁尼生，这样一个看似理智的人，以如此奇特的方式运用语言？他为何那么做？那种语言在当时有什么可以料想的用途？现在又如何？我曾经想，现在也想，像物理学家解释黑洞或类星体发出的不规则“信号”1那样解释文学作品。我现在仍在努力，仍在困惑。

另一个动机是驱邪。这种动机是高尚还是卑劣，要看你如何判断。人们对文学的力量有一种有益的恐惧，害怕文学会向我们灌输关于种族、性别或阶级的危险假设或偏颇观念。文化研究和修辞阅读，特别是后者的“解构”模式，就拥有这种保健或防卫的目的。当修辞性的阅读或曰“慢读”揭示了文学发挥魔力的机制之后，这种魔力就消失无踪了。它看上去就像是一种戏法。当对《失乐园》进行女性主义解读之后，弥尔顿性别歧视的假设就显露无遗，比如“他只为上帝，她则为他心中的上帝”这句。然而，这首诗也失去了魔力，无从展现那对美妙伉俪栖息的虚构的伊甸园。“他们手牵手2走过，那对爱侣/自从相遇拥抱之后。”不依不饶的批评家会提醒“去神秘化”的读者，这幅景象是撒旦——那个又妒又恨的目击者——眼中的伊甸园。撒旦说：“见鬼！我悲怆的眼中看到了什么！”

弥尔顿笔下的撒旦，可以称为去神秘化的原型。心存怀疑的读者和评论家都属于这一类。或者说，弗里德里希·尼采也许是现代批判型读者的原型。尼采接受过古典修辞学的专业训练。他的《论道德的谱系》和其他一些著作，都是“文化批评”一词出现前的文化批评。《超道德意义上的真理和谎言》记载了尼采对“真理”界定的著名论点——不是对事物原本形态的陈述或展现，而是比喻的造物，简而言之即文学。尼采说：“真理是一支由隐喻、转喻、拟人组成的移动军队。”

……

上述两种批判性阅读方式——修辞阅读与文化研究，无疑对文学的灭亡起到了推波助澜的作用。

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1．黑洞是一种引力极强的天体，连光也不能逃脱它的引力。类星体是一种光谱像行星状星云但又不是星云的天体，它们会向宇宙发出脉冲信号，这种信号被科学家称为“来自外星的信号”。

2．“亚当与夏娃手牵手”是《失乐园》一再出现的主题，牵手代表两人成为一体。