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Culture
文艺版块
Book review
书评
The past and future of literature
文学的过去与未来
Full of sound and fury
充满喧哗与骚动
The novel was a dominant art form in the last century. What does this one portend?
小说是上世纪的主流艺术形式，本世纪的小说预示着什么？
Stranger Than Fiction. By Edwin Frank.
《比虚构更离奇》，埃德温·弗兰克著。
The novel is dead; the novel is dying; prestige television has killed it.
小说已死，小说正在死去，大制作电视剧已经杀死了小说。
These familiar complaints are oddly comforting, both because hand-wringing over the state of the novel is a time-honoured pursuit, and readers who pick up the remote instead of a book after dinner—as your correspondent does more often than he should—can feel they are engaging with culture’s dominant narrative form rather than just relaxing on the couch.
这些熟悉的抱怨奇怪地令人感到安慰，这既是因为对小说现状感到忧心忡忡是一项历史悠久的事业，也是因为那些晚饭后拿起遥控器而不是书的读者（本文记者也经常这样）可以感觉自己正在参与文化的主流叙事形式，而不仅仅是坐在沙发上放松。
Novels are not, in fact, dying: bookstores flog ever-changing stacks of new ones.
事实上小说并没有死去：书店还在售卖日新月异的各种新书。
But neither are they as culturally central as they were in the 1900s, when they were “the literary form of the time, prestigious, popular, taken as both mainstay of cultured conversation and of democratic culture”, argues Edwin Frank of the New York Review of Books Classics Series.
但小说也不再像20世纪那样具有文化中心地位，《纽约书评》经典系列的编辑埃德温·弗兰克认为，小说是“那个时代的主要文学形式，既受尊敬又流行，被视为文化对话和大众文化的支柱”。
The novel achieved that status by changing its focus.
小说通过改变其焦点而获得了这种地位。
In the 19th century novels were principally concerned with illuminating social mores and characters’ inner lives: think of George Eliot, Henry James and Anthony Trollope.
在19世纪，小说的主要关注点是阐明社会风俗和人物的内心世界：想想乔治·艾略特、亨利·詹姆斯、安东尼·特罗洛普。
But over the course of the next century the novel matured, as writers responded to a rapidly changing world by experimenting with form, structure and subject.
但在接下来的一个世纪里，小说逐渐成熟，作家们通过对写作形式、结构、主题进行实验来回应这个迅速变化的世界。
“Stranger Than Fiction” weaves historical overview and close reading into a biography of the form.
《比虚构更离奇》一书将历史回顾和文本细读交织，从而为小说立传。
Mercifully, the author does not plod through the years, directly tying books to events.
所幸作者没有冗长地逐年写过去，直接把小说著作与历史事件连起来。
Artistic creation is subtler than that, and books that an author intends for one purpose often serve another.
艺术创作比这更微妙，作者出于某种目的而写的书往往会服务于另一个目的。
Novels can also inspire each other.
小说也可以相互启发。
“Mrs Dalloway”, for example, was shaped by Virginia Woolf’s loathing of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”.
例如，《达洛维夫人》是弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫因为厌恶詹姆斯·乔伊斯的《尤利西斯》而写成的。
Mr Frank deftly captures how novelists translate, react to and sometimes shut out turbulent global events.
弗兰克巧妙地捕捉到了小说家们如何翻译、回应，有时甚至是回避动荡的全球事件。
(Returning to Trieste after the first world war, Joyce told an acquaintance, “Oh yes, I was told there was a war going on.”)
（一战结束后乔伊斯回到意大利的里雅斯特，对一个熟人说：“哦，是的，我听说正在打仗。”）
The first landmark 20th-century novel, Mr Frank argues, was “Notes from the Underground”, published in 1864 by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
弗兰克认为，20世纪第一部具有里程碑意义的小说是费奥多尔·陀思妥耶夫斯基于1864年出版的《地下室手记》。
The narrator whines, hectors and obsesses; he is both emotionally honest and thoroughly unreliable.
书中的叙述者哀怨、威吓、疯魔，他在情感上是诚实的，但又完全不可靠。
The plotless book tries to make sense of and to embody a frenzied world, offering none of the safety or resolution readers typically found in novels from the 19th century, which deployed “character and situation, expressed and explored through a reliable interplay of dialogue and description conducted under narrative oversight”.
这本没有情节的书试图理解并体现一个疯狂的世界，它不像19世纪小说那样为读者提供安全感或解决方案，19世纪小说部署“人物和情境，在叙事的监督下，通过真实可信的对话和描写的相互作用去表达和探索”。
Though plenty of contemporary novels still fit this description, Dostoyevsky was early to show they did not have to.
虽然许多当代小说仍然符合这种描述，但陀思妥耶夫斯基很早就表明小说不一定非得这样写。
The ghost of the unnamed narrator flickers at the edges of works written throughout the next century.
这个无名叙述者的幽灵在接下来一个世纪的各部小说中闪烁出没。
His lunatic babbling prefigures stream-of-consciousness works from Joyce and William Faulkner.
他的疯言疯语预现了从乔伊斯到威廉·福克纳的意识流作品。
It is no accident that this voice and disordered, confessional work emerged from Russia, rather than western Europe, in the late 19th century.
这种声音和这种混乱无序、忏悔式的作品在19世纪后期出现在俄罗斯而不是西欧，这并非偶然。
Until the first world war western Europe was largely peaceful, prosperous and bound by class and social conventions.
直到第一次世界大战之前，西欧大体上是和平繁荣的，并受到阶级和社会传统的约束。
The solid, reliable real world birthed the solid, reliable worlds of the social novel.
这种坚实可靠的现实世界孕育了坚实可靠的社会小说。
Russia had its hierarchies and conventions but was wilder; its authors could borrow from European tradition while living in a world beyond it.
俄罗斯也有其等级制度和传统，但俄罗斯更加狂野不驯，俄罗斯作家们可以借鉴欧洲传统，并同时生活在一个超越欧洲的世界里。
